The Origin of the Smiling Rock

This is the next chapter in the ongoing saga of Shamblin' Sam and Ella, Queen of the Damned. The Narrator isn't too happy with me at the moment. I think he may be losing his shit, as we sometimes say here in the slums. Given the difficulty of the subject matter, I think he's done an admirable job navigating it with delicate words, but maybe give him some encouragement in the comments. He's a little shaken...

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The Origin of the Smiling Rock

From an outsider’s perspective, Ella stood transfixed by the events unfolding on the screen in her hand, but as the black face of the EYEGOONS lightened to gray, Ella found herself inside the scene, as if the growing light pulled her into the device.

What she encountered was a sickly liminal space where trauma goes to hide from itself; a dirty basement, lit with the jaundiced, flickering glow of old fluorescent tubes.

There were children there. They were neither happy nor loved, but gaunt, malnourished creatures, scattered about the room, most sitting, despondent, on the cold concrete floor.

Save for one. A boy that couldn’t be older than ten walked right up to her and asked:

“Are you the angel come to save us?”

Ella looked down into that child’s face and wanted to say: Yes! Yes, dear child, come with me! All of you! Come with me!

She wanted to gather them up and run, because the sense of impending doom was visceral, palpable, undeniable.

But Ella was not the person the child was addressing. Ella was only seeing through that man’s eyes.

“Yes,” the man said, but Ella knew he lied. “Yes, I am an angel who’s come to save you, as you were told; but first, I need you all to do something for me.”

There were six children in all, three boys and three girls, and all looked up hopefully at the man’s words. He went on:

“Your caretakers here have taught you that the world is dangerous, and that you have been locked away for your own safety, to keep you from the demons who roam the earth in search of children to corrupt, to turn to evil, to turn against the will of God.”

The man reached out for the inquisitive boy’s hand, and the young lad looked up with adoration and took it. The man beckoned the remaining children, and they came to stand before him.

He crouched down to speak to them, taking the time to look each in the eye. Gentle. Kind.

Ella could feel his face smiling, but not his heart.

“But it was in fact your caretakers who were possessed and corrupt,” he went on. “The vile things they did to you here in this basement, in the name of their prophecy, were no service to God, but in doing them they drew my attention, and this is indeed the fulfillment of the will of the Lord, for here I am to save you!”

With that he stood and bid them follow. They all walked up the stairs, and into a house littered with lifeless bodies.

Some were shot; some stabbed; some bludgeoned. Some wore ligatures like overtightened bowties, their eyes bulging, adding to the shocked look that marked the final agonizing moment when their last breath died inside them.

They were arranged, sitting up, along the walls. The man led the children between them, as if it were a procession and the dead were unresponsive spectators.

The children did not care. All they knew throughout their short lives was the tale of the angel that would save them, and the angel came.

They were beaten, nearly starved, and raped by their captors into believing this prophecy; conditioned like Pavlovian dogs to think that if they ran, the demons would possess them, and they would be forever beyond the angel’s reach; so they took the beatings, and they didn’t complain about their grumbling bellies, and they even confused the worst offenses of all for expressions of love, for they were never taught any better.

(If suffering is all we know from the day we are born, do we know that we suffer?)

The man knew all of this because he was one of the children of the Angel Cult, but he escaped.

As they walked out of the house, Ella recognized a familiar creek running behind it. Daylight played off the slowly moving water, sparkling, and she registered the sense of awe the man felt. The children gasped.

“You’ve never been outside, you poor dears,” the man said, and there was a hitch in his voice, as if he might cry. “I remember the first time I saw it, how I knew that this was where God was, not in there, but out here. It was the first time I knew how much I was cheated.”

But the children did not understand. They followed the angel, listening to his words as if he whistled a whimsical melody and they were merely following along in a trance.

Though it was not yet smiling, Ella recognized the chunk of discarded stone as they approached.

“All of you, sit around the rock,” the man said, and the children did as he asked, forming a circle around the rock, facing it. The man walked around them from behind and said: “I am going to give you a magical elixir that we angels made to help you into Heaven.”

The man reached into his trench coat, and from a deep pocket brought out a flask and six small cups neatly stacked inside each other. He stepped between two children, lined up the cups on the rock, and poured six shots.

Then he handed one each to the children.

No! Ella wanted to scream, but she was a silent observer on a nightmare ride. This was memory, she knew, and hurt at the inability to stop what already happened collected somewhere inside her with the pain of losing her family to the Turning.

It bred there.

What would it become?

“It’s bitter, but just drink it down real fast, and you’ll be in Heaven before you know it!” the man said.

The children did as they were told.

(As to whether the children went to Heaven, The Narrator and the muddle-brained author who’s making him evoke this awful scene believe it to be so and encourage you to believe the same, for we must sincerely desire that if a Heaven exists it should be a haven for lost innocence.)

Ella could feel what the man felt as they watched the children die. He wanted their deaths to be peaceful, and quick, and his concoction made it so, but he really believed in what was left of his heart that he was doing the right thing.

He would not be so easy on himself.

He knew he committed a terrible sin, and would be forever forsaken, but he would rather be damned himself than damn these children to a life of failing to overcome the kind of horrors that drove him to commit egregious misdeeds of his own.

For he was a monster, a killer, and a rapist too.

He struggled with the Beast inside, but it always won, and someone else always got hurt.

His only recourse was to return to the place that made him and unleash the Beast upon its creators.

He also thought that the only way to be sure that these children would not go on to become what he did was to ease them into the next world.

Ella hated him for this. How did he have the right to decide what another can overcome? Why didn’t he save them?

When she looked around the circle, she counted five children.

Where was the inquisitive boy?

Then the man looked down and noted one cup of the concoction was left, unimbibed.

It dawned on Ella, even as it dawned on the man: the inquisitive boy was never there.

“DAVID! MY NAME IS DAVID!” the man screamed to the sky and threw the final cup of poison far off into the woods.

—the inquisitive boy was David, the boy who escaped the cult. These five children sitting around him were real, though they were in Heaven now, but the inquisitive boy was a hallucinatory memory.

There was only the broken man who was once a boy named David and the Beast that lived inside him.

David pulled out and unsheathed two new razors.

With expert efficiency, he slit both wrists simultaneously.

He pressed his bleeding wrists to the part of the rock farthest from him, trying to pull himself forward on the small slab, but he only succeeded in spreading a bloody arch across the sun-warmed surface. Weak, unable to hold onto consciousness, he fell back, then lunged to regain his grip, but his hands would not find purchase, for they were numb.

He fell back one last time, dragging his arms so that he made two lines below the arch.

David did not die happy, but he left a smile for the world to see.

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