“No, Enim. I’m not going to kill you,” he said. He reached over to take my arm and gently guided me to the door. His eyes flickered in the white light. “You’re going to kill yourself.”
Ch. 22
The sky was a dark, dirty gray that spread over the horizon and mixed into the half-washed away snow, and the air was thick with an unrelenting chill brought on by the wind and the ground beneath my feet was covered in a sludge that seeped down into my shoes and stung coldly against my skin. In the failing light, I could just see the group of people cluttered in the center of the campus who had returned from searching the island for Jack. My face twitched as Beringer steered me in the direction opposite them and lowered my head beneath a tree branch to shield us from view. Even if they had looked our way, they would never see me through the tree branches crisscrossing in a wall between us.
As the trees grew thicker around us, some of the wind was softened and I was able to walk without my head bent low into my collar. The silence was far too quiet, and I had no distraction from the thoughts running through my head. He was leading me up the familiar path to the cliffs where I had often sat and looked down at the water; it was undoubtedly the same place he had thrown the girls from. I wondered if I would disappear into the water as they had done, or if they would find my body crumpled on the jagged rocks below. Either way, they would all believe the same thing: that I had jumped to my death, just like my mother.
As another wave of cold closed in around me, I wondered if they would bury me in the plot next to her. I could picture my father walking through the cemetery and ruining his good shoes to stand in the space between the two graves, looking down wordlessly and shaking his head as he imagined what might have been if things had just gone the way that he had planned. And at the funeral Karl might apologize for not getting up to the island quickly enough, just like he hadn’t gotten to the bridge quickly enough, and perhaps Beringer would comfort him as he pressed his face into quivering hands and tell him that it was not his fault: that I had been sick, and devastated by the events that had unfolded so rapidly, and that there was no way that any of them could have stopped me ...
“Were the girls alive when you threw them off?”
The wind beyond the trees was screeching loudly. Beringer had to lean in to hear what I said.
“Sorry?”
“The girls,” I repeated. “Were they alive when you threw them off the cliff?”
He leaned back again.
“Yes.”
“What about Miss Mercier?”
I imagined her running barefoot through the woods on the opposite side of the campus again, her espresso-colored hair whipping into her face as she tried to glance behind to see if she was going fast enough, and her colorful skirt staining with mud as she fell to the ground.
“What about her?”
“Did she say anything?” I asked quietly. My mind had flickered back to Jack. He had stayed up for nights on end wondering if the reason that she had been killed that night had been because he had left his keys with her. I wondered if he would ever know who had killed her. I wondered if he would ever know who had killed me, either.
“Before I killed her?” he asked. When I nodded, he paused in thoughtful silence to remember, and I was struck that he was still every bit as considerate as before. It was a wonder that he could be every bit the same and so shockingly different all at once. “She said, ‘Je vous en supplie, je vous en supplie.’ She was begging me not to kill her.”
“But you did.”
“I didn’t want to, Enim. I’m not a cruel man – you know that.”
“You cut her to pieces.”
“I disarticulated her, yes. I admit that I got carried away; she wasn’t part of the plan.”
“But you killed those girls, too.”
“Yes ... but that was different. There was nothing malicious in my actions.”
“Then why did you do it?”
He waited to answer as the wind raked through the trees around us and rattled the dead branches like bones; a glimpse of blue was visible ahead.
“It was an experiment,” he said. His voice had gone quieter; he appeared to be talking to himself as much as he was to me. “I was curious. I wanted to know who they would blame when there was no one to blame – if they would turn on one another, or weed out the outcasts among them.”
“But they didn’t.”
“No, they did nothing. And I admit that I hadn’t been expecting it – I never thought that they would simply turn their heads and resign that the girls had run away, and not look for them or bother to report them out of anger and spite. But it was good; it taught me what I wanted to know about people. Other people, rather.”
The ground beneath our feet changed from frozen pine needles to rocks as we stepped onto the cliffs. The scenery below was a vast expanse of blue, cold and foreboding for as far as I could see, and the sky had never looked so tormented above.
“Damnatio memoriae,” I said.
Beringer hummed lowly in my ear. His grip on my arm was the only thing keeping me from dropping down below. I stared down at the rocks beneath my feet, my eyes unwilling to look any further and see the dark blue waving at me from the ocean, and my clothing whipped against my skin as I shook more violently, yet whether it was from cold or from fear I could no longer tell.
“It’s despicable,” he whispered. “Unprecedented. They all go through their lives alone in the worst way. They surround themselves with others and yet have no idea who the person standing by their side truly is.”
He took a step forward, but I kept my feet planted on the ground for fear of getting any closer to the edge. In doing so, his form shielded me from the cold wind and steadied some of my shaking.
“And people like us – people who care so deeply about others – are forced to live our lives alone. We’re separate from them, Enim. We see the world in a different way. We see each other in a different way.” His fingers relaxed a bit and the grip turned gentle. “I was so happy to have met you, Enim, and I meant it when told you that we’re alike.”
“That’s not true.” His proposal was just as unbelievable as it had been the first time that he had offered it to me, yet this time I rejected it out of aversion rather than bleakness. “You’re – you’re –”
“I’m what, Enim?”
I couldn’t settle on a word. They jumbled over one another in my head, pushing to get to the front and describe what I thought of him.
“Sick,” I said at last.
Beringer’s jaw tightened and I could hear the low grinding of his teeth.
“We’re all sick, in one way or another.”
He leaned his head down next to mine to stare into my face, his grip on my arm turning strong enough to shatter the bones beneath it, and his face was so familiar and unknown all at once that I couldn’t look away.
“I searched for years for an answer to what this was – to what I was,” he said. “I looked through articles and books on disorders that have been thought up and explained by men who all think the same way – who’ve never had the thoughts that befall the seeming-victims of their diagnoses. And after all of that, after sorting through all of these children, trying to find something remotely similar to what I was as a child, do you know what I found? Nothing. I found that they’ll never understand us, or even give it a moment’s thought to try.”
The wind rattled around us again, and in the dark only the glint from the moonlight told me where his eyes were. I shook my head at him, unbelieving, and my feet slid on the wet rocks as the gusting air blew us about.
“But you and I, Enim, we’re the same. We understand.”
I shook my head as I struggled to answer.
“No, I’m not – I’m not like you.”
Beringer bowed his head.
“No, I suppose you’re not. But if I had had more time, and if you had trusted me fully ... you might have been.”
He straightened and pushed me forward: my feet
skidded across the rocks and I lurched ahead to stare over the cliffs. The ocean below took over my sight as I stared down at it, a dark blue that swayed and circled about as though opening its arms to me, and I clung onto Beringer’s arm to keep from falling. He gripped me back for a moment as we stared at one another, both wishing that the other would change his mind, and our expressions mirrored our regret that neither of us would.
And as he gently eased my fingers to loosen my grip, it was such a different feeling than the one when Jack had grasped my arm before leaving the dorm room. Even though the motions were so similar, there was something completely contrasting in the way that I had wanted neither of them to let go. And as I thought of him disappearing through the door in my clothes, I thought of my mother leaving me as well, only this time it wasn’t with the knowledge that I had let her go, it was that it had been her choice to do so, and that, had she wanted, she could have held on to me instead.
And just as Beringer pried the last finger from his arm and let me go, I flung my other arm up and grabbed onto the fabric of his coat. My body twisted about as his weight halted my fall, and I saw his face morph into an expression of shock as I clung to him without falling over. For a moment he teetered on the edge, trying futilely to keep himself upright, but the ground beneath his feet was wet and icy and he slipped, falling forward, and we both tumbled over the edge and down, down towards the rocks below –
My vision turned dark as we dropped. I felt the impact of us hitting the ground in a state of disbelief, sure that I would keep falling until I hit something hard and sharp, but instead I fell forward on all fours into warmth. My arms slammed back into my shoulders as they were thrown from their sockets, but when I crashed forward it was onto Beringer’s body rather than the jagged ground. His weight had shifted below me as we fell and his body had cushioned my fall. I was oddly aware of the sound of his skull crushing inwards against the stone, and then of the blood rising from his form and smothering over my shaking hands and skin, and then we continued to topple down over the last of the rocks and plummeted onwards into the water.
The cold hit me worse than the fall had. For a moment I was in shock, thinking that I had been given a reprieve, but then the water came up and swallowed me down into it and every part of me screamed to tell me to raise my arms and heave myself back out, but my body had stopped functioning. I was stuck in place – every inch of me frozen as I sank lower and lower down – motionless and heavy as I drowned.
Beneath the surface, face towards the sky and arms outstretched, the season was so deep into winter that even the salt water had frozen into crystals in places, cutting against the skin in crucifixion. Through the surface, the barely-visible sky was simultaneously as dark and bright as ever, and the image was blurred and changing as the waves shifted overhead. And from where I was suspended somewhere between the top and the bottom, cold and broken and bleeding into the blue, I finally felt as though I could see the world for what it truly was.
Ch. 23
Muted noises were coming from afar, like the distant sounds of people chattering on the beach in springtime. I had stopped sinking and was suspended somewhere in the darkness, cold but numb and conscious but unmoving, and all of my senses felt weighted down by the cold and solitude. Time seemed to have shifted forward without touching me at all, and somehow I had been stuck beneath the ocean for years without ever needing to breathe, and there was no chance of being found.
As I attempted to open my eyes, one of my shoulders jerked back into something cushioned and soft, and I was half-aware that my breathing was coming in low, regular intervals. My mouth was somewhat agape and something had wormed down inside of my esophagus, scratching and scraping at the skin, yet no water flooded down into my lungs to drown me. I tried to raise my arms and pull it from my throat, but the heaviness was too much to overcome and I only squirmed in place instead.
The sounds above me drew closer as though the crowd on the beach had leaned over the water to watch me struggling on the ocean floor. Their voices were deep and muted through the thick expanse of liquid, and though I knew that they couldn’t see or hear me fully, I opened my mouth wide to let out a shout before remembering the object that had taken a place in my mouth. My head fell back as I choked against it, and in my struggle to spit it out, something like glass shattered in my ears and all the noise from the world became audible again all at once.
I jolted to my side and made to clutch my hands against my ears to quiet it again, but my limbs were barely functioning. The echoes of people speaking much too loudly and the crashes of metal and wood all around were impossibly hard to bear: it tore at the insides of my eardrums and ripped them apart. And just when the ringing set in and sent a sharp pain shooting through my skull, the familiar sound of beeping rose up through the rest as though I was pressed up against the room at the end of the hall in my grandmother’s old house.
“Enim? Enim, calm down. It’s all right.”
Something warm pressed against my shoulder and held me still, and I froze in place to listen to the broken-silence. The voice was a distantly familiar one that implored me to do as it asked, yet I couldn’t focus on it long enough to know who it belonged to. As I laid motionless with ragged breathing, my mind went into overdrive to place who it could be, and the only thought that came to mind was the last that I wanted as an answer.
Beringer.
I traced back through the memories that had shoved themselves into every far corner of my head and tried to remember all that had happened: he was the killer, he had murdered Miss Mercier and the local girls, and he had tried to kill me. I felt an overwhelming shakiness come over my skin as I replayed the image of him leading me up to the cliffs, and of how he had tried to throw me off but I had pulled him down with me –
“Can someone help him? He’s sick – I think he’s seizing –”
The object in my throat was expanding and barring every last bit of oxygen from my lungs. My back arched as I failed to lift my arms or legs to pull it away, and my head jerked to the side to spit it out instead –
Someone pulled the tube from my throat. As it came up, several large mouthfuls of salt-water followed and splattered on the tile floor as I heaved over the side of the bed. The hands holding my arms to keep me upright were far too reminiscent of how Beringer had suspended me over the edge of the cliffs, but it took me several moments of blinking before I could see against the bright fluorescent lights overhead to feel well enough to speak.
“Beringer –” I choked out, but the sound was hardly comprehensible. The hands over my arms clenched momentarily before helping me to lie back down and loosening.
“No, Enim, he’s ... he’s not here.”
“Beringer.”
The figure above me was blurred against the white lights, and his fuzzy outline seemed to unmistakably be the one of the psychiatrist before sharpening into my uncle. As Karl’s face came into view, he raised his hand to run through his hair and briefly shut his eyes. When they reopened, they were the same dark blue of the ocean.
“No, Enim, it’s me. It’s Karl.”
He had taken a step back with the words. My seeming disappointment that it was him there could not be rectified because of the quick, sharp breaths racking my lungs. Someone lifted a mask over my mouth to ease the discomfort; my breathing calmed as I wheezed into the plastic.
“He should be fine, now,” the nurse said, and Karl nodded absently and looked away until she left the room. It was only as I watched her go through the door that I realized fully that I was in a hospital, but the realization did nothing to ease the blankness of the white walls or the humming and beeping of machines.
Unable to speak, I made to wave my hand to get Karl’s attention but my arm only flopped to my side. Something was pinching against one finger and wires were running in crisscrosses across my body. The movements in my limbs were forced and heavy as though my bloodstream was drained and filled with sand, and my head throbbed against the pillow worse as
though it was split against the jagged rocks.
Karl looked down at me uneasily.
“Do you ... remember what happened?”
My head lulled to the side in an attempt to shake it; though the memories were clear, they were more fractured and disjointed than ever.
“You ... you don’t remember?” he asked. He glanced at the door as though hoping for an interruption, but it was solidly closed. “You ... you called me to come get you.”
Jack. I shut my eyes as his departure washed over me again, and the horrible sensation in my gut would have risen to my mouth if I had not just emptied the contents of it moments before. He had gone; everyone thought that he had killed Miss Mercier. And I had called Karl to come and get me, but that was before I had worked out the riddle. I knew the answer now: everything would be all right again –
“You remember?”
When I nodded, he sighed and slid his hands into his pockets, choosing to stare out the window to his other side rather than at me. I watched the crease in his brow deepen on his profile as he stood there in silence, and only when several moments had stretched between us did he speak again.
“You ... I ... I’m sorry, Enim. I should have been there faster; I should have done things differently.”
The words sounded vaguely reminiscent of the ones he had given my father fourteen months earlier. I blinked up at him, not quite sure that I understood.
“I should have said something months ago when you –” He broke off and ran his hand over his face to collect himself. “I knew that something wasn’t right; it was my responsibility. You wouldn’t be here if I had done things right, and Beringer ...”
I moved the mask off of my face with an aching arm so that I could wheeze, “What ... happened ... to ... him?”
None Shall Sleep (Damnatio Memoriae Book 1) Page 36