Fiction
Fantasy
Part I: Encounter
Martin Husser entered the train station late in the evening, long after darkness had settled. He had her where he wanted her, alone and vulnerable, another heretic courier, and he had come to dispatch her. He removed his gloves then turned down the collar of his jacket. Attached to his shirt collar was a silver lapel pin engraved with a dove that held a scroll in one claw and a quiver of arrows in the other. It identified him as a party member and, for good luck, he furtively brushed it three times with his index finger. An icy chill suffused the air, though the first days of winter were weeks away. About his neck he proudly wore a small stone cross, a gift from his superior for services honorably rendered. The flickering fluorescent lights combined with the lime-colored walls to wash the interior with a faint greenish tint. Plastic chairs, lined neatly against the walls, defined the room’s perimeter; a single row of tables occupied its center. All the seats but one were empty. In the background, barely audible, played an instrumental version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
At the table nearest Martin sat a young woman. Although she faced him, her long dark hair was a curtain, shielding her features as she huddled over an open book. Martin studied her. Her right arm rested on the table’s edge while her left forearm encircled her book, protecting it. Martin moved toward her. With each footfall against the beige linoleum, his presence echoed through the quiet station like an approaching storm. The woman remained motionless, focused on her reading it seemed.
He stopped at her table. He watched her quiet breathing and whitening knuckles as she clenched her left fist.
“Are you a believer, miss?” He pulled out a chair as he spoke and seated himself across from her.
“I didn’t know that was an option,” she answered, without looking up.
Martin chuckled. “It is for some people. But you’re not one of those sort are you?”
“No.”
“It’s not polite to hide your face when someone is talking to you.”
She raised her head as she ran her fingers through her hair, pulling back the curtain to reveal a pale face, thin lips, and dark eyes. “Better?”
For once he did not have a ready retort. He had seen the pictures in her file, but the surveillance photos had failed to capture something. He had not expected a familiar face, something from his youth, when the fire of his convictions burned with innocence and purity. Was it her attitude, her defiance, the steady resolution behind her unwavering gaze? Something reminded him of a girl he had known at school, a girl who loved to dance. He remembered pressing her close, smelling the perfume on her neck as they moved slowly in the dark. But this woman was not a teenager, and he was not asking her to dance. He studied the dark half-circles below her eyes. He was well-rested. She was weary.
“You—” he hesitated. “You shouldn’t have come here tonight.”
She responded with a sharp intake of breath.
“You know why I’m here don’t you? You could just go home. Hand over what you’ve got and go home.”
Her eyes locked on him and her breaths came quick and shallow.
She’s not very good at this, he thought. “Hey, I’m going out on a limb for you here.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He wanted her to say something else. For once he wanted to be mistaken about his assignment. He nodded toward her book. “Interesting?”
“Confessions. Saint Augustine.”
“That’s admirable.” He leaned toward her. “But you ought to try something simpler. These intellectual things,” he continued, flipping his hand derisively. “You have to be careful. It’s easy to get confused if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“The path may be narrow, but I doubt it’s simple.”
“No,” he answered, as they stared at one another. “It’s certainly not simple.” Get a grip, he cautioned himself. She’s not going to change. She doesn’t like you. He eyed a row of vending machines. “Too bad there’s nothing decent to eat here.”
Joan remembered the shared meals recorded in the scriptures, particularly the last one. Love thine enemy, she remembered. If she could not do so now, then when could she? “I have a couple sandwiches,” she offered, “if you’d like one.”
He hesitated. “No thanks,” he mumbled. “I think I’ll raid the machines.” He stood up. The chair legs scratched the floor like fingernails on a chalkboard.
She lowered her head, again allowing her hair to shield her face, hoping the agent was about to leave. She sensed the endgame was at hand. Her parched tongue ached for a sip of water, but her muscles froze, refused to move. She thought about the movement, the joy that would someday accompany the day of Jubilee, and about her parent’s confusion as she drifted from orthodoxy.
“They brutalize people,” she had told her parents. She mimicked what she had heard and read. “They don’t want heaven on earth. They want money and power.”
“They’ll kill you,” her father implored.
An abstract possibility, as with any teenager, that’s all death seemed to her then. She was a proud foot soldier in a war to overthrow hypocrisy with love and truth, not a martyr. “Why do I think in slogans?” she asked herself.
The agent placed his hands in the middle of the table as he leaned forward, stopping just above her head. She saw the cross hanging from his neck by a strip of leather. It dangled before her eyes like a plumb bob searching for a true vertical. On his collar, she saw the tiny dove, the symbol she had come to loathe and fear. “We know who you are, Joan,” he whispered. “Where you’re going and what you’re up to. Don’t you get it? People don’t need your ideas. They don’t want them. It’s all plain and simple. We don’t need your finessing of the truth. We don’t need your alternatives.”
Joan said nothing. She focused on the pages of tight print. The words blurred into wavy black lines as she listened to the agent. She had not read a word since he arrived. The disks were sewn inside her blouse, with a sweater worn over it to smooth out any hard surfaces. The movement needed couriers. Electronic dissemination posed too many risks. There were too many censors watching and listening. As she shifted in her chair, the hard edge of the CDs pressed into the flesh of her abdomen, just beneath her ribs, precisely where a knife thrust upwards would inflict maximum harm. “I could give him the CDs and run home,” she thought, “and inform on my friends when the authorities come to question me.” Joan prayed for strength.
“It’s not too late, Joan. Did you hear me?”
“Love may be very relevant to you, someday.”
Martin stood up. He had never heard that one before. Further talk was useless, perhaps even counterproductive. He could see that now. He had allowed pity to cloud his judgment. He approached the row of vending machines, and after purchasing a cheese sandwich and a can of grape juice, he took a seat in one of the chairs against the lime green wall. He stared at Joan while he chewed the stale bread then washed it down with juice.
Part II: Consummation
Martin lay on the lower bunk in his compartment with his eyes closed and his head propped against a pillow. The car swayed like a rocking cradle, and the rhythmic pulse of the wheels rolling across the seams in the tracks soothed the pounding at his temples. Sometimes the pressure raged so violently that he thought his forehead might rupture—like some aged, defective boiler—to release the fury seething inside.
Must call Arthur, he thought with effort, and reached for the phone. Martin reported to the head of the Bureau of Unorthodox Beliefs and Activities. The grand inquisitor, as Arthur was affectionately and not so affectionately known, required his agents to report every day on their statuses, regardless of their results.
“Hello, Arthur. Yes, this is Martin. Yes, lack of oxygen this time. Does wonders. Yes, I found them. They’re in splinters. No, I didn’t bother. I was getting one of those headaches again. She was a clever little girl. Quite attractive in a mysterious kind of way. She even offered me a sandwich. No, too bad really. Yes, thanks. I’ll see you in the office.”
Martin turned off the power to his phone before tossing it into his knapsack. The world had lost contact with him, at least temporarily. He covered his eyes, pressing his palm to his forehead. Sometimes the pressure relieved the pain if only for a moment. He liked that girl, Joan. She didn’t flinch. He couldn’t stand to look at her, to watch her die, so he had moved behind her. It was nothing personal.
His lips moved, mouthing his thoughts as he descended into unconsciousness. People in the corridor were talking. He wanted them to shut up. Those chocolate brown eyes that betrayed not a wisp of fear had burrowed deep into his memory. Joan gripped his arms until the end but never dug in her fingernails, not like the others who struggled and clawed. Such a waste to dispatch her. Such a horrible, horrible waste of a young life.
Part III: Atonement
Martin awoke to a tapping noise outside his window. He lay still and listened, hoping it would go away. A dull throbbing above his eyes cautioned him to sleep. The train was moving quickly now over a straight section of track. The tapping continued, growing louder and louder like some mad crescendo that hurtled ever onward, never reaching a climax. He thrust the curtain aside with a violent effort. He gave no thought to what might await him on the other side of that blue fabric and cold glass. The headache dulled his imagination, and a foul mood shot his courage with adrenaline. He readily discovered the source of his disturbance. A strip of rubber, part of the outer window seal, had come loose. After some difficulty with the locking mechanism, he managed to open the window. He worked to press the rubber back into its bed but gave up when his hand became numb from the cold. After turning on the main light, he fished a Swiss army knife out of his pocket. With a gleeful smile of triumph, he sliced through the errant rubber then threw it into the darkness.
He closed the window and curtain, noting the prowess of his ingenuity. Even his headache had diminished. The mental and physical exertion refreshed him. As he replaced the knife in his pocket, he noticed the discolored carpet below the closet. A reddish, bell-shaped stain had spread across his room. He reached forward to touch it. The carpet was sticky and his hand recoiled involuntarily. The fresh stain sparkled in the lamplight as the surface of a lake sparkles in the light from the moon. The redness crept slowly towards him, expanding in all directions.
Martin wiped his fingers across some unsoiled carpet, leaving four reddish streaks. He slipped his feet into his boots then stepped into the heart of the stain. The carpet squished under his weight. He popped the lever on the closet door then cautiously pulled it open.
Martin flung himself backwards against the opposite wall. Hanging in the closet, grotesquely twisted to fit the narrow space, were a young woman’s remains. A thick curtain of black hair hid her features, but Martin could plainly see her throat had been sliced from side to side. The prodigious blood from the gash had soaked her garments before dripping into a white earthen bowl at the bottom of the closet. A reddish film coated the collecting bowl’s exterior, for it had overflowed, sending the excess onto the carpet.
Martin’s breathing became labored and shallow. The sight of blood always irked his sensibility, but so much blood pulled him under like a drowning man. “What kind of sick— what kind of sick joke?” he repeated to himself. He forced his way past the closet into the corridor, leaving the body entombed with its sacrificial blood. Pressed against a wall he listened to the train’s rhythm, taking deep breaths as he regained his senses. He had to find the conductor and at the very least get a new room. As he staggered down the corridor, struggling against the train’s horizontal pitching, he noticed that the doorframes of his neighboring compartments were stained with blood, fresh blood that had pooled at the base of the frames. Martin glanced back at his door to find the frame clean and polished. The revelation shook him to his core. All he stood for had never been so precisely, clinically, and absolutely rejected. He would not be passed over.
He leapt to action. From the nearest door he coated his palms and fingers with blood and painted his doorframe, but the blood would not stick. It beaded and ran to the floor like water on wax, leaving the metal cleaner than before. His efforts became frenzied, as single-minded as a rabid animal. He beat the frame with open palms, attempting to fuse the blood with the metal, until his hands were bruised, and he collapsed to his knees. With his head against the door and rivulets of sweat sliding down his cheeks, he determined to jump from the train.
He rose on unsteady legs to make for the rear door. The leather strap that held his small stone cross tightened as it dug into the back of his neck. With his blood-stained hand, he grasped at his chest for the cross but instead found a circular stone with a hole in the middle through which the leather passed. The stone was flat on both sides and grew in his hand. Holding the stone to relieve the strain on his neck, he used his free arm to steady himself against the corridor wall as the train now pitched as violently as a boat caught in a storm at sea.
With each labored step down the corridor, the stone expanded. It soon exceeded the length of his forearm. When he reached the door, he could carry the stone no longer and rested it on his thighs. He struck the airlock with his fist, then fell through the open door. The millstone sent out sparks as it struck the metal floor. It rolled through a break in the railing around the landing’s perimeter, and as the stone dragged his chest across the ribbed floor he grasped the bars on either side of the opening. With his head perched over the edge and the leather biting deeper into his neck, he stared into a black abyss. Only the millstone, swinging like a pendulum with the train’s seesawing motion, interrupted the emptiness below. Darkness everywhere prevailed. There was nothing on which his eyes could focus. The train dangled in a void. The stone increased in thickness and circumference. The pain in his neck intensified. Drops of blood clung to the taut leather and rolled toward the stone. Martin grasped the bars tighter, so tight that his fingernails dug into his palms. He acted solely in the interest of survival. By instinct, he struggled with all his strength and wits to eke out another moment of life.
Through eyelashes stuck together with sweat, he saw a white figure approaching in the distance, propelled through the void without apparent effort. As the figure came closer he recognized a young woman. Her black hair was swept back revealing Joan’s face. Her body and limbs were draped with a flowing white robe pulled taut against her torso while the excess fabric fluttered behind her. She hovered below him, looking directly into his eyes, and smiled sweetly. He suspected she had returned for her final revenge and felt the helplessness of a moth caught in a spider’s web, but as he watched, she reached out and grasped the leather straps supporting the stone. Instantly the tension against his neck broke. The straps severed just above her hands. Down fell the stone into the abyss, with Joan trailing behind.
“No,” he cried. “Let go. For God’s sake let go,” he screamed. The words went nowhere as they left his tongue, snuffed out and dispersed like dust in a windstorm. Mortified, he watched the white figure diminish, growing smaller and smaller until the white speck vanished into the gloom. He closed his eyes. He felt sick, seasick, about to retch. Someone laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Mr. Husser? Are you alright, Mr. Husser? You shouldn’t be back here.”
Martin recognized the conductor’s voice. He opened his eyes to the light of dawn and saw the railroad ties passing beneath him. Thank you, he silently prayed.
“Let me help you.”
Martin released his grip on the railing as the conductor lifted him to his feet. His knuckles were white and his palms scarred by his fingernails. “I felt sick,” he mumbled. “I guess I got disoriented.”
“You look a bit pasty.”
“I haven’t felt well since last night. I had a headache, a migraine.”
“Yes,” said the conductor as he nodded.
Martin sensed the conductor’s disbelief. No doubt he had heard many such stories from passengers who had imbibed too much wine. On the conductor’s lapel, a silver pin engraved with the same dove as Martin’s glinted in the early morning sun.
“That’s an interesting cross you have there,” the conductor remarked.
Resting against Martin’s chest was a large stone cross, a Celtic cross that he had never seen before. He swallowed hard then reached for the back of his neck where his fingertips brushed over a deep scar, an indentation like a trench cutting across his flesh.
The conductor held Martin’s arm as he led him inside the car. “By the way,” he whispered. “The package has been taken care of.”
“What?”
“The bag. The black bag with the... Well, it’s been disposed of.”
The body. Those were the words the conductor chose not to articulate. Martin dropped to his knees, clasping his hands to his face. He pressed his shoulder against the corridor wall and wept bitterly.
Click Here for Easy-to-Read B&W Format
If this contribution met with your satisfaction, please consider making a contribution of your own so we may pay our authors and keep the magazine delivering great speculative fiction far into the future. Thank you for visiting.
Copyright 2009, Jeff Chapman. All rights reserved. Jeff Chapman has been writing fiction since he was able to put pencil to paper. His work falls in the fantasy and speculative genres. Though not always explicitly Christian, his Christian beliefs inform his writing. See his blog at http://jeffchapmanwriter.blogspot.com.
Contents
|
|
|
