The Lady's Champion

by M F Sullivan

  “What is this?” asked Trisha of the three new women. They looked between themselves, then studied her.

  “It’s a conspiracy,” suggested the one with hair so pale blonde it was nearly white.

  “Like a cult,” said the third, whose curly black hair, arranged in an immaculate bun, received the occasional pat from a fussing, jewel-covered hand.

  “No,” said the woman in the middle, a Native with her long hair in simple, elegant plaits, “it’s just some criminal organization of—”

  “Hookers.”

  “Whores.”

  The one in the middle looked annoyed at her sisters. “—Prostitutes.”

  “Independent working girls,” clarified Gethsemane patiently. “On our way to a convention, of sorts. You are not invited.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be,” insisted blushing Trisha, hands upon her chest, while a few of the other women smiled. Gethsemane, their apparent spokeswoman, went on.

  “Not tonight. But another night, perhaps. Our sisters are all correct; the women in the service of the Lady are all of those things. A cabal, a cult, and a conspiracy. But the truth is the real conspiracy, sister, you dig? It embodies everything around us. It is the oxygen we breathe and the food we eat, and is in itself embodied by those things. The Lady is nothing more than the sentient embodiment of the truth, and She has appeared throughout time in an infinite number of ways.”

  “‘The Lady’?”

  “She is that which the Hierophant wishes to suppress and kill. She has been hidden since the dawn of time, asleep within all of us: man, woman, and child. But only some can contact Her, and fewer still dare Host her. She lives upon the Earth in the form of an earthly woman and guides us from the shadows. Not all women who worship the Lady are ladies of the evening as we are; and not all women who worship the Lady worship Her in Her highest form; and not all women who worship the Lady in any of Her many forms believe that the avatar is the Lady; but I have seen that She is the Lady, and know it, and urge you to believe it. We, all of us, are Her keepers; Her Bearers.”

  It was all so very laughable. She might have, nearly, were it not for the circumstances at hand. “You gave my date a concussion and told me somebody plans to kill me so you could try to recruit me for your cult?”

  “No,” said Gethsemane. “We did those things to save you, so you will be our next Lady.”

  When silent, the vehicle was a whole new car. While Trisha’s brain churned into fifth gear, she asked, “Excuse me?”

  “We believe there are certain requirements to be the next avatar of a Lady at a given period,” said the Latina woman. “You fit the requirements of the era, but you are an unusual case because you were not chosen by the Lady or Her followers. You were chosen by the Hierophant. Because he wants to kill you, we wish to save you. And what will happen tonight—”

  “What will happen tonight?”

  At Trisha’s pressure, the five women exchanged a web of glances.

  “Tonight,” said Gethsemane, “when you return to your dorm room, you will have proof that what we say is true.”

  Her stomach sank into a foul pit of quicksand. “My roommate,” Trisha said. Gethsemane placed a hand upon hers.

  “I urge you not to think of her now. The Lady—”

  “This is ridiculous,” snapped the student, emotions exploding with every furious word that peeled through her lips. “I believe in science. I was never even a Christian growing up! I’ve never believed in anything I can’t see, and now you’re trying to tell me to believe in this? This is crazy. You’re all crazy, let me out of this—this crazy car!”

  It was the only adjective with which she could articulate her thoughts. It was crazy. It was one thing to have cultists try to recruit you. This was the seventies, the heyday of cults and inexplicable murder. The practice of hitchhiking had disappeared that year, along with a bunch of girls up in the state of Washington. America’s cultural landscape was such a fucked-up death trap most places that it was better to avoid all eye contact and hope the scrub you passed at night wasn’t the next Charles Manson. But this was Claremont. And these women weren’t recruiting her to join their cult; they were recruiting her to be its leader. To make it stranger, these weren’t cult members of the weird, gross kind you read about in the news—neither did they fit the pervaded cultural image of prostitutes. The Latina woman all but confirmed that when she said, “I used to feel the way you do. I’m a trained anthropologist, and when I was young, I believed in only what I could see in physical human history. But then, I saw the pattern in many cultural artifacts and mythologies across the world, and saw who I was inside. Then the Lady showed me the way to Her, and to the truth.”

  “What is the truth,” pressed Trisha. The women smiled as the limo pulled to a stop.

  “Like I said.” While the door opened from the outside, Gethsemane pressed against Trisha so all those women could pile out into the populated night. The open door allowed their chatter to mix with the clamorous sound of tens or hundreds of other women making their excited way into the grand hotel and its surely packed ballroom. “Tonight, you’re not invited. You’re not ready, sister.”

  “Then what in God’s name makes you think I should be your next Lady?”

  “You don’t believe in God, yet you protest in His name; you see what power society has given men? Even language is a tool of subjugation in this world.” The door shut and left them, now just Trisha and Gethsemane. The car once more began to move. “Language was once made to elevate mankind, men and women both. It is said by our faith that a woman was pivotal in forming the first spoken words more intricate than simple sounds, and that the Lady first came to this woman, in whom She longest dwelt, and through whom She first revealed assurances of the spirit and eternity.

  “But language since then has been perverted. Rather than revealing the truth, it veils. We speak the truth in every word we say and every gesture we make. We see it everywhere, in such a proliferation of symbols that we could never begin to collect, experience, or understand them all in a single human lifetime. But you will, because you are the Lady. You thirst for knowledge, for the solutions to life and death. You will have them.”

  Trisha was still concerned about feeling like a hostage, though the car was gentler (at least quieter) when absent the other women. “I’m not trying to be rude, but I just feel like, if your organization has been watching me, then you should know—”

  “That you’re going to be a hard sell? Oh, yes.” Gethsemane smiled. “We know. But we also know that you will come around.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Because, it is written.”

  “Okay.” Trisha laughed, glancing out the window. Sweet relief! They’d turned around the block to reorient themselves toward campus. “And that’s supposed to convince—”

  Glass shattered across the cabin of the flipping limo, which, with an explosive metal cry, rolled, then skidded out of its lane amid the honking of cars and the sound of someone else’s scream. At the crash of the stretch vehicle into the corner of the nearby building, all noise was obliterated. That would be what Trisha gathered later, from the news. At the moment it happened to her, the crash was but a crescendo of animal terror: Wondering, hoping, begging, please, not tonight. Not here. Not like this.

  She’d hit her head on something. What, it wasn’t clear; nor was it clear for how many seconds she’d lost consciousness. It must not have been long—Gethsemane had just begun to push herself up from where she’d collapsed within the upended vehicle when a foreign hand, huge by the standards of any person of the day, slithered in to pluck the Bearer by the neck as though she were a kitten. Out of the limo, that splendid woman was pulled screaming, and there that beautiful embodiment of Gethsemane met her end amid the torrid snaps of bones. Trisha was too tired and too blank with shock to react. She lifted her head an inch and let it fall again.

  A face peered into the vehicle: a man’s face, so pale and androgynous from that angl
e that it seemed to bleed into the face of a woman. A Lady, who stood before Tish in a strange, dark place that had no sound yet was sound, itself. The eye could not take the Lady in, stunning as She was. Sometimes it seemed to Trisha that She had four arms, sometimes three eyes, sometimes a halo or a crown shaped like the moon, or a warrior’s helmet, or a wingéd sun that blazed in glory a few inches above Her head. Those uncountable eyes glowed like the light from Her mouth, which spoke words Trisha knew at once to be beyond anything terrestrial.

  You will bring the truth into the world to lay the path for me, She announced to Trisha. And when this has been accomplished, I will leave my present body to take on yours—and you will live forever.

  “I must be dreaming,” insisted the stubborn student, who in this place did not wear glasses, and did not realize it until she reached up to adjust them. Laughing sharply, she looked down at herself and found herself buxom in a way she had always been but now for the first time experienced. She had never felt confidence before, but here, her lovely nature was a simple fact and exuded from her being as glory from the Lady’s. “I don’t believe in ghosts, or a god or the devil, or witches, or magic. I don’t believe in you.”

  My existence does not hinge on your belief, human, or your lack thereof. You will believe soon. Awaken now. Return to your room. You will be protected.

  “Why is all this happening?”

  The world where all this did not happen proved this one’s genesis. Therefore, all this must occur infinitely to create a world where it does not happen, where it cannot be caused. We all must sacrifice ourselves to protect all other universes from our reality.

  “I don’t understand.”

  You are a woman of science, and yet you do not understand the oscillations of the universe, or the implications of relativity, or the secrets hidden within the human’s genetic code. I do not fault you; no woman or man of science will fully understand the latter for a very long time. But the secret of a repetitive universe—the secret of my existence—has been encoded in the products of the human mind since that first day’s dawn. Every story ever written contains My same substance. You will see, but not with your eyes.

  “How?”

  The Lady did not speak. She only turned and, with a wave of her arm, revealed to Trisha that which six other avatars had seen before her, and in as many guises; but she saw it not as a palm tree, or a beehive, or a column, or a ladder, or a twisting serpent, or a spiral staircase. She saw the double helix chemical rungs of a towering strand of DNA, which coiled into the infinity of space and tugged at Trisha’s very bones.

  “What is this?”

  This, said the gently smiling Lady, is that thin wall through which God speaks to mankind.

  A series of gunshots interrupted the Communion with the Lady so suddenly that, though the conversation may have continued in eternity, Trisha snapped back to her body. The androgynous face from the window was nowhere to be seen. As women called out and someone uttered a distant cry, footsteps clattered down the street, and a siren yet many blocks away began its mournful howl. The twisted door was forced open after a few seconds of grinding and struggle. Trisha covered her face with her forearm as a few more glass shards twinkled down like falling stars. “He’s gone,” said the woman, whose face resolved into that of the anthropologist. Trisha struggled to maintain even this level of focus. “Come on; we need to get you out of here before the cops show up.”

  “But Gethsemane,” she began. The woman looked pained and reached into the vehicle.

  “Please, not now. We need to go.”

  The accident must have happened on the other side of the block from the hotel. Surely, he knew about the meeting. Knew where to come after he found Trisha’s roommate alone in the dorm room. That was what Trisha would eventually decide, anyway, when she realized there was credence to all these strange tales. For now, as she was helped out of the crumpled limo, the twisted neck of morbidly still Gethsemane was sufficient evidence that life could never be the same. Not after tonight. While Tish held back tears, another smaller car squealed up to the scene. The Native woman didn’t wait for the doors to shut after her passengers before she peeled off. Shaken in every sense of the word, Trisha tried to hold on to the pure feeling the vision had left within her breast. Tried not to lose it amid all the horrors of reality. “That crash—”

  “That was the Hierophant. He is not of this world—this iteration of the world. Were it not for him, the Lady would not exist, and the man with whom you spent tonight would be the husband with whom you discovered a reality-altering pair of substances. But you would also be responsible for many terrible things.”

  “How do you know all of this?”

  “The Lady has made it very clear. We are on the cusp of a silent war. In truth, we have fought this war for many years already, and laid much groundwork for it. The truth is all around you, Trisha. You will start to see it when you look closely.”

  “What about Gethsemane? My roommate?”

  “Life is temporary in this flawed place,” said the Native woman. “In truth, it is eternal.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t care that people are dying tonight?”

  “People die every night, everywhere. We are sorrier to lose Gethsemane now than you could ever know; but someday, we will see her again, and later still, she will be born again, here again, in this iteration of the world. This is the way with Bearers.”

  Trisha was in such a daze she hardly realized it when they pulled in front of her dorm. From her clutch purse, the anthropologist withdrew a business card. “There is a library here. A very small one. There you will find many books on these subjects. Please study. When you are ready, and you understand what you must undertake, we will be here for you.”

  “Where will I find you?”

  “You will know when you are ready,” said the woman again.

  Trisha glanced anxiously in the direction of the dorm.

  “You will be safe,” said the plaited woman. “We will watch over you in the coming months to ensure your safety while you embark on your true studies, and while you come to us. As it has been said—if he does not get you tonight, then you will never die.”

  The cloud of horror that had settled across the dorm building was evident from the moment she stepped foot within. Her body, already burned out from adrenaline, yet endured another pulse of the stuff. She doubled the pace of her steps to reach the third floor when she found people murmuring in hallways, doorways, common rooms, and every corner of the building like a cluster of terrified cockroaches. Worst, all regarded her in a way that stopped their conversation and hastened her steps. She knew what she would find, but she would never believe it until she arrived at the peak of proof she would receive about the reality of the night. She jogged through the hall of that destination floor while crying her roommate’s name. The crowd of attendants, police, campus security, and nurses all tried to keep her out. They failed.

  The matchbox-size studio was thick with the scent of death, which seemed impossible to her, as the death had only just occurred. Perhaps it was the smell of organ meat? She couldn’t think when every thought in that awful scene was had to the beat of a skipping record: that very same her roommate’s mother had sent just a few days before. “Lady—” cried the record, an uncanny chant while Trisha wept over the bloodied body of her dead surrogate. “Lady— Lady— Lady— Lady—”

  Her roommate’s mother gave her that record while tearfully sweeping off with the final box of her daughter’s things. Seeing Trisha’s wary eyes lingering on the album, the older woman said, “She would have wanted you to have it,” thinking in the good-natured way of a grieving parent that her little girl might live on in her friend. She did not know the significance of the album, whose particular skipping song was overlooked as evidence by the police in favor of the fact that it was skipping, mere effect of the obvious struggle.

  Only Trisha understood it was a message to her—only Trisha could understand. And even though
she understood, she felt mad in thinking it. Yet such a coincidence was beyond mere happenstance. Her roommate’s killer had selected the point in the song down to the very second.

  She was almost glad he had. The objective taunt bolstered her resolve that the events of that night had happened. Otherwise she would have been adrift in a sea of questions. Not that knowing was better! Such tangible confirmation of the Lady’s presence haunted the student. Trisha was expected to ease back into classes with the help of a great deal of counseling and the sorry reassurance that her dorm was watched (and she was sure that it was, by agents a great deal more competent than campus cops).

  But night after night, she lay awake analyzing the contents of that vision. That woman (Was it right to call such an entity a mere woman? Of course. Trisha was a scientist, not a cultist.) and that great spiral of DNA, and the place—and the feeling of that place! She could not understand it, nor could she understand why she so longed to experience it again. Why she had felt so whole in those seconds of interaction with something in which she did not fully believe.

  It was a few weeks before she went to the metaphysical library. Mostly, she was embarrassed to be seen someplace so goofy. At the time, she remained naively firm in her skepticism and could not see it had become her personal brand of fundamentalist thought. A true scientist understood critical thinking did not involve the automatic rejection of a challenging belief; and Trisha was, at that time, only a scientist-in-training. Some training, anyway. She had become so preoccupied by the nightly memories of her vision that she’d started missing classes. It was around that time, just before winter break, that she decided to take the plunge and visit the weird strip mall “library.”