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 * XI * WRATH
Catharsis
The last meeting of the heads of security that would ever take place within the walls of Castle Greggory was of two parts. On part was a celebration of their victory over the Shapeshifter.
Randy made a sort of fountain out of tall, fluted champagne glasses. He stacked them into a pyramid shape and then poured into the top one, so that as that glass at the pinnacle overflowed all the ones beneath it were filled. It was like a strange model of a prospering Republican economy.
Each of them took a glass then; though Greggory poured his into Sabre's water dish.
Eliphaz raised a glass. He made a toast. He said, "To Chance, the most benevolent and divine of Fate's Champions."
There were nods around the table; they chinked glasses.
"And the winning of half the war," added Randy.
"Here, here!"
Chink.
"And to uplifted spirits that will carry us, lively and prepared, to further victories," said Greggory.
"To life eternal," said Brad.
"Here, here!"
Chink.
They drank.
Eliphaz swallowed his glass down in one gulp. He reached for another glass from the pyramid-fountain.
"A new toast!" he said. "Here's to the power of the mind! The power to purge the flesh by means of science and spirit!"
"And to the money you will save on shoes," said Randy. Eliphaz laughed heartily.
Another chink.
Another deep swallow.
"I didn't know until now," said Greggory to Eliphaz, "how you really felt about luck. I thought when you asked that question during the interviews, about luck, that you were looking for people who didn't believe in it."
Eliphaz had, already, his third glass in his hand. He drank down half of it before addressing Greggory with a response to his statement. He said, "I didn't believe in luck. You're absolutely correct. I didn't believe anything happened by pure chance. I thought anything which happened came about as a mixture of preparation, determination and circumstance. Once all of those elements are in place, well then, who knows? You read my book Greggory. You know what grand credit I gave to the influence of Chaos. But: I didn't believe in luck. Not until now.
"When something like this happens, you have to stop and rethink things through. If you're in the position I'm in -- or was in, rather. Something so delicately detailed, so complicated as this... it makes me believe it had to have been part of some unknown purpose's design. And, not believing God would give a rat's ass one way or the other, I'm left only with speculations about the fickle lady: Luck."
Eliphaz laughed suddenly. It was a strange sound coming from his throat. Everyone had always seen him stern and serious and authoritative. He had never laughed before. He pointed at Greggory with the stump of his elbow. "Have you really bothered to try and recreate all of what had to happen in order for things to work out the way they did? Have you really looked at it? I mean, start with the castle itself: the floorplan, the termites, our managing to buy it. How many castles ever even go up for sale?
"Consider the lengths of security we went to. The lengths we had to go to. We were actually over-working the fastest, most powerful computer available, and because of that, we had to have a technician install a new cooling system. Liquid nitrogen for Godssake! Think of the fluke of its having been laundry day, and the blankets and sheet of your bed being changed at the precise moment of the Shapeshifter's breaking into our fortress. And the timing of it all: your retiring for the evening, the deadline I'd given the technician to meet, the collapse of the floor. Think of the over-sight of that timber during the remodeling we had done. And what are the odds against our having had the jacuzzi put in that exact spot, where it could catch the monster and freeze him solid so quickly? Just think of it all!"
There was a moment of respectful silence and reflection.
At last Brad spoke; saying what they all wanted to say. Saying the only thing that could, realistically be said. "Wow."
Then they all said it together.
"Wow."
"S'right," said Eliphaz, nodding.
"One more time then," said Brad, lifting his glass. "To Luck."
"To Luck," they echoed.
Chink.
The second part of the reason for their meeting was the discussion of further preparations for the coming of the Animator, and speculation about the nature of the Magician.
Eliphaz was deep into the pyramid when the insight finally hit him. They had been discussing the problem of luring the Animator into the living cage, but Eliphaz, not one to long put up with the trifles of how to execute a plan, could not keep himself limited to such a narrow spectrum of thinking.
He cried, "I have it!" And he was more than just a little bit inebriated by then. His eyes were glassy and stupid looking, his speech was slurred. Still, when he spoke he commanded everyone's attention effortlessly. "A tree!" he exclaimed. "It just came to me: if we want to seal up that bastard for a good long time, we have to find some living thing that goes on living for a good long time. And the answer is so obvious. A tree!"
But his solution was apparently so enlightened he had a hard time explaining his concept with mere words. His drunkenness may have had something to do with it. He had to draw pictures as he spoke, and it was a good thing he was ambidextrous.
He drew a tree much the same way a child in elementary school would: as the outline of a sprig of cauliflower. The universal symbol for tree. He said, "We're going to need a really big tree though. Like a Redwood, or a Douglas Fir, or a Sequoia. A big tree."
"I don't get it," said Brad. "What the hell are you talking about?" He was speaking for all of them.
"So shut up then. I'm essplainin'." He drew an archway in the trunk of his tree. "You know they can sometimes graft parts of one tree onto another, and then seal it up with tar and those synthetic bark coverings? Well, that's what we gotta do. We cut a hole in this here tree, big enough so we can put the whole skin cage in there." He drew a cube, representing the cage, inside the archway. "An' we gotta do it that was 'acause we can't take no chance on the Aminator, er, Animator, getting out. You know? And then, we replace the part we cut out, and seal over the seams with that tar and bark stuff. Eventually the tree grows right back together and, pow! We have constructed a living person, er, prison. Those trees last hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. I'm tellin' ya."
"But will it hold the Animator in the meantime?" asked Greggory. "Before the section we remove grows back in fully?"
"Well, we gotta be real careful," said Eliphaz. "So that piece fits back in there nice and tight. Tight like a virgin."
"We could even cut a covering from another tree," suggested Brad. "We could cut the cover so it would be a little bit too big for the hole, bevel the edges of the cover, and then smash it in there, like a cork!"
"Now that's thinkin'," said Eliphaz. He tapped the side of his head with his pencil. He had a silly looking grin on his face just then: tight-lipped and curving, like 'Have a Nice Day!' "That's using your noodle. That's using the old bean, Bradleyman." He paused then, and then said, "Well, well. This calls for another toast then: to trees!" He reached for another crystal block of pyramid. By himself practically, he had gotten down to its foundation.
And Greggory hated to be a damper on his friend's ebullience, but somebody had to say it. "Yes, but we still don't know how to get the Animator into the cage in the first place."
Eliphaz looked at him, uncomprehending. He finally said, "You guys expect me to haf to think of everything?"
* * *
Was it the spirit of the celebration that made Eliphaz go to drink? It was not.
It was a combination of many troubling things that made him so desire the comfort and refuge of a mind numbed by drink. His headache was worse for one thing. It was no longer just a painful throb. It was more upscale now: on the level of cancer. Clawed crabs, eating his brain. He thought perhaps he might have a tumor. And too, adding to the problem, his final valuation of the world and its purpose -- the role of all life on it. The truth of it was, Eliphaz had had a sort of religious experience in the aftermath of the Shapeshifter. The core of all his beliefs had been shattered; and he had started to have new, disturbing thoughts about the nature of Death, Chaos, Fate, and yes, even God. It made him wonder if maybe he hadn't gotten it all wrong in his book. It made him wonder about whether or not he really might be insane. And unprovoked, unbidden, unwanted, a revelation came to him then -- after the cargo plane and it's frozen occupant had lifted off the runway. He'd sat there, watching the plane, watching it go; smaller and smaller, and it had come. First as an inexplicable pang of remorse, and then as a startling comprehension he wanted desperately to deny.
So he drank. Heavily. Far beyond his capacity for alcohol. And blank, unreasoning stupidity came for him, and he embraced it. Anything to stop the pain. Anything to stop the thinking, thinking, thinking...
* * *
He was in a stupor as he spoke on the subject of the Magician. Most of what he said, in fact, was just unconscious rambling. He had no idea what he was saying, and later, he would have no recollection of it.
"So what have we got?" was how he started: asking a rhetorical question. He was asking the air. It took a great concentrated effort on the part of his listeners to hear the words in the noises he uttered: many of the subtle dynamics of speech had been robbed from Eliphaz by the champagne.
"A handful of suggestions. A little myth, a little folklore." A long pause. "Was he Moses, perhaps? parting the Red Sea? Was he Merlin? divining the future of Camelot and slaying dragons? What is real, what we have heard of him? What is imagined?
"Does he visit the bed-side of David Copperfield at night? bestowing on him knowledge of the working of the human mind and guidance on how it can be deceived? Did he share dreams and secrets with Nostradamus and Houdini?
"How will he attack? Through use of mind control? hypnotic enchantments? Will he drive us mad using illusions conjured from our fantasies and nightmares? Who can say? The only suggestion I have, my friends, is that he will most assuredly be more subtle than the others. His work bears always the markings of intellect and cleverness. He will not resort to seducing us or ripping us limb from limb, cutting us or strangling us. His will surely be an attack on our perceptions. He may lure us from reality with thoughts of pleasure, or lull us into complacency with notions of comfort and security. He will be sneaky, I tell you! He is the devil!" And Eliphaz stopped.
"So what can we do?" asked Randy.
"Nothing." He spit the word out, like it was a bitter taste.
"Nothing?!"
"We have no weapons to combat him with other than our very wits and alertness. We must stay ready for him. We must stay on edge. Only when he finally shows himself by attacking will we know how best to defend ourselves."
It was a sobering thought for the table: a confrontation with the completely unknown. Inevitably, there was fear -- the great one itself: Fear of the Unknown.
A long silence passed on the room.
Then suddenly, Eliphaz was rambling; loud and boisterous. "What about the Magician himself?" he demanded. "What of the very man? When he caused wonderment at the miracles he could perform, did he know for what end -- for what means -- he was working them? Did he ever understand his motivation, or know the reason behind his very existence? Did he realize what master he was serving? Did he ever understand what role it was that he was filling, or did he act merely to pass the infinite years, entertaining himself? Did he ever fully comprehend Death and the fact of his subservience to it? or was its meaninglessness a source of pain and grief for him as well? I ask you to wonder if perhaps he, the Magician, wasn't all along as foolish as the mortals he trod the earth with. Is it unfeasible?"
The others looked at him, shocked, confused. His drunkenness was so obviously apparent.
Eliphaz ended his ravings with a single syllable utterance: "Why?" Then he pounded twice with his fist and collapsed face first onto the table, sobbing.
Greggory touched his shoulder. "Eliphaz?"
"Leave me," he said.
And there was no arguing with that. They left him. Left him there, crying; helpless vent to the suffering of two and a half millennia.
***
Bradley and Greggory...
It was refreshing sometimes, being with Bradley; talking to him. His was a point of view that one did not come across often. Everything in his world was in stark contrast. There was black and white, right and wrong; no gray, no maybe, and though it was hard to understand how Bradley logically justified many of his standings, and harder still to get him to rationally explain them, never once did he doubt or re-think them. He was complex, yet simple; and severe.
He asked, while the two of them watched reconstruction, "What are you going to do after you win?" And Greggory, had to shake himself, unsure what he had heard, or what was meant by it. "Pardon me?"
The two of them were on the ground floor, at the site of the collapse, watching the contractors on their scaffolding, working new stones and mortar into the hole left over from the Shapeshifter's fall. They were paid by the hour, but even so, they were working fast: double-time. There was a substantial bonus to be earned if the job was done within two days. Greggory was uneasy about having so many strangers around, but Eliphaz had reassured him, saying he had screened all of them very thoroughly. There were no agents of the enemy, disguised, in their midst.
"You know. After we knock off these last two. What are you going to do?"
"I hadn't really thought much about it, I guess."
"Hadn't thought much about it?" Brad's tone was disbelief. "Man, how can you not think about it. Living forever." He wiped at the top of his head with his hand. "Man."
So then Greggory did stop for a second. Thinking.
"First thing I'd do is sell my secret, I suppose," Brad said. "Course, I'd be charging a pretty penny for it. You know there wouldn't be much point in living forever if you had to worry about money the whole time. I'd sell it to a couple of Arab oil barons or something. Get so much money that I'd never have to worry about it again. Then I'd buy a football team or something. Make sure of a continued income. Them sports franchise owners have got it made, I tell you. They don't even spend their own money building new stadiums."
"I didn't do it for the money," Greggory said.
"Yeah? Maybe not, but you're going to need it anyways. Living forever is going to take a lot of cold, hard cash."
"Hmm."
"Then: I'd get myself a mansion. Or hell, maybe even this castle would do. But I'd get swimming pools and tennis courts, and sports cars. Get rid of all these guns and missiles. And pack this place full of playboy bunnies. Beautiful women, wearing thong bikinis. Droves of 'em. All over the place."
"There were certain sacrifices I had to make, Brad. I'm sure you're not aware of."
A puzzled look came on Brad's face for a second. Then he made a scissoring gesture with his index and middle finger, and held his hand near his belt. "What? Snip, snip?"
"Not exactly, but to the same effect."
"Fuck, man. What's the point then? I'd rather be getting my share and have to die someday than give that up."
"There are other things in life, Brad."
"What about kids, man? What about the future?"
"I don't need kids to have a legacy anymore, Brad. I'm still going to be here."
"But what are you going to do with all that time on your hands?"
"I hadn't really thought about it much."
"I would've thought of that first. Before I decided to do any of the rest of this crazy shit."
"I didn't want to die."
"Who does? But what to do about it? I mean, death happens, man."
"You don't worry about it?"
"Well, I can't do anything about it, so why should I?"
"Say you could do something about it."
"Like you did?"
"Yes."
"I think I'd pass."
"You would?"
"Well, hell. You ain't ever gonna have a wife and kids. You never eat. You never drink. You gotta go through life constantly worrying about what to do if you get a whole in your suit. That ain't living, Greggory. That's existing."
"But what about all the ideas you could have? What about all the things you could learn? What about art, and science, and logic?" Greggory thought Brad would have to give pause to that, but he didn't.
"I guess I ain't that complex a man."