Warren Murphy: Shock Value

"His father never mentioned the incident. Perseus was worried that Mephisto knew who had started the fire and would try to get even with him, but as the weeks passed, he came to believe that Mephisto viewed the fire as an accident. Then one day Perseus told me that Mephisto had asked him to take the family's big yacht, the Pegasus, to Sardinia to pick up some relatives who were vacationing there. I sneaked out of the house when the ship was ready to sail so that I could watch it leave harbor. Perseus waved to me from the deck...."

She brushed a tear from her face. "When the ship was about a mile out of the harbor, the sky lit up in a blaze, and I heard a sound, a terrible sound like the gates of hell crashing shut. Fragments of metal and wood shot up from the ship, and columns of black smoke poured out of it. The smoke looked like blood in water, dark and spreading, filled with death.

"I didn't take time to think. All I knew was that the man I loved was on that ship, and I had to get to him somehow. I cut loose a small boat with an outboard motor and headed out toward the Pegasus. Even from a half-mile away, the air was hot and choking from the smoke. I could barely see. Then, when I was more than halfway to the ship, a second explosion turned the Pegasus into a ball of fire. Debris was flying everywhere.

"I stood up in the boat to try to get my bearings, since I couldn't see through the smoke. I didn't see the thing coming at me. A splinter from the deck, maybe, or part of the steel plating— I never found out. Whatever it was, it hit me in the face like a hot knife, so hard that it knocked me overboard. Now that I think back on it, it must only have been a glancing blow, or else I would have lost consciousness. I managed to find the boat somehow and crawl back into it. Something flooded into my eyes. I brushed them, and my hands came away covered with blood, my blood. It was everywhere— pouring down my clothes, falling in big drops onto the planks of the boat. I never saw so much blood. I thought I was dying. All I wanted to do at that point was to reach Perseus before it happened. For some reason, I never doubted that he was alive. Perseus was too big for death. But when I saw him, I remember wishing for a moment that he had died." Circe dabbed at her eyes with the back of a hand.

"I found him clinging to a wooden rafter in the water. His face was unrecognizable, a mass of burned flesh and teeth. All the skin had been burned off. I knew him only from his rings, which were melted into his fingers. One of his eyes was dangling from its socket. The bones of both legs had been shattered. His back was broken."

Circe's voice quavered with the memory. She placed one hand over her eyes and breathed shallowly, trying to pull back the tears.

"I don't know how I got him in the boat. The next thing I remember is the hospital. I was given blood and released after a few days. Perseus didn't leave for two years."

She lit a cigarette. "His mother died of heart failure then. Perseus was still far from recovered, but she had been paying for the operations he needed out of her own fortune. After she died, his father refused to pay the medical bills, and Perseus was moved to a clinic for the poor.

"I worked at what odd jobs I could. The wound on my face healed badly. This is the scar from it," she said bitterly, brushing her hand along her cheek. "Still, I was the lucky one. Perseus never completely healed."

"How is that?"

"In many ways. His body, of course, was permanently damaged, but his mind was broken, too. He knew his father had tried to kill him. I rented a small room for myself in the slum district of Corinth, and Perseus came to stay with me after his release from the clinic. He talked of nothing except his hatred for his father. Killing him wasn't good enough, he said. He wanted to hurt Mephisto in such a way that death would be welcome. He lived on hate in those days, and I encouraged him, because he had nothing else.

"To pass the days, he read— philosophy, theology. Ideas, I thought, to help him accept his condition. He took the name of Abraxas for himself. It was what the all-god of the ancients was called. 'Abraxas was once the most powerful force on earth,' Perseus told me. 'I plan to resurrect him.'

"As soon as he was able, he began to write letters— hundreds of them, it seemed— to his father's enemies asking them for money. Before the year was out, replies started to come in. Men from all over the world who wanted to see Mephisto's empire crumble lent him money to begin a business in direct competition with his father's. They didn't know how badly he'd been hurt, of course. He organized a small group of shipping experts, mostly men who'd once worked for Mephisto. The company was a success. Inside of three years, his Investors had all been repaid and Mephisto, growing older and disappointed in Perseus's younger brothers, watched the business he had spent his life building begin to falter.

"Abraxas did a funny thing then. He got me a tutor. He said that an education could give me more than any man could offer." She stared into the blackness of the cave, her eyes pinched. "Now that I think of it, I was going to leave him then. I'd done what I could, and didn't want to spend the rest of my life as his nurse; he could afford all the help he needed by then, anyway. But he must have known that I wouldn't turn down a gift like that. Everyone has his price, I suppose," she said softly.

"At any rate, after I'd learned enough to go to a university, he sent me to the Sorbonne in Paris to study. After that, he sent me on a tour of the world. Once in a while I would read in the newspapers about Abraxas's businesses. He had branched out into many different areas, taking care to keep each business small so as not to attract too much attention. The shipping company itself was a fraction of the size of his father's, but along with it were companies that controlled the piers of major sea trading cities, trucking firms, warehouses, graneries, dairies, importing firms— everything that affected shipping. Together Abraxas's companies squeezed Mephisto's into bankruptcy. Abraxas himself bought the house his father had built. Before the old man was off the grounds, a demolition crew was sent in to level the building to the ground.

"Three months later Mephisto shot himself. Abraxas sold his businesses and called me home.

"That was five years ago. We came to live here in Abaco. He said he needed to be in a remote place. I thought he chose the island because of his health— that this would be a kind of quiet retirement for him. But as soon as we arrived at South Shore, he began work on what he calls his Great Plan. In it, he has set himself up as a god, using the entire population of the earth as pawns in a foolish game. That's what I thought it was, a game. I didn't see any harm in all his crazy talk at first. It was just the rambling of a bitter, crippled man removed from the rest of the world. But others took him seriously. LePat— his lackey— is paid an enormous salary to cater to Abraxas's whims. His latest whim was to assemble a hundred of the best minds in the world to help him carry out his plan."

She paused. "They're doing it, you know. Do you understand? This time he's destroying the whole world. And he won't stop until he obliterates it just as he did his father."

Her voice had gone hoarse. A pile of cigarette butts littered the floor at her feet. She looked small, her arms wrapped closely around her body, the long mark on her face illuminated by the eerie phosphorescence of fireflies. She looked over at him. "Well, that's all of it." She smiled ruefully. "I don't even know your name."

"Remo," he said, moving close to her. "I don't know yours, either."

"My parents disowned me long ago for saving Abraxas. Circe is all I have now. I'm used to it."