“I’m going to kill you soon,” Samyaza continued, a decision evident in his words, “so I can go ahead and tell you.”
“But what if I don’t care to know now?”
“Why wouldn’t you care?” Samyaza was truly bewildered.
I held my hands out to my sides, palms up. “To be completely honest,” I said, motioning them and sighing, “I don’t want you to be disappointed that I’m not as amazed as you hope I’ll be. I’m afraid you might make my death more painful just to get back at me for it.”
“If that was true,” said Samyaza, “then you could just pretend you were amazed.”
“No, I’m a horrible actor.” I shook my head slowly. “You’d know I was lying right away, I’m afraid.”
Samyaza paid no attention to the naïf’s strolling aimlessly through the courtyard. One even passed right through his body as if he were a ghost, and the patients behind the glass all gasped and covered their faces with their hands.
More windows in the building filled up with faces. The sound of hands pounding against the glass was slightly more audible now. The glass must’ve been quite thick. It moved and shook with every thrust but did not make the vociferous noise it should have.
“It’s her eyes,” said Samyaza. “You were supposed to find them and bring them to her.” He laughed, gloating.
I faked my amazement and was a better actor than I had led Samyaza to believe. “Wow. Why didn’t I think of that?” My shoulders hunched over with false disappointment.
“You never would have found them, anyway,” Samyaza went on. “After I captured Paschar and took out her eyes, I hid them where I knew no one would ever think to look.”
The sun began to flicker sporadically.
“It was the greatest plan I’d ever devised,” said Samyaza, pride covering his features. “I tricked her and cursed her, stripping away her memories. And then I stole her power, using it against her. To keep her from ever knowing the Truth again, I made her believe the Garden and the Tree of Truth that she once nurtured were still there.”
My concentration divided between Samyaza’s explanation and our quickly changing surroundings. It seemed the more Samyaza spoke, the more undecided the status of the sun became. I felt Paschar stirring behind me and heard her mumbling soft words that I could not make out. But I did see what was going on now. Samyaza was the one holding the key to her memories, the one with the power of deception over her. As he carelessly told the truth, the Angel began to remember and to understand.
“But hiding the Angel herself,” said Samyaza, “was as important as hiding her eyes.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, playing along, “that makes sense. That’s why you brought her here. No one in Creation from the Outside would think to look anywhere but in Creation.”
“Ah-ha!” Samyaza raised his long, thick index finger high into the air. The patients in the window nearest him cowered and scrambled away. “Wrong again!”
“Oh?” I had expected to be right about that.
“Paschar exists in both,” Samyaza revealed. The wickedest grin ever spread across his lips. “Her body there, her mind here. Paschar is in-between realities.”
The sun disappeared and this time it did not come back.
I waited quietly for it, crossing my fingers in my mind, hoping that it wouldn’t come back even as much as I loved it. Samyaza was still too wrapped up in his own self-proclaimed genius to notice anything had changed at all. The four naïf’s walking through the courtyard even noticed that something was different. “A storm is coming,” one of them said. “A tor-na-do! Has ta’ be! Tha sky only gets dark that fast when there’s a tor-na-do a comin’,” shouted another with a heavy Southern accent.
A nurse ushered them inside. They walked slowly, looking up at the sky, awed by it.
“But no one will ever figure it out,” said Samyaza. “Every man he’s ever sent has failed and that’ll be the outcome every time hereafter. It’s almost a pity, really. I’ve grown quite bored with this game. I may just have to find something new to devise.
“Won’t be hard though,” Samyaza added. “I know I can come up with something grand and brilliant, if I do say so.”
Samyaza went toward me then.
“So!” he said, changing his thoughtful tune. “For now I get to entertain myself by killing you.” He said it with a huge and happy smile.
And then Samyaza’s demeanor changed in an instant and his giant demon face stiffened in a chaotic, teeth-baring snarl. His slit-eyes flashed and his snake-like tongue slithered out of his mouth. I began stumbling backward toward the Angel. Fear gripped my senses and stripped me of my bravery and mind tricks.
Tsaeb somehow had managed to find his way to the glass door unseen. He stood inside the hospital watching through a window. The patients in the windows above, overlooking the courtyard were worked into a frenzy. One slammed his head into the glass so hard that when he pulled back the pane was covered with blood.
Pandemonium broke out within the hospital.
Nurses ran past the tall glass windows chasing after patients and patients chased nurses. There were screams everywhere.
I screamed inside myself.
Samyaza picked me up by the waist with one massive hand. I had always wondered why the victims always did that in the movies. Now I knew. Fear has a way of paralyzing every muscle and sucking the breath straight out of a man’s lungs. Worst of all, it has a way of breaking his spirit and stealing his soul.
My lungs found air again and I let out a scream of agony. I felt my ribs crushing beneath the force of Samyaza’s grip. My eyes opened and closed. I could feel consciousness slipping away from me, but I would not have known the difference between dying and fainting if I had been given the chance to ponder it. I saw faces in my mind, those of my mother and my father. I saw Kate’s face and Amanda’s. I saw the face of the old smoking hag that had been influenced by the Devil somehow to catch her apartment on fire and put me on the Devil’s puppet strings. I saw the faces of Hugh Bastardi, Martin Scovolli and my best friend Danny and even those of people I’d never met, but saw every day in passing on my way to work.
Faces. It was all that I saw. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. There was no white light, or even a terrifying dark tunnel. Just faces.
And then my body hit the ground with a hard thud. I felt something pulling me across the ground and I heard a frantic and high-pitched voice. But I couldn’t open my eyes. It felt like they were attached somehow to my crushed ribs. Nothing worked other than my mind, the one thing I would rather stop working so that I couldn’t understand or know such pain.
“Norman,” said the frantic voice, “you have to see this!”
I could not put anything together: where I was, who was speaking to me, or what was going on around me. I wondered if I was dead and this was the beginning of my own personal Hell. The thought thrust my mind further into panic. Compared to the Hermit, Samyaza was as gentle and as beautiful as Paschar even in his demon form.
I screamed, “No! Just let me die!” Tears barreled from my clenched eyes. My hands clutched my face and my head.
Sophia smacking me in the face brought me out of the prison that was my mind. I saw her and the woman who had brought us across the lake hunkered over me. I was no longer on the Outside at the hospital. The forest trees loomed high in the sky. I could feel the dampness of the air on my face. But the sun was not shining and there was no soft green moss underneath me anymore. Instead, I lay on the forest floor against moist, dead leaves and broken branches.
“The Angel,” said Sophia, “she has eyes!”
I rose on my elbows until the pain from my broken ribs sent me crashing back onto the ground. But I had to see, to watch what was happening and so I pushed through that pain long enough to tilt my head to the side.
Paschar did have eyes and they were the most beautiful eyes set in the most beautiful face. A great white light surrounded her, but it was by no means blinding. Her white hair and skin se
emed made up of that light. She still wore the sheer black gown. A nine-foot snake, black as tar, slithered around her neck and in her petite white hands.
Tsaeb was crouched on the other side of me now. He whispered, “She put them back in. I saw when she did it, while Samyaza was crushing you. She put the eyes in their sockets and Samyaza fell. Right on his face! You should’ve seen it! It was like she pulled the plug on him or something and he went crashing to the ground! Just like that!” He snapped his fingers.
I felt disoriented. Between the excruciating pain and the changing scenes, it was nearly impossible to keep up. I looked up into the trees as they swayed and doubled and tripled. I blinked several times trying to shake my sight right.
I was lifted into the air.
Still partially on my back and side, I floated through the air toward somewhere. It took longer to realize what was happening at all.
“The Serpent was defeated by the Man,” said Paschar sitting on an old stone bench in the forest clearing. “But will the Man be defeated by the Serpent?”
The Angel set my injured body softly onto the ground near her. I was bewildered by the fact that my mind thought I should moan in pain, but my body did not respond in that way.
“Please don’t tell me,” I began, “he’s still after me?”
Paschar smiled a close-lipped smile. Maybe that smile of hers was supposed to be some kind of answer.
“He can’t be after you,” Tsaeb said. “He’s the snake!”
I shifted my eyes to better see the snake around her neck and then to see the Angel. Her smile was the same.
“But how could I have defeated him?” I said. “By tricking him?”
Paschar nodded slowly, her gentle fingertips stroking the black snake that was Samyaza.
The snake’s head swayed near Paschar’s shoulder, staring in my direction, its forked tongue slithering in and out of its mouth.
“Samyaza, the great Serpent, shall braid my hair no more.”
Paschar motioned for me to stand, her palm out. I thought about it first, but then lifted myself to my feet easily and without pain.
“But—”
“Samyaza’s lies go with him,” Paschar explained, stroking the snake on its thick head. “Into his belly go the deceptions, and out of mine will come the Truth.”
I had an uneasy feeling all of a sudden. A memory of the Tree of Life crowded my thoughts, how she gave no warning before she sent the tower crashing down. I knew from lessons already learned that if I had questions I had better ask them quickly.
“But what do I do next?” I said. “Where do I go now?”
“There is only one place left to go,” Paschar began. “Find the Center of Eden and undo what was once done.”
“But where’s the Center,” I urged.
Paschar’s serene, dream-like face began to falter. First, her smile faded and then she shut her eyes and opened them again, but to open them seemed an effort as if all she wanted to do was sleep.
“If you met the Tree of Life,” she began, “she would have shown you the way.”
I looked behind me at the woman who had possession of Vanity’s Mirror and she stepped up beside me. Pulling the mirror from her cloak, she held it up to show Paschar.
“It’s mine now,” said the young woman, “but I’ll go with him until he doesn’t need it anymore.”
Paschar nodded and shut her eyes again. Her discomfort was becoming more noticeable with every breath. With Samyaza wrapped around her petite white neck, she placed both hands on her rounded belly.
It was growing.
“The mirror will take you there,” said Paschar, “but its power is tricky and deceptive.”
“Yes,” I said, “I learned that already. Honestly, if I hadn’t been shown how to use it, I never would’ve figured it out on my own.”
“You would do better not to use it at all, but if it is your only way....”
“It is, but why?”
The Angel’s voice labored. “Do what you must,” she said, “but I know the Center of Eden to be somewhere where things began. That is all I know.”
I saw that the forest and everything around it was like how the rest of Creation always looked. Dead trees, gloomy sky, uncomfortable air. I longed for the illusion of what it had looked like before. As I watched the Angel, studying her quickly advancing changes and remembering the Tree of Life, I knew what was going to happen next. It was the ‘how’ that worried me.
“I think we should go,” said Tsaeb.
“Me too,” Sophia agreed, stepping back further. “She don’t look too good.”
Paschar looked ill, her skin no longer white and pristine, but pale and sickly. Samyaza slithered away from her and into the nearest tree.
Everything unfolded in slow motion. The way Paschar stood, so graceful and steady despite her discomfort. How her silky hair blew magically behind her like something out of a fairytale. How her delicate hands and arms raised high toward the sky and the way the sunlight broke through the grayness of Creation.
And then there was a silence so dead and so deafening that it made the world stand completely still. Two seconds. Three. A burst of light shot from Paschar’s eyes and from her mouth. Her body arched backward, her hands high in the air, her hair blowing wildly. And then her stomach burst open with light and for twelve long seconds her body was suspended in mid-air, blinding rays devouring her and everything around her.
The sound of trees breaking and a great rush of water filled the forest around us. The sky went dark and then light again as the black clouds broke apart as if God Himself pursed his lips and blew.
We were already near the lake again, running as fast as we could as the forest took shape all around us. Black turned to green, covering the trees like a thick blanket. The soft dark green moss that had once only been an illusion covered the ground. Like the new growth of vines, it crawled over everything in its path, claiming it. The growth was quickly on my heels. Sophia fell once and left Tsaeb scrambling to rip the vines from her ankles, fighting to keep more vines and moss from claiming him, too. The woman and I jerked Tsaeb and Sophia both from the ground and helped them toward the lake.
“Hurry!” I shouted, now with Sophia in my arms.
But that great rush of water we heard before was faster than we were and it took us all off our feet, barreling through the trees from behind; an angry rogue river to drown and destroy everything in its path. The last thing I saw just before it struck was our boat drifting far toward the center of the lake. The lake suddenly turned violent as the river joined it. My companions and I were swept away in an instant.
“The only constant in any man’s life.”
--
I COULDN’T REMEMBER WHAT I dreamt while I was unconscious, or even if I dreamt at all. When I awoke, I thought I might be dead. Truly dead this time. But as my memories slowly came together again, I had to be disappointed that I was not so lucky.
The water in my lungs came up first, followed by a burning sensation in my nostrils and throat. My eyes stung from the water and I couldn’t immediately open them. I could hear sounds all around me fading in and out: chirping birds and cool breezes gently stirring leaves. I could hear water, now tranquil and constant.
I opened my eyes and saw that I was on my stomach in a bed of that heavenly moss, the side of my face pressed against the dampness. My clothes were soaked and I had lost a sandal, but no bones were broken and that was the greatest relief of all. I raised myself carefully to my feet and gently kicked off the other sandal. My body was sore and my mind still foggy. I noticed too that my watch was gone, only the outline from where it had been protecting the skin from the sun was left.
As I started to investigate what else had washed ashore with me, I heard a snorting sound somewhere to my left. My guard was up instantly, but I wasn’t afraid. Nothing could scare me anymore, except the Hermit and even he would have to work at it harder...probably.
“I can hear you,” I said to whomever or
whatever might be listening.
I began to wonder where Tsaeb and the others were. Maybe they were dead.
Then I heard a low moan and the thick of bushes moved beside me. I walked straight over, ready to face it and when I leaned around the bush, I was surprised to see my friend, Taurus, lying in a pile of washed up branches and debris.
“Taurus!” I leaned over and offered a hand.
Taurus grunted and took it, nearly bringing me down with him. We both must’ve forgotten how much larger and stronger he was than me.
“I see you freed the Angel.” Taurus laughed.
“I guess I did!” I kept smiling, until Taurus started looking around for the others and my smile turned to concern.
“I hope the little one is alright,” he said, referring to Sophia.
It was just about that time when Tsaeb came running up, breathing so hard he had to stop and rest his hands upon his knees.
He could hardly get the words out. “Hurry...this way,” he said, motioning one hand. “You’ve got to see this!”
This was serious. I knew Tsaeb well enough by now, and for him to be so persistent, whatever it was had to be significant.
“Have you seen the others?” I said, following.
Tsaeb urged us along, five paces in front, as he explained. “They’re there. Me and the brat...washed up not far from...each other. I was more concerned about finding you, but of course...Sophia only cares about that damn mirror.” He looked back once, but kept walking faster, out of breath. “I mean sure...we could’ve found either of you first, but you should’ve seen Sophia’s face when the girl...came walking up along the path. She took out after her—her name’s Diana, by the way—and I thought Sophia was gonna...kill her! She started screaming about Vanity’s Mirror...blah, blah, blah. Long story short, Diana easily kept Sophia off her and since Diana lost the mirror, Sophia is fuming pissed!”
I grabbed Tsaeb’s shoulder from behind and stopped him dead in his tracks. Taurus almost ran us over before he could stop in time.
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