March 14
Today I feel so old, a cold emptiness fills my chest Where my heart used to be. In spite of all I have done for him, MacLeod has betrayed me. My friend has fallen in love with my Theresa. He, a half-civilized barbarian, dares to look at her with love, with the eyes of desire. I, who love her so myself, can hardly blame him, but I cannot permit this outrage. My only choice was to banish him from Madrid and send him far away.
I will miss him terribly, but if he stays, I will have to kill him.
March 15
I discovered them together, in the garden, in spite of my warnings. There was no choice but to fight, and no doubt as to the outcome. I ordered Theresa from the garden. She thought it was to spare her the sight of her lover's death. Perhaps that was part of my reasoning, but I did not want her there to see the Quickening. It is too soon for such a revelation.
Theresa amazed me and offered a deal. If I spared his life, she will give herself to me freely, and never mention this episode, or Duncan MacLeod, again. If I killed him, she promised to be in a convent by nightfall. She would be lost to me forever. I must give us this chance. She will learn to love me. All I need is time, and I have plenty of that.
Then too, MacLeod must he made to pay for what he has done. The pain will be much greater, the burden much heavier if I spare him. He must live every day with the knowledge that I defeated him, that he owes his life to the woman he loved but wasn't man enough to win.
One day we will fight again, and I will kill him. It is our destiny. Let him suffer until that day.
September 4, 1853
She has cheated me, they both have. All I asked was for Theresa to give us an honest chance. But every day and every night, MacLeod came between us. Even in the bed chamber at night, he was there, her eyes accusing me, holding me at a distance, denying me her heart. She offered only the exercise, never the love of a wife and mate given freely and completely. It was a torture for us both.
Finally, it was too much. I put her out of her misery. She rests at peace but I did not get off so lightly. My torments continue.
There is the passage of many years before Duncan MacLeod again enters the life of Otavio Consone. I have picked up their story with their next meeting in Paris, in 1997.
Carmen de la Vega, Watcher
December 17,1997
It is time for the final step in my revenge against Anna Hidalgo. I promised her back in 1971 that the death of Raphael was only the first cut. Again, a faithless woman shattered my plans and stole my dreams. All I wanted was to make her happy, and she returned my love and my favors with betrayal. So be it. I returned the favor by taking from her the thing that sustained her, the dance. But I wasn't finished. She thought that the dance was her whole world. But growing inside her was the fruit of her deceit, her daughter.
I waited, biding my time, watching her child grow into a beautiful woman. The child is delightful, almost as beautiful as her mother. Luisa Hidalgo is full and ripe like sweet fruit waiting to be tasted. She is very young and no challenge to my powers. Her seduction was a delight. We both took such pleasure in her youthful exuberance and curiosity
Now is the time to complete my vengeance on Anna Hidalgo. I will carry her daughter far away. Perhaps I will kill her, perhaps not. But Anna will never know. The last of her dreams will die once and for all with the loss of her child. First dreams with her lover, Raphael, then her dreams of a career in dance, and last, her dreams for her child. She will spend the rest of her days wondering, waiting for word that will never come. Anna will live to regret her betrayal with each and every day.
But that is not the best of it. To make my reward complete, my old enemy returns to pay his debt in full. Once again, Duncan MacLeod tries to interfere in my affairs. Once again he comes sniffing around my women. His life is forfeit. The day of reckoning is at hand.
MacLeod is so easy. He must play the hero, he cannot help himself. It will be the work of a moment to provoke him and put an end to his meddling forever. He will rush to rescue the beautiful women. He cannot help himself. He is a professional hero. It amazes me that he has lived so long. Perhaps his skills have improved enough to give me a real challenge. I shiver at the thought. The element of risk is what makes life worth living. Without the victory over a worthy opponent, how can I be worthy to be final One?
I have looked into the eyes of those I have defeated at the moment of truth, the instant before the final stroke that brings death for the last and final time. I saw deep into the wells of their souls. Then came the Quickening. All that they ever were belonged to me. I wrested it from them by right of combat. Their most private dreams and terrors were a banquet for my appetites. To the victor go the spoils.
Perhaps it would be better if MacLeod and I had never met. We would not have been friends but I would never have felt this pain, this ache that gnaws at my guts and sucks my soul. I gave him my trust and my friendship, I shared my life and my dreams and he repaid me by stealing my woman. Like a thief, he stabbed me in the back and robbed me of all that I valued most. I am what his betrayal has made me. Only my sword and the Circle gives me peace and a reason to go on. Once I was alive. Now I only exist to win. I pass my nights in meaningless conquests and my days in even more meaningless contests. Perhaps that is what l cannot forgive.
I hunger to see the look on MacLeod's face when he must again acknowledge that I am the master. Perhaps then I will have peace at last.
Down Towards the Outflow
by Roger Bellon
COMPOSER: Roger Bellon
Composer Roger Bellon was the savior of many a Highlander episode in his five seasons with the series, adding his haunting and playful music to the episodes under the pressure of a daunting international delivery schedule.
For "Down Towards the Outflow," Roger told us he wanted to explore something that the series really hadn't covered: the near-death/after-death experience of an Immortal coming back to life.
And just for the record, it's pronounced with a French accent: Ro-zhay Beh-lohn.
Doubled over in pain, her guts, oozing, are held in with bloodied and mud soiled hands. Her head reels, her face contorts with the pain of life moving swiftly from her nine hundred year old body. "Ah shit, this is the second time this month... fuck this war and fuck this god-forsaken planet!" Eyes shut, suddenly wrench open with fear and panic. Once again she will die and once again her life will painfully flash before her eyes, an experience, to this day, she cannot comprehend. "Christ not again, how many times am I going to see my mother yelling at me for smoking in the bathroom when I was a kid. Ma, please I'm sorry... I feel bad about it, but fuck, that was eight hundred and eighty-five years ago... give me a break with this shit... will ya!"
Light slowly engulfs her. The pain seems to fade into the background as she feels herself being propelled like one of those little round steel balls being shot down the chute of a pinball machine towards a rubber bumper. Faster and faster she speeds towards a faint light. The closer she moves towards the light the less she remembers about her death. She feels a warmth and calmness that she has never felt before and realizes that "Heaven" is the light at the end of the tunnel. Way in the distance she can make out what appears to be a neon sign. Blinking off and on, pulsating with that low Tesla buzz.
"HEAVEN, THIS WAY... what the fuck... and who in the hell is that?" Behind a white iron gate, a rather paunchy man, dressed in white robes garnished with feathered wings, seems to be motioning to her. "Wait a minute... the sign says Heaven is over there. Then why is he, hey... hey you... wait a minute... I thought I was going to Heav... what the fuck, who's that?" She whips past the angel smiling and waving at her. . .
"Maybe next time darling... have a good life... again!" he says.
Try as she may she can't seem to slow down or make herself move towards that white iron gate she so desperately wants to enter. Her speed suddenly accelerates towards a secondary light, not white. She is starting to feel a tinge of anxiety creep into her cells. "I
don't get it, and who are they?" Two people wave at her, a man and a woman. They are standing in front of a door with a sign on it that reads "IMMORTALS, KEEP RIGHT." "Boy, they both look familiar, isn't she, hey wait a fucking minute... is this a joke or what?"
The woman is dressed in a tight Betty Boop cocktail dress, her breasts bleed out from the top. She has short platinum blonde hair, big red lips and a large toothy smile. The man is bare chested, wearing tight black Eldridge Cleaver cock pants. His brown hair is in a pony tail with the prerequisite earring in place. "What the fuck... those are the two bozos from that dumb TV show I used to watch as a kid. What were their names? I think his was Duncan and hers was Amanda. That's it, Duncan and Amanda . . . what the hell are they doing here?" As she speeds by, they both smile and wave her on as if she is rounding third base on her way to home plate in the seventh game of the world series.
Her emotions seem to be turning to that of anger, even rage, as she whips by on her way to what looks like an EXIT sign. The sign is red and is above a dark brown hole. The closer she gets the worse she feels. Even the air has a hint of putrefied life in it. She can hear something in the distance, it seems to be the sounds of people yelling at each other. "Where the hell am I going now... Hell?" But it wasn't Hell, or was it? "God damn, I recognize those voices . . . that sounds like Captain Panzer screaming at Sergeant Paonessa again. What the fuck did he do this time?" Her speed is now in deceleration moving toward the brown hole, her stomach tingles and her ears whistle, her body feels heavy and constipated.
Without warning she is sucked in, the smell is unbearable, the pressure agonizing. She is being pushed down and down a long slimy tube that hugs her with its ribbed walls. She feels fear, pain, and all the complex emotions of an approaching event unknown. "Oh god this hurts, I can't breathe, I can't move... oh no NO Please!!!!!" Ear crushing decibels spew forth the pulsing sounds that punctuate her spiraling movements down towards the outflow. The apex is shattered with the reversing noisy suck of her birth, again.
Silence, calm, stillness, repose ripped by her desperate gasp for air. Chest heaving, the knotted cramped pain of rebirth line her under-skin to the tip of her tongue. The pungent moist odor of this atmosphere's air is the first sign of life she tastes. Her mind is blank, she knows what has happened, but cannot focus on the truth of her experience. Heavy eyelids cautiously unclose. The first image is of the night's deep blue ether holding the four moons of URR hostage. Such beauty only seems fitting after her recent purge....
"Lieutenant, Lieutenant, I've been searching for you since this morning. Are you alright, where have you been... Commander Ginsberg is mad as hell and needs to speak to you at once. It seems your squad's attack on quadrant 32-H has failed. Not only have the NOLLEB fled the planet intact, but the entire operation has gone over budget and I am personally getting flack from fleet Commanders Ginsberg and King at Gauttlemont headquarters."
"Slow down Corporal Hillman, slow down. Can't you see I feel like shit... what the hell happened to our men, what day is it for christsakes, where is everybody..."
"Lieutenant, don't you remember, your squad was hit by..."
"Oh god, Corporal, when I think of the fucking paperwork I could just... hold on, hold on... does the Commander know all the details of what happened here?"
"Not yet, Lieutenant, a final report is being compiled as we speak."
"Well then, Corporal, get me Master-Sergeant Abramowitz. He's been through enough of these episodes to give those shitheads at headquarters what they want. I'll be damned if I'm going to take the fall for this disaster. And besides, if we don't give them the kill numbers they want, our plans to spin this sequence off to a wider alien congregation are history. Captain Panzer put it best when he said, 'Boys, they'd better not fuck with my retirement,' and you know what, Corporal Hillman?"
"What, Lieutenant?"
"I agree one hundred percent with him... so get your ass in gear and get Master-Sergeant Abramowitz on the communicator before URR and the few of us left here become one with the cosmos. OR DO YOU THINK YOU CAN LIVE FOREVER...?"
The Methos Chronicles
Part 1
by Don Anderson
ASSISTANT PROPS MASTER: Don Anderson
Props on a television series include anything on the set that's not nailed down or being worn by an actor. On a week's notice, the props department could he called upon to come up with anything from groceries for MacLeod's kitchen to an "antique" tea set for a Japanese flashback.
Don Anderson's eagerness to contribute "The Methos Chronicles" to this project is just one more example of how Highlander managed to capture the imagination of its entire crew. While the props department might not be the first place you would think to look for script ideas, on Highlander it seemed that everyone was putting their creativity to the test, imagining their own stories for the characters they came to know and love.
I
When I was born, the world was still new; the morning dew of life clung purposefully to tree branches and walls, in hopes of surviving the inevitability of the rising sun that would extinguish it for another day. We were far luckier than that. We not only survived, we flourished in our home in the desert. I was welcomed into a large, happy family that occupied the same oasis as my father's grandfather had, long ago. My people had lived there, without interruption, for much longer than that, but our oral history contained specifics for only the last 100 or so years.
Nothing about my childhood was in any way remarkable, compared to the others in my village, or for that matter, from my own siblings. I was the second son of three boys and two girls by a father who claimed vague relation to an extinct royal court and a mother who descended from a line of traders who had settled in the area when she was just a baby herself. I did not lack for attention or love from my parents or my extended family that populated the immediate environs. We lived gratefully together under the limited shade of the fig trees and palms that grew around our home, giving us resources to barter with the many traders who passed through our oasis with items that we desired which remained unavailable to us by other means. In this way we continued with our lives, joyously greeting each new day as another opportunity to improve our condition. When I consider my past from this present perspective, I realise that my entire world was contained in that place with those people, surrounded by a sense of belonging that I have never known since that time. My life has always been about surviving, in one way or another, but the meaning that it had to me then, with the people that I loved and admired, has shaded somewhat in the ensuing years of my existence. The perfect simplicity of that time and place has left me searching for a replacement that I can never find.
Our home was surrounded by an unforgiving desert, which is now called Egypt, that tolerated no mistakes by unprepared travelers. Attempting to ford its expanse without the proper provisions was a fool's errand: certain, parched death awaited those who made a single mistake while fording the cruel distance between oases. Many of the childhood lessons that I learned were centred around tales of the sand engulfing unwary caravans who had fatally misjudged the ferocity of the sun overhead, or the amount of water necessary to complete the journey between the sanctuaries of population. Nothing and no one lived for long outside the boundaries of the settlements that grew around those sources of liquid. Water is the most important substance in that land, the currency of life itself.
It so happened that when I reached my 28th birthday, our home was visited by a terrible calamity. My father was made aware that the well from which we drew our sustenance had dropped in level more than ever before. It had been low in the past, as the underground streams that fed it ebbed and flowed, but never had it sunk to such a desperate mark before. There was an assembly of all the people in our settlement, so that we could decide upon a course of action that would permit us to continue living without it.
We had to move from there, and soon, but where could we go? None of my family had known any other place except this one, only a few of
our people had ventured beyond our immediate borders for long. We recounted the tales of other oases that we had heard from the traders who had rested here, and tried to decide which ones might be close enough for us to travel to. We also had to consider whether any of those potential destinations might be occupied by a clan that would be hostile to our arrival. That turned out to be the least of our immediate concerns.
II
When the Bedouin scouting party found me, I was certain that I had died, but they revived me with water from their gourds and carried me back to their camp. I was so disoriented that at first I could not understand what they were saying, but I gradually awakened and explained to them what had happened. As the caravan from our village followed the bearings to our new home that my father was taking from the sun, we saw a sandstorm forming in the distance. We became completely disoriented and lost track of each other when the maelstrom hit; the sky became darker than night as we were engulfed by the swirling sand. I crouched on the ground and huddled into a ball, protected by the cape that I wrapped around myself to shut out the insane sounds of the turbulence. It seemed to go on forever, because day was indistinguishable from night until it finally stopped and I emerged from my cover to find that I was alone. I struggled to find some trace of my family, but the landscape was completely different, having been dramatically reformed by the storm. It took two days before I came upon the realisation that I should continue following my father's directions to the oasis and hope that the others had done the same. With only a small amount of water left in my container, I knew that I had to begin moving again or I would perish in that unforgiving terrain.
An Evening at Joe's Page 6
