The white ceiling shook, spun up, and was gone.
Chapter Fifteen
I woke up with a start, feeling like I had just been slapped in the face. First thing I saw was Dr. Young’s maroon turtleneck. Then I saw his hand, rising.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked him, trying to sound sharp and angry. It came out as more of a whimper.
“It’s morning, Mr. Whales.”
It all came back to me at once.
“Oh my God! What the! Doc! What the hell were! Lloyd? Where’s that fucking Lloyd?” Shouting all this, I jumped up — I had been resting in a fetal position on an undersized brown love-seat — with such speed that I almost lost my balance and had to grab hold of the nearby bookcase for support. Something wet was on my cheeks. I got even louder when there was no immediate answer. “Dr. Young! Talk to me! I said talk to me, you cultist piece of shit!”
“Enough, Mr. Whales,” he said sternly, staring at me through narrowed eyes. I quickly checked my immediate surroundings, looking for a moderately heavy, preferably pointed object. We were in a white windowless room (some kind of office again, I thought) with a brown-painted rubber-wood desk, completely bare, in the middle, a matching chair behind it, a folded thingamajig for sleeping behind that, the worn at the arms love-seat I’d slept on to the right and the bookcase directly behind me. Not a single piece of jagged metal. Looking over my shoulder, I surveyed the book shelves. There was only one sufficiently thick book there, but I left it alone. It was the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. An old Barnes and Noble edition. Leather, or at least “leatheroid” jacket.
“Yes, enough is right!” I shouted with a detectable note of disappointment in my voice. Turning back to the old man, I contemplated a lunge for his throat.
Suddenly, I spotted Iris behind him, on a chair against the wall, knees tucked under her chin. She winced, hands on her ears, not looking at me. That cooled me down. I shut up and dropped back on the loveseat.
“What happened, Doc? Tell me it was the weed,” I begged, covering my eyes with my hands. As soon as I did, an image of that black thing appeared in my mind. With a loud slap my hands landed on my knees, grabbing them until the knuckles turned white.
“We were attacked. By dogs.”
“Dogs!?” I shouted again, not able to control myself. “I know what a dog looks like! Those weren’t any motherfucking dogs, OK?”
“No, of course not. They are just called ‘dogs’ because their method of search is similar to that of a canine. You see, they follow one’s trail. Not the smell, like normal dogs do, but another kind of trail—”
“Look. I don’t need a lecture. Just tell me what those things were.”
“Aliens,” Iris said. I grunted. Dr. Young glanced over at her and gave a ridiculously serious but slight nod, turning back to me.
“Perhaps it would be easier for you to think of them as angels, Mr. Whales.”
“No, Father Young. It wouldn’t be easier for me to think of them as angels. Angels are white, with wings, harps and glowing zeros floating above their heads. What I saw in that house was about as far from an angel as it gets.”
“They can change appearance,” he replied. “The form you saw has been picked as suitable for the task at hand. It is a lot easier to destroy a victim frightened out of his wits.”
I had been, still was frightened out of my wits. I knew, because my wits should have convinced me the event I had witnessed was a hallucination, caused by either the lack of medicine or some kind of a devilish drug Dr. Young had mixed in with the cannabis we smoked. Or it could have been even simpler and funnier. A very elaborate and successful Halloween prank, with guns shooting blanks and a couple of out-of-job basketball players in high-tech monster suits. The whole present conversation about “angel-dogs” should have seemed utterly absurd.
But my wits deserted me. Lloyd’s method of scaring me into a revelation apparently prevailed after all. I have seen the creature. I had no doubt about that. I heard its blood-freezing cry. I heard the shots. I somehow knew they had come to destroy me. And for all the dismissive gestures and face-making, I believed Dr. Young when he said they were not terrestrial. Which scared me even more.
Yet, there remained one comforting fact in all of this, I suddenly realized. Whatever they were, they had failed. I was still alive.
“Those… things. Were they immune to bullets?”
“Not any more than you and I are immune to mosquitoes.”
“How did we get out, Doc?”
“Well, we drove, but prior to that, I am not sure, Mr. Whales. I stopped one of them, if temporarily; the fate of the other one puzzled me all this time. Since you were facing it when it was in the street, I was hoping you were going to enlighten me about that.”
“Something killed it. There was a flash of white light…” I tried to remember more, but couldn’t. Instead, I remembered Lloyd and the hole he and the creature had made in the wall of the house. “Where’s Lloyd? I think I want my gun back now.”
As soon as the question left my lips I regretted asking it, because I knew Dr. Young was going to answer it in the same voice he’d just told me angels were out to kill me. I was right.
“I am afraid that was the end of the road for Mr. Freud. He is not with us any longer.”
I leaned back in the loveseat and looked at Iris. Her eyes told me she’d learned about Lloyd while I was unconscious.
I was surprised to find my own eyes swelling with tears.
What I knew about Lloyd could fit on a fortune cookie, and it wouldn’t have prophesized anything favorable. Hell, the guy was a murderer. But now I was alive, and he had died protecting me. One of those things had destroyed him instead of me.
And why? I still hadn’t a clue.
I wiped my eyes roughly with a sleeve of my sweater.
“Your report of the creature’s demise, however, is very comforting indeed,” Dr. Young continued, as though he was at a podium and just turned a page. “It seems you have other friends, Mr. Whales.”
You might survive yet, Mr. Whales. He didn’t say that, but I heard it nonetheless. And, despite the “comforting report,” facing the death of Lloyd, who had been trained and armed, I wasn’t at all crazy about my chances.
“Doc,” I said as calmly as I could. “I’ve seen the angels. I think it’s time you told me why they are trying to kill me.”
His eyes bore into mine, considering. Finally, he nodded. Iris got up from her chair and came to sit next to me on the loveseat.
“You’re right, Mr. Whales. You have seen the angels. You have taken the pills and you have stopped taking the pills. You are beginning to understand. You, I think, already know what I am going to say. But I am not certain if any of this makes you ready. I can tell you from personal experience that knowing what the answer will be and being ready for it are two very different things.”
“I don’t want to die not knowing the reason, Doc. I’m ready.”
“The problem is,” he continued as though he did not hear me, “that if you aren’t prepared, the knowledge, or let’s call it ‘information,’ will not be digested. If your brain rejects it once, it will be very hard to convince it afterwards.”
He sighed.
“However, with a narrow escape that we had, I am afraid there’s no other choice but to take that risk. I will try to be brief and basic.”
“As you know,” he began, immediately pausing to give me a doubtful glance. “As you probably know, Mr. Whales, history books teach us that organized religion originated from elemental worship. The first Man was helpless, clueless and fearful, so he began to worship different aspects of nature in order to appease them. It is a compelling and plausible theory. It does well to explain the evolution of elements into God-figures that govern them, the God-figures that were inevitably either animalistic, humanoid or mix of both, because the primitives could not imagine anything beyond what they saw. These beliefs, then, evolved further, most deities became more and more humanoid, and the animals they were previously ‘combined’ with them became ‘associated’ as in either the ability of a certain God to take on a form of a certain animal, or simply an animal being a symbol of that God for whatever forgotten reason. Presently, animal worship is mostly out of fashion, with the predominant religions all focusing on either purely humanoid (but infinitely more divine) Gods or their even more humanoid prophets. Thus, since religion was created by Man, its evolution will be complete when Man, becoming less and less fearful, clueless and helpless, becomes God.”