by Weston Ochse
“I get intense smells. I’ll wake and think the room is filled with the scent of jasmine and oranges, but of course these are nothing but the memories of scents.”
“Do you worry that they might take you over?” de Cherge asked. “That would be my greatest fear.”
“Mine as well. At first that was my worry, but now I think they talk to each other. I think they spend more time trying to discern who they themselves are than who I am.”
“What if they eventually come together as a united front?”
Boy Scout paused, then put his spoon down and pushed the bowl away. “That’s a hell of a thing to say.” De Cherge had just voiced what he’d been thinking but had been afraid to say out loud. He didn’t want to give the entities any ideas. As it stood, he didn’t know how much of his mind they had access to or if they could know real time what he was thinking. All he could do was frown as he crossed his arms and leveled his gaze at the abbot.
After a moment de Cherge’s eyes widened slightly. “Yes. Of course. I understand.” Then he shook his head. “This is all new. I’m trying to understand… to help.”
“You have helped,” Boy Scout said. “You gave me a place to recuperate. A place to deal with my—particular—issues. What other news do you have?”
“I’m informed that you will be leaving us. Madam May will be arriving shortly to escort you to your next endeavor.”
Madam May? Oh, Preacher’s Daughter. Lore. Then he remembered how he must look. He brought a hand up to his face and then his hair. It had seemed proper to live as a wild man as the wildness raged inside of him, but now that he seemed to have more control, he felt as if his outward appearance should present the same. Plus, if they were going to be traveling, he couldn’t be seen as if they’d just pulled him off the street.
“Is there a place I can—do you have…”
“Certainly. We can get you cleaned up. When you’re done eating, just let me know.”
Boy Scout leaned forward and asked, “Why is it really that you’re helping me?”
De Cherge leaned forward as well, his face serious. “The Mevlevi are known to us—what they’ve been doing—sending hostage travelers into Purgatory, what they call The White—in order to troll for certain entities. Their presence has been heavy in North Africa for the last fifty years. Both in the Legion and in the church, there have been notices to be careful while traveling. Twice I led units against them in Algeria and twice they escaped me. Maybe if they hadn’t escaped me you wouldn’t be here now.”
Boy Scout thought of the ancient cistern and the ten-foot-tall daeva the Mevlevi had been using as a power source. Then he remembered the field of buried bodies, thousands of them and no room to bury more. “No, I think they’ve been doing this far longer than the Legion has even existed. Still, I appreciate your efforts.”
The abbot shook his head quickly. “Ce n’est rien. It is no problem.” He stood. “Now if you are ready, we shall make an improved version of you for the world to see, non?”
Boy Scout started to stand and watched as his left arm swept everything from the table and onto the floor, while his right hand grabbed the abbot, clenching the fabric of his robe at his throat. Boy Scout jerked the man halfway across the table, then leaned in and with furious spittle said, “I’m going to rip out your throat and shit down your neck.”
Only Boy Scout wasn’t doing this.
Only he was.
But it wasn’t him.
Not really.
Chapter Two
Abbey Commissary
DE CHERGE TRIED to pull away, but the being inside of Boy Scout wouldn’t let him. Red hot anger filled him as if he’d just ingested the whole of the lava from a volcano. He felt his biceps bulge as he ripped the abbot across the table and onto the floor. Behind him he heard shouts and a scream. Inside he wanted to scream for help, as out of control of himself as he was in the many channels of his dreams. Outside he did scream, guttural French epithets at the top of his lungs, barking mad, elephant roaring, as an anger held back for decades finally found a breach in the wall, exploding forth.
The words flowing over his snarling lips held the curving lilt of a beautiful language, but even without knowing what he was saying, the cut and slash of it drew psychic wounds upon de Cherge’s stunned face.
But his words weren’t his only violence.
Boy Scout sat on the abbot’s chest.
His right hand began to rise and fall.
First a flat hand, it slammed repeatedly into de Cherge’s scarred face.
Then it turned into a fist, striking the man’s ear, his eye, his throat.
But de Cherge wasn’t merely a punching dummy. He’d been a captain in the French Foreign Legion and knew how to take care of himself.
Recovering from the shock of the attack, he brought his left knee up hard, catching Boy Scout in the kidney, folding him.
Boy Scout reeled with the pain, but the thing that had control of him had no concern about any damage being done to the body, evidenced by him not even hesitating as he continued to rain blow after blow onto the Frenchman.
Boy Scout balanced himself with his left hand on the ground beside de Cherge’s face and it was this arm that de Cherge wrapped his own arm around. He trapped the arm, pulled, then brought around his right knee, propelling Boy Scout off of him.
Boy Scout felt himself rolling and knew the move. De Cherge kept the momentum of the roll until he was on top and Boy Scout was on the bottom. He grabbed his assailant’s wrists and held them, shouting, “Stop it. No more.” He was already breathing heavily and the strain on his face as he tried to contain Boy Scout’s violence was showing from beneath the blackening bruises. “I said stop.”
Boy Scout watched as his body sagged, then slacked. It was like Pain TV. He was part of it but in body only. All he could do was watch as whoever had taken him over used his own jujitsu.
De Cherge loosened his grip and relaxed, probably thinking that Boy Scout was obeying his command, but instead, Boy Scout bucked his hips and then grabbed de Cherge’s hand, pulling it into him, then spinning beneath the Frenchman until he had the arm in an arm bar, his legs over de Cherge’s chest, the arm pulled straight, straining at the elbow to not break in two as Boy Scout pulled hard and continuously on the wrist.
OHMYGOD! he wanted to scream, prisoner to his own actions.
Then a crack as the arm broke, followed by de Cherge’s scream.
A hand grabbed at Boy Scout and began to pull him away, but he wouldn’t let go of the arm. The movement made de Cherge scream again and again, hyperventilating his pain into a world gone mad. The bone ripped through the skin, blood gushing.
Hands grabbed at him from all sides. Some pulled his hair. Another had him under the neck, heaving back. Still others clawed at his wrists, prying de Cherge free of his grip. He felt the pain and pull of it, but his body didn’t respond; instead, once his hands were free of de Cherge, they sought other opportunities. Whoever had their hand under his chin soon discovered what it felt like to have their hand locked, twisted, then broken at the wrist—the scaphoid process shattering like plaster from a wall.
The owner of the hand screamed and fell away.
Boy Scout surged to his feet, twisting around and gripping the arm of the hand that was in his hair. He caught the arm between his own left arm and body, then spun to his right, his weight and momentum ripping it out of the socket.
The owner of the arm screamed as well.
In fact everyone was screaming…
…FOR HIM TO STOP.
But whoever or whatever had him in its grip wasn’t ready.
The monks and nuns who had been previously gently eating were now standing, wide-eyed. Some had their fists balled, ready, or at least they thought, to fight. Others had their hands to the sides of their heads, as if the image of him was so unbelievable—which it was. Not a single person remained sitting. De Cherge and a pair of unnamed monks lay on the floor, each cradling the grievous injury Bo
y Scout had visited upon them.
He threw back his head and laughed.
But on the inside, he was ready to cry. He could only stand by, passive, as his body was turned into a violence delivery machine, his hands the lethal weapons they’d always been but without the governing mechanism that was his conscience. It was like being behind the wheel of a car careening through a crowd without being able to stop it, turn the wheel, or even bail out, which he would if he could. The claustrophobic emptiness of The White had never seemed so inviting.
Two monks ran at him.
Boy Scout grabbed one by the hair and used the man’s own momentum to hurl him past, where he tumbled to the floor and against a wall.
The other caught Boy Scout in the shoulder with a kick, but he was too slow in the retrieval.
Snatching the leg, Boy Scout brought his own leg up and then down at an angle on the inside of the monk’s planted leg, dislocating the knee in a sickening crunch. Not happy just to do some damage, Boy Scout brought his fist up and slammed it into the side of the knee of the leg he was holding. Then he let go, dropping the monk like a sack of trash.
Another monk came at him, swinging his fists like he knew how to use them.
Boy Scout stood his ground, his hands open and at his sides.
The monk struck him in the face with a right, then a left, then a right again.
Boy Scout’s head moved incrementally, but he made no notice of pain that blossomed with each blow.
The monk struck him again, flush in the center of his face.
Boy Scout felt a blinding hurt, then the warmth of blood as it cascaded from what was surely a broken nose, but he still made no move.
“Stop it! Stop fighting us,” the monk yelled.
Boy Scout didn’t miss the irony of the man’s statement as his body stood there doing nothing.
“Toz filk was filli gabuuk, ya kalbd,” Boy Scout said.
He recognized the Arabic, but didn’t understand the words.
The monk’s eyes narrowed, then he hauled back and delivered a punch that knocked Boy Scout down.
But he stood back up as if the blow hadn’t even registered, a pathetic, wild-haired version of the Terminator.
Boy Scout began to fight from the inside, but it was like fighting while floating in midair. He had nothing to grab, nothing to hold. The frustration of it was incredible. He’d been in his body for thirty-nine years and never once considered where his consciousness resided. But as sure as he knew he’d been mindjacked, he knew that wherever his consciousness was, the others were there as well. If he was in the cistern with the daeva, he’d have been able to enter The White at will and—
A thought occurred to him even as he was punched again.
He didn’t need the daeva to enter The White. The travelers inside of him hadn’t had the luxury of a daeva to help them transport. They’d entered it at different times and in different places. How had they gotten inside, then found him as he visited The White, then made it out? Was it something like this? Did they seek to leave their body and then get stuck in the nothing place, a sort of purgatory where the only thing you could control was your own visage? He felt violated; he didn’t want to lose his body to some other entity. They’d had their bodies. They’d had their chance. Through fate or consequence, they’d decided to leave theirs behind and he’d be damned if he’d let this being have his body.
And why had he stopped fighting?
Why was he just standing there taking a beating when he could easily—
Because the entity or whatever the fuck it was busy doing something else, which could only mean…
Boy Scout concentrated. He had no real idea what he was going to do. He’d never astral projected before, and he hadn’t ever really believed in it, but since he had at least three visitors inside of him, he could conveniently say that his situation had definitely changed. Not that he was actually going to astral project, but it was the only metaphor that he could think of for what he was trying to do.
He knew he didn’t want to return to The White, so instead he imagined the universe as the exact opposite. Black. A complete void of white without even a star to mar the Abyssinian universe he was attempting to create. Darker than dark. Blacker than black. A universe where nothing existed except himself, his place, and the core of his existence.
He blocked out sight and sound.
He blocked out the pummeling he was taking.
He blocked out the anxiety he felt and the fear he had that he’d never be free of this new, terrible existence.
The same concentration he’d once used to sight in on a target at nine hundred meters with a Barret .50 he applied to this moment, sighting in on nothing but the possibility that there was a place he could inhabit.
The same concentration he’d used when he was in a Close Quarters Battle stack, responsible for a single sector as they entered a room where he knew hostiles were and could only aim at a certain area, convinced that his teammates would have his back because they had the same training, he applied to this moment.
The same concentration he gave when scanning the side of the road for IED signs, he applied to this moment.
And he was there.
Or nowhere.
A universe of nothing but blackness.
The opposite of The White.
The Black.
And like in The Whitehe couldn’t see himself, at least not until he decided to will himself into a temporal existence. And even then, without a light source or a way to see, he’d never be able to see his own being. He just had to feel his way. He’d had the same problem moving in The White. Without legs and feet, how could he step? But he’d solved the riddle by merely willing himself forward, somehow moving without a sense of movement.
His sixth sense kicked in.
The feeling of being stared at.
The feeling of not being alone.
The feeling of a shape beside him in the dark.
He reached out with his mind and felt it… something pressing… something that had no give. He tried to push against it and felt it move. It grew larger and heavier. He pushed harder and it was as if a balloon popped. The smell of jasmine. A street scene from an Algerian market, basket weavers selling their wares beside a flower merchant. A sky going from gray blue to dark blue. The call to prayer in the voice of an old man, vibrato in its earnestness.
This, too, dissolved until there was less than nothing.
Then came lightness.
Piercing.
Blinding.
He blinked back tears as the light seared into him.
Then he realized that his eyes were open and he was no longer in The Black.
Preacher’s Daughter stood before him, confusion and anger on her face.
She brought her hand around and slapped him hard.
He felt it and it hurt.
She brought her hand around again and this time he grabbed it.
“Stop. It’s me,” he said.
“About damn time.” She looked around at the downed men and the scattered tables. “You certainly made a mess, didn’t you?”
Boy Scout sighed and realized that the simple motion of it made his face hurt. In fact, his face hurt just from doing nothing. But that didn’t matter. He was back. His body was his own. And for one incongruous moment, he was happy. So he smiled and in doing so, capped a chapter on his life that had been pure insanity.
Then he turned and felt the lights go out inside of him.
Chapter Three
Abbey Infirmary
THE SMALL, FOUR-BED infirmary was a busy place thanks to Boy Scout. When he woke up eighteen hours later, two of the monks he’d assaulted were in beds across from him. One was asleep, the clear plastic tube of an IV attached to his left arm, his right arm in a cast from hand to shoulder. The other was awake and regarded him with a smoldering anger. Both of his legs were in casts and slings that hung from the ceiling. The empty bed beside him had been pushed against the wall to allow de Cher
ge to be there. He sat in an arm chair, his right arm in a wrist-to-shoulder cast, cradled in his left hand.
Boy Scout felt like he was one big mottled bruise. His face was a cooked sausage and his chest and stomach ached from deep within. His lips were two dry twigs that gave way to the vast Sahara of his throat.
De Cherge handed him a glass of water.
Boy Scout took it and drank it slowly, his gaze steady on the one-time French Foreign Legionnaire turned Trappist abbot. When the glass was empty, de Cherge took it from Boy Scout and set it on the bedside table.
The act of adjusting to a sitting position made Boy Scout groan and grab for his stomach, but he pushed through and managed to do it without passing out.
“We took you for x-rays at Twin Peaks and they came back negative. No broken ribs and no internal injuries,” de Cherge said.
Boy Scout glanced once more at the other beds and polled his conscience. He’d done that. He’d put them here. He was pissed that his body had been used to deliver such violence—such damage. His anger was almost enough to overcome the shame he felt for doing what he did even if he wasn’t in control when it happened.
“How are they?” he asked, staring at the monk who stared back as if he wanted a rematch.
“Brother Frievald had a bad reaction to the anesthesia they used when they went to repair his shattered wrist. He’s going to be fine, but they are keeping him under until his heart rate and vitals return to normal. Brother Khost has about a fifty percent chance of walking again. You dislocated both of his knees. One was only a subduction, but the other was a complete dislocation including tearing the patella tendon.”
“And you?”
“Complex fracture of the radius. I’ll be fine. I’ve had worse.”
Boy Scout nodded and lowered his head. “Of course, you have. You do realize that it wasn’t me, yes?”
“As I understand it, after discussing your condition with Madam May, one of the entities inside of you was able to take over. But it was pretty plain to me when we were fighting that it wasn’t you.”