made my hands ache for my baton as I stared at the back of his head.
“I won my first campaign for mayor on a platform of civic improvement, including a brand new high school,” said Piotr. “That was ten long years ago, all so I could have the old one to myself. It might not look like much these days, but I assure you that it’s as grand and holy a temple as any other.”
He strode eagerly across the weedy concrete towards the school’s gloomy, gap-toothed main entrance. The bags followed obediently, towing my friends by the neck. My guards simply started moving forward, forcing me to walk between them or be trampled by the one behind me.
“Ten years is a long time, considering that I built my first pit in less than a month. But then you didn’t leave me much of a choice, did you? Without the holy scripture that you stole from me, I was forced to experiment for years to fill in the gaps in my memory. A lot of wasted sacrifices had to be made, men and women and children, just so I could rebuild what was lost all those years ago. And that’s only the last ten years. I couldn’t even begin building a pit until I had reconstructed the ritual itself, a task that I’ve been working on since I last saw you. I hope you’re proud of that, Abe. So much suffering, all on your head. Yours and Henry’s, I should say. I can understand Henry taking it for himself, since we both share an … appreciation for the truth and the power it grants, but I can never forgive him for not using it once he had it.”
“Fuck you, Piotr. At least be man enough to take responsibility for what you’ve done, instead of blaming me and Henry.” My voice sounded shockingly shrill and hateful to my ears. I needed to be calmer than this, more in control.
He stopped to turn and face us, his eyes moving between mine and Henry’s. “Question. Is it moral to have the ability to bring justice to the world and end all of its suffering once and for all, and then refuse to do so? Of course not. That’s the very definition of evil, and you two stink of it.”
Henry laughed, his deep voice booming out with genuine amusement. “Who are you trying to convince, you crazy son of a bitch? You think that everyone in the world wants to die, on account of their unbearable suffering? Shit, before you showed up, I was getting three visits a week from the Widow Landry up the road. I got no cause to complain. Tell you what, if you’re so miserable, just blow your own goddamn brains out, and let the rest of us get on with our lives. You can’t even fool yourself with that horseshit. You want to talk about evil, why don’t you ask the people you bleed out for your pool?”
For the first time, real emotion, real anger, clouded Piotr’s face. He stepped forward and slapped Henry hard across the mouth, staggering him. Blood ran down Henry’s chin and his eyes glazed over as he stumbled.
“Is it responsible to allow greed and pride to fuel war and genocide without raising a hand against it? What does humanity have to offer creation except blind self-interest and cruelty?”
He turned and hit me next, faster than I could flinch or turn my head, filling my mouth with the hot copper taste of blood and making my ears ring. The blow rocked me back a step, into the bag behind me. I was stunned, both literally and figuratively. Like me, his speed and power were inhuman. By the time the world snapped back into focus, Piotr had turned around and we were moving again.
There were signs taped to the inside of the wire-reinforced security glass at either side of the double doors that announced the “closed” status of the school. Below one of them was a small construction paper sign, a sun- bleached orange square, with its own announcement in big purple crayon block letters that said, “Good-bye Belmont Elementary! — Mrs. Dumphry’s 1st grade class.” I wondered how many of those kids, now teenagers, had been held prisoner in their own homes. Or had themselves held knives on their families.
Piotr opened the locks with an old-fashioned steel ring of keys, granting us entry to a small lobby strewn with leftover packing material and trash, the walls still decorated with posters and banners from the last day of school a decade ago. The smell of mildew and wood rot almost managed to cover the sickly sweet odor of decaying meat hovering faintly underneath.
“Did you like school, Abe?” asked Piotr as he led us down a long tiled corridor, his voice echoing in the empty space. “I did. Of course, my final term was interrupted when the Germans and Russians invaded Poland. Unfortunate. More unfortunate for my father, I suppose, since he was killed at Bzura, and for my mother who was raped and killed in the occupation afterwards. Not so good for my brother who later died sabotaging a supply train with the Armia Krajowa in the resistance, either.”
He stopped in front of a pair of wooden double doors at the end of the hall, which were chained shut. He unlocked the massive steel padlock and let the chain slither noisily to the floor, then tossed the padlock aside. “You might even say that it was worst of all for me when I survived the attack that killed my brother, prolonging my suffering. And worse again when the AK forced me out for nothing more than giving traitors and enemy sympathizers the justice that they deserved.
“They threw me out when they found the remains of a German soldier that I had questioned for a few days. Can you believe that? They abandoned me over a piece of German garbage! They said he was only a boy, as if that made any difference. What does age matter? How old was I when my entire world was destroyed? But all of that was nothing compared to what you did. In the very hour that I was to avenge my family and my country, you stepped in on the side of evil and atrocity and savagery and stopped justice from being done.”
He turned and pushed the doors open wide. “Well, delayed it, in any case. Justice will be done, and by your own hand, no less.”
Behind him, through the open doors, I stared once more into the face of a nightmare that had been haunting me for the last sixty years.
55
The room was all too familiar. It was a room that a part of me had never left, that surrounded me every time I closed my eyes. It took a second for me to understand that there were differences between the here-and-now and the persistent past, because the similarities were screaming at me, drowning everything else out.
It was a school gym instead of a train station, but it was rigged with the same equipment for the same purposes. Instead of heavy wooden beams crossing the ceiling, there were interlocking sections of construction scaffolding, but the chains and hooks suspended from them could easily have been the same, gleaming wetly in the dim light provided by camping lanterns set at intervals on the floor.
The wooden basketball court had been excavated in the center to make way for a huge concrete-lined depression situated directly under the hooks, now filled to the brim with what appeared to be an inky black liquid, but which I knew would be bright ruby red if smeared across a fingertip.
The air was humid and foul with the hot copper smell of fresh blood, just as I remembered, because no matter how old the blood was, how long ago the first drops fell from the first victim, the ritual kept it fresh, even warm. Against my will the memory of drowning in it claimed me, nearly choking me with the feel of my mouth and nostrils filling with the thick wetness of it. I had to take deep, gasping breaths until it passed.
Piotr patted me on the arm while I regained my composure, a look of compassion on his goddamned face. “I’m sorry, Abe.” He glanced at Henry. “I’m sorry your so-called friends pulled you out of your womb, your spring of immortality, prematurely. If you had been fully reborn the way I intended, you would never have suffered all these long years with your memories. You’d have been beyond that. But now, while they let you down and made you suffer, here I am, ready to heal you.”
The anger that I had been biting down on for the last hour, for the last week, for the last sixty years, turned into something else, something full of bile and jagged edges that I could no longer resist.
I lunged for Piotr and one of my bookends grabbed for me. I drove one hand into its face, grabbed a handful of slimy, squirming tentacles, and before the bag could react, ripped the worm clean out of its mouth. Or at least part of it, as only the severed head and a foot of the body ended up in my hand, the toothed tentacles thrashing and tearing at my skin all the way up to my elbow. The bag dropped to the ground in convulsions, clawing at its own face and neck. Even as it was falling, I was moving, slinging the head away from me with my right hand and reaching out with my left for Piotr.
My second bookend grabbed me from behind, but as strong as it was, it couldn’t keep me from crossing those last few feet. And then I was close enough. I brought both hands up and reached for Piotr’s neck, desperate to feel his thin, papery skin and stringy neck muscles tearing under my fingers.
But I couldn’t do it. There was no misty fog this time, no gesture or trick. It was just me. My body simply
