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If he focusses, he can almost feel the blood of the crew on his hands.
Malcolm knows it’s not real, of course – no matter what the guards say, no matter what anyone says, he knows what he saw – but it’s hard not to feel… responsible, in some way. If he’d just gotten his suspicions across a little sooner, if he’d seen what was wrong with William a little faster, if he’d even just convinced Angela to turn around… things could have ended so much better. For everyone, not just him. He’s come to accept that they would have realised he wasn’t his father one way or another. That’s life, after all, and life isn’t always fair.
After all, that’s life, and sometimes life has your ship be the one to find a cursed artifact jettisoned into space four centuries ago, and has you unable to do anything but find the bodies of your crewmates one after another. Like Hansel and Gretel, following their trail of white pebbles home.
(Sometimes, when his food is passed through the slot in his cell’s door, he still sees Serena’s hand lying abandoned on the tray.)
Hansel and Gretel were sent out again the next week, and Gretel had nothing but bread to try to leave a trail with – a trail that was devoured by crows, leaving her and her brother abandoned in the cold, lonely woods, with nothing to do but wait for their cold, lonely deaths.
It’s a cruel story. Even if the siblings found their way home eventually, they had to kill for the right to return: Malcolm had always thought it was creepy, even when he was small. When he said so, his dad had just laughed; when he said so again to his mother, she had just been furious his dad had read it to him at all.
Maybe that’s why he feels so strange following his own trail of breadcrumbs, a thin, almost invisible trail of red leading him further and further down this winding staircase, curling in on itself impossibly like a dying spider. A path that should dash him into the wall again and again only leading him further down, further into the cold metal depths of the abandoned Mephistopheles, all on a stranger’s account.
It’s not the real Mephistopheles, he knows that. Just as he knows that no one could’ve possibly gotten into his cell, or gotten a knife through security, or hidden a fleshy, bleeding door behind the plastic panels of his cell.
Just as he knows that he, Malcolm Somerset, never killed anyone aboard the Mephistopheles.
He keeps walking.
It’s cold, and bright, and there is nothing to do but think as the red sinks into the creases of his bare feet. Really, the only difference between walking the perimeter of his cell and walking the path is that he can feel himself descending with every step down the stairs. How long has it been since he’s walked down a staircase? The bathrooms are on the same level as his cell, and if they weren’t, he’d be taken down on a lift, anyway.
The Mephistopheles hadn’t had stairs, only the lift to get from one floor to the other. It was an old ship, and that was one of the points of failure that were going to have it grounded: it’s a miracle the killer had never seen fit to take advantage of it.
Had the killer been… alive enough to think that far ahead? The man who sent the spirit up there certainly thought it was dangerous regardless, and he’d been proven right now that it had killed again.
And it had killed again. The trial had been nothing but a sham, where an impulsive, jealous patricide was somehow drawn out into a planned, gruesome hunt of every last person aboard the ship, even when the evidence must’ve pointed to anything else. William’s room alone must’ve pointed to him being the killer: why would Malcolm have made his effigies in someone else’s room? Someone who must’ve still been fresh when the ship was found, at that!
They just wanted an easy answer. Someone, anyone to blame for what they’d found. Dead men can’t be punished, and someone has to answer for it when five people turn up dead on a spacecraft. And when the last survivor has already been found guilty of one murder…
His patients’ gown drags against the ground, wet with the red pooling on the metal floor. A distant ache throbs in his chest, like an ice pick stuck between the bars of his ribs, tugging at something just behind the pulsing muscle of his heart. When he catches a glimpse of himself in the metal again he can see his face pulled taut with the pain. He tilts his head. If he squints, he almost thinks he can see someone else behind him.
It’s the man in red, of course. The stranger who told him to kill his own father, dressed in red that stained his fingers at a touch, staring at him still with that unnamable something about his face. Familiar, but unfamiliar. Lined, and yet ageless. Recognisably human, and yet somehow… not.
He hadn’t been something pretending to be human – at least, not as far as Malcolm could tell – more like a stone Buddha, or someone else carved into marble or limestone, or some other rock. The ones where they aren’t made to look as though they could be breathing; the ones where the calm, complete stasis of stone is part of the piece. A Buddha with his stone hand raised isn’t supposed to take in a breath, open his eyes, leave you all but naked under his gaze as his gentle smile flattens into a cold, distant horizon.
Looking at him now doesn’t quite send chills down Malcolm’s spine, only an odd sort of tension. Something that makes him stiffen his shoulders, furrow his brow, an odd urge to check around him for a way out – just in case. Just as it had so long ago, when the world was still a place he could trust
Key in the lock, the man had said. Twist it until it clicks, and then you only have to walk through it.
He doesn’t know how long he’s been walking anymore. When he catches a glimpse of his reflection again, he looks haggard, exhausted, a hollowness to his cheek and to his eyes like the flesh within had been somehow scooped out and left to rot. Is it just from his imprisonment, or was it the walk? The asylum wouldn’t have let one of their patients wander around in such a ragged gown, but maybe they’d just left him to rot, since he’d die before the life sentence they’d forced onto him ran out anyway. Dead men don’t blow the whistle on poor treatment, even in countries without death penalties.
His hands leave tacky smears on his robe when he wipes them on his thighs, indistinguishable from the blistering, burning scarlet already stained into the cloth. It doesn’t matter. Bloodstains on the greyish-white fabric are just one more thing to be looked away from, like the remains being in Taylor’s room and Angela’s only reason for his guilt was proximity to the crew’s deaths. The deaths she had set him to investigate.
The blood still clings jealously to his hands, viciously bright against his skin. They say red and white flowers are a bad omen. Bloody bandages: you need to add something else to the bouquet, like green, for new life – or so they say. Whether they’re for a wedding, a christening, a graduation or a funeral, red and white cannot go alone.
(He wasn’t allowed to attend his father’s funeral. Apparently, people thought it’d be in poor taste, once his lie was discovered.)
Really, he couldn’t be surprised to find out he’d aged before his years, nor that the asylum food was insufficient to feed even a patient locked in a room barely as wide as he was tall. His dark hair finds itself discarded, hank by hank, into the pools of red as he walks. They used to treat patients for ringworm by applying thalium, and a dead man walking has no reason to worry about outdated care from doctors who know he’ll never be allowed to leave them.
It’s almost poetic. A vengeful ghost is cast into the heavens, and when mankind finds it and destroys it, the man who walks out of the shuttle is declared a vengeful ghost in its stead.
Malcolm sighs, and it grates against his throat. Twinges in his chest, sends shivering twitches down his scarlet-sticky hands. When he glances up, he can no longer see the floor he started from, only the trail winding further and further down.
A dead man walking killed everyone on the Mephistopheles, and a dead man walking was cast into the exhaust of the ship to burn. A dead man was brought home. A dead man is probably sitting on the floor of his cell, listening to the imagined instructions of a familiar, ageless stranger.
He can almost see the end of the staircase, now. When he sees his reflection in the polished, bloodied metal, he can see his father staring back, wrapped in the red that had pooled just before the front door, soaking into the welcome mat. Something about the bare scalp, the lined face, the empty eyes: something looking back that doesn’t look quite human enough anymore. Like a human face, carved in stone.
There is no reason to stop. He can almost feel a hand on his shoulder urging him on, and as the final step becomes nothingness, Malcolm lets its firm, scarlet-sticky touch push him down.
(When he thinks about it, the man in red looked almost like his father.)