Private Games

Chapter 5

WHEN I RETURNED to consciousness several days after the stoning, I was in hospital with a fractured skull and the nauseating feeling that I had been rewired somehow, made more alien than ever before.

I remembered everything about the attack and everything about my attackers. But when the police came to ask me what had happened, I told them I had no idea. I said I had memories of entering the building, but nothing more; and their questions soon stopped.

I healed slowly. A crablike scar formed on my scalp. My hair grew back, hiding it, and I began to nurture a dark fantasy that became my first obsession.

Two weeks later, I returned home to the little monsters and Minister Bob. Even they could tell I’d changed. I was no longer a wild child. I smiled and acted happy. I studied and developed my body.

Minister Bob thought that I’d found God.

But I admit to you that I did it all by embracing hatred. I stroked that crablike scar on my head, and focused my oldest emotional ally on things that I wanted to have and to happen. Armed with a dark heart, I went after them all, trying to show the entire world how different I really was. And though I acted the changed boy, the happy, achieving friend in public, I never forgot the stoning or the storms it had spawned in my head.

When I was fourteen, I began looking secretly for the monsters who’d broken my skull. I found them eventually, selling small twists of methamphetamine on a street corner not far from where I lived with Minister Bob and the little monsters.

I kept tabs on the pair until I turned sixteen and felt big and strong enough to act.

Minister Bob had been a steelworker before he found Jesus. On the sixth anniversary of my stoning, I took one of his heavy hammers and a pair of his old work overalls, and I slipped out at night when I was supposed to be studying.

Wearing the overalls and carrying the hammer in a satchel harvested from a rubbish bin, I found the two monsters who’d stoned me. Six years of their drug use and six years of my evolution had wiped me from their memory banks.

I lured them to an empty lot with the promise of money, and then I beat their brains to bloody pulp.