What a pale word. Pleasure. What a vanilla word, for the overpowering flood of sweating, grunting, delirious physical sensuality. My mouth hung open in shock. I did not like to think that I was naive, but whatever I had guessed or intuited of the body’s capacity for raw experience, it was nothing that began to approximate what Oriax’s touch had revealed.
I was embarrassed and overwhelmed. I was repelled and yet . . . not just repelled. My mouth was dry, my eyes wide, my heart pounding, and other sensations, sensations that I had never before felt but which nevertheless touched some chord in me.
“Oh!” I said.
“Do you see, Messenger? She said, ‘Oh!’ Don’t you want to savor the sweet innocence in that single syllable? ‘Oh!’” Oriax laughed. It was not a good laugh. Yes, it was musical, yes, it was delightfully rich and deep, but it struck some discordant note, too.
I drew back a step, and I could see that this unconscious reaction irritated Oriax. Her eyes snapped to Messenger, an oddly reptilian movement, too quick to be human. A predator’s eyes.
Messenger said, “You have the right to make your offer, Oriax.”
“Oh, not just yet, I think,” Oriax said, no longer in such a playful mood. “We will talk again, when she comes to see the whole truth and faces what her fate must be with you, Messenger. Then.” She raised one exquisitely manicured finger, extended it slowly, and let it merely brush my cheek.
I shuddered as the images washed through me again, washed through me but did not leave me feeling clean. But I closed my eyes, and I . . . savored them . . . just for a moment before they faded away. I knew before I opened my eyes that she would be gone, and she was.
Messenger watched me with the detachment of a scientist watching a specimen in a petri dish.
“What choice?” I asked him.
He looked at me, looked directly into my eyes, and I felt powerless to do anything but return his gaze. His detachment grew strained and I felt that in some way still too inchoate to explain, he was giving me something, some curse or blessing, or maybe it was all my imagination, so recently rocked by Oriax.
But for just a moment I saw things in his blue eyes. There was power there, and loss. There was knowledge but also vulnerability. He was, for all his strangeness, a boy. Maybe he was a thousand years old. But maybe he was barely older than me. Beneath that long black coat with its dreadful skull buttons, and beneath that severe, steel-gray shirt, there was maybe something real, something physical.
He was not a spirit, I felt, but a real being, a person, a mind but also a body.
But no, all of this was just a sort of hangover of the wild fantasies Oriax’s touch had revealed. No, I told myself harshly, you must not forget, Mara, that this boy is in league with the Master of the Game and that his touch was the very soul of darkest terror.
Samantha Early had fetched her backpack. She was going to school. Only after she had climbed into the car with her harried father did I recognize that she was wearing the exact outfit in which she killed herself.
“Oh, God. It’s today,” I said.
“Yes,” Messenger said.
“We have to . . . to stop it.”
I expected a non-answer or at best a cryptic comment that would do nothing to reassure or enlighten me. But, to my surprise, Messenger came closer and waited until the gravity he exerted had brought me to face him, to look at his face, into his eyes.
“You must understand. We do not have the duty of changing the world, of substituting our own wills for those of the people involved. A human deprived of freedom becomes something less than human. There must be free will. Even when . . .” Some dark memory clouded his eyes and caused him to glance away as if to hide a pain he was unwilling to reveal. He took a steadying breath and in a monotone went on. “People are free to make choices, even terrible ones. But when they make bad choices, when they do evil, then it may be that justice, fairly and ruthlessly applied, can show a person a new path. Justice is our cause, not human happiness.”
I was torn as to what to say in response. This was the most Messenger had ever shared with me. I didn’t want to discourage future explanations with too many questions, let alone arguments.
But just as curiosity drives me, so a lesser attribute, argumentativeness, sometimes rears its head. So I said, “If the point is justice, why the game? Why not just decide a sentence and carry it out?”
I blushed to see what next animated his face, for I was certain that for just the briefest moment, a flash that escaped before he could conceal it, he had looked at me with affection. Once he had recomposed his features into their usual emotionless character, he said, “Here is what I have been taught, and a small part of what I must teach you.”
Then, he drew four circles of light. They hung in the air. I noted my own calm reaction to what was at the least a very convincing special effect or at most something very like a miracle. I had seen nothing but miracles since waking in a field of dead grass beneath a sentient mist.
The circles were blue, red, green, and a color that I could not name since it appeared to shift, never remaining anything identifiable.
“This,” he said, touching the blue circle, “is what you are given at birth: your physical self, including your brain.” Messenger next touched the red circle. “Here is what you have lived: your parents, your schooling, all that you have seen and felt in your sixteen years. Your experience.”
He drew the red circle across so that it partly overlapped the blue.
“This,” he said, touching the green circle, “is your free will, the decisions you make.” He drew this circle across to overlap the earlier two.
Then he waited, no doubt knowing that curiosity would compel me to ask, “And the final circle?”
“This?” He touched the variegated circle. “This is chaos and randomness. It is chance.”
He pulled this final circle into position so that it overlapped the configuration, touching what I was given, what I had experienced, and my free will in turn. At the very center of the pattern the overlapping circles formed a bulging rectangle. He touched it and it glowed with a bright white light.
“And that,” Messenger said, “is you. And me. And Samantha and Liam and Emma, and all human beings. We live our lives in a shifting matrix of what we are given, what we experience, what we choose, and what random chance does that we cannot control.”
“The game is randomness,” I said.
“The game is randomness,” he agreed. “It is the most ancient of forces. In the beginning was a moment when random chance turned nothing to something. Nonexistence to existence.”
I had many more questions, and perhaps sensing this, Messenger moved us, so that we were no longer in Samantha Early’s driveway, but once more in her school, standing, as Samantha herself was, beneath the banner that read, Congratulations Samantha On Your Suck-cess!!!
It is possible that a stronger person, a person less wracked by the self-doubt that comes hand-in-hand with the cruel loss of control of compulsion, might have found a way to laugh it off. Even as fingers were pointed, and cruelly comic faces were made, and braying laughter filled the hallway. It is possible that another person could have somehow found the strength to hold her head high even as the one success she had ever had in her life was discredited, ridiculed, and reduced to ashes.
But Samantha Early was not that person.
Kayla, alone for once, watched from behind her open locker door. I saw her there. I saw her eyes follow Samantha as she dropped her book bag, turned, and fled the school, chased away by sickening gales of laughter.
Kayla had triumphed absolutely.
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I WANTED TO KILL HER. KAYLA. I DIDN’T KNOW the girl, had never guessed at her existence until the day before. But I felt a sickness inside myself watching her in her victory, her pointless, cruel victory.
“Call the
Game Master,” I said through gritted teeth.
Messenger said nothing. He was back to his taciturnity, his . . . I was about to say indifference, but when I saw his face, what I saw there was not indifference. He was looking at me with pity, as though he regretted my words. Or perhaps as though he was sorry to have made this tragedy a part of my life.
“She deserves to be punished,” I said stridently. “She killed Samantha as surely as if she’d stabbed her with a knife.”
Messenger looked at me for a long time as if considering what he should do with me. What I had taken for earlier approval, and then pity, had turned flinty. But whatever he was planning to do next was stopped by the arrival of Daniel, who walked past Kayla and beneath the banner. In his casual clothing he looked almost as if he could be one of the students now rushing to disappear into their classrooms.
“Daniel,” Messenger said in curt greeting.
“Messenger,” Daniel said just as curtly. “A matter requires your attention.”
“Another case?”
Daniel nodded. “A very serious one, I am sorry to tell you.”
“I am with my apprentice,” Messenger said tightly.
“Your apprentice is meant to learn, is she not?”
“I would soften the shock with a bit more time,” Messenger said.
“You have a soft heart, Messenger. I admire your compassion. But we have our obligations. We do not serve ourselves or even our apprentices.”
From that statement, delivered in clipped, no-nonsense style, I learned two things: that I had been mistaken in seeing Daniel as easygoing and that for whatever unfathomable reason, Daniel saw Messenger as softhearted. It made me want to laugh. The Messenger of Fear might have moments of compassion, but he had summoned the Game Master to terrify Liam and Emma, and if that had been compassion or softheartedness, it was of a type so attenuated that I could hardly recognize it.
“Oriax has her eye on my apprentice,” Messenger said. “I wish to take the necessary time to prepare her.”
“Oriax and her folk are always busy, as you know. It is possible that while Oriax teases you, Messenger, knowing your vulnerability, she has been at work elsewhere.”
Messenger drew a sharp breath. He had not liked the implication that Oriax had an effect on him. “So long as Ariadne lives, Oriax will have no power over me.”
Daniel sighed, looked down, and shook his head, a bit like a disappointed parent. “Don’t be a fool, Messenger. Do as you are directed. You see a great deal. But you do not see all.”
At that, Daniel, with a sideways glance at me, laid his hand against Messenger’s cheek. Strange to me that there could be something parental in that touch, for Daniel was smaller than Messenger. Perhaps a few years older, but in no way imposing or impressive.
I wondered whether Daniel, when he touched Messenger, who was not to be touched, saw that same horror show of images that still rattled like skeletons around in my mind.
The contact lasted for at least a minute, and halfway through Messenger bowed his head in acceptance. I was sure that Daniel was telling him something, transferring information of a sad nature to him, for Messenger’s eyes drooped and closed, and a weary sigh rose from his chest.
Finally Daniel took his hand away and Messenger stood there, silent, eyes still closed, rocking almost imperceptibly back and forth.
Daniel looked at me, waited until he was certain that he had my full attention, and said, “He is your master. You are his apprentice. Learn from him. He is a very good teacher.” He paused, gazing up at Messenger, as sad now as my “master,” and added in a husky voice, “He has given great service, and he has endured more of this wicked world than I hope you ever shall.”
Daniel walked around the two of us, and when I turned to watch him go, he was already gone. Kayla, too, was gone, though whether to her next class or elsewhere, I did not know.
“We must go,” Messenger said.
“Go? But aren’t we going to deal with Kayla?”
He shook his head. “She has already been . . . dealt with. This new thing—”
“She hasn’t been dealt with,” I said hotly. “She hasn’t had anything happen to her. You put Liam and Emma through hell for nothing. Okay, not nothing, but they were good people, not a wicked, manipulative bitch like Kayla.”
His answer was sharp and angry. “Be silent, or you will regret your careless words later.”
And then, in the usual Messenger style, we were gone from Samantha Early’s school. Though not from her story.
I would learn more of Samantha and Kayla, much more, and I would cry bitter tears over that final chapter.
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THE NEXT THING I SAW WAS A CAGE WITH chipped-paint steel bars. That cage was large enough to contain eight long steel tables bolted to the bare concrete floor, a television mounted on one wall, two filthy, open cinderblock-walled bathroom areas. It was also large enough to comfortably hold three dozen men, and was at the moment holding twice that number.
The men ranged in age from their fifties down to their teens. Each was dressed in an orange jumpsuit, though there were variations within narrow limits: Some wore the jumpsuit with sleeves down to cover track marks; others wore the sleeves rolled up to show off tattoos. Some had their zippers down to their navels; others had peeled the top off entirely to let it hang loose; still others were zipped up tight.
It was not difficult to see that the dayroom of the Contra Costa County Jail in Martinez was divided along racial lines. African Americans occupied the closest tables, Latinos took the next group, and white prisoners, many sporting Nazi tattoos, were farthest away and smallest in number.
Food had been served. Bologna on white bread, canned peaches, something that might once have been broccoli. Men ate with plastic forks, their shoulders hunched forward, their heads low over their food. The room was ear-splittingly loud from the television, which showed a mixed martial arts match that earned catcalls, groans, and shouts, as well as a more generalized yelling, guffawing, and even, here and there, unimpressive attempts at singing or rapping.
Messenger stepped through the bars. I watched him as he did it, suspecting he would do so, and wanting to observe closely to better understand just how he performed this particular bit of magic. But again, it was as if my eyes were simply not adapted to seeing what was happening before them. The closest I could come to describing it is to say that the bars seemed to avoid Messenger.
He motioned me forward, and though I had by that point walked through more than one solid object, I hesitated. I might be invisible to the inmates, but that was a knowledge that did not reach down with so much certainty that it could easily override my natural caution. Put plainly: the men in there frightened me. It was a mundane, real-world, and thus all the more compelling fear, different from the fear of the supernatural evoked by something like the Game Master.
But when Messenger jerked his head impatiently, I followed, and my fear of the men distracted me so that I scarcely noticed that I was once more suspending the laws of physics and passing through case-hardened steel bars.
Messenger moved on to stand across from a particular young man, an African American, maybe seventeen but maybe fifteen, it was hard to tell. He was tall but not muscular, good-looking without rising to the level of handsome. His most notable feature were his eyes, which were large and luminous, a light brown at odds with his dark skin.
He was afraid. He was shaking. He was chewing the bologna sandwich in a dry mouth, mechanically working his jaws, as two men, one to either side, leaned in far too close, pressing muscular biceps against him. Squeezing him and looking past the boy to wink at each other, to laugh conspiratorially.
“His name is Manolo,” Messenger said.
“He’s too young to be in here.”
“Yes. But even the young are sent here when they are
accused of murder.”
I looked at Manolo with new eyes, searching for something to connect with that most terrible of crimes. Murder? He was a scared boy.
“You going to eat them peaches, boy?” one of the thugs asked.
Manolo couldn’t speak—his mouth was full—so he nodded yes and hunched closer around his food.
“Hear that, G? This young man wishes to eat his peaches.”
“Huh.”
The first inmate stuck his hand out to Manolo. “I’m Andrews. What they call you?”
Manolo stared at the hand, then reluctantly shook it. “Manolo.”
“Oh, that is a weak handshake, little brother. That is a limp handshake, Mamomo. Yeah.”
“Manolo.”
“Yeah. Mamomo. That’s what I said.”
“Mamumu?” the other inmate mocked, his voice thick to the point of incomprehensibility. He laughed and slapped his hand down hard on the steel table. “Mamumu ma ma, moo.”
“You a sword swallower, Mamomo?”
Manolo shook his head.
Andrews leaned in closer. “Nah, I think you are. That weak handshake there? You all scared. All shaking, hey, that’s okay, you’re a fish, you maybe ought to be scared—there’s some bad men in here. Like Carolla here. He’s a bad man, aren’t you, Carolla?”
“Bad man,” the other one confirmed.
“See,” Andrews said. “You need to make friends fast here, fish. Need someone to watch your back.”
Carolla stuck his hand into Manolo’s plate, scooped up a peach slice, and popped it into his mouth.
“See? There you go. You let Carolla eat your peaches, maybe he won’t hurt you. If you don’t be nice, he’s going to hurt you. He’ll knock the teeth out of your mouth and bust you open, that’s a fact.”
Manolo swallowed, stiffened, and tried to stand up, but both men grabbed his shoulders and slammed him down hard into his seat. Both men began eating his peaches, making a joke of it, slurping and slopping, while Manolo sat helpless, pinioned.
“Let me go!” Manolo yelled.
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