Inside Lucifer's War (6 page)

I heard the usual chorus of hisses and moans after the reading, but then I heard shouts, singing, and chanting.

Lucifer returns to an upright position and the chants quiet. He stares at me, and I shudder at his look. He speaks slowly, as if he is drained from the recitation. “Dear Thomas. I offer you the chance to write the story of the one whom I shall raise. You will author the only book of the person who will rule on my behalf. It will be a sacred text. A book above all books. It will define how people should live so they should have peace. For this role, you will have great power and authority. You will write the New Testament of this time.”

I can hardly breathe at this proposition. I am to write the book of the Antichrist. This is madness.

Bluntly he commands, “Tell me that I chose the right person! Tell me now or perish, for my time has come!”

“You chose well,” I reply instantly. “I will do all that you ask.”

He continues, “I thought so. I don’t make mistakes. Now for your first assignment. I realize you haven’t had time to consume all of this, but there is an urgency you don’t understand.

“When you return to work on Monday, a colleague will ask if you would like to have coffee with him and a special guest. Accept the invitation. Talk naturally about the topics that are raised. You will be in your element, and the guest will be moved by your ideas. Accept any generosity he bestows on you and agree to meet him again. All that I ask of you is to be yourself.”

I sit quietly. My head wraps around his first statement:
When I return to work on Monday
. What day is it? I have had no concept of time since I awakened in this lair. I ask, “What day is tomorrow?”

He laughs. “Ah, yes, Thomas, always thinking of the big picture. Out of all that is laid before you, you simply desire to know what day tomorrow is. What an intellectual enigma you are.” He laughs and shakes his head.

“I’m sorry,” I say, feeling some reason to apologize. “It’s just that these past few days, well, I haven’t had a sense of time.”

“When you die, and you are with me, you will have no sense of it. Time will pass, the living will age, the rivers will eat away at their banks, the waves will lap the shores, and yet you will not perceive the passage of time.” He adds as if it is a passing thought, “Tomorrow is Sunday, Thomas. I shall leave you Saturday evening. When you awake, it will be Sunday morning.”

Again I try to recall what I was doing prior to being in this lair, but I can’t recall anything of the moments before finding myself on the floor of the cave. I once knew a man who’d had a cardiac arrest. He survived, thanks to his son’s rapid emergency response, and a new procedure to cool patients in his condition. Long after he had recovered, he couldn’t remember anything about the days or weeks before the cardiac arrest. I understand that feeling now. I try to replay the hours leading up to this encounter, but it is useless. It is as if my memory has been erased.

“So let me answer a few of your other questions before I leave you,” he says. “Yes, my disciples and I will be watching you. Yes, I shall return, and no, you will not know when that moment will occur. Yes, you will awake in your own home, and we will not be there. However, before I leave, I need to give you something. I am going to place a mark on you, Thomas, so that you will know that this was no dream, to remind you of our agreement, and to mark you as mine, lest you dismiss this conversation and this experience and chalk it up to a government conspiracy. That is what you believed, is it not? I must say that your conspiracy theories are inspired, if misdirected. This mark will not heal.”

Before I can say or do anything, he grabs my left wrist with clawlike grips. He twists my arm over, causing me to twist in pain and fall to my knees. The underside of my forearm is exposed while my arm rests painfully on the desktop. He removes a ring and places it on the underside of my forearm, near where the band of a watch might be. At the first touch, it seems cold, too cold. Then a burning sensation follows. It reminds me of scalding water. At first, the water seems cold, but quickly I realize it is hot water. It takes a moment for my brain to gauge how hot it is. It is the same with this ring. My flesh burns, and I scream out. He removes his ring and then bends over my arm and licks where he has touched.

I stay crouched on my knees, holding my left arm. I don’t look at the mark for several moments. I stare at my desk. Not looking at him or his mark feels like a victory to me.

“You will want to lie in your bed now,” he says as he leaves my office.

I slowly get up and look at my forearm. The mark is a burn and a cut at the same time. I expect to see a blister, but there is none. It is as if the burn happened weeks ago. The skin is marked where it is burned, but it also has cuts through it, like a razor. It is the size of a penny. It looks like a pattern of writing within a circle. I stagger out of my office and down the hall. I am half asleep as I fall into my bed. I roll over in a daze. The walls and ceilings ripple and become fuzzy. Soon I am asleep.

C
HAPTER 6

A New Awareness

The light breaks into my bedroom, awakening me to the new day. My bed feels wonderful. It is warm, the sheets and pillows are soft, and I don’t want to move. I slept very hard, not even getting up to use the bathroom, which I normally do at least twice a night. My dad used to tease me that I had inherited that trait from him. I press my head into a pillow and pull the other close to my chest. It’s been a habit since childhood. My mother called it “my snuggy pillow.” For a brief second—and only a second—the hours, days, or whatever just occurred are forgotten. And then they storm back to me.

I sit up straight in bed and look around. I am safely in my bedroom, in my bed. Of that, there is no doubt. I look down at my left arm and see the hairy backside of my forearm. The underside hurts slightly. I don’t want to look, but I slowly turn my forearm over. The entire time, I am telling myself, It was just a dream. It had to be a dream. Please, oh, please, let this have been a dream.

It wasn’t a dream, though. As clear as it had been the night before is the mark Lucifer had stamped on me. I clinch my hand into a fist and close my eyes. No, I say to myself.

I will not cry this morning, though. Instead, I am filled with rage. Rage against what, I am not sure. I hate the fact that I am in this situation. I hate Lucifer for putting me in this situation. If there is a God, which painfully I may have to accept, I hate him for allowing this to happen to me. No, I hate him for allowing Lucifer to rule over the dead. I clinch my fist again and let it go, as if I am clinching my hatred and releasing it.

It is a beautiful morning. A classic September morning in Austin. The sun shines brightly, without a cloud in the sky to interrupt its rays. It will be a hot afternoon as is typical for this time of year. Looking at my clock, I see it is just after nine o’clock. I slept much later than usual. I walk to the south side of my apartment and step onto the balcony. The sun feels wonderful, especially after wondering if I would ever see or feel it again. I look over Town Lake and see a lot of people on the running trails. That, too, is typical of this time of year. New students trying to get into shape to impress their peers, and returning students trying to recover their former bodies. All of them are out running, biking, and walking. These are the casual exercisers, though. It is too late in the day for the diehards to be going around the loop. Those training for marathons and half marathons and even the triathletes would have been out earlier in the cooler weather.

I wouldn’t call myself a serious runner. In fact, more recently, I have gravitated to a CrossFit workout. I am a casual runner. I enjoy 10Ks and half marathons, though mostly the former as of late. At age forty-five, I am aware that my joints have seen their best days, and I have no desire to push them to constant aching. Still, shorter running events are too much effort for the distance they cover. I don’t enter races to beat my best times; I enter races for other reasons. I enjoy the events themselves. Being around other runners feels good. There is camaraderie, a connection, with the runners at these events that is hard to explain. The events themselves cause me to work harder in my workouts than I might otherwise. For example, knowing that I am training for a 10K “mudder” in two months in Dallas keeps me motivated to run and lift throughout the dog days of summer. A mudder is an event that combines running, lifting, and obstacles, such as a mud crawl. Going to these events is also a way to meet attractive women who take care of their bodies, wear tight-fitting clothes, and have higher than average sex drives, thanks to the exercise. Waylon Jennings once sang, “There’s only two things in life that make it worth livin’ / is guitars that tune good and firm feelin’ women.” I have to believe he was in Austin when he first sang those words.

I am a serious enough runner to know that if I am going to run today, I will need to wait until this evening, when it is a bit cooler. Still, I need to get out of this apartment, and I need to burn through some frustration, even if this means a poor workout in the heat. I pick up my cell phone and contact Mike, one of my running partners. Mike typically runs longer on Saturdays, usually with our running club or with me, and he would take off Sundays. Since he doesn’t normally run on Sundays, he wouldn’t have been out this morning, so maybe he wouldn’t mind a short run with me, even if it is hot.

I suddenly think of a problem, though. I don’t have any memory of yesterday, so I wonder, did I run with him yesterday? I decide that if he refers to the two of us talking or running yesterday, I will chalk it up to memory loss from too much drinking and joke about it. Given my history, he would buy it.

“Hey, Thomas. I’m just walking into church. What’s going on?” Mike answers on the other side of the call.

“Oh, yeah. Sorry about that Mike. I’ll be quick. Is there any chance we could get in a short run when you get back home? Nothing big, maybe a four miler? I need to burn off some booze and food.”

With me, burning off alcohol and food is common, so Mike wouldn’t question it. Plus, this would lay the groundwork in case I can’t recall something from yesterday. I had forgotten about his church involvement on Sundays, as going to church was never a consideration of mine.

Mike responds, “As long as it’s a short one, I can do it. We’re having some people over later to watch the Cowboys, and I need to help Therese get some things done around the house. What do you say I meet you at your place a little after one? Will that work?”

“That’s great,” I say. “It’ll give me a chance to grab a bite. Thanks, man. I owe you.”

I hang up the phone and look at the clock again. It is several hours until one o’clock, and I am still not comfortable hanging out in the apartment. I quickly go to my closet and put on some running clothes. I grab my shoes and turn them over. There is very little dirt on them, and the dirt on them is dry, almost dusty. That’s a good sign. I probably didn’t run yesterday . . . at least not on the trail. I wonder if I went to a CrossFit class. My legs do feel a little sore, but that could have been from what happened in Lucifer’s lair.

After getting dressed, I grab my phone, watch, money holder, and apartment key and head out the door to the elevators. I bolt out of the elevator into the lobby, barely recognizing the twenty-something girl behind the desk telling me to have a nice morning.

I am surprisingly hungry, and coffee sounds great. I rarely make time for a hot breakfast, but today is an exception. I try to put on my watch as I walk, but where I would normally strap it on my left arm, I now have a sore—Lucifer’s mark. I attempt awkwardly to strap it to my right arm before deciding to stick it in my shorts pocket. Running shorts don’t allow much room for personal items, and the pocket is almost overloaded with my money clip and keys.

I walk a few blocks to a small café, Bluebonnets and Beer, which the locals have shortened to Bonnets’ Beer. I sit down at a booth and am quickly approached by a waitress. The place is mostly empty except for an older hippy couple sitting a few tables over and a college couple whose body language suggests they are in love. The waitress is young and pleasant, with a spattering of tattoos down her arm and some piercings in her brow. It is nice to hear a sweet voice talking to me. It’s a stark contrast from what I’ve been through. I have her bring me some coffee as I look over the menu. When she comes back with my coffee, I am still staring blankly at the menu. I haven’t read a word. My mind is focused on a single thing: Lucifer. After a few indecisive seconds, I ask her to bring me one of her favorites, as long as it has bacon and overhard eggs. She obliges happily.

The meal smells wonderful when she sets it in front of me. She has chosen well: chicken fried steak covered in egg and some gravy. On the side are several pieces of bacon and two slices of thick toast. I compliment her. She asks if there is anything else she can get for me, but I don’t answer. I am already lost in a memory.

I’m thinking about a time when my parents took me to breakfast. I couldn’t have been more than ten years old. My mother was lovely, and my father doted on her. She was taken from him long before he was ready to accept it, long before I was ready to accept it. I couldn’t understand how a loving God would do that to a family. I couldn’t understand how my dad could still love his God after that. Her passing was part of the reason my father and our relationship meant so much to me. He was all I had. I loved our occasional trips for breakfast. It always seemed more relaxed to me. For some reason, my parents would act silly at breakfast.