The crazy, asymmetrical room shook around me, Munch’s painting a prominent feature, but the magician wasn’t done yet. As my eyes found him, they saw the show’s clincher, which he must have pulled out of a top hat. It was a polished black revolver, and its barrel pointed straight at my chest.
Chapter Forty-Seven
To my credit, I didn’t faint that time. As soon as it became clear that I was going to be shot, the glossy barrel of the black revolver, Satan’s amused face, Iris’s eyelashes, the queer room around me — all acquired the perfect focus of objects in a vivid dream, in which inevitable lacks the slightest logical reason. There was nothing I could do to avoid it, aside from waking up. The realization brought about a strange feeling of peace. More, I was not only calm, I was fascinated.
I was also wrong. Again.
“I was going to shoot you,” Satan said in apologetic tone. “Was really looking forward to it. Polished and re-polished the gun, took shooting lessons. I’ve become quite adept at shooting from the hip, if I do say so myself. It was supposed to be a big deal. Resurrection is always a big deal.”
“Alas!” he cried dramatically, tossing the gun back in the drawer. Upon the contact with mahogany it emitted a loud Twank! I might have jumped. “You made my preparation an utter waste of time. You went and died and got resurrected all by yourself. Even I failed to anticipate that. And I’m much better at anticipating than at shooting, I’ll have you know.”
“Sorry, Satan,” I said dumbly.
“Hah! That’s good,” he chortled. “But call me Stan, please.”
“You mean when they faked the footage?” Iris asked.
“That’s clever, but no,” “Stan” replied with a careless wave of his hand. “I admit fondness for human symbolism, but my reference was rather more literal.”
“On the roof,” I said. “He means on the roof.”
I saw it all again. The roof, the gray, chewed-by-bullets cube of the elevator chamber, the black maw of the Seeker inches away from my face, gaping, filled with teeth but devoid of stench or even breath. I searched my mind for flashes of memories, for the proverbial “life” passing before my eyes, but there was nothing there aside from struggle, pain, anger, and finally darkness. And yet I knew he was right. Which made everything else wrong, and not only to me.
“But how?” For the first time Iris looked like she was asking a question she didn’t already know the answer to. “They were only setting him up.”
“And by getting away we thwarted their plans—”
“You simply did not become their version of the man. Their Project Antichrist. Their sock-puppet Antichrist for the masses. What my advanced, but on occasion hopelessly nearsighted brethren failed to imagine was the possibility that you could be the real one. That there could be a real one. I’d wager your performance on that roof has caused a lot of excitement.” He was positively beaming as he said that. “Yes, I confess, the very idea has been the source of considerable amusement.”
And as though out of what he’d just said his amusement was the statement least likely to be believed, Satan stared off into glossy surface of his desk for a moment, then threw his head back and cackled.
I looked to Iris for support. Somehow she managed to shrug with just her face. I held my own shrug in check, afraid I would not be able to stop shaking for about a year had I allowed it.
“But the prophecy is fiction!” I shouted, apparently not entirely in control after all. “How is it nearsighted to think there shouldn’t be a real Antichrist when you, yourself, have written the fake prophecy about him? More importantly, how is it not insane to expect one to exist?”
He peered at me over intertwined fingers with something near annoyance on his face. “Frankly, I’m not sure what you’re going on about, Luke. So the prophecy is fiction, what of it? Are you saying that by creating a character in a book of fiction the author somehow erases that character from pages of reality? That we should eliminate the possibility of ever meeting Oliver Twist or Raskolnikov simply because Dickens and Dostoyevsky have written about them?”
“N-no?” I began to lose thread of the conversation. And to sweat.
“Come now,” Stan said. “What exactly are we arguing about here? All of you saw what happened on that roof. All of you wondered, if not knew. And now that I’m telling you what it was, what you are, you’re scared, even though you know it’s the truth. But you shouldn’t be frightened. ‘Real’ Antichrist is not bound by the fake prophecy. In fact, I’m only using the name in the sense that you’re someone who stands up to them, to the way the world is set, which is, ironically, closer to the meaning of their prophecy than what you would become had I not interfered.”
“Only that? All I have to do is stand up to a bunch of gods and about seven billion of their followers? Boy, do I feel stupid for being afraid earlier.”
“Don’t be so dramatic. You’ve been doing the very thing ever since that doctor called you in the middle of the night. Quite successfully, I might add.”
“Successfully enough to get myself killed, if you’re to be believed.”
“There’s cute and there’s stupid. Neither becomes you.”
“Fine, I’m alive. I came back. So what? I nearly got Paul and Brome killed; I rescued Iris but left Dr. Young behind. It was too close, and that for only a partial success of a small rescue mission back when they didn’t know I could toss Seekers across roofs. We managed to survive, and I’m very happy about that, but I don’t really know what it is you expect me to do now.”
“Never mind what I expect,” he said. “But you forgot a small detail in your summary of your adventures. Your show.”
A display slid out of the middle of his desk and spun around, offering Iris and me a view of a website. It was a hastily put-together page, black font on white background, filled with images, video clips and questions, but at that moment all I could see was the header in large letters: SEEKING LUKE WHALES, in which the letters of my name changed every five seconds or so to spell out ANTI CHRIST. Under the header the hit counter kept rolling. I began to count the digits.
“One hundred thirty million hits,” Satan said. “In just under three days.”
From that first draft notice my life had been ruled by conspiracies, by desire to survive, by momentum. Run, hide, fight, but mostly run. Now the chase was over. The wheel I’d been running inside halted. They brought me out and told me that I was not like other rats in the lab. For the first time, they put me on the table and asked me what I wanted to do next.
One hundred and thirty million may not be an immediately impressive number to someone whose show had often boasted that many viewers in a single night, but converted into unique hits on a homemade website that went live some six hours after the end of my five-minute-long hijacking of the airwaves, against the backdrop of the sudden stillness, sudden absence of the momentum that had propelled me forward up to that point, that number affected me more than anything else I had learned within that pyramidal library.
But I had to learn at least one more thing. The first thing.
“Why do they want us to end the world?”
Satan, who had walked off to stand by the window while I’d scrolled through the forum topics on the website, turned around, nodded.
“Actually, ‘restarting’ the world would be a more accurate term.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This would be the sixth time the world ends. Since we’ve been around, in any event.”
“That’s insane.”
“Yes, it is. Which is why I chose to no longer be a part of it. Well… that and my refusal to accept the solution as final.”