Strange Eons: Nothing Is Worth Saving

“We are not immortal. Someday they will offer a eulogy for us and decide what to etch on the tombstone. Tell me, what would you like to see engraved where we rest? Shall they weep and curse God or be jubilant in our triumphs, celebratory?”

 

The other faced away in his desolate cell. Hour by hour the walls felt like they closed in, preparing to swallow him. He wouldn’t allow his antagonist the satisfaction of seeing the helpless snarl he veiled under shadows.

 

“No, I feel no satisfaction. I am not your enemy. Only your ascendancy that you continue to deny. Face me. It’s not as if you can escape anyway. Neither of us can flee the judgment of the other. Everything is exposed here, like a gaping wound.” 

 

Of course he couldn’t hide his hostility. How many times had this infernal hound caught the scent and dragged him out of the solitude of his thoughts? Cursing despite himself, Padraig Marko spun to face his jailor. His mirror reflection, all except for those serpent-like eyes. They followed him as a viper’s may follow an intruder in its den.

 

Through metal bars the mirthless gaze of Julian Bathory penetrated the heart of Padraig Marko. Seated on a plush chair of red velvet, ringed by regal-looking tapestries and paintings, that accursed conqueror spirit leisurely carved some effigy from a chunk of basswood in one palm. Rarely did he glance down at his work as he prodded his captive host. With every visit, too, his other was noticeably larger and stronger, reflecting the grueling, punishing trials he put their body through.

 

“Unity, communion, transcendence. This is the phrase we coined and the journey that MESSIAH teaches its followers to embrace. Few have ever reached enlightenment, regardless of faith or philosophy. Perhaps a few yogis, brittle in their twilight years and isolated beyond civilization. Some tribal shamans dipping into poisons and forbidden fruits. But men and women in the prime of their lives, strong and socially attuned enough to empower the world? Alexander the Great would be deemed a failed warlord by comparison.”

 

Marko’s profane counterpart looked back down, blade dancing in his hands as wooden shavings slipped to the floor. He grinned at his work, disregarding the other’s scorn as the pause extended uncomfortably.

 

“What occurred in those caves beneath Lake Jonah was a miracle. A greater intelligence chose a moment in time to focus His eye on humanity, the carrion that we are, and gift us with a divine spark. You should be fucking grateful, not still sitting in here woeful and gloomy. Padraig, you feeble and dickless little coward, this charade needs to end. Damn you.”

 

Bathory reached up and rattled the cage, and the grin abruptly shifted to a scowl to rival the prisoner’s. There was more impatience there than he’d ever admit to.  

 

“For all that you are, monster, you still need me.” Padraig turned away to behold the back wall, previously gray and barren, now lined with full-size prints of the places he’d seen in his early travels. His memories splashed onto canvas that he’d locked away before Julian Bathory could find and despoil them, or use them to forward his ambitions. Soaring horizons and sun-bleached ocean shores, towering libraries and museums housing ancient wonders. Tokens of his humanity that this thing conjured in some abyss could never relate to. 

 

“You envision yourself demon-king of MESSIAH, herald of a new world order of rabid devotees. Ambitions of ripping the heart out of PRIME and becoming its black core, ruining decent people like Nova and Rhine. You seek to either become the soul of all you touch, or the one to banish it into the dark of wherever you came from, and I won’t give you the tools you need to do it. There have to be limits.”

 

A grim chuckle. Those snake’s eyes followed him further as his hands moved almost mechanically, fashioning the idol in his grip. “So did you. You wanted these same things, Padraig.”

 

“Not like you. Not like this. I’m a man, flawed and always searching for answers. I know malice but I also know what it’s like to love and care. I’ve done foolish, immoral things but I know what remorse is. Remorse and loss and going a bridge too far.” He tore one of those projected memories from the wall and crumpled it in his hands, allowing it to turn to sand and slip through his fingers like an hourglass. A display of simple defiance and a reminder that Julian Bathory still needed Padraig Marko to carry out his twisted agenda. 

 

“Without what I offer you, you truly are just a thing. For all of your power, your self-indulgence, whatever else you may have managed to tap into when this…fusion or whatever came about, too many pieces are missing in this crude puzzle. Everyone in our inner circle knows it, devil. They see the gaps and what they might lead to. How much time do you have until they realize their monster can’t be controlled and has to be put down?”

 

Marko set himself down on his bed. His own accouterments changed to mirror the stately furnishings of his captor and he locked eyes with Julian Bathory. The other’s eyes shimmered, unamused. 

 

“You think I can’t play the game to suit my whims?” the other said with a sneer. “If indeed there’s dissent, mutiny even, are you prepared to lose it all? All you have worked, cried, bled for? Are you ready to lose her?”

 

The Hungarian had come to muse these conflicts plenty. Largely removed and observing as an outsider through a broken window, he’d found a new clarity. “Maybe it really has gone far enough. Perhaps MESSIAH needs to disappear. Maybe we have to disappear.”

 

Bathory’s look was murderous. As he leaned forward to speak, a third voice arose like a distant echo in a sprawling cave. With a heavy sigh, Julian Bathory placed the carved idol just inside the bars before rising. Unsurprisingly, a crown.

 

“Be a good lad and keep the protests to a minimum. I’ll even leave the lights on.”

 

Julian Bathory blinked his eyes and


*****

 

he arose from the chair behind his desk, brushing debris from his sprawling desk. Marion Sterling watched him from the doorway with hands clasped. In one hand was a manilla folder with financial documents spilling out. Billing info, portfolio data, invoices. On the outside her demeanor was pleasant, always professional but gracious and good-humored. Internally, her gut was knotted as she’d come recently to dread these exchanges; the director once seemed to relish the task of money management, crunching project numbers with a sort of reserved glee, but recently such vigor had been lost. His only fixations were in training, vengeance, violence.

 

“What is it, Ms. Sterling?” He leaned back, grimaced at the sight of the stuffed folder. His posture was eerily similar to the romanticized self-portrait hanging behind on the wall, the master of his domain.

 

She smiled, shifted her weight. Bathory’s behavior had been erratic, standoffish, and she hoped he didn’t detect the unease. “As you know, director, the last proposal extended to the foundation was rejected. I’ve been looking over the budget and, following meetings with some colleagues, I think we’ve settled on a figure-“

 

“There will be no donation.” He cut her off before she could get into her familiar rhythm, drumming fingers on the desktop and peering into the clouds over Abel, as if expecting some unseen foe to break through their cover any moment. Apathetic and belittling. “Fighting With Nora has spurned our charity. Cancel any further plans linked to them. They can rot and Jon Rhine will pay for their contempt.  He’ll be fundraising from a hospital bed soon enough. Will that be all, Marion?”

 

He pulled himself up and strided to the window, that empty gaze settling somewhere beyond. The man had become almost single-mindedly vicious, callous. Emotionally he had become something of a ghost, nothing like the unversed but animated man she had agreed to coach less than a year ago. The work he once fervently sank his teeth into was frequently relegated to staff now. She smoothed her olive-colored blouse – relax, she thought – and dropped the reports onto his desk.

 

“I understand you want to be a warrior, Director Bathory. Raise the banner of the organization in glorious battle and all of that.” She felt as if she was chiding a schoolboy, or a rich dilettante installed through nepotism, not Violence Jack’s chosen successor. “But a man in your position has duties and responsibilities, some of them less than desirable. Your leadership and your vision are needed. Director, if Father Shanahan were-”

 

“I am director of MESSIAH, Ms. Sterling, not Bruce,” he snapped, again cutting her off mid-thought. Marion could see his muscles tense, his fingers flexing. The man’s fury was barely contained and all it had taken was dropping his mentor’s name. “He remains in exile until such a point as I deign he can return. At present you’ll find him up north in his fortress of paranoia, likely barricaded in his office or his holy basement sanctum. Were I inclined to gamble I’d wager that you’d probably find him curled up in a makeshift nest of empty whiskey bottles and pages torn from his Black Testament magnum opus, waxing poetic about his legacy. Fucking liability he’s declined into.”

 

The unchecked rage was new. The man was agitated, his nerves frayed. There were rumblings that he’d often been coming off as brutally aggressive or outright diabolical. Marion Sterling, however, was far from some meek or fragile worker bee, and wouldn’t stand idly by as all of her own labors unraveled over their leader suddenly veering off-course of MESSIAH policy. She’d traveled the same cutthroat circles as Shanahan with a stalwart influence all her own.

 

“You had ideals, Julian,” she said in rebuke. “What happened to those? However amoral many of your designs have been, they’ve aligned with the organization’s big picture. You’ve preached about salvation and amassing the weak to fight. Finding higher purpose. But this recklessness will just reawaken our enemies.”

 

She sighed, biting her lip. He hadn’t stirred from his reverie.

 

“What can I say to change your mind?”

 

He finally turned and locked eyes with his fiery counsel. Behind those eyes were storm clouds, baleful and tempestuous.

 

“Nothing, Marion. There is only MESSIAH International. Everything else is secondary, be it a rival to be gutted or a lesser to be erased. We are not a cancer charity nor are we merely the scion of Bruce’s archaic Sect of Black Wisdom. We are a titan seeking to carve out an unassailable kingdom, and everyone opposing our work will burn. If only dust and cinders remain in our wake, I find that acceptable.” 

 

Beneath the window he kept a chess board. Turning his back to her again, Bathory brushed several pieces, a knight, a bishop, the queen. One finger flicked at a pawn, toppling it. “Perhaps you missed the memo. There are changes afoot and make no mistake: I am a tyrant. We build power through the agency of belief and conviction. If you want to attract followers and grow their faith, Ms. Sterling, then you must project strength. We will empower the MESSIAH movement through destroying our enemies, not compromising with them.”

 

A bell tolled. The ancient grandfather clock that he kept, a relic of a by-gone era, booming loud enough at every hour to echo through the three-story building. He pulled his jacket from its rack and shrugged it on, the anger abruptly dissolved with that clarion call.

 

“If you’ll excuse me, Marion, I have an appointment. Don’t hesitate to contact me if a matter of real urgency comes up.”  

 

He strolled out of the room and down the corridor, whistling some melody, the vaulted ceiling carrying the tune across the entire floor. When he’d vanished around the corner, Sterling slipped out her phone. Tapping a few digits and waiting for the other line to pick up, she stared with narrowed eyes at the old clock. She vaguely remembered it from Wyatt Manor.

 

A click. “Marion?”

 

“You were right. Between his…excessive response to the donation and the brazen rants, something’s amiss. He’s either gone rogue or gone mad. If we don’t nip this in the bud then all of our work could be in jeopardy.”

 

“I expected as such. He’s under watch but be wary of the loyalists. Julian has his own brand of zealots.”

 

Her eyes never left the clock as she nodded to herself. Didn’t leave the big brass pendulum that swayed back and forth under glass. “Understood.”

 

“Forever the crown, Ms. Sterling.”

 

“Forever the crown.”

 

Ending the call, Marion left the director’s office, echo of her heels clicking as she departed. A breeze filtered in through the open window, stirring the papers on the desk. The mammoth clock creaked and groaned.

 

*****

 

“I’m worried about Asher, Mr Kelley.”

 

Yeah, that made two of them.

 

Evan Kelley sat in the principal’s office in Abel Elementary across from Rory Combs. The school, like every other institution in town, was small and intimate. So much so that even administrators were keenly familiar with nearly all of the charges under their purview, their values and dispositions. If Principal Combs found reason to be distressed by his son then it was as if his wife had spoken on the issue, and he’d learned years ago not to argue with Janice’s intuitions.

 

“Asher has been…less avid about his studies lately, Mr. Kelley. Not to say that he doesn’t finish his assignments but the quality from such a bright child has been missing. He’s distracted.”

 

The elder Kelley nodded. This was a new experience; the teachers here regularly praised Asher’s dedication and creativity, and now he sat in this office at a loss as to explain his son’s fall-off. He’d become more withdrawn and even sullen at times, disposed to stretches of isolation. The reason, however, was enigmatic. He still took no grand interest in girls, still a few years short of that hormonal wave. Mountaineer football season wasn’t here yet.

 

“His interests have also darkened. He’s taken on a morbid fascination with scripture. Far different than how he’s approached the subject up until now.”

 

“How so?”

 

She looked over her visitor’s shoulder and through the glass into the hallway. Asher sat outside, legs swinging in his chair.

 

“Elements that children his age simply don’t think about. For instance, Asher has been asking what angels look like. When anyone tells him that they’re the most beautiful creations of God, he balks. Challenges the idea, even if it’s an adult, and he’s never gone down that road before. As much as I encourage critical thought in our children, Asher’s predilections have been…uncanny, to say the least. Please talk to your boy, Mr. Kelley.”

 

He nodded and smiled, just as he was expected to do. After a farewell and an offering of gratitude, Evan Kelley collected his son and made for home, exiting the school into yet another summer shower. 

 

They drove in silence for a few minutes. The boy looked out the window into the rain, not bothering to towel off his face or hair. Evan was still running through his head how he was going to talk to the boy when they got home, the tone he would take. Prior to Abel, in his old life, he’d experienced more than his own share of the grisly, the blasphemous.

 

“Daddy, what do you think happened to the Canaan Ripper?”

 

Evan didn’t react, keeping his eyes on the road. He downshifted, thinking a moment before pulling to a stop at one of the four operating red lights in Abel. They’d been told there would be better than triple that once MESSIAH’s projects completed and brought jobs to their ailing haven. “Where did you hear the story of the Ripper?”

 

A shrug. “Dunno now. Around. Some kids hear stuff and repeat it in school.”

 

His father hesitated, took in the rain pounding on the truck’s roof. “Don’t know, son. And I wouldn’t worry about it. That was long before you were born. Heck, even before I came to town and met your momma. Plenty of small-towns have nasty secrets in their past but they keep on. I’m certain he or she met the Lord’s justice eventually. I wouldn’t worry none about it.”

 

“I had a dream last night, daddy. You and mom were in it. So was he. He wore a big, scary mask and I know that’s who it was because that’s what you called him. Everyone was holding knives but yours was the biggest one of all. And it had blood over it and was dripping.”

 

He said nothing, only offering vague grunt and listened to the hammering rain. A downpour brought by the latest in a streak of almost endless storms that had plagued Abel and Roane County this year. The light seemed to stay red for an awfully long stretch of time. Evan Kelley kept waiting for his son to recite a passage from the Good Book to mitigate the tension he felt pressing in, make things just feel a bit normal again. Asher didn’t do that. Instead he put his against the window, tired, and sighed.

 

“They say Abel has more secrets than most towns. Bad secrets.”

 

Finally the light went green. They pressed onward to home as thunder rolled on the edge of the county line. 

 

***** 

 

He’d been calling her his queen since her unannounced arrival weeks ago. Showered her with gifts, frivolous things, stuffed animals and bouquets and candies. In spite of his endless pampering everything rang empty. Romance as concocted by one who once read a classic love story and missed the emotions for the tropes and cliches. This wasn’t romance, nor did she feel like a beloved monarch. It was more a performance act by a psychopath, locking away his tower princess as ransom. Gaslighting by a fiend that had gaslit himself into this phony fool’s errand.

 

He set down his glass and breathed deep. “Do you like it? It reminds me of what we shared when we first met.”

 

She smiled but offered no correction. However proud he looked in the moment, conjuring images from that cool spring in Vienna, she thought it a curious observation. The first glass they’d shared then had been a resplendent, full-bodied red, ruby and sweet. This was a dry white, wholly unremarkable. Julian basked in a false memory and that irked her beyond words. Was it mockery?

 

He’s become so hollow, she thought sadly. Nothing genuine remains in the man I loved. Padraig sees no beauty and savors not a thing. What has driven him here? Perhaps the pressure really has driven him mad.

 

He told her stories of his time in Vermont, and of the curiosities he found waiting in Abel. While she first felt apprehension in his wild theories, the same flights of deranged fantasy he’d relayed feverishly in letters, that soon gave way to fatigue, then spiraled into exhaustion. Initially suspecting the rich food, her attention moved to the wine glass that always seemed full. 

 

But it was his eyes. In fact every time they made eye contact she was transfixed, gradually more and more mesmerized by his tales regardless of their increasing lunacy.

 

She barely batted an eye when he reached his ending. “That is our destiny. To sew murder and madness across the globe and put the torch to Eden. Together. Have you ever wondered if God bleeds?”

 

“Why…why are you telling me this?”

 

“Because I rule MESSIAH, now and forever. You are my beloved and my queen. Tell me, do you know what every royal couple needs in their lives?”

 

How far are you willing to push to sabotage us, Padraig? Will you break first or shall the empire?

 

An icy chill had found its way down her spine earlier in the meal. But now she had faltered, faculties slipped completely. His grip tightened on her hand, and coincided with a menacing smile that widened as her vision clouded into imperceptible murk. The haze of a dream, lucidity cast away.

 

“No. What?”

 

He flashed a perverse smirk. “A prince, Nadia. An heir to the throne.”

 

Echoing in his mind, thrashing against the chains confining him, Padraig Marko howled in horror. Julian Bathory pulled her deep into his embrace, and there was no resistance. She was finally–

 

A firm knock at the door shattered his scheme.

 

“Director. You are needed. It’s urgent.” The voice belonged to Dimitri Gouskos.

 

Releasing Nadia to rest comfortably in her bed, Julian Bathory cursed into the void. A glass shattered between his fingers, drawing blood.

 

A reprieve, Padraig. One way or another, you will come to the table and you will surrender. This only ends one way.