Infernal

One step; began on one Earth and ending on another.

Richard blinked rapidly as he stepped out of the Rip, his pupils dilating. The Earth he’d just left had been bright, the sun warm on his back. This Earth was dimly lit and cold; the air heavy with moisture. A steady wailing sound like that of the wind pounding the eaves of a house in a storm rose and fell around him, with intermittent crashes and thuds like distant and random gunfire threaded throughout.

He looked back. The Rip had stayed in place this time; it’s bright and swirling colors spoiling his vision further. He looked away, closed his eyes, and waited for the brilliant afterimage to fade. When he opened his eyes again he was facing away from the Rip, looking into the heart of a maelstrom.

A wall of clouds so high he could not see their tops stood an eighth of a mile away. Within that wall, tumultuous shades of black and grey raced in and around each other, crackling with energy and electrical discharges. He turned counterclockwise, his eyes following the motion. It continued on and around, much further than he could see. It was like getting an ant’s eye view of a football stadium.

He recognized the phenomena. He’d just never seen on such a vast scale.

A hurricane, he thought. I’ve Ripped into the eye of a hurricane.

A bolt of lightning leapt from the eye wall to the ground, throwing up great clods of earth and rock and leaving behind a crater big enough to bathe in. A clap of thunder so loud it hurt his ears followed. Though the discharge had been several hundred yards away Richard had felt its raw power as a rumbling beneath his feet and took a few steps backwards, further into the eye of the storm.

Biggest damn hurricane ever imagined, he thought.

He looked towards the Rip—but not directly at it; he didn’t want to spoil his vision again—briefly entertaining the notion of stepping back through. Leaving this strange and dangerous world behind in favor of the safe and wondrous Earth he’d just left. But the answers he sought were here, or so he’d been led to believe. He couldn’t find it in his heart to believe that Charlie

Seraphim

had led him astray. Still, he’d best find his answers quickly, before the far wall of the eye reached him. A storm this size would generate winds of such immense power that nothing and no one could survive.

Above the howl of the wind and rumble of continuous thunder Richard heard a new sound: A beckoning and familiar sound from long ago Sunday afternoons. Overwhelmed with information both visual and auditory, it took Richard a moment to sort out what it was and what direction it was coming from. It was the sound of church bells. And it was coming from deeper within the eye.

He followed the sound into the gloaming. As he walked he noticed that there were trees here, as well as grass and other vegetation. Not sparse and damaged as he would have expected in the lee of the prevailing wall of a storm this size, but thick and lush, as if untouched by more than the merest of winds and rain. He passed one sturdy oak that was over seventy five feet tall. He was no botanist but thought an oak that size had to be at least a hundred years old.

How could all this have survived the storm? he wondered. Or did the eye somehow form around it? He was no meteorologist, either, but did not think such a thing was possible.

Not that impossible means much anymore, he thought.

He pushed into a dense thicket of white and pink Rosa Carolinae, the North American pasture rose, feeling a pull against his pants legs and a sting in his right arm as straight, needle-like thorns scratched at him. He hissed and rubbed his hand across the wounds—two of them felt quite deep—but felt no blood under his fingers. The pain faded away quickly, like the fragments of a dream upon waking.

Once through the thicket he could make out plain, rough-hewn stone walls surrounding a structure in the distance. The walls were a good twenty feet high and looked to be a third as thick. A massive arched door, a dozen feet tall, was centered in the wall immediately before him. Beyond, three windowless towers of equal height reached skyward. Each was topped with a simple slate roof. Like the walls that protected them, the towers were plain stone without any visible adornments or embellishments.

He reached the door—closer inspection revealed that the ten foot wide portal was made up of six slabs of thick, rough cut wood bound with iron—and lifted his arm to knock.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he thought.

Before he could curl his fingers to rap on the door he heard the sound of a large bolt being retracted on the other side. The door swung inwards. The double-fist sized iron hinges must have been oiled regularly, he thought, because despite the obvious weight of the door it opened with barely a sound.

A man wearing a brown robe and hood stood inside.

The Monk, Richard thought. Then: Is this the Messenger?

The man pulled back his hood revealing black hair gone silver at the temples and slate grey eyes. He smiled: “Welcome, brother. It has been too long since last we met.”

Richard was speechless. He had questions, about a million of them, but could get none of them out. The man before him had greeted him like an old friend. Called him brother. And with a sincerity that ruled out casual acquaintance.

Richard had never seen the man before in his life.

When he spoke he asked the first thing that came to mind:

“Who are you?”

“I have had many names,” the man replied, sweeping out his left arm in a ‘come in’ gesture. Richard passed through the gate and the man closed it behind him. He closed it easily, with one hand. That thing is really well oiled, Richard thought.

“I once lived as Kaelen O’Connell.” The man answered. He led Richard away from the gate towards the structure it protected; a two story stone building. The building was three sided, like a triangle set inside a square. At each point of the triangle was one of the towers Richard had spied rising above the wall. Like the towers, the building was plain and unadorned. Unlike the towers, however, there were small openings—he could not call them windows as they held no glass—every five feet or so. He estimated their size as two foot by three. Flickering light could be seen through some of them, behind others darkness held reign. “Once as Mitchell Bryer,” the man continued, then laughed. “I even spent one thoroughly enjoyable lifetime as a performer named Rajesh Khanna.”

They approached the entrance to the building; a twin of the gate in the wall. Two steps before they reached it the door swung open as silently as had the gate. Two men in robes stepped out and took up positions on either side, their faces shrouded under their hoods.

“Thank you,” the man said to the pair and led Richard into a large hall. Unlike the outside of the—monastery? Fortress? Richard wondered—building, the inside was lavishly adorned with tapestries, rugs, and fine, ornate furniture. Every inch of the walls not covered in drapery bore hand painted frescoes of angels and demons in battle, seraphim, cherubim and celestial beings Richard did not recognize. All were good, the labor of many hours. Some were exquisite. The ceiling of the hall bore the largest single frieze Richard had ever seen. An image of Heaven’s gates thrown wide, two warring groups of beings cast out and onto the Earth below. One group was insubstantial, shadow with form and nothing more. The second group was depicted as angels, both fighting with the shadow forms and being expelled along with them. It was the most awe inspiring painting Richard had ever seen.

“Most recently, however,” the man continued to Richard, “My name was Stephen Bana.”

Richard gaped, tearing his eyes away from the ceiling.

“That’s…” impossible, he’d been about to say, but swallowed the word. Sophia had been right. There was no such thing as impossible.

“They told you I was dead.” Stephen said. “That I vanished through an uncharted Rip some hundred and seventy-five years ago and was thought lost forever.

“No,” Richard said when he found his voice. “It actually never came up. But for you to be Stephen Bana, you’d have to be over two-hundred years old.”

“Two-hundred and fifty-three,” Stephen said. “More or less, depending on your point of view.”

The two monks who’d opened the gate for Richard and Stephen had closed it behind them and quietly disappeared down a hallway. Now they—or two others, Richard thought, who can tell with those hoods?—reappeared. One carried a tray of cheese and bread, the other a crystal decanter of water and a tray of goblets. They set the trays on a long table in the middle of the hall that would easily sit twenty and pulled out two chairs at the near end, one on either side. Stephen sat in one of these and gestured to Richard to sit in the other.

As he sat, Richard took in the man. Hair graying at the temples, but still full and vibrant. Creases around his mouth where he smiled, at the corners of his eyes and across his forehead. Most telling was the neck, where skin visibly thins first, then loses elasticity and tends to hang in old age. This man had age lines, but his neck was still firm. He looked to be a man no older than sixty. Richard shook his head in wonder. “How is that possible?”

“This Earth,” Stephen told him, pouring them both a goblet of water, “holds special properties in its atmosphere. Those who come here grow old far slower than on other Earths and do not suffer the indignities of old age for millennia. There is no Alzheimer’s here, no senile dementia. Even injuries have no affect on this planet.” He cast his gaze at the scratches on Richard’s arm. Deep, to be sure, but there was no blood yet and still no pain. It was if his body had had no reaction to the injury. “You will need to have that sewn up before you move on,” he told Richard. “Once you leave it will start bleeding.”

“Four days,” Richard mumbled.

“What is that?” Stephen said.

“Sophia told me her Mirror had been shot four days before she found me. That would explain why the wound was so fresh.”

Stephen sighed deeply. He’d picked up a large piece of the bread, home baked by the looks of it, torn off a piece for himself, and handed another to Richard. Now he set his piece back on the tray.

“A tragic oversight on my part,” he said. “I had no idea she’d been shot on the Homeworld. And if she felt it at all, the pain would have stopped within seconds of our arrival here. In her time here, she never disrobed that I’m aware of, and so she was probably unaware of the wound. If she was aware of it, she never said anything. It must have been awful for her to reach your Earth only to feel pain and confusion, and then fall to the effects of the injury.”

“That injury was nothing compared to what BanaTech did to her. And tried to do to me.”

They sat in silence for a moment, both feeling their loss for different reasons.

“Why did you send her to me?” Richard said at length. “I’m assuming you sent her, and didn’t just throw her in a random Rip.”

Bana was taken aback.

“Of course I sent her to you. She was the mother of the Key. It was her idea to find you and bring you into this. To sort this whole mess out before the Multi-verse is destroyed. Had she not been suffering the effects of her injury when she found you, not been delirious with fever and near death, she could have explained the situation to you and pled for your assistance. We had no idea Jefferson would be able to locate her so quickly. Her death was not part of the plan.”

“Very well,” Richard said, not knowing if he would have believed Sophia’s story and responded as he had if events had unfolded in a different way. The man’s grief and shock at her loss seemed genuine, however. He was not at all what Richard had expected. Not a larger than life enigma titivated in light that spoke with booming voice and trod with thunderous foot. Nor was he, as Richard would have expected of the legendary physicist Dr. Stephen Bana, the absent-minded genius who spoke in multi-syballic words and used phrases that one needed three Doctorates, or, at the very least, a set of encyclopedias and a collegiate dictionary to understand. He was, in fact, a very down to earth, genuine man. And one Richard found himself liking very much in a very short span of time. “But why send her to me? I’ve accepted that I’m a Prime, or a Keeper as the Seraph would have it. But I’m still just a man. How does a simple man stop BanaTech and these Infernal thingy’s? Or the destruction of the entire Multi-verse? For that matter, how is it that a human child, Key or not, can control the Focal Point and destroy it in the first place?”

Bana’s eyes widened in what Richard took for surprise. Then the older man burst out in deep, hearty laughter. Richard raised his eyebrows, not getting the joke. Bana struggled to regain his composure, and then reached for his water glass. When the laughing fit had passed he took a drink and set the glass back on the table.

“Oh, Richard,” he said, jovially, “you were always able to make me laugh.”

“What are you talking about,” Richard said.

“The Key, dear Richard. The Key.” Stephen said, his cheeks blooming with good humor. “Why she’s no more human than you or I.”