Back in the Rain

by Elen Chase

  One day, when I was four, my father left home. I remember watching him go away from my usual spot, where I used to sit and look at the shining dusk, not feeling the slightest emotion. He had never talked to me, not even once. And I had never called him “Dad,” even though I had learned I should refer to him that way, because I was scared. I was scared he would scream at me like he did with my mother. "That house seemed so big, but if I think about it now, it was just another Downtown shitty flat." I stopped as soon as those words came out of my mouth; I was talking too much. It was probably the fever's fault.

  "Ian, how old are you?" Ms. Wilson asked me politely.

  "Twenty."

  "You're young," she told me. "You're too young to look back at the past with such sadness in your eyes."

  I didn't really feel like having that conversation with her, so I ignored her and opened the homepage of a newspaper on my watchpad.

  "I'm sorry. I'm not in the position to say anything," she said, and she went back to her tasks. My head hurt, a hammering pain in my temples, and I couldn't focus on reading. I stared at the date on top of the page until she finally left the room. January 19. Once I was alone, I accessed the back-office of my watchpad where I was storing all my accounts and IDs, each one registered under a different name. I selected the very first one, which had been offline for six years, entered the password and went through the old mails and messages addressed to Dan Price. I was looking for one in particular, dated January 19 of six years before.

  “You've been offline for months, and I was told you've probably had your ID changed, so I don't think you'll ever read this message. But it's fine, because this is just me being selfish and making a wish. I wish that wherever you are, whatever you're doing, you’re glad to have been born into this world. Because I’m glad I met you. Happy Birthday, Dan.”

  Drew.

  I hid my face behind my knees and let all my sadness pervade me, crying like when I was a little kid, without making a sound. I missed him. I wondered if he had forgotten everything about me, or if sometimes he was still thinking of the time we spent together. I knew I had to pull myself together, because that was the life I had willingly chosen for myself almost seven years before.

  To calm myself down, I repeated in my head that it was going to end soon, that I had to hold on just a little longer.

  Time flies after all. I'm twenty one already.

  Chapter 62.b

  Two days after my unexpected suicide attempt, Sean and I were traveling by car to South Pholis, heading for the rehabilitation center Dan had stayed in. My doctor didn't want me to go; he sentenced that I was still too “unstable” to face such a stressful journey, but I was so convinced of what I was doing that I tried to run away alone in the middle of the night. It didn’t occur to me that the old lady would lock me inside. When she busted me trying to pick the lock, she slapped me in the face, making me feel like shit with a sentimental lecture on how worried they all were for me. And then she let me go with the promise I would bring one of the others with me. Against all my expectations, considering that things between us had gotten colder since he’d told me about Dan, Sean volunteered to come.

  "You should rest, it'll take awhile to get there." He was driving, and I was sitting next to him.

  "No, I slept enough during the past month," I replied.

  "I didn't think you were so serious about him." His tone of voice was softer, almost apologetic. "If I have to be honest, I was sure you were just going through a sort of momentary crisis when you first told me about your relationship."

  "Because he's a guy?"

  "There's that, but also because it was sort of… early."

  "Early… I never considered that. I let myself go completely with him. There was nothing so rational in my head like thinking how much time had passed since Shallie's death."

  "So you love him? Even if he knew Shallie? Even if he was there when she died?"

  "I called it love, but for you it might as well be an obsession. The thing is, I can't let him go. I don't want to. I want to know him, Sean. I want to know him for real this time."

  "I see. I'm sorry Drew, for being an asshole to you."

  "It's fine. We got you guys involved in our mess."

  "I got scared. When Ms. Wilson died, I realized for the first time how dangerous all of this really is. And when I found out about him, I was furious… I ended up being an insensitive bastard with you and the girls."

  "I'm not a champion of empathy either. Don't let it get to you too much."

  "I wasn't expecting you to break down like that. I came to see you every day. Chloe too. Do you remember that?"

  "No, not at all."

  "Sara took care of you the entire time."

  "I had that feeling… I'll never thank her enough." She must be going through hell. In just a couple of days Dan disappeared, and I… "I never told her about Dan and I… I guess she found out in the worst possible way in the end."

  "She already knew about you when I told her the truth about him."

  "Eh? Did she?"

  "Yes, she said he had told her before… I didn't ask the details."

  "I see." He told her about us. That was cute of him.

  Dan, where are you now?

  We arrived at the center in the early afternoon. I had already informed Dr. Miller we would stop by. He received us in his office immediately.

  "Andrew, it's nice to see you again," he said, shaking hands with me and Sean. "Not so nice to see you're not doing well," he added, his blue, deep eyes fixed on the bandages on my hand and my wrist.

  "This is nothing," I cut it short. "Dan is my top priority now. Please, tell me all that you know about him."

  "Did you think about what I told you last time?"

  "I did. You were right. I hadn't understood anything about him. I wasn't ready to know the truth, and I hurt him even more. Now he's gone, and I want him back. I want to save him. I'd do anything to have him back by my side."

  Miller put his hand on my shoulder and gently smiled at me, inviting me to sit down.

  It was going to be a long talk.

  Chapter 63.a

  There's nothing as easy as using a man who's lost his mind for you. And I had made sure to play it right, so that Damon Colten would lose his mind for me.

  "Don't look at me like that. You win, I'll bring you with me to the villa since you're insisting so much. But if anyone sees you, I'm gonna hurt you for good. Remember whose property you are," he said, lifting my chin up to have me look into his eyes.

  "You said the rest of the group will be there too." I took advantage of his good mood, sure he would tell me more. "Is it finally the time for this ritual you're so excited about?"

  "No, I'm going first to get things ready. The others will join me later at the beginning of February," he said, finishing getting dressed.

  "I want to stay until you'll be finished with that."

  "No, you're going back with the servants in the morning of the third. A stranger is not allowed inside during the ritual."

  "But I'm not a stranger," I said, touching the golden necklace with their symbol that he had given me weeks before. "You said you wanted to introduce me to the rest of the group."

  "The others don't know about you. I haven't even told the leader yet."

  "I see, how unfortunate. I guess even someone like you is scared in front of the big boss."

  "Boy, don't try to tease me. You stay in your place."

  "I thought my place was in your bed. Maybe you're afraid one of your colleagues will take me from you?"

  As soon as I said that, he slapped me in the face. He used to do a lot of things to me, but he never usually hit my face; maybe I had provoked him too much.

  "I said you go back on the third. Never even think of getting close to them. I'll decide when to introduce you to the order and how." He touched my cheek, carefully looking where he had just hit me. "Damn it, Ian, look what you made me do. You know how much I love your face." He called
Ms. Wilson while putting his coat on. "Bring some ice," he ordered her, then left. I waited a few minutes to be sure he wouldn't come back, then I tore that necklace off my neck and threw it on the floor, angry. It would have been perfect if he accepted to introduce me to the other members of his sect, but other than that, I couldn't complain. Having all five of them together in one place was what I had been waiting for. Of course everything would have been easier if I could sit at dinner with them, but it was a chance worth taking anyway.

  A chance to stop them before they could perform their ritual.

  Ms. Wilson came in with ice and the first aid kit. That scene, seen from the outside, would have probably looked comical, but for me it had become routine. As a human being, Colten was a complete failure. He was weak, vicious, and took pleasure in physically hurting others. The reason he had been so successful in life was that he was good at keeping it well hidden; he was a perfectly normal person everywhere, except in his bedroom. The first times I had sex with him, there was nothing unusual about him; he was a bit of a sadist, but it was something I could handle easily. Then, as days passed, he got more and more violent. Apparently, all the guys that came before me ran away as soon as they figured out what being with him really meant. But I had no intention of wasting the chance I had waited for so long to get closer, or even inside, the sect. I held on as it got worse day after day. First he liked to beat me up, then whip me, cut me, and worst of all, burn me. When he did that I screamed to the point I couldn't recognize my own voice, which didn't even seem human anymore. Soon my back was full of scars and injuries that would never heal in time before the next round. The scrapes on my wrists, done by the chains he used to tie me up, were almost always bleeding and gave me a fever a couple of times.

  At the time I had no idea how deep the wounds he had caused me were. I only kept repeating to myself that it would be over soon.

  When he was finished with me he usually left me in the care of Ms. Wilson. She and the butler, Mr. Hutchison, were the only ones to know of me and of the master's true nature. They didn't know why I was doing that, and both of them kept telling me to go away, that the money wasn't worth what I was going through, and that I would end up suffering permanent consequences if it kept going on that way. But I was getting closer, so I couldn't give up at that point. Colten had lost it for me. In his sick mind, I was the perfect toy; he didn't want me to die or leave. Whenever he wasn't torturing me, he was giving me money, gifts worth thousands of credits, and whatever I could ask for. So I asked him about the sect. He gave me more information in two months than all I had gathered in six years. I pretended to be interested in joining the sect as an assistant, and I made up my mind once for all: before their next murder, they would all be dead.

  Chapter 63.b

  Miller showed me Dan's clinic cartel. He was hospitalized on the 4th of February with maximum urgency. His conditions were critical both physically and psychologically; signs of strangulation, cuts, burns and bruises were only a part of the entries written in the medical report, along with a psychological breakdown that forced the doctors to sedate him for days.

  "On February 2, I was called by Bart Robinson Jr., the son of the minister of education, and was informed that two people would have been brought here on the fourth. Both twenty-one years old, they were supposed to be a boy and a girl. He had already made the necessary arrangements to pay our parcel and anticipated that the girl would need mostly psychological assistance, while the boy could have been in a worse condition. That night however, a man called Hutchison brought only Dan here. Mr. Hutchison asked me to keep Dan’s presence here secret and take care of him until he had recovered completely. He was in a hurry and wasn’t eager to tell me what had really happened. I convinced him to talk by revealing that the boy was my nephew, and I’m glad I learned the truth from him. When Dan regained consciousness, he was so in shock he wasn’t able to say a single word, let alone talk about that night. Even later on, he wouldn’t speak, and he couldn’t trust anyone, not even me. It took him weeks to slowly open up to us, and it would have never happened if we hadn’t known everything already."

  I was still in shock myself, just by looking at that clinic cartel. So Dan and Shallie were supposed to come here together. Robinson wanted to bring them here.

  "Who did this to him?" I asked, my voice ragged.

  "Damon Colten. Last November Dan was offered to be his lover for an absurd sum of money, and he was told that if he was good enough with his job, he could eventually get an important position in politics. He just had to let this man do to him whatever he wanted and forget it as soon as he closed the door behind his back. Dan accepted without even thinking about it."

  "Why? Did he need the money that bad?" asked Sean.

  "No," I said, "the old lady said that too. Dan never cared about the money… he always did a lot of dangerous stuff because he was looking for something."

  "Exactly. It was Colten he was looking for. Or at least, Colten was one of those he was looking for. Dan spent six years of his life searching for the people connected to a particular symbol; a seven pointed star in a spiral."

  The sect. An uneasy feeling arose in my gut. Did he say six years?

  "This is what he told us," said Miller, and he passed me a report in which Dan's words had been transcribed.

  “Not being able to find out about the men of the seven pointed star only using my job, I got friends in the drug market. Combining drugs and prostitution I was able to get in the bed of the right people. It took me in total six years to find out that they were a sect that killed a woman every seven years following some sort of ritual, and that they were all politicians and powerful men. When thanks to a regular client I found out that Colten was a member of this sect, I did all I could to get close to him. I was finally composing the puzzle around An's death.”

  So he knew. How? Did she tell him? But the symbol, where did he see it?

  Why did you do all that on your own, Dan?

  For all those years.

  Why didn't you tell me?

  Chapter 64.a

  The family I was born into was a mess. My mother decided to give birth to me out of a whim, because she wanted a memory of the man she had loved so much, who had left her after he got tired of her. I learned soon to hold back my words, my tears and even my thoughts, so that I could try to match her changing mood.

  Somehow I ended up being what other people called “defective.” I was closed up in my glass jar, unable to react to what was happening in the rest of the world. I don't know why my mother decided to have me cured. When I had just turned seven, she brought me to Uptown and I started seeing my doctor, Rick Lowell. I felt rather comfortable in his office. At first I couldn't talk to him, but he never forced me to. The room was full of toys, and he simply told me I could do whatever I wanted there. I wouldn't walk around the office, but something caught my attention. It was a set of colored pencils, abandoned on a coffee table in a corner: an item nobody was using anymore, except classical artists. I took them in my hands almost scared using them could somehow be bad, but Dr. Lowell nodded happily at me. I spent all the afternoon drawing, and when it was time to go away I felt almost disappointed. Finally, Dr. Lowell told me I could have the pencils if I promised to show him my drawings. I began to love going to his office. I couldn't wait for school to end; that place was a prison to me. I couldn't talk to the other kids and was bullied in return. I spent the whole time watching the minutes pass by on my watchpad. During class I was bored; studying was way too easy for me. I could memorize whatever I read with no effort at all, and in a few weeks I had completed the program of the whole year on my own.

  Dr. Lowell used to ask me several questions while I was drawing. He had earned my trust, so I always replied to him. I liked it when he complimented my drawing skills or my ability to study. He was an adult, but he wasn't frightening like my dad was. He was always calm and smiled a lot: the kind of man who would keep a framed picture of his family on his desk. I fe
lt too uneasy to ask him about it, so when he wasn't around, I looked at it secretly. He had two kids around my age; with some surprise I recognized a boy I had seen at school. I wondered what was it like to be that man's kids. The only memories I had of my father were his screams and the disappointed look on his face the day he left. A family where everyone smiled seemed like another dimension to me. I wasn't jealous or envious, I just liked to admire it in silence, like when you stand enchanted in front of a shop too expensive for you.

  One day, in the waiting room of the doctor's office, I met his daughter. I recognized her immediately, and nervousness grew into me along with the realization of the undeniable truth that it never ended well whenever I was around other kids. I hoped she wouldn't try talking to me, but, obviously, she did. I couldn't speak a word in response to what she told me and, even in the case I was physically able to handle a conversation, I was so freaked out I completely lost track of what she was saying. The usual pattern was simply going to repeat again: a kid tried to talk to me, I couldn't say anything back, and I was told I was strange and left behind. I didn't want her to tell her dad that I was strange. I didn't want to disappoint the doctor. Yet she kept talking. She talked for twenty long minutes, and when her mother came in to pick her up, she told me she wanted to see me again. I didn't understand. I could barely let the doctor get close to my glass jar, and now this girl was knocking on its surface, forcing me to keep my eyes on her. I didn't know how to react to that. In the following days, she really came to see me again. I could tell she was the doctor's daughter; her smile was gentle and warm, just like his. An wasn't like the other kids I had met. Not even once did she seem to judge me, even if there was clearly something wrong with me. I found myself wanting to talk to her. I wanted to at least thank her, just that. Another Tuesday afternoon, while I was struggling to find the courage to tell her those two simple words, Dr. Lowell came in the waiting room.