Father had always valued privacy, and the cottage had proved to be the perfect place to do his real work, hold meetings and discuss strategy with his most trusted advisers. He had led a worldwide organization for decades until his sudden death. Adam, at one time a rejected child and embarrassment to his father, had—during his father’s last years—become closer than anyone else to the old man. Most of the senior members, including Adam himself, had believed he would eventually succeed his father and bring about the event their organization had dreamed of for centuries.
His father had never entirely accepted Adam’s view of Manna. The organization had been built by powerful Users, and to them it was an ancient Magick available to initiates. Adam told his father it was most likely Manna was alien nanotechnology. It seemed it was available to anyone with a particular genetic predisposition. A cursory study revealed it had nothing to do with what you believed, who you worshiped or what kind of arcane word you muttered before Using. If you were genetically predisposed and were exposed to it, you could use Manna.
Adam had found supporters in the organization, but Father had been blind to the truth. He had spent a lifetime collecting and studying ancient Satanic documents, obtained from archaeological digs or private collections around the world. He could not let go of his precious Magick, so Adam finally gave up and practiced patience. His time would come.
Adam opened the cottage door with a key he took from under a stone in the garden. The perimeter security was such that it seemed pointless to waste money on securing the building itself.
Dust sheets still covered everything inside. Adam went back to the car and took out a backpack and a sleeping bag. He had enough food for three days, but he expected to have finished his planning before then. He threw the sleeping bag into what had once been the boardroom. He stopped for a moment, his eyes searching out the darker patch on the polished floorboards. It was still there - Adam had forbidden the staff to remove it. It was good to be reminded that there was no place for complacency. He would not suffer the same fate as Father. He stood in silence for a few moments, then went upstairs.
The study was the room Adam most closely associated with Father. He pulled back the dust sheets from the desk, chair and bookshelves. With a little effort, he could still see the old man sitting there, brow furrowed in concentration, his beloved books close at hand. Adam had only read one book since dropping out of Oxford a term before he was due to graduate. The recognition and opportunities academia offered were already of no interest to him, even then.
The crystal skull was still there. Father had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to have it stolen from a museum in Peru. After discovering its fabled supernatural powers to be disappointingly absent, Father had demonstrated his sense of humor by using it as a paperweight. It was sitting on top of the last Acolytes of Satan newsletter.
Naming the organization The Acolytes of Satan had been Father’s masterstroke. No one ever took them the slightest bit seriously and, in its latter years, the organization had even managed to obtain some European funding set aside for under-represented religious groups.
Adam pushed the skull and newsletter to the corner of the desk and sat down. He pulled the two reports out of his backpack. Sebastian Varden. Innisfarne. He settled down to scan the printed sheets. He would read slowly, and in detail, tomorrow. This afternoon was about getting the big picture.
Two hours later, he looked up to see the first tinges of red appearing in the sky outside. He put down the last page and steepled his fingers. He smiled, thinking how much this gesture reminded him of Father. He had respected the old man, despite his shortsightedness and naivety.
The files had contained two major surprises. He was impressed at how much information had been gathered during the last decade. The Broker had been an impressive figure and his network of informants and researchers were obviously talented, hardworking, flexible around legal constraints, and thorough. The man’s death had been regrettable, but the endgame was approaching, and Adam couldn’t afford to leave a trail.
The first surprise had been the fact that Sebastian Varden had been responsible for killing the woman who had murdered Father. Sonia Svetlana had underestimated Varden’s strength and her own abilities. She had paid the ultimate price. She had been as blind as Father in her own way, also believing her power—which was considerable—was based on some kind of Satanic Magick. She had swatted Father aside like an insect as she took over the leadership of the Acolytes, reducing him to a shriveled pile of blackened bones in the boardroom downstairs. Then she had gone to America to kill Varden. She hadn’t returned. The Acolytes of Satan had never recovered. Most of the senior figures had disappeared, and the catastrophic failure of Svetlana had convinced the organization’s less committed members to quietly abandon the project.
Father had failed to bring about the reign of Satan on Earth. Svetlana had convinced the Acolytes she could make it happen by wiping out the most powerful Manna users. She had failed. Now there was only Adam left. And he knew the Master. The darkness inside him was intimately connected to its Master, and he knew he would succeed where the Manna-loving fools had failed. Year Zero had proved beyond a doubt that his path was the right one. The generation of Manna users currently living would be the last. Adam was surely the forerunner of a new society. He had paid his dues. He had done his research. He had accepted the quest.
He knew Satan wasn’t coming back anytime soon. He was as much a piece of fiction as God. A promise of eternal life, a threat of damnation. The carrot and the stick. But Adam had seen through the charade, had spent his years at Oxford perusing ancient texts that revealed a different possibility. As the truth had become clearer, Adam recognized the role he had to play. He, and he alone, had the loyalty, commitment and power to restore order to the mess that was humanity.
The project was still alive. Varden was dead, but—on a tiny island off the northeast coast of England—his daughter still lived. Adam would kill Joni Varden.
And no one would ever see him coming.
20
Adam often dreamed, and his dreams were always variations on the same few key moments in his journey to the Master. The cottage was so full of memories that he wasn’t surprised when they emerged from his unconscious mind during the night. Adam paid close attention to dreams, believing that the gray area where consciousness becomes malleable often provides signs to those who knew how to interpret them.
There were two dreams that night, both clear and memorable. It was very unusual to experience these dreams together in this way. Adam took it to be a clear sign that he was getting close to his goal.
In the first dream, Adam was twelve years old.
Father had taken him shooting on the estate. Their wet coats were hanging in the pantry, and the two of them were warming themselves in front of the fire. Adam felt empty inside, a coldness spreading within him even as the fire brought warmth to his physical extremities.
“Why, Father? I want to stay here. With you.”
“I am not prepared to discuss this. I have work to do which you are not yet old enough to understand.”
“But, Father, I—,”
“Be quiet, Adam. I have made my decision. You are aware that our beliefs are not shared by the rest of the world. You know how important secrecy is. You will be expected to play your part. The school in England you will be attending is not completely unsympathetic to our way of life. I will give you the names of certain books you should seek out in its library. I will also have certain tutors contact you from time to time, to broaden your education. You will respect them as you would me. Is that clear?”
Adam knew that to continue to object would be futile.
“Yes, Father.”
“You will live with your mother in the school vacations.”
Adam tried to interject. His relationship with his mother was an uncomfortable one. His parents had been estranged since he was five, when his mother moved abroad. She seemed to tolerate Adam for the most
part, but it had always been clear she didn’t like her only son.
“If you are to live amongst the cattle and walk among them undetected, you must learn their ways. This is absolutely crucial. Do you understand?”
Adam nodded, miserably. Then Father stood and delivered the worst blow of all.
“You have no Manna ability, Adam. I can no longer deny the truth of this.”
Adam leaped to his feet.
“No, Father! I can learn, I know I can. You said so yourself! I am a late developer, but my power may be stronger when I come into it.”
Father simply shook his head slowly from side to side.
“No, Adam, you have no ability to summon Magick. My wish for it to be so has done us both a disservice. I wish it were otherwise. Now sit down.”
“But, Father, you said—,”
“Sit down, Adam!”
Adam never disobeyed Father, but he could feel the life for which he thought he was being prepared slipping away from him. He knew Father was the respected leader of a powerful organization. Lately, Adam had been allowed to take part in some of the rituals with the robes, the goat-skull masks, and the curved knife. He knew the sleepy young people who were brought to the cottage in the middle of the night never left. And he knew he was supposed to be by Father’s side. He took a step toward Father.
“I will learn to Use. I will. This is my destiny, Father, you must not send me—,”
Father glared at him in anger, and a great invisible hand pushed Adam in his chest, almost lifting him off his feet as he was tossed into the chair behind him. He could hardly breathe, but the worst pain wasn’t physical. Father had never used Manna against him before.
The old man turned his back on him.
“One day, Adam, you will return to me. You will be well-educated, both in the ways of this deluded world and in the ways of its true Master. There will be a place for you in the organization then, but it will be commensurate with your abilities. You leave first thing in the morning. You are dismissed.”
Adam walked out of the room with a new desire burning in his core. He would either learn to use Manna, or he would find a way to overcome those who flaunted their abilities.
Adam unzipped the sleeping bag and stood up, stretching. He drank some water and thought about the years he had spent in England, first at a small boarding school, then at university.
His academic career had seen him go to Oxford two years earlier than was normal. Great things were expected of him. His early abandonment of his studies caused consternation and disappointment.
His mother had died during that last term. It may have been a stroke, but he was no doctor. He had found her lying on her side on the bedroom floor, one leg encased in pantyhose, the other bare. Her skin had displayed a purplish tinge where it met the carpet. Adam had delayed calling the authorities for five days. He had been intrigued by the corpse now that the spirit within had gone. It was the first time he had been given an opportunity to study death, and he hadn’t wanted to waste it. He’d spent many hours watching her corpse. Her body had stiffened, changed color. There had been some astringent odors. But it hadn’t been her anymore. It hadn’t been his mother.
Adam left England liking his mother a little for the first time. She had contributed a valuable lesson. Her death had been an education in itself. Adam, although a bright student and well versed in the sciences would, nevertheless, not disregard the evidence of his own senses, his own observations. Humans are more than their bodies. There is an animating agent, known as spirit, soul. It exists.
During his time at Oxford, Adam had begun to explore the darkness he detected inside himself. This was not a metaphor, some ignorant abstract attempt to explain away depression, rage, the periods he had experienced since early childhood during which he had felt himself entirely separate, different, superior to everyone else. It was a real, palpable part of him. And it was growing. He had encouraged it, got to know it, developed a respect for it and, yes, even a little fear of it as it had become more and more of a presence within. And, as he had watched his mother’s dead body, he had felt the darkness coil and shift, its power building. Some experiments involving local Manna users had finally proved to him that he could end their deluded sense of entitlement. Now it was time to show Father.
Adam got back into the sleeping bag. He closed his eyes.
The second dream followed the first so closely it was as if he had opened a door in one time period and walked straight into another. He was back in Germany, years later.
Adam remembered this moment well.
He was standing on the roadside, close to the cottage. Father’s life had been threatened in recent weeks, and had surrounded himself with his most powerful Manna-using advisors. No one could get within half a mile without being sensed and—if they kept coming—the combined power of six senior Users would crush any enemy foolish enough to take them on. At least, that was the theory. Adam believed differently. He was about to risk his life finding out if he was right.
He was dressed in black. He carried no weapons other than an adapted taser - commonly known as a Manna-spanner.
Before moving, Adam looked within, found the darkness and let its coils reach out from his heart to fill his mind and body. He knew enough about psychiatry, a pseudo-science if ever there was one, to diagnose what the profession would make of him. Schizophrenia, with regular psychotic episodes. Schizophrenia because Adam heard voices, psychosis because the voices told Adam he was better than other people, and hurting—or killing—those who got in his way was perfectly acceptable behavior.
The voices spoke to him now. There were no words, but Adam could interpret the soundless void that opened up to him when he turned to it. He knew he was a psychopath. He embraced it. Why would anyone want to be anything else? He was the best of a new breed. The voices, the darkness, came from his Master. And it was abundantly clear that Adam was superior to other people. He was more intelligent than most, certainly more physically adept and incredibly focused. But the quality that made him truly stand out was his realism. He looked at the world—violent, selfish, unforgiving, cruel—as it was. He didn’t flinch. He had come to understand the true nature of creatures by discovering the true identity of their creator. And now it was time to share his discovery with Father.
Shrouded in his personal darkness, Adam walked toward the cottage, keeping close to the tree-line. He hadn’t expected any guards outside the cottage, and he was both relieved and disappointed to find this was, in fact, the case. Such confidence in their own power!
Adam climbed the ivy at the west end of the cottage, easily forcing the window of the storeroom on the second floor. Once inside, Adam unscrewed the lightbulb, then stood in the pitch-black room for a full three minutes, listening intently.
There were sounds coming from Father’s office, a murmured conversation. It was 11:15pm. No self-respecting Acolyte would go to bed before the witching hour of midnight. Other voices came from downstairs.
He opened the door and waited. Just as he was about to move, someone started to come upstairs. Adam took a few paces back into the room and stood absolutely still in the darkness. The footsteps stopped at the top of the stairs. Adam hoped the open storeroom door would seem unusual enough to raise suspicion. It did.
He felt the Manna wash into the room and around his body. The User was probing the room, knowing any intruder would be sensed immediately. They hadn’t reckoned on Adam. The Manna-sense parted around him and continued as if he were a pebble in a stream, then retreated.
Satisfied that no one was in the storeroom, the User walked in and flicked the light switch. During the second in which the User registered the missing lightbulb, Adam stepped silently forward and punched the figure in the throat. He caught the falling body and lowered it noiselessly to the floor. In the light from the hallway, Adam saw it was Petter, a much respected and feared senior Acolyte. He very nearly laughed at the ease with which he had neutralized him. He had even shown some restraint
, pulling the punch slightly so as not to kill the man. The fact that he would almost certainly never be able to speak again would be an appropriate reminder of the dangers of complacency.
Adam closed the storeroom door as he left and walked to the study. Its door was slightly ajar. Adam took a small mirror from one pocket. A magnet attached the mirror to the end of a piece of thick wire. Adam crouched and slowly pushed this past the edge of the door, angling it slightly upward. After three seconds, he pulled it back. The office had two occupants. Father and, to Adam’s pleasure, David. David headed up the Acolyte’s security operation. He was a sadistic killer and very good at his job, but Adam wasn’t going to let his admiration for the man deter him. He stood up.
Adam knocked on the study door. Petter had been heading this way, so knocking seemed an obvious approach.
“Enter,” came the voice from within. Adam reached into his left pants pocket and took out the Manna-spanner. Then he stepped inside. Father had his head bent over some papers and didn’t even look up. David was far more alert - he had got to his feet when Adam had knocked and only took a fraction of a second to react to the situation. But that fraction of a second was all Adam needed. The steel tip of his right shoe caught David under the chin and lifted him off his feet as the bone shattered. Adam stepped forward to catch him as he fell, simultaneously firing the spanner at Father.
Adam had spent some time adapting this particular weapon. Rather than hit the victim with enough voltage to cause uncontrollable spasms, this one released a high voltage burst for 0.8 seconds, then dropped the voltage to a level which was painful, but not agonizing. This meant Father’s Manna had been disabled, but his mental processes were reasonably functional. Adam explained as much as he checked David’s pulse.
“That’s a pity,” he said, “I always liked David.” Father’s eyes widened in horror, only to be replaced by a new, unfamiliar expression as he looked at his son. Then he chuckled, despite his body’s painful twitching. Adam realized what the unfamiliar expression was. It was pride.
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 78
