How to Make Life: Chapter Four

Inigo

Thirteen Years Later

            In the darkness of a small shack, a rat stirred awake.

            Its mangy fur blended in with the dank, moldy surroundings. As it rolled over and stretched its stiff muscles, it noticed how cold its body was. It shivered and desperately forced its black eyes open, whimpering through the foggy haze which clouded its mind. However, once it realized its perilous predicament, it sprung to its small paws in alertness. It let out a faint whimper.

            It was in a cage, small and gleaming amber and silver in the weak light. This trap was the source of the freezing fright that encrusted the rat’s heart, and it desperately tried the bars with its sharpened teeth, attempting to look for a way out. As it slowly paced the cage, it began to realize the horror it had found itself in.

            There was no escape.

            A shadow flickered in the light, and the rat started with a squeak. A figure materialized in the dilapidated gloom and began to unhurriedly approach the cage. The rat began to search for a way out with a greater fervor, gnawing at the bars until its gums bled in strain. And all the while, the human figure approached, inching ever closer.

            I stood in front of the cage.

I stood inside of the cage.

I leaned forward slightly and peered into its contents, watching the rat as it sniveled in fright, and I frowned as it curled up into a ball in the corner of the cage in defeat. It looked so scared, but it really, truly had no idea; there were worse things in life than just a little terror, so I had no sympathy. I never did any more.

Refusing to look into its pleading black eyes, I reached into the cage and snatched the rat up in a heavily gloved hand that usually caused my skin to break out in rashes. The rat seemed almost paralyzed by fear, and its struggling diminished when it realized what a firm grip I had on it. No escape. Pin it down. Don’t let it escape.

I did just that. I restrained the poor creature on a blood-soaked, wooden table in front of me. In response, a cloud of dirt and ash swirled up and danced in the light. The smell of death was strong as the hand which pinned the rat. I was bigger. It was smaller. My job was so damn easy sometimes.

“The hands,” I muttered. I grasped, with the hand that was not holding the rat, at a rusty blade near the cage. “The hands come off first. The hands. The hands.”

I continued to murmur this like a demonic chant, and I carefully exposed the rat’s front paws. Without so much as a grimace or smile, I skillfully cut off both the rat’s paws, and I then proceeded to do the same with its back feet. The feeling of the knife slicing through bone no longer churned my stomach; it hadn’t for years. Now, it was almost an enjoyable experience, but I was almost too scared to admit that to myself.

Though this torture only lasted a couple of seconds, the rat erupted into an explosive cacophony of screams and cries. It began to writhe uncontrollably in my hand, and I sighed as I had to wrestle with its contorting limbs to maintain my firm hold. It did not know who this devilish human was, but it knew that, if it valued its slipping life, it had to escape. However, my hand was stronger than the rat’s instinctual will. It usually was.

I clutched the rat tighter, knuckles cramping from the effort. I next pointed the tip of the knife at the rat’s gaping mouth, and said, “Next the tongue. The rude tongue.”

Cutting out the tongue was usually the easiest. The creature was already screaming so horribly, its mouth opened in appalling dread, that I was able to just reach into the cavernous depths and yank the tongue forward. A simple, quick slice. The rat gurgled on its own blood. A trickle of vomit was absorbed by my gloves.

When the rat began to struggle more furiously, its screams drowned by redness, I said, “I won’t let you go. I won’t let you go.” As if it understood, the rat twisted more violently; I could hear the snapping of its small bones. Again, I tried not to lament on the fact that the sound was as familiar to me as the whistle of the wind or the hissing of cockroaches.

“Skillfully and artfully,” I said next. Ah, I had said these words so many times that they rolled off my tongue without feeling. It was merely just procedure, as natural as blinking back tears in strong sunlight. “Your eyes are next.”

The popping of black eyes mixed with the sound of crunching bones and tortured screams. I watched as the eyes, small black orbs, rolled off the table and onto the dust-covered floor and were immediately lost amidst the organic remains which littered the miniscule shack. They were, of course, sightless, but I still was pounded with the strong feeling that they were still watching. I quickly looked away and waited patiently for the rat to die.

After only a few minutes - that was about how long it took all my other victims to perish – the rat’s life ended with a final, spasmodic twitch and weak cry. I extracted my fingers one by one from the deceased, bloody body, and I put down the knife with a dull thud on the table next to the empty cage.

The routine was over, and I could feel the dim light stroking my back; this was the time where I would let the light seep into my very pores. My mechanical movements were now replaced with deliberateness, and I grabbed at a stack of papers and a stubby pencil which lay near me (the pencil was, however, always very close). My eyes roved over the papers, and I flipped through them with a certain degree of madness highlighted by increased murmurings. Or was I mad? Perhaps this was sanity. Yes, sanity. I had made too many calculations for it to be anything else.

“This is it,” I said, tapping the pencil on the top sheet of paper a couple of times. Tap. Tap. “This has to be it. If it’s not. . . .” my voice trailed off, and I stared up at the low, moldy ceiling. I had just realized how heavy my eyes felt and how viciously my muscles ached. I was as stiff as the body lying before me. The world was so cruel.

With a deep intake of the dank, decaying air (I had only found it stifling when I was little) I took off my glove, picked up the rat, and placed it on top of the stack of papers. I watched for a moment as the rat’s blood mingled with the detailed instructions on the sheet. I let my horrid frown turn into a grotesque smile, and I placed my bare hands on either side of the rat.

I unleashed my held breathe.

With this, the small room was filled with a radiant, white light, purer than the clouds that floated in their hatefully carefree way over the Wall. The light danced over the decrepit walls and the copious amount of cages that filled the room. Some of these cages held still breathing entities, and they blinked and shrieked in the blinding brilliance. The dead rat itself began to glow as though moving on to some ethereal space, but just as quickly as the light had touched the dank room with its beautiful presence, it dissipated. The dead rat still lay atop the mound of notes, and I hovered over it with undisguised expectancy like the kind you feel when you slice open a dead cat to see if it has kittens.

And then, in the small basement reeking of death and despair, the shadow of the rat began to twitch in the gloomy light, mimicking the paroxysm of muscle. In that miniscule shack where only the ideologies of the devil seemed to govern,

a miracle unfolded.

The rat stirred.