A story sequence written starring some of my college friends.
19 March 2010
Lukasz,
Your friends in office have with much grievance seen your absence. To mind, I also found it odd that you must depart so suddenly for the crags of the High Tatras. Though your homeland, must Poland entertain you amongst its harshest of foehn winds? This absence, this schism, in the roster of the Senate, makes my news more painful to convey. I fear the darkness of my words may incite your flighty return, but can only hope so much. The vehicle of my exordium, dear President, is one of murder. The act, one which I’m sure will enter into a lineage of many tragedies, took place today in our very office. The particulars still escape the authorities, for the deed was concerted with the violence of a mysterious magnetic storm, which withdrew power from the security cameras. No doubt that, as death spilled itself across our floor, the villain escaped with the darkling maelstrom as his background. Our knowledge is therefore minimal at this time.
Before my trembling hand quits the keyboard, I must express another… peculiarity. In a remote subclause of our constitution, it is written that in the case of a senator’s murder, the acting President shall subsume all investigatory and executorial duties for the case. This means, Lukasz, that I have been granted the powers of illumination… and of death. It falls to me to locate this murderer, and to administer revenge. How much I long that it were you to take this mantle! For your mastery of the assassin’s art is far greater, and your will more steeled to the vices of man. The unnatural gifts bestowed on Senators upon induction are great. But will mine be great enough?
Let this letter be progenitor to light, and not dusk,
Vice President Waddell
PART 2
Lukasz,
Though my last letter may have yet to even cross the seas, I write now with more news, of a nature most grim. The police investigation of the murder scene has just now settled, and after many days of careful combing, they believe that they’ve collected all the pieces of the unfortunate victim. Their growing confidence in this matter, however, is checked completely by their lack of insight and the opacity of their words. From the few vagaries that they’ve delivered to me, it seems that the victim was somehow… and, logic escapes this… somehow unitized, as it were… dissected into small pieces and (my meal won’t agree with my saying) reorganized into what looked like an outline of wings along the floor… Is this some abstruse trick played at the freedom of graduation? The freedom which Sean will now never see? His struggles were vast, and his toils deep… is this the recompense afforded to one of our most skilled senators? My mind races in emblazoned fury when I consider the loss of such a soul, and the concomitant increase in paperwork for us all…
One thing is for certain, Lukasz. The elegance of this murder could not have been achieved by one outside our group. My suspicions are high, and my guard set, for those people we once considered friends now mar all pacts among us. The mode of the murder, in specific, would be condemning if I could pinpoint one amongst us with such a quartering skill… But, as the secrecy of our endowed ability is proportional to its absolute strength… I must need force the senators to expose themselves in some way or another. Kinesis, rapture, wrath, or alchemy… all senators hold some principle trait which guides their hand… my journey now begins in full.
In vengeance striving,
Vice President Waddell
PART 3
Journal Entry
What have I done? Even in my darkest imaginings, I never thought I could bring such harm to another… Was it really my own hand which traced out Sean’s various itinerary? Was it I who awoke, smiling, in the pool of his blood, a red angel aloft in a crimson sky? I could see it all; I could see it happening: flesh and sinew parting before my eyes, with naught but an effortless stroke of my will. Then, in a blur of legs and arms, I escaped the abattoir, and I fell silently upon the night. My eyes glazed against the cold as my body continued to roam, and I felt my consciousness slipping long before my body could quit. I awoke this morning in my own bed, painted with those feathers of gore… I was the angel in my clear remembrance. I was the force which shook someone from this plane… but how could I be?
= = =
How could it, indeed? Sounded a heavy voice from somewhere deep inside my body… deep inside my soul.
PART 4
Lukasz,
I write you today with some aggravation… you see, I’ve located the murderer. However, things, as always, are not so straightforward. Perhaps a full discourse of my adventure will help to clarify things…
Last Friday, I arrived at school just before 8:00, traversed the stairs, and removed my key in order to unlatch the senate door. I was much surprised, however, to see that the door was slightly ajar, and the light on. As it will be of little gravity to now reveal to you the nature of my power, I will say in short that I have a peculiar reaction to certain pieces of music. Perhaps this will explain why I carry that accursed Walkman with me in all my travels. So, with the potential danger of the situation, I fastened an earphone on my left lobe, and neared the open part of the door.
I could hear a female’s voice within, quite obviously in some degree of tremor. Fragments came to my free ear as I drew yet closer… “That blood… painted across my back… couldn’t be me… but the blood…” And, softer, and subtler, in the background, a man’s voice : “How could it, indeed… your fault…grievous error… chemical equilibrium…”
It was apparently this last suggestive statement from the male source which drove the quaking female over her (mental) limit… she let loose a piercing howl, and screaming, “Nooooo!!” rushed from her position toward the door. I could hear her footfalls growing louder and with the last reserve of my own wit, jumped from her path as she bolted out of the office.
Even out of the way, I was forced to stagger back as the force of her egress met me… apparently it was sourced by a senator’s energy… sure enough, as I raised my head from my position of wincing pain, and it met with those tennis shoes, the light blue jacket, and those atmospheric-gone-(not)-civil eyes, I could not mistake the personage of my pursuit – Rika, mad with psychosis, standing in front of me, noticing me, rearranging her posture for battle… Rika had destroyed Sean’s dear life.
With a flick of my hand, I ejected my mix tape and remorselessly flipped it from the paralyzing beats of Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up… to my final power… the decimating strength of Fugue and Toccata. As I hit play and its darkling incipient notes rose to my ears, its heavy bleakness fashioned about my arm a sword of such music as could never be heard twice. Rika, in her stead, had produced a drafting surface from the fabric of the cosmos, had with her own blood constructed with pain the lines of an alchemic mesh… The tempo rose and as my body filled with noise, black waves began to emanate about me… and strengthened… and resonated… until, with all of my bravery behind me, I charged toward her… However, her fierce line-work had not gone unrewarded, and just as I started forward, so too did she finish that mesh… and my arm was raised with staccato weapon in arc… and her lines formed in to a wall of blades about me… and as our powers collided, my darkness waves and her razors of light became an imbroglio, bending with their might the time and space between us…
And in those few seconds of our titanic clash, a deep crack was heard between, and we were thrown asunder… I recovered first, and was deeply surprised to see not one body but two lying before me… that of Rika, still somewhat trembling from what was surely a hint at her terrific judgment… and that (you must know!) of you, Lukasz, somehow transported across space by the force of our skirmish.
I will end with even yet the worst and most unrealistic of news, Lukasz. As you lay recovering in the hospital from your trip, so too did Rika lay in chains across the floor of the school’s Asylum (the Cashier’s Office), never moving, never speaking… never responding to my prodding and threats of alfalfa… Until just this morning, when, with new torturous vegetables in mind, I returned to that room, to find Rika in ague’s clutches, asleep for eternity with eyes reflecting infinity… That’s right… Rika has died… But the most aggravating thing of all is the short note I found scribbled across the flesh of her left shoulder. Seemingly, it only appeared after her last breath, and simply stated…“Control.”
This is a cataclysmic revolt to me, Lukasz, for with my power weakened by use and the death of yet another innocent-well-not-really-but-in-this-context-innocent senator, I must once more summon my wits to find the nature of our group’s real evil.
Be it written,
Vice President Waddell
PART 5
Nurse’s Report…April 2010…Floor 3 West Wing
Wing activity has been slow since the incident. It seems like the other patients in the ward have become introverted to the point of placidity. Even now the police aren’t sure what to make of the incident tapes, in part because their images are grainy, blurred; in part because they seem to defile reality.
As staff nurse for the evening of the incident, I have been directed to report what I witnessed. I only wish that my memories could be as vague as those videos… instead they revive nightly, they sear into my mind… no matter what treatment, what chloral hydrate I manage to smuggle, I cannot put myself at rest. Maybe writing this will return to me something of my distant past.
That night I was in high spirits. Margaret in room 302 had painted a picture of her daughter for me. Like the other patients, we encourage them to pursue art and music in the hopes they could improve, so I was ecstatic that she would share her daughter with me even if she never had one. You might think that working in the mental ward would provide little emotional nourishment for me. But, I disagree… being immersed in the shades of so many perspectives, and the thrills of imaginings that aren’t tainted by the pessimism of hard reality, is always something I’ve been fond of.
My happiness grew more as I visited with Bart, who had recently taken an interest in large machinery and could hardly stop talking! And yet more happily did I receive the little rendition of Amazing Grace that George played on a rose petal he found (don’t tell Agatha!). I was so elated that I almost approached room 314 without fear. However, that foolishness was soon lifted, because as I lifted the latch and…
[Here the letter is separated briefly by wet blot marks and what look like brave attempts to restart sentences.]
I’ll restart by describing room 314. The room had been empty as long as I can remember. Even when the wing was fringing on capacity, 314 remained clear. There is a rumor that the Board of Gents bought that room for their own purposes, and that during the cold war, night shrieks could be heard emanating within those walls. The records even show that a nurse and doctor, employed privately by the university system, were assigned specifically to that room (oddly, the doctor was a doctor of physics, not medicine). But, this is all just a wives tale that the nurses throw back and forth. No one has seen any activity from that room for the past twenty years. That’s why I was so surprised to see, just last week, that a young man (scarcely old enough to participate in our Saturday swig-off, bless him!) had been relocated there.
The patient, Lukasz, was an odd fellow, talking little and laughing much, who had suffered some sort of massive trauma. His symptoms reminded me of a sort of advanced and constant stress disorder that I had only before seen manifested in war prisoners or Tech students during finals week. As luck would have it, he was both… or so he would mumble, between pudding cups. I really saw no need for the excessive belts and chains lashing him to his bed, but the order came from high up, and I didn’t think to question it. He just seemed so gentle!
My shift only put me in the wing at night twice before the incident, but those nights were enough to shake my hopes for the good nature of the boy. On the first night, I heard a scratching noise emanating from within the room, intermittently punctuated by a groan or cry. Upon entering, I found that Lukasz had writhed free of part of his bindings, and was (by my stars!) slowly scratching away the flesh from his left arm… of course the pain must have been unbearable; Lukasz was not prescribed any regular opiate or tranquilizer by mandate… the blood from his foul work blotted his bed sheets in whorls and peaks organized into something like an impressionist landscape. The pain in his eyes told me that his was not the journey of a mad man, though… his look was sincere. He was truly concentrating on his arm, de-fleshed, like he was looking for something. Every few seconds his right arm would jerk away from his work in noncompliance, like he was at times overridden by some other prerogative. He began to pick away the pieces of fascia and muscle stretched taught along the bone, still searching, still with such an agonizing concentration… He was still searching as I sounded the alarm and the night men came to re-secure him.
My second night in the wing brought with it more strangeness. I visited 314 to ensure Lukasz was sleeping, and instead found him stark upright, unsecured, staring at his television screen. His eyes were so blank, like glass…. Like by looking into them I could see the beyond… Is that what he was seeing as he stared at the white noise playing across the television? He was mumbling something, too… so incoherently that I couldn’t tell if it was even in English… And, the strangest thing is, that as I pressed inward to hear more clearly, I thought I could faintly hear the static talking back to him…
I’ve reached that night once again. I have nothing else to waste time or to draw away your attention. So I must… I lifted the latch to once again find Lukasz blankly staring at his television screen, flashing white with noise. As I approached him to lay him back down, my foot hit something large on the floor. In… in the broken light from the static, I could make out another person, a man in a crooked and broken manner… like a store mannequin, or the thing that appears in a dark room just out of the corner of your eye… He felt so hollow, and heavy; in my shock I felt deprived of the ability to scream, conscious of my actions but completely unable to control them. I bent down and turned the man over, with the grim realization that this was the same and only person who so often visited Lukasz during the day… his business partner and friend, Evan… my hands quickly found the cause of the victim’s petrified stance… a number of long steel bars protruded from the torso, flecked with red at their tips like some sort of macabre flower garden. And, around the wounds flowed not blood, but a thick mixture of what looked like Portland cement, sand, and gravel… could this have been real? What evil could bring one to replace a person’s blood with builder’s concrete? The body still lays on the floor of my memory in that horrid and twisted form…
Still in shock, perhaps even now not fully worn off, was my next discovery… that, as I went to lay Lukasz to sleep before alerting the guards, he too was stiff, unresponsive. I quickly discovered that, strangely, Lukasz’s hands were pinned to the bed by shattered pieces of CDs… his throat engorged by the presence of hundreds of feet of cassette tape (coroner measurement at 281.25’ – a C60); and his temples broken and bleeding from what looked to me like a massive pseudoaneurism. Independent research on the cassette tape suggests that it was from the 1987 Rick Astley album, Whenever You Need Somebody. This cruelty is yet unexplainable… was this a struggle for power in the student senate that both of these young people held so dear? Is this connected with the Hayes murder? Was it merely a deranged author’s idea of a joke? Most ironic of all, though, is that upon analysis of Lukasz’s body, a black marking was found embedded in his right arm in approximately the same location as the torn flesh on his left… Whatever the word, “control” meant to Lukasz, he had struggled to remove it until his last (and agonizingly irksome) moments…
Respectfully,
Maria Goebbel
Former Nurse
Raging City Hospital
PART 6
Date: April 20, 2010
To: The Council
From: DM
Re: Victory
Esteemed members of The Council, I write today to inform you that our quarter three plans for domination have succeeded. Though the initial investment in Kryslev’s research at the hospital came under question twenty five years ago, there can be no misconstrued notions of deficit now. The infants that he inoculated with our nanomachines in room 314 grew up under the gaze of parents across the country that were blind enough not to notice their real children had been replaced. The machines, it seemed, had the uncanny ability to repress the higher creative capacity of the children, making them predisposed to enter into studies in engineering and the sciences. Even this was but a small pretense to their greater power, though… as they grew, the children developed a condensed form of life energy, that through the machines, they could exert according to their interests. The young one, Rika, and her ability to perform the temporal blade drafting technique, should illustrate this.
Our witless senators’ histories began to twine together as their parents and minds were warped into believing that first Mines, and then the Senate, were safe places. They all collected in the senate body, just as planned, the deplorable infants now turned deplorable students. From my seat as trusted advisor, I watched as they attempted to help their cohorts. I watched with a false smile painted across my face.
After I fell from my position in the council, I sought some small shaft of light that would bring me back to your graces… so, fifteen years ago, I slit Kryslev’s throat and injected myself with the nanomachines. Because my immune system was stronger than those of the infant subjects, my body began to rebel against them… it began to eat itself away in a vain attempt to protect me… I didn’t want to be protected. The nanomachines fought back, too, reducing me to a bloody pool, softly festering on my hand-knit divan for near-on three weeks. Then, slowly, a miracle happened… the machines gathered bits of textile and circuitry from my home… began rebuilding me… and making me better. They interfaced with my mind, and lent me the memory of the superceded machines… of those in the subjects. As my frame transitioned from sinew to steel, I knew deep within my being that I had become the central controller.
Yes, it was me. It was my sole doing that rankled their minds with visions of Mines, that brought them to their seats in Senate, that cut them down in battle. Rika yielded to my power when she dissected Hayes… and Lukasz when he petrified Waddell. That sealed the scheme, because up until that point it was only Waddell that was evading my influence… something in his material frequency negated my signal… likely it was his cursed music ability. With he and Dubaj gone, the Senate leadership slowly crumbled. Nordby and Weyer stood defiantly for a time before I had them both immolated with a flick of the wrist - it seems that Ziegler had quite a knack for chemo-pyrotechnics. But, he too soon fell after I had Reed shatter him in her zero-point potential field. It was beautiful, watching as he fell apart like so many of God’s legos at her very gaze. I was almost tempted to ask her to join us… but that was a passing whim. I pitted her against Rodriguez’s entropy subspace and they devolved each other’s matter into so many marbles of shadow and light… the burns still paint the Surbeck lobby like impressionist death… beautiful.
After a while I became bored, and instructed the others to begin attacking the student body. The pleasure lurking under my worried-looking façade was immense. A grand rebellion pit student against senate in an attempt to bring peace back to their lives. Now, as the war subsides and with the Senate annihilated, they will all look to you, to us, for their guidance. Our plans shall now proceed unimpeded… a new age is dawning! Fourth quarter earnings are projected high… let us hope that our little Hell will have enough desks for our eager pupils.
THE END
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