27.
The man who walks past me without seeing me, is someone I haven’t seen before. He’s enormously long, surely about two meters and extremely thin. He reminds me of the mast of a ship, only much more fragile. His hair is equally so; fine and thin. He’s wearing a long, white coat, such a coat doctors and lab assistants wear. He checks the tubes with nervous and shaky movements, examines the wires and infuses.
He’s continuously mumbling to himself, practically inaudible. I pick a few words: great, interesting. Something like that, but no full sentences. At least if the man is already talking coherently.
When he turns towards me with a frowned forehead and looks straight at me, I think I’m caught. That he can see me one way or another. Damn it, no, please no. His manic looking, cold eyes will always stay in my memory, I’m already sure about that.
Apparently he’s thinking about something or he’s very deep in thought because he’s already getting ready to leave the room again.
I can hardly believe it, but he didn’t notice the active computer. Speaking of an absent-minded professor! But then, right before he wants to leave the room, he turns around and looks surprised at the computer. He runs towards it with quick steps and takes a look at the screen. Then he sighs deeply and shuts down the computer. I hope he thinks he just forgot to shut that thing down. He looks around the room with half-closed eyes, shrugs, and finally leaves the room.
Phew.
I still wait for a while until the footsteps disappear and when I hear a door open and close again. Then I transform again from a piece of wall into myself. Change into a plant or chair would attract too much attention. The man will surely know which pieces of furniture are in the room and which are not and besides the room is so poorly decorated that every new piece would be extremely bad style. So there wasn’t anything else to do but to transform into a piece of the wall in the same white tone as the real wall.
I suspect the man disappeared into an adjoining room, so I leave the room on the tips of my toes. I still throw a backward glance, but the woman has closed her eyes again.
I hope they get a lot of beautiful dreams, then they have at least that kind of escape from all of this.
It doesn’t seem that the cellar has cracks through which I can move, so I decide to transform into fog as soon as I’m in the living room. I only hope I still have enough energy to make the transformation work.
I’m frightened to death when all of a sudden Selena stands in front of me. Even before I can blink my eyes, I get a punch in my face.
‘Bitch!’ I scream, while I bow forward and hold my hands against my nose. I can feel the blood trips seep through my fingers and stabs of pain go through my forehead.
Well, shit, that hurts. And then I feel the well-known prick in my upper arm. Great, that on top of it.
‘Come along, you,’ she hisses through her teeth.
She gets a hold of me and of course right on the spot where she pricked me.
I look for a second at the door on my right where I thought that doctor went through, but don’t hear any noise coming from the room.
I expect Selena is taking me to my room, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. She opens the door to Noël’s office and throws me inside. Stumbling I know to grab the desk. I turn around furiously, but Selena has already disappeared. I really swear, without her vampire power I would have already given her a facelift, such a facelift a bulldog would be jealous of.
The office is dark and quiet. I still vaguely smell the scents of the dinner Noël and I have consumed. A few television screens are on, but strangely enough there isn’t one on which my bedroom is shown. I do see the room with tubes and the living room. I then hear a creaking sound of a turning office chair and Noël’s voice that says: ‘light’.
Was he sitting over there the entire evening? Did he hear me walk past him? Did he see me in the living room facing the Dobermans that were running in the garden? And in the room with the tubes? Then he saw me transform, I fear! But why did he let me do as I pleased? Why didn’t he stop me earlier?
Noël looks straight at me, as if he isn’t angry, but rather disappointed. Then he reaches for a drawer and gets out a paper napkin that he offers me. I pull it out of his hands, dab my bloody nose with it and wipe of my hands. Carelessly I drop the bloodstained napkin to the floor. I carefully feel my nose, but he luckily doesn’t seem to be broken.
The entire time Noël is looking at me without saying a single word.
‘What?’ I say to break the annoying silence.
‘I didn’t say anything,’ he says ice calm.
I suddenly feel uncomfortable in my panties and shirt by his penetrating gaze. I ardently try pulling my shirt down, but it’s no use. And above that I also feel ice cold because of the transforming and the cold lets my nipples pierce through my shirt.
‘You understand I can’t let you go anymore,’ he finally says.
‘As if you were planning to do that!’
He ignores my opinion. ‘You’ve already seen too much.’
‘What do you do with those poor otherkinds?’ The words come out a bit shaky.
‘Do you want a coat?’
‘I ask: what do you do with those poor otherkinds?’
His eyes follow the shape of my shivering body and he smiles as if he enjoys it. Yuck! I feel mentally raped!
‘You’re cold because of the transforming, aren’t you?’
‘You know everything so well, don’t you? Than why do you bother asking me?’
‘It was in Jabar’s Lexicon, you know.’
‘No, because I don’t nose around in someone else’s private books.’
‘Then what did you do in the archives?’
Did he see that too? Dzjee, can’t I do anything in here without him knowing about it?
‘Do you know what also stands in the Lexicon? It will probably interest you.’
I don’t pursue the matter, so he continues: ‘Do you know why an elf is called an elf and a vampire a vampire? How all otherkinds came to their names?’
Again I don’t answer, but I have to admit I’m curious about it.
‘It’s nothing more than a theory, but a plausible and simple theory. Suspicions are that the names are based on legends and myths. The otherkinds took up the invented names from the human beings. If somewhere a story or creature showed resemblances to an otherkind, the name was used to classify them from then on.’
‘Angels have wings and devils horns in those tales. Doesn’t seem to show any resemblance to reality,’ I bring forward.
‘Maybe because in biblical stories devils can manipulate people and angels can put forests on fire from a distance. Well, who will tell.’ Noël shrugs his shoulders.
‘Why do you keep files about otherkinds?’ I now ask him.
‘You’re very curious.’
‘No, I’m not, because it wasn’t on my list of positive points,’ I answer.
He grins. ‘Than we have to complete that one.’
I shrug as if a want to say: just do as you please.
‘If you’re not planning to let me go, than you can just as well answer my questions!’ To re-enforce my words I put my hands on my hips and look furiously at him.
One corner of his mouth curls up, as if my behavior amuses him. It even makes me angrier, damn it!
‘Maybe,’ he then says. ‘But I need to get to know you better for that, something I’m already extremely looking forward to.’
‘You know me enough already. An entire file!’
‘Get to know you personally. As friends.’
‘Well, that won’t work.’
‘Yes, it will,’ he calmly answers.
‘Are you maybe planning to put me in a tube, just like those other otherkinds? And poke in my brains?’
‘Not at all. I won’t force you, you’ll do it out of your own will.’
‘Never! You hear me? Never!’
It attracts my attention he forgot to put the word ‘free’ before ‘will’, or didn’t he?
Actually I should kill him right here and right now. Transform my one hand into a knife should still work, I suspect. Or even into a pistol. I don’t mind losing a bone in my finger or more of them if I also help Selena to get to the other side.
If they don’t let me go, I won’t have anything else to do.
But somewhere I still have hope that Jabar and Diedie will find me and that’s of course better if I know what Noël is planning to do, now I’ve seen the room with tubes. And on the twentieth of may at eight p.m. maybe something important will be going on.
I can still kill them later on; it seems wiser to me to gather more information right now. Besides, I wouldn’t know how to save those otherkinds from the tubes and I’m afraid I’ll sign their death warrant when I rush into things. Let’s just hope Noël and Selena don’t kill me first or put me in a tube, but I’ve got the suspicion that Noël has other plans with me.
‘Never is an emotionally charged word, Manon. Be careful with the use of such words, very careful.’
‘You can’t say what I may and may not say!’
‘Manon, Manon.’ He sighs. ‘Within the next minute you’ll do everything I’ll ask you to do.’
I want to open my mouth to protest fiercely, but he makes a stop-gesture with his right hand.
‘I know who your parents are,’ he then says.
The cold I felt just a minute ago in the roots of my bones disappears immediately. With my mouth open I stare at him. I only realize I’m holding my breath when my longs are screaming for air.
Did I hear that well? Is he claiming to know my parents?
‘I’m not lying,’ he still adds.
Disbelief and confusion are probably readable from my face.
For a while I don’t know what to say. Do I want to believe him? Oh yes, I’d love to. Can I believe him? No! He’ll use every trick to submit myself to him. So I would follow him instead of Jabar. But still.
The last few years I made myself believe I don’t need to know whom my parents are, that it doesn’t matter. The love and care I receive from Jabar and Diedie are just as precious and maybe eve more than those from my biological parents. The fact that my parents just left me without a moment’s thought at a house has damped my curiosity.
Jabar and Diedie have never lied to me. As soon as I could understand it, they told me they weren’t my biological parents. I would lie if I claimed that the pain and grief an abandoned child feels overshadowed my childhood years. The question why and what I’d done wrong, although I was still a baby, kept me busy for many nights and colored my dreams dark more than ever. I’ve spilled enough tears and made myself believe I needed to be inferior if even my very own father and mother didn’t love me enough to raise me themselves.
But I left all of that behind me several years ago already, at least that’s what I thought. I’ve learned to build a shield around my heart; a coldness that has been there ever since and that has suppressed the longing for my real parents. Until now. Until those last words from Noël.
Suddenly I feel an immense hate boiling up for him. He has, just like that, without preparation, waked up sleeping dogs with me and it’s making me enraged!
‘You don’t have the right!’ I suddenly yell.
His first reaction is one of disbelief, but then he recovers. ‘What do you mean, Manon?’
I can’t help it. Call me weak, call me a blubbering cow, but at that moment something snaps inside of me. The last days and than this news he throws so emotionless in front of my feet. It’s all too much for me and I burst out crying.
With a trembling finger I point at him. ‘Not… the… right,’ I say with effort in between the sobbing.
For a while I see a kind of compassion appear in his eyes. Or is it regret. Or maybe I just want to see it with him, but it isn’t there.
I take a seat in the leather chair and hide my face in my hands. I don’t know where all those tears keep coming from, it seems like a storm flood. But strangely enough it feels liberating, as if the bottled up sadness from years is coming out. My shoulders shake continuously and I know I’ll have swollen eyes tomorrow. But I don’t care. Who sees me after all in this glazed prison?
A linen handkerchief is put on my lap. I grab at it, pat my eyes and blow my nose in it. Then I look up. Noël is back on his spot and looks understanding at me.
‘I’m sorry I blurted it out like that,’ he says softly and I even believe him.
I press my lips tightly together, scared that when I say one word a new crying fit will follow. My level will have decreased from three to two now, I think sarcastically.
‘But I didn’t lie. If you want to know it I can tell you who your parents are.’
‘Well?’ I hope I look combative again instead of like a damp rag.
He shakes his head. ‘You can’t expect something for nothing.’
‘I already thought that. I don’t immediately see you as a do-gooder either.’
‘Oh, but I am at heart.’
‘Do-gooder for your own businesses?’
‘Do you want to know?’
‘What? How Machiavellian you let no one stand in your way to stay rich?’
‘Your parents, Manon. Don’t play games right now,’ he answers in a punishing tone.
‘What’s in it for you?’
‘That you become my wife.’
I burst out laughing. Also this time I don’t have it under control. The tears run down my face again, but they are of hysteria. Or even more of disbelief. He looks deadly serious at me, by which the laughing becomes even more intense and I need to put my hands on my painful stomach muscles. Just like with the crying, he waits patiently until I’m done laughing.
‘You must be kidding?’ I smilingly say. I wipe the tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand.
‘I mean everything I say.’
‘Why would I for god’s sake marry you? I hate you! And besides, you could be my gramps! What I’m a saying? My great-gramps probably.’
‘Don’t ever say that again.’
‘What? Great-gramps?’ I grin.
‘To hate. That’s the most horrible word existing. Too emotionally charged.’
‘Oh, well, don’t you hate Jabar?’
His look hardens. ‘I’m disgusted by him and feel a deep-rooted lust of murdering him. But hate? No. Hate absorbs all of your energy and that isn’t good for yourself.’
‘Well, then I don’t want to know who my parents are.’
‘I’d sleep on it if I were you.’
‘I don’t need…’
Before I can go on Selena appears in the room. Does that dirty old hag maybe smell it when she needs to come and get me?