Kevin Anderson - Resurrection, Inc.

The imposter’s eyes widened with fervor, and he spoke so vehemently that droplets of saliva sprayed from his mouth. “Danal. We chose that name while you were still in the vat, because of the Writings, to force fulfillment of the prophecy.” He furiously flung the pages to another spot and quoted again, shoving the book in the Servant’s face. “Look! It says, ‘Sacrifice both the living and the dead,’ Satan said. ‘And I shall return to regain what is mine.’”

He snapped the book shut with finality, and carelessly let it drop to the floor with a thump. “It’s all in the Writings—proof positive. The meaning is clear. You should be sacrificed again, and Walpurgis Night is a perfect time.”

“I wrote most of the damned Writings!” Danal stood like a gargoyle himself, immobile but filled with hatred. He couldn’t move. The Command phrase locked all his muscles.

“I know. I was with you.”

A horrible suspicion crept upon Danal, and the imposter stopped himself, smiling in wonder. “Ah, you don’t know, do you? Nathans wouldn’t have told you.”

Danal stared at the imposter, wide-eyed. The look in the man’s gaze, the build of his body, his mannerisms as he moved—all clicked together like the flash of a switchblade snapping open. Stromgaard .

The man chuckled. “You should see the look on your face, Vincent!”

“You’re dead,” Danal said in a low voice.

“So were you,” the imposter countered, “but my death was only staged.”

Danal recalled the night of the sacrifice, seeing his “terminally ill” father dying and wasting away on the altar stone. He could still feel the nauseating packing sensation, the crunch of bone, as the sacrificial dagger bit into his father’s skeletal chest. Blood sprayed up ward. The heavy stubble on his jaw… covering a faint line of pinpricks from surface cloning?

Stromgaard was dead. He had to be. The muscles in Danal’s neck stood out as he tried to shake his head, to deny it. But the Command phrase kept him motionless.

“I wanted out of your little games,” the imposter continued. “And, frankly, I was getting sick of all the cold cynicism from you and Nathans about our religion. Don’t you have any sense of wonder left in your lives? Can’t you give supernatural events the benefit of the doubt?

“Nathans gave me another face so I could walk unrecognized, and we used one of the neo-Satanist converts to take my place on the sacrificial altar—there were so many willing ones! A pathetic story and some heavy makeup convinced you to do just what we wanted. It was for the best, it was for the good of the religion, because it showed a dramatic change of power from one High Priest to his successor.” Stromgaard Van Ryman scowled as if he had swallowed something bad. “I was there at the Sabbat. Do you know what it’s like to be in the audience while you watch your son kill his own father?”

“You were perfectly willing to murder me when the roles were reversed,” Danal countered.

“No matter.” Stromgaard shrugged. “I traveled, I went on pilgrimages to the original Salem, Massachusetts, to the Hartz Mountains of Eastern Europe, to the Balkans, to Budapest, to Transylvania. I studied the Writings, all of them, with an open mind, not with your rude sarcasm. It was all going so smoothly—I was perfectly content as an ascetic. Until you betrayed us! You and the whore!”

Danal strained until he thought his muscles would burst, but he still could not unlock the invisible binding of the Command phrase.

“That’s why I came back, to save the religion. For the good of neo-Satanism. You deserved everything you got, Vincent. For betraying the hopes of thousands of people, for mocking things you didn’t even try to understand.” He shook his head, sadly, it seemed. “But now we’ve brought you back, all the way back, and you can redeem yourself by unleashing the next Millennium.”

Danal remembered swimming through death—the warm darkness, the comforting light, the chimes, and the final unbreakable wall of memory he could not penetrate. “You don’t know how cruel that was. Bringing my memories back was the worst.”

“It was necessary,” Stromgaard said.

“Why? Why was it necessary?”

“Nathans had his own reasons. And I had mine.” The imposter’s face took on an expression of impatient scorn. “Nathans is afraid of death, even though he surrounds himself with it at Resurrection, Inc. He wants to be alive to enjoy the benefits of the perfect world he’s working so hard to create. Hah! And if a resurrected person can regain all his memories, then Nathans himself can live on as long as he wishes. That’s what he thinks. If he dies, he can just be resurrected, have his memories triggered, and live again. His own kind of immortality. Not realizing, of course, that after tonight when Satan and the New Age have come, all his efforts won’t count for anything at all.”

Van Ryman led the Servant over to the terminal on the wall, commanding him to follow. Danal moved woodenly. He had no choice. Sweat broke out on his forehead; he resisted with every grain of his free mind, but his body paid no attention, listening only to the Commands. Now, at least, he could move. He had a chance, so long as Stromgaard allowed him to keep his voice.

“And your reason for bringing back my memories?” Danal prodded.

“It’s obvious, Vincent—” he snapped. “If you paid any attention to the Writings. ‘Sacrifice both the living and the dead,’ says the Word, ‘And I shall return to regain what is mine.’”

“We sacrificed living victims and even some Servants, to no effect. But I figured it all out—it all fits. ‘Both the living and the dead’—that’s you, a Servant who was once dead and then reawakened to his old life. And you’re Danal, just like the Writings say. We have to sacrifice the same victim, first as a living person, then a second time as a resurrected Servant, a Servant with all his memories, with his own soul back. That’s very important.”

“I wrote that passage!” Danal exclaimed. “It doesn’t mean anything. You know that—we did it right in front of your eyes!”

Van Ryman looked intently at Danal, then spoke in a low awed voice, “And how do you know your hand wasn’t guided ? By some greater power?”

Danal could hardly believe what he had heard. “Don’t be absurd.”

“If you have Faith, no answer is necessary. If you have none, no answer is possible.”

Despite himself, Danal made a scornful noise. “That’s exactly the type of invincible ignorance we lashed out at in the first place.”

“But it does make sense. You wrote the truth without even knowing it. Think about it—Satan’s been dormant, sleeping because His followers were too few for too many centuries. But now neo-Satanism has grown strong—and because of Resurrection, Inc., the dead are walking again, just like in a dozen prophecies.

“Now you, Vincent, were sacrificed to Him, and then we brought you back to life. We snatched your soul from Satan, ripping it like candy from His claws. How can He ignore that? He is awakening—I can feel it. He’ll follow you here to reclaim what was given to Him.”

Van Ryman removed a handful of glistening electrodes from the innards of the Net terminal, and turned to look at Danal with bright and distant eyes. “Hold still, now.” Stromgaard positioned the electrodes in a clump at the back of Danal’s head. The Servant tried to clench his fists, but his body refused him even that.

“I had plenty of time to think, to meditate, and I received a Great Revelation. It was wonderful, Vincent—it would make you breathless! You see, for centuries, Satan hasn’t been able to possess anyone because cynical mankind has learned to resist. You know, by materialistic thinking, by skepticism, by forgetting how to fear the unknown. But mankind has created his own downfall, building with his own hands a mind that’ll be Satan’s greatest possession of all! One single mind to dominate the Earth and control everything. The Net!”