Chapter 22
There had always been the fear.
Even in life, even when he thought he was not afraid.
Even before he died.
Most would think he was still alive. An easy enough mistake to make. After all, he moved, breathed, ate. He seemed to do those things that living humans did. But those who thought that were wrong. A man was only a man who had a soul. His soul was dead.
It hadn't gone all at once, as it did for most living things. His soul had died in little pieces, bit by tiny bit. A thousand cuts, a million invisible drops of blood. It had taken years for his soul to pass into that final night. By the end, the last, lingering fragments had become a nuisance. Something to be extinguished. A disease. When it was gone completely he didn't miss it.
Back in the days when he had a soul, his name had been Jeremiah Purcell. But that was back when he could say that he was truly alive and not just a walking corpse.
He was an orphan, although it had not always been so. The early part of life-before this walking death-he had been raised on a farm in rural Kentucky.
For those first few years Jeremiah was a boy almost like any other. Until the day he killed his parents. It wasn't his fault. In his mind he had seen them die horribly. He thought they were on fire. Then it happened. When the daydream of his undisciplined mind became reality and his parents ran screaming, trying to put out the flames, young Jeremiah Purcell's soul began to shrink.
He was eight years old.
In his mind he dreamed they had died and somehow his mind had made that dream real. Impossible. He could not have killed his parents. The real world didn't work like that. Even a boy his age knew that. Things did not happen just because of an idle thought.
Even though he knew he had made it happen, there was a part of Jeremiah that stubbornly refused to believe. Through the sheriff's investigation, to the double funeral where he did not shed a tear, to the train platform where he was passed off to a social worker who would take him to a state home in Dover City, Jeremiah tried to tell himself that he hadn't done anything.
But on the train, it happened again. As he dozed in his seat, his mind misbehaved. Bent reality for all to see. He woke up to a mass hallucination of a snowstorm inside the train car. And when he woke, it stopped.
There had been chaos on that train. The astonished adults looked everywhere for the source of the snow. Everywhere but at the young boy who had made it happen. There was only one man who was looking at Jeremiah. And the way he stared, Jeremiah knew that the man in the blue business suit with the funny eyes understood the truth.
The child whose soul had not yet died had met the man who would begin to methodically murder it. The man had taken Jeremiah from the train. To the life that had been waiting for him all along. To a life of death.
Back on the farm Jeremiah had known fear. His father was a brute of a man who mistreated him. His life at home, in town, at school was filled with a hundred daily fears.
After he had murdered his parents there was new fear. The fear of being caught. Of others finding out about his special abilities. Of a new life in a state-run orphanage.
But until that chance meeting on a train, Jeremiah had not known true fear.
The man, he learned, was named Nuihc, although Jeremiah was never to call him by that name. He would be called Master. For Jeremiah it was not a term of respect, but a term of enslavement. And although his Master taught Jeremiah new levels of fear he hadn't known existed, he taught the young boy from Kentucky much, much more.
Nuihc was from a place called Korea. Jeremiah had vaguely heard of it. He was pretty certain his dead father had been in a war there at one time.
Nuihc's full title was Master of Sinanju. For the moment, he was but a Master, a practitioner of the deadliest martial art. He would one day soon be the Master of Sinanju, he vowed. This would happen once a minor obstacle could be removed from his path.
At first, as a boy from rural Kentucky, Jeremiah couldn't understand what a Sinanju was. He soon learned.
The training began three days after Nuihc liberated Jeremiah from the train.
It started with the breath.
"Life is breathing," Nuihc had explained. "Men do not breathe. They puff on what little air they need to keep their torpid bodies trudging forward. They breathe with their lungs, and even then only with part of them. You will breathe here."
With sharp fingers he pressed a spot in the pit of Jeremiah's stomach. The fingers hurt. This was something that Jeremiah would grow accustomed to. His new Master did not mind causing him pain.
At first finding the breath was hard.
Coaxing, holding the boy's belly and breathing in rhythm with Jeremiah, Nuihc taught the boy to breathe. Once he found it, Jeremiah caught on quickly.
He remembered the day. They were in an old, abandoned meat-packing plant in Illinois. When that first breath came to him-the first real breath in his entire life-Jeremiah had promptly vomited onto the floor.
"What's that smell, Master?" he asked, gagging on the rancid air he now breathed which had, until a moment before, seemed blessedly clean.
He would never know that his senses had been opened and he was smelling the stench of the cow blood and viscera that had soaked into the slaughterhouse floor for a hundred years.
The instant Jeremiah asked the question he felt the sting of Nuihc's hand across his face. It was pain that rattled his teeth and made his eyes water. The slap raised a red welt that would not heal for three weeks. Nuihc's face was a furious sneer.
"When I instruct, you listen," the Master said. Jeremiah listened.
He listened through those early years and into his preteens. All the while learning to control his body, to do things he had never imagined were possible. But whatever he did never seemed to be enough for his Master.
"You are a pitiful excuse for a pupil," Nuihc said one day after his eleven-year-old pupil had attempted a task eight times but only performed flawlessly seven of those eight times. "You are so obtuse you have no idea the great gift I am giving you. I should find another to train."
"Please, no, Master. I'll do better."
"You will," Nuihc had insisted. "Or I will kill you."
Jeremiah had no doubt that his teacher was telling the truth. The young man struggled to improve. The first years were difficult. But Jeremiah learned. Never, of course to the level of Nuihc's expectations. That didn't surprise Jeremiah. Thanks to Nuihc's constant intimidation, Jeremiah now fully understood how truly worthless he was. All the abuse, all the scorn that Nuihc heaped daily on his pupil's young shoulders was deserved. Jeremiah was no good as a man or as a pupil. He showed disrespect every time he didn't perform flawlessly.
This was the thing that injured Jeremiah most of all. More than anything, he wanted to show his teacher how much he meant to him. He thought that if he could do one thing right, match even a single move, he might demonstrate to Nuihc what was in his heart. The great love he felt for the man who had saved him from a life as a freak.
The training of his body was a welcome diversion from the growing powers of his mind. The beast that lurked in his brain was a monster that was impossible to tame. But it could be distracted if he concentrated on something else.
Jeremiah trained hard. Sometimes Nuihc would go away on business. At those times Jeremiah could have relaxed his regimen just a little. Fearing that the beast might get loose, the young man trained even more. He hoped that his diligence would not go by unnoticed.
Always when Nuihc returned he failed to notice the improvements his pupil had made on his own. Jeremiah realized it was his own fault for not trying harder. Quietly he would vow to work harder the next time.
When he was twelve years old Jeremiah killed a man.
Nuihc told his pupil that this was an honor. Masters of Sinanju of the recent age had begun to put this aspect of training off until their students were more fully developed. Nuihc's own Master and teacher-who, Jeremiah learned, was Nuihc's uncle-had not allowed his protege to know the thrill of the kill until he was well into his twenties.