I never asked them questions, that was not my role, but I did wonder what they thought they had seen, what they expected to find when they came out to join me the first night. Some ancient wild man, I imagine, half seer and half tramp, bearded and elflocked, smelling strangely and speaking of wonders, no doubt, the mystic power of blood and sacrifice.
Not me, at any rate, they cannot have expected me. A young man clean-shaven and smartly dressed, saying little and telling less, mostly showing. Showing and again showing, trying to batter the lesson home by endless repetition: here is pain, feel its tug; and look, it cannot hurt you, do you see?
I was, I suppose, just old enough to be their father, though he was older. I was old enough to befriend him, at least, and their mother also; and so I gained the parents’ trust where I had the children’s already, secretly locked between my fingers. I never let the two intermingle, was never seen in public with the children and barely spoke to them under their parents’ eyes. Our private understandings were a thing apart, held separate for safety’s sake. I’d warned them not to know me, when we met; they took that to extremes, of course, as children do. They made a game of ignoring me, which I encouraged: learn through play I might have told them over and over but did not, never felt the need.
They did that in any case, only not fast enough, or else it was too fast. And so we’d come to this, where I sat on an upturned tea-chest and watched the boy dangle, listened to him strangle and murmured my mantra at him one more time. It was wasted breath, of course, but I had it to waste, which he did not; and it’s the first, the last, the only lesson worth the learning, the heart of all teaching. And so I tried once more to drum it into his head, to have him understand that pain is and must be divisible, distributed at will.
‘This is hurting you much more than it’s hurting me,’ I said, seeing how blood sprayed from his torn scalp as he writhed and wrenched against the rope. ‘In fact, it’s not hurting me at all. Every man is an island, lad: alone, cut off, remote. Aye, and every child too. That’s what you’ve forgotten all this time, playing games with your sister. My fault, I admit it, but it’s you that have to suffer for it. That’s the division, that’s where pain draws the line. I’m here, she’s here’ — or she had been; I thought she’d gone by now, though certainly she’d taken her time about it, almost too light to choke and I was no poor man’s friend to pull down on her feet and make it easy — ‘but come right down to it, you’re still and always on your own.’
Pain is divisible, and I felt none of it — only frustration, and only at myself. The blame lay clearly with me, that this delight was spoiled. There could, there should have been years of my slow sculpting, bending tender spirits to a new shape, training fingers and minds to a new sensitivity; instead I’d let them slip out of my control, and we all had to pay the separate penalties for my inattention.
Mine was the lightest, by a distance. There would be no consequences to me, from any of what I did that day. I was known only as a casual acquaintance of the parents, worth one interview perhaps, but nothing more than that. The house we were in was isolated, and had long stood empty; it had been I who found it and I who introduced the children to it, as a more private place to play than their garden and easy of access day or night, but I’d worn gloves from the first day that we’d broken in. To them it had been part of my mystique, they hadn’t thought to look further. Their own prints would be everywhere, but not mine.
Their parents would grieve, of course, and suffer with it, not knowing that pain is divisible, hurt can be apportioned. It’s impossible to teach the old. Give me a ripening child, and I will give you — well, an adult like me. Growth must be guided, from the appropriate age. The right lessons in the right order, that’s what counts. I can show them wonders, one by one. I can make a wonder of them.
Give me a child — but no, don’t give me two. Therein lay my error, I took on too much without knowing. I have learned, now, and they have paid the price. I took the payment, of course, and enjoyed it, yes; but still my mind makes metaphors of shit and vomiting, which feel apt to me. I had taken these children and trained them to be what they became; they went too far too quickly, they got ahead of themselves and ahead of me, and so it was my task to expel them. That I could do it as I did was a gesture, a generosity of fate, but the overriding feeling was pure disappointment.
I’m hardly the first of us to do this. My own mentor told me that he had several discards before he came to me; no doubt he had others after, I wouldn’t know. We don’t keep in touch. The thought that he might have discarded me too if I’d been a weaker pupil, or a greedier — that lingers sometimes, a tickling abstraction in my head.
These two were greedy, but only I think because they were two, and siblings. Inevitably they were rivals, they competed. Even in front of me. I’d seen them jealous, I’d seen them egg each other on. I hadn’t seen the worst of it, that much was clear now.
I sat and watched until the boy was entirely still, until his blood had ceased to drip. Then — satisfied but unfulfilled, a curious sensation that I’d thought I’d long outgrown — I lifted the hatch and lowered my feet to the ladder, wondering as I left them how long it would be before they were found, whether there would be time for other fluids to drip and dribble, to soak through the boards and stain the plaster beneath, some sign to mark my failure.
I closed the hatch and took the ladder with me, to delay their discovery perhaps a little longer, give the juices perhaps a little chance to flow. I felt that I deserved that sign, I’d earned it.
As I made my way out through the kitchen, I passed what they had left for me on the flagged floor there, what they’d been so eager to show me that afternoon: what had changed all my plans for the day and for their lives, what had led me to take them one by one into the attic and leave them dangling, caught short and out of order, all unfinished.
It was a boy, they’d said, five or six years old and wandering alone, adrift. They’d inveigled him with sweets and promises, the kinds of gift I’d never offered them; they’d held his hand and brought him to the house, to a game they’d played for hours before I’d come in search.
Hard to be certain what it was or had been, that wet mess on the stones. Meat and bone, so much was evident; and there were clothes heaped in a corner, the unfastidious might — must, eventually — pick those over and label him a boy. Whoever that task fell to, I hoped they had the stomach for it. There was other matter that had been tossed there too: skin, largely. Skin and hair, from an inept vivisection.
The body’s major organs were laid out beside the faceless corpse, though not in any order. I’d have thought the children better trained than that, but they’d been wild, ecstatic, long past caring. And drenched in blood, and heedless of that too. Careful as I’d been, I’d have to destroy what I was wearing; I could smell this slaughter on me.
Wearily, sorrowfully, I stepped around the body and let myself out of the house, wondering just how long he’d taken in his dying, and glad for once — for the first time ever — not to have been there to see it done. Pain is divisible, and his had been witnessed, not wasted; all the waste had been going on around him.