Poison

            by Anthony Granados

 

Professor Doloven picked up the worn copy of A Clockwork Orange from his desk and waved it at the class.

“Yes, but what particular aspect of Alex’s parents, or more generally, his home, does Burgess place an emphasis on in the third chapter?” his eyes darted over the students, hunting a reply. A boy near the front gave one.

“He reinforces the emotional disconnect between Alex and his parents. The parents are invested, but impotent, powerless to affect change. For Alex, who desires power, this draws the connection between emotional investment and weakness.”

“Good, good, but how does that psychological foundation play out for Alex when he has his fangs pulled, so to speak?” this time another student answered. The exchange continued for some time, but Elaine, sitting in the back of the class, never spoke. This is how the days had passed recently. For Elaine, the coming graduation brought with it a dark mood that seeped through her like a drop of red wine in a glass of water. As much as her diploma would be a mark of freedom and success, so too would it signal the end of her friendship with professor Doloven, the man who had been her teacher for the past four years. More, Doloven had been the man who saw a girl too timid and too afraid to find her own way. He had been a father to her, and a friend.

“Well,” Doloven tossed the old book back down on his desk. “I have already taken too much of your time. Class dismissed; I shall expect to see you all on Friday.”

Elaine lingered, avoiding the stream of students pouring out the door.

“Elaine?”

“Ah, yes professor?”

“Do you have any plans for Friday, after graduation?”

Elaine raised an eyebrow, “Well, no, not really.”

“Then, I would very much like to have your company for dinner on Friday. I’m planning to retire at the end of this year, so it seems to me that we’ll both be starting something of a new life soon and I thought we might celebrate.”

 “Well, alright. What time?”

“How does six sound?”

“That, ah, seems rather early to me for dinner.”

Doloven chuckled, his craggy features bending into wrinkles, “I’m an old man, Elaine, and I need my beauty sleep.”

“Alright then,” Elaine laughed. “Six it is.”

 

Doloven opened the door wearing a quaint pair of dress pants and an earthy colored button-down shirt. A gentleman, he swept his hand for her to enter.

“Come in, come in. I’ve just finished cooking; your timing is impeccable.” He escorted her to a small table and she took a seat facing the living room. A full-length mirror stood alone in the room. Its frame was of ironwood, gnarled and twisted. The mirror itself was unusual, its color not clear, but an irregular grey, as though the craftsman who fashioned it had mixed smoke into the glass.

“There,” Doloven set down two well laden plates. “Magnificent!”

The conversation over dinner flowed pleasantly, although Elaine found that the mirror drew her gaze inexorably towards itself. Each time she looked, the mirror gave her not a reflection, but, it seemed, a glimpse of herself years later, aged and yet unchanged. Trick of the light, of course.

When both had finished eating, Doloven cleared their plates and brought out two slender glasses of red wine and a tiny platter of cheese.

“Decidedly the best way to finish a meal. And the wine is superlative, Elaine, you must try some.”

Elaine sipped some of the liquid in her glass. “Yeah, it’s pretty good. But, ah, what was I saying? Oh yeah, do you happen to know whether --.”

“Elaine I must interrupt you.” Doloven’s tone had changed, become almost harsh. He was looking down at a pocket-watch in his hand. “The wine you just drank contains a rather rare poison. It is sometimes called a “locked venom”; it will never leave your body, and unless you take an antidote”, he placed a tiny glass vial of clear fluid on the table, “exactly every three hours, to be fairly blunt, you will die.”

“Pr…professor, is this some kind of a… a joke?” she was staring down into her wine glass with a swelling sense of horror.

“No I’m afraid not, my dear. You have, by the way, two hours and fifty eight minutes.”

And in the space of a gasp, a heartbeat, she knew he wasn’t lying. She could almost taste the hint of zinc in the wine, something she had ignored a moment, no, two minutes, before.

He poisoned me.          He poisoned me.

She refused to absorb it, her mind slamming shut in the same way as often happens when a close friend dies. The tiny piece of information that had entered her world was now sending mammoth ripples surging through the entirety of what she knew, and it was too much.

No.      No no no no no.

With a rigid jerk she shoved away from the table; her chair toppled, throwing her to the floor. She half scrambled to her feet and stumbled twice before making it to the door. Unlocked. She flung it open and ran. Her heart was pounding, feet pounding the pavement, blood pounding behind her eyes. Nothing was really clear. Streets and street signs blurred, sidewalks and roadways shed their borders and she was running blind, tearing towards her apartment by instinct. She crashed into her room, locked and bolted the door so that some sense of security would linger in her tattered mind. She was in a nightmare, but instead of waking to escape her dreams, she was fleeing towards them to escape this terrible new reality, needing to hide. She curled under a heap of blankets and shivered.

 

She knew what it was even as she woke. Pain. A pain that crawled in little needling worms through her veins and out to the tips of her fingers, tiny blossoms of agony exploding over her skin. She couldn’t even gasp. There was a moment when the torment was so great that even moving from the bed, as she knew she had to do, seemed an impossibility. It passed, though, and she forced herself to walk to the door, and then out and back to the streets. Outside, rain escaped down from the clouds and the cold gave her a brief respite, yet she could sense the little needles growing with each drop that died on the pavement and marked another moment passed.

But it was not so great a distance to Doloven’s house.

Her run soon crumbled into a limping gait. She felt her way for the last block, crawling on her hands and knees, unable to stand; it took so much, such a great effort to tilt up her head towards his door. And he was there. Doloven, standing calmly in the doorway, eyes quietly noting the station of the hands on his pocket watch.

“You were almost late, my dear.”

She could say nothing, only reach a hand towards him, imploring him.

“Ah yes, of course.” He withdrew the small vial from his pocket and kneeled down on the wet concrete, disregarding the rain. His gentle hands lifted Elaine’s chin and delicately tipped the liquid into her mouth. She swallowed twice before the pain overwhelmed her.

 

She was aware of light for only a moment. His hands again lifted her chin, still gentle, and she drank a glass of something before slipping down, down, down, down…

 

Wine bottles lined the walls, nestled into elegantly styled redwood racks. A thick blanket lay under her. The floor was stone, a beautiful rose-veined granite, cool beneath her splayed fingers. She was in a wine cellar.

The cellar door opened and Doloven entered. He held a glass of water in one hand, and Elaine waited until he set it down on the floor before she hit him. Or tried to, anyways. Doloven caught her wrist and pinned her to the floor effortlessly.

“I had expected you to be a little more intelligent about this, Elaine. But perhaps you do not yet understand you situation.”

Elaine could only whimper as tears budded in her eyes.

“Allow me to explain. You might try to find the antidote on your own, thinking that in three hours you would be able to search through this house. You would be wrong. Even if you did find it, you would be making the assumption that I do not keep the antidote locked up, which assumption would be incorrect, of course. But perhaps you were intending to escape to a hospital. Laughable. You could very well spend your three hours in the waiting lobby, and it would take days for even the best medical staff to learn the exact nature of the poison. You would end your life on a sterile white bed next to a gunshot victim and an old lady with cancer. Or maybe the police would help, maybe they would swoop in and rescue you. And then you would die while the district attorney asked me questions in a room with a glass wall.”

The tears streamed down her face now, splashing onto the crystalline veins that ran through the granite.

“Ah, but do you seek revenge instead and wish only to kill me? Then, Elaine, there would simply be a contest of wits between us, and that is a contest you would certainly lose.”

Doloven released her wrist and stood.

“I recommend drinking that soon,” he indicated the glass on the floor. “But it’s your choice, of course.” He walked up the steps and out of the cellar, and Elaine’s body trembled with the sound of each footstep. From the floor above his voice trailed down to her.

“The door’s not locked. You can leave anytime.”

 

Three weeks had passed since Doloven left Elaine crying on the cold floor of the cellar. Time had degraded into the glasses of water that marked every three hours gone by and the cold food that Doloven gave her twice a day. The nights were spent crying, her tears fed by the water she drank. She tried calling the police once, explaining the situation to them, hoping they could do something. But the overworked officer on the other end thought it was a prank call and had hung up on her before she even managed to say where Doloven’s house was. She had spent the next day sitting on Doloven’s front stairs telling every passerby that she was going to die in three hours, but they had all hurried their pace and looked away. Doloven mixed the antidote with lemonade that day and brought it to her on the steps.

It was two dozen glasses of water later when Elaine realized that she had, in a way, already died.

She controlled nothing about the life she was living except that she lived it. Beyond the walls of Doloven’s house, she had no connection with the world, no friends, no family. Lying amongst the wine bottles and redwood racks in the cellar, her spirit had died. There might as well have been cyanide in her glass that first night instead of Doloven’s cruel poison. Her every breath came and went at his whim.

But not entirely…

That night, when Doloven came down to the cellar with a glass of water, Elaine stood stepped over to him. She took the glass from his hand.

“I’m leaving, Doloven.” She let the glass slip from her fingers. It shattered to pieces on the cool granite. “You and your poison can go to hell.”

He said nothing, and she turned and left him in the cellar with the wine bottles and broken glass.

Rain poured down outside, and the world seemed to be saturated with color. She wanted to find a park, some place where everything was green and living. There would be a great deal of pain soon, she knew, and she didn’t have a lot of time.

Elaine lay down on the grass, spread her arms and let the rain wash over her face. Warm tears mixed with the droplets of water that coursed over her cheeks, but she cried for a different reason now. Not afraid, but sad. Sad that she had not done more with her life, that she would not get the chance to now.

Hours passed.

Too many.

She heard his steps on the wet ground.

“There never was any poison, was there.” Not a question, really.

“No Elaine, never.”

“Then that first night…”

“A drug, a pain inducer.” Doloven paused, “Elaine, I did this for you. I hope… I want you to know that.”

Elaine only shook her head. She hadn’t moved from the grass.

“I need you to leave now, Doloven.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. I can find my own way.”