Chapter 22
Dig Graves
Dig Graves was nine years old when he saw his father impaled by a spear.
He was not supposed to creep down the staircase and slip through the shadows of the convent and scamper to where the nun’s watched their boxed TV in the sitting room. Peeking through the door he caught a glimpse of the screen flashing with interminable tales of death.
The orphaned children at the convent were not allowed to watch TV.
They were only allowed to scrub floors and wash dishes and be whacked by the cane.
However, Dig Graves was not very good at doing what he was supposed to be doing as evidenced by the skin on his arms that held the zebra pattern of scars from all the cane lashings he had tolerated.
After a while, he could barely feel it and so he decided that watching the Execution Battle was worth more walloping.
Through the flake of the door and past the nun’s smoking their cigarettes leaning over in their slouchy armchairs, Dig Graves searched desperately for his father on the TV.
Dig Graves had never met the man who he had come from, but he had seen a photograph of him in his personal file. That had been from another night of mischievous creeping around the convent, breaking into the nun’s office in search for his family.
Most children with Soulless parentage never discovered who their mothers and fathers were.
They were not supposed to know, just as they were not supposed to watch TV.
However, again, nine-year-old Dig Graves had not given much of a shit about that.
After studying his father’s photograph and absorbing the shape of his face, Dig Graves smiled with delight finding they had the same eyes.
He waited for the Execution Battle to meet him.
As he stood outside of the door where night chill climbed his small bones, he looked through the crack of the rusted hinge, holding onto the splintered wood frame and beamed.
His father appeared on screen.
Running through the tempest of the Battle, donning a jacket and a blade and a dump of fear smattered across his face. Dig Graves leaned forward, pure happiness lifting him up on his tip toes. He almost extended out his hand as if to stroke the screen, as if to know what his father would feel like.
His father looked up at the camera and Dig Graves looked at the screen and there, father and son met across time and space. Their eyes the same.
And then a spear sunk into his father’s gut.
The nun’s cheered.
Dig Graves let out a cry.
The nuns heaved off their chairs, found Dig Graves stitched to the door, and beat him while his father died.
When Dig Graves was eighteen years old, he watched his mother cry.
He was not supposed to find her, but on the day he was jostled out of the convent and told he was no longer a child orphan but now a displaced adult, he had decided to find his home.
He knew only her appearance from the photograph he had looked at in his file and her name typed under it.
Those inked words had sunk into his brain until his mind was tattooed with them.
It had been his mother’s name he had sung over and over like a favourite song.
It had been his mother’s name he had spoken each night into his pillow before he closed his eyes.
It had been his mother’s name that kept him comfort when a nun’s boot kicked into his side.
And it had been his mother’s name he had cuddled when no one else had opened their arms for him.
He took himself and the treasure of his mother’s name with him on his journey through Uandra in search for her. After months of a hungry stomach, of bruises from meeting cruel hands along the way, and feet that were bleeding from holes in his shoes, he found a little house tucked into the suburbs.
It was yellow brick with a red mailbox and a tyre swing under a shaded oak. The driveway held a car for a family of four and handprints of the parents and their children that lived there were pressed into stepping stones.
He knocked on the door.
She answered.
He looked at his mother.
She looked back at him. She looked at his eyes.
It was not a cry that heaved from her throat, it was a scream. So loud and piercing, she frightened herself with it and tumbled back into the neat, vacuumed carpet, clutching at her chest, her eyes wide with terror.
He called her the name that was hers. The name that he cradled like a pearl, the name that he savoured.
She called him devil, she called him demon, she called him wicked.
Out by the front of the house, Dig spoke to her husband, her Soulmate.
His mother’s Soulmate wouldn’t allow Dig Graves inside of the house, because even though it was his mother’s home, it was not Dig Graves’s home.
Dig Graves asked as if he could speak to her.
His mother’s Soulmate said, “No. She can’t speak to you. You look a lot like him.”
“Who?”
“Him. You’ve got the same eyes.”
Dig Graves touched his eyes, the same ones his father had.
“Please.” His mother’s Soulmate had stepped away. “Don’t ever come near her again.”
He looked to his mother, to where she was in her pretty home, through her pretty window, waiting for just one smile.
She remained inside, upon the couch, cradling her two children who did not have the eyes of the Soulless man who had raped her, but the eyes of her Soulmate whom she had married.
Dig Graves was twenty years old when he realised he was Soulless.
Two years had sailed by and not once did his heart thump and pound against the cage of his chest, eager and thirsty to find its matching Soulmate.
His person.
His love.
He listened to the silence in his chest just like the silence that came after his father was killed and the silence that came after his mother had turned her back.
Silence.
Silence.
There was nothing but silence in his chest.
He tried shocking himself by grabbing the line on an electric fence. He considered using a knife in a toaster, digging his finger into a wall socket. Anything. Something. He just wanted his heart to leap. He just wanted to find them.
Is that not what they had all been promised?
Undiluted and unconditional love.
Where was it? Where were they?
He found his half-sister.
“Glorious Pain,” he spoke her name.
She turned around on the sidewalk, clutching her takeaway coffee and re-fixed her sunglasses so that her eyes could not be seen. Panic coasted across her face. “I go by ‘Glory.’”
“I’m Dig.” He touched his chest. “He named me Dig Graves.”
They looked at each other for a long moment, savouring their family tie until she cut it with a knife. “Don’t ever come near me again.”
She left too.
When he found his half-brother, his half-brother had laughed like a wild animal behind the security glass.
Older than him, the two of them were near identical.
Slash Artery.
His older brother wore his name with pride and had it marked on him with a tattoo.
Slash was the only one out of the three of them that never hid his eyes.
He celebrated the father who had raped his mother with pride.
When Slash turned eighteen, he willingly called himself Soulless and had marched right up to the prison and knocked on the door, asking to join the Execution Battle.
“You should come in here,” Slash said with a serpentine smile. He wore a matching red shirt and pant suit like all prisoners in Haver. “Come in here little brother, it’s nice in here.”
“I’m not Soulless.” Dig cringed.
Slash leaned forward, smiling with all his teeth. “It’s only a matter of time little brother, you’ll be Soulless, just like me, just like our daddy. Let’s make history Dig, let’s butcher the whole God damn three prisons in the Battle. Daddy tried to do it, we could do it, together.”
“He wasn’t a father, just a psycho rapist sperm donor.” Dig gritted his teeth. “A piece of shit.’”
Slash laughed, rocking in his chair. “Daddy was a God. Come on Dig don’t be like Glorious. Our sister has got a stick up her ass. You and me, we’re brothers, that means something. Come in here, embrace it, let’s rule the Battle.”
“I’m not Soulless.”
“You’re Soulless.”
“You’re not even Soulless. You have a Soulmate, Slash.”
Slash got up, burning with ire. “I’m Soulless!” He pounded on the glass and became a creature. “Don’t you tell me I'm not Soulless! I’m Soulless! That bitch is not my Soulmate! If I see her again, I’ll kill her!”
Dig gave up on family and worked on himself.
Finding a job was difficult.
The man behind the counter looked over the resume, pursing his lips. When he looked up at Dig Graves, he frowned.
“You look… familiar,” the man said.
Dig Graves diverted his eyes.
“Oh damn.” The man leered back. “You look like that—”
“Yes.”
He wore the face of the infamous Soulless who had been known for raping and murdering and causing torment.
The Soulless serial killer who had been speared in the gut on live TV.
While the world had been cheering his demise, Dig Graves had been stretching his arm out to the TV in longing, not sure who the man was… only that he had wanted to know him.
“He left some women alive,” Dig explained dully. “With babies in their bellies before he went into prison.”
The man behind the counter sucked in a sharp breath, feeling for his phone. “You’re Soulless.”
“I’m not Soulless.”
“All his other kids are Soulless. I’ve seen them on TV, as crazy and wicked as he was.”
Dig swallowed hard. “I’m not like them. I’m not Soulless.”
“Is your heart searching for its Soulmate?”
Dig Graves placed his palm over his chest, feeling over the lacklustre beats. “I’m still young. Maybe it’s just not my time yet, or maybe my Soulmate hasn’t turned eighteen yet or maybe—”
“Or maybe you’re Soulless. Get out before I call the cops.”
People swam around Dig Graves like fish did to sharks.
Day after day, month after month, year after year, that silence in his chest continued. It did not take him long to succumb to the realisation that he was Soulless.
And then, one day, as he sprung into a fight at a bar, his heart started to thump.