by Quil Carter
Silas’s eyes were fixed forward, but they weren’t looking at me… they were staring off into his own memory.
“I was nine, Elish.”
My mouth dropped open. “W-what?” I said, my voice strangled.
Silas didn’t move, he only continued looking off into darkness.
But I knew there was no darkness in front of him, he was seeing what I knew must be a traumatic incident.
“He was forty-five,” Silas said, almost robotically. “He was bigger than me, stronger than me. He wanted me and I was easy pickings for him… a stupid naïve boy who would go with any man with a smiling face. I was his prey… and he got what he wanted.” Silas dashed his cigarette into the flower vase, his face disgusted and his jaw locked tight.
Then his eyes found mine again. They were hardened pieces of rock that held nothing inside of them but stone-cold darkness.
There was no love for me, no understanding. Or perhaps I was seeing that he saw no difference between what had happened to him, and what had happened to me.
Except that I’d allowed it.
“You see, Elish…” Silas began slowly. “I have a problem with older men who take advantage of young boys. It’s a sensitive topic for me, I don’t really like to discuss it.” He twisted the tip of the cigarette into the black vase, the glow of the ember lighting up his eyes like the emeralds were alive. “So when I hear of my golden boy freely throwing himself at a thirty-five-year-old teacher… I take extreme umbrage. Considering I was held down screaming, ripped apart until there was only a bleeding cavity between my legs, strangled then left stone dead in the woods. See, Elish… after everything I’ve been through, I really dislike the knowledge that my heir, my creation was seeking out a pervert to abuse him.”
I shook my head slowly. “It’s not the same…” I whispered, my tongue a useless muscle in my mouth, I could barely speak. “I’m thirteen… I’m matured. I’m no child.”
I’m… I’m an adult. My voice has deepened, I have body hair, I’m a teenager…
“You’re trying to tell me that physical appearance is all that makes a child?” Silas asked coolly. “Not their mental or emotional maturity? Interesting. I would hesitate to agree that you are an adult, Elish, when merely defending the life of another boy… Todd, right? Was enough to bring down the scorn of Elish Dekker. Then parading Todd’s head to torment your classmate? Does that seem like something a mature adult would do, Elish? A man who’s able to handle his emotions and hormones in an adult manner?”
I couldn’t answer him. I didn’t know how to answer him… what to say back.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. It was all I could say.
Silas put his cigarette between his lips and picked up his fork. I watched, sick to my stomach and nauseas, as he dinged the fork up against the wine glass a second time.
“Not as sorry as I will make you,” he whispered to me.
Suddenly the curtains surrounding Silas and I began to fall to the floor. My attention was immediately drawn to my left, and what I saw had me jumping to my feet.
It was a glass-walled cage, the floor of it silver and shiny. The cage was large, if I was to lay in the middle of it I wouldn’t be able to touch the sides. It was completely surrounded by glass walls too, ones that stopped only a foot from the ceiling. There was… a vent at the top, and that vent was affixed to the apartment’s ceiling before disappearing out of a sealed window.
And in front of this strange cage was a metal panel that was attached to it. There were dials on the front and an On/Off switch which was turned on.
I looked to Silas for any explanation, but when I got nothing I turned back to the machine and tried to make sense of just what it was and why it was here. Was this to imprison me? Torture me?
If he wanted me in that damn cage he was going to take me fighting.
But Silas remained where he was, not the hint of a smile on his face. He was looking at the machine in front of him with an expression I couldn’t read.
Then Silas said placidly, “Bring him out.”
Bring… him out?
The anxiety and fear inside of me flared like Silas’s words were gasoline. This was it… something was going to happen. He’d reached the end of his foreplay and now he was going to mentally and emotionally fuck me.
“Elish?”
That voice…
I turned around with a shuddered gasp, and I sunk to my knees as my legs turned to water.
Ryan.
He’s alive.
There was no relief at this, only horror – horror for him.
A naked Ryan was being walked into the center of the room by Commissioner Talbot and Dr. Zamir, both with their hands on his shoulder. As he got closer, I noticed that his trembling body was covered in a shining substance, possibly oil.
“Elish… do something!” Ryan yelled desperately when our eyes locked. He jerked his shoulder away from Talbot, but the Commissioner of the thiens roughly grabbed him again and wrenched his arm back. Ryan’s teeth clenched, sweat dripping off of his head. “Elish!?”
“Don’t you say another word to him,” Silas said, his voice dangerous. I saw him look at me out of the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t stop staring at Ryan as they dragged him towards the machine. “Or do you have something to say to him, Elish?”
Something to say?
Ryan looked at me pleadingly, begging me to do something.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered to him.
I screamed when Silas grabbed my hair and yanked me to my feet. “Don’t apologize to him, Elish!” he snarled in my ear. “You don’t fucking apologize to pedophiles.”
“I’m not a fucking–” I watched helpless as Talbot roughly pushed him against the glass wall of the machine. His face slammed against it, blood and saliva shooting from his mouth and staining the clear glass.
“Put him in,” Silas said. He held onto my hair and yanked my head back. “Watch.”
Watch?
Cristo.
This is just another Cristo.
Zamir opened the glass door and Ryan was shoved inside. I expected it to electrocute him or something, something to happen, but he only stumbled and looked around wildly.
The door closed behind him and it locked. Zamir then nodded to Silas and he and Talbot stepped away from the machine.
What are you going to do to him this time?
Just another Cristo…
I wonder if I’ll make the audience cry again?
“Are you hungry, love?” Silas asked nicely beside me. Ryan was banging on the glass wall in front of us, his face contorted into incomprehensible fear, he kept trying to make eye contact with me… I kept on having to look away.
“Well?”
“No,” I whispered.
Stop him.
I can’t.
Why?
I’m powerless.
“Well, I’m certainly hungry,” Silas said in a singing voice. My eyes focused on his hand as it stretched out in front of me.
He placed it on one of the dials and turned it… he turned it until it couldn’t go any higher.
Then he let go of my hair and got behind me. The demon then wrapped his arms around my waist and clutched me to him.
And Ryan continued pounding on the glass, pacing back and forth.
“Zamir and Talbot, take your leave,” Silas said, his breath hot against my ear.
The two left, the only silence emerging from their exit the sound of the door clicking shut. It was just me and Silas then, and the prisoner inside his glass cell.
But nothing was happening.
Until Ryan lifted up his foot.
He rubbed the bottom of it, his eyes fixed on the silver metal floor he was standing on. This was quickly followed by a wince, a look of deep confusion on his face as he tried to solve the same strange puzzle that I myself was.
But then Ryan’s eyes widened with terror, and his body convulsed as if an electric current had shot through it.
“NO! NO!” Ryan screamed hysterically, panic flooding him with an intensity that I didn’t yet understand. What was it? What was happening to him? All I could do was stare at him, my own body rooted and stationary. “Please! PLEASE! NO!”
What was happening?
Then Ryan jumped and I saw a puff of smoke come up from where his bare foot was, and when the other foot landed… a sizzling sound could be heard.
Oh god.
That was no normal floor…
The sound… the vent… the oil that covered his body…
That was a frying pan.
My mouth opened to scream, to scream, cry, beg… but no words sprung forth to audibly display the horror in which I was feeling in that moment. All I could do…
… was watch.
Ryan kept jumping, his face agony in solid form. I’d never seen such fear on a man, nor had I ever heard such screams. His oiled feet… at first I only saw red, but now as he jumped, more charred black could be seen. They were leaving patches of skin behind on the hot surface, and that skin was burning and blackening, sending wisps of dark smoke to float up to the vent above his head.
“Elish!” Ryan sobbed, the look of agony that he was giving me one I knew would haunt me for the rest of my life. The glass door was now covered in oil smudges from his repeated hits, and thicker smoke was billowing up from his feet. His toes were now char, and briefly I’d see a flame erupt before stifling. “Tell him to turn it off! TURN IT OFF!”
A strangled sob burst from my lips. I clasped a hand around my mouth but the intensity of the trembles rocking my body had it rubbing against my mouth. I wanted so badly to scream that I was sorry, to beg of him to use his strength to run head first into the glass so his neck would break. I knew that I could not save him, now I just needed him to die quickly.
Unable to hold himself up, Ryan suddenly collapsed to his knees. The scream he released was such a loud and terrifying trill, it seemed to physically rip me in half. I watched him grasp the glass windows with desperate hands, then he closed his eyes and his neck bent back in a way that looked like he was begging God to save him.
But there was no God, in this room I only saw the devil himself with his wan smile.
Another horrible scream rang, smoke was rising in black and grey plumes to the vent above him. He pounded with weakening arms onto the glass, streaks of red now mixing in with the smudges of oil, creating the most morbid and grotesque of paintings.
“Per-ish!” Silas suddenly sang, his voice barely carrying over Ryan’s screams. He reached over to the control panel and turned the dial halfway down.
I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t speak. Somehow Silas put me down on one of the chairs and said something to Perish that was drowned out by Ryan’s agony. He patted my back and rubbed it in a slow circle and a kiss was planted on my cheek.
My world was spinning around me. It was going fast… so fast.
This wasn’t real. Perhaps this isn’t real.
This can’t be real.
I looked up from my chair and saw Perish open up the painted glass door of the cage. Ryan had his head pressed against the glass, smoke rapidly pouring from his discoloured legs like it was he who was the demon, and not this king watching beside me with brilliant eyes.
Perish had… two bottles in his hands full of yellow liquid, most likely the same liquid they’d rubbed on Ryan. He stepped into the enclosure, smoke billowing from thick boots, and began spraying the oil all over Ryan’s body.
“Butter, salt, a few herbs… only the best for my lovely,” Silas whispered in my ear, then his voice raised. “Cut off a nice piece for us, Perish.”
Perish drew a knife. Ryan was gasping for air, groaning from pain. He looked up as Perish approached, but when he saw the knife he began to shake his head back and forth… before just giving up and closing his eyes.
He screamed again as Perish began to slice his cooked shin, the knife sweeping back and forth underneath a thin slab of browned, bleeding meat. When the knife reached the end of the slice, he picked it up, leaving behind bleeding grey flesh.
Stop screaming… please just die. Please just die.
Silas turned the dial back to full. But as he retracted his hand, he grabbed my chin, and forced my head up so I couldn’t look away.
Ryan had thrown up, white vomit now dripped down his mouth to land on the silver surface. It joined the blood that was flowing quickly down his shin, the cruor turning into a pale jelly soon as it made contact with the heat.
Perish walked towards us and I saw he was holding a long strip of crisped skin. He cut the piece in two and put it down on our plates, then bowed to Silas.
“Crispy skin… you loved it when you were a child,” Silas said pleasantly. I stared down at my plate, the browned skin giving off an aroma that reminded me of burnt bacon.
“See, love,” Silas said. He extended his hand and took mine into his own. “You made the mistake of presenting Todd to Ryan when he was already cooked, butchered up, and put into a pretty pastry. That’s why you didn’t get that grand reaction, lovely man. If you really want to teach those who hurt you a lesson.” He looked up at Ryan and beamed. “Let them watch.”
Let them watch.
My eyes travelled up, just in time to see a scrambling Ryan trip and fall onto the searing hot surface. He let out another gut-wrenching shriek, one that mixed in with the loud sizzling, and smoke shot up around him.
He didn’t get up.
But he continued to scream, to thrash like a bug that had been sprayed with insecticide. I watched him die. I watched him die in the most agonizing of fashions, and when he turned onto his back, his mind demanding for him to move even though there was no safe place for him to go, I saw his stomach was outlined with black, the center of it a golden brown.
Silas was chewing beside me, up and down went his mouth, and his lips smacked together.
Ryan’s chest heaved and I watched him take in what I knew would be his last deep breath.
And with him, I took a deep breath too, and I grabbed two tufts of my hair with my hands. Then when Ryan let out one last remaining scream for his life…
I screamed with him.
A scream that would announce my brain reaching the end of its limit, a scream that was my declaration of hysteria.
I fell to the ground on my knees and screamed again. I pulled my hands down, my hair ripping strand by strand out of my head, and began to cry hysterically.
It was all my fault. This was all my fault. Just like Cristo. This was just like Cristo.
He killed them. Silas killed them both. The man I loved like a father dies, the man I had feelings for dies. He kills them all… every one.
I was powerless. I had nothing. I had no control over anything. I was his victim. I was his pawn. I was his slave just like he’d said. What brief periods of control I’d gotten while he was absent had been swiftly taken away, and my progress had gone with them.
Silas ruled all of me. And it wasn’t until he’d pushed me to my second nervous breakdown, did I fully realize just how much. This man, this monster who I loved and respected, had a dark, vindictively evil side to him that I’d never seen before. But the older I got, the more I realized I’d been living with a mad man.
And this fact was all too clear to me when Silas put his arms around my chest and began shushing me softly.
“It’s okay, little love,” Silas whispered. The screams of Ryan had been silenced now but the smell remained and the sounds of his sizzling skin. “It’s over. Shush, baby, it’s all over.” I shook under his tight grasp, gasps of breath being sharply inhaled as I tried to fill my lungs with air. My body was failing me, as was my mind; I didn’t even have control over those two things anymore.
I was his.
I was Silas’s. I belonged to him.
I was nothing. I was only what he told me to be.
“Shhh… my poor baby,” Silas whispered. He stood, and even though I was near his height, he picked me up as if I weighed
nothing. Master Silas then pressed his cheek against my face and shushed me. “It’s all over. You’ve been punished and now my little love is forgiven.”
Confusion waded through this torrential storm of emotions and found me. I was forgiven? He’d punished me and I was forgiven?
This is no game, Silas.
My life… is not your game.
He took me to the elevator, talking quietly and calmly to me. I could do nothing but tremble and gasp in his arms, my eyes dry and my mouth and throat raw and sore. Where were we going? What else was he going to do to me? I couldn’t believe in that moment that he was taking me back to the apartment, my mind had been thrown into a state of catatonic shock and only involuntary movements were coming from me.
The elevator let us off in the hallway of our apartment. The door was partially ajar, and when Silas got to it, he pushed it open with his foot, I was still in his arms.
I saw four people shoot up from their places on the couch. Nero, Garrett, Ellis, and…
Sacario.
It was seeing him that brought me out of my state of paralyzed shock. He was unharmed, completely unharmed but his grey eyes went from concern to full-blown horror when he saw me.
“Sacario!” I cried. I found my energy and shifted out of Silas’s arms and put my feet to the floor.
The relief overwhelmed me. I was sure Silas had killed him. I took a step towards him as Sacario began to move to where I was, but I made it one step before collapsing onto the ground.
“Stay away from him,” Silas snarled. But I reached out and grabbed Sacario’s hand and squeezed it, tears rolling down my cheeks as my world crashed and burned. The relief I felt was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and I began to sob uncontrollably, my hand still clenching my friend’s.
“What did you do to him?” I heard Sacario say, his voice strangled.
“Nero, get him out of here!” Ellis whispered harshly. Sacario’s hand was ripped from mine and Silas pulled me to my feet, then lifted me.
I just cried. All I could do was cry as everything deteriorated around me and became nothing but blotches of colour on an artist’s pallet. I was emotionally disembowelled at that point, my mind melted and my body useless trembling meat.