Forgiven

by Gina Detwiler

  I lower the phone, amazed. “You saw that?”

  “Yeah. I thought it was the drugs, at first. But when the others ran away, I couldn’t. It was like I suddenly realized everything I had done—my hands were covered in blood, not only animals, but people too. I felt…ashamed.” His body sags, like he’s about to fall over. “I wanted to die. I tried to kill myself in jail. I didn’t eat for over a month. They put me in a hospital, force fed me until I was stable. Threatened to put me on a feeding tube.

  “When I went back to jail, they moved me in with a new cellmate. His name was Randy. He’d sit around reading the Bible all day. I started making fun of him and his religion. He didn’t get mad or nothing. One day, he gave me this.” Mace pulls a small, tattered Bible from his pocket. “He told me what he’d done to get locked up. He was a murderer, like me. Worse than me, maybe. Until Jesus saved him. He said God forgave him for what he done. And that He’d forgive me too.” The Bible shakes in his trembling hand. “So I read this. I read about Jesus—about His story and what He did. It pierced me like a knife.”

  “That’s great, Mace.” I am moved by his words but still do not trust him. “Maybe you should go to a church. They’ll take you in, give you a meal—”

  “They’ll find me.”

  “Who?”

  “Torega. The cartel. They are looking for me ʼcause I turned on them.”

  “A church would be a safe place. They wouldn’t look there.”

  “You don’t know. They have spies everywhere. Informants. No matter where I go, they will find me.”

  “I can’t help you,” I say. “I mean, I’m glad you’re clean and all, but there’s nothing I can do for you—”

  “Yes, there is.” He pauses and licks his cracked lips. “You can get this demon out of me.”

  I freeze. This is it. He’ll kill me.

  “I tried to get rid of it. But I can’t do it alone. I need help.” He looks at the book in his hands. “I feel like that guy—Legion? In this book. This demon won’t go away. Torega will kill me. But I don’t wanna die with this demon in me.”

  I peer at him. “How do you know you have a demon?”

  “Randy told me. He said it was why I felt the way I did. I thought he was crazy but now…” Tears well in his eyes. “I don’t want to kill anymore. But sometimes, I can’t help it. I can’t stop it. Please. Help me. I know you can.”

  He starts to cry, drops to his knees, and clutches the Bible to his chest.

  I sigh. “Fine. Come with me.”

  ***

  I make him take off his jacket and prove he has no weapons. He obediently puts the garment on backwards and I zip it up so the hood covers his face. He doesn’t fight me.

  I guide him into the passenger seat and buckle his seat belt. Then call Ralph and tell him I’m coming over with someone who needs his help.

  “Don’t move a muscle.” I start the car, and turn to give him a stern look, even though he can’t see it. “Or I’ll dump you on the side of the road and leave you there for Torega to find. Got it?” He nods, even though he probably knows this is an empty threat.

  Mace sits still as a corpse while I drive to the Hobbit Hole. In the underground garage, I help him out of the car, and lead him, still blindfolded, to the entrance of the Hobbit Hole. Ralph and Emilia are waiting in the main room when we come through the door. I unzip Mace’s jacket and take it off.

  Emilia draws in a quick breath but doesn’t speak. Ralph sighs.

  “Come and sit, both of you.” He offers Mace a seat in his own wing-backed chair, which surprises me. I sit on the couch with Emilia. Mace looks really small in that big chair. His legs twitch and his fingers twist around each other restlessly. Whatever demon is in him is probably alert and afraid.

  “What is your name?” Ralph asks. “Your real name.”

  “Mason…Watkins.” he says in a choked voice. I’m no discerner, but I realize the demon is trying to stop him from speaking.

  “Mason.” Ralph clasps his hands together. “Tell us about this demon of yours.”

  23: Gold Plated Lie

  Jared

  It should be hard to bear, this mere existence. But it isn’t.

  Between blood donation sessions, I stay on the top deck at the bow and stare out at the endless ocean. The wind plasters my face and hair and the cold digs into my bones. Wilder gives me a sedative every night and I sleep. I don’t fight it. I want to sleep now, to stop my brain from thinking, ruminating on the past and rehearsing the future.

  My dreams are vivid but no longer frightening. I dream of jumping off the tops of mountains, high cliffs, or out of airplanes flying through the sky. I do a lot of flying in my dreams—real flying, and it’s exhilarating. I don’t want those dreams to end.

  I avoid the others on the boat. No one seems interested in me anymore. I saw Shannon only once, hanging over the deck rail and gazing down at the water. I had the impression she was thinking of jumping too. I detected fear lurking behind her gaze. A mixture of dread and longing. The water—she still hated it, even after the exorcism. She glanced at me but didn’t move and didn’t look away. She simply stared at me.

  I refuse to eat meals with the others. I assume Speer and Hyde and Marta spend their times in some secret room, plotting how they will take over the world.

  One day, Owen comes to me with a message that Speer wants to have dinner with me—alone. I want to refuse, but in the end, I agree. Speer has kidnapped me and drugged me and forced me to partner with him, but I can’t seem to resist him. He draws me to himself with gravitational force, like the moon to the earth.

  Owen leads me to a luxurious stateroom, ringed with windows that curve around the rich dark woodwork. The bed is extra-long, obviously custom-made for Speer’s frame.

  “Jared!” Speer greets me in his usual manner, and we sit at a table beside the window. Attendants bustle around us, serving plates of lobster and filet mignon. Speer gets two lobsters and two thick slabs of steak. Owen presents a bottle of wine. Speer glances at me.

  “Red or white?”

  “Neither.”

  “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  He exhales his disappointment and points to the red. Owen fills a big glass.

  “How are you doing?” Speer picks up his lobster and breaks it in two. Water spews out and splatters his shirt. He wrenches off a claw and cracks it open with his hands. His movements are savage, almost animalistic. He attacks the lobster with gleeful viciousness.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Awesome. I told Len not to overdo it. I mean, you may be somewhat superhuman, but everyone has their limits, right?”

  “How did you know?” I can’t help but ask. “About me.”

  “You mean about your genes? Well, to be honest, I didn’t. Not until I got your DNA.”

  “How did you get that?”

  “Well, you remember. On the boat. The broken glass.”

  I stare at him.

  “Ha! I got lucky there. See, I knew there was something about you that wasn’t normal, based on the ancestry research I did. I’d bought this set of crystal tumblers in Murano years ago, but they were so fine they kept breaking. They were probably defective. I told Owen to serve you from one.”

  “So you planned that too.”

  “Well, it was my only shot. I knew you wouldn’t go for the time travel thing. If you didn’t break the glass, I’d at least get your saliva for a DNA test. I needed more than that to create the serum, however. I took a risk, and it paid off. That happens a lot for me.” He laughs. “But seriously, I really owe you a lot, Jared, and I won’t forget it, I promise. I’ll make you rich.”

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “Then give it to your girl—what’s her name?”

  “Grace.”

  “Grace. Right. Or give it to your favorite charity. I can see you’re a guy with principles. I have principles too, you know. That’s why I didn’t want to steal your D
NA. I mean, I know I stole a little of it, only for myself, but if you had said no, I would have ended it there.”

  I put my fork down. “Are you kidding? You consider luring me on this boat and tying me up and drugging me having principles?”

  Speer pretends he doesn’t even hear. “People don’t understand that nothing can get in the way of progress. That’s what I’m about. Progress. Moving the human race forward. That’s why I do everything I do. Before I die, I’ll have every house running on solar energy. An electric car in every garage. A colony on Mars. I’ll reduce the carbon footprint of every human being on this planet to 8.5 metric tons. And, because of you, I’ll cure every disease known to man.” He pauses to wipe the butter off his chin. “Like it or not, Jared, I will save the world.” He smiles at me, still chewing. “And also because of you, I’ll have a lot more time to work on those things. I rarely need to sleep anymore—I can practically work around the clock. And I’ll live to be what, two hundred? Three hundred? It’s awesome, being you.”

  “You haven’t been me long enough to know that.”

  He ignores the comment and launches into a long discourse I can only call “Speer’s Personal Theory of Everything.”

  “You know what really ticks me off? That for the last twenty years, all the best minds in the world have focused on one thing—software. It’s like the world is ruled by apps. People seem to care more about how to get more followers on Instagram than they do about solving the world’s problems. What happened to real innovation? NASA hasn’t invented anything new since freeze-dried food. They’re hopelessly behind on Mars exploration. Why should a private citizen like me spearhead that, anyway? NASA should have done it a long time ago. Oh yeah, they discover a new planet now and then, with their twenty-five-year-old telescopes. What good does that do anyone?”

  He goes on like this for some time, stopping only to devour his food, a running monologue peppered with expletives and head shaking. The world, according to Darwin Speer, is seriously screwed up. And he will fix it, single-handedly if he has to.

  “When the Romans wanted to keep the people from rising up, what did they give them? Bread and circuses! It’s the same thing today. As long as people are well-fed and have the latest iPhone, they really don’t care that the world around them is going to hell. They’ll be too busy checking Facebook.” He tosses a claw on the growing pile. “People are sheep.”

  Says the man who shot me up with drugs and held me captive.

  “What are your plans for CERN?” I interrupt his diatribe. “Why are you expanding it? What do you hope to accomplish?”

  “Oh, CERN. That’s a giant toy factory for me. I love big machines, can’t help it. You should see inside that place. I mean, it’s beyond awesome. You look at it and go, how did human beings even build that?”

  “So that’s it? Just playing around with giant toys? Nothing more?”

  “Well, maybe a little more. It’s fascinating, quantum physics. Not really my area—it’s more Bill’s thing. He talked me into it. He’s the theoretical physics nerd. But CERN is the key to everything in the universe. I couldn’t keep my hands off it.”

  “You’re playing with fire, Speer.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time. But don’t worry, I always come out on top.” He puts his fork down and picks up his wine glass. “Do you know what I find so fascinating about you, Jared? Aside from your genes, I mean. You never sold your soul. Here you are, this practically immortal man, and you never tried to capitalize on that. How old are you anyway? One hundred? Two hundred?”

  “Something like that.”

  “When did you know for sure that you were…different?”

  “I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know.”

  “What about your parents? Your father, Lucas—was he like you?”

  “I don’t know. He died when I was still young.”

  “Oh, right. Trapeze accident, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It seems strange that an experienced performer like your father would have died that way.”

  I shrug. “Accidents happen.”

  He smiles. “Not to people like us.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying maybe your birth father was more than you thought him to be.”

  “You think he was—like me?”

  Speer shrugs. “How else do you explain your genetic makeup? Oh, I’ve heard that story about the fallen angels and the Abyss. But everyone knows that’s a fantasy.”

  “How does everyone know that?”

  “C’mon, Jared, get real. You know as well as I do that it can’t be true.”

  “What proof do you have that it can’t be true?” Anger rises, heating my blood. “Are you the final arbiter of truth now?”

  “Take it easy. I’m only saying that there’s a difference between scientific discovery and fairy tales. Look, I get it. Quantum physics proves that what we thought were fixed rules of the universe really aren’t. That what we see is not all there is. It’s absolutely mind-blowing. We’re on the cusp of discovering other dimensions and other universes, and the next step will be the ability to send messages back and forth, or even travel between them. I get where you’re coming from with the whole angel thing. Science is getting closer and closer to—”

  “God?”

  He blinks. “To proving we don’t need God to explain the stuff we don’t understand.”

  “Like the creation of the universe.”

  “Exactly! We’re halfway there with CERN. I’ll simply give the place a power boost and take it over the finish line. Since the Higgs discovery, nothing has come out of there, with a whole lot of money going in. That seems wrong to me. And if I see a problem I can fix, I’m all about fixing it.”

  “You don’t get the basic flaw in your premise,” I say. “You are looking to the universe to explain how it created the universe. Do you see the problem? A thing can’t create itself.”

  “I’m not saying we can know everything, but if we could figure out how it all started, that would give us some serious clues for the rest.”

  “Yet you believe we’re living in a video game.”

  “Simulation. Is that really any different from your God hypothesis?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You believe an all-powerful divine being created and controls reality.” He picks up his wine glass. “I believe we are in a giant simulation created by alien beings with superior intelligence. Same idea, different players.”

  “It’s not the same,” I say. “Where is morality?”

  “Morality is a construct invented as a way to control people. All religion is about control, mainly through guilt.”

  “Yet you believe there are alien gamers controlling you.”

  “Controlling my reality, not me. How I deal with reality is my business.”

  “So you believe in free will, despite the fact that we exist in a computer simulation.” I shake my head. “And you think I’m crazy for believing in God.”

  “Frankly, Jared, I don’t care what you think about God. I think you are a god. To have lived for so long and still look like you’re in your early twenties—you’re like Wolverine or Thor come to life. I’m not interested in God. I’m interested in you.” He downs his wine in one gulp and slams the empty glass on the table. “I mean, do you really believe there is a pit filled with fallen angels under the earth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve been there.”

  I expect him to laugh. To mock me. But his face is still. He takes a long time to respond.

  “Prove it.”

  “What?”

  His eyes narrow and a corner of his mouth turns up. “Take me there.”

  24: After You

  Grace

  We sit around the dinner table and watch Mace devour three servings of Emilia’s meatloaf without stopping to take a breath. He acts as though he hasn’t eaten in ten years. Maybe he hasn’t.<
br />
  The deliverance yesterday took over four hours, but it wasn’t as dramatic as Shannon’s or Crow’s. Mace was eager to release the main spirit, which went by the name of the goat-demon Baphomet, well known for torturing young, lost men. It was difficult without Jared, but Penny came to help, and she turned out to be almost as good at discerning evil spirits. She ordered those demons around like they were nothing more than cockroaches.

  Baphomet, it turned out, is a character in the game Dungeons & Dragons, which Mace had once played to obsession.

  He was exhausted when it was over, so Ralph invited him to stay the night and gave him Jared’s room. I couldn’t bear that and had to leave. The deliverance had taken my mind off Jared for a few hours, but it all came roaring back.

  When Silas, Penny, and I arrived at the Hobbit Hole today, we found Mace washed and in clean clothes with his hair neatly combed. Emilia had done a miracle—I hardly recognized him. Watching him eat, I try to reconcile this scrawny child-man to the drug-addicted wizard who had nearly killed me in a satanic ritual.

  In between mouthfuls of food, he provides more information about his life. At the age of ten, he’d started playing D&D at a house owned by two men he referred to as Ned and Fred. A bunch of kids always hung out there. Engineers during the day, at night Ned and Fred were high wizards and practiced black magic that blew Mace’s mind.

  “They could make demon faces appear in mirrors and make things levitate and stuff like that. I wanted to learn, so they taught me. By the time I was eleven, I could do the spells myself. They said I had a gift. I thought this was what I was meant to do. The spells always required a sacrifice. We would lure stray cats in by leaving food outside in the yard. And when the cats came for the food, we’d nab them.”

  I push my plate away, sickened. Mace continues to eat, unfazed.

  “I decided I would be a wizard too—a High Wizard. I started doing drugs with Ned and Fred because they said it would heighten my power. Crank, mostly. Man, there’s no high like a crank high.” He glances at us and sees that we don’t know what he’s talking about. “Meth. On meth, I could do anything—I was like Superman. Ned and Fred only let us shoot up during the rituals. It wasn’t enough for me. I started sneaking around when they were asleep and stealing drugs. But they were wizards, so of course they knew what I was doing. They caught me and kicked me out. That’s when I went to the silo.”