Prospero's Half-Life

by Trevor Zaple

  The paranoia inside the community was palpable, but the concerns from outside were even worse. The rumours of a strong power pushing outward from the west were no longer rumours. Refugees fleeing east had increased, and since Brantford stood in the center of their path many of them had been caught up in Bentley’s mad web. There had been such an influx of people that Bentley had been convinced to do away with his “temptation test” and accept anyone willing to fall in line. Many of those who survived that significantly more obvious test brought along stories that made it appear that things were the same all over. This power from the west – London, most of them agreed that it was based out of London – was offering much the same: either fall in line or fall in the grave. They were apparently remarkably successful at it, as well; the refugees showed up from towns that stretched from the coast of Lake Erie to the Bruce Peninsula.

  The white-robes were too confident about their chances, it seemed to Richard. They discussed the issue in terms where they were the clear winner. The large influx of refugees were talked about as though they were a set of ready-made slaves, already as cowed as the community had been before Richard’s ascension. They discussed the western push of this power as though it were something that could be countered or talked to; they seemed to think that they were a natural barrier to it. Richard thought that this was far from being the case, but none of the other apostles had any interest in what he had to say. They had made it very clear from the outset that they considered him on the same order as pond scum, and that he had only achieved his position through luck and trickery. He had almost informed them cynically that the same could be said of them, but he held his tongue. He spent most of their full meetings with a sardonic smile plastered across his face.

  Since none of the other apostles would speak with him, he took to wandering through the community, observing with mounting dread the steadily increasing number of grey-robed people that the term embraced. There were now so many that the Keep could not contain them; they had begun to populate the old houses around the old school. As a result there were more people in the streets than there had been previously; Richard took advantage of the new freedom to wander between the buildings, quietly taking in all of the changes that had begun accelerating since his ascension. He had built up an excuse in his head the first few times, ready to tell anyone who stopped him that he was inspecting the new dwellings for orthodoxy. After a while it became pointless and he stopped; no one was going to stop him. The black robes that dotted the population would merely look at him and nod. The old members of the community would refuse to look at him, afraid of attracting his attention. The new members would stare boldly at him, their worn and drawn faces glaring at him hungrily.

  These new members seemed to be a strange mixture of cynicism, fear, and defiance. Richard did not blame them in the slightest. They were all things that he felt in himself, after all. The entire situation seemed poised to collapse, and he felt that everyone in the community outside of the council of the apostles could feel it. As the weeks went on he saw a look in the eyes of even the oldest members of the community, a look that simply seemed to be waiting. The house of cards, once assembled, is turned over to just such a crowd he thought, and it frightened him. The slightest breeze would bring that house down, and then what?

  This question, and others like it, were what drove him to wander the halls of the Keep and the paths to the new houses like a restless ghost. He chewed them in his mind like tough steak, worrying at it with obsessive force. It was during the course of these walks that he first noticed that Carolyn was showing up along a specific route every day. He began to follow her, vaguely and at a distance. He gauged when she left the Keep, and traced her to the outermost of the houses that they’d reoccupied. He followed her for days, establishing as precise a pattern as he could. After he felt confident that he had it plotted out correctly, he waited until a day when the weather meant that very few people would venture outside. He watched her leave the Keep, and traced her path by memory, far enough behind her that she would not see him coming. He approached the weathered white door set into the front of the house and tried the door handle. It swung open easily and when Richard stepped aside he was not obstructed by anyone. It opened onto a tight kitchen with only one person in it – a startled, frightened young man holding a glass of artificial juice. Richard glared at the man and he set the juice down on the counter and ran out of the kitchen. Richard followed him swiftly.

  He came out into a living room, shabbily appointed and filled with damp cardboard boxes. There were three people in the room: the man whom had run from the kitchen; a man with a thin, scraggily beard and watery brown eyes; and a woman that he recognized from that first day he had been introduced to the conspiracy. Her face was frightened but also fierce. She held a heavy-looking piece of pipe in her hand, hefting it menacingly. He summoned up all of the calm within him and stared her down. None of them moved. Eventually the woman lowered the pipe and the man with the scraggily beard lowered his head.

  “Would you really have tried that?” Richard asked mildly. The woman’s eyes went wild.

  “No, your honour,” she implored. “I would never...I would not dream of,”

  He dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “I am the same person I always was,” he said and her eyes widened. “Where is she?”

  “Who, your honour?” the scraggily man asked craftily. Richard stared at him levelly until his face flushed a deep red.

  “She’s upstairs,” the woman muttered. Richard nodded, smiling in conscious imitation of Brother Bentley. The people in the living room turned their faces from him, refusing to look at him as he crossed the room and mounted the stairs.

  At the top there was a cozy, dusty hallway lined with three doors. The second door on the right was open slightly. Richard crept along the wall, trying to keep his sound to a minimum. He reached the door, placed his palm on it, and then leapt through.

  He landed on the other side, instantly confused. There was no one in the room. He had a brief moment to turn this over in his mind before he was piled into from behind with great force. He found himself driven forward onto a dirty mattress with tangled sheets, face-first. He twisted around, trying to wrestle with his assailant, and found himself grabbed by the wrists and driven even further into the mattress. He struggled for breath, heaving upward to try to buck the person off of his back. Finally the pressure on him lifted and the person left the bed. He slowly turned around so that he was lying on his back. He moved slowly, so as not to excite his assailant into further action. He saw, with only slight surprise, that it was Carolyn. There was a long, serrated hunting knife in her hand and her pretty round face was screwed up into a rage-filled sneer.

  “Well isn’t this ironic,” she spat. “The murderer of helpless men finds himself helpless and about to die”.

  Richard lifted his hands slowly with the palms facing outward.

  “There’s no need for the knife, Carolyn,” he pleaded with her. “Put it down and let’s discuss this”.

  “There’s nothing to discuss,” she said, her voice lethal. “You’re a cheap opportunist and a murderer”.

  Richard exploded into rage. “I AM NOT A MURDERER!” he seethed. “You think that I KNEW what was going to happen? You think that I PLANNED all of that? Carolyn, one moment I was walking through the Keep wondering when I would be arrested and the next moment I’m being kidnapped and dragged up onto the roof of some building. When they threw Jacob off of the side I was tied up, Carolyn. Chris tied me up along with Jacob and I don’t know why!”.

  Carolyn stared at him without speaking for some time, working through what he was saying in her mind. She opened her mouth a few times, only to cut off what she was about to say. She searched every inch of his face, looking for deceit, but could not find it. Her demeanour changed; the tension flowed out of her shoulders, she lowered the knife, and she sat heavily down upon the mattress beside him.

  “He wanted it to be you, right from the s
tart,” she said dully. “He’d found out how highly Bentley held you in his regard and concocted this plan. He said we’d finally have a man on the inner council, someone who could actually effect things and not just gather information”. She said this somewhat bitterly, and Richard chose not to respond to it. “He was so shocked when Bentley announced that it was Jacob. We all were. Jacob had been playing us right from the start. He’d learned about us – we still don’t know how – and he’d set out to win our confidence. We know that now. With one little ploy he smashed us all apart”.

  “Well, it obviously still exists,” Richard remarked. “I mean, you aren’t coming out here for nothing, right?”

  Carolyn blinked, and then chuckled ruefully. “I suppose not,” she admitted. “We didn’t think that any of the white-robes would notice, and the black robes have their hands full just dealing with the huge population boom”.

  “None of them would have noticed,” Richard told her, “they’re all far too busy preening themselves and making noise about how unconcerned they are about things that should be concerning them greatly”. This hung in the air for a moment, and Carolyn slowly turned her head to look at him evenly.

  “How much do you know?” she asked. Richard looked at her silently for a minute before responding.

  “Not all that much,” he replied, “not really much more than I did before I put on this white robe. I know the rumours, but I don’t know any facts”.

  Carolyn laughed, and it was like tiny silver bells filling the small, dingy room. She slid her small, warm hand over his and smiled at him. Her smile seemed to make the room appear far larger than it really was, and his heart picked up a rhythm that he might have considered dangerous if he’d been inclined to care.

  “Well, we’ll have to bring you up to speed, then,” she said, and moved her lips to his, severing him from all thought and function with the swiftness of her razor-sharp knife.

  ELEVEN

  The inner council of apostles, as it turned out, spent a great deal of time disagreeing with each other, when they weren’t busy freezing Richard out of information and discussion. The real reason that no preparations had been made for the coming of the force that had badly frightened the refugees was that none of the leaders could agree on what to do about them. None of them believed the stories that the refugees brought with them; Carolyn related that each one of them seemed convinced that they had the strongest army anywhere, and that any attack on them would be foolish, at best. Each of them seemed to believe that the black robes were their own personal armed force, and that making any sort of deal or accommodation in order to defend against a coming attack would leave them open to the machinations of one of their fellows. Richard shook his head as Carolyn related all of this to him. It was utterly stupid, he raged both silently and aloud. There were so many things that could be done, but none of them were willing to step outside of themselves to do it.

  Carolyn nodded along with his rantings; she agreed with him whole-heartedly. She had also been moving amongst the refugees from the west, listening to their stories and trying to comfort their wounds, both physical and psychological. She had heard the stories, internalized them, and had begun living in fear of the eventual day that these implacable foes from London would sweep over them, enslaving those they could and brutally murdering those that they could not.

  They met in secret for weeks, and the scattered members of the old conspiracy would meet with them from time to time. There was little that could be done about the iron rule of Bentley and Richard’s fellow white-robes; the chaos and confusion that the refugees had brought made it impossible to gather together any sort of real secret rebellion against them. Some of the conspirators suggested undertaking a sort of guerrilla campaign of sabotage against the ruling elite; Richard considered it but ultimately ruled against it.

  “Violence and destruction will only cause the apostles to rally an even tighter climate of fear from the black robes, and the community is scared and paranoid enough to close ranks against us if we try such a thing,” Richard noted one night, as the idea was brought up for the third time. “We need to figure out a way to bring about their loss of power, in such a way that does not alienate the entire community against us”. Richard had already thought of one such way, but he had been holding off on suggesting it, hoping that someone else would make the connections and suggest it for him. Due to his particular status as a white-robe, he had been thrust into the role of leader of the conspiracy. The stress of being a leader in both the ruling elite and the movement to displace them was wearing on him, and he was hoping that someone else would take up the reins eventually. It did not happen on that night; no one made any further suggestions in line with what Richard had suggested, and as the members of the conspiracy filtered out in a slow, paranoid fashion, he turned to Carolyn with real despair in his eyes.

  “I don’t think that there’s any real way of bringing this whole thing down from the inside,” he said, his voice defeated. Carolyn studied him closely.

  “You’re not giving up, though...” she said, uncertain. Richard shook his head emphatically.

  “Never. These people need to live in a place without fear constantly over them. They survived a plague, Carolyn, a real world-ending, kill-em-all plague, and they deserve something more than to toil and die under some backwards theology that just serves to keep a madman happy. No, I think we need to seek outside help”.

  He walked across the living room of that last little house to have been occupied and stared out of the window. The night was pitch black and alive with the sound of cicadas. Their symphonies grew louder by the night, or so it seemed to Richard. Carolyn followed after him a moment later, and stole in beside him with a grace that Richard felt he could never have attempted.

  “You’re not talking about, about them, are you?” she asked, her voice crawling with revulsion. None of them had settled on a real name for that grave, unnamed force pushing its inevitable way east. There were refugees filtering in for the past week from towns that, in the world that had been, were only a half-hour away by car. They had pored over the maps endlessly, and decided that it would only be a week before the black-robes began encountering them at the edge of Brantford. A week, if they were lucky.

  “I AM talking about them!” Richard yelled, pounding his fist into the wall beside the window with sudden, vicious force. “We need to send them an emissary! Not from these cult idiots that pretend to rule here, but from us!” His voice faded to a near whisper. “The real voice of the community”.

  “What do you think would even happen?” Carolyn asked, her voice dangerous. “After all the stories you’ve heard. The atrocities they’ve committed. The way they’ve treated every town before us. What makes you think they would even want to try to talk with us?”

  Richard stared at her with frustrated rage dancing through his expression. He wanted to scream but he made himself breathe.

  “From what we’ve been told, none of those other places could have even tried to put up a resistance. You’ve heard them: “Oh, we were trying to get our crops planted and we were building fences to keep the bandits out when all of a sudden there’s an army demanding we surrender. So we grab our rusted old guns and our makeshift farming equipment and get ourselves killed”. We’re not like any of those other places. Bentley actually has an army here. They might roll through us, but we’d put up such a fight that they’d never forget. If we spell out the situation to them, show them the advantages to helping us and treating us diplomatically, they might be persuaded to strike a deal with us”.

  “I’m sure they would,” Carolyn bit back acidly. “It would be “join us or die”. I’m pretty sure we’re already expecting that”.

  Richard hit the wall again, with even greater force this time. Carolyn stepped back, her eyes blazing.

  “I’m sending someone to deliver my message to them,” Richard said, and his voice said that the idea was definitive, and not up for debate. Carolyn glared at him and wal
ked away.

  “I guess we’ll see an answer one way or another soon enough,” she said as she left the room. Richard scowled. She always had to get the last word in. He thought about hitting the wall one more time, for the sake of catharsis, but in the end he realized that he was too exhausted to even try.

  They got their answer within a week. Richard was attending the weekly meeting of the apostles, held without fail in the former teacher’s lounge of the Keep. “Attending”, of course, was an apropos word; he sat back and listened to the others jabber on self-importantly. As usual, he sat back, contributed nothing (unless Brother Bentley called on him) and watched their reactions to each other’s words. The petty political gamesmanship was amusing, in a black, desperate way. Eventually he grew bored of it, and began devising neat little daydream escapes in his head. During this particular meeting, he had been trying to remember all of the words to “Running Up That Hill” and blanking on the second verse; he furrowed his brow, looked up, and saw that their meeting had been invaded by three people: two scared-looking black-robes and a tall, proud looking man in a thick black leather jacket. At first, Richard had no reaction; he stared blankly at the stranger and tried in vain to figure out what was going on. The strange man had a large, purple Crown Royal bag in his hand, filled with something heavy.

  “Who the hell are you?” one of the apostles exploded, and several of them got to their feet. They were unarmed, so the gesture was meaningless; the black robes shifted their feet and stared at each other uncomfortably.

  “Gentlemen, please,” the stranger said smoothly, his voice rough and bassy but also oddly cultured. “Take your seats, this will not take long”. He smiled and it seemed to Richard that he had seen that sort of smile before, in a shark documentary. It chilled him and he saw with black humour that the faces of those apostles slowly lowering themselves back into their seats held the same base fear that their so-called protectors wore while guarding this stranger. Richard raised his hand to his mouth, wanting to cover up any stray reactions that he might give.