The Soul Consortium (3 page)

A bright spot of life ejects from one of the millions of storage cells layered into the wall opposite me. It drifts in the air like a fairy caught in the breeze, then fires into the machine.

“Farewell, Salem. See you in forty-six years.”

As I was walking up the stair

I met a man who wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there again today.

I wish, I wish he’d go away.

F
ate must be the strangest among the gods. She manipulates the world with immutable will—so devious and cunning yet she stands aloof from her pawns, unwilling to flaunt her talents. To recognize her one must have a very special mind indeed. And to appreciate her? Well, one must be insane.

Of course, there are times during her most fickle moments when she will show herself plainly, but they are rare. Take the advancement of science as an example. Galileo Galilei, desperate to usher mankind into a new era, determined to topple Ptolemy’s convenient model of the Earth at the center of the heavens with the sun circling us, and yes, where Copernicus tried before him and failed, Galileo—he succeeded.

Was that supposed to be the end of his victories? Of course not! How do I know? The answer is Fate. She intercepted this world with such obvious intent to finish his work. Galileo, you see, had wonderful ideas taking form in that incredible mind of his, but Death, as is his way, wanted the last word. He stole Galileo from us before he could bear fruit. But our goddess, in a rare moment of weakness or passion, revealed herself. Many had not seen it, but some of us now do. On the day Galileo Galilei died in January 1642, the fruit that had been pruned from his branch took seed elsewhere, and a little over nine months later, Sir Isaac Newton was born to continue the work Galileo had been denied.

You may believe this to be coincidence or mere trivia, but I know different, for Fate played the same game with me too. In the same minute that Zachary Cox succumbed to violent death, my mother gave birth to me, and my entire life has been a continuation of that man’s work. Zachary Cox had already murdered fifteen people in the six years before his career ended at my parents’ house. Naturally, I have no firm memory of that day, but I am well versed with the most dramatic recitation of the story, and sometimes I think I can hear my mother’s dying curse when I close my eyes to sleep.

My parents, Jack and Evelyn Roth, lived their quiet lives in a village in the north of England, enjoying a time of nervous peace after the Second World War. They intruded upon no one, worked hard for their neighbors, and were loved by the whole community, small though it was. My father earned their keep as a carpenter, lovingly carving rocking horses from the oak trees grown in the local woods; my mother painted them and sold flowers for the church. I should have been born into a family of warm roses and gentle prayer. But Fate had her cold eye fixed on my mother’s womb. She rescued me from that sickly sweet life.

August 17, 1951, changed everything for that village. It was late evening, a street party had finished outside my parents’ cottage, and the hearty enthusiasm of villagers with satisfied bellies full of wine and hog roast spilled over into song as they sauntered back to their homes. They knew my mother was due any day, and when she and my father had not arrived for the celebrations, it was assumed the big day had finally arrived and Dr. Maidestone would be overseeing the joyous event. Community spirit was high in those days but obviously not high enough for the locals to overcome their convenient ignorance of the violent screams coming from the Roth household that night.

Perhaps it was because the atmosphere in the village was one of such contentment or because the pink glow of the sunset lulled everyone into dreamy complacency, but not one resident entertained the possibility that the formidable Zachary Cox would be paying a visit to one of their homes that night. Why would they? Village life was better now that the war was forgotten—safe, quiet. It was time to bury the heartache of the past along with their loved ones and start appreciating better days. Nobody wanted to think about blood and horror anymore, let alone talk of such things. The murders they’d read in the papers were for other places. Not this village.

Dr. Maidestone had been sitting with my mother for most of the afternoon, holding one hand whilst my father held the other, both smiling and breathing words of encouragement. An ambulance was called when complications arose after her water broke, but because the streets had been closed to traffic, the driver took a different route through the back lanes and crashed at a tight bend; help never came. By the time the news came back to the Roths, my mother decided that Fate had granted her wish to give birth at home. She told the doctor it was what she wanted anyway. But had I been there to explain to her this error of judgement, I would have told her that this was Fate’s warning, not a blessing: my birth and life would be surrounded by untimely death.

Mr. Cox crawled in through the open window of the pantry when the contractions reached four-minute intervals. He was not expecting anyone to be home, and in truth, it is my belief that he had already begun to turn over a new leaf. I don’t believe he wanted to kill my parents or the doctor, but Fate obviously did.

In my teenage years I learned that Cox’s antisocial condition was brought on by the fact that he had been a conscientious objector to the war for religious reasons. The guilt of his survival and the death of his friends had manifested into a form of bloodlust executed with supreme efficiency and wondrous design, a skill I have since come to deeply admire. When the war ended, so did the murders. Nobody found him out, but as mental instability grew, so did the list of jobs ending in his dismissal, and Cox was forced to join the ranks of those who made their living through theft. Cox had chosen our village that night because of the street party, and I can only assume that the Roth home was chosen because Fate shined her irresistible ghost light upon it. Cox would end, and I would begin.

It was my father who heard the noise first. Expecting it to be an overenthusiastic celebrator, he reassured my mother that he would be gone less than a minute. She screamed her disapproval as he pried her sweaty fingers from his hand, knowing that my moment was coming, but he went anyway. The chaos and bloodshed that followed was regurgitated by the tabloids and spoken by grimacing mouths for years afterwards.

The whole scene played out in less than five minutes. Cox and my father crashed out of the pantry, across the landing, and into the living room like impassioned dancers, Cox clutching my father’s hair, my father’s strong carpenter arms wrapped around the murderer’s chest. Grunts escalated to screams as hair ripped from my father’s scalp; crockery displayed on the mantelpiece shattered as it met the tiles on the fireplace, and both men fell, thrashing against each other amongst shards of broken china. Cox cried out as one of his fingers snapped.

Maidestone shot looks of desperation between the fighters and my distraught mother as the violence came closer to her. Gripping her hand harder than she gripped his, blood pooling in the shallow birthing water, Maidestone shouted for both men to stop, but as the conflict reached its peak, only one did—my father.

He gurgled with the effort of movement, trembling fingers splayed over his stomach as blood spread across his shirt like ink on blotting paper. Cox struggled up as the victor, coughing and breathing heavily, and stared at the doctor and his patient with a bloodied screwdriver in his right hand and the look of a wounded wolf in his eyes.

Before the doctor had a chance to react, fire belched from the fireplace. In his last effort, my father drew the poker from the coal to slice Cox’s cheek with a wild swing. The murderer roared, but the attack only fuelled his rage, and with triumph proclaimed in his cry, he stamped his boot repeatedly into my father’s face. The clang of the poker released by the twitching hand followed the sickening crunch of bone against gristle and brain.

Only then did Dr. Maidestone, transfixed by the horror, make his move. He leapt forward to tackle Cox, and the two of them wrestled in the soot, blood, and fire, while my mother screamed a new life into the world, my own cry joining the crescendo.

Both men paused as the birth reached its climax. My mother pushed herself backward, slipping and splashing, wailing at the sight of her dead husband.

Maidestone grabbed Cox’s injured hand, yanking the broken finger, then twisting the arm so he could thrust him into the fire. Spikes from the fireguard pierced Cox’s back, and he arched with the pain as the doctor stumbled toward my mother, hoping his action was enough to stop their attacker. It wasn’t. Cox crawled away from the fireplace with flames leaping over his sweater to blister his face. Maidestone did his best to pull me free from my flailing mother, but Cox had already reached him and plunged the screwdriver into the doctor’s spine, stabbing with what little energy he had left.

“Please” was the last thing the doctor said before Cox thrust the screwdriver into the man’s throat when he turned.

Cox fell forward onto the wet floor and pointed at me as I lay there taking my first few breaths of life. My mother stopped moving and crying, and as the sound of splintering wood signaled the entry of my rescuers, my baby-blurred vision captured the last moment of life ebb from Cox’s eyes. My first memory.

L
ife between my first memory and my first murder blurred together like a hideous mosaic assembled by some lunatic using pieces of his own hardened vomit. Predictably, it was ugly.

The first few chunks of that depraved picture were set in place when I reached my fourth year. My foster parents, ever joking to their friends about my tempestuous nature, did not have the intuition to predict what I would do when left unsupervised in a playroom with the neighbors’ baby. It was only for five minutes, they reasoned, but for three of those minutes Donovan stared at me. Smiling and drooling, with no idea that Fate was about to use him as my first training exercise, the infant, two years my junior, tap, tap, tapped his rattle against his podgy thigh, hypnotizing me with his baby blues. I wanted to see how they worked. So I took them. Or tried.

I don’t know what became of baby Donovan after my distraught foster mother tore my bloody fingers away from him. I never saw her again after that day.

Finding new parents was almost impossible after that, but between seasons at various children’s homes, I occasionally passed to new guardians under increasingly strict regulations. But the harder they pressed upon my will, the more I pushed back, and knowing that my goddess had reserved a special place for me in her heart, I drove social workers and child psychologists to near insanity with every new incident. I don’t regret a single moment of those years. Fate forged me for the passions to come.

At the age of ten, they inflicted me upon the children’s division of Kettlewhite Mental Institution. And it was only in there, amongst the truly insane who had no life in their eyes, that I realized I had to tame my urges if I wanted to serve Fate properly. I wept convincing tears of remorse after each violent episode, performed well in group activities, and responded properly to the Rorschach tests—a butterfly instead of a torn throat, a flower instead of a cudgeled head—until I seeped into their favor and gained their trust. They released me back into the wild to new parents and to grammar school. I sat at the rear of the class, absorbing the insults and isolation, a tamed wolf circling the sheep, waiting for Fate to point out the strays from the flock.

I remember my first killing as though the images had been tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. At sixteen, learning to fulfil my calling as an outcast, I spent as much time alone as I could, and on that particular day, I decided to pay a visit to the banks of the stagnant pond in the woods near my school. I liked to go there before returning home; it was a good place for contemplation—a metaphor for my mind. I loved to stare at the green scum that covered the surface, thinking about how so many people had no idea what lay beneath the murky depths of the child they thought they knew.

An old tree overhung the still water, and from one of the thickest branches someone had tied a swing to it. I sat on it, pushed myself from the bank, and listened to the soft creaking of the rope as it swung back and forth.

Ten minutes passed before someone called from the bank, “Hey! Queer boy, I want a word.”

I craned my neck round to see. Graham Adams had his hands on his hips, puffed-out leathers, and a ridiculous quiff-rendered hairstyle that underlined him as a joke, so I laughed.

“Think it’s funny to upset my sister, do you?”

A pathetic fourteen-year-old girl in a pink dress playing hopscotch with her equally nauseating friends—she deserved what she got. When I saw her satchel by the classroom door I swiped it, emptied the contents into the yard, gulped down her packed lunch, then spat a healthy lump of doughy mucus into the empty bag. If any of the other boys in my year had done that, it would probably have earned him a laugh but not me. I got beaten up there and then by the Neanderthals in the year above me, laughing hysterically with the contact of each fist and boot. But obviously that wasn’t good enough for goody-two-shoes Graham. He decided to take it upon himself to pay me a private visit—the biggest mistake he could have made.

“You coming off that swing, or am I going to have to kick you off?”

I lifted one hand to my mouth and gasped in mock surprise at his threat. Then I laughed again.

Graham marched over to the tree, flushed with anger, and pulled the ropes. As the swing juddered to the bank, I fell from it into the mud, still laughing even as the first crack of knuckles jarred my cheek. Another punch followed as Graham’s knees pressed my arms into the wet soil, and then my fingers were at his throat, searching for the hard lump of his Adam’s apple. He shuffled out of my reach, stood up, and spat at me as I lay breathless with the water of the pond icy against the back of my head.