I'm awake. After all these years of slumber I'm finally awake. The biting pain of the blade fades quickly as it jerks me from the dream and I sit up suddenly. I reach up and touch the scar on my neck, faded now, and years old. For a few seconds I'm not quite sure where I am, but the memories come flooding back quickly. Joe Finch, lost and alone, is clinging to a branch as the flood rages around him but it is too strong and he is washed downstream to mix with the rest of them. He was right of course, his essence was draining away, but it was his need to replenish it that was incorrect. It always happens that way. Every time they cling on, not realising that what awaits them is not oblivion, but salvation. I have lived and died more times than I can count, and every time I become something more. Joe Finch may be dead, but he is not forgotten. Right now, there is work to do. Lucy is looking at me curiously as she sits on the edge of the lounge in Grey's reception. It's only natural that I should wake up here, but now I am the one who is in control. Lucy, once so terrifying to me, is now an object of pity. I will save her, and all the rest of them. Everyone will be spared except for Grey.
'Lucy,' I say, sitting up. 'Can you still see through me?'
'I can,' she replies, but she seems confused.
'Do you know who I am, Lucy?'
She thinks about it, and then shakes her head.
'Not any more...'
Diana is looking at us now, and at me in particular. She can feel there is something wrong, but she doesn't know what it is. It amuses me to think that I was once so confused as well.
'Do you know what you are?' I ask her, and she again shakes her head.
'You're a vehicle, Lucy. Grey is trying to use you as his vehicle. He has no form, and he intends to use you to enter the Underworld.'
'What do you mean, use me?'
'I mean he will take possession of not only your body, but also your personality and your mind. He will be the passenger, and when he is finished he will abandon you and take another.'
Sid was right of course, the Underworld is more real than the dream we were living in. It's far newer and has not yet begun to fade. I know what Grey is as well. He is a tumour, but not just of the brain, he is a tumour of the mind. I have been reborn so many times that some part of me has become disconnected. Some of the personalities I inhabited refused to let go, and they dwelt together, trying to conceal themselves from me. They poisoned the world in which I lived and twisted it. Like all tumours, all they could conjure was death. Grey twisted things and tried to confuse Joe long enough to kill my new vehicle. But it's too late now. I am awake, and it is Judgement Day for Grey.
'Lucy, you like to kill, don't you?'
At this her mouth curls up into a smile, those teeth shining in her face like points of fire.
'Well it's time for Grey to die. He tried to consume you, but now it's your turn. Tell me, what is the thing that Grey fears most of all?'
Lucy thinks about it as Diana watches on.
'You.'
I laugh in spite of myself, for I had no idea that he had been so honest with his Vampire. Perhaps he wasn't. He created something he couldn't control. He moulded Lucy out of gelem and then he lost control of her. She wasn't meant for this world and she could see right through it. She could stroll back and forth between the Overworld and the Underworld at a whim, which is more power than he ever had. The best he could do was manifest himself in Joe Finch's mind.
'Lucy, honey, are you okay?' says Diana from over at the desk, and I turn my eyes towards her.
She can see the light from behind my lids, the light of Armaita, and it awes her into silence, just as Joe was awed by Gabriel.
'Ignore her, Lucy. She is nothing. She is two-dimensional and interchangeable. Soon she will be dead. It is infection that Grey fears the most, next to me. He collects viruses because he knows that death is the only way to cross, but they terrify him. He is as fragile as the skull he inhabits, and the mere suggestion would be enough. Do you understand what I'm saying?'
She may understand or she may not. Motive doesn't seem to concern her.
'How do I kill him?' she says, her eyes lighting up at the thought of death.
'That is what I'm telling you, Lucy. Use your imagination, or better still, use his.'
Something has shifted. I can feel a shift in pressure. There is more matter in the universe than there used to be. The darkness is lifting from my tomb, and I can feel myself becoming exposed, but it is not yet time. The door opens and the Vampire enters. Gavrilo is not with her.
'There is footage of you, Vampire, killing the geneticist.'
She runs a finger around a strand of hair near her face, as if wringing the blood out of it.
'Do I look pretty?' she asks.
I do not answer. There is no point. The pressure is even higher now as the door opens again and standing behind her is not the Instrument as I expected. It is Him. Not Joe Finch, but Him.
'You're awake,' I say, my voice falling flatly to the floor in front of him and forming a puddle of despair at his feet.
'I'm awake,' he replies.
The Vampire is looking at me with a strange expression. It is one that I have seen before, but I have never been at the receiving end. The most apt term to describe it would be 'bloodlust'. I have a sickening feeling deep inside of me, and I can feel my form slipping away. The Vampire looms larger in the glass, her eyes sparkling like corpses and her teeth as bright as ash.
'What is it you want?' I manage to say, although I know all too well what the answer will be.
She is no longer my Vampire. She is His now. Everything is His and I have failed.
'Can you feel them? Perhaps they are too small.' she says.
I pause mid-thought, my terror giving way to confusion. There is only one sound in my tomb. The air is circulating from a hole in the roof. I look down at my arm and the tube that runs away into the wall. The giver of life, but it scares me still. The Vampire is looking at it also.
'What have you done?'
She shrugs, but with it her body expands as she sucks some of the life from me through the glass. I can see it passing, and it leaves condensation in the shape of a skull. It smiles at me and drips away to the floor in an instant.
'You were so careful, but not careful enough.'
Suddenly I feel Him behind me. He is inside my tomb. He places an arm on my shoulder and it sears me with the heat of it.
'The virus? Can you feel it?' He says in my ear, whispering so close that it reverberates.
Lucy is pressed up against the glass, straining to see, and I reach down and tear the tube from my arm, letting an arcing trail of liquid spray the glass where she stands. She laughs, a sound like a scream, shattered into a hundred staccato notes.
'It's too late,' she says as His hand grips my other shoulder.
'We can see through your lies,' He says.
Gavrilo Yama took a sip of his coffee and almost instantly spat it out again. The coffee machine in Grey's building was a hit and miss affair, although it was all too frequently miss in Gavrilo's opinion. He threw the entire cup into the bin as he emerged from the lift and strolled across the carpeted floor of the fifth floor. Lucy was still waiting in reception, and he certainly didn't feel like incurring another one of her moods, or worse still, a penknife in the knee as she had once done when he had killed a man in Reno just to watch him die, and not invited her along. She was temperamental, just as her mother had been. But she was smarter too. She had inherited something of the cunning that he felt he was blessed with, and a thousand times the enthusiasm. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his revolver as he approached the office door, placing a single bullet in the chamber as he had done so many times before. Somehow he never tired of it, although Lucy had tried to convince him it was puerile. He entered the room with a kick to the door, brandishing the gun and pointing it at Diana. She looked up in alarm at first but when she saw who it was she shook her head.
'Mr Yama, you really have to stop doing this. Security saw you
on the camera the other day and it took me twenty minutes to convince them it was just a joke.'
Gavrilo shook his head.
'It's no joke, Diana. The Huntress becomes the hunted!'
At this, Diana did smile. Diana's smile widened even further as he pulled the trigger. In fact it widened by quite a few centimetres and also went backwards at just under the speed of sound, coming to rest squelchingly on the wall behind her along with large portions of her skull. Diana was not feeling lucky, it seemed. Her body slumped forwards, seeping with wasted life, and then slid slowly off her Swedish design house chair and onto the floor. The smell of gunpowder wafted into Gavrilo's nostrils as he stood holding the gun in front of him. Gavrilo was not a poet, nor did he have any sense of the grandiose.
'Holy fucking shit,' he said.
I fall to the floor. I can feel them consuming me from within, eating me alive as I squirm, just as I had sought to do to Him. He stands over me, his face blank, but his eyes glowing with fury.
'You sought to steal fire from the Gods, Grey, and now you are being punished for it.'
I would ask for forgiveness, but this is not the God to grant it. There is only oblivion, not just for me, but for all that he has created. He is omnipotent, but I am now nothing more than omnimpotent. All powerless. I turn my head over to look at the Vampire, even as my neck melts away beneath it and it falls to the floor, cut off from its support. She is growing bigger, so much so that she fills the window with a thousand eyes and teeth that eat themselves. A thousand mouths all screaming the same thing.
'I am NOT a vehicle!'
She knows what she was designed for. It's dangerous for anybody to see their place. For the Vampire, for me, even for Him.
'Why do you think your vehicle manifested as this Vampire, Grey? I can tell you. It's because that is what you are. You are nothing but a parasite, tearing yourself from what we both once were. That is why you failed, and were always destined to fail.'
I try to turn back to him, but I can't. There's nothing left of me. I have drained from the skull of his dead Joe Finch and now there is nowhere for me to go. He has forsaken me.
'You killed Mohammed. He was mine but you corrupted him and made him fight against me as well. He was conflicted, but in the end his duty was to me. And when he tried to wake me you sent your men of garbage to destroy him. You climbed into Joe's brain and tried to eat him alive, and in his name I do the same to you.'
'The Furies. They are still unleashed,' I say in the darkness, but He doesn't answer me.
There is no more light, not even from Him, and I have lost all form. I have become nothing but essence, mingling with the matter and energy of His thought. And I can hear the Vampire. I can hear a child laughing.
'The next time we meet, we will not have a common goal,' Lucy says as we both stare at the dead man, a void where a person should have been.
'I look forward to it,' I reply as she walks from Grey's room, amused that she thinks it possible to threaten me.
As she comes out, Gavrilo is trying to come in, his face white and panicked in a way she has never seen before. She can smell the powder and she glances behind him at the desk where Diana is normally seated. Gavrilo glances past her through the open door at the glass and the darkness beyond. Then they both look at each other for a moment as an understanding is transmitted between them without words.
'We'd better go,' says Gavrilo.
'Yes.'
Gavrilo rushes ahead but Lucy pauses as she passes Diana's desk and looks around to examine the mess her father has made. Just as she promised, she sees Diana dead and she smiles at the sight.
24
The Lunatic Messiah Page 23
