Deomans of Faerel Read online

  The boy adjusted his spectacles. He had on what looked like a worn green frock coat. There was something odd about his face. He pointed to one of four tented slips of white cardboard on the table.

  “The card says, ‘Jack’.”

  Jack chuckled. “What is this, some kind of group meeting?”

  “Also, there is no chair,” the pale blonde added. She was leaning on the table, her chin in her thin hands. “Look around. There are only three chairs in here. There’s no chair for you.”

  Jack noticed that the back wall of the small room was covered from floor to ceiling by a thick red curtain. He tilted his head.

  “What’s behind the curtain?” he asked.

  “Just a wall,” the blonde said tiredly. She leaned back and he could see that she wore only a thin white robe. She could have been a patient, but these other two… “It’s just a wall of bricks.” She reached over and yanked the curtain aside. It was just as she had said, a solid wall of ruddy bricks. The woman chugged the curtain back in place and looked up smugly. “Satisfied?”

  The British woman leaned over and smiled. Her teeth were a dazzling white. She limply offered her hand.

  “I’m Claire.”

  Jack took her hand into his and shook. Her fingers were long and cold, as if they were made from porcelain.

  “Jack. But I suppose you already know that.”

  “What year do you think it is?” the Asian boy suddenly asked. The blonde sighed heavily. She rose from the chair and placed her hand on her chest.

  “My name is Hanna, I am from Austria. I am dying from cancer.” She flicked her wrist at the boy. “This is Som. He is twenty-four. He suffers from a disease that keeps him looking like a boy. It is also slowly killing him.” She pointed at the weirdly dressed Brit. “And you’ve already met Claire. Claire is a drug addict and a whore.”

  “Hey!” Claire only halfheartedly objected. She looked down and fiddled with her iridescent nails. “I don’t sleep with just anyone.”

  The blonde sneered. “Oh, I’m sorry. I stand corrected. You just screw whomever will provide you with that drug, what’s it called?”

  Claire pushed out her lower lip. “Dioxyrybocontrin,” she said to her hands.

  Som shook his head. He stood and Jack realized the boy, the young man, couldn’t have been taller than five feet.

  “None of that matters. Jack, what year do you think it is? It’s an important question.”

  The room was very small. A little claustrophobic. Jack fiddled with the chair until he was seated in front of his name card. He put his hands on the table. His first and last name was printed on the card in black ink.

  “Uh… I suppose it could already be 2014,” he said. “I don’t know, they say I’ve been out for a long time.” He already knew that it was 2014. Just after Christmas. But the less this group knew about him the better.

  Som chuckled. He looked at the others. “Shall we do this in chronological order?”

  Hanna didn’t hesitate. “1941.”

  “1968,” Som followed, without a hint of disagreement in his voice.

  Claire looked both nervous and embarrassed to answer. But she did.

  “2331,” she said shyly.

  Jack scoffed. “Yeah, okay.” He backed his chair. “Now I know I’m in the wrong group.”

  When he tried the door he found that it was locked. He jiggled the handle to make sure. He released it but his hand hovered. He chuckled nervously.

  “Okay. Look, I don’t know who you people are, but the one thing I do know for sure is that I’m not supposed to be here.”

  “Right,” said Som. “None of us are supposed to be here.”

  Jack cocked his head and gave a wry smile. He kept his hand near the handle. “No, seriously. I just took the wrong elevator.” He tried it again. Still locked.

  Hanna was laughing now. “Yes, an elevator this time!” She put her hand to her mouth but kept on laughing.

  Claire rested her hand on Jack’s shoulder. She kept it there until he slowly let go of the handle.

  “It’s alright.” She patted. “Just try to relax, okay? This is all about to get a wee bit strange.”

  That was an understatement. It seemed these people really believed they were all taken from different points in time and somehow transported into the room. Jack felt suddenly cold, but it wasn’t from any drop in temperature. He was beginning to feel more than just a little bit vulnerable.

  Nobody knows I’m down here, he thought. No one at all.

  Som did his best to explain. “Look, I can see that this is all coming across as strange. No one would expect you to react any differently. All I can tell you is this.” He put his hand on his chest. “I know exactly who I am, and I’m telling you my name is Som Lek Trudeaux. I am the son of a Thai mother and a French missionary. I have an unnamed disease that keeps my body in a prepubescent stage, although all the plumbing is working just fine, believe me.”

  Jack wasn’t interested in his entire biography. “Where are we?”

  No one said a word.

  “We believe we are in some… alternate dimension,” Claire finally offered.

  “No, that’s not it at all,” Hanna interjected. “That’s just silly. I think we have been drugged and taken away to some room in some military installation.”

  “Then how do you explain the simple fact that we are all from different points in time?” Som fired back. “And completely different parts of the world? Seriously, are you insane?”

  The woman was at a loss for words. It took her a moment to gather her thoughts. “No. No, I… I do not think that I am insane.” She didn’t sound so sure.

  “Precisely,” Som said.

  Claire finally took her seat next to Jack. She smelled like cotton candy.

  “I believe that you believe you are from 1941,” Som continued, “and I know that I am from 1968.” He sat back and crossed his small arms. “I may have made a mess of my life, but I am certain that I am not insane.”

  “Project 112,” Jack tossed in. Everyone stared. “I take it you guys have never heard of it? Psychotropic drugs—BZ, ketamine, Red Oil—all that crap. During the Gulf War they tested stuff like that on soldiers, our own troops.”

  “Which war?” Hanna inquired.

  Som shot his hands out with his eyes pinched shut. “Easy, Jack. She doesn’t know anything about the history of the world beyond her time.” He settled and crossed his arms. “And as far as I’m concerned, I don’t need to know either.”

  Jack gave a series of short nods. “Yeah, okay, I suppose you’re right. Sorry.” He returned to the table and folded his hands on the cool surface. “Uh… Hanna is it? What exactly did you mean when you said something about the elevator?”

  She was only half looking at him. “I don’t know. You said an elevator took you here.” She threw up her arms. “For me it was a chateau in the Steyr mountains. It looked…warm.” She suddenly softened. “I was trying to end my life by walking alone in the mountains, through the snow. I saw the chateau and I entered.”

  Jack reached back and tried the door again.

  Claire sat still beside him. “It won’t open,” she said quietly. “It will only open when someone draws near.” She gestured toward the chairs. “And it looks like we’re all here.”

  Jack stared at her. She looked so alien. “How did you get in here?” he asked.

  She scrunched up her shoulders. “I thought I was entering a rehab station.”

  “And I thought I was going into a spice shop,” Som said. “Can you believe that? I was on the run from a street gang I owed a lot of money to, the Tetra.” He stared off. “They would have killed me.”

  The curtains at the back suddenly stirred. They separated and a man in a charcoal business suit stepped into the room.

  Despite the fact that he had just walked through a solid wall he had yet to look upon them. He was too distracted by the rectangular crystal he held in his hands.

  The surface facing hi
m seemed to be glowing. He looked annoyingly at ease as he regarded the crystal like a day-trader checking his smart phone. His thumbs moved across the surface. At last, he slipped it into his lapel and casually surveyed the room.

  “Oh, come now,” he said in a deep baritone. “Why the long faces?”

  Jack had had enough. “What the hell is going on here?” he demanded.

  The man only laughed dryly. He moved over to stand beside the room’s only other fixture, a whiteboard affixed to the wall. The aluminum rail held one black dry erase marker. He picked it up and started drawing circles on the board.

  “My dear boy, you’ve been stuck inside what surely must be one of the most intriguing places you’ve ever had the fortune of stumbling upon and this is the only question you have for me?”

  “It’s as good a question as any,” Som fired.

  Across the room Hanna gasped. She had pulled back one side of the curtain. A long hallway of stone lined with softly glowing lanterns had replaced the brick wall.

  The man turned to face them. “Yes, well, I suppose you’re right about that.” He nodded. “Why don’t we sort this whole thing out as quickly as possible.”

  He was old but not elderly, moving with an energy that belied his years. Beneath slicked back salt-and-pepper hair beamed eyes as bright a shade of blue as someone easily twenty or thirty years younger. He looked thin but healthy and was immaculately groomed. He straightened and crossed his hands behind his back.

  “My name is Maltheus Falfax. I am a decommissioned angel of the highest order. And I’ve been waiting for you all for quite some time.”

  “Excuse me?” said Claire, holding up one finger. “I don’t mean to interrupt. But what the bloody hell are you talking about?”

  The man leaned forward. “Precisely, my dear. Hell is precisely what I’m talking about.”

  It was becoming clearer now to Jack. He hadn’t survived the accident.

  We’re in Hell, Jack thought. We’re all dead and we’re in Hell.

  The strange man regarded him as if the thought had been spoken aloud. He winked and then turned back to the group. “Now hold onto your hats,” he said. “This is all going to sound very strange, I’m sure. But there is a lot to cover and I haven’t the time to dillydally.”

  He cleared his throat. “Long ago, before the irreversible intrusion of time, man was nothing more than an afterthought, a concept as of yet not indulged by the Great Creator. But the idea was there and, like so many ideas, begged to be brought out into the light and reexamined.

  “The Creationist Committee was entirely against it. What good could come from the development of such a clearly inferior race of creatures? Existence itself was not suitable, could not support such an abstract concept. But the Great Creator had insisted. And in the end he was very convincing.

  “He challenged a select few with a project to develop the infrastructure of a new enhanced existence, one in which physical creation was the beginning and demise the only logical outcome. Until then, the notion that the Essence of Being could be invoked and placed down upon a singular moment in time—doomed from the start to be corrupted, to falter, to sicken and wither, and to eventually pass on into infinity—was absurd. But such was the challenge, and so it soon came to pass.

  “A plan for the race of man was realized. But man would need a special habitat, a unique environment in which to exist, to thrive, to learn, to love and to be tested if he were to have any use at all in the Eternal Plan.”

  Jack let out a tired sigh. It all sounded like some timeshare presentation gone horribly wrong.

  The man was relentless. He poked into the air. “Yours was the first universe. Did you know that? Your solar system—all those whirling planets, the suns and moons—all of it the pilot for an operational project that to this very point in time continues to evolve.

  “It took an incredible amount of subcommittees to finalize a working model. Shape, substance, color, depth, breadth, weight—all had to be painstakingly calculated and figured into the equation. And time. I hated that one most of all. I warned them, once you get the ball rolling with something like that, well…

  “Before long a blueprint had been finalized and phase one underway, Big Bang and all that. It continued on for quite some time. But over the eons some of the original baseline operatives became skewed. The Great Creator became angered and demanded the faltering actuals be brought in line with the core developmental goals. When the committee disagreed, they were cast down into the Abyss and the whole project nearly scrapped.”

  He shook his finger in the air. “In a fit of rage, the Great Creator hurled a swarm of asteroids at the fledgling planet, plunging it into an enduring icy winter that nearly destroyed it completely. It survived, of course, and eventually evolved under the guidance of an entirely new committee into the world you know as your home, the world of Earth. All the work of the original committee—the Destiny Scrolls, as they are called, the very blueprints for existence—was secreted away. No one ever saw them again. Lost for all eternity, or so it seemed.”

  The strange man took on a more serious tone. “But it wasn’t over quite just yet. Eager to get their hands on the vast stores of knowledge, Hell accepted the committee with open arms. Together, the two forces managed to achieve an alternate existence, one forged in the fires of Hell.

  “Hell peopled this alternate world called, Faerel, with its own versions of the original models—knockoffs of what history knows as the Preadamic races, the fabled versions of both man and creature that existed before Earth’s restructuring. But they soon discovered that something was very wrong. A very important component was missing, something Hell could not create, even with the help of the committee.

  “You see, in all of divine existence there is an infinitely greater whole, a driving force that binds every living thing together and which will unite during some undetermined, distant event. Some say this force precludes even the Gods and the Great Creator himself, but I find that very hard to believe.”

  He paused to scan each of their faces. No one spoke. He continued.

  “Is this all making sense? It’s very simple, really. What is important to recognize is that every living creature on every certified and approved plane of existence contains a special part, a piece of this greater whole that cannot be seen and only rarely perceived. It is what you know as the soul. In the end it is the gift that can provide its borrower with safe passage toward the eternal reward, or the curse which can banish them straight away toward an eternity of damnation.

  “The souls you possess are functioning and pure, that is not to say that you have not polluted them a bit in the short amount of time they have been in your possession. The soul, among other things, functions much like a living record, filtering the will and trapping bits and pieces of decisions made. The condition in which it is in when you cease to exist determines which route you take in the afterlife. You get the picture, I’m sure.

  “The problem here, the point that I’m trying to impress upon you all, is that the souls in Faerel do not function properly.” He gave a queer face. “It’s as if they have all been… switched off. Every inhabitant of Faerel is therefore blocked from the eternal reward, such as it once was on your world. As a result, its inhabitants cannot pass on to any kind of a pleasant afterlife, regardless of any lifestyle pursued. But neither can any creature’s powerful essence be taken into the Abyss, which makes them altogether useless to the Lords of Hades. In the end, each life simply winks forever out of existence.” He raised a brow. “That is, unless someone can solve the mystery, can somehow… turn the switch back on.”

  “Okay already,” Jack finally edged in. This was obviously some kind of deranged group therapy, some kind of problem solving session. The sooner this was over the better. He played along. “So what do you want from us?”

  The man gave an excited smile. “What I’m asking for is your help, your assistance in placing things back in balance. Each side, Heaven and Hell, is in a
constant struggle to obtain as much of life’s valuable essence, as many souls as possible, to arm themselves for the Final Conflict.” He stitched his brows. “I can’t impress upon you how awful it would be if those in the Abyss were able to collect more of this vagrant energy than those in alignment with the Great Creator.”

  It seemed like a no-brainer to Jack. He’d throw his two cents in and group would be over. Hell, this was actually better than physical therapy. He was anxious to get back. It was pizza night.

  “So why not just leave well enough alone? I mean, it just makes sense. If there’s going to be some kind of final battle between good and evil, and the energy located in a living soul is the key to turning the tide, then why not just leave things as-is? You said yourself that the souls in this place don’t work. So why turn them all on? Don’t we have enough to worry about on Earth?”

  “It’s simply not that easy,” the man countered. “You see, Hell is also looking for the scrolls. In fact, I fear they are now even closer to finding them than I. And if they do find them, there’s no telling what sort of loopholes they may discover, errors or omissions that may allow them to flip that switch themselves and then somehow siphon all the energy directly back into Hell, which could jumpstart Armageddon.”

  “This is crazy,” Som interjected. “First off, thanks for coming into the room right after this guy gets here. It’s perfectly okay that I’ve been in here for about a week now.”

  “Hey, I’ve been in here almost as long as you,” Claire added.”

  Som waved her off. “Even if what you’re saying is true, what can you possibly expect from us? How can we possible help? We are four, nearly broken human beings with no superpowers or mystical ways of fighting… demons? Do you really expect us to go up against demons and devils? Is that what you’re asking us to do?”

  “Hang on a second,” Jack interrupted. “You guys have all been in this same room for almost a week?” They nodded. “Well… what have you been eating?”

  Som brushed him aside. “We don’t need to eat in here.” He focused his attention on the man. “Seriously, though. Demons?”