Dusk in Kalevia: Chapter 5

With that, he was out the door and gone. The two men closed in on Toivo.

They were professionals–that much was clear. As each well-placed jab hit its mark, Toivo cursed the tyranny of flesh.

A punch closed one eye into red misery. He groaned.

What works of suffering one body can visit on another, thought Toivo. Even knowing his own strength in the face of such a threat, Toivo longed to be spared the onslaught that was ravaging this body. Pain like this was a remarkable thing.

He decided to try the easy way out: feigning weakness in defeat.

“I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

A strike to the side of his mouth threw a spray of bloody saliva onto his arm.

“A-anything!” he begged.

A chop to one collarbone, then the other. A crushing blow to the lower ribs.

He realized then that they didn’t want answers. They just wanted to cause pain.

No, not even wanted. Not for themselves. They simply enacted the will of those above them, choking off their empathy until torture became a routine activity like taking out the daily rubbish. They were deadened to suffering; machines programmed to hurt. This realization frightened and wounded Toivo more than their blows, and he pleaded with them, unleashing a frenzied stream of memories that he pulled from them in desperation.

Remember that you are human. Remember your little sister, your mongrel dog, your mother cooking soup. You, remember how your father taught you to skip stones on the river before he left for the war, and how your friend broke his ankle and you carried him home. Remember how people feel each other’s pain. You are human…you…

A fist caught him directly in the breastbone, wrenching the breath from his lungs and leaving him heaving in agony.

The guards heard and remembered and felt, but they didn’t stop. Even while wracked by obscure pangs of empathy they continued the beating, guilt-ridden and ashamed.

Eventually, Toivo ceased fighting. With every wicked blow, he retreated further inside himself, hovering on the edge of consciousness, his sole comfort being the knowledge that for him, at least, none of this was permanent.

Finally, they . Soul-sick and red-knuckled, they turned the light off and locked the cell.

Toivo drifted in and out of awareness, head lolling forward against his chest. Time flowed so slowly inside the prison of his injured body–an interminable, agonizing fever dream. Everything was horrible and confusing. His body didn’t even respond properly to his commands anymore, and every part of him seemed disconnected from everything else, alone and useless. At one point he realized that he was drooling, and there was no way for his numb, bound arms to wipe his mouth. Warm tears ran unbidden down one side of his face; the other eye was swollen shut.

Yet one clear thought remained.

This will pass.

As his consciousness returned in fits and starts, he started to become aware of strange forces at work within him. Like a ball of light in his chest slowly siphoning the pain into itself and burning it away in cleansing flame, something was gradually starting to pull him back together. Without being told–slowly, slowly–fractures knit and lesions closed. The sluggish blood pooled in countless bruises pulled back like a tide into the sea.

He was finally starting to regain some semblance of reality when he heard the door being unlocked.

He stiffened. They’d come back–it was going to happen all over again. Adrenaline shot through him as he began to think of ways he could bargain with them, before an even more disturbing possibility crossed his mind.

If these were the same men who had beat him, there was no way they’d fail to notice the remarkable recovery he’d made over the course of a few hours. Would they keep him here, destroying him and letting him heal, laying him out anesthetized on the examination table as doctors investigated the secrets of his puzzling anatomy? Could they kill him, or was it worse if they couldn’t? Death would at least bring freedom and a return to an incorporeal existence, but if death were impossible at the hands of a human… Toivo suffered, imagining the fate of a captured, invulnerable man.

Stay away, begged Toivo. Please leave. As the door swung open, he braced himself for the inevitable…

…And felt nothing there.

What was this? Certainly not the same group of thugs who had carried out the torture. Despite their deadened feelings, they still filled the room with emotion and memories–they were still human beings in spite of their savagery. Every mortal had a sense of vitality that Toivo could perceive, a warmth that they all shared just by virtue of being alive. Even the twisted man had shown something akin to a spirit.

This was different. This was like shining a torch down a mineshaft–unable to illuminate the bottom, the beam vanishing down a long tunnel of darkness. Nothing.

Toivo hoped for a moment that he was mistaken, and whoever it was had actually gone. The door slammed, and he heard someone give a small cough. Sure footsteps crossed the pitch-black room to stand invisible in front of him. He could hear faint breathing in the dark.

“It’s you, isn’t it,” said the Nothingness.

A shudder ran down Toivo’s spine at the voice: deep, soft, and terrifyingly calm. He suddenly realized that this was what he’d felt in the State Security building when he’d come for that first interview–the chilling shade that had touched him on his way out. What stood before him was nothing less than his death.

“Toivo Valonen, at last,” continued the darkness. “I know what you are.”

“…A journalist?” Toivo fought to keep his voice from breaking.

“But we both know you’re not really a journalist, are you? CIA operative?”

“No!”

“No, you’re right. Not CIA. Something much more interesting.”

The interrogation lamp clicked on and Toivo cringed in its glare. He heard the hiss of a breath drawn between teeth from the darkness beyond.

“The savage bastards!”

Toivo heard water being poured, and his body cried out for it in desperation. He whimpered as a cool glass was held to his split lips, the water tilted slowly into his mouth. He drained the glass dry and immediately felt the vigor return to his parched and aching form, new life flowing from his core to the tips of his fingers.

“I didn’t tell them to beat you,” said the voice in the darkness. “That wasn’t the plan.”

The trickle of water came again, and then the hands brought a damp handkerchief to Toivo’s face, gently rinsing away the blood caked to his nose and chin. Toivo shivered as fingers probed the places where wounds had been just hours before. He had never felt hands so cold.

“All healed,” said the owner of the voice, caressing a lingering bruise. “I knew it was you. I knew.”

“Who…are you?”

“You don’t remember me, Zophiel?”

“No,” Toivo breathed. “No, it can’t be…” He struggled against the handcuffs that bound him as the man who knew his true name stepped into the glare of the lamp.

The figure leaned uncomfortably close–Toivo could smell the mentholated lozenge on his breath–and the face resolved into sublime planes of light and shadow, young and fine. Bold, dark eyes stared down into Toivo’s own.

There were shadows inside those eyes–shadows as deep and ancient as the airless reaches of outer space. Toivo fell into them, reeling weightlessly as he was pulled down into the terrifying black hole of a memory.

He knew those eyes.

“Solas!”

To be continued in Chapter 6.

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