The Nightmare Game (63 page)

“But I have to make sure I make enough essence for
everyone, so I usually figure ten life forces per person, more for banquets and
special occasions, such as your arrival. The bouquet becomes so richly rounded
when one includes the right mix of people.”

“No!” I screamed again, as if my denying it would
make it any less real. Now, no longer merely fearful, I was filled with a
feeling of shame and remorse for the people that had died and I’d consumed,
shame such as I had never felt before.

“Poor Ashley. You poor, poor mortal. What’s the
matter dear? Never ate anyone before? And now to find out that you’ve gobbled
up so many life forces your very first time out of the gate. How tragic that
losing your cherry when it comes to cannibalism is so traumatic! I’m sorry it’s
given you indigestion.”

And then she laughed again, more mockingly than
before. “Did you honestly think you could tangle with a Goddess and not get
scathed?” she continued.

“I know you’re not what say you are. What are you
exactly?” I asked, as more confusion heaped itself upon me. I felt so dizzy and
nauseous that I probably would have been sick if there been anything in my
stomach. Her goddess claims rang as false as a thrift store bell, for she
neglected to realize that she had shown me her true face already. Oh, I had to
admit, she was good. She was very, very good. I could see how she had fooled
Ben and the others. On the surface, she seemed to be everything that one might
expect a goddess to be. She was powerful, beautiful beyond measure, graceful
and she did great tricks. But there was such pettiness, such evil in her that
she was far more devil than goddess.

“I told you already, you thick woman, I am the
Goddess of all,” she replied with enormous haughtiness and pride.

“No you’re not. You never would have done the
things you did if you were a goddess.”

“Obviously you need more convincing of who I am
and why I have the right to do the things I do.”

“Yes?” squeaked out of me pitifully. I sincerely
hoped I would not regret that answer.

“Then I will show you. I’ll give you a great honor
that few receive. You will be allowed to die knowing exactly who I am and why I
have sole rights to possession of that necklace.”

Arrosha then began to glow far brighter than
before, radiating a light that came from within her. The room turned to
complete darkness except for the illumination that was Arrosha. In the middle
of the room, shining as a single beacon in the black void, she began to
levitate, rising higher and higher until she was floating high in mid-air. Her
light gradually began to dim until it extinguished altogether and we stood in
complete darkness for a split second.

In the twinkling of an eye, however, we were
surrounded by a panorama of millions of stars, shining like so many
magnificent, beautiful gems.

We were standing now within our own solar system,
in front of a planet that stood out like a perfect jewel in space, which I
realized was our Earth. But it wasn’t the Earth that I knew, for instead of the
familiar continents, there was only one.

“Pangea,” Arrosha announced. “What you’re looking
at is the world as it once was, the world as I created it.”

We zoomed in until before us was a lovely beach by
a peaceful ocean, boarded by exotic tropical flora. I felt the warm sea breeze
blowing through my hair.

“Ah,” she said, relief in her voice. “It feels so
good to be back home. This is my personal garden.”

As we hovered silently above the peaceful scene
for what seemed like a long time, I studied her. In this relatively peaceful
moment, I had to admit that she was strikingly beautiful. Her alabaster skin
was radiant. Her features and bone structure were perfect, set off by high
arched black eyebrows, long black eyelashes, and wavy ebony hair that grew past
her waist and flowed softly in the breeze. Everything about her, her face, her
figure, her movements, was perfect. But only her housing was perfect, wasn’t
it? The evil inside of her had kept me from noticing before how exceptionally
beautiful she was on the outside. Why, I wondered, would such a perfect
exterior hold such a corrupt interior, such a black mind and heart? Had she
always been evil, I wondered. Had she always been mad?

Suddenly, she snapped out of her dreaminess and
said, excitedly and happily, “The children! But you haven’t seen my children!
They were my most wonderful creation ever!”

She waved her hand again and suddenly we seemed to
fast forward in time as paved roads appeared and beautiful buildings of
crystalline, gold and marble sprang up in time-lapse fashion.

“We won’t be able to hear any sound,” she
narrated, as if it were very important that I understand. “This is just a
projection. My children won’t be able to see or hear us at all. We can’t
interact.”

People, transparent at first, then gradually
growing solid, appeared, all quite tall and very aristocratic looking. Intelligent
in appearance, they were perfectly beautiful and stately, remarkably elegant
with perfect posture and extremely graceful movements. They reminded me of her
followers at her plantation home except, if it were at all possible, these
people were even more beautiful, more perfect.

“Is this…?” I began to ask.

“Yes, this is Illeaocea,” she answered before I
could finish, pride in her voice. “Actually, this section is Illeaote, the
capital city, the crown jewel in my crown jewel. This was my heaven on earth,
my home on your planet.”

 “It was so beautiful.” I said, truly impressed.

Arrosha sighed deeply. “Yes, it was, wasn’t it?”

She turned to me with tears in her eyes. I didn’t
think it was possible that a monster such as she, capable of such abominable
acts, could feel tender human emotion.

“Ben told you what happened here, did he not?” she
asked me, as if it were important to her that I knew.

“Yes, he did, during his tour at the mansion. At
least he told me all he knew.”

“You know enough of the story, then. My beautiful,
sweet, perfect children. So kind, so smart. This was their world. Let me show
you now so you can see for yourself.”

The camera lens of the panorama around me zoomed
into the city, allowing me a glimpse into the lives of these people.

“The humans that called Illeaocea their home were
so very beautiful,” she continued, silent tears streaming down her face. “They
possessed an intelligence that has never been matched to this day. They were
the loveliest, kindest and most civilized of all creatures. Their voices were
lyrical, their manner, polite, their movements, graceful. You’ve marveled
yourself at the beauty of the group that lived once at my mansion. Until they
betrayed me, they were my hand-picked chosen. If you’ve seen them, you’ve seen the
beauty of the inhabitants of Illeaocea. I have taken ordinary mortals and
transformed them into the image of my poor lost ones, because, to this day I
miss my darling Illeaoceans, I miss looking upon their sweet faces. But my
followers could never be anything more than living photographs of my poor, dead
children.”

As Arrosha became quiet, different scenes of
Illeaocean life played out around us. Their private moments at home and with
family, their leisure activities, of which there seemed to be many, their
political and business lives, which seemed to be lively, were all included in
the panorama. Then Arrosha showed me their scientists and I was able to see how
remarkably advanced these people were. Their technologies, more organic than
our own, made those of the early twenty-first century seem stone-aged by
comparison. I could only look and marvel, thinking in my own backward way just
how much like magic their technologies seemed to me. I suspected that even the
top minds in modern science would be humbled in viewing their accomplishments.

A scene came before me that featured chambers like
the one Edmond had revealed to me as his prison.

“What’s that?” I asked her, cautious as I went for
confirmation, lest I set her off again.

“Those are the stasis chambers,” she answered.
“Stasis fields were employed in Illeaocea for only the most brilliant and
accomplished citizens. This is how the momentum of their knowledge was never
lost. They allowed for a virtual immortality of sorts. Transformation was
usually the first line of medicine for either injury or disease, but
eventually, resistance to it built up, rendering it useless.”

At this point, I remembered what Max had told me,
that Arrosha never got tired of changing his looks, and I wondered why his
resistance to transformation had never built up.

“When someone of import was close to death and
everything else was exhausted,” she continued, “they were placed into a stasis
chamber until their mindless clone was ready to receive their brain patterns.
Personality and the rest of their incorporeal selves would be downloaded into
it. As the chambers could be used indefinitely, some, tired of living in the
world of the flesh, chose to remain comfortably resting in their chambers for
thousands of years, allowing their brains and their knowledge to be accessed
via computer interface.

“The stasis field was also considered an emergency
device, and the rich and powerful never traveled without them. In case there
was ever a medical emergency on the road, these devices would create individual
stasis chambers that would allow them to go into a state of what you might call
suspended animation until they could receive medical attention.”

We continued to watch the scenes that played out
before us. Even though the points of view kept shifting from close up to far
away and back again, it all seemed so real, so three-dimensional. It was not
like watching a movie at all, rather it was as if what she was showing me was
real and immediate, happening in the here and now.

“My sweet, brilliant children,” she sighed. “They
were so intelligent, so creative, so inventive. They were my best creations
ever. After they were destroyed by those horrible, inferior, jealous
Malitiuans, I was never the same again. I never got over their loss. I never created
anything again. I’ve tinkered around with things a bit, yes, but true creation,
no. It was just too painful.”

The scene before me shifted to a city that was
dark and bleak, blanketed with a thick sense of foreboding, a view reminiscent
of what the Communist empire might have looked like had it been designed by a
German expressionist. Arrosha was right to say that these people were very
different indeed from her beloved Illeaoceans.

 “The Malitiuans were horrible!” she ranted.
“Inferior in every conceivable way. They may have been technological savants,
but they were stupid and crude and thick in every way otherwise. They were
worse than most of the peoples that sprang up as descendants from the survivors
of the Pangaean holocaust. I hated them! I had nothing but contempt for them.
They were ugly and they smelled bad. They even tasted bad! They were such a
brutish, paranoid people, always tinkering with stronger and stronger weapons
to use against my children should the need arise. As if it ever would. My
children were far too advanced to make war upon them. They were civilized and
peace loving. The Malitiuans were a hateful people and they destroyed my
beloved children!”

Arrosha’s mood became mournful. “We are now
standing in the temple that my poor children built for me before their
destruction,” she said, great sadness in her voice. “This is how much they
loved me.”

When I looked at her, she looked far more tired
than she had earlier. Her fair skin had gone pale and dark shadows circled her
eyes. Had I not known what she was, I would have thought she was getting ill. I
wondered if it was her proximity to the necklace with its amulet which was
taking so much out of her.

“I know that Ben told you of their fate earlier,”
she said, tears still in her eyes. “But I think it better that you see it for
yourself. Then only can you grasp its true horror.”

Arrosha’s commentary stopped as, all about us now,
the ultimate fate of Illeaocea began to play itself out. There had been no
sound to anything that Arrosha had shown me and this was no exception, but I
didn’t need sound and soon became grateful that element was missing. Normal,
everyday life as usual changed to panic as the earthquakes hit. In every
direction I turned, the full force of the tragedy began. The realism of the
projection was now disturbing and truly frightening. Buildings toppled, the
people within them trapped and crushed. The ground fragmented, vast rifts
opening which swallowed whole neighborhoods in an instant. Lava spewed from the
ground as volcanoes spontaneously rose from the earth, expelling boulders and
more molten lava, engulfing masses of people running in futility to escape,
only to be overtaken and destroyed. Those undertaking to leave by sea fared no
better as massive amounts of lava poured into the ocean, making it boil
furiously. The entire country was lost, as under red skies filled with black
smoke, huge chunks of land continued to fall into the sea until the entire
country was gone, not even the land upon which it once stood remaining. The
scene around us then panned out quickly until we were looking at the Earth as
from a satellite. We saw fissures running through the gigantic Pangaean
continent, as if they were cracks in a glass window on a hot summer day spreading
at lightning speed; from this altitude, the cracks seemed to be unzipping the
continent in many different directions. As the continent was ripped into
pieces, we saw huge chunks of land, some larger than Australia, fall off into
the sea as the continent itself was torn asunder and began to drift apart,
rapidly at first and finally slowing to a crawl. Some of the pieces began to
take on recognizable shapes, especially those that would later become Africa
and the Americas.

“My world quite literally broke apart. There was
no one, nothing left to be saved, so I turned my airship around to rejoin my
envoy, only to find that they too had been wiped out while I was gone. The
massive earthquake that was now Pangaea had caused an upheaval across the
entire continent, sending massive showers of boulders raining down upon my
convoy while I was checking on Illeaocea.

“I needed to travel further, to find other
survivors in countries that had large Illeaocean populations, but all luck ran
out as a boulder landed on my ship, rendering it too damaged to go any farther.
I took my personal portable equipment plus what little from the convoy that
remained intact and went as far away from the major fissures as possible. I had
lost everyone and everything that I ever loved, I had lost what had become my
home. I was devastated and did not want to go on living, but, being immortal, I
had no choice.

“The worst of the destruction was over in this
area, so I materialized the sole stasis chamber with which I was equipped,
crawled inside, activated it and its cloaking device. It was in there that I
went to sleep for a long, long time. I wish I could have slept forever. While I
slept, my stasis chamber later told me, a nuclear winter ensued, far sooner and
lasting far longer than anyone could ever have imagined. Any meager, surviving
remnants of these once magnificent civilizations were then plunged into
darkness, into savagery, into a black age such as the world had never known
before and has never known since. While the world struggled to survive, while
entire races of people died, while entire species of life went extinct, I slept
in stasis. There was absolutely no reason for me to stay awake.

“How long I slept, I knew not. It could have been
a few thousand years for all I knew or even a few million. The chamber could
easily have told me, but I never wanted to know. Eventually, after my long
sleep, I decided to awaken, to see what had become of the world, to see if I
was alone in my survival. Thank goodness, I was not. How anything besides
myself could have survived was a complete mystery to me, but when I awakened,
some semblance of life had returned to the planet. So many species were wiped
out completely. But in the areas farthest from ground zero, some life had
survived, but only the very strongest, the smartest, and arguably, the
luckiest.

“In this new, horribly brutal existence,
everything was profoundly altered, even the weather patterns.” She shook her
head sadly and said, “It’s all so sad. While I searched all over, I could find
no people that were even remotely familiar to me. Nothing existed of those
once-noble races and their long, rich and thriving cultures. My search, like my
mourning, seemed to have no end.”