The Heavens Rise

balanced atop the head of his cane. “Oh my. You are upset with me, aren’t you?”

“If Marshall Ferriot is out there . . . if he can do what you can do, why did you bring me here?”

“You would rather I leave you unguarded?”

“Anthem is out there!”

“If it’s Marshall’s intention to hurt Anthem Landry, then Anthem is either already dead by his own hand or he’s been changed into something you will never want to lay eyes on!” This eruption sent Noah into a coughing fit, and when he lifted one fist to his mouth, Ben saw that that the space from his index finger to his thumb was a mass of red welts and fresh scar tissue.

“How would you know?” Ben asked.

“What do you mean, how—”

“If he’s . . . if he’s been changed. The thing you described . . . Miss Millie . . . You killed it right away. How can you know what it really was, or if it was—”

“If it was still her, you mean?”

Ben nodded.

“There were others,” Noah said. “Many others. And we made it a point to keep them alive for as long as we could just so we could answer that very question. And if you think I harbor one scrap of guilt for shooting that thing my wife turned into exactly when I did, then you are a worse listener than I thought.”

“Others . . .”

“You don’t think I’ve been here for eight years, do you? What? You think we just vanished into the swamp to live like rats? No, that part came later. First, we had to learn. First I had to play mad scientist, and she had to play test subject. You see, when I was in med school I did an exchange program in Thailand, so I knew the country fairly well. I also knew what we could get away with once we arrived. That’s where we conducted our experiments.”

“Experiments? On . . . people? You experimented on people?”

“On men who became sexually aroused by burning children with cigarettes and penetrating them with the legs of furniture. Trust me. We put them to a far, far better use. And no one will miss them. Least of all the children they traveled halfway across the world to abuse.”

“And what did your experiments prove?”

“Most of our initial conclusions we’re confirmed, just as she wrote them in her journal. The parasite resides in the brain and it allows the host to consume and metabolize frequencies of light which are not visible in this dimension of existence. On any equipment I could get my hands on anyway. But the pupils of both Nikki and her subjects dilated to twice their normal size during a drive, as we called it. Leading us to the conclusion that the eyes truly are the windows to the soul.”

“You consume . . . a person’s soul?”

“Close. You absorb part of it. It flows through you on a kind of conduit which we can’t see. The person completely loses all consciousness as a result. So forget what you’ve seen in the movies. This is not possession. You can’t see the world through their eyes. The mind-control aspect . . . well, it’s just a by-product, you see. A by-product of the fact that you can draw the person’s fundamental quantum material into your body by metabolizing part of it.”

“And the monsters?”

“Ah, see, that was the interesting part. Sometimes I would tell her what a subject was guilty of. This one, for instance, enjoys tying up young girls and applying abrasive chemicals to their bare flesh. Nikki would be able to drive that unsavory subject for as long as she wanted, and no monster. Unfortunately. But if, on the other hand, I spritzed the man with a little bit of Anthem Landry’s favorite cologne—Ralph Lauren Polo, is it? Well, then . . . showtime.”

“And what were they? The monsters?”

“They were from the mouth of hell is what they were. They were malformed hybrids of that person and one of their worst nightmares or some element of a past trauma. Just as it happened with Millie. Don’t worry. We did our due diligence. We confirmed what their worst nightmares were beforehand just to be sure we weren’t off the mark. The interviews were not my favorite part. She mostly handled those, well-spoken girl that she is. I can show you some photographs, if you’d like.”

“What I would like is to make sure Anthem Landry is okay so I can—”

“Anthem Fucking Landry,” Noah bellowed. “It all gets back to Anthem Landry. You’ve both tried so hard to save him—”

“What do you mean we both—”

“Oh, don’t you see it? Don’t you? She suffered a crisis of conscience in Bangkok, you see. She couldn’t go on with the experiments and she abandoned me. She left me there. But I knew exactly where she was going. Exactly. It’s the only reason I exposed myself, as you so eloquently put it. You see, I had taken samples from the pool before I capped the well. When she left me, I had no choice but to expose myself. But the problem? Well, the samples weren’t enough. It’s a funny creature, you see, our Elysium parasite. A drip and drab of it here and there has no real effect. In the wild, on its own, floating free through the swamp, it’s as inconsequential as a drop of water. But in concentration, it’s another thing entirely. If you capture it the way we did in that pool, if you get it to flock, then immerse someone in it, the change takes effect. So I came home as well to get—”

“As well?” Ben cried. “What do you mean as well?”

“Oh, come on, Ben. You’re smarter than this. You’ve always been smarter than this. A big brute you meet on the Internet walks into your apartment late at night, gets violent with you and suddenly just walks away.”

It took Ben a few minutes of gape-mouthed silence to remember what Noah was talking about. “I . . . I pulled a gun on the guy . . . I—”

“Is that why he smashed his head into your door frame three times in a row, the exact same number of times he smashed your head into the headboard?”

“How do you know all—”

“Or better yet, Anthem Landry, in an alleged blackout, smashes every bottle of liquor in his apartment and writes himself a note that says he’s done drinking forever. She was here for years, Ben, working on your lives from the shadows. But then she got scared. You see, she ignored my warnings all together, and she flat-out ignored what we had discovered in Bangkok. Which is that it isn’t contempt or anger that makes the monsters rise. It’s connection. It’s true love and true hate. Not the kind of petty, childish hate that gets bandied about on the Internet as some petty device against strangers. I’m taking about true hatred, the kind where you’re convinced the other person has been taking from you year after year after year and you’re powerless to stop them. That kind of hatred, Ben. The kind of hatred you feel for Marshall Ferriot.”

“How?” Ben said. “How could she . . . Did she not feel a connection to us? How could she have been using her power on us and not turned us into—”

“She wasn’t using it on you! She was using it on the people around you. The people who threatened you on the way home from the bar, the people who were standing in your way at work. She was your guardian angel, Ben. And it was going so well, she started to get careless. I had found her by then and I warned her. She went too far with Anthem that night. The bottles, the note. She knew I was right. So she went back to your apartment to remove all the surveillance software she’d installed on your computer so she could track your movements and whatever stories you were working on. That’s when your angry visitor showed up and she was forced to take action to keep you from becoming a hate crime. After that . . . Well, I haven’t seen her since.”

“That was six months ago. She has to know,” Ben whispered. “Just like you, she has to know after everything that’s happened today that Marshall’s awake. That he’s here. She has to know.”

“Maybe she does. I don’t know how far away she is. And you’re so desperate to leave. Do you really have the time to wait for her?”

“What does that— What do you mean?”