LITMIR.BIZ

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reason for such hope. Without Jaffe’s strange, half-intuitive grasp of occult principles to marry with his own scientific methodology, the miracle would not have been made, and how often did men of science sit down with men of magic (the suit-mongers, as Jaffe called them) and attempt a mingling of crafts? It was good they didn’t. There was too much dangerous stuff to discover. The occultists whose codes Jaffe had broken knew more about the nature of things than Fletcher would ever have suspected. Beneath their metaphors, their talk of the Bath of Rebirth, and of golden Progeny begotten by fathers of lead, they were ambitious for the same solutions he’d sought all his life. Artificial ways to advance the evolutionary urge: to take the human beyond itself. Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius, they advised. Let the obscure be explained by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown. They knew whereof they wrote. Between his science and theirs Fletcher had solved the problem. Synthesized a fluid that would carry evolution’s glad tidings through any living system, pressing (so he believed) the humblest cell towards a higher condition. Nuncio he’d called it: the Messenger. Now he knew he’d misnamed it. It was not a messenger of the gods, but the god itself. It had a life of its own. It had energy, and ambition. He had to destroy it, before it began to rewrite Genesis, beginning with Randolph Jaffe as Adam.

      ‘Father?’

      Raul had appeared behind him. Once again the boy had stripped off his clothes. After years of going naked, he was still unable to get used to their constrictions. And once again he used that damn word.

      ‘I’m not your father,’ Fletcher reminded him. ‘I never was and never will be. Can’t you get that into your head?’

      As ever, Raul listened. His eyes lacked whites, and were difficult to read, but his steady gaze never failed to mellow Fletcher.

      ‘What do you want?’ he said more softly.

      ‘The fires,’ the boy replied.

      ‘What about them?’

      ‘The wind, father –’ he began.

      It had got up in the last few minutes, coming straight off the ocean. When Fletcher followed Raul round to the front of the Mission, in the lee of which they’d built the Nuncio’s pyres, he found the notes being scattered, many of them far from consumed.

      ‘Damn you,’ Fletcher said, as much irritated by his own lack of attention to the task as the boy’s. ‘I told you: don’t put too much paper on at the same time.’

      He took hold of Raul’s arm, which was covered in silky hair, as was his entire body. There was a distinct smell of singeing, where the flames had risen suddenly and caught the boy by surprise. It took, he knew, considerable courage on Raul’s part to overcome his primal fear of fire. He was doing it for his father’s sake. He’d have done it for no other. Contrite, Fletcher put his arm around Raul’s shoulder. The boy clung, the way he’d clung in his previous incarnation, burying his face in the smell of the human.

      ‘We’d better just let them go,’ Fletcher said, watching as another gust of wind took leaves off the fire and scattered them like pages from a calendar, day upon day of pain and inspiration. Even if one or two of them were to be found, and that was unlikely along such a barren stretch of coast, nobody would be able to make any sense of them. It was only his obsessiveness that made him want to wipe the slate completely clean, and shouldn’t he know better, when that very obsessiveness had been one of the qualities that had brought this waste and tragedy about?

      The boy detached himself from around Fletcher and turned back to the fires.

      ‘No Raul…’ he said, ‘… forget them … let them go …’

      The boy chose not to hear; a trick he’d always had, even before the changes the Nuncio’s touch had brought about. How many times had Fletcher summoned the ape Raul had been only to have the wretched animal wilfully ignore him? It was in no small measure that very perversity which had encouraged Fletcher to test the Great Work on him: a whisper of the human in the simian which the Nuncio turned into a shout.

      Raul wasn’t making an attempt to collect the dispersed papers, however. His small, wide body was tensed, his head tilted up. He was sniffing the air.

      ‘What is it?’ Fletcher said. ‘You can smell somebody?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Where?’

      ‘Coming up the hill.’

      Fletcher knew better than to question Raul’s observation. The fact that he, Fletcher, could hear and smell nothing was simply a testament to the decadence of his senses. Nor did he need to ask from which direction their visitor was coming. There was only one route up to the Mission. Forging a single road through such inhospitable terrain, then up a steep hill, must have taxed even the masochism of Jesuits. They’d built one road, and the Mission, and then, perhaps failing to find God up here, vacated the place. If their ghosts ever drifted through, they’d find a deity now, Fletcher thought, in three phials of blue fluid. So would the man coming up the hill. It could only be Jaffe. Nobody else knew of their presence here.

      ‘Damn him,’ Fletcher said. ‘Why now? Why now?’

      It was a foolish question. Jaffe had chosen to come now because he knew his Great Work was being conspired against. He had a way of maintaining a presence in a place where he wasn’t; a spying echo of himself. Fletcher didn’t know how. One of Jaffe’s suits, no doubt. The kind of minor mind-tricks Fletcher would have dismissed as trickery once, as he would have dismissed so much else. It would take Jaffe several more minutes to get all the way up the hill, but that wasn’t enough time, by any means, for Fletcher and the boy to finish their labours.

      There were two tasks only he might yet complete if he was efficient. Both were vital. First, the killing and disposal of Raul, from whose transformed system an educated enquirer might glean the nature of the Nuncio. Second, the destruction of the three phials inside the Mission.

      It was there he returned now, through the chaos he had gladly wreaked on the place. Raul followed, walking barefoot through the smashed instrumentation and splintered furniture, to the inner sanctum. This was the only room that had not been invaded by the clutter of the Great Work. A plain cell that boasted only a desk, a chair, and an antiquated stereo. The chair was set in front of the window which overlooked the ocean. Here, in the first days following Raul’s successful transmutation, before the full realization of the Nuncio’s purpose and consequence had soiled Fletcher’s triumph, man and boy had sat, and watched the sky, and listened to Mozart together. All the mysteries, Fletcher had said, in one of his first lessons, were footnotes to music. Before everything, music.

      Now there’d be no more sublime Mozart; no more sky-watching; no more loving education. There was only time for a shot. Fletcher took the gun from beside his mescalin in the desk drawer.

      ‘We’re going to die?’ Raul said.

      He’d known this was coming. But not so soon.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘We should go outside,’ the boy said. ‘To the edge.’

      ‘No. There isn’t time. I’ve … I’ve got some work to do before I join you.’

      ‘But you said together.’

      ‘I know.’

      ‘You promised together.’

      ‘Jesus, Raul! I said: I know! But it can’t be helped. He’s coming. And if he takes you from me, alive or dead, he’ll use you. He’ll cut you up. Find out how the Nuncio works in you!’

      His words were intended to scare, and they succeeded. Raul let out a sob, his face knotted up with terror. He took a step backwards as Fletcher raised the gun.

      ‘I’ll be with you soon,’ Fletcher said. ‘I swear it. Just as soon as I can.’

      ‘Please, father …’

      ‘I’m not your father! Once

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