Raymond Khoury - The Sanctuary

Evelyn didn’t know what to make of his words, which rang concussively in her ears. The usefulness of the rest of you? What the hell did he mean by that? Her mind struggled under a brief assault of horrific implications before she went light-headed as the blood was being sucked out of her. The minutes stretched until she finally felt the needle slipping out of her arm.

The man in the lab coat got up, held the syringe up to the light, gave it a small shake, and seemed satisfied by his work. He capped the syringe and set it on his worktable. He picked up something else and came back and sat down. Evelyn saw that he’d brought back another syringe, a smaller one, along with a small glass vial that held a liquid the color of pale straw. He also had a small ball of cotton dabbed with alcohol, with which he dressed the small hole in her arm. He then reached for the small syringe and the vial and drew the liquid into the syringe.

“I already know you haven’t been completely forthcoming on the matter of who you’ve shared your little fascination with. Our eyes and our voices can betray so much more than we imagine, if one knows what to look for.” He squirted out any air bubbles left in the needle and turned to her. A glaze of cruelty shimmered in his eyes as they settled on her again. “I do,” he warned, before reaching over, pinning down her arm, and emptying the syringe into her, adding, “and this is a small taster of what you can expect if I feel you’re not being entirely truthful with me again.”

Fear tightened around Evelyn’s heart like an iron fist as she watched the liquid disappear into her body. She looked up at her captor, her mind swamped by panic, her eyes searching his impassive face for clues, her breathing coming short and fast. Her mouth opened to form a question, but it was cut short by a strange burning sensation that flared up around the needle’s entry point. It held there for a moment before it started to spread in both directions, making its way down to the tips of her fingers and up towards her chest, and as it traveled in her blood, it quickly increased in intensity, growing from a prickling pain to a scorching, excruciating torment until it felt as if every vein in her body were on fire, as if her entire cardiovascular system were a pipeline of burning fuel.

She was shaking now, her body rigid with pain, her vision blurred, her lips quivering, bubbles of sweat coalescing on her forehead and trickling down her face.

She felt as if she were being fried from the inside out.

The man in the lab coat just sat there and watched. He held the vial up, in front of her face, and seemed genuinely impressed by it. “Interesting little substance, this. It’s called capsaicin. We get it from chili peppers, although biting into an enchilada’s not quite the same as having this concentrate pumped into your blood, is it?” His wry smirk went all fuzzy as she blinked away her tears and shuddered from the searing pain.

“The chili pepper’s such a great little fruit,” he went on matter-offactly. “It tells us a lot about human nature. I mean, think about it. The reason it burns so much when you bite into it is, in evolutionary terms, a defense mechanism. It’s how the plant wards off animals and avoids getting eaten. Which works fine for all the other animals, but not for us humans. No, we’re different. We take this little red fruit and we don’t stay away from it. We seek it out, we farm it, and we derive pleasure from it. Perverse pleasure. For one thing, we actually add the stuff to our food. Willfully. By choice. We enjoy the pain it causes us. But that’s nothing compared to the perverse pleasure we get from using it to cause pain to others. Did you know that the Mayans used to punish wayward girls by rubbing it into their eyes, and, when the girls’ virginity was in question, onto their genitals? The Incas used to position themselves upwind from their enemies and make massive bonfires of chili pepper before battles. Even today, the Chinese use it to torture Tibetan monks. They tie them up around raging fires and dump chili in the flames. It makes their burns much more intense, to say nothing of what it does to the monks’ eyes. Pepper spray or chili con carne? It’s the blowfish of fruit. And you know what’s most surprising? We’re now discovering it’s got huge potential as a painkiller. A painkiller. Talk about human ingenuity.”

His words were wasted on Evelyn. She could see his mouth moving and hear snippets of sentences, but her brain was swamped and had lost its ability to process them. The wave of pain raced through to every neuron in her body, ravaging her down to her very core. She tried to cling to something hopeful, some image or thought that would somehow counterbalance the pain, and her mind latched on to Mia’s face, not the screaming face from the alley, but the beaming, smiling face she was more used to. She was on the verge of blacking out when, just as suddenly as it had swept through her, the burning started to recede. She took some deep breaths, tensing up for another wave of pain, waiting for it, fearful of its return, but it didn’t come back. It just died out like a flame.

The man in the lab coat was watching her with grim interest, as if she were a caged test animal. His arctic eyes didn’t register the slightest glimmer of concern. Instead, he casually slid a glance to his watch and nodded almost imperceptibly to himself, as if making a mental note of her reaction and how long it had lasted.

His last words to her before he’d administered the injection swooped into her mind. He’d called it a small taster of what she could expect.

She shuddered at the thought.

Not just a taster.

A small taster.

She couldn’t even begin to imagine what a full course would feel like.

He watched her regain her senses and nodded to the ghost behind her. Without a word, the ghost gave her another sip of water, then receded into the shadows. The man in the lab coat tilted his head and leaned in for a closer look.

“I believe you have things to tell me?” he asked crisply.

Mia felt an unfamiliar vulnerability as she and Corben exited the hotel and crossed Rue Commodore. It was an odd sensation. Every pore in her body was tingling with discomfort, and she found herself scanning the faces in the busy street suspiciously, searching the surroundings for hidden threats, even eyeing the clutch of waiting taxi drivers with unease.

She stuck close to Corben as he stopped by his parked car and retrieved a small leather pouch from its glove compartment. Glancing at him, she noticed that he was also keenly focused on the people and movements around them. She didn’t know whether to take solace from that or whether to feel even more worried. Instinctively, she inched a bit closer to him as they headed back down the sidewalk towards the entrance of Evelyn’s building.

When Evelyn had first arrived in Beirut, the city was still dusting itself off after years of what the locals stoically referred to as “the troubles.” The central government was only there in name, and basic amenities such as electricity and phone lines were hard to come by. Living across the street from the Commodore was as good as it got. The hotel’s uninterrupted supply of services to its guests also extended to its camped-on neighbors. The university managed to secure Evelyn a decent apartment on the third floor of a gray stucco building literally across the street from the hotel, and she’d called it home ever since. It might not have had the best view in town — not the sea and its flaming sunsets, nor the monumental mountain range to the east — but at least she didn’t have to huddle by a little gas lamp to read after those same sunsets had burnt themselves out behind the horizon. Plus the hotel’s barmen could shake up a pretty decent martini, and the wine list was decent and fairly priced.