Cold Hell - 7. Chapter 6

Mikael Mannu wasn’t sure how long he stood in the middle of the Jacuzzi before awareness returned to him. It could have been seconds, it could have been minutes. It was as if a black chasm had opened up inside of him, sucking out the awareness of space in time, his sense of place, his sense of self. There was only a sense of desolation that no words could describe.

What did he do to me?

For a long time he looked up at the ceiling, his eyes wide, his lips parted to show his gums, teeth, and tongue. He looked like a man who wanted to scream only he couldn’t seem to find the will to do so, let alone move or even breathe. He was only faintly aware of the activity happening around him: in front of him, in the corner of the rooms. The smell of sweat, and cum. After a moment he was able to remember where he was, to put events in order. He’d gone to the pub for a drink or two and then he came here, deciding he would have a little fun, get his rocks off before he went home and slept until it was time to get up the next day.

And he’d seen Danni, the new man from Earth.

There was something about Danni he couldn’t resist. He looked so young. Scrumptious. Innocent. He looks like the kind of person who likes it rough, was the thought that had gone through Mikael’s mind. He hadn’t expected Danni to put up a fight. They usually didn’t. And when they did Mikael made sure to punish them for it; because whatever he wanted he got, one way or another. He wasn’t used to someone fighting back, wasn’t used to someone getting the upper hand over him.

Until now.

But Danni had messed him up somehow.

When Danni had grabbed a hold of him the chasm had opened up and so many terrible things had flooded in: all the pain and misery in the universe. It was like taking an icy sharp blade through the heart; numbing. And he could hear voices whispering in his head, tiny voices over a static background.

Somehow he managed to get moving. His limbs felt heavy, hollow. It was difficult just to put one foot in front of the other. Finally he waded out of the basin, droplets of water dripping from his naked body. Forgetting all about the towel he made his way down the hallway completely nude. The shadows in the corridor seemed impossibly thick.

Now that he was in a quieter place, where there weren’t so many people, the voices seemed louder. Now they were coming from the corners where the shadows were thick, where someone might be hiding. He searched with his eyes but couldn’t see them. Occasionally he would hear his name and other words disconnected from each other…

Mikael…

Mikael...why…?

Why what? he thought. With his heart leaping in his chest he reached into the shadows, expecting to feel someone hiding there, perhaps playing a trick - and God help them when he got a hold of them - but there was no one there. Only solid wall. Eager to get out of the sauna he continued making his way down the corridor.

The man behind the window, Ladislav, handed Mikael back his clothes and rations card; his face appeared ghostly under the bare bulb hanging above his head. Out of habit Mikael checked his pockets for his rations card. It was common for someone to pick your pockets and steal your rations so they could get extra food or visit the brothel or get drugs. You can never be too careful.

He struggled getting into his clothes, pulling them over his wet flesh. He didn’t care about drying off. He just wanted to get away from this place and lock himself in his quarters with a bottle of hooch. He would drink himself to sleep and when he woke up he would go after Danni. He entertained fantasies of cornering him in an alley and squeezing the air from his lungs while he fucked him from behind until he bled and then keep on strangling him until he no longer drew breath. No one would come to rescue him. No one would care.

“No one fucks with me,” Mikael growled to himself. “No one.”

He stepped out into the cold with his clothes sticking to him. For a moment he was so disoriented by the light reflecting off the crusty snow he couldn’t understand why the air was stinging his lungs like this. Then he remembered he hadn’t put on his breathing mask. Once the mask was on, pumping plastic-tasting oxygen into his lungs, he began making his way back towards the building where his living quarters were held. Normally he moved gracefully over the ice but today his movements were clumsy and awkward, as if he’d gulped down too much bootie. The hands of familiar faces, men he went to the brothel with when he wasn’t watching over Dinah, clapped him on the back. He nodded at them and smiled but barely registered what they were saying. All he knew was that he wanted to be behind a closed hatch where no one could see him, where no one could bother him.

Still there was that feeling of desolation, the feeling he was drowning. He couldn’t shake himself free from it. He couldn’t understand where it came from, this sudden need to cry. The guilt. He saw the faces of those he hurt.

Stop, you’re hurting me -

Mikael, why did you do this? Why did you hurt me?

He closed his eyes. His head was starting to ache. The sound of snow crunching beneath his feet mixed with the echoing ghostly voices was deafening. Maddening.

He saw his father’s face staring at him, unable to move his arms because he’d tied them down. Mikael don’t do this, please. Be a good boy. Mikael, what did you do to your mother? What did you do to sweet Mummy? He saw his hand, the hand of a thirteen year old, shakily reach out and slice open his father’s jugular. He watched his father’s eyes widen as the crimson spurted out from the slit he’d made, trying to call for help perhaps, or ask why, but only to make gurgling sounds. Those gurgling sound were like music to young Mikael’s ears.

Now adult Mikael was sobbing. He couldn’t stop. Pissy keening sounds were coming from his mouth, the sound of a starving kitten. He was stomping up the steps of his dormitory now, about to open the hatch when he heard his mother’s voice call his name.

Mikael!

Lenora and Vewtrov Mannu stood just yards away. Somehow they had crawled their way out of the snow, where he’d buried them all those years ago, just as he’d last seen them. Somehow, even after all this time, the cold had preserved their flesh;, left it intact. He could see the open maw of his father’s throat, his mother’s throat; due to the poison he’d put in her water, she’d drowned in her morning bowl of borscht. Their eyes stared at him with a glazed, lifeless confusion, the need to know why, the need for retribution.

They can’t really be standing there! People would be able to see them, people would know they’re standing there!

Which left only two possibilities: Either he was insane or they were revenants!

Eyes bulging from his sockets, Mikael growled, “You’re not really there! Stay the fuck away from me!” His breath came out in puffy clouds of vapor. They were coming towards him now, walking across the snow. He punched the button that opened the hatch and shut it behind him. Once inside his own living space he let out a sigh of relief.

He was in here and they were out there. They couldn’t get in here, they couldn’t bother him. “You just need to get a good night’s worth of sleep,” he told himself.

He pulled the bottle of bootie from the fridge and snapped the top off with his thumb. He took a long, greedy swig from it. The liquid stung his throat as it went down, sloshing down the front of his jacket, numbing both body and soul. He sunk down on the smelly threadbare couch, pulling on the ratty blanket. For a moment, before drifting off, he looked at the blood stain next to the armchair where his father had died. Even after all these years, no matter the cleaning solution he used or how hard he scrubbed, he couldn’t get the stain to go away.

                    …

Dinah was running on her treadmill with Beethoven' s 9th Symphony playing on the speakers above her head. She was off in her own world, thinking, thinking, something she was apt to do when she wasn't running her tiny little kingdom.

She was thinking about her father Marcus. Like a ghost, he was always hovering around her, never far from her thoughts. The older she got, the closer to dying, to passing onto what happened after death be it a black void or blistering hell - if this was the case she had no allusions she was going to heaven - the more she thought of him.

Before Dinah, Marcus had been warden. Whenever she had to make a decision that could affect the entire colony she'd think, What would Daddy do? There had been many times, many sleepless nights, when she had missed him so terribly she couldn't stand it. On those nights she'd imagine curling up in a fetal position the way a baby was curled up in their mother's womb. She wished she could conjure his spirit, if human beings even had a spirit, just so she could talk to him one last time. How am I doing Daddy? she'd ask him. Am I doing good? Are you proud of me?

It wasn't a bullet to the head or a knife in the heart from an angry colonist, or even an accident in the snow that had killed him, but liver poisoning due to too much bootie. Alcoholism. By the end, his face had been so bloated and his eyes so jaundiced he looked like the living dead. When you caught a whiff of his breath you could smell the slow butilized degradation of his body. So many nights when he came home so drunk he couldn't walk Dinah would guide him to his bed. Thanks Cookie, he would say in a slurred voice before falling asleep.

Cookie was what he always called her, even when she was old enough that it wasn't cute anymore. He called her by her actual name when he was angry with her and that hadn't been very often.

She was elected warden when she was just twenty years old, not two months after Marcus had died. In the history of Planet Redemption she was the youngest elect to be given the responsibility. At first, as she was sure all politicians did, she started out with grand ideas. She would encourage people to be better, to be moral. But as the years went by she realized more and more being warden was not easy. Like her father she became bogged down by the job.Now she could understand why her father had become an alcoholic, drinking to the point of death. There was a time when she was headed in the same direction. Only she refused to let her drinking problems kill her the way Marcus had.

The responsibility of being clanwoman had affected her in other ways: she was greedy, power hungry. She had become lost in the game of politics. In the back of her mind she was constantly aware of what this job had done to her. But it was too late to go back to her old self. She was too far into the game.

Daddy would be disappointed in me. He always believed we were capable of being more than what we are.

There was a beep from the door. She shut the treadmill and mopped the sweat from her brow with a towel. She went to the hatch and opened it. Outside stood the hulking form of Mikael, his face hooded.

"I need to talk to you," he said, voice muffled by his oxygen mask.

She had no choice but to let him in. It had begun to snow outside and already her bare feet and ankles were beginning to grow numb from the cold. "Come in." She grabbed the remote from off the desk, pointed it at the radio and shut Beethoven off.

Dinah went to her desk and sat down. "What do you want?" she asked, not bothering to hide the fact she was perturbed. "I was in the middle of doing my exercise for the day."

He pulled down his hood and took off his mask. Dinah got a good look at him. His face was flushed from the cold and there were dark circles around his eyes. He sat in the chair across from her without being invited to do so. From where she sat Dinah could smell the booze and old sweat. She did her best to hide her surprise. She'd never seen Mikael look this way before.

"Well," she snapped when he hadn't said anything, "what was it you wanted to talk to me about?"

"Danni Ammodt."

"What about him?"

"There's something not right about him."

Now her attention was caught. Dinah had just finished the manuscript Natalia had presented her with this morning. The writing was good but it seemed too much like a work of fiction. Danni had claimed himself to be psychic, a trait passed down by his mother's side of the family, but that couldn't be possible now could it?

Perhaps I spoke too soon.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

Mikael looked at her with the mournful face of a child. Tears were trailing down from the corner of his eyes. She'd never seen him cry before. Never. "He did something to me."

"What did he do to you?"

Before he could answer, Mikael burst into sobs, his shoulders shaking. Dinah just watched, waiting. She could be very patient when she needed to be.

"I was just fooling around with him at the sauna and then he grabbed a hold of me. When he did, it was like I fell into a black hole. Ever since I've been hearing voices...and seeing things...my dead parents...and overwhelmed with such guilt and despair."

"And you think he did this to you?"

"Yes. I know it sounds crazy…"

"I believe you."

His eyes widened. Whatever Danni had done had turned her most vicious and loyal security guard into a sputtering idiot. "You do?"

Dinah smiled gently, turning on the charm. "I do."

"He's a freak."

For a moment Dinah was silent, the wheels turning in her head. She had an idea. There was only one way to tell if Danni was telling the truth in his memoir. "Mikael, I want you to do me a favor. I do not care how: the next time you can corner him alone I want you to kill him."