6025 words (24 minute read)

Genesis

"Please have a seat, Mr. Kraft," Dr. Lennartz offered impassively over his shoulder to his guest while reaching into a file cabinet to extract a thick folder; ignoring the man’s outstretched hand.

Rebuffed but unruffled, Herbert took the proffered chair, smoothing out his silk suit as he surveyed the office. "I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to speak with me. A man such as yourself must have little free time."

Lennartz placed the folder on his desk and sat opposite Herbert. "Yes, well, I have my reasons."

"Which are?"

"I simply want the truth published."

"Absolutely." Herbert pulled a digital recorder from his pocket, pressing the record button before asking, "Do you mind?"

Lennartz lightly shook his head, absently scratching his beard; his eyes focused on the recorder. "But I’m afraid," he started, returning his attention to Herbert, "that parts of this conversation are going to have to remain off the record."

Herbert leaned forward, nonplussed. "Pardon me? You do realize the purpose of this interview?"

"Of course I do, but I’m not interested in helping you write another exploitative book nor in openly violating doctor-patient privilege."

"You’re against exploitation?" Herbert curtly rejoined.

"Just as your career is important to you, sordid as it is, so is mine," Lennartz bit back in his clipped tone.

"Then why agree to an interview?"

Lennartz steepled his fingers, briefly pondering the question before answering, "To prepare you."

Herbert grinned sardonically. "For what?"

"Deom."

Herbert waived the threat off. "I’ve dealt with my share of banal sociopaths."

"Trust me," Lennartz gravely replied, "you’ve never dealt with anyone quite like him. Even after two decades as his doctor, the boy is still an enigma to me."

"He was your patient for years, doctor. If anyone is an expert on the man, it’s you."

Lennartz was taken aback by the comment as if insulted. "There are no experts when it comes to a case study such as Deom’s. The man is a cipher. His personality amorphous, a virtual non-entity." The doctor paused. "He has always been what he must be. Fluid. Even now, he confounds me. Sure he fits a profile. So many profiles. So many diagnoses. But who he is, why he is…" Lennartz looked at the swollen file on his desk. "That is why I decided to speak with you." His gray eyes flicked up and fixed on Herbert. "I want your research to succeed, Mr. Kraft. I really do. Maybe, unlike me, you can make sense of him."

"Perhaps. But to do that, I need insight of some sort into his life."

"Indeed." Lennartz took a deep breath, exhaling wistfully. "Indeed. Well, then let us start at the beginning."

"When did your sessions with Luke start?"

Lennartz leaned back in his chair, thinking back. "Let’s see. He was five then, so roughly twenty-eight years ago."

"His father brought him to you?"

"Yes. And the man made it clear he desired the utmost confidentiality concerning his son."

"It must have been difficult. A diplomat’s son-"

"I treat all of my patients the same, regardless of who they are."

"Really?" Herbert queried. "Do you normally deal in juvenile cases?"

Lennartz’s eyes narrowed. "Rarely."

"Then why did you accept Luke?"

"His father was a friend of mine. That was part of it. But…I can’t put it into words. There was simply something about that sickly, pale child who withered under the slightest scrutiny."

"So the endowment Luke’s father secured for you had nothing to do with it? Or was that to keep you quiet?"

Lennartz’s fiery glare threatened to melt his icy façade. "What is it you’re exactly looking for, Mr. Kraft?"

"I just want to tell a story."

"Yes, how tragic."

"So what was wrong with him?"

"His father brought him to me initially because of…aberrant behavior following his younger brother’s death."

"Such as?"

"Night terrors. Dysfunctional habits." Lennartz hesitated and then stated, "Self-harm."

Herbert blinked. "Pardon me? What do you mean by self-harm?"

Lennartz opened the folder and pulled out a series of photos, passing them across the desk to Herbert who peered in muted shock at what he held in his hands. "Jesus Christ."

"Apparently, the boy had been hurting himself, mostly with his own fingernails and teeth. The bite marks and abrasions are obvious as you can see, some quite grievous."

"He did this to himself?"

"That’s what his father told me."

Herbert looked up from the photos. "This had been going on for months?"

Lennartz nodded. "His father attempted to keep him under constant supervision, but that proved impossible. Somehow, inevitably, the wounds would appear. Action was finally taken following a near fatal head injury."

"How bad was it?"

"Fractured skull. Possible brain injury. He had leapt from the roof of the house." Lennartz shook his head. "I was the last option before institutionalization.

"So it started. After several sessions with the boy, I requested removing Luke from the household for more in depth psychiatric counseling. But his father would not have it. He didn’t want to risk the press discovering his son was, well, a ’genetic defective’ as he put it. So our sessions were kept as private as possible."

"Where were they held?"

"The family estate. It was quite isolated."

"And this went on for years?"

"Many years. I was given unlimited access to the boy. Our first sessions revolved around his self-mutilation, which went nowhere. The boy was oblivious to what I was asking and his mother was adamant that Luke wasn’t hurting himself, but never gave a viable alternative to the origins of his injuries. After years of observation, I can only say that I never once saw the boy directly harm himself."

"It just ceased?"

"It mysteriously stopped roughly several months after our sessions began."

"Do you think him capable of harming himself?"

"The boy could become agitated enough for the plausibility, but my presence seemed to soothe him."

Lennartz sighed and returned to his clinical notes, redirecting the conversation. "I think it necessary to present some lesser known facts on Deom, specifically biological abnormalities. If anything, his genetic make-up is the key to his personality. I’m sure you are unaware of the fact that he was born premature as well as a monorchid. And that he had a twin. Stillborn."

"No, I wasn’t aware of that."

"He displayed many of the clinical signs that accompany these conditions: Hyperactivity, lack of concentration, susceptibility to lying and fantasizing, and a strong sense of social inadequacy.

"But contrary to what the public believes, he was a deeply empathetic person. He simply had difficulties articulating it. If anything, Luke yearned for human connection. The cruel fact is he was incapable of it."

"You’ve lost me, doctor."

"To be blunt, his social skills were poor, but that, in part, was due to Asperger’s Syndrome as well as a rare case of synesthesia. His communication skill set was unique but also crippling. An example." Lennartz removed several sketches from the folder and passed them across the desk.

Herbert eyed the sketches, moving gradually from one to the next. Feverishly crude, yet compulsively measured, they were largely charcoal or ink; scenes of alien vistas, jagged cityscapes, or classical ruins. There was a lifeless quality to the smeared, spattered work; cold and detached, almost soulless. Everything a hollow shell. "What am I supposed to derive from this?"

"Take a closer look. Notice the figures."

Herbert glanced up. "What figures?"

"Exactly. They are mere dashes, barely noticeable. And the lines, see their noticeable tilt? The imperceptible imperfection. Then there is the monolithic nature of his work; his fascination with pillars, with skyscrapers, and of course, with ruin."

Herbert returned to the sketches, asking, “How severe was his Asperger’s?”

"It was mild-to-moderate. He ate atypically, never made eye contact, was socially clumsy, and prone to outbursts. He committed his daily life to patterns and impulsively organized his reality into predictable cycles. Repetition was key. Everything had to have a place, a reason, a time and could not deviate. If anything in his life diverged from this routine, this order, he became emotionally unstable. He could not handle what he viewed as chaos. He would also obsess over tasks. Until he finished an initial action, he could not stop regardless of the consequences. He would not suffer incompletion.

"Luke always seemed frustrated by this. His inability to control his actions or emotions was a source of conflict within the boy that led to wild swings in personality to either extreme, mania or depression. Moderation was impossible. This led, in my opinion, to a general division in his psyche bordering on dissociative personality disorder. There was always that dichotomy to him, this very personal belief he held that he was two specific beings, body and soul, each separate and individual. A fractured whole. He would speak of being able to mentally step back and watch himself act, curious as to his own intentions. ’Like a sleepwalker guided by shrouded powers’ he would say."

Herbert tilted his head. "A stranger to his own subconscious."

"Perhaps, but I believe it was Luke’s way of dealing with an intense self-loathing, the source of which I do not know. He realized his condition and, rather than accept it, blamed his flesh for failing him. Because of this he separated himself mentally from his body, a way of reconciling himself to his condition. It wasn’t his fault that he was flawed. It was his flesh. I think this hatred for his flesh was what drove his habitual need to wash and clean himself, as if he thought he could remove the taint within him."

"It would explain the self-torture."

"Indeed. Luke reveled in denying himself. ’The smothering of the sybaritic.’ Further, he pushed himself to herculean efforts, especially in his older years to prove his will stronger than his flesh. Nervous exhaustion was the norm.

"Try as I might, communication itself was difficult to establish with the boy and it was this difficulty that was the core of his problems. It fueled his depression and, I want to say, his self-loathing. He internalized to a severe degree, as I discovered early on, projecting his own personal questions and struggles. He created imaginary persons representing his fears, stresses, and anger. At first he attempted to ignore them, blaming them for his problems, but I encouraged him to confront them. Now I wish I hadn’t. These personalities came to dominate him. Some of the things they told him…that he told me…" Lennartz winced.

"You said he also suffered from synesthesia? What exactly do you mean?"

"Synesthesia, by definition, is an abnormal sensory reaction to stimuli. It was years before I diagnosed Deom with it. At first I thought Asperger’s alone was the main impediment, but that wasn’t the case.

"Luke’s synesthesia was unique. He perceived reality in numerical form. Every object, abstract or physical, real or imagined, was quantifiable to his mind appearing in…I suppose the proper term would be organic code. I came to this realization observing him and his fascination with numbers. It was a revelation. He would ascribe values to everything and catalogue events, ideas, people. His mind was remarkable; the perfect example of a photographic memory capable of high level functioning that could rival any computer. A true savant. The way humanity spoke to one another did not fit his senses. There was a disconnect. Irrationality. Realizing that it wasn’t simply social cues but an entire language and perceptual worldview that separated us, I turned to a colleague of mine."

"Is that how Luke became acquainted with Dr. Turing?"

"Yes. Alan took the boy under his wing and for the first time, Deom found someone capable of interacting with him on an intimate level. Alan understood the boy, taught him how to incorporate all these variables that existed in his head into equations that allowed Luke to finally order his thoughts and bring that chaotic inner soul of his under control. The rift within him seemed to narrow.

"Alan’s tutelage was a revelation to Luke, who seized upon his teachings like a zealot. For Luke, it was like being able to see, to speak, to hear for the first time. He became obsessed with everything around him, releasing a torrent of scholarly output in everything from quantum physics to morphogenesis. His workload was astounding."

Herbert put a hand out. "I don’t mean to deviate from the topic, doctor, but you haven’t spoken much about Luke’s family life. Surely that has some bearing here."

"I knew you would come to this eventually," Lennartz mumbled.

"It’s rather hard to ignore. Luke’s father was a public figure. A highly respected one at that."

"And you feel that has something to do with Luke’s mental state? Or are you merely asking for lurid details to condemn a decent man?"

"I’m simply searching for facts here, doctor. It’s up to you whether or not I demonize Luke’s father’s legacy."

Lennartz nodded to himself. "This is my personal opinion, mind you, off the record. Do you understand?"

"Of course," Herbert agreed, turning the recorder off.

"I believe there may have been abuse."

"Can you be more specific?"

Lennartz visibly struggled whether or not to clarify his words. "I’m sorry," he finally said. "I cannot, so please move on."

"But doctor-"

"Please. Move on."

Herbert reluctantly relented. "Alright, who did Luke gravitate to between the two?"

"His mother, though I can’t say whether it was to spite his father or because he truly loved her."

"You don’t believe he was sincere in his love for his mother?"

"With Luke one can never be sure. Whether consciously or not he was a series of contradictions and a manipulator at that. That boy was a conundrum I was determined to solve. Whether for him or for me, I can no longer say. And just when I thought I was on the verge of truly reaching the boy, I lost him."

"What happened?"

"His mother died. Nothing was the same after that. He shut down completely and eventually cancelled our sessions."

"Did he give a reason?"

"All he told me was ’it was time to look for answers elsewhere.’"

***

"He was a genius. My finest pupil…And he was a good friend."

"What more can you tell me about Luke, Dr. Turing?" Herbert asked, seated at the back of the vast lecture hall; Turing standing at the rostrum below.

"Quiet, but inquisitive. And dedicated. To his colleagues. To his work. His stamina was limitless. He could go for days theorizing, lost in that mind of his." A wisp of a smile teased at the corner of Turing’s thin lips only to twist into a frown.

"You said Luke had colleagues. Any friends?"

Dr. Turing came around the rostrum, arms folded, and solemnly examined the empty seats of the hall before his gaze returned to his guest. "Not in the sense that you think. His peers were…well they were equals. They did not judge him but accepted and appreciated his natural talents. They understood him as best as anyone could hope to and shared the same enthusiasm he did for the theoretical. Only through his work did he find connection and he reveled being part of something greater than himself." Turing turned to stare at the giant screen to his rear that dominated the hall upon which was projected a grand formula of symbols and numbers. Like an illusory stele, its glyphs told an ancient tale.

"What happened?"

"Eventually he surpassed us," Turing admitted, "and when we proved incapable of following him into that…dark ether, he left us behind."

"Dark ether?"

Turing looked over his shoulder at Herbert, an arm extended toward the screen and Luke’s work. "That was Luke’s term for dark fluid, the theory of interconnection between dark energy and dark matter. That hidden force that rules all reality. It was part of his grand unifying theory and the thesis that earned him his doctorate."

"How old was he then?"

"Seventeen." Turing retreated from Herbert toward Luke’s work, Deom’s equation glimmering upon the lenses of his glasses. “An old soul even then.”

"Can you explain his work?"

Turing started to pace back and forth, one hand buried in his pocket, the other gesticulating while he spoke as if he were attempting to weave his words into the real. "Luke was obsessed with the Higgs boson, the source of mass and ’Creator’ of our reality. He worked tirelessly to reveal the relationship between the invisible and visible, the ethereal and the physical. He postulated that energy and matter are one and the same, in different shapes constantly in flux; that the universe itself was a bubble ever contracting and expanding as energy passed through stages. Most importantly, time itself was a fallacy with everything existing at once, perceived via different perspectives."

Herbert cocked his head. "He didn’t believe in time?"

Bemused by the question, Turing stopped pacing. "Time is different for all things, Mr. Kraft. While we see ourselves moving forward, with the past lost and the future approaching, there are particles that move in retrograde, rushing past us backwards towards that ’lost’ time. If it is possible to move either way, forward or back, it would mean that existence is already set, that any point is accessible; in fact that every point is but a single point, and the future exists as surely as the past. Reality is perspective." Turing mockingly pointed at the side of his head. "It is our perceptual senses that fail us in that regard limiting our vision of the whole."

"So Deom theoretically sought to prove fate?"

"I believe he sought to comprehend the incomprehensible, to discover existential reason, everlasting order, but order is a fragile thing in the universe. Just one minor shift in the grand scheme and great chaos emerges. Like an atom having the power to annihilate a city when split."

"And this ’grand’ theory? Luke completed it?"

Turing sagely nodded toward the screen. "The initial part. The framework. And the possibility it holds even in that incomplete form…Yet events served to halt his work. Perhaps he purposefully left it incomplete as a challenge. Many have tried to finish it. But in the shadow of such a work, we can only fumble. It is indecipherable. Unprovable. Its simplicity belies its complexity. And what it implies-"

"What does it imply, professor?"

"God. It implies God. But it is more than that. It is a foundation for a new worldview. Unitary ideals. Consciousness as a variable. A radical shift in the make-up and inner workings of existence. Such a revolution terrified us.

"You have to understand. He tore down the old laws and allowed us to partake of his universal vision. Beyond dimensions. Past the physical. Words alone cannot describe what he revealed to us, those great mysteries. Many fell under his sway."

"And what became of these thralls of his?"

"What do you think happened to them?" Turing bitterly answered in the rhetorical. "They followed him into his own personal darkness. You know the rest."

"What changed him from theorist to anarchist?"

"We did. Many of my peers rejected his work, some cruelly. We cast him out. It sent him into a dark period I don’t think he ever recovered from. And then that ordeal with his mother…" Alan trailed off, soon returning to the podium to hit a button shutting down the projector causing Luke’s vaporous theory to wink out.

"Cancer, wasn’t it?"

"Yes," Turing affirmed, head bowed. "A particularly brutal and malignant case. The poor woman suffered horribly. Two mastectomies. Months of radiation therapy. Initially, that was what halted Luke’s work as he went home to be with her throughout her ordeal. She lasted little more than a year before she passed.

"Something shifted in the boy after that. He became withdrawn, sullen. Combative. Our conversations grew fewer and fewer. Eventually he took a sabbatical and never returned taking many of my best students with him.

"Seeing what became of him, I wish I had tried harder. So much potential. I let him slip through my fingers."

"Do you really believe that, doctor?" Herbert cynically prodded.

"He is a good man," Turing rejoined. “Just someone who found his place more in dreams than in reality.”

Herbert rose from his chair, his arm sweeping the hall. "Perhaps all this work drove him mad."

"You can’t have brilliance without madness, Mr. Kraft."

"And why is that?"

"Because the greatest minds always disagree with reality."

***

Brooding in the murk of his study, stacks of files towering haphazardly next to him on the desk, Herbert took another numbing nip of bourbon. Through slits in the bowing stacks, wan light streamed through casting a dim glow on his troubled scowl, the cocky façade long since crumbled. Like his life. Upon the pile lay his divorce papers. She had left him, finally, his wife. He knew she would but receiving the papers still stung. Yet in his heart he didn’t understand why. Why should he care? Why had he clung to her, to anything? Mundane stability? The ice rattled in the glass as his hand trembled.

Foreclosure. Failing investments. He’d fucked everything up. He was losing it all. After a life time of effort, fate was stripping him bare. Or was it the devil taking his due? The one thing Herbert had left was his work. His dreadful work. He took another sour sip, the smothering heaviness weighing down upon him. If only he could drown his thoughts. The most torturous thing was consciousness.

At the faint periphery lingered macabre sights. Glossy black and white homicide photos plastered the walls, the gore so slick it bled through. Bloated, rotting, eviscerated. Slack mouths with swollen tongues thick with death’s name. Deom’s name. Some of the victims were intact. Some. Others were in pieces like some macabre puzzle taken apart on a maniacal whim.

The photos and files had cost Herbert a hefty sum, more than he could afford, but anything that gave him insight into Deom was worth the price. It was his method of preparation, to enter into the mind of his subjects, come to understand them, rationalize them, and finally, to manipulate them. It was a morbid game he relished. But there was more to it than that.

His anonymous readers loved tragic monsters, he told himself. Herbert’s gift was to find that unique kernel of evil in every killer and to nurture it into something uniquely sinister; to make these banal men and their selfish deeds epic. Epic. Using the term in such a way was vulgar bordering on blasphemous. It made one want to spit at the very speaking of it. To make the marginal central…

"But who needs dull perfection?” he asked the fathomless dark. “Why reach for the unreachable?” Such grasping always led to a fall. And man’s fall was always more entertaining because it was real. Relatable. Since Adam was it any different, this dark yearning within us all to taste the unknowable? Like every myth and fable, man wanted to sample the forbidden. It was a flaw that ran through us all. Perhaps it was in our very genes.

In serials, we found our avatars; the failed and facile who, fostered by hubris, took the world by the throat. Gods over life and death. Deciders of fate. That freedom, lacking society’s shackles, acting instinctively, was a seductive opiate all wished to partake of even if vicariously. To end another’s life for the illusion of mastery over one’s own. But the price…could one measure the price of one’s soul?

“You went into the night and never came back,” Herbert drunkenly slurred as much to Deom’s victims as to himself. Closing his eyes, he gently squeezed the bridge of his nose. Too many hours. The images were beginning to seep into his subconscious. And his drinking was only getting worse. The fugues were increasing. But the dreams were worse. Sometimes he swore he glimpsed Deom’s victims out of the corner of his eye, lingering apparitions. But that was exhaustion. It had to be. The stress of returning to such grisly work. But he couldn’t walk away from it.

He’d spent a great deal of time preparing for this. Deom was to be his masterpiece, his testament to the true measure of man. Sure, others had published books on Deom. It was inevitable with the amount of coverage. But no one had interviewed him. No one had revealed his drives, his methods, his core motivation. All was hearsay and theory. Above all, none had the talent Herbert did to raise such a biography above superficial sensationalism. "You are going to make me legendary, you twisted bastard," Herbert confessed with a crooked smirk.

In a ghoulish way, Luke was to be his savior. With his investments failing and his wife divorcing him, Herbert was in tremendous debt. When the offer came, from Deom himself no less, the chance to turn things around was too great to pass up despite his own misgivings. Conscience, that nagging bitch. If anything, Herbert internally commented, Judas sold himself short for a mere thirty pieces of silver. “The world would have paid you much more,” he rasped.

In the annals of crime, Deom’s actions were revolutionary ushering in a new millennia of perverse possibility. Investigations were still ongoing years after his capture. If what Deom said was true, the man was an all-new type of criminal. He was more than a serial, more than a terrorist; something truly evil and antithetical to civilization and humanity.

Herbert pulled a folder from the stack and opened it, skimming through the press clippings inside. Suffer the Little Children, one article declared detailing the sniping of elementary school students. A series of bombings followed. The gassing of a subway. And there were more, so many more acts whose sole aim seemed to be anarchy. As Deom’s crimes progressed they evolved from the mindless and senseless to the calculated and cunning culminating in cyber assaults and economic raids that left tens of thousands destitute. To think one man could accomplish so much.

At first no one had known it was all connected. Then the letters started and the manifesto emerged online. Finally one of Deom’s cabal was captured, or rather surrendered herself like some martyr. “Freedom from the real,” she repeatedly proselytized. “The end to false perception.”

The reaction was destabilizing. Deom’s "spree" had engendered riots throughout America and abroad. Citizens lost faith in governments that could not protect them. Vigilante squads arose. Innocent strangers were attacked. Social networks collapsed. Society came apart. People saw monsters everywhere. No one was safe. Trust disappeared. Civilization was on the verge.

Then they caught Deom and things became worse. Luke admitted to hundreds of murders, dozens of atrocities and that was enough to get the judicial wheels rolling grinding the investigation beneath it. Governments jockeyed for extradition and the case came to a halt for years. It was all a farce.

Closing the folder, Herbert rubbed his graying temple, pondering the recent death threats and hate mail he’d received. ‘Parasite.’ ‘Profiteer of misery.’ The public had called him many things, but they also bought his books. "If they aren’t outraged, you aren’t relevant," he reassured himself. Still, he couldn’t shake the shame he felt. The taint. A product of his upbringing. No matter the acclaim, he knew what he was. Suffering was his specialty.

Who is like God? That question arose unbidden in his mind for the first time in years. A humbling question, but a contemptible one for the only true answer was no one. We are all imperfect children. But are we to blame? Does not a bad tree beget bad fruit?

Herbert’s thoughts turned to his father, a shadow that still loomed over his life. In many ways, he was Herbert’s God. His creator. His provider. Perhaps his eventual destroyer? Even now, the man was a mystery to him. He was an austere man who had little invested in life. He seemed more a shell than a person; a void.

But there was a kind side to the man. Being a widow, and naturally introverted, all his father had was Herbert; his sole piece of the world. An uneasy bond existed between the two. In his heart, Herbert felt his father must have cared for him, yet there was always that gulf the man could never fully cross. Not once could he recollect a hug or kind word. Yet what he could not offer emotionally he compensated for materially. His father sacrificed much to get his son into private schools, silently fostered Herbert’s talents, and though the man would never say it, he was proud of how his son excelled in his studies. But as much as he wanted his son to succeed, his father inserted a great deal of instability into his childhood, constantly uprooting them as if running from something. Over time, Herbert stopped making friends because what was the point? In time he would lose them anyway. Attachments were nothing more than nooses. All he had, all he needed was his father.

As Herbert grew older, he noticed more and more the peculiarities of the man. The odd comments revolving around death. The strange fetishes. His father’s increasing absences. And then, when Herbert was fourteen, everything changed. He woke in the middle of the night to strange sounds. Climbing from his bed, creeping down the hall, he heard something coming from the basement, something muffled and pained. Timidly he pressed on, heart pounding so fiercely he feared he’d pass out. And when he opened that cellar door and peered down into that tenebrous chamber he witnessed his father sodomizing a young girl. Shocked, Herbert recognized her; a local girl who he had had a crush on and brought to the house numerous times. He watched as his father ravished her, his face contorted into a demonic visage. The vile things he said. The way she shrieked. Yet Herbert couldn’t pull away nor speak. He simply stood there like some voyeur. And then he was discovered. His father charged up the stairs, seizing his son by the hair and throwing him against the wall. And just when Herbert thought his father about to strike him dead, the man’s wild-eyed expression softened as if finally seeing who he held. Lip quivering, his grip slackened and Herbert ran for the sanctuary of his bedroom.

It was a side of his father he didn’t know, or refused to accept existed. The two avoided one another for weeks after the event. Then one evening, Herbert’s father told him he wanted to take him for a drive. Terrified by his intentions, Herbert reluctantly relented and the two ventured into the night. They drove for over an hour in silence, the landscape becoming more rugged and untamed; almost primeval. Finally they stopped, pulling to the side of the road, the gravel crunching as loud as claps of thunder.

“Come,” his father emotionlessly commanded.

Herbert followed his father into the woods off the highway, the moon overhead large enough that its light lit the forest like midday with this ghostly luminescence. The trees seemed to maliciously claw at him as he trailed his father into the wilderness. And then the trees thinned and a ridge approached. His father stopped at the edge. Herbert realized he was looking down at something. There, at the foot of the ridge, lay a naked woman’s body. She’d been dead for God knows how long. Bruised and battered, splayed perversely like a fallen Christ, she blankly stared up at them.

“I can’t help myself,” his father hoarsely confessed. “I don’t want to do these things.” The look his father gave him was chilling, yet lamentable. “Don’t hate me.”

When the police finally came for his father, years later, Herbert felt shame. Shame for not having said anything to prevent the murders which followed. Shame for being the son of such a crude man. But above all, shame for not having saved his father from his demons.

And here he was, years later, writing about men who, like his father, felt compelled to brutality. Sometimes he couldn’t help but think that he was drawn to his work as a means to understand his father. Maybe to end the cycle.

That brought him to Deom. This was a story he felt compelled to tell even upon the threat of damnation. They surrounded him, Luke’s victims, each of their names whispers echoing in his ears. Gone. All gone. Snatched away. Yet still wanting this story told.

’I will swallow life and make it whole,’ Deom’s manifesto promised.

Herbert grabbed another folder and flipped through the photo-copied pages of a notebook that had belonged to Luke. Scribbled everywhere were indecipherable equations and coded words. Authorities still struggled to crack the cipher. This was one of the few things Luke refused to help authorities with. "Probably nothing but theoretical masturbation," Herbert mumbled, tossing the pages down.

Vigorously running his fingers through his hair to wake up, Herbert stood and crossed the room to the television. He bent down and skimmed through the discs stacked next to the video player, eventually selecting one and popping it in. The television screen blinked to life, horizontal lines streaking up the picture. A washed out interview room popped on. Luke sat across the table, face averted from the camera, while someone droned on out of sight. Herbert turned up the volume.

“I’ve been told you’ve been talking to someone. Someone who isn’t there.”

“Echoes,” Luke softly replied, gently rocking forward and back. “Qualia oscillations.”

After a pause, “Do you hear voices?”

“I sense them. Ripples. Ever expanding ripples.”

“What can you tell me about these ripples?”

“Apart. Set apart. Disparate branes.”

“Brains?”

Luke’s rocking slowed as he turned to stare into the camera. Herbert shuddered at those black eyes upon him. “The whole undone.”

“Help me to understand-”

Luke lunged across the table knocking the camera aside, the frame flying up to the ceiling before snow erupted on the screen.

Next Chapter: To Damascus