“Come on!” Chadwick was helping John to his feet, but his eyes were on the gathering population stepping out of their homes, leaving their chores, picking up rocks, sticks, tools…
Henry ejected the empty clip and stuck it in his pocket, pulling out his last one and ramming it in. He fired indiscriminately at the mass of people walking their way. And then he joined Chadwick and John in heading back to the forest.
A skinny man leaped down from a tree, cutting off their path. Chadwick sprayed him with a cloud of bullets, striking him in the foot, thigh, stomach, and neck.
“Where we going?” Henry called up to them, feeling the strain of his injuries.
They didn’t answer, fear that the demonic villagers might actually catch them blinding them to everything but the steady pumping of their legs.
Henry turned and saw that their pursuers were gaining on them. He swore.
“Up there!” John called out, pointing to a tall obelisk that stood piercing a grove of trees a hundred yards away. Of course, it was only a hope that they would find it standing in the center of a “teleporting” circle.
An arrow screamed by Henry’s head and buried itself into a tree ahead of him. And then another flew by, taking a centimeter of his scalp with it. He risked one look back over his shoulder and saw, to his dismay, the forest crawling with more white-skinned, loin-clothed warriors, swords and other weapons gleaming in their hands. He willed his legs to move even faster.
The monolith that was a phallic symbol representing the Cult of the Phoenix and the seed of Osiris actually did rest in the midst of a gypsum-coated henge. And as John pushed himself to get there sooner, the forest around them suddenly crawling with an impure army ascending like cockroaches out of rotten woodwork, he called out, “Oh, Jesus, please—”
And he was gone.
TWENTY
Zodiacal imagery is all around me. Like holograms, the celestial symbols circle my head. I reach out to touch Virgo, but my hand passes through it. Light is shining from somewhere, touching the shapes and smearing their dimensions into rainbows of different colors. I look around the cave and notice that dust no longer covers the ancient markings on the pillars. In fact, glancing down at the floor, I don’t see any dirt at all, just polished stone. I raise my weapon only to find it missing from my hands. Did I drop it? I look around for it but don’t see it anywhere. But in looking for it, I’m also made aware that the stone sarcophagus, along with all the skeletons that surrounded it, is gone. Lifting my hand to remove the night vision from off my eyes, I discover that it, too, has disappeared. What’s happening? I turn to leave the chamber but find a solid stone wall where the hole had been. I reach instinctively for a grenade, too scared to worry about the explosion bringing the desert down on top of me. And, of course, they’re missing, too. I look down at myself, and confusion sweeps through me like a tidal wave, almost knocking me off my feet. Where are my fatigues? I don’t understand. I’m wearing dark jeans, brown boots, and a ragged, gray t-shirt under a black windbreaker. How is this possible? What’s happening? A voice sounds from behind me, asking me if I’m okay. I spin around, fear gripping my heart as I half expect to find a terrorist aiming an AK-47 at me; but the other half of me recognizes that the accent doesn’t belong in this part of the world. And then, when I see him — as if the spell is suddenly broken — I realize that I’m not really dreaming.
“Are you okay, Johnny?” he asked again, walking out of the shadows.
John looked back behind him, realizing now that he must’ve been transported to this place when he ran through the circle. But—
“You’re looking for Henry and Mr. Aland.” He smiled, stepping closer. “Sorry, I wanted some privacy. I have already spoken to Henry anyway.”
John examined the mysterious figure with clear apprehension. He was wearing a white linen shirt that seemed to reflect the spinning display of the zodiac still circling around the room.
The man noticed John trying to peer through the colorful images. “My apologies,” he stated, and waved his hand. The zodiac vanished, and the colorful lights evaporated.
John could make out his surroundings more clearly now and noticed that the man was wearing loose pants made from the same material as his shirt. His feet were bare, his long curly hair golden around a perfectly tanned face. His white teeth shined brilliantly when he smiled, and his blue eyes looked as if they contained the oceans themselves. He looked to be about John’s age, though there was something in his expression that hinted at an arrogance much older than that.
The room around them was large and constructed of smooth limestone blocks, massive pillars holding up the tall ceiling. Over the man’s shoulder, John could see some kind of mirrored device standing beside an entranceway. Other than that, the room was empty.
The man smiled again as he turned and looked at the mirrors, acknowledging John’s interest in them. “We’ll get to that,” he said.
“Where am I?”
“My abode, of course.” He took a step back and bowed.
“How’d I get here?”
“You tell me.”
John’s eyes narrowed with accusation. “You’re Osiris.”
The man chuckled. “Ah,” he held up a finger and stepped closer, strands of his hair floating whimsically through the air as he moved.
“You’re a fallen angel,” John whispered, only half conscious of how ridiculous such a statement was, or should be.
He chuckled. “That is what they call me, though the true Osiris currently resides in chains much more restricting than my own. I found using his name to be incredibly helpful in continuing his work in Egypt all those years ago. Why work to create my own legacy when I could just borrow one already established? It saved me a lot of time.” He cocked his head to the side. “But what gave it away? Was it the giants or the dreams? No—” he snapped his fingers, “—it was the tape, wasn’t it?”
John’s heart began thumping. He felt the color drain from his face.
“Oh, you thought that because you were adopted—” He shook his head. “Now, Johnny, you know better than that.”
John clenched his fists.
Waving his hand, Osiris dismissed the angry response and walked toward the mirrored mechanism. “Come here, Johnny.”
John cautiously approached the mirrors, his own reflection walking to greet him. And then it disappeared, replaced by images of strangers.
John counted six mirrors, and each one held within its properties an active view of someone different. It was like watching six televisions, each one set on some reality show.
“What is this?”
“This is the instrument by which I have united my lost family.”
John watched the closest mirror and saw a man sitting at a desk working on a computer. “These are your—”
“My progeny, yes. My genetic code is written in their DNA. It’s become diluted over the years, of course…”
Stepping closer, John slowly reached out a finger and touched the glass. “You were watching me?” he breathed.
“From the moment you were conceived.” He crossed his arms. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, though. It is not like it used to be when our seed filled the whole earth. Now our offspring is rather limited. Especially mine, since I have been trapped here. Anyway, I have found that manipulating the environment around my kin, introducing them to each other, helps tremendously in getting them to me. To get just one person to this place without having to build a ‘support group’ around him is very difficult and time consuming. But,” he held up a finger again, “if you intertwine a few lives together, they just about get here themselves. It is a fascinating thing to watch.”
John swallowed the lump in his throat, realizing what he was being told.
“Your last name may not be Carter, but you were adopted by Carters for a reason.”
He knew it was true. He’d wanted to believe what Henry told him, that this had nothing to do with him, but deep down he always knew that
it did. And now Henry’s question became his own. Was redemption possible with this fallen creature’s blood running through his veins? The conversation he’d had with Pastor Brian the day before he left suddenly flashed through his head — the difficulty he had trying to live a holy life. But whereas he doubted before whether or not he had actually been redeemed, he was now wondering if that redemption was even possible at all. He began to pray as the floor moved beneath his feet.
“See! You know it’s true. Look at your face! No doubt in your eyes at all.” Osiris walked away from the mirrors, his hands folded behind his back. He looked thoughtfully up at the ceiling — which suddenly wasn’t there, a huge section of block somehow retracting and revealing the sunny sky above. “But something happened, Johnny. While you were in Iraq. I mean, I was watching you beat the hell out of that poor Iraqi, and then suddenly—” He spun on his heel and threw his hands out in the air. “Nothing! Just like that, you were gone.” He squinted like he was thinking real hard, making some kind of dramatic production out of it. “I didn’t know what happened, Johnny. Where did you go? Did you die? That’s what I thought. But then I saw you in Henry’s mirror, and in your adopted father’s mirror. But how was that possible, Johnny? That had never happened before.” And then he raised his voice, suddenly angry. “What made you disappear from my vision, Johnny?” He settled back into a whisper, his fingers dancing in exaggerated animation. “I thought about it for a long time and finally determined that there could be only one explanation.” He lifted his eyes, which were now shining intensely, and smirked evilly. “The Messssiah,” he whispered with serpent-like disdain. “You must have been taken from me by the Messiah, my DNA destroyed by the infusion of His Spirit.”
John stepped back as the fallen angel leaned toward him so closely that their noses were almost touching. Osiris stared into his eyes, unblinking. Tilting his head to the side, he looked up and down John’s body, circling around him. John held his breath.
“I didn’t think that my seed was redeemable,” he said softly, his voice growing more and more eerie. “I had to bring you here to see for myself.”
“That’s why you brought me here?”
“I’ve been working to bring you here from the moment you appeared in my mirror. It would’ve been an awful waste to just abandon you. You should think of yourself as an… experiment.”
“An experiment?” His stability was slowly returning, but now in the form of anger.
“Yessss. I wanted to know if I could still bring you here. And if I could, then maybe I could win you back. Turn you.”
John laughed. “I don’t think so.”
The angel sighed. “Yeah, me neither. But, nonetheless, here you are.” He shrugged. “Granted, I needed two others on the boat and Ronald’s help to make it happen.”
He blinked. Two others?
But Osiris just smiled and changed the subject. “Your friends interrupted a ceremony, and it has proven to be a rather large setback for me. I’m running out of time, Johnny.”
“You needed to release its spirit…”
He smiled. “Ah, someone’s been reading Enoch.”
“Why not just kill it?”
“I don’t make up the rules,” he looked up into the sky and yelled, “as I have so adequately learned!” His voice echoed.
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, Johnny, neither do I. Though my demon friends can visit me now,” he waved at the mirrors, “deliver such instruments and nudge my offspring toward me, it seems that the spirits born here don’t have the liberty to travel back and forth as the others do. So, I have to send them in a very precise and rather complicated way.”
“The henges,” John realized.
“Yes, the henges.”
“Is that how you’re planning on escaping this place?”
He sighed again, and his shoulders slumped. “Johnny, I’ve been on this island for about four thousand years. And for all but the last four hundred of them, I’ve been completely alone.”
“Until Christopher Carter showed up.”
“You’re rather good at putting the pieces together, aren’t you? Yes. When Christopher Carter arrived on the island in the year of our Lord—” he rolled his gleaming eyes in disgust, “—1609, I was given my eyessss back,” he hissed. “I could suddenly see out from my cell, but I could not interact with what I was seeing. One offspring was not enough to cross me over, though his presence on the island did provide a way for demons to visit me in my lonely world. And they came bearing plans of escape.”
By now, John’s fear had transitioned into curiosity and righteous indignation. “How?”
“How do I escape? By reconstructing what got me here in the first place. But I couldn’t do it myself. I needed the materials, I needed my giants, and, of course, I needed Christopher Carter to stay on the island.”
Pieces of Frank’s story came back to him. “You made him stay?”
He grinned diabolically. “I could whissssper in his ear.” He arrogantly walked a wide circle around John as he continued. “His presence created a doorway out in the water, but I couldn’t pull him through it because I needed him to sustain its opening. I needed others that I could bring through the gateway. And in your year of 1687, a very special relative was brought to me.”
“Sounds pretty complicated,” John mocked.
“Oh, it is. You see, that’s where He got me.” He put his head back and quoted from Enoch like he was some southern preacher. “‘Hear, Enoch, and take in these my words, for not to My angels have I told My secret, and I have not told them their rise, nor My endless realm, nor have they understood My creating, which I tell you today… And now to the Watchers say, In heaven have you been; secret things, however, have not been manifested to you; yet have you known a reprobated mystery.’ He tricked us, Johnny. God tricked us into thinking that we did know the secrets of creation. And so I used my knowledge of such secrets, the mysteries of the universe that your scientists can’t even begin to understand, to try and open the gates of Tarturus and free my condemned brethren. Only the joke was on me. Instead of freeing those in chains, I ended up trapped between the two worlds. This… sub-reality.”
“So then you did transform yourself after the Flood.”
He feigned a look of humble shame and nodded. “After my brothers had been condemned in the abyss, and their work had been erased from off the face of the earth, we decided to try once more. But it was obvious right away that things were different. God had already taken precautions.”
“Israel.”
“Yeah. The Jews. The Law. So freeing the two hundred that had first descended was the only way to overcome His ssssafeguard.”
Something that Henry and Chadwick just told him pricked his memory. “You were trying to prevent the birth of the Messiah.”
“Well, of course we were. But so much more than that, Johnny. We were trying to reestablish the true high priest, the true prophet and king back to his rightful throne.”
“Satan…”
Another laugh rebounded off the stone walls. “My brother, who you would probably know as Apollo, will be free once again, once earth’s cycle is complete. And I’ll be waiting for him and all his hosts. And then… then Lucifer will once again rule over that which has been taken from him and destroyed so many times.”
John shook his head. “You see, now you’ve lost me.”
Osiris smiled. “I fear I have divulged too much anyway. But one more thing before I kill you.” His appearance seemed to alter ever so slightly, the graceful fluidity of his movement suddenly becoming dark and chilling. “Did you know that women cannot resist us? And nor can we resist them. Reproducing with them is what brought this world to near extinction.” He smiled and walked back to the mirrors. “I told you, Johnny, that you disappeared from my device after your little epiphany. But three weeks ago,” he waved his hand over the glass, “this appeared.”
It was his house in Pennsylvania.
John gasped, the coolness he’d managed to maintain throughout the whole show shattering into a million pieces. His heart stopped in his chest, and he couldn’t breathe. He saw Kristen walk through the front door, the display following her into the house.
The angel began a haunting laugh, clapping his hands.
“You brought us together? She’s—”
He waved impatiently at the suggestion. “No, no, no. Your similar experiences with the Messiah did that. Besides, the seed, like sin, is passed down through man. Thus the whole virgin birth…” He was waving his hands around, waiting for him to get it.
“Then how—”
“Come on, Johnny. You’ve been an A student so far.”
Three weeks ago… that was when the strange feelings began coming back, when the dreams started again. He quickly replayed everything through his head, trying to keep it in some kind of chronological order. The dreams, the feelings, the apprehension about the trip, the tape, the apparition…”
And then he and Kristen were suddenly framed within a mirror, looking at each other.
The day he left.
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” he watched himself say.
“Look at me, Johnny. I have something to tell you. Something very important. But I’m going to wait until you get back and all of this, whatever you’re going through, is behind us. That means that you have to come back to me, Johnny. You understand me?”
He watched himself smile and remembered how hard it had been to make his lips form it. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry about last night.”
“I guess you’ll have to make it up to me on Sunday.”
“I’ll be here.”
The image faded away.
“You’re not crying are you, Johnny? Oh, for god’s sake.”
He realized that he was crying and promptly wiped the tears from his face, sadness quickly replaced by more potent doses of anger.
Progeny Page 29
