Call me Israel
By
R P Bezuidenhout
Published by
R P Bezuidenhout
Copyright 2014 R P Bezuidenhout
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“Call me Israel”, I have been studying at the university for the last 7 years. I would have gotten my degree at the end of this year. Well if the winds of good fortune prevailed I would have.
I am an avid photographer but still a novice, luckily the university started with a collaborative photographic workshop and I am enjoying it immensely. Well in the beginning I did. I am pretty sure the burned boy will kill me. I am also pretty sure that everybody, even my best friends will think it an accident.
Let me start at the beginning. Two months ago our assignment for our photography workshop was to take pictures of architecture around campus. It had something to do with light at different times of day and what not. The moral, I think was that the same thing could look different in different types of light.
A building can look happy and sunny and bright at midday and look ominous and filled with malady at midnight. I decided to direct most of my efforts at Kya Rosa, the ‘post grad something or another’, to the rest of the students the pretty building next to the main gate.
I had wondered over the last few weeks, how my life would have changed if I decided on the Human Science Building instead of ‘the great Kya Rosa’.
It all started one night on my way back from a commune party near the university. As I was walking past the main gate I saw a lot of commotion on campus. There were people running, not like athletes but like people running for their lives, and me being a 7 year student thus not too quick on the uptake, decided to walk in and see what all the activity was about.
They say that hindsight is 20/20 and looking back I should have known better, but as I entered, through open and unguarded gates I did not see anybody except the horribly burned figure of a child lying on the front porch of the Kya Rosa.
If I were not still extremely inebriated I might have gone home but "Brandewyn het nie brieke nie" and I walked over to investigate. There was a black child, a boy. He was burned beyond recognition. The skin stretched and moulded over his limbs.
A howl started, and it started in what felt like the deepest part of the earth’s centre. The howl kept growing as the corps started moving stretching and ripping the burnt skin to free itself from its decaying confides. The howl started reverberating in me as I saw the red bleeding half backed flesh beneath the layer of skin.
I howled again as I woke up on the steps of Kya Rose the next morning. I was making my way back to my flat in Lunnon Street when I remembered that today was Saturday morning and I had to hand in my film for the photographic workshop. I was still shaken by the events of the previous night and decided to give it a skip and try to shake both my hangover and my night terrors by taking a well-deserved nap. At my flat I chose my favourite couch and curled up in the sun with the TV blaring, as a counterpoint to my hazy memories of the previous night. The memories were making their way back into my over exhausted mind.
Sunday morning I awoke to open doors and a still on TV. I had fallen into a sleep as deep and dark as an open grave, but nightmares had not bothered me, I had slept like a baby.
I was angry at myself for not handing in my roll of film the previous day, but thought the sleep was a better idea in the long run for as the drink has left my system so did all ill feelings about burned corpses coming back to life, a life of skin tearing agony. I did however decide to go and hand in the film and have it developed later that day. It would be a shame if nobody saw my masterpieces. At the risk of sounding old fashioned or la-di-da, there is something about taking a picture with film that, no digital camera will ever compare to. The excitement of seeing the picture for the first time once developed. It is like 24 mini Christmases in an envelope.
After a long shower and a healthy breakfast of leftover pizza and half a stale beer I made my way to the plaza. A hot girl helped me and said the pictures will only be ready on Monday as they are closing at one on a Sunday. Me being a person of unlimited time restraints gave her my best smile and said I will collect them bright and early, knowing full well that on Mondays I slept in and would most likely only be back there by closing time.
The rest of my Sunday was rather uneventful until later that night when I walked to the quick shop in Lynwood Street. I was getting snacks for movie time. I saw one of the students that were also taking pictures of Kya Rose two days earlier. He was in a daze and almost looked drunk, but I could see his eyes, he was wide-awake. He looked like he was hiding from something, he was sticking to the shadows and he was saying something, over and over and over. Then he started running from... It looked like a cat. The cat stretched and grew and unfolded. It was the burned child.
The child was on his back in an instant and was clawing at him and shrieking. The speeding Golf that hit him did not see the leap the student gave nor did he see the burned boy rolling into the storm drain or the student’s body snap in half like a folding camp chair.
I stood there and slowly walked closer, as the police covered the bodies of both the students. Later I would learn the driver were also a photography student and admin assistant at the Kya Rosa. Both had died. The pedestrian instantly and the driver slowly bleeding out as the paramedics tried to close the gaping wound in his neck. “It must have been the windshield”, one of the cops said as the bodies were loaded into the ambulance.
I was hypnotized by the scene playing out in front of me. The car’s windshield was covered in a million cracks, but it was not broken. How do you get an open wound, about the size of a biting child’s mouth, on a cracked but not broken window?
The movie forgotten I dove into a bottle of cheap whiskey left at my place by a friend. Dreams of snarling, biting, teeth exposed by receding lips filled the time awake and asleep. The whiskey did not help me sleep but rather helped the nightmare merge into the hours spent awake.
Thank God for Monday. I was still alive, scared shitless but still alive, both the deaths had been ruled as either drunken blunders or stupid run of the mill accidents. Who would look into something like that, students drink, they drive too fast, and it is all part of what makes them the loveable miscreants they are.
I decided that I would take a look around, get my Veronica Mars on. It was way easier than I had hoped and the results shook me. I only needed to go to the police station and ask them if there were an increase in accidental deaths. They even gave me a list as I fibbed and told them I needed the info to write a story for my ‘res’ about alcohol related accidents.
5 Students have died in the last 2 months. All of the deaths have been ruled as accidents. My newfound revelation shook me. I could not figure out what the connection was so I decided to go back to where it all started. Kya Rosa
That night I did not drink, I also did not sleep; I had copious amounts of coffee and watched episodes of the Big bang theory on my PC. My stomach had turned sour and heartburn was slowly trying to burn a path through my chest. I thanked God for the sun on Tuesday. It was day again and everyone knows that nothing bad happens in the sunlight.
I was considering going back to Kya Rosa but the thought of dead children did not seem at all appealing, so I opted for the next best thing. A few days earlier I had taken pictures of the house, back, front and sides. Looking at pictures in the comfort of my own home seemed a lot safer than hanging out at the scene of
the crime. I made my way to the photo shop and stopped for a frozen yogurt.
English toffee, Yum! I wondered why it is known as English toffee. When in history were the English ever known for anything good tasting? These are the same people that eat jellied eels.
I got to the photo place and picked up my pictures, I did not look at them; I was feeling way too exposed out in the open. The hot girl from the previous day was not working and a guy covered in piercing handed me my parcel. He smiled. I left.
My next stop was at the university library; I struggled there for a while and did not feel like asking anybody for help so the Internet cafe was my next stop. Getting info on the house of horrors more commonly known as Kya Rosa was a breeze. What I learned was basically the following:
In 1908 the University was established and guess what, the Kya Rosa was the centre of higher learning. It was originally erected at Skinner Street and the Victorian beauty was later moved to where it resides