I glanced at the scourge, then back at him. He hadn’t taken his eyes away from me. Hadn’t even blinked.
‘Everyone here has made mistakes, some bigger than others, but we give people a chance to start again. In exchange, we require certain things. We require them to give themselves up to the programme. Completely.’
He paused, studied me.
‘And we require secrecy.’
He stopped again, this time for longer. Breathing in and out. Just staring at me, as if trying to decide whether I was capable of understanding.
‘Are you listening to me? We’ve worked too hard on this. Gone too far. This isn’t going to unravel because some no-note kid is lost in the ether.’
He meant Alex.
We looked at each other, his eyes deep and powerful. Staring each other out. Eventually he blinked and turned his gaze away, down to the wedding ring on top of my hand.
‘What you’ve never understood, David, is that our old lives don’t exist any more. We don’t have a space we can fit back into. We remove ourselves from society and we don’t go back. If you took one of these kids out of the programme because you thought you were saving them —’ he looked at me again ‘— where do you think they’d go?’
I glanced around the fridge. ‘Somewhere better than here.’
He studied me, as if waiting for me to correct myself. Then, when I refused to turn away from him, refused to say anything else, he started nodding his head.
‘Better than here,’ he repeated quietly.
Suddenly — just a blur of movement — he thrashed the scourge against my left leg. The tassles wrapped around my thigh. Circling it. Clinging to it. As they dropped away again, I looked down. A series of thin red marks were carved across my skin, tiny pricks of blood emerging inside them.
But I felt nothing.
‘It must be nice not feeling any pain,’ he said, looking down at my leg, then at the rest of my body. ‘Can you imagine going the rest of your life without pain?’
I felt a twitch in one of my toes. An odd sensation, like the nerve endings had finally fired up.
He tilted his head again, a half-smile on his face.
‘Is the feeling coming back?’
I glanced at him.
‘It will do. First your toes, then your feet, then your legs. You’ll start to feel normal again as it passes through your groin, up into your abdomen…’ He paused. Leaned forward. Pressed a finger against my chest, just below the ribcage. ‘It’s when it gets to here that you’ll wish you were dead.’
‘What the fuck have you done?’
He smiled. He’d clearly got the reaction he wanted.
‘We’ve drugged you, David. Well, actually, technically, we’ve partially paralysed you. Don’t worry, it won’t last for ever. But I should probably warn you that side effects can include sweating, salivation, rashes and vomiting. You shouldn’t suffer cardiac arrest… but, as with everything, you can never be sure.’
He pulled one of the thongs out from the scourge, and held it up to me. My blood was on it. Other blood too: darker, drier, stained on the leather. He studied it, turned it. There was more. The scourge was awash in it.
‘You know, I think some of this blood is Alex’s.’
He smiled again, a flash of darkness in his face for the first time.
‘The only way you can change someone is by removing temptation from their life,’ he continued, his expression softening — that same unblinking look. ‘The kids we bring here, especially the addicts, if we dried them out and sent them back, the temptation would still be there.’
I got a feeling in my toes again, stronger this time. A shooting sensation.
He leaned into me.
‘We promise them shelter. Food. Support. A family. But most of all, we help them forget. Forget about their addiction. Forget about their past. Do you honestly think any of them want to remember what they’ve done? What they’ve been through? One of the girls here stabbed a man in the chest after he raped her. Do you think she wants to remember what it feels like to have him forcing himself inside her?’
I didn’t reply. There was sensation at the top of my feet now. It lasted longer, like it was drifting across the surface of the skin.
‘So, we help them trade one life for another.’
He was still leaning in to me, his head at an angle.
‘Did you know that ketamine is the closest you’ll ever get to dying without your heart actually stopping? Users call it the ‘k-hole’. We mix it with a little dimethyltryptamine… and call it a resurrection.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘When we resurrect them,’ he continued, ignoring me, ‘some of the people on our programme find they come out of their bodies. Some see their lives played back at them. Some see bright lights in the darkness. It’s a symbolic rebirth. A resurrection into a new existence. A way to separate what’s been done in the past with what’s to come in the future.’
‘You’re fucking crazy.’
He laughed, and ran his fingers through the thongs. ‘No, David. The only crazy thing is that you think you’re doing good by stopping us.’
38
Andrew stared at me, his fingers running through the scourge. I looked back, conscious of the fact that they were trying to make me feel weak. They’d paralysed me. They’d taken my clothes. But they weren’t going to watch me crumble. His head tilted back again — a quirk of his — and then he broke out into a smile, as if he’d guessed what I was thinking.
‘I’ve spent a long time building this place, David. I’ve spent a long time getting the right people into position to help me. Surely you understand the need for me to protect what is important.’ He glanced at the wedding band on the top of my hand. ‘You’d protect what was important to you, wouldn’t you?’
‘The right people?’
He nodded.
‘Like that fucking freak in the mask?’
He didn’t move. Didn’t reply.
‘What’s right about him?’
‘He does what is necessary to secure our survival. We had problems at the beginning. He helped us with those problems. In return, we helped him.’
‘Was he helping you when he came for me in my home?’
More sensation in my feet. Both of them now.
‘He was ensuring—’
‘He’s not helping anybody. You’re not helping anybody.’
‘We’re taking away their pain.’
‘You’re erasing their memories.’
‘What memories do you think a heroin addict has, David?’ he said, his voice raised for the first time. ‘What about the girl we have here whose father molested her for eleven years?’
‘This isn’t right.’
He grunted. ‘How would you know what’s right?’
‘You’re forcing them.’
‘We ease their pain.’
‘You’re forcing drugs into them!’
‘We’re helping them build a new life!’ he shouted back. ‘We give them food and shelter. We give them company. They start again. They live again.’
Now I could feel the nerves igniting in my ankles and the balls of my feet. I looked down and saw my toes wriggling. Twitching. Moving.
When I looked up he was watching me.
‘You’re pushing it out of your system impressively fast,’ he said.