CHAPTER 24 AN ACCUMULATION OF ANGUISH
AN ACCUMULATION OF ANGUISH
When I open my eyes again, I’m lying on the floor on my back. I turn my head and find the broken body of Morris lying next to me. His eyes are blinking rapidly but his head is no longer attached to his neck.
I sit up even though it hurts; each breath brings with it a wave of pain and nausea.
A sickening noise, like the ripping of wet paper, sounds to my right.
As my vision comes into focus I catch a glimpse of Camille hunched over the dead body of the woman, removing her right leg with a long serrated knife.
I gasp and Camille looks up. She has a faraway look in her eyes.
Langan’s body is crumpled next to the platform in the center of the room. His arms have been removed from his torso and he stares angrily at Camille, shouting at her.
“You did this to me!” he screams. “Traitor!”
I think Camille has gone out of her mind.
She carefully cuts away the woman’s leg and because the woman wasn’t a reanimate, there is blood.
So much blood but it is black and sticky, like tar.
She holds the leg against herself, measuring, assessing.
She pays no mind to Langan as she presses the knife against her own leg, tearing at the flesh, and begins to cut.
The door the monster had come out of sits ajar.
The monster, Noah, and my dad are all missing.
My mom’s crumpled body lies on the floor but I cannot look.
It’s like my mind cannot accept what I’m seeing regardless of everything I’ve witnessed up to this point.
I stand and start to move toward the door.
Morris’s head begins to spit and sputter.
I give it a swift kick and it bounces into the shadows.
“Get her!” Langan shouts. He can’t get up and I look to Camille. She doesn’t even glance at me. She has situated herself on the floor and is slowly sawing through the decayed flesh of her own upper thigh.
Roger stumbles back into the room and approaches Camille.
His wobbly gait and broken skull make him look like something out of a horror movie—a shambling corpse brought back from the dead, stalking us through the bowels of this cursed castle.
I back away, fearing he’ll come after me but he is focused only on Camille.
“Camille, stop,” he says softly.
She doesn’t stop her cutting but he kneels next to her and gently puts his hand on her shoulder. The sight of him and her together, their bodies all but destroyed—this is the impossible price of immortality.
Camille, her chest heaving, her jaw clenched. “I can be who I was before. I can put my body back together if no one else will.”
Roger glances up, but he doesn’t move. The fight has gone out of him. He simply watches Camille sever her own leg. She gets through the last of the bone and tosses the knife down on the floor. Langan starts yelling again but soon quiets himself. They’re all irrevocably broken.
A small, muffled cry comes from where my mother had collapsed. The noise pulls me out of this terrible unreality and I rush to her side. She lies face down near the altar. Her body is twisted unnaturally and I’m afraid to touch her. She turns her head to the side and smiles at me.
“I—I thought you were—gone,” I say.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she says. “Help me turn over.”
I take her by her one good arm and roll her over onto her back.
I don’t want to look at the place where her other arm used to be.
She says it doesn’t hurt and I know she’s telling the truth but I still can’t stand to see her like this.
Can we even fix this? Do I have the skills to put her back together?
Tears sting my eyes as she takes my hand in hers.
“The monster took your dad and Noah ran after them,” she says.
“We can’t let this continue, Meka.” Her gaze splits to Camille, who is sitting silently, next to Roger.
Morris’s head lolls to the side. The arms and legs of his detached body twitch.
Langan has lowered himself to the floor and lies on his back, staring up at the ceiling.
“We used to be something,” Langan rambles. “He was our god.”
“He’s a monster,” I say quietly.
Langan turns to me. “The monster of all monsters.”
My mom touches my arm. “Go. Now.”
I grab Camille’s discarded knife and cut across the room, entering the open door on the opposite side.
Behind it are spiral stairs that wind up to the floors above.
I take the steps two at a time as I grip the knife until my palm aches.
The room I emerge into on the uppermost floor is empty and spans a wide swath of the castle.
The wooden planks that make up the floor are rotted away in some places, leaving gaping holes.
Clear on the other side I see the hulking silhouette of the monster.
I race toward him not knowing what I’m supposed to do when I reach him. I only know I need to get to him.
As I approach, the monster has my dad by the front of his shirt and is lifting him off the ground.
The boards groan under his feet. Noah is there, pounding wildly on the monster’s back, screaming at him.
The monster either doesn’t feel it or doesn’t care, I can’t tell which.
The monster steps toward the open window, whose glass has been broken out.
I scream as he dangles my father over the edge.
“Get away from him!’ I shout, wielding the knife in front of me. My hand is trembling and my heart feels like it’s in my throat.
The monster turns his head to look at me and again he smiles the most unsettling and unnatural grin.
“He doesn’t need to live,” says the monster.
“I have you now, my dearest Meka. And you are special. You are so much more than anything your father or his forebears could ever have been and I think, maybe, you don’t even know it yet.
You have only just begun to see, when others have kept their eyes closed for so very long. ”
“I know what I am!” I scream, allowing all my anger to bubble up and spill out.
“Do you?” the monster asks.
Noah strikes him hard across the back with some broken piece of wood he’d scrounged from somewhere.
The monster turns and knocks him aside with one colossal blow.
Noah hits the ground and skids across the floor coming to a stop at the base of the wall by the window.
He lies still and I try to remind myself that he can’t be killed that way.
“What do you want?” I shout as tears run hot down my cheeks. “Why are you doing this?”
The monster blinks once, then twice and turns his face up to the ceiling. “Because I must. Because it is only fair and right and just that I, who have been denied so much, should be able to determine who will receive this gift.”
“You haven’t been denied anything!” I yell. “You shouldn’t even be here in the first place!” I don’t know what Dippel’s motivations were for creating this creature but even if the power to reanimate someone was Dippel’s to command, he should never have done it.
Dad grips the monster’s robe and yanks hard on it, trying to free himself.
The billowing black cloth slips down revealing a jagged line of stitches at the monster’s shoulder.
The skin of the arm is a different color and texture than his torso.
The monster watches me watching him and he narrows his gaze at me.
In the daylight streaming through the window a row of poorly mended stitches running directly across the top of his forehead stretches open.
The white bone underneath shines like a crescent moon.
“Have you ever beheld anything so destroyed?” the monster asks.
“There is almost nothing left of them,” he continues.
“Of the men whose bodies were taken from the ground and fitted together to shelter what is left of my soul.” He breathes deep.
“Daniel Allen, Simeon Cady, William Lewis—I suppose I owe my existence to them. Their flesh made me what I am.”
“You owe your existence to Dippel,” I say angrily. “He made you.”
“And look what I have become,” the monster says. “I have existed for over two hundred years. A living shadow.” There is sadness, real human sadness in his words but I am unmoved.
“So why don’t you just let yourself die,” I say through gritted teeth. “Let yourself rot away. Turn to dust.”
“And miss the opportunity to see what you will become?” the monster asks. “I would never.”
“What she’ll become?” my dad rasps.
The monster turns, looks him in the face.
He drops my dad, who grasps hopelessly at the monster’s cloak tearing it away as he falls.
“No!” I scream.
Noah stirs on the floor but can’t seem to get his feet under him.
The monster is now nude and while his limbs are proportional, they don’t go together the way they should.
His right arm is shorter than his left and the skin on each side is a different color.
The bone in his upper thigh is exposed, the flesh around it decayed to almost nothing.
He has an array of stitches and patches as if he’s been mended and re-mended over and over again since he first came into being, two hundred years of stinking putrid flesh, melded together.
It is the most terrible thing I’ve ever seen.
He steps toward me, unashamed of his exposed state and unwilling to let it hinder him.
I hold the knife in front of me. The monster lowers his head and charges forward.
I try to duck out of the way but he stiffens his shoulder and puts it directly into my chest. A bolt of pain rips through me as I tumble to the floor.
I’m rolling up onto my side, gasping for the breath that’s been knocked out of me, when something impacts my leg.
I scream out in agony. The monster has stepped on my ankle, crushing it.
My vision blurs. Vomit rises in the back of my throat.
From the window there’s a scuffling sound, and when the haze of pain briefly clears I catch a glimpse of Noah hoisting my dad in from the window as he clings to the remnants of the monster’s cloak. He hadn’t fallen after all. The monster turns toward them and I pull myself up and limp after him.
“Your time has come,” the monster says to my dad as he advances, backing my dad up to the window again. “You’re not worthy of the power you possess.”
Noah is still going at the monster as my dad cowers in front of him. I look down at the knife, at my broken ankle, at this impossible situation. Is this how it will be? I’ll lose my dad and Noah and my mom and then be at the beck and call of the monster?
No.
No, I can’t accept that.
I still myself. Adrenaline saves me from the pain as I put my injured foot down.
I lurch forward with all the strength I can muster and slam into the monster’s back with the full weight of my body, sinking the knife in at the base of his skull.
We tumble forward through the open window and land on the snow-covered ground below.