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PERFECTLY EXECUTED
By Wayne Webb
CHAPTER 2.2
“The light and the dark battle it out for
control, the light always wins when it tries you know?” Samuel changed the
subject and moved his hand through the light and this time he kept it in the
sunshine and held it there. “It’s more powerful and more effective than the
dark, but ultimately the dark will win the war. The light wins every battle,
but the dark wins the war.” He moved his hand again and this time left it in
the shade.
The light through the bar shaded window was
so bright momentarily that his hand had glowed. When his hand moved and found
the shadow there was a faint afterimage in his vision for a few seconds, and
when he closed his eyes the photo negative on his eyelids, dancing whenever the
tried to examine it’s shape.
The younger interviewer said nothing,
partly from not knowing what to ask and partly from sensing that Samuel was not
finished.
“Do you want to know why that is?” He asked
the young man, but instead of controlling the conversation through some
passive-aggressive manipulation, he instead exuded a sadness and fear about the
idea. He wanted to share whatever it was he was thinking, not to educate the
lesser mind.
“Why is that?”
“Because of their natures. It’s who they
are and they cannot change that, can they?” Samuel was on the verge of tears,
but the interviewer still did not know why.
“Can people change their natures?” He
ventured finally, looking for the metaphor that Samuel Reid was proposing.
“People? I don’t know. I’m talking about
physics. The laws of … everything. The underlying science.” Samuel’s fear was
gone in a flash and replaced with a sense of superiority. People were not on
his level, not capable of being on his level.
“I don’t follow? We’re talking about light
and dark? Good and Evil? The battle between natures?” The interviewer looked at
his notes and desperately wanted to run the digital recording back and listen
in once more, see what he misheard or misread.
He had learned early on that the recording
was to remain unedited and unbroken, and even silence was to be recorded, timed
and noted.
“We?” Samuel looked at the man, curled his
hand into a fist and thumped it on the table once, but the burst of emotion
that went with it ran into a wall of jelly, slowing his passion and force down
to a crawl. He had anger and frustration, but he could not access it and could
not get through the thickness that prevented his quickening reactions and soon
in the silence that followed the thump he relaxed again.
His fist eased it’s tension and the fingers
slowly uncurled themselves and the blood pumped back into them turned them from
the gripped white to the hanging pink of relaxation.
“I was talking about nature, just one
nature, THE nature, Mother Nature I guess.” He trailed off and his gaze
drifted, caught the view of the brght blue sky outside the barred high window
and then it came back to him in a flash, the subject matter and his original
thought, but with the anger and passion smoothed away and back below the
surface.
“There was the light, oh yes there was the
light! What is light? Do you understand much about physics?” and the tears had
gone, the fear had flown with the anger.
“I did physics in School, the usual high
school stuff I guess?” A high-rise terminal betrayed his ignorance and lack of
confidence in the area.
Samuel smiled and felt at ease, and he
cracked his knuckles, the need to do something with the fist he had made and
lost was still there, hence his new habit of balling his hand and cracking the
knuckles, popping the air in them and making them sound out an intention he was
no longer capable of.
“Light is energy. Not the only energy mind,
it is AN energy. It’s a radiant energy, and we can see it – which is amazing
when you think about it, that the thing that lets us see is something we can
see and without it we cannot see anything. It’s that nature I mean to say, the
nature of radiant energy.”
“And the energy always wins the battle?”
“Battle?” Samuel looked confused but then
despite his tone he nodded and moved his hand into the light again from the
shadow. “So if light is radiant energy a series of electromagnetic radiated
pulse of photons or waves or whatever form it takes, then there is no real
battle at all is there?” He did not take his gaze off his hand this time and withdrew
it from the light, waiting again for the afterimage to fade. “What is darkness
then?”
“I know that one, darkness is the absence
of … oh.” The interviewer nodded and he could not help but grin, as he
understood Samuel’s meaning, if not the point he was making.
Dr Edward Thompson was listening to the exchange
on the digital recorder with interest later that week, in his office at the
remote lab. He took the recorded sessions seriously and listened intently at
every junction, poured over the motes and the observations of the psychology
student who was doing the ‘research’ for the book that Dr Thompson was
financing.
A book on killers, a book on the history
and pathology of Samuel Reid, and access to the notes was a precondition of the
project. Edward got copies of all research material and first look in at the
session data. The ‘author’ who he had hired to pen the non-fiction look at the
Eden murders, he was little more than a public face on the process that Edward
needed undertaken. They had lobbied the various authorities for access and
rights to the ‘interviews’ in the public interest and the agreements had been
reached easily enough.
Edward needed to know much more than the
interviewing student was getting to, he wanted to go in himself and wire the guiltiest
of all men to a table, check all his signs and his brain activity as he grilled
for the things that he wanted to know. Dr Thompson could not directly ask the
questions himself, it would be too obvious to anyone watching that they had
nothing to do with any book or any project to understand the mind of an insane
and unpredictable killer.
No one would leap to the right conclusion
either though, it was not that obvious what it was he was trying to get to and
he had no intention of sharing his true purpose with any of the staff he was
funding to write a book that would never see publication.
Not if his plan worked anyway.
He was working on a cure, of sorts. Not an
obvious one, not one with drugs or therapy but an ounce of the best cure he
could find.
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