Chapter 4 - CHAPTER ONE

"In thy Father's Name"

It was one of those humid midnight where the air was eerily embraced by a pall of menace and danger, in a world within worlds, in a place of severe poverty, a place of darkness and foreboding, a place where the shadows under a cloudless night plays in animated paranoia among the several inner path-walks within the realm. Shadows converging and pausing for a couple of minutes, slight hand movements, then the parting of ways, as they again melt into more darker patches of darkness. These shadows most often haunts the nights of the impoverished, the grounds they grew up in. Seldom are those who escaped the tentacles of the monster clutching them ever so slightly tighter, pulling each of them down to sink deeper in the the murky under world of sorrow, abandon, hurt, hate, crime and deeper despair. As each generation ending up worse than the last, as young ladies and lads marry off in their desire to quiet their longings for elusive escape and insecurities for years of personal rebellion against their fates, against who they are for the rest of their miserable lives. So they progress devoid of everything, most of all hope, through empty, despicable and mangled journeys of existence forgetting the greatest gift from their Creator – Life.

#

The old sheikh sat meditating in the wooden chair, a hard-wood chair from the fathers, and from the fathers of their fathers. The "Linkuran" where he sat was from a far-away land where we all began, a land of promise, and broken promises.

Tonight, the minutes and the seconds are more precious than rest, for rest would come into his life soon, the pumping of his heart keeping pace as the seconds pass, seconds and minutes signifying a yardstick of moments in his time path, the act of weighing his decisions and actions against the totality of his eighty five years of life. The gift of a life from a Creator of mostly not wanting for anything, the longer days of laughter and happiness than weariness, sorrows and sadness shared with his beloved family and successors.

Tonight is a rare opportunity only a few are given to review the deeds that makes him the kind of a man he had been. Yet everyone knows that in Purgatory Twenty-Seven and in all Purgatories, that a well off life could mean the barter for one's soul to the devil and in eternal damnation. As the hours passed by on his "Holy Last Ritual", the old man sank even deeper in mediation, he then whispered to himself, asking.

"How many have I pushed into the depths of hell and pulled up the ladder from them, the only means for them to climb out, should they find the will to escape their forced sentence into hell and eternal damnation?"

How many of them are innocents, victimized by my subjective judgments... How many survivors of whose life I have taken, put that burden of grief and sorrow, seldom felt and experienced by my family? How many sons have I condemned that could have redeemed all the sins of all the fathers in our diminishing race?

... My Allah, My True God. As you open my eyes at this moment, may you have given them the strengths they needed to be able to stand up, get away running or even crawling from the inferno I sent them and their loved ones into... Those seeds, I pray, You helped my Father to spawn and thrive on, and survived."

As the old sheik involuntary invoked his God unbowed against tradition, sprawled and spent from a tsunami of emotional guilt. A moist came forth from a long forgotten prison within him, formed into a drop at the corners of his closed eyes. The drop of tear in disbelief and hesitating the sudden liberty it almost forgot after 66 years, slowly putting a step forward into unfamiliar ground, flowed on the contours on the sheik's face. Flowing freely now, bringing life back to its creator and source. He then felt his thirst being quenched by the smooth fire from the inner corners of his heart where he locked it up and forgot about it. Softly he felt the pleasant fire pour out like an overflowed the dam, conquering and overcoming all of him, changing him into something he forgot that he was, like the of the unwelcomed tears unbecoming of that old person that he thought he was. He couldn't move to pay reverence to his God, he doesn't want to move.

Breaking down the old him and freeing the true him, his delirium showed him the fates of those souls of which he tinkered with. Showed him how they were wrecked. How his proclamation that he was a god, with the exclusive right to redeem life, broke those souls that the old man prayed for that his God had saved.

"Salaam malaikum, father." The voice seemed to travel around the entire room, thought the old man, before it reached his own ears. A voice he recalled coming from a frightened, hungry and cold 6 year old boy, when he was still 17 years old from his memory. He could never forget that time when his body convulsed as his being changed forever as he crossed a taboo threshold.

#

"Please help me... My father, why isn't he moving?" The six year old boy pleaded while looking straight at him as he suddenly turned around surprised. In that night darker than any other nights, he could see or rather feel the little boy's tears wanting to flow profusely, despite the boy's thick mask of false bravery.

"W-where did you come from?" he asked the boy with tremendous effort between trembling lips and a shaken being, while his gaze are busy re-scanning every corners and deep black shadows, anticipating, should those deep black voids would again materialize into another being, another boy, another witness after his plan to turn his back again and flee.

"Who are you?" He asked the boy kneeling beside the lifeless body. He wanted to raise his voice with authority, but it came out as a whisper. He felt for his back pocket and deposited the now retracted switchblade inside, involuntary rubbing his hands against his short jeans, in a desperate attempt to wipe the now drying blood on it.

Seconds that seemed minutes passed by slowly in his frantic mind, he should get moving, to turn and start running... if only his body was not nailed in the air at the moment, restricting him. It was decided in his mind not to add this little boy as his second victim at his baptism tonight. This little boy, clad in a tattered sack, is not a target. Not in the mission. He's now done piecing together what happened - the boy returned to their usual or agreed place to spend the night in that back alley, bringing home what he got from begging the streets. Isn't that they ways of the Rat People? When your home is the streets of the Metropolis, you would need to designate and communicate to whoever you're with a place where you plan to spend the night in. Once again sliding his gaze reviewing for the last time the inventories of evidence, one overturned cup beside a one five peso coin and three one peso coins cluttered on the ground, shimmering faintly over their dull surface a reflection of a light from somewhere. The disheveled boy with a dark grey dust coated hair, unmistakably from the soils and the street dust blanketing the concrete roads, mixed with saturated diesels and oils emitted from the multitudes of vehicles where begging boys harangue for alms. This boy reminded him of himself, this boy was him, when he was that age.

"It's very dangerous here." he uttered with finality, and with a heave turned around, walked away, pranced then jumped to propel himself as he ran away from that damned place. He figured he had put a good distance from the scene, he can now feel his legs' muscles starting to tighten, he can feel the pores on his head releasing the warm perspiration brushing against the humid air, he started to pace down his gait. His confidence started to build within him, he turned his head around to check the progress he had made distancing himself, but he paled suddenly at what he saw.

"That little imp is chasing me, dammit!" He jumped forward and started running as fast as he can again. Glancing back from time to time at his pursuer, "Shit! I can't seem to get away and gain distance from this monkey!?" He observed.

"Putang...!" Cursing out as he started to fall down, his foot got snared by a partially protruding iron bar and tripped. As the excruciating pain suddenly shot up from his splintered foot, the shock sent him face first down on the asphalt road. He righted himself lying down to face up the dusking sky, the bolts of pain from his foot coursed upwards and traveled through his scanty teen body, amazed to find that despite the pain he felt, he could still feel the tender heat rising up from the asphalted road on his back.

He could now hear the light tapping of the boy's footsteps approaching, the sound horribly magnified by the quiet and dark stillness of everything at that ungodly hour, where witches roam and where the Devil and Death are both out for as many souls as they can get. Within that hour a mythical moment transpired for him as he grieved for his soul that he sensed is dying. It was a pause to the ritual of triumph and surrender; the same ritual of fate whenever a lion ends the hunt by laying it paws on the lifeless prey, just before it starts devouring it.

He started sobbing, the stifled little sobs quickly turning into an uncontrollable cry, an outpouring, not from the agony from his raptured and bleeding foot, neither because he was afraid of the boy who is now just a few steps away from him. He closed his eyes, desperately trying to stop his profusely pouring tears.

"Don't cry... father." He can sense the child, the imp, now standing next to his left side without opening his eyes, he then felt the boy kneel beside his convulsing body as he cried uncontrollably. It was the second time the now completely orphaned boy went down on his knees, beside his slain real father, and obliviously, now by the newly baptized assassin. A mission decreed by a lower level officer from the "Organization", as an example to the others. An example to what happens if a consignee consistently fails to pay a merchandize of drugs given in trust within a system old as tradition, where the dead man, a "sistemador", was tasked to sell to mendicants and vagabonds like him.

He now chanted between sobs, in a whisper that only he can hear, hypnotically, "I've made the right diction, this is me, I've made the right decision, this is me, this is me..."

"... I am right, I am right. I've made the right decision... Am I right?" Instinctively, as if from the need for a lifeline to hold unto, he embraced the little boy back tightly.

#

"Marco, how is my beloved and beautiful daughter Amihan?" The sheik asked, as he stared into his guest's expressionless face trying to penetrate the think and invisible mask.

"She is well father." After all those years, still the old man never learned how to penetrate the disguise of the being in front of him.

"How is my lovely granddaughter? It seemed so long since I last saw them both." The sheik continued resignedly, trying to elicit even a hint of emotion from this person so close to him, and yet an interloper whom I trusted my only child and grandchild to, he just realized now.

"She is also fine father." The deep and ominous voice answered unceremoniously, as if granting satisfaction to the frivolous last wishes of a doomed soul.

"H-how are you, my son?" The old surrogate father's tender face was a mixture of gladness and sorrow, trying to extend a warm welcome and embrace a lost son that has never left his side since he met him on that fateful night so many years ago. When the stoic mask did not crack, and instead he felt it enveloping the stranger's whole being now, he then felt the fear he was trying to tame since yesterday suddenly coming back to him, coursing throughout him with such force.

Slowly the stranger sitting in front met the old man's gaze and spoke. "You know why I am here father. Please forgive me." The old man stared back at the stranger's eyes, into an abyss, as he desperately tried to reach the soul of this person, to try to know this stranger in this final moment that he thought he confidently knew, a grave disregard he overlooked and ignored.

"I know my son," the defeated father replied back, trying to form a smile to express his genuine forgiveness to his son, "and I forgive you, you are one of the few people whom my life is beholden to, and I lov..." In a swift instant and with minimal movement, as if it couldn't have disturbed the air between the the two of them, the stranger was now half crouched and in an arm's distance from the old man, his right arm now extended, and a sharp gleam winked from the tip of his "kris", while his dagger's pristine serpentine blade is soiled in a thin crimson on one of its sides.

The visitor sat back again, took out his paraphernalia, poured the "Otsa" in a little golden pan, lighted the candle on the old man's lounge table, and heated the base of the golden pan with the newly kindled flame. He then took out his syringe from one of his pockets, the needle sipped the now melted Otsa from the heated pan, then injected the liquid in the arm that killed his surrogate father.

He took out all the contents from his other pocket and laid those items on the table beside the paraphernalia he just used. The five peso and three one peso coins shall lay there on his father's table. A secret symbol when he started to accept his path and the way it shall be travelled. A reminder that however the path twists and turns, it shall always lead to back to beginnings.

The interloper stood up, rubbed his eyes with the back of his palm, trying to clear the slowly gathering clouds from his vision, and the image of his father's blood oozing profusely down from the severed neck artery to his white robe, tainting it slowly, slowly... as slowly as his quiet footsteps walked away from the father he adopted, from the father who brought him to where he is now. The assassin that made the assassin that he is now.

He left the paraphernalia with the small gold pan there, as the tradition should be, both a symbol and a warning on what happened, why it happened, and who was the last visitor, the final part and the last act for the Ceremonial Rights of Death. A tradition, a ceremony feared by all, and secretly, a welcome means of escape for those devoid of hope.

"How many have I pushed into the depths of hell and pulled up the ladder from them, the only means for them to climb out, should they develop and find the will to escape damnation?"