Martyr (The Martyr Trilogy)
Read Martyr (The Martyr Trilogy) Online
Authors: N.P. Beckwith
MARTYR™
by
N.P. Beckwith
Amazon
Kindle Edition, June 2014
Copyright
© 2014 by N.P. Beckwith
Published
by Flagship Fiction™ an imprint of CGI Publishing™
Copyright
© 2014 Command Group International LLC
Denver,
Colorado, United States of America
All
rights reserved. Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in
any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other
electronic or mechanical methods, without proper attribution or the prior written
permission of the publisher. For permission requests, contact the publisher at
www.cgipublishing.com
With the
exception of historical figures and events, all characters and situations
portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to persons, living
or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author
Cover
Image Copyrights:
Copyright
© 2014 N.P. Beckwith
MARTYR
N P Beckwith
Table
of Contents
I
never dreamed. Or if I did, I never remembered. Sleep was anesthesia, a blink
of the eyes between awake and awake again. That night I had dreamed, my mind
born anew into a world of tangible light and sound. I woke, and elation
dissolved into panic, as I realized my alarm hadn’t sounded. The blue-green
digits were flashing twelve o’clock, again and again; the power had gone off.
A glance at my watch confirmed my fears – I had overslept. I was supposed to
be in class in less than twenty minutes. I braced for an icy shower.
A
few minutes later, I had one leg in my pants and a trickle of red down my neck
from a reckless shave. I tried to remember my dream, but with each cast it
receded farther from my grasp. I finished dressing and ran a comb through my
hair, pausing before the mirror to inspect the result. I was a junior English
major with a minor in philosophy. English as a major was an easy choice. I
loved the interplay of words and ideas, and realized early on that a command of
language could give me a decisive advantage in life. But philosophy…that was a
little harder to explain.
I
wasn’t especially religious. My family hailed from a long line of
non-practicing Methodists, and had conveyed an attitude of extreme indifference
with regard to spiritual matters. It was more of a personal quest for truth.
I wanted to know what was real, what mattered. I wanted the certainty my
upbringing had failed to provide. I wasn’t dogmatic about it; on the contrary,
every time I was proven wrong brought me one step closer to knowing what was
right. I was fine-tuning my belief system, chiseling away the contradictions
and fallacies. When it was done, I would either find absolute truth, or
nothing. I honestly wasn’t sure which would be worse.
I
checked my watch again. Seven minutes. It wasn’t that I cared about the
class. “Politics of Religion” – sacred ground for the pious; battlefield for
the profane. Interesting, if only for the limitless mayhem potential. It
wasn’t that hard, really. All you had to do was suggest that something could
be known with certainty, and one side or the other would pounce, eager to shred
both the argument, and the person foolish enough to advance it. The real art
was in planting the seed without owning it, as in, “I heard someone in the
history department say…” Then just sit back and watch the blood flow.
I
had a powerful suspicion the professor was wise to my little games of
instigation, but he had yet to call me out. He was a real head case, that
one. Recently PhD’d, arrogance in spades. Textbook narcissist. Humiliation
and intimidation were the weapons he wielded to strike down any who questioned
his views or methods. This was all out there for anyone to see. Privately,
rumors circulated that he was into occultic stuff, but accounts varied widely
on the specifics. Almost nothing would have surprised me. It wasn’t the class
that had me trying to cram thirty minutes of hygiene into ten, and it certainly
wasn’t the professor. It was all about the girl.
Mana.
Part-time friend and long-time crush. Raven-haired beauty of some semi-exotic
stock. We had bonded over a mutual love of sport, somehow always ending up in
the gym at the same time. These were carefully crafted coincidences. I had
given her an edge in our first racquetball match, and she had neatly diced me.
After that I had always tried, and had lost as often as I’d won. As far as I
could tell, Mana didn’t suspect my true intentions. She went on a lot of first
dates, and few seconds. As soon as the guys realized that she expected them to
match wits with her before she’d even consider taking it farther, most never
called again, and she was fine with that. So was I. I worried that I might
have played the friendship angle a little too well, and become locked into that
status. I had been thinking that it was time to do something about that. But
now I was going to miss the social window, the crucial few minutes before
lecture when everyone found their seats and made their connections.
Breakfast
could wait; coffee could not. I nuked the thick stuff still sitting in the
pot, spiked it with cream before slipping into my jacket and out the door. I
had settled off campus after a less-than-satisfactory first term in the dorms.
The never-ending party that was campus life had not been conducive to serious
study. I shared a spacious rental house with three other guys who were hardly
ever there. This was a blessing. Most days I enjoyed the drive, a
mind-calming jaunt through a shadowed glade and along the edge of a
sandy-shored pond. Today it was just unwanted minutes. I accelerated,
dropping it into fourth as I entered the winding stretch of road that passed
through the shadow of the granite bluff called “God’s Forehead”. The landscape
permitted only a truncated view of the road ahead, but the Jeep knew the way.
Another quarter mile, and the road would level out, dip under an old railroad
bridge, and resume an easterly course toward the University.
Lances
of golden sunlight had begun to penetrate the thickness of forest, treetops
stark against a copper sky. The dream! It was the same sky I had seen in my
dream, triggering a recollection of other details. In the dream, I had been
driving on this same road, or one very much like it. But instead of going
under the tracks, the bridge had taken me over them. On the other side, the
pavement had become cracked and pitted, with tufts of long yellow grass poking
through in places. The farther I progressed, the more the state of the road
deteriorated, until the Jeep could no longer manage the terrain, and I was
forced to proceed on foot. Navigating the uneven ground, I traveled for some
time with eyes downcast, until a huff of exhaled breath brought my eyes back to
the fore.
There
was something in the road. It was a massive, many-pointed thing, silhouetted
in golden light. As my eyes adjusted to the glare, I could see that it was
some kind of creature, though not like any I had seen before. It was a deer,
or something of that nature, but essentially different. It had six legs: four
long, delicate forelegs and two heavily-muscled hind legs. It was easily ten
feet high at the shoulder, and it held its enormous head well above that. Its
antlers branched, and branched again, and again, more like the branches of a
tree than anything animal. And they were translucent, capturing and holding
the early morning light in a luminous halo about the beast’s head. It was
entirely white, like new snow, save for four enormous eyes of liquid gold. It
was watching me. There came a sound like an old air-raid siren. The creature had
thrown back its head, and the noise was issuing from that great, arching
throat. It lasted forever. Then the thing was across the road and gone, into
the trees.
Were
dreams really supposed to mean something, to provide a key to some unresolved
conflict in the psyche? The deer was my father, looking at me with censure,
the four eyes implying double the disappointment. I laughed at my own pathetic
attempt at Freudian analysis. Or the deer could have been Mana, representing
all that is beautiful, mysterious, elusive…and perhaps unattainable. Then
again, maybe the meaning lay in the numbers: four eyes, six legs, infinite
branches; something about my limitless potential? Psychobabble and nonsense.
Dreams don’t mean anything, I decided. Or they mean whatever you want them to
mean. Then I saw another angle. It wasn’t about the animal; it was about the
bridge, the first departure from the familiar, from the world as I knew it.
Every day you take the same path. What if, one day, you took a different one?
A bridge over instead of under, down instead of up, right instead of left?
Could that change everything? Could you ever go back? Would you want to?
That
was it: a different path. I was going to take a leap. I was going to talk to
Mana, ask her out. It wasn’t quite that simple, of course. But I knew the
words would come, as they always did. I’d say that the idea came to me
uninvited, when I was thinking about how much fun we always have together. I’d
tell her that it surprised me too at first, but when I thought about it, it
just felt so right. I’d assure her that it could never jeopardize our
friendship, only make it better. And of course, that we owed it to ourselves
to find out if there might be something there, and would regret it forever if
we didn’t try. OK, I’d drop the “forever” part, too melodramatic. But the
rest of the pieces were there. What happened today would change the dynamic of
our relationship forever – for better or worse. I was feeling my nerves, to be
sure; but I was also exhilarated. My dream had emboldened me to do something I
had wanted to do for a long time. And even if it backfired, it would be better
to know than to cling to a hope that was ultimately false. Wouldn’t it? I
crossed the bridge without even noticing.
