And they shall know me

A stream of consciousness POV exercise

With thanks to

Edith Bow

for running the show and

Emil Ottoman

for the prompt words Immolate Damnation Disinherit - it almost writes itself when you let it go.

And they shall know me

They let you read anything in here. They should know better. They should know me and take me at my word, but they will not..would not - AND BY HIS DEEDS WILL HE BE KNOWN - what more do I have to do? What more should I have done?

Time passes. She does not come. And so he waits.

How does a man come to be in a place like this? It’s something he could hear them talk about in his inner mind amongst the echoes of previous meetings, reviews and sessions and the clang of doors, chink of keys, the tink tink finger nails on phials, the snap of ampoules, the rough linen sighing regretfully on the walls. He would hug himself tightly anyway. He’s rationalised it, figures it was always coming to this, and he’s just got to wait. He tried to lick up the glass once, to see if he could get into the hospital wing.

Time passes. She does not come.

At the very start it was the butchers. The old shop - probably gone now, but then… weekends with his father to the butchers. A ritual: man and boy and mother never came. Man brings the meat, that's the game. The Butchers - a place where he learned about what the inside of meat looks like and how there were more knives in the world than you could count. The smell of meat, the sick and sweet and nearly but not quite rotten smell of well hung meat. The shape of it, the reduction of the carcasses into anonymity, the yellow of the tallow, the black and redness of the flesh, the geometry of anatomy yielding to the beat of blade on block and the snick snicker snick of the steel bringing back the edge.  That's the place where he got given his first secret to keep.

“Anything else for you, sir?”

“Just a half pound of crackling, Mr Berry. Bit for me, bit for the boy.”

“Right you are.”

The crackling: golden, fat and salted crunch; oily tooth breaking, jaw aching mouth coating pure essence of pork. The hairs on the back of it told him that it came from something that was alive as he looked at them for a second, disgusted, but not enough. He stuffed it into his young, learning mouth, and soon he cannot ever wait to eat once he’s got it in his hands. 

Salt and flour dust fell yellow to the sawdust and he kicked red trails though it to the oxblood trodden mud below. “Berry’s - the best butchers”. That’s what dad said. “Don’t tell your mum, Samuel, son. It’s our secret.”

What a place of learning for a boy - that the Butcher shop is a place for secrets and treats. Once, the scream of lambs like children drew him outside and round the back, while dad haggled over chops and Berry grinned red faced, loading the scales with them.

Yes, out the back in the killing shed, the abattoir, the knackers yard. That’s where he learned what fire does to flesh.  Peering through the doors. There he saw the knee buckled pigs bolted and brained, dropped and dragged to the blow torch and the heavy aproned man scorching with practised arcs the hair from their pink backs. The smell of burnt hair crawling up his nose.  This is where he learned that people eat each other -  the woman that sometimes served the meat and the blowtorch man, laid on a steel bench, bare backed, pig-pink and hairy, chewing at each other. They saw him watching, stopped and stared  laughing wetly. Wiping his face, blow torch man said “Tastes like chicken, son.” and she laughed and said “Not this bit. Fuck off, will you Sammy?” And he did.  Another secret, and he wondered for years what does it taste like?

How does a man come to have thoughts like his. Such a perfectly crafted delusion. The grandeur, the pomposity of it. It’s textbook? Another question that he hears them thinking.

The fall from the tree was when he first had thoughts of his difference. Of the two of them, in the race to the top of the oak, he was the one, when the branch gave out forty foot up, that was the one to survive the fall unscathed. But how? When the friend lay bloodied, senseless,  the white bone showing through torn blue jeans and little Suzanne jetting vomit and screaming at the sight of it, he was calm. He felt  like he wasn't really there, touching the bone shaft, fingering the meaty redness, red like at the butcher’s shop. 

Matthew came round and Sammy had his finger still pushed into the leg wound, feeling the heat and the juiciness. “Sammy don’t!” Suzzanne was screeching, Matthew gaped, pain too much to take and out he went again.

“I was just trying to stop the blood coming out.” Samuel James Harris (his name in times of his worst behaviour) lied through tears that he learned to squeeze out when he needed lies to sound like truths, lies that people wanted to be true. His dad still punished him for it and walked him round to Matthew’s house to say sorry. But it felt more like begging. Begging for forgiveness. He wondered if his dad had ever begged like that, if he knew what it felt like and that was why he had made Samuel do it. 

Time passes and still she does not come.

What is it that finally drives them to act? To make those desires and fantasies real?  He’s seen this very scene  acted out on the videos they let be watched in here. So trite. What are they thinking?

When the dog bit him, the dog he so wanted and loved and begged for, the spotty dog, dad, like from the film, the one he fed and took for a walk and petted and brushed and loved. When it bit him, and his blood came out, again he was calm, he didn't cry. He tied up the dog with the leash to a tree and he beat it with a stick until it was dead. It took a long time but he was never angry. Like when his dad had hit him, explaining quietly that he was bad and had to be punished so that he understood. Dad never did that angrily.  So Samuel learned this is what is right, this is what needs to be done - he bit me and that is what you get for making blood come out. He wondered if his dad felt as good as this when he beat him.  He looked at the dead dog. No, or he wouldn't have stopped. 

Sensing then that he might have done wrong, that death could be too much punishment,  he stole petrol from the lawn mower and burnt the dog. That was when he learned what petrol smells like, tastes like … what fire was, and that it would take a lot more to burn a body to nothing. That was when he met the first psychologist. They asked him, very gently,  to explain. It was an easy question, but he realised that sometimes you should tell lies.

How the pieces have come together, falling slowly into place, until the jigsaw of damnation is complete. The corners, then the edges, gather the blue bits, red bits, the clouds, the dark patches, faces, flowers,  twist and turn them and slowly the picture will be revealed.  They give you a lot of jigsaws here, and you have plenty of time to think. 

We can’t recommend him for release to a less secure facility.

His psychosis is profound. When we have tried lower doses of clozapine, he relapses into fascination with wounding and burning within weeks. He has left two staff with life changing injuries.  It would be like unleashing Hell.  

“Unleashing Hell”  they say? They let you read anything in here.  Admittedly, medical notes took some work to get hold of, but the doctor was alone.  He was the new one, and he hadn’t read the notes!

They should know better.

Time passes. He is still sure she will come, because it is written that she will, in the very old books. And we believe very old books; everyone does.

He is not understood, but does not understand why. Can’t everyone see the beauty of it but him? How the body is alive when it is just meat inside? The incredible thing that fire is? Every word for it is beautiful, primal, urgent, evocative of action, senses, reaction and change:  Fire! Flame, flammable, ignite, torch, combustion, roast and char and crisp and sear and bake and consume. Cremate, immolate, conflagrate, incinerate and cauterise. Magma, lava, furnace, smelt and melt and weld.  He aches for fire in every part of himself. He recites the words like a prayer, like a spell, but they never see it. None of them.

in a very old book he found his own understanding at last. He learned the seventy two names in the hierarchy in which his own name sat: Samael -  the Severity of God and keeper of the sacred knowledge. I am complete! He tried to explain it to them, because that’s what they wanted, but they would just nod and write it down. And they shall know me by works - what more should he have done?

Time passed - and then she came.

 “I’m Elizabeth,” she said. “I’m a clinical psychologist.” 

“I knew you would come,” he said “Eventually.”

“Did you?”

“Yes, it’s written, I can show you.”

“I came because you hurt my predecessor very badly. Would you like to tell me about that?”

“I’d like to taste you, actually,” he said leaning forward intently. Then something passed between them, in a certain look she gave him; a certain movement of her lips, her legs under the desk, a rearrangement of the hair. The way she held a pencil. The light in her eyes sometimes and how it would go dark. He knew that look.

He told her everything and she told him nothing and it made him all the more certain that she had come, that she was silent only because she knew that he would know her from her actions and the time would come for her to act. And so it did.

A sunday. Few staff, a surprise visit, not in the rota. In his restraints, she pushed him down on the floor easily. She straddled him slowly and deliberately. “You wanted to taste me, didnt you, my little devil man?” From his prone position he could see she wore nothing beneath her skirt. This was the moment. This was when his god would make him.

“I knew you were her. I knew you were my Lillith,” he said, eyes alight with anticipation finally realised. “I knew you would come for me, and I knew that you understood the second we met.”

She nodded and pulled down his grey marl tracksuit bottoms - so inoffensive and uniform. Then pulled down his underwear, revealing his genitals. She took him in her hand as he stiffened, but then with the other hand, she pulled out a scalpel and castrated him. The suddenness, the sharpness, the spray of blood surprised him for a second but then he screamed, like they had all screamed for him before.

She held him down, “hush little devil man,” she crooned as his life ebbed out, her hand over his mouth, making him taste his own blood.  “I am your Lillith, didn't you read how it would be? In the books?” She began to cut herself through her clothes, their blood mingling  the pain of the cutting is euphoric, terrible but necessary.  Then when he was giving up the fight she stood up. From her satchel, she took the perrier bottle, its green glass carefully chosen, and emptied it on him, filling the room with petrol vapours. From the door, she threw the matches and as his beloved fire engulfed him, he knew his god had forsaken him and he burned and he burned and he burned until only his sins remained.

It is unclear how the accelerant or the scalpel found their way into the interview room but in view of this particular patient’s psychosis and his intelligence quotient, we surmise that he himself must have found a way to do so. There is to be a full investigation. Dr Malphas is thankfully not seriously injured.