Part One “The Sad Man” | Part Two “Amelie” | Part Three “Horatio”
Part Two
Three days before our night in the red room, with that strange man and the nightmare that followed, I had planned to confront Amelie. However, when she finally came home from her nightly escapades, I remained silent, all accusations drowning within me for fear of them being true.
That night, she seemed different, lively, cheerful, enshrouded by an unfamiliar scent, feeding my suspicions. I watched her, nodded politely, exchanged a modicum of words and endured the agony of uncertainty until we both retired to the room where passion was but a faint memory. A dreadful place, a shared bed, an imaginary line down the middle that neither of us would cross.
Amelie seemed too excited to sleep, stealing guilty glances at her phone every time it chimed, ensuring I could not see, but I knew, deep in my heart, I knew. What else could it be but another man? No. Not my Amelie. Maybe it was better not to know. I just wanted her back, the Amelie I fell in love with. The woman lying beside me, her back turned, was not her.
I did not realise then, but she must have had that cursed mark already and, together with Marcus, was plotting to convert me too, turn me into whatever I am now. A puppet. An instrument for the Sad Man, Lord of Despair. And despair I must, for what I have done, there can be no redemption.
When Amelie did not return the day after my nightmare, I called Marcus, only to find him missing as well. Had they run away together? A numbness spread through my body, and thoughts invaded my mind like countless crows descending upon their prey in a cacophony of betrayal. A betrayal of a different nature than what my befuddled mind had conjured me to believe.
Marcus had been a friend and trusted colleague for the better part of two decades. He would not abandon our research. Would he? For an affair? No. Our project had entered a critical phase, the Turritopsis serum war ready for live subjects. We were on the verge of a scientific breakthrough. Amelie did not see it that way. Who wants immortal rats? she would say. Life is meant to be lived, not dragged out indefinitely.
She hated my work, or so I thought, complaining often enough about it, the stench of necrotic tissue, the long and erratic hours, until one day, she stopped complaining, stopped talking about her day, my day. No more Good Morning, no Good Night. We would speak the bare minimum to register each other as occupying the same living space.
What happened? Where did it all go wrong? Or did everything happen according to some grand design? Lives lived on the irrevocable rails of destiny. Destined for greatness. An empty phrase, a cliché perpetuated by overbearing parents raising their children believing they can achieve anything if they set their mind to it. A beautiful lie tied to an inexorable rude awakening. One that made a small part inside me wish I’d never grown up, never found out. Never experienced the joys and pains of adulthood, the existential weight of eking out a living within the construct we call society, invariably prone to collapse once it has run its course. Of course, I found out, as we all must. I found it all: The highs, the lows and the abyss.
Amelie was my abyss. I followed her that night, two days before our fateful kiss. She was heading for the graveyard. An odd destination to meet a lover, I thought, while I pursued her like a hound frenzied by the scent of blood. I couldn’t stop myself even if I wanted to, knowing what I did was wrong.
It was almost midnight, and I was certain the place would be closed to visitors, yet upon her arrival, as she stood there in her white satin dress shimmering in the silver moonlight, the heavy iron gates swung open with a moan. She passed through, paused and turned, looking in my direction, and I felt the sensation a child has when being caught doing something forbidden. It was as if she knew she was being followed, inviting me to follow, to bear witness to what was to come.
Marcus was there. And with them stood someone else, someone I now know to be the one, the arbiter of my fate, of all our fates, harbinger of all that runs counter to what it means to be human. One instant, they stood robed. The next, their dark bodies bent in ecstatic shivers under the pale argent light of the midnight hour. Their unholy union was too much to bear, and I averted my gaze in shame and fear, fear that I had lost her forever to that… abomination.
In the stillness of the night, the sound of a shutter tethered me back to reality, and as I looked on, the three figures faded into darkness, and another appeared, holding what I thought to be a camera. Had this ghastly deed been documented? Were they mere actors playing their parts? Before long, I found myself alone, locked in, unable to leave. I did what any guilt-driven creature would do. I hid in the shadow of a poet’s tomb, covered in what seemed to be traces of lipstick, hundreds, thousands of kisses, boring into the stone in their vain attempt to reach lips forever silenced. While I waited for the break of dawn, I wondered what this once so disdained, now so revered poet would have to say were he permitted to return for just one moment.
The next day, sleep-deprived and unnerved by what I had witnessed, I swore to confront Amelie. She was out for the day, meeting friends, doing things I never had any interest in and now desperately wanted to know. Not knowing spurred the wildest speculations, speculations I sought to silence once and for all, but Amelie did not come home that night. She sent me a message saying she would stay the night at her friend’s place. I knew it to be a lie, yet I believed, I chose to believe, it was easier than facing the truth. That night, I worked until I heard the song of birds.
Then came the day she kissed me for the first time in years. I don’t even know how it happened. I was determined to speak my mind, but when she came home, she was Amelie, my Amelie. It was her, the woman I loved with all my heart, and when we kissed, all suspicion was wiped from my mind. I felt hope, hope for happiness, all else was for nought, and so we went to see the Sad Man.
Now I know it was not her. It was not the Amelie I knew. Now I know that all that has led up to this point was the making of one man. Now that I am certain, I know what I need to do. I suspect it was me, my hand, that had left that crimson mark on Amelie’s temple to purge her mind from sin. Now I know I have to put an end to this insanity.
For weeks, I wandered dark alleys, trying to find that door, that room. Nothing else was of any interest to me. I cared not for food or drink, sustaining myself with drugs, heading towards the end of my road, I thought, having lost everything, I would take my work to my grave, along with the life of the one who sought to profit from it.
After all the mysterious midnight meetings, delirium-inducing red room encounters, and crimson marks, it came down to petty corporate espionage, the only logical explanation my sleep-deprived and drug-addled mind concluded with unwavering certainty. Immortality, after all, is something people will kill for, that and a new pair of shoes.
Naturally, I destroyed all data and samples, not before injecting myself with the last dose of the serum meant for our lab rat, and for all intents and purposes, that was exactly how I felt, convinced I could not fall any lower. How wrong I was.
My ratiocination had one fatal flaw: my mark. Had I drilled a hole into my head? Had I left the mortal plane along with my love and my friend? I rubbed the scar on my temple, feeling the cold plastic of the implement in my hand, finding myself back in the room where I had seen Amelie in a pool of crimson, where Marcus and Amelie had vanished behind the red velvet curtain, where the Sad Man had reached inside me and removed something undying from within me.
There I stood. There, in the wooden chair, sat the man with the silver-plated skull. The man who had destroyed everything I ever cared about. He looked at me in silence with eyes like grey mist, the whirring of the power drill in my hand the only audible sound.
Read Next
A tale in three parts. Please find parts one “The Sad Man” and three “Horatio” linked below.
TFTD Community
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Chilling, Alexander. Some gorgeous prose in here, just like in the first entry.
Dark and mysterious continuation.
I will be rereading all of these once the final third is out!
PS you managed a "crimson" this week too ;)
Great story, Alexander. I was completely drawn in by the pacing and the movement of the character through the streets, through the mental twist. I was reminded also of Babette in Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” and her fear of death driving her to trade her body for the experimental drug Dylar. And Babette’s husband Jack experiencing the similar paranoia (well I guess its not paranoia of it turns about to be a fact) as he hunts down his tormentor. Even if it’s not a perfect pairing, anytime i can make a connection to DeLillo makes me enjoy the read! Thanks again and nice work throwing some crimson in there….i feel this may have been a coordinated effort with Nathan lol.