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The Cavern Dark Enough
The shards of the mirror, now shattered and accusing, were if anything a greater torment than the whole had ever contrived to be.
The breath caught in his throat, and V swallowed the last half-sob, hearing it die deep down inside his chest, mystified that this small sound could carry so far and reverberate for so long; but perhaps, instead, the echoes were only the product of his mind, consumed as it was by just one word, repeated over and over.
“Evey,” he breathed, tasting her name, sweet enough, for now, on lips that he knew would never touch hers. Again, “Evey,” He took the mask from its bed of bright glass splinters; studied that easy smile, that smooth and unblemished skin, everything that Prothero and his legionaries had forcibly stripped him of, duplicated now in a steel shell of a face. It regarded him, and he it, in equal measure.
Better this way, said V, as he pulled the mask back on and fastened the strap once more. Better a smooth falsehood than a ruined reality. Rising, he reached for his cloak, and slipped it around his shoulders. Instinct sent his hand reaching for his knife-belt, but as his fingers closed upon it, he paused. No. No, not this time. There would be no need, not for this errand.
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V left the River Avon behind him soon enough and, as if it were the
What was done to me was monstrous...and they created a monster. V supposed that the metaphor of Hell was apposite enough, after all, for didn’t hell give birth to monsters, both of the form and of the mind? His words, and Evey’s, chased each other’s tails around and around in his hindbrain.
The dank sycamore forest cloaked him as he walked, keeping from the footpaths, for sunset wasn’t long past and there might still be late wanderers out, with torches and with dogs, neither of which would be too kind should they happen upon him. Still, V moved with deceptive grace and stealth for such a large man, and left nothing in his wake but drifting leaves and, just once, the strident cry of a tawny owl.
V had never brought himself to wonder why he had never returned here before, never sought so much as one answer or one piece of the fractured puzzle of his memories here behind the walls of the carelessly gated ruins. An easy enough conclusion this, given that nothing remained here but rubble, warped steel doors set on frail hinges, cracked porcelain tiles and still, even after two decades, the strong-imagined scent of suffering and blood, rising from the arms of remembrance like the Kraken.
His birthplace.
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The assorted bestiary of the Wiltshire woodland, not given to much introspection, had had few qualms about setting up home amongst the bare bones of Larkhill detention centre. Very few qualms, in fact, since outside the quarantine zone life was much easier for the lack of human encroachment.
The voices must have been imprinted on…no, he corrected, driven into the stones of this place like sledgehammered masonry nails, to have remained so shrill.
The pathology is the same
as... down on the floor, you...please, it hurts too...I can’t, I can’t, I...get
those straps on her...no sign of the antibodies that...we need more subjects
for...fire in the generator room...in the generator room...generator
room...room...
Memory. V shook his head savagely to dislodge the shrieks. Only memory gave ghosts their shape and substance, and nothing more, but was it any great surprise that a living memory as abrupt and as jaded as his own should spawn ghosts of this clarity and clamour?
He’d found the spot he sought, anyway, and as he slipped to his knees, he removed his gloves one after the other and pressed the scarified flesh of his palms to the leaf-muck on the tiles, brushing it aside, feeling the naked contact that he needed to form the recollection around the sensation; a pearl forming around a speck of grit, indeed.
It trickled. Then it flowed. Then it returned in a tempest.
-------------
He’d been dragged back to
his cell for the fifth time in as many hours, or so it seemed without the
benefit of any clock, after yet another blood test, EKG and MRI. Dr. Stanton had looked at him with an air of
venal pride, not as anyone should look at a man but as one might look at a
diamond ring.
Wasn’t he her creation,
then? For all he knew, he was. His memories had been razed and sacked by the
pathogens and the narcotics and the hallucinogens that they poured into him day
by day, trying to push the boundaries of his sufferance, whispering to one
another above his spinning, mixed-up head that he was the last of them, surely
he had to die too, and soon enough.
He burned. Inside and out, he roared with flames. His blood felt like a bushel of needles in
his veins, and now he spread himself on the mercifully cold floor of the cell
and stilled his twitching limbs one by one, through pure force of will.
Be still, he commanded himself. Think of Valerie, and of what she would have
said to you. Thrash and burn, with pain
or with venom and bile, and they will only take that last inch of humanity from
you with contemptuous ease. Do not let
them see you broken.
Her letter was deep in its hiding place in the rat hole, where he was happy to let it lie. He had long since learned it word for word, anyway.
Something shifted and clicked inside V’s recollection now, and he heard Dr. Stanton’s cry of alarm once more.
“The generator’s gone
up! Where’s Prothero?”
“He’s not here tonight,
he’s at Party headquarters! Diana, for
God’s sake just get out!”
Stanton was stumbling for
the narrow access door that led to the courtyard, the flames already fanning
and racing along behind her heels and driving thick, oily smoke ahead of them
like a flock of sheep. She whimpered,
and then felt a hand on her arm, shoving her out into the cool and blessed
clear of the night air.
She felt her legs cease on
her, and she dropped and crawled over the soaking wet grass, all composure lost
in the ancient primal instinct to escape from the sight and scent of fire. Losing, at last, the final drop of energy
that terror had lent her, she turned over her shoulder and bit back a powerful
scream.
It was him. Framed against
the vicious wall of fire, it was him.
She’d believed – hoped? – him dead already, choked by the smoke or
pinned beneath collapsing concrete in the cellblock, but some vestige of her
had known better, had known that this man would not succumb to any mere fire or
crushing after surviving all the decadent brutality that Stanton’s medical
expertise had managed to visit upon him.
Closer now. V pressed inward, conjuring and captivating every detail.
Stanton rose, pushing her
legs to one last burst of effort, but even with the priest tugging at her hand,
begging her to be away from the conflagration, she turned back. If only she’d been turned to a pillar of salt
there and then - she would have considered it a tender mercy compared to the
blinding horror behind her.
She could see no eyes in
that melting, raw visage, nothing at all that still remained humanoid apart
from a gaping mouth. And yet he looked at her, and as he flung
his head back and roared at the smoke-hazed sky, roaring in defiance of
everything she’d thought she held sway over, Stanton finally turned and limped
away, knowing that there was nothing left in the world but to wait for her crimes to apprehend her.
It was over, for now. It seemed to V that he had sapped the very bricks of their power by withdrawing this memory from them, and as if in counterpoint to this, a trickle of desiccated mortar hissed in the darkness. Fire and fury and the simple erosion of time itself were conspiring to return Larkhill to the earth for good.
V stood, regarding the hard, whitewashed stars dispassionately through the open roof of his former cell. No moon tonight to rival them, of course.
First the scourging, he reminded himself, and only then the balm.
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As the night passed by, V left Larkhill once more to its own attrition in sin, but not quite without hope of redemption in his one last gesture; an innocent rose, a freshly-bloomed Scarlet Carson, placed with infinite tenderness in the centre of the desolate cell.
Time whispered by, the stars wheeled overhead, the tawny owl swept across the land in search of prey. Only when the first suggestion of dawn struck Larkhill and its crumbled sepulchres did the velvet rose glow with life, and only then did V’s single glittering tear light up within its petals.
The End
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