We Are Monsters (24 page)

Alex suddenly wished Devon were there. Anyone, even his assailant, his brother's alleged killer, would help ease the tension he felt at this moment. He pinched the sheet just below the man's chin and pulled it down.

The man was definitely dead. His neck was slashed open, the wide wound crusted with dried blood, surrounded by raw, tattered skin. He could see where the esophagus was severed and the stark white of the spinal column. The rest was a pulpy mess.

The man's head rolled towards him. The neck could no longer support it. And the eyes blinked rapidly, as though trying to focus. A raspy gust of air escaped the neck wound, wafting the first ripe scent of body rot Alex's way.

Alex staggered back, feeling a painful shock. The distance provided a new perspective. He was better able to view the man's face. The blinking, animated face that was starting to rise up from the bed, leaving flakes of dried blood behind. He recognized it.

And now knew there were worse things than insanity.

Chapter Forty-Seven

It was a scream that had been building within her for decades, growing charged with more and more energy every time she had swallowed it down.

“I said NO! Stop it!” Her face quaked with the force of her rage. Spittle flew from her mouth and blood vessels burst in her eyes. “Don't you fucking touch me!”

The priest paused. The montage of replicated women stopped their song and gasped. Everyone stood frozen in place. From Angela's vantage point, it looked like some pagan ritual gone wrong.

The priest snarled, “You don't get to deny me.” But he looked hesitant, unsure.

Angela felt the hands restraining her arms and legs weaken. The eyes looking down at her all became filmed with tears. She flailed her arms and kicked her legs and broke free from their grasp. She fell to the bed and scooted back against the headboard. Jesus gazed down from his cross.

“No. You have no control over me. You cannot take from me. You cannot have me. I won't allow you to.” She was no longer shouting, but there was a vital strength in her voice. A vein of power that sounded more sacrosanct than the choir's song.

The priest's erection began to wilt. His outer face shuttered, a spasm of disparate features emerging from the images behind. He was at once both youthful and old, infantile and ancient. A boyish face with elderly eyes and old, dangling ears. A cascading brow with withered skin and lush, sensuous lips. His face continued to morph, cycling through a spectrum of disjointed features and a range of ages.

Then
his
piercing blue eyes appeared and locked in place. Next his nose, porous with dark pits like strawberry seeds. The cheeks became sooty with stubble, the chin dimpled. His hair turned dark and converged in a widow's peak. When his face stopped shifting, his head drooped, as though from exhaustion. Or shame. The women draped him with his robe.

He put it on. He pulled up the hood. And his face receded back into the descending gloom. His voice—his kind and gentle voice—came from the dark. She could just see his lips move. “I do it because I care about you. Because I love you.”

The women around the bed no longer shared Angela's face. They each wore their own. And each time she looked they wore a different one, as if representing all the women of the world. They watched in raptured silence.

Angela rose farther up the headboard. She scooted her legs underneath her so that she could move forward. So that she was no longer retreating. “I've spent my whole life receiving your type of love. That's not what it is. It's the opposite. And it's over. I won't accept it anymore.”

She moved towards him, her uncle whom she hadn't seen in over twenty years. “No, you hide behind your religion, but it's all a charade. It's the most despicable disguise.” She shuffled forward on her knees, hands curling into tight fists beside her. “You're the one who needs to repent. You're the one who should seek forgiveness.”

She reached out and pulled the hood back from his head, revealing his face as it had looked when she last saw him. After he had finished molesting her. “You're the one who should seek God.”

For a moment, he looked somber, as though shamed by her speech. But then she saw it. The slightest uptick at the corner of his mouth. The barely suppressed smile. The smug look of reproach. It was all she could take.

Her fist flew up from her side and smashed him in the face.

The room flashed—for just an instant it disappeared and she was back in the conference room, where Eli and Alex sat paralyzed, unfocused eyes staring into an empty room—then it reappeared.

Blood spewed from her uncle's nose. He was holding it and mewling in pain.

The women began to murmur. Their hands formed fists and they crowded the bed. A hand shot out and hit him on the head. Another caught him on the back of his neck. “No!” the women said together as they struck him. “It's not what we needed. No!”

He covered his head with his arms to block the punches, his expression turning from pain to fear. “Stop!” he cried.

“No!” the women said, pressing forward, pummeling him with rigid fists.

“Please!” he yelled, curling into a ball. “Stop!”

“No!” They dug their fists into his spine, his ribs, each strike landing with a solid thunk.

“That's enough,” Angela said.

She'd said it quietly but the women all stopped at once. They were breathing heavily, their faces flushed. They looked ready to pounce again. Like they were barely restrained.

“It won't do any good. It's done. It just brings us to his level. It makes us ugly like him.”

He was still curled in a fetal position, shaking and stammering for them to “stop, please stop”.

Angela placed a hand on his back, gently. She lifted him up. His nose was dented in the middle. Blue knots were swelling on the sides of his head. His eyes were shifty, like a cornered raccoon, but they settled as they focused on Angela's. She held his gaze.

She saw him for what he really was, the face beneath the mask. The traumatized child with an illness of his own. She saw in him her patients whom she treated with such compassion.

“We're all victims,” she said.

The room sizzled, it flashed, and she caught another brief glimpse of the conference room, like a snapshot into a parallel world.

She thumbed blood from his lip and wiped it on her blouse. She parted his hair to inspect his scrapes. “What you did was due to a sickness. But you never realized that it could be contagious. That it infected me.”

His brow knitted together in deep thought or confusion. “I never meant to hurt you,” he said.

Angela nodded. Her chin dimpled and her eyes began to burn. “I believe you,” she said. “That doesn't excuse what you did, but I believe you never meant to harm me.”

His face shook in an attempt to suppress a surge of emotion—it burned red as though he had been holding his breath. Then the emotion broke through and he let out an ugly wail. A man never looked more like a boy. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I hate who I am.”

“I know,” Angela said. “I hate myself too.”

And there was truth there. All the self-destructive acts throughout her life had been an attempt to punish herself for self-imagined wrongs she had never committed. Everyone else was worthy of compassion, capable of redemption, but not her. Perhaps her uncle's atrocious acts had planted the seed of self-loathing, but its tendrils had grown deep. It was a cancerous weed that spreads with reckless abandon until someone is able to spot it and wrench it out from the ground.

But another one will grow back in its place. Like weeds, they always will. Their roots go back to the beginning of time.

Angela could not bring herself to embrace the man before her, but she took him by the shoulders and squeezed. She fought for eye contact and found it. “I forgive you,” she said.

A smile broke through his battered face. Blood bordered his rust-colored teeth. His face began to age again, rapidly. Wrinkles carving through his skin like the formation of a canyon through a time-lapse camera. He brought the hood back over his head, bringing down the veil of shadow. But, even through the depthless dark, she could still see the faint glow of his smile.

He crawled off the bed, grabbing his walking staff on the way. His array of ornamental chains tinkled as he hobbled back towards the door.

The women followed behind. All except for one. She had poorly cut, crinkly red hair, and a freckled and pockmarked face.

Poor girl could use some concealer,
Angela thought, then admonished herself.
No, her face is her face. Who am I to judge?

The redheaded woman eased up to the edge of the bed. Her eyes were green. Angela was sure she had seen them before. In equally darkened rooms such as this.

“You're ready to see her now,” the woman said. She held out her hand for Angela to take. “Come.”

Angela had been so consumed by the confrontation that she had momentarily lost sight of where she was.
Dead,
she thought again.
This must be some final test. Some life review to gauge what I've learned.
She reached out and took the redheaded woman's hand.
Perhaps this is where I meet God.

“Her?” Angela said.

The redhead nodded; her emerald eyes glowed.

“I knew it!” Angela said.

She came down from the bed, feeling the rough-spun fiber of the wool rug under her feet. The room was cool. The candle flames produced golden coronas in the corners of her eyes. They crackled softly on their waxen wicks. Every detail, Angela observed, was intricate and acute. She never thought the afterlife would feel so real.

The woman led her past the column of candelabras. On the far side was a second door that she hadn't seen. It appeared to be made from flimsy pine, covered with a thin, white coat of paint that was beginning to peel.

“She's in here,” the woman said. Her wan smile widened to reveal crooked teeth, which she covered with her hand.

“Don't do that,” Angela said. “Don't be afraid to smile.”

The woman dropped her hand and laughed, but she began to blush. It would take time.

Angela faced the door. “Who's in there?”

“Go see.”

Angela looked at her ruffled cloak. She attempted to smooth the wrinkles with her hands, but stopped. It was useless.
What does it matter?
she thought.
Surely God won't be vain.

She swallowed and saliva stuck in her throat.
I hope.

She opened the door. And began to cry.

Chapter Forty-Eight

“Look what you've done,” Dr. Francis said, his face a pale slate of shock. “They're all dead. All of them. You're right, Eli. Too many have died in your name. And here they die still.”

Eli swiped blood from his eyes. He almost slipped in the slick pool forming at his feet. The odor was overwhelming. It was one he had smelled before, a pungent mixture of blood, excrement and gun smoke. No other sense was as capable of awakening a memory in such vivid detail. And all of his most poignant memories seemed to be connected to death.

“It's not what I wanted,” Eli said. He wanted out of the pit, but felt compelled to stay awhile longer. As some form of penance. “I didn't mean for this to happen.”

“It doesn't matter what you want or what you mean to have happen. It's what you allow. How many good deeds does it take to counter the bad? Where does your scale tip? You admonish the sacrifice of one life to save the lives of many, yet sacrifice many to save the life of one. Where is the good in that?”

Eli hung his head. The open eyes of the dead stared up at him in blind judgment.
That's not who I am,
he thought. But was that true? How many had died on his watch? Could he have intervened to save them? Why hadn't he then?

Eli had always considered his work to be righteous. Not in a religious sense, but in terms of doing the right thing. He'd helped to drive psychiatry in a more compassionate and humane direction. He'd treated his patients the same way he would want to be treated.

But had he held true to his noble convictions in the most dire of situations? Or had he cowered and succumbed in the moments that mattered most? Sure, it's easy to act righteous—to do the right thing—when nothing's on the line. But how does one act when life itself is on the line? Isn't that the true test? And, if so, had he passed?

No. He had not.

So, did that make his life a failure? His philosophy a sham?

He didn't know.

Dr. Francis walked back to the intercom. He dismissed Sergeant Wagner and had him disperse the remaining donors from the firing line.

He came back to the edge of the pit and looked down. He shook his head. “I don't know what's gotten into you today. Take some time. Regroup. And we'll start again when you're ready.”

He left the room. The young soldier followed him out.

Mere seconds passed before the door swung open again.

Two nurses entered, dark skin against stark-white uniforms from a prior era that made them look a bit like nuns. Their black hair, streaked grey along the sides, was slicked back against their heads, covered by an old-timey nurse's cap. Their faces were shiny, wrinkle-free and smooth, belying their age, with eyes that appeared sharp and wise. One had freckles, the other did not; otherwise, they could have been twins.

“Mmmm-mmmm-mmmm, what a mess,” the one with the freckles said. According to a tag on her lapel her name was April. The one without the freckles was May.

“Sure is,” May said. “Can't seem to keep his nose clean for long, can he?”

“Nope, not Eli. God help him. Always trying to save the world, but who's going to save the world from him?”

They squatted down and reached out all four arms. “Come on, sugar,” April said. “Let's get you clear of this mess.”

Eli's arms were smeared with blood; it dripped from his elbows. He could taste it leaking into his mouth from his lips. He didn't want to stain the nurse's pristine white outfits, but had no way to make himself clean. He wiped what he could on his pants.

They both offered quarter-moon smiles. Their teeth gleamed. “Come on, now. Blood don't bother us. Once it's shed it loses all its power. It just washes away.”

Eli reached up and they grabbed his arms. He meant to brace his foot against the lip of the pit for leverage, but they leaned back and yanked him free, nearly dislocating his arms from each socket. The nurses were surprisingly strong.

May looked down into the pit and clucked her tongue. “I bet you meant well, though.”

“He always do.”

More than with Dr. Francis, more than Sergeant Wagner, Eli felt a desperate need to confess his confusion to these two women. He needed for them to help him understand what was going on. He grabbed each by their outer shoulders, staining their sleeves maroon. “Please. I need you to help me,” he said. “I don't know how I got here. I don't know where I am.”

They exchanged a blank look. It revealed nothing.

“We
are
here to help you, honey,” April said.

Eli sighed with relief. “Thank you. Thank you. Please, what is happening?”

“Right now you're talking with us. Pretty soon, we're going to take you back to your office. Help get you cleaned up.”

“Right, but…” Eli was becoming impatient. He needed answers. He needed to understand the situation. He needed to know if he had finally gone insane. “I don't know how I got here or what I'm doing. This all seems crazy to me.”

Neither April nor May seemed concerned by this statement. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world for him to say. “That's how everybody feels, honey. That's life.”

He hung his head. He let go of their shoulders and his hands slumped towards the floor.

The nurses came around on either side of Eli and grasped him by the elbows, as though preparing to escort him down a wedding aisle. They started moving him towards the door.

“Wants all the answers, don't he?”

“Sure, don't we all?”

“But then we don't see what's right in front of us.”

“Might as well be blind as a bat to what's right under our very noses.”

“You got people want to help you, Eli. You just got to let them.”

“Don't worry about what's gone on before or what comes next, just do the best you can every step along the way and you'll make it out okay.”

Eli felt exhausted. Taking another step
was
all he could focus on at the moment. If it weren't for their support, he would likely collapse to the floor.

“Some people are happy to make sacrifices—sacrifice their life, even—to help someone along their way. Something like this. Seems like a tragedy now. Senseless and unnecessary. But good will come from it. You just got to allow it to come through.”

“The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“If only people knew.”

They were walking down a hallway so bright it hurt Eli's eyes. It was clear of people, and quiet. He couldn't even hear the squeak of their footfalls as they shuffled along the glossy linoleum floor. The world was their voices, nothing but their vague and confusing banter.

Aside from the glaring light, the scenery was the same as at Sugar Hill. He saw the door to where his office should be, ahead on the left. They stopped just shy of it and the nurses released his arms.

“Let's get you cleaned up,” April said.

May nodded. “Wash this mess away and start fresh.”

His name was on the placard by the door, just like at his actual office. The door appeared the same as well, the top half obscured by pebbled glass. He turned and looked at the two nurses. Even in their bloodstained clothes, they looked as beautiful as their springtime names.

“No, I can handle it,” Eli said. What he couldn't handle was any more of their clichéd riddles, which did nothing to alleviate his hopeless confusion. If anything, it only added to his sense of unease.

April and May exchanged a look revealing nothing.

“Okay,” April said.

“If you say so,” May said.

They turned and began walking back the way they had come.

“He's a stubborn one,” he heard one of them say, her voice fading.

“Has a hard time accepting help.”

“Doesn't see it when it's right in front of him.”

“Well, he will.”

“Or he won't.”

“One or the other.”

“That's the only two there are.”

“Just hope too many more people don't have to die before he do.”

Eli turned the knob—his hand felt like it was coated in honey—and pushed open the door. The office was exactly how he had left it. An oasis of normalcy. He stumbled in and shut the door.
Perhaps I'm back,
he thought.
Back from some fugue state.

Which would make his bloodstained clothes even more disconcerting.

No. Nothing can be worse than what I've just been through. Even if I've murdered one hundred men in some blind psychotic state.

He shuffled to his desk and collapsed in the chair, unconcerned about smearing blood. His body was tingling with exhaustion, his head swimming. He closed his eyes and took a couple of deep breaths, holding each as long as his lungs would allow. The room smelled like old lemons. Like teakwood. After the vile reek of the feeding pit, it was the most wonderful scent he'd ever inhaled.

Eli opened a cabinet and removed the mandala, pinning it to the wall. He switched on the CD player, turning it to his favorite song—an Indian instrumental featuring the hypnotic strums of the sitar. He spun the chair towards the mandala with its weblike weave of psychedelic designs. He let his eyes lose focus, his lids fall. Everything became a blur. He drew each breath from the stomach, letting it rise up his spine and flow out each nostril, inhaling again in a circular loop, stomach expanding.

Outside was silence, inside the sitar, each string being plucked with expert precision, creating a mesmerizing flow.

Eli began to pray—to what deity, he did not know. Perhaps it was to the wandering soul of Rajamadja, wherever that may be. It was a wordless prayer. It was the channeling of thought through emotion.

If you made me, you must know how I feel. Please make it stop. If there is an infinity, I cannot fathom enduring it. Why must we suffer so much?
All of this expressed through a sharp burning in the chest—through indescribable fear. The fear of being stuck inside himself forever.

The player plucked the strings faster. The mandala's weave-like web pulsated and began to spin. Eli's breath became shallow as his panic grew more pronounced.

Fear is deadly. Perhaps my killer has finally come.

The sitar reached a crescendo, a fervent and constant strum. It was a chaotic sound. It was murmurings of the most manic mind. It threatened to go on like that forever, long after the cooling of the final sun.

Then it stopped. It
paused
. And when it resumed, it was the sound of a regular acoustic guitar being strummed. Perhaps like the one Elvis Presley used to play. Or every little boy in their earliest imagination.

It was a folk tune, slow and full of backwoods soul, its sound influenced by sweltering summers and the serenading bugs of the bayou. There was a distinct purpose to the player's tune. A heartbeat. A transmission of meaning that transcended verbal translation.

A voice began to sing. An adolescent voice speaking of heartbreak and loss and truths that most men prefer to ignore. Eli recognized the voice. He hadn't heard it in decades, but he knew whom it belonged to now.

His shallow breathing began to deepen. His heart slowed its frantic pace. He realized that every muscle was fully clenched and he felt himself begin to relax.

The guitar stopped, the singer became silent. And then Randall's high-pitched, wavery voice spoke to Eli through the speaker. And panic set back in.