‘Stop,’ I said.
He ignored me, selected one of the nails and pressed the point against my index finger. It was razor sharp, immediately piercing the skin.
‘They tell me you’re right-handed,’ he said.
‘Stop.’
‘So, we’ll have some fun with the left first.’
‘Stop.’
He smashed the hammer against the head of the nail. I felt it carve through my finger, out through the fingernail, and split the sleeper beneath — then, seconds later, I felt the pain. Immense waves of it, crackling down my arms and into my hand like a lightning strike. I yelled out, the noise bouncing off the walls and coming back at me.
‘The hand’s a very complex piece of anatomy,’ Legion continued, his voice even and serious, talking over my cries of pain. He placed the tip of the second nail against my middle finger. ‘Twenty-seven bones, including eight in the wrist alone. Muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, veins, arteries, nerves… You’ve got to make sure you don’t hit anything important.’
My hand started twitching, like a dying animal left in the road. He watched it for a moment. Tilted his head. Studied me, like I was on the other side of the glass in a zoo.
Then he hammered the nail through the second finger.
I screamed out.
‘We’re going to kill you, David,’ he said.
I screamed again, even longer and louder, trying to force some of the pain out through my throat and drown out the sound of his voice. But he just waited for me to quieten. And once I did, he reached into the front pocket of his apron and brought out a syringe.
‘But first you’re going to feel…’
He raised the needle.
‘… what it’s like to be resurrected.’
I died quickly.
All sound was swallowed up. Light turned to darkness. Then the darkness changed and suddenly I was looking down at myself. My near-naked body frozen on the cross. The handcuffs on my wrists. Legion watching me from below. I could see everything: the top of my head, the nails, the scourge marks on my back. I still felt conscious. I could still feel the wood of the cross against the back of my arms, and my inner voice telling me, over and over, that I wasn’t dead yet.
But then something shifted.
A feeling washed over me, like the little control I’d had left was slipping away. And — as that went — scenes from my life began to play out. In the forest with my dad. Sitting beside his bed when he’d died. Meeting Derryn for the first time. The day I asked her to marry me. The day we got told we couldn’t have kids. The day she told me to find the first missing girl.
‘It’s perfect for you, David.’
Her voice again. And after her voice, a different kind of darkness: devouring everything, consuming it, until all that was left were the echoes of voices I once loved.
And beyond that, waves crashing on top of one another.
Like the sound of the sea.
Family
There were four in a group, digging flowerbeds in the earth outside Bethany. Across from them, a man and a woman watched. He was forgetting so much now — dates, faces, conversations he’d vowed never to lose — but he remembered their names. The man was Stephen, the first person he’d met when he arrived on the farm. And the woman was Maggie. He didn’t remember much about her. He wasn’t sure he had ever spoken to her. But he knew her face. In the darkness at the back of his mind, where he stored what he was determined they wouldn’t take, he had a clear memory of her, leaning over him, clamping his mouth open and taking his teeth.
It was early spring. The earth was wet. He scooped up a pile of soil and tossed it to his side. Further down, he could see Rose, the girl who had been punished, like him, by being taken to the room with the rings. He’d got to know her quite well. They’d spent three days in that room together until she’d been taken away. She would talk to him a little, tell him things — as much as she could remember, anyway. And then she was moved on to the next part of the programme. She looked better now — less grey, more colour — but she also barely seemed to remember him. Sometimes he would pass her and he could see her big, bright eyes linger on him, her brain firing as she tried to remember where she’d seen him, or what they had talked about. But most times, she just looked right through him, as if he were a ghost passing across the fields of the farm.
He pounded the shovel down into the ground and felt it reverberate up the handle. The fingers of his hands throbbed for a moment, and then the pain faded into a dull ache. He turned his left hand over. At the fingertips, where once he’d traced creases and lifelines, were patches of smooth, white skin. Wounds. Half an inch across and vaguely circular in shape. When he turned his hand over, he could see the same wound, replicated beneath the veneer of the fingernail. Except, while the nail had grown back, the space around the wound hadn’t fully — and never would. It dipped, like a groove; a bloodless, colourless patch of skin.
The last stage of the programme.
The programme destroyed and rebuilt them, ready for their next life. A new life free from the memories of addiction, and rape, and violence. But free, as well, from the memories of anything else they’d once done. Any places they’d been. Any people they’d loved. By the time the programme was over, they had no recollection of their first life. And no past.
Except he did — and always would.
He slid a hand into his pocket and touched the top of the Polaroid. He didn’t need to take it out. He knew what it looked like. Every inch of it. And he knew what he was going to do with it if he ever got the chance. He’d fought the programme all the way through. And the memories he’d managed to cling on to, in his pocket and in his head, they would never get to find.
He pulls up to the kerb and kills the engine. There’s a crack in the windscreen, from left to right. In the corner, over the steering wheel, he can see blood. A lot of blood.
He gets out and locks the doors.
At the front of the car the grille is broken, one of the headlights has smashed and there’s blood across the bonnet. Splashed like paint. Running across and down, covering the badge and the lights, the bumper and the registration plate. He turns and looks up the path to the house.
Through the window, he can see his dad.
He moves quickly up the path, on to the porch and opens the front door. The house smells of fried food. In the kitchen he can see his dad, standing over a frying pan, moving the handle. His dad doesn’t notice him at first, then — as he turns — he jumps.
‘Oh, you frightened me,’ his dad says. He looks him up and down. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I did it, Dad.’
‘Did what?’
‘Al.’
‘What about him?’
‘I took care of him.’
His dad smiles. ‘You talked to him?’
‘No. No. I mean I took care of him. Like we said.’
His dad frowns. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘We can keep the money.’
‘What?’
‘The money,’ he says, a little more desperate now. ‘We can keep it. We can do what we want with it. Al’s gone, Dad. I took care of him. He’s gone.’