I awoke with a start, as though someone had shaken me violently. Elina was snoring gently beside me in the moonlight. The curtains seemed to have opened themselves. I found my dressing gown and went outside into the cold London air to have a smoke. In the pocket of the dressing gown I found a pack of cigarettes I had given up and smoke matches.
I puffed away gently as the small hours began to tick over. My sleep had brought forth a rather disturbing dream if put in perspective. It was more of a montage of very violent acts, without thought, without reason, people committing terrible deeds simply because they were terrible. I no that I’m in no way perfect but at least I always have a reason for what I do. I smoked the last three cigarettes, dropping the used filters to the ground before going back inside. I tried to wash away the grotesque images in the shower to no avail.
It was puzzling me, mocking me almost. I had seen Elina peel away a young boy’s flesh so that you could tickle his heart. The boy was awake, drugged, but still very much awake. I remembered the time I broke so many bones of this one girl’s body, her arms, legs, pelvis, that if I hadn’t have killed her she would have been about as much use as Helen Keller. My dream however, was penetrating my subconscious, making me feel standoffish of something far milder than I had seen in real life. It was if I was skimming the surface, touching the tip of an iceberg, with a fear not of what it was but what it foretold. I needed to shrug it off quickly for I had a busy schedule planned. Reports were to be filed, testimonies to be signed, it was if the hand of justice always had a form for one to scratch initials.
“I thought you had quit smoking” Cinquain said slowly. I turned around, having missed him when walking outside. He was rolling a silver dollar between his fingers, a neat little trick which rather gave away his Flaws.
“I did; those were candy sticks” I toweled my hair vigorously, “don’t you ever go to bed?”
Cinquain, whenever out of original replies, quoted, “No rest for the wicked”
“It’s funny you should say that. I had a rather disturbing dream”
“You watched ‘Children of Men’?”
“Funny, no. I was in some sort of-”
“Afterlife?”
“I was going to say cinema. I was watching a movie over people being decapitated, have their facial features removed, the kind of thing you see on those medical shows”
“What did you have to eat?”
“Buttered popcorn and a chilled lemon-lime soda. Anyway, I’m watching this movie and suddenly I hear this voice. Usually I hate it when people yell advice to the characters on the screen but what he was saying didn’t quite synch with what was happening”
“Go on”
“Well then I turned to see someone sitting next to me-”
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t know; it was more of a shadow of a man than any sort of being. Anyway, it started whispering things, things that disturbed even me, well not quite me. My Flaw, although he didn’t call it a Flaw, he called it- I can’t remember but it was good. It was as if he and I were related”
“Sort of the way you and I are related?”
“And our Flaws our what makes us inhuman?” I paused for thought, “I don’t know if a Flaw can be passed down through blood, my mother certainly never showed any sign of it. It was one of those dreams, makes you think, doesn’t it?”
I shook it off in that sentence but it crept into my mind while I was filing a school shoot-out into the database. Uploading the photographs I had taken were taking time of their own and so I began seeing if I could remember my conversation in my imaginary movie theatre. As I began typing my transcript, the name ‘Sialon’ rolled off of the keyboard. Although I’m not a heavy drinker and drinking at work is usual frowned upon, I added vodka to my lemon-lime soda. I didn’t know why; I just thought it was a good idea and the more I drank the clearer my memory became.
“Excuse me but do you have to smoke in here?”
“It begins” (you’ll just have to imagine the demonic voice I’m afraid)
“What do you think of the movie? Personally, I find the plot rubbish”
“You look like your father, just like a Sophistai”
“Who are you?”
“The better question is: who are you?”
“I am Parable, the Paedophile”
“Or you are the Son of Panthalassa”
“What are you?”
“Work it out, Son of Panthalassa”
“I prefer Parable, and are you my Dark Flaw?”
“I am not a student on Flaws; I am a professor of a far wider Academy; of which Dark Flaws are only a part. You’re a Sophistai, but you can call me Sialon”
“What did you say?”
“A Sophistai, a Rache, one of the Cognoscenti. Don’t you know?... you don’t, do you? Parable, the Paedophile doesn’t know”
“I’m tired of you-”
“I am not of you. Your Abilities aren’t like the others, you’re something new”
“I like to surprise people; I’m good at being shiny and new. What do you want?”
“Only what you want”
I saved the file on my computer as is my habit. I’m a data hoarder, I will save anything to my hard drive that I find vaguely interesting. It was a strange sort of dream, usually my dreams are understandable, something both Freud and Jung can agree on. I finished up with the school shoot-out and found myself tipsy as a movie star.
I was called away to the Ferguson Apartment Complex, a very cozy sort of place where someone had been murdered. Rice was already on the scene, keen to book Celia Cunningham, girlfriend of the victim. She was impeccably dressed for a murder suspect; wither hair freshly straightened, her make-up reapplied and her clothes without crease. The apartment itself was fairly clean, with Douglas Fry sprawled along the sofa with his neck slit and his trousers around his ankles, genitals mangled with a hair straightener. Rather like a charred sausage left on the grill.
“Something funny Parable?” Rice growled at me as I photographed the scene, “this is someone’s child”
Usually I can hold in laughter but it was too much. Right in front of Cunningham, I corpsed with total laughter. Even Byrnes had a scowl.
“The suspect doesn’t deny that the hair straightener that mutilated the victim’s genitals was hers, she was the only one with a key and there’s no sign of forced entry. He was drugged from a bottle of beer, probably with Rohypnol”
“Celia Cunningham” I declared in my heroic tone, “is not the killer”
“How do you know?”
“It’s a little early for me to be doing my ‘the facts were these’ scene but I know for a fact that Celia Cunningham did not kill this man”
“How do you know?”
“Her hair has been straightened in the last few hours, there’s only one hair straightener on the inventory. Would you knowingly use a hair straightener that had been applied to someone’s genitals?”
After work, I toddled off to my wonderful girlfriend Elina’s flat and let myself in. Our conversations had grown weary but with the anecdote of the Mutilated Genitals I felt armed for battle. I surveyed her apartment; It was messy but homely, lots of books, booze and little else. She herself wasn’t in so I helped myself to her bourbon while I waited. Bourbon has always been a tricky drink for me and as soon as I had downed my fifth glass I felt like I was sinking into a dream, or a nightmare, or something even deeper.
“Did you make me laugh?”
“You found it funny; I only lowered your super-ego. It’s been lowered before”
“Tell me what you know about Dark Flaws”
“The Rache?”
“I demand you tell me who you are! What you know!”
“You demand me? OK, I’ll humour you, but only you my puppet. The legends say that God, in all his benevolence, created the Angels to watch over his work, but as they fell from his grace he became depressed, ashamed of what he had done. God is not forgiving, nor does he forget. He let out a sigh of revenge that was whisked away by the tides of the universe, flowing across the Streams of Neverhappens and Unlikelys, through the Forest of Shouldnots and Havenots, passed around the Army of Smoke-and-Fire, before it ended up here”
“In me?”
“In you? Don’t be so vain. You’re nothing special, you were an accident, simply in the right place at the right time. Or, at least, your ancestor was”
“My ancestor? What ancestor?”
“Why don’t we have a child? Something tasty? I can hear you salivating at the thought of a juicy steak, a morsel”
“It’s a school day”
“That’s never been a problem before”
“Elina wouldn’t like it if I were to-”
“Nobody tells us what to do, Parable, the Paedophile, Son of Panthalassa. Let’s go find us a child”
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