Part two of three...
On Thorns Stands the Rose
But, for his theft, in pride of all his growth
A vengeful canker eat him up to death.
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see,
But sweet, or colour it had stol'n from thee.
William Shakespeare's Sonnet 99
Burials are archaic.
It strikes me that even as we advance in knowledge some of our worst customs persist. We are not a species that excels at letting go. Putting a child into the impartial ground has no comparison in the human experience and the cards they give you are drivel. I recall my wife scanning each rhyme-and-meter statement as though she could drag understanding from cookie-cutter poetry. Having failed to reanimate him, I watched the dirt to which he'd return being sprinkled on the small coffin and every atom in my grieving body railed against the cruelty.
Faith was irreparably lost.
She would claim that my sanity suffered from that day forward, a victim of unrealistic goals. The world of unconventional science frightened her more as the weeks passed, but I couldn't be hindered with the task of explanation. The steps I was taking troubled even Belly, a staunch supporter of all things improbable. The concept wasn't foreign to him, having seen much the same as I under LSD's influence. Our many projects were left abandoned as I slaved over the impractical application of conjecture. That another reality existed was beyond question and reaching it became the air I breathed. Peter himself breathed somewhere else and no barrier would keep me from extracting him.
He didn't recognize me.
The place was unfamiliar, though I'd lived in its facsimile for years. Cars we never owned sat beside a sculpted lawn we'd never designed. While many of our experiments echoed the Twilight Zone, I now lived it because I found my doppelganger lying with a woman who seemed infinitely younger than the one I left behind. Their son, my son, slept in the room next door. He lived. And when I woke the boy with the muted green eyes, my lack of beard and thinner frame rendered me a stranger.
The scream was quickly quelled.
Spiriting away a seven year old was made rather more difficult by the fact that I'd neglected a sedative. For my next kidnapping, I shall remember this. Oh, he fussed and my lies were doubted as they paraded from my mouth clear to the other side. But something about the travel to our dimension stilled the protests. The boy had been unprepared for the taxation of such an unnatural excursion and his consciousness had simply shorted out. Back at my lab, I slid my living child into the chamber and for anxious days waited for the result.
I stole the mantle of God.
And like the child himself, I had no intention of returning it. Explaining the miracle had been as complex a lie as any uttered by the well-meaning. Heeding Belly's advice, the story was weaved with the thread of fact, a taut operation indeed. But when the boy was produced a week after burial and as healthy as ever, questions fell away. No one noted the darker shade of his eyes, the slightly thicker build. Any guilt assigned to me by my spouse was cast aside. Peter remembered little of his time in his original home, accepting the pretense of sickness-bred haziness without struggle. And his adoration for his mother only grew.
But I was suspect.
He never voiced discomfort with me, but my presence seemed to stifle something in him. Not afraid of me by any detectable measure, only the cautious regard of one trying to peer behind the mask and unable to pull back the layers. But my books fascinated the somber boy. And thus became apparent the overriding difference between my sons who, despite my internal efforts, still felt like separate entities. Individuals. The one I lost was slower to knowledge while in this one lived the evidence of a formidable mind. Brilliance in fact and in this I was well pleased. Here was my heir, our future. And though Belly maintained a strange aloofness in the face of my miracle, he could not deny our good fortune.
Fate and all her flowing skirts had been thwarted.
Belly's disinterest in the boy did not last. To my recollection, it was my partner who first broached the subject of experimentation on the child. Peter was, after all, our only specimen from another plane of existence. We owed it to the very science that allowed me to find him. And as Belly continued marching in one 'special child' after another in search of feasible candidates, I was scolded for refusing to add mine to the schedule. Selfish, I was called. Innate curiosity be damned, this was my son! But Belly reasoned that this Peter was not mine to begin with and it was inexcusable to suspend valuable research for the sake of emotional attachment. What happened that day, for want of a stronger word, I shall call a breakdown and the aftershocks rippled into a rift between us. A shame, really.
My first and last friend.
Ultimately my need to understand silenced the dying voice of my conscience and the experiments began. The boy was mechanically gifted, something I used as a catalyst for cooperation. Follow this gear, trace that wire and then watch what it does. We engaged in hypnosis whenever Peter turned timid, but I never put him at risk. So much was learned and yet nothing could be published. But it's true what they say; knowledge is its own reward.
The knowledge of Peter's origin would die with me.