Messenger of Fear Novella #1 (3 page)
Read Messenger of Fear Novella #1 Online
Authors: Michael Grant
From there to his thighs took perhaps five long, long minutes. Barton's voice was ragged, blown out, a hoarse, rasping, animal sound.
I would not have thought that serpent's jaw could widen any farther, but this is a species able to swallow small cows, given time, so widen it did; and now the snake's teeth were biting into Barton's waist, undulating up and down its length to gorge itself on the living boy.
No human with a shred of humanity within her could possibly watch this without sickening, and I am
still only human. I lost the contents of my stomach, retching violently in response to all the chemicals a body releases upon seeing the intolerable.
“We have to stop this,” I whispered to Messenger. “It isn't right.”
Messenger said nothing.
“It . . . hurts,” Barton managed to say. “I . . . can't breathe.”
Those were the last words he spoke, for now the snake had his chest, and Barton's breathing was shallow and desperate. With each exhalation the snake tightened its grip, so that each breath shortened the next.
I PRAYED THEN TO MY OWN GOD, NOT TO ISTHIL who I served and despised, but to the God in whom I still believed and hoped was watching, for it all to end.
But there was no succor for Barton Jones, who had murdered.
The snake had swallowed Barton's entire length with only the head and arms still free.
He looked at me then, Barton did, with eyes that no longer pleaded for mercy but simply needed to see something human and real. I think he believed my face would be the last thing he would ever see.
His body was now a huge bulge in the snake's body, but he no longer writhed or kicked. The blood was being squeezed from his lower body, and the air from his lungs.
Then, with a final powerful undulation of that snake's whole twelve-foot length, Barton Jones was gone.
The snake closed its jaws over fingers, and suddenly, without a sound or a warning, it was gone.
Barton Jones lay now on the clean tile floor of his classroom. He was not covered in blood. He was not covered in the bodily fluids that had been squeezed from him. He merely lay, a boy, barely breathing, eyes squeezed shut, motionless and silent.
I knew he was not dead. I knew that all of it had been an illusion. But when an illusion can be seen and smelled and tasted and touched, it ceases to be something even the strongest mind can resist believing.
The snake was real to Barton Jones. It was real to me.
I felt dirty and ashamed. I was sick in ways that went far beyond a queasy stomach. What I had witnessed had been an atrocity. The fact that Barton Jones was a
murderer, that justice demanded punishment for him, or even that this worst of fears was the product of his own imagination did nothing to lessen my own sense of the savagery of this punishment.
Was this truly the price Isthil demanded? Then She was a savage, barbaric creature.
And yet I served Her. As did Messenger.
Daniel was with us; Daniel, that deceptively average young man in the jeans and hoodie.
“Barton Jones,” Messenger said, “your punishment is completed. The balance that you disturbed with your wicked deed has been righted. You are free to go.”
Had I had within me any remaining vestige of humor, I might have laughed. Free to go. He would never be free of this memory, and neither would I.
But was he so destroyed that he had permanently lost his mind? Would he find within himself the strength to go on?
Daniel was watching Messenger, as he does, knowing that Messenger himself has been pushed as far and perhaps further than any feeling creature could endure.
Messenger removed the black hood and stuffed it into his pocket. His face shone with perspiration. He
was breathing hard, as was I, almost as if it were we two who had endured Barton's agony of body and mind.
“Rise if you are able,” Daniel said to Barton.
Barton's eyes flicked open. I believe he may have briefly lost consciousness, which could only have been a good thing for him.
He woke screaming in that same ragged, blown-out croak.
Daniel and Messenger and I waited. None of us could help Barton. He was on the cusp between going on with whatever he could now make of his life and being taken away to the Shoals, that mysterious place about which I knew only that the wicked who have been driven mad by their punishment will have a bare possibility of recovering, or else will live out their days in halls echoing with nightmare shouts and mad laughter.
We waited, because we are patient, we who serve the harsh goddess Isthil.
Slowly, slowly, trembling like an old man with palsy, Barton drew his legs beneath him, came to a crawling position on hands and knees, and finally rose, shaking and weeping, to his feet.
“Good,” Daniel said.
I saw relief in Messenger's eyes, and knew it shone from mine as well. Barton would survive.
Survive, but whether he could yet make something of his life, I was not to learn then.
“Are we done?” I demanded. And without waiting for an answer or permission, I left that place and returned instantly to my abode.
Some person or magical force unseen by me ensures that my abode is cleaned and stocked with food, and that my dirty clothes are washed and returned. That person or force does not stock my shelves with alcohol. I am not a drinker, but at that moment, with the silence echoing my every slight sound, I would have swallowed alcohol or anything else that would have blanked that memory.
But of course those who serve Isthil are never allowed to forget what they have done in Her service.
I stood before the mirror in my bedroom and waited.
I didn't see it at first, for it formed on my right side, just where my waistband would be, concealed by my hanging arm.
But then I felt the tingle and the heat as the image appeared. I watched as it was outlined as if by an invisible artist. I watched as the shape became clear and as
the livid colors filled in the sketched shape.
And at last, there it was: a boy's face, contorted in terror, as the snake consumed him. The tattoo Isthil gives has an awful advantage over regular tattoos: it moves. Just a little, just barely enough to perceive, but on my flesh that snake's body did pulse and writhe.
I had dressed myself by the time Messenger came.
I offered him a soda and took one myself.
“Tell me it's true,” I said after a long silence had passed.
“What is your question?” he asked.
“Tell me it's true. Tell me that this is necessary. Tell me that we are not just carrying out the sadistic games of a cruel being.” When he said nothing, I went on. “Tell me it's true and vital and that we are saving existence itself from extinction, Messenger. Even if it's not true, tell me it is true.”
“It is true,” Messenger said.
The day would come when I would see Isthil myself. The day would come when I knew the truth of it all.
The day would never come when I would forget what I had seen, or forgive myself.
“Now I have a question,” Messenger said, surprising
me. “For deliberate, calculated murder, what is the usual penalty?”
That caught me off guard. I frowned. “In some states it's the death penalty. Otherwise it's life in prison.”
“Yes,” Messenger said. “Death. And yet Barton Jones lives. Or life in prison. For a teenage boy with no great physical strength, no gang to protect him. Decades in a cage, being beaten, raped, degraded, possibly killed or driven to suicide. If Isthil's justice is savage, what of human justice?”
I had no answer to that. Had I ever given a thought to those we throw into our medieval prisons? No. And given the choice for myself, would I endure what the Master of the Game and Messenger had inflicted on Barton rather than spend thirty or forty or fifty years in a cage?
Yes. Which still did not entirely put to rest my moral doubts.
I hoped Barton would find a way to move on with his life. He was a cold-blooded killer. He had been a victim, as well, of his teacher's predation. But that had not been his motive for murder.
He had murdered over homework.
He had murdered out of laziness.
We wield a great and terrible power, we Messengers of Fear and apprentices. That power is not a gift but a curse. And my duty, the unknown years of it that stretched before me, are a punishment for my own terrible deeds.
Messenger left then.
I don't know how long I stood and just stared blankly at my bare walls. Time has lost much of its meaning for me. Was it an hour? Was it a day?
But like Barton Jones, I now had to find within myself the will to go on. The Shoals could welcome me, too, if I let myself be destroyed by my duty.
I vowed never to let that happen. There was no snake, just as there had been no fire that consumed Derek Grady. All of it was illusion. I knew that. And for all I knew, the Master of the Game was illusion as well.
But terror is terror, whatever the source.
I knew that Lisa Bayless's terror had been as great, and though she deserved punishment, she had not deserved to die choking in her bathroom. Barton still had a life, however traumatized he was, but Lisa would be dead forever.
For me at that moment, no terror was greater than the knowledge that this wouldn't be the last of it for me. I was still only an apprentice. In time, all the weight of my despicable obligation would be on my shoulders alone.
Then two paths would be open to me. In time, I would cease to be Mara the apprentice. I would be the Messenger of Fear. And in that role I would either find a way to harden myself, and thus lose myself, or I would suffer unspeakable agonies in the pursuit of brutal justice, in service to a god that was not
my
God.
No third way was possible.
There was no escape. . . .
There was no way out for me. . . .
At least, none that I knew then.
MICHAEL GRANT,
author of the Gone series and the Magnificent Twelve series, has spent much of his life on the move. Raised in a military family, he attended ten schools in five states, as well as three schools in France. Even as an adult he kept moving, and in fact he became a writer in part because it was one of the few jobs that wouldn't tie him down. His fondest dream is to spend a year circumnavigating the globe and visiting every continent. Yes, even Antarctica. He lives in California with his wife, Katherine Applegate, and their two children.
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THE SNAKE: A MESSENGER OF FEAR STORY
. Copyright © 2014 by Michael Grant. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © October 2014 ISBN 9780062207494
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FIRST EDITION
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