by Joshua Ingle
The elevator doors almost closed automatically, but Crystal shoved them aside, backed into the elevator, and tugged on Cole’s shirt so he’d join her.
“Uh, okay, okay—just wait.” Virgil glanced around the room, then located Heather’s blue plastic ruler on the counter, still near Cole’s wine bottles. He brought it over to the elevator and held it up. “This ruler is a timeline of your life, all right? At zero inches you’re born, and at twelve inches you die. Where do you think you are right now?”
Crystal was getting tired of these mind games. She shrugged and pointed to the three-inch mark.
Virgil shook his head. “Wrong.” He pointed to the space before the “0” on the left end of the ruler. “You’re here.”
“I’m not even born? Then how am I here?” This seemed like more nonsense to Crystal. She hit the button for the ground floor, but Virgil stepped between the doors before they could close. “That’s what a Sanctuary is, Crystal. It’s a place where you’re tested before you live, to see if…” His voice trailed off, like he himself wasn’t sure of the answer he was giving. “It’s a place where you’re tested before you live, to see if you’re good enough to be born. If you die in here, or if you don’t make a certain choice that you’re supposed to make before sunrise, you’ll never exist out there in the real world.”
Crystal shook her head. “But I remember things. I have memories of my childhood, of growing up, of meeting Cole.”
“Just one possible life. None of you existed before sunset tonight. Your memories are only in your head to set up this Sanctuary’s scenario.”
“So all we have to do is make an important choice, and we’ll be safe?” The idea was laughably far-fetched, even after tonight’s craziness.
But Virgil responded: “Yes.”
“Then what’s my choice? What’s Cole’s choice?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been trying to find that out since I got here. And now, because you called the police, you’ve sucked more people into the Sanctuary. And if you leave with them and cross the boundary again, you might suck in even more. It’s bad enough that all those people will have to make their own Big Choices. But it’s far, far worse in a Sanctuary like this one: a Sanctuary that’s under attack, where just going outside or opening your window is suicide. So I’m begging you, Crystal: please stay inside where it’s safe.”
“And what if I think this is all bullshit? What if I feel safer with the cops downstairs?”
Virgil didn’t skip a beat: he snapped the ruler in two.
Crystal took everything in and tried to digest it. She let herself become mesmerized by the alternating police lights on the far wall. I’m supposed to make an important choice so I can leave this whole life and go… be born? She almost giggled at the idea’s silliness. Nevertheless, she led Cole forward, out of the elevator, past a relieved-looking Virgil. “Who’s testing us?” she asked.
Virgil broke eye contact, seemed to go inside himself for a moment, then said: “The universe’s most vicious Sadist.” He stepped into the elevator.
“God?” Crystal asked after him. “Is God testing us?”
“If you want to call Him that. Now I’m going to save the police. Please stay here. And if I don’t come back, Crystal, Cole… please choose wisely.”
13
DING.
As Thorn used Virgil to open the elevator, the Judge complained behind him. “And what exactly am I supposed to do? Twiddle my thumbs while you go kill yourself? I took a big damned risk coming here to save you, Thorn. Stop wasting both our time on these humans.”
“If you won’t help me, then yes, please stay here and twiddle your thumbs.” And don’t use Brandon’s body to slaughter the humans, he almost said, but he didn’t want to give the Judge any ideas. Despite Brandon’s violent tendencies, the man’s death had discouraged Thorn greatly. Thorn had hoped to save him. But at least Brandon’s demise meant fewer humans alive who must make choices.
Thorn didn’t even know how these choices worked. Would each human be able to leave upon making his or her individual choice, or did they all have to make their choices before they could leave together? Would the Enemy really let a person’s entire future rest on the choices of others? Thorn couldn’t imagine so, but then again, the Enemy was deranged.
The Judge grabbed Thorn with such suddenness that Thorn nearly dropped Virgil’s body. “What if the humans do make their choices and escape the Sanctuary? No demon’s ever returned from a Sanctuary where that happened. I’m not gonna die in here for your sake.”
“I have a theory about all that, but time is of the essence. I’ll explain when I return.”
“If you return.” The Judge crossed his arms and eyed Thorn with a disgruntled stare. He slid his sunglasses back over his eyes as the elevator doors closed between them.
Thorn pushed the button for the ground floor twice just to assure himself he wouldn’t be trapped here again. The elevator felt ominous to him even now that he’d recaptured Virgil’s body. Its fluorescent lights beamed down oppressively, its hum more like a hiss, welcoming him back to his cage.
His pretense of saving the police seemed to have convinced everyone upstairs. In truth, he knew the officers were already a lost cause. His last view out the windows upstairs had been of the demon army spiraling down toward the approaching car. He’d realized then how naïve his original thoughts of saving them had been. Now he’d be lucky just to damage their bodies enough to render them useless to the demons—which was a vitally important task if Crystal and Cole were to survive. The work would be repugnant, but at least the officers would be dead puppets by the time Thorn got to them. Still, he dreaded the fight.
Thorn wondered whether a true army had ever been inside a Sanctuary. He’d heard tales of small groups of demons venturing into the testing chambers, but this might well be the first time an entire legion had ever entered one. Lucky me.
Thorn recalled an incident in the distant past when his colleague Aponon had infiltrated a Sanctuary, dreaming self-aggrandizing thoughts of changing the course of world events by killing the next Augustus—as if such a coincidence were likely, or even verifiable. Instead, he’d found a Sanctuary full of simple burghers exchanging coin in Roman Constantinople, so he’d murdered them all and returned to Earth in a sour mood. Decades later, Thorn had run into Aponon in a brothel in Athens. The demon swore to Thorn that he’d recently seen one of those same burghers alive and well, but poor now, working the nets on a fishing boat off the coast. “That man should be dead!” Aponon raged. “I slit his throat in the Sanctuary!” Aponon had spent the rest of the man’s life with him, tormenting him in retaliation for the perceived affront. Thorn, of course, had no way of knowing whether Aponon was correct, or raving mad. But he’d always doubted his colleague’s conspiracy theory. At the time, he’d told himself that Aponon had merely found a man whose face was similar to that of the man he’d killed; nothing more.
Now, as the elevator opened onto the ground floor, Thorn imagined all the theories about Sanctuaries that his own return to Earth would spark, should he survive the night. What mysteries did these walls hold? If only my attackers could see that there’s some hidden meaning to the Enemy’s testing chambers. If only I had time to examine this place. Perhaps there’d been some accuracy to Thorn’s initial musings: could the means to defecting to the Enemy be disguised and hidden somewhere within the Sanctuaries? If so, it was well hidden. Thorn had kept his eyes peeled for such a path all night, and he’d seen nothing.
Earlier, before the initial attack, Thorn had done his best to cordon off the condo’s ground floor from the outdoors, but his efforts had been rushed, and he wasn’t sure he’d closed all the windows and doors. Coming back down here might prove to be my last move of the night. He stepped out of the elevator and nervously ran Virgil’s hand over his bald head.
He checked his watch. 3:28 a.m.
•
“Do you believe Virgil’s story?” Crystal asked, hoping Cole woul
d say no, if only to convince her. The story seemed crazy. It seemed like something her mom would make up. But what other explanation could there be for what she’d seen outside? And inside? Brandon’s body, reanimated… Now that Virgil had finally told them his take on what was happening, she almost believed him.
In response to her question, Cole snickered incredulously. He untied the lace on the doors to the master bedroom, and Crystal remembered Brandon trapping Virgil on the other side of those doors. She made a point of remembering to ask the security guard how he’d escaped.
She looked at the living room and at Brandon’s covered body on the floor. “I could use some company now,” Crystal said. “Can we wait together in your room?”
“I want to be alone,” Cole said, and moved into his bedroom, toward the closet. Crystal was hurt by that, but she didn’t ask again. She went to the guest bathroom to check on her wounds. If Cole wants to be alone, let him be alone. She couldn’t imagine ever living a life as solitary as his.
But after a minute, the night’s trauma got the best of her, and she started tensing at every shadow and creaking pipe. Horrors wandered the halls of this condo tonight. Crystal would rather be alone with an unwelcoming Cole than alone with them. Besides, once the police found Brandon’s body, both Crystal and Cole would be in legal trouble for who knew how long—so the next few minutes might be their last chance to reconcile with each other.
She slipped out of her shoes and padded softly into his bedroom. Cole wasn’t there, so she tried his closet, which was was larger than Crystal’s whole bedroom in her mom’s house, although he didn’t use much of its space. Shirts hung on a rack on one side, above his two pairs of shoes. The closet held three dressers, but he used only one drawer.
Cole stood by a tarp that covered an old keyboard at the far end of the closet. All the rest of the space was just empty shelves.
Well… not quite, Crystal discovered as she tiptoed farther inward. Dozens of canvases were stacked horizontally along small cavities in the wall, not visible from the closet’s entrance. She had never noticed the cavities or their contents.
If Cole knew Crystal had followed him, he said nothing about it. He pulled the tarp off of the keyboard, braced himself, lifted it, then carried it out into the bedroom, nearly bumping into Crystal on his way past. She knew he played a little piano, and that he used music to calm himself when he was upset, but his hidden artistic lair took her by surprise. She quietly browsed his paintings, most of which were just smears of color, but painted with a level of artistic skill she never would have expected Cole to have, given both his blindness and his general apathy. She recalled seeing him in his paint-speckled apron on the docks earlier tonight.
Crystal soon found a chaotic composition featuring paint that was still wet: a cyclone of gloomy shades, swirling and churning in an undefined mass of abstract darkness, leaned against a wall to dry. Cole’s easel stood nearby, coated with dried paint of all colors.
She imagined him sitting before a blank canvas with nothing to see but the picture in his head. In her mind, he had the colors organized, so he knew exactly where they were, and his hand hovered above them as he decided. Would Cole choose a color, or would he linger in indecision like he so often did with other matters? Tonight he chose black. His brush hit the canvas, then darted to and fro. His arm moved with finesse, weaving a web of solid dark curves. Black, blue, purple, brown, black. The brush mixed and tarnished the color pools as it dipped into them over and over. Cole twisted his brush, rushing to intersect line after line, shooting up, down, and diagonally, stinging the white canvas with its murky hues. Droplets of paint dripped to the ground as Cole painted the final stroke of his creation—the one now sitting before Crystal.
Crystal found it weird, and sad, that Cole had kept this side of himself from her, but now that she’d found it, she felt closer to him than ever, in spite of their recent argument. She perused the other rows of paintings. Not all of them were as dark. Most of the paintings were of fire; they had a certain similarity to the painting hung in the living room. Had Cole painted that one too?
At the end of one row, Crystal found a small, rough image that appeared to show a young child facing a gravestone, with a tall man dressed in black standing directly behind him. A white “R.I.P.” was painted in the bottom corner. Cole must’ve painted this after his dad died.
A gentle piano tune wafted in from the bedroom. Intricate, brooding, sad. Crystal followed it, and found Cole sitting on the edge of his bed, his fingers gliding over his keyboard. The electronic curtains were down, so she pushed the button next to the light switch to raise them, revealing a view of the darkness outside, the docks below, the sheet lightning in the distance.
She sat next to Cole and his keyboard. The music stopped briefly, then Cole continued his piece. “I didn’t know you painted,” Crystal said.
Cole nodded. “My mom taught me when I was a kid.”
She watched his skillful piano playing for several seconds. “You’re pretty good at this, too.”
“My dad taught me. I’ve been hooked since I was little. Music is the only thing I’ve ever really cared about.”
What about me? Crystal wanted to ask, but she knew better. “Why’d you never try playing for a living?”
“I dunno. It’s difficult to make money with music. It’s a hard life.”
“A lot of things are difficult,” Crystal said.
She watched Cole play for a bit—long enough to learn the structure of the piece he was playing. Then she moved her hands over the higher keys and began playing a harmony, making it up off the top of her head. “But sometimes, the difficulty is worth it.”
Cole smiled, and they played together.
•
Marcus had spent the last few hours pressed against the outside of the building, listening to whatever he could hear through the windows and air ducts. To think that mere walls and glass could separate him from his prey! That Thorn had managed to survive this long was egregious enough, but the fact that he was actually succeeding at keeping these two humans out of harm’s way enraged Marcus even more. At least now the world’s demons saw Thorn for what he really was: a bumbling coward unfit to lead.
Marcus himself had been amused to see that Thorn was trying to prove himself to the Enemy, to save his own hide by saving His precious humans. What a backwards simpleton. Did he not remember the past? Did he not realize that the battle of the demon’s justice versus the Enemy’s evil still raged to this day?
“Cool it, Marcus,” the Atlanta Judge continued from the other side of the balcony’s sliding glass doors. “I’m not letting you in.”
“You have that Brandon boy’s corpse right there, Judge. It’d be simple for you to open this door, and you have my guarantee that you will not be harmed. On the contrary, consider yourself my guest in this Sanctuary.”
“I don’t think your friends back there feel exactly the same way.” The Judge motioned toward the demon army drifting outside, with which Marcus had only just made a tentative truce. He’d agreed to return the territory he’d captured in Central Africa if they’d just let him kill Thorn.
“I’m not asking you to let them in, Judge. Just me.”
“You know, you’ve been such a boy scout in the recent past, Marcus. I just—I feel compelled to trust you. Sure, come on in.”
“Really?”
“Ha. You are thick, man. Did God create you in His own image? I bet He did.”
A lesser demon might have burst into a rage at the Judge, but Marcus kept calm. He gestured confidently to the foyer beyond the Judge. “You’ve seen Thorn. You know how he is now. He is traitor to our kind. We can not let him live.”
The Judge dropped his gaze at that, and his teasing banter as well.
Marcus continued. “Thorn may have been a great demon once, but no longer. The Enemy has poisoned his mind. With your own eyes, you saw his actions in Piedmont Park, and now you have seen his actions here tonight. He no longer believes a
s you and I believe. He is no longer one of us.”
The Judge drifted sorrowfully downward. Marcus’s words were reaching him.
“I know you have your own grievances with me, but you were the one who sentenced Thorn to this Sanctuary to test where his loyalties lie. We now know the answer. So relinquish any attachment you have to him. Let me inside, and let me do what needs to be done.”
•
“Quickly, quickly. Come on in.” Thorn used Virgil to coax the police officers through the door into the underground parking garage. Demons were already latching onto their minds, but Thorn had gotten them to park their car mere feet from the door, and as they entered the building, Thorn fought back his adversaries in the spirit world. They would have had a better chance if they’d simply attacked Thorn directly, but they’d gone for the humans first. For once, Thorn was thankful for their hubris.
Not a single demon had gotten inside by the time Thorn shut the door behind the officers. Minutes earlier, tense moments had passed as he’d run outside of the parking garage, waving them away from the main entrance where Heather’s remains lay splattered across the ground. A few more moments of driving and they would have seen her, but the carnage had escaped their notice, and at last they were safely inside.
Now for the hard part. He’d been too busy trying to save Crystal and Cole to think of a plausible story to tell these men. He hadn’t expected it would be necessary—he’d been certain they’d be dead by the time he reached them.
What was worse, Thorn realized, was that he’d been in too much of a rush and hadn’t thought to hide Brandon’s body. Now the officers would find it as soon as they entered the condo upstairs—and they would surely handcuff Virgil, Crystal, and Cole, then call in backup.
His options now were limited. He couldn’t just send them away, or the demons would get them. He either had to come up with a convincing alibi for Cole’s 9-1-1 call, or he would have to subdue them somehow, then interrogate them to learn what their Big Choice was.
