by Ira Robinson
She had come so far since that last day in the hospital three years before, her body recovering with a miraculous pace the doctors could not fathom. They wanted her there for more tests, assuring him it was for the benefit of other kids like her who were going through their own dances with death, but that request was refused. Lisa, herself, would not have minded, and made it clear she was up for it, despite being tired of being stuck for so long, but Carver would not allow it.
How could he explain to those men of science what had happened to Lisa? How could they understand that what cured her was nothing of her own body, nor the endless supplies of toxicity and destructive chemistry they kept pounding her with, but was entirely due to the direct intervention of something outside the realms of normalcy?
How could he tell them, as the first few days after his agreement with Biel, and the changes happening within his own body keeping apace, that the reason her cancer was gone was because of some magical interference. The color coming back to her skin, the tumors only taking hours to dissolve, the energy with which she grasped life anew, none of those had anything to do with the doctors.
Lisa, too, questioned, and at first Carver kept quiet about things, agreeing it was a miracle. He did his best to keep the scars as hidden from her as he could, and, for a while, it worked. She was so distracted by how good she felt and the endless stream of specialists who passed through her room, she had no real time to pay attention.
That was fine. He didn't know how he could explain it to her, anyway.
It was only after bringing her home and the sense of the familiar began to kick back in for her that she noticed the changes within him. Foremost that he was there with her always.
She stayed somewhat stand-offish to him, not entirely sure, perhaps, whether his being there was going to last. After all, he had done a lot to break her trust. She might not have understood why he spent so much time from her while in his cycle of destruction, but that didn't matter. She could only see the results.
It was a testament to the beautiful nature of her soul that the bond of forgiveness in her was so strong.
His own beginning days were difficult, not only because he had to deal with the newness of Lisa's health and putting their home back together again after so much neglect, but because of the changes going on inside of him.
His physical need for the heroin was gone, shredded, perhaps, by the flames that ripped through him while laying on the floor of that filthy flop house basement, but the psychological desire was still there, a constant reminder that he had to be vigilant against it.
While what was happening to Lisa, and the need to keep her recovery at a good pace, made an easy distraction, it was in the moments she slept, snuggled in her bed, that were the hardest.
Sometimes, he would stand in the doorway of her room and stare at her sleeping form, her chest rising slowly as she held her small toy bear. Flashes of memories washed over him as he stared, pinpricks of the needles entering his skin, breaking through to the veins beneath, would come back to him and he would grit his teeth or wring his hands to try to force them out of his head.
The dreams were particularly horrible, and those first weeks were an endless stream of them.
Dark imagery, visions of falling into a great pit where rivers of humanity burned, screaming in a unity unlike anything he could ever imagine, haunted him. It was a reality, he knew, existing somewhere just beyond the perceptions of people, hidden behind the thin veil of sanity.
But Carver was no longer normal. He had access to these places, seeing past the glamour of the real world into hell.
Those screams tormented his mind, ringing in his ears far after his eyes awakened to a new day, and in those moments, he longed for the bitter release and haze a hit would give him, relieving, perhaps, some of the sharp edges of those cries for mercy.
What made it worse was the sound of Biel's voice, remnants of his deep tones telling him that place was where his destiny lay. There was a spot already picked out for him among those masses, where his own voice would be added into the death knells reverberating through eternity.
Other things came to him in those first days, as well, some not as horrible, but all a miasma of confusion that he had a hard time grasping.
Somehow, what Biel had done was changed him in such a way that he was perched between heaven and hell, whether he understood the implications of that completely or not, and had little choice in the matter.
If he did not do as he was bade to do, he would watch Lisa crumble again. She would be lost to him, sucked away one minute at a time, by the return of the sickness. A hand was on her, always, keeping her well, and he was reminded of it when he looked at her.
Those few weeks were a hard, lonely, for him, isolated behind the walls of the place they called home, a house that had never truly been his to begin with. The property, huge and set in the middle of the woods outside of town, was Sasha's by inheritance, and she, too, was gone now.
But he had nowhere else to go, none Lisa would know as home, and he had little means of supporting her, anyway. Jobless and bereft of most savings, that bit of time was the most difficult he had ever been through.
When the first message came, it grew worse.
Carver shook his head, scattering the memories away as he handed the gun back to Lisa again, cocking it to make it ready for her to take the shot.
She was nearly as tall as himself, growing swiftly since the cancer left her, driven into a higher state by the physical activities he kept pushing her into. She was graceful and, he thought, felt most at home among the trees surrounding their area, spending endless hours exploring every trace she could find before skipping on to the next.
Most days he would join her, keeping his own body as fit as he could make it. He had to. His job forced him to deal with things no one else had to.
Lisa sighted down the barrel again, the metal glinting the sun above into his eyes. He squinted a bit to ensure she was aiming correctly, and smiled as she put a tiny bit of pressure on the trigger. The gun bucked again, the barrel trying to jerk upward and out of her control, but she kept it as steady as her frame would let her. She lowered it, her finger on the outside of the trigger so there was no risk of it accidentally firing again before handing it back to him.
She was doing so well, and had taken to his training of her in ways he did not expect. He hoped she would never have to use any of it, but he knew the darkness the world was falling into, more intimately than any other human could, and he wanted her to be ready, if she should ever have need.
He made it into as much of a game with her as he could, but he did not hide the truth from her.
Not anymore.
It was only a week before she had noticed that the scars were now present on his body. They shocked her, and he could tell she was hesitant to ask about them, but her spotting them happened by accident and neither of them were prepared for it.
He was in the bathroom and was changing clothes, just taking off his shirt in front of the large mirror there. The lines across his chest caught his attention again and he hesitated, trying anew to discern any kind of pattern there might be to them, but, was, as always, unsuccessful. There had to be something to them, but that something was, at the time, unfathomable.
Lisa opened the door, not realizing he was in there and he whirled around in surprise.
Until then, the small bits of makeup he used covered things up so she would not see them, and he tried to keep the thin black gloves he found discarded in a drawer to hide those on his hands, using the excuse he was chilled. That was acceptable to her, but he suspected it would not last.
He wanted to wait as long as he could before trying to explain to his little girl how he had come to bear scars that covered his whole body, the dread of it pervading his every movement when she was awake.
Their relationship was, at that time, tenuous at best, and they were just starting to get to know each other again.
"What are those, Daddy?" she
asked, her small voice still recovering some from being so sick.
He pulled the shirt on quickly, covering up all but those on his hands. His head turned down and he stared down, his face reddening, and scuffed his foot across the floor. "They're nothing, honey," he muttered and closed the door again.
She was curious, though, and over the next few days kept pressing him to say what happened.
How to tell a child their father was changed by a demon who offered them little choice? It was a conundrum he could not avoid. He had to express what had become of him in some way, but did what he could to evade her prying.
He played things off as best he could, finally telling her he might tell her about it some day, which he knew was not a good excuse. But it seemed to mollify her, at least for a time, though it was obvious she was not happy about it.
By the time he managed to come back home after his first mission, he could put things off no longer with her.
The message came as a small package with a letter carrying a strange hand-written script, dried blots of ink left all over the page. It was as if whoever had scrawled it did not know exactly how, but wanted to make a show as if they did, imitating something fancy while appearing childish.
It was legible, however, with the name of a person and an address, followed by the word, "Consecrate."
The signature was a simple, "B."
Carver did not know how the package came to be on his dining room table, nor had he seen the deliverers in any of the times he had received similar since. With the power Biel obviously had, he could have made them appear out of nowhere, for all Carver knew.
An old dictionary was left behind by Sasha's parents, dust covered and sitting on a bookshelf in the study. Carver flipped to the definition of the word and raised his brows.
"To cause something to serve a divine purpose. To cleanse and make sacred an object or being."
Carver turned his hand over and stared at the symbols emblazoned there, remembering the brilliant halo of light that shot out of it when he was in the basement. He had tried, since then, to make it happen again, but, though he could feel something there, some pressure as if a dam was waiting to be loosed, he could make nothing occur.
Was it related? Did that light, somehow, serve the purpose for which he was being sent?
If so, he didn't know how he was going to make such a thing happen. Besides, he did not feel particularly holy, and that had to count, right?
He closed the book and put it back on the shelf again, shaking his head at the turns his life had taken over that last month.
He served a design, though. The dreams told him, making it clear he was a tool, a weapon to be used to keep the balance in place.
He picked up the envelope again and, as he held it in his hand, pondering what to do next, a veil came over his mind.
It was not anything like the fog of the drugs he had spent time mired in, and was no flashback, yet, for a moment, he was confused into thinking it was. However, after a few seconds, a vision began to form in the fog, a hallucination, perhaps, but a useful one. A man stood before him, dressed in a tailored suit and short hair, much like his own. He was not bad looking, but Carver saw nothing out of the ordinary about him and tried to shake off the haze that had befallen him.
The vision warped, the face of the man in front of him shifting into something else, darker and ashen. Carver squeezed his eyes tighter and the image became clearer, the whole body of the man now changing into something else.
The figure still wore the same suit but was a hideous thing, with no hair, and eyes as wide as a serpent with a mouth to match.
The envelope dropped from Carver's fingers and the haze pulled away. He jerked his lids open, his legs tight and ready to bolt, but nothing was out of place around him.
He stared at the paper on the floor, the letter inside of the package sticking partially from it.
While he knew the vision was nothing more than information, it felt as real as the table he placed his hand on to hang on to. Whatever caused it to happen had shown him a real thing, the man and the demon one and the same.
He huffed down into the chair in front of him, his breath escaping slowly as he tried to process what he saw.
Visions, dreams, creeping creatures in the night, horrible manifestations that could be real or not, all so much for him to handle within such a short period, and all he really wanted to do was spend time with the little girl finally returned to him.
Too much. Too many extremes for a man who had seen the terrible life could give, and still he was expected to do more.
Now what? How he was being pushed to commit himself to becoming this unnatural thing, powered by the unholy, in order to keep other unholy things from being out of control?
How was he to cope? Go to a therapist?
There wasn't a counselor in the world who would touch any of this and think he was anything but insane.
He called Mrs. Lowe, who had sat for him and Sasha before, and found her willing to watch Lisa for the evening while he "went out." It would cost him, and there wasn't much in his pockets to give, but he suspected if he ignored this envelope and the message the vision contained, he would find his life radically altered again.
He dropped Lisa off with her teddy bear and a kiss, telling her he would see her later that night, all the while wondering if what he said was yet another lie to the little girl who heard them so often from him before. He was not out seeking a fix, this time, though. No, now he was going to play the part of some crazed avenging angel or something, ridding the world of an evil that didn't belong.
What would Freud have to say about that particular vision of himself?
Probably that he wanted to sleep with his mother while injecting a drug of a totally different type into his veins than he was accustomed to.
The address in the note was not far and he reached it within a half hour of dropping Lisa off with the sitter. The place was posh and he felt quite out of sorts in his old beater of a truck, but he hoped he would merely appear as a contract worker or something similar. Innocuous and not worth a second glance.
There was enough traffic passing by, either way, that he didn't think anyone would care.
The building was tall, a ten story apartment complex that was probably about as old as this area of town, dark brick fronting a lot of glass that reflected the cold sky above. He had no clue how he was going to play all of this, but there was a pressure within him building that he could not quite identify, until he closed his eyes and forced himself to relax and probe the sensation.
There was as sort of static, an electrical tingle along his skin and in his gut that seemed to press him in a certain direction. He had noticed it only a little, at first, while he drove toward the building, but now that he was there, it had grown to the point he could not ignore it.
His eyes widened as the realization came. He was sensing the demon, drawn to it like a magnet pointing north.
He concentrated harder, letting go of the steering wheel and holding his hand in front of him, instinctively outward. As he did, he felt more, smaller sparks of the dark lives all around him. The one in the building nearby was much stronger than the others, and he wasn't sure if that was because it was supposed to be his target, or if the creature in there was somehow heightened above the rest.
They were everywhere, and as that understanding hit him, a nervous tic began in his foot, thumping against the metal floorboard of his old truck.
How many? Dozens? Hundreds? He could not discern, but they were in every direction he turned.
The night in the basement, when Biel changed him, something besides his body altered. The being had connected him to these darknesses, tying him to them in such a way he could now feel when they were around.
He brought his hand to his face and swiped some of the sweat that had begun to pour from his forehead away. It was not until then he realized the demonic were real, though he had been shown evidence of it before. The scars across his body s
hould have been enough for that. But it was there, sitting in the truck with the cold air beginning to swirl flakes of snow from the heavens, that it all became something more for Carver, and that was the moment he knew he needed to do what he could to make sure Lisa was safe from the world that had now widened before him.
He closed his eyes and wiped them with his hand. When he pulled it off and dropped it to his lap, he opened them anew and the light from the sky warped from the gray, becoming brilliant in comparison.
It was like the night in the basement, when his eyesight deepened into a greater sensitivity. He had become used to the increased sense of hearing and smell that came with the change Biel generated, though great noise gave him a headache he could only kill by finding silence for a while.
His vision seemed to be something different, coming and going when it pleased.
