Back in the Rain

by Elen Chase

  "I know," he said. "Me too."

  "Is there more that you’re hiding?" I asked. "I know there's something about your past. You can tell me anything. I’ll do anything for you."

  "You don't have to," he said, so low I could barely hear him. "It's easier for me if you don't."

  "I don't understand." I took his face in my hands. "I’m dense, and I don't really understand people around me. So even if I see your pain, if you don't tell me clearly, I'll never get to know what's going on in your mind."

  He gently took my hands off his face and showed me the most beautiful smile I had ever seen. Not just his lips, but his eyes were smiling too, and in the first light of day their blue was so intense I could see the ocean inside of them. "Thanks, Drew," he said. Feeling like drowning in that deep cold water, I lost any will to talk and focused on calming down my heartbeat.

  Chapter 26

  Reading the four editions of the “New Era Eulogy,” we figured out that the text was always identical between the various editions, so with the years passing by no censorship or changes were applied to it, not even after the scandal of sixty years before. The first edition, ninety-seven years old, was published after the birth of the new government. The second was from fifty-six years before, and, being printed after the scandal, it had a very long preface written by a committee of academics stating the immense value of the book on a cultural level, inviting the reader to consider the book for what it really was: a literary masterpiece testifying the reactions of people to an important historical change. The third edition, of thirty years before – printed on the same year as the first articles Robinson selected – was a beautiful yet simple edition with a leather cover and silk-screened title, with no preface or comments from experts, made mainly for collectors. The fourth, of twenty-two years before, was the one that everybody had in their house; the one we studied at school, a complete edition with a simple preface for students and a lot of notes to explain the language and quotations.

  Since the content of the books was exactly the same for every edition, we focused on taking notes on the prophecy of destruction described in the book. With all the characteristics of an epic poem, it narrated the story of a hero wandering in a world dominated by machines, where people lived following a series of fixed rules which brought them to forget different things during the course of their lives, following four cycles of seven years each. During the first cycle, they forgot language and traditions; during the second, lands and families; during the third, they forgot feelings; and during the fourth, they mutated into machines themselves by losing their hearts. At the start of his adventure the hero, Jukka (pronounced – yukka – deriving from the word “God,” in an ancient language), whose home was destroyed in the prologue, set off on a journey in search of another human being, and in every cycle he met a young woman, but ended up losing her in the end, as she got assimilated by the other humans turning into machines. In the last cycle, Jukka and a little girl are the only human beings left in the world, and as she is about to lose her mind and mutate into a machine, the hero carves out his own heart with a knife to give it to her, so that the memories and the feelings of the women he met during his journey could continue living on in her. The girl, left all alone in the entire world, can't bear to continue living, but is not able to throw away the life spared by the hero. So she uses all the feelings in Jukka's heart to make a prayer to the Earth itself, to put an end to everything. And the land starts breaking and burning, the water evaporates away, and the grass dies until the planet collapses into its inner burning core, finally allowing the girl to rest in peace.

  Also helped by the articles of the time, we immediately found a correlation between the book and the way the sect operated sixty years before. All their victims were seven years old girls, the same age of the girl of the last cycle, and all of them were killed in a creepy ceremony with four priests condemning the victim for each one of the four “forgetting sins” of the four cycles. After the ceremony, the girl got killed with a knife and her heart was burned on an altar, with the prayer that her death could prevent the world from following the same destiny. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to understand anything else. Putting aside what happened sixty years before, which was clear at that point, I still couldn't figure out at all how Robinson proved the existence of the second sect, and why he suspected they restarted their activity thirty years before.

  "The book from thirty years ago doesn't suggest anything?" Lilian asked me. She had come to the library to help me out.

  "Nothing. It's just plain text, the only reason I'm still looking at it is that Robinson believed it all started thirty years ago. But why did he? It doesn't make any sense."

  "If there's nothing in the book there must be something in the articles. Maybe something that happened at the time showed Bart a link to the book."

  "I checked," I replied hitting my head on the table. "In the articles about the dead girls of thirty years ago, there's just a couple of them dying from illness and one getting hit by a train."

  "I see. So we only really know how the sect worked sixty years ago."

  "Yes, and it's useless. Every year they killed a seven-year-old girl with a knife. Shallie was twenty-one, and most likely died by poison. And it can't be something that happens every year; I made a list of the girls and women who disappeared mysteriously, and they did it at a completely random pattern. So now they do their thing completely in a different manner from before."

  "Why do you say they did it every year?" she said, looking at an article containing the report of all the victims.

  "There's the date of the six girls' deaths. It's in the paper you have right in your hands now."

  "That's why I'm telling you, there are girls that were killed in the same year."

  "What?" I got close to her to take a look. How could such an important thing pass right before my eyes?

  "Are you even paying any attention to what you're doing?" she said, hitting me in the head with a book.

  "Ouch!" I carefully looked at the dates. "December, July, February, September, April, November. February and September, and again April and November, they were killed in the same year."

  "It's a seven months difference for every murder."

  "Seven months… every cycle of the book lasted seven years," I said.

  "So they killed a girl by the end of every cycle."

  "Seven was also the age of the girl from the last section of the book. In the edition with the notes they say it's a number with a great meaning. It is said that God created the world in seven days, in the east is considered a lucky number and there are a lot of esoteric symbols that involve it. I wasn't surprised they put it in a book describing the end of the world."

  "You had read such important information and didn't consider it at all? You're an idiot," she said, hitting me again on the head.

  "Ouch!"

  "If the deaths follow the pattern of the cycles in the book, do you think it's possible that the victims somehow represented the cycles too?" Lilian asked me.

  "No, this is so stupid. The cycles are too generic. Take the second one, for example; anybody could represent family. And the next should be feelings, but do you know any kid that has more or less feelings than the others?"

  "Andrew, we're talking about murderers. Once they decide to kill it's easy to find an excuse, no matter how stupid it would seem. Look at the first and the fifth girl they killed." The two girls were both foreigners; a cute Asian girl and a little one with white pearl skin and platinum blonde hair. So they both represented the first cycle, language and tradition?

  "This is racist," I commented, with a disgust in my mouth that wouldn't go away.

  "Racist, disgusting and perverted. That's exactly what they were."

  "What they are," I corrected her. "Was Shallie representing one of those stupid cycles too? Was she killed because she had a beautiful family, or because she had a big heart? I can't accept all of this." I put the papers on the table and I rubbed my
eyes. I was neither angry or sad about it, I was just rather depressed. Lilian got closer to me and gently patted my shoulder.

  "Come on," she said, "we can put an end to all of this. I don't really want my baby to be born in such a shitty world. Bart died to prevent that." I nodded, stretched my arms and I was ready to go back at it.

  "Shallie was probably brought back by his car," I told her.

  "I know… but it couldn’t be him who did it, right?"

  "Right."

  "Any idea who could it be?"

  "No, Dan is working on it."

  "… about your friend, who is he? I see you drag him with you wherever you go."

  "He's dragging me, most of the time."

  "Do you trust him?"

  "Of course I do," I answered without even thinking.

  "You said he has friends in the drug market."

  "Those connections are proving themselves useful, despite being absolutely irritating."

  "He planned to damage my dad's car. That could have killed him."

  "No, that was an accident, Lilian."

  "He knew a lot about me when you first came to my house."

  "He likes to keep everything under control."

  "Right. And I have to send messages to his watchpad, so he can read whatever we have to say."

  "That's a safety measure. What's wrong now? I thought you liked him."

  "This is not about liking or disliking him. I find him suspicious."

  "Lilian, he's doing all of this for me."

  "Why? Doesn't he have a life? What if he's working for somebody?"

  "He's not."

  "How can you be so sure? What do you know about what he's really doing when you're not together?"

  "I'm sure, because he proved a thousand times how much he cares for me. And if you decided to trust me, you have to trust him as well, it's included in the package. And that's the end of the story."

  "If you say so," she said, as Dan came back to our library room. I told him what we had found out about the first sect, and now I couldn't help noticing how Lilian studied carefully his reactions to what we said. He didn't seem to have noticed, or even if he did, he didn't care.

  "Now how they operated sixty years ago is clear under every point of view. And we know that the actual sect does things differently from them… but what if we change our perspective? Instead of looking at their differences, why don't we look at what they still have in common?" said Dan, thinking.

  "The book, and the fact that they kill women," I replied.

  "The book," he said looking at my notes from that day, "four cycles of seven years. Does that remind you of something?" I had no idea what he was talking about, so I just waited for him to explain. Then he opened a picture on his watchpad, the picture he took of their altar in the villa. It was a seven pointed star surrounded by circles, no, not circles. A spiral turning four times.

  "That's what it represents," I said. It all seemed more clear now.

  "They must still be killing following the symbol," he said. "Only in a different way than before."

  "And what is this way?" asked Lilian.

  "I don't know," said Dan. "We'll have to find out."

  Chapter 27

  Ten days after almost locking myself in that library room working on the books and the articles, that piece of shit —otherwise called Jim— finally contacted us to go see the poison maker. It was the 15th of May. We had an appointment with that Bill guy, Jim's right hand man, and thankfully Jim wasn't coming with us. I was already stressed out from being in a dead end with my analysis of that stuff, so I didn’t want to also have to deal with that asshole.

  "Please tell me this Bill is better than him," I told Dan, on the train to get to Downtown.

  "They're completely different. Bill is a natural leader. He inspires trust and the others follow him because they believe in him. In high school I saw him become the leader of a delinquent group without even noticing."

  "High school?"

  "Yeah, he was my upperclassman. He's two years older than us."

  "Why were you hanging out with a delinquent group?"

  "I wasn't," he said, and I looked at him as to ask more. "I wasn't part of the group, but I knew Bill well." I stared at him even more. "We met by chance because we skipped class in the same spot."

  "And?" I had a bad feeling about it.

  "And somehow he took a liking to me."

  "And?"

  "And nothing. Oh, he taught me how to fight and stuff."

  "Seriously?"

  "It's easy to get into a fight here, it's better to know how to defend yourself. Maybe you should learn too."

  "I can take care of myself," I said, avoiding looking into his eyes. The place they were keeping Cruise was several floors underground, in a famous casino of Downtown. Dan explained that place was a sort of headquarters for Jim's group since they had been doing business with the director of the casino, and that area was entirely reserved for them. It was my first time going to such a place, and I was surprised to find it exactly identical to what I saw in movies and to what people told me. We went in from the main entrance, but when Dan gave his name at the reception and asked for Bill, the girl of the front desk accompanied us to the elevator and unlocked the possibility to access the underground floors with a key-card. Our meeting point was floor -2, where we found two guys wearing black jackets over white shirts waiting for us. They both seemed just a few years older than us and despite their bad-guy look and their tattoos, they greeted Dan like an old friend, and were strangely nice to me too. One of them, Ray, was a fat guy with black hair and a long beard, while the other, Nick, was a skinhead with piercings all over his face. They led us to a studio room, had us sit on the sofas and offered us something to drink, while we waited for this Bill to finish an important call in another room. Ray was asking Dan a lot of questions about what he had been doing over the past year, while Nick was telling me how he sympathized with my situation, and that he'd go crazy if such a tragedy happened to his wife and stuff like that. I did my best to listen to him, ignoring how he was repeating the word “fuck” every two seconds. Moreover Jim had promised us nobody would know what we were investigating, but, including those two and Bill, the secret had certainly started spreading. I didn't like that. As if he read my mind, as soon as Ray let him go, Dan got close to me and told me I didn't have to worry, that we could trust them. Seeing him so sure calmed me down a little, but still I wished I could punch Jim's face hard enough to make his teeth fall out. I was starting to enjoy that thought when Bill finally joined us in the studio. He was tall and broad-shouldered, dark hair, scruffy beard and small gray eyes. He was wearing a black t-shirt and jeans and didn't seem at all the boss of a gang. But I could understand immediately what Dan told me about him being a natural leader: he stood up straight with a solid smile and firm eyes, the ones of a person who knows exactly what to do and how to do it. He came to me first to introduce himself.

  "Nice to meet you Andrew, I've heard a lot about you." Not that I cared about their opinions, but from the face he was making I wondered for a second what Jim had told him about me. I was way more concerned, however, about the way he stared at Dan, got close to him and ruffled his hair without saying a word, and about the way Dan seemed perfectly comfortable with it.

  "Cruise is downstairs," said Bill then. "I had a chat with him myself. I can assure you that he's gonna be honest with you."

  "Good," said Dan. A little voice in my head suggested what they could have done to the guy to be so sure he'd talk, but I decided to ignore that, even though that would mean proving that what Jim told me last time was the truth: I was using them and their power for my purposes, shutting out all my principles. We took the elevator again to floor -5, accompanied by Bill. He opened a blinded door with a code and we found ourselves in a white room. In it, a bald man was lying on a bed and turned around when he heard us arrive. He was supposed to be forty, but his carved face made him look older. He reminded me of a salaman
der or a lizard. My girlfriend's possible indirect murderer. The temptation to kill him with my own hands was strong, but I held it back. I wasn't sure he was involved in it yet, and I needed answers.

  "You made ‘Dipsa,’ a poison able to kill somebody without leaving any trace… is that correct?" I asked him. He gave me a crazy smile and nodded happily. He must have been proud of his work. I had the sensation to be talking to an animal, not a human being.

  "I'll show you a picture now. You will tell me if the person you see in it bought the poison from you." I opened the picture I took of that soldier in the villa from the watchpad.

  "It's too far, I can't see," he said with the same, calm, crazy smile as before.

  Dan zoomed the photo and said, coldly, "Look better."

  The man moved his head left and right, and in the end said, "Yes, I know him!"

  "Who is he?" asked Dan.

  "Mr. Smith," he said, laughing. "He's Mr. Smith." The man was completely out of his mind.

  "Did you make him like this or that's the way he's always been?" I asked Bill, who was leaning against the wall close to the door with crossed arms.

  "The second one," he replied.

  "Do I look abnormal to you?" Cruise asked me. I wasn't expecting him to ask me a question directly. I thought he was more detached from this world, and I was startled by it. "I was like you all, you know… a boring ant moving dust in a perfect assembly line. Until I broke free," he said, laughing.

  "Interesting," said Dan, even colder than before. "Who is Mr. Smith?"

  "He's a soldier, or maybe was, I don't know." He moved his eyes as if he was following a butterfly flying around the room.

  "Who is he working for?" asked Dan.

  "I don't know," he replied, still looking around the room, fascinated by something. Dan grabbed his shirt and pulled him closer to get his attention again.