Disclaimer: Story will contain graphic, heavily violent scenes (like this chapter), strong language, and adult themes so reader discretion is advised. All characters are property of Quantic Dream and in no way does the author claim any rights to their entities forthwith. Blah blah blah please don't sue.
Chapter III
Even though Norman's body shook with violent, uncontrollable tremors, with his physical being succumbing once again to the residual after effects of Triptocaine, a part of him was glad that his condition escalated enough to be finally wheeled away from the psychopath that was Lieutenant Carter Blake. Though they had worked together on the Origami Killer case, shared the same goal and expectation of capturing the murderer - had their working relationship been so disintegrated that it would escalate to gross, repugnant antics such as spitting down another's throat? If Carter had that much enmity, why save him from death at the motel room in the first place? Somehow there was an answer, and Norman couldn't quite understand it just yet.
His vision of Carter started growing farther and farther away while the Agent was wheeled hastily down the hospital hallway. Then Norman noticed the lieutenant begin to follow, wishing to dear God that he wouldn't, and found relief when a male nurse had impeded his advancements with a hand to Carter's chest. As the nurse began explaining why the lieutenant could not follow, Carter stood quite vexed, looked down at the hand holding him in place, then back at the nurse. Then in a tumultuous torrent that could only be exercised by Carter Blake, he spat at the shocked nurse's face (perhaps the same loogie intended for Norman), then rebuked him further by delivering a powerful cross punch across his temple; the force knocked the male nurse to the adjacent wall then slid down against its surface soon after, unconscious.
Norman almost pitied the nurse if he didn't deem his action foolhardy, because even the agent knew full well that any physical contact with Carter, no matter how miniscule, was just an open invitation to an excessive counter attack; if push came to shove, Carter definitely pushed well beyond the boundaries to the point of perilous disaster. The agent was all too familiar with this, like how the lieutenant was willing to pull a gun on him during their heated interrogation of Ethan Mars during the Origami Killer case, with the only resolution being leave the room immediately or, as Carter so eloquently put it, "paint the walls with your fucking brains." Norman, being an intuitive and logical man, opted to follow his intellect than to react to the rage blazing inside him, and departed without further escalation (though he made sure to throw a couple of chairs in his mini-tantrum exit to show his displeasure). Norman Jayden really meant it when he called Carter Blake a psychopathic asshole during those investigative days working together.
Still, Norman found some of the lieutenant's actions in the past hour a bit puzzling as he was wheeled away. True, Carter did react to everything as he normally would: wrathful and violent. And yet beyond the surface actions seemed a much more subtle, almost empathetic nature…
Or, this could simply be the Triptocane just addling his judgment and perception, as the narcotic was jostling all across his body, his skin feeling like nettles, spiking through his insides going out. Pain, too much pain, his mind didn't have enough constitution to remain conscious through it much longer. Yet through all this, as the drug tried dreadfully to claim him in her sweet embrace, he could see the lieutenant far down that hall as two nurses grappled each of his arms, desperately holding back the deluge that was Carter Blake.
"I want you alive you son of a bitch!" Carter yelled, struggling between his human captors. "Do you hear me, Norman? Alive!"
'Over my dead body asshole,' thought Norman in an acerbic objection.
That wasn't to say that Norman had just conceded defeat, that he would just die on that medical dolly; no, far from it. While the doctors and nurses brought him to an emergency room and started removing his mouth froth with a suction catheter, Norman came to his own personal conclusion. It wouldn't be Carter to decide just because he wants him alive, and neither would the Triptocaine that was overloading his body right down to the axons and dendrites, seizing him further. No, just out of complete scorn for the lieutenant, and by extension the drug he was so sinfully addicted to, it would be Norman himself to settle on his own fate.
Yes, so he did willingly take Triptocane in that motel room, and yes, quite possibly far too much that it would kill him, perhaps a part of him wanting to die. But that was then, when he wallowed in his own pitiable existence of regrets and the desires to forget. He realized now in hindsight that it was an exceptionally rash and an infinitely idiotic thing to have done. And as Norman lay prostrate, wired to machines that beeped erratically at him, forewarning him of a possible grim finality while medical personnel tended to him frantically, he came to the conclusion that he wanted to live. That was all there was to it, a decision marked by his own free will and accord; to grasp at his second chance at life despite the failings he procured with the Origami Killer case, despite having to face the demons of his own failure.
And he will face them all, one by one, standing in a queue or in a massive free-for-all brawl if he had to. Each one hellish in their own torment, each one more sinister than the last; but no matter how fearful they were, no matter how overwhelming they could be, each one was as feeble as an origami figure. Demons would only haunt him if he let them, if he empowered them, gave them what they wanted. And in his vision of near-death, his eyes bore witness to a descending maiden above dressed in flowing blue, her serpentine tongue savagely licking about, gliding downwards in a sweet embrace to claim him. Sweet Triptocaine, the deadliest temptress of them all, the vile demon empress of his life that returned again to make her claim to his soul.
Only this time Norman would not accede; his mind was now his blade and his body the shield, with the entirety of his self the hallowed ground, a sanctified temple of the spirit, not filled with the emptiness of being, but with the powerful distillation of becoming. Norman will become an enforcer, a protectorate, an avatar of righteousness, because there was still a chance at redemption, to be forgiven, to be set free, by capturing the Origami Killer and bringing him to Justice.
So Norman grasped the ethereal maiden's slithering blue tongue into his fist, and viciously pulled back until all her essence spewed out of her orifice, shrieking: the grief, the sorrow, the hopelessness, the regret and all the components that swirled out of the darkness until what remained was a faint shining star. It was warm, solid, with the brightness growing in intensity from each passing moment until Norman was bathed in its palliative essence that seemed to radiate forever.
Then the starlight began piercing his eyes rather obtrusively. It was then that Norman realized that the light he saw now was the illumination coming from a bright pocket flash light. The portable light was turned off and he could see a doctor examining him and talking out loud, but the words came to him muffled and indiscernible, probably an after effect of his events with Triptocaine. Last thing he remembered though were the erratic, shrill sounds of beeping monitors that signaled the harbinger of his death. Now his sense of time shifted forward, having seemingly survived his overdose, as he was stationed in a recovery room partitioned by curtains, hooked up to an EKG machine that showed a steady, rhythmic heart beat, as if to say with each pulse: "Alive. Alive. Alive." The environment here overall was far less hectic than before, no doubt this was where some of the recent emergency room patients were brought in for observation after completion of medical services.
And despite his physically exhausted state, Norman couldn't help but smile. He did it, he actually did it; he defeated the Triptocaine, the greatest and deadliest of his demons. He could just envision it now, the rest of his other nightmares would be easy to conquer, obliterated piece by piece, until all that remained was the empty foundations of what he was, and be able to reconstruct himself into something new. His personal road to Damascus was now a life worth living by a calendar with no dates – unknown and mutable, full of possibilities.
The doctor finished his brief observational check-up and left Norman to recuperate from his ordeal. But the agent's mind churned and meshed, swelling with the static of thoughts, denying his body of the respite it needed. He was quite ecstatic with himself: who'd have thought that dying could be so thrilling, the rush! Well, he reconsidered that it wasn't necessarily the dying part per se, but coming back from it and surviving, that was where the wellspring of his excitement sprung forth. Isn't the inevitability of death from the mortality that begets it the greatest fear of all humans? So, he lived through the danger by his own free-will, conquered death and transcended, slaying the blue Triptocaine beast with his vorpal blade that went snicker-snack!
Jesus, who'd have thought that post Triptocaine overdose could make one so loopy? Or maybe it was the medical concoction running through his IV lines that was causing his half-baked mental cognizance? Norman wasn't quite sure which it was, but he just felt rather empowered, glowing even, like he could jump off the bed and start doing the Macarena. And when Norman tried to sit up, his body wailed with the excruciating intensity of being strained beyond its physical threshold, he could only manage half an inch upward with clenched teeth before flopping back on the bed. He thought that perhaps the Macarena will have to wait, and should just stick to wiggling his big toe.
Still, Norman grudgingly realized that half the credit to his resurrection was partly thanks to Carter. Though conjuring up even the remotest thought that the lieutenant had much to do with his current state of being was both disdainful and grotesque, hell it even made his chest and head pulse painfully for some reason. He wondered if perhaps Carter had played kick-ball with his corpse before applying CPR on his briefly deceased self only an hour or so ago in that motel room. Norman would not put it past the lieutenant, since he was willing to spit down his throat. How abhorrent, how repulsive! Shameful to say the least, Norman should be enraged against Carter for being such an enormous douche bag.
And yet, the agent recalled that moment when he was being wheeled away down the hospital hallway, when Carter was restrained by two male nurses like the bestial savage that he was. He shouted that he wanted him alive, what the hell was that all about? Norman recalled something flickering briefly in Carter's face at that moment, glimmered momentarily in his eyes…was he concerned? Since when did Carter Blake show concern, let alone a shred of compassion, if such a word even existed in his personal vocabulary of F-bombs and S-words, accompanied no doubt with several more archaic diatribes in the language of Carterisms.
The truth was that Norman had seen that concern of his before, a bit earlier in their whole overdose escapade. It was back at the motel room, when the agent was just brought back to life, and they had that moment so bizarre and extraordinary that even an "awkward turtle" could not properly describe it. Carter's fist was pressed firmly on his chest, and both their breaths were quite labored and exerted, staring intently at one another. Then Carter asked Norman if he was okay, in a voice that echoed concern as much as his expression did…
If Norman looked at that moment in another angle, wherein the act of CPR involves the pumping of a vital organ, the physical contact of lips, heavy breaths, the exchange of something internal through one part of the body into another, followed by a climactic exaltation by both parties once the victim is resuscitated by their savior – the entire thing, in a perverted maligned sort of perspective, was all abnormally sexual without even having the context or intention to be amatory. If Norman's stomach, along with the rest of his physical attributes, weren't so sluggishly out of sync with the pace of his mind right now, he was sure that he'd have thrown up a little in his mouth right about now. No, if anything it was just a harmless tete-a-tete moment in the face of imminent danger, nothing more than that, right?
Then the next hazy moment of that event started coming into focus, recalling that massive head butt of Carter Blake after applying CPR to Norman in the motel room. No wonder the agent's skull felt like a railroad spike had lodged itself deeply in his lobe, it was all no thanks to the lieutenant. Suddenly his mind pulsed at the thought, as if another spike was forcefully invading into his skull. Now he started to feel livid, first the head butt and then threat to spit in his throat? How would Carter like it if he got head butted, then anesthetized to a table so that he could have his mouth forced open, then spit down his throat? Would he hate it? Would Carter despise Norman more? Would the lieutenant yell out vehemently again to blame him for being responsible for failing to save Shaun Mars?
Norman's string of thoughts jarred to a halt, his intuitive profiler mind wedging itself between his logic from his ire. The pieces of the past events were there, circling his head in their own orbit of incomplete rationales: the anger, the helpfulness, the blame, and most of all, the concern. Each of them were diametric opposites to at least another, clashing against each other, yet tied to a thread that molded them together to create a cohesive whole that was the modus operandi of Carter Blake. Just what exactly did he want?
Before the agent could investigate this query further, a small, blue tank crawled along his blanket, across his left leg. Norman looked puzzled at first, perhaps thinking that some kid's remote controlled toy happened to make its way to his bed. But he froze as another tank rolled in from over the right edge of his bed, scuttling towards him, followed by another at the far end. He recognized these tanks, he had seen them before many, many times during one of his spouts of work boredom – these came from the in-game feature of ARI. Norman tapped two fingers around his eye area to ensure he was not wearing his glasses at all, and sure enough they were not on his face. Last he remembered they fell off before he lay convulsing near death at the motel room, so what was this all about? How could this be happening?
The tanks rolled towards each other, his abdominal area serving as the central battle ground for their virtual war game. The tanks rumbled and flickered, rotating their canons between one another, preparing to take aim and fire. Norman's breaths steadily increased, growing shortened and panicked, his EKG meter pacing faster and faster. What was going on? Was this a post traumatic stress episode? Or the hospital fluids flowing from his IV tubes? Maybe the concussion caused by Carter's head butt earlier? Perhaps a Triptocaine induced hallucination? Before his line of questions could continue, the tanks abruptly stopped targeting at each other, then rotated their canons to the opposite end of Norman's bed. The agent looked quizzical at first, concerned not only of their presence, but why they were looking the other way. Then he followed their line of vision to an ominous figure standing at the end of his hospital bed.
It was a handsome man, exaggeratedly dressed in a rich blue zoot suit, with two coupled silver chains of different lengths running from his waist and down his right pant leg – one arcing short, another dipping low just above his knee. The man had an air of refinement, yet furtively sinister, adjusting his pinstripe necktie accentuated with both lighter and darker shades of blue colors to meld with the hue of his clothing. If only Norman could see this man's face, but all he could identify at that moment was the devious Cheshire grin between a finely shaved dark goatee, just below his blue felt hat that covered his eyes. Then the man's voice rolled out, shockingly familiar, but held behind it a clandestine irregularity:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out across the sky
Like a patient etherized on the table…
Suddenly, the man in the zoot suit appeared as a ghostly apparition right above him, straddling him by the waist, edging his way closer and closer to Norman's face. If he wasn't auditorily impaired right now, he would have heard his EKG meter spiking rapidly, jumping across its screen in erratic strokes – but why did he hear this handsome man so copacetic? Norman's world began to phase out of focus and into blackness, but not before he could see the visage of his tormentor in blue from under his hat, his eyes shimmering impressively with the same colored intensity as his suit.
The image of Carter Blake grinned maliciously down at the agent, leaning across the length of his body, almost suffocating in his potency, until he felt the crushing concentration of his greatest demon made manifest consume him whole, darkening his vision into the perilous abyss.
And from the blackness, the agent heard Carter's voice, foreboding and echoing: "Thought it was over? It may never be over, Norman."
The Thin Man found Scott Shelby to be a man of routine. After all, to be a serial killer, one would have to be particularly methodical in not only the killings, but in all aspects of life, and midnight coffee at a corner 1950s diner was of no exception. Still, watching Scott from afar and observing, with the Thin Man as the scientist and with Scott as the bacterium under his sleuthing microscope, he was starting to feel impatient, and somewhat irritated at the detective.
Scott did nothing, he always did nothing. Literally and absolutely nothing of merit, night after night in that godforsaken café, in that same booth, ordering the same single cup of decaffeinated, no cream & no sugar coffee, with the same three counterclockwise stirs before sipping it occasionally for the rest of his time there. Then, he would sigh, his eyes glazed over distantly as he time traveled mentally to whatever particular event he fancied in his past. And he stayed like that for almost half an hour, a hand to his spoon, not a single fiber of his joints budging a centimeter, almost becoming an extension of the booth furniture, until his drink turned cold. Then, he would suddenly snap out of his revere with two blinks, take one last sip of his ice, bitter coffee, then slap a couple of bills on the table and leave.
The sameness, each and every night, watching his regret poisoning the monster from within, being siphoned and strained, purified into godforsaken humanity. No, the Thin Man knew that this had to stop soon, Scott's darkness was croaking, wailing for help, reaching out with its claws and teeth to tether itself on any handhold to pull itself out of the pit. It only made the mission to reawaken Scott Shelby's monster all the more urgent. Thankfully, he had a little help in order to facilitate in this process, thankful for Nathaniel Williams.
People like Nathaniel could be so easily swayed, convinced to do anything you wanted them to do. Their malleability was due to their overzealousness in a faith, an idea, a belief to a higher power than themselves, and Nathaniel was no exception. And people like Norman Jayden would so easily dismiss Nathaniel as having a "persecution complex" or men like Carter Blake as him being a twisted, God-fearing idiot. What the agent and the lieutenant couldn't fathom was zealots like Nathaniel simply needed a certain focus, primarily a guide, a leader to temper and shape them into powerful tools to accomplish whatever you wanted them to. And with the Thin Man's supernatural ability to convince the feeble minded with his serpentine charisma, all it took were simple keywords to move Nathaniel into abject servitude.
"Your God commands you," was the final phrase the Thin Man had said in his first meeting with Nathaniel to convince him to join his cause.
He had found Nathaniel back during the time of the Origami Killer Case. He saw the religious man was so afraid, uncertain, and most of all full of doubt – not because of the Thin Mans's fortuitous meeting, but at his own faith from an incident that, to this day, remained undocumented and only aware between the both of them, and one other.
It started with Agent Jayden and Lieutenant Blake back at Nathaniel's apartment which lead to a heated incident, involving raised guns and certain threats to expel the demon that was Carter Blake. Nathanial's failing to fulfill his threat had shaken him quite deeply to the very bowels of his soul, unable to successfully exercise the Anti-Christ. He was subsequently hauled to the police station for further questioning, which was ultimately routine and uneventful, with the conclusion being that Nathaniel was not the Origami Killer.
After the interrogation and holding, they eventually released Nathaniel. While he was glad that his troublesome situation had concluded, how could he have known that holding a gun against the Anti-Christ earlier that day would return to him in a ten-fold vengence? No man appreciates having the barrel of a gun pointing right at their face, especially a man as choleric as Lieutenant Carter Blake.
So when Nathaniel left the station, he went through the streets to make his way back home, planning to pray forgiveness to those that cast the first stone against him, and to possibly smite certain evildoers; and end the night with several Hail Marys and Our Fathers. It had been raining very hard that night, much stronger than the past few days, enough to obscure the prowling of a vile demon.
Then in the din of the eve, Carter Blake emerged from an alley and pulled him into its darkness, throwing him across the air with bestial strength. Nathaniel sailed across the alley and slammed his back against the corner of a dumpster before rolling across the wet ground. Carter advanced towards him with a wrathful vigor, calling him by foul names, all of them severely deprecating: fucking faggot, cum rag, filthy cunt, shit eating piss ant, and so forth until they all blurred together in a mesh of vile evils and curses. Then came the flying foot onto Nathaniel's gut, never realizing that steel-toed shoes could hurt so bad; and it hurt even worse after the second, then third time, expelling the air forcefully from his lungs.
As the wheezing Nathaniel desperately tried to crawl away from his demonic attacker, egress from the situation by exiting the alley, Carter grabbed him by the ankles and pulled him deeper into the dark, spinning him across the wet ground in a giant 180 arc and tossed him. Nathaniel slid a short distance across the damp floor and onto a stack of plastic garbage bags that collapsed on him. Carter's wrath was far from over, after all Nathaniel had the utter gall to point a gun at the lieutenant of all people, threatening his life, try to kill him. And to the lieutenant, it was only fair the measure should be returned in kind, in the most brutal way possible.
So Carter took one of the plastic bags, ripped it open, and poured all its garbage over Nathaniel to further his suffering through humiliation. The stench of rotten food and putrid human waste smelled pungent, revolting, staining his clothes and body with their sick juices. Then he took two empty glass bottles of beer from the poured out refuse, put them inside the plastic he recently opened, then rolled them inside bag, and smashed them onto the nearby alley wall, turning them into vicious shards.
"Get up, fucker!" hissed the lieutenant, picking him up by the throat in a suffocating grip, then slammed him onto the nearby dumpster.
When Carter released his vice from his neck, he made sure to throw one solid punch straight across Nathaniel's eye, swelling it. Then he forcefully turned Nathaniel around, cuffing his hands behind him.
"What-what are you-" Nathaniel desperately cried out as loud as the pain jostling all over his body.
Carter replied by kicking him savagely on the back of his knee, forcing him on a kneeling position on the drenched ground. Then he hissed in his ear, "Mother fucker, point a gun at me? Try to kill me? When I'm done with you, I'll make the Anti-Christ look like a Charlie Brown Christmas special, cuz I'm far worse than the devil!"
The lieutenant pulled Nathaniel's denim jacket off until it rolled down to his cuffed wrists, exposing his back, and further constricting his hand and upper body movements. Then Carter wound up the plastic bag into a taught whip, with the broken glass bulging at its end, exposing a couple of sharp filaments. He took a few paces back, swung out the tight, handmade whip and lashed it across Nathaniel's back. The first strike felt inconsequential, but that was only the precursor to firmly set the glass. It was the second strike that stung, slashing its way through the thin material of his shirt and reaching skin, making him scream. Then the third one came, stinging harder than the one before it, then a fourth, and a fifth, bludgeoning his flesh over and over in criss-cross hatches until the blood flowed freely. Had he not been so castrated and shackled, Nathaniel would have run away, fled from his vicious attacker, but all he could do in his position was roll to the side, lying on his stomach, worming away in a pathetic heap as Carter whipped out again and again. Nathaniel cried out desperately but the rain was roaring so hard that his voice was muted and absorbed by the torrential downpour. This was all so terribly vicious, like reliving one of the stigmatas of Christ himself. It was probably about the thirteenth strike that the glass exploded out of the shoddy plastic material, scattering around Nathaniel, with a few smaller pieces acting as projectiles that dug deep into his flesh.
And there he laid on the wet floor, with tears and blood flowing out of him as much as the heavy rain that fell from the sky, quivering like some massive, tortured worm. This punishment was all so much, too extreme, why was this happening? Wouldn't anybody help him? All he could think at that moment was this one compelling phrase from the religious text he worshipped so dearly: 'Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?'
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
If only Nathaniel had a gun, oh how he would have used it to enact such heavenly righteousness against Carter Blake, show him the wrath of God! Or more to the sense, the wrath of an absent God, one he felt had abandoned him at his time of need as he lay writhing in pain and agony, under the cascading rain of a darkened evening. Except he recalled what the FBI agent told him that day: "A gun won't work on the Anti-Christ, he's much too powerful than that."
So when Carter loomed over him, when the lieutenant's next course of action was to pulverize his teeth in until all was left were his gums, Nathaniel shouted something that left the lieutenant stunned, puzzled, initially unable to hear his words clearly between his bloody sobs and the falling rain.
"What did you say to me you mother fucker?" he yelled out, visibly upset, but also incredibly perplexed.
Then with another mighty heave of a desperate man, with the last breath of his conscious soul, Nathaniel cried to the devil above him: "I…I forgive you!"
Forgiveness: more powerful than a bullet, bypassing the barriers of the flesh, and hitting straight to the heart. And for an iota, a long, breathless human moment passed between them. The devil had been expelled, exercised righteously from his furious power, if but for a moment.
Ah, if only Nathaniel was still conscious soon after when Carter kneeled down and lifted his head up to speak to his face. How would he have reacted to the lieutenant's reply? Would he think that these were the words coming from the true Anti-Christ himself, or perhaps a flawed human being with a darkening deep inside the wellspring of his soul?
Because Carter replied, "I don't deserve to be forgiven."
He let go of Nathaniel and, out of mercy, uncuffed him. But beyond that Carter left him in the alleyway to stew in his wounds, his face blank but troubled. Perhaps he left him lying there out of anger, or perhaps out of a human sense of incredible shame for self-witnessing the brief flicker of the monster he truly was, the beast he never wanted to be, but became purely so out of circumstance.
When a few lonely moments had passed, Nathaniel came to consciousness. He groaned, feeling his body as broken as his soul, and by extension his faith in a God. Nathaniel tried to stand, but all he could do was sit up on his knees with gritted teeth, unable to put on his jacket to cover his pain and shame. So with hissed, painful breaths, he removed his jacket, then sat there under the rain feeling scared, helpless and utterly alone; the world felt like a realm of hidden monsters where the angels on high were just devils dancing and laughing at mortals under the pale moonlight. He could not have been more right to say the least, as a greater monster far worse than the Anti-Christ, than even Carter Blake himself, emerged from the shadows and calmly approached Nathaniel with purpose.
The Thin Man came to the fallen, bloodied man, put a hand out to raise him up, and said, "Come follow me, and I will make you a fisher of men."
Nathaniel looked up, the lamppost from the street illuminating the Thin Man in a radiant silhouette of light, revealing his shadowed frame – a dark angel descending from the heavens! Eli! Eli!
"Your God commands you," the Thin Man said, in his hypnotic and serpentine voice, alluring and deeply compelling.
Then Nathaniel accepted the Thin Man's hand, and was drawn in by his dark, otherworldly divinity.
And ever since that time, Nathaniel had followed the Thin Man like a true apostle – loyal and unquestioning. And yet the Thin Man saw him no more than a tool, a useable means to a grandiose end for the master plan to resurrect the Origami Killer and then brutally slay the monster for the sake of Justice in a world without. And as long as the Thin Man gave Nathaniel the God he wanted, he would blindly follow him even to the precipice of death.
For now, Scott's darkness must be revived, resuscitated. It was a bit irksome to collect the necessary pieces to address this issue, but it was well worth it, as the Thin Man held a simple brown box in his hands. He would give this object to Scott himself, but it was far too soon in the plan for the two to meet, not yet. Their meeting had to be cultivated, aged well like fine wine, until the precise moment when the two can share each other's darkness, until the Thin Man can consume his.
"Give this to him," commanded the Thin Man to Nathaniel with authority. "Leave it on his table."
Nathaniel took the box without question, and replied, "Yes, my Lord."
He watched Nathaniel scuttle away, slinking under street lamps and awnings, until he reached the diner. Nathaniel entered, scurried towards Scott Shelby who was sitting frozen and despondent, no doubt deep in his trance of regret: whether it be the loss of his twin brother, or perhaps his last killing as the Origami Killer, with the death of Shaun Mars and the eventual suicide of Ethan Mars, they made no difference – all reasons were inconsequential. What was important was that he reach out to the monster within Scott soon, make first contact, and guide him through the Thin Man's twisting maze of deception and murders.
Nobody took particular notice of Nathaniel, he seemed to have a way to keep himself obfuscated, scrambling narrowly as a sewer rat would between pipes. The Thin Man chose his apostle very well, no better man suited to be the extension of his righteous arm than the overzealous Nathaniel, a wonderful servant indeed.
And as quickly as Nathaniel entered, he scampered towards Scott's table, laid the box down quietly on the edge, then scrambled out of the diner. He dodged under lights and overhangs before returning to the Thin Man, looking at him expectantly.
Then he both respectfully and fearfully lowered his gaze from the Thin Man and said, "I have done your bidding my Lord."
And, as a master to its pet, he put a hand to his forehead and simply uttered the words: "Bless you child. You may take your leave now."
"Thank you, my Lord." And Nathaniel crawled back into the darkness.
Meanwhile, the Thin Man observed Scott Shelby, watching and waiting patiently for him to break out from his revere. And when he did, the man took notice of the box laying at the edge of his diner table, looking absolutely puzzled. The words "To the Origami Killer" were penned neatly and precisely on its cover. He was not quite sure where it came from, what to do with it, let alone what its purpose was. But despite its mysterious arrival and circumstances, it called to him, allured him, beckoned for him in some unheard siren song, claiming him. The darkness within, the beast inside Scott knew and understood; in the language of killers, the Thin Man was calling to him through this box, calling towards the Origami Killer.
So Scott drew the box close to his person, paused, waiting, deliberating. This was an impasse, the two roads diverging: one leading to humanity, the other leading him back to the darkness. He placed two hands on the side of the cover, his palms magnetized to its surface, feeling a deathly pulse as a tiny surge of the killer within grew, swelled. Then he lifted the cover, his inner monster metastasizing, emerging from its egg, returning; the remnants of a residual humanity burning out.
And when he completely opened the box it was as if a geyser sprung forth from within, the darkness claiming, returning to fill his void with a greater abyss; its monstrous form breaking free, rising, its wings of desire unfurling. Because Scott saw three objects from within the box: the first two was an origami figure and an orchid to serve as the reminder of who he was – the Origami Killer – and the other was a photograph of Andrew Barker.
At first he looked at the picture, mystified with a sense of unfamiliarity. Then slowly, like the dawn rising at the edge of a horizon, he recognized him as the man he had stopped during the robbery at Hassan's convenience store on his last Origami Killer foray. He stared at the photo for a moment, and then flipped it over to read the one word that would fully bring to life his inner, cruel beast.
Father.
And the Thin Man mirrored the same wide smile as Scott Shelby's, knowing that the darkness became manifest, knowing that the Origami Killer had returned.
Author's Note: Thank you for reading! All comments and constructive criticisms are always welcome. And a big thank for those that have already made an awesome review to my other chapters! :D
I also wanted to take this time to inform you fine readers that there are a couple of excellent and entertaining audio interviews I've found of Leon Ockenden done by a podcast called Playstation Chat. For those of you who are Norman Jayden fans, and want to get to know the man behind the "Nahman" these interviews are well worth your time. The dude is a pretty funny guy!
If you're interested, I've left a detailed post at the Heavy Rain community message board which contains the links for download: forum(dot)fanfiction(dot)net/topic/73306/39396354/1/
Sorry for the (dot) in the web address but fanfiction website parses website links to prevent spam bots, including links to its own website :\
In addition, the guys at Playstation Chat will be interviewing Pascal Langdale (actor for Ethan Mars) in the next week or so, you should totally send them some questions to ask him via the Playstation Chat podcast! Otherwise, I'll be posting up the link when it's released on the author's note of my next chapter. :)