by Ryan Schow
Looking around at the bystanders’ bodies and body parts, he couldn’t help but take pride in his work. He was efficient and merciful. Not at all like his former self working in the slums of the East End of London. These people knew no pain, not the way women like Mary Kelly knew pain. For that, he praised his humanitarian self.
In his head, Beethoven’s symphony thundered on. He felt light at heart. Vigilant on his feet. Flinging blood off the blade, he stepped past and over the warm corpses and their scattered parts, his eyes fixed on his next targets: the students.
After that, it would only be him and Sensei Naygel.
3
Sensei Naygel was in the bathroom with the fan on going number two when the carnage took place. He didn’t hear the screams, but when he exited the lavatory—which was adjoined to the black belt lounge—he noticed the noise levels on the floor had fallen silent. He briefly chased the anomaly out of his head. The stillness, however, bothered him. He opened the door leading to the main dojo, and what he found was a sight unlike anything he had ever witnessed before, and he’d seen combat in two different wars.
Everyone was gone, save for a nine year old blue belt (Ms. Granger) and a boy with a tall twist of black hair on his head. The boy had a deeply homicidal look on his face. All around, blood stained the floors. There were puddles of it everywhere.
“Who are you?” he asked the boy.
“Sensei Naygel, I presume?” he asked with a most pleasant voice.
Ms. Granger was stuck to the furthest wall, the blade of a Samurai sword buried halfway to the hilt in her abdomen. The brown haired child was so white in the face she had turned green.
“What did you do to her?” Naygel asked, horrified. His hands were already fists, his feet already rooting to the floor.
“She was the last,” the boy said.
He then turned, held out his hand, and the sword came rushing through the air to meet it. Ms. Granger’s body crumpled, but it did not fall to the mat. With his other hand extended, almost like he was coordinating a production, or leading a symphony, the boy somehow held the body at a slumped over, impossible angle. He then lifted his hand and Ms. Granger’s body rose with it. When he flung his hand, the girl went flying, too, and then she disappeared into thin air.
Naygel blinked fast three times, not trusting his eyes.
What the hell? he thought.
“See?” the boy said, merrily. “All clean. Barely any evidence left to terrify the locals.”
But his dojo was not clean. Everyone was gone, but the school’s floor was drenched with blood and hunks of shredded flesh. Had this boy, this creature, somehow managed to pitch everyone into this open hole in space? How did he disappear them into this…nothingness? He blinked again, tried to get his bearings as the world closed in around him. If he wasn’t a more practical man, he would swear that he was having a nightmare.
Looking around, taking into account the gore spread throughout his dojo, Naygel had to assume this psychotic kid did to everyone what he did to little Ms. Granger. That this was no nightmare that he could wake up from. For all of its improbability, this was real.
“Where did Ms. Granger go?” he heard himself ask the boy. Naygel was still having difficulties connecting the dots. His body wavered for the slightest moment.
“Into The Void,” the boy proclaimed.
“Which is where?” Naygel asked as he stepped onto the mat, avoiding several large pools of red. The boy came across the padded surface to meet him, sword in hand.
“Nowhere. The space between planes. Think of it as an interdimensional trash compactor.”
“Are they all dead?”
He smiled, took a bow, spreading his arms.
“Put the sword down,” Naygel said.
“No.”
“You are a coward,” he spat, his anger finally bleeding through. “Setting after women with a sword? Killing children?”
He kept his eyes off the blood, focused all his thoughts only on the boy.
“I want to know where Raven de’ Medici is. Tell me where I can find her and I will make your passing every bit as painless as theirs.”
“Drop the sword,” Naygel said again.
Instead of dropping it, he flung it aside, waited a fraction of a second, then turned, stuck his hand out, and the sword was gone as well. Sucked into a nothingness Naygel couldn’t comprehend.
“You want to play?” the boy asked.
“Yes,” Naygel hissed.
They met each other in the center of the mat, hands up, ready to go. The look on the boy’s face was sheer titillation. Naygel didn’t understand. He needed to know why the boy did what he did. And how. He needed some sort of explanation. But after seeing what he had done to Ms. Granger, and then with Ms. Granger, he wasn’t sure he would last long enough for a Q&A session.
“You’re like her, aren’t you?” Naygel asked.
“Raven?”
“Yes.”
He smiled. “I’m better.”
Now Naygel knew he wouldn’t survive.
“What did she do that you should come after her like this?” Naygel asked, taking a slight angle on the boy, whose hands were also up.
“She—”
The moment he spoke, Naygel shot in on him, driving a vicious blow to the boy’s Adam’s apple. The boy staggered backwards, eyes flashed wide open, gasping for breath. Naygel kicked the inside of the boy’s left ankle, snapping it, then hammered him again with lightening speed and precision, directly on the Adam’s apple a second and final time. The boy hit the mat, flopped on his back, then proceeded to choke to death as his throat swelled.
Seeing what he saw, taking no chances, Naygel lifted a knee and stomped down so hard on the boy’s head he died right there on the spot.
For a long time, Naygel just looked at him. He could barely comprehend the boy, much less his compulsion to kill everyone Naygel cared about. His students were his life. Now they were gone, and he couldn’t imagine where. Sitting beside the boy, situating himself in Lotus position, he went through a slow meditation, relaxing his body, unwinding his mind.
I won’t survive this, he thought. Neither my heart, nor my mind.
4
Naygel was sitting in perfect Lotus stillness beside the dead boy when the front door opened. He looked up, unsure of how to explain any of this, when he saw who the visitor was. It was the boy.
What?
He glanced down at the dead boy, then looked back up at his very alive twin.
Impossible!
“Okay, you got me on that one,” the boy announced. “But I know karate now, so if you would be so kind, I would love a rematch.”
Naygel stood up, his mind going to pieces.
“You…you’re…”
“Not what you think I am. Now I’ll ask again, where is Raven de’ Medici?”
“She’s not my student anymore,” he said, his face stricken. Leaning over, he grabbed the boy by his explosion of hair and hauled him to the side of the mat. In truth, he needed to touch the dead boy to know he was still real.
Sidestepping several puddles of blood, the boy’s twin said, “I know you know where she’s at.”
“I don’t.”
At the mat’s edge, the fresh boy knelt down, untied the laces of his military style boots, slipped them off along with his socks. He stood and said, “Rei. Everything begins and ends with respect, yes Sensei?”
Naygel said nothing.
The boy bowed, a perfect bow—which was nearly impossible to achieve without decades of practice—then stepped onto the mat.
“Tell me where she is, Sensei Naygel, and I will exercise mercy.”
Naygel stepped forward, wondering if he killed this one, would another appear? At the same time he was certain he would never have the answers he wanted.
The boy stood before him and bowed a second time. Naygel bowed. The boy’s guard, it was much different than before. More precise.
“Isshin-ryu, right? I studied it si
nce we were here last.”
“That was three minutes ago.”
“For you.”
Naygel got the right angle, threw a punch, which the boy hit with a stronger punch of his own. Naygel’s ring finger broke. The boy snickered.
“Been practicing that one,” he said, jovially.
Naygel switched stances, not showing the pain, even though he felt it plenty. “What do you want with Raven?”
“That which no one in history has been able to take from her.” He sidestepped Naygel’s fiercest kick, threw a swift back-fist that cut open the master’s cheek.
Impossible, Naygel thought for the second time. The boy’s punch was more accurate and deadly than his own.
“What’s that?” Naygel asked, wincing, slightly dazed.
“Her soul. I want to eat her soul.” And with that the boy threw a flurry of punches and kicks, blocking Naygel’s own advances, then breaking two of Naygel’s ribs with a brutal sidekick.
Naygel shrank back, folding at the site of the injury. Chastising himself for showing pain, he did what he could to mask his emotions. The boy, however, would now target his ribs as his greatest weakness.
“Makes you want to shit your pants, yes Sensei?”
Switching stances again, he put up his guard, prepared to fight the boy with his injured hand. The boy went back to work, and Naygel’s injuries mounted.
Broken eye socket, partial blinding in his left eye with an eye gouge, three more broken ribs, four broken fingers, four broken toes, a partially ripped off ear and a snapped-in-half femur. Naygel couldn’t walk. Couldn’t stand.
“Tell me where she is,” the boy demanded, barely even winded. “Tell me or you die like I died.” Looking at his dead twin—or perhaps a…clone?—he pointed and said, “Like he died.”
Naygel thought for a second about how quickly Raven had defeated him when they sparred her way. Blood was drizzling out of his mouth and wounds. His appendages were swollen and throbbing, and he had indeed soiled himself when the other three ribs broke. Taking a shallow breath, the pain he was suffering no longer masking itself, he said, “I will tell you where she is, not because you’ve broken me—”
“I have.”
“—but because I want her to break you. And she will.”
Smiling, grabbing a handful of hair and jerking Naygel’s head back, the boy said, “That’s all very good natured and vindictive of you—”
“She goes to school in the Sierra foothills, just above Sacramento, in a town called Newcastle. It’s a secret school for the children of the elite, so you won’t find it on a map, and you won’t find it on the internet.”
5
“I remember reading about this ‘internet,’” the boy mused. “It’s the start of my world, our world, a world where you can be free of the body without having to die. Do you have this ‘internet’ here?”
“Yes, but you won’t find it—”
“Put me in it, now.”
“You don’t go in it,” Naygel said, struggling against the boy’s superhuman grip on his shorthairs. Growling, seeing black spots and pulsing waves, he said, “You get on it.”
The boy pulled Sensei Naygel roughly to his feet. He tried not to show weakness in the midst of defeat, but it was impossible at this point. Sliding an arm under both his useless arms, the boy supported the better part of Naygel’s weight upon his small frame.
“The lounge,” Naygel said, unable to disguise his physical agony.
He set Naygel down on the couch, taking a seat himself at the desk. Pointing at the computer screen, the boy said, “This is the internet?”
“Sort of,” Naygel said, near passing out, his leg swelling fast and tight against his skin. His face burned and his fingers throbbed, several of them turned at wrong angles.
Sweating profusely, everything hurting, Naygel directed him to Google maps, then said, “Type in Newcastle, California and click the ‘Earth’ button on the bottom.” The boy did as directed. A small segment was blacked out, almost like the satellite failed. “The black spot,” Naygel said, “that’s where she goes to school.” By now, his evacuated colon was smelling things up.
“And you’re sure of this?”
He nodded somberly, praying he wasn’t condemning Raven to the same fate he was surely bound to suffer. “She was a student of mine,” he managed to say. “And I listen well.”
“Of course you do,” the boy said, getting up. He pulled Naygel to his feet once more (which had Naygel groaning audibly), took on the bulk of the weight and hobbled him out to the mat.
“If you’re going to kill me,” Naygel huffed out, “just do it already.”
The boy sat him on the mat against the wall and said, “I already have”—he said, pointing to his heart—“inside. I’ve already killed you inside. You’ll live while having died this inner death.”
He was right. But worse, he was cruel.
Then, when Naygel was sure he would leave, or finish him, the boy opened his arms wide to the ceiling, almost like he was wanting some invisible giant to hug him. He was about to ask the boy what he was doing when the air opened up and dozens upon dozens of bodies, body parts and a slew of guts came tumbling to the mat, all heaped together and mutilated, followed by the slop and drizzle of almost two hundred pints of blood mixed in with whole organs and splintered bones and popped-out eyeballs.
The smell alone was atrocious. Like sewage mixed with a thick metallic scent. In war, where the horrors and cruelty of man abound, it was never this bad. Never so…sick and concentrated.
Turning to watch him, the boy in body number two said, “Just remember, I’ve killed you.” Then he smiled, cocked his head sideways and winked at him before walking out the front door.
Naygel turned and puked.
The Paradox of Never-Never Land
1
On the gurney in the lab, I work my future self her out of her clothes, marvel at the scars on her body, scars that aren’t on me now, scars that weren’t aloud to heal. I touch a circular spot about the size of a dime and an image flashes in my head of a cigar being put out on her skin. It heals, so the bright orange bud of the cigar is pressed to flesh once more. For a second, my skin hurts where her skin hurt. In my mind is the phantom voice of a cruel man saying, “You see? I told you it would work. She cannot heal so well now.”
At this point, I can’t tell if this is a memory of hers I picked up while inside her, or if I have the power to touch a person’s scar and know the way it got there.
I pull my finger off the wound and the image falls away, but not the tenor of the man’s voice in my mind, and certainly not the way he sounded so excited about the future me not healing. I trace my fingers over other scar tissue lines on her body (knives and whips), a strange network of ninety degree loops (chains), then I pull my hand away completely. A sheen of sweat glistens along my upper lip and my forehead, and on the small of my back. My breath is short.
“What have you gone through?” I say, more to myself than her. Stealing a deep breath, I lay my hands upon her once more.
Trailing my palms down her shoulders (they were pulled out of socket and left that way for years on a sadistic stretching device), sliding them down to her ribs (broken with canes, fists, boot heels), her legs (beaten with bats, boards, constant kicking; broken and re-broken and beaten some more), her pubic bone (ceaseless rape), I feel her suffering as though it’s my suffering. As if I touched a live wire and got the nastiest shock of my life, I jerk my hand away, horrified, enraged, my eyes instantly swimming with what I know will be tears for what she’s endured. For what I must endure in the future.
I can’t be her. Not with what she’s survived.
No way.
I smooth her hair back, lovingly, crying for what she endured, sobbing for who she has become, and that’s when a new host of imagery assaults my senses. She’s been frozen, drowned, thrown off the tops of buildings, run down by cars. I pull away from her, unable to stop the crush of tears and s
adness. Then I wrap my arms around her and bawl into her chest, wishing I could take this from her, not have her live any of it.
“Take it,” the voice inside me says. I stand up, wipe my eyes, look down at her only to find her eye open. She’s looking at me.
“Are you…awake?” I ask.
The eye shuts, and I feel her retreating inside. I follow her in. Find a clear pathway through the muck and mire of her mind and trail her down into her psyche. This time, I have a different experience. Her mind is set in the framework of a giant honeycomb. I didn’t expect that. It’s dark and noisy inside her head, the harried chatter of a thousand riled voices. If I were a bee, and the buzzing were a constant thing, this would be my hive. My cell. For a moment, I lose her. Inside, I’m panicking.
“Raven!” I cry into the chaos.
“Shut up, tourist!” someone yells from somewhere. A man. No, a brute.
“Raven!”
“Shut up, bitch!” another voice yells. Inside the honeycomb are not only sharp voices, but not so pleasant personalities. And places to hide. Is she nearby?
She has to be!
I work my way deeper down and it’s like crawling through a sanitarium where all the patients are choking the hallways and crowding the TV and game rooms. There must be hundreds of personalities in here! Thousands!
“Raven!” I scream into the dark and faceless masses.
“Not here,” someone whispers so close to me, I jump away, startled.
“Down below,” another more motherly voice replies.
Working my way through the black beehive of personalities and other programs, I try feeling for her rather than calling out, but what I feel deep in my spirit is the need for these personalities inside her to get out. A little girl cries; a dozen girls cry. They’re wanting out. All of them. They’re all desperate for escape, and falling into fits of begging. They want out. They are demanding I release them. I clap my hands to my ears, drive downward, moving ever deeper into the noise and madness of her/my head.
