D

by George Right

  And here is, at last, my statement in pleading. I stood up, winked to the artist and, without hurrying, opened the papers.

  "'The independent expert psychiatric appraisal which has been carried out... having considered the presented audio- and videorecord of the conversation..." (yes, yes–I recorded video, too, using a tiny directed camera lens in my top button, in the best traditions of spy movies) "using the techniques of analysis... on the basis... complex case... the conclusion... paranoid psychosis of traumatic genesis. Thus, on the question of whether the subject was sane at the moment of he committed certain criminal acts and whether he can bear responsibility for them, the answer is–negative.'"

  Noise in the hall. Jackson looks at me with round eyes. Then he tries to move forward, but guards hold him:

  "Son of a bitch! You promised me!"

  The accused, known before for his equanimity–by the way, it's one of the signs of his disorder–has real hysterics. I smile indulgently to the judge. Informal, but quite indicative confirmation of the expert opinion...

  The prosecution inertly demands yet another psychiatric examination. The judge rejects. Oh yes, certainly–experts can make mistakes (though the opinion I presented is decorated with very authoritative signatures). But any doubt is treated in favor of the accused. Especially when the matter is not feigned illness to save his life, but feigned health to go to the electric chair. In this case the pathology is obvious even without sophisticated medical terms...

  The sentence. Everyone stands up.

  "... not guilty of capital murder by reason of insanity and he shall be placed for compulsory treatment in the Greenhill psychiatric hospital until such time..."

  "You bastard!"

  It's not Jackson shouting now. This is a woman in a black scarf, the mother of one of the victims. And she shouts not at the murderer but at me. She believes that I saved the torturer of her child from his deserved punishment. Though, actually, a lifelong stay in a mental hospital is not a wonderful existence. And it is certain that Jackson will stay there for life; with his experience of successfully faking mental health nobody will believe him ever again. I think, at least thirty years... these institutions provide good care and very careful supervision, so they definitely won't allow him to die ahead of time. Some men try to calm the woman, then remove her from the hall. I can understand her feelings, but I'm only doing my duty, aren't I?

  The artist gazes hard at me and his pencil flies fast across the paper. I do not doubt that behind a door TV reporters already wait.

  * * *

  "... right from the crime scene. The police department representative just confirmed that the body found belongs to Mike Goldman, a young, but already well-known lawyer who became famous for achieving a not guilty verdict in the case of serial killer 'Jack-is-Back Jackson.'” This event caused controversial reaction not only because so many people wanted Jackson executed, but also because Goldman achieved the verdict by making and using recordings of a private conversation against the will of his client. However, his actions were recognized as lawful since they were carried out in the interests of the client who was lately recognized as incapacitated. For the current cruel murder, the police have no official suspects yet, but the most likely motive is revenge by some friends or relatives of Jackson's victims; it is known that some of them continue to blame..."

  "Bob, they're taking him away right now! Shoot!"

  "Get away from the stretcher!"

  "The people have a right to..."

  "Officer!"

  "Okay, okay, we're leaving..."

  "V-vultures..."

  "Cool! I managed to take a close up of his face!"

  "Oh, what's the use? They won't allow it to be aired due to ethical-fucking-reasons. Politically correct assholes, it's impossible to work nowadays... Well, show me what you have. Damn, turn the screen towards me, I can't see! Hmm..."

  "What's wrong?"

  "Well, nothing's wrong... But have you ever seen on the face of a corpse with fifteen knife wounds such a satisfied smile?”

  DESPAIR

  Yes, it is the absolute top, pinnacle of despair!

  Michael Shcherbakov

  What if, unsuspectingly wandering in the dark vaults of the universe, you find truths so horrible and disgusting, that even the knowing of them will turn your whole existence into an everlasting nightmare?

  "Rilme Gfurku"

  All the routes do lead the frozens

  Into void and eternal cold.

  Fleur

  In the beginning there was nausea. Not the sharp nausea from poison, which rises to the throat by emetic spasms yet giving at the same time hope for subsequent relief, but rather the viscous, dreary nausea of weakness after a long leaden sleep in a stuffy room–a nausea that fills the chest with caustic wadding, the mouth with dry muck, and the brain with pulsing lead. On the one hand, in such a condition the last thing you want to do is to get up and move at all. On the other hand, you understand that if you continue to lie down, the headache will grow even worse. So it is necessary to overcome your instinct and to get up. And it would not be a bad idea to open a window, even if it were winter outside.

  Those were his first conscious thoughts. After comprehension came astonishment: he understood that he actually didn't remember what season it was. While astonishment was turning into anxiety, and anxiety into fear, he realized that he didn't remember what the day before was... or the day before that... or... He vainly tried to snatch from his memory any fragment of his life, but came across only emptiness. Or (this sensation arrived a bit later) the blank wall which cut his past off. However, the situation with his present was no better. He didn't know where he was or how he got there.

  He did not know who he was or even what his name was.

  With an effort of sheer will he suppressed the growing panic. I need to analyze, he told himself. He can think: that's good. I think, therefore, I am... This phrase came from somewhere. He did not know where but most likely it was not born in his brain. That meant that in the blank wall cutting off his past there were some cracks through which something can leak through, and if he consistently expanded them... scratched wider... tore them apart...

  He opened his eyes.

  Sight confirmed what touch had already told him: He lay on a rather rigid cot with neither bed sheets, nor blanket, nor pillow–only something like oilcloth, a dirty, sticky oilcloth under his naked body. He was, however, not absolutely naked. Here and there on his body were some rags and flaps, but they were not cloth. It was difficult to inspect them in more detail. He needed to bend his chin down to his chest, which immediately made his neck ache and, besides, the light in the room was too dim. The light came from a rectangular ceiling fixture covered with dust, burning obviously at half power and unsteadily: a shivering, agonizing light.

  Accumulators are giving out: another alien, off-the-wall thought came to him. Accumulators? Why accumulators? Shouldn't the house be connected to the local electricity grid?

  Nevertheless, even such light allowed him to understand that the room was very small. Except for the cot, there was only a wardrobe on the opposite wall and a little table near a wall between them. On the fourth wall there was a door, and one more door to the right of the wardrobe. No windows at all. And it smelled musty, as if nobody had lived here for many years.

  At last he sat up on the cot (a painful pulsation was felt at once in his temples and the back of his neck) and then stood on the floor, feeling with displeasure the dust and dirt under his bare feet. Even worse, when he took a step something revoltingly and damply crackled under his heel–something, seemingly, alive. More precisely, alive a moment before he stepped on it. A cockroach? Likely it was a cockroach... brrr, repulsive! He squeamishly dragged his heel through the dirty floor, trying to wipe off the remains of the creature. Then he approached the wardrobe and opened its door. Some plastic hangers were inside, but no clothing.

  He stepped to a door near the wardrobe. Intuition told him that
behind it there was not a corridor, but a bathroom. When he opened the door, a light automatically came on with a loud click that forced him to shudder. It was indeed a bathroom. It was very tiny but was more brightly lit than the room he had just left. On the left there was a toilet bowl, on the right a washstand, and directly ahead but behind an opaque blue curtain–the bath. Once everything here probably sparkled with radiance and chrome, but those days had long since passed. There was no stone or tile. They had been replaced with plastic. In brighter, though still unstable, light, the dirt on the floor and suspicious stains on the walls were even more clearly visible. It smelled of mold.

  He turned to the toilet bowl–and frowned. Brown stains were on the seat and in the bottom. The stains, however, had dried up long ago. An association between an open toilet bowl and the bottom jaw of a skull suddenly flashed in his mind. For some time he stood, expecting the fulfillment of the usual physiological ritual, but not a drop came out. He just didn't need to urinate. But he wanted to drink–more precisely, not to drink, but to get rid of the brackish taste in the mouth.

  He turned to the washbasin. It was in no better condition than the toilet bowl. At the bottom was either sand or scales of rust, and the tap was spattered with some dried residue. No, he definitely would not drink from this tap. But he could at least rinse his face and hands. He turned the faucet handle. A squeezed hiss, like from a throat of a dying asthmatic, came out, but no water. Instead, gray dust fell from the tap. Then the sound changed, as if the air met an additional obstacle. He had already reached to return the faucet to its initial position, but at that moment the tap sniffed and spat out a whole handful of cockroaches. They hit the basin bottom and scattered in all directions. Some, however, began to stupidly rush and spin in one place.

  His first reflex reaction was to jump aside before the insects, gushing over the edge of the basin, would start falling on his feet. However, he immediately realized that it was necessary to close the tap which was still spilling out new cockroaches. Hardly had he time to do it when he felt the disgusting tickling touch from insects crawling on his ankles. He executed something like a convulsive dance, shaking them off, and then jumped aside to the toilet bowl, looking with disgust at the creatures running on the floor. If he were wearing shoes, he would squash them all, but now he could only move back as much as was possible in a tiny bathroom and hope that they wouldn't climb on him again.

  Ridiculous, he thought. I, a human being, driven into a corner by some bugs. After all, they are not even poisonous. Nonetheless, he could not overcome his fastidiousness. These creatures always caused an insuperable loathing in him. Always? It seemed that one more remembrance broke out from his unknown past. But cockroaches, probably, were afraid of the man, too. Soon they spread out–some slipping from the room, some running under the curtain–but where the others went, he did not notice.

  He raised his eyes from the floor and looked in the mirror over the washstand. It was dusty and dirty too, but in the middle there was an irregular oval seemingly of pure glass, as if someone had hastily wiped a window. The man looked at himself from a distance, then stepped closer, studying with displeasure the unfamiliar sickly pale rumpled face with deep shadows under the eyes and dissheveled tufts of hair sticking out over a bandage. A bandage, yes. His head at forehead level had been sloppily bandaged by something like a used compress. No–he leaned into the mirror even more closely–it was not a gauze bandage with an open weave, but some continuous, dense yellowish-gray fabric with torn, fringed edges. And some bandages somehow stuck–probably dried on–and rags were on many other places of his body, on his neck, his right shoulder, his left forearm, the left side of his breast, his stomach. And scars were on his fingers like marks from rings.

  It seemed that something began to clear up. He had been in an accident, received a head injury (not only a head injury), and therefore he could not remember anything. But in that case, where was he? In a hospital? The architecture of the building looked to be government issue. But if it were a hospital, it was closed and abandoned, maybe fifty years ago.

  There was no blood on the bandages, nor any pain under them. He touched them, at first delicately, then more firmly. An attempt, however, to tear off at least the long rag crossing his abdomen from top down failed. At first he just simply pulled it, increasing the effort until he felt pain, then sharply jerked several times, each time producing a new impulse of pain. But the bandage held firmly–as if... as if it had grown into his body. No, that was nonsense, he told himself. It will be necessary simply to soak it off. There should be water somewhere around here.

  He again lifted his eyes to the person reflected in the mirror and then suddenly recoiled. A huge cockroach ran up the mirror just centimeters from his eyes (it seemed to him–for just a moment–directly on his face). And now he had clearly seen that something was wrong with this insect. First, the cockroach was neither red nor black, but pale, sickeningly whitish. Second, it was too big for a household cockroach. And, more importantly–it had seven legs. Not six, as all other insects, and not even eight, as spiders do–but seven. There were three on the left side and four on the right.

  The disgusting creature suddenly stopped in the middle of the mirror, as if to study itself to be convinced that this was no illusion. Overcoming his revulsion, the man looked at the insect for some time. No leg had been torn off. The limbs really grew asymmetrically and, apparently, were even of different lengths. The man helplessly looked around in search of anything with which to kill the freak, then angrily reminded himself that he had much more important problems. He turned to the bath. After all he had already seen, he had no real hope of a working shower, but he still drew aside the curtain.

  And stopped dead. The wall over the bath was crossed by a wide inscription obviously made by a finger, generously dipped in something dark red. Only one word: "DESPAIR.”

  From sloppy letters, long ago dried, the stains limped downwards. Involuntarily tracking their direction, he lowered his eyes to the bath–and for the first time truly wanted to cry.

  At the bottom of the bath, reddened from the dried blood (yes, he could not cowardly convince himself anymore that it was not blood), a naked corpse lay face down. It was a man, not old and in rather good physical shape–though it had not saved him. There was no doubt that it was a corpse and not very fresh. The bluish-pale skin was covered with stains of a whitish mold. Yet there was no cadaverous stench for some reason. There also were no visible wounds on the back of the body. But the amnesiac had no doubt that severe wounds mutilated the front side of the body. It looked as if this unfortunate man literally drowned in his own blood since the drain had been stoppered. How much blood is in a human adult–is it some five liters? Not too much, but it is possible to choke even in a soup bowl. Or had he died from blood loss earlier? The wounds, however, from which so much blood had flowed out, could be deadly in themselves.

  The absence of a stench, however, led him to think that the corpse might not be a real corpse but, for example, a dummy. And that all this in general was just an idiotic prank arranged by a bunch of wild friends. He might have been given something to drink that knocked him unconscious, brought to some abandoned house (but why would there be electricity in an abandoned house, and in what era were houses built without windows?), the things here smeared with paint, a doll put into a bath... But the mutant cockroaches? Are there, among his friends, experts in genetic engineering?

  However, even all this would not explain the memory loss. A person who was drunk might not remember at all where and with whom he drank, but he does not forget all his previous existence! Anyway, did he even drink at all in that life? Perhaps he was a committed nondrinker? He could not remember even that.

  Nevertheless, he bent down and with uncertainty pushed at the recumbent body. The cold slippery skin, covered with fine hairs, moved slightly under his fingers. No, it was definitely not rubber or something similar! He fastidiously jerked back his hand and, after quickly looking
around, wiped it on the curtain–which did not look at all clean.

  After his push the right hand of the corpse had turned a little, and now it was clearly visible that its fingers were bloody, especially the index finger. But the fingers were not entirely covered in blood. Mainly just the fingertips were stained. Probably, clamped between the body's side and the bath wall, the hand had not bathed in the main bloody pool at the bottom. So what did it mean–this man dipped his fingers in his wounds? Dipped to make this inscription? If a dying person has a chance to leave a final message, at least in such a way, it would be more logical to write the name of the murderer or something to that effect.

  The man dare not touch the corpse again, especially not to overturn it. It was all too clear what he would see: skin entirely covered with blood, terrible slash wounds–judging by the quantity of blood, the poor fellow was really mangled–and, probably, the viscera literally falling out through the openings. No, no! Whatever happened, he should get away from there as fast as possible so he would not become the next one dead!

  He jumped back into the room and jerked the handle of the door leading, he believed, to a corridor. A bloodcurdling thought flashed in his mind–what if the door were locked? And indeed, it had no inclination to open either out or in. But before the panic could completely engulf him, he looked at the door more attentively and understood that it simply should be slid to the right. His new attempt met with no difficulties. Behind the door there was indeed a corridor, barely lit by the same dim flickering lighting fixtures. There were no windows there, either.

  At this moment he remembered that he was naked and decided to find some clothes. The choices were poor. He must try to fashion something from either the oilcloth off the cot or the curtain in the bathroom. The situation was complicated because he had no cutting tool and to tear synthetic material would not be easy. As he discovered, however, someone had already cut half of the oilcloth away. Could it have been for the same purpose? In any event, he rolled something like a skirt for himself from the remaining half. It would cover him unreliably. If he needed to run, it certainly would unwind and fall off. However, if he really had to run, he would have more serious problems than his naked ass.