A Latent Dark (61 page)

Orrin croaked something he couldn’t understand, but Gil seemed to listen to the noise intently. She turned to James.

“He says it’s fine. You’re a terrible shot anyway.”

James smiled, then reached for Sarah’s hand as the ground began to shake.

“Hold on!” shouted Gil as shelves rattled.

Above them it sounded as though a storm was sweeping through, with wind howling through windows and the structure of the building beginning to shudder. John was looking at the lantern at that very moment and he could have sworn that it began to move on its own.

Then he realized that it was
they
who were moving, pulled towards the wall as items from the shelves fell and crashed, landing on the wall as if it were now the new floor. John struggled against overwhelming vertigo as the tiny room shifted, pulling everything back towards the center of the city, where a miniature black hole had begun to gobble up the surrounding buildings. There was a deafening crash from above and what sounded like an entire wall collapsing, and then scraping across the ground.

He began to wonder if it really was the end of the world.

*

Lyle wasn’t sure what to expect at first. The sensation of falling was at the same time frightening and exhilarating, a leap of faith if there ever was one. Of course, it was all highly questionable making a deal with the devil now just to spare his own life, but he wasn’t done yet. He had so much more work to do, more laboratories to oversee, ones even the Vatican didn’t know about. Lyle was a very rich man.

He felt tiny arms around his waist as the witch girl hugged him. He could feel how repulsed she was by him, how scared. Lyle grinned; fear was power. The girl was still useful for the time being.

“Please tell me now,”
she asked.

“Tell you what?”
he said innocently, enjoying the petty revenge.
How does that feel, you little wretch? How does it feel to be inches from your goal and have it pulled just out of reach?

He felt her sigh.
“About Melissa.”

“Tell you about your friend?”

“Yes.”

“Why should I?”

“Because I can’t keep carrying you if you don’t.”

“But, we’re still falling,” Lyle said. “I thought you were good at this.”

They continued to tumble through shadow and vacuum while he rode her like a haunted steed through the darkness.

Oh, Lord but it felt good! The witch girl tensed up against him, getting angrier, weaker. Soon he would see his opening and then step into the light, leaving her here to die drowning in her own sin.

“It’s because you’re too heavy.”
He could hear the frustration in her voice.
“I… I don’t know if I can find the docks… I might be lost.”

It was utterly satisfying to hear the little witch plead for her life.

“Might be lost?”
he chided.
“Child, I can’t weigh more than Father Thomas and you didn’t seem to have any problem with him.”

“No.”
she said.
“Trust me, you weigh much more than him. Your shadow makes you much heavier in here.”

“This is a trick isn’t it?”
he said, squeezing her to him. She gasped.
“You’re playing with me you little devil’s whore.”

Then she was gone.

Lyle’s feet landed on soft ground. He stood in a round room with a chair in the center. It was the lab as it looked ages ago, back before they knew how important it was to light everything. The girl who stood in front of him only looked like Skyla, but Lyle never forgot a face.

“Hello, Rhia,” he said.

“Hello, Lyle,” said the girl. “Long time no see.”

His arm itched. He scratched it absently. “Where’d my ride go?”

“Skyla doesn’t know where the docks are Lyle. She told you that. I’ve sent her somewhere safe.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “I’ll walk from here.”

“I just wanted to warn you before you continue.”

Lyle raised an eyebrow. “Oh?” He finally noticed just how irritated his arm had become. That damn wound. It never seemed to heal.

“You have a choice, Lyle,” she said. “The first option is that I can take you to the docks, but it will come at a price.”

“And what price is that?” he said, smirking.

“That’s not for me to decide,” she said. “The second option is that you stay here. The funding dries up for your labs and they go dormant. Otherwise I see them being destroyed the same way this one was. More people will die and you’ll have an even heavier price to pay.”

Lyle laughed and held up his hands. “I’ve paid a heavy price already Rhia. Many people have paid a heavy price. Whatever it is you think I need to pay to get to the docks is pocket change compared to the immeasurable work I have yet to do. I’ll take my chances and no trickery of yours will change that.”

She cocked her head, looking at him curiously. A lock of black hair fell over one eye. “The docks it is then?”

“Sure, whatever,” he said. “Just get me out of here.”

He had certainly thought Rhia was dead. Whatever black magic this was, it wasn’t working on Lyle. He had been in this business far too long for that to happen. Rhia shrugged and stepped back into the shadows. Another figure appeared; it walked toward him, all in white. Lyle didn’t remember a mirror before. He also didn’t remember walking.

The Other Lyle walked up to him, grinning, a stream of black smoke pouring from his arm. He scratched at it. The relief was incredible, but only managed to tear the gash open more. He continued to scratch, each stroke ripping open the fabric of his suit as more black soot and dust spilled out. As it drifted to the ground it formed faces. They looked up at him, laughing as they poured out onto the ground. They were faces he knew from long ago, the faces of people he had lied to, manipulated, and ordered dead.

There were faces from Lassimir, a woman running from soldiers, carrying her child as bullets sunk into her back. There were faces of people burning, their hands tied behind them against a wooden pyre.

They all looked up at him as he scratched and scratched. The gash in his arm spread until it made a jagged ring beneath his shoulder. The skin below the seam fell away like a shed sleeve. It floated to the ground amidst a cloud of smiling soot.

The itching spread along his chest, under his neck. The faces in the soot were older now, Rhia and Lynn’s parents, that Walter fellow. They all laughed up at him as he continued to tear at his burning skin.

The last of the faces was all too familiar. She looked up from the arms of that farmer, naked and writhing as he plowed fields Lyle had left for dead so long ago. She grinned at him in her pleasure and Lyle wished he could have cut and burned her and that farmer all over again, the traitorous heathens.

Judith laughed as her hands and fingers turned dark and gangrenous, the blood poisoning eating her alive, raking the back of the farmer as he arched in delight. She laughed as the limbs—
Lyle’s
limbs—were falling off now, cut away and cauterized.

He clawed at his neck, his face. The images were burned into his mind no matter how hard he scratched at the fine skin of his eyelids.

“We’re here.”
Rhia said.
“Oh, and before I forget…”

He felt a slap on his back. Something stuck to him.

“I’ve got a message for you to deliver. I told you there was a price.”

Lyle took a deep breath as the salt air burned his lungs, burned his eyes, his naked, raw skin. It was more redemption than he could bear and after a while, in the tiny metal room, he began to scream.

*

Harold watched the collapse from a distant hillside overlooking the ocean. At first it was indiscernible from the evening sky, a hole in the universe as the dome collapsed inward, sucking the telescope into the building. He could hear the screaming of the metal tubes and girders from miles away.

Next, the surrounding cemetery and structures went, sucked into the singularity like a child’s building blocks pulled in a river of flowing dust. A streamer of white radiation spewed from the singularity, spinning wildly like an out of control firework cutting through the fog. It scorched the countryside, scribbling a zigzag pattern into the buildings and ground.

The black hole died, converting its mass into radiation, shrinking in power and size. There was a brilliant flash of white light which threw a shockwave across the landscape, then receded as air poured into the vacuum. An enormous crater sat where the lab once was, as smooth as a hollowed glass bowl. Bedrock, subway rails, layers upon layers of buried streets and ruins peered out into the sinkhole like earthworms recoiling from the spade of God.

Water from the severed pipes began to seep into the hole creating a perfectly circular lake. All along the docks, boats sped away from the ruins of a city lost to its own devices. The center of Rhinewall was a vacant hollow, the city a husk.

Gansworth was sitting beside him, but it wasn’t the boy’s voice he heard.

“I don’t have much time,”
said Melissa.
“But I wanted you someplace safe.”

“Lyle—The archbishop. I almost—I…”

“You’re not a murderer Daddy,”
the voice fainter this time.
“And I wasn’t about to let you become one.”

“What will happen to him?” asked Harold. “What will happen to me?”

“You?“
He thought he felt her shrug.
“I hope you’ll be happy. I hope you’ll find someone new and live your life. I hope you’ll find something that gives it all meaning, that you leave something behind you are proud of. But ultimately, it’s all up to you.”

Harold felt his voice crack. “I miss you so much Missy. I—”

“I know,”
she said.
“But you have to come to terms first. You have to let the anger go. You’re only going to hurt yourself more if you don’t.”

“Are you in heaven?”

There was a pause. When her voice returned it was hard to distinguish from the sound of the ocean.

“There really isn’t a heaven, not really,”
she said.
“Just different perspectives. You take everything with you. All the love, the guilt, hate and anger; it all comes with you. You just have to deal with it all over again. The sooner you settle that now, the less work you’ll have later on.”

Harold’s mind raced, trying to find other topics, other questions, anything to stretch out these last moments with his daughter forever.

“But where will you go?” he asked at last.

“I’ll be around.”
There was a smile that filled his chest with warmth. Then there was only the distant sound of waves.

After a long while, Gansworth cleared his throat. “Mister Montegut, sir?”

Harold blinked away tears and turned, forgetting that the boy had been right there this whole time. He cleared his own throat and swallowed.

“Arthur, my stalwart companion,” he said. “What is it?”

Arthur looked back down the hillside at the blackened crater, the scarred buildings. A line of charred smoking earth scrawled across the ground like a child’s marker. He took a deep breath.