I promised her love.
“I need to tell you a story,” I say, my voice thin. “It’s long, it’s unpleasant, and I’ve never uttered a word of it to another soul, living or dead or in between. But it’s the only way I can make sense of this—the only way you willeverunderstand what it means. What your mother has created.”
“Merrick,” she whispers. Then, louder, “Merrick.”
I open my eyes. Meet her tender gaze. Fall into it, headlong, over and over again.
“I’m right here with you.” She joins me on the bench, taking my hand in hers. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I nod and breathe in the scent of her again. The promise of what it means to love someone, the simultaneous terror and sanctuary.
“You asked me once,” I begin, “what happened to me. Why I don’t like to be touched.”
I feel her stiffen beside me, but she holds fast to my hand, giving me strength.
“I’ve never spoken of my family—my human family. I feigned poor memory, but the truth is, my childhood is seared into my heart like a brand.” I shudder as the bitter wind of those memories blows through me anew, but I force myself to continue. “My parents were indifferent in the best of times, and those were the days and nights I most craved. To be left alone with my books, tucked under the blanket with a torch and a good story and a sweet I’d stolen from my mother’s stash in the kitchen.
“I know you don’t have the same connection to books, but for me… to say they saved my life is no exaggeration. Those stories, whether fictional adventures or real accounts of bravery and heroism, allowed me to both lose myselfandfeel seen. They gave me hope, purpose, a light on my darkest nights.”
My skin begins to hum with remembered pain. I inhale deeply, attempting to summon more courage.
“But mostly,” I continue, “my parentsweren’tindifferent. They were horribly cruel in ways on par with the worst demon torturers in the deepest, darkest prisons of Hell. They didn’t beat me, no. Quite the opposite, really. They merely…removedme.”
“What do you mean?” she whispers.
“For no reason that I could ever discern, nothing but a bout of boredom or a mean streak, they would lock me away, shut me up in the attic for weeks at a time with nothing but some water and a few rations of food, no light but the pale sunlight that came in through the uneven slats of the roof by day. No books, even. I’d only the rodents to keep me company, of which there were plenty. At night, if I dared nod off, I’d awaken to their scampering and scuttling, claws and teeth scratching and nibbling my flesh.”
I shudder again. Elizabeth holds tighter, and I focus on her touch, the solidity of it. The warmth.
“Eventually, my parents would grow tired of the game and set me free. And there was my mother, standing at the bottom of the stairs with a smile and open arms, cooing for me, knowing I would run to her, so starved was I for touch. She hugged me, stroked my hair, and I lapped it up like a starved thing. For that’s what I was, what they made me. Twisting my desperation into adoration and I… I couldn’t…” My voice breaks, the memories stabbing me anew. “My mother lived for those moments. Lived to see me weeping in her arms, begging her not to send me to the attic again. ‘Never,’ she would say. ‘Never again, my pet.’ Weeks would pass. And then, once I became sure she’d meant it that time, she would upend my world all over again.”
“What about your father?” she asks.
“His silence was complacence. He allowed her to manipulate and torture me under his very nose, and said nothing. Did nothing. Acknowledgednothing.” I clench my jaw against the familiar rage. “Asking for his intervention only resulted in prolonged punishment. It was a vicious cycle with no end. Over time I learned to loathe the touch of another human, for it would only remind me of my mother’s cruelty. My desperation for any scrap of affection.” I shake my head, still at a loss, even now.“What a twisted game she played, and I let her win every single time. Until I finally figured out my escape plan.”
“What did you do?”
“Homework.” A thin laugh escapes. “For all their efforts to keep me out of school, they couldn’t stop me from pursuing my love of knowledge. When I became old enough—big enough, I suppose—to stand up to them, I enrolled in school myself, relying on the kindness of friends’ parents for school supplies, a borrowed coat in the winter, a couch to sleep on during exams. My parents found out, of course. They accused me of thinking I was better than them, of not appreciating all they sacrificed for me. But I was beyond caring at that point. I’d stopped believing their lies, stopped needing their twisted form of love. The day I received my acceptance letter for University, they burned all of my books. It was the very last time I ever saw my parents. The very last time I ever allowed them to remind me I was a weak and broken and useless boy.”
“No, Merrick.” Elizabeth touches my face, turning me toward her. “Look at me. Please look at me.”
I lift my gaze to hers, steeling myself for pity, but finding only determination. And there, in that fathomless fiery green, I see my salvation.
“You were never weak and broken and useless,” she says. “You were strong enough to survive the monsters. To survive Hell on earth, and find a way out.”
I touch my forehead to hers and breathe her in again, drawing strength from her belief in me. The strength to keep going, to tell her the part of the story that might finally dim the light in her eyes.
Because in the end, Ididn’tsurvive the monsters.
I merely became one myself.
“I flourished at University, as you can imagine. The hallowed halls of academia, the tradition, the pursuit of excellence,knowledge as a passion, as a gateway to more knowledge… these became my touchstones. My haven in a world that up until then had felt so lonely and terrible. And, socially inept as I was, I managed to make two very good mates.”
She smiles. “Warren and Oliver.”
“We shared a flat, took many of the same classes. Pursued graduate degrees together. They were always more outgoing, though, bouncing from party to party, while I preferred the library. The familiar comforts of books. The smell of paper and ink, of leather-bound tomes. The mysteries contained within.”
“Ahh. The doctorate origin story.”
