by A. Q. Owen
“Oh, right. Steve the priest.”
After initially waking up, Orion thought maybe the visit from his old nemesis was just a dream. Seeing the multiple glasses on the counter along with an almost empty bottle of whiskey dispelled that thought…or was it hope?
Steve had said some pretty incredible things during the course of their conversation. He’d mentioned something about a sword some old guy gave him and was rambling on about revenge. That was it, wasn’t it? Revenge?
Orion wandered over to the pantry and pulled open the door. He grabbed his bottle of ibuprofen and dumped three pills into his palm. A quick swig of water, and the three pills were down his throat. He hoped they would work faster than usual. His head was killing him.
He passed on breakfast, instead just wanting to get out on the road before there was too much traffic. He could always pick something up at the little diner near the river. One of the few things he appreciated about his life was that he could work from anywhere as long as his laptop kept running. As a design consultant, he’d created a wide variety of 3-D models for various companies. From action figures to campers, Orion had done it all. He’d made a good amount of money during the time he immersed himself in his work. He quickly realized that no amount of new projects or money would ever make him feel better. Nothing would.
He sold the house just a few short months after Sara’s death. Part of him wanted to stay there, maybe to honor her memory. He hated the notion that someone else would sleep in her room or make it their office. But every time he looked out the window or door and saw the patch of asphalt where she’d been hit by the car, Orion went through those events all over again in his mind. No, he couldn’t stay there. He had to leave.
An old building downtown had been renovated and turned into loft apartments. They even had big garages, he supposed for people with more money than sense. At least he’d supposed that before he started buying more motorcycles. Now he was likely one of those without any common sense and far more money than he imagined. Some of his designs brought in checks every month that numbered in the tens of thousands of dollars, and for work he’d done months ago.
Orion was about to walk out the door when he noticed something strange on the little table next to the entrance. He stood by the exposed brick wall and stared down at the object. He’d never seen it before.
“What’s this?” he wondered out loud and reached down to touch it.
It was a silver ring with a black Templar Cross in the center. Engraved on the inside of the ring were words he couldn’t read. It looked like Latin, but he wasn’t sure. He had taken German in high school. This wasn’t German.
Frowning, he palmed the ring and walked back over to his desktop in the rear corner. His workspace was considerable, wrapping around the corner and occupying several feet on both walls. He had two monitors connected to his desktop so he could multitask while working from home on some of his bigger projects.
He pulled up his chair and analyzed the engraving on the ring once more before entering the letters into the search bar.
Suddenly, the computer monitor flickered and went black. The lights in the room did the same, blinking for a second before dimming. Orion looked around and scowled. He checked the power strip under the desk and saw it was still plugged in. Not that that would have made the lights go out.
“Blackout?” Then he wondered if he’d paid his electric bill on time. Of course he had. That bill, along with most of his others, was set to autopay.
He stood up and wandered over to the kitchen and saw that the clock on the oven and the microwave were both blank. The power was out in his entire apartment.
He pinched his eyebrows together and turned his head, his eyes locking on the ring. He shook off the notion. “No,” he said. There was no way the ring had anything to do with the power outage. Was there? No. It had to be a coincidence.
Orion strolled back over to the desk and picked up the ring. As he looked at the image on the exterior, he noticed a strange, pale glow coming from the object. He watched as the letters on the inside disappeared, leaving nothing but a smooth, silver surface.
“Whoa, what the hell?”
His fingers slipped, and he dropped the ring to the floor. It clanked on the hard surface and spun around on its rim before settling.
Orion bent down and picked it up, inspecting the inside once more where the lettering had been. He shook his head. “This is freaky.”
He looked around the room, paranoid for a second that someone may have broken in and accidentally left the jewelry on the little table. He shook that off a second later. That was a dumb idea. What kind of burglar breaks into someone’s home and leaves a parting gift?
No, it had to be Steve. He must have left it by mistake.
The lights flickered in the kitchen, and he heard his computer restart. He frowned and spun around in a circle, more confused than before.
Orion walked back over to his computer and jostled the mouse. The screen flashed to life once more, and he clicked on the internet icon. He entered a web search for rings with a variety of other terms. One of the search phrases he used included the word cross. There were so many results that he had to go back to the beginning and change things up.
Over and over again, he tried myriad combinations, but none of the results were useful.
He eased back in his chair and laced his fingers together on top of his head. He stared at the screen for nearly a minute, clicking his tongue while he tried to figure out what was going on.
He sighed and realized there was no way his brain was going to let this go until he had some answers. That meant he was going to have to go see Steve.
Orion had hoped that wouldn’t be necessary. The conversation, at least the parts he remembered, had been awkward at best. Steve’s confession about how he’d hated Orion for most of his adolescent and young adult life struck him as an awkward lead-in to what turned out to be some kind of counseling session.
Steve meant well, Orion supposed. Maybe the priest just didn’t have a good understanding of social conventions. He’d been pretty insistent on spending some time with Orion, which probably wouldn’t have happened had Orion been sober.
Those moments were few and far between. He’d given up temperance long ago.
The thought reminded him of the splitting headache pounding in his skull. He shook his head, remembering he hadn’t had his coffee yet. Most of the time, he set the coffee pot to start making his morning joe around 7:15. He must have forgotten to prepare it the day before. He frowned, recalling his routine of the previous day.
Orion walked over to the pot and pulled out the filter slide. Sure enough, fresh coffee grounds were in the unbleached filter, and water was in the reservoir. He craned his neck to the side and saw that the plug was still in the outlet.
“Huh. That’s strange.” He took the plug out of the socket and held it for a second before shoving the prongs back in. Sure enough, the red light on the front of the pot came on, and the clock started blinking.
Annoyed at the minor inconvenience, he didn’t bother setting the timers and everything again, instead pressing the brew button to get a quick fix of caffeine before heading out.
He walked back over to the computer while the coffeemaker dripped the steaming brown liquid into the pot and sent wafts of roasted, earthy aromas through the apartment. There were few things Orion enjoyed more than the smell of fresh coffee. The scent of metal and rubber in a motorcycle showroom was another simple pleasure in that vein. He’d often thought that if he could bottle those smells and sell them as cologne, he would, though he doubted anyone would buy them.
Back at the computer, Orion continued his search for answers about the ring. But he kept running into walls. There were too many results and too much to sift through, as he’d realized earlier. So, he gave up and searched through some of the headlines.
He hated the news. The media was as corrupt as any politician, perhaps more so in many ways. Now and then, though, he w
ould skim some of the headlines and find something interesting. It was almost never on the front page. Those spots were usually reserved for tragedies, disease, or some sort of fear-based articles. Orion had no interest in any of that. He’d faced enough tragedy for ten lifetimes.
On one of the business pages, something caught his eye. It was a small section about Zasser Industries. Since the catastrophic incident with their deep-space travel mechanism, commonly called “the gate”, they appear to have been experiencing ongoing financial troubles.
Orion leaned closer to scan the article. He recalled talking a little about it with Steve the night before, just moments prior to passing out, or so Orion suspected.
The Zasser Industries Incident made global news on New Year’s Eve of 2050. The gate was supposed to be an amalgamation between high science and magic. Orion recalled hearing something about it, but not much. He’d been buried in grief and unwilling to pay attention to what was going on in the outside world.
Now, for whatever reason, his curiosity was piqued.
The coffeemaker slowed and Orion got out of his chair to go fill a cup. When he’d poured a mug of hot joe, he quickly returned to his workstation, forgetting all about whatever it was he’d planned on doing—riding his motorcycle somewhere—and dove back into the article about the Incident.
There wasn’t much in that article, so he did a rapid web search and started finding scraps of information about Zasser, but the stuff on whatever happened with their interstellar gate was difficult to find.
The original article he’d discovered didn’t say much about it, either, vaguely referring to it as part of the reason for the company’s financial woes. After that, the trail of information dried up. Orion leaned back again and took a sip of coffee. He scratched his head and set the mug down. He didn’t realize it at the time, but it was the first moment in forever since he hadn’t thought about Sara or Jennifer. His entire focus was on the bizarre mystery before him.
Orion spent the next hour trying to dig up any solid information he could about the Zasser Incident, but the search was in vain.
He let out a sigh and shut down the computer, finally deciding there was no point in looking anymore. He took the empty cup over to the sink, rinsed it out, and left it in the bottom, then strode back over to the door, grabbed his keys, and walked out.
At the bottom of the lift, he walked over to his small collection of motorcycles and hopped onto the Arch. It was a bike unlike any other he’d ever seen. He loved all his motorcycles, but this one was special. It cost him an arm and a leg, too, but he didn’t care. At this point, he didn’t have anyone to leave his money to when his number was called, so why worry about it. You can’t take it with you; at least that old saw was his motto. Orion didn’t live frivolously. He wanted to make sure he had enough to live comfortably for the rest of his miserable life. That said, he planned on making sure the last check he wrote in this world was one that bounced.
He hit a button on the side of the garage and the door slid up to the ceiling. Then he started the motorcycle. It revved to life with a growl that never seemed to grow old. One second he was sitting on the seat letting the bike warm up, the next he was screaming down the road toward the church where Steve worked.
Even if his old enemy didn’t have any answers about the ring or the strange occurrence at Zasser, at least the guy could help him get his car home from the bar.
5
Orion pulled into one of the parking spots in front of the church and had a quick look around. He didn’t know why, but he was getting the strangest feeling that he was being followed or watched—maybe both.
He didn’t see anyone other than a few homeless people milling around one of the street corners. There was a collection of men in orange vests and green hats, but they were working on a construction project across the street. Other than that, there appeared to be nothing but ordinary pedestrians going about their day.
Orion sighed and let his anxiety drift away. Why would anyone follow him? He was a nobody. Since the death of his daughter, he’d gone to great lengths to make sure that was the case. He’d lost contact with most of his friends, let go of nearly everyone close to him. His parents had been dead for years, and he had no special connection to his ex-wife’s family for obvious reasons.
He walked toward the steps, between his car and Steve’s, and climbed to the heavy wooden doors. Why was it that nearly every church he’d ever been to had enormous wooden doors like this? For a place was meant to be welcoming to all, sticking a couple of gates like this in the entrance didn’t necessarily send the right message. Then again, they were pretty cool looking. Perhaps the decor over convenience was okay just this once.
Orion tugged on the handle, and the hinges creaked in protest. A musty smell of stone, wood, and upholstered pews wafted out. It was like a museum in that way. Orion wasn’t surprised. Old cathedrals like this one always had that scent. He’d been to Europe twice and was amazed that even churches five hundred years older than the ones in the States featured a similar smell.
It wasn’t bad. In fact, he rather enjoyed it, as if God himself were welcoming him in with familiar scents.
Orion hadn’t been to church in a long time. It wasn’t that he blamed God for the accident with his daughter. Quite the contrary. He blamed the other guy.
He vaguely recalled telling Steve something like that the night before, but it was all a bit hazy. Man, I was drunk, he thought.
The door closed behind him, and the bright sunlight that had briefly pierced his eyes as he removed the tinted helmet diminished to a cave-like darkness.
It took a couple of seconds for his eyes to adjust. The candlelight coming from the front of the cathedral helped, casting a dim, flickering glow throughout the sanctuary and into the atrium in the back.
He didn’t notice any activity in the presbytery and looked around to his right and left to see if there were any signs pointing the way to the priest’s office. One was hanging on a brick near a set of double doors. Below it was a stone bowl containing holy water.
Orion snorted at the notion. There was nothing holy about it, at least not in his opinion. The water itself was just molecules and atoms, nothing more. He also realized there was something to believing the liquid had some kind of powerful, God-given properties.
After Sara died, he went through a stage of anger, though if he was honest he’d never let go of the emotion, the rage that simmered inside him. He’d pushed the anger down deep inside, letting it fester so he could do something more productive.
He spent months poring over the scriptures, trying to find answers from God. None came. He prayed, meditated, screamed into the sky in the dead of night. Still nothing.
Then, one day, as if by chance, he was wandering through a bookstore in the city. Orion had found that the only thing that offered any kind of comfort, besides booze, was being surrounded by stories. He preferred fiction since life tended to suck, especially for him. He’d been strolling by a section on spirituality and noticed a book with an odd title: The Elijah Effect.
The title drew him in unlike any book he’d ever read before. He picked it up out of sheer curiosity and walked to the back of the bookstore, finding a quiet table in the corner. Quiet here, however, was relative. Every two minutes it seemed like the espresso machine was busily frothing people’s cappuccinos or steaming lattes.
The background noises didn’t bother him as he was absorbed by the book, sucked into its grip and held until it was nearly closing time. He bought the book on his way out and continued reading late into the night, mesmerized by the things the author was saying.
He’d never seen anything like it before. And it explained everything in regard to the human experience, even answering the eternal question: Why do bad things happen to good people?
The book posited that great prophets or miracle workers like Elijah were tapping into something that anyone could access. The universe created by God worked on a system, a system that could be a
ccessed and tweaked by human beings. It was after reading this book that he realized God didn’t actually tamper with human history, or human lives in general.
The creator sent messengers from time to time, sure, but those great miracle workers were doing things without the aid of divine intervention. The author of the book talked about it in terms of quantum mechanics, that everything exists in a permanent state of potential.
These miracle workers, prophets, shamans, whatever they were called, were just men and women, people connecting to something far more powerful than most of the world had ever believed.
Why did some people miraculously show up one day with cancer, and the next day it was gone? What about moments of tragedy where there were inexplicably survivors? And the placebo effect, what about that? Why did over 30 percent of all test subjects with every medication ever conceived have the same results with a placebo as with the real medication?
The more questions Orion asked about this sort of thing, the more he was shut down. He’d talked to his friends about it, his pastors, even a counselor at one point. All of them blew it off. Most of them said the same old line; that “some things had to be taken on faith.”
Faith? Where had faith been the day he’d lost his daughter?
No, that wasn’t good enough.
He wanted more.
The desire for real explanations had led him to end his church visits. Orion believed that, on a spiritual level, church was the 101 class of learning about the universe and the human experience. He wanted the graduate degree.
As he made his way toward the placard on the wall, he reflected on that journey; the search that had taken months rushed through his head in seconds. An epiphany struck him at the moment he reached the sign and read the short directions of how to reach the priest’s offices.
“Magic,” he said with a chuckle.
Orion didn’t know where the thought came from. It just…appeared. Like a neon sign flashing in a stormy night.
