The Loneliness of Stars

by Z. M. Wilmot

  ~Vinzetti Cellitti Magritto, in his personal diary

  I held my ground, not really thinking about what I was doing, as he ran forward at me. At the last moment, I leapt out of the way. Or at least I tried to – I wasn’t fast enough. Vincent slammed into my shoulder and grabbed my arm. He spun me around and threw me into the nearest cluster of roots. As soon as they touched me, the roots grabbed hold of me, and began to drag me upwards.

  Vincent turned to me, panting. His eyes gleamed. “No, no, this won’t do. Much too fast.” He took out a knife from his pocket and slashed through all but two of the roots holding me – one around both legs and one around both arms. For good measure, he cleared out the nearby ones as well. I don’t think I could have escaped from the two roots holding me even if I hadn’t been frozen with terror.

  “Much better – two roots pull much more slowly than seven.” Vincent grinned madly. “I was going to do the same to Stephen, but you found us remarkably quickly – I didn’t even have the chance to set the plant on fire. But with you… I have time. First, I think, your skin will come off. Then your fingers and toes. One eye, an ear. Your tongue – and then I’ll shove them all down your throat. Then, I’ll play a little tune with your exposed nerve endings, burn them off one by one, until only a few remain. Then the tree will get you, and I shall set it ablaze, so you will both burn and be digested, and the last thing you will ever see will be the inner mouth of the tree.” He let out a truly maniacal laugh.

  I snapped out of my terror and began to struggle. “Psy, this won’t get me to join you!”

  Vincent, who had been slowly walking towards me, a sinister, expectant smile on his face, stopped. “Psy?” He laughed. “Psy is gone, boy. His presence has left the area. This is all me.” He smiled. “He’s the one who let me survive. If you believe anything strongly enough, it becomes reality. He made me believe that I wasn’t dead – he entered my mind in my last dying moments, and he revived me. He took hold of my mind, and he carried me out of the ship. I ripped a hole through the hull with my bare hands, with his power at my disposal. I escaped, and then I wandered into the woods. He knew that the ship was going to explode – his enemies wanted it to be so, and he knows everything.

  “I hid in the woods for a while. He healed my injuries almost completely, and he had taken control of every part of me, and I was only too happy to let him do so – he promised me satisfaction and eternal life. When I began to get hungry, we dug up Allen’s and Allon’s corpses, and found Rafael’s at the top of a tree. It was my first sampling of human flesh – it’s actually not that bad.” He laughed.

  “And then Psy came for you. I could feel some part of him elsewhere – he took my image and projected it to you. He had incorporated some of me into him, and must have acquired my appetite for pain, for he chose my form to torment you. Then Lord Yttrios came, and drove Psy away from the planet – but not too far. I wandered around for hours, dazed and powerless, after Psy left me, taking most of me with him – everything but my hunger for pain. Adam and Stephen found me then, as I was recovering, and dragged me back to camp. That was too bad – I had been planning on picking you all off one by one from the darkness.

  “When I felt Psy return to the planet, but not to my mind, I was hurt beyond words, and as soon as I felt his presence again thrown from the planet, I made my move, taking Stephen away. I was going to practice on him, then take everyone else, saving you for last. Psy wanted you, and I want to cause him as much pain as I can – by taking you away from him in the most terrible way possible.”

  He began to walk towards me again. “So this is just me, the product of a deranged series of cruel experiments, inflicted on me by my uncaring parents. They never loved me – or each other. They were partners – their marriage was a business deal. Both were millionaires, a result of being in the drug business – Cytokin. Strong stuff.

  “Everything that they did was for a gain of some kind. They taught me that kindness is a lie.” He stopped walking forward, half a meter away from me, and nodded, his eyes going distant. “They taught me many good lessons. Never to trust, never to love, never to be kind. Always look out for yourself.” He laughed sadly. “I took their philosophies to heart, Jak. My entire life has been one path to self-fulfillment and satisfaction – and I have enjoyed it. They instilled in me a love of pain, of power – it gave me the greatest of pleasures, whenever I could see it, pain inflicted on others. I have spent my entire life seeking the perfect pain, the most exquisite deaths.

  “They went first, my parents. Both of them. My father died quite well – I hung him from the wrists with a dectafilament, so that the wire would slowly cut through his flesh. I gradually heated the wires, and they sank into his tough skin. Then I dropped him into a knee-high pool of boiling water.” A dreamy look entered his eyes. “The screams – I’ll never forget the way he screamed.” He remained silent for a moment, then shook his head. “Then I injected him with Rythaxin – a chemical he had developed himself, to use for interrogations. A brilliant invention.” He smiled happily. “He tested it on me at one point – only a small dose. That was why they raised me. I was a free test subject.”

  That explained so much.

  “The drug takes over the brain, and causes neurons all over your body to fire, sending explosive waves of agony through your body. I gave him ten times what he gave me.” Vincent’s smile grew into a grin. “He died of pain. It wasn’t the wires or the water that got him – it was the Rythaxin. His brain just shut down.” He cocked his head. “Then he fell into the boiling water. That finished him for sure.

  “My mother tried to escape. She couldn’t run for long, though. See, after my father was dead, I had their house, their laboratory, and their secret storehouse. I recoded the house so that only I had access, and then I hunted her down. I spooned out both of her eyes, and served a delicious toast to her – eyeball jam and toasted foot. What a treat.” He sighed, and his eyes went cloudy again.

  He continued. “Her death was not as pleasing to me. I returned to my house, and I began to kidnap people in the surrounding areas, bringing them into my private testing chambers. I built the most exquisite death and torture chambers on the face of the earth. They were so beautiful…” A tear rolled down his cheek.

  “It was a good thing my parents had never registered our house. It was hidden, below the ground, surrounded by sensory displacement fields. That’s what kept me going for so long. I extended my life down there. The town of Heurkfortsheer, the closest one to me, gained the reputation of being haunted. No one could figure out where their children went.” He giggled. “Of course, adults disappeared, too, and pets – but no one cares about them.

  “I developed a drug to allow me to extend my life – I lived down there a hundred years before a freak earthquake forced me to move. I then entered the public eye, as the serial killer Vinzetti Chavez.” I blinked. Vinzetti Chavez was a legendary figure, the most elusive and terrifying serial killer ever to walk the planets of the Terran Home Rule. When I was younger, my mother had used the threat of Vinzetti coming after us to get us to obey her. He had never been caught, and twenty years ago, had merely vanished. Everyone assumed that he had died, although odd murders were often still blamed on him.

  As I drew my thoughts and attention away from his monologue, I realized that I was halfway between the ground and the tree. Maybe if I distracted him enough, I could die quickly and avoid being tortured.

  Vincent went on, pouring out his life story to me. I briefly wondered why he was doing so, but all that I could think of was that he wanted to tell someone – and I just happened to be that someone. “Eventually, I got sick of always being on the run. It gets tiring. I vanished for a few years, then came back with a new identity – Vinzetti Cellitti Magritto – or Vincent Magritto, a security guard by training, from the state of Genova. I worked various jobs, restraining, for the first time in my life, my lust for pain. For sixteen long years I lasted, hardly killing anyone – only those th
at my job required me to.

  “When I heard about the Ambassador expedition, I knew I had to get on the crew – it offered me a group of people with diverse backgrounds, all of whom had a relatively low expectancy of ever returning – and we would be isolated and separated from any real contact with humanity; the perfect place to fulfill my lust and end my life, dying happily. I had become rather famous in Genova for my successful defense of Xathron Laboratories against a rival organization, and I was quickly put forward by the Genovans as a representative for the crew. I was the obvious choice for chief of security, and I got the position, along with a few fellow compatriots to work under me, who thought I was some kind of god. All but Valerius – that’s why he had to die.”

  He must have noticed my shocked expression at this comment, for he smiled cruelly. “Perhaps Psy was right – psychological torture is more effective than physical torture. No, I did not destroy the Diplomat – but I did not stand in the way of its destruction, either. Ivor hacked the computers, using a crude mechanism. I ignored it, with the full knowledge of what he was planning. I just made sure that Valerius was placed on the crew – along with Angela. She was always too intelligent for her own good.

  “And Lazarus – he was my work, too. It was a rushed job – I did not have the opportunity to perform my full arsenal of tortures upon him, but I thought that killing him with his own cross was a stroke of genius – his pain at the realization that the symbol of his holy savior was involved in an act of murder caused his spirit to die.” He giggled. “It’s too bad Antiochus didn’t give me a go at him – but he did himself in wonderfully. Brilliantly executed, and probably painful too. I only wish I had been able to see the act itself, before he shut off the cameras. My recipe was rather good though, don’t you think? I added it myself, before anyone else saw the pot.” I began to shake with rage.

  He smiled. “And do you know what the best part is? I could always shift the blame away from myself – a perk of being in charge of security. Anakos and al-Jamullah, those damn scientists, died easily, and far too quickly to alleviate my lust for any length of time. Ezekiel, on the other hand, was a masterpiece, despite the extremely short time I had to do it – and doctored security footage made it easy to pin it on Korzos and take power for myself.”

  I couldn’t contain myself any longer. I thrashed around wildly and screamed in anger. I pulled at the root binding my arms together, and it snapped. I was too upset and furious to be surprised at this, or at the root holding my legs snapping. Vincent was smiling wickedly, and moving his hand around his groin. “Coming to get me, Jak?”

  I did. I ran at him, punching and kicking wildly. At first, he held his own against me, but my fury soon overcame him. He was pushed further and further back, across the clear space, and into the roots. Real fear entered his eyes, and I reveled in it. “Die, you fucking goddamn bastard.” I slammed my hand, knuckles first, into his eyes, and he shrieked in pain, collapsing on the ground. I leapt into the air and landed on his chest. I felt his ribs and lungs give way, and his screams and movements suddenly stopped. Blood began to soak through his uniform.

  I don’t know how long I mutilated his body for, but I eventually stopped and stepped back, my anger having abated. I felt curiously content now, as if all of the frustration, despair, and anger I had been experiencing on this voyage had all left me as I demolished Vincent.

  I stood there, standing over his body, and I summoned up the hate to perform one last act upon him: I spat on his corpse and turned away.

  35

  “Reality is relative. Whatever one chooses to believe, if they believe it hard enough, is their reality. One might think that one thing is reality, and another may think the complete opposite, and they both are correct. You under-developed subservient races do not seem capable of understanding this basic concept.”