In an attempt to make this story manageable, I have broken it down into chapters, so it doesn't read as one page as long as a football field. Use these buttons to navigate through the chapters, and don't be fooled by the fact that Chapter 13 is called "The End". This story is 14 chapters long!
WRATH * II * WRATH
Science and Dreams
Guests on Eliphaz' island were not a common occurrence. The last person to set foot in it, other than its resident, had been the technician who had installed Eliphaz' digital satellite dish eight months previous.
Now Eliphaz had a guest. His black-cloaked visitor seated himself on an antique, Victorian sofa after a brief examination of his surroundings. He seemed to take particular interest in the tracks that his and Eliphaz' feet had made through the dust on the floor, and the pretzel-shaped clearing of the dust that existed in the middle of the room. Eliphaz looked upon the intruder's curiosity with disdain; either the man was simply being cautious, or he was being suspicious, or he was being a snoop.
"I'd offer you a cup of coffee," said Eliphaz, though sarcastically, "but I have none to offer. Would you care for a glass of water?"
"That won't be necessary."
Eliphaz grunted. He seated himself in a high, wing-backed chair with dark leather cushions and brass tacks. "Well then," he said. "Suppose we just skip over all the pleasantries and get right to the point. I'm not a person who appreciates being disturbed. What do you want?"
The shadow-shrouded face beneath the hood of the cloak seemed to study him for a few moments, but Eliphaz couldn't be sure, as the man's eyes were hidden by darkness.
"My name is Greggory Clefferts," said the man in black.
"Pleased to meet you Greg," said Eliphaz impatiently. "Now what do you want?"
There was another uncomfortably long pause.
"I came to you, only managing to find you after many years of searching. I came to you because we have something very uncommon in common."
"Do tell."
"We are both immortal."
Eliphaz had no reply. For perhaps the first time in his life he found himself to be speechless. All his life Eliphaz had been plagued by endless hours of wonderment as to why he alone was destined to live, on and on, while everyone and everything around him aged, withered and died. Time and time again, for literally thousands of years, his mind had returned to that topic, and always it had proven to be a mental pursuit through questions, questions, questions and the finding of not a single answer. And now, incredibly, after all that time, a man was standing, or sitting rather, before him, telling him that he too was an immortal.
He was glad for his having already seated himself, for suddenly his head was swimming and his knees were weak. His strength had left him. He felt as though he were collapsing further into the cushion on the back of his chair.
After another full minute of prolonged silence, Eliphaz finally managed enough composure to stammer, "How? Why?"
The man named Greggory said: "Perhaps some explanation is due."
And he proceeded to tell his story.
* * *
"You may not think this has much to do with anything, but let me tell you right off, it's the cornerstone upon which my life's story is founded: my father was an atheist. When I was seven I approached my father with one of the typical questions of life that a seven year old is inclined to ask. I asked him what happens to people when they die. Do you know what he said? He said dying was like falling asleep... like being unconscious. I asked if people dreamed when they were dead and he said no, all they do is lie there decomposing; unconscious, rotting. I asked him about heaven and God and he said they were both concepts made up by men who were just afraid to face up to the fact of life's uniqueness -- that it only happens once -- that there is no immortal soul and you never get a second chance at anything. He said there was no higher calling. He said there was no purpose in life.
"Let me tell you, Mr. Montrego, I have never been as scared in my entire life as I was then.
"But let me also say that if it had not been for my father's faith in medicine, technology and science, I never would have had the upbringing in mathematics and engineering that I did. And if not for that, I never would've developed the method by which I achieved agelessness and subsequent immortality.
"My father, while being confident that there was no God, was confident that everything was within the understanding of man. He used to tell me that man, having the ability to build machines that can put him on the moon, split the atom, and replace the human heart, has the ability to do anything he puts his mind to. But still, he laughed at my ambition to live forever; he said, 'Son, this is a thing which you will most assuredly learn: there are only two things which are inescapable facts of life -- the rest of it may be debatable, but these two things are not: death and taxation.'
"Yes, my father laughed at my plan. He told me living forever was not only impossible but also insane. And I greatly respect my father... for his intelligence and wisdom... but his words, even having millennia of human grief and experience as proof behind them, had no effect on me. I knew, with a certainty, in my heart, that regardless of the arguments against it, life could be sustained in a man indefinitely. It was just a matter of discovering how.
"Throughout the years of my education, both in high school and college, I took every class concerning science, medicine, mathematics and engineering available to me, never failing to achieve an 'A' and complete mastery of the subject. I hungrily devoured every theory and every idea, mulling them over carefully; making sure that I understood the logic of every concept before advancing to the next.
"After achieving a Ph.D. in all the areas in which a glimpse of the scientific nature of humanity might be caught, I earned a position on the staff of a company called Biotech. At Biotech my chief area of expertise was in the research and engineering of artificial organs and prosthetics. I was given my own lab and two laboratory assistants were placed under my charge. My work for the company primarily consisted of enhancement of the nervous system; artificial stimulus response technology -- that is to say artificial nerves, and direct machine interfacing with the human brain. What this was eventually supposed to lead up to was creating sensory equipment able to reproduce the sensations of sight, hearing, touch and smell -- taste was not on my list of priorities -- for those who were born with defects or those who had lost their response capabilities due to environmental misfortune. I earned more than two hundred patents for Biotech in my days there, but I digress. That was what my job for the company was. My personal mission was discovery of a means by which life could be extended indefinitely.
"I will not bore you with details of the exhaustive research and testing I did. I will only tell you of the final results:
"I discovered a measurable force which, until revealed by my experimenting, had somehow gone undetected by all the scientists and doctors that had worked on the problem of longevity before me. For lack of a better or more meaningful word, I called this force 'Soul,' although its properties are nothing like that of the soul which supposedly travels to heaven or hell at the time of a man's death. It is a force only found in living beings. At the birth of a living creature, the amount of Soul it possesses is very great, but through the course of a lifetime, the Soul slowly leaks out, until finally, when it is all spent and lost, the creature dies.
"The rest is rather difficult to explain. Perhaps I should just show you."
And with that said by way of presentation, the black figure named Greggory opened the cloak that kept hidden his body. Beneath it he was wearing a black shirt which he set to unbuttoning. When the front of the shirt had been totally separated, Eliphaz could see that modifications had been made on Greggory's original anatomy. Beneath the flesh that covered his rib-cage, strange, mechanical shapes loomed -- cylinders and tubes and spheres stuck out from his abdomen in bas-relief, and the flesh itself, with which his body was clad, had a most unnatural sheen. Truly, his skin seemed to be made more of a vinyl or plastic, the way the light revealed it.
Greggory lowered his hood then, exposing his face, and Eliphaz could not help but gasp in wonderment. The lower half of Greggory's face -- nose and mouth -- had been sealed over (replaced) by an object that stuck out from his jaw like a blunted proboscis. It looked a little bit like a gas mask had somehow fused with his skull. Above the mask, Greggory's eyes were orbs screened by a smoke-tinted plate of glass that was flush with the plane of his forehead, like a surgically implanted scuba mask, and it was filled with some clear liquid. Below the mask, set into his throat, was a speaker grill, and from that plastic mesh came Greggory's voice as he began to speak again.
"I figured out how Soul escapes," he said. Here he inserted a pause as he thought of how best to explain the rest of his discovery. Eliphaz made no move to interrupt him, he was still silent from wonder; amazed at the sight of what Greggory had done with his body -- he was no longer even human. More cyborg than even The Terminator had looked.
On the side of Greggory's head were his ears; domes with funnel shaped depressions set into the middle of them. Over each funnel, a thin membrane, thin to the point of transparency, had been stretched like the skin on an Indian drum. Through the gossamer membranes, Eliphaz could see a web of diodes and hair-fine wires, vibrating as sound passed through. Greggory had no hair, and his bald head shone doubly bright, for it appeared as though all the flesh on his body, not just that on his chest, had been replaced with that shiny, pale-tan vinyl.
"Believe it or not, all living things grow old and die simply because their bodies are too porous -- to fragile -- to contain their Soul. Every breath exhaled, every drop of blood lost, every bit of matter the body uses to build up hair and fingernails, every time the body expels wastes... all those simple things... every time one of those functions occurs, the body loses a little bit of Soul, Mr. Montrego."
"And you've figured out how to stop the Soul's leaking out?"
Greggory gestured at his body with an open hand. "My body is completely self- sufficient, self-contained. My body produces no waste materials, everything is recycled within and used again. I have no need to breathe, no need to eat, no need to drink. The only thing necessary to my survival is that I keep the machines that sustain me well maintained. As of the last tests I performed, the amount of Soul my body leaks is zero, or so close to zero that my instruments cannot register it. If this latter is the case I have no doubt that as technology improves I will be able to measure the amount of escaping Soul, pinpoint the area from which it escapes, seal it up, and thusly tighten my grip on immortality."
"Impressive," said Eliphaz. The exact word and tone he'd used when Chevrolet announced that a Geo would get fifty highway miles to the gallon. After a few minutes of silence, realizing that Greggory had said all he was inclined to, Eliphaz added, "So, while this is all well and dandy, Greg, it does little to answer my original question. Why are you here?"
"Mr. Montrego," he said. "You're the only person in the world that I would consider telling this to." And then, seeming to lose track of his line of thought, he said, "I read your book. It greatly influenced my life. The sections on meditation and broadening the horizons of human consciousness were of particular interest to me. All of the operations I performed on myself, I performed while in the trance of focused concentration you describe in chapter three. And most of my breakthrough theories that led to my discovery of Soul came to me in dreams as a direct result of my training my subconscious as you explain the procedure for in chapter seven."
"So you came here to thank me?"
"No. I came here for help. You see, lately I've been having a recurring dream. In this dream, I'm standing on a cat-walk that is suspended above a field of tall grasses. The cat-walk is completely without means of support to my eyes, it stretches to the point of vanishing at both horizons, and yet there are no wires or pillars anywhere that I can see. The cat-walk is made of gleaming steel for the most part, but where I stand the walk is tiled with thick, glossy black squares like ceramic or plastic, I don't know which. In my dream, I stand motionless upon this cat-walk for what seems to be several days, for the sun rises and sets many times. Then, at the rising of the sun one morning, a dense fog is covering the land, and the range of my vision is limited to about fifty feet. Now: from somewhere in the fog I hear the galloping of horses, far away and distant, but as time passes their thunderous hoof beats come closer and closer, and so close the horses are coming that I can hear the breath of the mighty beasts chuffing from their nostrils. And from somewhere in their midst, there is the sound of many people screaming.
"Then the fog parts before me, like a stage curtain, and I see them. Four horses with four riders, and they are riding straight towards me. Once they are a few steps clear of the fog I see them in detail. Here I will not bother you with unnecessary description, Eliphaz. These horses and their riders have already been described by you... and the Apostle John."
"The Apocalypse Riders," whispered Eliphaz.
Greggory continued, "As they ride towards me, I see they are clearing away the grasses of the field. War is cutting away huge sections of the field with his sword, and Death is doing likewise with his scythe. The grass before which Pestilence rides twists and writhes, finally turning black and then being trod to pulp beneath the hooves of his sickly colored horse. Before Famine the grass is withering and turning brown as though brought down by extreme heat or intense drought. And all the while they ride there is the sound of the screaming, and the screaming is somehow coming up from the grass as it is perishing.
"Now as the riders approach me on the cat-walk, they slow their steeds, until finally, as they are about to ride by beneath me, they come to a halt altogether. Death from his seat on the black horse looks up at me. I can see that from his blank sockets an unholy red-orange glow emanates. He speaks to me:
"'Beyond our reach you may be,' he says; his voice sounds like someone shouting a whisper, hoarse and breathy, but loud and powerful. 'But there are other agents of the mission.' And just as he stops talking the ground begins to shake and rumble. The horses whinny anxiously as though with dread, and I see their eyes are wide with stupid, animal terror. Then Death laughs and the riders resume their gallop. Within seconds they are gone from my sight, the fog swallowing them up. I am alone.
"But then I see something else coming through the fog -- again, I see four somethings. Though they are still blurred and vague to me through the mists I can see that they are huge -- as tall as buildings probably -- and human in shape.
"It is at this time that I wake. The terror of this dream you cannot begin to know. Why, if my heart will still frail human, surely I would be dead by now. Dead of fear."
Again there was silence between them.
"I can see why you have come to see me now," said Eliphaz, finally.
"Chapter twelve," said Greggory.
"'There are four Soldiers of Death,'" Eliphaz said, quoting himself from Chaos, Immortality, and Horizons of the Mind. "'These are known to most people as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, although the original word translated "death" in most versions of the Bible would really be better translated as Time -- thereby making the last of the riders, Death, the one plight that none can escape: Age.'"
"But as well as your mention of the Four Soldiers of Death, you also mention Four Champions of Death."
Eliphaz nodded. "The Succubus, Shapechanger, Animator and Magician. The four horrors of human history -- from whose existence all the stories of ghosts, vampires, witches and wizards ever told have evolved."
"Would you agree that the message of my dream seems to imply that since I have traveled beyond the reach of Death's soldiers, the Champions of Death have been alerted to my condition?"
"Dreams," Eliphaz said, his voice full of contempt.
"In your own book you said that no dream could ever be discounted or judged insignificant."
"I was speaking, perhaps, of my dreams when I wrote that."
"Surely --" but Eliphaz cut Greggory off this time.
"You believe this dream to be an omen then, yes?"
"Yes."
"And you have come to me for help."
"Yes."
"What is it you expect me to do?"
"I'm not sure if you can help me, Mr. Montrego, but I have reason to believe you might be able to. In your book you state that you have been alive for almost two and a half millennia."
"What of it? What has that got to do with you?"
"It seems a fairly obvious connection to me, Mr. Montrego. In all your many years of life, the Champions of Death have never come looking for you."
***
But before any of that went down...
Timothy Golding was a man who went by the rather lengthy, proper title of, Director of Research and Field Studies. He was an executive for Biotech Industries. He had been ear-marked for management and executive offices early on in his career, when he had just gained employment for the company. Originally chosen for his impressive looking certifications and educational background, he had, at one point, worked in the same laboratory as Greggory Clefferts. But he had not been nearly so gifted in terms of intuition or original thinking as Greggory had. He had big ideas, and big plans, but lacked a real capability for execution; for the actual designing of the devices and products Biotech was interested in developing. So while Greggory stayed on, researching, designing, testing and planning in the lab, Biotech sent Timothy on to higher levels where they thought his experience could be made better use of, his potential better tapped; delegating, supervising -- ass-kissing. In fact, Greggory, the man he had started as an assistant to, was now in his chain of command; he was Greggory's boss. And it was a position he relished greatly.
Now money wise, Timothy, despite his executive status, was still a couple of rungs below his employee, Greggory. The reason being that patent bonuses, prizes, and grants lifted the lowly engineer into a seven digit salary range, while Timothy still struggled to just break into six. Timothy knew it too; knew full well where the payroll for his department was allocated. And knowing how much more money his underling was making than he was came to be at the core of the resentment he had for Greggory. He knew, despite his title and status, Greggory was the real hero -- the real mover and shaker in his department. And he hated him for it. Stealing his show, his spotlight.
So when it came to his attention, one day, that Greggory was misappropriating company time, funds, resources and man-hours, it was not regret that was topping his list of emotions when he found himself looking forward to a confrontation with the man. Timothy was delighted by the prospect. He could think of no better way to spend an afternoon then criticizing, demeaning and denouncing the man who had caused him so much fruitless jealousy for so many years. He knew, before he had even reflected on what Greggory's motivations might have been, that termination was the only way to handle such a bold transgression; such flagrant embezzlement. Perhaps such thinking was selfish; not in the best interest of the company, but really, how much was a patent on synthetic, electrically reflexive, muscle fiber worth? How much profit would a design for an artificial liver bring in?
He sat there behind his desk, looking out his tenth story office window, a smug look on his face, and his fingers steepled below his chin. He kept thinking about how shamed and embarrassed Greggory would be. He liked to envision the engineer down on his knees, with tears streaming from his eyes, as he begged to be kept on; and himself, stone-hearted, rejecting his pleas. In this day-fantasy of Timothy's, Greggory was even willing to take a drastic pay cut; even willing to give Timothy sixty percent of his patents bonus at the end of the year. Ha! Even as he thought, dwelling on the prospect of their meeting, the smugness so plain on his lips and cheeks started to be overshadowed by a look of smirking evil. His face, lit by steep-slanting, afternoon sun that touched only on his brow and the tip of his nose, was, for a moment, the visage of a grinning skull.
When his secretary buzzed him on the intercom and told him Greggory Clefferts wanted to talk to him, he had to fight to restrain some of his enthusiasm. He didn't want to look too happy about this, after all. He wanted to look cool, calm, controlled. Maybe even exude an air of remorse. He pushed the speaker phone button that would put him through to his secretary's desk, and then paused, unhurried, dramatic, before saying, "Send him right in."
But his secretary wasn't about to usher him in. "Well, sir," she said, "he's not here. Not in person. He's on the phone for you. Line three."
Some considerable wind came out of Timothy's sails then. "Is he calling from his office in the lab?" he asked. "Did he forget our appointment for this afternoon?"
"No sir. I think he might be calling from home or something. Maybe he's sick."
Sick indeed. Why can't the man just show up and do his job?
"Thank you," said Timothy. He disconnected his secretary, picked up the cordless hand-set of his phone and pushed the flashing button for line three. "Golding speaking," he said. Like a leader, he said it; an important man. He'd always liked the sound of his own voice.
"Yeah, Tim?" It didn't sound like Greggory. It sounded kind of faint, and tinny; distant. But who else would have the gall to call him 'Tim?' Nobody but Clefferts.
"Yes. Speaking."
"This is Greggory Clefferts."
"Ah, yes. Mr. Clefferts." As though needing to remind himself of who the speaker was.
"Yeah. Look, Tim. I'm not coming into work today."
"Under the weather some? Your voice sounds terrible. Scratchy."
"Well, my throat does feel a little funny today, buy really, that has nothing to do with why I'm calling. I'm calling to give you my resignation. It seems I have a sudden conflict of interests. I'm going to have to discontinue my work for Biotech."
"What?!"
"Yeah. I was in late at the lab last weekend, doing some personal work. Thinking things over. I used quite a bit of equipment that I hadn't requested any time on. I'll reimburse the company any of the cost for that. Whatever you think is fair. I don't want this to be a messy, drawn out thing, Tim. I'll send somebody by to clean out my lab, okay?"
"This," said Tim, then pausing to swallow, thinking, This just won't do, this just won't do. "This seems awfully sudden. Is this something you'd rather talk about in person? I have plenty of time for you in my schedule this afternoon, if you can make it."
"No, Tim. There'd be no need for that. I've said all I really have to say."
"Clefferts, we had an appointment. Business is business. You can't just shirk me off like that."
"I've got other things I have to do, Tim. I'll send somebody by for my things. Bye." And then there was a click, and Greggory had hung up, and he was gone.
And he had robbed Tim of his one, glorious, redeeming moment.
Tim pounded his fist on his desk. "Dammit," he said. "Why can't you just keep your appointment?"