Chapter 19
“There, there, there you go. We’re here.”
I look up at Jason’s house, it seems caught in the fading light for a moment, silhouetted starkly against the trees. I look back at Rob, sat in the driving seat of his sports car. I kind of realise that it’s been an interesting ride, me sobering up every minute as we drove out here, and him, high on cocaine and alcohol, swerving to miss imaginary deer and, I think, dragons, on the way. But we’re here ok, and that’s the main thing. “Are you sure you don’t want to come in?” I ask.
“No, no, not at all. People to see, policemen to bait. Have fun, and oh…. If you ever decide you want to retrain as a lawyer, well… forget it.” He winks at me, and shoots off back down the drive.
I walk over to the entrance of Jason’s house, push the heavy oak door open and go inside, hoping that this trip to see The General will go all right, or at least that I will survive it.
The living room is completely empty and I walk into the centre and look around, guessing Jason must be upstairs. “Jason” I call. It feels strange, I realise, being completely sober in the afternoon. There’s no reply and so I start walking towards the staircase. “Jason!”
“Hello John” says a voice behind me. I stop, and very slowly turn around. At the other end of the living room there are three people standing together. I must have missed them when I first came in, though I’m not entirely sure how. The person in the middle is Jason, and he has a worried look on his face. To his right is a woman, very smart, not exactly beautiful but she has something and I know I’ve seen her before, and to his left is a man, small but well built, muscles bulging out of his black t-shirt. He looks young but old, with black hair and a brown, battered face, wearing an expression that is half way between mean and terrifying.
It’s him who speaks. “Why don’t you have a seat, John? In fact, why don’t we all have a seat. That would be nice. Let’s all sit down.”
They all move and sit on the armchairs, in unison, and I follow, sitting on the sofa, looking warily at the man. And I’ve only just realised that he’s called me John.
“So how have you been?” the man smiles. “It’s been ages since we saw you last.”
“Erm…” I hesitate. “I’m, erm, not sure I remember…”
“Mark…” Jason says urgently, “is it true?”
I look over at him. “Is what true?”
“Is it true that you’re actually John Paris?”
I shrug, and smile weakly. “Well, kind of, I guess”
“Jesus” he says, wearily and slumps back into his sofa. “Well that explains a hell of a lot. Like why you couldn’t remember anything, why you’ve been acting like such a jerk.”
“Erm, yeah, sorry”
“You’ve let us down, John” says the man again. He’s holding a knife in his left hand, slowly rubbing it up and down his right arm.
“I have?”
He sighs. “I’m afraid so. We had a deal, remember? And it was very important that you kept your side of the deal.”
“And…” I say, hesitantly, “I didn’t?”
“Well, no, John, you didn’t. You disappeared, and then you died. It was very annoying. At first we thought your death was an accident, an unhappy coincidence, shall we say, but we realised quickly enough that it wasn’t. That in fact, you had, let us down. That you chose not to follow your part of the deal. And we don’t like that at all, you know. We really don’t.” He’s tracing figures on his arm with the knife, studying it carefully as he talks, and finally he looks up at me.
“Erm, well, you see, my memory, it’s kind of gone…”
He chuckles. “Of course. Where are my manners. My name’s Richard Marx. It’s good to see you, John Paris.” He leans forward and holds out his hand, and tentatively I shake it.
“Richard Marx?” I ask quietly. The name rings a bell.
“The Village” whispers Jason. “He’s from The Village.” Of course. The name that Jelfs gave us before he, well, blew up. I gulp.
“And you remember Nadia?” Marx asks, glancing across at the woman. I follow his eyes, and she looks bored, distracted, filing a fingernail without looking up. “We last saw each other at the funeral” she says. “Your funeral.”
“Oh! Of course!” I smile.
“You had quite a thing for Nadia” smiles Marx. “Of course, she is good looking. But with you it went further. I think you actually thought you loved her, though God knows why, you didn’t even really know her. I think it must have been your upbringing, if I’m honest. I think you were just needy, and she came along. But then what am I, I’m not a psychologist, I don’t understand these things. Never really got love, seems like a waste of time to me. Anyway. How’s Mike?”
“Mike?” I ask, nervously looking at the way he’s tracing the lines on his arm, the way he starts to draw blood.
“Yes, you know, Mike, your brother” He’s still not looking up. “Or, as I think Jason here calls him, Zoltan Draman.”
“Erm, well I don’t know, I haven’t seen him for years…”
“Yeah” says Marx slowly, “you see I’m not entirely sure that’s true. I’m pretty sure that you saw him recently. Very recently, in fact.”
“I did?”
“Oh yes. You see we, that is, you and I, we had a deal. I think I mentioned that before.”
I nod nervously.
“Do you remember the deal that we had?” he asks quietly.
I shake my head nervously.
“Well, it was very simple. Let me explain it to you. Michael Paris used to be part of our group, in fact, quite an integral part. He worked with us on developing a lot of the systems and techniques that we have perfected over the last few years. He was good, in fact he was very good, and we worked well together as a team. We could have had the world at our fingertips.” He glances up at me and I look away.
“But…” says Jason
Marx looks wearily across at him. “Yes?”
“But how does…” he fades out, like he’s not entirely sure what he wants to ask. Like, how does it all work, is it really magic? Well maybe Jason’s seen it, but I haven’t. I don’t think so at least.
Marx studies his arm, studies the thin lines of blood and slowly with his right finger traces across the lines and puts his finger to his lips. “How does magic work? Is that what you want to know?” He doesn’t look at us, and neither of us reply, the question hanging in the air.
He sighs. “It’s here all around us. All we need to do is to know how to harness it. Modern tools, modern medicine, they break things down, need to understand the mechanics of every little thing, and that’s their problem. They entirely miss the point. Look at that vase over there,” he nods and we both turn to look at a clear vase, half full of water, holding some black, dying flowers. He stares at the vase and it’s like his eyes are changing, going black, like he’s not there anymore, then his eyes close and suddenly the flowers burst into flame, shrivel and die, the burning leaves falling into the water. “Wow” says Jason, so quietly I can hardly hear.
“It’s all there, all you need to do is know how to touch the air around them, how to feel it, how to join with it, and then it’s all yours. Just close your eyes, reach out and touch.” There’s silence in the room. Nadia lights a cigarette, and looks bored.
“We were almost there” he continues, quietly. “Mike Paris and I, in control. Together we had gone so much further. Together we had discovered things that even the ancients hadn’t, we had discovered what … Such a breakthrough. We had the world. He and I. We had the world.”
Nadia looks over at him, as if she’s noticing us for the first time. “Darling” she says softly. He looks over at her, and his hands are trembling. He looks at Jason, and then back at me.
“But then, something went wrong. Do you know what that was?”
“No” I whisper.
Marx lets the knife drop and leans forward in his chair, bringing his face close to mi
ne. “He betrayed us” he whispers. “He betrayed us and he left, with the keys and the secret to our greatest invention. Can you work out what that invention was?”
“No” I say quietly.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mark” says Jason, “even I worked that out. This everlasting life bullshit… this ability to…”
“It’s not bullshit” spits Marx angrily. “It’s incredible. The capacity to release the essence of a person from his or her body, and place it in someone else. The capacity to live indefinitely, to move between one body and another, the capacity to escape death. It is the… ultimate. And Mark Paris stole it from us.”
“I’m sorry” I whisper.
“Ha! Yes, you’re sorry! Well thank you for that. Not sorry enough, though, as it appears. Our deal, John, was that you would bring Mike back to us. We knew you could. Even though you were weak and stupid, even though he didn’t particularly like you, he looked out for you. And all you had to do was go and see him, tell him you were in trouble and you needed his help, and he would come back with you. And then we would have him. We provided everything for you, we had it all set up, and you agreed to do it. You came to us. You offered him up to us. And then you let us down.”
“But…” I start, “why would I agree to betray my own brother?”
“Ha!” laughs Marx. “For all sorts of reasons. Maybe you hated him, because he was always the one who everyone loved, he was always the one in control, and you were just a snivelling wreck. Maybe because he let you take all the beatings from your dad, whilst he danced around it. Maybe because he left, he escaped, he set himself up and became incredibly rich, whilst you lived in a sad, dirty bedsit. Maybe for any of those reasons. But also because we could do something for you, something that you really wanted.”
“You could?”
“Her!” shouts Marx, waving the knife at Nadia. “Her! You were in love with her, and she barely noticed you. You were desperate, you would do anything. And you knew we wanted him. We could give her to you. We could make her fall in love with you, just like that” he clicks his fingers “and you, you were so desperate, that you would do anything for that to happen.”
I look over at Nadia, she’s still studying her nails, I don’t know if she’s listening but she’s not paying any attention. I wonder what it would be like to be in love with her, but I can’t even begin to imagine.
“But…” says Jason tentatively. “surely something like emotion, like love is different? You can’t just control it?” He looks down at his hands, fidgeting with them. I’ve never seen him so uncertain.
Marx laughs. “Love is easy. Love is nothing.” Nadia glances up at him. “Oh, you cynic” she says in a gravelly, erotic voice. I feel a rush of, well, something, in my stomach. She smokes her cigarette casually, gracefully, looking out at the vast windows onto the vast landscape beyond.
Marx glances up at me. “Love is nothing. Just a reaction. Just electrical impulses in the mind, travelling from one place to the next. All it is, that’s all it is, the mind telling the body to feel sick, to feel weak, to feel an understanding, to feel a connection. Just random electrical signals, controlled in some way. All we have to do is intervene slightly, to provide the connection, to let the electricity flow. And then you’d do anything. Anything at all” he says, half laughing, “and for what.” He lets the words hang in the air. “Of course, the weaker you are, the better, the easier it is to change those paths. We don’t need people like you” he says quietly, looking at me, resuming the tracing, the endless tracing of the knife blade on his arm. We’re all silent for a while, Marx humming very softly under his breath as he watches the blood. I look down at my hands, shaking slightly, and look over at Nadia, again. I do remember her, I think. I do remember her. From then.
“What happened then?” asks Jason softly.
“What happened” snarls Marx, back with the knife in his hand, back tracing bloody shapes on his arm, “was that we gave John here everything he needed. He went off in search of Mike, but we never heard back from him. Until, of course, we read that he had been attacked, beaten in an alleyway. But not to death. To within an inch of his life. We weren’t sure if this was just a coincidence, or part of the procedure, so we kept an eye on what was going on. And when we saw both of you paying a little visit to our friend Mr Jelfs, it confirmed our suspicions that this had really happened. That John’s essence had transferred to this Mark Forth.”
“Erm, because…?” I ask.
Marx sighs. “I have to spell it out. The procedure, as far as we are aware, works in a way that it loosens the essence of the person from his or her body. And when that person is killed, or dies, he doesn’t die for a period of time, a few days, a couple of weeks, we think. During that time, the essence can transfer to someone else, and that person’s essence goes into the dying man’s body. So, it would appear that Mike and John here made another deal, instead, and Mike carried out this procedure on John, sent him back, and arranged for him to be beaten up. John died in the hospital and became Mark Forth. And so, let us down badly. And now, my friends, it’s time to pay.” He puts the knife down and looks at me. I look at Jason. “Sorry” I say, but Jason’s not listening.
“But listen…” Jason says quickly, “we have our best team working on finding Draman, I mean, Mike. If we get him for you…”
Marx laughs. “Mike Paris, Zoltan Draman. The greatest engineer in the history of humanity. The man with magic at his fingertips. You’ll never succeed.”
“But” Jason says, a look of desperation on his face, “I thought you and he… I mean, I thought it was both of you, not just him, I mean…”
Marx doesn’t look up. “Yes, it was” he says, slowly. “It was. It was us. Brothers together. United in one. Finding the secrets together. Changing things. But it was him who stumbled on the greatest secret, it was him who started to unlock it first. It could have been me, it could have been me, of course it could, but I wouldn’t have gone. I wouldn’t have betrayed him. But he couldn’t see beyond, he couldn’t see the possibilities, he was too wrapped up in himself. Motivated by greed.”
“Look…” says Jason, “please. The man I know, he’s seriously powerful. I mean, he knows about some of this stuff too, he showed me…”
Marx’s head snaps up. “He does?” he asks warily. “What did he show you?”
“All kinds of weird shit” says Jason, shaking his head. “Half humans, half animals. People who could kill with a look. People growing old, shrivelling up and dying, all in a second. People with green blood, people with a third eye, people…” he’s talking quickly, the words tumbling in desperation from his mouth.
“All right” says Marx slowly, “maybe some of the basics, he knows. And he’s after Mike? Why?” Jason glances at me. “Well” he sighs, “have you heard of a band called Four Ways West?”
“No” says Marx.
“No?” repeats Jason. “The most successful band on the planet, ever? Songs like Ice Cream Heart and The Keys to my Everlasting Love? You must have heard of them…”
“I don’t pay much attention to popular culture, I’m afraid” Marx replies. “It rots the mind” Nadia adds.
“Exactly!” shouts Jason, excited. “That’s exactly it. You see, basically, our covenant is to destroy this band, because of the harm that they do to our children.”
“A very noble pursuit, I’m sure” Nadia says, not looking up. She touches the cigarette to her lips in a delicate, graceful motion, hardly inhaling.
“We apprehended and isolated each individual member of this band, and we were about to execute them, weren’t we, Mark.” I give a slight nod, not really wanting to get into this, “when we discovered that they had been seen by Draman, and had had the, well, procedure…”
Marx looks up, interested. “You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure” nods Jason, excitedly. “So we isolated them, locked them up and went in search of Draman. You see” he leans forward in his chair to Marx, “this is criti
cal to us. We have devoted so much time, in some way our lives, to doing this, that we must find Draman. And The General…”
“The General…?” interrupts Marx. “Rather a grand name” says Nadia, bored.
“Yes, well, he’s our leader, he has huge resources and power, and he will bring Draman back to us.”
Marx has stopped cutting himself. He’s studying Jason. He looks over at Nadia and she glances up at him and gives an almost imperceptible nod. Marx coughs to clear his throat. “Maybe we should meet this man, The General, and agree a way forward. Provided we can agree terms that are satisfactory to us, we’ll potentially let you live.”
Jason sighs, relieved.
Just then Jason’s phone rings. He glances at the display, and picks up quickly. “Yes, General? Yes, I understand. All right, right away.” He puts the phone down and looks at Marx. “We have him” he says. “We have Mike Paris.”
Marx smiles. “Well, that was quick.”
And then the doorbell rings. Everyone glances at each other, uncertain who this could be. Before we can do anything, the heavy door swings open, and a face emerges from behind it. “Afternoon chaps. I was wondering if Mark was around… I haven’t interrupted anything have I?”
“Oh for fuck’s sake” I say under my breath. It’s Jonathan.