Sins of the Reaper - 3

Unless Dante warned him beforehand, Marlowe will assume that since I'm blind, I am no danger to him. But I am not nearly as helpless as I appear. After decades developing my own form of second sight, the olfactory and auditory centers of my brain have achieved what my damaged visual cortex no longer can.

In addition to scent and sound, I can detect the heat billowing from vehicles and buildings and from the sound of the wind floating above and around objects 'see' the seeming vacancy of unseen form and matter. People move about me like ghosts cloaked in gossamer silks, their energy pulsing like saintly auras.

I have against all hope learned to navigate the unseen as if it was seen, recognizing obstacles within my pathway in the same manner and eventually with the same ease as integrating the sensation and coordination of my limbs in relation to my body.

But as Marlowe reaches his ghostly right arm slowly into his jacket for his gun his fingers tighten convulsively and unexpectedly, his fingernails drawing blood from his palms even as my fingernails do the same into my own. His breath expels in shock and exasperation as he tries to stand before collapsing back into his seat, the muscles in his calves beginning to violently spasm and tighten around the tibia and fibula in each leg, the pressure threatening the integrity of his bones even if only within his own mind. Likewise, his feet are immobilized as his toes helplessly curl inward much as his fingers continue to drive into his palms.

“A time is coming and is now,” I murmur, “when fellow feeling will prevent neighbor from inflicting physical injury on neighbor for fear of bowing under pain of equal and identical symptom. Do you feel my pain Inspector Marlowe? Ah … but you only feel a tenth of the pain I now experience. And do you know why?”

“No,” he answers in a strained voice, mocking his efforts to master the pain without thrashing wildly about.

“Pity. Unlike the Reaper I feel pity for you even as you try to kill me. You feel in your flesh only the pain I inflict on myself as your heart and respiration move synchronously with mine, but the torment of my thoughts, the brain storms and the heartache that I daily endure – those I spare you even though they too are the legacy of my Master. I could kill you Inspector Marlowe … I could stop the beating of your heart or the respiration in your lungs. But I cannot stop your heart without stopping my own for that is the natural and sacred order.

“A time is coming and now is when no one will teach his neighbor, saying, Thou shalt not kill, for he who kills, must do equal violence to himself; and no one will admonish another Thou shalt not steal, for he who steals robs himself; and no one will warn another Thou shalt not bear false witness, for he who bears false witness testifies against himself.”

But Marlowe has stopped listening as he begins to helplessly stomp his crippled feet in increasing agony. Rolling my chair carefully around my desk, I slowly approach him until my knees make gentle contact with his and I begin to comfort him like a mother cooing to a suffering child.

“Be still,” I whisper as I reach my arms around him, my hands and his still tightly clenched as he falls helplessly against me. “It will be over in just a moment – the pain will cease and you will be made whole.” Releasing the tension in my flexor digitorum profundus and superficialis muscles and therefore also in his, he slips backwards into the chair in relief, only stiffening once I slip his pistol from its holster and begin to roll my chair back around my desk. He makes no effort to retrieve it at all.

“I’m a dead man,” he says simply.

Men are such babies.

“On the contrary,” I reply, “you killed me. I’m the one who is dead.”

I fire two rounds from the pistol into a thick book in one of my desk drawers and hand the pistol back to him.

“I’ll contact the cleaners and ensure they invoice the Company. I only expect to live a few more days in any event and they can come out and do the job then. Dante doesn’t even need to know.

Marlowe holds the pistol in his hand uncertainly for a few moments before holstering it – perhaps wondering if he could get a shot off before I cripple him a second time.

“You want something?” he asks weakly.

“Yes. I want your help.”

“I thought you were finished with the game.”

“Me too. But now that I know you lied to Dante I still can make one final move.”

Marlowe answers me with silence.

The last time I played the game was the hardest and most worthless lesson of my life, the beginning of the long, lonely years following cruelly in its wake, my thoughts blindly grasping after a calculation to fill the aching gap between reality and hope. But I never found it, the remembered terror still awakening me in the quiet of night, the intrigues that have long governed my life exposed by the mocking echo of the silent darkness, a trembling reminder that when it really mattered my equations failed me utterly.

But the game will not end with my death – Dante will have to play someone else – someone whose stake in the outcome he will not foresee – someone hidden by the mistaken assumption that he has killed his most knowledgeable adversary.

She is so much greater than I.

Stubbornly looking for evidence of my earlier machinations he will eventually begin to draw patterns and connections that exist only in his mind, planning and executing countermoves that must eventually expose his flank for the final, fatal blow.

“Dante will attempt to confront Shaytan himself. He will bring you and you will tell me what happens. Do not under any circumstances carry ammunition or have any loaded in your pistol.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Shaytan can do things that were never intended when the company commissioned him. His anger is like fuel to a fire. When Dante confronts him, he will be enraged.

Dante and all who do his bidding are the enemy. Shaytan will not hurt you if you do not present a lethal threat. He can only kill now by using the lethal intention of his adversary. No adversary – no one dies. If all of you came unarmed no one would need die at all, but Dante will never do that.”

“Why didn’t you tell Dante that?”

“He never would believe it, but you can pass it on to him if you feel strongly enough about it.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Live. Afterwards, come and tell me what happened at your earliest convenience.”

When I look into the future of what might be, I see every conceivable contingency Dante might choose, but Jon’s mind is as dark and unknowable as a thunderstorm.

His unexpected reappearance should have connected the dots on a long- neglected graph drawn half a lifetime before, but it’s as if he has not returned at all, the dust of the man I thought I knew still awaiting the last trump within the rubble of old Bethlehem.

I need someone to tell me what happens in the confrontation between Jon and Dante even if only to relieve my mind. Perhaps I might even use it to do a little good.

Then and only then, can I finally rest from my labors.