by Shaun Meeks
“I have to have faith. I do. It’s all I have left right now. Faith. I have to pray to God that he won’t lie to me, the way my father did.”
He raises the gun and points it right at me. I can see down the dark barrel of his weapon. It looks clean and well-oiled and I’m positive the thing won’t misfire. Garcia is one of those people that would be so anal about his gun that he’d clean it once or twice a week no matter what. I have to be careful here. He’s on edge, his son gone. One wrong word and he’ll shoot me. I’m not sure I’d be able to recover from that.
“Good. Having faith is important,” I tell him, and hope this will keep him from squeezing the trigger. “I tell that to a lot of people. But how are you going to keep faith, feel like a good person and look your son in the face if you kill me? Are you a murderer?”
“No, I’m not.”
“I didn’t think so. You don’t need to do this, Garcia. He’s playing with you, trying to get you to do his dirty work. Let me go and get your boy and bring him back to you and your wife.”
“My wife’s dead!” Garcia growls, and the gun in his hand starts to shake. “She died four years ago.”
“But I saw you at the church with—”
“My sister. Not my wife. She was taken away by cancer and now those monsters have my boy. I don’t want to be alone. He’s all I have, can’t you understand that?”
“I do, but—”
“I’m sorry, Dillon,” he says, cutting me off again. “I know God will forgive me.”
“No, that’s not true. Garcia, if you love your son—”
I see the flash of the barrel and instantly turn my body in a poor attempt to deke out the bullet. I think of the Matrix movies and do my best to pull off a little Neo action, but it’s no good. I don’t even hear the report of the gun when I see white before my eyes and my head gets rung like a bell. I’m stunned for a moment, as the white light becomes everything my world is made of. I wait for it to go away to see how bad it is, expecting a ton of pain, but all there is now is the light. It’s not going away.
This time, there’s no darkness.
Only light and white.
Oh no, is this death?
I have no idea, but best not to think anymore. Not that I have much of a choice.
Forever is so nice, eternity is warm and brilliant, as bright as the sun and it’s not scary to be here. As I move deeper into the void I think this must be heaven, or a good facsimile of it and I try to find God and angels and everything else that supposed to be here. I’ve read enough to know what people say is here and I want to see it first-hand. I want the pearly white gates, the cherubs and all the perfection that heaven is supposed to be. Maybe my family will be here somewhere, just waiting for me.
There’s no sound, no feel of wind, it’s a vast space of nothingness, and yet I find it comforting. Even my head has stopped pulsing for the first time since I was jumped in my stairwell. The lack of a bass drum boom in my head is a blessing in itself. In fact, I feel nothing close to pain, or pleasure. It’s as if every sensation has been burnt away. The only thing I can feel is the white light around me, swallowing me whole and I don’t think that’s such a bad thing.
I move further into the white and as I do, I think of Rouge and that’s the first time I feel anything. Sadness. Sorrow at the idea I won’t see her, that I’ve died without getting to say goodbye. There wasn’t enough time for one last kiss when she left, or even a hug. and now I’m dead, shot in the head and in the great beyond. Not what I expected to happen to me, yet here I am.
Still, if this is heaven, in the way many believe the afterlife to be, Rouge should be right around the corner. I’ve always heard that time doesn’t exist here. Not the way we perceive it on Earth or in most other realms. If that’s the case, she should be here somewhere. All I have to do is find her.
I pick up my pace and pass by the same nothing as I go. There’s nothing here and nothing to either side of me. It’s a vast ocean of nil. I feel like I’m on the worst treadmill ever because this is just getting redundant and silly. How can I find anything or anyone here when the only thing that exists aside from me is increasingly annoying white light?
Wait, do I even exist here? Am I me or am I just light as well?
I raise my hand in front of my face and I’m relieved to see the five digits I’ve come to know so well. So, if I’m here and this is the great afterlife, I should be able to find someone here. Rouge has to be here.
Maybe if I call to her, she’ll hear me, or be able to appear. It’s worth a shot.
I open my mouth and with all the force I can muster, I yell out.
“Dillon?”
That’s not right. I’ll try again.
“Dillon, wake up!”
That voice, it’s not mine and those are my words. I go to yell again, but even before my mouth opens, I hear the same voice calling out my name and I know it. I know it so well, but my brain doesn’t want to work. It’s right there, on the tip of my tongue, but in the bright white of the dead, I can’t find it. Is that my dad? My brother? One of the elders?
“Dillon, you’re not dead. Wake your bumbaclot up!”
There it is.
Godfrey. He’s here with me. Dead as well and trying to find me. At least I’ll know someone else in this otherworld.
“Dillon, wake up or I swear I will lay my back hand on you!”
I don’t know where you are, Godfrey, but if you call again, I’ll find you. I try and say these words out loud, but I guess in heaven, words can be spoken from you mind. It’s so great. Now I just need to—
Lightening shakes the world and the pain in my head wakes up. What was that? It’s terrible and frightening. I go to ask Godfrey if he heard it and felt it, but before I can, the thunder strikes the world and my head again and all around me the white changes. The ground shakes and there are fissures in the perfect emptiness. Beyond the cracks I can see blue. And beyond the blue, I see my pain waiting for me—agony and a useless fight.
Oh that doesn’t feel good. Godfrey, where are you? Are you feeling this too?
Godfrey doesn’t answer. Instead, the thunder and pain does and with this strike the white world begins to bleed colour. There’s blues, grey, red and everything else. Sound finds me, the sound of people talking, horns blowing and as the haze in front of me melts away I scream at the monster hovering over me.
“Relax, Dillon. I had to pull you inside, but it’s me, Godfrey. If we stayed out there, even more people will see me.”
Through the throbbing beat in my head I take a good look at the thing that’s claiming to be Godfrey. It’s tall and bulky, with a face that reminds me of the Lizard in the old Spiderman comics. His skin is green and bulbous, his mouth and nose more of a snout than anything, but I can tell right now he’s smiling at me. There’s no way I should be able to see a grin on that snout, but there’s no denying it, nor is there any way to not believe who it is. The eyes give it away. I guess I never really knew what he’d look like outside the shop. This is the real Godfrey.
“What the hell is going on?” I ask, and try to sit up, but my head is on fire.
“Lay down. You were shot, but it’s nothing really; more of a graze. You have bigger problems.”
“Like what?”
“Like the parasite you have living in you right now.”
“Parasite? What the hell are you going on about, Godfrey?” I try and sit up, but as I do, my head lights up as though someone just set off Fourth of July fireworks in here. I cry out and then feel Godfrey putting his hands on my shoulders, holding me still.
“You were hit in the head the other day, right?” he asks, and I hope it’s a rhetorical question because I’m in no mood to answer him. “When you were, there must’ve been something on the tool used. You said it was a bat, right?” I nod. “Actually, I know for sure there was something on the bat
because I’m the one who sold the damn thing.”
“What?”
“It’s a long story, and I’ll tell you all about it, but first we need to get the fucker out of there. Now, turn your head away and then hold still.”
I do as he says, biting down the pain that flares as I do, but I don’t know pain until he puts one hand on the side of my face and the other hand begins to peel open the stitches in the back. I feel them popping, can sense the skin back there peeling back like a smile on some evil clown’s face and before I can cry out, Godfrey, the lizard man version of him, slides fingers into me and he didn’t even buy me a drink.
I try to speak, to cry, but my mouth moves and only the most pathetic sounds come out. I’m not proud of this moment, happy Rouge isn’t here to see it because before long, I’m crying like a baby.
Godfrey’s claws or nails or whatever is attached to his fingertips, scrape against my skull as he probes under my scalp for what he said is a parasite. My stomach is churning from the feeling, and I wracked with shivers and disgust. I can hear the wet sounds of my skin moving off my skull and there’s a sensation of warmth as blood runs from the wound and pools under my ear that’s pushed against the floor. I have to do something not to pay attention. If I find a special place or maybe concentrate on something in the room I’m in, maybe I can somehow forget what he’s doing.
There’s a vase on a coffee table full of fake flowers.
On the wall is a painting that looks as though someone might’ve done it by accident, then called it art.
Beside that is a framed photo of Detective Garcia and his son.
In my head I feel something shift and bite into the bone. I swear there is someone screaming inside of me.
“Got it!” Godfrey cries out, and then the pain intensifies as he tries to pull it out. The feeling of something biting into my skull intensifies and I can feel my heart beating in my brain. “You’re not going anywhere, you little bastard!”
I miss that white light. The freedom and painlessness I felt was so pleasant. Maybe that was Heaven I saw for a moment and this is Hell. Perhaps all those heavy metal covers over the years were wrong and the place evil people go after they die isn’t some burning pit of sulphur and horned demons, but just a ball of agony were gross looking things pull stuff from your body. I know a lot about what’s out in the world and in all the universes, but death is a mystery, even to me.
Pressure. It’s so intense and it feels like Godfrey’s trying to tear all the hair out of my head. I wince and moan as he fights to get it loose and I hear the thing inside me, making strange cooing sounds. I hope that means it’s losing this battle. Shivers run down my spine and tears have begun to roll down my cheeks from it all.
Then, as bad as the pain is, it’s gone. There’s a stinging in the back of my head, and a slight soreness from the open wound, but the throbbing headache and the biting shriek that had been echoing through me is no more. Godfrey let’s go of my head and I sit up and turn to him to see what he’s got. Clenched between his fingers is a florescent blue glob that looks a little like a ball on a string. Then I think it looks more like a weird sperm and I’m even more grossed out.
“What is that?” I ask, not sure I can remember ever seeing something like that before.
“It’s a R’thuard. It’s a parasite of sorts that attaches itself to the skulls of its victims and feeds off emotions and thoughts, depending on where it is. This one was harvested by a client from a Dethlore that was found on Earth years before you ever came. I’ve had it for a long time.”
“And you sold it to someone?”
“I sold the weapon it was attached to. A bat. You’re not my only customer you know.”
I do know that, but selling this to someone breaks the rules, I’m sure of it. Especially a human.
“So you sold it to a human? And you told me you were scared of the consequences. What about those ones?”
“I’m not proud of what I did, and everything that’s occurred since, but I’m here to help now, Dillon. If I’m going to be sent somewhere else as punishment, I think I’ve earned it, but for now, you deserve help. I should tell you what I know.
And he starts.
Two weeks before I was attacked in the stairwell, a man came into the shop and asked for an item. Godfrey explains that it happens now and again where a human is led to him by a source who knows what Godfrey is. Usually it’s just to sell, but on occasion, it’s to buy as well. The man asked for a Yourn, a type of bat that has been dipped in the blood of a Droon, which is the equivalent of a dragon, only from a distant star where it lives in a world of fire. A Yourn alone is a powerful weapon against many demons, but is just a bat against someone like me. That’s unless someone also bought a Yourn with a R’thuard attached to it as this person did.
“Who was it who bought it?”
“Just a man. Nothing impressive about him. Average height, weight, with brown hair, brown eyes. Maybe thirty Earth years old and dressed as normal as people here dress, although perhaps a little dirtier than most.”
“So when I came in after the accident, did you know that’s what happened to me?”
“Not really. You showed me the picture of the symbol though and as you did, I saw something move under your scalp and knew the two things were no coincidence.”
“So why not just tell me? You’ve already broken rules before. Why not just say what the symbol was and what was inside me?”
“Because this little bastard would’ve told its owner.”
Godfrey explains that a R’thuard can and usually does have a psychic link with whoever owns it. He says he was worried that if he told me too much and acted as though he could offer me real help, he’d be killed and then there’d be no way to help as he’s clearly done. I guess that makes some sort of weird sense, but it also makes me think in the end all he was doing was covering his own ass. No doubt the real reason he’s helping is that I might be the only one who can stop the Colossus’ and the shadowy man. If I’m out of the picture, Godfrey would have to do it on his own and that just ain’t his style.
I sit there for a second and try to really put it all together. If it wasn’t for what he just said, I’m not sure I’d be able to get from where it all started to here, but in a way, Rouge had been right all along. Someone is setting me up. The parasite, the attack, the kids, the killing of Sara; it’s all just a strange plot that still doesn’t totally add up. Whoever is doing this could have killed Godfrey and stolen the book, or if it’s me they’ve wanted all along, why not just kill me right off the bat? It would’ve been easy so many different times. Is this just the crazy idea of a madman and trying to make sense of it will make my head explode? It feels that way.
“So, do you think the man who bought the R’thuard is the one behind it all, or is he a pawn like the junkie and the Colossus’?” I ask Godfrey, hoping he has a better idea than me.
“I don’t know. I don’t think a human could get this far, but it wouldn’t be the first time. Others have done much worse with power. Rasputin, Genghis Khan and even General Lee. Humans are capable, but for this, I don’t know.”
I nod and know he’s right. Everyone and anyone is suspect now. Even Godfrey himself. Not telling me the truth and then disappearing are just two strikes against a man who long ago struck out.
Still, he did help in the end, so I’ll give him a break on that front.
“So, after it all, you left the book for me to find and skipped off until just now?”
“The book was the least I could do, but I’ve been following you since to keep an eye on you as best I can,” he says, and I guess that explains how I’ve been feeling eyes on me this whole time. I really thought it was something the shadowy man had done, but since he had a R’thuard put in my skull, I guess he didn’t need a spy. Godfrey was my own lizardy fairy godmother. How sweet.
“Shit,” I say sud
denly, and look around the room. “Where’s my bag and the book? Garcia was going to take it.”
“He did take the book, but good news is, he didn’t know to take anything else. So we still have a chance.”
“Aside from the fact that I don’t know what to do with the items.”
“Neither do I,” Godfrey says with a smirk before he pulls out a lighter from his pants pocket and sparks it. The orange flame dances and he puts it to our little blue buddy, the R’thuard, and before long it scorches, and then turns to dust before us. It didn’t make a sound.
“You look happy with yourself,” I say, seeing what I’m assuming is a smile on his face.
“I am. Now that our spy is gone, I can speak the truth. I know what to do with the items and how to use them against the Colossus’.”
“Seriously? Thank the stars!”
He explains it quickly and it seems easy enough, though only the first part. What we need to do after seems less fun than anything else I’ve ever done in my life. So, step one is to wrap Rouge’s hair around the sceptre and bless it with fire as I rotate the symbol carved into my arm around it. We do it, and it seems as silly as it sounds. It also smells terrible. The odour of hair burning is enough to make me want to hack up something from my nearly empty stomach, but I hold it off.
It’s done and now, it’s time for the hard part.
This isn’t the first rodeo I’ve been to in my life. There have been quite a few hairy situations in the time I’ve been on Earth, which is a very, very long time. Recently I went up against a Hellion, one of the most vicious demons ever made and it was right here in this world. That was a damn close call, but luckily Rouge saved my ass with some tools Godfrey sent up to me. There was also a time when I went up against two men who had called forth a female Grath, which many here might think of as a Banshee, but is a creature from three galaxies away. A Grath can call you to them with their sweet song, like a light draws in a moth, and then BOOM, your brains get turned into scrambled eggs.
