by A.R. Rivera
A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma Smothered in Horseshit
“I don’t know.” I shake my head at Abi’s question.
After the weird discussion that ultimately amounted to nothing—just like most interactions with all versions of my father—he left. After that, Abi decided the best thing she could do for me was to jog my memory. To entice my Swiss cheese brain into connecting the proverbial dots. To hopefully keep me from losing years of valuable time trying to solve the problem her and her husband have already found the answer to, she said.
I already know the answer they’ve come up with. They want to kill every version of Daemon that exists in every dimension. Not that I object to the idea, I just don’t see how killing every one of him is going to change anything for me, or how increased inter-dimensional travel is going to help anyone. It’s the opposite of the deal I made with Eli.
But Abi insists that I am wrong, and since my entire relationship with my own Abi has always enforced my innate wrongness, I’ve agreed to keep an open mind.
A big part of the picture she’s painting is embedded in my interactions with Daemon and the places I’ve travelled. So I’m letting her walk me through my memories of the man that started this whole thing.
“Close your eyes. Think really hard.” She whispers. “You’re in Manhattan, back on that rooftop. He’s there with you . . .”
I’m lying on her couch. She’s got her knees pressed to the carpet beside me, leaning in close as I visualize the fight I had with the demon back in World Two.
“Do you see him?”
“Yes.”
“Picture every detail you can remember.” She instructs.
In my mind’s eye, the cityscape unfolds all around me. I’m on my knees, hunching over, thankful to be alive, staring at the puddle my clothes are making on the roof of the high-rise parking garage. The wormhole from Water World has just closed and I’m soaking wet.
“Are there clouds in the sky?”
I recall the dark and distant billows when I looked around. “A pillar of smoke. From the apartment building he set on fire.”
“Good. That’s very good. Now, tell me what happened next.”
“He kicked me onto my back,” I remember the taste of blood and the sting of his boot.
“Tell me what he’s wearing.”
“Same dirty trench coat as always.” He swam in that thing?
“Underneath that—what kind of shirt?”
I can’t picture it. “I don’t know.”
“What happened next?”
“Daemon spoke.” The words jump out at me and I repeat them before she asks. “He said, ‘you won’t follow me this time.’”
I feel Abi’s hand gripping my shoulder. “Good.” She tries to sound relaxed, but it’s not soothing at all. “Then what?”
“He threw me off the roof.”
Her lets out a breath. “No. something else happened in between.”
I shake my head. “That was it.”
“You just let him toss you off a building? You were a limp noodle—you didn’t grab at him or try to stop him?”
“I grabbed him,” I recall. “I grabbed his shirt. It was dirty.” I remember now, can see my finger clutching at it. “I ripped it.”
“Good,” Abi says again. “That’s good, you remember. Now, instead of remembering the fall, I want you to focus on what’s in your hand. Can you do that?”
My mind plays through falling, the wind and the bouncing from an awning or two, then landing in the backseat of that convertible. It wasn’t until after I realized I was okay that that I took stock of the scrap of cotton in my grip.
“There was a small piece of metal, like I stole the charm from a necklace when I ripped his shirt.”
“Think really hard, now, G, and tell me what it looks like.”
With eyes shut tight, I imagine the pilfered trinket. “It was bare metal. Three small discs connected—”
“Yes!” Abi interrupts. “Yes, it was. Does it remind you of something you might have seen somewhere else... on someone else, perhaps?”
The question jolts my brain. The words come rushing out my mouth before the thoughts finish forming. “The native boy showed me a similar charm.”
Opening my eyes to find Abi looking down with a grave expression. “Very good, G. That’s very good. Now let’s move forward.
“Close your eyes and tell me about the cave you walked through just before you found the next Threestone.”
Talk about anticlimactic. I thought I made a breakthrough, but apparently, it was just an exercise to get me to the next question. You have to learn one in order to count to two, I guess.
Relaxing back into the over-stuffed sofa, I listen to the sound of Abi’s voice and let it carry me through the memory. She and I talked enough about where I’ve been that she has no trouble leading me back to that open field, encroached by rocks and trees, where I was left to linger when the young native boy was called away by his mother.
“You’re staring at the entrance of the dark cave.”
My mind fills with the details. I speak them to her. Describe the sway of the trees, the storm growing in the distance, and my nerves after observing there was no visible way out of the enclosure I’d been left in.
“When you walked into the cave, what did you see?”
“Light,” I tell her. “The Threestone were lighting my path.”
“Did you get a look around? See any rooms?”
“No,” I mutter, recalling the way the stones lit up my path and took off. I describe this to her and she doesn’t sound a bit surprised.
“After your stones joined with the next set, what did you do?”
“I walked back through the cave and had to push past an old man that showed up. He tried to block the exit. I got back to the field and found my way out.” I had a lightning bolt to catch.
“No.” Abi disagrees and I open my eyes.
“What do you mean, ‘no’? I was there. I know what happened.”
“Think, G. Slow down and picture it. Now, you’ve got the newest set of stones, and you’re walking back to the cave. What do you see?”
Lying back on the couch, I close my eyes and concentrate.
“Oh.” The word drags out as I recall the odd carving I forgot to mention. “There was a stick-looking figure of a tree. A bare tree carved into the outer wall of the cave. I didn’t see it until I turned to walk back inside.”
“Yes, that’s what I was hoping for. It’s not a tree. It’s the mark of the Suma.”
Opening my eyes, I interlock my fingers over my stomach and stare at the ceiling. “What’s a Suma? And what does any of this have to do with Daemon?”
“You want to know who Daemon is?”
Turning quickly to my side, I am smack-dab in her face when I answer. “You know I do.” Because if I know who he is or where he comes from, then I can hunt him down.
“You’ve never heard of a tribe called the Suma? Everything that Eli has learned about them tells me they were brutal.”
I latch onto the one word. “Were?”
“They existed in a comparatively slower plane and are extinct in ours, as far as Eli knows. But their symbols are very important to you and your legacy. So, do yourself a favor and try to recall where else you saw that symbol, the one that looked like a tree.”
I shake my head and return to my former position, lying back as directed.
“Now, tell me more about Doyen.” She commands and my head goes into overdrive.
Flashes of time spent in that icy plane dance beneath my eyelids. I see the black smoke rising into the sky. The blank landscape. The cold, empty feeling.
Floating over the outer wall. Finding Rocky. The android assigned to guard and guide me through the city, Origin Two-One-Seven.
Doyen’s wide waist line and long robe, his smooth round chin that I had never seen before because the version of him that I knew kept it covered by a long, scraggly beard. Then there was the long ha
ir, neatly kept back in a long braid so I couldn’t see the snakehead tattooed beneath it—if it was there.
Everything about him seemed the opposite of my nemesis. Except both men shared deeply set eyes, that cruel sneer, and a taste for blood.
That last day, as I stood beside him, pretending to listen as he blathered on about his family problems and following a stranger into the forest.
Shit.
I’m upright on the couch, clutching Abi’s hand, muttering the word Eli taught me. It was the same word Doyen used when he pointed to the pink scar on his shoulder. “It is the mark of my people,” Doyen had explained excitedly. “It is the Tresunus.”
“It was his home?” I ask.
She nods but answers with a question. “Now that you know he has the mark, how many versions of Daemon have you come across?”
I want to answer her, but my mind is flying a mile a minute. Filling with more and more questions.
I’m relatively the same in every universe, right? I mean, I’ve only run into one other version of myself so far and he was a sixteen year-old moron, but I still recognized myself. I’ve seen three versions of my father and could pick him out in a crowd without a wink.
“How can Daemon be so different?” I ask. “He was fat and hairy.” He was power-hungry, though. Just like Daemon, the false friend and surprise murderer.
“G, you’ve seen three versions of Daemon.”
“Doyen-Daemon and Daemon-Daemon.”
“You’re forgetting the native boy, G.”
“No. That wasn’t Daemon. He may have been from the same tribe, but that wasn’t him. I would have known.”
“Your father never mentioned the name Nahuiollin?”
“Only once, in passing,” I answer, flinching at the remembered images of the video from Jeanine’s computer, the one wherein my father addressed the man I know as Daemon as Nahuiollin.
“When you opened the gateway, to cross over into that ancient plane, what did you ask the stones to do?”
“I needed to get away.” I’d just committed the ultimate crime and it was only a matter of time before I was found out. There was no time to get to Rocky and I was angry. Angry that the right thing to do was to leave him behind. “I asked the stones to take me to the one my father called Nahuiollin.”
And I landed in that ancient landscape and met a young native who showed me the path to the stones.
“Have the stones ever taken you to a place that you didn’t ask to go?”
“No.”
“So... then you agree? That the Suma boy was Daemon?”
Sighing, I give a reluctant nod.
She sighs too. “Good, G. That’s good you agree. So, you must also agree that he has to die next.”
