Dr. Waters was aware of a sharp pain in his head as he opened his eyes and tried to focus. It took him several minutes to register why he felt so groggy. It all came rushing back to him and he sat bolt upright from the position he had been lying in. He remembered going to investigate the sound his wife had heard and seeing what had been done to his war figurines. Waters remembered rushing upstairs and finding Adele's body with her cold blooded killer. The thought made him want to retch. Grief mixed with a total sense of helplessness overtook him and even managed to drown out the incredible pain that he felt throbbing in his head.
"Well, hello there sleeping beauty." A terrifying and familiar voice said from behind him. Waters turned and focused on the shadowy figure of the boy he knew as Wraith. It did not even register to him to think of the young man as Jimmy. Jimmy was a good kid. This man was a monster. He realized that while Wraith was standing up, he was stooped over a little. His mind was still struggling to wake up, so he had not noticed at first that he was inside a tent. It was only when he had seen how Wraith was standing that he recognized what sort of structure he was in. He almost asked why he was there, but he had a feeling he would be finding that out soon enough anyway.
"How long was I out?" He asked instead. It seemed like a better question. Not really all that relevant, but it was something that Wraith might not have told him on his own. Mostly it was because he wanted to know how much time had passed since his wife had died. He wanted so badly to join her. It was not her fault that this man had come calling and he did not want her to get too much of a head start on him at whatever it was that waited in the next life, if anything.
"Not long." Wraith replied. "Only a few minutes. If it had been much longer, I would have woken you up. I don't have all night after all, and I really wanted to have a chance to talk to you before you kill yourself."
"Kill myself?" Waters felt like kicking himself. He was trying not to ask questions that would be answered soon anyway. He did not think that he had very much longer to live and Wraith would no doubt let him see it coming.
"Yes. One way or another. I think it will become obvious shortly." Wraith said dismissively. "In the mean time I thought it would be nice to have one more session with you. That is assuming you are still willing to talk to me. Reach deep down inside yourself doctor. Can you be professional with the man that killed your wife?"
"Please just kill me and get it over with." Waters pleaded. He did not know if he could even try to be this man's psychiatrist.
"I like your attitude." Wraith said. "Don't worry. It is coming. But I still need you to answer my question."
"You want me to treat you? You are beyond treatment. You always were." Waters said.
"Well then I guess you should never have given me a clean bill of health." Wraith said, flashing his evil grin again. "How could you even call yourself a psychiatrist and let yourself be fooled by a seven year old with a penchant for killing small animals?"
"So that is what this is about?" Waters asked in total disbelief. "You killed my wife and drug me to this tent all because I didn't cure you? Now you think that we can have one more session and it will make everything better? There is nothing that can change the fact that you are nothing more than a sadistic monster."
"I am not a monster. I am balance. You are the monster. You and everybody else that tries to live their little lives satisfying the status quo. I am not the monster of the story. I thought you would have figured that out a long time ago. I am the one that saves the child from his evil parents. Did you really learn nothing from my story?" Wraith explained, calm and cool as if he was talking about the weather. "The world is the child and you and your kind are the parents. You withhold what is good in order to fit your own preconceived ideas about what is right and what is wrong."
"And what makes you the one that gets to decide what is best?" Waters asked. "Do you think that killing people somehow makes you superior to them?"
"Yes." Wraith answered. Waters had to hand it to the man; he had never shown any signs of a lack of conviction in his own ideals. "See how much fun this is? I have really missed our little chats like this. Haven't you?"
"I have never missed you." Waters said. "But as long as you insist on playing this sick little game, let me ask you a question. Why did you kill Adele? She did nothing to you. She never even knew about you."
"That is simple, good doctor. I killed her to make you suffer. It would have been too easy just to kill you and move on with my life. I wanted to break you. I wanted to show you how wrong you always were. That nobody had a right to life. That life is only earned through the blood of others. Would you have seen that if I had simply slit your throat? Would you have begged for death as you did after seeing your wife? I do not think so." Wraith said matter-of-factly.
"You like to make people give in to your line of thinking?" Waters asked.
"In a way. I prefer to think of it as showing them at the end of their lives how very wrong they were about life." Wraith shrugged. "None of this is really what I wanted to talk to you about though. You have already acknowledged your lack of a right to life through your pleads for me to end it. I wanted to talk to you about something I did that was actually bad."
"You feel bad about something?" Waters could not even fathom what sort of deed would make this unsettled young man have a guilty conscience. What did he do, help an old lady cross the street? Stop a mugging? Pet a kitten without sticking a knife through it? Only a good deed could have upset a man this sick in the head.
"Yes." Wraith acknowledged, and his voice actually wavered a little. It was clear that he was still emotional about whatever it was. Strange as it seemed, Waters found that he was fascinated to know what could possibly upset him so much that he felt the need to get it off his chest. "I killed a pregnant woman. The fetus was too young to survive on its own. That means I killed a baby."
"I have a feeling you have killed a lot of people. Why should a baby be any different?" Dr. Waters asked, feeling an inexplicable interest bubbling forth from his grief.
"I have killed a lot of people. I will kill many more. But I have never killed a child. Children are off limits. They have not done anything deserving of death yet. They do not have a right to life as you believed, but neither should they have a contract with death. It is wrong to kill a child before you know what it is going to be like. For the first time in my life, I have done something that I am ashamed of. I guess I just needed to talk to you about it because I really don't know how to feel about it." Wraith told him.
"You should feel bad about it. You took an innocent life." Waters said. "But I really do not see how this is any different than all the other innocent lives you have taken."
"Because none of the rest were innocent." Wraith interjected. "All of them had done something deserving of death and I was the reaper. This baby had not even taken its first breath yet. I should not have killed it. I cried for the first time since my mom betrayed me to you. I was the betrayer this time. I betrayed the baby by not giving it the chance to become as in tune to the world as I am."
"Personally, I think that the death of the baby was the least lamentable death you have caused. In the minds of many, it would not even qualify as having been alive." Waters said.
"Then you will never truly understand." Wraith said. "Those people are idiots, and I kill them without remorse for their views. I had hoped that this would be helpful, but it seems I was just wasting both of our time. I don't see any reason to put this off any longer."
"So now you are going to kill me?" Waters asked.
"No. You are going to kill yourself. How many times do I need to say that? Do you remember what you found in your study?"
"The war figurines?" Waters asked.
"Precisely." Wraith said. "What were they doing?"
"The British soldiers were pumping the German barracks with gas to kill them."
"And that is exactly what I am going to do. I happen to have secured a nice amount of hydrogen sulfide that I am going to pump into this tent. It is definitely going to be enough to kill you in a short period of time. Now here is where you get to choose how you are going to die. You can either wait inside and let the gas shut you down and kill you, or you can choose to make your exit out this Velcro door. As you know, the gas is extremely flammable and the friction you create by opening the Velcro will be more than enough to ignite it."
"So how am I killing myself by staying in the tent?" Waters inquired. He was almost more interested in how Wraith had come to this reasoning than he was in the fact that he was going to be dead very shortly. It was like he had become detached by the notion of his death.
"I think that is fairly obvious." Wraith answered. "If you choose to remain in the tent, then you choose death for yourself. I am not going to be in here keeping you from escaping. That means it will be a form of suicide. If you decide to exit the tent once the pumping starts, it will mean that you are still trying to live. Unfortunately, there is no way for you to be fast enough. I am going to be pumping it in at a great rate. Either way you will be making a choice, and will die. Like I said, you will be killing yourself."
If you are not going to keep me inside the tent, what is to stop me from exiting right after you do? Before you can start pumping it in."
"Oh that part of it is really simple." Wraith answered, as he proceeded to deliver a quick strike to the doctor's jaw. It was not enough to knock him out, but it certainly did the trick of stunning him and knocking him to the ground. Wraith exited the tent and turned on the pump that was hooked to the small tank of hydrogen sulfide. Waters could smell the rotten egg smell associated with the gas as he struggled off the ground. For a very short while he thought about just sitting there and letting the gas do its thing.
After a short pause, though, his human survival nature kicked in over both reasoning and grief. He knew that it would mean death to open the tent, and he knew that he really did not want to go on without his wife. Ultimately, however, the desire to live outweighed all of it. He reached out for the door and yanked it open in an insane attempt to get out faster than the fire could consume him. He never stood a chance. The gas was already in his lungs and all around him. As the tent opened, the gas ignited and instantly burned him both inside and outside. His lungs were incinerated before he could even realize his mistake.
Wraith did not even watch the fireball. He had started walking away as soon as he turned the pump on. He knew that the doctor would open the tent. That was why he had hit him in the first place. In spite of the fact that the doctor had begged for death earlier, he knew that Waters had never fully realized how wrong he had been about his idea of every living thing having a right to life. The heat on his back did little to affect the cold that he felt inside. It was not that he had enjoyed doing this. It had simply been necessary and he had put it off for far too long. Now that the loose ends were tied up he could finally focus on James.