“What do you mean?” I shouted, out of frustration, my angry voice reverberating over the dungeon stones. Then all of a sudden, I understood. I had buried that possibility a long time ago, even trained myself not to revive that thought at all. But now it resurged, like lava from a volcano.
“You mean...mum and dad?” My voice became louder. “You’re saying...you want to tell me you’re involved in their death?”
Darrell did not say a word for a long time.
I waited, holding on my madness with excruciating effort as long as I could, until it became impossible.
“IS THAT SO? SPEAK, YOU ASSHOLE!” I exploded.
But even after that insult, Darrell still said nothing. However, with a quick, almost imperceptible movement of his head, he nodded.
At that moment, everything looked very clear to me.
“Ha, nice try,” I dismissed him with a sarcastic gesture of my hand. “You must be really desperate if you’re trying to pretend you, like, are responsible for that. Why don’t you lock me in isolation some more days?”
Darrell’s expression turned deadly serious. “I may be desperate,” he whispered, “but this is not a lie.”
I shook a little. It was a bluff, I knew it. It had to be a bluff.
“I’m not stupid, you know.”
“If you need to be convinced, I’ll tell you all the details.”
“YOU’RE LYING! YOU ONLY WANT ME TO BE A GOOD DARKFIRE AGAIN! YOU NEVER DID ANYTHING ELSE IN YOUR LIFE!”
But Darrell had already begun narrating.
“It all began when your parents were keeping you in detention, after you caused some accident at your school. After a while, you dared reveal them our training sessions, and as a result, they prevented me from spending time with you forever. That couldn’t happen. Finding a Darkfire is so rare, we just cannot let that happen. So after some period, I consulted myself with the heads of our Order. I explained them the situation. You and I lived on the same floor of the same building, yet I hadn’t seen your face for a long time. We concluded that as long as you were under your parents’ protection, we would never get access to you, or even if we did, it would happen too late. You would enter into your teenage years and start becoming a man, too independent to decide to follow me, too aware of what taking the Darkfire route would mean for your psyche. We had to take you while you were still a child, with any means. Your parents were our obstacle. An enemy, just as much as the Apollonids.”
I couldn’t interrupt him at all. Despite trying with all my might to believe it was all a bluff, I just couldn’t stop listening to his story. His words just kept flowing inside my ears like dozens of spines.
“We took care of everything. We personally searched for criminals to pay for staging the robbery and then the murder of your parents. It took so much to plan everything: it had to look like a normal murder, like the one you see on the news. At the same time, we had to find some scum who would do the dirty job for us. But where to look for, without the plan coming to light? Then someone said something interesting. They talked about a place where, once taken all precautions, we would find them. So I took a computer and entered there. The Deep Web. There, you can find anything. The vastest markets of services that would get you arrested. You can even hire assassins to do the job for you. It didn’t take too long to find the men we needed, and once we did, we planned everything together with them. They would disguise themselves as thieves, while the Order would monitor the building we lived in, to communicate when you and your parents would go out. They never asked my name or why I was asking them to kill those people. They know very well the importance of minding their own business. After that, all that was left to do was waiting for you three to go out some evening, call the Order and watch the show.”
“Please, master...” I said, breathing more heavily “I won’t get fooled...”
“It’s you who is fooling himself right now,” Darrell said, triumphant. “Even after I abused you, even after I made you suffer so much – see, Hayden, I’m aware of what I have done – there’s still a part of you that views me as that gentle neighbour that made games with you. Well, it’s time for you to accept the truth. A Darkfire, to reach his goal, has to get rid of any obstacle. I had to get rid of your parents, once and for all.” He paused. “And I did it. This is the damn truth, and I’m not saying it now to make you hate me. Heck, I don’t even care any more if you prefer that fag of yours rather than doing your duty. I just know I have to try. But before I definitely declare the failure of my mission, before your negligence sets the world on fire, I wanted at least to free myself from this weight.”
I was panting. My fingers were making small movements on their own.
He didn’t look like acting at all...
“I am not a man of great fantasy, Hayden. Maybe another Darkfire with my same experience, but more intellect, would have found a more elegant solution. Some were successfully trained while their parents were still alive, staging something with the Social Services, or whatever. But not me. I had to act really quickly. It may be problematic and definitely risky as an approach, but destroying an obstacle is still effective to defeat it. Besides, such a plan would provide you with an experience horrid enough to better make you shape the vision of the world you needed.”
My parents. An obstacle. An obstacle to his plan. Their plan.
But still. Some part of me, somewhere in my brain, kept telling me it was a hoax. A cruel joke.
No. There were too many details in his story to really believe he was acting. But couldn’t he have just prepared everything long before? Maybe that same day? That made sense.
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“I don’t believe you until you give me proof. You could have invented everything this morning.”
Darrell looked at me with eyes full of hate.
“I planned the death of your parents. I didn’t invent anything! Either you surrender to the truth or-!”
“Shut up.”
I was shaking. My hands started closing on themselves, on the gesture that made me evoke the fireballs.
I wasn’t even caring about whether it was true or not. It was a frustration produced by love that was now guiding me. I had been abused for days, deprived of Douglas, deprived of a normal life, because of the man in front of me. Whether he had planned to make me become an orphan or not, it would have added little to the ocean of awfulness he was.
The uncertainty only fuelled my hate.
“You’re an uttermost idiot! Go to that fag of yours if it’s really important, and think of me while you burn alive while he’ll play with you with his-”
“I SAID SHUT UP!”
My roar of agony resonated throughout the stone walls and almost pierced my own ears. The smoke from the fireballs was intoxicating.
“DIE!”
I threw one fireball, then another, and then another, in the direction of his head, his chest, wherever his vital organs could be. Darrell could have easily defended himself, but to my surprise, he didn’t move a muscle. It was as if he had not only waited, but also hoped for my explosion. There was almost a glimpse of a half-smile as his hair was set on fire.
That only fueled my anger. Soon, the creature in front of me became a living, agonizing fireball. My hate erupted in all its purest form, not the ridiculous disdain I had been taught, but the true, destructive nature of hate that destroyed everything. The flames finally began consuming his flesh; his mouth was no more forcing any smile, but was wide open, screaming a pain of death.
The dungeon was no more dark and gloomy; it was instead resplendent, full of yellow light. The smoke was taking the place of the air, but I didn’t mind. His screams rumbled through the stone walls, creating a symphony of pain and horror. But that morbid spectacle didn’t disgust me at all; on the contrary, I was enjoying it immensely. It was the greatest enjoyment I had ever had.
Darrell’s figure was completely hidden behind the flame that touched every part of his agonizing body. The screams of pain became more and more intense, until all of a sudden, they were replaced by lamented coughs.
Time became liquid; whether it had been one minute, one hour or one day, it didn’t matter. I remained there, uncaring of the smoke hitting my eyes, watching the flames slowly extinguishing themselves until the thing they had hidden appeared in front of me.
The skin was reduced to black dust; the bones were now visible. Nobody could ever guess the dark thing that lay in front of me had been something sentient, except for its shape. In silence, I made two steps towards what remained of my master.
I laughed.
Just like a villain from a film, I erupted in a long joyless laugh of triumph, a laugh of victory against an enemy. With all the fury I still had in my body, I spat on the big ball of black dust, kicked it, threw more fireballs, did anything to rub my hate on that lifeless thing, like a warrior from a primitive time who had just won a battle.
“I’ll see you in hell as a winner.”
Slowly, the rational side of me started returning. I had committed a homicide, this time willingly. I couldn’t stay there one second more; there was nothing left for me in that cursed place. I ran towards the staircase. I opened the secret door. I ran towards the entrance room; Miss Ward was in the kitchen. I took my car keys. I exited towards the garden, where my car was parked. I opened it, and in no time at all, I was driving, directed to Plymouth. Drive, reach him; that was all I could think of. The death of Darrell, for a while, was nothing but a scratch inside my thoughts.
***
I rang his doorbell with my own fist rather than the finger. Only then did I realize how I looked like. My black shirt and my arms were full of all the possible kind of dirt one could think of: sweat, tears, carbon and, unmistakable, blood. But I knew once he’d answer my call (I did my best not to think if), everything would get better.
He could just be out of home, though. It was Thursday afternoon: he likely was still at work. But I needed him right now, and I couldn’t even think of the idea he would be away, for whatever reason.
“I’m sorry! I need you! Please! I am so...so...”
I didn’t even know what else I was, apart from sorry.
“Please...open the door...I was forced...open...I need you...I-”
The door opened. There, standing in front of me, was Douglas.
“What the...Hayden?”
I hugged him, delirious.
“I didn’t want to disappear so long!” I cried out. “I was forced...I was abused...I...I...”
“Hayden!” He exclaimed, hugging me. “It’s alright, I believe you! Just...just come inside!”
He took me with his smooth hands into his living room. We sat on the red couch.
“Thank...you...” I said with great effort.
“No problem, Hayden. I never stopped waiting for you.”
His hand caressed me. How good it was to have someone who did that to you, a sensation that only two other people had given me in my life. I could finally be a human again...have a normal life, a normal job, return from home and then have someone who loved me, without having to worry about whatever was outside...
“I am here for you, Hayden.” He brought my head to his chest, where I was sobbing. “You can explain me later. Now, I’m going to take you to the shower, then we’ll rest together.”
He accompanied me to his bathroom, where a wonderful shower cabin was waiting to purify my skin from the filth of the last weeks. After I got out, we sat back on the sofa, and stayed like that for who knows how long, in silence, in need of nothing else but our bodies being in contact. I wasn’t hating the world any more. Now my world became Douglas. Only Douglas and the sofa where we lay.
Rapidly, I closed my eyes and fell asleep, exhausted for the emotions, while my love caressed my black hair.
***
When I woke up, the clock indicated it was evening. Douglas wasn’t on the sofa, but in front of me, with a plate of chocolate biscuits and some milk, while his TV was turned on. “For you, my dear,” he smiled, while the screen showed images of people escaping in a large crowd.
“What’s that?”
“Oh...it seems there has been a terrorist attack in Manchester today, so I was looking at the news.” He turned off the TV. “It isn't important for now. All that matters is that you get better.” He sat on the sofa. “Do you feel like telling me what happened?”
I opened my mouth. “I...” and nothing else came out of it.
He looked at me intensely.
“Hayden,” he said, with that tone that was at the same time lovely and demanding. “Whatever it is, I will listen to you. You don’t have to be afraid. I’m here for you regardless.” He looked at the window with the night city shortly. “But if I’m going to take care of you, I need to know at least what happened. Not the full story, I don’t mind if you can’t tell me, even though I always thought you were hiding something important. I never asked you further, because it would have been bad for both of us if I cared too much. But now, seeing you like this, after two weeks...” he closed his eyes and put a delicate hand on my cheek. “If you just let me know what happened, at least, it’ll be better. You’ll feel better too. You trust me, don’t you?”
I trusted him more than anyone else in the world. That was what I begged my mouth to speak. Instead, it said something else.
“But it’s horrible...really horrible...”
“Here, have a biscuit. You need something sweet.”
“T...thanks,” I sighed. “I just need some moment...”
“I’ll wait for you,” he said, smiled again.
All my mental defences had been brutally destroyed, like a sand castle taken down by a nuclear bomb. It didn’t matter any more what I had been told to do, to behave like, to be: my collapsed mind couldn’t defend himself from that lovely assault.
I began, inspired by the sight of the comforting smile of the only person in the world who cared for me unconditionally.