The Scene

There was just something about that scene that I never forgot—that I couldn’t forget.

It could’ve been the horror, the terror in the woman’s eyes. The trembling as the boy killer turned his eyes on her, she too frightened even to scream, until the piercing cry of her daughter gave voice to the dread in both their hearts. And those cold, dead eyes that stared, in pitiful silence, at the merciless world—eyes seated deep in a skull severed in the blink of an eye.

And with a thud, the dagger that whizzed through the air to implant itself deep in the little daughter’s heart. A senseless slaughter, indiscriminate and unreserved.

And yet, even amidst all the blood and bodies, when all the screams died away… it seemed the most lifeless eyes of them all… were his.

As gruesome as the scene was, the lightlessness of his eye was the crowning horror. Even as he held the blood-dripping daggers in his tiny, nine-year-old hands, he created the distinct impression around him that he wasn’t the villain—only yet another victim in some cruel game. He killed them, with his own blood-soaked hands—even down to the six-year-old girl. But I could not feel anger towards him. I felt angry at the deed, yes, but towards him… I felt this strange, but strong, sense of… believe it or not… pity. It would’ve seemed cruel and thoughtless, indeed even inhuman, to think this, if not for the flashback I was shown next.

“What have we done? What have we done! We’ve taken a boy and created a monster!”

“It is under our control, André. It is ours.”

“At what cost, Davin? At what cost?”

“I don’t get your drift.”

“The torment we’ve inflicted on him has made him pliable as putty in our hands— but in this we have robbed him of all free will. We’ve only given him nightmares, and guilt beyond compare—guilt heaped on a child’s soul, the soul of one who should never have lost his innocence, so completely, and so soon. Whatever evil he commits is on our heads.”

“It had no life to live anyway! It’s the bastard son of a dead whore. Its life without us is nothing! It means nothing to the world but what meaning we put in it.”

And the boy, huddled alone in a corner of the steel-bolted room, his hands still bloodstained, his eyes showing him so painfully a single breath from falling off the utmost edge of sanity… writing with his own blood in a tear-stained diary, over and over like some sick mantra, “Kill me now.”

I screamed and covered my head. Even though it was just a vision of the past. Even though there was nothing I could do. I felt sick to my stomach, ready to throw up. I felt miserable, ready to roll over and die. And I could not help but wonder of his despair, so longing for the comfort of death’s indiscriminate arms, and yet… his body so altered… that even that solace he was denied.

If he ever questioned his orders, if he ever tried to defy the scientists who ruled over him so murderously, the pain would be unspeakable. Always beaten or probed to the edge of death—but never beyond. They were not that kind. And, as he always chastised himself for years afterward, he was not brave enough to take it. He was a child—how could he have been? But the guilt of that cowardice seemed the most unbearable of all…

And so, that grim spectacle of a massacre continued, from birth ‘til the age of ten… and the despair that so enveloped his young soul, so early stripped of its innocence, lay burning in his eyes with the question—the one, painful question he was not allowed to ask—Why?

I guess in truth, what I really could never forget, what I really saw in all the secrets of his battered and broken mind, was a fifteen-year-long, hopelessly painful, hopelessly pitiful, scene of… of a boy searching vainly to find the meaning in death, even as death… was his only meaning.

Prose practice, character composition, from the perspective of Killer Instinct’s Alexis Gate while transported into the mind and memory of Matthias Harding.

By Elizabeth Chin, 11-11-06