The Heavens Rise (26 page)

The last time Ben had laid eyes on Noah Delongpre had been eight years ago; the man had been home early after doing his rounds at the hospital and rifling through mail in the kitchen as he pretended not to eavesdrop on the conversation Nikki and Ben were having in the other room; another whispered, frantic how-can-I-ever-forgive-Anthem session Ben felt overwhelmed by and powerless to bring to a satisfying close. Noah’s eyes had briefly met Ben’s through the doorway, and for the first time he’d seen real concern for Nikki in them. The sight of it had so startled him in that moment, he’d stammered through his next few sentences to his best friend.

Noah Delongpre had always struck Ben as a wildly self-centered man, and his only real joy in the world seemed to be his love for his wife, a love he saw his only daughter as a distraction from. Perhaps if Nikki had been less self-possessed, more in need of his constant guidance,
he could have treated her like a patient. Or a case. Maybe that’s exactly what he’d done following the madness recorded in the journal he’d just read.

But now, here he was, looking as if he had aged two decades instead of one. Gone was his military-grade buzz cut; it had been replaced by a thick salt-and-pepper mane he’d tied into a ponytail and threaded through the back of his gnawed baseball cap. He had the same angular features, with small, deeply set eyes, dwarfed by his boat’s prow of a nose. But Ben couldn’t tell if the tightness in his expression was the result of controlled fury or a great, interior strain.

“If you’re going to waste our time with protests, do it now, by all means,” Noah Delongpre said. “But allow me to remind you that there was a time when the mere notion of there being a chemical inside of plants that essentially metabolized sunlight itself would have seemed like an insanity to most men. Maybe it still does . . .”

“You exposed yourself to it too?”
Insane,
Ben thought, even as he spoke.
All of this is insane.
But it felt as if some long-buried set of instincts inside him had taken over and was answering for him, some primitive yet essential ability to believe in the impossible. He didn’t dare call it faith. Not yet, anyway. To do so would imply that the hell of which he’d just read had something of the divine within it.

“So you believe what you read?” Noah asked.

“Whatever you can do, whatever
she
can do, you’ve done it to me twice. So I’m not sure I really have a choice.”

“You were hoping it was her, no doubt. When you opened the door.”

“No. I knew it wasn’t her.”

“How?”

“Because she would never treat me like this.”

“It’s been almost a decade, Ben. You have no idea what she’s capable of doing to you or anyone—” His anger caused him to straighten a bit, and just this small movement stoked the fires of whatever injury he was struggling against. “That’s the only reason I drove you again—”

“
Drove
me?”

“That’s the term we came up with for it. Her power. He’s got his own name for it too, I bet. Marshall Ferriot, that is. But I warn you, don’t become lost in the language of the thing. Terms, labels—they’ll do nothing to blunt its reality.” When he noticed the expression on Ben’s face, his eyebrows lifted and he recoiled, both hands balanced atop the head of his cane. “Oh my. You are upset with me, aren’t you?”

“If Marshall Ferriot is out there . . . if he can do what you can do, why did you bring me
here
?”

“You would rather I leave you unguarded?”

“
Anthem
is out there!”

“If it’s Marshall’s intention to hurt Anthem Landry, then Anthem is either already dead by his own hand or he’s been changed into something you will never want to lay eyes on!” This eruption sent Noah into a coughing fit, and when he lifted one fist to his mouth, Ben saw that that the space from his index finger to his thumb was a mass of red welts and fresh scar tissue.

“How would you know?” Ben asked.

“What do you mean, how—”

“If he’s . . . if he’s been
changed.
The thing you described . . . Miss Millie . . . You killed it right away. How can you know what it really was, or if it was—”

“If it was still
her
, you mean?”

Ben nodded.

“There were others,” Noah said. “Many others. And we made it a point to keep them alive for as long as we could just so we could answer that very question. And if you think I harbor one scrap of guilt for shooting that
thing
my wife turned into exactly when I did, then you are a worse listener than I thought.”

“Others . . .”

“You don’t think I’ve been
here
for eight years, do you? What? You think we just vanished into the swamp to live like rats? No, that part
came later. First, we had to learn. First I had to play mad scientist, and she had to play test subject. You see, when I was in med school I did an exchange program in Thailand, so I knew the country fairly well. I also knew what we could get away with once we arrived. That’s where we conducted our experiments.”

“Experiments? On . . .
people
? You experimented on people?”

“On men who became sexually aroused by burning children with cigarettes and penetrating them with the legs of furniture. Trust me. We put them to a far, far better use. And no one will miss them. Least of all the children they traveled halfway across the world to abuse.”

“And what did your experiments prove?”

“Most of our initial conclusions we’re confirmed, just as she wrote them in her journal. The parasite resides in the brain and it allows the host to consume and metabolize frequencies of light which are not visible in this dimension of existence. On any equipment I could get my hands on anyway. But the pupils of both Nikki and her subjects dilated to twice their normal size during a drive, as we called it. Leading us to the conclusion that the eyes truly are the windows to the soul.”

“You consume . . . a person’s soul?”

“Close. You absorb part of it. It flows through you on a kind of conduit which we can’t see. The person completely loses all consciousness as a result. So forget what you’ve seen in the movies. This is not possession. You can’t see the world through
their
eyes. The mind-control aspect . . . well, it’s just a by-product, you see. A by-product of the fact that you can draw the person’s fundamental quantum material into your body by metabolizing part of it.”

“And the monsters?”

“Ah, see, that was the interesting part. Sometimes I would tell her what a subject was guilty of. This one, for instance, enjoys tying up young girls and applying abrasive chemicals to their bare flesh. Nikki would be able to drive that unsavory subject for as long as she wanted,
and no monster. Unfortunately. But if, on the other hand, I spritzed the man with a little bit of Anthem Landry’s favorite cologne—Ralph Lauren Polo, is it? Well, then . . . showtime.”

“And what were they? The monsters?”

“They were from the mouth of hell is what they were. They were malformed hybrids of that person and one of their worst nightmares or some element of a past trauma. Just as it happened with Millie. Don’t worry. We did our due diligence. We confirmed what their worst nightmares were beforehand just to be sure we weren’t off the mark. The interviews were not my favorite part. She mostly handled those, well-spoken girl that she is. I can show you some photographs, if you’d like.”

“What I would
like
is to make sure Anthem Landry is okay so I can—”

“Anthem Fucking Landry,”
Noah bellowed. “It all gets back to Anthem Landry. You’ve both tried so hard to save him—”

“What do you mean we both—”

“Oh, don’t you see it?
Don’t you?
She suffered a crisis of conscience in Bangkok, you see. She couldn’t go on with the experiments and she abandoned me. She
left
me there. But I knew exactly where she was going. Exactly. It’s the only reason I exposed myself, as you so eloquently put it. You see, I had taken samples from the pool before I capped the well. When she left me, I had no choice but to expose myself. But the problem? Well, the samples weren’t enough. It’s a funny creature, you see, our Elysium parasite. A drip and drab of it here and there has no real effect. In the wild, on its own, floating free through the swamp, it’s as inconsequential as a drop of water. But in concentration, it’s another thing entirely. If you capture it the way we did in that pool, if you get it to
flock,
then immerse someone in it, the change takes effect. So I came home as well to get—”

“As well?” Ben cried. “What do you mean
as well
?”

“Oh, come on, Ben. You’re smarter than this. You’ve always been
smarter than this. A big brute you meet on the Internet walks into your apartment late at night, gets violent with you and suddenly just walks away.”

It took Ben a few minutes of gape-mouthed silence to remember what Noah was talking about. “I . . . I pulled a gun on the guy . . . I—”

“Is that why he smashed his head into your door frame three times in a row, the exact same number of times he smashed your head into the headboard?”

“How do you know all—”

“Or better yet, Anthem Landry, in an
alleged
blackout, smashes every bottle of liquor in his apartment and writes himself a note that says he’s done drinking forever. She was here for years, Ben, working on your lives from the shadows. But then she got scared. You see, she ignored my warnings all together, and she flat-out ignored what we had discovered in Bangkok. Which is that it isn’t contempt or anger that makes the monsters rise. It’s
connection.
It’s true love and true hate. Not the kind of petty, childish hate that gets bandied about on the Internet as some petty device against strangers. I’m taking about true hatred, the kind where you’re convinced the other person has been taking from you year after year after year and you’re powerless to stop them.
That
kind of hatred, Ben. The kind of hatred you feel for Marshall Ferriot.”

“How?” Ben said. “How could she . . . Did she not feel a connection to
us
? How could she have been using her power on us and not turned us into—”

“She wasn’t using it on you! She was using it on the people
around
you. The people who threatened you on the way home from the bar, the people who were standing in your way at work. She was your guardian angel, Ben. And it was going so well, she started to get careless. I had found her by then and I warned her. She went too far with Anthem that night. The bottles, the note. She knew I was right. So she went back to your apartment to remove all the surveillance
software she’d installed on your computer so she could track your movements and whatever stories you were working on. That’s when your angry visitor showed up and she was forced to take action to keep you from becoming a hate crime. After that . . . Well, I haven’t seen her since.”

“That was six months ago. She has to know,” Ben whispered. “Just like you, she has to know after everything that’s happened today that Marshall’s awake. That he’s here. She
has
to know.”

“Maybe she does. I don’t know how far away she is. And you’re so desperate to leave. Do you really have the time to wait for her?”

“What does that— What do you mean?”

“I have more of it, Ben. I went to the source and I took as much as I could ever need.”

“It looks like you took too much,” Ben whispered.

Noah lifted his scarred hand from the top of the cane. “Nice try,” he muttered. “But this is from something else altogether.”

Noah’s smile was wobbly. “You always hid behind your sarcasm, Ben. Always. When you weren’t hiding behind Anthem and Nikki. You’re still hiding behind him, by the way. Standing here, at the threshold of one of the greatest miracles ever to be visited upon mankind, wondering how that vulgar, self-obsessed drunk will fare by the time the night is over.”

“I haven’t heard anything that sounds like a miracle,” Ben whispered.

“Then you haven’t been listening!”
Noah roared.

“Why didn’t you stop him yourself?” Ben fired back. “Why go to all this trouble and waste all this time?”

“So time spent on
you
is wasted?”

“Stop fucking around with me!”

“There is no shield against what Marshall Ferriot has. There is no antidote. And if he gets you in his sights and he gets close enough, there’s no running. I am going to give you what you need to stop him,
Ben. But first it was my responsibility to tell you our story so you would know the risks. So you would know how this works.”

“You’ve told me
nothing,
” Ben said. “I’ve got one journal entry from eight years ago, and nothing about what came afterwards except for your word. Which I don’t believe, by the way.”

“How could you deny what I can do after every—”

“I’m denying your
story
. You were the only person she had left in the world. She wouldn’t have left you in Bangkok unless she had a damn good reason.”

Noah lowered his eyes as if he were disappointed, and this time, Ben felt the darkness come like an insect darting through the air behind him before coming in for a landing on the back of his neck.

•   •   •

He came to on his knees, just outside a weak halo of light thrown by a Coleman lantern sitting on the floorboards a few feet away. There was pitch black all around him, but he could sense that he’d been moved—
driven
—inside some kind of barn or large storage shed. But it was the photographs spread out in a semicircle before him that captivated him.

At least twenty images in all, but they were of the same three monstrous creatures. One of them had to be the thing Millie Delongpre had been turned into. Just as Nikki had written in her journal, the contrast between the creature’s scaled face and the huge, staring, death-glazed human eyes stopped Ben’s breath in his throat, forced him back onto his haunches.

The others were worse.

All of them had been photographed in death; there was a giant hybrid of a man and what had to be a pit bull that had an almost serene expression, save for its gaping jaws, so huge and so stuffed with giant, almost cartoonish canine teeth, they looked poised to divide the entire creature’s head in half. The most human-looking creature of the three
was an enormous woman—the combat rifle leaning against the concrete wall next to her gave her scale; Ben figured she was at least ten feet tall—with a giant ridge dividing her head and her twin flaps of greasy, knotted black curls. The flesh of her crossed legs was sealed together as if by hot wax. If she had been mobile, she would have been forced to drag herself around by her arms. Her dangling, teardrop-shaped breasts were striated by spiderwebs of dark blue veins and a lewd, serpentine tongue dangled from her leering clown’s grin of a mouth, so big that the entire thing could never have fit between her lips no matter how hard she had tried.