PROPHECY 156

The statement ‘sometimes your destiny finds you’ was followed by a series of quick cuts, presenting an explosion from different angles. The protagonist was casually strolling away from these, safe in the conviction that he would be needed for a final battle. The TV boomed. Att had been watching a film very late, and it merged seamlessly into these charming fragments. The advert promised this and that, steadily secured in the future. To progress the state of technology in one fell swoop, for the benefit of rapt attention. That fire must be real, Att thought.

The film she had been watching, like the one now being advertised, was about revenge. A man had been wronged—Att could not remember if his cattle had been stolen or his wife raped—and he had been buffeted in all directions to act against those who had performed the wrong thing. This group, it turned out, had their own code of right and wrong, which the protagonist grew to respect in his attempt to infiltrate them. But finally, he stood face to face with the man who had committed the first sin, and killed him, brutally.

Nothing could stop this man, Att thought, and she felt a surge of attraction. It reminded her of how Ahm, on an earlier night, similarly could not be stopped. On a stroll, they had been harassed by a group of young men. Att had mattered very little to them—a small one simply grabbed her, shoved her up against a wall and held her there, occasionally pushing her so that she scraped her back on the rough brickwork. The rest turned on Ahm, who fought them off, one by one. When it was over, he had walked up to the small one and slapped him across the face, after which Att was let go.

The man who held her captive for those minutes had briefly spoken, not to her exactly, but beside her, and because she was the only one within hearing range, she accepted the duty as receptacle for those words.

‘He shouldn’t have done those things. We are the Brothers around here. What we say goes. If you do not come out to play, you do not come out at all.’

Att had not said anything.

Making his way out of the house where the main drama had unfolded, the protagonist needed to kill many of the people he had learned to respect. Punishment needs to be total, outside of the grey. It endures to the point of necessity. At one point he hid in a room where a woman was kept, the film indicated, as a sex slave. The protagonist killed her too because he could not take her with him and, he figured, it was better for her to be dead. Better not to be at all.

‘And when it does, you better make yourself ready.’

Att watched the explosion increase in intensity as the camera zoomed in on a determined face, the flames reflecting in his eyes. There must be fire all around him, Att thought. Her hand open and closed alternately, making a fist, making itself ready.

‘It seemed like a normal day, a normal life...’

‘Do you know what you have to do?’

Att tried to concentrate. This must be important for what would happen next.

‘The house is designed as a bunker, with the rooms nested in each other.’

‘Like a Russian doll’ she said. Her words came as a disruption. She was not expected to talk at this point.

‘Not quite... Did you ever see the film which had a group of people stuck, or, I think, placed, in an endless series of rooms that all looked the same—although they didn’t quite look like rooms—but were not all the same because they had different traps in them. Or some had. The whole thing turned out to be a geometrical exercise, applying universal laws to change and human behaviour. The problem was that it was all a cruel—no, not even cruel, pathetic maybe—joke, that just did not have any relevance to any problem. But it was fun to try and figure out why the rooms were interchangeable. Or maybe, why the people were not.’

‘I’m not sure I did.’

‘Anyway, the rooms are interchangeable, is what I meant—but it does not matter much in this situation.’

‘What does matter?’

‘That in the rooms, I mean, the rooms replicate what has come before. It can be very confusing.’

‘And I have to make it to the central room. Is that where the whole operation is held?’

‘Yes. And only you can stop it.’

The first room came to Att quite without her noticing. It was small, with a large bed, a few wardrobes, a bookcase. The bed had very sumptuous-looking linen, covering voluminous duvets, deep red and deep greens that went with the room’s wood panelling. There were a man and a woman in it, and they were embracing, lovingly. The woman seemed to have a lot of urgent things to say to him, because she was grasping his shoulder, whispering incessantly into his ear. He was paying close attention to her while trying to calm her fingers against his chest. Their intimacy was broken by an intruder. He grabbed the woman and left by a side door. The man left in the room was devastated—he rolled around on the bed crying and screaming, sometimes the woman’s name, but mostly unintelligible nonsense of sorrow. Finally, he fell to his knees in front of the door where she had last been seen, raised his face and said ‘God, I put to you an oath. What was mine has been taken and is no longer mine. But I shall not rest until revenge is complete. I shall take it slowly and methodically, against your wishes of peacefulness, but nonetheless, I ask you to guide my hand, guide the death that my actions shall bestow.’

Att interjected ‘Let’s go, I will help you find her.’

‘By now, there is no point. They’ll have her strung up, like a piece of meat. She cannot come back to me. Oh, I know, I know she is dead. Because as they debased her, they could not break her. Her eyes stood defiantly against them, I am sure. When addressed, she never replied. When beckoned, taunted, a tear on her cheek, but no words from her mouth. When asked to reject, was it really a choice? She knew, she knew. When pushed, shoved, onto the ground, the correct amount of stiffness. When beaten, her knees folded into her body, eyes averted, pain turned inwards. The surface of her skin breaking apart, in precise spots. The pain slow and mounting... No, it is too much! I cannot bear it. She took her suffering, accepted it into her body. But it shall not go unnoticed! Here I am, vengeful!’

His eyes shone.

The man turned around and walked up to Att, embraced her. She took his face in her hands, wiped his tears.

‘I can hear them in the next room—let’s go.’

When they found her small shivering body, he could only gawp at it. Blindfolded and trussed but largely unharmed, apart from the blood-stained thighs. He would not speak to her. The intruders spoke instead.

‘She asked us to be quick, so she could return to you.’

‘Were you?’

‘You see, Brother, it is not a choice.’

‘Some of us are free.’

‘We have the determining force.’

‘Our decisions will create the world and continue to create the new.’

‘The ultimate consequence cannot be ours to bear: in the beginning, division into two, followed by possession. Then, carnal multiplication of matter. Put differently: in the beginning was not the word.’

‘I need to continue my journey’ Att said. She directed her words to the woman. The men had started building a bonfire; the unimportant ones breaking up furniture, their leader handing pieces to the man Att had helped. He stacked them neatly and according to instruction.

To be an emblem for suffering.

Clenching her fist, this time her skin slipped against itself. Att’s fingers were wet, gooey. She wished she could insist, like the man walking away from the fire had done when faced with his enemy. Like he had done when he had fulfilled his destiny. The ultimate consequence: death. But only for those who were not allowed thought. They watched in horror, as the beast rose, laying waste.

Att considered getting Ahm on the phone. She would like to discuss the recent discoveries she had made for herself.

‘One day I woke up and I just knew that something had changed. I did not leave for work that day; instead, I went down to the basement.’

‘Something took form that day. I was told I had to take a step back and consider the initial meeting.’

Ahm said, ‘There is only indecision. Here, there is reality. I will protect you.’

No, wait. She had not seen Ahm for many days, weeks even. Rumour had it that he had been drawn into the company of a circle whose ritualistic obsessions were widely speculated about. Att could see how these held a strange fascination, for options had, of late, been few and far between. When he opened the door there was surprise on his face, an involuntary gentle smile that quickly dropped into a frown of uneasiness.

‘I didn’t expect you...’

‘I can leave.’ Att made no attempt at making her appearance a coincidence.

‘Wait, wait. Come in, of course, come in! I’ll set you a plate.’

When she brushed against him in the foyer his body was vacant.

She sat down at Ahm’s table with people she had never seen before. At the head was a man who, she inferred, was called Jakob. Jakob took up the whole room and held everyone’s attention—Ahm sat next to him like a little boy. Jakob had a way of moving which was hypnotic. Att was not sure if he was talking, but there was a constant mumbling, accompanied by small shrugs of the shoulders and quirks of the corners of the mouth. He held strings in his hands that may well have been attached to the other guest’s chests—small pants could be heard whenever he moved his fingers.

‘Enjoying your food, dear visitor?’ he addressed Att. ‘It is my favourite—I always make sure Ahm serves this dish at our parties.’

‘My name is...’ Att stopped herself.

‘You’ll be joining us for the ceremony? You can see the moon beautifully from the observatory upstairs’ a woman on Att’s right blurted out.

Jakob’s eyes spoke of a trespass. The room fell silent again until he gave out a hearty laugh.

‘You’ll have to excuse us today, we’re all a bit on edge because we are expecting some crucial news tonight. Please. Tell us about yourself.’

‘Myself? Yes, I... walked for a long while to get here.’

She did not know how much time had passed, but Ahm was gone from the table.

‘Excuse me, I need the bathroom.’

Leaving the dining room, Att made her way up a set of stairs clumsily hidden behind a curtain. In the observatory, she found Ahm sobbing. She doubted the tears were for her, offered, as they were, regardless of her presence. He turned to her with a contrived gesture: one arm folded tight over his abdomen, finger pointing to the elbow of the other arm, also held close to the body but with its hand reaching upwards. The fingers of this arm were loosely gripping some object, but with the palm turned away from her, Att could not see what it was.

On the floor a large diagram was drawn, made to take the form of a pentagram. It was comical how wrong it was, Att thought, a pastiche even of the black magic symbols she so often saw in films. The minute markings resembled hieroglyphs—a dead language, if it had ever been one. The group’s remarkable faith in originary meaning, the innate power of intent was to be of no consequence here, frantically diminished in that display of lost words. The large windows of the observatory looked out on nothing.

Ahm walked, maintaining his pose, to a point of the star, kneeled, and carefully placed the object in his hand there. He remained when the rest of the group joined them. Gently they motioned Att to the centre of the diagram. She crouched down.

No, it was not quite like that. She needed to discuss something. When she talked to Ahm on the phone he sounded quite beside himself. He had woken up, he said, in a plush hotel room, but the thing was, he could not recognise his body. Could she come?

Att opened another door. It sounded like a fire crackled behind her. And then it roared.

In the hotel room, a man was dead on the floor. Another man was sitting in a chair by the window, curtains drawn, gun ready at his hand.

‘You didn’t make it in time.’

‘I don’t know who this is. Or you for that matter.’

‘Did you find out?’

‘No. I came here for revenge.’

‘You came here because you were told to.’

They shuffled the body onto the bed. Att took time to observe the scars which covered it, and the new wound it had been adorned with, right through the heart. She positioned the hands across the chest, one with its fingers open, spreading out, the other pointing at the gaping hole in the chest. As a final touch, she opened his eyes. What looked out at her then was something that had no need for seeing, although it tried when communication was necessary. No, not now, this was not one of those moments. Att fell back on the sofa and tried to clear her head. Hers had been a great loss. When she returned, there had been a lot of unthinking, inert masses – these soon became more malleable and softened her touch. Here she was with this body. The protocol had quite failed. She felt not turned away from the fire but right inside it, alongside those who got left behind. She found herself embracing the stranger in the room, whispering sweetly about her journey and its obstacles. There was space for them next to the body.

‘I tried to protect you.’ His arm fell away, pointing to the gun which had been forgotten on the floor. Without hesitation, Att took it and shot him. She shot the TV which had been making a loud hissing noise ever since she walked in. Now, she would hear them coming.

As a solid block they entered the room. ‘See!’ a man at the front shouted. In his arms was a crumbling plaster sculpture mounted on a stick. It had the likeness of an old general, straight and stiff, with his hands raised high over his head, holding a small globe. The globe was a different material, dark and smooth, and reflected every aspect of the room. The group gathered around Att on the bed. She crouched over the two bodies, laid herself flat on top of her folded thighs. The rounded mirror on top of the general showed her to herself like this. With a touch of her finger, her face split in two, joined by her gaping mouth. A different darkness, in there. She laughed again, louder and louder until it became a strain in her entire body. Then, she got the notion that she was not laughing at all, but doing something much worse.

by Tilde Fredholm

Tilde Fredholm is a writer living in London. Her writing has previously appeared in The Debutante, The Critical Flame, and Another Gaze.