Chapter 56
MY FATHER TRANSFORMED the walls of the barn into movie screens onto which he projected a series of extremely graphic and grisly scenes, all of them rated H for Horrible and Horrifying.
And Historical.
Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes devastating Central Asia and Russia.
King Herod the Great ordering the execution of all the young male children in the village of Bethlehem so he wouldn’t lose his throne to the “king” whose birth three wise men had read in the stars.
The horrors and tortures of the Spanish Inquisition, including the burning at the stake of all those whom the church declared heretics.
Robespierre and his Reign of Terror. Sixteen thousand people losing their heads to the guillotine.
King Leopold of Belgium’s atrocities in the Congo.
The murders of the Romanov family by the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1918.
The mass murder of many millions of people in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin.
“Do you see him, Daniel?” my father asked as we watched Nazi soldiers wiping out the Warsaw Ghetto in 1941.
“No.”
“Look carefully. There. Skulking in the background.”
I stared beyond the hate-filled Nazis and the terrified Jews, and saw two glowing red dots.
I looked harder.
I saw him. The two points of throbbing red were his hideous, burning eyes.
“It’s Number 2! He was there?”
My father nodded. “Throughout history, whenever humankind, fueled by ignorance and hate, turns against itself, you will see him.”
And I did. Now that I knew what I was looking for, Abbadon was easy to spot. His appearance always changed, but his eyes never did. They burned like stoked embers in a hearth under the blast of a bellows whenever humans committed atrocities against other humans.
At the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of unarmed Indian protestors by the British in 1919.
In the killing fields of Cambodia, when the Marxist Khmer Rouge regime murdered more than two million of its fellow Cambodians.
He was there when Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds.
He gloried in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
He cheered on the holocaust in Rwanda when a million Tutsis were butchered.
“He is always there,” my father said. “He triumphs when hatred overpowers all other human emotions. Study him, Daniel. Study everything he does—and I mean everything. Every movement, every gesture, every telling smile. Look for his weaknesses.”
“I don’t see any!”
“Look harder.”
I did, but all I saw was the crimson-eyed fiend lurking in the background, delighting as human beings turned on one another. I watched until I couldn’t watch anymore.
I turned my head away from the carnage flowing across the barn walls just as Colonel Gaddafi was sending foreign mercenaries into the streets of Tripoli to murder his fellow Libyans.
“Focus, Daniel! Focus!”
I refused to look at the horror displayed on the walls any longer.
“Who is this monster?” I demanded.
“Focus, son!”
“No. Tell me. The List can’t, but you can, can’t you? Who is Number 2?”
My father heaved the heaviest sigh I have ever heard in my life.
“Very well, Daniel. You leave me no choice.”
I couldn’t believe it: my father was finally ready to tell me everything!