Ghosts of Eden (22 page)

Wrigley grinned. “Why don’t you get the jar, Garty? He can’t touch it; it’s been blocked from him by The Council. Open it. Let us see what happens.”

Garty, shaking all over, looked at Wrigley—who was nodding: go on, go on—and then at Xander, who wore that slight smirk, whose eyes were dark and knowing, just like the eyes of the lookalikes. He stepped toward the jar. He glanced at the telescopic pointer that now lay on the ground, then back up to Xander’s hateful eyes. He closed on the jar.

“I can’t touch it—no,” Xander said suddenly, with such authority Garty froze, poised only feet from the jar. “But it won’t do you any good. He’s not what you think he is, Wrigley. He’s just a boy. He’s nothing like his sister. He’s worthless.”

Garty looked up at the man he had thought was his uncle.

Xander smiled thinly. He opened his lab coat, revealing a collection of masks tied within by strings, dangling, clanking together like wooden wind chimes. One by one, the masks began to fall, but when they struck the stone floor, instead of clanking like wood, they made a plopping sound, like mud striking concrete. Garty watched in fascinated horror as heads of liquid flesh began to roll toward him.

“Fuck you,” Garty shouted, and lunged for the jar. He tumbled forward, grabbed the jar, and rolled onto his back. He made it to his knees before the heads were upon him. The first one rolled up his arm and bit him. He watched three out of the five fingers on his right hand disappear into the dark maw of the head’s over-large mouth and the jar tumbled out of his grasp and rolled away. He screamed. Another head attacked his leg. Another rolled over, aiming for his throat or face, but he smacked it away with the back of his hand.

He could hear Wrigley and Xander grappling with each other, grunting and fighting. He kicked out at one of the heads and it made a soft squelching sound as the membrane holding it together gave and splattered. Distantly, he thought he could still hear himself screaming, as more and more heads came at him. The one on his leg was attached, biting deeper and deeper into his calf muscle. He couldn’t feel the pain—not yet—but he could feel the hot blood gurgling down his leg. He spun around, gaining his feet, kicking another of the heads even as two more rolled in to take its place. “Wrigley!” He limped away from the encroaching horde of heads, stopping only for a moment to stomp the head attached to his calf with his other foot; it was like a shiny gray stomach bursting open. Two of the heads had rolled around and were now coming at him from the direction he was fleeing. He braced himself, hoping he’d still be able to get at least one good kick in before his wounded leg gave out, but something whipped by him and both heads collapsed into gray matter.

Garty turned in time to see Wrigley lashing out with pale hands tipped with yellow and cracked fingernails, Xander dodging the swipe, spinning deftly, delivering an open-handed strike to Wrigley’s chest.

Wrigley stumbled backwards, flailing to keep his feet, tumbling towards the roiling darkness on the other side of the ring of stones. His mouth was wide open, tooth-lined and huge; his tongue flying around his attacker to swipe at the horde of heads approaching Garty. As he began to fall, his tongue whipped back to wrap Xander, to catch himself and pull either himself back into the fray or take Xander with him into the darkness, but Xander had anticipated the move and slashed quickly with the telescopic pointer he had somehow recovered. Wrigley’s cry of outrage was silenced the instant the darkness swallowed him. His tongue shivered and slapped the ground, curling all about the stone circle like a slain serpent.

Garty moved as fast as he could, but several of the heads rolled ahead of him and then came back to trip him. He threw his hands out to catch his fall and they were met by the soft and sticky mass of the heads that had rolled beneath him. And they were on top of him and he couldn’t see anything and they were closing over him and he couldn’t breathe.

SEVEN

“Stop!”

Xander’s head jolted up to look at her. Shocked surprise wrinkled his features. Xander had been watching the horde of heads act as a single mass, bringing Garty—securely enmeshed within their swirl—closer and closer to the oily wall of darkness.

“You can’t. I know what I am now,” Kayla said, stepping into the ring of stones. Her foot brushed something small and gray, which she kicked away, heard it skip stone against stone into the shadows.

Xander put his hand out and the heads came to a halt. “I doubt that.”

“At first I thought they were only dreams. I thought everyone had nightmares. But that’s not true, not the way I was having them. Then, for a while, I thought your house was haunted. I thought I was seeing ghosts. But that’s not true either.”

Xander gripped the telescopic pointer, holding it at the ready. “No. That’s not true.”

“If you let Garty go, I’ll help you.”

Xander stepped forward, coming into the center of the stone circle. His eyes narrowed, calculating the situation. “How did you escape the Umbra Ina? I put you there for safekeeping, to prevent you from leaving my domain.”

“You lied to me. You’re not really my uncle, are you?”

“No. I took his pipe, told you stories from his journals. But that doesn’t matter now. I’m glad that you finally see what you are, Kayla. I had to train you while you were still young enough to believe, but old enough to understand and make it real. You’re the one who’s haunted, not the house. You’re a denotic. A dreamer. None of this,” he waved his arms about, “would be possible without you.”

Kayla squared her shoulders, hoping that she looked more confident than she felt. “Then you can’t kill me.”

Xander shook his head, smiling. “No. I can’t.”

“And if I cooperate, you won’t keep me locked up in the dark?”

“I suppose not.”

Kayla glanced at the mass holding her brother, returned her eyes to Xander. She took a step forward. “Then what do we do now?”

“We continue our lessons.”

“You’ll let my brother go?”

Xander shrugged. “He’s of little importance.” His eyes flickered.

The heads around Garty began to lose their consistency and melt. Kayla watched the running threads of flesh become gelatinous puddles, Garty’s body settling, sinking into the muck—limp, but she could still see the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.

“Now,” Xander said. “Shall we continue?”

Kayla glanced around the stone circle. “Here? Now?”

“Yes, of course. What better place than in an environment created within your imagination and shaped by my will? Seems appropriate, I think. Would you like somewhere to sit?”

But before Kayla could respond, the air filled with a silvery sheen and the ground shook beneath her feet. When she turned, just behind her, a new rock had risen from the earth. It was reddish, with ancient hieroglyphics carved on its face: a spiral; a man with a square head; zags of lightning.

In a small divot, she sat; the rock was the perfect height for her.

Xander nodded, approached her until he was standing at the center of the circle of stones, only a few feet from where Kayla sat. Behind him, Kayla could see Garty’s motionless body on the stone floor. She wanted to go to him, to make sure he was okay, but she couldn’t. She had to play Xander’s game.

“A present-day high-speed computer the size of the Earth,” he began, as if it were just another day in the library, “would have the power to compute the collective capacity of all human thought throughout the entirety of our species in less than two minutes.”

Kayla nodded, but she knew that Garty had been right: Dr. Xander
was
crazy.

“Quantum computing would, of course, shorten this time to a fraction of a second, allowing for the power required to run a successful simulation.”

Kayla struggled to sit still. She was no longer interested in Xander’s theories and stories. She wanted to get Garty and get the hell out of this place. She concentrated on looking interested and making eye contact with her lecturer.

“It is possible, then, to imagine the earth as a gigantic organic machine, computing and projecting the reality we see around us. Are we all, then, nothing more than simulated beings in a simulated world? And if this is true, and we are its typical inhabitants, science—the discipline for revealing truth—would be undermined. It would be useless to us.” He smiled his close-mouthed smile. “But if we could create our own simulated universe, would we? If we had the capability, could we resist the Godgame? Would we not create a reality for lesser beings?”

Kayla glanced to the side: Garty was gone. She snapped her eyes back, hoping she hadn’t made a face or shown any sign she’d seen anything of any interest.

“Of course, most of these simulated beings would consider the fact that they were in a simulation preposterous. Even skeptics would point to the fact that their world functions and behaves by a certain set of rules, but fail to understand that it is the simulator—one such as myself—who made those rules.”

Kayla tried to look for Garty without making it obvious, turning to scratch the side of her neck.

Xander’s face twitched. “There’s no escape. You know that, don’t you, Garty?”

Kayla jumped. She turned.

Garty had been trying to hobble around the edge of the stone circle unnoticed. He froze. He was trembling, but he turned to face his adversary, leaning on his good leg, clutching his wounded hand in a bloody tangle of his shirt. In his other hand, he held something that looked to her like a small stone.

Xander’s smile disappeared. “What are you holding?”

Garty met Xander’s gaze. “I see you’re still playing mind games. You have to have
someone
to listen to your egotistical ranting, don’t you?”

Kayla jumped to her feet. The thing she’d kicked earlier, she realized, Garty was now holding. “Garty! Get out of here!”

“It won’t do you any good,” Xander said, ignoring Kayla.

“What won’t?”

“The Vessex, the jar Wrigley gave you.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Oh, no. Wrigley was a fool. He was wrong about you.”

“Really? He said
you
were a total loser, and he seemed to be right about that. He said
you
couldn’t make it into The Council. He said Thayer was the one with the real talent, not you. So why don’t you go and fuck yourself!”

Garty shook the jar. The lid fell free.

Nothing happened. Kayla watched Garty look inside, turn the jar upside down: empty.

Xander’s face darkened. “I meant what I said. You’ll not find a way out of this place, now that you’re here. It was by my influence, you came to live in my house, and it is now by my influence you will stay. Kayla, as well. Her step-parents had to go. She is
my
denotic. She will reside here for many centuries to come. But not you, Garty. Your potential has been wasted. You will wither and die.”

“I don’t think so,” Garty said.

“In fact, you may as well die now.” Xander pointed the telescopic pointer.

Garty flinched.

“How weak the flesh that has no mind.” His pointer crackled with bright electricity.

“Reality transcends your experience of it, Dr. Xander,” a strong voice said from the other side of the circle of stones. “It does not rely on concepts of your creation. It is incomprehensible.”

A figure emerged from the shadows between two of the standing stones. It was tall—at least eight feet—hairless, with skin tinged purple, deepening about the folds and wrinkles of its face. It approached, stepping lightly, almost as if it were floating over the surface of the rocks, its flowing robes a deep vermillion color, wafting around and behind it, leaving tracers of smoke.

Kayla glanced back at Xander and, for the first time, saw trepidation in his eyes. As the figure came closer, she moved around the rock, keeping it between her and this new danger.

“How…?” Xander seemed to be, another first, at a loss for words.

“The sabbantiac let me in,” the observer said.

“Sabbantiac?”

An over-large hand appeared from within the observer’s vermillion robes, indicated Garty, then disappeared again.

“Thayer was the last!”

“The last of three,” the observer said.

“Three!”

“So, you see, this young man is fully capable of escaping your ‘dark Eden,’ even ripping it open if he so chooses.”

“Impossible!”

The rock Kayla had been hiding behind began to shake; the ground began to shift and bubble, as if losing its solidity. Garty was waving frantically at her, waving for her to run to him, to get away from what was about to happen.

“I won’t let you ruin my plans!” Xander said, his eyes large and black.

“The Council will not allow your transgressions to continue,” said the observer, rising from the ground.

Kayla stepped away from the rock, fighting to keep her feet against the rumbling earth. Garty was on the other side of the circle of stones. She would have to run around or between Xander and the observer to get to him.