The Last Story (21 page)

A hand roughly grabbed my arm.

"Come," Roger said. "The night's young. We have somewhere special to go."

CHAPTER

XIX

JLJL E TOOK us TO the cemetery where I was buried.

I knew he would. He had a flair for the dramatic, and he was a sick person. It was getting on toward eleven o'clock. The cemetery was a large, lonely field of rolling blackness. As he goaded us toward my grave, I was surprised to see that he had already visited the spot earlier.

The gravesite had been uncovered, not an easy task, what with concrete liners and other stuff grave diggers used nowadays.

My tombstone lay toppled nearby. A shovel rested on top of the mound of brown dirt.

Roger had probably worked up a sweat digging it all out. I remarked on the fact and he shoved his gun deeper into my spine, causing me to bump into Peter's wheelchair, which I helped wheel over the uneven ground.

"Shut up and keep moving," he said.

"Talk about bad dialogue," I said. "You were going to edit my script? You couldn't edit the ingredients on a can of dog food."

"Your mouth is going to be the death of you."

"Then I may as well talk while I can. You've been following me."

"For longer than you know, sister."

"How did you set Bob up?"

"Easy. He wanted to play a prank on you. I showed him how. Getting into the secured area was easy; he just dug a hole and went under the fence.

He was going to let us go after I returned in the lifeboat. We just took a little air out of the tubes.

There was no hole. There was never any real danger from the sharks."

"For you and me," I said.

"For me," he corrected. "I almost put you in the pond last night."

"Why didn't you? Death by shark bite—you can't get much better than that."

"Just wait," he promised.

"Who are you?" I asked. "Or should I say, what are you?"

"I'm surprised you haven't figured that out."

"Just as many Wanderers are incarnating on Earth to help with the transition, many with negative vibrations are also returning to stop it. They will not succeed, but they can upset the plans of many men and women of good will. In particular, they dislike Wanderers and attack them when they have the chance. "

"You're a Black Wanderer. You're an Orion.

You're a lousy kisser."

He smacked me on the back of my head with his gun. "Shut up!"

"You're an out-of-work actor," Peter said, putting in his own two cents' worth.

Roger was bitter. "I don't need your money or your starring roles. Our kind are well financed. We have structure. We obey orders. Your friend's detective friend in Chicago will discover that the hard way tomorrow. He will pay for snooping into our business."

"How old were you when you realized what you were?" I asked curiously.

"I have always known I had a great destiny."

I stopped thirty feet short of my grave and turned around, knowing he might shoot me, but not really giving a damn. I was so pissed at him. The hatred drowned out my fear. Yet I doubted it would hold the fear at bay when the mud began to fill my lungs.

That he intended to bury me alive was a given.

"Why did you come after me?" I asked. "What was I doing that was so disturbing?"

Surprisingly, he acted pleased to tell me the truth. "You know the answer to that. You were beginning to write books that broke down established concepts. We couldn't have that.

Those concepts are the keys to control. Control is the secret of power. We especially couldn't allow you to publish your story of the invasion and the establishment of the quarantine. People might not consciously understand it, but it could stir ancient memories."

What he said shocked me, and I had written the story. The whole situation was madness.

From the

outside he was just a cute guy. Except he was pointing a gun at me.

"My story took place in the future," I protested.

Roger shook his head. "In the past. Three hundred thousand years ago."

"But in my story humanity had starships. We traveled the galaxy."

"And so your people did. Until we stopped them and put them in their place."

"Wow," I mumbled, astonished I had such a heavy muse working for me. Then my pride resurfaced.

"You didn't stop all of us. I know now what Sarteen did. She exploded that egg. She wasn't afraid to sacrifice her life. I see the moral of the tale, why I wrote it. Others will as well. It is better to die free of the lies of the quarantine than to live beneath the tyranny of its illusions.

Sarteen defeated your precious Captain Eworl. Not all of humanity was trapped."

Roger was haughty. "So what? The few of you who come here accomplish nothing. We find you and we kill you. Look at your supposedly great leaders. They never last long."

"Yeah, but we keep coming. We don't give up.

And I think we've got you by the throat now. A new era is rolling in. Your fire-and-brimstone fear tactics don't work anymore. People don't buy the devil chasing their souls. They're coming back to what's inside. They're listening to what the yogi and others like him are teaching."

Roger snorted. "Him? He's just another ignored prophet."

"I didn't ignore him. Yeah, maybe for a short time I fell for your charm. But in my heart I was always with him, and he with me. He's with Peter and me now. Go ahead and put us in the ground.

You won't see either of us beg for mercy. We know you have no mercy. We've died before and know that death doesn't exist. It's just another lie you propagate on the ignorant." I spat in his face. "I'm glad I never had sex with you. That's one thing I have to be proud of. The snake never got to me."

He slapped me in the face with his gun. A numbing pain spread through both my cheeks and a wave of dizziness swept over me. Sticky blood dripped from my nose. I believed he'd broken it.

This time I had pushed him too far. Yet it was interesting what his anger revealed, and what my choice of words indicated. Ancient memories were indeed being stirred. For a moment his features blurred and elongated. I blinked and thought I saw a toothy maw, a wide snout, and knew it was a vision similar to what Sarteen had beheld when the elevator door aboard her starship had opened. In fact, for all I knew, I had been Sarteen.

And Roger, he was a lizard.

"You will scream before I'm through with you,"

he promised.

I laughed. "You sound like Bob in my book."

He threw me into the grave on top of my black coffin with its gold trim, which had faded.

I landed on my back, smashing my skull on the metal. The shock brought another wave of dizziness. Red stars, the color and consistency of fireworks, danced across ray field of vision. Peter, strangely silent, was forced to sit at the edge of the hole and watch it all.

Roger picked up his shovel and threw a few pounds of dirt in my face as I struggled to climb out.

The force of the earth caused me to stumble and fall. While I lay momentarily helpless, another two shovelfuls landed on top of me. My resolve not to cry out weakened. Edgar Allan Poe had been right. There was no worse way to go than live burial.

"Peter." I coughed, trying to roll over and push myself up, to at least die standing on my feet. But such a position was not recommended in Roger Teller's Book of Games & Graves. I got as far as my knees when Roger swung his shovel through a wide curving arc and caught me on the right temple with the steel blade. The pain was intense, a thing of Biblical proportions.

Smashing against the wall of the hole, I felt as if my scalp had been lifted three inches and a balloon filled with red liquid beneath it had popped. I lost a pint of blood in five seconds.

It spread over the top of my coffin like the melting wax of a red candle. Worse, he had hit me precisely where I was weakest, where my headaches always started. The internal damage became very much external. It was a miracle I didn't lose consciousness or topple over. Yet it was not a miracle I would have prayed for to God. Better that my nightmare should end quickly, I thought. From out of the corner of my left eye, I watched Roger toss his shovel aside and crouch beside the hole, peering down at me with a grin so idiotic that if I hadn't been bleeding so much, I swear I would have vomited in his face.

"Now," Roger said pleasantly. "If you will just open the coffin and take out what's inside, I might stop throwing dirt on top of you. What do you say?"

I wiped at my face, trying to get one last look at Peter. In either body, he was my darling.

I wanted to leave this life with him on my mind. I didn't imagine Roger would let him live long after I was gone.

Yet I couldn't find him.

He wasn't in his chair.

Roger continued to grin.

"Does that sound like a deal, Shari Ann Cooper?"

he asked.

Then I saw Peter. He was standing!

"No," I replied.

Peter was bending over and picking up the shovel!

Roger leaned over to hear me better. "You said no? To me?"

Peter raised the shovel over his head.

I smiled through my blood. "Yes, Roger. I'm turning you down again."

Peter brought down the shovel hard on the back of Roger's head. Peter's aim was precise, driven by a supernatural will. The monster tumbled into the grave; he fell facedown onto the coffin. The back of his head was split open. His blood poured out and mingled with my mine, creating a puddle of ooze that looked as if it had been spilled from a victim of the black plague. A cursed puddle that spread as if pumped from within, even though Roger's dark eyes lay wide open and staring at a nothingness as hopeless as his long-range plans had been. He was dead.

"Thank God," I whispered.

Then I collapsed beside the enemy.

CHAPTER

XX

JL HE ANSWER TO THE MYSTERY of Peter's healing lay in the yogi's words to him at the public lecture. "It is this love that will heal you. Nothing ever heals except divine love. It is all that there is." Peter later said that watching me be tortured to death was painful beyond belief.

Yet it was that pain that forced him to act on a love that we, as mere mortals, have trouble believing exists, divine love.

It was grace, truly, that allowed him to stand, to defeat the enemy. It was grace that allowed the change in his spinal cord to remain permanent. It is now five days after the attack and he walks fine. The karma of his past suicide has been burnt to ash.

But what about my karma? Peter took me to the hospital after the struggle at the cemetery. There I regained consciousness and allowed the doctors to sew my scalp together—forty prickling stitches.

Yet I refused to stay for further tests, even though the pain in my head was unbearable.

Intuitively, I understood there was nothing they could do for me.

Roger shattered the last threads of blood vessel that had kept Jean Rodrigues's brain functioning the past three years. There was not much time left.

Knowing that, I went home to write this story, my last story.

It is dark in my apartment as I work. Peter and Jacob are asleep. Outside my window, I see the wide expanse of the black ocean, feel the cool salty breeze. It is a childish observation but it has always amazed me how the color of the sea changes with the color of the sky. Yet, in the same way, life also changes with the color of our emotions. Now, as I write these words, even though it is night, the world looks bright to me. At last, I am at peace.

I know how to finish "The Starlight Crystal."

At that moment the elevator door opened.

Sarteen saw Captain Eworl.

She did recognize him.

Just a second. Before I continue I have to jot down an old fable. Sarteen's grandmother told it to the future starship captain one night when the then five-year-old girl was about to go to bed. The story comes to me as I write, like an old memory.

There was once a dragon who lived in a wishing well.

He had been there for many years, but always stayed out of sight, at the bottom in the pitch dark, where the water was cold as ice. When people visited the well, they never saw the dragon. Yet sometimes they heard him his voice more like thoughts in their minds than whis pers in their ears. Standing beside the well, people would be seized by the belief that if they wished for something, it would come true. But only if they wished hard and offered to give something in return. For that was the condition the dragon always made. He had the power to fulfill dreams, yet his price was high. Because people, not knowing that they were praying to a dragon, would sometimes say out loud, "I would give my right arm to be famous." Or, "I would give my health to live in such a wonderful house." Or, "I would give anything to find true love."

This last wish pleased the dragon the most because then he could take everything from that person, and give nothing in return. Because, of course, love is the one thing a dragon can never give. It is the one thing a dragon knows nothing about, and the person would die broken-hearted. Yet if the person wished for fame or a house, the dragon could easily dole that out, and then take the person's arm or health, whatever had been offered in return for the prize.

The man would become well-known and then have an accident and his arm would be severed from his body. The woman would move into her new home and then have a nervous breakdown trying to take care of it. Always the dragon would get his reward, and always the person would suffer for having asked for anything.

But one day a young but wise girl came to the well.

Knowing its reputation as a wish-giving well, she asked for happiness. The request was unusual; the dragon had never received it before. True, many people asked for certain things to make them happy, but no one asked for

happiness itself. Curious to know this person better, the dragon crawled out of the well and showed the girl his true form. He was surprised that she didn't back away from him in horror. Indeed, his first question to her was

"Why aren't you afraid of me?"

"Why should I be?" the girl asked.