Twenty minutes later, Logan was pressed up against the cold stone wall of an alleyway. Red emergency lights from an ambulance parked in front of Jean Grey’s apartment flashed across him as he watched paramedics emerge from the building carrying a stretcher.
The leader of the assassins had managed to lose him like he was a rank amateur. Given his injuries and the amount of poison in his system, it shouldn’t have come as any surprise. The rest of the cadre had gone up in smoke by the time Logan’s rage burned itself out somewhere on the Lower East Side. Afraid of what he might find if he went back, he had lingered on a rooftop there for a few minutes. At least it stopped raining.
Now, Logan watched silently as the two stretchers were loaded into the back of the ambulance. Knight was on one, conscious, and talking to the paramedics as she was loaded into the ambulance. Logan could just make out the exchange, Jean exhibited every sign of a severe reaction to poison, but the toxin seemed to have mysteriously burned itself out of her system. Knight claimed she could not account for this unusual reaction. She was relieved to hear that her roommate would recover in time.
Logan slumped against the wall. The enormous energies contained in Grey’s body had saved her, as his own mutant healing ability had saved him—though just barely.
His relief dissolved quickly into shame and regret. All the strength drained out of his battered limbs. In his long, violent life, he could not remember ever being so completely exhausted.
The paramedics closed the doors of the ambulance and it pulled slowly out into the street. Logan looked on helplessly as it passed by the alley, splashing through a puddle at the curb. The spray of water spooked a group of pigeons on the sidewalk. They scattered, rising up in a cloud of fluttering wings while the red lights of the ambulance swept away, receding out of sight.
The silence that followed was broken only by the slow sound of Logan’s breathing. He leaned his head back, and for a long time gazed numbly into the empty darkness overhead. Slowly at first, but then with increasing consistency, it started to rain.
He pushed away from the wall and steadied himself on his feet. As the shower became a downpour, he took a last look back at the apartment. Then, hunched over against the weather, Logan turned around and silently walked away down the alley.
The Worst Prison of All
C.J. Henderson
“That bald cripple ... he’s the one.”
It was a whisper, low and dark and promising violence, a grim breath of air formed a thousand yards from the ears of the man it labeled. The speaker’s intended target could not hear the words, of course. The noise of the street—people squawking over the price of vegetables, greeting friends, hailing jitneys, jostling and laughing their way through the dry and baking morning— reduced everyone’s auditory range to mere inches. Luckily, the target did not need to rely on such a minor, inadequate sense as hearing.
His name was Charles Xavier. Bald and thin, a figure of powerful shoulders and bent, crushed legs, he had come to the city of Agadir in southern Morocco for the Moslem festival of Achoura. It was a day of fasting and honoring the dead marked by masked carnivals and fireworks. Being attacked by a half-dozen men, however, was not usually a part of the itinerary.
A smile—part curiosity, part pity—-disrupted the normally straight line of Xavier’s mouth. A segment of his brain filtered the different impulses swirling in the auras of the men waiting to pounce upon him. Although he could not see them, he could feel their presence quite clearly, their attention linked to the energies of the speaker, his attention still piercing the air, stabbing outward directly at what he only thought of as “the bald cripple.”
Interesting, thought Xavier. They do not even know who I am. Or why they are about to attack. This is not their idea.
Intrigued, Xavier decided to take a moment from his passage through the colorfully festooned side streets of Agadir to investigate what was happening around him. Turning his wheelchair, he propelled himself straight toward his would-be attackers. His scan of their brains’ motivational centers had found them devoid of purpose. They were being manipulated by some unseen force—one even Xavier could not sense clearly. Not yet.
I’ll need a focal anchor, he thought, still wheeling himself toward those who would murder him. Scanning the simple forms of the third
dimension all about him with only his eyes, he found nothing that suited his need.
Buildings, merchant’s stalls—too stationary, uncaring, cold. Cars, passersby—not stable, uninterested, transient. Then his eyes struck the little girl. And her toy.
“Let’s go.”
The half-dozen thugs stepped free of the shadows, out of their alley, their movements quick and precise—carefully guided by an extra hand.
Throw it.
The girl hurled her ball as ordered. The thick, hard rubber sphere rolled through the eighteen-and-a-half feet of space separating its owner from Xavier. He raised his hand to intercept the flying toy, positioning each finger carefully.
At the same time that one tiny segment of his brain occupied itself with catching the ball, another debated what to do about the men approaching him. They had dashed from the alley with the speed of hungry cats—their hands filled with blades and clubs, their eyes locked. Their wills were things of iron resolve. The cripple had to be destroyed. Killed. Beaten. Bloodied. Smashed. Annihilated.
But, Xavier again noted with interest, they don’t know why. They ’re not even actually aware that they ’re attacking.
A thousand options lay before Xavier. Even as he had mentally commanded the girl to throw her ball, he realized he could do anything to the men he wished—reduce them to mental children, terrorize them by making them see monsters, send them to turn themselves in to the police, fry their neural circuits, cripple them with strokes—for one with the bald man’s vast mental abilities, the list was virtually endless. But, knowing they were under the control of another, he merely threw forth a simple mental command into each of their brains.
The flying ball neared the zenith of its arc, hanging in the air in gravity-destroying triumph, resisting its inevitable capitulation.
The men stumbled into each other, their brains freed of the controlling fingers snaking into them from the unknown.
As the girl watched her ball, her unblinking stare still in its first second, as the men took control of their brains once more—the clouds blown clear from their minds—Xavier left his hand poised to catch the ball while he mentally threw himself outward through the depths of his fathomless consciousness.
The mental dagger he had launched at his attackers had neatly cleaved the ethereal binders linking the six to that which had possessed them. In a flash, Xavier’s astral presence followed the severed strands back to their source. He found their owner waiting. It was a vast thing, stretching for miles through the twisting nether spiral.
“Well done, meat thing. Well done.”
Xavier floated in the swirling fling of an unending dreamscape. The void pulsated, a limitless abyss of inexplicably colored twilight, one filled with locomotions determined not by gravities but through their relationships with the cacophony of discordant sound that leeched in from the edges of one’s consciousness.
Xavier had been there before. Any of sufficient mental power could have traced the ethereal wisps of control back to the nowhere between the dimensions where he now faced his unknown foe. Over the millennia the pulsating emptiness had been known by many names—limbo, Erebus, Tophet, Gehenna, Avemus, a thousand more. It was, simply, that segment of eternity where those without power waited. And from where those with power struck.
“What are you?”
“I am Gol-shenthu, the Forgotten One. Which is my preferred condition.”
“I asked not your label,” said Xavier. “What syllables you attach to yourself are of no consequence to me. 1 asked ‘'what are you?’ Now answer.”
The massive shape shifted, colors jumbling discordantly along its shimmering frame. Angles boiled
along the surface of the thing, jutting, then recessing awkwardly. After a millisecond of eternities, the creature released a handful of words into the ether.
“I am known by many names to your like. The thought of me has shaken the logic of your realm, leaving those who would describe me lost in the contradiction of dreadful joy.”
Xavier created a noise with his mind which translated in the silent world of sheer thought as a derisive sneer. The sound was a lie, however. The bald man could sense unimaginable power within the horrid bulk warping inward on itself before him. A score of different sections of his brain all analyzed the situation into which he had been drawn, instantly informing him that he had stumbled across a being of limitless strength.
“To know me is to die,” said Gol-shenthu, “and yet, not to know me is to have never lived.”
Feigning indifference to his host’s posturing, Xavier told it his own theory. “Allow me to differ. You are nothing more than a common demon. Specifically, a vampire. Aggrandized by the ease with which you have snared your victims for so many years, you now think of yourself as some great and fearsome godling, instead of the licker of carrion that you are.”
Xavier felt the void heat all about him. The irridescent, prolately spheroidal form of Gol-shenthu boiled, the chaotic geometry of it splintering and re-forming a thousand times. Crackling sound shattered against the color of the massive beast-thing. All the time, Xavier’s astral form hung still in the great black nothing, waiting for the confrontation he could sense growing in dark waves.
“And I will tell you what you are, charlesxavier.” The voice sliced cruelly through the bald man’s brain.
(In the third dimension, the red rubber ball toppled past the zenith of its arc, hurtling forward toward Xavier’s outstretched hand.)
“You are a tired and wretched creature” said Gol-shenthu., “You watch life while others live it. From the confines of your chair. Your feeble transport. Your prison.”
Xavier smiled once more. “I float the cosmic fibers, as do you. I do not envy others any more than I would wish for them to envy me.” “You lie,” insisted the pulsing maelstrom. “You have the ability to fuse with the In Between for a moment here or there, but this is not your home. Your home is disabled, a maimed and enfeebled sack of flesh and fluids that binds you to your self-propelled wheelbarrow. I live here, free and magnificent, grand and alive and immortal. But not you.” The atmosphere shuddered. A blistering noise ran across Gol-shenthu’s surface, a wet concordance feigning disinterest as it sneered, “You, despite the powers of your mind, can never be as long-lived as I. You will always remain a helpless prisoner of your lame flesh, forever hindered by your useless legs.”
Xavier’s mind split for a moment—part keeping a watch on his opponent, part slipping into memory. In the swiftest of moments, all the relevant portions of his life passed through his mind’s eye in millisecond splinters, all of it tossed forth so that he might prove or disprove the horror’s accusations.
For a moment Xavier saw his parents again, Brian and Sharon. He saw himself playing ball with his father, running through the yard with his mother. He saw his college years, enriched by the cheers of his fellows as he brought his alma mater trophy after trophy. Running races, playing football, he was unbeatable, his considerable mental powers always allowing him to know what his opponents’ next moves would be. His tour of duty as an infantryman had seemed charmed, again due to his heightened senses.
And even when he lost the use of his legs, he had been living life to the fullest he had ever known. Traveling in Tibet, he had reached a mysterious walled city in the shadow of the Himalayas. There he had encountered a terrible dictator known only as Lucifer. Leading local rebels through a secret tunnel his mental powers had discovered, Xavier had freed the local countryside from the grasp of the monster who had conquered it. Unfortunately, his reward for his efforts had been to end trapped beneath a massive slab of stone, dropped on him by the fleeing tyrant. The locals managed to free him, but not before his legs had been crushed and mined beyond all hope of repair.
“I have preyed on the mental energies of your type for centuries,” sneered the horrid bulk of the Forgotten One. “For ages I sustained myself on regular mortals. One brain at a time... so slow, so little return for my efforts. More energy was used to consume them than was gained in their consumption. But then, meat like you began to be bom.”
“Lucky you,” answered Xavier.
“Yes, exactly so,” the thing replied. “You mutants, bursting with energy, so much more delicious, so much more nourishing, satisfying . . .”
“We do our best,” said the bald man, sarcastically.
“You do, indeed,” the Forgotten One said. “And you—you, especially—you will be the best of all. Your mind is excellent, brimming with energy, enough to last me for centuries. My consumption of it will allow the time I have never had to find others like you, to build reserves of power so that I might finally rend the wall between our dimensions, that I might finally be able to feast in earnest.” ,
“And, I’m just supposed to sit back and allow all of this?” asked Xavier in a measured tone. “You may remember, I dispatched your minions without any real effort.”
“Of course you did,” responded the boiling mass of ectoplasm hanging in the void before Xavier. “You were supposed to.”
And then, the first obsidian tentacles wrapped themselves around the surprised mutant.
“They were but a tap on your shoulder to capture your attention, a signpost to bring you to me.”
Xavier evolved his astral form, driving spikes outward from his form into Gol-shenthu’s appendages. The thing noticed a moment of pain, but manipulated its tendrils so that they slid around its opponent’s defenses. Xavier raised his body temperature to solar levels, but the creature instantly channeled the frigid atmosphere of the void between itself and its victim.
“To struggle is futile,” admonished Gol-shenthu, its thick words ringing within Xavier’s brain. “And besides, why would you even bother to? A captive to limiting flesh, locked in the terrible prison of your ruined body—why would you ignore the chance to free yourself, to join me as I first conquer all of this space, and then your own?” “Never!” Xavier’s thought echoed through the miles of Gol-shenthu, rattling the corpulent form violently enough to shake scales loose from its shimmering hide.
The mutant reached within himself, first steeling his astral form, then exploding it outward. His spirit form segmented into a thousand different sentient entities, all of them propelled at blinding speed throughout Gol-shenthu’s form. The massive vampire barely seemed to notice the attack.
(The red rubber ball rolled onward through the air, still following its predetermined arc, hurtling ever onward toward the same outstretched hand.)
“Foolish meat,” whispered Gol-shenthu. Its essence congealed around the thousand bits of Xavier’s astral self. “You have no choice. Give in, cripple. Spare yourself more of the pain you have lived with all your life. Give in.”
Xavier’s consciousness sharpened the edges of all his random aspects, slicing through his enemy’s hardening body. At the same time, memory flooded him as well, admitting the truth in and yet also rejecting Gol-shenthu’s words. The bald man remembered his life after he was freed from Lucifer’s trap. For months after his return to America he had sulked and despaired, spending half his waking moments enraged, the other half in tears.
“Your premise comes close to reality,” Xavier said, feeding the grasping thing surrounding him. “Before my accident I had been on top of the world—young, wealthy, gifted with powers beyond all reason. Whatever I desired became mine.”
(The red rubber ball crawled nearer to the beckoning fingers. The blink the little girl had begun when she threw the ball finally finished itself, her eyelids slamming against one another, slamming their owner into darkness.)
“But then my golden life was stripped away. I was left crushed and broken—no longer a star, an a
ttraction. The admiration that had flowed to me in rivers soured into pity. I could not ran, walk along a wooded path, swim the oceans, climb the stairs. My life was over.”
Xavier could sense his enemy’s interest in his words. After a hundred thousand centuries of solitude, the peaks of the thing’s ability to amuse itself had worn away to featureless planes. Splitting the tiny fragments of his astral self into even smaller sections, Xavier burrowed even further into the bulk of his foe.
“But then, I found that my legs had been holding me back, diverting me from my true destiny. As the joys of self-pity waned, I discovered the true power of my mind. Forced by fate into my prison, I effected my escape across the floodplane of dimensions outside my own.”
(Less than a yard from the outstretched fingers, the ball rolled onward. The little girl’s lashes began to separate.)
Gol-shenthu listened to Xavier’s words, all the while grasping at the elusive motes of the bald man’s astral form. The shining particles flashed from point to point within the pulsating horror’s bulk, dodging wildly as the thing grasped at their enervating essence. By constantly shrinking the fragments’ size, Xavier had been able to elude the Forgotten One’s salivating grasp. But, the reductions had also reached a near subatomic size. Another subdivision would render him infinitesimal, incapable of ever escaping Gol-shenthu’s personal gravity.
(Thirteen inches from the rigid hand, the red rubber sphere forced its way forward, shattering the air, streaming onward toward the desperate fingers.)
• “There is no escape for you now, charlesxavier. In your fear you have digested yourself for me. You are mine.”
“You overestimate yourself, monster,” answered ^Xavier. His individual astral specks clawed frantically as the grasping geometry of Gol-shenthu cornered them one by one. Ignoring the impending doom surrounding him, the bald man blasted the monster with his words.
“You speak of prisons, but you are so blinded by your own inadequacies that you do not see the bars holding you in and down and back—bars far more capable of restraint than those of my mere ‘meat prison.’ ”
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