The Memory Man

by Steven Savile

  ‘Are you telling me they were, what, charging people to experience the thrill of killing a child? Profiting from death?’

  ‘They said that the devil was in us. They told us they had to drive him out.’ Michael was lost to the memories now, earning the crude nickname Frankie had given him. ‘They made us beat ourselves over and over, until we bled down the lengths of our spines from deep lacerations. It was the only way we could prove that we loved God. That we gave ourselves to Him. What kind of god demands a child does that, Peter? What kind of god?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘And they punished us. There’s a lake. It’s not far away. Eight hundred metres from the main building. They made us run naked to the far side, swim across, and then run back inside again while all the other kids were forced to watch. I saw one boy drown trying to swim it in the middle of winter. The shock of the icy water was too much for his weak body. This wasn’t to prove anything, you see. This was a warning to everyone watching. Do what you are told. Obey.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Not always. There would be new children arriving all the time. Two or three a week. We told them what happened, we warned them, but they didn’t believe us. Why would they? No one wanted to believe that their salvation could be so twisted. They thought we were making up stories, that we were trying to scare them. They learned the hard way. Believe me. They were locked in the cellar and left there. Sometimes they were down there for a day or two, alone in the dark, no food, only a little water. Other times it was as though they had been completely forgotten about. But then one of the priests would come with a story about their new family.’

  ‘But you knew different?’

  ‘There would always be a new mound in the garden. Black earth that had been freshly dug. So many of them. And nothing to mark where they lay.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ash said.

  ‘Your apology means nothing to me. That isn’t why I brought you here. And I have no need for your pity.’

  ‘Was Danilo one of them? One of the men who gave out the punishments?’

  ‘He was the worst. And they rewarded him for it. Giving him a new hell to rule over in Romania, where he was protected. Imagine this, Peter, they would beat any boy they found touching themselves. Whip them with the metal edge of the belt buckle. There was one boy, William, who couldn’t stop himself. He was simple, that was the word they used for it back then. Simple. Simple William. He was the politician’s favourite. He taught him to pleasure himself. Watched him. He never did any harm, he was the sweetest child, but he couldn’t stop. He thought it would make them happy, like it made Anglemark happy, to watch him. They would catch him at night. Night after night, they would come for him.’

  ‘And Danilo beat him because of it?’

  ‘Oh no, Peter, Pietro Danilo was the devil. He did not resort to crude lashes when he could dispense true agony. Danilo cut his penis off in front of us. He used a bread knife. He heated the blade in a coal fire. Poor William. He didn’t understand. He thought they were going to save him, because that’s what they kept telling him. They offered him salvation. I can still hear his screams. Then they took him away. We never saw him again.’

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘He has nothing to do with this place. Danilo held the knife. He did that. And he did it with a smile on his face.’

  ‘So, you took his penis in return. Justice. What about the others? The eye? The tongue? What had they done to deserve your punishment?’

  ‘They used us any way they wanted. Danilo was a sadist, enjoying inflicting pain. Others came to satisfy their sexual predilections. They enjoyed the girls; they enjoyed the boys more. If we didn’t do whatever they wanted, we were beaten until they broke us and we did it anyway. For some it would become too much. They would try to kill themselves. Sometimes they succeeded.’

  Ash was struggling, his body was in torment, but it was nothing beside his mind. He believed every word no matter how much he didn’t want to. He shook his head. ‘How long have you been planning your punishment?’

  ‘There are not many of us left, Peter, victim or abuser, but I’ve been planning this for most of my life in one way or another. It became a concrete plan a year ago when I realized I no longer had the luxury of time.’

  As Michael spoke, Ash thought he caught a flicker of movement in his peripheral vision; at the back of the church, a shadow. The light was playing tricks on him. Or the pain. He was balanced on his toes, barely taking the strain from his shoulders, but he couldn’t keep that precarious balance for ever. Sooner, rather than later, his feet were going to slip from the wooden block supporting them, and his arms would be torn from their sockets.

  He gritted his teeth against the pain. There was one question he needed to ask. ‘Why am I here? How have I failed you?’

  ‘I did wonder when we would get to that. There was a boy, he was older than the rest of us. He saw what was going on, but to be painfully blunt he wasn’t young enough or pretty enough for the visitors to want to pay for him. So he ingratiated himself with Danilo, making himself useful. You know the sort, the devil’s right hand. The thing was, he was growing, and growing fast. He was a big lad, and only getting bigger. It wouldn’t be long before he was big enough to fight back. That made him dangerous.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Ash said.

  ‘One night he came into our dormitory and asked for our help. He was going to escape. It was a grand thing. It filled us with hope. I hate hope. I can’t begin to tell you how much I hate hope. He had it all figured out. He needed us to cover for him when Danilo did his rounds at curfew. He promised me, he looked me in the eye and promised he was going to tell the world what was happening to us. He was going to get help.’

  ‘And that’s how it was shut down? He saved you?’

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake, you really are naive for a policeman, Peter. Saved? We never heard from him again. He got out and he ran. He made himself a new life. He forgot all about us. We waited. He never came. Some of us thought he’d been caught and was under one of the trees, food for the worms. Danilo made sure we paid for helping him escape. He lit a fire in the big hall. He had us suspended over the red-hot coals, burning the soles of our feet. One by one he brought us to the fire pit and hauled us up over the flames. One by one he broke us. We were children. Someone was always going to be weak enough to confess our part in the escape. We held out for six hours, Peter. Six hours of torture, to buy him the time to run. And he abandoned us.’

  ‘Or you were right and they caught him,’ Ash said. He did everything in his power not to look towards the back of the chapel as he caught another flicker of movement. He didn’t want to look, for fear of drawing Michael’s attention to it. He didn’t want to hope, because waiting to be saved was a chilling parallel to the Memory Man’s story.

  Michael laughed, a short, bitter, mirthless bark. ‘He didn’t die. He escaped. He made it to England. I only found out a year ago, and he was already dead by then.’

  ‘Too late to face him,’ Ash said, feeling his balance go and struggling desperately to right himself before his weight pulled him forward.

  ‘And that is why you are here, in his place. Because I cannot face him.’

  Ash shook his head, still not grasping how he fitted into such an elaborate – and personal – revenge.

  ‘But why me?’

  ‘Because he was your father, Peter, and it is our curse to suffer for the sins of our fathers.’

  SIXTY-NINE

  ‘No. You’re wrong,’ Ash said, but he knew he wasn’t. It explained the birthday pilgrimage to orphanages to give presents. Survivor’s guilt. It explained the memories of the sign and the tree. He’d been here before. His father had brought him here to show him his biggest regret without ever admitting he had failed the ones he’d left behind. It was a devastating truth. Christ, how could he have lived all those years with that inside him?

  ‘I am not wrong, Peter. Believe me. My research is thorough.’

  Ash shook his
head in both refusal and denial, but Michael was no longer paying any attention to him. Instead, his tormentor set about gathering stacks of prayer books and casting them across the stone floor around Ash’s feet.

  Forty, fifty, one hundred, he gathered everything that would burn, and built what would become the pyre before the altar.

  And there was nothing Ash could do about it.

  He tested the restraints but couldn’t pull his wrists clear of the crucifix holding him upright and couldn’t break the bonds tying him to it. He mustered every ounce of strength he had, but without the leverage couldn’t force so much as a creak out of the old wood. All that he succeeded in doing was losing his precarious footing, and put all his weight on his wrists, spreadeagled and in agony.

  The sudden surge of pain tore a cry from him as he kicked out desperately trying to find his footing again.

  ‘Save yourself the pain, Peter.’ Michael threw another pile of prayer books onto the pyre. ‘The cross might not be as strong as it was, but it’s more than strong enough to hold you while the smoke eats into your lungs and the fire chars your skin.’

  It didn’t stop Ash trying. He tensed his muscles, testing the bonds again.

  Beneath him, Michael went back to one of the pews where he had stashed a petrol can. He uncapped it and began to calmly splash petrol on the pile of books. The stench was incredible.

  He needed time.

  He felt the electrical tape bite into his wrists as he strained desperately against it. There was no give left in it. He couldn’t rub it against the wood, trying to build up friction and saw through it. It wasn’t about to snap.

  He wanted to rage but could barely muster a whimper. ‘You haven’t told me about Bonn,’ he said. ‘What happened there? How does it factor in?’

  ‘There?’

  ‘Germany.’

  Michael began to laugh. The acoustics of the chapel made it sound hysterical.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘I have told you about Bonn. I’ve explained it all to you, Peter. You’re just too slow to put it all together.’

  ‘Then tell me again. Make me understand.’

  ‘You’ve been looking for the wrong thing, Peter. Remember Bonn, poor sweet simple William Bonn, who had his cock cut off because he couldn’t stop playing with himself. Do you know the worst of it? Some of them had forgotten. They’d blanked him from their memories. Turned him into nothing. He deserved better from his tormentors. He deserved to be remembered. Even when I faced them down they tried to pretend he never existed. Anglemark masturbated over him and had the gall to lie to my face, trying to convince me I was wrong, that he didn’t know the boy or any of the boys like Bonn. Danilo at least didn’t deny it. He owned his part in it at the end. Not that it saved his soul. The others, Dooley, Ramirez, Tournard, and Maffrici, they saw what was happening, they could have spoken out, they knew but they didn’t value those children enough to save them. It wasn’t a secret what was happening there. More deserve to die for what they did, but they escaped me, dying before I could reach them. I regret that. You have to understand, Peter, someone had to fight for them. For Bonn and all the children like him. Someone had to make them pay for what they did to them.’

  ‘I can get justice for them,’ Ash swore. He’d caught the references, they saw, they didn’t speak out. Eyes, tongue. He could piece it together now. In Michael’s eyes they were all to blame, whether they were the judge who failed to prosecute, or the guardians who sold access to the boys to perverts like the politician. It was a fucking mess. And his own father had been carrying that inside him all these years? It was heart-breaking, and just proved how little he’d actually known the man. But then, like he’d said to Dooley’s housekeeper and his father had said to him, ‘every man deserved his secrets’. He wasn’t sure he could believe that any more. More than anything he wished the old man was still around for him to talk to. That was a guilt he should never have had to bear, not to the grave. ‘But not from up here. That is what we do. We speak for the dead. We get justice for those who can’t get it for themselves. Let me help you.’

  ‘There can never be justice, only vengeance.’

  ‘You don’t have to do this. Cut me down. It doesn’t have to end this way.’

  ‘Yes, it does. This is the thing that makes sense.’

  ‘Please. Do you want me to beg, is that it? I’ll beg. Because you’re wrong about me, I don’t have a death wish. I have seen far too much death.’

  ‘Then think of this as a final release, Peter.’

  ‘How do you know it’s true? How do you know it was my father who betrayed you?’

  ‘Because I told him,’ said a voice from the shadows. ‘But I never meant it to come to this. There has been far too much suffering because of me. It stops now, Stefan.’

  Michael turned in the direction of the voice.

  ‘Don’t call me that, Stefan Karius is dead. I am Michael.’

  He reached beneath his jacket while the new arrival stepped into the light.

  Ernesto Donatti stood in the aisle, his hands held up to show that he meant no harm.

  ‘I’m sorry, Peter. This is my fault,’ the Vatican envoy said, walking slowly down the aisle, hands still raised.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ Michael said.

  ‘I am not. I am torn by guilt and sadness. You came to me for names, Stefan. I gave you them but I had no idea of what you were planning …’ He shook his head.

  ‘I am doing this for every child who survived that place. And for all of us who didn’t. They deserve justice.’

  ‘But you don’t know what these men did after and what good they may have done. You didn’t know Peter’s dad. You never knew him, Stefan. Do you know what he did every year? He took Peter here on a pilgrimage of guilt to different orphanages. He delivered presents. He tried to bring a little happiness to their lives. And that was because he couldn’t forget. Don’t get me wrong, he wanted to. That was all he ever wanted to do. But those memories would never leave him. They were a part of the man he became. But the older he became the more distant they became, like a dream, and the horrors faded. He couldn’t remember what was real and what was imagined by the end. But he never forgot what happened to you there. He came back after the fire. He thought you were all dead, and he bore that guilt heavily. You need to remember, he was just a child himself. He couldn’t change things.’

  ‘You lie.’

  Donatti shook his head sadly. ‘You should have let sleeping dogs lie, Stefan.’

  ‘And let those men live?’

  ‘They are all old. Spent. They pose no danger to anyone. They will face the Lord and face his judgement. Ours is not to exact His righteous fury. You should have told your story. You should have shone a light on the horrors of this place, and places like it, and brought some peace to the restless dead. But no. You wanted to be the hand of God. “For our God is a consuming fire.” Hebrews 12:29, Stefan.’ Donatti lowered his hands slowly. ‘They made you into what you have become, and I understand that, I truly do. I see the path you have followed, and how far you have fallen from the light. But the great tragedy of this is that you are no better than they were.’

  There was a blur of movement, a flash, and the chapel filled with furious noise for a moment – a single deafening shot – before Donatti fell to the ground. He no longer lay in the glorious technicoloured light of the stained-glass window but had fallen into the shadow.

  Michael let his arm fall to his side, the smoking gun in his hand. He let it fall to the flagstones. ‘He shouldn’t have said that,’ he said, unable to take his eyes off the body on the ground.

  The blood began to pool around Donatti.

  Ash felt betrayed. Bereft.

  His friend had known all of it. Not just known, he was complicit. From that first note in Paris, the Monsignor’s disappearance and the yellow-brick road that led all the way to Maffrici’s parlour; he had known all of it.

  He must have known Michael – Stefan
as he’d called him – was responsible.

  ‘You don’t have to do this.’

  ‘I have to. This is the path to salvation. I cannot stop until I have finished. You are the last of them that I can reach in this life.’

  ‘Your confession, though, people need to know what happened here. There needs to be a reckoning.’

  ‘I am that reckoning.’

  ‘No. It needs to be more than that. More than a few corpses littering the street. People need to hear the truth.’

  ‘I have written everything down. Everything I remember, everything they did to us, every crime.’ With his free hand he slipped a notebook from his pocket. ‘It is all in here. Who the people were, what they did, and who they did it to. Everything.’

  And with that, he took a lighter from his pocket, thumbed the wheel into flame, and tossed it on top of the pile of petrol-soaked books.

  The flames caught instantly and grew, voraciously consuming the paper as it fed the fire. Michael didn’t stand idly by watching his handiwork. He dragged the remains of several broken chairs and pews up to the altar and fed them to the flames.

  The flames grew, licking up at his feet. The stench of petrol rose.

  The air was filled with heat and smoke.

  Ash coughed, gagging on the smoke.

  He had seconds. Any longer and the only way he was coming down from the cross was to become his name.

  He strained for all he was worth to free one hand, twisting his back against the cross-brace of the crucifix.

  The wood creaked and groaned.

  The smoke stung his eyes, bring tears to them.

  He blinked them back, but more came, turning the inside of the chapel into a blur of smoke and shadow.

  He could have sworn in that moment he saw the silhouette of a man in the doorway, waiting to guide him into the light. He doubled down, roaring a deep primal scream as he really gave into the rage, the anger, frustration, and fear that had hounded him since he heard the news of Mitch Greer’s death. He was not ready to meet his old friend. Not yet.