Messenger of Fear (Messenger of Fear 1)

Messenger said, “You have the right to make your offer, Oriax.”

“Oh, not just yet, I think,” Oriax said, no longer in such a playful mood. “We will talk again, when she comes to see the whole truth and faces what her fate must be with you, Messenger. Then.” She raised one exquisitely manicured finger, extended it slowly, and let it merely brush my cheek.

I shuddered as the images washed through me again, washed through me but did not leave me feeling clean. But I closed my eyes, and I . . . savored them . . . just for a moment before they faded away. I knew before I opened my eyes that she would be gone, and she was.

Messenger watched me with the detachment of a scientist watching a specimen in a petri dish.

“What choice?” I asked him.

He looked at me, looked directly into my eyes, and I felt powerless to do anything but return his gaze. His detachment grew strained and I felt that in some way still too inchoate to explain, he was giving me something, some curse or blessing, or maybe it was all my imagination, so recently rocked by Oriax.

But for just a moment I saw things in his blue eyes. There was power there, and loss. There was knowledge but also vulnerability. He was, for all his strangeness, a boy. Maybe he was a thousand years old. But maybe he was barely older than me. Beneath that long black coat with its dreadful skull buttons, and beneath that severe, steel-gray shirt, there was maybe something real, something physical.

He was not a spirit, I felt, but a real being, a person, a mind but also a body.

But no, all of this was just a sort of hangover of the wild fantasies Oriax’s touch had revealed. No, I told myself harshly, you must not forget, Mara, that this boy is in league with the Master of the Game and that his touch was the very soul of darkest terror.

Samantha Early had fetched her backpack. She was going to school. Only after she had climbed into the car with her harried father did I recognize that she was wearing the exact outfit in which she killed herself.

“Oh, God. It’s today,” I said.

“Yes,” Messenger said.

“We have to . . . to stop it.”

I expected a non-answer or at best a cryptic comment that would do nothing to reassure or enlighten me. But, to my surprise, Messenger came closer and waited until the gravity he exerted had brought me to face him, to look at his face, into his eyes.

“You must understand. We do not have the duty of changing the world, of substituting our own wills for those of the people involved. A human deprived of freedom becomes something less than human. There must be free will. Even when . . .” Some dark memory clouded his eyes and caused him to glance away as if to hide a pain he was unwilling to reveal. He took a steadying breath and in a monotone went on. “People are free to make choices, even terrible ones. But when they make bad choices, when they do evil, then it may be that justice, fairly and ruthlessly applied, can show a person a new path. Justice is our cause, not human happiness.”

I was torn as to what to say in response. This was the most Messenger had ever shared with me. I didn’t want to discourage future explanations with too many questions, let alone arguments.

But just as curiosity drives me, so a lesser attribute, argumentativeness, sometimes rears its head. So I said, “If the point is justice, why the game? Why not just decide a sentence and carry it out?”

I blushed to see what next animated his face, for I was certain that for just the briefest moment, a flash that escaped before he could conceal it, he had looked at me with affection. Once he had recomposed his features into their usual emotionless character, he said, “Here is what I have been taught, and a small part of what I must teach you.”

Then, he drew four circles of light. They hung in the air. I noted my own calm reaction to what was at the least a very convincing special effect or at most something very like a miracle. I had seen nothing but miracles since waking in a field of dead grass beneath a sentient mist.

The circles were blue, red, green, and a color that I could not name since it appeared to shift, never remaining anything identifiable.

“This,” he said, touching the blue circle, “is what you are given at birth: your physical self, including your brain.” Messenger next touched the red circle. “Here is what you have lived: your parents, your schooling, all that you have seen and felt in your sixteen years. Your experience.”

He drew the red circle across so that it partly overlapped the blue.

“This,” he said, touching the green circle, “is your free will, the decisions you make.” He drew this circle across to overlap the earlier two.

Then he waited, no doubt knowing that curiosity would compel me to ask, “And the final circle?”

“This?” He touched the variegated circle. “This is chaos and randomness. It is chance.”

He pulled this final circle into position so that it overlapped the configuration, touching what I was given, what I had experienced, and my free will in turn. At the very center of the pattern the overlapping circles formed a bulging rectangle. He touched it and it glowed with a bright white light.

“And that,” Messenger said, “is you. And me. And Samantha and Liam and Emma, and all human beings. We live our lives in a shifting matrix of what we are given, what we experience, what we choose, and what random chance does that we cannot control.”

“The game is randomness,” I said.

“The game is randomness,” he agreed. “It is the most ancient of forces. In the beginning was a moment when random chance turned nothing to something. Nonexistence to existence.”

I had many more questions, and perhaps sensing this, Messenger moved us, so that we were no longer in Samantha Early’s driveway, but once more in her school, standing, as Samantha herself was, beneath the banner that read, Congratulations Samantha On Your Suck-cess!!!