by Martin Rose
“He’s dead!” I roared.
“Here, Daddy,” a quiet voice spoke beside me.
The older boy who had cut himself moments before held his plate out to me. On the surface of the glass, gristle of fat and meat, no more than a fingertip in length. His pale face stared upwards, awaiting my approval. My lips peeled back from my teeth in horrified disgust.
I wanted it. My stomach churned in anticipation.
With effort, I turned away but fared no better in the other direction; down the dining table, row after row of children were lifting their knives and cutting pieces of themselves, butchers flaying meat off their own bodies. Their blood hit the air like a breaking storm when the barometric pressure dropped, stitched through lightning and thunder.
“An offering, Vitus. For you.”
And God, I was starving.
“No,” I whispered.
“Deny your own children!” Jessica accused.
I took her accusation with a flinch, forgetting entirely about the Glock nestled in my holster. Who would I have shot and for what crime? It was as dead as the rest of me, forgotten in the failing sectors of my brain. My mind was a tall building whose lights were slowly being shut down, each floor closed off with crime scene tape and shut away behind locked doors. One by one, each room plunged into darkness.
My temperature ratcheted into stratospheric levels. Heat crept into my dead and torn cheeks, fevered with the ravaging virus.
Soon, there would be nothing left of me to stop the inevitable, and Jessica knew it. The tilt of her head, the fall of her blond hair, put me in mind of my porch vulture, watching me to see what I would do, if I would cave in or refuse. The air was thick with their shared scent of blood and skin and hot, breathing bodies. They crowded in upon me until my back was up against the stage. It bit into my spine. Their images parsed through my senses as jumpy and frenetic frames.
“Eat, Vitus. Your family awaits you.”
Abruptly, the
last
sentient
part of me
met with
darkness.
*
Zzzzt.
Zzzzt.
*
And then, I awoke.
My head throbbed, my skull reduced to fragments of a broken bowl encased in a thin layer of rotten flesh. The ceiling of my cell in Madam Astra’s—Jessica’s—quarters, loomed above me. I attempted to sit up and wrench myself into an upright position and failed. I was pinioned against the uncomfortable cot, a metal band across my neck, more lashings constricted around my wrists and ankles.
If I were alive, I might have liked this, I noted with gallows amusement, attempting to arch my back and get a better view of my surroundings.
A rustling. A shadow moved beside me.
The dark figure drew closer. A cameo illuminated only by feeble light from a bulb in the wall socket. A ski mask shrouded his features, but I knew him from his lambent eyes and his lean and starved gait: the shooter.
“You,” I hissed.
He raised a finger to his lips, his eyes darting to the door and back again. He held a gun in his grip. A silencer protruded from the end. Footsteps shuffled at the closed door behind him and sent shadows through the threshold before they passed on with their business. In this underground lair, it begged the question of how he’d found me at all.
I pondered this new turn of events, attempting to remember something, anything, from the moments before, leading up to this one.
All that was left in my fractured memory were broken images of the dining hall. Faces like shuffled cards. I ran a dead tongue over the surface of my teeth. I tasted blood, hints of flesh stuck between the serrated molars. These remains were the only proof I needed of what had elapsed from my last conscious memory, of the children closing in on me in the dining hall, with Jessica by my side, to now.
I cursed myself, like a drunk recovering from one bender too many. Jessica had taken my pills away. What had happened that I was awake now? I doubted she was feeling benevolent and decided to dose me before trussing me up like a Christmas turkey. To whom did I owe my brief spell of lucidity?
As if in answer, the shooter opened his gloved palm. On the flat surface, he produced a bottle, my pills rattling inside of it. I recognized the bottle—my emergency stash. I kept it in a hidden compartment in my vintage television housing at home, along with a porn magazine I’d never thrown out and didn’t even like.
“What’d you do with the magazine?” I whispered.
His eyes narrowed in consternation, and if I were in a better mood I would have laughed. I had already decided he wasn’t here to kill me. If that had been his intention he would have done it already. He glanced back at the door and I struggled in my bindings.
“Get me out of here,” I demanded.
He did not answer. Instead, he set the gun aside on the end table beside the picture of me and Jessica in the shattered frame. After a moment of reflection, he studied his shoes, heaved a sigh, and with one hand, lifted away the ski mask. It slid away from a mop of blond hair, pale features.
I was looking at a double of myself.
I gaped openly, until he cleared his throat and shifted, uncomfortable with the scrutiny.
“Clay?” I whispered.
He looked sad, then, his lips twisted. He struggled with the answer, and the minute the words escaped his lips, I knew it was a lie.
“Yes.”
He’s lying!
You thought that about Jessica, too.
I considered that thought, handling it like a lit stick of dynamite. After a moment, it was easier to blow out the fuse. His identity, real or imagined, was not important yet. Getting out of this hellhole and away from my angry wife and a hundred bloody, zombie-food munchkins was.
“You fed me the pills?”
“You weren’t much good without them. You wouldn’t open your mouth at first, but when I held my fingers out you tried to snap at them, so I just chucked the pills at you until I got two in.”
“Oh,” I said, wishing I had not known. “Help me out of here.”
“I can’t,” he whispered. “They closed off the main entrance with concrete blocks. Cemented it in.”
“How are they supposed to leave, then?”
He looked at me, so like myself at that age—about to marry, join the army, and ruin my life in general. Before Kosovo. The resemblance was both ghostly and eerie. Maybe he was Clay.
I shoved that thought aside.
“Don’t you get it? They’re not planning on leaving. This is it. Swan song.”
Rage flared suddenly and my temper was blown to shreds with my patience. My wrists chafed uncomfortably against the metal cuffs.
“So what’s the plan, recite poetry and light farts? You should have left me like I was.”
“I didn’t know any other way to wake you—”
“That’s the idea, stupid! Leave me dead, leave me animal, leave me a monster! The idea is to never wake up. Never.”
I averted my gaze, looking off into the ceiling. White space interspliced with shadows cut across the surface. An awkward, hurt silence filled the space between us, and he cleared his throat before speaking again.
“I just wanted to tell you I love you, Dad,” he spoke gently, and picking up his gun, yanked his ski mask back over his face.
In that moment, I was certain that he was not Clay—he never had been, never would be. All this chasing a longlost ghost to discover my wife had been the one who survived, not my son. My “son” was the decoy to seduce me to her door, the one thing Jessica knew I’d never stop searching for. The truth was obvious now that I was confronted by an imposter—if Clay were alive, Jessica would not need a hundred copies of him to surround her, because she would have been satisfied with the original.
I thought of the missing child posters scattered across town. On signposts and convenience stores. I passed them when I bought my cigarettes and crushed them beneath my feet when they fell to the tarmac. Whi
ch of them was the young man standing before me now?
Clay was dead.
The grief cut me afresh, and I turned to the man who believed I was his father.
“You were the first one, weren’t you?”
He stopped in mid-stride, a black figure in the center of the room, tall. He looked strong, the sort of son that would make a father proud—somebody else’s father, to be sure. I wondered how long his natural parents spent searching for him, or if he had been a convenient orphan Jessica had picked up along the way, the first one to begin the terrible spiral into madness.
“Yes,” he answered. He turned back to face me and finally seated himself beside the mattress, cold brown eyes watching me with quiet wonder. He had waited all of his life for this moment; I hoped it was everything he imagined, like a cheap melodrama designed to exploit the vulnerable, the young, the inexperienced who didn’t yet know life adhered to no script and offered only cold indifference for each measure of your love and bitter experience. Good, I thought, let one of us get something he wants.
“She brought the others after. At first, it wasn’t a big deal. But after awhile, there were so many . . . she sent me away before it got that far. She said I was not her son anymore. I was too old.”
“The cage?” I whispered, and my fist clenched involuntarily. “Everything in that journal, that diary . . . was that real, what I found? Did you write that?”
“It’s real, the cage,” he answered, and looked away. “But whatever you found, it doesn’t belong to me, but it’s real, Vitus. Who knows what unfortunate child wrote it, and what miserable end he met with.”
He might not be my Clay, my real son; but the memory of the journal, the adolescent tears staining the ink on the yellowed pages, invoked a protective rage. She had used it against me, and I had followed the lure all the way back to the source, the barbs of her hook set deep in my throat.
No, he wasn’t my son.
But for a while, I pleaded with myself, let me pretend.
“And what then?” I asked.
“Everything changed. Events might have been different, if I had stayed a boy.”
“But you grew up,” I filled in.
“She sent me away once I began to ask questions. I was not like the others, I was curious, I was—”
“You were smarter. She couldn’t maneuver you as easily.”
“Then, I left. Escaped. I . . . killed one of them,” and he spoke with pained regret. By rights, he should have been a boy worried about girls (or boys, for all I knew) and picking out a career path after high school. Instead, his young face bore the marks of trauma in training—something wizened lurked behind his eyes. “He was in my way.”
I had never had the chance to see Clay at this age, to know him as an adult, and never would. Faced with my boy’s doppelgänger, I was at a loss. I could console him with what limited emotional resources I had. That’s what a father would have done, and I found I wanted to be fill that role, even if only in these dark hours.
“You did what you had to do,” I offered, and hoped it would be enough.
Cold comfort. He remained still, then shrugged, refusing to look me in the eyes.
“My questioning was bad enough. That, maybe Mother could have lived with. The beginning of the end was the night I found her without her face.”
While he spoke, he lifted the gun and began to unload the weapon just to pull out the magazine and the chambered round. Fingers that should have been doing something more mundane, like texting or working an after-school job, serviced a killing machine instead. We don’t all get that kind of idyllic life and I knew it well. That he weathered a different kind filled me with pride that I had no right to feel on his behalf.
I said nothing and waited for him to fill the silence, as I knew he would.
“It was a warm night and I was thirsty. They locked me in, but I’d already mastered lock-picking by the time I was ten. I remember creeping out into the hallway and the bedroom door was open just a crack. And beyond her mattress, the room opened up into a bathroom, and I could see her, standing at a mirror. She was my mother, the only mother I had ever known—and she didn’t have a face.
“She was studying her reflection. What for, I don’t know, it was horrible to behold. I could see all the things beneath her skin, roping veins and red, wet tissue, the shape of her teeth in her jaw and the hole that was her nose. Beside her, there was this deflated . . . mask, I suppose. Her face a sheath of skin, like a shedding snake.”
I hitched in a breath.
“Dead,” I said between clenched teeth.
Astra evaded definition and capture because I couldn’t summon the logic to understand how she could be my wife and still be alive. If I had bitten her, I had infected her. Reason stood that she would be every bit a zombie that I was, minus the pills.
It was falling into place now. The smell that followed her in a thick miasma. The hint of mold in the shadows of her dress.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Something about it . . . even her real eyes were milky gray, like yours. She hides them. Sometimes with contacts. Can you imagine my fear, my overwhelming terror, to wake up and realize my mother was dead, and she wore masks? That I had never seen her true face?”
He shook his head and began to reload the magazine.
“After that, things weren’t the same. I thought she hadn’t seen me, but she acted different. Maybe she sensed me, smelled me, but she knew I’d been there. She didn’t want me interacting with the other kids and giving her away. So she sent me away. Years went by, I got away, started living where I could—on the streets, in empty houses, anywhere I could make a space and sleep at night. I kept contact with some of them. We’d swap notes and leave messages for each other in empty mailboxes and under the porches of foreclosed houses. Do you know how many McMansions are just sitting empty out there in abandoned developments? And then, a few months ago, one of them let me know that they were preparing for the Lord. I knew they had found you.”
He pushed the magazine back into the gun with his eyes trained on the door. When he was satisfied with his loaded weapon and could detect no movement beyond the wall, he turned back to me.
“They used the Rogers to lure me in,” I concluded.
He nodded. “Once she took the children, she’d locate the parents. They were broken, disconsolate in their grief. It made them vulnerable to suggestion. She managed to take them on once they were broken by the loss of their children. People are so vulnerable at that moment. They work for her now. They are loyal, and most of them are the ones she stole the children from. They’ve never seen the compound. They just do her dirty work, believing when they die they will be saved and reunited with their lost children. Little do they know that just beneath their feet their missing children are housed in a compound and taught to believe Astra is their mother. Mrs. Pied Piper herself.”
“So you shot the ones she sent for me.”
He nodded again.
All this time, he’d been trying to stave off the inevitable. His efforts had been to protect me, not to put me down. I cursed myself quietly.
“Kid?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re a helluva shot.”
He smiled but could not meet my eyes while he did it. The contained expression on his face was telling, revealing a man who received the barest minimum of support and love from the world. I wondered if I should be the one to tell him it only gets worse from here.
“Get out of here, Owen,” I said.
His expression changed swiftly, immediately concerned.
“I’m going to take you out of here—”
“You said it yourself, they blocked off the entrance. If we try to leave together, we get caught together. I’m dead already, Owen. You’re still alive. You’ve got a chance. Hide. Search for a way out. When you find it, take it, and don’t look back.”
“No,” he said. “I’m in it with you. I’m not leaving.”
My face hardened. I brought up my n
ext words from the harder spaces inside myself.
“You’re a sorry excuse for a son. Wouldn’t matter if you died anyway, huh? Clearly, the college life isn’t in your future. Pissed that away.” I forced a sneer to match the words, a sneer I did not feel. He flinched before me, creeping back an inch, as though I were filled with a heat that would burn him.
“You’re lying,” he snapped. “I can tell. You want to drive me away.”
His eyes turned hard as he reached out and gripped my hand. Warm fingers on my own, and for a moment I thought he was going to hold hands with me like a frightened child. A nice gesture, but not really helpful. Instead, he pulled out a marker from his pocket and bit the cap off with his mouth.
He wrote across the side of my index finger and when the marker sunk into the spongy membrane to poke at the bone beneath, he cursed and continued on with dedicated patience until he had big, clear letters: DADDY.
“What’s that for?”
He put away the marker.
“For you to remember when you forget everything else.”
He rattled the pills in his hand.
“God, not again,” I whispered.
“There’s no other way. Listen, the dose will run out before morning, by the time they come in to take you away. This word on your hand, look at it.”
I made a mental note to ask him when he started moonlighting as my personal pharmacist. This kid knew more about me and my habits than I was comfortable with. Did he gain all that through surveillance? Internet searches? It left another bad taste in my mouth among the many, but there was no time for it now. Later, I told myself. For now, I attempted to do as he asked, bending against the restraints to examine his handiwork. Black marker on my dead, rotten skin.
“Something about the disease . . . kills the consciousness, destroys the frontal lobe. I’m not a doctor, I can’t stop it, but it’s basic psychology. Hypnotic suggestion. Use the word to trigger the subconscious.”
“How about we screw that and just use a real trigger, eh?”
“I’m serious,” he insisted. “Triggering the subconscious won’t change the drive of your base instincts, okay? But it could modify your behavior. Give you . . . second thoughts, in a manner of speaking. Focus you. You’ll still be a monster, but you’ll be a motivated monster instead. Got it?”