refused to go any further. As the fact dawned on me, I realized that Piotr was shouting into my face, calling my name.
“Abe! You can’t hurt me, but you are killing your friends! Abe! Listen to me.” And then I could hear them, choking and strangling behind me. I looked back over my shoulder and there they were, Anne and Chuck and Henry, all down on the ground, fingers clawing at the cords sunken into the flesh of their necks, faces already purpling, and so help me God, I turned back around and lunged for Piotr again, lost in the madness and the rage.
I could see what was happening, but I couldn’t help myself. I was beyond sanity. Piotr said something, and the bag behind me wrapped his hands around my torso, lifted me bodily, and turned me around so that I was forced to see my friends dying. It took an eternity, but I was able to get some small amount of control back before it was too late. I forced myself to be still until the bag put me down and stepped away.
I watched Anne claw the now slack cord away from the raw ugly skin underneath and suck air into her lungs. She sobbed and gasped and then threw up on the floor between her hands. The wracking coughs that followed were painful to hear. Henry and Chuck were faring little better. I had almost killed them. Knowingly.
My face and jaw hurt, and my throat was sore from the screaming that I never heard. An image appeared in my mind’s eye of a crude painting on a wall in dead woman’s house. A painting of my face, raving and insane, and I knew then that the painting was right. I had seen my true face.
Piotr looked just as calm as always. “Finally. I thought I was going to have to hang one of them on a sacrificial chain to get you ready for your part. Come on, I promise you that soon you’ll never have to deny your nature again.”
I didn’t follow. Instead I turned to look back at the people that I almost killed. “Anne, I’m sorry. I’m not … I’m so sorry.”
I felt sick when I heard her voice, raspy and strained, coming out of her bruised throat. “It’s okay. I know. I’m here because I wanted to be here, Abe. I know you thought you were using me, but we both know that I was using you, too. You needed to find Piotr and I needed someone to avenge my grandfather’s death. So, we’re even, okay?”
I didn’t know how to say that it wasn’t okay, so I just shook my head.
Piotr tapped me on the shoulder. “Speaking of vengeance, the time for both of ours is drawing close. Time to go.”
He turned and led us up a mobile set of steel stairs on wheels like you would see blocking the aisle at a home supply warehouse store. It was a huge right triangle of handrails and stair steps chained to the side of the scaffolding, allowing access to the platforms and catwalks that were arranged in a large square around the pool, some twenty feet off the ground.
Once on top, I could see that the square ring of catwalks was actually bisected by another walkway that ran from one side to the other, directly over the pit. Hooked chains hung to either side of the center catwalk so that the victims would be level with a person standing there.
One of the corners where the outer catwalks met had an additional platform secured to it, a ten-by-ten wooden square supporting four bodies, their faces partially obscured by rectangles of otherworldly metal. I could imagine the twin spikes on the backs of the altar pieces piercing their eyes, fixing the blocks to their faces and granting them a view of another place, while at the same time taking their mundane sight.
The length of the spikes should have been more than enough to pierce their brains all the way to the rear of their skulls and kill them, but they were clearly still alive, jerking and twitching as if they were trying to look away from the synchronized shadows that passed over the altar pieces. They were nailed to the platform through wrists and shins to keep them in place, but they remained silent, no cries of anguish escaped their grimacing lips and gnashing teeth.
Piotr turned to my remaining guard and said, “It’s time to open the roof. Go outside and tell the others to begin pulling the chains.” Without any response, the thing turned and stepped off of the catwalk, dropping twenty feet into the darkness below. I heard it hit the ground far more lightly and gracefully than its bulk would suggest.
Piotr relaxed, apparently content to wait for his orders to be carried out, and Anne spoke in her damaged voice. “Why are you doing this? You keep talking about justice and vengeance but if that were true, you’d have already killed us. Abe and Henry are the last ones alive who interfered with you, and you have them, but they’re still alive. Why?”
Piotr kept his gaze on the ceiling as he replied. “It’s not justice for Abe and Henry that I’m concerned with, although they’ll receive their measure as well. It’s all of us. All of humanity in its corrupt, hateful, self-serving glory. We praise ourselves for wholesale slaughter and call it glorious because we have labeled them the enemy. We blow up children to make a point, create anguish and destroy lives to preserve dogma, and commit genocide on a daily basis. Even now, somewhere in the world men are hacking women’s breasts off with a machete so they can’t feed their children in an attempt to wipe their ethnic group from the face of the Earth. And they feel justified in doing it. Proud, even. We need to be destroyed. That’s justice.”
“Even you?”
“Just because I can see clearly doesn’t mean I’m any better. There was a time, before I received guidance, when I thought I was righteous, that I was going to punish the wrong in the name of the right. But Abe gave me the gift of time. I came to understand that the problem wasn’t the men who killed my family, or the nation that spawned them, or their allies. It was just their nature. Our nature. They did what they did because they were in a position to do so, not because they were special in any way. They did it because they could, and given the chance, any one of us would have done the same. All it takes is the tiniest reassurance that we’ll be praised for doing the right thing, the acceptance of those around us. And we’re able to kill and mutilate with the worst of them.”
Harsh squealing echoed down to us from the ceiling as a sliver of the night sky became visible overhead. A rectangle of sheet metal as long as the roof and forty feet wide began to slide away, grinding harshly across the top of the building.
The sky that was revealed was wrong. The relentless cloud cover was still overhead, but now the faint corpse-light illuminating it was laced with vast shadows that curled and writhed so slowly you had to look away and back again to see it. The lower surface of the cloud cover was uneven, like the surface of the sea, and roiling in slow motion.
Anne was still trying to talk Piotr off the proverbial ledge, something that I knew was futile, just as I knew she had to try. “But what about the innocent? Even if it were possible to kill everyone, you’d be killing the victims of humanity’s crimes at the same time.”
He shrugged. “Innocent just means you haven’t had a chance to express yourself yet. We’re all monsters here.”
The roof section came away from the building and landed on the ground outside with a crashing racket. Light stronger than a full moon flooded the gym, revealing what the camp lanterns on the floor could not. The bleachers on the left and right walls were packed with worm-filled townspeople, sitting shoulder to shoulder the length of the building on both sides. Their hands were clenching and unclenching and their jaws were working and chewing on nothing as they stared upwards, towards the sky.
I felt despair so sharp that it could reach me even through my rage as I looked out into that vast crowd of lunatic husbands and wives, schoolteachers and shop clerks, all straining and shuddering in their seats. I wondered if Mazie’s father was in there somewhere.
Piotr gave us a moment to appreciate his accomplishment, and then climbed up the ladder. After everyone had followed him up and onto the catwalk, Piotr took Anne’s leash and pulled her away from the others. Chuck and Henry were left at the top of the stairs with their keepers.
Piotr led Anne and myself across the outer catwalk, which thrummed under our feet as we moved. Now that there was more light, we could clearly see the blood pit through the steel mesh of the catwalk’s floor, at least two stories below us. Being able to see through the floor, combined with the narrow three-foot width and a complete lack of handrails, made it a harrowing, dizzying experience.
The three of us walked down the right side of the outer perimeter without speaking. Anne glanced back at me repeatedly, but I didn’t know what to say to her. I was still unable to touch Piotr, and running away didn’t appear to be an option. Even if I could somehow get her free of the cord before Piotr could crush her windpipe, below us was a sea of hundreds of bags under Piotr’s control. I just met her eyes helplessly and kept walking. Being Anne, of course, she was having none of that.
