The Lethal Heptagon

CHAPTER II

     My hairs were on end and my hands kept shaking, as if they were placed on a vibrolegs, while every microsecond of that vandal incident fell on my weak consciousness. It was just the beginning part of what happened that night but that was enough for me to go crazy. I was half conscious, I grabbed my hair tightly while I roamed everywhere, without knowing where I was going.

     In an attempt to fall on the floor, I took my night lamp and hit it against the wall, and immediately fully regained consciousness.

     I saw what had happened, I had broken my second bedside lamp, I had already broken the first on another occasion. I always ended up breaking something after my uncontrollable anger with all my fury. The feeling was horrible. According to my psychologist, I suffered from something called PTSD, with meaning "Posttraumatic Stress disorder", a psychological disease that develops in a victim of a trauma when the symptoms of it persist or worsen. In my case the symptoms were: severe anxiety, persistent memories of the event and retrospective scenes—which appear to me as day dreams.

     Quickly, I sat on the side of the bed and checked my drawer to see if I still kept my pair of anxiolytics and paracetamol, which was what the psychologist had recommended to me for anxiety and headache respectively; unfortunately it was already over.

     Upon disappointment, I shook my back forward and placed my hands on my face in tears. My head hurt, and the memories about Allegra still persisted. After a couple of seconds in that state I heard knocks from the door.

     "Lucas, it's time," I heard Dante say on the other side. "We'll be waiting for you, don't be late, Race is already here, and you know he doesn't like unpunctuality," he added.

     I wasn't feeling well at all, I wasn't in the mood, although of course, I couldn't stay without attending. It was the last class we would have of shooting, a class which was imposed by Thomas Darwell, my father, through the constitution of his home.

     My father was a lunatic, he had right at the entrance of the house a beige paper inside a transparent glass cube in which the ten rules that ruled the house resided. Rules that I don't know from where the fuck he had taken them from, they were all very weird and imposing, they violated our rights as human beings, we could not go out without consent or purpose, bring friends, sing, dance or even laugh. Who the hell imposes this?

     Well, my father did it, shit.

     According to the second rule, being his biological children, we were obliged to have shooting classes. He also forced us to do exercises as if we were in a military camp. And although none of us enjoyed it, we could neither comment, nor make any assumption or suggestion of any kind about anything that he imposed, since it was also prohibited. Literally, there was no freedom of expression in that house.

     You may wonder why he did that to us, well, in his defense he said that it was out of protection and self-defense since in a city as dangerous as Wellington, where murders and homicides happened like damn, that is, every day, any day we could be surprised by the sect that was murdering people. I didn't totally believe him, but at the same time I didn't have so many reasons not to believe him since I had already experienced the fury of those people. That association of thugs, they lacked heart.

     I got out of bed after a moment of reflection and left my room. Apparently, Dante was waiting for me outside my room.

     I and my brothers were triplets. But amongst them, I was the weirdo, I didn't share traits similar to theirs and almost not of my father either. My blue eyes clashed with the coffee of their eyes as well as my brown hair did with their dark one. Although good, the shape of the face and nose was similar between us... not even were we of the same skin color since I was fair-skinned.