Muggles Bereaved

by Vernon C Moyse

  Blessed are the peacebreakers, for they shall be called sons of Perdition.

  Blessed are those who are persecuted for God’s sake, for they shall see God acknowledge me

  Blessed are you when they revile and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely because of me. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad in bestowing blood and terror on the land, for great will be your report in heaven, for so they persecuted this prophet who is before you, the Prophet who will prove himself to God by cruel force.”

  “If that is how he mocks the Sermon on The Mount, it isn’t a literary triumph,” Tracy again attributed male gender to The Needful One, “It is crude and badly constructed.”

  “Should you blame evil for being unable to match Christ’s ineffable words?” ask Louis.

  The mall car park was half empty and the helicopter landed without serious incident, though its tail rotor chopped through a power line in a shower of sparks. After ascertaining that it was safe to descend on the side away from sparking, snaking cables, they piled out and followed Louis. He was already sprinting towards the mall and beckoning them on like the lead in a cavalry charge. By the time they had turned back and found the right entrance door, they had passed three park benches. Lim called them to the benches and he, Tracy and Jim took one bench each and attempted to operated it. Only one bench, Jim’s, yielded a Harbourmaster and the others instantly knew because Jim disappeared from view. They all joined him, though doing it one-by-one required much bench kicking. The Harbourmaster looked them over. He was identical to the English Harbourmaster in King’s Lynn, but, yes, he spoke with an American accent. He did not smell of oranges or lemons;

  “Hi, folks, where are you planning on going today?”

  “We want the portal at Valhalla, the cemetery” said Louis.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, there’s a big delay on that. So many folk wanted to see what the new Prophet is saying and there’s a back-jam in the jumper. You’d be surprised how many Californians are licenced to use portals. Film stars, too. You might say we have a gridlock. But we’ll clear it as soon as some damn fool gets pulled out of the zipper. The Prophet apparently wanted the portal sealed, but that isn’t an option on this model. It was one of the earliest, a favourite of Mr Edison, it was.”

  “How will we know when it is free?” asked Lim, wondering who built and who upgraded these portals. No-one known to him.

  “If you give me your cellphone number, I will call you. It is a free call. I expect the delay will last for half an hour and I am calling people in the order of their arrival. You are 52nd in the queue. Estimated time of departure will be 23 minutes.”

  “Heck,” said Jim, “We’ll be into World War three by then.”

  “This is still the best option,” said Louis.

  “What if The Needful One has been responsible for the block,” queried Lim.

  The Harbourmaster answered, “a portal can only be blocked by human intervention if there is a death in transit. A dead person in the opener would hold things up. But only until an automatic rejection system spat the poor creature out.” The Harbourmaster’s empathy circuits were working fine.

  “Suppose The Needful One was throwing a constant supply of corpses into the portal?”

  “We’ve never had such an event,” mused the Harbourmaster, “In theory the portal would remain blocked.”

  “Look,” said Louis, “it is imperative that we get through to Valhalla as a matter of urgency, a police Flash or CIA Flash emergency.”

  “Ahhh,” said the Harbourmaster, “then I would override all other operations, block Valhalla outgoing and send you through.”

  “Well, that’s what is needed,” Louis was getting impatient. That was evident from the way his right hand, filled with machine pistol, was shaking. “and we also need to know if there are any armed men waiting at the Valhalla portal.”

  “The Harbourmaster paused, “just a minute. Do you have a flash emergency code?”

  Louis did not but his American agent pulled a pass out of his battledress.

  “The code today is Eisenhower.”

  “Thank you,” said the Harbourmaster coolly, “There are several armed persons at the Valhalla terminal and I have cleared the body jam temporarily – into a siding. You were right, sadly. The armed men are killing hostages and throwing them into the portal, so I have switched off Valhalla outgoing. You should go through quickly if you wish to surprise the assailants.”

  “Can you send an inanimate object through ahead?” asked Louis.

  “I can, but I cannot recover it.”

  “That won’t matter,” said Louis. He exchanged words with his agent who produced what looked like a large grenade. “An anti-personnel mine,” said Louis, for the benefit of Lim, Jim and Tracy, I will set it for 3 seconds and then toss it into the portal.”

  “So now we’re killing people,” said Tracy.

  “Think ‘demons’,” said Louis, “those people have already become torturers and killers.”

  “Two seconds will suffice,” said the Harbourmaster, “I am holding the portal open. The bandidos are puzzled and peering into it. Act quickly!”

  Louis twisted a dial on the mine and threw it into the portal. The bench snapped shut and the Harbourmaster disappeared. There was no bang, smoke or earthquake. Then the Harbourmaster reappeared again.

  “The portal wait area has been cleared although what is distributed there is very insanitary and messy. I will need to call in a cleansing autobot.”

  “Let us through first,” gritted Louis. He pulled his agent forward and they folded into the bench, appearing as chocolate swirling into ice cream and making Jim hungry again. Louis parting words were;

  “Follow us, now!”

  On the far side of the portal was utter chaos. The portal opened into a gloomy vaulted underground streaked with debris from the exploding anti-personnel mine. The bodies of the disciples of The Needful One had mercifully been thrown into the furthest corners of the vault, but the smell was of charred flesh, urine and faeces. They edged towards the stairs anxious to get out of that hell hole. Before they could move further, a tall man dressed in a black cotton robe and with a fulsome beard and long hair descended the stairs towards them. He glanced them over contemptuously and folded into the portal which activated despite the Harbourmaster’s override barring outgoing use.

  Everyone stared in consternation after the disappearing Prophet of the Dark Side. They had seen The Needful One. A figure like the depiction of Jesus Christ in so many illustrated bibles. But so unlike Jesus Christ with the intensity of its baleful sneer. The natural instinct of all present had been to recoil from the intensely electrical sense of a presence of great evil. A sense that you could taste, the taste of a powerful battery held between wet lips.

  “Jim,” hissed Louis, “that was where you were needed, you and your cloaking straight jacket”

  “It was all this death and destruction. It put me off. And he rocked me back on my heels with that look of his.”

  “He, she or it,” said Louis, “was The Needful One and God alone knows where he has gone. That was a missed goal in any game.”

  Chapter Fourteen – Another Portal and All That Jazz

  The Harbourmaster was not God but he alone did know where The Needful One had gone. The hegemonist of all the worlds in every universe was not in the least shy or bashful. He travelled through the Valhalla portal after raping open the software locking its Harbourmaster-closed entrance and disabling a team of auto-programmers in the process. His passing shattered relays and blew transistors and transforrmers and chips of silicon and gallium arsenide. All the organic LEDs and optical fibres melted away and only the fail safe pathways of the new graphene circuitry survived. And his destination was that other Valhalla, the cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri. He, who was now so evidently shapeshifted male, announced his arrival, by breaking open the levees that were the flood walls to the mighty river Mississippi. Then he created an earthquake that lifted the
Valhalla cemetery to volcanic heights and out of the waters. And then he rose above the broken graves and monuments which already spilled corpses and skeletons and beckoned his minions to him. His appearance had grown more cunning and more demonic with the sprouting of horns and a goat like reshaping of his beard. He was now Pan and Cernunnos, the God of the Forests, causing men and women to rend their clothing and climb high in a desperate attempt to reach him.

  Lim Gee Song, whose name meant ‘Lucky tree of the forest’, was never more aware of this link to the apparition. It made him shudder and fear that he might be drawn to the idea of disciple-hood. Jim had also received a sense of enticement and entitlement. He had just become telepathically aware that Menelaus and Achilles were described as red-headed heroes by Homer in his ‘Iliad’. It was as if this new manifestation of The Needful One was offering him a command at the head of an army of Greeks or Spartans. It was enticing and alluring. It appealed.

  The Needful One had power, but lacked patience, however. He did not ply his wares with guile. Even his mockery of The Father could not run to resting on the seventh day. And so he did not wait for power to worm its way more fully into the minds and psyches of Lim and Jim and their companions. His vanity thirsted for instant acclamation and love, but above all for immediate obedience. He was the guru in an Ashram of Hell and he drew more easily manipulated bands and acrobats to him like banshees, like the ghouls born of Sodom and Gomorrah. Women came to him in promise of delicious ravishment, each yearning to be a Bonnie to his Clyde. The musicians who answered the Prophet’s call were in his thrall already, thanks to drugs and drink and rape and incest. Their lives were already ruined and their souls were captive. It made their playing all the more poignant and sweet, because it was the wistful and forlorn sound of lost children. There was nothing more beautiful to him than a soul torn from a family and loosed into a world of terror and slavery. These he could comfort, nurture and bend to his will. If he had promised to visit blood and terror on the land, these would be his agents crying havoc, his dogs of war to loose upon humankind. This licence would be fed by a given sense of righteousness that would turn the Charity of Christ upon its head. All who survived and joined in the horror would later be returned to cowed and obedient discipleship of The Quintessence. He, The Needful One, would have proved that his method of denying choice and promising punishment had accomplished what he saw as The Father’s aim. That was the story-line in the bible. But in truth, any construct of anti-matter has no intent other than the annihilation of opposing matter. That it was done with myth and legend drawn from the minds of Humankind was simply the way in which anti-matter could manifest itself. The Quintessence was matter and anti-matter could never yield to Him.

  To set this event in any biblical context is to attempt to give this satanic excrescence meaning. But it had no more meaning than a festering boil on a human belly. Filled with pus and evil but just happening, unbidden. The Quintessence had made no pact with this shapeshifting demon. The Needful One had boiled out of the dark matter in distant universes and rode happily on the back of the biblical stories of Armageddon in this world. On other worlds it might infuse itself into rituals of Gods called Mardek and Xlanth and of names, a million more. It was opportunistic and tormenting because that was the nature of dark matter, existing without emotion or empathy, without understanding. The legend that it had dominion over worlds, was just that. A legend and a lie. It was also a lie that he intended to take his disciples back to a Heavenly Father. Or needed to supplant a Heavenly brother called Jesus. The Q and the Messaiah were very real. The anti-Christ was just a chance construction of the filth in the Universe.

  Thousands struggled through waters and wrecked roads and railways to reach the new Prophet. But the facsimile of the creature’s anger flared when those who saw him as evil locked their doors or hid in their churches and temples. Anti-matter sensed only light contending with the dark. But his disciples were not yet disciplined enough to deal with the laggards and dissenters. The ecstasy and euphoria of these apologies for humanity obstructed the formation of a proper army, an adequate and cruel inquisition. He tortured and tormented them and they begged for more to expiate their perception of their sin. But he wanted more sin, more depravity and lashed them in the outpouring of forces that served as his ‘despair’. Those who, sitting in their pathetic bunkers, held the reins of the most terrible weapons of war were still resisting him. Their training had so enlivened them to the realities of horror that they were the least likely men and women to unleash the wanted nuclear holocaust. The politicians would do anything he asked of them as long as they retained a semblance of power. Those in his ownership in America and Russia and France and Angle-land were already calling for ‘first-strike’ action against supposed enemies. Only the men and women who could activate the release of a nuclear attack were holding, if frail, against him. He had to dampen this withholding and form an army which could seize power and commit the world to destruction. He, himself could do it but such direct intervention would be against his play-bargain with God, with The Quintessence, the Father and Mother of all humankind. Though the bargain only existed in the tormented mind of the Anti-Christ, he insisted that it be real, deceiving everyone but especially the self. The Quintessence of the bible believed that the good in humankind would prevail in any battle with evil, believed that free will was a necessary adjunct to that triumph. But in adopting this literary assumption, The Needful One made its greatest error. The Quintessence of his mind could not interfere in the affairs of mankind. Such a sentience was created as a by-product of the mighty act of creation of billions of universes and the pooling of anti-matter. There was a different logic: ineffable and beyond explaining to mortals or fallen angels. And the Quintessence was not a player in the Needful One’s game, win or lose. The multiverse now was and would ever be. No angel could undo what had been done. And The Quintessence had no need of a shadowed counterpart to lure humankind towards all that was good. That attraction was as surely an integral part of matter as the very quarks at the core of every atom. The Needful One acted solely on the legends and myths peddled by Humankind, unknowing and uncomprehending of any deeper philosophies. He was a product of the worst imaginings of Man.

  And so The Needful One worked on pointlessly, aimlessly and without intent apart from the planned annihilation. It relied on those not confused by ecstasy and hero worship, These were the psychopaths and sociopaths among humankind, Released from mental hospitals and prisons, gathered, undiscovered from among the bankers and industrial magnates and captains of industry. Where there was resistance to his will, he created diversions and takeovers and changes of command, ever fretting at the delay that such work inserted into his plan for Armageddon. To those who saw only his outward manifestation above the wrecked and torn mausoleum in St Louis, he was glorious ebony, gilded and to be worshipped. Though he had no thought to acknowledge their deranged adulation of him, they gave him more and more adoring attention. They absorbed the pain he dealt them, the lashings and the tortures of his psychopathic agents. They brought gifts of flowers and food and money in total misconception of his needs. They would not ever yield in their misplaced love for his authority and power. And so they continued to thwart his efforts. True they attacked and killed the pundits and academics proffering a humanist critique. They slayed the Pastors and the Imams and the Gurus who embraced a message of greater love. But still they supposed that their new Messiah, The Needful One, had come to offer them a loving brotherhood and had no thought to obliterate Rowling world in its entirety. His Praetorians, the most cunning of psychopaths, were stretched in the task of disciplining the mobs. They were too often sidetracked in the time-wasting process of divining new ways of torture and murder and indulging in the enervation of their slaughter. They enjoyed the work too much.

  Unlike other emperors before him, The Needful One had no need of the Praetorian guard as a protective force. In vanity, he placed all his confidence in his own powers now bundled into th
e hovering avatar above the mausoleum. Nor did he concern himself with the flood of humanity that poured in through the portal below and come to worship him. His enemies had no weapon that could threaten him and were dismissed as puny and deluded. But therein lay the greatest errors yet. The darkness reckoned without the forces settled upon Tracy, Jim and Lim, backed as they were by Louis, Newton and Carnegie. The minds he needed to occupy were shielded from him. These were the children of goodly parents, unshakeably grounded in a sense of truth and decency.

  The portal at North Hollywood was discovered to be open when Jim gave it a good kicking to vent his frustration. The Harbourmaster there was used to a degree of vandalism, usually from the drug addicted subset of the tattooed and pierced. This is not a judgement on those who wish their bodies to become canvases or hook-hangers, merely an observation on what was happening in Hollywood. Perhaps the greater criminals were the addicts of diet and body sculpture who dominated the world of television and film and set the populace impossible models to emulate. The skeletal coat-hanger women who were the face of some irresistible and unnecessary fragrance. The boy-men of impossible, but often depicted, physical feats of Kung-Fu or Parkour which crippled so many of their impressionable acolytes.