The Reaper

Maples?’

Brook didn’t answer. He could see where this was leading.

‘I remember you telling me about her death. You described the power Floyd Wrigley had over her perfectly. “Suddenly he’s a God. He is God.” you said. “He can choose.” Maybe I am insane, Damen. But I know I’m not God. Yet thousands of apparently sane people, every year, become God. They assume the power. Power over life and death. The power of God.

‘Take a Christian country like America.’ The sarcasm in Sorenson’s voice was a little overdone. ‘I lived in Los Angeles from 1995 for three years. You didn’t know that.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Continuing my work in my small way. Not that anyone would notice in such a place. Los Angeles-the City of the Angels. America-the Home of the Brave. For such a humourless people, their sense of the absurd is delicious. Do you know how many people are murdered in America every year, Damen?’

No reply. Brook could see how long Sorenson had been preparing this and decided to offer no interruptions. He shook his head.

‘Twenty-four-thousand people. Every year. On average, every week in the Land of the Free, nearly five hundred people are murdered. They don’t die in road accidents or of heart disease or cancer. They have their lives deliberately ended by another human being. So how many killers is that, assuming more than one person is murdered by the same killer?

‘Let’s be generous and say there are eighteen thousand killers in America. In any one year.’ Sorenson looked hard at his pupil, raising a bony digit for emphasis. ‘What do you suppose gave all those people-eighteen thousand of them-the right to assume the power of God and end the lives of their victims?’

‘They don’t see it that way.’

‘Exactly!’ shouted Sorenson, slamming a fist down on his chair. ‘There’s no guiding hand behind them. They see no power other than their own. If there is such a power, where is it? Why isn’t it being used for good? Why won’t this power stop them killing? And if this power is not to be used for good then ‘Why shouldn’t I use it?’ they ask. Each of these eighteen thousand murderers has realised that anybody can wield this power. What need have we of metaphysical God, when, with a squeeze of the trigger or a stroke of the blade, we can be God? We are God. What a power, Damen. What an awesome power.

And who wants that power? Not those who have power, other power, power to affect things. No. It’s those without the power to change anything that thirst after the ultimate expression of existence-the God-given power to take life. Our society has become infected by that power, Damen. The millions with no power and no influence have realised they can turn themselves into a celestial being with a single act.

‘And then there are people like you and I. We look on in horror. We wonder what’s happening to the world. Did God really die at Auschwitz? Where is the order, the rightness of things? We see God devolving His powers to decide who lives and who dies, without reference to any logical system.

‘I’m not religious…’

‘Neither am I, Damen. Neither are the eighteen thousand people who committed murder in America last year. ‘God doesn’t exist!’ they say. ‘If He did exist He’d do something. If God does exist He doesn’t give a damn so why should we?’

‘And so we ask ourselves. A million questions. You know them as well as I do. It’s the interrogation at the Theatre of the Absurd. Why can Hitler live to kill six million Jews, when an innocent baby can be snuffed out at birth? How can Josef Stalin die in his sleep when a bus full of schoolchildren can career into a swollen river and be washed away? Why do arms dealers get to sip martinis in the sun while the weapons they sell are used to slaughter women and children in the name of ethnic purity?

‘Why? What is the point of it all, Damen? It’s complete chaos. Does this God want us to hate him? Does he want us to despair of His creation?’ Sorenson took a strained sigh and dabbed his brow with a hand towel produced from behind a cushion. ‘Excuse me. As you can see I feel strongly about this.’

‘And where do you fit into all this?’

‘Me?’ Sorenson laughed. As you said, Damen, I am now God. I have assumed that power. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. If God refuses to bind a guiding philosophy to His power then I must do that for Him. I must show the world that power over life and death can be justly managed, so others can take up the mantle. The Reaper leads the way. He makes us see that the guilty can be judged and the innocent saved. The Reaper can decide. The Reaper does decide. It’s the only way.

‘The Elphick boy was young. I felt sorry but it was right. But his parents? They created him. They made him what he was. I was satisfied with their tears, their suffering. They learned a hard lesson and, by the end, they knew it was right. They saw I’d brought them beauty. They saw I’d brought them together as a family, for one last exquisite moment, and were grateful.’

‘And Wrigley?’

‘Floyd Wrigley was chosen for you, Damen, to prove to you the justness of The Reaper’s work. But still you refused to see and I had to look elsewhere.’

‘Charlie.’

Sorenson nodded. ‘His pain was so deep. The Reaper was happy to help him.’

‘By making him kill Roddy Telfer?’

‘By showing him that he had the power to make the world a better place.’

‘And Tamara Wrigley? Kylie Wallis? Roddy Telfer’s unborn child? Did their deaths make the world a better place?’

‘Nature versus nurture, Damen.’

‘What?’

‘Genetics or environment? You look but you don’t see. Is the way we’re raised responsible for what we are and what we do or is it laid down in our genetic make-up, as unchangeable as the sunrise? I suspect you’re an environment man, Damen. It’s the liberal choice.’

‘But you believe in science, in genetics.’

‘Believe? No. Like you I believe in nothing but my own ability to act. That’s how the choice is made. Nature versus nurture. When you’re the child of a habitual criminal your future is written. If the genes don’t get you, the environment will. It’s what the Americans call a slam-dunk.

‘You saw the poor Wallis girl, her virginity torn from her at such an age.’ Brook looked sharply up at Sorenson. ‘Of course I knew, Damen, every sickening detail-more even than you. And how long before this poor child delivered the seed of some habitual criminal like her father? Three years? Two years? Six months? And the cycle of abuse begins again.

‘She didn’t suffer if that’s what you want to know. She’d suffered enough before The Reaper took her. The parents cried. Finally they’d seen real pain and were forced to confront it, fear it. And they understood. I wish I could be certain they cried for their daughter and not for themselves. It was the same with the Wrigley girl…’

‘She was called Tamara. She’d have been twenty-six now.’

‘Yes.’ Sorenson was unfazed by Brook’s attempt to humanise his victims. ‘And how many young Floyds do you think she’d have squeezed out by now, strutting their stuff around the ‘hood’?

‘So the Wallis baby was saved because there was still time to change its future by changing its environment?’

Sorenson smiled warmly at Brook. ‘Exactly. Another drink.’

‘Is that why you write it on the wall?’

‘Don’t feign ignorance, Damen. Nobody in the Wallis family was saved. You know who benefits from The Reaper’s work.’

‘Benefits?’ From the depths, Brook hatched a bitter laugh. ‘From cutting the throats of little boys and girls.’

Sorenson’s grin forced Brook to look away. ‘Don’t bore me with the response you think society requires of you. Who benefits?’

Brook remembered Kylie, skin like white porcelain, her top sliced open, her back scored like a joint of pork. He remembered her mother, he remembered Bobby Wallis. He remembered the aggression of Jason in the hospital. He remembered Floyd Wrigley and Sammy Elphick and his boy hanging from the light fitting, shorn of his V-sign.

‘Tell me, Damen.’ Sorenson’s eyes bored into Brook and he couldn’t hold the look. He’d tapped into the