Desolation (28 page)

Cain dropped his eyes and backed away. Could he really help? He had run here under the impression that George would not hurt him, but where that idea had come from, who had implanted it in his mind, he had no idea.

Could he really, truly help?

George tried to turn again, twisting hard. His shoulder struck the door frame and wood splintered, architraves falling against Cain's upraised arms. George growled. Perhaps he was trying to speak, but his mouth had become a shape that could never form words. He was built now for killing and destruction, not thought and conversation.

“So ugly I want to puke,” Cain said quietly, not quite believing his own words.

“Oh shit,” the shadow said in his mind, its voice receding as it fled elsewhere in the house.

George leaped and Cain backed away. He stumbled but kept pushing with his feet, putting distance between himself and George. The mutated man landed on all fours and came closer, jaws dripping, teeth bared and long where the gums had receded. He reached for Cain where he lay floundering on the landing.

“No!” Cain shouted, and the shadow winced in his mind. George sat back and laughed.

Cain recognized the trick immediately. He tried to stand, but the monster was already away, moving quickly back through the shattered door and into the little girl's bedroom. As Cain stood and ran forward, he heard the girl's screams cut off by a sickening tearing sound. Blood splashed and turned the bedroom light red.

A hopeless sob escaped Cain's lips, and tears tried to make the scene unreal.

Someone whined. Cain glanced to his left into the bathroom once again. As soon as the stricken father saw the horror in Cain's eyes, his hands dropped from his throat and he died, his final tears diluting his already thickening blood.

“You bastard!” Cain shouted, running to the room. He did not want to see, but there was no way now that he could turn away.
This is my fault, all my fault!
George had done this to show Cain what he could do, and why, and how powerful the Way had made him. If Cain had not shunned Magenta
yesterday, this family would still be alive. If he had taken more time to look into himself, see whether Pure Sight really was there and what it would entail in his form, George may have gone days or weeks without another kill.

“Can't blame yourself,” the shadow said from elsewhere in the house. “You didn't kill them. It's just the Way of things.”

“Fuck the Way!” Cain shouted. “Fuck it! And why are you so scared? Piece of shit, that's you!” His feet tangled in a length of architrave, and he bent and snatched it up without thinking. The wood was thin, but he might be able to fend off George's first blow, at least.

“Not scared,” the shadow said. “You have to see this on your own.”

Cain stood in the doorway and took a good, long look at the scene before him, punishing himself with the horror of it all. George was leaning over the bed, blood streaking his bruised and stretched skin, heavy shoulders flexing as his arms ripped at the dead girl, hand falling and rising to lift scoops of meat to his jaws.

“I have always . . . been . . . alone.”

The monster turned around and the grotesque, bloody smile on his malformed face brought the rage up out of Cain. Fear hid away, farther than the shadow. Doubt was drowned, smothered by the sense of rightness that rose within him, up from depths he never knew were there. He brought up the length of broken timber and growled like a wolf.

For an instant a flicker of doubt crossed
George's face. He looked left and right like a nervous bird. But then he looked straight at Cain again, threw back his head, and laughed, spitting gobs of flesh that stuck on the ceiling between glow-in-the-dark stars.

“Hey, ugly,” a voice said from Cain's left. “Sometimes you go too far.”

Sister Josephine was squatting on the sill of the open window, slick hands and feet resting delicately between a collection of model horses. Her habit flowed about her. Honey filled the room, an overpowering aroma that succeeded in washing out the stench of blood and insides . . . but only for a moment. Cain did not look for long, did not breathe in that scent and believe that everything was all right, and if the nun spoke again he did not hear her words. He grasped the moment she had given him—George was still staring at Sister Josephine, his jaws hanging slack and bloody—and thrust forward with the broken architrave.

George screamed. It was an expression of sheer agony that the little girl had never had the chance to utter. As the wood jarred home in the monster's stomach, Cain shouted too, his hands slipping along the snapped timber and picking up a dozen heavy splinters between his fingers. He backed away, aghast at what he had done. The shadow appeared at his shoulder and laid a cold hand against his neck, but Cain shook it off, swearing, backing up to the doorway as George stood to his full unnatural height.

“I'm sorry!” Cain shouted, ridiculous and yet heartfelt. George staggered across the room toward
the door, blood spewing out around his hands where he held the architrave protruding from his gut, and Cain wondered whether that blood was all his own. Several bees buzzed at the wound and, finding it not to their liking, bumbled lazily out the open window. “I'm sorry!”

“Shit,” George growled, his voice distorted. “Oh God, it hurtsss!” His body already seemed smaller than it had before, not shrinking but lessening. However the monstrous transformation took him, he could not maintain it in the grip of such pain.

Cain glanced again at the open window. The nun had gone, but he thought he heard a laugh hiding somewhere among George's continuing cries of pain.

“I bet that hurts,” the shadow said.

“Of course it hurts!” George shouted. “Pull it out!”

“Sure thing,” said the shadow.

“No!” Cain said, and he realized the shadow was playing with both of them.

The injured man fell to the floor, rolled onto his side, and started writhing. Another scream came, rising into a high, keening whine that seemed to go on and on, assaulting Cain's ears almost as much as the siren. But only his ears. This sound could not reach inside his heart, because guilt was quickly being buried by the anger. His newfound confidence hammered it down and told him that George deserved this, every painful second between now and his death had been earned a thousand times over. Cain looked to the mess on the bed and nodded, unable to stifle another sob for the fate of that poor girl.

The shadow voiced its agreement from behind. “We should leave,” it said then. “There's nothing more we can do here.”

“I can't go anywhere!” George screeched.

“You're not,” Cain said, “and there's
plenty
more we can do.” He saw confusion in the monster's eyes as he walked forward to stand over George.
Could still be dangerous
, he thought,
could lash out with those claws, those feet, and maybe he's just feigning it
. But he could see a curl of gut squeezing from the wound in George's stomach now, and he knew that this was no sham. “Here, let me.” He reached out for the end of the protruding architrave.

George grew still. Perhaps he thought Cain really would help him, find his Way in time to realize just how George was helpless in the face of his own.

Cain grabbed the wood in both hands and twisted, pushed, leaning left and right, and he closed his eyes to the horrible sight of George thrashing and dying beneath him.

The screams, though. He could not avoid the screams. They were rich and loud and filled with the memory of decades of death. Such was their intensity that Cain expected the siren to scream in and punish him for such an experience. But at last, at long last, he believed that he was way beyond its reach. This murder by his own hand had shifted him out of his father's influence forever.

If only I'd been faster
, Cain thought.
If only I hadn't delayed out there in the garden. Maybe all this would have turned out differently
.

He had begun to make his own life.

 

“How do you feel?” the shadow asked.

“Leave me alone.”

Cain was sitting beneath a tree in the park. The shadow moved around him, across the grass, in and out of a clump of bushes, circling like a dog avoiding its angry master. Cain was carefully pulling splinters from his palm and the flap of skin between his thumb and forefinger. There was not enough light to see by, but the slivers were large enough to get a grip on in the dark. Each one hurt more, and he welcomed that. Each extraction brought tears and he let them flow free, hoping that they would distort this world beyond what it was revealing to him. Exactly what that was, he was unsure. But he wanted none of it.

He could still hear the echoes of George's final screams, as if they were haunting the park.

And he could still hear that little girl's final cry. He would hear it always. It had replaced the siren as his tormentor, his punisher, because had he acted differently that scream would have never been uttered. The girl would be asleep in her Barbie pajamas, with her model horses watching over her and the luminous stars on the ceiling giving her sweet dreams.

“We should move,” the shadow said.

“Why?”

“Someone may find us here.”

“So? What about it?”

“You don't want to be connected—”

“I
am
connected!” Cain shouted, standing and kicking out at where he thought the shadow may be. Darkness slunk away from him, flowing about
the tree like water. “I
caused
that! George did what he did because of
me
, to show
me!
”

“Fool,” the shadow whispered. “You can't blame yourself for what he did. He wasn't so insecure that he'd need to show you
anything
. Don't flatter yourself with the idea that you could have prevented that.”

“But . . .”

The shadow emerged from the dark and stood beside him, more solid and real than he had ever seen. Cain leaned back, eyes wide with a fearful fascination, staring at the shadow and trying so hard to make out any features. There were none; only a consistent absence of light. And yet it held the shape of a human, moved like a man, and spoke with the calm assurance of someone comfortable in their own skin.

“You remember those months and years in your father's basement?” the shadow said. “Those times he tortured you, trying to pry a talent from you that he knew he could not possibly have himself?”

“Pure Sight is no talent,” Cain said.

“Whatever the fuck you call it!” the shadow spat. “Shut up and listen. You remember those times?”

“Of course.”

“Your father would exclude all sound from your world for weeks on end, making you exist in utter silence. No talking, no laughing, no crying, no conversation. You had to cover your ears when he slid your food tray in, just in case it made a bump and you heard it. You used to enjoy eating so much because you could hear your jaws clicking, the food
being mashed between your teeth, and you thought of that as a small victory.”

Cain nodded, though he could not recall the shadow being there, not then. And if it had been there, how could it have known what he was thinking each time he chewed, drank, swallowed?

“Whose fault was it when the siren shattered your mind?”

“My father's.”

“No, it was yours.”

Cain shook his head. “Magenta already told me that. She was wrong, too.”

“No she wasn't, she was right. If what George did was your fault, then the siren was your fault as well. You alone are to blame for what it did to you.”

Cain frowned, glared sidelong at the shadow that stood beside him. “What are you?” he asked for the very first time.

The shadow only chuckled and moved away. “Think about it,” it said. “Think about guilt, and cause and effect. What you did tonight was to stop George, not steer him. He picked his own path, and the Way was his guide.”

“They're all fucked up,” Cain said. “George, Whistler, Magenta, even the nun. So much potential put to waste! There's so much they could do with what they have! Think of all the
good
they could do! It must drive them bad. Evil. They're evil.”

“That's not what they'd say,” the shadow muttered. “But I suppose that's something for you to decide.”

Cain started walking toward the park gates, eager to leave and get back onto the streets. He had no idea of where to go, but simply moving felt better than sitting and musing on things. His original intention had to been to follow them all, see what Pure Sight made of them, and then reject it totally and utterly. Witnessing them would convince him of his decision. It would strengthen his conviction.

What George had done this evening was more than enough to do that on its own.

But there was something else: the shadow. Cain had no idea what it was, although he knew it had kept him company when he was younger, hidden away in his father's basement and enduring the old man's misdirected experiments. It had come from Cain himself, he was sure, emerging to protect his sanity during those long, awful years when he should have been meeting friends, going to school, discovering girls, playing football, having a life of his own. The shadow had been his only friend. And now that it was back, Cain found himself relying on it once again.

The question that nagged at him was
Why
was it back? It had been locked safely away for so long that he had stopped thinking of it as real. The chest had become a symbol, that was all, an indication that he was attempting to put the past behind him and move on to whatever he could make of his future.

But now that the chest was ruptured and open, and the shadow was out, he realized that it had not been his past contained therein at all. It was something much, much closer to him.

“What
are
you?” he asked of the dark, and the shadow spoke back.