Modern Vices

The days of blindly navigating himself were over, and Adrian could only reminisce about the oddities that shaped his existence, at an age when he was too young to name them or assess their value. He experienced them as a sensor would trace the slightest sounds and motions, often without fear or judgment. But sometimes these hindrances did come, with a sting of urgency that he wished would cause change. He recalled the suspicious figures who haunted his childhood, taunting him with knowing glances, passing by him while he strolled with his parents through his hometown. So many details had become clearer, with a suddenness too sharp to feel human. He felt the rush and pain of self-injury, an act that harmonized the spirit with a sense of control, even though it was jolted unpleasantly.

These figures were the classic eccentrics of Ocean City, Maryland, who hid their stoniness, beneath casual and modern facades; their down-to-Earth nature was therefore annoyingly insincere. For some reason, they often wore glasses and didn’t appear to care for themselves. These men were either overweight or underweight, and sometimes wore fake, docile smiles that seemed to veil petulance. They were sometimes pale and stubbled, and walking or lifting seemed slightly strained with a tinge of sour reluctance and laziness.

But at some level, one always knew they could never be exploited. They had horrors hidden and shoved up their sleeves, reeking in the form of a bleak, nasty ambience that one could smell from miles away. At the age of twelve, during year 3033, he had seen them many times on television, giving speeches about their fight against America’s Christianized, Western society. They always claimed a drug could free these “poor cultural slaves”, from principles against sexual freedom. Whenever Adrian heard such phrases, he dared listen no further to the details of their theories, since he found them so tedious and unoriginal. He was disconcertedly aware that these people had somehow become important in the legal system, profiting immensely from increasing the prison population, incarcerating criminals for inordinate periods of time. Even petty offenders were treated likewise.

They also tortured criminals in ways that Adrian’s parents never shared with him. Unlike many children, his interest in the harmful or forbidden was intended to gain wisdom, wondering why murder and brutality existed. Were they spurred by too much passion or too much reason? Sometimes it was the most reasonable folks who seemed extremely detached, solely capable of opportunism or conflict. Both of these were hungry desires to connect, even if scarcely.

However, Adrian’s thoughtfulness did not aid his self-restraint. He was prone to theft, lying and witty irreverence that charmed some and angered others. One February afternoon, he snuck into Griffith Alliance Monastery (which was rumored to occupy these fanatics), and found a book mawkishly titled Death of the Old World. It suited the dismal office in which he found himself, though its silliness was no match to what a deep void the place resembled. He stood alone with the walls of peeling paint, and a faint pungent smell entirely new to his senses. He had found this book on the wooden desk where papers were spread about, seemingly tearstained and scribbled with illegible writing.

The book was dark-brown, plain and leather-bound, which seemed old-fashioned for the fanatics’ taste. He had expected something far flashier, and yet this book had a kind of biblical solemnity. Out of zealous concern and curiosity, he tried to sneak it into his pocket before he was thrown to the floor and held down, by a man screaming, “Leave at once, scum! I won’t let your soul pollute this monastery!”

With horror and conceited disgust, he strained his neck while looking up at his attacker, a pasty, pudgy man with his balding hair gelled back and a pedantic air of greed.

“I’ve seen you before! I know what you are, you piece of shit!”

Along with his office clothes and well-groomed appearance, the man had touched a tremulous nerve in Adrian’s memory; he was one of the fools who sometimes stood in the background, while the fanatics’ speeches were given, always mannequinlike as he listened. It came as no surprise or leap of the imagination, that this creature was one of them. Adrian was soon arrested, convicted and sentenced to five years in jail, after his attacker had embellished the story of this encounter, knowing full well what lay in store for the intruder. He framed Adrian as having threatened him with a knife, mixing in grains of truth to his narrative, which entailed the criminal’s attempt at theft.

At dawn the two doctors arrived at Adrian’s cell, with a kind of prideful sympathy about them as they stared through the bars. Their sorrow regarding their horrid plans, seemed mixed with pity and self-satisfaction, impure motives they couldn’t admit to themselves or others. They wished to believe that their sadness for their victim, was unadulterated compassion. As smug and callow young men, they were entangled with internal dialogue, obsequious to their own nature. The bags under Adrian’s eyes and his listless expression, were terror moving in slow motion; he had to hold it at an arm’s length, otherwise it would run amok.

The doctors opened his cell and led him down the hall to a barren room with only a counter, and its walls patched with mold. With a saturnine tone, Dr. Morrison instructed him to remove his clothes, including his underwear. Adrian confusedly followed his instruction, as he heard a tenor voice and footsteps entering the room. It said, “This is what I’ve been waiting to see.” The man came closer, who for the first few seconds, he could not distinguish as male or female. He had an ominous beauty too perfect to be trustworthy, and slightly impish like a clown. He was cleanly shaven, he had reddish lips, his eyebrows were a little too neat and trimmed, his nose was disproportionately small, and he wore a gray suit. He was a grotesque doppelganger of the feminine, lacking the essence of the qualities he mirrored.

After Adrian was finished undressing, the man pulled a needle from his pocket and instructed him to raise his right arm with his palm facing up. After Adrian complied, he injected it into one of the veins below his wrist. As the clear fluid entered his body, he became nauseous and dehydrated while a sharp pain erupted in his forehead every few seconds. When he tried to vomit, he couldn’t; his thirsty sickness worsened as the stranger gazed at him. The delirium, like smog, made a fourth wall between himself and his punisher, who studied him with an unidentifiable emotion that sent shivers up his spine. He just knew he had seen this feeling before, in people he passed in the street, in black-and-white films that he vaguely recalled, and in fleeting fantasies that flurried through his head. What was it? His instincts knew what this feeling was, though his vocabulary didn’t. Its peripheral trait was dreamily covetous, either love or hatred, though its deepest drive was unknown. But was it something he had that this stranger desired, or was it him; the totality of his being? His punisher’s desire seemed broader than just the will to inflict pain.

Once this fiend pulled the needle from his arm, he became dizzy for a few seconds as he staggered to the floor. This came with abdominal agony, that to his dismay, wasn’t gone after his giddiness ceased. All his symptoms epitomized as he writhed and struggled, trying in vain to vomit again. Then he slowly rose to his feet, weakly exclaiming, “I need water. . . Please, give me water.” Slouching and writhing, he advanced on his punisher and croaked, “Please, get me out of here.” The man was aroused by his tortured body and movements, as the hot and cold of sickness alternated. The shifts were so quick that Adrian gagged, overwhelmed by their potence and unable to perspire.

He staggered towards Dr. Morrison and begged to be set free. Though the doctor looked at him directly, he seemed as if he didn’t see or hear him. When Adrian glanced around frantically, he noticed the same gazes from all the others. He then found himself in the throes of a vision: under the hot sunshine he stood at the end of a dock, with the steep rocky shore several meters behind him. The bright day lacked the ghostly flawlessness, that he would have expected from such a hallucination; a biting sensation of reality crept in. Beside him was a boy, maybe six or so, wearing a laurel wreath on his head, a goldish brown loincloth and a grapevine spiraled around his chest and midriff. With his pointed, hearty countenance he viewed Adrian bemusedly, his head turned to him while his body faced the sea. He then kneeled down, facing the frothing currents as a white, apple-sized sphere moved about in them. It could have easily been mistaken as some item that had been sucked in by the tides, except that it moved with a life of its own. The more he studied it the more he could perceive its fleshy exterior, which shook gelatinously as it brushed past a boulder covered with algae.

The boy removed his grapevine and wreath and dove into the water, chasing the orb until he caught it in his hands. Adrian was wretchedly aware that the water was futile to drink, since all was mere fantasy. The boy’s alien, triumphant grin, seemingly possessed or hypnotized, was the last thing he saw before he lost consciousness.

 

 

 

Ideologue’s Inferno (New Edition and Theatrical Adaptation of “The Prison of Philosophy”)

CHARACTERS

PETER RAWSON – 35 years old, with round glasses. A sleazy former member of a New Age cult, who is now in prison for various kidnappings, rapes and murders. He uses a pedantic, philosophical façade to hide his psychopathy.

CHRISTINA – Peter Rawson’s wife. 29 years old, beautiful. Warm, compassionate and funny.

DAVID – Christina’s dad, who is keenly aware of the cult’s dangerous influence, and wants to protect his daughter at all costs.

MAURICE – Burly, athletic, around 50 years old. One of Peter’s fellow inmates, and head of the prison gang.

ANASTASSYA – Wearing white, eighteenth century French nightgown. Large eyes. Beautiful. Late twenties. Barefooted. She is a spiritual, supernatural muse who behaves as Peter’s conscience. However, she is not a figment of Peter’s imagination, but with her spectral powers, she only makes herself visible to him.

EVELYN – One of the cult’s victims. Twenty-eight.

JAMES – Forty. A member of cult.

MARCUS GRIFFITH – Sixty years old. Head of cult.

SETTINGS

1. A prison cell with a bed horizontally facing the audience, and a small silver table beside it. A toilet is to the left of the bed.
2. Basement of monastery with gray brick walls and ceiling.
3. Prison cafeteria with three long tables perpendicularly facing the audience. White brick walls and floor.
4. Christina’s kitchen. Table perpendicular to audience. Fridge stage-right. White tiled floor. Kitchen counter stage-left, perpendicular to audience.

Director’s Notes

This is a naturalistic play with attention to psychological details. The acting should serve this genre.

SCENE ONE:

(Night. The sound of crickets. The bed is horizontally facing the audience. Peter is sitting at the side of his bed that faces the audience, center-stage. A dim white light shines on them. Chopin’s Funeral March sonata is playing. Beside the bed stands Anastassya with her eyes closed, but he does not notice her at first).

PETER: My disorientation is ceaseless; I keep trying to fight through a barrier inside me, because I know I’m alive in there in somewhere. I’m aware that there are emotions I have ignored and dismissed, and now they are relentlessly wailing at me from a distance: regret, friendship, happiness, fear. But static keeps appearing in my head and preventing me from experiencing and surpassing them. I feel more self-aware than I have ever been, and I feel as if change is at my fingertips and I’m just about to grasp it. But then it eludes me. (Pauses). I feel your presence again, Anastassya.

(Anastassya opens her eyes)

PETER: Why do you continue to torment me like this? I feel as if you’ve secretly existed in my life all these years. And now you think you can show up here and change me with all your pretty phrases. It doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid.

ANASTASSYA: Your glibness won’t work either.

PETER: (Turns to her) Tell me the real reason why you’re here, lunatic! What do you want from me?!

ANASTASSYA: To use your terminology, I want you to come to terms with yourself Peter. I can’t bear this any longer. I am a muse, a spirit who was sent here for your sake, and in the world I come from, I watch the souls of your dead victims mourn their departure from the Earth, and your vanity that sent them spiraling into madness before they died—

PETER: This is nonsense, Anastassya! Let me be! How dare you come here and tell me how to live!

ANASTASSYA: I can only guide you. I can’t force you to rehabilitate yourself.

PETER: (Sighs) I guess we will never understand each other. But you will always be following my every step, hiding near me and making ripples in my thoughts and feelings, like some kind of parasite.

ANASTASSYA: You will bring about your own demise and a life of misery. I’m not going to linger around and watch that happen.

(Anastassya disappears through a doorway that opens back-center-stage, and emanates blue light and emits fog. The door closes and Peter walks swiftly to where she exited, looking at it as if he is trying to make sense of it. He then faces the audience as he looks at his hands while holding them up, and then everything around him in bewilderment).

PETER: (Quietly) This can’t be real. Somebody tell me this isn’t.

(Peter desperately leans against the wall and slides down to the floor, sitting and slouching in defeatism and confusion. He looks behind him once more, and then at the audience).

PETER: There’s nothing left for me now.

(Blackout).

SCENE TWO:

(Lights come on. Peter is sitting in prison cafeteria, in the table center-stage. Christina enters stage left escorted by two officers).

PETER: (Getting up and storming over to her) Ugh, what now?! Can’t a man catch a break. I don’t want hear the same sob story again.

CHRISTINA: (Angrily turns away from Peter and faces audience) Why do I even bother? This is absurd. You are clearly too holier-than-thou to own up to your mistakes, and I married you. Why was I such a fool? Why did I put up with this for so many years? You’re the same spineless coward that you always were, but I guess I had magical thinking, believing that you would turn around and admit how you betrayed me.

PETER: Look, Christina, I’ve got a lot on my mind. Please leave me alone!

CHRISTINA: (Ignoring him and continuing) Evelyn, my friend who you kidnapped and raped was only a human being like you, and yet you saw her as an existential threat, as if she had so much power over you—

PETER: I didn’t believe she had any power. Do you really think she meant anything to me? You remember her, don’t you? She was quite a character: the way she batted her eyelashes with that coy, mysterious expression, whenever she was in my presence; I hated her lustfulness. I always sensed she was trying to manipulate me.

CHRISTINA: How?

PETER: (Broods for a moment) That I couldn’t pinpoint. But of course, I never said anything. I managed to hide my disgust and behave civilly. Yet I always felt this strange urge to hurt her, whenever she spoke to me. I think it was that voice she used; she was like a deranged little girl who was desperate for my attention. I could tell she was up to something. She was also an intense, fervent critic of my New Age organization, the cult that everyone despises because they think it’s too eccentric, edgy and dangerous. We’re trying to purge Western Christian values out of our subjects (through drugs and indoctrination), so that we can free them from control, and let them indulge in desires that—-well, society wouldn’t normally allow them to indulge. We’re the kind of boogeyman everyone hides from—

CHRISTINA: Don’t be ridiculous, Peter! The real reason why you’re all feared, is because you’re a criminal gang! And many of your victims were not even Christian! Evelyn certainly wasn’t!

PETER: Yes, but she was just like them in some ways: she was one of those stupid, wealth-obsessed journalists who were against our sexual proclivities and completely obsessed with monogamy—

CHRISTINA: What did monogamy have anything to do with this? You and your gang of degenerates were raping women and children; that’s what she was raising awareness about! But you think anyone who calls you out on your depraved crimes, is not progressive enough, especially if she’s rich and upper-class! You guys call yourselves counterculture, and act like you’re a bunch of saviors who are gonna change humanity! But you’re the biggest tyrants in the country! Evelyn wasn’t a Nazi who was out to destroy you! You were a thug, and she wanted you to get caught: plain and simple!

PETER: Trust me, she was going to find some way to sabotage me! I wanted her to become part of my cult, so that I would have the upperhand: she would do all the things I told her to do, especially if I gave her enough drugs. Eventually, she wouldn’t need anything or anyone, including herself. She could just follow orders without thought or question. And even though we were somewhat close in age, and we weren’t biologically related, I saw her as my daughter in the spiritual sense of the word, which was she never aware of and never appreciated, and I wasn’t going to let her use me. I felt that she could be a future disciple, and that it was my responsibility to free her. I often tried to lecture her out of her narrowmindedness, telling her that the only reason why she resisted us was that she was brainwashed by her ridiculous family, who don’t care about anyone but themselves. They also hate radicals like us. After all those years of pain, I just couldn’t be silent. Something had to be done. I seized her from her apartment and took her to where I thought she belonged: the monastery that I knew would fix her. But she continued to make the situation difficult for me, even after I violated her. She continued insulting me, telling me that I was worthless, ‘cause you see, that’s what happens to decent people in this day and age. Those who have the best and humblest intentions, are smacked down by the airheads that this generation has created—

CHRISTINA: Once you’re done spewing jargon, can I interject? How much longer am I gonna have to wait before I can offer my perspective, and talk about how I was victimized?

PETER: Shut up! Let me finish—shit, now I’ve lost my train of thought.

CHRISTINA: (Snickers) Maybe that’s a good thing. You think way too much. That’s why you can’t keep your mouth shut. You’re full of ideas just bouncing off the walls. No wonder you became a charlatan. Instead of all this rambling, don’t you have anything meaningful to say to me? Can’t you feel remorse? Aren’t you aware of how deeply you broke my trust and faith in you? All these years, you’ve never let me in on anything that’s going on inside you. I never knew what you were thinking or feeling. Everything was halfhearted, condescending bullshit.

PETER: Okay. (Sighs). Last night, I felt like I could write out what was going on in me, as a way to take a step back from myself, and study it. But now the only way I can finally get this off my chest, is through some form of human contact, to keep my mind centered and rational, to keep it from veering off on horrible tangents. I started off writing these sentences, ‘My objectivity continues to decrease as my joy increases, since my will power is incompatible with my inner life.’ Then I stopped because I became aware that I was indulging. Now, I’ll be clear and honest with myself and you: I shut you out for a while, and refused to talk to you because you reminded me of what I was incapable of, the empathy, strength, decisiveness and will that I have suffered to keep up, but then I fail because of my own callousness. Even though I am sitting in prison, and have everything taken away from me, I feel the constant urge to take back the power I used to have, as if that’s possible. I want to rejoin society and dominate it again, with the help of my friends who destroyed my sense of self, and rebuilt it again in a new form. The more deeply religious I became, the more desensitized I was from others. But I disguised this with the pretense of wisdom and intelligence, and I wished that I could just shut out the rest of the world, without the need for anyone else. I could just turn to people whenever I felt they were necessary, but otherwise, they meant nothing.

CHRISTINA: (Sarcastically) Well, I’m glad that you care about me so much. I’m glad that all the principles you have said you believe in: benevolence, kindness, wisdom and self-knowledge, have somehow been conveniently inapplicable when it comes to you. I should have trusted my instincts about you the moment I met you. You were such a creep. How could anybody trusted you? I feel like I’ve been used by a lunatic who’s escaped from the asylum, because he realized that he couldn’t run it. I mean, who the hell do you think you are? Why did you demand that I give you so much care and attention all these years? I always tried to serve you. What did you ever do to serve me?

PETER: I serve no one.

CHRISTINA: Well, good for you. I hope that works out for you.

PETER: Don’t give me that smart-alecky bullshit, Christina. I’m trying here, okay? I’ve been trying to be a better person. It’s just been difficult because I’m faced with the fact that no one has ever done that for me. No one has ever stuck their neck out for me, and worried about what I needed. I am constantly told that I’m delusional, and that I’m trying to gaslight everyone else.

CHRISTINA: But that’s exactly what you’ve done all these years. You tried to make me think that I was blind or irrational. Your vanity amazes me! Aren’t you embarrassed? Don’t you feel any shame? The farther we got in our marriage, the stranger you got. All the times I ran to you for comfort and advice, you were checked out, distant. And whenever I argued with you to wake you the hell up, you were either calm and unfazed, or extremely hostile, to the point that I feared for my safety. But I always felt you had the potential to turn around, which was what exasperated me the most. I thought I had sometimes seen glimmers of compassion in you, but you stifled them like they made you uncomfortable. Please tell me that you’ve thought about my feelings just a little bit. I’m not asking for much.

PETER: (Scoffs) I guess you hide all this hysterical idiocy from everyone else, and save it for me.

CHRISTINA: So this is what it’s come to. After all this, after all your apparent remorse that you expressed during the court hearings, and after all the time I’ve painstakingly set aside for you: the therapy sessions trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with your mind, the series of inquiries about why you were acting so strangely and refusing to return anyone’s calls. I wished that I had seen this coming.

PETER: There’s nothing you could have done to stop me, even if you had.

CHRISTINA: I guess I should get going. I won’t torture myself anymore. There’s no point to this conversation.

(Christina exits stage-left, as Peter smirks and shakes his head)

SCENE TWO:

(James, Marcus and Evelyn are standing inside the basement of the monastery, to the right of the stairwell. Evelyn’s nose is bloodied. She tries to open to the door stage left)

EVELYN: SET ME FREE! SET ME FREE! (She bangs on the door). SOMEBODY HELP!

(Evelyn gives up and cries).

JAMES: (Ignoring her as he talks to Marcus) Isn’t it obvious Marcus? The police caught Peter Rawson a couple years ago, simply because he was too stupid to conceal his crimes, unlike the rest of us. We, the rest of the cult escaped the grasp of the law, because we were smart. We told everybody that we wanted the kids just for indoctrination, and we made sure to take liberties with them in places that no one had access to, which no one could see, like in these underground rooms and passageways for instance.

MARCUS: That’s not the only factor. We were also much stronger and more persistent than he was.

JAMES: Well, I definitely disagree with you on that. No one fought harder and fell harder than he did. He’s a unique kind of tough. He intellectualizes his crimes even more intensely than the rest of us, which gives him a coldness that I deeply admire. His female victims say he’s not the kind of tough that resembles courage; he’s just the absence of feeling. He only feels when it serves some purpose, like an automated switch that goes on and off. (Pauses). I feel that we’ve lapsed in our development. We were cowardly in having run away and hid from society, keeping our true identities hidden. So what if none of the law is on our side anymore? Let’s not run from the law any longer. Let’s embrace it, and try to get John and Radcliffe, those federal officers on our side again. As long as they support us, we’ll never be prosecuted no matter how hard our victims fight in court, just like it was in the past before they were brainwashed and turned against us. They agreed that so many Americans were a bunch of God-fearing maniacs. They weren’t fazed by all the crimes we were committing.

MARCUS: Let’s not be too hasty in our decisions either. We must be as discreet as possible. Otherwise we won’t survive.

 

JAMES: But we must get those federal officers on our side, so that we can enhance the cult’s power, without any worries that we will be brought to that artificial construction of justice that everyone talks about. See, that is the downside of us being brought into the world. We have to be subjected to the establishment, and all these human follies, and made to feel that if we don’t submit to them, that we are too vain and simplistic.

 

MARCUS: That’s enough talk. What should we do now? Are there any other alternatives, which will substitute the agony that we have suffered all these years?

 

JAMES: (Scoffs) What pain have we suffered? Our lives have been well-rounded—cruel but well-rounded, and I agree with your sentiments. We no longer need to conceal our true identities. We need to face our adversaries fearlessly, and we won’t tolerate these animalistic, primitive people who are trying to keep us down. We are much more daring than all these idiots who surround us. We need to fight them to the death. If the police find us, we’ll kill them. I hope they and their families get as much hell as they deserve. Most human beings, except our little circle, are psychologically maladaptive and selfish. I hope that one day, we can depopulate the planet, leaving only us left. They don’t recognize genius; they’re too caught up in their materialistic views. There are far too many of them, fraught with masculine, oppressive values.

 

EVELYN: (To James and Marcus) SET ME FREE! PLEASE!

JAMES: Keep it down, Evelyn.

EVELYN: WHILE I’M FORCED TO STAND HERE AND SUFFER, YOU GUYS TALK ABOUT NONSENSE!

(James slowly approaches her with a sadistic, sanctimonious expression).

JAMES: Evelyn, you’re going to have to earn the respect you want. Your worth is in your actions.

EVELYN: I’ve done nothing to deserve this! All I’ve done is just watch myself waste away every day!

JAMES: Please don’t insult my intelligence. Appealing to sympathy is a logical fallacy, as I’ve explained to you before.

(Marcus laughs harshly and salaciously, as he comes up behind her and gropes her breasts).

MARCUS: No wonder Peter was obsessed with you. You’re cruel, and you’re also an enigma.

(Evelyn tries to push him away but he slaps her in the face. He unbuttons her skirt as James holds her back, to stop her from running away. She eventually escapes and pulls a knife from her pocket).

EVELYN: If you don’t set me free I’ll kill myself right here!

(James runs over to her and tries to yank it out of her hand).

 

JAMES: YOU COWARD! HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN YOUR PLACE?!

 

(The knife falls out of her hand as she resists, and he chases her to the corner of the room, grabbing her neck).

 

JAMES: Stop this absurdity right now! I’ve been your spiritual guide for so long. Are you going to abandon me like this?!

 

EVELYN: You’re nobody! You’ve destroyed my life! You’ve destroyed everything!

 

(Evelyn runs over to the knife, grabs and stabs herself in the chest and falls dead, before James can stop her. There is then silence as James and Marcus furiously gaze at her body).

 

JAMES: She betrayed me, even though she had so much potential. But instead she decided to waste it.

 

(Marcus picks her up)

 

MARCUS: Let’s get her out of here.

 

JAMES: Let’s just stay and relax here first. We’ve had a lot to deal with.

 

(Marcus puts her back down).

 

JAMES: (Looking back at Evelyn’s body) The egocentricity of youth these days is appalling. More of them should live with far more austerity and asceticism like us. We’re living in a land of lost souls. When I wake up every morning, I ask myself, ‘How the hell did we get here?’

 

MARCUS: (Wistfully shaking his head) I wish I could answer that question. I try to put these issues at the back of my mind.

 

JAMES: Do you ever think that we could get past it all?

 

MARCUS: No, most likely not, but we may as well keep trying.

 

JAMES: (Pause) Have you ever wondered about all the reasons why we’re doing this? Are we really driven by a force that’s bigger than ourselves? Or is that just an illusion?

 

MARCUS: I don’t think it’s an illusion. I think it’s a legitimate feeling. It never feels like there’s enough time to accomplish everything though. I always feel like someone is around the corner, ready to drag us down.

 

JAMES: That’s ridiculous. Why would you think that? Even though none of the law is on our side anymore, we still have a great deal of status and recognition. If we can get enough admiration, even if it’s false and sycophantic, we can avoid incarceration forever. We can secretly work within the government, so that any decisions we make will be disguised with a political mask that no one will question. There’s no limit to our capacity for influence, and our philosophical understanding.

 

MARCUS: Don’t be sanguine though. We’re not invincible.

 

(James picks up Evelyn’s body).

 

JAMES: Alright, I’m done for the day. Let’s take out the trash.

 

(James unlocks the door stage left and they exit).

 

SCENE THREE:

 

(Lights come on. Peter is sitting in prison cafeteria, in the table center-stage. He sits at the end of the table as he faces the audience. Another inmate, Paul, sits next to him. Two prison guards stand beside each other stage right, and survey the crowd. Maurice Gibson is walking through the crowd with a fierce expression, and occasionally flashing contemptuous looks at Peter, who pretends not to notice him as he pathetically eats with his head lowered, like a sickly, downtrodden dog)

 

PETER: What a monotonous day it’s been. When will I ever get the respect I deserve? I feel like I’m trapped in an alien world, where my intelligence is being insulted by a bunch of automatons with no will or mind of their own. I wish I could just sink into the floor, or fall into a coma for an indefinite period of time. But I am trapped here having to face the reality of other people, who don’t know how to think for themselves, and don’t know how to contribute to society.

 

(Maurice sits down at the table next to his, and angrily bites into his sandwich while he looks around him in a paranoid, arrogant fashion, as if he perceives a threat. He is sitting at the end of the table, and facing the audience).

 

MAURICE: (To one of the inmates) There’s Peter over there.

 

PETER: I’ve gotta tell you Paul, it’s strange. I feel across between depressed and ecstatic—it’s like that feeling you get when you’re starving but you’ve drunk a lot of caffeine. I guess I’m just adjusting to this place, and I don’t know how to handle myself. I keep telling myself, ‘Just be a gentleman, and don’t get into any trouble.’ But you know me, I’m always on the verge of doing something zany and unpredictable. I guess I’m addicted to scaring myself, ‘cause my existence is so small. I want some surprises, and every day I’m faced with the fact that I have to create my own reality; it’s ironically more damning for me to know that it if it always remains the same, I am the only one at fault. Since it is all in my hands, I feel more powerless. I feel like my environment could give me more freedom than I could provide myself, and yet it never does.

 

PAUL: Well, that’s just human. Don’t worry about that. I’ve given up trying to manage myself. I just wait to see where my feelings take me, and there’s something calming about that.

 

PETER: I’ve been in a frenzy these days. I’m starting to think that the freedom I yearn isn’t real. I’m stuck with the endless banter around me, the sounds of people talking behind my back, and describing me in ways that I don’t recognize, as if I’ve never existed in my own body, or controlled my own actions. They say I’ve been heartless, but I don’t know what that truly means. To me that word is old-fashioned and poetic, the kind of term that bigots used against revolutionaries. Everyone thinks I oppress them, but I am indeed the most oppressed individual there is. People despise me because I represent an idea: spiritual independence.

 

PAUL: (Rolls his eyes) You’ve been part of an elite circle for a third of your life already. What oppression are you talking about?

 

PETER: People look at me like I’m some kind of specimen, a monster who doesn’t belong their little cliques that they’ve formed. I, in particular, am an intellectual with the ability to be unbiased, and therefore I am morally superior. I just have some issues with self-control.

 

(Chopin’s Funeral March comes on again as Anastassya enters stage-right, accompanied by Andrew’s ghost. They approach Peter, but no one else sees them except him. Peter anxiously looks at them)

 

PETER: (Quietly) Please leave and give me some peace.

 

PAUL: Who are you talking to?

 

ANASTASSYA: (To Peter) When you killed them, you lost all sight of yourself. You don’t represent an idea. You represent nothing. You are just a bare skeleton of a human being.

 

PETER: Don’t madden me like this!

 

(Maurice notices Peter doing what he perceives as talking to nothingness)

 

MAURICE: (Laughing harshly and talking to the other inmates) That nutjob is at it again!

 

(Anastassya somberly exits stage-left and the music fades, and Peter quickly exits stage-right. Lights fade).

 

SCENE FOUR:

 

(Christina is sitting in the kitchen, at the table with David, and they are both facing the audience).

 

CHRISTINA: Dad, it’s too late now. Evelyn is dead, and on top of it I can’t have her killer prosecuted. The cult now has all of the law on their side. It’s even worse than before.

 

DAVID: This is hell. What are we going to do when the cult becomes globally influential. Then we’ll really be screwed. Let’s just hope that eighty percent of the world’s countries don’t get economically and physically destroyed like they have in the past, because of constant wars.

 

CHRISTINA: I’d like to think that we’ve got enough prowess and knowledge to prevent them from destroying the planet, but on the other hand, I keep thinking that maybe in spite of the cult’s buffoonery and unrealistic ideas, they still have some ability to be cunning and clever, in which case they will be much harder to defeat. I feel that at the end of the day, the situation is utterly hopeless.

 

DAVID: Don’t give up that quickly. I’m sure there’s a solution. We just have to expand our horizons, and expand our perspective so that we have more latitude, and we can face these pseudo-academics and stupid politicians, with gusto. I’ve never condoned violence in the past, but I’m starting to feel that it’s the only option. These people we’re dealing with, resemble the demons that people used to warn the population about, and those people used to be laughingstocks to us, since they never tried to appear charming and agreeable. They were just blunt and honest.

 

CHRISTINA: Yes, I know exactly what you mean. It feels like honesty is a sin nowadays. I wish that I could just flee the country; I wish it were that simple. But I have to stay here and figure out how to overthrow these people, since now, they seem to be leaking into the government. I was hoping they would stay out of politics, since they are religious fanatics with seemingly no interest in real affairs, or people’s well-being and prosperity. They’re like every other intellectual elite group; they don’t see other people as real. They only see them as a string of ideas and theories that they can apply whenever convenient.

 

(The door stage right opens and policeman storms in).

 

POLICEMAN: Christina, you’re under arrest.

 

CHRISTINA: W-What happened? What’s going on? What is—

 

POLICEMAN: You’ve been spreading false information about Marcus Griffith and Peter Rawson’s organization.

 

CHRISTINA: No! This isn’t right! I swear! Everything I said was true! They killed my friend Evelyn! There is mountains of evidence for their crimes! Please!

 

(Christina gets up and moves away from him as he advances on her, holding the handcuffs).

 

DAVID: LEAVE HER ALONE! THIS IS ALL WRONG! YOU’VE GOT IT ALL WRONG! THERE’S PLENTY OF EVIDENCE, I SWEAR!

 

POLICEMAN: You’re only making this harder on yourself, Christina. Just come with me. It’s over.

 

(Policeman tries to handcuff her but she punches him in the face and runs away. He chases her and pins her to the floor. He handcuffs her and she keeps resisting, beginning to suffocate under his weight and physical exertion).

 

DAVID: YOU’RE KILLING HER! STOP!

 

(She continues to resist until she suffocates and dies. Noticing that she’s stopped resisting, the policeman pulls her up and notices that she is limp, responseless and that the life has left her eyes. David agitatedly runs over to her, weeping as she crumples to the floor after the police officer tries to get her to stand. David feels her pulse and checks her heartbeat, and tries to rescuscitate her by pushing on her chest).

 

DAVID: Come on Christina! Come on! You can do it!

 

(David eventually stops when he realizes she’s dead).

 

DAVID: (Screams) NOOOOO!

 

POLICEMAN: (Quietly) You’ve seen this coming, you’ve seen this coming all along. This should come as no surprise. You stay here to clean up the mess. I’ll have no part in this any longer, and don’t try to get the law involved. They won’t do a damn thing.

 

(Policeman coldly gazes at David weeping)

 

POLICEMAN: You’ve all brought this on yourselves.

(Policeman exits through the door and lights fade).

 

SCENE FIVE:

 

(For a few moments Peter is silently standing in his cell beside his bed, facing the audience. Anastassya stands behind him but is visible to audience, while she has her eyes closed).

 

PETER: In my conceit, I never saw the world as it was. I was lost in solipsism and now my wife is dead because of it. The only way I could finally reach into myself, get in touch with my emotions and acknowledge them completely, was through some kind of tragedy. Nothing else could get me to awaken. Why does it always require the worst to transition into enlightenment? It feels like some kind of punishment from the universe, whenever things play out that way. I want to believe that I made it all on my own, without the spite of fate or human experiences. Why don’t I ever get a chance?! Why does it have to end this way?! I’ve tried to do so much for humanity, and yet I was always pushed into a corner by society, and made to look like a fool. Christina could have worked things out with me, but instead she took the coward’s way out. What an idiot! I should have predicted this. She never listened to me, and continued with her brainwashed rhetoric. Now, I’m at a crossroads. I could either worsen or rehabilitate myself. I’m too afraid to change. I don’t know what it entails. Paralysis is the only way I feel safest, since inaction is my newest solace: it’s better I have the Devil I know than the Devil I don’t.

 

ANASTASSYA: This was what I always warned you about. But now you must deal with the ramifications. It is all in your hands.

 

(Peter sits on the bed breathing furiously, and then bends over weeping. Blackout).

 

 

Suspicions of the Underworld

He wished that he could hurry to Monica Hallworth and spill all these buried fragments of knowledge to her, hopefully surfacing his memories in wholeness, clarity and accuracy. He felt that her nurse-like attributes were fit for the most intimate issues. He even craved that slight embarrassment of letting his guard down, that bare and infantile sensation.

Meanwhile, Monica was heading up to the lounge, wondering why she had seen several police officers throughout her journey from the office. In the atmosphere below, she and her employees felt deprived of a force that they hadn’t noticed until its absence; an unblemished, watchful presence that had dissipated. Who had been following their every step, feeling the weight of their successes and failures and then retreating into the unknown? Why would such a thought even occur to her?

As she came closer to the lounge’s doorway, she felt as if she was travelling back in time. She was so torn apart by the demands of the modern age, in all its nonsense and incoherence, that recreation looked primal in comparison. When she reached the entrance, she almost expected to see an ancient race, centuries before its extinction, relishing its mindless paradise and drinking its nectars.

For a month she had been receiving reports of inexplicably broken machines, and other suspicious sightings that she pondered endlessly. Several employees had seen the man who Adrian encountered at seventeen, and had kept envisioning while he drank and tried to escape from his existence. But when her employees witnessed him, he was wearing a yellow suit with a fresh bloodstain a little larger than his head, on his upper back. While he strolled through the passageways, the Nordic woman who Dmitri and his friends had seen, was clinging onto his arm. She was begging him to give her another chance, for an unknowable reason. She was wearing a long-sleeved purple shirt, and jeans that were ripped all over, and she had the slight smell of alcohol. But in spite of her pleas, the man had a fishlike blankness that Dmitri would have known too well. This sighting always occurred a few minutes before any employee came across a broken machine, just like the other sighting in which the man accompanied a little girl. She looked about four, and she followed him with a zombified gait. Her orange hair sharply contrasted her sickly hue, as she sometimes glanced at him with a trepidatious reverence.

Whenever Monica heard of all these details, she hated this stranger as a dog would smell and respond to insidiousness, detecting a threat before anyone else. When she entered, she saw Adrian walking towards her, looking angry, irresolute and disengaged with anything around him.

Eric

Freedom with a moral basis suddenly seemed false, like a disguised tyranny that would lead to his demise. Like Dmitri he felt that happiness, if too conscious of itself, lost its power and meaning through time, and perhaps even immediately. Pleasure was the only kind of happiness that functioned with a will of its own, with no form or vision, as if it were an accident. But the difference between Adrian and Dmitri, is that Dmitri still wanted a moral basis for liberty.

But even as his drunkenness became more possessive, another dislocated memory entered uninvited. He kept seeing Marcus Griffith’s much younger brother Eric in his mind. Eric looked similar to Marcus except for his blond curly hair, and the dazzled quality of one who had ventured through dangerous territories, that had enlightened him and softened his pride. The look gave him a pleasant musicality, though it portrayed madness and exhaustion. Adrian knew him as the antithesis of Marcus, given his compassion and empathy. He even vaguely recalled that Eric, at nineteen, had been trying to prosecute his brother’s criminal organization, while they were systematically abusing Adrian.

The fifth time Eric appeared he was standing on his knees in a stone dungeon, looking at him with that same shadowy humble wisdom. Then Adrian returned to his senses as he saw the paramedics guide the boy towards the door, as he held Sylvia’s hand. Adrian bent his head down and rubbed his forehead, by circularly moving his thumb and top fingers while alternately moving them close and far apart. Tension was building in his forehead; a pithy stage in his life that been placed in a barely retrievable place inside him, was now fighting its way into his conscious existence.

Adrian’s Repressed Memories

Behind Sylvia stood the two other paramedics, young Indian women with a majestic patience about them. Adrian was on the other side of the bar and across from them, noticing the boy’s escape from the depressive solipsism of sickness. The crowd that surrounded him, in all its loud hedonistic glory, did not obscure such a climax. Though he could not recall the events in his personal history, to which his diary entry had alluded, he knew that they had somehow led to this point. Suffering had polished him, bringing him to this noble pinnacle where he could see such a transformation.

But a recollection kept peeping from his unconscious, as a fragment that seemed displaced and devoid of background knowledge. A man kept flashing through his imagination, who at first, he could not distinguish as male or female. He had a kind of ominous beauty too perfect to be trustworthy, and slightly impish like a clown. He was cleanly shaven, he had reddish lips, his eyebrows were a little too neat and trimmed, his nose was disproportionately small, and he was naked with bloodied hands. Whenever Adrian envisioned him he felt fleetingly nauseous, alternating with his joy over the boy’s recovery. He wanted to stab this horrid vision in the chest, while he suppressed his own panic. Though the stranger was physically womanish he lacked a woman’s warmth, giving his androgyny a hideous barrenness.

To dampen his anxiety, he gulped down more of his whiskey, and enjoyed losing a sense of control.

The Authorities Arrive

Throughout the crowd Dmitri heard many people say, “I recognized that guy! I thought he was in prison for life!” Samuel, Miriam and Alastair were sitting at a table near the stage, looking winded and angst-ridden. The atmosphere slowly changed back to normal, dissolving into sounds of merriment. Dmitri and Katya sat at the bar in the same spot as Daniel, as Katya held the boy in her lap and asked one the bartenders for a glass of water. He was Christopher, the same man who had alerted security.

The police and paramedics soon arrived with fierce contemplative looks. The police went downstairs to search the area Dmitri and his friends explored, and the paramedics approached the boy. Katya gently woke him up.

“Can you breathe alright?” one of the three women asked him, as she opened her medical kit on the counter.

“I’m having a bit of trouble,” he replied in a half-whisper. From the kit she pulled a hard, black plastic and miniature version of one of the machines below. Its electromagnetic frequencies were responsible for the respiratory system. The paramedic put it against his chest, and he felt warmth and vibration in his upper body. As his malaise lessened, his face froze and became lost and distant; his relief sent his soul between cogence and insanity. How was this any different than an exorcism?

But this sensation was disrupted when he noticed the same woman who Dmitri’s clan saw below. It was the first time the boy witnessed her; given her torment and nakedness, he assumed she was mentally ill. She was standing against the stairwell’s balustrade, faced in his direction as she trembled.

“Looks like we’re raising Hell tonight,” said Daniel to Adrian, snorting as he noticed her. “I’ve seen that woman here before. It’s strange: now, she’s got her clothes off.”

 

The Escape

Dmitri decided not to flee immediately, because he didn’t want to make any definitive assumptions about this predicament. As a first priority, he reached into his pocket with the intention of dialing 911, but then saw Peter Rawson appear through the doorway and lunge at him. He pinned Dmitri to the floor and repeatedly punched him, as Alastair tried to pull him off. Alastair eventually succeeded and they ran out of the room, with Dmitri carrying the boy as he began writhing and convulsing.

Peter chased them through the hallways and the room with the glass wall, as the boy’s cognizance fluctuated. When they reached the lounge, they received bewildered looks from people. Peter tried to grab the boy from Dmitri’s arms, but fell as Dmitri broke free.

“LOWLIFE IDIOTS! SCUM!” Peter screamed as he stood up. “THINK YOU’RE HOT SHIT, DON’T YOU?!” He ran at Dmitri, punched him in the stomach and pulled the boy out of his weakening arms. Dmitri stumbled backwards into the crowd, as many of them gasped. Samuel, Alastair and Miriam chased Peter towards the stairwell that led to the basement, as he carried the boy. But the boy leapt from his arms, landed on the floor and staggeringly ran from him towards the door.

Katya stopped performing as one of the bartenders ran to get the security guards, and commotion began to spread throughout the crowd, becoming filled with confused cries. As Dmitri frantically followed the boy outside, Daniel, Adrian, Sally and Michelle held Peter back. Sally and Michelle were athletic Korean women, thirty-four, who had cured Peter’s multiple victims. They had recognized him from the moment he entered: the round glasses, the triangular face and the slippery, selfish desperation that electrified his movements.

All four held him down as he screamed, “THINK YOU’RE HOT SHIT, DON’T YOU?! I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL KILL YOU AND YOUR FAMILY!”

Five security guards, aging men with penetrating scowls, came running upstairs and demanded that everyone move and release him. To Adrian, their grouchiness outshone the religious fanatic screaming on the floor; its apathy poured comic relief into chaos. He wished to laugh and weep simultaneously, as they picked Peter up and dragged him outside, where Dmitri and the boy were sitting on the bench. Dmitri had called the ambulance and police.

As Peter kicked, screamed and resisted, Katya hurried out of the lounge and over to the boy.

“Are you alright?!” she asked.

“YOU WILL ALL PAY FOR THIS! THESE ARE THE END TIMES, FOLKS! REPENT! ONE DAY, WHEN IT’S TOO LATE, YOU’LL SEE WHO WAS RIGHT!” Peter bellowed, his voice breaking in a wraithlike manner.

The boy was fully conscious but delirious, and hunched with his head horizontally tilted as his eyes looked forward mournfully. He began to look jaundiced as well, and he shivered as if he was under physical strain.

“I just need a doctor,” he said croakily. Katya sat down next to him and put her hand on his shoulder, her wide mouth and slit eyes burning with an eerie empathy.

“YOUR TIME IS UP!” Peter bellowed, his voice breaking once more. In the boy’s feverish daze his delusions returned again: he heard the being’s voice say, “We are spiritually married; we share a special bond you won’t find with anyone else. But make sure to keep it a secret.” The boy fainted and fell into her breasts, as Peter finally stopped resisting. Surprisingly silent, he stormed off with a hormonally morbid demeanor.

“This can’t be,” said Katya mutely, allowing the boy to rest. “How did he escape? What does this mean for us now? I-I mean, let’s hope he doesn’t have the law on his side again. Otherwise we’re screwed.”

Dmitri shook his head and said, “Everything goes downhill from here. But we’ll do what we can. That’s all I can say.”

“We should bring the kid inside and give him a glass of water,” said Katya, and she carried him as they went back inside. Meanwhile, Daniel and Alastair passionately conversed as they stood in the crowd.

“This is why I avoid people,” said Alastair, pathetically inhaling a cigarette.

“Welcome to my world,” said Daniel, insolently gazing through the crowd. “I guess that pedophile shithead Peter Rawson is walking free now, huh? I wonder how that happened.”

Disturbing Clues

Through the door’s window, they saw a man walking away from the door towards a silver metal table in the center of the room. He was hairless, he wore a blue lab coat and his gait was serpentine. Dmitri devoutly wished that he would turn around and reveal himself.

They continued walking until they reached one of the machines. They were all steel, silver, wide and cylindrical, and each was the size of a small building. It had a glass hemisphere in the center of the top, which emanated blue light. The machine was evenly divided by two windows, which covered its circumference. They shone the same luminosity, which sometimes flickered when the toxin levels were higher than average. Signs that warned of high toxicity, were also placed throughout the underground network.

This particular machine was alone in a colossal room, in which it was lower than the ceiling. But the machine still took up most of the room, with luckily enough space for them to wander around. Dmitri had a déjà vu when they came across a window. It exposed the underwater Hades in which they found themselves. Dmitri could have sworn this sequence lived in his ancestral memory, and the faces of various fish reminded him of the monster he had seen in his childhood. Their faces were plain and emotionally ambiguous, with the illusion of heartlessness that his trauma projected. He was repulsed by the squirming motion of their swimming. A pufferfish and a school of salmon passed by the window, and behind them in the distance was a machine that lit the murkiness. This was the only aquatic machine in this neighborhood. It was placed here because the plant life had molded, since some of the chemicals had seeped into this area as well. A little bit of mold still remained, even in spite of the cleansing that had occurred over the years; it was on some of the seaweed and coral reefs.

The persistent white noise, reminded him of frequent erotic nightmares he had when he was twelve. Their epicure gave their frightfulness a savory flare. In each dream a mystical, supernatural woman entered his bedroom and tickled him, as the moonlight meshed with a faint airy sound. (The machines were somehow audible even though he lay in his room). On some nights she was Anastassya, and other nights came women with chalk-white skin, a different one per nightmare. The first dream began with a quiet entrance, as Anastassya approached his bed. She was seemingly across between a Stepford wife, and a vision that would occur in a trance. He felt glad to surrender his safety and security, to her whims that would awaken dormant parts of him.

She said playfully and softly, “Don’t try to run away.” In the absurdity of his juvenile psyche, he felt obligated to stay. As she removed the blanket from his body, she said almost in a whisper, “We’ll start here and then we’ll play a game after.” She moved the bottom of his pajama shirt to just below his chest, from back to front. Then his breathing blissfully deepened; his bare stomach rose and fell as she began to tickle it, her expression beautifully feline and sinister. He remained still, his heart palpitating; her hands felt superb and uncanny. Her feminine presence echoed the nurses who had rescued his health, and inspired this dream. He loved feeling imprisoned and he thought that he had met her before his birth, when he was in spirit.

She eventually ceased and lay down next to him. He moved the bottom of his shirt back down, examining her with the sudden, fleeting awareness that he was dreaming. He quickly got out of bed and ran out of his room, as she kittenishly chased him. They ran through the mansion and as she drew closer, the scent of her coconut perfume surrounded him.

The countless nightmares that followed had the same narratives. But each alternated between Anastassya and one of the chalk-white women, whose gaits were more menacing.

As Dmitri relished these memories, he was interrupted by the distant voice. It joked, “We’re at death’s door.”

“You’re a nut!” Dmitri heard another man jest. A chorus of laughter followed.

They left the room and continued through another hallway, as the white noise slowly became meditative.

“I could imagine myself living here. Can’t you?” Alastair said to Miriam with a comic charisma.

“Yeah, it does start to grow on you after a while,” she replied with a wondrous, deer-like countenance.

Dmitri was filled with dread when they entered another room, in which a destroyed machine was before them. Grayish smoke was everywhere, and the device’s top half had been broken off, lying on the floor. This part was empty but the device’s damaged entrails were still in the lower half: computer-circuited blocks that were once constructed together into a giant vertical rectangle. Many of them had come apart and were lying all over the floor. From the machine a hissing sound emerged.

“What the hell happened here?!” Samuel exclaimed. “This place has been a freak show ever since we started our walk. Let’s just get out of this room and keep going. I think I smell a fuckin’ corpse again!” He humorously smirked as the rest noticed the stench from before, and they briskly departed. Just after the stench vanished in a few minutes, they discovered their respite had not yet been earned. A naked young woman with an unhinged tortured air and a strong alcoholic scent, was sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall. She looked Nordic except that Dmitri didn’t recognize her as any of his models. As she wrung her hands he furtively glanced at her. His pulse raced and his demeanor became stern to hide his nervousness.

When they turned the corner they saw a windowed door to their right, and above the window were these words in red letters: HIGHLY TOXIC AREA. ONLY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ALLOWED. Through the window and in the room, they saw another machine several feet away, broken in the same fashion. Two men in clear plastic oxygen masks were standing beside it. They inaudibly conversed with viciously paranoid expressions, as they examined the catastrophe before them. A woman’s voice came through a speaker on the ceiling above Dmitri and his friends, which said, “Richard Gallagher and Bob Jenkins, please report to the main office, Room 109.” They noticed that at the end of the passageway, were two large glass doors through which the office was visible. It was filled with cubicles and employees hurrying about with a stiff, stifled hysteria. At the front desk sat Monica Hallworth, a beautiful Japanese woman, about thirty, with a semi-short buzzcut and a long face with a pronounced jaw. The small amount of acne on her forehead, peculiarly enhanced her youthful attractiveness. She was anxiously writing something on a piece of paper.

The Monica Hallworth Poison Control Center, to which this office belonged, was specifically designated for the production and development of these devices. Many professionals within the medical sciences, including Monica, were also part of this organization. Though they did not provide treatment here and their function was different, they were driven by the same turmoil. Since they were curing the cult’s multiple former victims and witnessing all the damage inflicted on them, they found respite in going the extra mile. To them, this could only mean clearing the horrid remains below that the criminals had left behind.

“Huh,” Samuel said, his tone softening from brusqueness to melancholy. “I wonder what’s going on.” His voice exposed an element of doom, as if he saw a pattern in all these events that he was mostly afraid to acknowledge. They continued walking and saw that each door had the same warning above the window, and another device had also been broken. The workmen in all the rooms looked frantic and restless, sometimes walking with a feigned, cocky professionalism fraught with insecurity. Alastair regretted bringing his friends into this spiritually starved realm. Dmitri felt that his tickling muses would have died here, weeping and gnashing. Though he knew they could not die, his revulsion with this place said otherwise. But like Samuel, he tried to ignore his own suspicions.

Once they reached the end of the hallway, they turned around and headed back. They eventually turned the corner and proceeded along the passageway they traversed earlier, and the hissing sounds faded into the distance. They were soon drowned out by the normal, serene airy noise from machines that had not been destroyed. It was a quiet Hell as it had been since the beginning. This was the kind Dmitri despised the most.

They came across a swimming pool, which looked about twenty feet long and ten feet wide. Its room had the same sort of brick tile walls and floor, but the inside of the pool was a rustier, grayish blue, made of rough stone without tiles. The room was empty except for another young boy, about the same age as the previous, who was deliriously walking beside the pool, towards the doorway beside the one they entered. He was slightly chubby and his lip was contemptuously curled. His shirtlessness exposed three cuts just below his neck, and his ripped jeans revealed bruises on his knees.

From the doorway beside theirs came the same voice, “Now, come in here. Don’t be shy.” The stranger effeminately laughed as the boy came closer to the doorway, looking into it with an anguished expression. Through it a small thin man with large square glasses entered. He had a moustache, his brown hair was parted to the right, and his countenance was affectedly formal, difficult to read. But when the boy reached the doorway the man grinned, revealing teeth that seemed artificial: entirely white and perfectly shaped. Dmitri’s mouth went dry as he saw this.

“There we go,” the man said, in a voice similar to the other. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder to guide him through, but the boy furiously pushed him away.

“Come on now,” the man said, with a feigned patience. “Be reasonable, I’m not—“ The boy then vomited blood, and Dmitri, Samuel, Alastair and Miriam rushed over to him.

“Are you alright?! Do you want us to call the doctor?!” Dmitri asked.

“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of him just fine,” the man said, with a hearty tone that had a hint of callousness. The boy vomited again, as he stumbled away from the man. Dmitri helped him maintain his balance by following behind, and putting his hands on his arms.

“We need to get him to the emergency room!” he exclaimed.

“We’ll take care of him. Don’t worry about it,” the man said, with anger flaring up in his tone as he tried to sustain a veneer of friendliness. The boy vomited again and collapsed on the floor, facing the ceiling with his eyes rolled back. Dmitri then noticed the stranger behind the entrance, who he had heard various times. He was the wretch, the being who held Dmitri hostage along with Peter Rawson, when Dmitri was a child. He had the exact same appearance as before, as if he had never been physiologically altered and rehabilitated, unlike what the public had been told; he had not even aged. He was completely still as he stared at the pained child, with a mix of lechery and sanctimony. What horrible plan was he brewing in his head? What clandestine powers were pulling his strings? How many more of his kind had returned as well, by some mysterious cause? Had all of these beings returned to their original state, prowling the streets and the underground passageways again? After having been given life sentences, had the cult escaped from prison?

The Underground Passageway

Meanwhile, Dmitri, Miriam and Samuel followed Alastair to the two stairwells a little past the bar, because he had said he was going to show them something. They went down two flights of stairs to a gigantic room, where across from them was a glass wall that revealed they were underwater. The walls and ceiling were black, and the wool, carpeted floor had gray and green stripes.

Loud white noise filled the room, because of the underground machines next to it. These were fuelled by energy that cleared the chemicals from the underground rooms and passageways of the neighborhood. These were where the cult used to carry many of their rituals, while spraying these drugs into the air. Traces of the chemicals sometimes traveled into the subway, and people had to wear masks over their noses and mouths.

In the murky water, Dmitri heard a distant voice both feminine and masculine. It was clearly a man’s but had the alien cruelty of an unfamiliar realm, in which one was lost. He wished he could discern what it said. Then he slowly went over to the glass wall, and saw the silhouette of a man tread the ocean floor with the ease that one would walk on land. His features were impossible to discern, since he was a few meters away.

Dmitri turned to Alastair, who was a little ways behind him, and said, “This place gives me a funny feeling.” He snickered to falsely diminish the severity of his statement.

“Really?” Alastair looked around. “Why do you say that?”

“Well . . . it’s nothing. Forget it.”

“How about we go for a little walk?” Alastair asked them, starting to head towards the door. They followed him through the entrance, and began venturing through a light-blue, ceramic, brick tile passageway. But after a few steps, they smelled a stench that that made them gag slightly, and their eyes water.

“What the hell is that smell?!” Samuel exclaimed. “It’s like a rotting corpse!” They began to walk more briskly, hoping they would leave the stench soon. Dmitri then heard the same distant, androgynous voice again, except that it didn’t sound like it was underwater. It said, “We’ve got another one!”

“I could have sworn I’ve heard that voice before,” said Alastair, yawning. “It sounds so familiar.”

“I just heard it a couple minutes ago,” Dmitri replied, trying to hide his unease. “I heard it through the glass wall, and then I saw the silhouette of a man walking on the ocean floor.”

“Huh,” Alastair replied, furrowing his brow.

The stench ceased after a few minutes.

“That smell is finally gone,” said Miriam. “I can’t imagine what that was.”

Samuel snorted and shook his head. Dmitri then noticed a gaunt man ahead appear from a passageway to their right. The left side of his neck was scarred, and his right hand trembled as he drunkenly staggered towards them.

“You guys enjoying your stroll?” he asked them, with a jokingly sarcastic smile. There was also some perverse satisfaction in his tone.

“Well, it’s been interesting so far,” said Miriam, giggling. They walked past him and reached a deep-red, windowed steel door to their left, where a jaundiced young boy, about ten or eleven, was standing. He was facing them but gloomily gazing past them. Dmitri became increasingly nervous, and verged on telling his friends that he wished to leave.

Continuation of Chapter Two: Daniel and Adrian

“She takes this piece to a whole other level, doesn’t she?” said Adrian, in a husky voice.

“She is an anomaly,” Daniel replied patronizingly. “It’s too bad that she’s married to that idiot Dmitri. He’s too stuck in the past: it’s like he wants to turn the United States into the way it was in the nineteen-fifties, when people blindly respected authority, and never thought outside the box. He’s always critical of my out-of-control lifestyle, including my carousing, and he is famous for his quasi-religious hocus-pocus. He’s reserved and straightlaced, and yet he is a romantic: he’s the worst breed.”

Adrian chuckled and said, “Now you’re being too hard on him. He’s nothing like those cardboard, old-fashioned types. He’s incredibly sophisticated, and also tormented by his past. He doesn’t just live in some Stepford world. You should get to know him. He’s friends with many of those scientists, who have made all those breakthroughs in combining biology and technology. Now, they’re at the stage where they can create organisms through invisible, odorless chemicals, which are made from various gases and cellular compounds. The organisms are grown behind windows, each one belonging to an elevator-sized room. Beside the window of each room, is a computer screen that scans the relationship between the manifestation of brainwaves, and the organisms’ growth and internalization of the chemicals. Below the screen is a highly advanced monitor, which detects these frequencies. Sometimes, through these monitors, the scientists hear quiet breaths that oddly coincide with this relationship. But these sounds appear at a stage when it is impossible for a respiratory system, to even develop in the organism. It’s spooky. No one can explain that.”

Daniel became obstinately silent, piercingly looking at him. Then, with a cavalier lethargy, he took a hard, cherry-flavored candy from his pocket. On its wrapper was a cartoon version of Anastassya, coyly smiling as she sat on a full moon. Her eyes were open, looking upwards. Beside the moon, on each side of the wrapper was a silver lining.

“Michelle, Natasha, Sarah and Sally, some of Dmitri’s models, are nurses,” Adrian continued. “According to him, there are parallels between their work, and the practices of the female mystics who lived in Europe during the twelfth century. He described the experience he had in the hospital, after he had escaped from those degenerates, as an example of the kind of work his models do now. In the twelfth century, these women removed various items of clothing from the parts of their subjects, most affected by diseases. They cured their subjects, through putting a few drops of various elixirs, on the exposed parts of their bodies. Like the medicine the nurses used with Dmitri, these liquids instantly absorbed in the skin, leaving no wetness behind.

“Alastair is one of their patients, who sees them regularly, and during each check-up he gets an abdominal x-ray. (He is one of Dmitri’s scientist friends). After Alastair was kidnapped by that cult, and poisoned with those drugs, he has struggled with various ailments way into his adulthood: throwing up blood or vomit, severe headaches, and respiratory issues. He is also a psychological mess, after having been raped by Peter Rawson, and all the cult’s disgusting creations. His sickness is so severe that the nurses can’t use the ordinary procedure that I just described. During the abdominal x-rays, they give him these yellow pills, each containing an algorithm that, like the liquid medicine, detects and erases toxins in the body, except that these pills are far more potent. During each x-ray they only give him one pill, which is all it takes. He gets an odd, soothing feeling in his stomach as many of the toxins within it are eliminated. (This is the part of his body that was damaged). He feels a seratonin boost as well.”

Daniel snorted. “None of this is even close to mysticism. This is just plain old science at work. If Dmitri picked up a book every now and then, he would see that.”