Infernal

Richard ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth to make certain all his teeth were present and accounted for and that he hadn’t bitten his tongue off during the violent impact.

“That was close,” Sophia said, shaken.

A quick scan of the HumVee’s interior assured Richard all systems were functioning properly.

“Too close,” he said, turning to the left to illuminate their path with the floodlights.

The riverbed was armored with round stones, some larger than others but none impassable. Tree branches and silt deposits were strewn here and there along with other unidentifiable debris, likely manmade but nothing as large as the remains of the still settling wreckage near the bottom of the boat ramp.

“It may be a bit rough,” Richard said, “but it should be easier going than a dead jungle. If you don’t mind a bit of jostling, I’m going to push on a little faster.”

“Jostle away.”

He did, pushing the vehicle to just under thirty miles an hour, appreciating the military grade shocks and struts.

“I assume,” Richard said after he’d adjusted to the constant shuddering and vibration of traversing a dry riverbed, “the FPG project didn’t end with the debacle at Oxwitic.”

“Of course not. This is Jefferson we’re talking about,” Sophia said. “Analysis of the data revealed that though Manus had failed to open a Rip, they were on the right track. They had just chosen the wrong subject. What they needed was someone who experienced the Rips rather than just passed through them. Someone who had a greater knowledge of what goes on inside them. Jefferson had the project moved to another world, had another ZeVatron built, and pushed on. This time he chose someone who more closely fit the needs of the project.”

“He used a Prime,” Richard intuited.

“Correct,” Sophia said.

“But if all Primes are like me, all crusaders as you put it, why would one work for Jefferson? I’ve only met the man twice and I know the Multi-verse would be better off without him.”

“Because all Primes are not like you,” Sophia replied. One of the things we know about Primes is that most of you die young. A mere handful actually encounters the Rips or become aware of the existence of the Multi-verse. That awareness seems to be some kind of trigger. As if knowledge or experience of the Rips allows you to live longer and fuller lives. As is you’ve been touched.”

“And the others?” Richard asked.

“Most don’t make it to adulthood. They die in bizarre accidents or tragic series of events. Or they develop cancer in late adolescence and quickly succumb. It’s as if there’s a design in place. As if you’re being used by some force beyond the natural world. A few of you are useful, and therefore survive. The others are not and are discarded like empty soup cans.”

“Then how is it I’ve lived to such a ripe old age?” Richard asked. “I never encountered a Rip before and wasn’t aware of the existence of the Multi-verse until a few days ago.”

“I don’t know,” Sophia said. “Maybe you encountered a Rip without knowing it, experienced something you didn’t recognize as abnormal. All I know is that something happened to you before you reached adulthood, something significant. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here now.”

“I think I would remember a thing like that,” Richard said.

And now, as he thought about it, perhaps he did.

In grade school Richard’s normal route home from school took him past a ramshackle house that had been vacant far longer than he’d been alive. According to local legend—mostly the imaginings and fabrications of pre-adolescent minds—the property had been the home of Randolph and Helena Williams; founders and benefactors of the small town where Richard had grown up.

As the story went, Randolph was a native of a small town in Ohio, the eldest son of an oil executive and heir to a vast fortune. In early 1936, at the age of seventeen, Randolph left his parents lavish home and his inheritance behind. There was speculation that he’d gotten himself into some sort of legal trouble in Ohio, trouble that even his wealthy parents could not shield him from, and he’d fled before he could be arrested by authorities. Another line went that he’d had a falling out with his father about his place in the family hierarchy and had struck out to make his own fortune.

For several years he’d traveled the Midwest before settling in Northwestern Kansas.

As the United States entered the war in Europe and many men his age found themselves embroiled in tooth and nail battle with Hitler’s Nazi machine overseas, Randolph Williams found oil on the vast acreage he’d purchased near the Colorado border. Later that year he met Helena Clafton, the fourteen year-old daughter of a derrick man. They were wed within a month.

Shortly thereafter, Randolph built his young wife her dream home. Three stories and fifteen rooms on six acres unsullied by the growing sprawl of the nearby town or by anything as noisome and unwelcome—to Randolph at least—as neighbors.

After the war that had engulfed the world had come to its climactic and horrific close, Randolph William’s fortunes changed. The once seemingly inexhaustible wealth of oil being pulled from the Kansas soil dried up, taking the itinerant workers and the large population of those who had come to serve their needs with them. The town, once spread over a twenty-five square mile section of the state like butter on a slice of bread faded away to a mere shadow of its former self as residents sought their futures in larger cities like Kansas City, Topeka, or Wichita.

His oil company all but bankrupt and his fortunes depleted, Williams retreated with his wife to their six-acre home. Some said he went mad at the failure of his business. Some said it was his wife’s failure to give him an heir. In either case he became reclusive. It was only when his mother informed local authorities that she’d not heard from her son or his wife in over six months that their bodies were found.

Helena’s head rested on a silver tray in the center of the table in the dining room. Her left arm was on a red padded velvet bench in the foyer, the index finger forced and tied so that it pointed to the dining room table as if to ensure that whoever came into the house would find the delectable taste treat left there. Her right arm was similarly positioned and nailed to a wall near the back door of the house. The rest of her was in the kitchen amidst huge dried swashes of blood, a meat cleaver, two saws and a pocketknife.

The county sheriff found Randolph in an upstairs bedroom with a large bottle of sulfuric acid used for opening drains and a Smith and Wesson .44 caliber revolver he’d kept on display in his study. He’d quaffed better than half the bottle of drain cleaner before blowing his brains out in a garish smear across the headboard.

In 1964 a wealthy young couple had bought the property, then consisting of a mere acre of land bordered on three sides by farmland and fronted by what would one day become US 36. Undeterred by the legends of the house and its former occupants they set about renovations. While excavating a hole for a swimming pool the decades old remains of at least thirteen pre-adolescent girls were discovered.

The couple fled less than a month later claiming odd noises and screams that persisted throughout the night, strange lights that darted about from room to room no matter the time of day, and—the final straw for them—punches and scratches from unseen hands on their arms and across their backs.

They claimed the house itself was alive and wanted no one in it.

No one remembered the name of the young couple, much less cared. The story was Randolph Williams and the atrocities he committed there. It was then, and always would be, the Williams house.

The property had not sold again.

The house and remaining outbuildings were taken by a tornado that tore through the area in 2005, finally laying to rest anything that might be wandering about the property and going bump in the night.

It was a cool autumn evening in late October of 1982 Richard was thinking about as he maneuvered the HumVee through the riverbed and around drifts of deadwood that resembled the bones of long dead and unimaginable great beasts. On that night, the Williams house had still been standing, though dilapidated and in a complete state of disrepair.

And, if one believed local lore, still very much alive.

Richard passed the property twice a day on his way to and from school for seven years. Despite hearing of the Williams murder-suicide, as well as the murders of the young girls attributed to Randolph Williams and the purported haunting, he’d never given the house a second thought in the light of day. Even at night, as he lay ready to sleep, the stories passed along by his classmates on the playground failed to conjure images of dismembered apparitions screaming out their sorrow and rage in the confines of the house.

On that evening, just a few nights shy of Halloween, as the sun fell slowly towards the horizon casting a purplish goodnight kiss upon the earth, something had changed.

It was almost eight o’clock. Baseball practice had run late. Their coach, in a bad mood as he seemed to be most of the time, had made them run laps until they’d all been dogging it—breathing heavily, tongues swollen in their mouths for want of water. He could have called his father for a ride but even at that young age Richard had preferred to be alone with his thoughts. To walk in the twilight and feel the late evening breeze cool his hot face.

As he passed the Williams house he noticed the once pristine white walls with glorious blue trim were now faded into monochromatic shades of grey. The porch balusters were cracked, the paint peeling. Broken windows stared from all three floors like sightless, soulless eyes—and Richard heard a beckoning voice from deep inside the decaying walls:

Richard.

He stopped and looked at the house. Truly seeing it for the first time.

Riiichard.

The house seemed to loom. As if while he’d been passing it had moved closer to the road.

“Ha, ha, funny,” he said, thinking one of his classmates, a member of the baseball team perhaps, was playing a prank on him. Except all his friends called him Rick. And his enemies—everyone had a few—called him Dick. Always with emphasis in case others should miss that they were referencing male genitalia. Only his parents, teachers, and other adults called him Richard.

Without realizing it he’d moved up the broken and overgrown brick walkway, between the rusted iron bars of the wrought iron fence, past two long dead cherry trees that lined the walk, and had placed one foot on the front porch steps. His weight on the aged wood made it creak in protest, startling him from his fugue.

Riiichaaard.

And then he was in the parlor, the front door open in the foyer behind him casting the last of the days light tepidly through the opening. The room smelled of mold and mildew, the same smell he remembered from breaking open rotten logs to see what creatures—millipedes and spiders, mostly—lived inside. Underneath that smell was something else. Something dead. Something rotting. Something that made him think of the dead and rancid woodchuck he’d found in the woods behind his house the summer before.

Riiichaaarrrd!

The voice was most certainly in his head. What he saw when he next came to his senses in the dining room had to be as well.

The room should have been dark, but was not. Light as bright as a candle seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Shadows clung to the walls and covered the ceiling and floor as if hiding great secrets. There was no usable furniture left in the old house, yet, in the center of the room stood a polished mahogany dining table, complete with eight high-backed chairs and an intricate, pristine white lace tablecloth.

On a footed silver tray with ornate handles in the center of the table rested a woman’s head. It sat upright in a pool of blood crawling with flies and maggots. Her cheeks were poofed out as if she were holding her breath, the skin a ghastly shade of green. Her eyes were shut but had swollen behind purple-black eyelids until they threatened to burst through the thin tissue. Her mouth was open, the tongue swollen to the point that it stuck out and lay upon the silver tray as if she were licking it.

Really dogging it, Richard thought absurdly.

The eyelids popped open. Maggots squirted out from around the sightless, clouded grey eyes. The mouth opened even wider and the woman screamed:

RIIICHAAARRRDDD!!!

Maggots spewed from the wide open maw, twisting and writhing upon themselves, bursting open in a torrent of flies. Richard wheeled and fled into the night.

He looked back just once. Through the dining room window he saw a turbulent flash of light, a mélange of color so beautiful and violent as to stop him in his tracks and take the breath from his lungs.

At the window, in front of this cacophony of color, stood a dark figure. It seemed to gesture to him. To come back. Step into the light. See what wonders it beheld.

Sensibly, Richard kept running.

By the time he’d covered the distance between the Williams house and his own Richard had convinced himself the entire incident had been the byproduct of exhaustion—the long baseball practice followed by the extra laps. By the following morning he’d put the event out of his mind and had never given it another thought. Until now.

What was in that house? What foul and

Infernal

thing had stood in the window, beckoning him to return?

Had that luminescence glimpsed briefly as terror drove him fleet of foot away from the property, that light he now thought so similar to the radiance of the Rips, been a Rip forming? Was that when he was exposed? What if he had entered it then, as the shadow had beckoned? At the tender age of thirteen. What course would his life had taken then?

And what if he’d never entered that house? Hadn’t fallen into that trancelike state and stepped across the dooryard, through the foyer, and into that wretched room full of shadow and horror? Would he have been considered useless by whatever intelligent design drove the Multi-verse? Deemed unnecessary and thrown away like an old pair of socks? The thought that he might be a mere pawn on some celestial chessboard was appalling.

Have I no control over my life now at all?

Have I ever?

If the Infernal is on one side of the board, who, or what is on the other?

“Years ago,” Sophia interrupted Richard’s train of thought, bringing him back to the moment, “Jefferson began a campaign to wipe out every Prime in existence. The QC’s had kept a list of potential Primes for decades based on public records like birth and death certificates, education records, reproductive status, and other data that fits their algorithm. Hell, I think they even use credit reports. He took that information, which includes descriptions, home worlds and addresses, and began hunting. He got a lot of you, maybe as many as a thousand.”

“Christ!” Richard said.

“But every time a Prime was killed another was born and he soon realized his efforts were fruitless. So he switched gears and began tracking Primes. Once they were old enough, he’d expose them to the Rips and subvert their thinking to match his own. In some cases coercion was necessary. In most cases it was not. He gets them when they’re young, ten or twelve at the oldest. A young mind can be easily molded by an older, more experienced one.”

“He brainwashes them,” Richard said.

“Yes. And for every Prime like you, Jefferson has a dozen more ready to do his bidding. Finding one to volunteer for the FPG project was relatively easy.”

“What went wrong that time?” Richard asked.

“You really are perceptive, aren’t you?” Sophia said with something like admiration.

“Not really, no,” Richard said. “Achieving control of an artificial Rip would be like handing Jefferson the keys to the Multi-verse. Since he hasn’t ripped in to kill us, he doesn’t yet have that ability. Hence, he hasn’t perfected the Focal Point Generator. Simple deductive reasoning.”

“Well put, Sherlock.” Sophia said. “You’re right, though. The experiment failed again. The Prime who volunteered for the project came within a hair’s breadth of opening a Rip but something went wrong. He, the FPG, and a control room full of techs vanished into thin air. No trace of them has ever been found. That set the program back for years. For a time Jefferson was forced to resume his original method of incursion; political subversion prior to civilian subjugation. Failing that, all out war.

“In the end, the data from that second failed attempt revealed another clue. The Quantum-Cray’s alone can’t open a Rip. Pairing the computers with a non-Prime won’t work either. The combination of a Prime and the machines should have worked, but didn’t. Not in that test, or the two similar tests that followed.”

“Why am I not surprised that Jefferson never gives up?” Richard said sourly.

“A fellow researcher, an acquaintance of mine, came up with the answer,” Sophia said. “A prodigious savant.”

“A prodigy?” Richard asked.

“Not exactly,” Sophia said. “A prodigious savant is someone with a particular skill level far beyond that of a prodigy. They usually suffer from some sort of cognitive disability like Autism or Asperger’s Syndrome. The most common trait is seemingly limitless mnemonic skill. Many also have eidetic or photographic memories. Prodigious savants are extremely rare. Less than one hundred cases have been discovered on any one Earth in the last century. It’s possible that less than five thousand are alive throughout the Multi-verse.

“My acquaintance,” Sophia’s voice grew softer as if it pained her to continue, “had a daughter with Asperger’s syndrome. The child had difficulty communicating with others and connecting emotionally with anyone, even those closest to her. She had to have help with day-to-day things like eating and dressing. Her mother was under incredible stress all the time. The child was clumsy, a common condition with Asperger’s. Numerous times she fell and hurt herself but never cried out in pain. Perhaps she didn’t feel it or just didn’t know how to express it. Raising the child required constant care and attention; a demanding task for anyone let alone a working, single mother.

“In spite of all that, the child was a prodigious savant. Anything related to numbers or math, the girl could solve with ease in a matter of seconds—even high function calculations that took the QC’s hours to solve. It was if her seven-year old, rack-thin body contained the computing power of thousands of Quantum-Cray’s.

“The child’s ability with numbers and all manner of abstract problem solving led her mother to posit that the artificial Rips could not only be successfully formed but directed as Jefferson desired. If a Prime with the same abilities as her daughter could be found.

“Wait.” Richard said, incredulous. “Are you telling me that they Key we’re searching for is a child?

“I am. An eight-year old girl with severe autism to be exact. Her name is Elianna.”

“And the Sophia I met back in Kansas, your Mirror, stole the Key—this Elianna—from BanaTech?”

“Yes,” Sophia said, “but stole is hardly the right word. Absconded with is more like it.”

“I don’t understand,” Richard admitted.

“Jefferson was not about to scour the Multi-verse for a Prime that fit his needs. Not when he had one right at his fingertips. He planned to abduct the child from the very researcher who had discovered the solution to powering the Focal Point Generator. When she learned of his plan, she took the child and ran.

“Richard,” Sophia shifted in her seat and looked at him. “Elianna is my Mirror’s daughter.”