"I
understand," Blanes replied. "But some part of you actually
likes
this
situation, Jacqueline." He held a hand up like a stop sign to
prevent her reply. "Just a small part. It's subconscious. He
contaminates your subconscious. It's like a deep well: you drop the
bucket down and lots of stuff comes back up with the water. Dead
bugs. Everything inside you, everything there ever was, that he's
dredged up and brought to the surface. Deep down, you know there's
pleasure there, too..."
Blanes's
face was transforming as he spoke. His eyes seemed to have no pupils.
They were like puss-filled, oozing abscesses beneath his brows.
And
that was when she woke up.
She
must have fallen asleep, or maybe it was a disconnect. She remembered
everything about it; it was awful. Blanes's face, changing right
before her eyes ... Thankfully, it was just a nightmare.
Jacqueline
looked around and realized that something was very wrong.
THE
image
ended. Victor shut down the file and uploaded another one.
He
didn't know if he wanted to see it or not. Suddenly, he didn't. Even
if it were really him (how many poor devils did they crucify back
then before they got the Lord?). No, not in the infinitesimal shiver
of a Planck time, the tyranny of evanescent atoms. He didn't want to
see the Son of God rotting, devoured by a moment so infinitesimally
short that it didn't even have room for the Father. Eternity,
Infinite Duration, the Beatific and Mystical Rose: they were God's
time. What was this ... this Infinite Brevity? What should he call
it? Instantaneity?
Any
space of time so short that the Mystical Rose was just a stem surely
belonged to the Devil. A flash of lightning, a glimmer, the blink of
an eye, or even the
idea
of
blinking were all infinitely longer. Victor thought of something
awful. In that millionth-of-a-second cosmos, Good did not exist,
because Good took longer than Evil.
He'd
found them by chance in one of Silberg's filing cabinets earlier that
afternoon, when he was looking for blank CDs. Several compact discs
labeled "diffs."
Immediately
he recalled Elisa's story. They had to be the "diffusions"
Nadja had told her that Silberg saved, the unsuccessful experiments,
when they opened time strings with erroneous energy calculations and
everything had come out blurry or indistinct. How could they still be
there? Maybe Eagle thought that was the safest place to store them.
Or maybe they were totally unusable. Regardless, he was sure he
wouldn't be able to see much, but the name that had come up when he
popped the CD in—"crucif," followed by a number—was
just too tempting, too persuasive for him to be able to give up that
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
There
were a couple of laptops in Silberg's lab with fully charged
batteries. Victor guessed that the computer technicians who came to
the island used them to inspect the CDs. Even though Blanes had told
them to remove all the batteries from everything, Victor had made
sure to leave one of the laptops operational. In order not to ruin
their plans, he'd done a quick calculation: the flashlight he'd left
behind needed less energy than the one he'd taken. So the energy
being used now equated—more or less—to what the big
flashlight used. And if, despite his safety measures, it was still
wrong of him to be doing this, then he didn't care. He'd take full
responsibility. He had to see some of those images. Just a
few.
And
nothing in the world was going to stop him.
He'd
been trembling when he opened the first one. But it was a pale,
rose-colored universe, a surreal delirium. The next nine looked like
1970s cartoons drawn by someone on acid. The eleventh, though, took
his breath away.
A
landscape. A mountain. A cross.
All
of a sudden, the cross turned into a post with no crossbeam. He
swallowed hard. Those morphological changes had to be because of the
Planck times. The cross, in such tiny spaces, was not a cross. He
couldn't see any human figure.
The
image lasted only five seconds. Victor saved it and opened the next
one.
It
was very blurry. A hill seemed to be ablaze. He closed it and opened
the next. A foreshortened version of the cross. Or maybe it was
another one, because now he made out another cross on the hilltop and
the edge of another one off to the right. Three.
And
figures standing around them. Shapes, decapitated shadows.
A
cold sweat drenched his back. The image was incredibly fuzzy, but he
could still make out shapes on the crosses.
Victor
took off his glasses and drew his face all the way up to the screen
until he could make out all the details. The image jumped, and one of
the crosses disappeared almost entirely. In its place there was a
stain, floating in space, an oval shape hanging from the wood like a
wasp's nest on a joist.
Is
that you, Lord? Is it you? His eyes welled up with tears. He held his
fingers out to the screen, as if to touch the hazy silhouette.
He
was so intent on the image that he didn't hear the door open behind
him. The creak of the hinges was drowned out by the pounding storm.
FOR
a
second, she thought she was still dreaming.
The
screen Blanes was leaning against was
perforated.
There
was a clean, round hole, the size of a soccer ball. The light shining
through it must have come from the control room, on
the
other side
of
the wall.
What
was most disturbing, though, was Blanes.
The
right side of his face had a deep, elliptical gouge, as big as his
brow, eye socket, and cheekbone. Beneath it she could see (perfectly
visible in the glow coming through the screen) dense, reddish masses.
Jacqueline thought she could identify them: frontal sinuses, narrow
nasal septum, trigeminal and facial nerve cords, the bumpy wall of
his brain ... It was like an anatomical hologram.
The
wind and the sea have gone.
An
immeasurable silence had descended. The darkness was different, too.
More compact, more solid, somehow. There were no flashlights, no
light at all aside from what filtered through that hole.
They've
gone: only the old boat remains.
She
stood up and realized that she was not, in fact, dreaming. It was all
too real. She was herself, and her bare feet were touching the floor,
though she didn't feel the cold of the...
Something
made her look down: she saw the tops of her breasts, her nipples. She
touched her body. She wasn't wearing anything, no clothes, no
jewelry. She had nothing on, no cover.
The
wind and the sea have gone. They've gone. They've gone.
She
turned to Carter, but she couldn't see him. Victor was gone, too. The
only one left was Blanes, paralyzed and perforated, and her.
Just
the two of them, and the darkness.
LIMP
as
a rag doll, Victor flew through the air and crashed down where the
Hand sent him. He banged against the open drawer where the diffusions
had been and felt an incredibly sharp pain behind his knees. When he
landed, it raised a cloud of dust that made him cough. The Hand
grabbed him by the hair and he was lifted up into the bright, starry
sky, clear and pure as airborne snow. The slap across his face made
his left earring and grumble like a rickety engine. He tried to grab
something for support and scratched the metal wall behind him. His
glasses were gone, but he could make out—right in front of
him—an eye so black it looked opaque; it had no iris. So black
that it stood out against the second-rate darkness of the room. He
heard the mechanism click.
"Listen,
you stupid priest..." Carter's voice, hissing like a blowtorch,
seemed to come from the eye. "I'm pointing a carbon-fiber 98S at
you, and I've got thirty 5.5-millimeter bullets in the clip. One shot
from this distance and you'll be blown clear into next week, got it?"
Victor whined and whimpered, blind without his glasses. "Let me
warn you:
I'm
not myself.
Something's
happening to me. I know it, I can tell. Since we came back to this
fucking island, I've become someone else, someone even
worse
than
who I was. Right now, I'd be only too glad to blow your brains out,
wipe them off me with a rag, and go have breakfast."
Do
it,
Victor
thought, though he couldn't say a word, and Carter wouldn't let him
try. "If you
ever
take
off while you're on guard without telling me, if you turn on any
fucking machine without my permission, I swear I'll kill you. That's
not a threat; it's just the way it is. I might even kill you if you
don't, but you'll have to let me be the judge of that. Don't give me
any easy excuses, Father. Got it?"
Victor
nodded. Carter handed him his glasses and shoved him toward the door.
And
that's when it all happened.
MORE
than
feel it, she sensed it.
It
wasn't an image, a sound, or a smell. Nothing material, nothing you
could perceive with any of your senses. But she knew Zig Zag was
there, at the back of the room, the same way she'd have known if a
nameless man in a crowd loved only her.
The
wind and the sea have gone. Only the abyss remains.
"God
... Oh, dear God, please! Help me! Carter! David! Please, help
me!..."
Terror
has a point of no return. In that instant, Jacqueline crossed it.
She
curled up into a ball against the screen next to Blanes's petrified
body, hands over her breasts, and screamed. Again and again. Screamed
like she'd never screamed in her whole life, holding nothing back,
thinking nothing except that she'd lose her mind. She howled, she
bellowed like a dying animal, until her throat nearly split open,
until she thought her head would explode and her lungs would fill
with blood, until she knew she was insane, or dead, or at least
anesthetized.
Suddenly,
something emerged from the back of the room. It was a shadow, and as
it moved it seemed to drag the room's darkness with it. Jacqueline
turned and looked.
She
stopped shouting when she saw the eyes.
At
the very same instant, she managed to give her body one final,
definitive command. She got up and ran to the door as though
abandoning a sinking ship.
They've
gone. They've gone. They've gone. They've gone. They've gone.
She'd
never make it, she thought. She'd never be able to escape.
He
would
catch her (he was fast, too fast). But the last remaining shred of
her sanity told her she was doing the right thing.