Pavel Kravchenko: Project Antichrist

“Please, follow me,” the smiley young man said, starting up the stairs. Brome took another look around and nodded. Everyone moved to follow.

“Not you,” Bogdan said, stopping me. Brome, four steps up, also stopped and turned around, frowning.

“Why not?” he demanded.

“I have to meet him,” I replied, suddenly queasy. This, now, was the end of my road. What had started with a plastic bottle tossed out of the window was going to end here, today, in the crooked house on the island of Nowhere. Bogdan nodded, and I had a queer feeling his nod responded to what I thought rather than what I said.

“We can all meet him then,” said Brome and took a step down. “There’ll be plenty of time to rest afterwards.”

“You’ll meet him, don’t worry. But tonight is reserved for Luke alone.”

“Who the hell is the guy, anyway?” Paul asked.

“Tomorrow, Paul. Tonight you rest.”

“I’ll go with Luke,” said Iris, taking my hand. Bogdan considered it and gave another nod.

“This way. We’ll see the rest of you tomorrow.” With that Bogdan started down a narrow corridor. Squeezing Iris’s hand I followed.

The library we entered would feel right at home in any upscale house with triangular windows. There was your fireplace, your redwood desk with drawers, your leather armchairs, your velvet curtains, your bookshelves filled with books. The room was two stories high, which, together with the triangular windows, made the walls seem to slant inwards. Here also several paintings decorated the walls; the one above the fire place caught my attention immediately. A skillful reproduction of it hung in my study.

A tall, black-clad man was leaning on the windowsill of an open window. In the darkness outside strange shadows moved and shifted. The man’s youthful face was clean-shaven, thin, had a prominent Roman nose and high cheekbones. Curls of his charcoal hair moved with the breeze. He studied us, a hint of amusement in his small, deep-set eyes.

“Two steaks, one well done, one medium rare, just like you ordered, sir,” Bogdan announced with a flourish.

“I’m joking,” he hastened to add with a grin, seeing my face. “Good night.”

“He’s still new at humor,” the man said when the door closed. He spoke with a distinct British accent. “As I am. By the way, the walls do slant. This study is actually within a pyramid. I’ll show you later from the outside.”

Still not altogether comfortable, I turned towards “Scream.”

“So that’s where the original has been all these years.”

“Hmm? Oh, ‘Scream?’ No. That’s a fake. Not the slightest idea who has the real one.”

“Oh.”

“It’s a good fake,” Iris said.

“You give me too much credit,” the man replied with a chuckle. Both Iris and I grinned, and I breathed a sign of relief. The man pushed away from the windowsill.

“Enough of the small talk,” he said. “Go ahead, Mr. Whales.”

I stared at him, relieved no longer. He nodded encouragingly.

“It’s you,” I blurted out. A small smile appeared on his face, but he didn’t reply. Iris gave me a raised eyebrow.

“You are the Antichrist.”

There was a minute of silence, shattered abruptly by a burst of laughter. Iris’s look said I was completely off the simplest truth ever. I stood and bore it. I figured it was just one of those days. The man, meanwhile, circled the desk and lowered himself in the armchair behind it.

“You have it all wrong, Mr. Whales,” he stated finally.

“Then who the hell are you? Aside from Lloyd’s employer that is. I know that.”

“I am what they like to call Satan, of course!” he exclaimed.

I grunted in righteous indignation. “How is that different?”

“I am an alien, Luke. The Antichrist is human. Which makes the commonplace disinformation about the Antichrist being the son of Satan impossible to be true. All that talk about the mark of triple-six is nothing more than a primitive numerological code for human. Father, mother, child. We, the ‘divines,’ are seven.” He chuckled and reached down into the drawer. I turned to Iris. I knew she was about to say it. The room was suddenly stuffy. My heartbeat became the sound of a speeding train. Paralyzed, I watched her lips form the phrase.

“You are the Antichrist.”

“That is correct on more levels than one,” the man, the creature who called himself Satan, confirmed cheerfully.

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.