He got up and tiptoed to the door, which he'd purposely left open. After padding out into the dark hallway, he took the matches from his pocket. Hours earlier, when Carter had been searching for them to light his cigarette, he was afraid he'd be caught. Luckily, Carter hadn't realized who'd taken them.
Holding up the flickering flame before him, he turned right and made it to the first barracks' hallway. From there, he could hear not only the rain hammering down but the gale-force winds, too. Victor cupped his hand around the flame, thinking it might blow out.
The darkness was nerve-racking. He was terrified. In theory, Zig Zag (if that monster actually existed, and he still wasn't sure that he did) wasn't a direct threat to him, but the others had instilled him with a bloodcurdling fear. And the riotous storm, the darkness, and those cold metal walls didn't exactly do much to calm him down.
The match was burning his fingers. He blew it out and threw it on the floor.
For a second, before he struck another one, he couldn't see a thing.
Fear, in large part, is nothing but imagination: Victor had read that over and over. If you didn't let your imagination run wild, darkness and noises had no power over you.
He dropped the match. No way was he bending down to try to find it. He pulled another one from the book.
In any case, he was almost there. After striking the third one, he could make out the door, a few feet to his right.
"WHERE did Victor go?"
"I don't know," Jacqueline replied. "And I don't care, either." She turned over to try to go back to sleep. Unconsciousness was the only way to keep her fear at bay.
"We can't carry the weight of this ourselves, Jacqueline. Victor is a big help. If he weren't here, we'd be as lost as a sailboat, with no wind and no sea."
Jacqueline, who had closed her eyes, sat up and looked at Blanes. He was still in the same chair, his head leaning against the screen, his green shirt stained with sweat, legs stretched out and crossed in his baggy jeans. His friendly, open face—stubbly gray beard, pockmarked cheeks, and big nose—was turned toward her affectionately.
"What did you just say?"
"That we shouldn't let Victor go. He's our only help."
"No ... I mean ... You said something about the wind and a boat." Blanes frowned.
"It was just a turn of phrase. Why?"
"It reminded me of a poem Michel wrote when he was twelve. He read it to me over the phone and I loved it. I encouraged him to keep writing. I miss him so much..." Jacqueline fought back her tears. "The wind and the sea have gone. Only the old boat remains ... He's fifteen now, and he's still writing..." She rubbed her arms and looked around, suddenly uneasy. "Did you hear something?"
"No," soothed Blanes.
The room's darkness was overwhelming. Jacqueline was sure it was bigger than the space it occupied.
"I'm next." She was half whining and half pouting, like a naughty girl who's been punished. "And I know exactly what he's going to do to me. He tells me every night. I thought about killing myself so many times, and I would, if he'd let me. But he won't. He likes me to keep waiting for him, day after day. And in exchange, he gives me pleasure and terror, in equal doses. He tosses them to me the way you toss a dog a bone, and I gnaw on them both... Do you know what I told my husband when I decided to leave him? 'I'm still young and I want to live my own life, do what I want to do, follow my heart.'" She shook her head, flustered, and smiled. "Those weren't my words. He said them for me." Blanes nodded.
"I abandoned my husband and child ... I abandoned little Michel... I had to; he wanted me to be alone. He comes to me at night and makes me crawl on the floor and throw myself at his feet. He made me dye my hair black, he makes me wear all this makeup, and dress like a ... Do you know why my hair is this color?" She ran a hand through her copper tresses and smiled. "Sometimes, I rebel. It's hard, but I do it. I've done too much for him already, don't you think? Left my whole life behind: my job, my husband ... Michel, my only son. You have no idea how hateful he is, the horrible things he says about my son. Living alone, at least I can... I can take all that hatred myself..."
"I understand," Blanes replied. "But some part of you actually likes this situation, Jacqueline." He held a hand up like a stop sign to prevent her reply. "Just a small part. It's subconscious. He contaminates your subconscious. It's like a deep well: you drop the bucket down and lots of stuff comes back up with the water. Dead bugs. Everything inside you, everything there ever was, that he's dredged up and brought to the surface. Deep down, you know there's pleasure there, too..."
Blanes's face was transforming as he spoke. His eyes seemed to have no pupils. They were like puss-filled, oozing abscesses beneath his brows.
And that was when she woke up.
She must have fallen asleep, or maybe it was a disconnect. She remembered everything about it; it was awful. Blanes's face, changing right before her eyes ... Thankfully, it was just a nightmare.
Jacqueline looked around and realized that something was very wrong.
THE image ended. Victor shut down the file and uploaded another one.
He didn't know if he wanted to see it or not. Suddenly, he didn't. Even if it were really him (how many poor devils did they crucify back then before they got the Lord?). No, not in the infinitesimal shiver of a Planck time, the tyranny of evanescent atoms. He didn't want to see the Son of God rotting, devoured by a moment so infinitesimally short that it didn't even have room for the Father. Eternity, Infinite Duration, the Beatific and Mystical Rose: they were God's time. What was this ... this Infinite Brevity? What should he call it? Instantaneity?
Any space of time so short that the Mystical Rose was just a stem surely belonged to the Devil. A flash of lightning, a glimmer, the blink of an eye, or even the idea of blinking were all infinitely longer. Victor thought of something awful. In that millionth-of-a-second cosmos, Good did not exist, because Good took longer than Evil.
He'd found them by chance in one of Silberg's filing cabinets earlier that afternoon, when he was looking for blank CDs. Several compact discs labeled "diffs."
Immediately he recalled Elisa's story. They had to be the "diffusions" Nadja had told her that Silberg saved, the unsuccessful experiments, when they opened time strings with erroneous energy calculations and everything had come out blurry or indistinct. How could they still be there? Maybe Eagle thought that was the safest place to store them. Or maybe they were totally unusable. Regardless, he was sure he wouldn't be able to see much, but the name that had come up when he popped the CD in—"crucif," followed by a number—was just too tempting, too persuasive for him to be able to give up that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
There were a couple of laptops in Silberg's lab with fully charged batteries. Victor guessed that the computer technicians who came to the island used them to inspect the CDs. Even though Blanes had told them to remove all the batteries from everything, Victor had made sure to leave one of the laptops operational. In order not to ruin their plans, he'd done a quick calculation: the flashlight he'd left behind needed less energy than the one he'd taken. So the energy being used now equated—more or less—to what the big flashlight used. And if, despite his safety measures, it was still wrong of him to be doing this, then he didn't care. He'd take full responsibility. He had to see some of those images. Just a few. And nothing in the world was going to stop him.
He'd been trembling when he opened the first one. But it was a pale, rose-colored universe, a surreal delirium. The next nine looked like 1970s cartoons drawn by someone on acid. The eleventh, though, took his breath away.
A landscape. A mountain. A cross.
All of a sudden, the cross turned into a post with no crossbeam. He swallowed hard. Those morphological changes had to be because of the Planck times. The cross, in such tiny spaces, was not a cross. He couldn't see any human figure.
The image lasted only five seconds. Victor saved it and opened the next one.
It was very blurry. A hill seeme
d to be ablaze. He closed it and opened the next. A foreshortened version of the cross. Or maybe it was another one, because now he made out another cross on the hilltop and the edge of another one off to the right. Three.
And figures standing around them. Shapes, decapitated shadows.
A cold sweat drenched his back. The image was incredibly fuzzy, but he could still make out shapes on the crosses.
Victor took off his glasses and drew his face all the way up to the screen until he could make out all the details. The image jumped, and one of the crosses disappeared almost entirely. In its place there was a stain, floating in space, an oval shape hanging from the wood like a wasp's nest on a joist.
Is that you, Lord? Is it you? His eyes welled up with tears. He held his fingers out to the screen, as if to touch the hazy silhouette.
He was so intent on the image that he didn't hear the door open behind him. The creak of the hinges was drowned out by the pounding storm.
FOR a second, she thought she was still dreaming.
The screen Blanes was leaning against was perforated. There was a clean, round hole, the size of a soccer ball. The light shining through it must have come from the control room, on the other side of the wall.
What was most disturbing, though, was Blanes.
The right side of his face had a deep, elliptical gouge, as big as his brow, eye socket, and cheekbone. Beneath it she could see (perfectly visible in the glow coming through the screen) dense, reddish masses. Jacqueline thought she could identify them: frontal sinuses, narrow nasal septum, trigeminal and facial nerve cords, the bumpy wall of his brain ... It was like an anatomical hologram.
The wind and the sea have gone.
An immeasurable silence had descended. The darkness was different, too. More compact, more solid, somehow. There were no flashlights, no light at all aside from what filtered through that hole.
They've gone: only the old boat remains.
She stood up and realized that she was not, in fact, dreaming. It was all too real. She was herself, and her bare feet were touching the floor, though she didn't feel the cold of the...
Something made her look down: she saw the tops of her breasts, her nipples. She touched her body. She wasn't wearing anything, no clothes, no jewelry. She had nothing on, no cover.
The wind and the sea have gone. They've gone. They've gone.
She turned to Carter, but she couldn't see him. Victor was gone, too. The only one left was Blanes, paralyzed and perforated, and her.
Just the two of them, and the darkness.
LIMP as a rag doll, Victor flew through the air and crashed down where the Hand sent him. He banged against the open drawer where the diffusions had been and felt an incredibly sharp pain behind his knees. When he landed, it raised a cloud of dust that made him cough. The Hand grabbed him by the hair and he was lifted up into the bright, starry sky, clear and pure as airborne snow. The slap across his face made his left earring and grumble like a rickety engine. He tried to grab something for support and scratched the metal wall behind him. His glasses were gone, but he could make out—right in front of him—an eye so black it looked opaque; it had no iris. So black that it stood out against the second-rate darkness of the room. He heard the mechanism click.
"Listen, you stupid priest..." Carter's voice, hissing like a blowtorch, seemed to come from the eye. "I'm pointing a carbon-fiber 98S at you, and I've got thirty 5.5-millimeter bullets in the clip. One shot from this distance and you'll be blown clear into next week, got it?" Victor whined and whimpered, blind without his glasses. "Let me warn you: I'm not myself. Something's happening to me. I know it, I can tell. Since we came back to this fucking island, I've become someone else, someone even worse than who I was. Right now, I'd be only too glad to blow your brains out, wipe them off me with a rag, and go have breakfast." Do it, Victor thought, though he couldn't say a word, and Carter wouldn't let him try. "If you ever take off while you're on guard without telling me, if you turn on any fucking machine without my permission, I swear I'll kill you. That's not a threat; it's just the way it is. I might even kill you if you don't, but you'll have to let me be the judge of that. Don't give me any easy excuses, Father. Got it?"
Victor nodded. Carter handed him his glasses and shoved him toward the door.
And that's when it all happened.
MORE than feel it, she sensed it.
It wasn't an image, a sound, or a smell. Nothing material, nothing you could perceive with any of your senses. But she knew Zig Zag was there, at the back of the room, the same way she'd have known if a nameless man in a crowd loved only her.
The wind and the sea have gone. Only the abyss remains.
"God ... Oh, dear God, please! Help me! Carter! David! Please, help me!..."
Terror has a point of no return. In that instant, Jacqueline crossed it.
She curled up into a ball against the screen next to Blanes's petrified body, hands over her breasts, and screamed. Again and again. Screamed like she'd never screamed in her whole life, holding nothing back, thinking nothing except that she'd lose her mind. She howled, she bellowed like a dying animal, until her throat nearly split open, until she thought her head would explode and her lungs would fill with blood, until she knew she was insane, or dead, or at least anesthetized.
Suddenly, something emerged from the back of the room. It was a shadow, and as it moved it seemed to drag the room's darkness with it. Jacqueline turned and looked.
She stopped shouting when she saw the eyes.
At the very same instant, she managed to give her body one final, definitive command. She got up and ran to the door as though abandoning a sinking ship.
They've gone. They've gone. They've gone. They've gone. They've gone.
She'd never make it, she thought. She'd never be able to escape. He would catch her (he was fast, too fast). But the last remaining shred of her sanity told her she was doing the right thing.
What any living thing in her place would have done after seeing those eyes.
THE image had been processed. The computer asked her if she wanted to upload it. Trying to contain her anxiety, Elisa hit ENTER.
After one flickering instant, the screen blinked and turned a pale pink, showing what looked like a blurry photograph of the control room. She had no trouble identifying the shiny accelerator in the background and the two computers in the foreground. Something had changed, though with such poor definition she took a second to realize what it was. There was another light source; a flashlight by the computer on the right was shining. In its glow, she could see a smudge seated in the same place she was.
She couldn't breathe. Something in her mind cracked and a torrent of memories came pouring out. Ten years later, she was seeing him again. The poor quality of the image left a lot to her imagination. She reconstructed his bony back and big, pointy head. Everything was jagged because of the Planck time; she needed better resolution to be able to make out who it really was.
Ric Valente stared at the computer screen, with no clue that ten years later she'd be watching him on the same screen. He was alone, and thought he would be forever.
Once she'd recovered from the shock, Elisa hunched over the screen almost the same as Valente, both surveying the past, peeking into history's keyhole, spying like indiscreet butlers.
What's he looking at? What is he doing?
The lights on the control panel where Ric sat told her that he, too, had just opened several time strings and was contemplating the results. The camera angle let her see the screen Ric was looking at, but his silhouette blocked the images on it. I wouldn't be able to make anything out even if he moved, she thought. I need the profiles.
Something about that image intrigued her. What was it? Why did she suddenly feel so ill at ease?
The more she looked at it, the more sure she was that something wasn't right. There was something hidden, or maybe it was obvious, like those games in which you have to find ten differences between two pictures. She tried t
o concentrate.
When the image skipped to another time string, she jumped. Now Ric had moved to the left, but everything was still very fuzzily outlined and, as she'd suspected, she couldn't even hazard a guess as to what he'd been looking at, despite an unblocked view of Ric's screen. It was just a big sepia blur. That must be Zig Zag, but I need to profile it and zoom in. There was someone else beside Ric now. Though she could see only part of the face and body, she recognized Rosalyn Reiter. That must have been when poor Rosalyn snuck up on him. He was probably trying to explain what he was doing there. That string was from an infinitesimal fraction of time, two seconds before the blackout. It was less than a millisecond long, at 4:10:10. Rosalyn was nowhere near the generator. How had she managed to get inside the generator room and be electrocuted in less than two seconds? It had all happened during the attack, and she was starting to see how it could have come about.
But there was still some tiny detail she couldn't put her finger on that made her uneasy. What was it?
That was the last time string. Before she forgot, she typed in a command string and began profiling, programming the computer to keep working after it had been shut down.
Suddenly, something struck her. Neither Ric nor Rosalyn had shadows. She knew that Rosalyn was dead and therefore she couldn't have split. But what about Ric? Did that mean he was dead, too?
As she sat there, pondering the possibility, she felt another, more intense anxiety.
Turning her head, she looked back at the camera.
The control room was dark. The pinkish phosphorescence on the screen cast the only light, and its glow went no more than six feet. Following Blanes's instructions, she'd disconnected the accelerator an hour ago and unplugged the other computers and components. Her watch battery was sitting on the table (though she knew from the computer screen that it was almost midnight). Outside, the storm still raged. She felt its fury through the walls, and water crashed ceaselessly against the windows.
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