The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil ...
It wasn't a dream.
It had felt unreal, as he had made his way to the place he had seen in his head, knowing where to go because of some flashing images and a lot of pain. And then the building had been there, just like he had known it would be - just like he had hoped it wouldn't be.
If he was honest, he already knew before he went in there. Maybe it was because the building looked so exactly the same as it had in his head, when he had never seen it before. Maybe he could smell the blood in the air and just didn't register it on a conscious level. But before he pulled open the door and snapped on his flashlight, he already knew.
But that didn't make what he found any better, any easier to bear.
It was a little, pink shoe. A sneaker. Tiny and abandoned. That was the first thing he saw - just a shoe … but it was an entire story in and of itself, screaming thousands of words he didn't want to read. He knelt down to pick it up and just stared at it, in the round beam of his flashlight - feeling the grief and guilt crash in on him. A tiny shoe. And somewhere, close by, there would be a tiny girl who was missing it. And he was already too late to save her. He had refused to save her.
He straightened up - and forced himself to look around...
...
After he'd seen, after he'd made himself look at them all - find them all, he staggered back out into the sunshine and threw up. The sky was blue overhead, he could hear birds singing nearby and the more distant sound of traffic … and just beyond the door was more slaughter and bloodshed than he had ever thought possible. It seemed unreal; that these two worlds, the normal one and the other one - the one with all the death, could just sit side by side. He threw up again.
Still unsteady on his feet, his head swimming and dizzy, he stumbled and tumbled his way over to a low wall and sank down. Then he buried his head in his hands for a moment, before rubbing his face and sitting straight up and taking a deep breath. He didn't know what to do. Should he leave them? Should he tell someone? But who? Should he bury them himself - but how could he do that? He couldn't move all those bodies alone, he didn't have a car and this place wasn't close enough to the sort of ground he could dig a grave in.
He considered - just for a moment - simply taking the tiny girl, and burying her as a symbolic gesture to the rest of her people … his people. But then that would mean taking her body away from her mom, leaving her alone in the ground, in the dark, and he quickly abandoned the thought.
He had found her in there, amongst all the other bodies, the adults - the men, the women, the bigger children … whole families slaughtered. And she had been in there, the smallest of them all, her dead eyes wide open and staring at the ceiling, her terror preserved in their glassiness.
He had closed her eyes, and put her abandoned shoe back on her foot - like she was Cinderella. Just seeing her lying there, one foot clad only in a frilly sock - he had a sudden, wild and stupid thought that her feet would get cold. So he had put her shoe back on for her. There was nothing else he could do for her - not now anyway.
Out on the wall, he hung his head and tried not to cry. He should have done something. He should have helped. He had been given a chance to make a difference … well... look at the difference he had made.
...
He had no recollection of getting home - no idea when, or after how long, he got up from that wall, left that place - left those people behind. He just walked away. But by the time he got home he had somehow acquired a bottle of whisky wrapped in a brown, paper bag.
That night, he didn't even bother with a glass. He just drank and drank, straight from the bottle, hoping to blot out the memories, hoping to blot out the feelings, hoping to lose himself completely to the sweet and welcome blackness of unconsciousness.
He did black out. Eventually. But he found no rest there, no solace. Instead, he dreamed - all night long, the same dream over and over: he was back in his classroom, and he was busy. He had lessons to prepare and papers to grade and he was trying to get some of the kids' work ready to go up on his reading display. And the whole time, there was somewhere he needed to be. He needed to get this done - and get it done quickly - because there was something important he needed to do.
But she wouldn't let him, the whole time - as he moved from task to task, with an ever increasing sense of urgency - the little girl's incessant voice piped after him, asking him to help her. She needed help. Would he help her? Please. Would he help? He told her to wait a minute. He told her he would look at her homework in just a second but she needed to be quiet for now, Mr. Doyle was busy. He moved away from her to get on with the next job, but she followed along behind.
Over and over, she asked. 'Will you help me? Please. Mr. Doyle, will you help me?' It wasn't until he lost his patience and he turned his head to look at her - ready to snap - that he realised she was only wearing one shoe...