CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Being freakishly tall had always been a curse. Clothes didn’t fit, he couldn’t sit in regular chairs, people would always ask him what the weather was like at this altitude, not to mention that height and skinniness reminded people, for some reason, of scarecrows.
From childhood to adulthood, he’d always felt like a freakshow exhibit, but then someone had come along and put it all into perspective. From that day on in MCI Jessup, he was no longer ashamed of being a gangly freak, and that’s when he’d started developing width to even out the height.
Yes, this was the real him. He knew this barbarian had been living inside him all this time. It just took a special person to bring it out.
He went to the cabinet and worked the lock and took out a vial and a fresh needle.
He drew one out and held it up to the bulb, and the oil inside it caught the light.
He had a system for this. He filled the syringe then swabbed the outside of his thigh.
Then he found the muscle, drew back, watched for blood, found none, and pressed the plunger home, and the small fire of it spread under the skin and he breathed out through his teeth and waited for it to pass.
In lieu of speaking aloud, he thought the words he wanted to say.
I haven’t watched the footage back. I can’t do it. In case I see something that gives me away. Then I’ll worry about it. So I’m going to steer clear until the whole job is finished. What do you think?
The thing on the wall didn’t respond, even to his telepathic projections.
It was an inanimate object. He was aware, in the way a man was aware of things he had decided to live alongside, that this was unusual behaviour.
He had been told, by people whose business it was to have opinions about such things, that his interior life had certain features that fell outside the normal range.
He did not dispute it. Normal range had never been a useful concept where he was concerned, and the men who told him these things had done their telling from behind a desk in a room with a locked door, and the desk and the room and the lock had not been there for their protection.
Once the rush of the anabolic wore off, he stood up and went to the mirror one more time.
His stomach needed some work, but abs were the result of low body fat, not resistance training.
Unfortunately, if he wanted arms and legs the size of tree trunks, he had to eat like a pig, and doing so bloated the mid-section.
It wasn’t a big deal, because his idol hadn’t been perfectly sculpted around the mid-section either.
I’ve got the next one ready to go. It’s happening tonight. Are you excited?
The next one had been chosen months ago.
He had their routine memorized down to the smallest detail, and in about three hours, he’d put the plan into action.
It was going to be a little riskier than the others because he wouldn’t have much privacy for this one, but that would make the whole thing sweeter when it was all said and done.
He’d settled on a method old enough that the men who designed it had at least done it honestly, out in the square at noon, where the town was made to look.
The method was older and worse than anything he had done so far, a thing out of the deep past, designed by men who understood that punishment was meant to be witnessed and meant to be felt and meant, above all, to be slow.
He had studied it for years. He knew the apparatus.
He knew the sequence. He knew what the body did at each stage of it and how long each stage took, and he had practiced the parts of it that could be practiced, on weight and on wood and once, briefly, satisfyingly, on something that had screamed.
The advocate he had chosen for it had spoken, more than once, in favour of suffering as a deterrent.
Had said, in that bright untroubled voice, that the trouble with modern justice was that it had forgotten how to make an example of a man.
And he intended to remind everyone what an example looked like.
Back in those days, there’d been a hood, and for a long time he’d had it wrong, had thought the hood was for hiding.
It wasn’t. The hood was a kindness the headsman paid the crowd, so none of them would have to know the face of the man doing on their behalf the thing they hadn’t the stomach to do themselves.
The mask was a mercy. He understood that now.
Beside the thing on the wall, on a wooden peg he’d fixed there for the purpose, hung the outfit. The tunic, the hood, the whole of it. He’d made it himself, by hand. It was a fine creation. Billy Hayes had even said so himself.