The dark.
Not the dark of closed eyes. Not the dark of a windowless room. A dark of absence — the kind that comes when there is nothing left to see because there is no one left to see.
And yet, he saw.
Not with his eyes. He no longer had eyes. Not with his body. He no longer had a body. Something in him — the last thing, perhaps, what remained when all the rest had been torn away — was watching.
And he saw.
***
First, what there had been before the uncle.
A group home, somewhere. A room shared with three other kids who didn't speak to each other. A plastic bag for his things. Clothes passed down once someone else had finished wearing them out. A cafeteria where you had to eat fast to have time to finish. The cold of hallways in winter, because no one thought to turn the radiators back on for children no one looked at.
The boy had no name in those places. Or rather, he had one, but no one used it. He was called by number. He was spoken to when it was necessary.
No one touched him. Not in cruelty, not in Ten years.
And then the uncle.
***
A house. Not large. A simple kitchen, a living room with a worn couch, a television that only worked intermittently, a bookshelf stacked with books whose spines were broken. An old man sitting in the armchair. Gray hair, stooped back, hands that sometimes trembled but that always held firm when they had to.
The uncle.
Not an uncle by blood. The word had simply settled between them, because there had to be one, and no other fit. The old man had taken in a kid no one wanted, at an age when no one wanted, and he had kept him. Not out of duty. Out of choice. A decision made one evening and kept every day after, without a complaint, without a sigh.
Kaen — the spectator — saw the boy sitting on the floor, at the foot of the armchair, a book open on his knees. Very young. Ten, maybe eleven. The uncle, above him, was reading aloud. A deep voice, calm, that turned every sentence into something one wanted to listen to until the end.
A novel. The novel, already. Long before Kaen would know it would become his map to another world, he was already reading its first chapters with his uncle.
The uncle often did that. Made him read. "A man who does not read remains a child", he would say. The boy, without really understanding, would nod. And he would read.
Kaen — the spectator — felt something he no longer had a body to feel.
The only man who had ever loved him.
***
The cellar.
The dark there was almost the same as the one he stood in now — but with a smell. Rust. Blood. Damp. And the boy — twelve years old, perhaps a little less — tied against the wall, the ropes biting his skin until they drew blood.
Above, the living room.
Another man. Someone Kaen could not see — memory had not kept his face from that night. A voice. Too calm. Too warm for what it was doing.
"You knew this would happen one day, didn't you?"
The uncle, tied too, was crying. Begging. Not for himself — for the boy. "Do what you want with me, but let him go!"
The killer laughed with the softness of something that had nothing human about it.
Kaen — the spectator — wanted to look away with eyes he didn't have. He couldn't. He watched. He had to watch, because that was his life. Because what was happening in that room was the moment he had lost the only person who had ever given him anything.
The sounds.
There was no need to describe them. Memory had not forgotten them. The slide of a blade against metal. The silence before the screams. The screams. Again. Again. Then nothing — just one last word from the killer, spoken almost gently.
"Goodbye, old man."
And the wet crack that followed.
The boy, in the cellar, had no voice left. He had screamed until his vocal cords had torn. All he had left were his eyes. And even those, later, would not remember exactly.
***
Ten years.
They passed as a single image — not a sequence, a superposition. The boy who sleeps badly. The boy who wakes at night in sweat, the same nightmare on every anniversary. The boy who grows up in an empty house. The boy who learns to live with an absence in place of a father.
Ten years, and he had become a man. Not really. Someone who looked like a man. Someone who walked and worked and read and who, once a year, went to the cemetery in the rain.
***
The cemetery, next. In the rain. As every year. And that day, the killer.
That part, he did not need to see again in detail. He knew it by heart, down to the lines that had been exchanged and that had echoed for ten years in his head. He went through it the way one walks through a room knowing where every piece of furniture stands.
Except one.
At the precise moment when the killer, standing in the rain, raised the branch to throw it, he opened his eyes. Black. Abyssal. And in that black, there was something the twenty-two-year-old boy, terrified, had not had time to see.
A remorse.
"How dare you feel remorse after what you did, you bastard."
Kaen had spoken into the void. His voice echoed in the darkness.
The spectator, he saw it now. As if it had taken dying twice to notice.
The branch flew. The strike was perfect. And the sky, above the kneeling boy, turned white.
***
The dark returned.
Kaen — the other Kaen, the one who was watching — stayed motionless in his absence. His first life had just passed before him. Twenty-two years. A loved uncle. A death. Ten years of nightmares. And an end in the rain, at the hand of a man with black eyes.
All of that, he already remembered — he had always known it. But there was one thing he had forgotten, or had not wanted to see at the time.
The remorse.
In the killer's black eyes, just before he threw the branch, there had been remorse. The twenty-two-year-old boy, terrified, had not seen it. The spectator did, now. And he did not know what to do with it.
A man who feels regret does not kill for nothing. A man who feels regret does not act alone.
But that was a question for later. For a life he perhaps no longer had.
He stayed there, in the dark, before the memory of a cemetery in the rain and an old man he had loved.
"This time, I will know who you are."
The silence did not answer. But it was listening.
And something, behind him, began to move.