Father Panic's Opera Macabre

by Thomas Tessier

  He was safe, for now. He sank to the floor and sat in the darkness. It felt good to rest his back against the wall, to be alone. But his mind was still swarming with unbearable images and raging confusion.

  And then he became aware of the mask again. It was still on his face. As soon as he thought about it, he could feel it seem to tighten, choking his pores as if it were trying to enter his body through his skin. Suppressing panic for a moment, Neil tried again to remove it. Be calm, he told himself, find an edge and work it back. But he got nowhere with it. He could feel his fingertips on it, he could even make a small portion of it move slightly- but then it always slipped away from his hand and back in place. It was impossibly filmy to his touch, but on his face it felt heavy and oppressive.

  He finally gave up, sobbing once out loud and banging his head back against the wall in frustration.

  Someone laughed.

  Neil froze. The shocking human sound had come from only a few feet away. He could hardly think at all now, let alone know what to do. He heard the soft pat of childlike footsteps on the floor, followed by a very loud click, and then an overhead light went on. There were piles of clothes everywhere, the floor dotted with random heaps of them. Nothing but clothes. The woman grinning hideously at Neil was the same dwarf he had seen on the balustrade when he arrived at Marisa's house.

  She was one of them, she would alert the guards-

  The woman read his panic and immediately made calming gestures to stop him from doing anything foolish. Neil was thinking that he ought to kill her and turn the light off. Her voice sounded like that of a toy doll, but there was something soothing in her tone. She held her finger to her lips. Neil sat where he was. It occurred to him that he was dead anyway, so what was the point of resisting, much less killing someone else? He felt tired. All of the energy he had somehow summoned up in escaping from the guards and then hiding in this barn-like building was now gone. His head ached and the mask felt like a huge clamp on his face. Let it be. Roll into it.

  Noise, the sound of activity outside. The woman went to the window to take a look, then quickly turned away. She gestured with her hand for Neil to follow her. They went up a large, open flight of stairs to the second floor, which was covered with more mounds of clothing. There was no sorting, no order, just random tilting piles of ordinary clothes, as if they had simply been thrown down where they were.

  The woman kept gesturing and Neil followed her to the front side of the building. There were two windows overlooking the open ground outside. She went to one and pointed Neil to the other. He no longer thought of her as a threat to him, and yet he didn't feel that she was a friend or ally. This place was like a concentration camp, but without the Nazis. The dwarf woman was perhaps a prisoner, but one allowed to live because of the work she did with these clothes, or because someone liked her- some insane reason. He didn't know, he had no idea, just fleeting guesses.

  Why was he there?

  Dozens of guards had assembled in the yard outside. The spotlights were fixed, illuminating the whole area in a harsh light. Everyone seemed to be standing around expectantly. Neil could feel the sense of something about to happen, and yet it was such an utterly barren scene- his novelist's instinct found it completely unworthy. Of anything.

  A moment later, three large trucks arrived, each one full of women. They ranged from teenagers to the elderly. The guards immediately swung into action, pulling or flinging the women off the trucks. The older women were dealt with summarily, either shot in the head, stabbed or clubbed to the ground. Within moments, there were bodies everywhere and the spurious air of order had given way to chaos and mayhem.

  It was worse for middle-aged women. Guards hacked at their skulls with axes, chopping off clumps of hair and flesh. They were pulled out of their clothes, beaten, slashed and kicked. Long knives or wide swords were inserted into them, then twisted, and yanked. Pistols were roughly forced into their mouths, vaginas or anuses, and then fired. Ears and noses were slashed off before their deliverance.

  Neil sagged against the window frame. He gazed at the guards who were doing all of this. They didn't look angry, so much as determined. Like homeowners who had a job to do, because they could not bear to live with a certain pest. Whether you sprayed them in groups or crushed them beneath your heel one at a time, they had to go.

  Two guards held a woman face down on the ground. Another guard pulled her hair so that her head was raised up a few inches. A fourth guard came and stood over her. He had some tool in his hand. A saw. He began to saw the back of her neck, like a log. The woman's body quivered like wire strung too tight, electric, and then collapsed. The guard swung her loose head and rolled it away like a bowling ball.

  The youngest fared worst of all, their breasts hacked off, knives thrust into them, their loins doused with gasoline and set afire. Or they were fucked first, repeatedly, until someone decided they were no longer worthy. He saw one girl held bent over at the waist and entered from behind. When the guard in her was about to climax, he waved his fingers excitedly in the air. Another guard stepped up, swung a hatchet and decapitated the girl. It wasn't clean, it took three blows, but that only seemed to enhance the pleasure of the one who was coming in her. Then the guard with the bloody hatchet held up the girl's head and pushed her lips back to expose her teeth-evoking loud cheers and laughter. She had long straight hair, parted in the middle. A style that would fit in easily in Rome, Paris, London, New York or San Francisco.

  Neil turned to the dwarf woman perched on a pile of clothes at the other window. It was as if he wasn't there. Her expression was blank, but she was totally caught up in what she was seeing. She gazed outward, like someone watching the crucial scene in a gripping movie. Understandable, and yet-how could anyone watch that ?

  Neil had felt such fear, but now he saw fear as something shallow, a surface ripple. In his blood and in his bones, in his whole body, he felt his own death now, and he knew it didn't matter. Not even to him.

  He looked outside once more. It was like a Bosch painting, except that Bosch lacked the imagination or nerve for this horror. In some forlorn part of his brain Neil heard Abba singing "Fernando" in a tinny voice. And there, almost directly below him-he saw Marisa. She was watching the scene, close up. She was in a group of six or eight people, all of whom wore civilian garb. She had on a long black dress and leather coat. Her hair was done up in braids that were coiled tightly to her head.

  Marisa ...

  The dwarf woman gagged and giggled.

  Marisa turned and rested her head on the shoulder of the young man standing beside her. His arm went around her, then rubbed her shoulders and back comfortingly. She looked up and he kissed her. No doubt about it, Neil was certain that it was the young man he had seen in the alcove, the same one who had knocked him out with a blackjack.

  A little implosion, that's all.

  Opera.

  Neil turned and ran.

  As if he should be surprised! Neil felt angry at himself. He had seen Father Anton at work. If her uncle, a priest, could be implicated in this, how could Marisa not be? Still, it was crushing to see her out there, calmly taking everything in. Kissing her lover. Was that Hugo?

  The dwarf woman called out to him. Neil's foot snagged and he fell onto a large pile of clothing. He rolled over and came to rest, lying on his back. For a moment he thought he might never move again. He wanted only to remain there, burrowing in, hiding in the drifts of old clothes. He inhaled deeply. He could detect the whole range of human smells that lingered in the dresses, skirts and blouses, even terror and death.

  He closed his eyes, allowing himself to imagine for just a second that when he opened them again he would be somewhere else. In the Italy that he knew. In his car, which worked. On a road, to somewhere.

  But where was the house, where was his car?

  What had happened to him?

  He opened his eyes and saw the dwarf woman smiling down at him. But she wagged her finger and shook her head.
Neil understood. She was right. If he just ran impulsively like that, he would inevitably give himself away and soon be captured. That wasn't the way to do it. Neil nodded in agreement and almost managed a faint smile.

  She had seemed positively deranged the first time he had encountered her, but now he understood the mad, antic gleam in her eyes, the grinning and harsh laughter. He was where she lived.

  The woman took his thumb in her pudgy little hand and tugged. Neil pushed himself to his feet. Outside, the screams and gunshots continued. He followed the woman through the mounds of clothing, toward the back of the upper room. It was much darker there, no windows, no electric light. They came to a door in the side wall. She opened it. Neil saw stairs disappearing down into complete darkness. No, he didn't like that.

  The woman made a series of gestures, and Neil realized that she was trying to give him directions, to tell him which way to go. To escape? What else could it be? She would have called the guards and turned him in by now if that was her intention. She pointed to the front of the room and held her hand to her ear-Neil noticed that the sounds of the bloody rampage outside were slowly diminishing. The woman was telling him to hurry now, while so many of the guards were still preoccupied. This was his best opportunity. Okay, he understood. The directions were simple, which probably meant that his chances were almost nil. But he would try.

  He stepped through the doorway and turned to nod appreciatively to the woman. Her head bobbed, she waved, urging him to go, and she closed the door. Neil put his hand on the wall and made his way slowly down the stairs in complete darkness. He had no trouble and he found the door at the bottom. He listened carefully for a few seconds, and heard nothing but the muffled sounds from outside.

  The door opened directly into the adjacent building. The room was dark, but enough light penetrated from the front windows. Neil saw that this building was almost identical to the one he had just left. A large room and piles of clothing-though they were smaller and fewer in number. He moved quickly to the far side of the room, at the back. He found the next door that he was looking for, but it wasn't where it was supposed to be. He expected to find a door that would let him out at the rear of the building, but this door was in the side wall again and it clearly led into the next building. Neil wondered if he had misunderstood the woman. He must have. Well, he had no choice but to go on.

  The ground floor room in the next building contained dozens of bunks, cots and bed mats on the floor. They looked too mean and wretched to be for the guards. But there were no inmates, the beds were all empty. The room was bathed in the same eerie grey-white light from outside. Neil hurried to the other rear corner. He groaned aloud when he discovered that once again the door was in the side wall. Then he noticed the quiet-there was no more gunfire. He had to keep going, and hurry.

  He opened the door a crack and saw that there were lights on in the next room. His view was blocked by a wood partition. He opened the door a little more and eased himself quietly inside. There was a strong smell of alcohol in the air. Then he heard the sound of someone moving about. Neil had never fought with anybody in his life, not even in grammar school in Southie-a remarkable but, he sometimes felt, dubious achievement. One person he could deal with-maybe. Two or more? Ha ha.

  Then he saw it, on the other side of the room-the door in the back wall, the door he needed, to get outside. It Was about thirty feet away. Neil stared at it. The floor was bare, aside from a few small wood crates and boxes lying about. There was nothing at all between him and the door that he could crawl behind or use to hide himself if he had to.

  Neil moved carefully and slowly, testing each step, edging along the partition. The sounds he heard were slight, impossible to figure. He inched his face along the wood. Then a sigh, and a woman's voice, just a few words that were answered briefly by another woman. Neil was puzzled by this, but also vaguely encouraged. If these women were prisoners too, like the dwarf, they might be willing to help him.

  Neil crouched and slowly expanded his angle of vision into the room. He saw some worktables that were cluttered with jars, boxes, hand tools and clumps of packing straw. Then the back of a woman's head came into view, grey hair tied up in a bun. She was seated on the other side of the tables, her back to Neil.

  He leaned a little farther beyond the partition and saw the other woman, also grey-haired. She was bent over, apparently engaged in some chore. She was about ten feet away from the woman seated by the tables. Two older women. It occurred to Neil that they could be sorting out and packing up any valuables taken from the victims, like coins and rings. If that was the case, there might well be a guard in the room, watching them, still out of Neil's sight.

  But then the woman straightened up and he recognized her as one of Marisa's relatives, her mother or one of her grandmothers. So the other one, with her back to Neil, was probably also a relative. Of course, they were all in on this madness. That seemed to make it a little less likely that there was a guard with them.

  Neil took a deep breath and stepped around the partition-it was the back wall of some wooden shelves. He scanned the room quickly, saw that there was no guard, just the two women. He moved around the worktables. There were no front windows-an unexpected help. The women looked at him, then at each other, and they began to laugh. Neil stopped as if he had run into a brick wall. The open floor of the large room was strewn with the dead bodies of small children. There were dozens of them, boys and girls, infants and toddlers, some dressed, some naked, their skin color ranging from bone white to a pale grey-blue.

  The old woman who was seated on a long bench was the grandmother who had been sharpening fruit spoons. In fact, she had one of those spoons in her hand now. On the bench beside her was the body of a small girl, her head resting on the woman's lap. They were laughing louder now. The woman pushed the girl's eyelid back and deftly used the spoon to scoop out the eye, which she then held out for Neil to see. He couldn't move. Then she reached toward the table, turned the spoon and dropped the eye into a large glass jar of clear liquid-the alcohol. There were already dozens of eyes in the jar, like shiny blue and brown pearls. Neil saw two other jars on the table, full and capped. He looked at the bodies on the floor and saw those that had been done-their empty eye sockets dark, thin strands of fleshy membrane trailing across their faces. And the rest, all around him, waiting.

  He felt like a piece of ice, or stone, but he walked carefully toward the woman on the bench. She was still laughing, but her eyes were watchful. As he drew closer, she stood up and quickly scooted a few yards away. The child's head thumped on the bench, and then the body slid off. Neil went to the worktable. And there was grandma's favorite set of spoons, a dozen or fifteen of them, in different sizes. He took one in his hand and ran his finger along the edge. Sharp enough for the grisly work at hand, but was it sharp enough for him?

  Neil put the spoon in his pocket and, without even glancing at the two women, went quickly to the back of the room. He opened the door, slipped outside and looked around. Arcs of light, moving zones of exposed ground. But there were also wide, shifting pockets of darkness, and Neil ran into the darkness. He expected to feel a bullet in his back at any moment. He kept running, veering off, swerving back, always hugging the darkness.

  No alarms went off, no shots were fired, but Neil had a sense that he wasn't going to make it. His breath was ragged now, his chest and legs were tightening in pain, and a cramp was stitching through his abdomen. He kept on, gasping loudly but driving himself forward. Don't stop.

  Then he hit the fence. Barbed wire raked across his scalp and dug into his throat, belly and thighs. He bounced back, hit the ground, and now he couldn't move. He couldn't even breathe. Flat on his back-there was the moon again. It wasn't his asthma, he realized. He'd had the wind knocked out of him, but that was all. Slowly his chest began to move again-oh, the sweet, sweet taste of air.

  But he knew that the light would find him soon, he had to move. Neil dragged himself under the fence. Another
twenty tortuous yards of dangerous open ground, and then he was in the woods, safe for the moment. He tried to follow the general direction the dwarf woman had indicated. Before long, however, he could sense the river nearby, and that was all he needed. For a few minutes he stumbled around, struggling in the darkness with thick brush, saplings and swampy ground underfoot. Finally, Neil found a clear patch of solid land at the water's edge. He sat down to let his body rest.

  The idea was to swim to the other side and thereby escape. But what was on the other side? Where was the other side? The river looked so wide that he doubted he could make it across. What if he gave up and surrendered? If he begged to see Marisa, would she come?

  Would she recognize him, and save his life? But Neil immediately felt a sense of shame and anger. How could he even consider that possibility? He had seen her world, and the only alternatives were to flee or to die.