by Jon Jacks
Beth thought of the third room.
The room that Galilee had denied her from properly seeing.
‘The third room,’ she said. ‘What’s in the third room?’
‘No Beth! Don’t ask!’
Beth whirled around. Galilee had somehow managed to speak despite the strands still binding his mouth.
‘Ah, he’s still denying you, eh?’
Although he was grinning maliciously, there was still something about Horus’s expression that implied he was impressed by Galilee’s short, strangled speech.
The third door appeared before Beth.
It opened slowly. Temptingly slowly.
It was no longer a small room. It could have stretched to the ends of time for all Beth knew.
It was still dark. Yet Beth sensed it was a darkness that reached on and on, like an endless hole in the blue sky.
‘What’s in it?’ Beth demanded, more curious than ever.
‘Take a closer look if you want,’ Horus said.
His face was now human, his beak having become a roman nose. His horns were now a mass of auburn, curly hair.
He was strikingly, surprisingly, handsome.
‘No Beth, don’t!’ Galilee struggled to speak. It wasn’t only incredibly difficult for him, but also seemed to be causing him immense pain. ‘Please!’
‘Then just tell me–’
‘Beth, no! Don’t you see?’ Galilee was almost choking in his desperation to speak.
Instead of attempting to stop Galilee speaking, Horus merely smiled amusedly.
‘That’s the very danger of the room!’ Galilee cried. ‘You’re giving in to it bit by bit. As soon as I tell you what it is, it draws you on to the next level!’
What was so amazing about this room that she wasn’t even allowed to know what was in it?
What gave Galilee the right to keep so much information from her, like she was a child who was too young to deal with it?
Why was she always being kept in the dark about so many things?
‘This room, Beth,’ said Horus, stepping closer to the door and holding out an arm, inviting her to step inside, ‘will allow you to bring your mother back. To make her however you want her to be.’
Beth eyed the door yearningly.
She stepped forward.
From Galilee, there only came a muffled cry. Horus must have somehow bound his mouth once more.
Why had Horus let him speak for so long? Why stop him now?
‘Make her however I want her to be?’ Beth repeated suspiciously, drawing back from the door. ‘But that’s not how it’s supposed to be, is it? We’re not supposed to make people how we want them to be. That’s your view of how the world should be.’
‘You mean the way I banished all those ridiculously restricting rules? Rules actually created by man, in his foolish craving to understand something he could never fully comprehend.’
‘No one created those rules. Unless there really is a God, and he created them. All the scientists did were gradually discover them.’
Horus laughed.
‘Yes, that’s what you’ve all been fooled into believing, isn’t it? But really, man has simply had his foot in this door, Beth, never daring to fully enter and bathe in its gifts. So each time he thought he had made a discovery, it was just another barrier he had created, denying himself the understanding he so desired. Each time he flattered himself he had crossed a new frontier, he failed to realise it was a frontier of his own making. Everything he searches for always ends up just tantalisingly out of his reach. The objects he’s observing becoming ever smaller, the universe ever larger. He can never find the truth in this way, because he’s looking in the wrong direction. And that, Beth, is why we had to change everything.’
‘We? You mean you,’ Beth spat angrily.
‘But Beth, I couldn’t have set all these wonderful changes in motion without your help now, could I? It was your riddle, after all – you’ve always been so good with your poetic predictions – and your calendar.’
Beth thought back to the calendar and riddle she had discovered in the base of Silbury Hill.
‘I found them. That’s all.’
‘Have I just wasted my time explaining about man’s supposed discoveries? So why wouldn’t you, with all your latent powers, create something as simple as a calendar?’
‘The more this goes on, the more I figure you’re mixing me up with someone else.’
‘Hmn, I believe it’s you who’s “mixed-up”, Beth. It’s so ironic. Here you are, so close to accepting everything that could be yours for the taking. Yet you’re still denying who you really are.’
‘Lynese? You mean Lynese? She doesn’t have the powers to create things like that. Besides, I wouldn’t let her. I didn’t even know she was there at that time.’
‘Didn’t know she was there?’ he grinned. ‘But she’s been there a long time, Beth. And she’s thankfully had more freedom than you want to believe. Otherwise, that little know-all religious studies teacher would have raised the alarm too soon, wouldn’t she?’
‘Miss Hilary? I had nothing to do with her death! That was Kate!’
‘Kate?’ He chuckled mischievously. ‘Now that silly little pip squeak really wasn’t aware of what was going on at that time, was she?’
An anguished Beth bit her lip.
The wall’s base had been weakened by water damage. Just, in fact, as Silbury Hill had been weakened by water, allowing the hidden chambers to be discovered,
‘Why so shocked?’
Horus couldn’t fail to notice that Beth was horror-struck.
‘You’re shocked by the death of some strange little creature who could have worked out what was going on before we were ready. Yet you quite happily arranged the deaths of those poor young soldiers.’
‘That wasn’t me!’ Beth was incensed.
Horus replied in a whispering voice, the hissed whispers she had heard in her dream.
‘Over there, there are more men attacking over there!’
‘No, no! It was just a dream!’
‘I saw you flying over them! I saw you whispering confusion in their ears!’
‘No! I wouldn’t confuse them!’
‘There are too many for you! Run, run!’
‘But I was only trying to warn them! Not to confuse them!’
‘Of course, of course! Just like you wouldn’t want to confuse your own people, would you?’
‘Of course not!’
She didn’t say it as defiantly, as assuredly, as she had intended.
Hadn’t Tull been confused when he had accused her of hurting Canola and tried to attack her? He had attacked, instead, the poor man next to her.
Isn’t that exactly what the confused solders had been tricked into doing?
And Foley; hadn’t he been terrified of her for a while? The way he had accused her of wanting him dead? Calling her ‘Annie’, originally so reverently.
Annie.
Lynese. Annie.
They didn’t really go together, did they?
Annie came from Ann, didn’t it?
Or, more like – Morrigan!
All that bewilderment suffered by the young soldiers. The crow, flying over them, whispering its confusion.
‘It’s Morrigan inside me, isn’t it? Not Lynese?’
You’ve got me clean to rights guv! I’ll come quietly.
Lynese – or, rather Morrigan – chuckled mockingly.
*
Chapter 72
Horus didn’t answer Beth’s spoken question; he smiled once again, like he found everything that was happening so incredibly amusing.
Could he hear Morrigan?
Or did he just have a very good idea of what the conversation between Beth and Morrigan woul
d be like?
So all that about Lynese facing up to you; it was all just a lie, wasn’t it?
It was not all a lie!
Morrigan sounded affronted by such an accusation.
Poor little Lynese did face me in her final battle. And, in fact, I do seem to have inherited some of her pathetic little powers – probably because that nasty little trick was played on us just as I destroyed her. But they certainly came in handy when it came to fooling you, don’t you think?
You destroyed her? Just as you destroyed a whole island full of people!
Well, darling, don’t mountaineers say they climb a mountain just because it was there? This was a challenge for me too! It was there – and then, well, yes, it wasn’t. If you get my drift?
This…this is just so incredibly awful! How could I end up with such a horrible, evil person inside me?
Hey, I didn’t choose you either darling, remember? I could ask how I ended up incarcerated inside such a dreadful little do-gooder!
Well, this dreadful little do-gooder is going to make sure you don’t get any more control!
It’s all a bit late for that I’m afraid, darling. I’ve always had a bit more than I’ve let on. But, thankfully – stupidly – you’ve been letting me have more and more, haven’t you? You just had to see your poor dear mother, didn’t you? And then you were so thrilled helping Canola! What harm could there have been in that? you thought! And just look at how you stopped that army putting your friends to flight – oh, the friends you also set against each other. That was a bit silly of you, wasn’t it?
Suddenly, Beth whirled Hew around in the air. Instead of striking Horus, however, she swung it around in her hands so that the point was directed at her own throat.
‘I still have control over my body.’
She said it out loud. She wanted Horus to know what she intended to do. And why.
‘If I kill myself, I take you with me.’
Horus brought a hand up to his mouth as if shocked. But his eyes twinkled with amusement.
His hand was only there to either conceal or stop himself from chuckling.
Please, be my guest darling! It would be messier than I’d prefer, but not impossible.
Beth let her sword fall away from her throat.
If she killed herself, it merely freed Morrigan.
But that meant, too, that if she were killed by someone else, Morrigan would be freed anyway.
She had to stall for time.
She needed to work out what she should do.
*
‘If you’re so powerful, why did you need me to bring Galilee to you?’
‘We didn’t,’ Horus replied. ‘He was just an extra bonus.’
I wasn’t quite sure who he was at first. He was hiding his true presence from people like myself. I’d thought the odrad would take care of him, to be honest. But when that failed to happen, and when I saw he was so bizarrely attracted to you, I thought, well – there has to be some advantage in having Machal’s host enslaved by love.
‘It’s so reassuring of course,’ Horus said, stepping closer to Beth, ‘to know that you’re prepared to sacrifice yourself for our cause.’
Beth threw herself towards him in a roll, rising in a fluid strike towards his chest with Hew.
Horus never even flinched. He fixed his silvery eye upon her. The Eye of Horus.
She froze in mid-action, the blade only a hand’s breadth away from cleaving Horus’s flesh.
She quivered with fear, realising that she no longer had control over her own body.
Her arms, her legs, refused to do what she wanted them to do.
She dropped Hew, the sword landing softly on the sand.
Oh dear oh dear. What control do you have now, eh darling? The Eye of Horus controls all your senses. Just as it does poor lover boy over there.
Beth wanted to turn, to look at Galilee.
But she couldn’t.
She was finding it hard to even think what she wanted to do.
Lover boy doesn’t know it, but he’s bound by the energy of his own senses. But in your case, darling, your own senses are going to be so overloaded they’re going to slowly tear you apart. I’m telling you this while you can still think, darling. Because the Eye controls all your six senses, including thought.
Beth’s muscles, her skin, even her bones, were tingling, stretching, cracking.
They ached with everything that she had touched and everything that had touched her. Every fall she had suffered, every pleasurable stroke, every agony, every sting, every illness.
Her ears drummed and beat with every tune, every shout, every whisper she had ever heard.
Her eyeballs bulged, flooded with all manner of sights.
Her mouth, tongue and stomach zinged and turned and gagged with everything sharp and horrible. It all overrode anything that had been delicious, which in its own right was unbearable when all coming at you at once.
Similarly, her nose recoiled at every stench.
It all fed into her thoughts, mingling with every memory, every heartache, every slight, every misery.
The worst of it is darling, you really will want to squeal, believe me. Oh, but you won’t be able to, will you?
Every sense, every experience, was screaming for attention. Yet it was drowned out by everything else.
Her body was tearing itself apart.
Her flesh felt like it was being unwound in strips. Like the unravelling of an Egyptian mummy. Her brain was being gouged at, then pulled in threads down her nose.
As Morrigan had promised, she wanted to scream.
But she couldn’t.
*
Chapter 73
Oh no, no, no! Please make it stop! Make it stop, make it stop!
The screaming came from deep down inside. Beth thought they were her own screams, fruitlessly seeking release.
This isn’t supposed to be happening! What’s going wrong?
They weren’t her screams.
They were Morrigan’s.
Beth couldn’t understand why Morrigan was screaming.
She sensed that Morrigan couldn’t understand why Morrigan was screaming!
She sensed, too, that by now her body and mind should be too overloaded with sensations, too badly damaged, to register anything so specific.
Trying to think amongst such an overload of thoughts should be impossible.
Her flesh wasn’t unravelling, revealing and freeing Morrigan in all her glory. It just felt that way.
One sensation amongst so many.
‘This is hurting Morrigan as much as it’s hurting me!’
She saw the shock on Horus’s face.
She shouldn’t be able to shriek, let alone be able to put a sentence together amongst the deluge of thoughts she was suffering.
She shouldn’t be able to see that he was shocked!
She had to think hard, to put aside all those overwhelming thoughts of an entire life and come up with some way of letting Galilee know that he was being held captive by his own senses.
‘Morrigan must be linked to my six senses that the Eye’s controlling!’
She didn’t know if Galilee had heard her, let alone if he would have made sense of it, or if it could help him.
She couldn’t do much more.
Despite having more control over her senses that either Morrigan or Horus had obviously assumed she would have, she was still struggling for survival.
She couldn’t put up with this intense pain for much longer without losing her mind.
Morrigan’s anguished screams alone would send most people crazy.
Then, abruptly, it all stopped.
The screaming. T
he pain.
The feeling that she was being gradually stripped down to her very bones and then way beyond.
She felt like collapsing.
But she didn’t want to give Horus the satisfaction of seeing her crumple before him.
*
Horus didn’t look either satisfied or dissatisfied.
He simply, nonchalantly, waved a hand.
‘I don’t understand it! It was like I was the one being torn down to my core!’
The voice came from Beth’s mouth, but it wasn’t Beth speaking.
It was Morrigan.
‘Perhaps, as she says, her senses are somehow linked with yours.’
Horus observed Beth like she were an interesting specimen in a scientific experiment.
‘Impossible!’ Morrigan snapped.
‘Perhaps we’ll just have to kill her after all.’
‘No, no! You didn’t feel what I felt just then!’ For the first time ever, Morrigan sounded terrified. ‘It might well kill me too!’
Beth glanced down at Hew.
Perhaps, now, if she killed herself she would take Morrigan with her.
But she couldn’t move. The Eye still had control over most if not all of her senses.
As Beth glanced at it, Morrigan also saw the blade resting on the sand. She guessed Beth’s intention.
‘Now she knows that killing herself might kill me! We have to do something! Otherwise I’ll always be in danger!’
Horus still appeared more curious than concerned.
‘There is a place where all weaker spirit is extinguished. Only the strongest survives.’
‘Erewslen!’ Morrigan said it with peculiar dread.
‘Erewslen.’ Horus repeated the name with a peculiar disinterest. ‘Of course, I could send you there; but I couldn’t bring you back.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Morrigan said, like she was quickly thinking things through. ‘Once I’m free, I can make my own way back.’
Morrigan sounded confident once more.
‘No!’ Galilee suddenly cried from behind them. ‘Not the Erewslen!’
Horus seemed surprised rather than worried that Galilee had managed to regain his speech.
He only frowned as he raised his hands over Beth, frowned in concentration as he began weaving the energy around her.
He was creating vibrantly tinted ripples, manipulating undulating currents.
Beth felt as if her feet were being sucked down into a rapidly strengthening whirlpool.
Glancing down, she saw that her feet had vanished. Her lower legs were slowly disintegrating too.
The pull of the whirling currents was gradually moving up her body.