Heartland

Understanding? Peace? Hardly. It had been a way to justify the pain.

Hildegard moaned and bucked on the bed, straining against her bonds. Her head moved on the bed, and there was a smear of blood on the mattress. Were her visions any different? What she saw, what she wrote down: Was it a record of the future, or a justification of her pain?

I looked down at my wound, now a pale hole in my chest. The bleeding had almost stopped, and the hole looked like a shadow on my skin. Nicols squeezed the rag over the nearly full basin, and pale blood spattered the surface of the pool. Like rain falling on the ocean. Why did we feel pain? Why had the Creator given us this failing? Why hadn't He made us stronger?

If you believed we were His eyes, distinct observers who could look upon His work and validate it by Witnessing it, then our purpose was to inhabit this world, to be part of its existence as a way of giving it all purpose. It is a grand extrapolation of the question about a tree falling in an empty forest: If no one is there to witness creation, has it really happened?

But was it more than that? Were we justification of His pain? Were our eyes, our minds, our hearts, our nervous systems, our souls a means by which the Creator expressed His own apprehension of being? Was our pain an infinitesimal part of His, split and shared across billions and billions of points of light?

'Of course, it is,' Nicols said. He sat back on his heels. 'All existence is suffering. Don't you remember the Eight-Fold Path?'

'Why are you here, John? And don't tell me that you're the guilty part of my conscience. I don't think I can take you parroting back to me everything I told you.'

He smiled. 'No, I'm a volunteer.'

'Why?'

'To watch over you.'

'What about them?'

'They're transient. They won't stay much longer.'

I recalled Husserl's comment about the Architects. They will leave you.

'When?' I asked Nicols.

'Soon.' He lifted his shoulders at my expression. 'It's not my place to tell you.' He looked at the three men and the possessed priestess. 'You will know, I think. When it is time.'

'But not yet.'

'No.' He shook his head.

I lifted my stump from the chair's armrest. The candlelight reflected from the silver medallion pressed into the pale flesh of my forearm. Cristobel's magick circle, meant to protect him from injury. What good had it done him when an entire building fell on him?

'I fell, John. Antoine threw me down an elevator shaft. I should be dead.'

He took my shortened arm and turned it over so he could examine the medallion too. 'You should be.'

'But I'm not.'

He smiled. 'Not yet. Death isn't a part of this place. Neither is time. We are like that kitten. The one in the box.'

'Schrodinger's.'

'That's the one. Caught on the cusp. Neither one nor the other. Not until someone looks in the box and observes us.'

'Who?'

'God, perhaps.'

I shook my head. 'I don't believe that. That would imply that there is a place where I can go that He cannot. That would invalidate His existence. That would invalidate mine.'

'Unless you were God.'

'But I'm not.'

'Are you sure?' he asked. 'You thought you were once.'

'That was different.'

'How?'

'I was trying to rattle Bernard. I was trying to get him to doubt himself. To doubt that he was right. He was going to kill us all with his insane plan to harvest everyone's soul. I didn't have the power to stop him; I had to trick him. I had to plant a seed of doubt.'

'It worked, didn't it?'

'Yes, but-'

'So why does it have to be a trick? Why couldn't it be the truth? One you were more ready to accept than him?'

'I'm-I'm not sure. . What do I believe, John? What's the point of trying?'

Nicols laid the rag down on the floor and stood up. He offered me his hand, and waved his fingers when I looked at him dumbly. 'Come with me,' he said.

'I'm-' I indicated the hole and then, realizing I was pointing at it with the stump of my right hand, I waved that at him too.

'Those are the limits of your flesh,' he said. 'They don't matter here.' He gestured again. 'Come on, Michael. We need to wake her up or she'll never stop dreaming.'

At first, I felt the pain of all my wounds, recent and historical: every bone ached, every joint complained; the old holes in my chest-imagined and real-burned like hot coals had been placed against my skin; the new hole, this one made by Antoine too, spewed a great rush of dark water-tears and blood; I lost sensation in my right arm again, a frost descending upon my nerve endings. The chair exerted a tremendous pull on me, like a mother's embrace. But I stood.

'There,' Nicols said. 'That wasn't so bad, was it?'

I looked back at the body sitting in the chair. 'It looks pretty bad.'

'Well, you were never easy on it. That's for sure. Time heals; chicks dig scars. That sort of bullshit.'

'I had to be brave, John.'

'I know, Michael. We all have to find our own way.'

He led my spirit over to the bed, moving one of the screens aside, and as we stood at its foot, the bound woman visibly relaxed. There was blood on her face, in her hair, and on the mattress beneath her. There were old marks on her legs-this wasn't the first time she had been bound. A stick had been forced in her mouth, tied in place with strips of cloth around her head. Her hair, much longer than I had ever seen it, was in a wild disarray about her face.

It wasn't the woman from the painting. It wasn't Hildegard. It was Marielle.

The three priests looked up, their heads moving in such unison that it seemed like they were all working off the same marionette string. Cristobel. Philippe. Lafoutain. My three wise men. All looking very somber and stoic.

Their mouths were all stitched shut.

Nicols shrugged as I looked to him for an explanation. 'You shouldn't listen to them. You know how they are. Schemers. The whole lot of them. I'll be glad when they're gone.'

'Are they crowding you, John?' I found the idea funny, even in these circumstances.

'No,' he said. 'But you're still fragile. You still don't trust yourself. You'll listen to them because you think you need that reassurance.'

'And I should listen to you instead?'

He waved a finger at me. 'I hear sarcasm. That's good.'

'Is this a pep talk, John?' I glanced around the tiny room. 'Is all of this an elaborate excuse to cheer me up?'

He snorted. 'You remember my last pep talk?'

I did. He had held a gun to his head and threatened to shoot himself if I hadn't shown him that I could care about someone other than myself. It hadn't been a hollow gesture. He would have done it. The fact that I was instrumental in driving him to the brink of suicide hadn't been lost on me, either.

'What am I supposed to do, John?' I sighed. 'I couldn't stop Bernard. He wiped out more than fifty thousand