The Multitude

by J M Fraser

  She gestured toward a follower whose husband had drowned in a flood. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.”

  Then she turned her attention to Quintus.

  Maynya, the Sanctimonia guardian-turned-prophet, and Carla, a simple shopkeeper killed by a train, gazed together at the man they loved. They swallowed. Tears stained their cheeks.

  Each woman had found joy.

  EPILOGUE

  Hiroshima: April 12, 2020

  Gabriella knelt at the edge of the azalea garden and busied herself with a planting. When she finished, she set her spade on the ground, wiped her hands in her apron, and looked up at the empty sky, praying to a voice she couldn’t remember ever hearing. After over seventy offerings, decades of visits, perhaps the gardeners would relent. Her tulip deserved to stand tall among the other flowers.

  “I suppose it should.”

  Such a familiar voice! She spun around to face a girl who hadn’t died after all. Somehow, history had refreshed itself in a wondrous way, as if a door opened to reveal long-absent colors, elusive sounds, shy fragrances. Amazement and joy combined to steal Gabriella’s breath away.

  Asura, the girl who knew all the secrets, looked little different than on the day the pilgrims flocked to her garden from miles away and butterflies danced in the circular entranceway. She still kept her dark hair in a bun adorned with pins, she reflected the sky with her blue-and-white kimono, and she revealed nothing in her stoic smile. The enigmatic child had returned.

  Gabriella grabbed Asura’s hands and gazed into deep, ambiguous eyes. “Why did you wait so long to come back?”

  Asura pulled away. “How long would you hold a grudge over the premature death of an only son?”

  Jesus had been her son? The implication nearly sent Gabriella to her knees in supplication. But perhaps she’d misheard. Self-absorption often compromised her senses, a flaw she’d come to believe might be as bad as her pride. “Are you… You can’t be God.”

  “I might have been, for all you knew. But let’s not dwell on my definition. Consider me a girl in hot water, just like you. God isn’t happy with either one of us at the moment.”

  Gabriella turned away to hide tears welling in her eyes. “My few mistakes were made with good intentions.”

  In the stony silence that followed, the horseshoe-shaped white cenotaph in the near distance mocked her, a memorial lacking Asura’s name for good reason.

  She choked back a sob. “You goaded me into going to Herod, with your talk about pebbles and boulders, the butterflies in the gateway, and the way you let your shadow burn into the bench. What could a proper angel do but read the signs and act accordingly?” Her voice shook. She’d spent many years considering iterations that wouldn’t have included betrayal of God’s only Son.

  When an immediate response didn’t come, she turned to face Asura again, half fearing her guilty conscience had summoned a mere hallucination. During the early aftermath of the bomb, she’d seen Asura in crowds, shadows, pool reflections, clouds. She’d mistaken the voices of random children as Asura’s. She’d chased butterflies across meadows into woods where the girl might have been hiding.

  This time, so many years later, Asura proved to be no mirage. She remained standing, but with arms folded and an unhappy frown on her face.

  Or pity? Gabriella’s stomach lurched at the thought anyone might feel sorry for her.

  “Suppose you aren’t a proper angel?” Asura said.

  She flinched. Why so harsh a verdict for a single transgression? Okay, perhaps she’d committed more than one, but not many. When measured against the decades gone by, the count had been relatively small.

  Gabriella stammered an unintelligible response even she couldn’t understand. She lowered her gaze, traced some dirt with the toe of her shoe, and dared to look up again, only to find the same expression. But she’d misinterpreted it. Asura’s hint of a frown didn’t suggest sadness or pity.

  Far worse.

  Disappointment. She gulped. “I can work at becoming better. I’ll be magnificent! Henry Stoddard thinks I might be young for an angel. There’s still hope for me.”

  “Suppose you aren’t an angel at all?” This question came sharper, carrying the sting of a slap.

  Gabriella gasped. Did Asura plan to strip her of her wings? She should never have spoken to Herod. Why had she interfered with Carla’s fate? Or Brewster’s. Or…or…

  The list went on and on, widening the gap from a minor lack of propriety to some serious mischief indeed. But Asura had her all wrong. Didn’t she? She stomped her foot. “I am not a demon.”

  “Nor were you ever an angel.” Asura settled a gentle hand on her shoulder.

  Gabriella shrugged her off. “What would you have me be then, some immortal freak?”

  Asura reshaped her frown to an almost smile. More pity? Sympathy perhaps? “I’ll have you be what you are, Gabriella, the multitude. You are the echo of every man, woman, and child who ever walked the earth. This is the reason you can pass so easily from mind to mind and memory to memory. They are all you, in a sense. You are the sum of everything good and bad in this world.”

  The multitude.

  Not an angel. Not a demon.

  Gabriella’s eyes moistened. Surely not from tears. The strong never cried. No. Asura’s disturbing term had been so ridiculous as to bring on an allergy. “You’re saying I’m nothing. Just a shadow.”

  Asura flashed the kindest smile. “I’m saying you’re unique. Come walk with me.”

  Gabriella had enough of the reunion. She tried to stalk away…but smoke stopped her at every turn.

  The portal between realities, while always an annoyance, had at least been consistent in its behavior, shadowing her, serving as a singular gateway. Not anymore. It duplicated itself again and again like an amoeba gone wild. She swung away from one iteration only to have another shift in front of her. A third positioned itself to her right. A fourth materialized on her left.

  She threw up her hands. “Enough!” She could only flee Asura’s awful revelation by passing out of the Christian world into what…yet another broken civilization begging for a messiah?

  Asura gripped her shoulder from behind. “Mankind needed a fresh gospel, Gabriella. Heaven knows the old ones have been ignored lately.”

  “So this was all about rebooting religion? You played me like a pawn from the beginning.”

  “No. I don’t micromanage any more than God does. You made your own choices.” Asura sighed. “I suppose if He did micromanage, we wouldn’t have gotten ourselves into such a fix to begin with.”

  “You mean He would have stopped you?” Gabriella turned to face the beautiful porcelain doll she’d once hoped to protect. “If I am the multitude, what are you, Asura? Tell me that much.”

  Asura looked down. “A messenger? I suppose we all should speak less and listen more.” The portals disappeared, and she walked away.

  Gabriella hurried after her. “Where are you going?”

  “My home.”

  They walked in silence, leaving the garden and passing the various landmarks of Hiroshima Memorial Park—the cenotaph, the fountain, the skeletal ruins of the Industrial Promotion Hall, and, impossibly, a low garden wall with a unique, circular stone entranceway. Marble benches waited across a flagstone path from each other. Gabriella’s knees wobbled.

  She and Asura sat across from each other, positioning themselves as they had so many years earlier.

  Asura’s smile spread to her eyes, bringing a deeper blue to the sky.

  Gabriella struggled not to cry.

  “You’ve walked the earth in confusion throughout your long life. Perhaps you’d have made better choices if you hadn’t been alone.” Asura motioned toward the gateway, and a girl stepped through.

  Gabriella gaped at her own profile. In reflection? As a mirage?

  “She’s real,” Asura said. “Meet your twin.”

  Sorrow fluttered away on the wings of a thousand butte
rflies. A blonde-haired, ponytailed girl now stood among them.

  “Your act duplicated every man, woman, and child on earth at the time of Herod,” Asura said. “And what is the multitude if not all of them? Meet your clone.”

  Gabriella rushed up and wrapped her arms around her double. “Where have you been all this time?”

  Her double grimaced. “Gaul.”

  “Gaul?”

  “It’s a hopeless place, and I’m powerless there. I only have a cabin. This invisible wall keeps me from—”

  With heart in throat, Gabriella could barely find the voice to respond. “I know the feeling.”

  “I’ve been searching for a messiah among the rabble,” her sister said.

  “No need,” Gabriella said. “I’ve got that covered.”

  Asura brushed past them into the gateway. “I have a ball in the garden. Shall we chalk the path for another game? Maybe we’ll get it right this time.”

  TERMINUS

  DID YOU ENJOY THE MULTITUDE?

  Please do this writer a solid, by hopping onto Amazon and leaving a reader review. The process is simple:

  (1) Type The Multitude in the search box.

  (2) Click the cover picture.

  (3) Scroll to the bottom and click Write a Review.

  (4) Write a bit about your travels through time in space with Gabriella, Carla, Maynya, Brewster, and Quintus. You don’t need to write much. Some reviews are only a few words in length. Others are longer. Just do what feels comfortable to you.

  (5) Once you’re finished, while still in Amazon, maybe you’d like to read the other novels in the Gabriella Trilogy? You’ll find excerpts of Faulty Bones and The Witch of the Hills on the following pages.

  Thank you!

  J.M. Fraser

  Excerpt from

  FAULTY BONES

  by J.M. Fraser

  One day, running on empty and down to my last few dollars, I run into a friend of a friend who introduces me to another friend, who tells me about Hal, who knows some guy named Philippe. A French guy. Philippe has a scam going. Counterfeit chips.

  Enter Philippe. We’re at his joke of an apartment, and I’m sitting across from him at an ancient Formica table with wobbly legs, in a kitchen so old the appliances are colored yellow and green. Not white or stainless steel like the kind I’d buy if I could ever build up a bankroll large enough to cover anything more than a poker buy-in and the next meal. We’re talking hard times all around, and that shouldn’t make any sense to me, given the fact Philippe is supposed to be a successful counterfeiter and all.

  But I’m a little too desperate for cash to worry about that. Besides this man’s nationality has captured my entire focus, distracting me from all else, cuz for a poker player, there’s nothing more important than the initial read. Ironic, huh?

  Anyway, Philippe isn’t French. He’s an everyday, balding, older guy with tattoos all over the muscled arms bulging out of his dirty T-shirt. He looks like another Joe or Bob or Hank. A former seaman or retired cop who let himself go in his declining years. Until he opens his mouth to speak.

  “What can I help choo weef and how much woudchoo pay me?”

  Yep, he’s Russian through and through, not only based on his accent, which I won’t try to pathetically imitate anymore, but also the give something to get something attitude, especially the way he emphasizes the word pay, dragging it out slowly, the same way he’d undoubtedly prolong my torture if I fail to return every penny I’ll ever owe him, notwithstanding the fact I’m a woman, and a pretty one at that. Uh-huh, that’s a brag, but I work long and hard at taking good care of myself. We’re talking six miles of roadwork a day, minimum. I eat the right foods, barely any at all, and thanks to the unfailing wisdom of my late mom, I brush my hair to a shine at least once a day. She always said what a man finds the most appealing in a woman at first glance sits north of her forehead. My mom insisted on that, so don’t believe anyone who claims they’re a tits man or a legs man. That all comes after the initial impression.

  I know all about reads, believe me.

  I gaze into Philippe’s eyes, cool as can be, and I silently count to twelve before answering, just to convey how unintimidating I find his subtle menace and the overall dire situation I may be getting sucked into. Who in their right mind goes to a man who isn’t only Russian but undoubtedly mobbed up, to get involved as a mule for his dastardly counterfeiting enterprise? Yes, my right knee is beginning to tremble in its hiding place under the table and out of view, but I command it to hold steady. Not one inch of my body can even hint at the absolute terror causing my heart to pump a thousand miles per hour.

  Otherwise, I’m sunk with a guy like this. He’ll have me for breakfast if that half-empty bottle of vodka at his elbow hasn’t satisfied his appetite already.

  “I don’t like the feel of you,” I say in a steady voice, “so let’s just say I came for a visit, and I choked down a nice glass of vodka with you, but now I’ll be on my way.”

  That’s what’s known as a bluff, folks.

  I start to rise from my chair, but quick as an eyeblink, he has me by the wrist with a powerful hand. Anyone…anyone would scream at this point, but I’ve commanded all body parts, including my throat, to behave, so I merely whimper, and then I bust out crying.

  Faulty Bones is available now on Amazon

  Excerpt from

  THE WITCH OF THE HILLS

  by J.M. Fraser

  A tiny shape emerged at the shimmery point in the distance where highway squiggled into heat mirage. Brian squinted but couldn’t make it out. Fence post?

  Eastern Wyoming had so much to offer.

  The distance closed fast, and the figure turned into a girl with her thumb out. A stiff breeze scattered dark hair across her face and ruffled her long country dress. She held her ground where the shoulder met the pavement, as if daring the next semi to take her down. Spunky, unconventional, interesting, the hitchhiker represented everything Brian had been hoping to find on his first-ever road trip alone.

  As foot on the gas became foot off the gas became foot on the brake, the possibilities raced through his mind.

  Together in the car, the two of them could crack jokes about the boring scenery. Bluffs, scrub brush, coal trains. Let’s stop and take a picture of those wicked telephone poles.

  They could swap life stories. Matching sets, most likely—parents, school, part-time jobs, rules, rules, rules, but also a vision of a promising future, a light at the end of the tunnel, the day when they might be old enough to start making the rules themselves or at least wouldn’t have to follow every stinking one of them.

  Maybe they’d stop for gas and have a moment, looking at each other but pretending not to look, and then catching each other’s eye, holding that gaze, and, and, and—

  And with all the wishful thinking, he almost blew past this glistening can of soda in the desert, this cheeseburger in a sushi bar. Brian braked harder and cut over from the fast lane.

  The girl allowed him some room to get off the road. She was cute up close. A smile would have helped, but cute nonetheless, in a scraggly-haired, brooding sort of way.

  So far, so good. He lowered the passenger window, imagining the best possible exchange. Something like…

  “Want a ride?”

  “You bet!”

  With that in mind, he spoke his line to perfection.

  She gazed at him a beat too long for somebody following the best possible script. And she crossed her arms. Bad signs. A car roared by, buffeting them with draft. She waited for it to muscle past them, waited until silence hung heavy in the air. “Not with the likes of you,” she said.

  The Witch of the Hills is available now on Amazon

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  J.M. Fraser is a businessman and writer. He’s living the dream with his better half, Mary, in the suburban prairies west of Milwaukee. When not doing whatever it is that they do, they spend as much time as they can with their two daughters, Carolyn and Natalie
, and a cute little grandson named Colin.