THE SECOND SIGHT
Chapter 39
THE INITIATIONS
Location: THE CHAMBER
When the pot is empty the horned monster drops it, and it shattered to smithereens around his feet.
He laughs, a terrible booming sound that reverberates around the chamber, causing Boat’s ears to hurt.
JOE BOAT MONSTER
(in a thun-derous evil voice)
COME YE UNTO ME, MINIONS!
He screams, and his voice isn’t Joe Boat’s voice at all but a great thumping devilish sound that could’ve frozen the blood of the Lucifer himself.
The things which had once been people of incredible standing in society, the Boss Players, obeys him!
A lot of scary, smoky, white howling things shoots out from the other monsters and dash into the Joe Boat Monster.
These are indistinct, smoky, frightening, screaming and hissing things!
They emerge in hundreds, screeching horribly, flying into the horned beast, hitting him from all sides and entering, never to come out again, forming a part of it.. for eternity!
That is why his eyes have had rainbow colours!
It is not just one demon, but a host of them!
A legion!
What Yaw Boat is witnessing now is a sight that could’ve made any human go mad instantly.
He can see glimpses of those infernally nasty faces of the things, and he shuts his eyes ti-ghtly, unable to take it anymore.
They are many, in thousands, and it seems as if it will never end. They float all around Boat, leaving their hosts and becoming a part of the demon in Joe Boat.
Their frantic screeches and wailing alone is enough to drive a man crazy.
The Thing that had been Joe Boat shakes from all sides as the demons disappear into him as if buffeted by a strong wind.
And then, mercifully, the terrible noise finally stops, and silence reigns.
Suddenly a soft cloth is pressed against Boat’s mouth and nostrils. It is Basoah.
Yaw Boat struggles briefly, weakly… but to no avail.
Chloroform.
He sli-ps into absolute darkness.
Pas-sIONS
Yaw Boat comes out of the restricting confines of the drug slowly.
He doesn’t move, but allows awareness to seep slowly throu-ghhim.
Boat realizes that he is sitting upright now, but his hands and legs are strapped. His head is down, his chin cradling the top of his che-st.
He can see throu-ghthe slits of his eyes that he is now dressed in the same bulbous filmy white gowns they had been wearing.
He is now sitting on a throne, his arms and legs strapped firmly but not too ti-ghtly. Boat can make out the legs of another throne opposite him, and as he lifts his head slowly he sees that his father is occu-pying it.
At first Joe Boat does not that his son is looking at him.
He is dressed in an expensive white suit, and his legs are crossed. His body is turned half-way on the throne, his forehead resting on the V of forefinger and thumb of his left hand.
His face, in fairness, looks absolutely pained and distressed, and there is the sheen of tears on his cheeks.
They are still in the un-derground chamber – Funky Grounds – but it is clean now. All the hideous corpses, skeletons and other artefacts have been removed. The snake is gone.
Even the grotesque drawings have been hurriedly painted over.
The chamber is virtually empty except for the two of them, father and son.
Cold floor, cold walls… two Boats.
With a sick heart Boat wonders what it all means.
His heart is a hollow pain in his che-st.
What has happened now? Is it all over? Is he now a Devil’s apprentice? Worse, is his body now inhabited by one of those disgusting things? Is everything too late for him?
Is he now going to have the mark of the beast on his forehead?
It seems so, on the evidence of what he is seeing.
Time has run out for you! Even as you read this, a demon of old is ready to take over your body and your soul…
Anderson!
Has his fate – by some process he still knows nothing about – been sealed? Has he become an unwilling disciple of whatever dark for-ces this man deals in?
And yet, as Boat looks at that stressed face opposite him, he realizes that he still can’t hate his father.
He feels anger and bitterness, and he feels absolutely betrayed. Things might probably never be the same again between them, but he is still his father, a man who has given him love, even if for a dark purpose, and who has spared the rod as a result of that love.
A man who has been by his side, and been a great father, to all intents and purposes, and has been there, available for him whenever he nee-ded him.
Boat loves his father, and if Joe Boat has drawn him into whatever hell he is dabbling in, Boat will never forgive him, and he will never go near him again.
Let Joe Boat live with that on his conscience.
That will be punishment enough.
But Boat can never hate him.
Joe Boat lifts his head, and their eyes meet.
His face broke instantly into painful lines, and tears fall down his cheeks slowly. Several times he tries to speak, but his li-ps only tremble, and nothing comes out.
After a while he takes out a hu-ge handkerchief and wipes his face. He takes a shuddering breath, and then he tries to look at his young son squarely in the eyes.
JOE BOAT
(haltingly, painfully)
Please, Yaw! Please don’t look at me like that, son.
Boat says nothing. He just stares at him, and yes, his gaze is bitter because it reflects the seething poison in his heart.
JOE BOAT
(softly)
I’m sorry, my boy. I owe you an explanation.
BOAT
(heartbreakingly)
How did my mother die? Did you kill her? Like Miss Naana?
It floors Joe Boat.
He looks absolutely devastated.
His face is haunted as his eyes take on a faraway look, seeing things that plagues only him.
What happened next is something Boat has never seen before. His whole face suddenly crumbles, ravaged by a savage self-loathing and nightmarish remorse, and Boat’s heart sinks with a fearful agony, acutely aware that there is indeed a mystery surrounding his mother’s death, and she hasn’t died after delivery, like his father has told him.
When Joe Boat speaks, his words are those of a broken man, laying himself open, barring his soul to find a little peace for years of living with the guilt.
JOE BOAT
(softly)
I loved your mother, son. She was my life, the air I breathed. But I won’t begin there. Let me begin from the beginning, son. You’ve always known that my parents – your grandparents – died in a motor accident when I was a boy. Well, that’s not the truth, son. I never knew my parents. I grew up in an orphanage.
Here it is at last… the truth!
And Boat is scared.
It doesn’t sound a big deal, really. You grew up knowing your grand folks bought it in some freak motor crash, and then you are told that was not the case after all. No big deal, right?
Wrong. It scares the living bejesus out of Yaw Boat.
JOE BOAT
A group of prisoners cleaning a sewage system, I was told, found me in the gutter crying, my umbilical cord still uncut, and traces of amniotic fluid and blood still on me. Evidently, the parents who gave birth to me hated me enough to dump me in a sewer immediately I was born.
He pauses and takes a shuddering breath. Boat can see the pain on his face as he dredges up ghosts long buried and memories that have festered in his soul for decades.
JOE BOAT
I have always wondered who they were. Was my mother a mistress, or was she a who-re who didn’t want a baby? Was she a young girl scared to keep a baby? Were my parents married? Did my father reject me? Did she, perchance, die during childbirth and an irresponsible parent or husband or boyfriend, even mother, dumped me in a gutter? You could ask a million questions and, believe me, it wasn’t easy growing up in an orphanage with things like that plaguing your mind. The orphanage itself was hell. The Manager was… was a very sick man. A very, very sick man.
His face is covered with a trace of sweat now.
His pain is almost tangible, something you could almost feel caressing your skin. He has always been a resolute man, stoic sometimes, not easily given to emotions.
He is only pas-sionate when he is on the pulpit, extolling the Christian virtue, or when driving a ha-rd bargain and going in for the kill on a business deal. Always reliable, always clean, and now Boat can feel his pain and know what is coming, and quite suddenly he doesn’t want to be a part of that history and to know that part he his father has hidden from him for so long.
JOE BOAT
That manager did a lot of bad things to the young boys in the orphanage. He had other terrible friends too… homos-×uals and paedophiles. They not only used us for their sinful plea-sures, but the manager gained from it by taking hu-ge sums of money from his clientele and allowing them to abuse the children.
Yaw Boat is not only chagrined, but terribly horrified.
He can just imagine him then.
Joe Boat must have been a very pretty young boy then, and he might have suffered ha-rder than any in the hands of a homos-×ual manager and his pervert clientele.
Yaw Boat feels equal parts of shame and compas-sion for his father for what he must have gone throu-gh, and somehow Boat finds it ha-rd sustaining his earlier level of disappointment in his father.
JOE BOAT
(softly)
That man was a big man. The biggest man I’ve ever seen, and he hurt me a great deal. One night, however, he was quite drunk, and he took me to his quarters. That night he wanted something… really, really filthy. I could not do it, and he was incensed with fury and began to beat me. He would’ve killed me that night. He was a baseball freak, and had lots of paraphernalia on the game in a glas-s case, some autographed by some baseball greats.
It was his most prized possessions. During the agony of his as-sault that night he tossed me, quite by accident, into this glas-s case, and the baseball bats spilled out. He was alarmed and stopped his as-sault to save his idols. It made me mad, I guess, to see him doing that whilst I was lying on the floor half-dead, bleeding from multiple cuts I had sustained from his as-sault and from being cut by sha-rds of broken glas-s.
His pause is longer this time, and his breathing is laboured, his face tortured. He leans forward, props his elbows on his thi-ghs, laces his fingers into an inverted V, and put his forehead on it.
Boat says nothing; it isn’t the kind of story that you hurried. Secondly he is too shocked to for-ce his father to continue.
JOE BOAT
I went mad, son, yes I did. I picked up one of the bats and by the time other staff smashed down the door and came in, his drunken screams have turned to silent pleas, whimpers and shudders. He died as they were taking him to hospital. His head was too bashed in, you see. I was traumatized by that incident, especially after the cops came for me, and the court hearings that followed.
One evening, before real court case began in the juvenile court, a man came to me whilst I was I was in police cells. He told me he read my story in the newspapers, and he had been very tou-ched by it. He wanted to help me, and so he had appointed his team of lawyers to defend me. That man was rich and powerful. His name was Simon Boat.
Yaw Boat nods slowly with un-derstanding.
BOAT
(softly)
Yeah. Simon Boat. My supposed grandfather.
JOE BOAT
Yes, the man I said was your grandfather. His lawyers were able to convince other victims whose terrible tales led to the beginning of a great scandal because most of the men mentioned by the kids were powerful men in society. The arrests were sweeping. When I was found innocent Simon adopted me and changed my name from Joshua 27 – you know, the name I was given at the orphanage; I was the twenty-seventh boy to be named Joshua in the orphanage – to Joe Boat.
Yaw Boat looks at his father sadly.
BOAT
Let me guess, he introduced you to this… this evil world, didn’t he, Dad?
Joe Boat nods and sighs miserably, his face haunted and distraught.
JOE BOAT
He fulfilled my inner craving to be accepted and loved. He had lots of money, and he sent me to the best schools. Truth was, he had no family, and he showered all his love on me. He was my father, and for the first time in my life I was very happy. I felt alive and wanted, and my life was bliss. Fifteen years later, on his deathbed, he told me a most terrible thing.
Simon Boat had told his young adopted son that he was a vessel, and that for more than thirty years his body had been possessed by a demon of old that had been living on earth for generations.
That demon had lived in fathers and sons for thousands of years. Simon Boat’s father had been a vessel for the demon, and on his death Simon had been the chosen one whose body was nee-ded for the demon to live throu-ghanother lifetime. It was now the turn of the young man from the orphanage to let his body become a vessel so that the whole awful cycle could go on.
Joe Boat had of course been really scared and he had refused to be a part of it, but the old man as-sured him that the he would never feel the presence of the demon in him. He would never even remember that he was possessed after a little time, but he would be rich and powerful, and would have the world at his feet.
Joe Boat had had no choice simply because he dreaded going back to the life of poverty, loneliness and degradation. He had reluctantly accepted the conditions attached. After all, he erroneously thought, he would rarely feel the presence of the demon, and he could enjoy life for eternity.
Power and wealth at a comparatively zero cost.
BOAT
(horrified)
But there was a price, wasn’t it, Dad? I am the cost – the only real cost – aren’t I? Me, your own flesh, your son. A form of rotating evil, handed down the family, a freaky father-to-son inheritance, all other issues incidental, isn’t it?
As he speaks tears well up in Boat’s eyes and slowly spills down his cheeks.
Joe Boat’s face is frantic, destroyed. He only wants to be accepted and loved by his only son, and not to be hated.
In that instant Yaw Boat feels the bond between them, a bond that is as invisible as it is strong: the bond between parent and child.
And in the madness that Boat finds himself in, that bond represents everything good; sanity, hope, faith and life.
Yaw Boat would have tou-ched his father then if he could, and he could have gladly wept on his shoulder. Now things are becoming a little clearer, and his dislike of his father is ebbing away a little at a time.
Boat wants so much to speak, to as-sure him that he is still his son, but somehow, without the powerful magic of physical contact, his tongue remains glued to the roof of his mouth, and his eyes, expresses none of the emotional flood he is being inundated with.
Joe Boat looks away at last, breaking the power of that moment. The breath he exhales is shuddering, rocking his hu-ge frame.
TBc…