Blakely speaks of torture—but there is no greater torture than to experience a blissful taste, only to have the pleasure snatched away. It’s better to yearn for a moment unfulfilled than to know exactly what you can never have.
Her memory will weaken over time, becoming tarnished and faded around the edges. As humans, we’re not intended to recall every detail of our past in perfect clarity. We require the ability to forget. It helps the mind accept and move on.
The morning sun crests above the treetops, shining a brilliant ray of clarity over Devil’s Peak, making the night before seem like a distant dream. Sleep deprivation might also be giving way to less lucid thoughts.
At least, that’s the theory I’ve developed as I palm the glass vial in my pocket. The tube has three compartments separated by a thin wall of glass. In each compartment: Potassium chlorate, glycerin, and water.
I remove my hand from my pocket, acutely aware of the vial as I drop the threadbare sack to the ground.
Acceptance is a form of defeat. Once you abandon the pursuit to obtain your greatness, you quickly begin to whither.
I can hear my cells decaying. Membranes dissolving. Molecules splitting and devouring the necrotic matter. The stronger cells leech off the weak as they deteriorate.
Self-destruct.
This is what she wrote in the journal—that I would destroy myself. An insightful prediction, seeing as I’m teetering on the verge of just that.
It’s all their memories. The voices inside my head. Every failed subject that became a part of this place, a part of me. As long as I was chasing the obsession, there was no time to remember their faces. They were subjects—not names.
Creating a cure would save me from them, would justify their deaths. Without the cure, with only a failed experiment, their deaths are meaningless.
I dig my hands into the earth near the river. My fingers claw at the sediment, a rich soil that shouldn’t exist in this environment.
The ground is made rich by the nutrients buried here.
Chemistry is vital, especially when disposing of bodies.
With a resigned breath, I push my hands into the frigid river to cleanse the filth away. Then I begin to pry a large rock loose from the bank. I start with one, then a second. I select each stone with purpose. Size, weight, shape.
Fresh water rushes past boulders, shaving down rough edges as it has done consistently over the years, making the river stones worn, smooth. Welcoming, even.
This is the process. Take the hard and jagged thing and apply pressure and consistency until it conforms. Geology. Trial by trial. The scientific method. And if that fails, there is always elimination.
Eradicate the deviation.
I place the cleaned rocks in the sack and heave it over my shoulder.
As we are not primitive animals, we all have a psychological weakness. One consuming desire that renders us helpless.
She is mine.
The brightest flower, the intricate butterfly wing—she was designed for me, to lure me in, to make me weak. Trying to resist her snare was vain, and ineffective.
Do not touch.
Oh, I touched. I put my hand right into her flame. Then I begged her to burn me again.
Obsession is the eighth deadly sin…and she owned me with one kiss.
She’s a deviation. A flawed design. Yet so perfectly engineered for her purpose.
Eradicate the deviation.
The stones knock together against my back as I hike up the hill. The wrought iron gate squeaks open, disturbing the tranquility, a noise out of place in this isolated habitat.
I drop the sack near my feet and dig out one of the medium-sized stones. I bring out the pewter pocket watch and click it open, lay it on the hard-packed earth. The ticking reverberates against the bark of the thin pines. I watch the second hand jump, jump, jump…
I smash the rock against the glass face of the clock.
My hand trembles as I stare down at the broken timepiece. I release the rock back into the pile in the sack, flex my fingers. Sweat trickles down my temples. A bird flutters its wings too loudly.
The silence is unsettling.
A glimpse of Mary’s smiling face, then the image catches fire, smoldering into cracked, charred ash. All this time, I’ve held on to an ideal memory of her that shaped who I became.
A monster.
I hear Blakely’s voice as she says it, and I’m no longer denying the truth. Just as Blakely shamelessly accepts who she is, I accept who I’ve become.
When I emerge inside the chamber, I’ve been reborn. An all-new synthesis of a man. What I have to do has never been more clear.
I am a curer of disease.
My life’s work cannot succumb to one malady—one deviation in the design.
She’s my illness…and there’s no cure.
Elimination.
The loud thunk of the sack hitting the wood floor startles Blakely, and she looks up to find me in the one source of light beneath the bare bulb. She’s absorbed by the darkness of the room, but I can still make out her silhouette.
A thousand ticking hands, a thousand glass faces peering down, reflecting her beautiful face back at me.
I empty the sack of rocks.
“Alex, whatever you believe you have to do—”
“It’s no longer about what I believe.” I swoop down and select a stone from the pile. I turn the rock over as I inspect the smooth surface, the flaws. I chose this stone for her. I set it aside. It’s not yet time.
“You were right, Blakely,” I say. “Every beginning has an end, and we’ve reached ours.”
I hunt through the rocks and choose a larger rock, then I face the wall of floating clocks. I pitch the stone at the backlit clock in the center. The glass cracks, knocking the clock to the floor and shattering the face into shards.
“Willy Sturgis. Subject number one. Ten thirty-two P.M. was his expiration time.” I glance back at Blakely. “The time of his death. The time I killed him.”
Her knees are pulled to her chest, her eyes large and watching. She’s almost convincing of her helpless state, but I know better. She’s a temptress who will tear my throat out. She made me that promise.
I select another rock and lob it at the wall, striking the clock to the right. “Thomas Sanders. Subject two. I terminated his life at four twenty-seven.”
In a violent production, I continue to destroy the clocks. One by one, I break the faces that have hung in suspension since the conception of my project. Mary’s clock stares at me, the only other timepiece with frozen hands, the time displaying the moment I received the call of her murder.
I truly believed I was avenging her—that it was love for my twin sister that drove me to such extreme measures. Now, I wonder if denial for who she was, the choice to refuse to accept her character, was the driving force.
“In the end, we remained a reflection of each other, didn’t we?” I say out loud, laughing at the absurdity. My sister and I, twin monsters. Why didn’t Grayson come for me next?
Because that’s not who I was.
My fingers curl around the rock, gripping to the point of pain. I pitch the river stone at the clock and smash the glass, watching as the pendulum crashes to the floor. The room fades darker.
One rock left.
I pick it up and note the weight in my hand before I stalk toward Blakely.
No longer playing the victim, she slides up against the wall to stand before me. The thin shirt is still damp and clings to her body. She wraps her arms around her waist as she watches me cautiously.