He allowed the searing heat from the scourge to thread through his nerves, concentrating on the purging. He focused on the atonement of sins he could never wash or whip away.
“Miért?” Why? he whispered and snapped his wrist. The pain blossomed now. He imagined a purple flower budding on his back and absorbing his thoughts, his being.
“Julia, édes Júlia!”
He snapped, and this time pain flooded his brain and glutted his every sense. The warm trickle of blood began its slow meander. Much more would flow before he was through. He wanted it now, the lessons learned from the cat o’ nines, as he offered his soul up to be devoured by some higher power. To be stricken for the thing he hadn’t stopped. The whip sailed through the air. Snap! His mind blanked. All there was now was the scathing and burning of flesh under the crack of the whip.
The images began to recede.
Chapter Eleven
He would have died if he could have, but some moral admonitions have a tighter grip than others. He did not want to go to Hell, though in his heart, he knew of no other place that would accept him.
Loneliness could be a brutal adversary. The weeks passed in Madame Laroux’s apartment in Montreal. The cold deepened as winter approached, and already gusts of wind that froze one’s face at first contact were usual. Simon did not venture far because of this.
The Madame’s food tasted delicious, her wine sweet and the occasional conversation by other boarders quite welcomed. Still Simon did not gain weight, for he only ate once a day.
At night, the flog taught him the abstinence of guilt, but it could not whip away the ache of loneliness. It could not bring back the object of his love, but only promise to blot out its memory.
One deep November night, when Simon had lingered late after dinner in the parlor, Madam Laroux’s fine House produced such a catalyst. The reaction dug deep to the chemistry of his soul.
She did not carry the lace fan he had seen her toting three weeks prior, thus exposing her face in full. Beautiful lines with petite nose and slender chin. Eyes like living glass. Her dress was buttoned, but beneath that delicate fabric her bosoms swelled.
“You are new?” she asked in a voice like an angel.
“I am, Mademoiselle.”
Her eyes drifted down. It made him flush. “Your hands,” she said and took one into hers, “they are skilled, oui?
Simon felt his breath catch in his throat. “Oui, Lady, very.”
She leaned in close and whispered in his ear. “You are not from France as they say.”
His face exploded with heat. He began to withdraw his hand from hers, but she held it tight.
“Your secret safe with me. I love a man who is skilled with his hands.” Her eyebrows raised, her eyes lit up, her smile filled the room.
“You are very lovely,” he said. “You remind me very much of someone I knew once. Someone very dear to me.”
“Oh, I can be for you whatever you like,” she said.
His heart beat wildly in his chest. Her words sung the sweetest melody. Even now, her image seemed to distort further, as he stared into her eyes. He no longer saw a girl in the service of Madame Laroux, but his savior reincarnate.
“Mademoiselle,” he whispered, now clutching her hand in his. “Forgive me, what is your name?”
“My name, Monsieur, is…Julia.”
* * * *
The weeks that followed were a blur for Simon Kadoza. He arranged with the Madam of the house that he should have exclusive rights to the one called Julia and he paid three times the rate. The nights that passed after were nothing short of a miracle for him.
A smile returned to his lips for the first time in months. The wounds of his flagellation healed and disappeared. Each night he found new life in the contours of her naked body as he peeled back layers of clothing to reveal her fleshy parts, her pink nipples hardened by the chill of his room, her musky, hirsute cleft that he warmed with the hungry heat of his tongue. Found new life in her unbridled moans when he made love to her.
The two ventured to the many shops and restaurants where Simon bought her all manner of trifle. They remained inside under covers, twining their naked bodies, when the cold and the wind and the snows proved too much for them.
They spoke of moving away together from Madame Laroux’s estate, to a place of Julia’s choosing, anywhere in the world that she like. Nothing was too far, too exotic, too plain. His scourge lay dormant in its pouch as the images from his past melded with those of the present.
“Then what?” she asked, one evening after lovemaking. “What name will you call me when we have our castle in America, hmm?”
His hand found her buttock and patted it softly. He shrugged. “I will call you Julia, by your name. Why would I call you anything else?”
She shrugged. Then looked at him and smiled. Tears stained her cheeks.
“What is wrong, my love?”
She wiped her nose and laughed. “If only it can be true,” she said.
Simon did not understand. “Of course it can be true. It is true.”
“And Madame Laroux?” she asked. “What of her?”
“Madame Laroux? Madame Laroux? How should that cold woman enter my bed? I will pay your bride price.”
Three weeks passed in this wise, Simon living blindly in this world, until the night before they were to leave, when Julia turned up dead.
* * * *
The police inspector’s expression did not betray his office. His manner was calm, if not cold. He was a younger man than Simon, a good looking man, likely with a wife and children waiting for him at home.
“Please Monsieur, tell me again what happened.”
Simon shook his aching head. He felt exhausted from crying. He and the inspector had been engaged in this redundant parlez for three hours. He wanted to leave. He wanted to leave forever. “I don’t know. I tell you, when I came back to the room, I found her…already dead.”
“You say you never left her side in three weeks, eh?” he said.
“Yes, but tonight I had matters to attend to.”
The detective’s brow rose. “Matters?”
“I told you. We were going to leave in the morning.”
“Where were you going?”
“To America,” said Simon. “We were going to restart our life together in America.”
The detective sat back and folded his arms across his chest. “Hmmm,” he said, his belief dubious. “You and this—” he waived a hand in the air, a gesture.
“Julia.” Simon looked up for the first time, directly at the inspector. “I was going to start my life over with Julia.”
The inspector nodded slowly, took a breath and said: “Tell me, Monsieur, you aware that this girl was a prostitute, no?”
Simon swallowed and blinked. “She’s no prostitute, sir.”
“I see. So, do you know her name was not Julia, but Elizabeth Duboise?”
“Pardon?”
“I said, do you know her name was not Julia?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t understand. We are talking about the same person, about my Julia, yes?”
The detective sat back and shook his head.“Homme est délirant,” he said to himself. “Wait here, Monsieur, s’il vous plait.”
When the inspector returned he was not alone. Three suited officers accompanied him. “You come now,” he said into Simon’s ear as he jangled metal keys and pulled his arms behind his back.
“What are you doing?”
“Shh,” said the detective. Cold metal clamped against Simon’s wrists. “Come quietly now.”
Chapter Twelve
How many days, weeks or months had passed he did not know, indeed could not. The darkness of his cell, the solitude, the barest form of sustenance that could not be digni
fied as food, all of this distorted his innate notions of time. Pure madness for a clockmaker.
He sat now in the dank and squalid solitude. His thoughts deepened in the darkness of his cell, the cell he never left. The shit bucket beside him brimmed full. It hadn’t been emptied in a week.
His cell consisted of cement walls. No window to the outside. A straw mattress, breaking at the seams and polluted with lice. The metal door, bolted from the outside, held an aperture large enough to stick out a single head. At night, howls racketed down the hard hallways. Men battered their bodies against their metal doors like wild, caged beasts.
He had been taken directly here, bound in leather belts. No trial need be held, the facility was no prison in any legal sense. The place—Longue Pointe Insane Asylum near Montreal owned and operated by the Sisters of Providence.
His hair suffered shaving twice monthly. He did not receive baths or showers as such. Sprayed with ice cold water that bruised his genitalia and dusted with a white powder that made his skin burn composed his hygiene.
His clothes delivered themselves into the hands of greedy guardsmen, stolen or sold, leaving him naked. Some weeks past, he’d stopped vomiting up the watery gruel they shoved under the door.
He kept to himself in the lonely dark, avoiding the watch of the greasy-coat doctors who prowled the halls for someone to feed their poisons too. Once, watching from his door wicket, he’d witnessed an inmate pulled from his cell, naked and filthy with his own shit and stuck with half a dozen needles at least. The man had vomited green foam and twitched before being hauled away like a sack of potatoes.
The cell had been refilled with a new patient.
Simon’s mind played games with him in the pitch of his stinking cell. The images, those terrible and heart breaking remembrances of a life, long over, played in his mind as a motion picture might if he had ever seen one. Their continued recounting brought about something fiercely wicked, not innate, to their constitution. Not only did he see his wife and darling daughters burned to a crisp in their house fire one year prior, but he saw himself, in those waking dreams, lighting the spark that would become the conflagration. A deed he knew he had not done.
More. He’d come to understand his acute inability to differentiate between the whore he’d taken in the estate of Madame Laroux and his own deceased Julia, but how had the prostitute died?
His beguiling mind showed him a portrait of himself, knife in hand, tearing her supple flesh to ribbons in the dead of night, awash in her hot blood. He remembered it in exacting detail though he knew—knew with all his soul—he had not done this deed. Knew it…hoped it.
And then the screams tore from this throat. Wild, thrashing protestations on blistery cold nights that he had not done it, he had not taken those lives. Perhaps he had not stopped the fulfillment of fate, but he had not brought it about with murderous action.
Had he? Oh, the madness, the guilt and plain confusion. His insanity flourished inside this lunatic prison.
“You can stop screaming now,” said a voice in the darkness.
Simon thought the speaker to be inside his head, not unusual in recent times.
“I said, stop your screaming, sir.”
Simon pulled his head up from between his knees. “Who’s there?”
“Dispensed with social graces have we?”
“Yes. There’s no use for civility in this witch pit. Who’s there and how did you get in here?”
A match flared. Simon blinked. “Jézus Krisztus!”
A grinning face with eyes drooped, an unsettling smirk showcased by long, rotten teeth. The man was naked, like Simon, save for a pair of fingerless gloves. “Sorry, boy.”
The hot stench of sulfur stung Simon’s nose.
“Who are you?”
“Me,” said the man, watching as the flame of his match marched toward his fingertips. “I am Merlin, see?” The match went out.
Simon expected a vanishing trick, but got another burst of match stick. The man squatted near him, too near.
“Merlin?”
The man shook his head vigorously, if not a trifle simian. “I gots loadsa tricks.” He laughed stupidly.
“Like what?”
“Like how I got in here.”
“And how was that?”
Merlin pursed his lips and blew out, waving his arms in an imitation of smoke. The match went out. He fired another.
“Won’t you stop it?” asked Simon, waving the air.
“Hey, hey, hey,” said Merlin, “gots a question for you, want to hear it?”
“No.”
Merlin flinched toward the door like a thief, then chuckled and grew serious again. “Sure you’re sure?”
“Tell me before I shove those matches down your throat.”
“Okay, okay. Look. See. I gotta plan. No, not a plan…a thing!” He chuckled again, his breath smelling like decomposing fish.
“You better start making sense,” Simon grumbled.
“Sshh. Listen. So, I hear you here, right. I hear you every night screaming, saying, ‘I didn’t do it, I didn’t. I swear to it, oh, blah, blah, blah’, yeah?”
To Simon’s eerie fascination, Merlin had made a perfect imitation of what he thought his voice should sound like. “Go on.”
Merlin lit another match.
“Yeah, so I—” he turned aside, as if addressing someone or something beside him. “I believe you.”
“You do?” Simon took interest in the lunatic. “You believe me?”
“Right…” he looked up and stroked his chin. “But when you scream it like that, they don’t believe you, I mean, they know you is guilty of whatever crime they said to put you in here. Makes sense, eh?”
He had a point. “I didn’t think they listened.”
Merlin’s eyes popped wide in the yellow glow. “Oh they do, sir. They do, they listen to our screams, they listen loud and clear so’s to make sure it’s not their crimes we screamin’ about.”
The match went out.
Merlin lit another. He inched closer, squatting so that his testicles bulged from between his foul thighs. The man was little more than skin and bones and a pair of testicles. Simon could smell his thick odor, even in his putrid cell.
“But that’s not it,” said Merlin. “That’s not my business here. You be innocent, this be true, but you’re stuck here, forever, just like all the rest. Just like all the rest. And listen to me well, Simon Kadoza, they be coming. Those worse than the Sisters of this Hellpit. The Taninim, yeah, the Taninim come and then not us, not just us, but all the men and women and beasts of this earth be slaves then forever, capiche? All be slaves forever and ever and ever.”
Simon shifted to relieve the strain on his buttocks against the cold floor. He waived a hand. “You’re speaking nonsense.”
“Nonsense? Nonsense?” Merlin gestured his hand to the cell around them. “This sir, be nonsense.” He slapped the flat palm of his hand against the floor. “This be illusion.” His match went out.
Simon raised a hand in the dark. “Don’t light another one and please leave by whatever method you arrived.”
He heard the grating of pebble against rock, the sound of a body moving. He relaxed a bit, the imbecile was leaving.
A match flared and Merlin’s rotted-tooth smile glittered in the light.
“Bah!” cried Simon.
“Cast me out, cast me out? Okay. But answer this first: want to get cast out of here yourself?”
The question was like a fish hook. It hadn’t occurred to Simon until now that this idiot could help him escape. He had come into his locked cell, so he could leave it and teach Simon the trick, too.
Simon grabbed Merlin by his foul mouth, forcing a string of curses and drizzle from the man’s cracked lips. The match stick fell col
d. “Show me how to get out.” He breathed in the dark, nearly gagging on Merlin’s stink. “Show me!”
Merlin waggled his head from side to side, trying to extricate himself from Simon’s hold. Finally he shouted, “Not right, time not right!”
Simon let go, surprised at his coarse show of emotion and crept to the door, feeling his way along the floor. Merlin made pig-like noises in the dark as he scrambled for what Simon knew were matches.
Simon traced the outline of the door with his fingertips, peeling and pulling at the edge of it, trying to open it. “You must have picked the lock,” he said. “That’s how you must have done it.”
A match flared. Merlin crouched below him, his eyes round and crazed. “Not lock-picked,” he said. “Trick-picked!”
Simon slumped and let his body slip down the grimy door to rest idly next to Merlin. Tears wet his eyelids.
“I get you out. I get you free. Free as a lark, oui? Free as a butterfly, but you listen to me, si? You listen to me, boy, it takes time.”
“Fool, if you can get me out, then why don’t you get yourself out? What are you still doing here?”
Merlin spread his hands and shrugged. “I’ve nowhere to go.”
“Certainly you can find better than this.”
Merlin gazed at the light, transfixed. “Nowhere to hide…Pro si Leviathans erant ut procreate, orbis terrarium…could non sto pro lemma.”
“I don’t speak Latin,” Simon mumbled.
“For if the Leviathans were to procreate, the world…could not stand before them.”
Something fizzled, a snake-like hiss that startled and made Simon jump back into the dark confines of his squalid cell. Spying behind him, he spotted only smoke, a haze already dissipating.
“Leviathans? You mean sea—?”
Merlin was gone.
The Demon of Montreal Page 5