The couple stood just inside the doorway to the small house, the male clinging pathetically to the female’s hand, staring deep into her completely indifferent, tranquil eyes with a look that was perhaps meant to be seductive.  “Please, Josephine, allow me to stay with you just for tonight.  I truly love you!  Please, let me prove it to you!  I just want to make you happy!”

She let her hand fall from his and, rousing from her state of empty boredom, said patiently, “Mr. Evan, I have asked you before, please call me Dr. Alaric.  You know I can’t allow you to stay here and I would not have even let you in my front door if I had checked the peephole first.  Mr. Evan, I try to maintain a strictly professional relationship with my associates, so if you would, I’m tired and will ask you to leave. Now.”

He began to plead with her once more but she stepped past him, ignoring his meaningless words.  As she courteously unlocked and opened the front door for her guest, the shadow in the night that had been patiently waiting for this opportunity flooded in, knocking Dr. Josephine Alaric to the side.  The new man, dressed all in black with black jeans tucked into black boots, black sleeves tucked into black gloves, and a black hood concealing a black face, quickly shut and locked the door once more.  He pressed a shiny silver pistol under Mr. George Evan’s chin and said softly, “Shut up, right now.”

Everyone was silent, but Mr. Evan was particularly so.  “To the vanity,” the black figure commanded and prodded the handsome, blond, twenty-six-year-old man in the throat.  Mr. Evan stumbled backwards very slowly, a whimper bubbling in his chest, his wide blue eyes fixed on the empty black hood of the stranger, just as empty as Dr. Alaric’s eyes.  He bumped into the large vanity, packed with antiques and an antique of itself, that had invaded Dr. Alaric’s living room.  

The stranger removed from the pocket of his zipped jacket a clinking set of handcuffs and said solemnly, being careful to keep his body at an angle where Dr. Alaric would stay visible, “Down on the floor.”  Mr. Evan obediently made his way to the spice-scented rug and laid down on his back, staring up warily into that black barrel.  The stranger crouched and briskly placed the man’s hands on either side of the thick, sturdy leg of the vanity and cuffed them there; not even George Evan’s powerful, trim body could lift the wooden monstrosity.

The stranger stood once more and stepped out of his victim’s limited reach, then turned to face his real target.  After a moment, of her defiant eyes staring into the darkness of his hood, the stranger asked, “Josephine.  Do you know who I am?”  Dr. Alaric slowly shook her head, unimpressed eyes not leaving his face.  The stranger gulped.  He had forgotten about those dead eyes, at the very most ever showing mild interest.  But he would not lose his nerve.  He had come too far, and had no where else to go.  He removed his finger from the trigger of his pistol and hesitantly reached up to his face; then, with frequent pauses, he carefully pushed the hood back onto his neck.

Mr. Evan gasped and exclaimed, “What the hell is it?” but Dr. Alaric only watched with calm disinterest.

“Do you recognize me now, Josephine?” the stranger asked, and continued, “I have a few more scars, but I have hardly changed in years.”

Dr. Alaric nodded this time and said softly, “Delano Alaric.”

A cold breath shuddered from the stranger’s mouth.  “It has been years since I heard those words.  Delano.  They took it away from me and gave me a number too long to memorize.”

The gun had drooped towards the floor, and Mr. Evan was feeling bold.  “Josephine, please, tell me what’s happening.  What is this creature?”

Delano’s bright red eyes drifted lazily to the frantic man, and Dr. Alaric explained, “I made him for myself.  I made him to be perfect.  I sculpted him and programmed him.  I made him mine.  There were some – flaws – but he was revolutionary.  Of course, I couldn’t keep my lovely Delano under wraps for long, especially with how closely the government used to watch me.  They came and took him from me.  I thought he was dead, but here he is.  My boy.  Delano Alaric.”

Mr. Evan’s wide blue eyes scanned the thing in awe.  It had been created by her.  He knew the gorgeous doctor was brilliant, but nor enough to build a monster in her basement.  The thing was anything but perfect.  It looked sick, even near death.  Its sandy yellow skin was mottled and appeared as though it would have the texture of grease-coated sandpaper, when in reality Delano’s skin was soft and smooth, tender as a child’s.  If it gained weight it would perhaps look healthier, but the thing was skinny and lanky, hardly more than dim yellow cloth, dappled with millions of tiny burnt-orange freckles, wrapped tight around sticks of bone and a grinning skull.  Its face was long and narrow, with high cheek bones and lean, sharp features, like a shark.  Its mouth was small and always in a sneer, the red-orange lips cracked and dry and the white of his wide red eyes were sickly yellow.  They were huge and sunken into its face like embedded embers burning in a dirty skull, and in its darting glance, insanity shone with sparkling clarity.  The hair was long, below its shoulders, and pulled into a neat ponytail.  It was dirty and greasy, just like the gleaming yellow and orange skin, but a shade of dead strawberry blond.  There were dark bruises around its eyes and steel stitches cutting blatantly across its face, right from the corners of its petite mouth to the back of its jaw, then a row of steel staples starting under its lips and disappearing down under its narrow chin.  It looked dead, or at least dying, and its eyes were so angry.  It seemed somehow artificial and out of place, as though it weren’t real, just a mockery of reality and scab of life.  Mr. Evan couldn’t look away from the pitiful thing, even if the sight of it was making him sick to his stomach.  He felt himself begin to wretch and finally turned his face down, blushing shamefully.

Delano turned back to his master, his creator, his only love.  “Josephine, you hurt me so much.  How could you make me like this?  Why even wake me up if you knew what kind of a life I would lead in this world?”

Dr. Alaric said emotionlessly, “I intended only to awaken you for a few hours.  I had to know if you were functioning, what kind of progress I had made.  But you were so mature emotionally and intellectually.  I had not expected that.  I decided to test you for a few more days before I would terminate you.  But you had a distinct personality – the very one I had assigned you.  You learned quickly.  You were infinitely complex, both emotionlessly and intellectually.  I couldn’t just put you down as a failure; you were phenomenal.  I decided to keep you around for another couple weeks, just to determine why you were so advanced.  But then they came and they took you from me.  There was nothing I could do, Delano.”

He did not recall his first few days awake.  He just remembered her smiling face.  She taught him how to speak, then how to read.  She gave him a TV to watch, a dictionary, and a library of books.  Every day for hours, she would sit with him and talk, or show him a new skill, including counting, sewing, Pictionary, poetry, cooking, yoga, German, geography, Mario, typing, painting, guitar, and pop culture.  He loved her and looked forward to her visiting his basement every day.  

For perhaps a month, his life had been total bliss: his master telling him how great he was doing, himself discovering every manner of new concept in a bright and interesting world, his diary recording all of his experiences, and only a few occasional moments of concern where he wondered why there was no one like him in any of the books or movies.  When he asked his master about these things, she patiently explained to him why he couldn’t yet go outside and why he had no parents, just his creator.  And she had never lied nor hidden anything from him.  Except that she intended to kill him when she was through observing him and that to his beloved master, he was just a variable on a chart.  

And then the strange men had come into his basement and dragged him from his room.  Josephine had screamed and cried, her strong, beautiful features contorted with indignation, and that scared Delano more than anything.  They didn’t speak to him, didn’t reply when he begged and bawled to see his master again and wondered why she wasn’t protecting him.  They gave him a shot, but they weren’t gentle like his creator.  He gasped and flinched when the huge needle pierced him; he had been so innocent, with no idea of the kind of pain he would be made to endure before what started as a nightmare and became his life was over.  

But it didn’t work.  When the shot failed to sedate him, they just tied him hand and foot, gagged him with a sock, and carried him out in the dark night to their van, where they gave him another ineffective shot, then stuffed him into a clear, horizontal box.  His red and yellow eyes were wide with terror and streaming with tears as he beat on the plastic and he saw his master, her eyes cold and dead, watching him from the street.  The doors the van slammed shut, leaving him in darkness and casting him into an indefinite Hell.

At first he begged them to take him back to Dr. Alaric, but soon just begged for death when the pain began.  Dr. Alaric had supported him, studying his progress to determine his developments.  But these scientists with their goggles and their masks and their gloves did not care what her invention could become.  They just wanted to understand her process so that they could make their own friends.

As such, they did not even pretend to care about him.  They caged him, made him live like an animal, shocked him for behavior not submissive enough, and tested him mercilessly, despite that they could find no sedative or anesthetic that would hold him under or numb him.  They gave him every kind of sickness which he suffered through despite large patched his skin rotting off, extensive malfunction of many of his organs, and extraordinary pain from every toxin and piece of tissue damage.  And there was always the not knowing or understanding.  Josephine had explained to him each test and procedure, then explained the results.  All the scientists did was put him back in his cell and let him cry.  

They studied his behavior, first conditioning him to fear the color pink by shocking his brain each time he looked at it, then flooding it away by propping his eyes open and tying him up in a small room painted solid pink, pouring pink paint all over his body, and placing a mirror before him wile he screamed and thrashed, his mind aflame with pain from the imagined shocks.

They trained him like an animal, offering him food for performing certain stunts after starving him for days.  They even trained him to crawl across a bed of razors on his hands and knees while balancing a teddy bear on his back and wailing through his tears of pain and humiliation carious Broadway musicals, all for a piece of stale hospital bread.

Their exploration of his body began with tissue samples.  Then they began to explore his anatomy.  At first they hesitated, but soon they would strap him down immobile, gag him thoroughly, then cut him open and examine his heart, his throat, his intestines.  They would turn out the lights and leave him there like a cadaver, his organs splayed across the operating table, and go home for the weekend, never bothering with the very alive man left alone to cry silently and wonder when it would ever end, wishing that he would finally die and fantasizing about Josephine bursting through the door to hold him and heal him in her dependable way, to pet his hair and cradle him to her chest and take away his agony, and explain that they just wanted to understand him and they didn’t realize that he was a real person.  She would listen patiently to him babble and bawl about how much he missed her, kiss the top of his head, and take him home to tuck him into his soft, warm bed in his basement, only to awaken him a few hours later with a new book of movie of piece of equipment  to explore.

The cold florescent lights of the laboratory snapped on and Delano’s eyes, the only mobile part on his body, flickered to the door.  He heart pounded in his open chest as even through the haze of pain he dared to hope he would see her flowing black hair, her soft tan skin, and her broad pearly smile.  But a pair of scientists, dressed all in white, approached him through the door.  He tried to scream and beg as they brought their tools into view, but it was only a muffled whimpering.  Then, they popped out his eyes and examined them.

Of course, they always put him back together when they were through dissecting him, but his vision would always be blurry, his sense of taste would always be skewed salty, his left calf would always feel as though cramping, and his body refused to heal.  They fit his organs neatly back inside of him and sewed him shut with thin steel wire.  They reconnected his eyes and poked them back into their sockets.  In his ribs, jaw, pelvis, and spine, where they had cut through the bone, they used sturdy steel staples to hold him together.  They coated his innards with a wax to replace damaged membranes, and while this sufficed in preventing his liver and stomach from grinding each other down, it was not effective enough to prevent extraordinary pain with each step and jiggle he made.  They soon realized, however, that he was not healing like he should have.  The blood vessels and muscles healed, but the skin, bone, and much of the connective tissue did not.  So they sewed him up even tighter and left him a living cadaver.  

While he lay as still as possible, lost in a sea of torment, utterly alone for weeks at a time, so alone that he would begin to look forward to the torturous meetings with the impersonal scientists who ignored him, he wondered why his master never rescued him.  She could do it, he was sure, but she wasn’t, for some reason.  Why did his master abandon him to this endless fate?  Why didn’t she care anymore?  At first, Delano was certain he had done something terribly wrong.  Josephine would not have allowed him to be condemned to this agony if he had not.  For a long time, he wished to kill himself not just to escape the misery but also out of shame.  How could he have betrayed her like that?  How dare he be ungrateful enough to deserve this punishment?  But slowly, he began to wonder if he had done anything wrong at all.  He hardly dared to consider it.

Perhaps it was his creator’s fault he was so tortured.

From the moment he thought it, he could not get it out of his mind.  It was horrible.  He had loved her so much.  But soon, the precious memories of his days in the basement with her, which had sustained his hope for years, began to inspire only anger, hatred, and despair.  Now, in his fantasies, his only companions, he broke out of his cell, stole a car, raced to her house, and cut her to pieces.  It later became a reality.

Her eyes were staring into his.  Those black eyes – so dull and empty, cold and tranquil – examined his face without any emotion.  He felt enough for both of them, though.  While the weak little man in the background squirmed and watched in awe, Delano felt the acidic anger in his throat.  “Josephine!” he suddenly wailed, “You don’t know what I’ve been through!  You can’t imagine the agony of being cut into a thousand pieces, examined, and put back together again.  You’ve never known the pain, and the absolute terror, as the screaming fire envelopes your helpless body when you lay there and watch them take everything out of you and slowly fill you up again.  That excruciating pain, when you’re made to resist their anesthetics, and when you’re so innocent you don’t understand anything at all, it’s unbearable.  I’ve wished for insanity so many times, for death, for you, for anyone or anything!  But it’s relentless, the way you made me.  That pain, it still clings to me.  I refuse to heal.  Is that another of your provisions?  That I should have to carry this on, around, and inside of me, forever?  On and on, it never ends!  You can’t imagine.  You’ll never know.  But do you want to try?”

He lunged at her, pistol raised to her belly, intending to make her suffer before she died.  His creator.  She had created a monster and then doomed Delano to a life in Hell.  But those eyes stopped him.  He paused just in front of her, staring into those solemn orbs.  She hadn’t flinched.  “How could you do this?  What did I do to deserve this?” he whimpered.

She continued to stare into his hurt red eyes.  “I never wanted them to take you.  I would not have wanted you to live like this.  I’m sorry.”

Anger exploded into his chest.  She had created him like this; how could she deny it?  With a snarl, he raised the pistol and prepared to smack her across the face with the barrel.  

As he swung it at her cold, beautiful face, he felt himself implode.  The gun dropped from his hand a foot from her cheek, and her crumpled to the floor with a shriek of agony.  He curled and convulsed for a few seconds, then just lay there at her feet, sobbing and gripping his head in both hands, knees pulled up to his chest and eyes clamped tight.

She crouched beside his twitching, whimpering figure and gently smoothed his hair, humming softly.  Through his tears, he squeaked quietly, “What the hell did you do to me?”

As usual, Dr. Alaric was quite matter-of-fact.  “It was an early experiment.  I never wanted anything I might create to turn against me, so I began programming them to punish themselves anytime they willingly tried to hurt me.”

Delano shook with tears.  His body curled tightly, he whispered, “It was worse than anything I ever felt before.”

“I know.  I’m sorry, Delano.”  Dr. Alaric cooed.  She placed his gun to the side, then laid down behind the young man and pulled his back against her chest.  She cradled him and pet his dirty pink-blond hair, humming softly and kissing the back of his head.

“I hate you,” he mumbled.  “You made me weak and pathetic.  I will never know what it’s like to be my own person.  I’m just your pet.”

She squeezed him gently and said, “I know.  I didn’t expect you to gain an identity.  Come back to me, Delano.  I can make you feel more comfortable.”

He shook and sobbed, gasping, “I want to kill myself.”

Dr. Alaric nuzzled the back of his neck.  “Come back to the basement, Delano.  Write in your journal.  Eat some real food.  Let me take care of you.  I’ll get you some books, and you can help me out around the house and in the lab.  I will try to fix you.  I think I know how to make you heal.  It will be just like before you left.  Do you remember how to play Mario?  You beat me for the first time the day before you left.  C’mon, Delano.  It will be good.”

“You hurt me so much,” he sobbed, wishing she would let go of him.  He wanted his gun back.  Even if he couldn’t get revenge first, he would still end his miserable life as planned.

She caressed his wet cheek, avoiding the steel stitches and bruises.  “I didn’t want you to get hurt.  I wanted you to be happy.  I didn’t want them to take you.”

Delano continued to sob, wishing he had the strength to push her away.  “You made me like this though.  You created me as a freak, knowing I would live like one.”

“I was going to keep you happy.  I would not have let you live more than a few hours it I had known you would live a decade in Hell.”

“How could I forgive you?  I’ve suffered so much because of what you did to me.  And when you were supposed to be looking out for me, you just weren’t there.”

“I gave you life, Delano.  Give me a chance to make it better for you.”

Now he just sobbed and cried.  Dr. Alaric stroked his arm and kissed his shoulder one last time, then slowly pulled away and climbed to her feet, bringing with her a set of tiny silver keys.  She crouched beside the panicked Mr. Evan and said softly, “There is no need to tell anyone about this, George.  I’ll be in the office on Monday.”

Mr. Evan swallowed hard, eyes wide, and nodded nervously.  Dr.  Alaric unclipped his handcuffs and helped her friend to his feet.  They quietly crossed the living room, Mr. Evan staring warily at the small figure of Delano, who had fallen into a fitful sleep on the rug.  The two companions parted, and Dr. Alaric locked the door behind him.

She returned to Delano and dropped to her knees beside him.  The man jumped when she shook his shoulder and quickly sat up, his watery red eyes full of uncertainty.  She slipped an arm under his and helped him to his feet, putting the pistol in his hand.  He hesitantly slipped it under his waistband; there would be time later to kill himself.  She pointed over his shoulder and he turned to see it: the basement door.  

His breath caught.  Beyond it, he knew, he would find the steep, narrow, hazardous staircase.  He would click on the light and the perfect black would be consumed by glaring artificial fluorescents.  He would emerge into the cold white laboratory, complete with an operating table, gently buzzing equipment, vials of chemicals, and partially “alive” specimens in quietly bubbling containers.  He the three pictures on the walls.  

One was a poster of a grinning alien with a long, black, domed head, spiky claws, and a bony, sharp tail, which had given him nightmares at first until he had seen the movie.

The second was two colors: blue and gold.  It had always calmed him.  It was a vibrant photograph of ripe wheat fields on hill rolling into infinity, where the golden sea met a completely flat, empty, sapphire abyss of sky.