41

A year has passed since I began this journal. My doctors will read it and we will discuss it, and the lawyers will try to corroborate the details, and everyone will wonder in horrified titillation just exactly how much of it is true.

It is all true.

But that concerns me not at all, for I have discovered the advantages of a cage; it may keep the imprisoned one away from society, but it also keeps society away from the prisoner.

I am most fortunate.

Society knows its strengths and its weaknesses, and this hospital has a civic duty to keep its reputation untarnished. This hospital will do everything in its power to keep the public from knowing that towels occasionally disappear from the linen rooms and show up around the necks of the dead. Society would rather lie and cheat and cover up its ineptitude than believe my story, rather than believe that I live safely, happily, here, as long as there is a solitary night guard who can be beguiled with a simple melody.

At last I have learned that it is not death that makes such a difference; it is life. My life. I kill to live. And it is a fair trade. I suckle the life from small animals, leaving their juiceless remains for the scavengers—three or four a night is plenty—and only twice have I been unable to resist the craving for a human.

I kill to live. I have grown through the passions of the larvae, through the dangerous excitement, the extravaganzas of killing. I have grown through the pupa withdrawal and emerged into adulthood. Now, as my view of eternity is gradually brought into focus, other priorities draw my attention.

For now I have a Student of my own. I have passed through solitude, and have entered into a partnership—an internal realm filled with peace and happiness. I teach, and my teachings are reminiscent of my teacher.

How well I remember Her, and how much She meant to me during those early times.

Will my Student turn out to be a different refraction of my own soul? Or is this Student actually a separate, breathing, warm human being? I have no answers, but I am patient. The answers will come. I know only that my sharing with this One is the very essence of fulfillment.

I am no longer alone.

Tonight when I awoke, I found a little cake the other patients had placed by my bedside. The nurses will take notice in the morning whether I have eaten it or not. They have never seen me eat. But they will find it intact, its chocolate frosting unnibbled, the yellow 21 written in warped hand will be undisturbed.

I am fortunate to have found such peace at this young age.

The cane they gave me is metal tubing and distasteful, but it serves me. I pretend with it, as I pad along the halls, that I hear the grit of the roadway beneath my boots, and the stomp of a solid cherrywood cane with a brass lizard as a knob. I feel the cold wind biting through my cloak, and I talk and laugh with my Student, watching the growth, the progress, growing myself through our association, knowing that I am, that we are, immortal and eternal.

“They put her in an asylum somewhere out in the country. I went to visit her several times when she was in the hospital in Philadelphia, but she was always sleeping.

“I went back to Westwater, got my old construction job back, but after only a week, I quit. Being consumed—obsessed, I guess—by something for years and then having it be over, resolved, left quite a void. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do now. Go back to school, maybe, or do a little traveling. Chasing Angelina all over the country wasn’t exactly traveling, but I’ve kind of got the bug to go explore some.

“I don’t know.

“My arm healed. It’s all scarred, and I’ve lost some of the movement in my wrist, but it’s not bad. I can still pull a trigger.

“Pull a trigger. God, what a dream I had last night. I’m not sure I can even talk about it.

“I dreamed I was hunting, all alone, up in the mountains. I was sitting on a rock, just waiting, my rifle cradled in the crook of my arm, and a big buck strolled right into the clearing. It was the same buck I’d tracked for weeks. Weeks. And there it was, right in front of me, bigger than life. Very slowly, I lifted the rifle, sighted, and pulled the trigger.

“The rifle kicked me in the shoulder, and the sound knocked snow off some of the trees. I remember bouncing on the bed, it kind of woke me up, but not really. The buck started, and took off for a dozen yards, then went down, and I ran over to him. I guess maybe I’ve never watched a deer die. At least I never saw it like this.

“I hit him right where I’d aimed, right through the throat. Hot blood pumped from the wound in his neck, and steamed into the snow. I watched it spurt. I just watched it, the deer kicked a little, then stopped, and soon the blood slowed, then the spurting stopped and it just ran out for a while, through his hair, melting the snow. It was so beautiful, that dark red against the white.

“I just watched it and I was so glad that this deer I’d hunted, this buck I’d come to know, come to love, could die such a beautiful death.

“When I woke up, my pillow was soaked with saliva, and a hunger rumbled deep within my soul.”