Camilla Ch. 118

"Let go of my hands!" she shouted. "I'm gonna kill her!"

Camilla kicked him sharply in the balls, knocking him to the ground. She and Collette continued struggling.

Collette's face grew redder and redder. Camilla's black fingernails dug into her mother's neck, making it bleed profusely. Finally, Camilla's fingers bore holes into Collette's neck, and her lifeless body fell to the ground.

"I did it," Camila said, panting and looking at her bloody hands. "I finally killed the bitch."

Troy crawled over to Collette's bloody body, tears streaming down his face. "You murdered your own mother--and father--and she's the bitch?" he cried. "She was right about you all along: you are a little beast! Everything you touch, you kill!"

The shock of hearing those stinging words jolted Camilla awake from her subspace dream. She was reeling and disoriented. Don, Agape, and Candice arrived after breaking through the psychic barrier; they used Nigrovum to knock the two masked men away, making them fly to the other side of the room and hit the brick walls head first. They lay on the floor, bloodied and unconscious.

Camilla recovered from her dizziness. Her friends freed her from the strappado bondage, but she then used Nigrovum to knock them away before they could get a chance to carry her back upstairs. She then ran out of the BDSM dungeon and down the stairs to basement four.

She fell onto the hard floor of a dark, cold, circular room. She saw a light leading into another room, one that seemed much warmer. Shivering and hugging her naked body, she ran toward the room, sensing extreme danger but welcoming it, wanting to purge herself of her guilt more than ever, after having just heard her mother's so cruel words.

Don, Agape, and Candice ran after her.

"No, Camilla!" Agape shouted. "Don't go in there!"

It was too late: Camilla ran into the heat. There, in a kitchen, four men were waiting to get their revenge on her: Dirk and Guy, the Vancouver bisexuals who'd tried to enslave her in their apartment the day after her gang-bang with Williams and her other high school teachers. Jay and John, the orderly and customer who'd raped her in the hospital when she was comatose, were also there, hungry for revenge. They set up a psychic barrier, temporarily keeping her friends out.

"Remember the bug spray you put on our Vaseline, Camilla?" Dirk growled. "Ooh, that burning passion!"

"Our injuries didn't just take away our manhood, you bitch!" Guy snarled. "They killed us. Now it's your turn to have your genitals and asshole burned off." He grabbed her left arm.

"That's right," Dirk said, grabbing her right arm. "But we have something worse than bug spray. You'll see."

"Your pussy's gonna look the way you left my disintegrated cock and balls," said John, grabbing her right leg. "A giant hole between your legs."

"Your whole body's gonna blow to pieces, " said Jay, grabbing her left leg. "Not just your head."

They picked her up and carried her to a large hole in a wall, an oven in which a huge fire burned, with what seemed like thousands of knifes slicing up and down on a scalding hot table.

"Oh, God! No! Please!" she screamed, struggling to get free, not prepared for so torturous a punishment. She had her feet on the wall, on either side of the hole, pushing away to stop them from pushing her in.

Her friends broke through the psychic barrier and ran into the kitchen.

"If you want to reach the heavenly realms this way, you must endure the annihilation that's waiting for you in there," Don said.

"We don't want you to suffer in that way," said Agape, with tears in his eyes for what his daughter was about to suffer. "But you keep wavering in your resolve to save yourself. The only way to get to heaven is straight through there, willfully, without ever looking back."

You must also give up your body in the morgue, Camilla, Armand's disembodied voice called out to her from the world of the living, from his hotel in Montreal.

"She isn't letting her corpse decompose up there?" Candice asked.

No, Singh's voice said. She's still far too attached to it.

"She's using Nigrovum to keep it intact?" Don asked.

Yes, Armand's voice said.

You must let it go, Camilla, Singh's voice called out from Vancouver.

"But I...want it...to stay beautiful," Camilla said, still struggling to get free of her four vengeful abductors. "I don't want...my body...to decompose. Unh!"

"But it must!" Agape said. "Decomposition is a natural part of death. You must accept that, or you'll suffer forever."

"Let go, Camilla," Don said. "Free yourself from attachment. Have some peace, finally."

"I don't...want to...be ugly," Camilla said. "Ah!"

"It will be too difficult for us to free you from hell if you won't commit to your own salvation," Agape said. "in your irresolution, you'll just bounce back and forth, from level to level in this inferno, and you'll be trapped here forever."

"We wanted to take you out of hell by going up, the slow and long, but ultimately easier way," Candice said. "You didn't want that; you wanted to go down through the serpent's tail. Well, this is it. Excruciating. You have to deal with it."

"I go...through that fire?" Camilla asked, still struggling, and getting tired. "Burned and...cut to pieces, but after that, I'm in heaven?"

"Yes," Don said. "But first let go of your psychic control of your body in the morgue. Let it decompose. Don't be attached to it. It doesn't need to be beautiful: you'll be beautiful in the heavenly realms."

"Yes," Candice said. "Through the fire, through the serpent's tail, into its head, through the Nirvanic realm, then to paradise."

"We'll be waiting for you there," Agape said.

"Be brave," Don said.

"OK," Camilla said in a trembling voice. She finally stopped struggling.

"Yeah!" the four men shouted in vindictive glee; then they threw her into the oven.

She released her psychic control of her body in the morgue, and it finally began to rot.

****************

The next morning, the nurse working in the Montreal morgue took a doctor she'd told about Camilla to where her body was being held in its cold chamber.

"I'm telling you, Dr. Taggert," she said as she opened the cold chamber. "Her body isn't decomposing at--"

She was shocked to see Camilla's corpse suddenly in an advanced state of decomposition, since it had been in the cold chamber for over two months.

"It isn't decomposing at all, eh?" the doctor asked her with a slight sneer.

"N-never mind," she said, quickly putting the body back inside.

*****************

Camilla screamed as her body was being burned by the fires in the oven she'd been thrown into. In part, however, I--I mean she--was glad to suffer, for her guilt was even more painful to her than her body pain.

Then I felt--I mean, she felt all those knives cutting up my body--I mean, her body. The mutilated pieces were cut into ever smaller and smaller pieces, and were diced and minced into such fineness, as to be a powder. The heat of the oven melted the powder into a liquid. The liquid felt increasingly merged with its surroundings, and I felt my consciousness float through a serpentine tail.

Satan's Tail, I thought.

I sensed the biting head of the ouroboros, cutting into and devouring the tail; with the annihilation of that tail, I finally felt the approaching end of my desire, my fear, and my suffering. My guilt feelings were fading, too.

The liquid that I'd become, at first like molten lava, now cooled and merged with the purifying waters of an ocean, an infinite ocean, that flooded all over me and all over the surrounding landscape of the earth. I became one with the ocean, psychically linked with everyone and everything. It no longer seemed as though Nigrovum, but rather the divine, was linking me with other forms of consciousness; or, perhaps, my lack of a body, of an ego, was no longer limiting Nigrovum's expression in me. Perhaps I had become pure Nigrovum, my identity absorbed into it fully. Or, is Nigrovum simply Brahman?

The waters grew hotter, and slowly began evaporating...I felt myself passing through the ineffable bliss of the Nirvanic realm...the void from which all things come...a nothingness that is everything...

*

*

*

...condensation in the clouds, then rain...drops of rain pouring on the lawn in front of a big, beautiful mansion...a puddle forms on the lawn. The water of the puddle somehow congeals, as it were. An unconscious human body is formed from the water...mine.

I wake up in what looks like the bed of a hospital room. Daddy is sitting on the side of my bed. Candice, Don, Jasmine--the black girl Candice loved in the mansion on Grouse Mountain--and Carrie are standing by, delighted and relieved to see me finally awake.

"Daddy?" I say, sitting up and rubbing my eyes. "Candice?" I look to my side and see my hair--blonde--draped on my peach-skinned arm. "Carrie? Father Josiah?"

"Yes, sweetheart," Daddy says, with tears streaming down his cheeks. "We have you back, at last." He opens his arms for me to hug him.

"Oh, Daddy," I say, now crying myself and throwing my arms around him in a tight embrace. "And I have you back now, too. I'm in heaven, finally."

"Welcome back, baby," Candice says, stroking my hair. "It is heaven here, in a way, with you now back with us."

"I'm so...sorry," I say in heavy sobs. "To you all."

"For what?" Don asks.

"For hurting you," I say, still sobbing.

"When did you hurt us?" asks Carrie.

"I had...sex with...Daddy," I begin, my words constantly interrupted by my endless sobbing. "Then I killed him...trying to kill you, Carrie." The others are looking at each other, apparently totally confused as to what I could possibly mean by such shocking confessions. "I cheated...on Candice...all the time. I made you...all sick...with Nigrovum. I killed...you all, and sent you...to hell. I'm such...a bad girl." My body shook with each sob.

"What on earth are you talking about?" asks Daddy, letting go of me and looking deep in my teary eyes.

"That must have been some dream you were having," says Jasmine. Candice puts her arm around Jasmine and kisses her on the cheek. Jasmine kisses her back on the lips.

"Dream?" I ask, now the confused one.

"Yes, Camilla," Don says. "You just woke up from a long coma."

"A coma?" I ask.

"Yes," Daddy says. "You've been out of it for several months, ever since your mother's house burned down, when you and Angus discovered her in the middle of that disgusting...orgy..." He whispers that last word.

"I don't understand," I say. "Yeah, I remember seeing Mommy naked and tied up, with all those bare-naked men, and they were gang-banging her and--"

"Camilla!" Daddy gently chides me. "Nice little girls don't use naughty words like that."

"Daddy, I'm not a child anymore, I'm a fully-grown wo--" I look down at myself. I'm flat-chested! I'm skinny! I'm smaller! I have the body of a--what?--ten-year-old?!

"What do you mean, you're not a child?" Daddy asks. "Of course you are."

"Oh!" I whine, beginning to cry again. "I don't wanna be a little kid. I want my sexy grown-up body back!"

"Sweetie, you've always been a child," Carrie says, caressing my cheek. She and Daddy hug and kiss, as do Candice and Jasmine. It disappoints me to see them as two pairs of lovers, and none of them mine; strangely, though, I feel numb of any jealousy.

"You must have dreamed you were an adult, during your coma," Daddy says. "Just after you'd fainted in the burning house, firemen rescued you; though your mom, Angus, and almost all of her lovers died in the fire."

"Yeah?" Candice asks. "What happened?"

"Oh, it was awful," Daddy says. "BDSM, naked men in gimp masks--Collette was really into kink. All while having custody of Camilla after our divorce. She'd give the girl sleeping pills so she wouldn't know what her mom was doing. Ridiculous way to raise a child. Was she too cheap to pay for a baby-sitter and have her decadent fun elsewhere?"

"How'd the fire start?" Jasmine asks.

"Angus, then Collette's husband and Camilla's step-dad, unexpectedly came home from the last minute cancellation of a business trip," Daddy explains. "He caught Collette by surprise, doing what she would typically do--cheating. They argued and fought. Camilla, having not taken her sleeping pill that night, suddenly appeared, all distraught from what she saw, and knocking over one of several candlesticks used to light up the dark bedroom. I don't know why Collette needed candlesticks: I guess they were there to decorate the room and give it a sexier vibe. Anyway, the house caught on fire, and the poor, traumatized girl swooned, saved by the firemen in the nick of time. I don't think anyone else survived. If anyone did, the media got the story from them. Anyway, that's the story as I understand it from the news."

"How awful," Don says.

"But, I thought I woke up from the coma, like, twenty-seven years ago," I say, still crying and confused.

"Do you remember waking up back then?" Carrie asks.

"Well, no," I say. "Which is strange, 'cause normally remember just about everything."

"You do, do you?" Candice asks skeptically.

"Yeah, I have a photographic memory," I say.

"Your mom used to claim she had a photographic memory," Daddy says. "Well, Carrie is your mew mommy, sweetie. We got married last month, while you were in your coma."

"Oh," I say, disappointed, but oddly accepting of the relationship, as I am of that of Candice and Jasmine, who peck each other on the lips. "But I couldn't have dreamed it all. I remember everything too well, too vividly, and no child could know the grown-up stuff that I know."

"After living with Collette for three years, a child can be knowledgeable about lots of adult stuff," Daddy says. He exchanges nervous glances with Carrie, Don, and Candice, as though he's hiding something from me. I try to do a scan of his thoughts, but I can't detect any hidden agenda. Are they all blocking me? I can't tell. All the same, I think he's lying about me dreaming it all. He probably thinks he's protecting me from all that pain, the sweet man. "And a smart girl like you, with your curiosity, looking up things on Wikipedia to know what your mom was always doing when you were supposedly asleep, I'm sure you could have learned lots of grown-up things."

"The kids today grow up too fast," Don says.

"I remember--you'd study anything--and everything," Daddy says. "I still remember, even back when Collette and I were married, you would read online synopses of Shakespeare plays, or of Moby-Dick, or look at pictures of masks from ancient Greek comedy on your computer. How those masks used to scare you!"

I think Daddy's lying, making up alternative explanations for why I know so much stuff.

"Well, maybe I got some of my adult knowledge from Nigrovum," I say.

"Nigrovum?" Daddy asks, sneering slightly. "What on earth is Nigrovum?"

"It's not of the earth," I say. "Nigrovum: tiny black alien egg-like things, swimming around in my blood. They give me the power to do anything I want, and to know anything I want to know."

"A child's imagination," Carrie says, chuckling. "Adorable."

"It's real!" I insist, slightly annoyed. "That, and my photographic memory could have given me all my knowledge."

"Baby, there's no such thing as so-called 'photographic memory', or eidetic memory," Carrie says. "As a psychologist, I've tested it. Many people, like you and your mom, claim to have total recall. But it's never been proven, not once."

"Your memory's excellent, sweetie. There's no doubt of that," Daddy says. "But it's not perfect."

"But Nigrovum helps me to know--" I begin.

"Sweetie, there's no such thing as Nigrovum, or eidetic memory, and there's no adult body for you...not for another eight years, anyway," Carrie insists.

I'm crying again. "I don't wanna be a little girl; this isn't me."

"Yes, it is; of course it is!" Daddy says, holding my arms and looking into my eyes. "This little girl is you, the real you."

"But I don't wanna be--" I begin.

"Why not?" Candice asks. "You're such a cutie. I look at you, and want to pick you up and give you a big hug."

"I'm skinny and ugly," I say in sobs.

"No, you're not!" Daddy shouts. "You don't have to be an adult with a sexy body; you don't have to try to be someone else. You just have to be a little girl."

"Be yourself, Camilla," Jasmine says.

"Your true self," Don says.

"Beautiful and little," Daddy says.

Dr. Petrovich comes in with a nurse in her late fifties. "I'm afraid visiting time is over."

"OK, Doctor," Daddy says, getting up. "We'll come by tomorrow, sweetie. Get some rest. Bye."

"Bye, Camilla," Candice says, walking out of the room holding Jasmine's hand. The others say good-bye to me and leave.

"They're right about you being pretty," the doctor says.

"That's right," says the nurse. "Don't grow up too fast."

They leave after giving me a quick check-up; then I take a short nap.

***************

About an hour later, I wake up and get out of bed. I walk out of my room, wearing a hospital gown. Oddly, the halls are completely empty of people, and all quiet. I go to an exit door down the hall, open it, and get out of the hall. I go up the stairs and find a door to the roof. I open it, and go out. I walk over to the edge of the building.

I look up at the blue, sunny sky of a late afternoon, knowing the Nirvanic realm is up there, beyond the clouds. I smile, yearning for it. Then I look down at the grassy ground, about ten floors down. I get dizzy and a little scared from seeing such a long way down. After that, I look all over the surrounding scenery: it's just as it had been described to me--green, grassy countryside, beautiful and peaceful. A Pure Land, an ideal place for gaining total purification and for nurturing spirituality. I have surely found the heavenly realms.

I go over and over in my mind everything that happened to me since the coma--my real coma, not this white lie I'm sure my daddy just told me, to protect me from the awful truth. I remember back when I turned eighteen and quit my McDonald's job to work as a stripper for Luvlee's. I remember the crush I had on Mr. Grisham. Since I know how painful the later memories are, I find it easier to narrate my past as if I were someone else watching it from a distance, saying, 'Camilla did this, she did that', instead of 'I did this, I did that'. It's always easier to be someone else than it is to be yourself, anyway.

To ease the pain further, I remember those years, from being an eighteen-year-old to a thirty-seven-year-old, as I understood everything then, without my knowledge of later events, or of what the masked men were doing, or of how Nigrovum was affecting my life, until I discovered them when I did later. I prefer remembering the early years as being of me just enjoying the sex and worrying about small problems like being caught by Ms. Callahan, things like that. Ignorance is bliss, and it's better to forget the awful things we know, worrying about them only later, so we can take a rest from agitation. Knowing is hell, believe me. That's why eating of the Tree of Knowledge leads to The Fall, and I want to be Eve before the Fall again, for as long as possible.