The Sin Eaters

by Aaron Summers

  “Look around. What do you see?”

  Eliza craned her neck to take in the panorama of the Pacific. Their northern view was lush and green, full of creatures she knew existed only in the Galapagos Islands. They flew over the famed Galapagos tortoise on the way in. She cared more about the relict pink iguanas that reminded her so much of dinosaurs. The slope rolled more than a mile from the caldera to the brief plains into a blanket of turquoise shore waters that darkened to midnight blue as the ocean floor retreated. That deep blue snare guided her to the interminable divide between horizon and ocean.

  UseYourWordsMakeYourselfTalkShareYourThoughtsFeelingsTellHimHeWillTellYouHaveToConnectNotIntruding

  “I see these beautiful waters right around the shore. It looks like emeralds and sapphires all jumbled together. But there’s water all around us. I’ve never really understood what it meant to be on an island before. Then the waters… it gets deeper where the water turns that dark blue, and I’m trying to find the horizon but the ocean and the sky kind of fade. No, they blur into… a single line? Maybe? I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  She winced and looked down, noticing her bleeding thumb. Had she been chewing it? She sucked the blood away before she continued.

  “That’s what you’re seeing right now, too. It’s endless. You feel small and isolated, like the island.”

  He nodded.

  “Charlie, why did we come here? You’re remembering something that happened to you, but I don’t think… I don’t think it happened here. But maybe in the Pacific, or on an island, or both. Can you tell me?”

  He stiffened. She remembered Pachamama’s bizarre generational story. It echoed Hyun Minseok’s story too much to be coincidence. Hadn’t that priest found Takka as a statue on the beach? Some creatures froze in response to fear. Possums played dead, didn’t they? But so did tigers while they stalked prey. It wouldn’t be too much a stretch, not with everything she learned about the man since coming to Peru, to take the instinct to hold still and draw that out a few years, add in some rapid intra-lifetime adaptations, and…

  “I remember… am remembering… way… a path.”

  He curled down to inspect his leg. It was bare from below the knee where his sailcloth pants ended to his naked foot. He ran a hand from his ankle to his knee and back. Rachana’s team knew about the severe bone overgrowth on his tibia and fibula. Did he know about it? He had to be able to feel it. The scarring was massive. Eliza leaned in to inspect. She had seen his skin under a microscope already but it was still bizarre. She hadn’t realized until a week ago that he lacked body hair except on his head.

  The leg was as smooth as hers, probably smoother, but his skin was wrong. She couldn’t think of a better word. The coloration was right but the texture resembled snake skin in miniature. Rachana’s research indicated it more closely resembled shark skin with overlapping chainmail rows of sharp spines that were smooth in the direction of the water’s flow but rough if rubbed the wrong way. Either way, it wasn’t human skin.

  How had anyone ever tattooed that mesh armor? Apparently not well. The man himself was pleased when she asked him about the ink work, despite him not remembering where most of them came from or what they even meant. He was unbothered by their vague, often fuzzy structures. That was how people tattooed skin for most of human history, she had learned. Only in the 20th century did crisp art appear. She suspected most people could tell you why they chose to be tattooed, though. He wouldn’t tell her what the half-inked, half-scarred faint lines of a circle on his forearm meant, though she suspected she knew.

  His skin told the story of his life. It was his own life atlas and she knew she couldn’t read it. Could he?

  “What are you remembering?”

  He continued rubbing his leg before switching to the other and resuming the inspection. He switched back to the right leg.

  “I do not remember. Know. I do not know.”

  “But you do, don’t you? It’s your other mind working right now. The hidden one. Right?”

  She held her breath. He might take the bait and finally engage with her. He had to be aware of his split consciousness, didn’t he? Even if he never acknowledged it, he had to know. It was the creature inside the man who remembered the forgotten story about an island, the ocean, and whatever snapped his leg in half once upon a time. Maybe that was the original trauma.

  Thick cords of coarse black hair swung as he turned to face her. He wore his unbundled mane like a crown during these field trips. She decided she liked it.

  “What do you ask me?”

  “I was asking what you’re remembering. But you don’t seem to know.” She drew a breath through her teeth. “But I think that you do. Not conscious you. The other one. The one who… the one who attacked the compound that night. The beast. Jernbjorn.”

  He was going to lunge at her. She felt it in her bones, in the quivering joints ready to make a futile attempt to run, in her pounding heart.

  “Jernbjorn… Jernbjorn is… was… before. Not now. Before. Ago. Another.”

  His eyelids spasmed. Eliza was reminded again of a computer paused in the middle of a difficult operation. Which operating system would reboot if he crashed right now?

  “Right. But what we are doesn’t really go away, does it? It’s still in there. I think it’s… Lord, this sounds crazy outside my own head but hey, that’s what we’ve agreed to do. I think it’s like a defense mechanism on steroids. Which only makes sense because it’s you. I think when you’re too stressed or think you’re in danger, that part of your mind takes over. You might not even be aware of it. But it’s there.”

  She placed a hand on his knee. Her splayed fingers barely covered the vibrating joint. His escape vessel launched in less than a week. Now was the time.

  “Isn’t it? It’s okay. The Grupo knows, too. They’re trying to help figure all this out for you. Like… like the scar tissue inside your leg.” She poked the spot he had inspected. “There’s a gnarly bone growth right there. Looks like you snapped the leg in half at some point. I’m kinda surprised you still have a leg. Do you remember that?”

  The vibration grew until his whole body shook. His eyes rolled back in his head as his thick jaw clenched. She heard his teeth grind and hoped his tongue was safe. Ash and sulfur stained the air as his clawed fingers dug furrows in the black volcanic soil. The first hints of purple bloomed on his neck.

  PushPushPushFindTheThreadAndFollowItGoAskHim

  “But here’s what I can’t figure out. How does this all work together? Normally people with identity disorders slip between the identities pretty easily. It’s really creepy to watch. But not you. It’s like you’re fighting a battle that you’re not even aware of. Like the Charlie I’m talking to doesn’t want to let Jernbjorn out of the cave. Like the two ideas are tearing each other apart. How did you become like this? It had to be an awful trauma. Is that what happened to your leg?”

  She was talking too fast. Slowing down wasn’t an option anymore, though. The questions would overwhelm him. Maybe that was the only way. He would avoid the discussion forever if given the chance. She could never physically force him to talk. His chance to hide forever came in less than seven days. She didn’t know what kept him here right now.

  ItsYouHasToBeYouThatsWhyRachanaHatesYouHasToBeYouYoureTheVariableNotYouSomeoneHeKnew

  “Who is it I remind you of? Is that what you’re remembering? I remind you of someone you lost, or maybe someone who hurt you. You’re trying to remember but the beast won’t let you, maybe because it hurts you so much. But it’s okay, Charlie. You’re not alone. You can’t keep running from danger. It’s going to take you into space and kill you. I won’t let you kill yourself. Tell me.”

  She swallowed a lump in her throat.

  “Tell me. Xontlato!”

  The Nahuatl word vomited from her traitorous mouth. Now wasn’t the time to use her last resort. It was a cheap trick that tasted as foreign as it sounded, a thing crafted in a place and time
that had nothing to do with the worlds she studied. The entire memory, the meaning, the sound, the place, it belonged to a piece of his mind that Pachamama safeguarded during the sleeps between true consciousness. But Eliza realized what she wanted as she said it. She wanted to speak with the real person inside him, not the masquerade of humanity sitting in front of her or the beasts she knew from his stories that he thought he could be.

  The vibration stopped. His hands plunged into the volcanic soil and came out black. He stared at his own talonic fingers as if they belonged to someone else.

  “I remember an island covered in flowers as pink as the setting sun.”

  She choked as she started to repeat the stolen command. It was an unfair thing to do. From her mouth, in this setting, it would force him to engage with whatever grievance he kept buried. But it wasn’t buried, was it? All his failed attempts to die couldn’t bury it any more than they could bury him. The zombie memory was eating him alive.

  “I remember the falcon with wings that blacked out the sun.”

  He looked up from his hands to her face. Tears evaporated as they rolled down his steaming face. Galaxies of orchid fluid filled his watery eyes as they stared into hers. Whatever was going on inside his body, his mind was here with her, right now.

  “I remember you.”

  The fluid darkened to black. He blinked and a hollow stare replaced the serum as his black irises faded to grey transparency against their dark field.

  Eliza scrambled backwards, her hands and feet slipping on the grasses as she tried to put space between her and the thing in front of her. Charlie had fallen inside it. She froze. Running would make this worse. She woke the thing inside the man and now had a chance to face it.

  ThatsExactlyWhatYouDidYouWokeHimUpNotCharlieNotJernbjornWhoIsThisNotTakkaHesAwakeTalkWithHim

  “Who…,” she eased to her feet. “Who do you remember?”

  He was gone. She blinked and stumbled forward but the earth snared her ankles. She tugged a foot free as the other sank. The volcano would swallow her soon. She screamed but felt the words melt to wasted heat as her throat constricted. A stomach gurgled beside her ear. She swung a hand out to slap the monster away but connected with empty sky. The whole world became the sky, taking with it the sprawling volcano, the island, everything except the ocean in which she floated. Lilac and ammonia mingled into an awful perfume that washed over her as she fought to slow her breathing. Each breath stank of bleach and life.

  He was back. So was the island. She tugged her foot free from the greedy soil and reached a hand out to grab him and with him, reality, but her hands digitized into the wind. Her thumb cascaded into pixels. When she looked back to Charlie, she saw a hole. It made no sense. Of everything unbelievable, this was least real. It looked less like an empty place and more like someone deleted a piece of existence. She walked around it without moving her feet. It was featureless from any angle though it was the size of her missing friend. She raised a hand to it, felt the inexorable pull of the sun’s titanic gravity, and fell through onto the star’s burning surface.

  “No, no, no, no, no, this isn’t… this isn’t… no! Mom! Help me!”

  Why had she screamed for her mother? They barely spoke. The woman couldn’t save herself, or her dad, or her sister. Why could she save Eliza? She screamed for help again and again until the sun’s plasma seared her voice and then she closed her eyes.

  An alarm clock greeted her. Its merciless display read 09:42 09:42 09:42 forever as the lump in the bed refused to move. Eliza covered her eyes with her hand to stop herself from seeing her dead sister. 09:42 tracked her vision as the lines of her palm deepened into rain-carved arroyos in the depths of a Texas summer.

  The bone-dry desert rolled into an amniotic ocean. A statue waited on the beach. She crossed the endless miles from desert to shore in a single step and was beside it. The statue turned. It was Charlie, a cruder version, carved from obsidian-speckled granite by the Paleolithic imagination of a sculptor she never knew. Its mineral-streaked face split as it smiled. Lightning crackled from its empty eyes to shock her fingers.

  She hissed, snatched her hand away, and was sitting on the caldera’s rim beside Charlie again. He hadn’t moved.

  “What was… what was… what was…”

  The sky darkened as the sun aged to senility and expanded into a red giant the size of the sky. It baked the detail from existence. Charlie was standing by the rim but he was no longer Charlie. A thing like a bear, no, like a buffalo, no, in some awful way like a human stood on four legs to watch her. Shaggy cloaks of fur hung from its frame. A forest of green lichen and glowing mushrooms grew in those cloaks. But the eyes were familiar. She stared into black irises and galaxies of orchid stains.

  “This is… is your… this is your sleep. Your dreams. This is Jernbjorn.”

  The creature took her into its gaping maw. She was not afraid because they traveled somewhere. There would be a destination. The waiting throat turned into the bottom of the volcano as she stared into it from an impossible height. A beating heart of molten magma waited beneath the surface. She reached out to feel its planetary pulse as the world around her darkened a final time. The magma became an eye that gathered all the bits of existence to fuse into helium and hydrogen and burn like a drowsing orange star that might one day be made of solid, timeless iron.

  Ammonia filled the air again. She retched but choked back the vomit. Would it be too much to dive into the ocean, drink it to its depths, and then find more worlds to drain? The burning star lingered. She was sitting again and so was Charlie. He hadn’t moved.

  “Are you… is we… are we…?”

  “We are here and now.” His lips hadn’t moved.

  She inspected her own hands. The lines that defined them from the rest of reality looked thick like a cartoon. She squinted and the lines sublimated into the air. She flexed and was happy to find her hands weren’t evaporating at all. They felt real. She could feel again. Had that been missing before? Had she felt any of the things she saw or smelled or heard or tasted or feared or loved?

  “I saw… I saw… saw… you did that.” The idea coalesced into solid words. “You did that. That was your sleeeeeeeeep.”

  The world drawled as her mind fought to anchor itself. Recognizing the cause helped.

  ”Your shleep. Sleeping. Slip. Sleep.”

  “A moment.”

  “Momenth? I was gone for... For… yearsh is the wrong word. Long time.” She blinked but took too long and almost fell asleep. “A moment?”

  He nodded. His smile was neither happy nor angry. This was as honest as the person in front of her could be. Someone else was feeling what he felt his entire life.

  “Awful. Long time. I saw…”

  “The chasm below us. The horrible myths I have told you. Many things you do not know you saw but will remember in the moments between thoughts, and always when you dream. You will never forget this.”

  “Thisth is why you want to… to…” she whirled an unreliable finger around her temple and then whistled as her hand rocketed to space.

  He nodded again.

  “I must go.”

  HoldOnImStillInHereCantPoisonMeLikeThatLetMeThinkHeWasDifferentBeforeDruggedUsAnotherDefenseMechanismCallHimOnItLookAtHisEyesGhostEyesIceEyesClearEyes

  “Not… not yet. Wait. I hath a questionth. Question. God, make thisth stop. What was question? Oh! You were different before but you poisonth me to stop me asking the question. Can’t hide from me. Tell me.”

  Each formed thought cleared more of the fog. She forced the usual dam in her mind to let the words flow. They would do the thinking for her until she could trust herself again. He was here, with her, on this mountain, for a reason and he had drugged her to try and literally change her mind. She felt her ischemic smile form. They were close. She just had to ask the right question. Pachamama had understood this and now she did, too.

  “Who are you?”

  His jaw dropped open. He tried to close it b
ut she saw his body had frozen again. Body and mind were in open conflict now. His eyes never shifted, though.

  “I said, because I’m obvioushly not talking with Charlie anymore and can’t be talking with Jernbuh… Jernbor… with buffalo bear thingy… you’re different. You’re awake. You attacked me because of ‘membering things. Who are you?”

  The man in front of her frowned. He stared at the sun so long she thought he must be blind.

  “You will tell me first. Then I will tell you. Then you will make a promise. Then I will go.”

  OhNoNoNoHellNoNotHappeningNopeNoNo

  “Go where?”

  “You will tell me who you are, Doctor Eliza Reyes.”

  “Then you will tell me? You can’t forgeth… forget. Can’t forget while I’m talking with you. Took forever to wake you up.”

  He nodded. Gone was the gut-clenching instinct to stare at the predator. Here was a human, a person, however strange. She could talk with him. It might be the only chance to ever talk with the person inside the costumes again.

  “Okay, yeah. I can do this. But you won’t like me. I don’t.”

  CHAPTER 22 - DARA AT THE GATES

  Stars twinkled over the moonless midnight valley. Its low walls, almost so low that it could not be called a valley at all, brimmed with silent watchers. Those watchers signaled to each other with complex hand gestures not agreed upon in advance. Still, they all understood. This was miserable work. Warm, safe, distant firelight glowed from the valley floor. They hungered for that comfort. None dared move. Fen had not released them, yet.

  A trio crouched on the outside of the ridge. None in the basin could hear their heated argument. Voices would give away their surprise. Fen did not enjoy this hiding. He wanted to march into the valley and offer terms. The foolish Dara would not reject the terms while surrounded by so many warriors.