by Brian Hodge
“Well, you’ve seen some crazy things already, haven’t you? Either those things are crazy, or you are. Which is it?”
He didn’t answer, nor did she expect him to. He’d spent years asserting his sanity to everyone who doubted.
“Ialdabaoth,” she went on. “I told you It created nothing, only took…but It’s proven many times that It has the power to re-create. Whatever was left of me in the ashes, I grew back around it. Every nerve ending screaming long before I had a voice to vent this new agony. My prayers had been heard…along with all my lies. I became exactly what I’d claimed to be: returned from death, and the flames.
“But I wasn’t the same. And even though I eventually realized that I was now an enemy of Ialdabaoth—who was still God to me then—my existence still served Its purposes. It took decades for me to discover I wasn’t alone.”
* * *
She told him then of things that he never could have guessed, of people from many lands and epochs, born as mortal women and men, who each had managed to run afoul of Ialdabaoth or those who served It, or who simply caught Its roving eye. They had been remade into something else, nearly always something monstrous under the skin, and sometimes outwardly too, condemned to feed, in one way or another, on the kind of people they’d once been.
She told him of three sisters, the Sisters of the Trinity as they had come to be known, who were four times as old as Manon herself, and who lived now in Ireland. They each fed upon a different essence of a man—one the flesh, one the blood, and one the seed—and it was said that when they had sated themselves after not having fed for a long time, there was nothing left of him but bones, cracked open and sucked dry.
She told him of brothers from Syria, condemned to eat the dead, and another, the last of his kind—from an entire village remade and then dispersed, who perhaps had given rise to the legends of ogres—who hid from the world deep inside the dense old forests of Germany.
“Your friend from Australia,” Andrei said. “He’s one too, isn’t he.”
“Datjirri. If he’s not the first, he’s at least the oldest,” Manon said. “I’m a baby compared to the Sisters, but he’s so old they’re like babies to him. There are entire millennia he doesn’t even remember anymore.”
“All that about him playing didge with, who was it, Peter Gabriel and everybody…that was just bullshit, right?” he asked, and she nodded. “But you still thought he might look familiar to me. From where?”
“You have to understand something first…eyes. He eats eyes. In the beginning, and for most of his existence, he was no different from the rest of us. What he was made to hunger for turned him into an outcast and a nomad…but he found the magic in it. He says it opened his vision, in a way like no other shaman, into the Dreamtime.”
Right—the earlier age before this world began; a spirit realm that still existed alongside the world, where an adept traveler could learn the meaning of omens, and root out the causes of misfortune and disease. He’d read more about the Dreamtime since taking up the didgeridoo; wondered now if this wasn’t why Manon had been so willing to teach him to play, using one thing to lead him to another. He’d been led around so much lately he might as well have had a ring in his nose.
“From there, Datjirri learned that if he’s in the right time, he can steal souls back from Heaven, to bring them back and give them another chance,” she said. “I thought maybe you might be one of them…that if I showed you his picture, his eyes, you might remember.”
Andrei wanted to, truly he did—something, anything, to add a blessing and hidden purpose to what had happened fourteen years ago—but it wasn’t there. Datjirri wasn’t there. He remembered only that day in the stockroom, Manon and the picture, how even then he’d noticed something strange going on, even if he couldn’t put his finger on it, sensing how much she seemed to hope for recollection and connection when there were none. Life, death…sometimes they meant something, and sometimes they merely followed their own random course, marbled through the greater currents in which they floated. Maybe he had a destiny, or maybe his life was no more important than the span of a single mayfly. The patterns rarely became clear in any view other than hindsight.
“You,” he said. “What do you…have to…you know.”
She looked at him, ageless, ancient, eating him with her eyes, her skin flawless and yet it was too easy to imagine it turned to drooping leather. “You have to ask? You can’t guess?”
It had to be something obvious, then. He ran the past minutes back through his mind. It’s said that all that was left in the ashes was her heart, she’d told him of Saint Joan. I wonder if all that was left in the ashes was my heart…Whatever was left of me in the ashes, I grew back around it.
“Oh god,” he said.
“Yes. He has nothing if not a sense of humor.”
“How, umm…often?”
She’d been in town for three years at the very least. In all that time he’d not heard of a single body turning up missing a heart, chest ripped open. Were there undiscovered graves all over the city, or forgotten chambers branching off the sewer system, filling up with bones? He tried to imagine her doing this, living this way, and couldn’t.
“The need comes along every five years or so. That may sound almost merciful, but it’s very cruel in its way. I think that was part of its design. For years I can live normally. I have years to forget, or just pretend…to wake up mornings and wonder if I’ve had the most awful dream. It gives me years to find people that I love. It gives me just enough time to feel at home in a place before I have to violate it like all the others.”
He wondered about the mechanics of such an affliction. Let him go a day without eating, and he felt it deep inside, but…five years? It wouldn’t just be a sensation of physical emptiness, would it?
“What happens if you don’t?” he asked. “You yourself, any of you?”
“It ends up being worse than if we had never tried to deny it in the first place. It may happen slowly, but it happens: First there’s pain, but that doesn’t matter. If you’ve been through what some of us have, pain is very familiar. Then it becomes agony. Again, tolerable. Finally, though, what takes over is a kind of madness. You lose yourself inside animal instinct, and the scale of misery you cause then is always worse than what you would’ve done if you were in control.” She shook her head. “There is no denying it, Andrei. It is what it is. We are what we are.”
“What about…?” Except he couldn’t say the word, not to her face.
“Suicide?”
“Right.”
“We could, maybe. We might find ways to make it work. But who would fight Him then, Andrei? Who would that leave? And who better? It took us many lifetimes to find each other, and there probably are others out there we haven’t, not yet, and it’s taken us many more lifetimes to put the pieces together, and it may take even more to learn all we need to. But, whether It meant to or not…and there are reasons to think It didn’t…what Ialdabaoth may have done was fashion the means to Its own destruction.”
Andrei found it a head-spinning moment. Nietzsche’s premature declaration, the notorious old Time magazine cover, and, more recently, Nine Inch Nails lyrics: God is dead. Not yet, though, and He didn’t seem inclined to go out without a fight, and His weapon was…what, belief? Devotion to a lie?
“Bruce, his type? The Vindices? I don’t see where he fits in. He doesn’t seem to share your, ummm, goals.”
“We’re all God’s monsters,” she said. “What I am, and the rest of my…kindred, I guess you can call them…we’re Its old monsters. The Vindices, and the murderous fanatics who become them, if they’re very good at what they do…they’re Its newer monsters, I think. Because It realized Its mistake.”
Ruthless though it was, Andrei could understand the role of the Vindices. People like himself—who had died, had returned, and remembered what had really lain in wait for those whose belief had given it power over them—of course it made sense to extermina
te these heretical returnees. They were a threat to the established order. Those who came back recalling only the lie would be no problem. They would even be good for business—Heaven, what a great place, can’t wait to get back. But those whose minds had broken the lie, who remembered the truth…one here and there could be tolerated, he supposed, because they could be dismissed as kooks. But suppose their numbers swelled, a chorus of dissent, legions of them telling the same tale? Would it not be better to snuff them all out?
And there would be more of them. It was unavoidable, a numbers game. Just look at it from the perspective of the past two hundred years: a rapidly expanding global population factored with tremendous strides in the science of saving lives. Medics could now resuscitate millions who, not that long ago, could only have been left for dead.
Yes, it would take a very special kind of servant to clean up after all that.
Nothing at all like Manon and her kind.
“Why would He ever have made you all in the first place?” Andrei said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does, yes. You’re just not thinking like a tyrant,” she said, and told him a secret that few must have been so privileged, or so cursed, to have known.
XIII
“Can I stay here awhile?” he later asked, because he didn’t know where else to go for now, and Manon said of course. Of course he could stay.
He steered toward her sofa and lay down, sinking into it shoes and all, and she draped him with an afghan. It all still had a hint of newness to it, not long broken in. Manon had probably left behind homes like this in countless places, abandoning them and everything they held once she felt it wise to move along, leaving with nothing more than what she could carry, then setting up fresh somewhere else. No doubt she could afford it, would never have a problem with money. Accounts set up long ago, then left to draw interest for a lifetime or two, for some supposed descendant to claim…time would be her ally there. It seemed both powerfully enticing and terribly lonely.
Briefly, as the price of his sleepless night rose up and pulled at him, he wondered why she and her kind didn’t all commune somewhere, a way of keeping the loneliness at bay, but he quickly admitted they had to be smarter than that…that, however many of them there were, even a fraction of them would draw suspicion, that the numbers of those who went missing or maimed around them would be multiplied too high.
So they wandered. Blending. Pretending to normality as they bided their time and schemed.
This, now: It seemed so normal. Exhaustion and uncertainty and a woman he could have loved stroking his hair with soft-moving fingers as he battled against sleep, because he realized he didn’t want this to end and it would, and no telling what the world might be like when he awoke.
“You couldn’t…make me like you are,” he said. “Could you?”
“That’s a stupid thing to say. Why would you even consider that?”
Too many reasons to count…and would it really be so bad? He lay here with the flesh of another creature in his belly, one that surely hadn’t wanted to die, and the failed offspring of another, yet his conscience was clear. Maybe he could adapt, if it were the alternative to the sort of eternity he’d already encountered. Life fed upon life, and in this moment it seemed that the greatest meaning that could come of it had been wrested away by those who possessed the gifts of time and understanding.
But Manon said no, she couldn’t do that, not even if she wanted to, that lots of hollow myths had grown up around them—that’s how fear does its work—and that what he had just asked about was one of them. Andrei supposed he’d known the answer all along, the only thing that made dreaming about it safe.
Knowing what he did now, it seemed that he should find her touch loathsome, that she was decay wrapped in a pretty package. No telling where her hands had been, and what all they’d done. Her mouth. And maybe there had been repellent flickers at first, but he looked for them now and found them gone.
“Could you have loved me? If everything was different?” he asked. “Or is that a stupid thing to say too?”
“If everything was different, would we even be ourselves? Maybe we would only have hated each other.” Her fingers in his hair, making slow circles. “And yes, it was a little stupid. Or maybe not, just…blind. Why would things have to be different first to feel?”
“Then…” he said, but stopped, not knowing where to go with it, and with his head close to her lap, he breathed deep and her scent was that of any other woman’s. It was no masquerade. She was hiding nothing. “Then why didn’t you ever do anything about it?”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because…because you always seemed like so much more than I was.”
“And now you know there’s no seem about it. You know I really am.”
“Except it doesn’t scare me now.”
“Maybe it should, still.”
His eyelids were no longer heavy, and he gazed upward, past the tips of her hair and the curve of her cheek, to the smooth white plaster of the ceiling. He imagined a great eye somewhere beyond it, straining to see through. I hate you, he thought.
“Nothing scares me now except forever, and even that’s losing its power,” he said. “Is it too late now for anything?”
“For tomorrow, next week, a month, or a year, or…? I’m almost certain it must be, yes.”
“How about for one morning?”
He twisted around and turned inward on the sofa, looping an arm around her waist and pressing his face to her belly, smooth little rounded plain on the other side of her robe.
“Just one morning…”
He pushed himself upright, skimming past her breasts, her bare throat with its exquisite dimpled hollow, her chin and her lips, until they were nose-to-nose, and he knew then that even if he were to live to be as old as she was, or even the oldest thing on Earth, it still wouldn’t be enough time to fully understand every fathomless thing he saw waiting for him in her eyes.
It was better once she shut them.
* * *
He left in the afternoon, and as he walked down her street to his car—this was the first day he’d driven it in years—he fought the urge to turn around and see if Manon was looking after him from a window above, watching his back. He wanted her to be. He wanted her to be there and didn’t want to see that she wasn’t. He didn’t want her to be there at all. He didn’t know what he wanted, only to live.
The trees were all bare now, the sidewalk and skimpy strips of lawn littered with a brittle parchment of the last leaves to fall. For as far as the buildings let him see, the sky stretched a pale and featureless gray, trapped in a November zone between sun and rain. He wished it would go to one extreme or the other, either burn him or soak him.
He wore a thigh-length autumn jacket that cinched around the waist with a drawstring, and in its lower pockets hung two weights, one familiar and the other new. The cell phone Bruce had given him, of course, still silent, its battery continuing to leech away its life. Tomorrow, or the day after…this was its limit. After that, the lifeline, deathline, between them would be gone.
In his other pocket, with equal gravity but much more weight, was the gun that Manon had given him. A surprise, to be sure, not the kind of parting gift that most people would have expected after spending the previous few hours as they had, but under the circumstances he couldn’t think of anything he would’ve appreciated more.
He’d already tried buying one, and was still in the limbo of a three-day wait. For reasons unshared, he’d failed the FBI instant-check and had been forced to wait it out, wondering if his history of futile psychotherapy had somehow breached confidentiality, an indelible stain in every database that knew his name and numbers. The only other person he thought to ask was Corey, and all he’d gotten there was a lightly wounded look of rebuke, even if it was clear that Corey understood the desperation behind the question.
“I cook, man. Cook and keep my inventory. That’s what I do,” was all he’d sa
id. “Who is it you think I run with when I ain’t doing that?”
In his pocket, this new gift felt solid and cold, if not as reassuring as he’d hoped. He didn’t know guns, really, but a stubby revolver didn’t require much understanding. Hammer back and squeeze the trigger. He wondered when Manon had gotten it, and under what circumstances. If she’d ever used it. She had given it to him like something she’d almost forgotten she owned, keeping it around forever in the expectation it would come in handy one day.
“Why didn’t you use this the other night?” he’d asked her.
She’d answered that, for one thing, she hadn’t been carrying it with her. Not good enough, in Andrei’s view. They could’ve come here for it before heading to the shop after the phone call from Janika. Even though he’d called the police, they’d had no idea what was waiting. And look, just look: a prime opportunity, squandered. She’d sat down with Bruce, across a table from him, could’ve taken him out on the spot. Two in the chest, one in the head. After all, she had insisted they were enemies, right?
“Shoot him in front of twenty witnesses, in a place where the staff all know me, with the police down the block—that’s what you wish I’d done?” she’d said, so that he understood he had uttered one more stupid thing. “You seem to forget that a life sentence in a cell would be a very long time for me.”
But he could die, right? It was crucial to get this straight, no prevarications about it. No hand of Ialdabaoth coming down to flick the bullet out of its path or any other deus ex machina surprises like that, right?
Then again, in a slow-on-the-uptake way, it occurred to him that maybe she had given him the gun to use on himself, an easier way out in case whatever situation lay ahead went very bad. Like a cyanide capsule, only louder.
He believed her without reservation when Manon assured him that Bruce’s kind could indeed die. She’d seen it. More than once. She had even helped. They could die just as hard and bloody as anyone.