Pulse of Heroes (26 page)

Elliot couldn’t explain his actions, and
refused to even consider the idea that he might be developing
feelings for Michelle. Still, Xander argued that once Elliot made
the decision to save her life, he bore the responsibility to
explain things to her. Michelle would be lost otherwise, and
considering her curious personality would probably come after the
truth anyway. Only she would do so without any supervision or care
for their privacy, which could cause everyone at the school to
suffer.

Michelle looked around the giant room, then
back at Elliot who was still leaning against the table. She might
have been excited to discover what she considered ‘miracles’ of his
physical abilities, but that was nothing compared to the entirely
different reality he was about to reveal to her. Elliot knew that
knowing about him and his kind was going to change Michelle’s life
forever. Was he being selfish? Was he really sharing all this with
her because she deserved to know the truth? Or was he sharing with
her for his own benefit? Whatever the answer, Michelle the
seventeen-year-old girl would not leave the school as the same
person that entered it. How could he do this to her? How could he
curse her like that? The humans that knew about Elliot and his kind
always felt isolated from the rest of humanity.

“I will leave you two alone now,” Xander
said, and both Elliot and Michelle watched the glass doors hiss
closed behind him.

Michelle stepped forward and looked around in
awe. “What is this place?” she asked in amazement. The place looked
like a huge library and a museum combined. It felt circular, but
she couldn’t see the walls from where she stood because the layers
of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves extended in all directions like a
labyrinth. Some of the shelves didn’t hold books at all, but rather
they contained artifacts of all kinds, each marked with a date and
place of origin. In what appeared to be the middle point of the
room there was a massive circular table, the one Elliot was leaning
against, with computer monitors occupying half of it while the
other half remained clear. Close to the table there were four
curved couches that were also laid out in a circular pattern. The
floor was made of etched concrete although a few thin rugs were
strewn about here and there. Elliot gave Michelle the time to
absorb her surroundings. After spinning around and around several
times to look at everything she became dizzy, and laughed at
herself when she almost tipped over. Elliot laughed too.

“Careful. It’s a lot to look at. This is
where all our important things are stored and archived. We also do
a lot of our research here when we are not researching on the road.
As you can see, this is a school. Just not a conventional one.”

Michelle wanted to know why it was
underground, and why the glass doors? Elliot explained to her that
the room was specifically designed and precisely calibrated to
protect the many ancient artifacts stored inside. It was supplied
with special pressurized air that had almost zero humidity, and
there was a filtration system that removed whatever moisture was
brought in through their breathing. Many of the artifacts would
have had to have been protected behind museum glass, but here they
were lying out exposed and just as safe. Even the light was
especially designed to eliminate all UV rays.

Elliot motioned for Michelle to follow him
and they walked deeper into the maze of multiple shelves,
eventually reaching the wall. It too was made of shiny polished
concrete, and Elliot explained that it was five feet thick and had
been specifically constructed so as to keep the insides under
regulated temperature. Neither fire nor ice could affect things
within its confines, and it also provided security because the
value of the room’s contents was utterly immeasurable. Michelle
asked why the wall was curved, and just as she suspected, Elliot
told her that she was looking at the bottom half of the same
circular wall that surrounded the school premises. “This place is
huge then!” Michelle exclaimed.

Next, Elliot showed Michelle a small, dark
glass room. Strange uniforms and masks that looked like HAZMAT
outfits hung on hooks just outside it and Elliot turned on the
light inside the room using a separate switch. The little glass
cubicle held many more rolled up papers and books that were written
on parchment, even fabric. He explained to her that the articles in
there were extremely fragile, and that extra special care was
needed while handling them.

They navigated back to the large table in the
center of the room. Elliot pointed to several computers stacked
underneath it in a sort of cage-like structure, and told Michelle
that Kahl was working on a massive project of transferring all the
data they had in various manuscripts into a large file that they
would eventually release to the public. They had many books and
ancient knowledge that the academic world thought were lost to
time. Michelle didn’t know what to say; there was nothing that
could be said to describe the wonderment and newfound respect that
she felt towards Elliot and the rest of them. She sat down on one
of the leather couches and told Elliot how amazing it was to even
be there. But then she remembered everything that Xander had told
her upstairs, and she felt troubled again. Elliot’s mood changed
when he saw her tensing up. “Everything Xander told you is true,
Michelle,” he said as he sat down on a couch across from hers.
Which only proved to Michelle that the tension between them wasn’t
imagined. It was a strange tension, not like when they almost
kissed, and it wasn’t about anger, or hurt feelings. It was a
tension of mistrust. He wasn’t telling her everything. Normally she
would feel hurt, but under these strange circumstances, she
rationalized that Elliot was holding back because he was protecting
himself.

“I know you told me that you’re not like
everyone else, but I don’t think I really understood what that
meant until what Xander told me. I believed you because I saw you
do all those extraordinary things, but I didn’t really grasp it
all,” she said, choosing her words very carefully.

“I know, Michelle. I can’t even grasp it all
myself. You look at me, and you see me as I am through your eyes,
but your brain can’t really grapple with the complete picture. I
have been alive for so long, constantly reinventing myself again
and again, that I myself get confused about all the lives I’ve
lived and the stories that I’ve told.”

“How old are you, really?” she asked him.
Elliot studied Michelle, measuring her. He wasn’t sure if she could
handle the truth. “You don’t have to worry about it. I won’t freak
out, I promise,” she said.

Elliot smiled at her in amusement. “I’m about
4700 years old, give or take,” he announced proudly, laughing when
he saw Michelle’s jaw drop after she could no longer fight it.

Michelle couldn’t deal with that number, not
yet. She didn’t know what to think, so she concentrated on
something else, asking him what did he mean by ‘give or take’, and
when was his actual birthday. But Elliot explained to her that he
had experienced many birthdays, depending on which calendar he was
living under and which chapter of life he was living, and that he
had intentionally stopped thinking about his real birthday a long
time ago.

Elliot had never known his real parents. When
his mother fell pregnant, she refused to disclose who the father
was, not even to her own sister. All she disclosed was that the
father was a traveler from a foreign land. It was a difficult
birth, and although the delivery was successful, she died 12 days
later from severe hemorrhaging. “I never knew my mother, or the
‘supposed foreigner’ that was my father.”

Michelle looked down at the floor, unable to
watch Elliot’s face as it contorted with pain. As much as she
wanted to know everything about him, she felt that he was telling
her too much. Was she supposed to show sympathy, which was what she
felt, or would that make him feel uncomfortable? He sure didn’t
seem like he wanted comforting, but she would be lying if she
pretended to act otherwise. Michelle had thought that she would be
able to handle anything that was thrown her way, yet she found
herself without an answer. She wanted Elliot to spare her the
details, but he had decided otherwise. He hadn’t visited those
cobweb-covered memories in a long time, and it was probably time to
bleed out a little. Elliot sensed Michelle’s squirming thoughts,
but figured that if his words scared her away it was probably for
the best anyway.

In those years it was common convention to
send any orphans to be raised under the auspices of the great
temple of Enki, The Abzu. But Elliot’s grandmother refused to send
him away. He was the only connection she had to her beloved
daughter and she wasn’t going to lose him too. His grandparents and
aunt tried to raise him as well as they could. Still, anytime they
took Elliot out in public places such as the market or celebrations
outside the temples, strangers would curse at them and spit in
front of their feet. They felt that because Elliot was not raised
inside the temple, his presence would bring bad luck upon the
entire city. By the time that Elliot was old enough to walk on his
own most people had made peace with the boy’s presence, but some
still looked at him with suspicion. When Elliot was about eight
years old he got jumped by four older boys and they beat him and
called him all kind of names including ‘bastard’. When he returned
home with a torn shirt and a bruised face he demanded that his
grandfather tell him the truth about his real parents. After which
Elliot grew to hate his mother. He was cursed because of her lack
of integrity. She obviously protected the name of his father, which
only meant that she had not been raped or taken advantage of. She
cared more about him than about herself or her unborn child. As he
got a little older, he became obsessed with finding out his
father’s identity, and it was around those years that he started
showing signs of extra strength and strange abilities. And that was
when his world turned upside down. Elliot went from being looked
down upon to someone who was blessed and celebrated. The same
people who spit and cursed at him would come visit him at home so
he could lay his hands on them to ease their ailments and to bless
them; the hypocrisy was all too clear. If he had a use to others he
was blessed, and if they had no use of him he was cursed. Elliot
began making rounds at the Abzu and even traveled to Uruk to bless
people at the temple of the Goddess Inanna. He helped his
grandparents out financially by charging a small fee for his
services, yet he grew angrier with each passing day. He had somehow
hoped that his fame would bring his father out of hiding and the
two could finally be reunited. Of course that meeting never took
place.

Michelle was captivated by Elliot’s amazing
tale, but no matter how hard she tried, it was difficult for her to
imagine that his account wasn’t some fantasy straight out of A
Thousand and One Arabian Nights. His words came out like a
memorized story. He just spit them out with hardly any attachment
to their context. How many times had he repeated the same story to
someone else, she wondered?

Elliot could sense that Michelle was
evaluating him and he didn’t like not knowing what she was
thinking. He got up from his seat and tried to find something to do
with his hands, picking up articles from the shelves and studying
them as if he had never seen them before. What was she thinking?
Should he care what some kid thought about him? No, of course not.
Michelle got up from the couch and followed Elliot. “Are you ok?”
she asked him quietly. She was afraid that her question might imply
that she thought him to be weak. Elliot looked at Michelle as if it
was the first time he noticed that she was there.

“Oh, nothing at all. I just didn’t want to
bore you with any more details. It’s a long drawn out story and
it’s pointless. Maybe now you can understand why my childhood is
not something I care to remember, let alone a birthday.”

Elliot’s mood changed and although his eyes
were wide and blue there was a cold and distant gaze to them.
Michelle could tell that talking about his childhood had bothered
him a lot more than he even revealed to her. She felt sad for him,
and her whole being, her consciousness, told her, screamed at her,
that she should comfort him, but Elliot’s tense muscles warned her
not to get too close. Michelle pointed to a white object on a
nearby shelf. “What is this?” she asked. It looked like a narrow,
shallow bowl on top of a small stand with carvings on each side of
its base. One was a monkeylike creature standing on two legs and
holding something in each hand, and on the other side she
recognized the half dog half man image of an Egyptian god. “It
doesn’t seem like this bowl can hold much of anything.” Elliot
smiled when he saw what she was looking at, and she was glad that
she had succeeded in distracting him from his dark mood. Elliot’s
eyes smiled when he smiled and Michelle stood next to him
transfixed by his beauty.

He ran his finger along the smooth curvature
of the object in question and told her that she was right, the
narrow curvature of the bowl would definitely not hold much.

“Besides a human head,” he snickered.

“What!” Michelle jumped back just a little
and that made Elliot laugh. He told her that the alabaster headrest
belonged to Kahl. It was the one they had rested his head upon in
his burial chamber. The monkey-like creature was a depiction of the
god Bes who protected against evil and the other depiction was of
the god Anupu, better known as Anubis, the Protector of the
Dead.

“But Kahl is not dead! What are you talking
about?” asked a very confused Michelle. Elliot laughed even louder
than before, and explained to her that Kahl had only pretended to
be dead in order to slip out of town unnoticed. He was able to slow
his heartbeat to a level where no human could detect it. When they
placed his cold body in the embalming room for the night, he simply
got up and left, taking the headrest as a souvenir. Everyone
thought that Kahl’s enemies had dragged the body away as an act of
dishonor. He was a high official in Lower Egypt back then, and even
in ancient times, every politician had his enemies. By sunrise Kahl
had made his way to the port where Elliot was waiting for him on a
small boat. They were well on their way towards Oea by
midmorning.