by Max Hardy
I look at Jacob, at his still, quiet body. How can that be? He can’t even move, apart from dilating a pupil: on or off.
‘I know what you are thinking John. Jacob is ostensibly lifeless. He’s not. He’s just processing centuries worth of memories. That doesn’t happen in an instant. That takes time. It could take decades. But I believe that time will get shorter, in his children, then in their children. The other thing to understand is that he won’t have your current memories, only those that were in your DNA up to the point of conception, carried in the sperm that created him. But I have also found a way to get recent memories into him. A variation on the way that we are already able to put data into DNA. That’s why we are hooked up to him John, so that he will receive either yours, or my recent memories, whichever one of us happens to die first. So this is your final choice. Kill me, and your son will have my memories. Kill yourself, and he will have yours. How do you like the sound of becoming immortal John?’
Chapter 41
Skilful feet stride stealthily along the stone floored corridor, the line of ARO’s progressing in near silent synchronisation. The first officer holds up a hand, the trail slowing as he does, as he sees the entrance to the Chapel just to his right, the door slightly ajar. Cruickshank and Strange sidestep the line of ARO’s up to the front and step in at the side of the open door.
‘Voices.’ Cruickshank whispers, listening intently, holding a finger up to her lips in a shush.
‘How is that a choice? The second you die, the bomb will explode and we will all die.’ Saul’s voice booms in a contained echo.
‘John, Jacob and a bomb!’ Strange mouths over to Cruickshank as he raised two fingers, counting on his left hand.
‘Not if we reach the rapture before we die. And we will reach the rapture. You may be in agony John, but you are also sexually aroused. The chemicals in your body are mixing, your senses will start to heighten and your cells will start to ignite. The more pain we suffer, the more sexual pleasure we indulge in, the more our DNA will melt, breaking down the blockers that hold our memories. That happens first in the bone marrow, where the needles are secreted in our legs. When we hit the rapture, just at the point of orgasm and death, then the marrow will flow from us into Jacob. When it hits the needles in Jacob, the bomb will diffuse, and one of us, whichever is the first, will be immortal. How quickly do you want to die John?’ Adam revealed, a manic tone to his pained voice.
‘Adam? Why is he making threats?’ Cruickshank queried in confusion. Strange raised a third finger.
‘If it saves my son from your deity delusion, then right now. Just kill me Rebecca, kill me now!’ Saul screamed.
‘Four!’ Strange mouthed, raising a fourth finger, panic in his eyes, as he stepped towards the open door.
‘Stop Rebecca, don’t do it!’ Eve interjected forcefully.
‘Five!’ Cruickshank whispered, throwing out a hand to stop Strange progressing further. ‘I’m not having you get killed on me. We don’t know where the hell Gabriel is!’ Strange raised a fifth finger.
‘That’s all I needed to know Gabriel.’ Eve said calmly.
Strange and Cruickshank looked deep into each other’s eyes, realisation dawning on them both simultaneously. ‘Adam is Gabriel!’ they both whispered synchronously, Strange’s features becoming focused and alert. He turned to the ARO’s and addressed them quickly, with ruthless efficiency.
‘Five people in there. By the sounds of the echo in the voices, behind some kind of screen. There’s a bomb as well. It sounds like Adam/Gabriel is in control of that. Nobody sounds in a position to shoot at us. I want an arc of officers just inside the door, guns pointing into the room, but no firing, this is purely intimidation. He needs to know we are here.’ Strange relayed quickly. ‘On my mark: Go!’
Two by two the ARO’s lined up, then stormed into the Chapel, scything off left and right, rifles pointed straight ahead, focusing on the four visible people in the two glass cases. They formed an arc just inside the chapel door, leaving a space, through which Cruickshank and Strange entered, side by side, taking in the macabre vista in front of them.
‘Whatever the hell you are doing, stop, all of you!’ Strange ordered firmly, raising a hand in placation, eyes darting between the four people in the glass cases.
Adam’s features were half filled with confusion and euphoria in equal measures. His lips started to move, ready to address Strange, but he was distracted as Eve started to pull the tubes from his legs.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Adam spat at her, shaking in his restraints. ‘Do I have to remind you that there’s a bomb under Jacob. Pull one more of those tubes out and it blows!’ he threatened insidiously.
‘Go ahead, detonate.’ Eve replied calmly, panic entering the eyes of everyone looking over to her. Rebecca ran to the glass and started banging on it, pleading for Eve to stop. Saul started screaming likewise, trembling in his restraints. Strange started to stride toward the glass case, demanding the same. The ARO’s backed up, right into the wall of the room. Cruickshank stood stoically observing Eve.
‘You think I won’t! After everything you have seen me do, you are trying to call my bluff!’ Adam sneered in obvious apoplexy, pressing his thumb agonisingly into the button of the trigger in his hand.
‘I’m not trying to call your bluff. I’m just waiting for you to understand that yours wasn’t the last play in this endgame. I’m just waiting for your crazy, insular mind to realise who is standing in front of you.’ Eve relayed with serene composure as she pulled out the last tube and dropped it to the floor, the screams of everyone echoing around the room.
Adam looked furiously up at her, a crazed realisation overwhelming his face. He pressed the trigger, everyone’s screams stopping, replaced by silent dread.
Replaced by silence. No explosion, just silence.
All eyes turned to Eve.
‘Perhaps it’s time to introduce myself Adam. You know me well. I am Jessica Seymour. I am the Eve who has been part of this from the start and I will be the Eve to stop it all. All of your warped, barbaric ideology will be destroyed in the next ten minutes. All of our failings in letting you loose on the world will be redeemed too. I diffused the bomb Adam, and I am going to kill you.’ Eve said as she reached over Adam and started to dig her fingers into his chest, breaking the skin with her sharp nails, worming a thumb under the muscle, forcing it through to the bone of his ribs.
Adam looked down at her fingers inveigling their way under the skin, his features twitching, a shimmering of pleasure gleaming from his emerald eyes as Eve started to rip it open.
‘So you knew what I was up to? Killing me won’t make a difference. You do realise that. While Jacob may not get my recent memories, he still has all of our ancestral memories. He will still be the first of our line to achieve immortality.’
‘We suspected. We put plans in place to find out years ago, the very first time Gabriel appeared on the scene. Henry had a suspicion who it was and for a while, let you run free. We all regret that now. We recognise the Fallen Angels have become worse than every single one of the religious atrocities we have revealed, by allowing you to be created and by allowing you to wreak havoc on the world. That ends today. We end today.’ Eve replied with a quiet dignity. She reached a hand inside his ripped chest and circled bloody fingers around the bone of a rib and yanked hard, breaking it from its cage. Adam baulked in his restraints, stifling a scream, riding the wave of excruciating pain.
Strange knocked on the glass case frantically. ‘Eve, you don’t have to do this. Killing him won’t achieve anything, don’t sully your hands with his blood.’ he pleaded.
‘They already are Jeremiah, and the deaths of every single innocent Angel he has killed, or by proxy, made people kill.’ Eve responded sanguinely, then turned back to Adam.
‘This world should never have known your faith. It should never have needed to fear it. It won’t need to fear it anymore.’ Eve said, then thrust the broken rib deep into A
dam’s chest, straight through his heart. His body wracked in its restraints, blood spurting from his chest uncontrollably as his body breathed in the throes of death. He started to gag, the viscose liquid entering his lungs, seeping up his windpipe, filling his throat, spittling from his mouth as with one last gargling breath, life left him, dulling his emerald eyes.
Eve pulled the rib from his heart, holding it tightly in her hand, and turned to face Saul and Rebecca, her body covered in Adam’s blood. ‘We should have been welcoming you home, into the wings of the Fallen Angels, for bringing the first new child of an Angel into this world. Instead, we nearly killed you all. A belief that can do that to the very family it loves, is not a belief we wanted to be part of this world any longer. All of us, collectively, decided it was time to go: time for our last supper. The faith of the Fallen Angels ends here. Learn from our mistakes, tell Jacob all about those mistakes and bring him up to love the family he has, not the one that may come in our eternal tomorrow.’
Eve turned towards Strange, and walked up to the glass, placing a hand opposite his flat palm. ‘We drew them in because we needed them. We needed them to get to Adam. None of this was their doing. It was all us, The Fallen Angels. We will no longer stand in the shadows of our own God and let these atrocities prevail. We will no longer allow innocent Angels to bleed in the ignominy of our seed. This is where the Fallen Angels end.’
Eve took a step back and raised the bloody rib high into the air, grasping it in both hands. Her face was filled with an anguished sadness, as she looked around beseeching eyes, their agonising cries reaching her ears, flowing with the sorrow of her mourning tears. ‘Forgive us.’ she whispered, through teeth trembling with grief. Eve brought her arms down fast, the hands heading for her chest, the rib aimed true, ripping through her blouse, piercing her porcelain skin, breaking the ribcage, puncturing her already broken, bleeding heart.
Chapter 42
Zeros and ones. On or off. There or not there. That’s what we all start out as. That’s probably the only thing that Adam got right. Whether we were created by the cosmos, or made by our maker, it all comes back to either being there, or not there. It’s where we started with Jacob. All I saw in his beautiful emerald eyes was nothingness and desolation: the emptiness of forever. That started me on a journey back to my own childhood, my own rickety rooms and my own fear of being alone. But then in amongst a world gone mad all around us, he dilated a pupil, all by himself. There wasn’t just a zero any more, there was a one. There wasn’t just and off, there was an on. There wasn’t just nothing, now there was something. Something to live for.
And now there isn’t just zeros and ones. He can now control the length of his dilation and as a family, Rebecca, Jacob and me, we have learned Morse Code together, and we can communicate. He loves the water, we know that because he tells us. We are in the water now, in the clear blue, gently lapping shallows of Lake Garda, a cloudless sapphire blue sky wearing a dazzling golden sun encompassing our horizon. Jacob is floating on the surface, his body ululating with the waves, his pupils dilating madly, as his eyes tap out ‘…., .-, .--., .--., -.---‘ spelling ‘Happy’. Rebecca smiles radiantly. Her own hair is growing back and the scars on her body are starting to subdue. I am healing too. My arms came out of their casts just yesterday and the fingers are nearly there. Healed enough for me to paint at least. And lord, how I have painted. Every single conceivable view from the beautiful gardens of Eden out over the lake, to the mountains in the distance. My dark period is over. Now it is all light.
‘Time to come out now little angel.’ Rebecca whispers, leaning over Jacob so he can see her lips.
‘-., ---‘ , ‘No’ he replies.
‘Oh yes young man, you’ve been in here more than an hour.’ Rebecca chastises, light-heartedly. We float him into the shoreline and lift him out of the water and into his wheelchair. Rebecca grabs a towel from the back of the chair seat and starts drying him down.
We have told him about his family. About the Fallen Angels and where he comes from. He is inquisitive, and wants to understand, so we tell him as much as we can. He absolutely adores his other family as well. Especially because they bring him presents. Jeremiah and Gaynor have visited four times now in the space of a month and stayed for long weekends each time. Most of that time they have spent with Jacob, but we have made time to catch up on how the investigation is wrapping up in the real world, away from our heavenly haven.
Rebecca has had her conviction for murdering Michael overturned. Both of us have had charges for perverting the course of justice dropped. The Crown Prosecution Service concluded there was not enough evidence to charge Rebecca with the murders of Desiderata Bentley or George Darrie. All of the deaths got washed up in the wake of the Fallen Angels. All of the exposed murderers have now been convicted and are awaiting trial. Dozens of families have finally been able to lay their dearly departed to rest. It’s a closure, of sorts. It doesn’t stop Jerry and I grabbing a bottle of rum and speculating into the wee hours of the morning though. We are detectives. There’s never really closure. Our minds will always question and investigate and want to know more. What we are investigating at the moment is if there are any other branches of our family left out there alone in the world. We have searched all the Ennis files, and ones we found at Henry’s home, as well as those we found here in Eden, but so far, we haven’t found anyone else. We seem to be the last Angels alive. And because we are the last alive, we inherit all the family assets. Including Eden. When, and that is when, not if, we find others, this will be their sanctuary, as it is for us. A place to rest and recuperate, to experience the beautiful things in life, like floating on the lapping waves and seeing your son’s eyes smile, and to know that it is those things, that mean more than anything.
We reach the long patio outside of the villa and lift Jacob onto a laid out blanket, under the midday sun. I tuck Ian Bear into the crick of his neck and run a finger tenderly down his sun tanned arm, to his little hands.
A finger twitches on Jacob’s hand. My breathing stops, and I wait on baited breath, my senses becoming heightened. I check his pulse to see if it is dropping, I listen to his breathing to see if it becomes shallow, I smell his breath for burning chocolate, all in a split second, hoping to sense none of them, hoping beyond hope that this is his first natural movement. Hope is not as fragile as it used to be. I am still disappointed, but not desolate now, as the chocolate smell comes, and his breathing shallows and his pulse drops. He starts to fit.
His arms are shaking and I gently stroke my fingers up and down them, relaxing the skin. Rebecca does the same, measured concern in her smiling face as she looks down into Jacob’s open eyes.
‘Once upon a time, there was an old toymaker called Gepetto….’ she starts to tell him his favourite story, one hand now softly stroking his quivering head. I lie down beside him, gently singing into his ear ‘Go to sleep little boy, go to sleep. Let the sandman come and fill your eyes. Go to sleep little boy, go to sleep. Till the morning time and so to rise.’ over and over again, in a soothing lilting lullaby.
His legs are quaking uncontrollably now, his whole body in spasm, lifting his back off the blanket, spittle forming in the corners of his mouth. I grab the towel from just above his head and delicately wipe it away, still singing softly into his ear.
‘…someday, you will be a real boy…’ Rebecca continues as the apex of his fit hits, every limb fully extended and shaking, his head now lolling uncontrollably, while I continue to sing to him, both of us exuding a calm tranquillity, exactly what Jacob needs.
Slowly, the stuttering starts to ebb, and his limbs stop shaking. His torso stops bucking and the lolling of his head eases, then stops, looking toward me, every limb instantly becoming inert as the fit ends.
‘Hey son. How you feeling?’ I ask, looking deep into his green eyes, anxious to see his pupils dilate. They don’t move. I look over to Rebecca, a slight surprise joining the anxiety. This has never happened after a fit, not
since he’s been able to dilate. She scurries around to join me, tucking tight into my side, glaring into his eye.
‘Jacob, are you OK little Angel?’ she queries, stroking his cheek.
No movement. My heart sinks, emptiness chewing on my stomach, echoed in Rebecca’s frantic gaze. My eyes dart all over his body, looking for a sign of injury from the fit, conscious he may have hurt himself. I can’t see any abrasions or bleeding. Then I stop, my chest constricting, my heart suddenly thumping a billion to the dozen. I stare at the little finger on his right hand in utter incredulity.
The little finger on his right hand which is softly tapping an indelible litany.
I nudge Rebecca, and point down to his hand. She looks, and physically shrieks, throwing her arms around me in agitated excitement.
‘He’s moving John. Jesus, he’s moving!’ she screams, tears flowing freely down her quivering cheeks.
The other fingers start to move, a gentle susurration waving through them as Jacob stretches his hand and lifts it off the blanket. I look up to his face, and he blinks. And blinks again, his head ever so slowly moving as a tremor enters his lips, shaking them open.
A guttural gasp escapes through them, a grunt from virgin vocal cords. Elation is overwhelming me. I cannot stop the freakish, wide eyed grin that has overtaken my face, nor the boggle eyes as the balls try to burst out of my head in excitement. Rebecca is holding onto me so tight in breathless anticipation, that she is ravaging my skin with her nails.