Below me, darkness was penetrated by flashes of lightning. I fell or the darkness rose, I’m not sure which, but soon it was as if I was in a silent lightning storm, but each flash illuminated nothing but the texture of the darkness around me.
And then I was no longer falling but walking, moving with arms outstretched, unable to find any solid object, a frightened, unsteady wanderer in a black cave. I became aware of a presence. At first it seemed as if it was pursuing me, but no, it was before me and I was pursuing it. It was darkness at the center of darkness, a hollowness in the fabric of the air around me, a vacuum drawing me toward it even as it withdrew from my questing fingers.
And then an electric thrill shot up my arms as I touched the dark form. I felt again the wet and heaving heart, the slick bone, and deeper still my hands traveled until I touched something invisible, a writhing beast, and I cried out but made no sound, and this cry of mine seemed to still the frantic contortions of this unseen monstrosity.
I felt it. It was not large, no bigger than a large cat or small dog. My fingers traveled over it, making out tendrils, craters, some surfaces slick and wet, others like scabs.
There was a crease in it, a slight indentation that I suspected went the circumference of it, and I knew, though how I knew, I could not say, that I was meant to pry the halves apart. In obedience to this instinct I dug my fingers into the crease, and to my surprise, it came apart with no more effort than I might have had to exert to split apart a cracked egg.
And then. And then. Oh, God, how can I put into words the brutal images that erupted from that split? I saw Derek fleeing, panicked, running in sheer mindless terror from a pursuer that could neither be glimpsed nor outrun.
I saw him lying flat, tied down to a crude wooden table, as above him a nearly comically large hypodermic needle descended slowly, slowly toward his abdomen.
I saw him behind the wheel of a car, and a tractor-trailer hurtling toward a head-on collision.
There were snatches of imagery from movies, some of which I recognized.
There were images of one-armed men with chainsaws that I heard as stories told ’round a dying campfire.
I knew what I was seeing as I plowed helplessly through the haunted house of Derek’s imagination. I was seeing his fears, his darkest terrors, the stuff of his nightmares, the things that had frightened him from earliest childhood until this moment.
And worse, far worse than seeing these things, I felt them. I brushed against them, and each new terror sent shockwaves through me. They were like infections that, once touched, I knew I could never fully shake off.
And I knew then, oh, with such soul-deadening dread, that this was what I had felt from my brief contact with Messenger. I understood then that he had absorbed some part of the terrors of so many tortured, twisted minds. I understood that he had never, could never, fully erase them from his own consciousness and that these terrors had made his touch toxic.
And that the same thing was happening now. To me.
I don’t know how much time passed as I dredged through the accumulated horrors of Derek’s mind. Maybe no time passed at all. Maybe it was a thousand years. Time lost all meaning—what good was time, how could it be measured, when all you could think to do was to scream?
Slowly then, slowly the unbearable intensity weakened. Slowly, like a person rising from a nightmare to the light, I floated up and away from the awful beast, the beast that now closed, locking me out. I floated up and away, up and away, but nothing, nothing was forgotten.
I opened my eyes. Derek was before me, his back to me, my hands on his heart and head.
I looked past him and saw Messenger. He was pale, as always, but somehow more deathly now. His blue eyes met mine, and I saw within them the thing that kept me from hating him as I perhaps should: compassion.
I had traveled to a place he had often visited himself. He knew. He understood in a way that no other being could.
My voice trembling, weak, I said, “You did this to me.”
He shook his head imperceptibly. “No, Mara. You did this to yourself. As I did it to myself. As my master before me did it to himself.”
Gasping, I broke contact with Derek.
“Was it . . . fun?” Oriax asked, unable to conceal the cruelty of her curiosity. She licked her green-tinged lips as though she was savoring the lingering flavor of some delicacy.
“What is his fear?” Messenger asked me.
“I . . . There were so many.” I closed my eyes, but that brought the pictures back to life, so I opened them again, wide, knowing that darkness was now my enemy and that what salvation and peace I could find was in light, even the sickly light the mist allowed me.
“There was one fear greater than all others,” Messenger said, his voice soft but insistent. “There was one fear beneath all of the others.”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Yes. There was.”
DEREK WAS FOUR YEARS OLD WHEN HE FIRST heard the story of the Maid of Orléans. He wasn’t even part of the conversation; it was something he heard his older brother talking about to a friend after reading Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc in school. Derek’s brother relished, in the way that slightly sadistic older brothers have done since the dawn of time, the opportunity to frighten his little brother.
Joan of Arc was born in the small French town of Arc in the year 1412 during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. England was winning.
She heard, or believed she heard, the voice of God directing her to offer her services to the French army. Through a bizarre set of circumstances, and owing to the credulous superstitions of the time, Joan ended up being taken quite seriously. She became a bit of a rock star for the French, who were happy to seize on any inspiration.