"The picture on his back showed the Illustrated Man himself, with his fingers about my neck, choking me to death. I didn't wait for it to become clear and sharp and a definite picture."
~The Illustrated Man
It was all too cerebral; his own dismal mentality was far too much for his own good, and it always seemed to come back to haunt him. Insanity soon became another madman, left to stalk him through every turn of his relentless phantasms.
He was a black hole.
The child stumbled through the doorway into his lair, looking anxious. Myrnin sat in the shadows, all the while the gaping hole in his mind tearing at his conscience. He knew this child; a slight, powerless girl. He must have known how brightly she had shone….
But the disease overpowered him, as he always knew it would. Claire would never know the man behind the cruel demise, and he had so often prayed she would get away from him. When the time came, he would not save her. It was a simple matter of predator and its prey; the very purpose of the unshakeable structure that was Morganville.
It was only fate that would enslave him as its madman.
She had fallen quickly; much faster than he expected. She knew well not to give him the satisfaction of her retreat.
And it angered him.
He pulled her up quickly, anger feverishly teeming in his voice as he screamed at her to get out. He saw in her wide eyes that she knew that that was impossible as he did, but he pushed her back against the wall, rounding off of her. Myrnin threw a lab table down, satisfied by the collected shatter of slides and Erlenmeyer flasks.
All the work that would stay in this cage, never to be touched. In time, it would become as fossilized as he, and little Claire would cease to be there to put it all together again.
"Claire, listen to my instruction very carefully. Leave, and quickly. Shut the portals down. You must leave, NOW."
Her hand was outstretched to him, and he let out the dry laugh of an ancient man. She thought she could save him.
But he was starved and imprisoned, and the blood pulsating through her was enough to set him ablaze.
He lashed out, striking the girl in the side. If she cried out, he paid no attention to it, driven by only hunger as he clawed and tore with his teeth.
He held back only for so long, and froze as something pierced his chest. His blood-covered fingers wrapped gingerly around the capsule that stabbed into his skin, and his eyes went to the dart gun in the child's hand…. Claire. Sanity returned in a rush, replacing the numb rage with pain.
She was damaged beyond recognition; wounds cascading over her shoulders, blood seeping through tattered clothing. Myrnin no longer felt the burning of a fervent hunger; it was replaced by the searing terror in his frozen heart.
No.
One hand went out to her shuddering form, and she cringed away from him, backing hard against the corner and crumpling to the ground, gasping for breath. Her brazen eyes reminded Myrnin of a frightened animal, cornered by a merciless predator, and he stayed frozen and watched, as fate would always have it.
Her lips formed a hoarse, lifeless word that he couldn't bring himself to hear.
"Don't," he begged her, "Don't speak."
So he sat with the frightened girl as she died, too afraid to near her. He spoke to her long after her eyes had drifted shut, never once daring to touch her, as hungry as he still was.
It was too cerebral, as if talking to the skeleton of his own existence.
The dead girl became a dead girl, just as Ada had, and he was the madman put into play.
Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.
He was a black hole, and she had been pulled in.
It was, in all truth, inevitable.
And so then came his downfall.