William Bernhardt - Dark Eye

He had expected them two days ago, and was startled to see not only that they finally arrived, but that they had brought Susan with them. She must’ve insisted.

She had not been drinking. Had she resisted the temptation he’d laid before her? Had he broken her, or had she somehow managed to reassemble herself? He would have to wait quietly and watch. Proceed with the new plan, with the implementation of the secret he had been given. And when the time came, hope that Susan was ready for him.

No wonder he had found himself attracted to Susan. It was all so clear now, now that he knew everything.

She was the Vessel.

He put the binoculars back in their leather case. It would be so easy to pick them all off, one by one, leaving nothing but a few more corpses littering this potter’s field. And why not? He could do anything now, anything at all.

He’d had to isolate himself these past few days, return to the texts, meditate. Commune with his totem. He eventually realized that his flaw was not so much in his actions, nor in his plan-but in himself. He could not force the offerings-they had to come willingly. These paltry reincarnations were woefully insufficient; something far greater was necessary to merit the meed he desired. And he had to secure a Vessel worthy of the soul with which he sought reunion.

He was a new person now, a new man with a new plan.

He was ready to Ascend.

His long days in the xeric wasteland had been fraught with temptation, but he had resisted them. His passage had been filled with torments, but he had weathered them. His last night in the Spring Mountains had been the time of his translation. He had offered his very essence, everything he had. He had gone without food, without water, re-creating the vision quest that first revealed his true destiny. He’d stripped and pounded himself with sand, abused himself with the cactus flower. He’d bled and he’d wept. And when at last he’d fallen down on the rocky crag, exhausted beyond reckoning, he believed he had failed.

The truth had come to him in a dream, as did all knowledge of that other blessed world.

“You have done well,” said the voice, the one that could not be ignored. “You have pleased us, and so you shall become one with us. The time of your Ascension is at hand.” And so the voice which he had once heard in his head became his own. He became the totem. And the totem was he.

He looked down now upon those pitiful fools, scurrying about like infantile ants. He laughed, and even his laughter was filled with power. He was the mountain now, and they but grains of sand, a part of him, but not of him, in his world, but not of his world. He was invulnerable, indomitable. He had slipped beyond the boundaries of time and space- By a route obscure and lonely, / Haunted by ill angels only, / Where an Eidolon, named Night, / On a black throne reigns upright, / I have reached these lands but newly… / From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime… / Out of Space, out of Time…

He stretched his arms toward the sky, letting the stardust settle all around him, feeling at home and at one with the cosmos. I am larger than death, he knew, and greater.

The man I once was is no more.

I am the Raven.

After I came to, I stayed outside the basement while the crime techs did their work. There was nothing I could contribute at this stage. Better to let the experts work unimpeded. I took another pill, rested in the backseat of Patrick’s car. I still felt drawn, unsteady. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was embarrassed. Fainting was so amateurish, and worse, so… girlish. Even if I did just get out of the hospital. It was exactly what the old-guard grunts expected someone like me to do.

After another hour or so, I got bored and slowly made my way inside. I saw Amelia Escavez outside the house. She had a football-sized metal frame on the ground and was pouring plaster inside it.

“Another tire track?”

“Footprint. Wanna see?”

I did. “Think it’s him?”

“A definite possibility. There are several of them around the place.”

“Anything that might help us find him? A distinctive tread, maybe?”

“I don’t think so. But it’ll be good for confirmation if you do catch him.” She quickly corrected herself. “When. I mean-after-”

“I know what you mean.”

I entered the house. Crime lab guys in coveralls were working over the shack, upstairs and down, hoping against hope for any trace of a clue that might tell us where this man was now. Using something called gentian violet, which stained skin cells left behind on adhesive surfaces, they’d managed to lift prints off a piece of masking tape. But since Edgar didn’t appear to have a record, that wouldn’t get us far. Ditto for the hair and fiber traces. As always, Edgar hadn’t given us anything that would help us find him. Didn’t even have the courtesy to leave a forwarding address.

When I got to the basement, I found Darcy hunched over the remains of Fara Spencer. Now that was a bizarre sight. Here was a kid so innocent, so gentle, he literally wouldn’t step on a spider. Terrified of puppy dogs. But he had no difficulty working around a corpse. Of course, the corpse could do him no harm now, but that wouldn’t comfort most people. Only Darcy’s brain was free from those irrational emotional associations we have about the dead.

“Did you ever eat bugs?” he said when he saw me approach.

I don’t know. Maybe it was the combination of that horrible corpse-which was crawling with bugs-and the suggestion of eating them that made me certain I was going to heave, the only thing that would be even more embarrassing than fainting. I placed a hand against the wall to steady myself and willed my stomach to behave. Most importantly, I kept my eyes locked on Darcy-not the corpse he was scrutinizing, and not the field of corpses that lay beyond.

“No, my tastes run more to meat and potatoes.”

“Did you know that some people in some countries eat bugs all the time? I don’t like eating bugs. When I was in grade school, some of the other kids told me to eat bugs and I did. But then they laughed at me.”

I’d wager he got a lot of that in school. “I don’t blame you for not liking bugs.”

“But I do. Bugs are cool. Except for spiders. Just not for eating.” He grinned guilelessly.

Well, of course-what little boy didn’t like bugs?

“I used to collect them, but my dad made me throw them all out.”

“Spoilsport.”

“Then I started reading about them in the library. Did you know that blowflies love dead bodies?”

“I, um, think I heard that mentioned at the academy.”

“They love to lay their eggs in dead people. This body has bugs all over it.”

“Yup.” I didn’t look.

“Do you know how long it takes a blowfly to go from egg to larva to pupa to adult?”

“Oh, the answer’s on the tip of my tongue…”

“When it goes from egg to first instar larva, it’s about this big.” He held his fingers only a few millimeters apart. “Then it sheds its skin and goes to second instar larva-this big.” The fingers widened. “Then it sheds its skin again and does the third instar.” His fingers were more than ten millimeters apart now. “After that, it becomes an adult.”

“That is so cool. You know, I should go to the library more often.”

Darcy pointed at the squirmy, whitish bits crawling out of Fara’s nose. “Those are third instar. She died ten days ago.”

I did a double take. “But how could you possibly-”

“It takes eight days to get to the third instar.”

“But you can’t know when it was born.”