“How did you come upon this ship,” the woman asked, her English already better. “How long have you traveled in it?”
They revealed little more about themselves, but asked questions of Lourdes she sensed they already knew the answers to. Yet they feigned surprise and interest in her answers, all the while studying her as she studied them. Lourdes obliged them, joining in their gavotte, making her own glib conversation.
“What is your destination?” the woman asked, always the one pressing for information.
“I have none,” Lourdes answered truthfully. “I intend to enjoy myself from here to the end of the world.”
“The world won’t end,” the man told her. “It only will change.”
“Not according to Dillon,” Lourdes said.
They didn’t deny knowing who he was. “His world ends,” the boy told her. “Not yours.”
When the food arrived, the boy shoved it into his mouth with a disregard for manners that typified any eight-year-old.
“I didn’t know angels were gluttons,” Lourdes quipped.
“These bodies need to eat,” said the woman. “And we enjoy the pleasure of it.”
“Since when do angels enjoy pleasures of the flesh?”
“We do when flesh is our temple,” answered the woman, with a pious lift of her eyebrows that made Lourdes squirm.
“So, as angels do you have names I might know? Michael? Gabriel? Do any of you play a horn?”
“People give us names,” said the man, “but they are not our own.”
“I don’t play the horn,” offered the boy. “But my host would like to learn the guitar.” Their little dance went on through the meal, a very civil affair. It was during dessert that Lourdes decided to change the step.
“I’d like to know why I’m dining with angels,” she asked, letting some of the graciousness drain from her voice. “You’ve been here half the day, and still haven’t told me why.”
“That’s easy,” said the boy, sucking mousse from a chocolate swan shell. “We want you to help us.”
“If you’re angels, why would you need my help?”
But the boy seemed more interested in devouring the chocolate swan than answering, so the man took over.
“Even the best craftsmen need tools for their craft. We’ve come to offer you the chance to be a tool in a task more important than you can know.”
“Important to who?”
They chose to ignore that question. “You already have all the money and power you can use, but I know something is missing. Something you feel you were born to do, but what, you don’t know.” He leaned in closer, grinning. “But we know.” He paused, looking Lourdes in the eye. “You were born to serve us. If you serve our needs, for the first time in your life you will truly feel contentment.”
So that was it. Servitude. That wasn’t a dance Lourdes knew. “I don’t serve anyone.”
Then the woman chimed in, oozing self-righteousness. “Do this not for our benefit, but for your own,” she said. “For your own salvation.”
Lourdes laughed, spraying a fine mist of mousse in her direction. “My salvation?” Their inflated pretensions grew more annoying by the moment. “If my immortal soul needs saving, I don’t need the three of you as intercessors. Besides, I’ve grown used to the idea of going down with the ship.”
Apparently they weren’t all-knowing, because they had no quick comeback. Lourdes felt herself taking the lead in their nasty little tango.
“We can fill your spirit in ways it has never been filled,” the man pleaded.
“I was offered that once before,” Lourdes told them. “By a creature that called itself Okoya.”
The angels bristled at the name, as if their spirits seethed rage deep within their host bodies. Lourdes smiled. “Ah, I see you know that particular interdimensional scumbag.”
“We are angels!” the man insisted. “Don’t anger us.”
“So perform a miracle.”
It caught them off guard. The man stammered. “What?”
“Perform a miracle. If you’re an angel, make me believe; show me some magic I’ve never seen, and make it good, because I’ve seen a lot.”
The boy looked at her quizzically, the woman looked down, her long hair dangling toward her food. So much for her sanctimonious airs.
“Te podría matar a hora mismo!” the man growled, his anger lapsing him into Spanish.
“Fine, then kill me.” She slammed her fist down on the table, loudly enough for a dozen guests around her to turn.
The “angels” did nothing; only smoldered deep within the bodies of their hosts. Now with the upper hand, Lourdes wielded her disdain from the bottom of her belly. “You pretend to be divine, you talk of salvation, but you’ve forgotten one thing: I’ve pretended to be divine as well—made a lot of people believe it, but it didn’t bring me any closer to being a god. I have no patience for your pretensions.”
She stood from the table, looking each of them in the eye, daring them to lash out at her, but they didn’t. Either they can’t, or they truly do need me for something, she thought. Either way, it was a victory for her. Oddly, the boy’s face began to go red, and his lip to quiver. She saw tears in his eyes; his host body reacting to the stimulus of being scolded. But in the man and woman, she saw bitter anger.
“Dinner is over,” she said. “I want you off my ship.” Then she stormed to her cabin and waited to see what their next step would be. Either they would leave and cease to be her concern, or they would make some move. Either an attack, or reconciliation. She waited, keeping her own anger simmering in case she needed to call on it to help battle theirs.
THE BOY CAME TO her cabin at ten in the evening, alone.
“Why are you still here?” Lourdes scoffed. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?”
“My name is Guillermo,” said the boy. “But people call me Memo. It is the name attached to this host body. You may call me that. The others are Cerilla and Carlos.”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“Please, sit down.”
Lourdes reluctantly crossed to her most comfortable chair, and took a seat. If there was anger, sorrow, or any other emotion in this creature before her, Lourdes could not sense it. There was a complete lack of passion to him—a direct, businesslike tone to his voice. Perhaps, thought Lourdes, the tango has ended.
“I’m listening,” she said.
“We are not what we claim to be,” Memo began, “and at the same time, we are what we claim to be.”
“You’ve come to me with riddles?”
The boy ignored her and continued. “You would call our realm heaven, but it is a place humans will never see. We don’t come here often, because human beings have never been important to us. We appear in a caul of light, becoming the one thing your spirit most desires. Some have seen us as angels, some see us as loved ones. Some see us as God. We shine with glory, turning your hope to our advantage. We lure you close with promises of heaven and love. Close enough so that we may devour your souls, and leave your shells to walk the earth.”
She felt the hair on her neck rise, the skin on her arms and legs tightening into gooseflesh. His candor was almost as disturbing as his revelation. “Then you are like Okoya,” she said, surprised to find her voice quivering. She tried to summon her anger and bitterness to use as a shield, but could not find it. She was suddenly bereft of anger, and instead found fear in its place.
“The one you call Okoya is the least of us,” he said. “A criminal spirit, weak, worthless, and unimportant.”
Lourdes wanted to push herself away, but the chair sat in a corner. She wanted to expel this boy-thing from her suite, but sending it away now would be a show of weakness.
“Do you want me to go on?” he asked.
Every ounce of her soul said no. “Yes,” she told him, and he continued in the same easy, forthright tone.
“Humanity,” he said, “has always struggled to learn its purpose. We know the answer, and
always have. Your purpose is to feed our appetites. You are food of the Gods. You’ve never been anything more. And never will be.”
His dispassion made it sound like a simple fact of life, as if the ramifications were insignificant. As if humanity was insignificant. She wanted to deny his claims—she was always so skilled at strategic denial, but somehow this boy had sliced through her defenses. That was, after all, his skill. But instead of showing her spirit the thing it most desired, it showed her instead the thing she most feared, capturing her just as effectively. She felt her soul bare and open to this child-faced predator. This was the vulnerability she had sensed within herself; these creatures knew ways of shoving a hook deep within one’s soul.
“You can see why it would have been much easier if you had simply accepted us as angels when we arrived,” he said. “We didn’t want our meeting to have to come to this.”
“Stop . . .” Her voice now came as a faint whisper. “Please, for the love of God, stop.”
“God?” said Memo with the sweetest of voices. “Everything your world has ever seen as divine has been our hand at work. We are pretenders, you could say, showing the world a false light, so that we can feed.”
Lies lies lies . . . everything it says is a lie. But that voice in her was fading, what little faith she had was extinguished beneath the boy’s thumb.
“More of us are coming,” he said. “We need you to help us prepare.”
Lourdes was crying now, bawling uncontrollably. Could all this be true? Could the universe be such a hostile, loveless place that this vile blasphemy could be true? In spite of herself she found herself infected by him, accepting every word he said, like it was gospel.
“Do you believe me?”
But why did he have to ask? He knew she did. He had snared her, and she longed for him to devour her soul. She longed now for the death of her consciousness, so she did not have to live with the knowledge he had forced down her gullet.
But it didn’t devour her, instead it took a step closer. Then, the boy suddenly seemed no more than a little child again, frightened and lonely. She didn’t understand the change in him, only that it served to shift her even further off balance.
“Abrázame,” Memo pleaded. “Hold me. My mother—she never does. It is her ruined face—she feels she is unworthy to hold me. But you can, Lourdes. Hold me. Hold me now.”
Her arms swung open. He stepped forward, her arms swung closed, enveloping him, and in that embrace, her last failing ember of faith was snuffed into darkness. With nothing left to cling to, she held him tightly, and cried, rocking him back and forth. Let my life end. Let the world end. Let every last human vanish from existence, for what does it matter now? What does it matter now?
BY MIDNIGHT, THE BLUE HORIZON had moved through the Gatun Locks, and was sailing into the flat blackness of the open sea.
21. SANCTUARY
* * *
DILLON AWOKE ON A LOUNGE CHAIR IN PARADISE. HIS EYES focused, revealing a flagstone patio within a colorful flower garden, surrounded by a grove of wild-limbed, white-barked trees. A large, free-standing umbrella shielded him from the sun.
Although his mind still struggled to fit together his memories he was fairly certain that none of them would logically lead him here. He remembered driving along the Texas highway, and then came the flash of sudden awareness of an unearthly arrival so disturbing it sent him flying off the road. He recalled his unintended stunt in the graveyard. And Tessic. Tessic was there. Why was Tessic there?
As he lay on the lounge, he could still feel the threat of the strange trinity that had infected the world, but it felt distant now. Whoever they were, whatever they were, their arrival had changed something in him, amping up his power to a new extreme.
Dillon heard footsteps, and turned to see that Elon Tessic approached through the knotty olive trees that stood only a few feet taller than he.
“Good to see you awake,” Tessic said, and sat in a chair beside him. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d come out of it today at all.”
“Where am I?” Dillon asked. “Where’s Maddy?”
“Lieutenant Haas is perfectly fine. Off entertaining herself, I think.” Tessic studied Dillon for a moment. “What do you remember?”
A bit more was coming back to Dillon now. There was the helicopter, the relieving sensation of being spirited away from the graveyard.
“I remember an extremely large needle,” Dillon finally said.
Tessic laughed. “You might also remember I gave you the choice of being sedated or not. You chose sedation.”
“I must not have been in my right mind,” Dillon said.
Tessic raised an eyebrow. “No, you weren’t.” There was a small table between them, and a bowl of fresh fruit. Tessic picked through the fruit until he found a few dark, shiny cherries. He popped one into his mouth and spit out the pit. He offered the bowl to Dillon, but Dillon declined.
“I’d like to know how you found me,” Dillon said.
“Trade secret,” Tessic answered. “But rest assured, no one else searching for you will find you here. Not even our friends in the military.”
“You still haven’t told me where ‘here’ is.” But Tessic only grinned. Dillon took a deep breath and tried to get a sense of his surroundings. More often than not, his ability to reach out and sense distant subtleties in the world around him was a distraction, but there were times it helped to orient him. Although he could feel the olive grove around him, he felt nothing beyond it. It was a discomfiting feeling.
“Are we on an island?” he asked. But if it were an island it must have been the Dead Sea, because even on an island, he’d be able to feel life and currents within the water.
“Come and see for yourself,” Tessic answered, getting up. He offered Dillon a hand, but Dillon wanted no assistance. He stood, expecting his balance to be clumsy, and his knees to be weak, but apparently the rest had done him good.
Tessic led him slowly through the olive grove. “This garden was designed by a feng shui specialist,” Tessic told him, “for maximum harmony and vitality.”
A dozen yards farther and the grove came to an abrupt end at a glass wall seven feet high; a dramatic barrier separating Tessic’s world from everyone else’s. Beyond the glass wall was a city, stretching out beneath them.
“An ounce of perspective begets a pound, yes?”
“So we’re on a rooftop?”
“Sixty-seventh floor.”
“I don’t recognize the city.”
“Houston. We are atop Tessitech’s southern headquarters.”
But there was something wrong. Dillon closed his eyes, and tried to sense the patterns of the city. He had learned to avoid cities, because their intensity overloaded his thoughts. The world shouted at him enough without him having to feel the blare of a city. But, oddly, there was none of that here. All he could feel were the faintest of echoes of the city patterns below.
Tessic tapped on the glass wall. “Three inches of crystal inlaid with twelve micro-fine layers of lead mesh,” he explained. “Wonderful stuff—a neutron bomb could go off, and you wouldn’t get a sunburn.” He beamed. “I own the patent.”
“Why am I here?”
“That is for you to find out.”
“I’m not in the mood for guessing games.”
“You misunderstand,” said Tessic. “I mean this literally. You see, all five floors of this penthouse were built with you in mind. The entire place is lined, floors and walls, to contain your energy and sensory field. It keeps you from being overwhelmed with what lies outside, and will keep those on the outside from sensing you. This place can serve whatever function you choose. A retreat, perhaps, as it is for me.”
Dillon got the gist. “Just another cell. Only prettier.”
Tessic bristled at the suggestion. “There are no locks here. You can leave whenever you please. My hope is that you will see the wisdom of staying.”
“And Maddy?”
“She is my gue
st as well. In fact, she told me you needed a place like this to settle your mind. That you lacked a certain clarity.”
“She said that?”
“In so many words.”
Dillon put his hand to the glass, then turned to look at the olive grove. An oasis in the sky. A world apart. He turned to Tessic. “I don’t think I was meant to live a life of leisure.”
“None of us are,” Tessic said. “We are all called to action in one way or another. But sometimes we need a place to regroup, and to stage our operations. Even Superman had his Fortress of Solitude, yes?”
Dillon chuckled at the thought. “If you saw me in the graveyard, then you should know I’m not a man of steel.”
“There are substances more useful than steel.”
Useful, thought Dillon. Yes, for a man like Tessic everything had to have utility. There would always be something for him. “So what do you want from me?”
Tessic pondered the question, but didn’t respond quite yet. “Come, I’ll give you the grand tour.” They strode back into the grove, taking a different flagstone path that led to an artificial stream. Hidden speakers pumped the sounds of birds and other wildlife into the air, adding to the illusion. By the time they reached the steam, there was no telling they were on the roof of a skyscraper.
“Until a few years ago,” Tessic said, “I was arrogant enough to think I was the greatest man of our time. Then you appeared on the scene.”
“Jealous, Elon?”
Tessic shook his head. “No. Envy never brings a man true success. Certainly there are men like Bussard in the world, who are threatened by anything more powerful than themselves. But I am not Bussard. To me you are not a threat. You are . . . an opportunity.”
The path wound them back to the garden where the two lounge chairs sat. But this time, Dillon saw the vine-covered wall behind it, and the opening that led to an elevator. “Opportunity for what?”
Tessic paused, picking up his bowl of fruit, popping a few grapes. “I have so much money, I can’t find enough things to do with it—and the curse of wealth can be as potent as its blessing. You see, when money ceases to be an issue, a man can either become a slave to his passions, or buy his freedom from them, seeking more worthy objectives.”