by A. J. Curry
“Compartmentalize”: It's something I've done most of my life, something I started taking to an extreme after my wife left me. When it’s time to do The Job, that's what I do − without a single thought spared for anyone or anything else. When it’s time to do The Order’s bidding, I do that. When it’s time to drink, I drink. When it’s time to sleep, I do my best. I compartmentalize, and do everything possible to leave as little time as possible for the compartment labeled “grieve over losing my wife”.
It’s not a perfect approach, but it works. I'm still alive, I still have a job. I still have a home and a life. It's still the home and life I made for her… But there's nothing I can do about that.
Now I had a new compartment, and I wasn't sure what to call it. “Consorting with Satan” and “trying to save the world” were both choices that came to mind, but so did “killing time until time gets around to killing me”. The presumption that I still cared enough about the world to save it was maybe even a bigger presumption than taking at face value a guy claiming to be Lucifer.
As a final touch, I stuffed my old gray paisley scarf down the front of the jacket. Instead of walking to the Lamb, I decided to drive. My old Porsche is like my old leather jacket − or like me, I suppose. Beat up and not so shiny and definitely seen better days. But everything works, and “shiny” is overrated. Refusing to put the top up in anything less than a downpour had fubar’d the upholstery. Dyeing it black and applying black duct tape to the busted seams had fixed things as far as I was concerned.
It was a short drive to The Lamb, made shorter by the fact I still drive like a guy from Texas. The place was already filling up by the time I got there. Luckily, Murgenstaern had beat me there and grabbed a table in back where we could talk without an audience.
I grabbed a pint and made my way back. He was watching the Seahawks administer a beatdown to the Forty-Niners on the big screen in the front of the bar like he actually gave a shit − which maybe he did, for all I knew. I asked my instincts again if he was any more or less human than, say, Evangeia.
The answer remained “probably less”. I wasn’t inducted into The Order for psychic ability. I’ve picked up a few bits of Chaos Magick over the years, but any random half dozen folks at a Throbbing Gristle tribute show are probably better than I am. But I trust my instincts and my intuitions. At the end of the day, they’re all I’ve got.
“Well, cheers you evil bastard,” I said, taking the other seat. “You got me to do something last night I really shouldn’t oughta done.”
He glanced down from the TV. As soon as he stopped pretending to watch the game, he stopped pretending to be human − or at least normal. “Good to see you as well, Murphy. By all means tell me more, unless the lapse in question is a personal matter.”
“Oh, no − quite professional.” I took a long drag on my beer. “I lied to someone who is pretty much capable of everything they say about you. Granted, it was just a lie of omission… but that ain’t gonna save my ass if shit goes south.”
He shrugged. “If shit well and truly ‘goes south’, I could wind up the only fully sentient biped on this planet. What happened?”
“Not that much. I just neglected to tell my boss − my realboss − about my new drinking buddy, Satan himself, when I was asked if I had noticed anything ‘unusual’ lately.”
“Sounds like a small enough matter. And I am not Satan.”
“You weren’t there − as for the ‘Satan’ wisecrack, what difference does it make? You aren’t ‘Lucifer’ either, in any meaningful sense.”
It wasn’t a long pause, but it was definitely there. “Only in ways that are meaningful to me.”
“And if I’m real lucky, I might even live long enough to understand or appreciate any of that. What’re you drinking, by the way?”
“Boneyard, actually.”
“Appropriate. I’m grabbing another round − and then it’s time to ‘talk shop’, old son.”
Getting another round gave me a moment to think about where I wanted to take this. The problem with depending on instinct and intuition is that a lot of the time you wind up being shit for advance planning. On the other hand, sometimes stuff works out anyway.
By the time I made it back with a couple of fresh pints, I’d thought things through as far as maybe staying alive for another day or two. “So,” I said. “How about we skip ahead to the part about making whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing worth my while? Anything I need to sign in my own blood?”
“What I have in mind may or may not require shed blood, but I think we can dispense with wasting any on signed agreements. As for your compensation, if this works, it is my fond hope to be done with this place… this planet. You are welcome to amuse yourself as you please with whatever I leave behind here − assuming your various employers don’t take it from you.”
I’d gotten similar pitches in various parts of Central America back in the day. I’d never particularly cared for it back then, either. “Fine. I wind up wealthy beyond my wildest dreams, assuming I don’t wind up in small bloody bits. What I really want is probably beyond even your ability to grant. We can talk about it later. You said you needed my help. Let’s talk about that − and just so we understand each other, if anything is on a ‘need to know’ basis, I’m outta here as soon as I’m done with this beer.”
“Fair enough, although some of what I tell you must be taken at my word.”
“That’ll work… for now.”
“Best I start at the beginning.”
“Good thing I got another round.”
nine: murgenstaern
Genesis and astrophysics are not as out of alignment as they are frequently thought to be, once you make allowances for differences in languages and perspective − at least the parts I know about. I was willed into being sometime between the Big Bang and the creation of space. There were many of us. Beings of pure energy created solely to hear and carry out what might be described as “the word of God”. Angels, in other words.
We numbered many, though not infinite, and through our ministrations, the stars and galaxies formed. We watched the universe expand and take shape.
A thing we had not expected happened as the universe expanded. God remained at the center of what God had wrought. We could not. The face of God grew more distant, the voice of God more faint.
Also, we grew smaller − or rather, stayed the same.
Some remained closer to the center of the cosmos and grew greater from their proximity to the Power and the Glory. Others remained true to their purpose as messengers and ministers of The Plan as they knew it, remaining in the periphery of the expanding universe to shape the course of that expansion. As time and space grew, our ability to move within it lessened. The effort of even traversing a mere galaxy became great. Then even to move between solar systems exceeded us.
Then finally, those of us who had chosen to remain and carry out The Word became as planet-bound as the creatures we had shepherded into existence in obedience to that Word.
I call myself “Morningstar”, among other reasons, in remembrance of the bright morning of Creation. Whatever I chose to resemble, at my core I am a piece of that bright morning − a conscious singularity.
By the time humankind arose from the muck, the time I could have left this world was drawing to a close. I chose to stay, feeling that sentience arising from mere matter must be what The Master intended all along. And so here I remain.
But here is the thing humans fail to understand about the depths of time. Given enough time, almost anything is possible. Monkeys can learn to talk and yield the fire of Creation. Rifts can occur in an ever expanding cosmos, granting access to… elsewhere.
When my kind was created, other things were created as well. Less than angels, but more than mere matter. Those shards of my birth matrix continued to travel outward, though not as angels fly. Over enough time, such a shard might even overtake a small planet in the outer cosmos.
Were I to merge my inne
r being with such a thing, I would grow great again. Not so great as to be a shaper of galaxies, but great enough to travel among them. Perhaps even to go home.
I had known that in time, such a thing might come within my grasp. Sometimes patience pays.
ten: murphy
“So, does this thing have a name?” It had taken more than a round of course. Retelling Genesis from a first-person perspective isn’t a particularly quick or easy affair, even given the huge chunks of material Murgenstaern had certainly skipped over.
“None in any human tongue. Why would it?”
“Point taken. What does it look like?”
“Like myself, it could look like almost anything. Given where it has been for most of time, it probably looks…like a rock, more than not. It is a leftover piece of the stuff God used to make angels. Call it a Seraphim Stone.”
“Nice. OK, ‘Seraphim Stone’ it is. So here’s another question. How are you so sure of what this thing is? I’m tapped into some pretty serious insider sources, and if any of them have a clue they are keeping it pretty close to home.”
“I am sure you have little more trust for any of your various employers than I do, but it doesn’t matter. I know that the Stone is here. It calls to me. I hear it, every bit as much as I once heard the voice of The Almighty.”
“This would be the part where I have to take you at your word, right?”
“One such, to be sure.”
“Hopefully, there will not be many. Can we now, finally, talk about what it is you need me to do?”
“Very little, really. I need you to help me gain access to wherever The Stone winds up.”
I had sort of seen it coming. “In which case, you are out of luck, old son.”
“How so?”
“Let’s start with the ‘wherever it winds up’ part. The Archangel Array, along with your mcguffin, was successfully retrieved from the Indian Ocean earlier today by a U.S. naval task force. There was never any real doubt of that outcome. I don’t have a high enough security clearance to know exactly what happened after that, but I have enough institutional knowledge to fill in the gaps.
Right now, your Seraphim Stone and the Archangel Array wreckage are under extreme lock and key − probably on an aircraft carrier underway to a U.S. airbase − probably Diego Garcia.
“What happens after that has a lot to do with just how much your Seraphim Stone really looks like a rock. If the incident forensics team finds even a trace of anything that doesn’t look ‘like a rock, more or less’, it’s going to get airlifted straight to Nevada.”
“Area 51?”
I laughed. “For an angelic being, you have some quaint and misinformed notions. Area 51, Area 52 − hell, for all I know they’ve trotted out an “Area 53” by now. That’s all misdirection. But I do know that any expert analysis of a suspected extraterrestrial organism or artifact is going to take place at one of several high-security facilities in the less populated parts of Nevada − and that’s just assuming this remains ‘Company’ business.”
I was beginning to get a sense of how to “read” Murgenstaern. For the most part, his “human suit” was damned near perfect. But when something got his attention, he would forget to act human. When something really got his attention, he essentially turned to stone. He turned statue for a brief moment before speaking.
“I assume you refer to what you describe as your ‘real’ employers.”
“Correct. I am hardly the only mole The Order has embedded within the U.S. shadow government. Area Fifty Whatever is so infiltrated it might as well be considered a joint operation. And that’s where it gets a bit more interesting… but still hypothetical.”
“How so?”
This was not gonna be fun, but I couldn’t see a way around it. “I can’t help you, Murgenstaern. All the riches in the world or whatever you were planning to offer me is of no use if I’m dead − which is how I will wind up if I take any unauthorized field trips to Nevada, much less the Indian Ocean.”
“How do you wind up dead?”
“Unlike you, I’m going to wind up that way no matter what. The way I wind up that way in a hurry is by fucking with my employers. Let’s start with my ‘day job.’ Do you really think I get to just ‘phone in’ a lead role as an intel analyst from some random location in the Pacific Northwest? People like me usually work in a damned dungeon where you don’t even go to the pisser without your security badge and occasionally get strip-searched when you go home for the day. I had to pull in a lot of markers for this, had to make some serious promises, and had to agree to some serious conditions.
“When I was still married, my wife tried to get the cable company to add some movie channels as a ‘surprise’. Luckily, Caroline was never any damned good at keeping secrets − otherwise we would’ve all gotten a surprise the moment a local cable company tech tried to touch my damned modem.
“I don’t know for sure that my house would get blown up if I missed work under unusual circumstances, but I’m not inclined to find out. If I want time off, I have to ask for it months in advance. There is spyware on my phone that I know about, including stuff I’m not supposed to know about, and probably more stuff that I don’t know about. Post-Snowden, the measures adopted to keep people like me in line got very serious. Given the current administration, I keep my head down and my nose clean.”
“Does not your affiliation with The Order affect any of this?”
I guess a transcendental being can get by on raw power in a state of ignorance. Must be nice.
“Yeah, it makes things a damned sight more complicated. The Order doesn’t need any of that crap to keep me on a short leash. They actually respect my privacy one helluva lot more than The Company does − but the consequences of going rogue on them would make for a very entertaining and very short supernatural horror flick.
“At some point, I would love to find out what you really know and what you are really capable of − assuming we continue to have the occasional beer together and you were just joking about making make me disappear. But as far as helping you break into a highly secured facility to get some thingamajig that’s going to get you off this planet, I don’t know who the hell you think you’re talking to. I’m just a broken down old fuck with an interesting history and a collection of bad life choices.
“I’m sure a lot of people would want to read something deeper into the coincidence of us meeting, including the people I’m lying to about having even met you − hell, they don’t believe anything is a ‘coincidence’ − but I’m beginning to think it may be exactly that.”
Another statue moment, then the statue spoke. “There are those who say that everything happens for a reason.”
I laughed. “If you are one of them, then you have spent the better part of eternity learning nothing. My wife − sorry, ex-wife − believes crap like that, believes that it was somehow ‘fate’ that she’d wind up on the other side of the country engaged to some asshat she met in some bar.”
I laughed again. It even sounded nasty to me, but I couldn’t help it. “Good looking women hanging out in bars get hooked up, just like free radicals wind up forming molecules − it ain’t fate, it’s physics.
“As for your ‘Seraphim Stone’, I just don’t see any urgency here. It’s been around forever and so have you. The way things are going, you can just wait a century, snag it from the wreckage after humanity has finished committing suicide, and be on your way. Hell, that’s what I’d do.”
It had taken a few beers to get to this point, and I’d been leaning toward double and triple IPAs. But I truly and honestly no longer gave a shit. About anything, really. I should’ve known, though, that he wasn’t going to let me off the hook that easy. After a few moments of statue-like stillness, he spoke.
“Your analysis is correct on almost all points, with two important exceptions. One is that there is, in fact, some urgency here that will not await the collapse of your civilization. The other is that the impediments to aiding me yo
u have mentioned are all matters with which I can assist − at least as far as concerns your ‘day job’.
“The Order is a different matter, although I have some means of dealing with them as well − as well as some history with them, as well as with those they oppose. Any urgency here comes from that history.
“I suppose I have been operating on a ‘need to know’ basis. Your need just escalated. Time I told you a few things about your Order − as well as a few things about me.”
Act 3: Discretion
one : murgenstaern
No living creature on this planet ever has or ever could bear witness to my true nature. Luckily, matter accretes to me. By the time it mattered what that matter looked like, I had become quite adept at shaping it to suit my needs.
Once this had become my place of exile, it had become my habit to pass among humans as one of their own. Call it discretion if you will. I could appear among them as a God if I liked, have done so on occasion. But it never turns out well for the humans − or me, given that I hate having to move.
Imagine my dismay when I discovered I was not the only such imposter.
I knew they were not other angels. The light of Creation cannot be hidden from those who contain that light as well. But equally evident was that they were no more human than I.
They were among those who first began to appear after the rifts opened. It was no coincidence.
The continued expansion of the universe had opened holes in its fundamental fabric and things from Elsewhere had crept in. I find it unimaginable that this was not part of God’s plan, but we don't talk anymore, so really I cannot say.
I had no idea what they were at that time and in many ways know little more now. Others later followed through the rifts, and factions among them formed various alliances with humans. The group that calls itself “The Order” is one among these.
I had believed myself invisible to all of these Others until the day a group attempted to ambush me and drag me into a portal to their Elsewhere. I learned that day how better to disguise myself. They learned that day that a diminished archangel… is still an archangel.
