And when they slowly, dramatically, opened a canvas sheath and drew out the brutal instruments of torture, he broke.
“Ariadne,” he said, weeping. “I gave it to Ariadne to pass on to the Resistance.”
I closed my eyes, unable to bear the sight. He had been weak, as I had been weak. He had destroyed Ariadne, as I had destroyed Samantha Early. This was the evil he had done. The weight of it crushed me. How many times over how many years had Messenger told himself he had no choice? How many times had he played that scene again and again in his head? How many times had her name haunted him with a guilt he could not forgive himself for?
I knew what came next and I wished I could look away, but it is a messenger’s duty to witness, so I moved through time in that effortless way I had learned, and found I was in the same room. But this time, it was Ariadne shackled. And it was her face that bled from the hail of fists.
She gave them an address.
Her terrified voice said, “If you want the Jew, the one who gave us the gun, he’s at Sixty-Eight Rue du Cercle.”
They released them both, Messenger and Ariadne, but at different times, and they would not see each other again until much had changed.
I saw Messenger-before-he-was-Messenger standing at the edge of the train tracks, tears streaming down his face, steeling himself to step in front of that onrushing steam locomotive and end his life. I wanted to cry out, “No!” but of course I already knew he was not to die this day.
A mist, a yellow mist, closed around him and he was gone.
I wondered if I had the power to see the moment when he met his own messenger. When he first faced the Master of the Game. And when, shattered as I had been shattered, he refused freedom and chose instead the same terrible penance as I had.
He would not have known that his duties would soon require him to confront Ariadne with the evidence of her own betrayal. He would not have known that she would fail the Master of the Game’s test.
Was it not cruel beyond all imagining to make him pierce his true love’s mind and find the fear that destroyed her?
I froze the world around me then, closed my eyes, and fought to hold on to the newfound strength I had shown in resisting Oriax. I was not afraid, I was just terribly sad. I was sad for the two young lovers, for the evil that had pushed them to betrayal, at the guilt that had eaten at them both for far longer than I had ever imagined. There had always been something ancient concealed beneath Messenger’s boyish looks. He had been frozen in time, not aging in his flesh but aging terribly in his mind, accumulating ever more regrets, ever more suffering.
I did not need to see more. I understood. Messenger had betrayed his love and Ariadne had betrayed a neighbor to his death and the death of all his family.
Ah, but I still did not know the full weight of these events. I thought I had learned all there was to know, but secrets still remained.
Ariadne. I spoke her name in my mind and in hers. I felt her brutalized consciousness turn slowly to me, as slowly as a flower following the sun.
Have you been in this place since then? I asked.
Since then, she answered.
It is time to leave.
I cannot.
You can. If you forgive.
I can forgive all but one.
You must forgive her, too, Ariadne. You must earn that forgiveness and you will be free.
I betrayed him. I betrayed him and his family. All dead because I was weak. All dead because of me. All save one.
The Jew. If you want the Jew . . . His entire family. All but one.
All but one.
That one lives, still, I said. He suffers, but he lives. And soon he will be free of his long penance, but he searches the world for you, Ariadne. His love has not faded.
Her emotions were mine, her pain so raw I could not avoid its echoes.
I can never see him, Ariadne said. His family . . . his mother, his father, his two sisters . . . all dead and him cursed to a life of sorrow and loneliness.
And guilt, I added. He suffers the same guilt as you. But he has earned his freedom, and he has earned a right to . . . to love you. Ariadne, decades have passed and still he searches for you, praying that you have escaped this torment and are back in the world of the living.
There is no freedom from the evil of your own heart.
There is no freedom in helpless self-pity and remorse, I said. But there is the freedom to fight.
To fight? The Nazis?
I laughed. No, we took care of them. The world is different, there are different evils to fight. Will you fight them, Ariadne? Will you spend your life fighting Malech and all his servants?
We rose, Ariadne and I. When I withdrew from the intimacy of the Piercing and opened my eyes, I saw that we were rising toward the diamond above us, rising toward the light.
“Forgive,” I said. “Forgive him and forgive yourself, Ariadne. And come back to the land of the living.”
22
THE NEXT DAY MESSENGER CAME FOR ME.
He was the Messenger I knew, the absurdly beautiful boy in black. But of course I now knew he was far, far older than he seemed. Even his love affair was older than me, older than my mother or father, older than my grandparents. My God, he had loved that girl for seven decades.
And for that time he had carried out the hard justice of Isthil and bore the vivid marks on his body.
“It is time for us to catch up with Trent,” Messenger said, sounding very businesslike. He waited until I nodded.
Needless to say, Messenger being Messenger, he did not whip out an iPad and show me a video of Trent. Instead, I simply went from being where I was, to a cold and slush-lined street.
Trent was in a motorized wheelchair. His carefully nurtured muscles were slack. His limbs were atrophied. He had a mouthpiece that allowed him to control the movements of his wheelchair.
But it was not moving. The battery had died.
He sat helpless, immobile, at a street corner bus stop in Des Moines. His exhalations were steam. His eyes were desperate.
A man walked down the street toward him, spotted him, looked left and right, and grew furtive. Across the street was a Caribou Coffee and past it a small shopping center. On Trent’s side of the street was a hospital and the usual cluster of medical buildings.
Trent was on his way to Caribou where his home health aide was to meet him.
The man approaching on foot did not feel himself to be observed except by indifferent motorists, passing on the four-lane road.
Without a word he began to rifle Trent’s pockets as Trent sat helpless, shivering, afraid.
The man stole twenty dollars he found in the inner pocket of Trent’s coat.
In a voice slurred by paralysis, Trent said, “Please don’t. Please don’t.”
The man pocketed the money, considered the helpless young man before him, and calmly tipped the wheelchair over.
Trent’s head lay in the snow. One wheel of the chair spun. And the thief walked away. Trent cried then, cried and his tears ran down to freeze in the snow.
It is terrible to see humiliation and despair, no matter how bad a person Trent was, no matter the damage he had done, or the life he had cost.
But I had more to see. Once again, curiosity was not my friend. And now I saw a shockingly older Trent. He had not aged well. He might perhaps be thirty years old, I supposed, but it was hard to tell. His body was shriveled doll limbs attached to a swollen upper body and a head with long hair.
Trent was marooned on the top floor of a shopping mall. The elevator before him had a sign that read, Sorry for the inconvenience: Maintenance.
He sat there, unable to leave, for two hours as people walked by, incurious, indifferent, or perhaps just mystified as to what they might do.
Messenger released me, and I took a last sip of coffee.
“He’s older,” I said. “I think he’s already lived maybe twenty years like that. Twenty years, Messenger, that’s a life sentence.” A ter
ribly long time, but not as long as Messenger’s own sentence.
“He will awake from this life sentence when we go to him.”
I nodded. “All right. I’m ready.”
Once again we stood in Trent’s basement. He was as we had left him, a strong, healthy young man with a head full of hates.
And suddenly, his eyes opened. Just like that, Trent—the comatose one before me—gasped, sucked in a shaky breath, and woke.
He stared up at me. Stared at me like I was an impossibility. Like I could not be there, probably wasn’t there. He turned his head, only his head, to look left and right and his bewilderment edged toward panic.
For the longest time then he looked back at me and at Messenger. That stare seemed to go on and on forever.
His body was trembling, and he noticed it. He frowned in incomprehension. And then, he moved one arm. Just a little. And cried out, “Ahh! Ahh!”
He moved the arm again. And his other arm.
“Ahh!”
Tears formed in his eyes. He was swallowing hard and obviously afraid, but not the fear of growing terror, rather the fear of discovery, of realization and hope. He was crying quite openly, crying without shame or self-consciousness.
Then, sobbing, he moved his legs. When they shifted, he stopped, bit his lip, then moved them again.
We were seeing a boy—no, not a boy anymore, not a boy with sixteen years of experience of life, but a man in a boy’s body. An old man, a man with a long life of pain and perhaps much worse than pain.
Slowly, slowly, as if he couldn’t believe it yet, Trent rose to his feet.
I had chills. Only a few minutes had passed but I had dipped into Trent’s experience long enough to have some impression of what he had endured subjectively.
To a casual observer he was still the muscular sixteen-year-old boy, but I saw something very different in his eyes now. Not just tears, but something far deeper. Something so very like what I saw in Messenger’s own eyes and had not understood until the Shoals.
We watched, Messenger as mesmerized as I was myself.
At last Trent mastered his emotions and I braced for his resentment, his fury. We had subjected him to an entire lifetime of misery and humiliation.
Hadn’t we?
Trent whispered something that neither of us could hear. He took a careful, tentative step. He approached, haltingly, as though he could still not believe he was able to walk.
He came within a foot of me and I was still braced for him to lash out.
“Thank you,” he said.
I misunderstood his meaning. I said, “You can walk again because you’ve suffered your punishment and now it’s over.”
He shook his head slowly. “No. No, I mean, thank you for giving me that life.”
“What?”
He sighed and passed his hand over his face, wiping away tears, and when he was done he smiled. He smiled, then threw back his head and laughed.
“No,” he said, barely able to stop laughing, and now crying very different tears. “No, I mean thank you for what you did. Thank you for giving me that. For all I lived. I . . . I’m not the same person. I’m . . .” He had to pause to catch his breath. “I lived fifty-two years as a quadriplegic. I was angry and bitter, but then . . . then, well, I found love. So much love. I . . .” He shook his head, amazed. But he could not have been more amazed than I.
“And now I come back to this life,” Trent said. “My God, it’s like . . . I can’t even . . .”
Then to my astonishment he said, “Can I hug you?” And he held his arms wide.
Messenger said, “No. We are not to be touched.”
Trent nodded, accepting that. “I’m very sorry for you. It must be terribly painful for you.”
Messenger flinched and looked away. Then Messenger said stiffly, “Thank you for your concern. But we have our duty.”
“You believed you were punishing me,” Trent said kindly. “But you saved me. You saved me from what I would otherwise have become. I’m . . . I’m not that person anymore. I have to . . . to, to, to see my mom, to see my school, to go and change, like . . . everything.”
We let him go, Messenger and I, and we ourselves went away. Back to the place that’s not my home.
Messenger said nothing and finally I couldn’t take it. “Aren’t you amazed?” I demanded. “Aren’t you thrilled? I want to jump up and down and, I don’t know, sing a song or something.”
“I am pleased,” he allowed. Then, as if he couldn’t quite believe it, he added, “Yes, I am pleased.”
Then, the miracle. Messenger actually smiled.
It didn’t last long, just a second or two, but the boy in black, the Messenger of Fear, produced an actual, human grin. And then it was gone.
And now the time had come, and I was both nervous and excited. I feared that I had set in motion events that would leave me very alone. I was sad, sorry for myself, miserable, and yet, I felt no doubt about my course.
“Messenger,” I said, the words heavy on my heart. “Come with me.”
I didn’t wait for him to argue or forbid. I was suddenly there, and a moment later, so was he.
It was one of the mystical places of the type that Messenger had haunted, knowing that Ariadne had always wanted to visit.
“Stonehenge?” Messenger asked, puzzled. “Why are we at Stonehenge, Mara?”
Everyone has seen the photographs of Stonehenge, the tall, rugged uprights of ancient stone, the few remaining crosspieces that together inscribe a place of such eldritch power that few speak above a whisper there.
But the photos seldom show the surrounding emptiness, a grassy field in every direction. And they never show the quite modern building half a mile away where you can buy a sandwich and a coffee and board an open bus to take you to the henge.
It was a day of mixed sun and cloud, a sky at once promising and threatening, with the wind direction deciding fair or foul.
There were a few Stonehenge Down tourists walking slowly around the circumference, pointing cameras, striking poses, and sometimes just standing still and silent to feel the power of the place. The tourists were kept at a distance, but we, well, we had come by a different path to this place and so Messenger and I stood at the very center of the circle.
“Have you been here before?” I asked him.
He shook his head, mystified, and it was a small victory leaving him baffled for once. But it was a melancholy accomplishment because I sensed that this would be one of the last times, if not the last time, I saw the beautiful boy in black.
“No. But . . . but I have meant to come,” he said.
We were not visible to the tourists; they gazed thoughtfully and saw nothing. Only one person saw us and he stood on a slight rise beyond the parading circle. He had pushed the hood of his sweatshirt back, baring his head to the sun. Daniel watched. Did he know what I was doing? Of course he did—he is Daniel. Did he approve?
Well, he did not stop me.
“Why are we here, Mara?” Messenger asked.
“For a meeting. A reunion.”
“If this coyness is revenge for my own taciturnity, I understand but—”
“I went to the Shoals,” I said.
He froze. He did not move, speak, or even blink, for an achingly long time. Of course he knew why I had gone to the Shoals. There could only be one reason.
I didn’t mean to leave him hanging, but in a moment I knew that I would be forgotten. That knowledge pierced me like a blade. But if pain can ever be good, this pain was.
“You’re older than you look,” I said, and wiped away a tear.
“Yes,” he managed.
“And French.”
He nodded so slightly it was barely visible.
“Messenger . . .”
“Yes, Mara.”
I could have explained, but it would be superfluous. So I said, “Ariadne.”
And she stepped away from the shuffling circle of tourists and walked toward us.
Messenger hid so much from me as he taught me, revealing only the mysteries he felt I needed to know. He had been gentle with me, spoon-feeding me like a baby. He had protected me from the full strangeness and horror and beauty of his world, his and my world.
He had shielded me, too, from himself, from his pain and his guilt and his terrible sorrow. He had kept his emotions in check. But now I saw not the Messenger of Fear but a boy, his face trembling, emotion tugging at his mouth, his nostrils flared, his eyes filling with and then spilling tears.
I had wanted badly at times for that openness to be something I had earned. I had wanted him to love me, as I had begun to love him. Now I was destroying any chance that we would ever be together.
It hurt.
It felt wonderful.
And it hurt like hell.
He did not move until Ariadne herself, seeing him, broke into a run, a careless, graceless, desperate run and then a sound, a whimper, a sob perhaps, came from him and he ran.
I watched them come within inches before Messenger withdrew and with a desperate edge to his voice said, “Stop! I am not to be touched.”
Daniel was beside me. “You surprise me, Mara.”
Messenger and Ariadne stood, inches separating them, hands reaching automatically, then stopping, as if both were surrounded by invisible force fields.
“They’ve been in love for decades, longer than I’ve been alive, longer than my grandparents have been alive,” I said. “That is something too big and too . . .” I sighed. “Too wonderful, for me to intrude in.”
“You freed her from the Shoals,” Daniel said.
“I freed us both,” I said.
“Two happy endings in one day. That’s very rare in a messenger’s life. And yet, still, it could be happier.”
“Yes, Daniel, it could.”
“Hah!” He laughed, a genuine laugh, and he nodded. “Well, a young woman who enters the Shoals and emerges with a life saved . . . It would be strange to describe such a creature as a mere apprentice.”
Daniel winked and at that instant froze the world around us. Every tourist stood where they were, no eye blinked, no shutter snapped. The clouds in the sky became a still life. The blades of grass no longer revealed the breeze. Only Messenger and Ariadne were still moving, still craving each other’s touch, still whispering urgently, still looking into each other’s eyes as if nothing else existed.