Witch World (46 page)

Syn appeared annoyed that I knew of the man, that Kendor had shared such a secret with me. She spoke quickly. “I was ripe for the truth. I would have discovered it on my own. He merely pointed me in the right direction.”

“In the direction of hell, where demons feed on the pain of others?” I asked.

“Phrase it that way if you wish. Or call them gods who are capable of transforming the greatest evil into the greatest good.”

“Pleasure?” I asked.

“Pleasure. Ecstasy. Bliss. Different words for the same goal.” Syn paused. “Remove your hand from my younger self.”

I hesitated. “Why?”

Syn chuckled. “The believer in God asks why? Did you know that the atheist who has realized that the only salvation in life is pleasure usually asks why not? Why shouldn’t your pain be used to generate joy?”

“Because you create it at another’s expense,” I replied.

“Then remove your hand. The longer you touch her, the greater her pain will last.”

“That’s a lie. Your son died sixteen centuries ago. This is just a play. We can’t change the past.”

Syn grew more serious. “Maybe it can’t be changed, no one knows. But I do know I saw you right after I found Robere. You stood above me as you stand now. I thought you were a demon, come to mock me in my grief.” She paused. “Remove your hand from my shoulder. Stop the pleasure from entering your heart.”

With a tremendous act of will, I managed to withdraw my hand. The pleasure stopped. Not even the satisfaction of letting the old Syn go prevented the loss from crashing down on me. I felt buried beneath a mountain of blandness, where there was neither pleasure nor pain, only emptiness. It was amazing how dreadful it was. That quick, I feared I was already addicted to the pleasure.

“I did it,” I taunted her. “It wasn’t so hard.”

“That’s because you’ve just begun.”

I should have known what was to follow.

Suddenly we were in Sicily with the Syn and Kendor of that time, who were attending to their daughter, Era, a grown woman with two children, Anna and Theo, all of whom were sick with the bubonic plague. Anna was the sickest of the three, and Syn stayed with her night and day in both worlds.

It helped their offspring that Syn and Kendor had healing abilities, but the disease possessed the power of a demon’s curse. It was too virulent for any form of psychic healing. Over a
week—which I experienced as compressed moments—Anna’s face and throat swelled a terrible black-blue as the bubonic bacteria multiplied in her veins. Every breath was a nightmare. As the girl neared death, Syn insisted I touch her, and the weary Syn of that time. I protested, but she grabbed my hands and placed them where she wanted.

The emotional grief, the physical pain, it was all a horrible blur. I couldn’t stand it. Indeed, I refused to take it, and although I knew I was once again falling for Syn’s seduction, I repeated the line from the litany in my mind:
Pain becomes a pleasure when power creates pain.

Instantly the pain stopped as a tidal wave of pleasure rocked me to the core. The euphoria was like a gift. Yes, I thought, that was exactly what it was. A gift from the denizens of the red realm.

“Naturally they reward those who reward them,” Syn whispered in my ear, in Anna’s room, as the girl began to choke and ancient Syn wept. “All you have to do is bring them suffering, yours or another’s, and the pleasure will be there. Not only that, but they’ll grant you great power.”

“Why?” I asked.

“So you’ll have the ability to create more pain.”

Her remark explained the last line of the litany, the one I had been reciting.

“That’s how you discovered bafflement. During World War Two,” I said. “It was given to you because you helped the Nazis.”

“You strike near the truth. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. But you forget how much the Americans contributed with their firebombing of millions of Japanese, and the final two blows that gave me full access to this realm, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In those two instants I felt a thrill you cannot imagine.” Syn seemed to lean closer, although she was already on top of me. “From my perspective, it was the most God-fearing nation on earth that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there can be no God.”

“The afterimage of those thrills never left you,” I said. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki got burned into your soul. You’re forever trying to re-create them.”

“So I am. So what?” Syn mocked me. “If you don’t approve, then release Anna and let her die. Oh, wait, I see you hesitate. Are you afraid your pleasure might stop?”

It was harder this time to let go. Syn’s grief was greater than before, and as a result, so was the pleasure the inhabitants of the red realm were bestowing on me. It seemed perverse to drink nectar because the person beside me was sweating blood. Yet so it was. Anna was dying in her grandmother’s hands, and Syn’s daughter, Era, and her grandson, Theo, were coughing in the next room. The Syn of my vision knew it was only a matter of time before she lost all her offspring. Yet her pain only magnified my delight. It was as if every cell in my body were having an orgasm.

Somehow, though, I managed to let go. The sight of Syn’s
agony gave me the strength. I was too disgusted with myself to hold on.

I expected red-robed Syn to react with anger.

She only laughed. It was like she knew she had me.

Syn took me forward in time to the Syn of the eighteenth century, to the days when she ran every morning to the letter box to see if there was a message from Herme from the New World. But Herme never wrote, and every day she read in the papers how the war between England and the colonies was causing more casualties. She knew in her heart her son must be one of them.

Red-robed Syn forced me to fix on a vision of her younger self as she knelt, weeping, beside the empty letter box. Once more, with the pain came the pleasure, because I instinctively redirected her suffering toward those who inhabited the red realm. It was as if I offered it to them, like a sacrifice.

In my vision I saw a tall man with a long white beard appear beside the weeping Syn. He looked like a wizard and I didn’t have to be told that I was gazing at the infamous Alchemist. So he was alive during those days, even though Kendor swore he had killed him more than two thousand years earlier.

This time Syn pulled my hands away.

The pleasure ceased. The vision faded.

“You’re not ready to know what he taught me,” Syn said.

It was the first time since I had entered the red realm that
I had seen her rattled. “Afraid I might become more powerful than you?” I teased her.

She slapped my face, and it stung, and I didn’t even have a physical body. “Don’t forget who’s the master here!” she cried.

I fought to act unmoved. “Strange, I don’t remember ever agreeing to be your student.”

Syn appeared to welcome my bravura. Again she came near and seemed to speak in either my ear or my mind. “I asked if you believed in God. Even though it’s a work of fiction, the Bible contains traces of secret wisdom. Do you remember when Jesus told his disciples, ‘In my Father’s house are many mansions’?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well, this is my mansion! And this is your room!” Syn exclaimed as she raised her arms and in a flash we were in the hospital, in the morgue, when Dr. Dave was alone with me, feeling me up. I watched as I finally tapped into my power, the fire in my solar plexus, and my body suddenly warmed and I was able to sit upright.

“You goddamn pervert! Touch me again and I’ll cut off your dick!”

Of course the shock was what initiated the man’s heart attack, even though he probably would have had one soon enough. Syn, however, didn’t care about that. From her side she was trying to prove to me that I was already a murderer. I was getting used to her methods. That’s why she was taking me
to my first victim, almost as if to shout,
See what you did to my friend!
I watched as the coroner sagged to the floor and gasped for breath.

“Put your hand on his heart,” Syn ordered.

“No.”

“I promise you will be pleased.”

“No,” I said.

“Very pleased, Jessica. Or should I call you Jessie? Are you not a killer in both worlds?”

“I’m not a killer at all! I’m not like you!”

She grabbed my arm. “You wouldn’t be here if you were not ready to follow me. Notice how none of the others were able to cross over to the red sphere. Only you came.” She released my arm but shoved me in the back toward Dr. Dave.

“Wait,” I said, sensing she wasn’t telling me the whole truth. That was one positive quality of the red realm. Thoughts appeared as physical objects, they had substance, which made it difficult for her to hide her agenda from me.

“Why?” Syn demanded.

“In witch world, in the house, I’m holding Lara.”

Syn paused. “So you noticed.”

I nodded. “There’s a connection. She’s another reason I’m here with you. But . . . she’s not like you.”

“She’s not like anyone! She’s an infant! You’ve said these words yourself. To me, and to you, she’s pure potentiality. She’s like atomic energy. Is it good? Is it bad? It can be used to heat
a million homes. Or it can flatten the same homes. Lara sits in the same position. She’s raw power, and yes, that power has helped bring you to this realm ahead of your time. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we can mold her to our own design.”

“You brought me here to get to her.”

“I brought you here to get to both of you.” She poked my arm sharply. “Now touch him, drink of his pain, reap what you have sown. I promise, you won’t be disappointed.”

I don’t know why I did it. Curiosity, perhaps.

Lies. How easy it is to lie inside one’s own mind.

I was like an addict mentally rationalizing his next fix.

I did it for the pleasure I knew he would give me.

I put my hand on Dr. Dave’s dying heart. Even when the real Syn, dressed in blue scrubs, reentered the morgue and spoke to the man, I kept my hand in place. And I knew Dr. Susan Wheeler had seen me even then, as I saw her now, in a vision.

The pleasure was pure and irresistible.

If there was no God, then this wasn’t a bad substitute.

I was only able to let go when Syn offered me a greater taste. A snap of her fingers brought us forward in time into another room. To where Russell burned to death in the fire I had thrust into his chest. Oh, Lord, such pain, such pleasure—his screams actually made me giggle. I knew my reaction was sick, and I didn’t care.

Then, finally, the culmination arrived, when Syn led me out into the desert to my most recent victim. I had kidnapped Kari to protect Jimmy and Huck. I hadn’t intended to kill her. It was a fact I’d had no idea about her secret abilities.

Yet that was nothing but another set of lies. The two of us, we had a history. From the time she had stolen Jimmy away from me, I had been itching to kill the bitch.

Touching Kari’s head, as I choked the breath from her body, grinding the back of her head in the gravel I would use to bury her, I was suddenly filled with a euphoria the gods would have envied. And this time I didn’t have to pause and direct her pain to the red realm. I did it automatically, and with, of course, pleasure.

I had to drop to my knees to stay in contact with Kari, just as I had done earlier in the day when I had crushed her trachea. And when I looked up, drunk with the sparks flying between the synapses of my spirit brain, I saw that Syn was not only wearing a red robe but a gold crown. From my place on the ground—out of gratitude to the thrill she had given me—I bowed to her. For the first time I actually felt grateful to her.

“You’re the red queen,” I said, finally understanding the hidden meaning in the game of twenty-two. It was no wonder the Alchemist had created it, and that he collected the profits from it. He was the one who had shown the world the opening to the red world, which stood above witch world, not to mention the real world. It was odd but it no longer bothered me
that my own world should seem like a place of shadows. I felt I owed Syn an apology.

“Save it,” she said as she read my mind once more. “Pay me back with blood. Pay
them
back with pain.”

“Them?” I said.

She put her hands on my shoulders and leaned over and kissed my forehead. “You’re one of us now, Jessica,” she said.

I let go of Kari and stood. The loss of the pleasure she gave me caused me no grief. Because I knew what was to come next would be even better. Yes, I told myself, it would just keep getting better.

I WAS WRONG. A MOMENT LATER WE EXITED THE RED
sphere and nothing had changed. “Nothing” meant the players in the drama were still the same. They were even in the same place as when I had left the room. The reason was because I had never really gone anywhere. No time had even gone by, as far as I could tell.

Yet something inside of me had changed.

I was hungry now. Hungry for the pleasure.

It was not as if I had lost my mind. I still knew that Syn was evil, just as any intelligent heroin addict knows that his drug of choice is evil. But that doesn’t lessen his desire for the needle. In fact, it probably increases it. And Syn was offering me the most forbidden fruit of all. A straightforward exchange. Give me pain and I’ll give you pleasure. That was her message. That was her power.

I trembled as I held Lara in my hands. I felt unworthy of holding her, at least until I had proven I was worthy of being her mother. Because I suddenly realized that might not be the case.

For that reason I handed her to James.

But that was not the only reason I gave her up.

I needed both my hands free.

From nearby, Syn looked at me and nodded.

We had exited the red sphere but I could still read her mind. She didn’t have to speak the words. For the moment, the fusion had halted, and Herme and Kendor had reopened their eyes. They had failed to strike Syn down but their effort had not been in vain because even though Syn’s bafflement had protected her, it had failed to destroy her enemies.