Pascal’s Redemption

     The intruder was caught, restrained, tortured, and executed. The process was repeated as many times as Mother Silvia deemed necessary for a full interrogation. She extracted all the information she cared about within his first three deaths, his next 27 were strictly for her and the children’s amusement.

     She favored using a razor stiletto; passing current thru the blade till it radiated white heat. Sometimes she choose him to be suspended from the ceiling with arms banded. Sometimes she choose him to be crushed against the floor, under 5 times normal gravity. Rational questioning always descended into her wildly slashing at him. He would cry out in pain as she took an eye, removed an ear, cut an artery.

     Her questioning ended long before her abuse, her abuse concluded with slicing open the man’s abdomen, spilling out his intestines.

   He revealed himself to be a 15^th century Hessian assassin, contracted by an unknown source to kill Silvia and all her children, “for the good of everything to come”, was his provided reason.

     Questions rose as to how someone Earth-bound, and from such a primitive age, could penetrate into their dimension outside of time. The only possible answers suggested that his client was someone inside the school, someone with the means to bring the man thru a secret channel.

     Content with the revelation (for the time being), she set the knife on the work bench, compose herself by cleaning her face with fresh linen, then calmly announce to the children that they were free to do with the man as they pleased. She would resurrect him latter, when the mood suited her.

     Pascal remembered the man, chained to a hook in the ceiling, looking down at him. The stranger bled from seemingly every inch of his body. But as he looked at Pascal, a small spark exited his remaining eye. The man then smiled with badly eviscerated lips.      

     Seconds later the children focused their minds in unison, ripping the man in half at the waist line. They cheered and regaled at the carnage, dozens began clamoring for the spilled blood, splashing it playfully at the children in the back whose uniforms still showed more white than crimson. 

     The image of the mutilated body dangling pendulum like, burned into Pascal's mind. Normally he would have been as overjoyed as the other children were at their new toy, but he now felt an emotion he’d never felt before… Sadness. 

     He had the sudden realization that his hands, his face, his cloths, were all soaked with the man’s blood. Like a title wave, new feelings flooded his thoughts, horror, terror, regret, revoltion… Pain!  So much pain!

     Pascal collapsed to the floor, at the edge of the growing red pool.

He wanted to vomit.

He wanted to scream.

He wanted to not be here.

He wanted to have never been here.

     The other children became silent, and gathered around the fallen boy. He was doing something none of them had ever done in their entire lives, he was crying.

     Summoning all his strength, he stood. Stumbling on the slick floor, he ran.

    Bloody footprints marked his path out of the chamber, thru the garden, over the bridge, onto the cliffs of infinity, the edge of his world. The sky over the school was an ever changing kaleidoscope of pastels. The school itself was mounted on a rocky mass that floated in an area that can only be described as an eye of the storm between universes. 

     Pascal peeled off his cloths, and threw them over the edge of the cliff.

     He would never see them again.

     Pascal wanted to throw himself off of the cliff.

     He never wanted to see himself again.

     “What is this!” he cried out, “Why am I feeling this?” He fell onto warm white sand, yet still shivered.

     “That spark… What was that spark in his eye?”

    Pascal sat at the bottom of the marble stair way that led down from the main hall to the cliff edge. He stared at the spot where he asked himself that question 20 years ago. 

   He was a teacher today, youngest one in the schools history. All the benefits that accompany such a position were granted to him.

He could now change his appearance at a whim.

He could now bend Space-Time.

He could now finish what the man started 20 years before.

     The days of Mother Silvia’s sick clan, were numbered.