Passing Through Darkness- The Complete Cycle

by Malcolm McKenzie

  “Do you know how to cast out the Darkness?” I asked him.

  “Why, no,” he replied. “That’s why this will be such an instructive experience for me.”

  The jail was a squat, wooden cylinder, fifteen feet in diameter and not quite as tall. It might have started life as a grain silo before being given a new purpose. Three broad steps led up to a stout oak door, banded with black iron, pierced at head height with an iron grate and barred from the outside.

  The sheriff slid the bar aside and swung the door open, revealing one interior room split in half by a wall of iron bars. The half closest to us contained a table, a chair, and a cabinet. The other half contained a bench, a water jug, a chamber pot, and a figure huddled on the floor, wrapped in heavy chains of the same black iron.

  “Did you have to chain her like that?” I asked.

  The sheriff handed me a tangle of rope from the table. It had split into two strands. The break didn’t look like it had been sawn or cut - it had simply come apart. “Nothing else would hold her. I checked the chain this morning. It’s starting to wear through too, but it’ll last long enough.”

  “We’ll need torches,” I said. “If it does come out it’s not going to be happy. And it’s going to be looking for someone else to infect. Or kill.”

  Rolf jogged to the bonfire and returned with three burning brands, giving one each to Dee and me and keeping one himself. “I’ll watch from outside. No offense, and appreciate what you’re trying to do. But we can’t take the risk of you getting infected and breaking out.”

  I had to admit that made sense. “What about you?” I asked Dee.

  “I believe I will be best positioned to observe and expand my research from outside as well.”

  And that made perfect sense too.

  And then the door was barred behind us, and Prophetess and I were alone in the flickering torchlight with the girl. And the Darkness.

  “Wennit?” Prophetess said softly.

  The figure on the ground unfolded and rose to its feet, amazingly gracefully for someone whose ankles and wrists were shackled together. The girl was dark-haired and pretty, maybe a bit older than Prophetess or me. Her face was smudged with dirt and her clothing was torn in places, but she looked perfectly healthy - free of the cuts and bruises that someone would get if they struggled while being put in chains.

  “Can you come a little closer?” she asked, shuffling right up to the bars.

  I put my free hand on Prophetess’ shoulder, holding her in place. “Very bad idea.”

  “Can you let me out?” asked the girl.

  “I’d like to let you out, Wennit,” said Prophetess. “You just have to let go of the Darkness.”

  The girl threw herself against the bars. The chain linking the manacles on her ankles and wrists kept her from reaching through, but she slammed herself into the iron three times. The bars rattled in their frame. The cell had probably been built to hold obnoxious drunks who needed to sleep it off - I wondered exactly how strong it was.

  “You don’t care about me!” she screamed. “You’re just like all the rest of them! None of you care about me!”

  I had lost my grip on Prophetess’ shoulder, and she took a step forward. I hadn’t dismissed the idea that she was a deluded fool, but she had more courage than I did. It was all I could do not to hammer on the door and scream to be let out.

  “We care about you, Wennit. God cares about you. If you embrace him, you can cast out the Darkness.”

  “You care about me?” Her voice was wheedling again. “Then come closer. You and your big, strong Select. Do you love me? Then come and embrace me yourselves.”

  There was a fierce hunger there at the end, repulsive and yet somehow seductive.

  “Wennit, you need to embrace God. He’s reaching out to you. Embrace him and let go of the Darkness. Let God’s light burn the Darkness from you.”

  “Burn me? That’s what you all want to do, burn me!”

  “Everyone here loves you, Wennit, but they’re afraid of the Darkness in you. You have to embrace God and cast out the Darkness. They’re afraid you’ll hurt other people. You hurt Quilla, and the sheriff. You don’t want to hurt anyone like that again, do you?”

  “That bitch Quilla? She deserved it. She took Reeve from me, and no one cared. No one cares about me, just about her. I’ll make her pay for it. Nobody cares what I want. But I’ll make you care!” She slammed herself into the bars again.

  I pulled Prophetess back. “I don’t think you’re going to be able to get it out if she’s not going to help you,” I whispered.

  “It’s the Darkness talking,” said Prophetess.

  “Not completely, I don’t think. Maybe she wouldn’t say those things without it in her, but I bet she’d think them on her own.”

  Prophetess took two more steps forward. “Wennit, God sent his own son to save us. He’s reaching out to you. You just have to grasp his hand. But you have to really try. God reaches out, but we have to take hold of his hand. If you do that, the Darkness has no power over you.”

  “God’s never done anything for me. Nobody’s ever done anything for me.”

  “God loves you. Everyone here loves you. No one wants to hurt you.”

  “They want to burn me!” she screamed. And then, softly, “I’m scared.”

  Tears began to trickle down Prophetess’ cheeks. She stepped up to the bars and took Wennit’s hands. My grip closed so tight on the torch that the wood cracked, but I didn’t know what to do.

  “Let God in, Wennit. There’s no fear in the Lord. The light of the Lord casts out all Darkness. Let in the light of the Lord.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “He is love, Wennit. In his name I cast out the Darkness. Say it with me.” In a voice of command I’d never heard from her, she repeated, “Say it with me, Wennit. God is love. In his name I cast out the Darkness.”

  “I don’t… God is love. In his name I cast out the Darkness,” the girl murmured.

  “Again! God is love. In his name I cast out the Darkness! There is no Darkness in the light of the Lord. There is no fear in the light of the Lord. In his name I cast out the Darkness!”

  Prophetess repeated the command, over and over. And Wennit followed her, softly at first, then more loudly. Prophetess began a litany of what I recognized as her Universalist prayers, and the girl repeated those as well.

  Prophetess abruptly gripped Wennit’s shoulder with one hand, placed the other on her forehead, and bellowed, “In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I cast you out!”

  “Oh, crap,” I breathed. Because it was coming out.

  A cloud of what looked like smoke rose off the girl. It hovered for a moment in the air above her, then, before I could even think of moving, encircled Prophetess.

  “The body of Christ is in me,” Prophetess cried. “There is no place for you here!”

  For a moment the cloud hovered, then darted toward me. I waved my torch at it in a panic like a child trying to shoo a bee. The cloud dodged the flame, drew up toward the ceiling, and then streamed out through the grate.

  Seconds later the sheriff slid back the bar and opened the door. I staggered into the sunlight.

  “It took off into the air,” Rolf exclaimed. “It’s gone.”

  On the floor of the jail Prophetess and Wennit leaned against each other, holding hands through the bars, each dissolved in tears.

  “Extraordinary! I’ve never seen anything like it,” Dee was repeating for the third or fourth time.

  Needless to say, Prophetess was the most celebrated person the village had ever hosted. A religious pilgrim is one thing. A religious pilgrim who can actually cast out evil, saving lives and souls, is something else entirely.

  I was trying to wrap my head around it. “It wasn’t a very big cloud,” I said, mostly to myself. “The girl must have been weak, but Prophetess had enough strength of will to overpower it.”

  “The Darkness preys most readily on th
e weak, that’s true,” Dee said. “But it’s most dangerous when it possesses the strong.”

  I had no idea what that comment was supposed to imply. Somehow it came across as a thinly veiled jab, although I couldn’t say why other than that the self-styled philosopher just rubbed me the wrong way. I had the feeling that if the cloud had possessed me and driven me into a murderous rage, Dee would have been the first to go.

  We were squatting with the townsfolk on the ground around the bonfire. With no humans to be burned anymore, the fire had been banked and used to roast pigs and sheep instead. I was a little disturbed by the imagery, but not so much that I wasn’t eating.

  Wennit had offered up tearful apologies to Sheriff Rolf and Quilla. The sheriff had waved it off, blaming his wounds on the Darkness and the hazards of his profession. Quilla had been less gracious - her acceptance of Wennit’s weepy, clingy contrition had been sullen and half-hearted at best. That was maybe not so hard to understand. Wennit was now a minor celebrity herself, the woman who had survived the Darkness. Quilla was just a girl with four huge scars gouged into her face who would never be pretty again.

  Prophetess was surrounded by admirers, from the miller whose daughter had been saved to the mayor of the village. I was stuck with Dee.

  On closer inspection he seemed older than I had first thought, nearing middle age. He was tall and lanky, dressed in a motley assortment of rags that would embarrass a garbage miner. I was again vaguely reminded of a scarecrow.

  A talking scarecrow. He didn’t seem capable of shutting up. His evident fascination with Prophetess didn’t sit terribly well with me either. I wasn’t certain that interest was entirely academic.

  “At least we’re getting a good meal out of all this,” I mumbled around a mouthful of pork. “Hopefully we’ll get reprovisioned too. We need to be on our way tomorrow,” I added meaningfully.

  “Of course, of course. I must imagine that a holy pilgrim like our Prophetess has a vital undertaking guiding her, eh?” He grinned. “And of course it will be my pleasure to accompany you - I daresay I know this territory like few others. My pleasure to help in any way I can, and what an opportunity to learn from each other, eh?”

  Oh, dear God, seriously? Just because I don’t believe in you, is that any reason to torture me?

  7. On the Run

  I hadn’t argued. I had merely suggested to Prophetess, in the mildest terms, that hauling around a babbling, middle-aged fraud of an occultist might not contribute to our speedy progress. I hadn’t used those words - at least, not exactly those words.

  She had disagreed. And I had been forced to admit that I was not familiar with the land this far north. Dee assured us that he was. I didn’t particularly believe him, but I wasn’t going to call him a liar to his face. I suppose the silly bugger must have come from somewhere.

  The following morning saw us on the road, our packs loaded with smoked meat, dried fruit, fresh bread, and small beer.

  “…fascinating to observe it first hand,” Dee was saying, or continuing. I wasn’t sure he had stopped speaking since our meal the day before. He might have kept talking in his sleep.

  He kept pace with us easily with a strange, loose-jointed stride. He was a tall man, between Prophetess and me in height, but gaunt. His constant babbling didn’t interfere with his walking, although I couldn’t tell when he had time to breathe. But he carried a pack larger than mine, and walked without the aid of a stick.

  “While of course doctrine would tell us that the Darkness is the physical manifestation of sin, to actually see it confronted and defeated by faith, well, the experience is unique, not so?”

  Exasperated, I interjected, “The Darkness isn’t the physical manifestation of anything. It’s a technology gone wrong. It was made by men just before the Fall. I’m pretty sure sin has been around a lot longer than that.”

  “Well, just so, my Select friend, in the narrowest sense. But here, you see, you myopically focus on the physical and fail to consider the metaphysical. Yes, the Darkness is human creation, but in a real way so is sin itself, not so? The Darkness is the product of the original sin, pride, man’s arrogance and disobedience, yes?”

  He raised his eyebrows at Prophetess, and she nodded.

  “And of course you can see how in the village the young lady’s sins, her lust, her rage, were manifested through the Darkness. Closing the circle, as it were.”

  “All that you’re really saying is that the Darkness was created through a bad decision and people make bad decisions when they’re infected with it. You might as well call it the physical manifestation of stupidity.”

  Dee chuckled. “Do you really think the girl’s actions under the influence of the Darkness are best characterized as stupid? Or as evil?”

  I grunted and held my peace. Dee was goading me into saying foolish things just to contradict him. There was no sense falling into that trap. What he chose to call the Darkness didn’t change what it was.

  Waving grasses stretched to infinity on either side of the road. Under that bright morning sun, it again seemed strange that the Darkness could lurk anywhere in the world.

  Although I could imagine other things in all that grass.

  Prophetess had dropped behind. I glanced over my shoulder and she was keeping pace, but a few yards back, suddenly looking tired and drawn. She had been quiet all morning, although I had assumed that was just because Dee let no one else get a word in edgewise.

  I slowed until she caught up with me. Dee continued ahead, still talking.

  “Are you all right?”

  I was shocked to see a tear run down her cheek.

  “Hey, hey, you just faced down the Darkness itself! What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know if I can do it again,” she said, her voice tight. “It was all I could do back there not to run away screaming. How am I supposed to face Yoshana? Yoshana isn’t some girl possessed by the Darkness - Yoshana commands the Darkness. Maybe God chose wrong.”

  Even to an unbeliever like me, that suggestion seemed blasphemous on its face. I was just barely clever enough not to say that, though. But I was puzzled. “You said Yoshana was claiming she’s been reborn into the service of God,” I said. “How would she square that with using the Darkness?”

  Dee’s voice interrupted. “Does not the psalm say, ‘even the darkness is radiant in his sight?’ That’s how, my friend. Yoshana says she has harnessed the Darkness itself in the service of God. In fact, while her followers mostly call themselves the Knights of Resurrection, she has named her army the Darkness Radiant.”

  We were all stopped in the middle of the road now, and Dee was giving me a penetrating look that suddenly didn’t seem foolish at all. “You have to realize, my young Select friend, if you’re going to confront Yoshana… she’s not just so much stronger than you that she can kill you with an errant thought. She’s smarter than you are too.”

  I frowned.

  “No offense, my friend, but Yoshana is considered the greatest military mind of our age. She’s so dangerous not because of her command of the Darkness, though that’s lethal enough. But every Hellguard has that mastery, and many other Overlords come close. No, she’s dangerous because of the intellect behind all that power. Manipulating the raw power of the Darkness, manipulating forces on the battlefield, manipulating the emotions of her followers - she’s without peer at any of them. I don’t know what you have in mind to oppose her… but it had best be something of surpassing cleverness.”

  I looked at Prophetess. I didn’t have any plan at all, let alone a clever one. She looked stricken.

  “Well, I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Dee said.

  We had plenty of time to think of something. We walked down that road for days, an endless, wide ribbon of asphalt stretching between scrubby woods and abandoned ruins. Of course, it might have been easier to think if Dee had ever stopped talking.

  The man had an endless accumulation of facts - or at least thoughts - on an endless arra
y of subjects. And an endless capacity to expound on them.

  On religion:

  “The irony is that with the breakdown in trade, religion coalesced rather than splintering. Before the Fall there were dozens of organized religions, many of them not even Christian. But now, except for the Descendants and a few other isolated sects - and the paleos - only the Universalists, the Reborn, and the Jospehites remain. I must say, it was a richer world before.”

  On the Darkness:

  “While I can see how a strict rationalist might reject the metaphysical significance of the Darkness and view it simply as a tool gone wrong, you must surely agree that it is both a result of Man’s worst impulses, and an expression of them.”

  On the Select:

  “While I of course must defer to the native expertise, as it were, of one who is himself Select, my research indicates the gray skin, white hair and black eyes are entirely accidental. Before the Fall, the parents of the Select could select, so to speak, any combination of skin, hair, and eye color for their offspring. The neutral coloring the modern Select exhibit is a base, a primer if you will, onto which the desired appearance could be imprinted. But with the loss of the imprinting technology, the base color has become the Select’s only color. And now it stands, forgive me, as a sort of mark of Cain to illustrate the folly of interfering with God’s design.”

  That last would probably have offended me if I hadn’t become numb long before. But while Dee didn’t speak in a monotone, he was certainly monotonous.

  He talked while we walked. He talked while we stopped to eat. He talked while we made camp at the side of the road. I was mildly surprised to find that he didn’t talk in his sleep.

  To be completely fair, he didn’t speak constantly. He was perfectly willing to listen to others if he felt they might expand his store of knowledge. But if no one else was talking, he seemed to feel obligated to fill the void.

  The days blurred together, an endless march down that road to the accompaniment of his voice. It must have been on the fourth or fifth day that we were passing through the ruins of a large town or small city. Unwalled, it had probably fallen when the Age of Fear began. Devastated skeletons of building stretched past the limits of sight on either side of the road. There was only the mildest change from his lecturing tone when Dee announced, “Oh, I do believe that’s going to be a problem,” and pointed down the road behind us.