Генри Каттнер - A Cross of Centuries

His laughter came slow, horrible and complacent.

He took three steps and swept his arms around her. Her flesh shrank from the grip of that evil.

And then, suddenly, strangely, she felt the evil leave him. The hard arms shuddered, drew away, and then tightened again, with frantic tenderness, while he bent his head and she felt the sudden hotness of tears.

He could not speak for a while. Cold as stone, she held him. I

Somehow she was sitting on a couch and he was kneeling before her, his face buried in her lap.

She could not make out many of his choking words.

“Remember . . . I remember. . . the old memories .

I can’t stand it, I can’t look back, or ahead ... they— they had a name for me. I remember now. .. .“

She laid one hand on his head. His hair was cold and damp.

“They called me Antichrist!”

He lifted his face and looked at her.

“Help me!” he cried in anguish. “Help me, help me!” Then his head bowed again and he pressed his fists against his temples, whispering wordlessly.

She remembered what was in her right hand, and she lifted the knife and drove it down as hard as she could, to give him the help he needed.

She stood at the window, her back to the room and the dead immortal.

She waited for the priest Mona to return. He would know what to do next. Probably the secret would have to be kept, somehow.

They would not harm her, she knew that. The rever­ence that had surrounded Tyrell enfolded her too. She would live on, the only immortal now, born in a time of peace, living forever and alone in the worlds of peace. Some day, some time, another immortal might be born, but she did not want to think of that now. She could think only of Tyrell and her loneliness.

She looked through the window at the bright blue and green, the pure day of God, washed clean now of the last red stain of man’s bloody past. She knew that Tyrell would be glad if he could see this cleanness, this purity that could go on forever.

She would see it go on. She was part of it, as Tyrell had not been. And even in the loneliness she already felt, there was a feeling of compensation, somehow. She was dedicated to the centuries of man that were to come.

She reached beyond her sorrow and love. From far away she could hear the solemn chanting of the priests. It was part of the righteousness that had come to the worlds now, at last, after the long and bloody path to the new Golgotha. But it was the last Golgotha, and she would go on now as she must, dedicated and sure.

Immortal.

She lifted her head and looked steadily at the blue. She would look forward into the future. The past was for­gotten. And the past, to her, meant no bloody heritage, no deep corruption that would work unseen in the black hell of the mind’s abyss until the monstrous seed reached up to destroy God’s peace. And love.

Quite suddenly, she remembered that she had com­mitted murder. Her arm thrilled again with the violence of the blow; her hand tingled with the splash of shed blood.

Very quickly she closed her thoughts against the mem­ory. She looked up at the sky, holding hard against the closed gateway of her mind as though the assault battered already against the fragile bars.