31

Marith stepped out of the low car and slapped the door behind her. She noticed that the garage door had been replaced. A smirk pulled at the corners of her mouth, while she thanked the heavens Gene had never installed camera’s.

She didn’t bring her cello with her just yet. There was always something with this guy and she wasn’t so sure they would even get to the practicing part that afternoon.

“I have met a nice young man in church.” Lucille’s words kept circling through Marith’s mind. She had looked so happy and her voice had been frail and expecting.

“He’s a pianist. He also plays the organ. His name is Samuel. I’ve got his phone number.”

While Lucille had rummaged through her purse Marith had smiled, reluctantly and with her lips closed tight, and, she guessed, flames dancing behind her pupils.

After the Elder had handed Marith his personal information her suspicions were proven and her horrors were completed. Her new partner for the recital was the same guy that was renting the lake house, who happened to be the guy she’d had this disastrous lunch with weeks ago.

What was it about this man that was so incredibly off-putting and unsettling? Was it the fact that he had the charisma of a dirty, decomposing dishcloth? Was it the mistrusting look in his eyes? Or was it just his convictions about life in general?

Marith had wanted to make a witty comment, like ‘are you sure he can suffer through playing with a lady cellist?’ But she had kept that snide remark to herself, because she knew Lucille wouldn’t understand and then she had to explain things that were basically unexplainable.

She decided to swallow her pride this round and get it over with. Apart from taking care of Gene and becoming a member of a local gang of paranormal misfits she hadn’t done much recently, at least nothing to further her music career.

Now she was trotting through untouched snow on her way to a practice session with him, with a pit in her stomach. She had postponed this as long as possible, hoping he would be practicing just as much as she was, so their time spend practicing together would be limited to a minimum.

She had already spotted him on the far end of the jetty that stretched out in front of the lake house. Despite the sun drenched weather it was quite a peculiar place to be sitting in the middle of the day in the heart of winter.

He was barely wearing any clothes. At least, not clothes that could protect a human from the winter in these mountains. Maybe he was warm from chopping wood, she thought. She had just walked past a tree stump with split chunks of wood by its side and an axe placed firmly into the middle. He didn’t seem like a rugged or outdoorsy type, but looks could be deceiving.

When they had first met he had told her he had no musical predispositions. She knew he had been hiding things for her, the sneaky bastard.

She stuck her hands in the pockets of the navy blue winter’s coat that she had borrowed from Lieke. Her footsteps sounded hollow on the wooden boards.

There was something fundamentally wrong with that guy. If only she wouldn’t feel so confused and defensive around him she might be able to figure out what it was exactly that made him so repulsive.

“I thought your musical abilities were limited to singing in the shower?” Marith informed, walking up to him.

I invented most instruments, Samuel thought bitterly, without looking at her, including your cello, as a way to torture the conscientious and disciplined mind.

“I may have downplayed myself somewhat.” He glanced up over his shoulder and smiled wryly.

Marith was instantly remembered of why she hadn’t contacted him again after last time. The unbearable self-pity was dripping off his face in the most insufferable ways. Even though she’d had some setbacks in life herself, she just wanted to slap it off his face and tell him to ‘man up’. She restrained herself.

“I’ve also been practicing lately. On the piano in the solarium.”

She nodded. That reminded Marith about how her mother had forced Gene to spend a mind boggling amount of money on a new kitchen and the solarium, several months before she filed for divorce, so the house would be more accustomed to her needs, which basically boiled down to being able to brag to her lesser subsidised girlfriends about the wealth of her husband.

“Do you want to…?” She gestured at the house, where she had parked the car.

“Nah,” he shrugged. “I don’t feel like it. Come sit.”

“You haven’t practiced the pieces, have you?” Marith grinned. She was used to this behaviour from her students in Europe.

He smiled a sly smile at her and gave her some side-eye.

She sat down on his left and took it all in. The lake in front of them, flat as a mirror, reflecting the snow topped mountains, holding the world’s greatest secrets, frozen to prevent more drownings. The forest behind them, finally filled with the clamour of twittering birds again. That glorious cliff the entire Chain had become quite acquainted with, shining proudly in the sunlight on their left, covered in unspeakable and irreversible adolescent trauma.

A strange urge to clear the air between them washed over her.

“I am sorry about the other week. I didn’t want to be mean. I just like to live life on my own terms, you know?”

She wanted to say that she prefers to live her life ‘in freedom’, but for some reason she didn’t think that was a concept that would resonate with him.

He was like the single, middle-aged fat lady at every birthday party that was lecturing skinny, young impressionable teenage girls on how to diet. They were setting others up for failure by ruining their metabolism and sprouting an unhealthy relationship with food at a precarious and impressionable age, so they could be miserable together. That was what Marith saw when she looked at Samuel, who had undoubtedly been a nice guy, once upon a time, before he had started to visit the wrong websites and forums.

“Let’s just agree to disagree,” she urged, when he didn’t reply.

Marith was determined on making this work somehow, now that they had been thrusted together to do this recital. She figured there probably weren’t a lot of pianists to be found in the remote area. She would have to find a way to work with this one.

Samuel nodded. He looked drawn. He was wearing prescription glasses. They were windows into this pale, lacklustre eyes.

“God sure had a good day when he made Sweet Lake,” Marith, likely the least religious out of the two of them, said with a sigh, changing the subject.

They both continued to enjoy Sweet Lake’s nature in silence, their legs dangling over the edge of the jetty, above the dark, frozen lake.

Marith considered her sensitivity to be both a gift and a disadvantage. She had carried a deep, cutting pain within her, for as long as she could remember, but when she came to think of how she experienced the world it wasn’t all bad. Without her sensibilities she wouldn’t be playing the cello or be able to lose herself in a museum, a good book or even the forest.

Her contemplations were disturbed by Samuel. He shifted slightly on the jetty next to her and drew a deep breath, before speaking.

“The right and the wrong are not two clear paths with nothing in the middle. Sometimes the right path is so clouded, so misted, the wrong path seems a fine way to go.”

“Sure.” Marith frowned and then nodded, assuming he was looking for a way to make things right between them, as well.

When she figured he wasn’t going to follow that statement up with anything illuminating she dropped her head back to allow her pale face some watered down, weak wintry sunlight and took a breath of the cleanest air one could ever hope to breathe.

She became very aware of her own heartbeat, forcing the blood to course through her veins, supplied with oxygen by her calm, now healthy lungs. Her own blood was singing in her ears. The forest fell silent. The whistling birds had stopped being feathered, little, carefree, energy balls for a moment and started to whisper, which caused a shiver up her spine.

A touch of wind played with her hair. At that moment she experienced it all simultaneously. The stimuli flooding in prickled all her senses at once, like in a lucid dream. Her skin tingled, then sparkled and eventually seemed to be burning.

The Web was trying to tell her something.

She realized her marvels about her own heartbeat had stopped her from noticing the lack of another.

She inhaled and exhaled to prevent herself from panicking. She prayed he hadn’t noticed her sudden hunch.

She closed her eyes, while her lungs breathed haphazard bursts of condense, and focused. Hesitantly directing the vibrating strings in her mind to his chest there turned out to be something amiss… The lying pianist was minus a healthy heart.

There was no way any human could still be alive, walking and talking, with the pulsating engine of the circulatory system failing like that.

“Well,” she stated, “if you haven’t prepared I better get going. Maybe we can reschedule our appointment?” She hassled a bunch of words together to excuse herself. “It is getting cold and dark soon,” she added, for no apparent reason.

She then scrambled up from her harsh seat and stretched herself out, to not appear too hasty.

“It was lovely talking to you, Samuel,” Marith said with a weak smile, trying to hide her horror.

He still stared blankly at the lake and refused to look at her. She looked at the back of his blonde head and hesitated briefly, but then quickly turned around to walk away.

“No, it wasn’t.”

“What?” Marith froze. He appeared to be standing right behind her,

breathing down her neck.

“It wasn’t lovely to talk to me, otherwise you wouldn’t have avoided me in the past few weeks.”

“I was busy!” Marith urged, stepping forward and then turning around to face him. She had been busy.

“Why are you leaving now then? Shouldn’t we practice for the recital?” He asked bluntly. His face hardened and suddenly he looked a decade older than the last time she had seen him.

“No, you should practice on your own first.” Marith frowned at him angrily. Still not sure if he knew that she knew.

“Fine! Go back to your Chain. I know that’s what you’ve been doing!”

Marith couldn’t refrain from gasping. There was no point in denying it. At that point they both knew that they both knew.

She unfroze and was about to learn how fast the immortal Runner really was. She took a half-hearted attempt at a sprint to where the jetty met the back yard of the lake house, but before she reached it he was waiting for her, obstructing her path.

He crossed his arms slowly and a death expression, that worried Marith greatly, crept across his colourless face.

“I won’t let you,” Marith uttered, shaking her head. Later she wasn’t able to recall whether she had whispered, sighed or yelled those words at him.

“There is order in chaos, Marissshj,” Samuel lisped, speaking her name for the first time. “But you know that, don’t you? You’re one of those rare people that thrive in chaos.”

“Not sure what you’re talking about,” Marith answered hesitantly and curiously out of breath.

“It’s like classical music… we have to plough through the bad part to get to the good part. I can sense you’re good at that. Your whole past, your childhood, your adolescence… when did you have stability? And yet, you’re a professional musician, you’ve found your way into an elite club off… whatever you are. You even got a half-decent man on your arm this time.”

Marith was struck with fury and frustration. Did he know everything about her? How? Her mouth may have opened and closed, but nothing came out. This amused the Kid intensely.

“Together,” he said, rushing forwards and grabbing her forearms firmly in a harsh clasp, like the claws of a bird catching its prey, “we can make things better… the Web, the world… they’re waiting for us. We can do it together.” Despite the unfortunate situation she found herself in she didn’t fail to notice he was very adamant on the ‘together’ part of his plans. A pathetic glimmer of hope flashed in his eyes, while Marith tried to free herself from his grip. “I can be the pianist and you can be the cellist.” He breathed an icy cloud of death into her disgusted face.

“No,” she panted. She could feel him suck the energy out of her. It travelled from her core to her shoulders and arms and finally into the palms of his hands. He wasn’t locked to the pressure points on her wrists yet and Marith was willing to do everything in her power to prevent him from reaching those spots.

“We can make the world beautiful,” he kept trying, still not making sense to the Mage.

“The world is beautiful,” she hissed in turn, eyes bulging, “without you in it.”

She regretted that addition to her original statement as soon as the words left her lips. An angry bitterness washed over his face. Then he let go of her recalcitrant arms and leapt for her.

In the split second that he allowed her she stumbled backwards. The wood of the jetty was frozen and slippery. She faltered. With panic rising in her abdomen she realised there was no sense in keeping her balance while the Kid was after her.

Then she gave herself permission to lose her poise, as a result of which she tumbled towards the frozen lake. Before leaving the jetty entirely her body did stop to hit one of the bollards that was holding the structure together. The wooden pillar impinged her centre, under her ribs, right in the stomach. Marith briefly imagined this was what being attacked by a crowbar must feel like.

When she did land on the ice she learned that the mirror was as soft and forgiving as a brick wall.

Altogether it was a graceless and unsightly fall that left her crying and flinching in a bundle of clothes and limbs.

The Kid jumped after her. Of course he landed perfectly on his feet, without so much as staggering or slipping on the smooth surface. He looked down on her. She laid gagging and moaning at his feet, which is exactly where and how he liked his women.

Unaware of the whereabouts of the Kid and afraid the skin of her face would freeze to the ice she rolled onto her back, hugging her torso and wheezing. Her legs lingered sprawled around her.

She was displeased, but not surprised, to learn that Samuel stood right next to her. He gave her a crooked smile and eyed her opportunistically.

Marith knew that look. All women knew that look. It upset her twisted stomach beyond what she could humanly take.

“No,” she uttered somehow, in between the dry heaves and swallowing vomit back.

She collected all her leftover strength and send it to her legs. She put her boots down on the ice and started to push herself to the shore. She failed miserably at that. The soles of her boots had a deep structure, but not enough to overcome how slick and glib the ice was. Her feet didn’t find any grip.

Samuel cackled and bend his knees, lowering himself. Marith’s blood chilled and the back of her mind calculated the odds of this encounter ending up in rape.

She laid quietly next to him, breathing frantic clouds of vapour into the air between them. A hopeless sensation of powerlessness overtook her.

Why was the part of her brain that was supposed to decide between flight, fright or fight telling her to undergo this passively? Wasn’t she Rebirthed to resist this creature?

Suddenly his weight was on top of her. It was sickening. He sat on her lower abdomen and stared her in the eyes. He wasn’t heavy, but the joy he experienced pinning her to the ice repulsed her.

Few words were exchanged. He tried to grab her arms again and this time he did go for the wrists.

Marith tried hitting, slapping and beating his hands away from hers. It didn’t take long for the Kid to lose his patience and grab her throat.

He shifted his pelvis down her torso, to her hips, and bend down over her, until his face hovered above hers. Marith protested heavily, but realised it was a losing battle. He was too strong and his grip on her throat too dangerous.

“Did you know time is not absolute?” He appeared to be starting another pointless lecture, while on a manic power trip.

She felt his lifeless breath brush past her skin. She closed her eyes for a few moments.

Her assaulter let her throat go with one hand, but the other one clasped around her neck like a steel collar. His free hand was searching for one of her wrists, while he was determined to keep eye contact with the Mage he was overpowering.

“I am aware,” Marith brought out, almost choked into unconsciousness, remembering a documentary about Einstein and other people way smarter than herself.

The Kid was closing her oesophagus with his left hand, trying to grab her left wrist with his right hand. She wasn’t cooperating, but that didn’t hold him back from talking incessantly anyway.

“Time in the Empty ticksss... differently,” he hissed disgustingly into her face. “Some parts of human history have eluded me completely, during other parts time slowed down for me, showing me stuff. Like when you and your imbecile friends were born, for instance.”

Marith enervated. She couldn’t keep fighting him. Despite the loss of his anchor he was mighty strong.

“Good… for… you.” She felt like throwing up. The creep remained on top of her and her throat was burning.

“But not for you.” Amongst all the evil splashing off his face Marith noticed a glimmer of hope in his eyes as he said it.

She laid limply under him. Her muscles were cramping under his strength, her body slammed onto the icy surface. She couldn’t resist him anymore.

Marith had never known real fear. She had been anxious and stressed, sure, but she had never experienced the ‘existence threatening, adrenaline rushed, impaired vision, life flashing before her eyes’ fear. And this moment didn’t seem to be able change that.

She had surely expected that meeting the Kid, the bane of her existence, would be a life altering experience, with a storm brewing at the horizon, her mind racing for cool solutions, resulting in heroism inducing endeavour.

There was, however, none of that. She was piqued and mad that she wasn’t strong enough, but at the same time she managed to make a list in her head of her priorities. Organizing and planning were some of her favourite activities after all.

Being plagued by a chaotic, helicoptering, hectoring tyrant for most of her life had sort of prepared her for this, in a sick and horrible way, of course.

“I’ve done nothing to deserve you people obstructing me!” He continued unpleasantly, when Marith didn’t respond to his last remarks.

“You’ve done plenty,” Marith answered flatly looking into his pale face.

“No, you don’t get it. I just want to stay in this dimension. That is all.” He tried to convince her with a smooth voice. Suddenly his cold, empty eyes appeared big and begging. The iron clutch around her neck seemed to be relaxing somewhat.

“Then get off of me!” She pushed him hard, with both hands against his chest. Not hard enough to actually move him, but he decided to use his own free will to lift himself up, away from her.

They both clambered up hastily. Marith skidded and slipped over the ice to the shore. Her fingertips tracing the cold, hard surface of the lake, while her feet kicked her awkwardly forward. It was as if she was stumbling out of that train in the Netherlands again, she thought grim.

Samuel was already there, in the backyard of the lake house, standing on top of the snow, looking composed and expecting.

“Do you know how old I am?” He asked monotonous, with a frustrated look in his eyes and expectant lines around his mouth.

“Who cares?!” Marith barked at him, now that they were both on solid ground again.

“Just answer the question. What have you got to lose?”

Marith sighed to show her uneasiness. “I guess you must be more than six thousand years old, since that is when the asteroids hit Earth.”

She rubbed the sore skin of her throat and neck, while eyeing him suspiciously.

“I am ten thousand years old, give or take a century.” A painful grimace travelled across his face.

“Of course, my parents were older. They had me when mommy dearest had to go to her special place, her safe space, to think super important thoughts about the future of mankind. I had been running for four thousand years, before I did what I did… what I had to do.”

“Right,” Marith uttered curtly.

“Did you know that in those four thousand years, that I was allowed on Earth, I have never even had a family of my own? I was obligated to either stay in Oracle’s dimension or at the Designer’s place.”

Marith noticed how he never referred really to his parents as ‘mom’ or ‘dad’.

“You guys call him First Watchmaker, but he wasn’t,” Samuel continued, as if the details mattered that afternoon. “He was a fabricator. No Watchmaker existed until he died and the asteroids came.

“Don’t forget that the Web was still ‘open’ back then. There was no reason for the information that pulsated through it to be shielded.

“This made it easy for my parents, my masters, to monitor me constantly. Trust me when I say that they watched everything I did or didn’t do. Anything I ate, how much I slept, how long I bathed, any girl I dared to look at. Every action was scrutinized.

“I was criticized mercilessly for any discrepancies. If it took me so much as a second too long to run from one to the other there would be consequences, a formal investigation of where I had been and why. They were in full control at any given moment in time.

“They robbed me of any opportunity to be independent, to even think my own thoughts, to be an individual. It was dehumanizing and humiliating.”

Marith swallowed. Where had she seen this behaviour before?

“Four thousand years is a long time to be controlled by two overbearing idiots. I can tell you that.”

Shards and chunks of her own childhood flashed before her eyes, while Samuel explained how he did the world a favour. Would modern technology, Western medicine and progress in general even exist if First Oracle and First Watchmaker had been allowed to reign for ten-thousand years?

Somewhere deep down she felt bad for him. A part of her - an astronomically small part, but still a part - understood how and why he had been driven to his horrendous acts of violence against his own parents. They were the people he had trusted, probably the only people that had been around when he had grown up, the people that were supposed to guide him into adulthood.

First Oracle and First Watchmaker had been endowed with the task of delivering a stable and helpful person into their trinity and to society in general, but they had been imperious maniacs that hadn’t prepared him for anything, except serving them.

They had ruined him. They had failed to give their child a childhood and now he was lost. He was a homicidal psychopath and homicidal psychopaths don’t just happen. She knew that.

“Only three Chains in and I get send to the Empty,” Samuel babbled on. “I hadn’t even been free for a thousand years at that point. Of course, compared to my parents the Empty was a walk in the park. Calm, serene, no pressure. At least my thoughts were free there, pure. There are worse things than isolation. You know that.”

Marith’s thoughts strayed back to when they had first met. When Samuel had quoted Sartre and Marith had liked him, to some degree, at least.

“Now my time has come and I won’t squander it. I am allowed to live, to exist. I will survive this round,” he continued, determined. “If I have to seize control over the whole goddamn Web to stay here, so be it. You can’t stop me, not anymore,” the Runner informed the Mage.

“Have you taken a look at this village? At the people in it? That is what will happen to the rest of the world if we let you,” Marith spat.

“Yes, and soon it will only get better. I can tell you that,” he said toying. A little, knowing smile played around his mouth. He put his hands on his narrow hips and looked at her.

“If you think I won’t fight myself into an untimely death to prevent you from doing so you are sorely mistaken...” Marith said threateningly.

“Oh, I know you will,” Samuel answered.

He was counting on that.

“You people fought yourself out of countless wars and conflicts. You tamed the water and overcame the most cruel weather conditions. You colonized half the planet because you wanted to pepper your steaks. You are descended from a special type of cunts.”

He looked her up and down, like he was trying to figure out how Dutch she really was. How far would she go? What was she actually capable of after he had riled her up enough?

“When this is all over,” he gestured in the air between them, “I’m spending the rest of my days oppressing peasants, drinking liquid babies, shape-shifting, planning wars, not paying my taxes... I know what you think of me.”

He made the ‘t’ sound wet again and Marith shivered.

“Now, why don’t you go tell your congregation of degenerates about me? And I’ll go pick up my new Watchmaker.” He smirked. It might have been the first time, Marith had seen him looking actually happy.

She wasn’t sure her mouth was open, but the white clouds of condense travelling from her lungs into the air were very telling.

He knew. She hadn’t consciously noticed him grabbing her wrist or sucking the information out of her, but who knew how far his abilities stretched?

She didn’t move. What could she do? He was faster than she would ever be. If she moved he would run off to the clinic. If she didn’t she couldn’t inform the Chain.

He was going to run to the clinic anyway. Marith knew what she had to do. She was going to alert the others and trust that the Runners on duty could keep Samuel away from Etienne long enough.

The cold, sore Mage had to force herself into action.

She gave him one last glance, filled with loathing and disdain. Then she turned around and ran. She ran like it was the only thing that had ever mattered in her whole life. She knew he was going to do the same.

Her legs seemingly kicked up to her chest, while she sprinted her way back to the red car through the un-shovelled snow.

“Bitch!” She heard behind her. The word came from the distance, but cut through the air like a whip.

A soaring sound followed. Whatever it was it couldn’t be good news. She jumped face forward into the snow.

The back of Gene’s car got introduced to the axe she had walked past earlier.

When she looked up the backyard and the shoreline were empty.

She left the axe sticking out of the bumper and clawed her way through the snow, dragging her hurt body towards the driver’s side of the car. This had slowed her down. Fractions of seconds did count when it came to the Kid.

She was healing faster than a human would, because she was a Mage. She wondered if her specific skills could be of any help to herself now as well. Unfortunately there was no time to find out.

Samuel was gone and there was no time to lose. As soon as she sat in the driver’s seat she called the first person that came to mind.

“He went all Shining on my ass!” She yelled through the phone. Technically, just on her car, but she didn’t have time to discuss the trifling details.

“You’re not supposed to call,” Vanessa commented dryly.

“Why the hell not? He knows everything anyway!”

“The Kid?”

“Yeah, it’s this guy, Samuel…” Marith felt like crying for a split second and then composed herself. “The one that’s renting the lake house.”

“Okay, calm down. I’ll alert the others,” Vanessa said in an even tone of voice.

Marith envied her tranquillity under these circumstances.

“Why are you so calm?” She wondered, while starting the vehicle with her free hand.

“Because I am holding Etienne right now. For once we are ahead of him.” Marith could hear Vanessa smile through the phone, before she hang up.

Oracle must have seen me in trouble, Marith thought, while turning the keys and starting the engine. She probably showed dr. Sybling who had urged the Chain to bring Etienne into safety as a precaution.

Their system still worked.

Marith fumbled the stick into first gear and sped off. The car roared and skidded. The small, sportive vehicle clearly wasn’t made for winter in the mountains, but it eventually obeyed.

The cello case gave an unfortunate thud against the window of the passenger’s seat when she sped off the terrain. The carbon fibre case had been strapped in, but those belts weren’t made for antique instruments.

As she swung the car onto the bypass to the clinic the alarm that was, quite obtusely, built into each clockwork started screaming at her from her left pocket.