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 * XIII * WRATH
The End
The prison, fashioned in the trunk of a mighty redwood, held fast. A perfectly sealed area of living tissues. The Animator went in its confines for many many centuries. He never tried for Greggory's life again.
* * *
And Eliphaz: how could it be that a man of his many talents and powers ever die? Neither Greggory nor Randy could believe it. In the aftermath of the Animator, while the other guards were hurrying to accomplish the retiring of the cruel phantom permanently, they went through the wreckage of the gate-house, searching for the remains of the limousine and their unearthly friend.
They found the limousine. The stone chamber of the gate-house -- the head of the Animator's golem -- had fallen to the earth and been smashed into dust, and the limo within had been thoroughly crushed too. Flattened out like sod. Of course, there was no way any mere man could've lived through such peril and catastrophe. Just looking at the crumpled ruin of the car, the two of them knew that performing any further search would be fruitless. But they searched anyway.
They continued in their excavation of the gate-house, and the crater around it, until they had final, conclusive proof of the fate of their friend.
* * *
Randy stayed on with Greggory till the end; compelled, obliged. Motivated by a sense of honor and ethics far beyond the power of money to purchase. But Randy was the only one who did stay. With his resources so drastically depleted it was hard for Greggory to find loyalty among any of the other guards.
They stayed in humble lodgings, hotels and motels mostly. They took with them only what they could pack in the back of the last jeep to have remained intact from the castle. It was packed to the rafters with machine guns, grenades and flame-throwers they had scavenged from the ruin.
Every day found them further along the roads and highways, traveling nomads; and too, every day brought new expectation that this would be the one the Magician would come for them on. They fully expected that when he did come he would invariably be successful. They had virtually nothing left of their once strong defenses and great numbers. How could they hope to turn him back, the wiliest and craftiest of the champions?
Yet each day came and went, and they continued, traveling from place to place, city to city, state to state, ever alert, ever vigilant, so Death would not come on them while they were unawares, and the Magician did not come.
What did come to Greggory was the dream.
* * *
It was a dream so strikingly similar in tone to the one about the horsemen reaping the harvest of humanity in the fog-shrouded field, that Greggory could not help but take it for an omen.
And it came to him every night.
In it, he was a statue. A lovely, white marble statue, in a garden of flowers and fruit-laden trees. The garden was surrounded by a high stone wall; rough gray rock, overgrown with lichen and ivy.
As a statue, Greggory was helpless to do anything but watch as things unfolded around him. Things happened there in the garden, and though longing swelled in him to the point where it caused him to physically ache, he was unfulfilled no matter how strong his desire to get down off the pedestal and partake of the garden's beauty. It made him sorrow in a way he had never before experienced.
The sun would shine on the dew-covered ground in the morning, and then cool spring breezes would stir up the leaves and blossoms around him. Foxes, rabbits and deer would leap and scamper through the foliage. Sometimes the animals would be near enough to touch, but always, Greggory was powerless to move. It seemed joy and happiness were always just out of reach.
Then the sun would set, painting the sky as though it were a canvas, in breath- taking hues of violet and orange. And just as before, in his dream about the horsemen, the sun rose and set on him many times as he stood, motionless, unchanging, there in the garden.
But while each dawn shed down light on scenes of unmatched serenity, joy and beauty, each night that came to the garden caused decay, death and ugliness. After the setting of the sun, cold would come into the orchard, like a thief, bitter and frosty, stripping trees of their leaves and flowers of their blooms. The fruits and grasses would shrivel and then break into icy splinters. Then gale-force winds would blow through the garden, ripping away branches and toppling trees, until, at last, the landscape illuminated by the cold, silver light of the moon was that of a barren, desert wasteland. For Greggory to be there, helpless, watching as all the life and glory of that orchard was plundered each night, pained him even more than his inability to partake of the pleasures of it during the daylight hours. His eyes were dry then only for a lack of glands to secrete tears with.
Each morning the sun would rise, and life would spring eternal. Each night, the moon would shine down on a grim reminder of death. And every new morning that came, Greggory saw that his alabaster, marble hide had darkened some, darkened some, darkened some... Inevitably, before waking, he no longer seemed to be a thing of purity, gleaming white, but more, a symbol of vitiation. Like rusted, blackened iron.
And then, on waking he would sit, bolt-upright in bed, with terror and grief clenched around his nylon heart, wondering at the dream's significance, but telling no one about it.
He went on having that dream. For forty-two nights he had it.
But after bearing the weight of that disturbing premonition for so long, he woke, jarred from sleep on that forty-second night, and the story of his dream was like a bitter taste in his mouth, and he had to get it out.
It was dark of course. It was the middle of the night, and the only light in his room was the thin, filtered blue coming through the curtains, from the ice machine just outside his room. He fumbled over the things he had arranged there on the nightstand next to him, and his fingers finally came on what he was seeking. He felt the shape of a face there in the dark next to him.
"Eliphaz," he said.
And a voice answered him. "Were you afraid I'd gone off somewhere?" His remarkable friend's voice was somehow biting: calm and sarcastic at the same time. "Where else could I be?"
For Eliphaz was still there, still alive, somehow still surviving, though now entirely without a body. He had always envisioned himself as being a man -- a creature -- of pure thought and formless mental energies, and now, he that was very nearly all he was. He was just a head. No more than a jar for the containing of his brain and ideas. But still he lived.
Greggory and Randy had finally found him, after searching through the gate-house for so long. All of his torso, even his one remaining good arm, had been smashed into paste, but his skull was still intact, and he was still alive. When they first came upon him, face down in the rubble, he was swearing and spitting -- dust and fragmented particles of rock stuck to his lips -- "It's just a flesh wound! It's just a flesh wound!" And somehow it was easier to see that he had survived, even in the condition he was in, than it was to believe he had finally died. Eliphaz exuded the air of an immortal. It was impossible to think he could ever die.
"Eliphaz. I keep having this horrible dream."
Greggory picked his friend up, carrying him under his arm, and he stole out of the room, quietly, not wanting to wake Randy. He took Eliphaz out to the jeep in the parking lot; a place where they could be alone and talk without interruption. And Greggory told Eliphaz all about his dream.
* * *
When Greggory was done, having exhumed all of the dream that there was in his memory, Eliphaz was silent for a long time; thinking, frowning.
Greggory prodded him. "What do you think?"
And Eliphaz, after much careful thought, replied:
"Your dream is capable of being interpreted many different ways, Greggory. It has many levels of complexity and symbolism. But I will tell you what I think:
"You are a statue in a garden. From the setting, I gather a metaphorical reference to your achievements coming about from the efforts and devices of man, and that your being man-made sets you apart from the rest of the natural world. Even from your appearance as being of marble I think significance can be seen: for the stone itself is a natural material, but it has been molded by man, sculpted. It has been made to represent a natural form, but it is not: it is just an imitation. It is a statement about the life you have crafted for yourself.
"And, of course, in your dream as a statue, you are powerless to move and act with this world around you. Do you see? It means that by the doing of your own cleverness you have separated yourself from much natural interaction. You no longer smell or taste or feel. You have eliminated many biological processes from your body; many of them unnecessary, true, but still all things necessary for life. Real life. Though you can still hear and see what happens around you, it is not enough. You are unfulfilled. The nature of the Soul trapped inside you is to want to mingle freely with the air and caress the beauty of the world around it. Your Soul yearns to eat, and breathe, inhale heady aromas, partake of the love of a woman... yet you can no longer experience any of these joys.
"The setting and rising of the sun is again a reference to time; the passing of much time. It is significant only in the fact that it allows you to see the results of constant progress and change in the world of the mortals around you. The day is life, and the night is death. It is a reminder of the constant, unstoppable cycles of the natural order. And the sorrow you feel at the setting of each sun is from the death and departure of all the things you have come to love and feel attachment to. In all the world now, only you are in a condition to last forever, and witnessing the continuation of the cycle as an outsider causes you considerable grief and pain. Until the last.
"In the end of your dream, you are black and rusty. You have learned to stop caring about the elements of the world around you. You have stopped wondering at them, and you have ceased to have empathy at all, for anyone, or anything, and in such a manner, you lose touch with the last thing that made you human. The statue, turning from marble to metal represents this. In the end, not even your natural properties show through: you are entirely a thing of manufacture. Synthetic and soulless, but still stubbornly clinging to a life-force which should have long ago left you.
"What your dream is telling you, Greggory, is that in your quest to attain life everlasting, you have sacrificed all the things that made life worthwhile. Your dream is telling you that your victory over death is a hollow triumph, for there are no rewards to savor."
Greggory was quick to reply when he sensed that Eliphaz had at last concluded. "Preposterous!" he snapped. "Who asked you anyway?"
"You did," said Eliphaz.
* * *
A year went by.
A whole year.
Greggory and Randy, worn thin by their constant expectation of the final attack, did little more than exist through that year. They spent the hours of each day with sweating nerves and tense muscles. They ate, they slept. They checked their weapons; making sure they were oiled and maintained and loaded.
But the Magician never came.
* * *
Only the dream kept coming back. And though he wanted to deny it, and though he continued to argue and debate with Eliphaz over it, Greggory knew his friend's interpretation of the dream was the correct one. For indeed, his life had already been reduced to a mundane, mechanical repetition of the things a real man would do. His life had stopped having meaning. He had stopped laughing. Enjoyment had gone out of him. More and more often he would wind up daydreaming about the experiences and sensations he had abandoned to create the continuing, hollow monotony he now had, and called, his existence. His life. His mockery of life.
More and more his memories were becoming a refuge for his nervous, tired mind. He thought of Angela, and he thought of running in the summertime. Running until his heart was pounding, and his lungs were aching, and he was gasping in great lungfuls of fragrant green air. He remembered his childhood friend, Sparky, playful little mutt: much better than any Coldlove or Sabre, which would just as soon tear your throat out as fetch a stick. He remembered the way Sparky's fur felt between his fingers and the way his licking kisses felt on his face. He remembered the taste of a cherry phosphor at the soda fountain, and corn on the cob, glazed in dripping, yellow butter.
And at the times when those thoughts came to him at their most powerfully convincing and heart-wrenching , unfailingly, Eliphaz was there with a reminder of how mournful it was to be immortal among the mortal.
"Trust me," he would say. "I've been there. I've seen two and a half millennia. I saw everything I ever cared about either change into something corrupted, or die. Living forever isn't easy Greggory. In fact, it's a bitch. If I were in a position to choose my own fate, it sure as hell wouldn't be this."
But still Greggory continued. He stayed aware. He stayed ready to defend himself, and he tried constantly to think good thoughts. Are you in your happy place? he asked himself. He tried hard to hope. And keep hoping.
Then one day, he woke from the dream and knew, with certainty, that he was done. He was empty, wasted. The fight was gone for him, and there was no thinking of poems about rage to sustain him this time.
He said to the darkness, "Help me. Let me find a way to get back what I gave up. I want to live again." He paused a long time then before adding, "And then I want to die."
He knew Eliphaz would be listening.
He was fully expecting Eliphaz' answer.
"I can help you, Greggory. We can get it back for you."
* * *
Greggory Clefferts died a natural death two weeks after his eighty-third birthday. His good friend Eliphaz paid mightily to have a marble obelisk raised over his grave; a great monument to a great man. It had a bronze plaque set near the base of it, right underneath his name and the dates of his life. It said: "He Relearned How to Live." The next plot over was vacant, but reserved, for Angela Clefferts.
* * *
Eliphaz, great man of thought, went on living.