by Jinn, Bo
“What’s wrong, child?”
“S-s-something h-happened,” she stuttered, sobbing in spams. “S-something bad … Saul!”
She buried her eyes in her hands and wept.
The hermit slowly lowered onto the bed beside her.
“You are thinking too much,” he said. “You should rest now.”
“No. No, I can feel it. I can feel it,” she wept.
“What do you feel?”
“I don’t know.” She shook away the horrid vision. “I don’t know … It hurts,” she said. “It hurts.”
The hermit kept his gaze on her and waited for her cries to quell before he wiped away the tears with his sleeve.
“I…” the girl faltered. “I don’t think he’s coming back,.”
“He promised you he would come back.”
The little head sniffled, gulped and nodded.
“To wait is not enough. You must believe. Even when we are utterly powerless, we will always have the power to believe. I have watched you kneel in this room every day, believing.”
“But…” she sobbed. “It… doesn’t…”
“You’re wrong,” the hermit rumbled. “If you feel his pain, it means he is still fighting. His faith in you keeps him alive, but your faith – that is the only thing that will bring him back.”
She sniffled and wiped away her tears.
“You must have faith, for his sake and ours,” the hermit whispered. “Without it, we…”
They were interrupted by a knocking at the door at the bottom of the stairs. The hermit turned to face the source and Naomi raised her head at once.
A pause.
“Is it…”
“No,” the hermit interrupted immediately.
The knocks came in a straight sequence of four.
“You wait here,” he said to the girl.
He descended the candlelit stairs and slowly approached the door and the knocks came again as he approached.
He opened.
In the dark doorway, there stood a black-suited, synthetic-faced man – a man whom the hermit knew well, and countenance hardened fearfully.
“Martial…”
“Never say that name,” the hermit rumbled.
The dark coat over Eastman’s suit was drizzled with fresh snow as he stood before the threshold. The hermit’s omniscient eyes lowered to the floor and rose again. Once he appeared to have fully measured the commissioner, he drew the door open and led the way down the narrow corridor without a word and not a word was uttered until the two dark figures were seated across from one another.
The candlelight illumined their interlocking gazes. The shadows were over the hermit’s deep-set eyes. Eastman sat upright, his briefcase laid flat on the table before him. In the midst of the long and austere silence, a soundless dialogue seemed to be going on between them.
“Where is Vartanian?” The hermit’s voice was something between a rumble and a whisper.
The elusive flickers of conceit in Eastman’s dark, beady eyes could not hide themselves from the hermit any more than his thoughts. He delayed. Then, in the next moment, with almost mechanical deliberation, the commissioner’s hands rose off the armrests, and when his eight fingertips settled on the top of the thin briefcase, the locks clicked open.
He took out a large, black envelope. On the front, the martial insignia – the three-horned, three-headed beast – was marked in platinum. The briefcase closed and Eastman placed the black envelope lightly beside the candle on the table-top. The hermit’s grave eyes roamed from the commissioner to the thin file lying on the table between them. After a momentary delay, the vascular white hand emerged.
“A decree from the Martial High Court,” Eastman answered. “Approved by the First Region Senior Commissioner of the Martial Bureau himself.”
The hermit slipped the fold out of the throat and removed two secured sheets of paper. True to the commissioner’s words, he pinpointed the platinum seal of the Senior Commission of the regions at the bottom, along with a number of other marks and autographs.
“It is the first of its kind,” said the commissioner, as he scanned the first page. “Given your exceptional circumstances I imagine it will also be the last.”
A brief reading of the first page yielded its purpose, summed up in the three bold words at the end of the first line:
“DECREE OF EMANCIPATION”
The hermit’s eyes rose and peered over the top of the page at the commissioner.
“The arrangements for your retransfer to civil jurisdiction have already been made. After twenty-five long years, your wish has finally come true…”
“You did not answer my question,” the hermit interrupted with a stern glare.
The commissioner tilted his gaze slightly to one side.
“I assumed it was no longer relevant,” he said.
“The fact that you’re here attests that it is.” The hermit laid the decree on the table and sat back, laying down his arms and fastening his grip on the rests like a monarch. “You don’t expect me to believe you went through the trouble of lobbying for all this just to gratify the lost hope of an old dreg?”
He hummed and contemplated. “…Why are you here?”
The beginnings of a synthetic smile flashed upon the commissioner’s face.
“Again, the question is not relevant.”
“Ah, but it is,” the hermit remarked with a drone. The flaming wick stirred with his breath. “You are here now for the same reason you were here the first time, when you gave the girl to me. Now, you must tell me what that reason is.”
“Our reasons stem only from our purpose. At present, our purpose is Martial Vartanian.”
“You are trying to break him.”
“NO.”
Eastman’s voice suddenly and aberrantly deepened to a frightening baritone. There was a long silence, and when he spoke again, his voice softened back to its former pitch: “We are trying to cure him.”
“Of course,” nodded the hermit. “A matter of perspective… Why is he so valuable to you?”
“Martial Vartanian’s value extends as far as his caste, no different than anyone else,” the commissioner replied, frankly. “We take as much trouble with our martials as their value merits. No more. No less. We all have our purpose. We are all elements in the pattern.”
“You see nothing wrong with the pattern?”
“Wrong…” At this Eastman paused. “I am not sure I understand your question…”
Silence fell again.
The hermit bided his time. His dark eyes were intense and burning with the flaming wick, unravelling the hidden schemes out of those quasi-imperceptible tells in the commissioner’s blank stare. The unassailable, dead logicality that permeated his every word and gesture mirrored the very system that gave him and everyone else their purpose; a being without cause above his function, a figure of dead neutrality, a machine. And the mechanicalness of his scope was clear enough, but the method raised a few questions -- one in particular. Seeing as how they had already had the opportunity to expel the girl…
“Why now and not before?”
Eastman was slow with his answer: “Everything happens when, and as, it is supposed to.”
“Indeed,” nodded the hermit.
And the answer could only mean one thing. Saul Vartanian was alive, and very probably on the brink of being broken. Every measured step had been designed to the point of choreography, specifically to bring him to this moment.
“Why not simply take her away?” he asked.
“There are rules to what we do.”
”…Freedom,” the hermit hummed and nodded.
“We are here to serve and abet the will, not defy it.”
“But I can.”
“Of course.” Eastman bowed his head. “Freedom demands it.”
“So, you are leaving his fate to me.”
“All we are offering you is a choice. His fate, like yours, is determined either way. It is written in n
ature. No one can change it.”
“I see…” hummed the hermit. A subtle smile emerged across the rucked and ashen feature.
“Then we understand each another.”
“I think we do… There is, however just one problem: The choice is not mine to make.”
Eastman’s beady eyes inclined with an air of curiosity. The hermit’s smile faded from him and there was another long silence, after which he spoke again. In a raised voice, keeping his eyes fixed on the commissioner with consistent intensity, he called out: “I hear you there, child.”
There was a brief pause. Eastman turned toward the open doorway.
A few tentative seconds after the hermit spoke, Naomi peeped out from behind the door, where she had been standing, listening. She came forward with an anxious sigh and the hermit rotated his graying old head over his shoulder.
“Come here,” he said.
She obeyed without a word, and the commissioner’s eyes followed her closely as she came toward them. The old hermit lifted her up and settled her upon his lap and the gleaming eyes turned up searchingly at the grizzled old head.
“Do you know this man?” he asked, looking down at her.
She turned and set her innocent stare upon the commissioner, and something in him seemed to writhe with unease the instant their eyes met.
“Why is he here?” she asked.
“He’s come to offer us freedom,” replied the hermit. “From this place … forever. To leave and never come back.”
The girl looked back up at the old hermit with a searching gaze.
“What about Saul?” she asked
The hermit looked away and was silent.
Naomi lowered her saddened as though she would break into tears again at any moment. But before long she turned her eyes back up and spoke:
“Faith,” she said, simply.
The hermit bowed his head.
There was silence again, and in the midst of the silence, Naomi turned her eyes back toward Eastman. “Saul promised he’ll back,” she said. “I promised I’d wait for him.”
She lingered a little while before turning her bidding eyes back up to the old hermit. He lowered her back to the floor, and as soon as her feet touched the ground, she toddled out of the room, and the silence between the two dark figures endured until the sound of the little footsteps climbing the stairs ended with the shutting of a door.
“You have your answer,” spoke the hermit.
The commissioner bowed his head with seeming approval. He checked the time on his watch and, apparently seeing that he had expended about as much time as the reason for his visit warranted, rose from his seat and took up his coat. His arms automatically slipped into the sleeves. Then, taking his briefcase, cast one last supercilious look upon the old hermit.
“I needn’t tell you this is highly irrational,” said Eastman.
“Reason,” said the hermit, “is sordidly overrated.”
“You know this will change nothing.”
“Yes… and no.”
The hermit slowly rose from his chair and regarded the commissioner with a look of premonition. “Perhaps not soon, Mr. Eastman,” he said, his voice ominous, “but, in time, I think you will find it will change … just about everything.”
Day 0
Faint murmurs through the dark brought him back to being.
For what seemed like hours he was a dead vessel of sensation rousing, not knowing where he was, whence he’d come or wither he was going, and the resonances of steady footfalls and a steady monotone in the background were all that were until the light came in shallow pulses of white. The pulses brightened, then dimmed and then brightened more still. When his sense of equilibrium came and his vision cleared, he realised that he was on his back.
The lights winked from the passing ceiling and the faint murmurs grew into blaring echoes. It may have been another nightmare, but there was no way to tell the difference between one hell and another anymore. Thoughts flitted through his mind in an incomprehensible flux, like pieces of a shattered pattern.
When the ceiling lights passed, he could see the shadows of the marching figures on either side of him, stretching and receding on the walls. He wanted to rise, but his body would not start to impulse. The shadows stopped when the lights went out. The footsteps departed and he was alone in the dark. There sounded an electromechanical hum and he suddenly felt another shift in equilibrium. Though he knew his body was being moved, he felt nothing. It was a strange, ghostly feeling, as though his mind occupied a space that was not his own. And since he had, at present, no memory of being alive, he supposed he must be dead.
The long intermission of soundless gloom could have gone on forever.
A broad beam of pale light beamed down from the ceiling, lighting up a five-yard circle of bare floor. It was only after the light shone down on him that he realised he was upright, and that the bed on which he had been lying had someway morphed into a seat which hugged the whole of his body mould-like from head to toe.
Dead from the skull down, unable to move his neck, his eyes flitted about in their sockets. His flesh was bare and flayed to the point that the blood-red insignia on his arms blended into raw skin and his chest rose with involuntary breaths, squalling with each inhale as a mask fed the air into his lungs with intermittent wafts. He willed to move again and still nothing. Not even a twitch of the finger.
Through the shadows beyond the column of light, he saw what appeared to be a host of vague silhouetted figures sitting above, behind and around him. The outlines of their grim and overlapping heads were all directed at the centre of the chamber, and directly ahead of him was a wall of pitch black.
A frame of light appeared through the wall of black as a door opened and a dark silhouette momentarily appeared against the backdrop of light before the doors closed again. The sound of evenly tapping heels approached and terminated when the ominous figure stopped directly before him. The figure lifted its head. The shadow over his feature receded and the round lenses of his pince-nez were opaque through the glare of the overhead light.
“Welcome back, Saul.”
Pope removed his glasses and stood, silently gazing at his patient. His air was different – more explicit: The smile on his face was clear and his azure eyes flashed with purpose. A sudden murderous impulse engulfed Saul’s thoughts at first sight of him. Low, feral growls rolled with his steady breaths. He was powerless.
“Neural blockers,” said Pope, shortly. “Drugless sedatives: They work by shutting off neural signals directly at the brain.” He stepped forward and began to pace around the circle of light. “Don’t worry,” he continued, “your lucidity will not be affected in any way. You should know, however, that it is within our control to shut off your brain at any time and that we shall do so as soon as we feel you are no longer able to continue with these sessions, however long they may last -- hours, days, months … years. There will be no way for you to tell. You will have no comprehension of the world beyond this space until our time is at an end.”
Pope stopped pacing as soon as he came full circle. His eyes flashed and his countenance darkened.
“Now, before we begin,” he concluded. “You may ask your questions.”
There was a seeming deliberation in his every act, down to the inflection of his speech. It was as though he were re-enacting something. The troubling thought entered Saul’s mind that this was not the first time the two of them had been here. The air rushed into his throat. He looked up and a wraithlike voice proceeded from his mask:
“How am I here?”
His throat rasped and burned as though he were breathing fire.
“You came here,” said Pope.
He paused for air to refill his lungs.
“What happened to me?”
“You were found wandering the desert some seventy miles west of Dolinovka,” said Pope, as he began to form circles with his paces again. “You must have followed the sun for three days…”
Pope’s voice faded into the visions, which returned to him in flashes: The mountain of smoldering corpses, the blood spraying his face and the howls that shredded the walls of his throat until he was mute. A flash later and he was alone: wandering, wailing in the wilderness, bare-bodied, his gear pried from his body. The sun rose and beat down on his flesh by day and the cold ravaged the rawhide by night. He remembered the grinding aches in his joints and the dehydration and the cracks and tears forming in the exposed skin. By all known laws of nature, he should have been dead by the third day, but still he marched on, following his shadow by morning and the setting sun by noon, the moon and stars by night; never stopping.
Why had he begun? Where had he been going?
“Do you remember, Saul?”
The visions disappeared and Pope was standing over him again, hands crossed at his back, the bleak, frigid blue orbs shining through shadow.
“I remember.”
His eyes peered around the room again. His vision sharpened and he could just about make out the obscure faces of the onlookers around him. He was sure he could see Eastman across the floor, lying back in his seat with his head rested on his fingertips. The studious gaze pierced through the shadow.
“Where am I?” he asked
Pope took a deep breath and exhaled.
“The final resting place of all defectors,” he replied ominously.
A rush of air filled his lungs again.
“Do you know why we are here?” asked the neuralist.
Up to that point he had only had a sense of what was going on.
“Yes,” he answered with vague relief.
Just kill me and be done with it, he thought.
The smirk curled in the neuralist’s lips.
“Do you want to die, Saul?”
“Yes.”
“Then why did you not kill yourself when you had the chance?”
The question blindsided him. And then – just then – he remembered. He remembered why he began the long march in the desert, why he did not take his own life in spite of his every impulse to do so. The promise.
