Jack Chalker: The Messiah Choice

With that thought came the sudden realization that all this would never have been revealed to him unless it no longer mattered. Looking around, he entered the trail and the forest but stopped as the sounds from the meadow made it seem as if some great beast had now reached the top and was out in the open. It was such a convincing illusion that in spite of himself he stopped, turned, and looked back at the meadow and the altar stone. Nothing was visible in the eerie silence, but now, as he looked on, the grass in front of the altar stone bent and twisted as if crushed by an enormous foot, followed by yet another giant imprint a few yards further on.

Sir Robert turned and began to run down the path. He reached a junction of two trails, one well worn and leading back to the road, the other leading away towards the cliff trail down to the beach. He did not hesitate but.took the slightly overgrown cliff trail. The road was his logical choice, and even if he’d met other people out there it would not stop that madman from killing them all to get to him. That he would not have. The cliff trail was also the most direct route to the village, although it was almost never used for that.

There were sounds behind him, sounds of some great beast crashing through the dense underbrush. Beamed-in illusion or true monster, it made no difference; the thing was almost certainly death and it was stalking him.

His heart pounding, he broke through the last of the bush and came to the edge of the cliff. It was more than a hundred foot drop and quite sheer, and he was forced to run along for a few hundred yards, fearing that the terrible thing, whatever it was, that chased him would spot him and simply knock him off the cliff. He was determined not to give its controller that satisfaction. If he could not outrun it, he would make bloody well certain that no verdict of death by accident or natural causes was possible.

He reached the trail break where it wound down the cliff to the sea and took it, going as fast as he dared. He was not in top condition, but he was no heart candidate, either. He jumped a few of the switchbacks when he dared to save time, and heard it break from the trees behind and above him. He dared not look back, but made for the beach as fast as he could. He jumped the last six feet into the sand and fell momentarily, then got up and continued to run along the beach towards the town and also out towards the water.

There was a rocky outcrop ahead, and he knew that the town lay not far beyond it. As he moved to the water’s edge, he suddenly caught sight of the steeple of the small church and felt encouragement. He might just make it! Slowing, he risked a look back, and saw a huge disturbance in the sand near the bottom of the beach trail; now the sand was falling away, as if pressed in by some great weight, a body that had to be twenty feet tall if it existed at all and with a stride to match. He knew in an instant that he could not make it, and made his way out into the water. Even now sounds were damped, and the breakers came at him not in silence but as if far away. He knew the water was quite shallow at this point, but he hoped that the rough water would diffuse any projection if that was what his stalker was.

The great footprints reached the edge of the water and then began to walk along, paralleling his progress. He felt suddenly elated. Oho! Don’t like the rough water, do you?

Another five minutes and he would be within hailing distance of the town. Another five minutes of wading in waist-deep water and surviving the occasional high wave and there would be plenty of witnesses, probably too many for such as this. With the supply boat due in today, his assassins would miss their chance.

He had nearly reached the outcrop after which the town would be in full view and he was suddenly feeling confident. He risked stopping for a moment, ten feet or more out, and turned. “Got you, you bastard!” he yelled back at the apparently empty beach. “You cut it too fine this time!”

At that moment a huge breaker came in and struck him in the back, propelling him forward, towards the beach. He stumbled and dropped into the water, losing the papers he’d managed to cling to, and then picked himself up as quickly as possible. He had been pushed forward a good four feet!

Suddenly something he could not see grasped him by the head and shoulders and lifted him out of the water. He was flung by some invisible force fifteen feet or more into the air, dangling and struggling as if held by some great hand.

The “hand” shifted and held him suspended now by a hold on his waist, and he found himself lifted still higher, perhaps twenty or twenty-five feet, and brought close over the sands as if whatever had hold of him was studying him for a moment. He yelled and screamed, hoping that some noise, anything, would carry to the town that was so very near.

And then the great hand slowly tightened, more and more, and his eyes bulged and his mouth opened wide, only now it was incapable of sound.

And then the bloody, mangled carcass of what was now hardly recognizable as human remains dropped to the sands below, out of the reach of the water that might have saved him.

Quite abruptly the area was alive with the screeches of sea birds, the buzz of insects, and the roar of crashing breakers once more.

The entire beach area had been covered with a huge patchwork of tarpaulins so that it resembled a sports stadium field being protected from the rain, though it was in bright sunshine.

Security officers stood at all access points to the beach area, extending from the trail above all the way to the point at which the body had struck the sands. The body itself had been photographed and then removed, but all else was as undisturbed as it could be considering the circumstances.

Two men walked down the beach from town: one a short, burly man built like a barrel with flaming red hair and an unkempt beard to match, the other tall, athletically built, with a long, lean, angular face and sharp nose. His long hair was turning a premature dark gray.

“Lucky you were so close and could get here on short notice,” commented Constable Julius “Red” Mathias, the shorter and older of the two men. “I mean, this is the cushiest job in law enforcement up to now—nothing to enforce and plenty of tropical breezes and really good pay to boot—but this thing would drive anybody nuts.” Mathias had a pronounced Midlands accent tempered only a bit by being away from Britain so long.

Gregory MacDonald chuckled sourly. “Luck had something to do with it all right, Red, but it was all bad and all mine.”

“Ain’t as unlucky as Sir Robert, you might note,” the other quipped, sticking an unlit, half-smoked cigar in his mouth.

MacDonald noted it. “Thought you were going to quit those.”

“Y’don’t see me smokin’, now do you? Call it me pacifier.”

They reached the scene and MacDonald was impressed. “Have ’em roll it back a ways, Red,” he instructed. “I want to take a look at what we’re really dealing with here.”

Red gave a sour laugh and spat. “Oh, this is a winner. A classic, lad. The sort of thing that makes up all at once for a century or two of crime-free living here.”

At the constable’s order, the crew began to slowly but professionally roll up the tarps one at a time, exposing the death scene first.

“Where’d you get all these people, Red?”

“Oh, they’s mostly security staff from the Institute. The place is crawlin’ with ’em, so why not use ’em? The others doin’ the heavy work are mostly men from the town. Those security fellows fought like hell my bringin’ in the others, but when you see what we got you’ll understand why I didn’t feel right just leavin’ this all to the Institute boys.”