37.
They’re all having a reasonably fright when they see the tubes. Hearing about it or actually seeing it with your own eyes is of course a serious difference. Diedie starts to whine and flees to the hall with the words: ‘This cannot be, this cannot be,’ interrupted by sobbing.
Oded’s face spells trouble. If he would have had his Brengun with him, he would have probably ran upstairs to kill Doc and Selena after all. I wouldn’t have stopped him. It’s easy to be against death penalty as long as you aren’t confronted with the horrors of murder yourself. Believe me, if you would see what we’re seeing right now, you would curse us for the light punishments we gave the culprits.
Jabar keeps shaking his head in denial, as if he can’t believe that suchlike monsters exist that would do something like this to otherkinds.
‘I’ve warned you it would be a horrible image,’ I say softly and bite my lower lip to ease the pressure I feel in my chest, which naturally completely fails. My heart breaks and my eyes mist over when I look at Lucas. Slowly the tears run down my cheeks, but I don’t do anything to dry them.
‘This is… words fail me,’ Jabar says with a broken voice.
‘Against this kind of sick ideas Jabar and I have fought in the Second World War,’ Oded says. ‘Are they still alive?’
‘Yes.’ With heavy legs I walk towards a tube and tap the display that shows all kind of active lines. ‘This one shows among other things their heartbeat.’
Jabar also shuffles to the tubes and looks at their scalped heads one by one. I hear Diedie cry softly on the background. I want to comfort her, although comfort is by far inadequate here, but first we need to decide what we’re going to do.
Jabar sighs deeply and then says: ‘Parts of their brains are missing.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘They’ve kept them in the operating room in some kind of bowls with liquid in them.’
‘So that’s what I saw,’ Oded says with clenched jaws. ‘I was already wondering. Slime monsters, that’s what they are!’
‘Can they live on like this… without… you know?’ I ask Jabar.
He shakes his head gloomily. ‘No, Manon, at least not like they used to.’
‘Those parts can be put back, can’t they?!’ I now cry out. I realize how stupid I must sound, but I don’t want to give up hope. Not yet. No, not yet…
‘No, Manon, they can’t. They’re largely brain death.’
‘Yes, I understand that,’ I now say calmer.
‘Manon, you’d rather don’t want to hear what I’m going to suggest now.’ Jabar looks at me with a sad look in his eyes.
‘What?’ And then I realize. ‘No! Absolutely not! They’re still alive!’
‘You call this alive? Would you want to live like this? Like a plant? Who knows what has been damages. Their speech, their reason, memory?’
‘Jabar is right, Manon,’ Oded adds. ‘It isn’t a life for them anymore this way. And how should it be declared to the outside world?’
I turn away from them and stare at the white wall. How can they even think about killing those people? It’s too horrible to be put in words. Some of them are still very young and they’re still alive! But are they really? Would I indeed want to live on like that? No, probably not. On the other hand it’s easily said now. Maybe if I could decide myself in this kind of situation I would want to go on. Everything better than dead? No, I don’t believe that, at least not in the deepest of my heart.
I turn around again and look at the tube in which a woman is hanging who must have once looked stunning, but now only looks like a lifeless doll with hollow cheeks and light-blue lips. Her bones are sharply sticking out and her skin looks pale and spotted. Some clips of limp hair frame the still remaining exposed, pink-red brains.
I’m frightened when she suddenly opens her eyes. She slowly looks around in the room, looks at us one by one and then inaudibly forms words with her mouth. I understand what she’s saying, but I don’t want to accept it.
Nevertheless, Oded has also seen it and says in a sad voice: ‘She says she wants to die.’
She then repeats with great difficulty a few times the word: ‘Please.’
I nod while the tears are streaming down my cheeks. For the last time I run to Lucas’s tube and kiss the cold glass.
‘Goodbye, my love,’ I whisper, turn around, run out of the room, run past Diedie, upstairs and by means of the card outside.
There I scream my longs out. I scream to the trees, to the air, the grass. I cry out all of my misery, all my feelings of guilt in my head and the pain out of my heart. When I’m done screaming, the catharsis has freed me a little bit, but certainly not totally.
I feel something poking against my leg and see Bass standing next to me. He looks up at me and it seems he understands what’s going on. His mate is standing next to him and seems to know Bass and I know each other, because he’s looking quietly at me. I lean down and scratch Bass in his neck. His eyes look understandingly when he licks my hands and maybe I’m only just imagining it. I hug Bass and dry my tears on his fur. He allows it as if he knows he’s helping someone this way. There’s nothing that heals more than the support of human’s best friend, the dog. At the spot I decide to take both of them home with me. Jabar will probably allow it, if only it is because he knows it would comfort me.
I stay there, sitting on the ground with Bass and his mate, until I feel a hand coming down on my shoulder. It’s Diedie who looks understandingly and with red eyes down on me.
‘They need to do it, Manon,’ she says softly.
‘I know.’
‘Beautiful dogs.’ She leans down and pats their heads.
‘I’m taking them with me,’ I say resolutely, so she knows I won’t tolerate contradiction.
‘That’s alright. Have you already given them a name?’
I know what she’s doing, she’s trying to distract me.
‘Only him here, his name is Bass.’
‘Not really original.’ It’s a sad smile that appears on her face.
‘I’ll call the other one… Bonkers. He’s more muscles and fatter.’
‘Bonkers?’ She chuckles softly. ‘Is that even a name?’
‘From now on it is. I think it sounds fairly tough and it fits a Doberman, doesn’t it?’
Diedie nods.
‘Bass and Bonkers,’ I decide and give both of them a kiss on their head.
At that moment Jabar and Oded come outside. I’ve never saw a suchlike expression on their faces. As if their entire family has died and above that the world is going to end. With hanging shoulders and guilty looks they join us.
‘It has happened, we separated them from the machines. Manon, go to the car. We’re going to burn down the house,’ Jabar says. Each word seems to cost him a lot of effort.
‘No! I’m not a little child anymore, damn it, I’m twenty-four! I’m staying.’
Jabar nods.
‘Hey, your Lexicon!’ I cry out. ‘We almost forget that one. And the files about the otherkinds!’
‘Just let it burn with the rest. If we take them with us, we’re only running the risk they’ll end up in the wrong hands again.’
‘But maybe,’ Oded thinks, ‘we save lives with it in the future.’
‘Do you want to take information with you that has been gathered by such a horrible person? I should have destroyed the Lexicon a lot earlier already.’
‘Now you’re saying,’ Oded admits.
‘No!’ I cry out.
It’s strange, but it seems as if the Lexicon is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It feels as another victory for Noël if we let it burn together with the house. I just can’t allow that. I run into the house and straight towards Noël’s office.
It isn’t on the desk, so I open the desk drawers. I don’t do it tidy, because this way I can still let off steam. Paper twirls around and enraged I push the items aside, but in the drawers no Lexicon is to be found. The bookcases are also in for it; books land with a thud on the ground and covers scratch open. I seem to be a tornado going astray that’s raging through the office with a devastating power. Enraged I look around the room and walk towards the painting I grab with both hands and throw down with brute force. No hidden safe. The archive room!
I run towards it, but it’s locked. I take out my Glock and shoot with two well-aimed shots the lock into smithereens, after which I kick open the door. One by one I open each cabinet drawer and throw the papers and files out and let them fall carelessly on the ground. No Lexicon. Nowhere! Jabar quietly comes to stand beside me and puts his hand on my shoulder.
‘Just leave it, Manon, it isn’t that important.’
Nevertheless, I hear he doesn’t mean it, but nod after all. Then suddenly something comes back to my mind.
I look at Jabar with big eyes. ‘We haven’t checked the locked room.’
‘Should we do that?’
‘Yes, of course,’ I answer upset. I don’t get he still doubts about that.
‘If what’s in there is even worse than that room with all those…’ Jabar softly shakes his head. ‘I don’t know if it is that wise. The nightmares won’t be tender already.’
‘I want to know!’
Curiosity will once become my death, I realize, but until then I will please it. I run out of the archive room with Jabar following in my tracks. Oded is just descending the stairs and looks interrogatively at us. Jabar wavers his hand as if he wants to say: don’t ask.
The secret room can be either the middle room on the left or one of the two last rooms on the right. The first one I try, by shooting down the lock, only seems to be a stock room with medical stuff. I don’t think it’s the great hidden thing and cross to the middle room on the right. Oded and Jabar don’t say a word and let me do as I please.
I shoot my pistol empty on the lock. What we get to see in that room makes me wish I could turn back time and followed Jabar’s advice. He always knows things better than I do, so why didn’t I just listen!
On a table lies a man that’s tied up with belts that run over his stomach and chest. His hands and feet are chained with irons to the table and over his forehead runs a tight band. His head is being scalped and his brains are exposed. The brains appear to be unnaturally big to me, bulging further out than the border of his head. I walk towards him with rapid beating heart but the worst is still to come then.
His chest has been opened more than once and closed again, that’s clear from the different sloppy made stitches. Next to him stands an ECG device that shows a strong irregular heartbeat.
The poor man is above that awake, looks at me with wide-open eyes and lips that move, but don’t make a sound. His look is so begging and afraid my eyes become moist again.
Then I see he has vampire teeth and his eyes are colored red. If I though I has heard and seen the worst, I was wrong again.
Oded comes to stand besides me and holds a file in his hands. ‘It was lying there on the cabinet,’ he says softly. ‘What I read in here can’t be true.’
‘What?’ Oded asks and looks over his shoulders. ‘Oh, my goodness.’
Oded clears his throat and says: ‘There’s really no end to the distasteful and horrible practices of that guy.’
Jabar sounds exhausted when he says: ‘This is the lowest of the lowest.’
The man on the table opens his mouth a bit further and I see his tongue has been cut out!
‘Unbelievable,’ Oded sighs. ‘Noël was trying to make a cross between the different otherkinds, that’s why his brains look much bigger than normally is the case.’
The man produced a heartbreaking sound.
‘He wants to die,’ Oded says in a sad tone. ‘I’m reading his thoughts. They’ve tortured him for weeks. He doesn’t want to live anymore and certainly not in the way he is now. Once he was only a vampire and now… His body hurts everywhere and he can’t handle the different gifts. They’re colliding with one another so he continuously has a dreadful headache.’
‘Noël is a real Frankenstein,’ I say with a rasping voice.
I look at the man and put my hand on his cheek. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what you’ve been through. You must have suffered horribly.’
The man answers by blinking his eyes, looks at me for the last time and then closes his eyes for eternity. The fickle ECG pattern becomes a completely straight line.
‘He has stopped his heart,’ Oded says. His voice cracks. ‘He wanted to do it for a long time already, but they kept his gifts suppressed with a sleeping drug.’
I know everything about that.
With a depressed feeling, we leave the dead man.
I hope he has finally found rest now.
Together with Oded, Jabar gets the delivery van, in which Oded always keeps an extra jerrycan with petrol in it, just in case he would run out and no petrol station would be around. Diedie and I wait at the house, together with the dogs. From time to time we hug each other without saying anything.
Less than five minutes later Jabar and Oded arrive at the drive and stop at the parking places. With the jerrycan in between them they walk towards the house. After about ten minutes they come back outside. They leave the front door open so there’s enough oxygen in the house and the fire won’t be put out.
With the six of us we watch from a safe distance how smoke comes out of the house, the first flames lick and the window burst. Finally Diedie still does her mojo and the result is amazing. It seems as if nothing has happened and the house looks exactly the same before Oded and Jabar burned it down. I feel the heat coming from the house, I smell the thick smoke and hear the house falling to pieces, but there are no flames to be seen.
The sun has totally set and through the cold blackness of the night, everything seems even more grim and terrifying. Without saying a word we get into the car. Bass and Bonkers immediately takes their places next to me and lay their heads on my lap.
The entire road home we’re all quiet in sorrow.