The butler, who was wearing a stark white mask and was garbed a strange, brown robe carried in salads and gracefully placed an individual dish for the whole party. He then swiftly moved over toward Amour and poured him a glass from a new wine bottle before rushing to stand at his master’s side. He became stoic, as if he were a living statue.
“But concerning your love for my wife,” Amour took a bite and looked away while seeming to ponder to himself. “How deep is it?”
“What?!”
“I mean…” He chuckled. “What, did you guys sleep together?”
Zola took out her headphones and interjected. “No!”
Shraeu thought for a moment but admitted, “No.”
“Well, did you guys do anything else—like kiss or…?”
“No.”
Amour threw his hands up. “Then why the hell did you think this was going to go your way, Lieutenant! Don't you understand how to tell when a woman wants your attention versus when you should just let it go?!” He laughed again. “My lovely wife knows that I have a very peculiar appetite. However, I never thought I'd see the day when she'd actually cater to it! I mean, I imagine she made promises, am I correct?”
“Well, yes, but—”
Amour held up a finger. “Easy now.” He smiled again and winked. “She probably promised you a life with her and glory for trying to turn me in—she told you that she was ‘afraid,’ that she needed a chance to get away from me.”
“That's… exactly—”
“And she was very convincing; I'm proud.” He looked over at Zola. “She’s been faithful to me since we met when I was treating soldiers in Gaspul, long before I finally made my place in the Citadel. You know, Lieutenant, I always told her that I would build an empire from nothing; I confessed that I had an unconquerable ambition. I then established connections in the country via both my art and medical knowledge. I became something much more than a citizen. Do you understand what I do, Lieutenant?”
“Hurt people. Destroy lives.”
“Well… yes, there's that—there’s certainly that, but you shouldn’t think in such a shallow manner, buddy! Believe what you want, but I own three major corporations in the Blue Sector. I'm the director behind a culinary brand, an art conglomerate (my first business), AND!” He slammed his palms on the dinner table. “I sell medical equipment from a series of chain shops around the Citadel! Amazing, right? –It’s amazing. While rising above the rest of the population, I had my face reconstructed—my nerves regrown and connected. Yet, I still retain a fondness for masks.” His grin spread over a jovial demeanor. “I cherish them.”
Soon, the Gaspulan butler had brought in everything and began portioning out the dinner to all before standing aside once again.
“So, Lieutenant,” he took a bite of venison with one hand and scratched his head shyly with the other, “you could say that I've accomplished my goals…”
Amour then considered a spot on the ceiling, concentrated for a few second, and scowled while suffering some new vexation. “Except I fucking haven't!” With fork in hand, he banged on the table again. “I have a higher calling in life, something that you wouldn't understand! I have a portrait in mind, a dream.”
“Any dream you could possibly have is going to be a damn nightmare. You aren't human, and Zola is being brainwashed by you!”
“Oh! Is she?” Amour looked astonished.
“No.” Zola quietly got up from the table and became grim as she stared ahead. Finally, she looked at Shraeu and smiled faintly.
“You are a damn fool,” she said, “don't you ever question my love for my husband again!”
She turned her head in a gesture of superiority before walking out of the room and stating: “I'll be upstairs, Amour. Just keep the noise down.”
“Easy enough.” Amour had begun voraciously devouring everything in sight and scooted his wife’s untouched food closer to himself.
Shraeu bitterly started eating in small amounts here and there but downed every glass of wine poured for him. “Noise?” He inquired.
The wall behind Amour had been obscured by an old, blank tapestry. With a quick movement, Amour pulled at a rope that rolled the tapestry up and out of the way of a painting:
… A disturbing display loomed over the feast…
“Now normally, Lieutenant, I work with sculptures and masks, but every now and then I become fully… Awake. I paint. Author new ideas.”
“Is that blood? All of it's made out of blood!?”
Amour had used a victim's own fluids to craft the portrait of a featureless person whose face stretched to contain its own desperate scream. “A good replacement for ink, don’t you think?” He mused.
“What have you done?”
“Oh, what have I done? Just wait. We're getting to that.” Amour's eyes had grown a much darker shade of crimson; it was as if they were enclosed in an aura, glowing with a dread which engulfed his guest. He stood from up and nonchalantly walked in the Lieutenant's direction as Thume trailed behind.
“Finally. FINALLY. I get to discuss my dream with someone—even if it's just you, an incompetent man in a place of power in which he has no business being. Even from the beginning, when Zola told me about you, I knew you were of a lesser sort. A man imbibing bottle after bottle, taking credit for work he couldn’t possibly do himself. Lieutenant Shraeu—oh, Lieutenant Shraeu, how you are a joke of a being to me! That's why I can't find it in me to eat you. I can’t even make you Beautiful again. But maybe you, too, can laugh.”
“Excuse me?! W-What the f—”
“As I said, nothing about you really speaks to me as an artist. So, I don’t have any use for you in my exhibit—you know what I mean? It's nothing personal; it's just that you don't provide me with the inspiration. Still… there's someone who did, albeit for a short while—Mr. Thume, show him.”
The butler turned away and slowly took off his mask.
“Listen, Lieutenant Shraeu. This world we inhabit together, it's held by the unworthy—the unwashed. And no,” he laughed, “Don’t be foolish. I'm not talking about celebrities or the big wigs in government, I'm talking about humanity in general.”
“I don't understand.”
Thume began retrieving another object out of a small, dark bag.
“I knew you wouldn't. You see, I've been called—called to be the world's greatest artist; it's a bit of a burden sometimes, you’ll have to excuse me if I seem a little tired. But the only way I can accomplish my dream is by ridding my memory of one small hiccup, if you will. It stands in the way, obscuring my painting.”
Shraeu said nothing; his nerves were coming to a peak.
“There is a man who believes I’ve been unworthy since I was born. The last thing I'll do for myself is take everything away from him. I will make him understand that I am important, that I am needed, Shraeu! Because this world needs me…” Amour’s gaze hardened as he fixed his eyes on the Lieutenant. Below those terrible red embers, the rest of his face grew dark. “It needs me,” he said, “far more than it needs you.”
The butler turned and revealed a different kind of mask. One made from freshly-procured skin, stretched across a backing and displaying a look of terror from someone whose eyes had been removed.
“Is this all some kind of act? You know if you even put a finger on me, the Dawn Bureau will destroy you! You'll never reach your dream, you son of a bitch!”
Amour suddenly acquired another mask, but this one covered the wearer's face and neck and was completely black except for a skull that had been welded to it. Attached to the skull, there were horns that had been sanded down into shorter versions.
“Of all of my creations, this one remains my favorite. Blood portraits are nice, but nothing beats something you can wear!”
Amour pulled the mask over his features and looked down at the Lieutenant. Shraeu became defensive and stood up while backing away gradually. The madman kept walking toward him, teasing out his anxiety with slow, deliberate step
s.
“I need to let you in on one more small detail, Lieutenant.” His voice had dropped to a deep, solemn whisper which bellowed in a way and in conjunction with a horrid resonance.
“W-what? What do you want!?”
“Thume’s mask. Does it look familiar to you?”
“Huh?” Shraeu looked at it. “Uh, no—w-why?”
“Where's your wife, Lieutenant?”
There was a short period of silence that followed.
“In your hunt to kill me,” Amour’s twisted voice continued to deepen, “did you ever consider checking up on her? While chasing another man's woman, you managed to completely neglect your own…”
“What does—”
Amour was face-to-face with the Lieutenant. “And now… the painting.” He breathed in and out deeply. “The mask. The dinner. She came running right back to you—just in a different form than to what you’re accustomed.”
“Wait… no.” Shraeu understood but couldn’t let himself accept it. “This… it’s all her? The dinner…”
Amour stepped back. His voice resumed its lighter, more jovial hum. “You will have a place in my painting, after all, Lieutenant—in my Dream. I will fill this empty world with bodies. Corpses made anew. Into purity. Into art. It will be the perfect portrait of entropy, wouldn't you say so? And Zola? She will stand with me as a God, a fellow artist.”
“I’ll—I’ll stop you! And even if I can't, the Bureau will take everything!”
“Mr. Thume…”
The butler handed Amour his shotgun. Amour sighed before speaking again, “Fortunately, that's already been taken care of.”
“What do you mean?! Did you kill all of them, too?”
“Of course not—you think me some barbarian! Really, I'm not that reckless. I mean, I may be a little different in the brain, but that doesn't bring me down to your level. Most certainly not! As it turns out, the Bureau is focused on other problems entirely. But worry only for yourself—would you prefer to be fed to dogs or given over to leopards?”
“I don't—”
Amour blasted the Lieutenant in the face and shouted: “Oops!” His figure was splotched in scarlet bright enough to match his eyes. “Too FUCKING slow, you piece of shit!!” He shouted at the Lieutenant’s obliterated corpse. “Leopards, it is.”
13
Street Struck
--
Tavon
--
FOR A WHILE, I was the biggest people-magnet at the institution, and it was for all the wrong reasons. By age fifteen, I was already moving from fight to fight at The Khalil Center for Independent Learners. To everyone, I was just a scary kid dressed in wack clothes smelling like piss and failing to fit me in any complimentary manner. I'd been there long enough for everybody to have an idea about where I’d come from, and so most kids didn't pay me any attention. And the others… well…
The strongest person I ever fought in school was my very first harasser: someone who was about to leave after having failed his classes multiple times and who took his frustration out on the rest of the school. He left me with a few scrapes and bruises, but it seemed like whatever I'd been taught about combat in the past kept rearing its head more and more often. I struck him possibly a total of five times, and he gave up after passing out for a moment and regaining consciousness just to flee in a different direction.
After that initial confrontation, everyone wanted a piece of “T, the School Bully.” Bully. I know, right? So, during that period in my upbringing I generally thought: Fuck it; if that's what they want me to be, then I'll give it to them.
I took on individuals as well as larger groups with varying success. Furthermore, it's funny, because the real tough guys in school were the only ones holding back and leaving me mostly alone. I guess I always got the idiots, and, in hindsight, I was lucky no one ever pulled a gun on me. But as you can imagine, I was a troubled kid—at least, that's how the Headmaster viewed it. That man wanted nothing more than to find reasons to expel me as I’d kept roughing up the wrong guys; kids belonging to wealthier families who were starting to consider other schools because I chose to defend myself. They threatened lawsuits until they saw what I came from…
There was no money in trying to sue us.
Jerik Sandeze stayed on the streets in the Third Quadrant, and for years he'd managed to sustain us and even came close once to owning his own shop. But Eze wasn't all there sometimes, and that's probably the reason why he always fell so short of his own goals. He swore to me that he wasn't shooting up anymore, but the truth was that he'd just learned to hide it better. And, luckily, I'd gotten off that stuff and dealt with the withdrawals during my fourteenth birthday. Anubis also stuck around for a time but had grown more and more absent over the years; the beast hadn’t aged in the slightest.
I started out as a good student because I had nothing else to keep me company but books and seemingly endless exams that demanded excessive hours of study. It was the only real measure of my importance—to be honest, though, I feel like fighting did even more to build my confidence. Eventually, someone was able to see a person underneath my own growing hostility toward the outside world.
I was in Composition class, and we were just receiving our graded essays after a month of wondering if I'd completely fucked it up this time; I’ve never been a good writer. Moreover, Eze had endured extraordinary stress from dealing with an overwhelming amount of complaints about my actions at the Khalil Center. All I could do to salvage my reputation was maintain decent grades. Everyone was assigned their own computer and portable virtual headsets that linked to the school network and allowed students to send in assignments from home. Actually, the institution had its very own class on how to operate the headset because its design was complex to most people. Since I spent so much time alone, I came to understand that thing pretty well.
Professor Aloc Norlin stood in front of us and viewed information stored within his own virtual headset through an opaque visor that lit up with visuals we couldn't see. All that was visible happened to be the blankness of my own screen in front of me as I anxiously waited for the results. The kid next to where I was seated, a rich boy who hadn’t been missing any meals, started looking at me and then looking back to the screen displayed by his headset. He boasted, “Just watch, T! I'm going to be a professional writer some day; I know I killed that dumbass essay. Ay, if you want any tips, man, just lemme know. I got you covered,” he punctuated this with a patronizing wink.
“He don't want no tips from you, fatass!” Exclaimed another boy only a few seats down. Others in the class began snickering.
“Shut up,” The kid retorted. “Who are you to talk, anyways? You got the face of damn dog, and you just mad ‘cuz your mamma forgot you at the dumpster thinking you were part of the trash!”
“How about you try sayin’ that again, you stupid—!”
“Hey!” Norlin’s intimidating voice shook the two of them as it thundered throughout the classroom. “Both of you settle down right now or I'm failing you for this rating period!”
The damage was already done, though, as the class had erupted in laughter and cries of “Tell him about it!” and “Yeah! Get his ass good!”
“All right-all right now, this your final warning before I fail ALL of you! Chill out, ya’ll! What’s gotten into you kids…” The look of disappointment he expressed sobered everyone’s attitude.
“Yes, Professor Norlin.” The class responded somewhat reluctant now that their joy was diminished.
There was a piercing emission that echoed across the room.
He’d uploaded the results online.
I clicked on a link and viewed a paper I'd titled: “Marketing As A Lifestyle.” We were supposed to write an essay about a subject on which we each felt like we were the experts. My entire topic was about how difficult it was trying to generate an income when one had little to nothing.
I looked to see that I’d gotten a ninety percent score on my paper. In a comment box
to the side, Professor Norlin had typed: “This is an interesting take on the mentality of people struggling to move from one income level to the next. I know you have it in you to do great work, Tavon, but you need to stay out of trouble to make it to that point.”
“What the fuck!”
The boisterous kid from earlier had received a score of ten percent with the note: “This whole thing is plagiarized, but I gave you a ten for spelling your name right. See me after school.”
“Is something wrong, Mr. Eason?”
Eason stood up, struggled for a moment to peer over at my screen results, and clenched his fists. “Yeah! Fucking… Rat-boy hobo,” he stuttered, “got a better score than me! If anybody plagiarized, it's him! I'm innocent! I know T’s dumbass can’t even spell!”
“Mr. Eason, that doesn't make any sense. Go on and sit your ignorant self down already.”
“Yeah, Eason!” Another kid chimed in. “You heard ‘em, that's your cardio for the day!”
Eason threw his headset and walked toward the door. “Man, fuck all you guys—”
“Watch your mouth, Mr. Eason!” Norlin warned.
“Fuck you, too. I'm out.” Eason slammed the door behind him.
“Ay yo, you just gonna let him talk to you like that, Teach? You gonna write him up?” A girl in the class asked in shock.
Professor Norlin rested his hands on the podium at the end of the room and shook his head. “I don't believe in trying to get one over another person—especially a student.” He stood upright and grew somber; Norlin liked giving his dramatic lectures. “Teachers volunteer themselves into a position to assist the next generation’s growth. If I see someone failing in my class, then I see it as a reflection of my own ability to educate. Therefore, it's not on me to write up some punk and get him in trouble. He'll work his way through his own problems and come back when he's ready.” He smiled.
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