PEEL THIS
Part Two: Red
In the ancient world, our name was sex and death; a goddess of fertility and war. Ishizu once said that we were all destined to pass through the seven gates of hell.
But Big Sister's hell was far more accessable than my own. Cairo. Giza. Tokyo. Domino. She saw these as the underworld incarnate. Even the small village she first took me to wreaked of modern evils, she later told me, when she was a woman and I a man. She looked at me with the distance of years and the discrepancies of our bodies between us and told me how distasteful my obsessions were. How I had whored my soul to the gods of metal.
And she could not forgive me the death of our father.
To children, the delights of evil are decadent not because they are forbidden, but because they are foreign. They come as strange and exotic visitors wearing glamorous robes and carrying luminous trinkets.
The falacy you all believe: Evil is dark. It isn't. It is luminous. A swaddling, warm light and, to a child bred in the dusty caverns of a forgotten world, it is intoxicating. It is only after it had embraced me that I began to realize the claws had sunk so deep into my veins that if I pulled them out, I would bleed to death.
But here was this little boy. Evil. Same height as me, same eyes as me, same length of body, same small and perfect lips. Same fear of the dark, (though he would never admit it). And I could feel him swelling over me in quick successive waves, the four arms stretching out stretching out, my expression becoming sharper, beyond my control, my hair standing on end, the sensation unpleasant and prickling as the folicles arched.
The pain of it was warm. Equisite. And I felt the first stirrings of adulthood when that Other child took me. That tell-tale pleasure sickness that radiates from the pit of the stomach to the chest and then down, down between the legs. That throbbing warmth is Evil to me, even now. It frightens me to touch it. Still...I do. And the embrace is that rare luxury that never quite looses its appeal because it presses itself into my consciousness, penetrates with a startling lucidity.
The world is far more real when I let it take me.
You believe I did not know I killed my father? That I woke as if from some unpleasant dream and, confused, saw that body? I knew what I'd done. Oh, I knew. I remember the warm spurt of his blood against my knuckles, the twist of his face as I ground the blade into his lung and heart. The way his robes shushed against the floor.
Shh. Shh. Shh.
Hush little Malik. Don't look little Malik. Rishid's arms around me, his scent terrified and strong. Hush now. That night he lay beside me, big brother arms and a body that still smelled of blood, and he rocked me to sleep.
I knew what I'd done. And I cried, because I was supposed to cry, wasn't I?
But Big Sister knew.
Children are such devious things.
