A. Hartley - Will Power

“Shouldn’t you be guarding the door?” I suggested hurriedly, anxious to get rid of him and the strangeness he suddenly seemed to exude.

“I was finishing my shift when you arrived,” he answered. “There’ll be another guard down there by now.” His manner rapidly shifted back to how it had been when I first spoke to him. All trace of the distance I had felt from him as he recited those oddly familiar words was gone.

“Then perhaps you can help me,” I said, unsure exactly where my words were leading me, but desperate to have him leave.

His face lit up. “Certainly,” he said. “What can I do?”

“You see this bluish dust in the ash?”

He stooped over and nodded thoughtfully. “What is it?” he asked.

“Well that’s what I need to find out,” I said, straightening up and trying to sound professional. “It may just be a little calcined sulfur such as is commonly discharged when the err. . celedine fibers are exposed to intense heat in the presence of anthracite, belomnites and, you know, cellulites. It could also, however, indicate the build-up of vitrilic carbon mandible particles.”

“Is that bad?” said the soldier, reading my expression.

“Let’s just say that if I’m right-and I hope to God that I’m not-the next spark kindled in this room could create an explosion which would leave nothing of this building but a dirty great crater in the ground.”

His jaw dropped. I went on. “I need you to go outside and find me a cup full of bird droppings. Preferably from er. . a kind of hawk. Female. It has to be female. Put male droppings in there and the alcolyde mercurials will spontaneously combust, and then we’ll be in real trouble. But you must walk very carefully. If you create a spark with your armor against the stone walls, we’ve had it.”

“I’ll get right on it,” he breathed, and began to tiptoe out.

“And don’t tell anyone!” I added hastily. “I mean, we don’t want a, you know, panic on our hands.”

He left me, creeping with arms spread for balance and uneasy glances back at the mound of ash which I was poking thoughtfully. Imagine , I mused as he left, how much easier life would be if all the people I met could be relied upon to be as dim as the worthy trooper who has just left me. Alas, such special gullibility is all too rare, and the world is a correspondingly tougher place for the rest of us.

I was so wrapped up in these considerations that I almost forgot to capitalize on the opportunity that that special gullibility had won me. I sprang up, dusted off my hands, and tried the door. It opened onto the gallery that skirted the great dome, and there was no sign of life that I could see or hear. I trotted hurriedly down the corridor to the great doors with their brass panels, lifting my skirts as I ran. When I got to them I found myself again aware of the dull hum which seemed to come from inside. As I stood there listening, my gaze fell upon the metal relief work which covered the doors. Before, I had noticed the images of the library with its great dome, but I hadn’t considered the details. I leaned closer to consider the figures depicted in the panels, noting that the builders were small and squat. I was just thinking about how odd this was and leaning on the door in a pensive kind of way when I recoiled suddenly. It was as warm as before, and pulsed with energy.

This was no fire. I guess I had always known that, but it struck me like a crossbow bolt through the forehead that I had been lied to on all sides. It also meant that there was something behind this door which I was not supposed to see, something which perhaps explained the strange secrecy which hung over this building. Without thinking further, I took the great brass ring in my right hand and twisted it sharply. The door clicked and yielded. The door opened. Nothing could have prepared me for what I saw next.

The room inside was vast, and both walls and floor were stone. It could have been magnificent, and probably was, once. Now it was a scene of devastation and chaos. Much of the stonework was shattered and all the huge, carved images which stood like columns supporting the roof were disfigured so extensively that it was impossible to discern if they had been men or beasts. The intricately worked wooden paneling, which seemed to have borne remarkable pictures in marquetry, had been hacked to splinters. Only fragments of the beautiful wooden inlay could still be made out where the vandalism (for such it seemed) was limited to severe scoring and the crude strokes of a paintbrush dipped in scarlet. The same savage desecration was everywhere. The immense paintings which hung from the ceiling buttresses were slashed to stained tatters, the bookcases had been emptied and their contents violently shredded, and the statues which stood on either side of the great throne at the far end of the hall had been beheaded and daubed with crimson paint. There was, and had been, no fire. There was no smoke staining, no ash, no charred timber. The ruin before me was man-made and it had been effected with what I can only describe as hatred: a hatred so profound that it had unleashed a fury beyond words, beyond reason. Furthermore, it had not happened recently.

On everything, from the brutalized statues to the torn pages of the books which littered the floor like a confetti carpet, was a gray furring: dust. It looked as if the room had not been disturbed for years, decades even.

But it was not uninhabited. In a stone chair at the far end of the chamber, overlooking this ruined wasteland and flanked by crippled statuary, sat a man. He was robed and hooded in purest white and his hands were lost in the sleeves. He was motionless, though he was turned toward me, and, though I could not see his face under his pale and heavy cowl, I felt his eyes upon me.

He did not move. I, seemingly paralyzed, was unable even to speak. The pulsing throb which I had felt through the door seemed to be all around me, not pushing me out of the room, but swirling at me from all sides. It was as if I was at the center of an eyeball whose iris had contracted tightly about me. And then, as if the room had suddenly dwindled, the walls rushing in until the entire chamber was only a few feet square, I stood at the man’s feet and he was gazing down at me from his throne. My mind emptied. Then he spoke-or, rather, I heard a word in my head. The voice was cold and unfamiliar. It said one thing only, and it was not a question, comment, or exclamation. Rather it was the tone of someone acknowledging my presence-someone who had expected, even sent for , me.

“Outsider.”

My eyes were fixed on the dark hollow within the hood, the space where the man’s face should have been, and I could not tear them away. But however hard I stared I could not guess what that face would be like if I had the strength to reach up and tug the cowl back. Pale and old beyond reckoning, I knew, though where this idea came from, I could not say.

I felt cold, pinned like a bug under a lens, and then I had the strangest and most uncomfortable sensation of being read like a book, the pages of my life torn open and riffled as if he could see into me, into my past, into my mind and heart. I felt exposed, naked. I fought to close myself to him, but couldn’t. He had me in some sort of inverse vice that forced me apart, separated my very thoughts and feelings.

It was horrible.

I knew I couldn’t stop it, but somehow I lighted on another possibility, something that might distract or unsettle him. He had called me Outsider. Through the confusion and fear I managed to shape a defiance that was also a kind of question.

“As prophesied,” I thought.

Then, as my eyes burned futilely into his, I became aware that the charge in the air, the energy that rushed about me like liquid, had acquired a color. It was now visible as a grayish smoke tinged with violet. As it surged and darted I saw, from the corner of my eye, that it was lit by flickers of blue-white lightning ripping through sullen clouds. I tried to look away from the seated figure, but my eyes would not leave his hooded visage. The air grew heavier and darker until the flashes of light burned themselves into my vision for seconds after they had passed. As the light faded, I felt the hatred which had ravaged the room and the coldness of the mind which had gripped mine and I was overcome with fear. In desperation, I tried to shut my eyes, but they stood open as if their lids were pinned back. They burned. The black hollow of the man’s head filled my vision, but around me the room was growing still darker. There was another flash of light, more brilliant than the rest, and it forked right through my head. I cried out with a defiance born of fear and again tried to shut my eyes. It was like closing vast, iron-bound doors, and required all my strength. For a moment, my eyelids were immobile and staring, dry, smoldering so badly that I thought they would clot over with blood; then they were moving. I drew them down as if I was winching some great weight over a pulley. When they were no more than cracks through which I could see the seated figure, he shifted.