“I’m not—”
“Are you seriously pussing out on me? A little bit of trouble with Conamarra and you turn into her puppy dog? Oh, oh, pet me on my little head, please pet me, waaaah.”
“Aw, man, it’s not like that.”
“That’s just what it’s like. Don’t you know what this is? All of them against us. Ni—ers, Jews, Mexicans, now we have to put up with camel-jockeys, too? They’re taking over, man, taking over. Taking. Over.”
“Dude, I just don’t want to get all into some big thing over this,” Pete pleaded. Then his eyes lit up with a crafty light. “Hey, how come it’s just the two of us? Why isn’t Marlon down here with us?”
“Conamarra probably got to him first, and he wimped out, just like you’re doing. That’s the game, man, they play us against each other. Make us weak.”
They had made it most of the way down the hallway when a security guard stepped in front of them and spoke into a walkie-talkie. “I got them both, right here. Yes, ma’am.”
To the boys the guard said, “You two need to get your stuff from your lockers—which are not down this hallway—and get off the school grounds.”
An argument followed, but in the end Trent and Pete, with their backpacks full, walked off the grounds to Pete’s car.
The car had no backseat in which Messenger and I might conveniently wedge ourselves, so we simply walked alongside the car. The fact that I accepted this rewriting of the laws of physics without much shock is, I suppose, a sign that I was adjusting to Messenger’s world. Then, too, I had seen this trick before.
We walked alongside the car as it accelerated to thirty and then forty miles an hour. Somehow we were ambling along at forty miles an hour, stopping at stop signs, then effortlessly accelerating despite the fact that when I looked down at my feet they were doing no more than walking. There was no stiff wind in our faces, we were not huffing and puffing, we were simply effortlessly keeping pace with a car moving several times faster than the fastest runner. The car still sounded like a car, and all the other sounds of the road roared in our ears, but I could hear the conversation in the car as clearly and as intimately as I always heard Messenger’s voice.
It was not a conversation I enjoyed hearing. Much of it was a string of angry expletives and racial slurs covering every ethnic group, but mostly focused on Muslims.
And the theme that grew from that obscene anger was one of revenge. Revenge for the suspension from school. But not revenge against the vice principal, no. No, the talk was of getting them.
Them.
“Is there anything more exciting than a pair of angry fools with a them to pursue?”
Oriax.
She was beside us, walking along on her absurdly tall and impossibly pointed boots. As always she had a new outfit, not more revealing than the earlier one but every bit as likely to cause a sudden cessation of conversation among those who appreciate female sensuality.
I did not resist the feeling. At that moment my brain was still reeling from the shooting of Aimal and the girls and the teacher. I would have preferred any thought to that memory.
Probably it was shameful that I was so desperate to push that horror aside. But I had already seen far too many things I’d give anything to purge from my memory. If this was to be my fate I would see many, many more. They would be tattooed on my flesh until all of me was covered. I knew my sanity would be at risk, was at risk.
And I had no Ariadne to hold on to.
“What do you think they’ll do?” Oriax asked, and clapped her hands in gleeful anticipation.
The answer was not long in coming. Trent pulled a bottle of peppermint schnapps from under his seat.
“Of course!” Oriax said. “I should have guessed. They’ll need that.”
Messenger ignored her as he usually did, as though his refusal to engage would discourage her. It was clear he had no power to make her go away. He could lose her sometimes in the swift movement through whatever impossible geography comprised our universe, but he could not forbid her to be present.
I decided on a different approach. If I was truly to become the messenger myself someday, then Oriax would become my problem to deal with.
And curiosity has always been my strength as well as my weakness.
“What do you get out of this, Oriax?” I demanded.
She smiled at me, parting her mauve lips to reveal white teeth that looked a bit sharper than teeth should be. “Excellent question, mini-Messenger. I will answer it if you’ll agree to answer one of mine.”
Messenger’s eyes flicked a warning, but I took Oriax’s challenge. “Okay. I agree.”
“Excellent,” she purred. “What I get out of this is the pleasure of seeing and helping to inflict pain. I savor human despair. I revel in human weakness. But equally, I take enjoyment from offering its opposite: pleasure.” She made a sort of philosophical sound, a worldly sigh, a commentary on life’s interesting vagaries. “It’s fortunate, really, because in a way it’s also my . . . job.” She spoke that word with evident distaste. “I am what I am, and I am what I do, and I enjoy what I do.”
She leaned toward me, very close, and I felt my heart race. It was not a rational thing, nor even strictly a sexual thing, it was something almost like gravity—invisible, inescapable, inevitable. When Oriax did that, I could no more ignore it than I could ignore the heat of the sun or the pull of the earth’s core.
“And now, my question for you, mini-Messenger. It is this: Have you fantasized about our lovely, handsome Messenger? Have you imagined yourself in his arms? In his bed?”
I started to blurt an answer, but Oriax held up a cautioning hand. “If you lie, I will know it. And so will Messenger.”
My mind went instantly to a dream I’d had, one of my more unsettling, though not at all terrifying, dreams.
No one should be held responsible for their dreams.
“I never imagined Messenger having a bed,” I managed to say as a blush rose up my neck to burn my cheeks.
“Hah!” She seemed delighted with my pathetic evasion. She knew she had landed a blow. She knew she had made things awkward between Messenger and me. Awkward to say the least.
She was, as she’d said, reveling in human weakness.
Darkness had fallen completely by the time the car pulled into a cemetery that was much more opulent than the one we’d visited so far away. The car crept along manicured paths between stark marble testimonials to lost love. There were impressive marble crypts and small granite crosses. Here and there a Star of David.
“There!” a slurring Pete said, and pointed.
Trent stopped the car and the two boys stumbled out. The sun had gone down and the shadows were growing long.
We followed them onto the springy grass to a modest granite headstone. It read Mohammed Marwat, beloved husband, father, brother. And a fairly recent date of death. It was decorated with an engraved crescent and star.
“Yeah. Raghead,” Trent said.
Pete offered some expletives of support.
Then Trent kicked the headstone. His reward was pain that had him hopping and cursing. He limped back to Pete’s car and rummaged in the trunk until he found a tire iron and a can of red spray paint.
With the tire iron he began digging at the foundation of the stone, wedging the crowbar end beneath it and, finally, toppling it onto its back while Pete kept watch.
More loud cursing.
“And now, the paint,” Oriax said with a wink.
Trent shook the paint can, musing about his message. In the end he decided on his favorite word, Raghead, which he misspelled as Rag-hed. Then added an expletive. And finally the words, Go home.
“And there we have your basic grave desecration,” Oriax said with satisfaction. “Are we really all here for a little grave desecration? This is your mission, Messenger? Trivial.”
And then Trent urinated on the stone and Pete did likewise.
“Okay,” Oriax said with tolerant humor, “now, it’
s an enhanced grave desecration. But really, Messenger, are you going to subject these two cretins to the full-on Messenger treatment? I’m surprised you’d want to show mini-Messenger the true pitiless savagery of your absurd goddess’s so-called justice.”
I expected Messenger to ignore her. But instead I found him looking at her very thoughtfully. And Oriax didn’t like it. She seemed to blanch, although that’s too strong an image for the very slight, barely noticeable pullback.
I wondered if she was frightened of Messenger. But no, in the times I’d seen them together she had never shown any fear. But she had just now winced—and again, that’s too strong an image for a change of expression that was so well concealed as to be almost unnoticeable.
Almost unnoticeable.
And yet I was sure that she had done something or said something she now regretted.
“Well, I have other, friendlier folk to see,” Oriax said lamely, and disappeared.
“What was that about?” I asked.
“Indeed. What was that about?” He repeated my question while, of course, offering no answer.
“Thanks for clearing that up,” I grumbled, just relieved to have something other than my fantasies, my alleged fantasies, as the main focus of conversation.
He sighed and relented. “Not all of us who live in this world beyond the normal have the same abilities and gifts,” Messenger said. “Oriax’s kind sometimes sees further than we are able.”
“Further? As in deeper into? Or as in further away?”
He shook his head very slightly. “Further ahead. Time, not space.”
In my mind I heard Pop pop pop. I saw brain and bone and blood. I sucked in air but seemed to be suffocating, as though the air held no oxygen. I realized I was trembling.
I realized as well that the murder of Aimal, and the girls, and their teacher, was yet to come. It was in the future, still. Right now, across the world, Aimal was alive.
Somehow this led to that, though the how of it was not yet clear to me. What was the Isthil gospel that Messenger had quoted to Oriax? ‘If you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn say not that you are innocent when the heart dies.’ Was this the pricked finger?
I did not want to show Messenger any more weakness, which is how I thought of my fainting at the school yard. If I was to be Watson to his Holmes, then I had to be able to hold my own. Keep up. I clenched my fists together behind my back and squeezed until deep crescents were pushed into my palms and my forearms ached. But I hid it. I pushed the murder sickness down inside.
“Well,” I said, “where are we off to next?”
He stood silent in deep thought, ignoring me. Finally he must have reached some kind of conclusion because he said, “That’s enough for now. You’ll be wanting food and rest.”
He was quite right, but I wondered whether he had gleaned that from an unwanted intrusion into my mind—he was certainly capable of that—or whether he was just noticing the sag of my shoulders and the unconcealable agitation on my face. Either way I found myself alone in my . . . I must find something to call the place where I ate and slept and showered. It seemed absurd to call it home, but it was all the home I had for now.
As always there was food in the kitchen: fresh fruit, cereal, and milk, Flake bars—a habit I’d picked up during a childhood visit to the UK—and even a frozen pizza. All things I would ordinarily eat.
I made myself a dinner-breakfast of egg, cheese, and English muffin sandwich and wished this place had come with internet, or at least TV. But this place existed outside of normal space and time so the cable company did not exactly have its lines here.
There were books, however. Some were the sorts of books I normally read for pleasure, but there were some heavy, leather-bound tomes as well, that could not have been placed there by accident. There was a shelf of these just to the side of the fireplace.
Someone or something had arranged kindling, logs, and matches, and I took that as an invitation. Before there was computer-plus-internet to shine a light on our faces there was fire. I built a decent little blaze that crackled impressively and threw off the odd spark. I pulled cushions off the sofa and sat there within range of the comforting heat with a small pile of obscure books.
“Thesis and Antithesis: The Search for Balance,” I read aloud. “Wow, that sounds like the dullest book ever written.” As did a book simply titled Justice that weighed about as much as one might expect so portentously titled a book to weigh.
In the end I opened a large but not terribly thick book with a magnificently embossed blue leather cover.
“Isthil,” I read aloud.
Messenger had taken me to Shamanvold, that awe-inspiring pit where the names of all Messengers are inscribed alongside bas-reliefs of the Heptarchy, the Seven Gods, of which Isthil was one.
I opened the book and read.
In the beginning was the void.
Into the void came existence.
But existence was precarious,
Suspended above the void,
Surrounded by the void.
A guppy at the shark’s mouth.
A feather floating before the waterfall.
A pebble wobbling at the lip of a bottomless pit.
Ours is not the first existence.
Existence has occurred before.
And existence has failed.
It has fallen into the shark’s teeth.
It has been swept down into the rushing water.
It has tipped and fallen into the pit.
Existence blinks into being,
And in a blink is gone.
“Well, that’s cheerful,” I muttered to the fireplace.
Into existence came the Seven.
Summoned by the will of existence itself.
Summoned to serve existence.
Summoned to ensure that this time,
Existence should not fail.
Summoned to maintain the balance,
Of the guppy, the feather, and the pebble.
Summoned to extend the length of that blink.
And thus was Isthil born . . .
I read on, skimming past the long origin story, looking for the passage Messenger had quoted. And there, at last, amid a series of homilies and parables, I found it, though Messenger had slightly misquoted.
“The fool says, ‘I never intended to kill, I meant only to wound.’ But I tell you that if you prick a finger with a poisoned thorn you may not claim innocence when the heart dies. Do not plant a weed and pretend surprise when it grows to strangle your garden. For, I tell you that to hate is to kill, for from hatred grows death as surely as life grows from love. Therefore do not nurture hatred, but love, even for those who hate you in return. Hatred wins many battles, and yet will love triumph.”
The message came from a strange god, not my God, but it was no different than the lesson of my own faith, and perhaps many other faiths as well. Whatever Isthil really was, divine or mortal, god or pretender, I thought her words wise.
I decided I must read further, but the warmth of the fire and the lingering horror of seeing children shot down as I watched helplessly took their toll.
I did not dream of Isthil or of the balance of the world. I dreamed of places I had known, and people: a mother. A father now lying in his honored grave. Teachers. Friends. All of them in my dream seem to be on the other side of a pane of thick glass. I could hear their voices only as unintelligible murmurs. I saw their faces, but distorted by distance and the eternal yellow mist that in some way separated me from ordinary life.
And then, yes, I dreamed of Messenger. I saw him in my mind without his long black coat. Without the symbols of his office, the ring of horror and the ring of Isthil.
To my unfettered subconscious imagination he was the boy he was before becoming the Messenger of Fear, or at least how I imagined he must have been. Tall and beautiful as he was still, but sitting on a rock at the edge of the ocean, laughing as waves sent cold, salt spray to dampen his chest and shoulders, and
the rope-gathered linen pants I had dressed him in.
Yes, I looked with more than casual interest at his chest and shoulders, at his long black hair as it blew behind him, at his compassionate eyes. Yes, Oriax, I confess.
But even in my dream I knew it was false, for I knew that Messenger’s body was covered in the tattoo-vivant marks of the horrors he had seen and made to happen.
I did not, in my dream, look at the single such terrible decoration that now marked my own body. I never looked at that, not in dreams, and only reluctantly in reality.
But in my dream Messenger did not look at me as I looked at him. Instead he whispered a single word. The crashing waves tore that word from his lips, but I knew in my heart that what he had said was, “Ariadne.”
Ariadne, not Mara. Nor could it ever be Mara.
I think I cried in my sleep then, though I remember no dream, for my pillow was damp upon waking.
“It’s time,” Messenger said, but he was no longer the laughing boy by the ocean. He was back, looming above me, the real Messenger of Fear, grim and relentless.
5
“ARE WE GOING AFTER TRENT AND PETE?” I asked.
“Yes. But not yet. Later. For now we have a very different matter to address.”
I was on the point of asking him where we were about to suddenly appear next, but by the time I could form the question, we had already stood in a wrecked, abandoned room.
It took me a while to establish just where we were. Messenger, of course, did not volunteer to help, preferring I suppose, that I use my own powers of observation. I don’t think I’d ever been particularly observant before, but I had changed and grown since becoming what Oriax liked to call “mini-Messenger” and I now paid a great deal more attention to my environment.
In this case the environment was an abandoned business of some sort. That it was abandoned was evident from the filth, the dust, the cobwebs and spiderwebs, the lack of any light aside from the ghostly greenish-gray of streetlights filtering in through a grimy window and grimier glass door.
There was a waist-high counter that surely once held a cash register. Behind the counter was a twisted mess of wire racks, a torn cardboard poster for Camel cigarettes. Strewn across the linoleum tile floor of the room were random bits of shelving, an upended round cooler splashed with the Pepsi logo, and a liberal scattering of trash—candy wrappers, empty chips bags, plastic cups, paper hot dog holders, empty water bottles, cigarette butts, and dried feces.