Chapter 37
We do not speak the name of the most infamous Soulless serial killer that had lived in Uandra.
He had wanted fame and so we ensured never to give it to him. His name was tucked under the rug, his notorious feats of slaughter never gossiped over, his death best to be forgotten.
However, his eyes.
I remembered his eyes.
I saw them once, when I was very young, holding onto Magnus’s arm as we strolled out of the car and into a teahouse where he liked to take me on Sundays.
I wore one of my lace-collared dresses, my hair braided into a crown, holding a tulip with a ribbon around it’s stem which Magnus had gifted to me along with a kiss on my forehead.
I was six years old and freshly new out of being orphaned from my parents and adopted by my older brother.
Magnus wore one of his crisp white suit jackets and turned us to pose for a journalist who snapped our photo and who proceeded to ask Magnus about his political work.
They showed him a photo of a Soulless man, pushing it directly into his face and then a video clip of the same Soulless man in the Execution Battle getting harpooned in the chest with a spear.
I did not mind the spear going into the man’s chest, nor the spray of blood that was captured after; nor how he had fallen and how the people who had killed him had cheered and then severed his head and paraded it around like a birthday balloon in the air.
What had shaken me were his eyes.
Dark eyes. The shade of polished obsidian, of midnight hours when monsters crept from under the bed. They glimmered. They shone. Eyes that predators wore.
Magnus hissed with irritation and slapped his hand over my eyes, covering the obtrusion of what the journalist had knocked in our face.
“Please,” he had said. “She’s only six. Be mindful.”
The journalist apologised. “But do you have a comment on his death?”
Magnus removed his hand from my eyes and smoothed back his well-oiled hair, smiling his pearl white teeth. “Justice has been done, more confirmation that the Execution Battle is necessary for peace in our society.”
My older brother and I sat in the teahouse, side by side.
Lavender perfumed the air, my white buckle shoes only just brushed the floor, I folded the cloth napkin over my lap just as Magnus had told me to and he ordered a three-tiered selection of cakes, scones and biscuits.
He looked at me, his elbow resting on the tabletop, cradling his chin, watching me sip from my teacup, studying.
“Who was he?” I had asked him.
“Who, Duckie?” He reached over and fixed a bobby pin into my hair and smoothed back an untamed strand until my hair was as neat as his.
“The Soulless man who died.”
“Someone very wicked. Were you frightened?”
I thought on this and could not answer.
“Not to worry, Duckie.” He pressed my nose. “I will make sure not a single wicked thing touches you.”
The wicked thing had children.
Quite a few. The Soulless man had committed numerous atrocities before he ended up in prison, some of his deeds included raping copious amounts of women, and those he did not kill ended up growing his seed, birthing a new generation of Soulless.
The eldest son was Slash Artery.
The dumbest name.
His people collected Dig and I by smuggling black cotton bags over our heads. They tied my wrists in front of me and prodded me to walk. Rude. I couldn’t see where I was going.
“If you touch her, I’ll gut you!” Dig’s voice ripped through the void of the dark.
“Dig!” I kicked him—at least I assumed it was him. “They need to touch me, I cannot see. I need assistance in walking. Please stop saying that.”
When we finally arrived at our destination I was forced to kneel.
I balanced myself by touching a cold concrete floor with my tied hands.
The bag was ripped off my head, ruining my hair.
They did the same to Dig who knelt at my side.
Dig’s arm was not broken. Just dislocated.
He had fixed it now and it was in a somewhat useable state.
We were in a warehouse—no, a night club.
Black walls and floors bloomed a permanent night.
Underground, soaked with ancient scents of sweat and alcohol.
Strobe lights were still intact along the ceiling.
A child’s doll was strangled and hung by its neck for decoration.
Clusters of inmates circled, peering down at us with perpetual grins.
A large crew. Much larger than any I had seen at Ricker.
There was only one inmate forerunner who had this many cult followers.
I looked to the stage in front of us. Upon the two-stepped dais where collections of bones and pieces of metal and wood had been stuck together to create a throne, sat the infamous Soulless man’s first-born son.
Slash Artery.
The dumbest name.
Donning black leather pants, a pink sequined crop top and a fur stole, he pressed down on a woman’s head as she knelt between his opened legs, using her mouth to pleasure his—oh, he had a large appendage. It was impressive.
When he came, he did not make a sound, falling into minute irritation as he looked down at his hedonism, which apparently did not seem very enjoyable, but rather very nothing.
He waved for the woman to leave him and packed himself back into his pants.
The leather made a statement out of his bulge, and he leaned forward, showing us his face.
Black messy hair, a gaudy smirk and…
His eyes.
The same pair of eyes I had seen when I was six years old. The same pair of eyes that forced me into a tremble.
Slash loved his father’s eyes he had been given so much that he had tattooed two arrows on either of his eye temples. The arrows pointed inwards to his father’s black eyes, forcing whoever saw him to look upon the fierceness of his gaze.
“Bow!” A woman strained my head to dip to Slash Artery.
The dumbest name.
I resisted her hand. “Why? He is not royalty.”
“He’s Slash Artery.”
The dumbest name.
“So?” I tried to get comfortable on the concrete floor. “He is not royalty.”
“His father was a god.”
“That makes him celestial, not royal.”
“Bow!”
“You have still not given me an adequate reason to.”
Upon his throne, Slash clicked his fingers.
The woman quickly skated back into the crowd.
Slash leaned into his throne, crossing one leg over the other and sipped from a wine glass that someone had placed in his hand. He looked down at Dig and I, grinning like a clown.
“Dig!” He slapped the arm on his throne, his palm smacking the top of a skull. “We are on day nine. I thought you’d come and see me sooner.”
“Fuck off, Slash,” Dig said. “I got important shit to do. Let me go.”
Slash cackled manically, his voice went deep and then shrill like a badly orchestrated song. “Have you given much thought to joining me?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“Nah.”
Those black predatory eyes of his glimmered and his smile twisted in on itself, growing ugly. “You’re in restraints Dig, at my mercy. I think you should change that answer of yours.”
“Nah.”
Slash laughed again, but this time there was no joy in it.
I nudged Dig with my elbow and whispered, “I think he wants to be friends with you.”
Dig twitched his nose, his impatience easily mustered. “I got enough friends.”
“I don’t think you have any friends.”
“I’m not following this goat cheese.”
“He’s a serial killer,” I reminded him. “A very serious serial killer, didn’t he—”.
“Yeah, he did.”
Slash Artery—the dumbest name—loved his infamous Soulless father so very dearly that Slash took it upon himself to walk in his father’s shoes.
Known as being a troubled child, he grew into a troubled adult.
He knocked on the door of Haver prison and asked to be arrested and for entry into its rust bleeding walls and the Execution Battle.
He had trained for it, learning death while others were learning taxes, and joined the Battle with blazing splendour, slaughtering and butchering with hysterical laughter.
“Slash wants to kill you?” I asked Dig.
“He wants me to join him as a follower.”
“In his cult?”
“No, his book club. Yes, his cult.”
Slash tossed his wine glass behind him, splattering the wall with glass and liquid. He took out a red coloured lollipop, inhaled it and licked it once before returning it to his pocket and gestured to me. “Who’s this?”
Dig clenched his jaw. “She’s no one.”
I looked at Dig aghast. How dare he. No one! “I am Delphine De—I am no one. Yes, I am no one.”
Slash stood up and stretched, the action made his pink-sequined crop top lift further up his midsection, exposing his sharp muscled abdominals. It seemed everyone in prison all had gym memberships. He sauntered down each step languidly, his lips peeling up into their grin and bent down to Dig.
He snatched Dig’s jaw. In response Dig tried to bite him but failed.
“Join me,” Slash said, his voice slippery like a serpent. “It’s what Daddy would have wanted.”
I yawned. Honestly, this all could have been an email.
Dig jerked, trying to remove his jaw from Slash’s grip. “That man was a piece of shit.”
“You should be proud Dig—”
“Don’t—”
“—you have the might inside of you—”
“Get off—”
“—all you just need to do is see it.” Slash snatched away Dig’s sunglasses, revealing his face to the world. “There you go little brother, just like Daddy.”