Killing Adonis

by J M Donellan

  ***

  The wheels of Elijah’s throne spin like twin steel suns as Rosaline pushes him towards the house in search of temporary respite from the gaggle of guests. When she sees the guard on the floor inside the doors, she calls out, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

  Freya pokes her head out of the Danger Room and motions Rosaline to join her.

  “Freya? What are you doing in there? I thought this room was locked? And that guard…what happ—?”

  “Shhh! Quick, get in here before someone sees you!”

  Rosaline pushes her freshly minted husband through the doorway and Freya quickly closes the door behind them.

  “I’ve always wondered what’s in here! What is that book you’re looking at, Jack?”

  Freya removes a syringe from her handbag, rolls back Elijah’s sleeve, and taps at his arm to find the vein.

  “What are you doing? What’s that you’re giving him?”

  “Flumazenil. It’s a benzodiazepine antagonist, kind of like an anti-sedative. Basically like injecting half a dozen cans of Red Bull straight into your veins.”

  Rosaline’s lip quivers like the tremor preceding an earthquake. “You mean you’re trying to wake him up?”

  “Yes. My guess is he’ll be with us in a few minutes.”

  Rosaline’s face builds into a grin then collapses into a frown.

  “My Elijah is coming back to me?”

  “He’ll be awake again, Rosaline, but you have to understand the Vincettis have been keeping a lot of secrets from you. There are some things about him that you might not want to—”

  “If he wakes up, he’ll be all mine again…”

  “Well, yes, but…” Freya tries to continue, her voice edged with frustration.

  “My sleeping prince—”

  “Rosaline!” Freya grabs her by the shoulders and snaps her fingers repeatedly in front of her face. “Focus. We can deal with your dozing Adonis…oh, shit…I didn’t mean to…”

  Rosaline’s body shudders with sobs. It’s a short, convulsive rhythm, like an old car sputtering to life.

  “Rosaline! I know you’re upset but you need to be quiet or someone will hear us! He—”

  “I don’t want him to wake up!”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want him to wake up! Not ever! Not after the horrible things I found out about! If he wakes up, my dream will be dead! Please don’t let him wake up! Haven’t you ever had a dream you didn’t want to end? Oh God, I’m going to wind up just like Mummy…I’m never taking this wedding dress off…”

  “Freya—”

  “Not now, Jack!”

  “Freya, I can hear someone coming! I th—”

  SCAN COMPLETE

  ACCESS GRANTED: EVELYN VINCETTI

  ***

  Yvette downs her eighth champagne and feels the sky start to spin. She feels weightless and free, as though she could be borne away to some magical foreign land on a warm summer breeze. Soon this crowd will be all wailing and gnashing of teeth but, for now, she is content to revel in the sweet, dizzy bliss.

  She floats over to the mob gathered around Ramsey, whose suit is drenched with lakes of crimson. “Somebody call an ambulance!” a woman yells.

  “No no no, I’m fine. Just a bit…uh…I feel quite faint…No! I’ll be fine. More embarrassed than anything. But could, ah, could someone take me home?”

  Yvette eyes his Cartier watch, Ferragamo shoes, Yves Saint Laurent belt. “I could take you. I was about to leave, anyway. I may have left my iron on at home.”

  Ramsey eyes the woman leaning over him, her curtain of dark hair hanging against the elegant curves of her ivory cheeks, her jewels glimmering in the light, her resplendent smile. Behind her shimmers an ethereal orange glow. His head spins and he mumbles, “Are you an angel?”

  She laughs. “Not even close, my dear.” She bends down, throws his arm over her shoulder and helps him stagger to his feet. When she gets him to her car, Yvette heaves him into the passenger seat and then, as she walks round to the driver’s door, points and shouts out to the watching crowd, “Oh my, is that a fire?”

  Laughing, she leaps into the car, turns on the ignition and screeches the tyres as she takes off. Hundreds of guests run towards their cars—none faster than Thomas P. Wortz—and tear off into the night as vicious red tongues of fire consume the Vincetti mansion.

  ***

  The Danger Room door swings open and Evelyn fixes each of them with a fierce, calculating stare, like a warrior queen surveying her enemy on the battlefield. Her eyes linger for a moment on Elijah, whose right hand is moving with a barely discernible twitch. “Hmph,” she pronounces, before kneeling next to Rosaline, huddled wretchedly on the floor, and patting her gently on the back.

  “There, there dear. It’ll be alright. I promise.”

  Jack, Callum, Freya, and Evelyn hold their positions and listen as Rosaline’s sobbing fills the room.

  Elijah convulses and groans.

  Evelyn jumps to her feet. “Will someone explain what the hell is happening?”

  Jack passes her the notebook. “Evelyn—”

  She shoots him an apoplectic glare.

  “Mum, you’re not going to like what you see here…”

  “I don’t like what I’m seeing already, so it can’t get too much worse.” She drums her fingers on the book cover without opening it, then looks at Freya. “You remind me of myself as a girl, you know? Brash, selfish, curious, charming.”

  Freya wraps her arms around Rosaline.

  “When,” says Evelyn, “did you figure out we’d been sedating him?”

  “Not as goddamn quickly as I should have. I found someone else’s blood on him a few days ago. And then I found a syringe of quazepam in the kitchen bin.”

  Evelyn nods curtly. “I should’ve been more careful. Emptying the damn bins, that was always Maria’s job…”

  “Why the hell would you keep Elijah sedated?”

  “Do you really have to ask, Jack? After that car crash, when he killed that poor girl and her father, not to mention that prostitute, Harland and I figured a coma was the only way to keep him out of prison. This way we could give him a day off now and then…better to live a day as a lion than a thousand as a lamb, and all that. We made him promise to keep his…activities quiet. Now, pray tell, what’s in this little black book?”

  “It’s a scrapbook. Of Elijah’s victims,” says Freya. “A trophy collection. All the people he’s killed and harmed on his ‘days off,’ including Maria.”

  “Don’t be so hysterically hyperbolic, girl. It’s true Elijah said he was going to take care of Maria when she started sticking her nose where it didn’t belong, and I assumed he was simply going to get her deported, but instead she had that heart attack…”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Yes,” says Evelyn, her voice devoid of its usual conviction.

  “You managed to organise Maria’s funeral rather quickly.”

  “I have two personal assistants, and a secretary. Does mere efficiency qualify as evidence of some ridiculous conspiracy?”

  “Look in the book, Evelyn. See the truth about your son.”

  Evelyn bites her lip, scratches lightly at the book cover then throws it at the wall. “No. Burn it. Burn it now.”

  “Evelyn, your son has been killing people, and you’ve been providing him with a perfect alibi,” growls Freya.

  “It’s not true!”

  “It is!”

  “Fine! It is true, but I don’t want to fucking believe it!” Evelyn screeches.

  Rosaline looks up with fearful, teary eyes.

  Everyone stares at Evelyn, her face red, her steely composure vanquished. “I’m not a perfect fool. But I’m his mother. I can’t believe he would ever do anything so completely awful. Not m
y perfect little boy. I don’t care what evidence you show me. I won’t believe it. I won’t I won’t I won’t I won’t!”

  Evelyn expels a frenzied, spluttering sob and wipes at her eyes.

  Rosaline stands and places her arms around Evelyn, who buries her face in the white puffs of Rosaline’s shoulder pads.

  Elijah shuffles and emits a low, grumbling moan as the door opens.

  “Does anyone smell smoke?” asks Callum, sniffing at the air.

  “That’s my cigar.” Harland enters, puffing a large Cuban. “Someone want to tell me what’s going on here?”

  “Grrrumuphlgh,” mumbles Elijah.

  “Well, that can’t be good,” says Harland.

  Jack picks up the notebook and hands it to his father.

  Harland flips through it, grunts indignantly, then presses his cigar to the pages until they start to blacken and smoke. “Elijah, you damned fool, just when everything was going so nicely…”

  “No!” yelps Rosaline, smacking the book out of his hand and stomping on it.

  “My. Elijah. Is. Not going. To go. To prison! His actions. Are. A family matter!” roars Harland.

  “I am your family now, you lecherous, grey-haired swine!”

  Everyone stares at Rosaline, stunned into silence. Her fury is as fearsome as it is unexpected.

  She inhales.

  Exhales.

  Inhales.

  Exhales.

  Inhales.

  Exhales.

  She holds up a manicured finger and shoves it under Harland’s nose. “He’s waking up, and it’s too late to stop. He’s waking up and he is going to prison. He will atone…make penance.”

  “You. Think. So. Do you, my little princess? We’ll just see. What. My lawyers. Have to say. About that!” spits Harland.

  Evelyn nods. “I can assure you, Elijah will be dealt with in the Vincetti manner. In our manner.”

  “Which means,” says Jack, “you’ll sweep it all under the carpet, like always.”

  “Elijah is a killer…a monster,” says Freya. “You’ve shaped him into some idealised Renaissance man, something from myth and legend, but the mythic figure he most closely resembles is Grendel in Beowulf. He hunts and kills for sheer pleasure, simply because he can. And the only thing worse than Grendel in that story,” she starts, but sees Evelyn’s blank look. “Doesn’t anybody read anymore? Help me out here, Jack.”

  Jack looks at his mother and says, “Grendel’s mother. The only creature more terrible than Grendel was his mother.”

  Harland grabs Jack by his lapel and pulls his face close. “You’d. Best. Watch. Your. Tongue.” Then he drops his cigar to the floor, and crushes it with his heel. “Bah. I’m done with cigars.” His teeth scrape some of the residue off his tongue and he spits it out. “They taste like charred possum droppings.”

  “I really do smell smoke,” says Callum.

  “As I said, it’s…ah…” As Harland opens the door and pokes his head out, a thick cloud of smoke and a wave of heat invade the room. “Shit! The house is on fire! The whole fucking place!”

  Evelyn and Harland converge on Elijah, who is beginning to drool and shake.

  Freya yells, “Run!”

  Jack and Callum dash out the door, but Rosaline stays rooted, her eyes darting frantically between Elijah and Freya.

  “Now!” Freya grabs Rosaline by the hand and pulls her out the door, with the Vincettis trailing close behind. They run through the smoke, coughing, their eyes burning and skin stinging with heat. Outside is a maelstrom of screeching voices and tyres as the wedding guests escape. Rosaline trips over a rug and her hand slips from Freya’s, who turns to glimpse the Vincettis through the smoke behind her. She sees Elijah’s eyes fluttering open. Even through the obfuscating haze, they are a spectacular blue.

  A veil of flame licks feverishly at a wall hanging ahead of the Vincettis and they disappear in the orange and blue flash.

  “Run!” Freya shouts, pulling Rosaline to her feet. “Come on! Fucking run!”

  Rosaline shrieks as the fire flares in front of her, then scrambles after Freya. Up ahead, Callum shoves the front door open on a starry night sky and runs to his car.

  Jack reaches the door and pauses, looking back inside.

  “What are you doing? Fucking get outside!” Freya screams as she catches up to him and then staggers out into the night air, her lungs racked with smoke. Rosaline tears past her and tumbles onto the grass, no longer caring about her frills and pearls.

  Freya sees Jack standing frozen in the doorway, looking back as the flames hungrily caress walls and curtains, sending out heat in thick, heady waves.

  “I have to go back for Elijah!”

  “You can’t! You’ll fucking die. Come out here now!” Freya screams.

  “I…I don’t want to,” he stammers. “I can’t leave my family, my home.”

  “Jack, your home is about to become ash and rubble and your brother is a deranged sociopath!”

  “But…out there. I can’t go out there! There’s…all the, you know…I can’t. I can’t leave my family. Go without me.”

  “Jack, we need to leave now! Come with me, okay? I’m obviously in love with you, you stupid jerk!”

  Callum screeches his Mazda to a halt in front of the house. He jumps out, grabs Rosaline by the arms and drags her into the backseat. Freya helps him lift her feet in, then turns back to see Jack still staring at her from the doorway.

  “I can’t…I’m sorry,” shouts Jack above the cracking of the flames and the falling debris.

  “Not as sorry as you’ll be if you don’t get in the fucking car!”

  Jack’s face is a war of fear and confusion; he shakes his head and walks back into the house, fading into the smoke. Freya runs after him, reaching the door just in time to see him disappear underneath a falling chandelier, the flames flickering kaleidoscopically in its myriad facets. She screams and pulls at him, trying to free him from the mess of glass and steel.

  Callum rushes in beside her and helps her drag Jack out from underneath the chandelier. The pair of them lift him up and throw his arms around their shoulders and carry him out to the car. Callum climbs into the driver’s seat and Freya sits beside him, with Rosaline and Jack slumped in the back like a pair of mob victims.

  As the house recedes into the distance, a flash in the rearview mirror catches Freya’s eye. She can barely make out three figures clustered together on the roof. She squints at the three of them, silhouetted against the violent orange wall of flame. Then the roof collapses beneath them, and they are devoured by the inferno.

  Section VI

  Recovery

  ***

  “It seems a commonly received idea among men and even among women themselves that it requires nothing but a disappointment in love, the want of an object, a general disgust, or incapacity for other things, to turn a woman into a good nurse.”

  Florence Nightingale,

  Notes on Nursing: What it Is and What it Is Not

  33

  Karma Coma

  ***

  It’s a dream. She knows it the moment she enters the Danger Room and runs her hand along its cold, concrete walls. They are defiant and tangible despite existing solely within her imagination. She picks up the notebook and slowly tears out the pages, one by one, leaving Valerie’s until last. Stares at it. Studies the gleam of her smile and her eyes, their shine glowing with a promise that will never be fulfilled. She drops this, too, to the floor.

  She walks over to his bed. He is sitting, awake but not speaking, draped in a shadow that should not exist with the lights on. But this is a dream, isn’t it? It abides by the rules of physics no more than a six-year-old heeds the rules of Monopoly.

  As she approaches him, it’s his eyes she notices first. So blue, like the colour of Debussy’s “Clai
r de Lune.”

  He reaches a hand around to the back of her neck, pulls her in towards him. Their lips meet.

  Jack closes his eyes, lies back on the bed and fades out of her focus, like an old blurry movie. Freya squints, but he remains fuzzy, obscured. The sound is low at first, but steadily increases.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  B–

  ***

  –eep.

  Beep.

  Beep.

  “Freya? Freya? Wake up. The doctor’s here.”

  Callum pushes her shoulder gently and her eyes flicker open. The beeping fills her ears.

  “Freya, is it? I’m Dr Aisha Satrapi.”

  “Hi,” she mumbles, her vision still blurry.

  “Can I have a moment to talk about your husband?”

  “Oh, he’s not…never mind. How’s he doing?”

  “Well, if we’re to look at the positives, much better than could have been expected. He’s got a broken leg, for starters, but that blow to his head was extremely serious. He’s experienced major damage to his skull. Luckily, the brain tissue, from what we can tell so far, is undamaged. Given Mr Vincetti has OI, he is very lucky to be alive. However…” She pauses, glances down at the sheet in front of her then back at Freya.

  “Please, just spit it out. I don’t like the sound of that ‘however’.”

  “I’m afraid he’s slipped into a coma. He’s stable, blood pressure and heart rate are both low but well within the acceptable ranges. But at this stage, we can’t give you an indication of when he might wake up. Comas can be very—”

  “Unpredictable.”

  “Exactly. There’s an outside possibility he may wake up tomorrow, but there’s also the chance he may not come out of it for months. Or at all. Meanwhile, you may see some movement, eyelids flickering, fingers trembling, that kind of thing. They could be indications he’s coming around, or just muscle spasms. Not knowing will be tough for you to deal with but, unfortunately, that’s the nature of his condition.”

  Callum takes Freya’s hand in his and pulls her close. Her tears add to the blood and ash on his shoulder.

  “I’ll leave you two alone. Ask the nurses to contact me if you need anything.” At the door, she turns back. “I’m truly sorry,” she says with a sincerity Freya imagines she has practised to a fine art.