Flood comes into the room. He comes to stand over the bodies. Their breath is low and steady, and does not react to his presence.
There is another window here, over the bed, and here the curtains have been pulled back. Though beyond the window, Flood sees nothing but more darkness. No streetlamps and no moon. No strange edge to the way the absence of light lies over objects underneath it. Just flat unending black, profuse as hell. It is a different sort of darkness than that from which he’d come out of in the tunnel. He can feel no language in it. No sound.
Flood finds that, unlike all the objects, he is not prevented from touching the people. In fact, almost the opposite is true. He doesn’t know why, but he can’t seem to control his left limb from rising up to pet the long arms of the sleeping woman. Her skin is soft and covered in light hair. She is very warm. The man is warm, too. Flood lingers over both, caressing their scalps and tracing the veins along their limbs. They don’t seem to feel anything, or don’t respond with more than slight alterations in their sleeping posture. Their eyes are rolled back under their lids, jerking hastily under the flesh there as if in desperation for some icon lodged into the skull.
Flood feels a great desire to lie down. More so, he wants to pull the man out of the bed and stuff his body in the closet, and take his place in the bed beside the woman. Just to sleep some. He is so tired. It has been long years coming up to now. But the man’s body is too heavy to move, even an arm alone. Flood can do nothing to change the way they are; he can only brush and breathe against them, feel them, try to try. The woman’s face seems so familiar; the lips around the mouth, the groove of the neckline, the shoulders. He wants to hold her, to lie against her. Instead, he tries to wake her, shaking gently at her shoulders. He says a name he believes could be hers, could be anybody’s. She goes on sleeping, always sleeping, no matter what now.
Under their skin, the eyes looking out seem to see nothing.
Flood leaves the room. Coming back along the wall, he finds the child’s door has been closed and locked from the inside. Flood pulls at the knob and whispers into the gap under the door and no one answers.
Other windows in the house reflect the same black matter as the first. Flood can’t force his arms up to try to turn the latch or bang the glass out, the blood inside his arm turning to stone. The same is true of the three doors he finds leading into the space from outside; he can’t reach them, even the one he finds ready to be unlocked, the key left turned in the deadbolt for anyone to use.
He could stay in here forever, Flood feels. He could move from room to room and continue his life like that. He would feel fine here. Nothing would have to happen. The people could sleep and sleep and say nothing to him. He feels no hunger, no fear, no boredom, and can’t imagine having to feel these ways again. And yet he knows, inevitably, these feelings will find him, grow into him, change him. He knows he has to leave the house before anything can take his heart; to keep the feeling he feels now inside him, held inside him, untouchable.
Flood returns to try to wake the woman twice again without result before he leaves the house the way he came. His body passes though the mirror, and then, once clicked locked behind him, he continues back down the passage into different darkness.
FLOOD: Whatever else I can’t remember I remember was my eye forever.
They realize Gravey must be moved. In the streets and cities there’s demand, creamed in the people. The smell of the blood of the city says his name inside them. The people wish. The warden’s worried all the people begging banging shrieking fucking licking at the doors around the center will find some way to beat their whole way in, and worse than free the killer, kill him. Gravey must suffer for his crimes. All must suffer, all days, in the name they’ve built to walk and live among. The warden wants to get him somewhere undetected, with thicker walls and wiser locks. Four men in black suits come in and hold him down and stick his forearm with three different kinds of needle, leaking juice. Thereafter there’s a large amount of light.
Gravey grins. He blinks his eyes hard, feeling giddy. He looks into the men.
“My friends,” he says. “My me again.”
His forehead shudders, quaking in moonlike ridges.
The men stop. The men stand around Gravey in a circle. They watch him lie. There is a kind of smell about the session, skin in glisten. The dark clothes of the men begin to darken more. They do not look up at one another. The drugs in Gravey’s arm trace through his veins. His eyes remain open. He does not look at the men. The men adjust their positions in the circle without speaking to form another kind of shape. Gravey seems to puff up some. A smoke somewhere rising. Gravey gives the men new names. The names appear inside their head. The shape of them shifts again, again. The walls are wet.
The men leave the room. They leave Gravey on the floor there with the door open.
The largest of the four men walks along the long hall to the exit corridor. He comes into a series of other rooms and goes into the first room not already occupied with warming bodies and takes a service revolver off the wall. He shoots himself in the shoulder, that with which he’d given Gravey the injection, then shoots between the eyes. His blood runs from his body in a star.
The second largest of the four men walks along the long hall to the exit corridor into the door to the outside. He walks straight ahead from the building bypassing his vehicle and the gates, walks without looking in either direction into traffic across the main thoroughfare abutting the complex, causing two family-sized vehicles to swerve to avoid him and crash into several vehicles, which crash into several more. He walks four point four further miles causing similar dysfunction resulting in an uncounted number of accidents or deaths until he arrives at his home, where his wife and three-year-old daughter are napping in the smallest room of the house. He locks them into the house. He sets fire to the house using propane from the grill and gasoline siphoned from his car. He goes back into the house. He locks the front door, tapes his knees and wrists together, lies down on the floor there below the bed beside his child and wife.
The second smallest of the four men goes about his day; he feels tired but rather happy somehow, giddy even; in the morning he will make a routine visit to his physician, who will find a small blue growth in the flesh around his kidneys, and in the flesh behind his eyes.
The smallest of the four men goes into a break room with a telephone. He begins calling numbers from memory of the people and businesses he has known inside his life, dialing rapidly each one in an order subscribed to his emotion. He will speak to bodies, to machines. He will speak to the presences at the end of the line and give into them not a word but the Name of God coursed through him without sound. Each of the called will act on their own calls burned in their own brains until they have sent as well the waking message to hundreds of others, who do the same. Each person, having completed some precise number of calls already written, kills themselves with knives or ropes or pills or whatever way it is they always privately fantasized on at their grossest or most bored.
Gravey closes the cell with him inside it.
RUTHERFORD: [stricken from record]
INTERVIEW WITH GRETCH GRAVEY, CONDUCTED BY J. BURNS. 10/16/2
, 1:30 P.M.
JB:
Why did you kill [more than] four hundred and forty people?