Sins of the Reaper - 9

When I looked up at the sky again the sun was already heading for the western horizon. I was slow to realize I had finally fallen to sleep. But the memory of Portinari's chamber bathed in light refused to let me go. My eyes still heavy with sleep even as the memory stubbornly persisted, I closed them reluctantly, the room trying to slip with me into a subterranean consciousness.

But I could not sleep, the memories unlocked in the chamber were too fresh, too alive to suppress any longer. I knew when El's arms slipped from around my chest and the lights activated, blinding me, that it was Portinari's chamber even without seeing her sitting at the missing desk.

I had never seen the room lit during the other sessions with her and El, my disorientation so great that I helplessly wondered if the empty room was real or simply another illusion created by the soulless Madeleine, the darkened chamber veiled by remembered light.

Perhaps I had never left it at all.

Reaching into my pocket to reassuringly touch my apartment key I found an unexpected photograph instead, my hand trembling as I pulled it out – its image of Lilly smiling across the decades so real in the moment that I involuntarily flinched, the photograph slipping from my fingers and fluttering to the floor.

Her face in the picture reminded me even more forcefully of the similarity between Lilly and El’s open and guileless expressions. But it could not be real; no photographic record of either Lilly or Bea survived the explosion in Bethlehem.

I remembered its detonation with a kind of detached unreality, the resultant blaze of light far off in my mind – like a memorable scene in a movie watched so long ago that I no longer felt the terror originally generated in the crucible of the terrifying moment.

I remembered Lilly’s death in the same vacant manner, the details not so much forgotten as repressed. All of my friends died on that terrible journey of long ago save for Bea. And where is she now? She said Remember me and she I remembered above all but at what price? Has she remembered me? Has she remembered any of this?

And what of the people I have killed, all those angry, shattered souls who still shout with remembered fury in the stillness of sleepless nights? Will their ghosts visit me in the light of day now that I remember once more my past crimes?

Can I lay them at the feet of my makers and make them share the weight of these memories or must I bear them alone without the former respite of blessed amnesia?

But this too I already know the answer. I volunteered for the agency when I still lusted night and day for vengeance for the death of my brothers in arms. I volunteered to have a device planted in my brain that awakened a unique skill set only when it was required and repressed the memory of my deeds once executed. I recorded my acts of violence in the art tattooed upon my flesh, the symbols substitutes for the memories sacrificed upon the devil's altar.

Stripping my left sleeve I tearfully stared at the scarred and reddened tissue as if I had never really looked at it before, hints of colored ink peeking through the ruined flesh like guilty deeds awaiting exposure to the light of day rather than the remembered darkness in my minds. My thoughts began once more to shimmer with the sound of faraway voices, some shouting with deep throaty anger, others weeping with inconsolable grief, waiting, all of then waiting for my final cleansing immolation.

My body trembled with terror even as my mind weakly dismissed the reappearance of the long-forgotten tattoos as apopheniac delusion, my hands fumbling to remove my shirt and the undershirt beneath it, faint spots of unexpected color dotting my stomach where for the past thirty years I noticed only scarring before.

But in that moment, it seemed so real that I dug my fingernails into the flesh above my navel with both hands and dragged them toward my sides with all my might, trickles of blood following the pathways carved by my nails as my abs rippled and trembled with the pain of flames still trapped beneath the thickly scarred epidermis. Ignoring the reawakened pain, I made a second pass and dug even deeper as if the pink flesh beneath the scars might hide earlier and better memories from before the war that inalterably changed who I was and whom I once loved.

I remembered the horror of Lilly’s death as I fiercely clawed the scars on my chest and arms, her face appearing within my thoughts anew even as the ancient serpent emerged impossibly from the sarcophagus of my ruined flesh, remembered flames roaring high into the smoky sky above me. “Don’t turn on the lights,” her voice pleaded as if born from my burning and bleeding flesh, the returning darkness hiding her now invisible form even as I gasped for air in the remembered blast-furnace heat, my hands alternately slapping and scraping my trembling flesh as I shakily stood.

But this is not how I wished to remember her, my hands briefly stilled in terror as the remembered smell of rotting flesh overcame the charred smell of my own, Lilly’s pale and naked body faintly appearing on a bed that wasn’t in the chamber a moment before, her remembered voice alternately moaning and gasping with exertion, her body shaking like a caterpillar violently liquefying its flesh as I stared in mute horror. The trembling briefly pausing, the thing atop the hospital bed wheezed with heaving exhaustion. No, I helplessly thought, not her too.

“It’s not too late Jon,” her ghost gasped … “kiss me and live forever.”

The apparition beginning to weep aloud I screamed “Make it stop!” my trembling fingers defensively gouging my flesh from my lower back to my ribcage, the volcanic heat of remembered flames licking my flesh as if pain alone could banish the terrifying image from memory. But the ghastly horror of it was fixed and unmoving within my consciousness, mortification of my body powerless to prevent the unopened door from its untimely opening.

A swift shaft of invasive light revealed Lilly’s lidless eyes as they once stared in terror at mine, my fingernails pausing mid-scrape upon my cheeks. Where her lovely skin once shown a milky film oozed, her body spasmodically rippling as the flesh covering her bare abdomen tore helplessly away and I shivered with reciprocal feeling as I helplessly tore at my own throat. Her teeth bristling within her lipless mouth, her voice and mine screamed again in mutual horror.

“Make it stop!” I cried out weakly through my tears, the echo of her cries reverberating with mine in my ears and memory together, the room shimmering with the sound of faraway voices, some shouting with deep throaty anger, others weeping with inconsolable grief. But I could bear to see her desiccated flesh no more, ashamedly bowing my head even as I prayed for her to leave her death bed and embrace me with emaciated arms. Shakily removing my shoes and socks, I pulled down my pants and underwear before digging my fingernails into my ankles and dragging them violently upward as I wept aloud, the blood running freely from my hip flexors all the way down to my feet. Swaying weakly I turned and collapsed back into the chair, my chest heaving with sobs as Michael died again and again in my arms and Lily wasted helplessly away before my unseeing eyes.

True memories never die. They may morph or lie or change in small and indiscernible ways, but even if I cease to remember them their voices still shout with remembered fury from the marrow of my bones and haunt my sleeping consciousness as I turn restlessly in the night.

No amount of clawing at my scarred flesh could banish their remembered faces from my thoughts or still their weeping voices. Even though it was more than I could bear, the pain of Michael and Lilly’s final moments pulsed within my consciousness even as blood ran in tiny rivulets across the whole of my trembling nakedness, the former pull of anesthetization overcome in the moment by the powerful emotions born from the final session in the memory chamber. There will be no more I swear.

Leaning back in the chair in exhaustion I wondered how long it would be before the room returned to it former darkened sense of order and I could return to my apartment. But a heavy pounding on the door lifted my head from the back of the chair in surprise. It was only then that it occurred to me that the pale and empty surroundings were material rather than memory, the blood slowly scabbing on my aching flesh real rather than apparition. The photograph of Lilly laid face up on the floor – a few splattered drops of blood drying on its surface reinforcing the surrounding reality.

The door abruptly swinging open, “I remember,” I whispered hoarsely to the stranger who entered the room as if expecting him to magically understand.

“I remember who I am.”