I’m sitting at a bar, drinking away the day’s miseries, whiskey sour, ice. A man sits down next to me. He has an accent, eastern European, possibly Russian. He introduces himself.
“Mikhail.”
“John.” I reply.
“John, you look as if you have had a bit of a bad day,” he says. “Why don’t I buy you a drink?”
“I’m not…you know… attracted to…men.” I say, slightly taken aback at the offer.
“Neither am I.” he replies, quizzical look on his face. “Why would you think of gay?”
“It’s just usually when a person buys another person a drink it’s seen as, well…an advance.” I explain.
“I see.” he says as if the idea had never crossed his mind. “I am married though. Not gay.”
“And you want to buy me a drink because…?” I ask.
“As I say, you look sad. I too have much sadness. It is better to be sad with a person than be sad alone, is it not?”
“I suppose.” I agree. I have no reason to turn down a free drink.
“Well then.” he says, smiling. “Tell me, what makes you sad?”
“ Uh… I’m an alcoholic.” I say, laughing softly through my nose. “My ex-wife is a bitch, my job sucks and I’m kinda trying to find a reason not to kill myself.” This was all more or less true, though simply stated.
He nods, makes a face that suggests a certain amount of identification with what I’m saying and takes a sip of his drink. “Ah. Yes. This is very common, I find, among men where I come from.”
We chat away for about an hour. I don’t even know what I’m saying, just holding up my end of the encounter the best I can until the mention of some stronger inebriating agents is brought up and he invites me back to his apartment to partake. I’m game. I have nothing to do tomorrow and I badly need some kind of escape, chemical or otherwise.
We walk down an empty street, sharing drinks from a flask of scotch as we continue our conversation.
“I hate the winter.” I say as I take a drink. “Every year it gets so God damn cold up here, I just wanna get the hell out. Is it cold where you come from?”
“Yes. Very.” he says, hands in pockets as we keep walking.
When we get to the door I get a good look at him for the first time. The bar had been dimly lit. The light above the door to his apartment complex is harsh and I can finally make out the full picture.
He’s tall, taller than me at any rate, and skinny. He has the frank and somewhat sad look that many eastern Europeans seem to wear as a perpetual expression. He’s deathly pale with dark circles under his eyes and he has short somewhat thin hair, the color of faded leather. He looks like an office worker really, nothing terribly outstanding or noteworthy about him beside his foreignness. The sort who works at a mid level job, Monday through Friday, and gets blasted on the weekends, a million just like him in every country in the world.
“This is it.” he says as we walk into his apartment. It’s small and sparse but neat.
“Phew!” I’m hit with the overwhelming smell, something like a cross between Lysol, bleach, perfume, Axe body spray and burnt meat.
“I like a certain aroma.” he says. “And… I cook. You will get used to it in a minute.”
“Yeah… I guess.” I say. I notice at least ten Tupperware containers, filled with some unspecified food, piled on top of the refrigerator and kitchen counter.
He sees me examining the containers and smiles somewhat shyly. “Fridge is full.”
“I see.”
“Go sit down.” he says. “I’ll be back in a moment.”
I sit down on a beaten up leather chair that’s in front of a glass plated table. An ashtray full of half smoked cigarettes, placed next to some magazines and a razor-blade. The cocaine residue is obviously evident, a faded light stain of powder and scratches trailing all over the glass.
He arrives back in the living area as I make myself comfortable, clutching a bag of blow that he lays out on the table.
“Nice,” I say as I dump out the powder and separate it into lines.
“Do you ever wonder about your soul… John?” he asks me, cigarette smoke curling out from under his nostrils.
“Uhh…” I hesitate, not wanting to get into some deep existential conversation. “No. I mean…wonder about it how exactly?”
“Just…does it go on?” Is this life all there is? What do you think?”
I pretend to weigh the matter heavily, humoring his sudden whimsical bit of philosophy. He has clearly built up some kind of situation where we bare our souls to eachother. I’m unable to connect to any kind of deep conversation and just try to keep things at a surface level.
“I guess I don’t really know the answer.” I say.
“Hmph.” He grunts, eyes cast off at something behind me. “Would you like to know… what I think?”
Services, Catholic mass, the bible all pass through my mind. Everything I’d been born with and told to live as, the whole moral framework of my life suddenly presents itself in my subconscious
“Not …really.” I say, honestly before I can stop myself.
He gives a short laugh. “Of course. Go ahead and imbibe.”
“Thank you.” I say, bending over to start the night’s extra-intoxication.
“I have something I must confess,” he says as I put my nose to the straw, hovering over the table.
I inhale the fine white powder gladly, letting the day’s troubles melt away as I feel the first wave of contentment wash over me. “Oh yeah, what’s that?”
“Look at me John.”
I glance up and see Mikhail holding a small black gun, a serious look on his face.
“Jesus Christ!” I exclaim. “What the hell is that for?”
“I’m going to have to kill you.” he says, pointing the pistol at me. “I’m very… sorry about this.”
Ten thousand feelings explode in my chest, expand, collide with one another, settle and die. The shock certainly made me jump but my basic resting state of depressed indifference quickly asserts itself. I’m calm.
“I don’t suppose you might at least tell me, why?”
He weighs my words for a moment before pouring us both a glass of scotch. “I suppose I owe you that, at least. Do not mistake my bluntness for cruelty, I am not an evil man. I’ve merely resigned myself to what I must do. Before I tell you, I want you to look at the back of my left hand.” He lifts his hand. “What do you see?”
I look. “Just a hand.” I say. The hand is long and thickly veined but normal as far as I can tell.
He sighs, sadly. “ Worth a shot.”
“What am I supposed to see?” I ask.
“I will explain.”
“Please do.” I say.
He pauses for a moment, eyes cast down at the table, his lips moving silently as if stuck in some prayer.
He begins. “I was never a drinker until I moved to America.” he says, eyes lingering for a moment on his glass. He takes a drink. “My wife’s father was a terrible alcoholic. He used to beat her. She wouldn’t tolerate it. I had to leave her and my daughter in Tolyatti.”
“Tolyatti?” I ask..
“It is a very poor city in Russia. It is …where I am from.” he says. “It is not a nice place for a child to grow up. I am saving money to bring my girls over to America. My little girl will grow up in an American suburb with a nice yard.” He says this defiantly, a certain bitterness in his voice cracking the surface.
“That’s…a noble ideal.” I say. I’m not terribly interested in these little details, the small matter of the gun in my face rendering such things a bit moot. My inebriated state both deadens my impulses and emboldens me against panic. I just stare and listen..
“Anyway, I am telling a story…” he says. “It was about six months ago. I was missing my girls very much that day and I went to a bar and got myself very, very drunk. I must have blacked out because I only recall stumbling home late and falling on my bed.”
“I see.” I say. The longer he talks the more time I have to think of something, so I nod in interest.
“I woke the next day and found a large black X on the back of my left hand. I could remember nothing of the night before so I brushed it off as a prank; someone had drawn on my hand as I lay in drunken stupor. It happens all the time in America, I understand.”
“Yes, we do that sometimes.” I say. “Draw on peoples faces and …all that.”
“This is very immature.” he says. “In Tolyati they would kill you if you did this.”
“But that wasn’t what it was.” I say.
He nods, licking his lips as he ashes his cigarette.
“I only began to worry when I realized that no matter how hard I scrubbed the blasted mark it wouldn’t wash off. I’m a very clean person. I don’t like having any stains on my clothes or body. I started to dread that in my inebriated state I had gotten a tattoo and forgotten about it.”
“It can happen.” I reply.
He nods, barely.
“I went about my day normally. Nobody remarked on the X and I didn’t mention it. I considered it fortunate. I had a good job and being a Russian, I try not to make any reasons for my coworkers to have any unusual thoughts about me. A Russian with tattoos on his hands conjures up… bad image for the average American.”
I don’t know what he is talking about but feign understanding.
“I woke the next day to the song Karma Chameleon on the radio. I’ll never forget. The sleep amnesia, that overtakes us all, had led me to forget, temporarily, the mark on my hand. I thought nothing of it as I went to the bathroom to begin the morning ritual. It was only when I spied my hand in the mirror that a new and even greater shock overcame me. The mark, that had been what I thought at the time, a simple X had changed. It was now a Roman numeral nine. You know the one, an I before an X.”
“So the X was a ten.” I say.
“Precisely!” he exclaims.
I take a moment to study his face. He seems earnest in his telling, even relieved to be getting it out in the open. He isn’t toying with me; he’s genuinely trying to justify himself.
“I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.” he says, continuing. “How could this be? I don’t need to list the reasons why it confounded me. You know as well as I do why it would.”
“Yeah.” I say.
“The next day the mark was a V with three I’s. Eight.”
“It was counting down.” I say.
“Yes, but to what?” he asks. “How could I know?
At this moment I begin taking in the details of the environment around me. “Could there be some strange kind of tattoo that is able to change over days?” I ask him.
“You think I did not think of that?” he asks. “I checked. No such thing exists.”
There is a broken mirror with a black hand-print around the point of shatter. It’s to the left and slightly skewed away from the door which is why I didn’t notice when I came in.
“Well…” I say. “Couldn’t there be…”
“What?” he demands, harshly. “Couldn’t there be what? A logical explanation?”
I shrug, displaying my hands, palms up, hopefully. “I mean…yeah. Maybe it was like…a…”
“Like a what?”
“I dunno!” I exclaim, defeated. “I just don’t wanna get shot!”
He snorts a laugh, shaking his head. “Yes. I am sorry. Obviously you are nervous. I …apologize.”
Under the mirror there is what appears to be a mannequin’s leg, wrapped with a blue ribbon sitting on its side. Next to that is what looks like a bible, open, faced down to the floor with a pair of scissors jammed into the cover.
“I had to try and find out something about this…curse.” he says, continuing his tale. I couldn’t just sit back and see what happened.”
“So?” I ask.
“So I do what anyone in this day and age would do. I looked on internet.”
“It’s what I would do.” I say. “Did you find anything?”
“I didn’t.”
“That’s a shame…” I say, as evenly as possible.
“Unfortunately my path was soon made clear to me by… other means…”
“Please, go on.” I say.
“When the mark had counted all the way down I received a call. My mother had passed away in Russia.”
“Oh.” I say. “But that-
“That night I had a dream.” he says cutting me off. “I was out in a canoe somewhere far away from land. It started to rain. I looked into the sky and I realized that the rain was turning into blood. When the drops landed on the water they would suddenly transform into spiders that then all clumped together into one giant… horrible face. I try to row away from the monster but it sucked me towards it with its breath. I bowed down before the horrifying creature, begging for my life. It…communicated with me. It said if I found a truly righteous man, he could see the mark of the Romans on my hand. This man could set me free from its curse. You see why I ask you if you could see anything on my hand?”
“Set you free?” I ask, moving past his obvious question. “Free of what?”
He leans back in his chair, face bitter in expression as he ashes his cigarette. “Guilt. Growing up in my hometown…one had to do certain things… to survive…”
Suddenly he gets very close to me. “Look again.” he says, pushing his hand towards my face. “Are you sure you don’t see the mark?”
“I don’t see anything.” I say.
“And neither has anyone else. This troubled me deeply at first. Nobody else could see what to me was as clear as day. The dream had told me that I was… cursed… but I still didn’t fully understand the nature of it.”
“What made you so sure …that you …” I don’t want to set him off by suggesting he’s crazy. Luckily, he continues speaking.
“My mother dying could be written of as a coincidence.” he says. “She was old. But…something… happened.”
He sits in silence for a minute, smoking and looking into the distance.
“Go on.” I say after a bit more quiet.
“I am… sorry.” he says. “I find this whole thing somewhat difficult to speak of. I will tell you.”
He takes a drink before continuing. “I was driving around very late at night. I had so much on my mind… and I couldn’t sleep. I like to drive. It helps clear my head you see. I had been fired from my job for missing too much work and I didn’t know how I would ever be able to send for my girls to come over to America. I had been drinking a bit and I…I wasn’t paying attention. It was raining. I…hit someone. It was way out in the middle of nowhere. I got out to see but…”
“But…” I say, eyeing him closely, studying him for any sign of weakness or vulnerability I could exploit.
“The man was dead.” he says, harshly, spitting on the floor and wiping his lips. “I am ashamed to admit that I drove away at top speed. I have other people than myself to think about. What would happen to my daughter? My wife?”
“Okay.” I say. “You killed someone-”
“Not just killed. Murdered.” he insisted.
“Fine, murdered.” I say, continuing. “That doesn’t explain why you have to kill me.”
“When I awoke the next day the mark had reset to ten.” he explains. “Do you see? Do you see the curse I have been given?”
“It reset the countdown…” I say.
“It did.”
“Hmmm.” I maintain the illusion of normalcy, still just trying to keep the inevitable at bay. “So…you killed more people.” I say after a prolonged silence.
“Yes.” he says, rubbing his eyelids in exhausted shame.
“Tell me about that.” I say.
He stares at me, thinking. After taking a deep breath he nods.
“I didn’t want to kill.” he says, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow. “It took until the mark had gotten down to two again before I was able to will myself to …deliberately murder.”
I take another sip from my glass, the scotch burning my throat as I swallowed.
“It wasn’t the same as accidentally hitting someone with your car. Killing , it… changes you. Once you’ve felt the life leaving another person, that essence evaporating in the final gasping breath…you are never truly whole again. You have separated yourself from humanity.” he paused, clearly thinking of something important to him. He breathes in deeply. Exhales.
“You can never go back…”
There must be something I can say.
“And now you must understand. I… have to kill you.” he says. “If I do not kill you it could be my daughter, my wife. I cannot take that chance, even though it is possible that I am simply insane. If it was only me I would just let the curse take its toll.”
I rub my eyes, trying to make some sense out of the situation. Does he actually believe the things he’s saying? Except for his story, he doesn’t seem crazy. I decide to keep the conversation going as long as I can.
“Why me?” I ask. “Why does it have to be me?”
“Why not you?” he asks. “You aren’t anybody important.”
“I-” I try desperately to think of something that links me to the outside world. “I have…a Facebook…”
“You don’t update it. Every couple months you get wasted and weigh in on politics. Nobody will notice.”
I divert my eyes from his for a moment, lips pursed. “No…that’s….no…”
“Am I wrong?” he asks.
“Listen. Forget about all that for a second.” I say changing the subject. “We were seen together. When people realize I’ve gone missing the police will come for you!”
“Nobody will miss you.” he says candidly.
“You don’t know me!” I shout, offended.
“But I do know you. I’ve been following you for days. You have no family. No friends.” Mikhail put out his cigarette, lighting another and offering me one which I took.
“So that makes it okay to kill me?” I ask.
“You are not a righteous man. You cannot see the mark.”
I realize trying to reason with this person is unlikely to be fruitful.
“So.” I say, stalling further. “You’ve been killing someone about every ten days for how long? That’s a lot of bodies.”
He squirmed a little in his seat, clearly uncomfortable. “Yes…it is unfortunate.”
“I haven’t heard anything about a serial killer on the loose so that means you must be digging a lot of deep graves. Someone’s going to find these people.”
He hesitates a moment before continuing.
“This was a problem at first yes. But I had another dream you see. The creature, the same one from before,”
“The bloody spider face thing, right.”
“Yes,” he continues. “He explained what I needed to do. It made sense. It would destroy the evidence and cut down on spending too. A man must eat.…”
It takes a few seconds before what he says registers. I look over at the Tupperware. Filled with meat.
“That’s impossible…” I finally say after letting the true horror sink in. “ What do you do with the bones?”
“I don’t want to talk about this.” he says, tight lipped.
I sigh and take a long drink.
“So let me just get this whole thing entirely straight.” I say after a moment to gather my thoughts.
“You have a mark on your hand that only you can see. This mark counts down from ten until you murder someone. Then it resets. If you don’t kill someone, somebody close to you dies instead. So far I’ve got it right?”
“Yes.” He nods, expression flat.
“And now, you’re eating people because a giant face made of spiders and blood told you to?”
He frowns.
“Well, when you say it out loud like that…”
“Do you think maybe you should talk to a doctor about some of this?” I ask, as tactfully as possible.
He sighs angrily, turning away from me for a minute, taken aback at my suggestion.
“A doctor would lock me away. I am aware this whole thing sounds …strange. But it doesn’t matter. I cannot take that risk. My wife and daughter cannot be put in danger.”
“What do you think is going to happen to them when you get caught?” I ask. “You can’t keep this up forever.”
“When I have paid for my sins God will send me the man who can see the mark.” he says, with certainty. “Until then I must kill.”
There is nothing I can say.
He raises the gun to my head.
“I’m sorry.” he says.
“You don’t have to-”
“Good-bye.”he says.
“Wait-wai-”
The sound of a bang, a shocking whiplash. Darkness.
And then suddenly I’m in a canoe in the middle of the ocean. It’s dark, darker than any night I’ve ever experienced. A thick blinding fog mulls around me like a soup. The deathly silent air fills with a sense of deep and ancient foreboding as if the blackened souls of a thousand murderers had somehow been made into vapor and clumped into one horrifying vortex of pain. I sit in the boat, naked and shivering as it starts to rain. At first just a small trickle, then gradually heavier and heavier until it becomes a raging torrent. In the darkness I can’t at first see the redness but a flash of lightning illuminates me for a moment revealing a storm of blood. I have nothing to cover myself and the cold thick liquid engulfs me completely. The sea itself is unnaturally calm but the blood rain, unyielding. The congealing gore suddenly morphs into spiders that hiss and groan with the voices of dying men. They crawl over me, biting and clawing my skin, wrapping me in a crimson web until I scream for mercy. Suddenly the creatures freeze and then they all mass themselves into a huge floating pile, bobbing in the sea as the thunder crashes with horrifying light. The mound starts to take form, a mouth, eyes and a hole with long stringy tendrils hanging out where the nose should be.
It doesn’t speak to me. It screams a high pitched wail that blasts me backwards. I almost fall into the water from it’s force. I dare to look again and I see the face shaking back and forth, a hideous ripple pulsating through the makeshift skin that then bursts into flame. Though it says no words the message is somehow crystal clear and the message is this: You are damned and you will suffer. You are in hell.
But I’m not dead.
I wake up.
It takes me a moment to understand that I’m alive and not at the mercy of an unholy demon. The pain in my head is horrific, a sharp driving hammer to the front of my skull. The smell of disinfectant enters my nostrils and sends me into a brief panic, thinking I’m back in Mikhail’s lair of an apartment but as my eyes adjust and the picture comes into focus I realize I’m in a hospital.
I let out a loud, involuntary groan as I attempt to sit up, retreating when I feel a pang of nausea that pushes me back into a supine position.
“He- help…” I whisper. My mouth is dry. I manage to speak up with a great deal of effort. “HELP!” I scream. I frantically push the button for the nurse.
Suddenly I hear a yelp. “He’s awake!” a young woman’s high shrill voice rings out.
The room is flooded with doctors and nurses, policemen and people with cameras.
“Out!” an authoritative voice commands. “All of you out!”
I black out for a moment again, awakening to to the scene of a deeply concerned older man’s face looking down at me.
“Mr. Davies.” the man says. “How are you feeling?”
“What’s happened?” I ask. “Where…where is he?”
“You were shot. It’s a miracle you survived. They killed the perpetrator, the police I mean. Somebody heard the noise and called 911. He was killed in a gunfight.”
“I…I see…” I say.
There’s an awkward silence where we just look at each other.
“How long have I been out?” I ask, finally breaking it.
“About a week.” he says. “You had to have several surgeries. An inch to the left and the bullet would have killed you instantly.”
“Oh.” I say.
“When you’re up to it, the police would like to have a word with you.” he says, writing something down on his chart. “I’m sorry to bring it up, it’s just they were very particular about informing them as soon as you woke up. I don’t suppose you’re up to talking to them yet?”
Might as well get it over with.
“It’s fine…yes, send them in.” I say.
He leaves and about forty minutes go by before a younger looking man with a short blonde haircut and an unshaven face walks in. He’s wearing a slightly beaten up trench coat and a pair of leather gloves.
The detective’s eyes are bloodshot and watery. He has the nervous manner of a man waiting for something to drop, blinking far too much and jumping at the slightest noise.
He swallows hard as he approaches me, introducing himself as Detective Heller. He’s pale with dark circles under his eyes, obviously subsisting on little sleep.
“I just need some information.” he says, his voice a nervous tin-can staccato, scraping sandpaper.
He asks me to tell him exactly what happened, to the best of my recollection, that night I was shot. He says he’s investigating a possible serial killer. Mikhail was a serial killer.
“We were at the bar..”
“Which bar is this?
“Uhh… Jack’s bar I think is the name. Jack or Jackson.” I say, trying to remember.
“Jack’s Sin Tavern on Maple Street?” the detective suggests.
“Yes,” I say, throbbing pain filling my head.
“Hang on…” he says, going through his notes. “Do you often visit this bar?”
“Yeah.” I answer. “I drink there quite a bit. I work from home and it’s very close by.”
“That’s interesting.” he says.
I try to think back. The vision I had of the spiders and the blood, it’s fading.
“It’s all very strange.” I say.
He snorts a desperate sort of snicker. “A lot of strange things have been happening since that night.” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose.
“Like what?” I ask.
I..I’m sure they aren’t connected.” he says. He’s hesitating. There’s something he doesn’t want to tell me.
“Indulge me.” I reply.
Heller scratches his bristled chin and blinks, inhaling through his nose. After a second he speaks. “The officer who shot and killed Mikhail, that man killed himself two days ago. Hung himself. I was the one who discovered him.”
“That’s terrible.” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Well, he’d been having dreams…” he says, looking at the floor. “He was unstable I guess. I didn’t know the guy. But enough about him, tell me about Mikhail. What kind of person was he, or did he seem to be to you? Just whatever impressions you had.”
I linger on the fact that he said the suicide had dreams. What kind of shit is that to say? We all have dreams. Mikhail had dreams of spiders and blood.
“Well, first of all the guy was crazy.” I say. “He had to be a schizophrenic…”
“Why?” the detective asks. “What sort of things made him seem crazy?”
I look at him, brow arched. “Are you serious? You saw the Tupperware, right? He said he was eating people.”
“Ah. Yes. We did find…human remains.”
“Yeah.” I say. “He’d been cooking, he said.”
“Did he say why? Why he was eating them?” Detective Heller takes out a handkerchief to better deal with his sweating.
“To save money I think, is kind of what I took away from it. And a giant uh, spider headed demon told him it was what he should do. Did I mention the spider demon head guy?”
The mention of the spider demon seems to register slightly, though I can’t be sure. He wipes sweat from his brow and writes something in his notebook.
“Anyway the whole thing was nuts. ” I continue. “He said he had this mark that only he could see…”
The detective suddenly jumps like a startled kitten, eyes widening. “A mark?” he asks. “Did you say a mark? Where was this mark?”
“On his hand..” I say, watching the detective turn incredibly pale, more sweat beading down his forehead. “It was a Roman numeral ten. It started counting down.”
“Counting down?” he asks, a nervous laugh interrupting his question. “How? How was it counting down?”
“Well…he said that it changed from an X to an I before an X. That’s how he knew it was numbers and not just an X… you know, Roman numerals… are you okay?” I ask him.
“I’m fine.” he replies. “Counting down to what? What was it counting down to?”
A horrible flaming face of blood and spiders screaming and cursing me flashes in my mind. I block it out.
“Well…” I manage to say, “he said that…Listen it’s a long story…”
“Try and sum it up for me!” he yells, grabbing my arm in a tight clench. He immediately realizes what he’s done and relinquishes his hold.
“I’m sorry.” he says. “Please it’s very important…for my report.”
We lock eyes and I see two pits of coal black staring with an intensity I’ve never come upon before. I flinch and regain myself.
“Well, basically when the number got to zero his mother died.” I explain as clearly as I could. “Then he got in a hit and run that killed a guy and it reset from Ten. He said… he killed all those people because only killing someone would stop it from taking someone else close to him.”
The detective bites his lip and exhales sharply. “I see.” Nothing is said for a moment, nervous tension shooting through the air like electric strings in a tug of war.
“Was there anything else?” he asks.
“Uh..yes.” I say, deliberately choosing my words. “He said that if a somebody was able to see the mark…well that was a righteous man who could free him.”
“ Free him of what?”
“Of…things! I dunno! Stuff.” I’m at my wit’s end, wanting nothing more than for this man to leave.
At this point another detective walks in, a tall muscular man with a sharp mustache. He pats Detective Heller on the back, causing the nervous man to jump back and put his hands in the air.
“Whoa.” the big officer says. “Need to lay off the pipe there, hotshot.”
“I don’t smoke meth!” Heller shouts. The officer backs off, hands in the air in a sign of peace. “Hey, take it easy Heller.”
Detective Heller just swallows and smooths his pants before giving me one more look.
“Thank you for your time.” he says as he backs away and leaves the room.
The officer gives a look, rolling his eyes and pointing back with his thumb. “Jeez, some people, eh?”
“He…he’s a meth addict?” I ask, calming down somewhat.
“Everyone knows it, he denies it. His dad’s the chief, whatcha gonna do?”
The large officer asks me a few more questions. He repeats what Heller said about the serial killings that have been happening in the area. He leaves.
A nurse comes in and shoots me full of strong pain medication. It’s lights out for a long dreamless sleep.
I must have slept for ten hours. A day goes by. Two days. I do nothing. Every time I close my eyes I see that horrible face. I thought it was fading but it was just taking its time, seeping into every thought, poisoning me.
I need to distract myself. I turn on the television and switch to the news.
The local channel goes on for five minutes about a local high schooler who is going to break a local rushing record in football. I watch numbly for an hour.
“Breaking news.” the attractive blonde female news anchor says, looking very seriously into the camera. “Just in from Nashua, earlier this week we reported on up to 18 missing persons cases that are being linked to a serial murderer who was killed in a gun battle last Friday. Police are saying they’ve found another body, causing them to believe there may have been two perpetrators involv-”
I turn it off.
Weeks of recovery. Somehow there wasn’t really any brain damage, so I don’t need to learn how to walk or talk again. It just takes time to heal and when they finally do release me I’m incredibly weak, muscles atrophied from laying in bed.
For the moment I’m just going to continue living my life. I’ve had no spiritual awakening, no moment of catharsis that set the world right again and allowed me to re-enter society as a new man. All I have is the screaming fiery image of a demon cursing me and telling me I’m damned. Damned to what? I don’t know anything. The demon said I was in hell. Is this what hell is? Just an isolated paranoid existence, periodically interrupted by visions of horror?
Mikhail was crazy. He had to be. Why then do I shut out all news from the outside world? What am I afraid of hearing if it’s all just a madman’s hallucination?
Why do I keep checking my hand?