Richard K. Lyon

 

Chapter 1.  A PASS-OR-DIE READING COMPREHENSION TEST

 

         "Sister Helen Mary, you need to listen to me very carefully." As the man in black robes spoke, he pulled his hands back into his robes, both his empty right hand and the left, which held a 45 revolver.  With a black hood covering his face the helpless nun could see nothing of his face except for his cold blue eyes. "I have two plans.  In one—"

         Interrupting him, the nun demanded, "If we're going to talk, you have to tell me your name."  Standing as tall as her 5'4" frame permitted she looked up at him, speaking with the clear voice she had used to discipline schoolboys for six decades.

         "Call me Simon," he snapped, "and Simon says whether you live or die."  After a pause he continued, "Now, as I was saying, I have one plan in which I kill you and your friends.  In the other, your friends never find out anything's wrong.  They take an enjoyable tour of this museum and go home unharmed.  For this second plan to work, you have to act as my spokesperson.  I know the news media will give you all the coverage I need.  What I don't know is whether or not you can understand my message.  You can't just repeat what I tell you.  You'll have to explain it in layman's terms."

         Pulling a stack of papers from his robes he handed it to her.  It was a twenty pages manuscript. The title seemed to be in English, or rather it was composed of English words but they didn't make any sense to the 84-year-old nun. 

         "I'll give you twenty minutes to read this, then I'll question you."

         Throughout her many years, Sister Helen Mary had practiced the virtue of silence, not speaking until what she had to say was well considered.  This virtue now helped her recover from all that had just happened.  The past hour had been a trip through Hell.  Despite her age, Sister Helen Mary was still active.  A group from two retirement homes, thirty-one elderly women and one truly ancient man, had been scheduled for an outing. When Sister Helen couldn't lead them, Sister Helen Mary had gladly replaced her.  The outing was a trip to some sort of church-related museum, the Boston Archdiocese Collection of Historic Curiosities.  Seemingly it was one of those places whose chief merit was free admission. 

         From the inside the museum looked like a combination between a medieval cathedral and an abandoned warehouse.  While admission was indeed free, departure was not. As the guide was starting to lead her charges away for their tour, Sister Helen Mary remembered needing to make a phone call.  No phone being handy, she started toward the door only to have the driver of the second bus, the one that brought people from the other retirement home, step in her way.

         "Come with me," he had ordered.  Though she saw the gun in his hand, there was a moment in which she couldn't believe it. 

         "But I..." she began, feeling like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.  The gun was black, utterly steady, and quite real. 

         Moving where he pointed, she went down a hallway and found herself in a large room facing a black-robed man.  As she stood before him now, his threat to kill everyone made absolutely no sense—but killings were common and rarely made sense.  Thirty-two lives were in peril, and saving them was her responsibility.  Despite the burden of this knowledge, she was silent for a long moment.  When she did speak it was in a calm firm voice.  "If you wish me to read, I'll need a quiet place with a good light."

         Nodding agreement, the black-hooded man gestured toward the far side of the room.  There was some sort of booth there.  In fact, though she could not imagine what it was doing here, it was a confessional.

         Rushing to it with what little speed her old legs could manage, Helen Mary entered and sat down.  While this sanctuary could not provide her any physical safety, it offered the greater gift of spiritual clarity.  Surprisingly, the reading light was good.  The papers she'd been given were a copy of an article from Physical Reviews, which she supposed was some sort of scholarly journal. Trying to read it, she stumbled through a hoard of incomprehensible phrases, "Newton's equations as modified by Relativity... the Schrödinger Wave Equation... Computer algorithms..."  Minutes slipped past as Helen Mary struggled to understand a tiny fraction of what she read.  It was futile.  Sister Helen had taught physics at a junior college but Helen Mary was classically trained.  She could conjugate a host of Latin verbs—not that the Church had much use for Latin these days—she could write grammatically faultless English prose, another talent for which the world no longer felt a need, but how was she supposed to manage something like this?  The people who would be killed if she failed—many of them were younger than she with many good years left.

         So much suddenly depended on her and what could she do?

         She could pray.

         She should have begun this task that way because that was always the right way to begin any task, especially a hard one.  While she could hardly expect God to send an angel, still He—

         "Please, Sister Helen Mary, don't be alarmed.  I'm a friend and more than a friend."

         There was no one in the other half of the confessional. She knew she'd just heard a real voice but there wasn't anyone there.  For the first time in many years the gift of silence deserted her.  Without thought she blurted, "I've always believed in miracles, but as historical events.  I never expected to meet an angel. I—"

         "Actually," the unseen being replied, "I'm not an angel.  I'm... the Chinese word is ying ko.  Literally that translates as 'shadow,' but it means a kind of demon—but we can talk about that later.  There's a strong oak cane behind your chair.  The heavy silver head makes it a good weapon.  When you leave here, act as though you can't walk without it.  Make it clear they'll have to carry you around if they don't let you keep it.  They'll do the easy thing: they'll let you keep it and stay far enough away so you can't swat them.  Simon has bunions on both of his big toes.  He'll be especially careful to stay beyond your reach.  On the other side of this room directly opposite this booth there's a chalk mark on the floor.  Stand there when he questions you.  I'll whisper the answers in your ear."

         "Time's up!" someone shouted from the room outside the confessional.

         "Goodbye, my beloved," the unseen voice said and was silent.

         Without any chance to think about what was happening to her, Sister Helen Mary picked up the cane and began hobbling across the room.  All of the gang had the opportunity earlier to notice that she could walk without a cane, but true to the Demon's prediction, none tried to take it away from her.  Instead they kept their distance.  The section of the room directly opposite the confessional was empty, void of any possible hiding place, but an X in chalk was on the floor as promised.

         "Now," Simon said, his voice void of emotion, "tell me about what you just read."

         "It's an article from the January 15 edition of Physical Reviews," she replied.  In saying this, Sister Helen Mary had completely exhausted her understanding of the article.  For an uncomfortable moment she stood silent, wondering if that voice in the confessional had been real or a fantasy born of her fear.  Just as she reluctantly decided that it could not have been real, it spoke.  Making its words her own, she continued.

         "Newton, Einstein, and all the scientists between them were people who sat at a desk writing equations on paper.  This led them to believe that the universe was a structure governed by mathematics, ruled by a set of equations.  Computers, however, use algorithms.  For a long time, everyone in science believed that computer algorithms were merely an approximation to the truth expressed by the equations.

         "In 2002, however, Wolfram published his work on cellular automata.  He suggested that it was the other way around—that the universe was run by algorithms, and the equations were the approximation."

         Though she was watching Simon closely, his hooded eyes gave no hint of his thoughts.  Was he pleased that she appeared to understand what she'd read...or was he about to order mass executions?  She'd always thought she could face death with a clean conscience, but now she was taking help from a demon to cheat on an exam!  Resolving to worry about that tomorrow, she went on.

         "Initially Wolfram's work was dismissed as a 'sterile speculation.'  If there wasn't any way to tell the difference between a universe ruled by equations and one ruled by algorithms, then there was no point in worrying about it.

         "After a while, however, scientists began changing their minds because there is a difference between equations and algorithms.  The equations that govern the Newton-Einstein universe contain a large number of seemingly arbitrary constants, the speed of light, the gravitational constant, the fine structure constant, and so on.  There's no way to deduce any of these constants from first principals.  As far as physics is concerned they could have values wildly different from those they do have, but even a tiny change in any of them would mean that the universe we know would not exist.  Lee Smolin calculated that a change in the composite value of the constants of only one part in ten to the two hundred twenty ninth power would mean the stars, the galaxies, life, everything couldn't have happened.

         "In conventional physics the only explanation for this was luck and that much luck is impossible.  No other explanation was possible within conventional physics because equations can't change the constants they contain.

         "An algorithm can.  An algorithm can include a feedback loop that adjusts the constants in it to provide a desired result."

         While she spoke, the black-robed figure stood motionless, staring at her in silence.  Now he interrupted her.

         "Sister," he said, "The alarm has gone off sooner than I expected.  I have to finish this one way or another. The last section of the paper is the most important.  Tell me about it."

         The voice that whispered all the answers in her ear began, "Obviously any feedback system..." and fell silent.  One of Simon's four thugs had moved closer to her.  Her demon, was he forced to keep silent for fear of being overheard?

         In the movies and on TV, demons could only be heard by the person they were speaking to, but what did Hollywood know about demons?

         Discarding that line of thought Helen Mary decided her only option was to stall.  "The last section of the paper," she began, deciding to hit back at this evil man who threatened people in her care, "was very poorly written.  There were fully six sentences using the 'which' in a context correctly requiring the word 'that.'  Fourteen times the writer used the word phenomena which is plural in contexts in which the singular phenomenon would have been correct."

         "But!" Simon protested to no avail.

         Continuing relentlessly Sister Helen Mary said, "You also very badly overused the words 'but' and 'so.'  Dr. Simon Maguson, you really ought to–"

         "How do you know my name?" he screamed, his bald and rather homely head popping out from under his hood.

         "The paper lists four authors by last name and initials.  Only one has a first name starting with 'S.'"

         Moaning, Simon nodded, "Okay, you're a little smarter then I thought.  That's good.  Just explain the last section of the paper."

         "All right!" she snapped, taking a quick swipe at the nearby thug with her cane.  As he retreated, the demon whispered to her and she echoed his words.  "Obviously any sort of feedback loop requires sampling points.  If algorithms govern the universe, then there have to be objects that provide the feedback.  In the paper you describe such objects as being 'extremely anomalous.'  Since communication between them is subject to speed of light limitations they'd have to be numerous and scattered throughout the universe.  You didn't give me a chance to study the last section of the paper, but I gather your probability analysis showed that there were likely to be several of them here on–"

         Bursting into the room through a door at its far end a fifth thug shouted, "Boss!  The cops are coming!  We got maybe five minutes!"

         Simon Maguson nodded.  Turning back toward Sister Helen Mary, he said, "I need you to go outside and wait for the police.  Tell them about the old people I'm holding hostage and about what will happen if they storm this place with flash bangs."

         Helen Mary did not reply immediately.  At the start of this interview Dr. Maguson had had absolute mastery of the situation.  She knew better than to let him regain it.  In a firm voice she said, "If I'm to tell the police that everyone is all right, I have to see them and be sure that they are."

         "Fine," Maguson said, gesturing to one of his men, "Johnson, see to it."

         Hobbling forward with her cane and making what for her was good speed, Helen Mary followed Johnson through this strange museum.  It looked like a warehouse because that's what it had once been.  Now, thanks to a rather crude conversion effort, it was full of display cases.

         Helen Mary stared at these cases in horrified fascination. One of them, labeled THE SKULLS OF THE MARQUIS DE SADE, held three skulls while another held eleven spears, all of them labeled the Spear of Destiny!  When Christ was on the Cross, a Roman soldier ended His suffering by stabbing Him in the side with his spear.  That had been the one and only Spear of Destiny, but the commercial demand for unholy objects was greater than the demand for holy ones, causing the Spear of Destiny to multiply more rapidly than pieces of the True Cross.

         Abruptly Sister Helen Mary knew where she was.  Officially this place had been designated to be the "Boston Archdiocese Collection of Historic Curiosities," but it was far better known by another name.

         It wasn't supposed to open until next month, but this was Law's Black Museum.  Throughout the centuries there had been seemingly unholy objects, things that provoked superstitious fear.  All too often that fear had been so great that the objects could not be destroyed.  They accumulated in Rome until Pope Pious XII, fearing Hitler would seize them, sent them here. 

         As Johnson led her around a corner, Helen Mary found herself facing thirty-one old women and the thug who'd been guiding them around the museum.  A ninety-year-old named Francis gushed, "Sister Helen Mary, tell this man that he has to let us go to Paris!  It's Liberation Day!  We have to help the Resistance drive out the Nazis!"

         For a moment Helen Mary stared at the woman in confusion.  She was demanding the right to time travel back to the middle of World War II, and all the women with her seemed in complete support of this request.  Taking a deep breath, Helen Mary faced the thug who'd been acting as the ladies' tour guide.  "After a little more, aren't you planning to let them sit down and have a cup of tea?"

         "Yeah, sure," he agreed in a puzzled tone, "but I can't take them to Paris to do it."

         "Old Mr. Grant will take care of that," she assured him.  Glancing around, she didn't see the old man.  He'd probably wandered off. 

         "What are you talking about?" the thug/guide demanded.

         "Mr. Grant is in the other retirement home," she explained. "I've never met him, but I'm told he's a marvelous story teller.  People listening to him say it's almost like living the story."

         "Sister, please," Johnson urged, "you know you can't afford to be late."  Leading her to a door, he opened it for her but did not follow. 

         As she stepped outside into the bright sunshine, Sister Helen Mary found herself face to face with a Boston policeman.  "Please take me to whoever's in charge," she said.

        

Chapter 2.  AN INVISIBLE MAN

 

         Sitting in a mobile command center, Lieutenant John Gray, Boston PD, was worried.  He was doing everything by the book, but the book wasn't written for cases like this. Normally a hostage situation was a result of criminals blundering their way into a trap and desperately trying to avoid capture.  Routine police procedure was to keep them trapped until they lost hope. 

         That wasn't what happened this time.  The long planned opening of Law's Black Museum had been delayed for a week.  That allowed Dr. Simon Maguson and his gang to just walk in and take over the place.  Since they knew they couldn't open the vault without triggering an alarm, they made arrangements well in advance to have some hostages delivered.

         Old people.  People whose hearts weren't likely to stand much stress.  If Gray ordered an attack on the museum, he'd probably kill most of the old folks.  Of course, he couldn't do that.  The only thing he could do was block off all possible escape routes.  He'd done that, but this Maguson character would have known from the start that that was what he'd do.

         That meant the guy was planning something... but what?

         He hadn't wanted to let the old nun go back but there'd been no choice.  The thugs in there would rather shoot an old person than change an adult diaper. 

         Could she have told him anything about Law's Black Museum that he didn't already know? What he did know added up to an uncomfortable picture. A vast collection of objects with reputations for evil, things gathered from all over the world, some of them already ancient when the Church had acquired them centuries ago.  The worst of them stored in a vault that a madman would soon open.

         That might have been all right if Dr. Simon Maguson was an ordinary madman, but he was far from that.  He'd used Sister Helen Mary to deliver a message to Gray and to the waiting reporters.  The nun had explained a strange scientific theory about the nature of reality.  According to this theory, anomalous objects existed, objects that could be used to change the laws of the universe.  Did Maguson believe that the vault held such an anomalous object?  Did he imagine that getting it would give him vast power, make him master of the universe?

         Could Maguson actually believe anything so absurd?  Maybe.  The TV newscasts were reporting that NSF had recognized the possible danger of experiments involving the Wolfram speculation and had conspired with its foreign counterparts to withhold funding from such experiments.  The newscasts were also filled with interviews of distinguished scientists.  All of them said they couldn't be sure the Wolfram speculation was wrong, couldn't be sure Maguson wouldn't find enormous power in the vault. 

         None of this made any sense to Gray and the more he thought about it, the more it bothered him.  Five hours between the alarm and the opening, and he could do nothing!

         When Gray felt helpless, he turned not to his religion but to his training.  Since even a clever criminal couldn't get all the details right, police work required relentless attention to the details. 

         Now, rising from his chair, Lieutenant Gray decided that the detail which most wanted his attention was replaying the tapes from the surveillance cameras.  From the start of this business he'd had all the exits from the museum under observation, both by camera and by uniformed police officers.  Other than the nun coming out and returning, the police hadn't seen anything.  Probably that meant there was nothing on the tapes, but looking couldn't do any harm.

         The surveillance cameras scanned, endlessly turning back and forth to look at different areas.  While that made the tapes impossible to watch in fast forward, there was a computer program that allowed viewing the tapes so as to see only what the camera saw at a given angle.

         Gray hit it before he was halfway through the tapes.  It was subtle.  Anyone watching the tapes the way they'd been recorded would have missed it.  Even in this viewing mode he could easily have missed it.

         A shadow.

         Though the camera was seemingly in a position to see everything, all it saw was a shadow.  No sign of the man who cast that shadow.  The shadow left the museum shortly after the nun, and returned shortly before.

         Seemingly, the shadow had been cast by an invisible man.  Though Lieutenant Gray refused to believe that, the other explanation was, when you thought about it, rather more disturbing.  Someone who didn't want to be seen had outsmarted the camera.  Like a man walking past a rotating sprinkler without getting wet, he'd gauged where it would be looking in each part of its scan and had twice walked through that pattern while avoiding the notice of the watching policemen. 

         When he was a boy, his grandmother had told him stories of men—or rather beings—who could do such things.  She was Chinese, and she called them ying ko, shadow demons.

        

Chapter 3.  IS PARIS BURNING?

 

         When Helen Mary came back into the museum, the transition from bright sunlight to the gloom of the Black Museum blinded her.  As her eyes struggled to adjust, a man's voice said, "Sister, I don't want to frighten you.  My orders are to escort you safely back to the others.  Please just stay close behind me and, whatever you do, don't grab my gun arm."

         She could now see the man, one of Maguson's thugs... or perhaps that wasn't quite fair.  His eyes, like those of a frightened animal, were darting this way and that, but he was struggling to be brave.  Gently she said, "My son, I don't know what's frightening you, but surely there's nothing to be afraid of."

         "Yeah," he snarled, "that's what the boss says.  According to him, Cardinal Law had this place set up like a spook house, and we shouldn't let our imaginations play tricks on us."

         As he spoke, he started down a long corridor, gesturing for her to follow.  She did.  Before they had gone a dozen steps he whirled about, gun leveled, pointing back the way they'd come.

         "There's nothing there," she told him.

         Angrily shaking his head he snapped, "I saw something."  His eyes and gun scanning this way and that, he continued, "It was...a shadow."

         "The whole museum is full of shadows," she objected.

         "This shadow was moving!"  he snapped. "It was following us!  I—"

         His gaze shifted.  His eyes widened as he stared at the end of the hallway.  There, waiting for them in the place to which they'd been going, was a pitch-black shape looming out of the gray darkness.  Obviously it was only a trick of the lighting, but very little imagination was needed to make it into a hulking monstrous shape, a thing from nightmares.

         The man saw it.  With Helen Mary behind him he swung his big revolver in that direction and stared at the blackness.  After a long moment he said, "Sorry.  Guess it's nothin', just my nerves.  I—"

         Abruptly his whole body stiffened, the gun rising to fire again and again, each blast a thunderous roar. Despite his fear, despite the urge to panic, his hand was steady and he aimed every shot as he would in target practice.  After six he was clicking on empty chambers.

         Pulling cartridges from his pocket the man continued to stare at the far end of the hallway as he struggled to reload his gun.  From her position behind him Helen Mary couldn't see what held his terrified attention but she could hear the laughter.  It seemed to come from both ends of the hallway, an evil laughter filled with malevolent triumph. 

         This was too much for the man.  Screaming, he dropped his gun and his bullets and ran for the exit.  Hands raised, he burst into the sunshine, shouting, "Don't shoot!  I surrender!"

         Watching him disappear, Helen Mary had mixed feelings.  Her first impulse was to be as frightened as the fleeing thug, but she knew that was wrong.  Thirty-two people were in danger, and it was her duty to save them.  If she had to accept the help of a demon to do that, then that was what she would do. 

         By now she estimated the thirty-one old women would have finished the first leg of their museum tour and would be sitting down for their morning tea and cookies.  Despite his tendency to wander off, old Mr. Grant could be counted on to show up. 

         With her escort gone it took her a little time to find the museum's cafeteria. When she arrived, she saw she was too late for tea.  The old women were all gathered around to hear the ancient Mr. Grant tell a tale of adventure.  From everything she'd heard, the man was an extraordinary storyteller.  While she would normally have been eager to hear him, the present opportunity to do something useful was not to be wasted.  If she could slip through the cafeteria unnoticed...

         As she stepped through the doorway, she felt strangely dizzy, rather like Alice in Wonderland falling down a rabbit hollow.  As her eyes cleared, she saw a beautiful street stretched out before her.  Even in wartime the trees that lined the Champ Elysees were an elegant green and spoke of peace.  Food was scarce, but the tables of the sidewalk cafes still allowed people to meet, talk and share the little they had.

         This was Paris, the City of lights, the most beautiful city in the world, miraculously spared the destruction of war... until now.  The Allies were coming and Adolph Hitler had ordered the German troops to burn the city when they retreated.

         As Helen Mary hurried down the street, she saw three German soldiers ahead.  Would they want to check her documents?  The papers the Resistance had given her were not high quality forgeries.  To make up for that she was wearing a tight sweater and rather short skirt.  Hopefully the Germans would pay more attention to her shapely legs than to her documents.

         NO!  This is wrong!  I can't be 16 again!  I buried all the memories of this part of my life!

         The soldiers had noticed her and were coming toward her.  She gave them a smile, the kind of frightened smile that hinted she could be taken advantage of.  One of the soldiers would take her someplace where they could be alone.  When he woke up with a severe headache, he'd be too ashamed to report it.

         As one of them came toward her, she had another moment of utter confusion and—she was 84 again.  She was on the other side of the cafeteria without her cane.

         What had that been?  It couldn't have been an LSD flashback because she'd never been exposed to LSD.  A suppressed memory?  She'd often consulted with people who blocked out parts of their lives to avoid painful memories.  They sometimes had flashbacks, but never anything this vivid.  Besides, she wasn't like them.  She didn't have suppressed memories.  What she'd just experienced couldn't have been real because she hadn't been in Paris during World War II.  She'd—

         She couldn't remember.  In fact, she remembered little of her life prior to becoming a nun. That was as it should be.  She'd been a widow, starting a new life and putting her old life behind her.  There'd been new duties and right now she needed to be tending to them.  People were in danger.  She had to get to the confessional and talk to her demon.

         While she got there easily enough, another of Maguson's thugs was standing outside the confessional.  When she approached, he whirled, leveling his automatic at her.  His face was contorted with a look of terror, his gun hand trembling as he thrust the weapon at her.  "Keep back!" he shouted, "I'll shoot!"

         Helen Mary stopped.  In a moment the man's face showed recognition.  Shamefacedly pointing his gun at the floor, he cried, "I'm sorry!  Please forgive me!"

         In her long life, she had had occasions to deal with dangerous, frightened men.  Regarding them simply as thugs was, she knew, a mistake easily made but still wrong. "I do forgive you," she said, "but what you need is God's forgiveness."

         After staring at her briefly, he nodded.  Lowering his head he moaned, "What am I to do?  I'm working for a man who's completely mad.  The cops outside want to arrest me for kidnapping.  If any of the old women die, they'll charge me with murder and—"

         He stopped. After a moment of shuddering he continued, "There's a demon.  Sometimes I see his shadow slipping through the darkness.  Sometimes I hear his horrible laughter, mocking me.  Nothing I can do.  Revered Mother, he has me for dead meat.  I'm doomed."

         "No," Sister Helen Mary declared forcefully. "Seek God's forgiveness and you shall be saved."

         Shaking his head the man transferred his gun to his left hand and held out his right.  The back of his hand was marked with a black skull.  "This mark just appeared," he explained.  "It's the demon's brand.  I'm his property."

         "God owns your soul," she told him firmly.  "Throw away that gun, go outside and surrender to the police."

         For a long moment he stared at her, his eyes full of indecision.  Abruptly he believed.  The gun fell to the floor.  Shouting a thank you, he ran away.

         Sitting down in the confessional, she waited for her demon to whisper to her.  No unseen voice came.  She had time to start arguing with her conscience.  Given that she was in a desperate situation, did that make it right to accept help from a demon?  Logically the answer would seem to be yes, but—

         "Sister Helen Mary," a voice from nowhere whispered, "do you remember Paris?"

         "I've never been to Paris and I demand to know why you called me your beloved," she snapped.

         "I said that because it was true.  Long ago, in another age, another world, you and I were lovers.  Before I met you, I was a soulless thing, a being without any sense of right or wrong.  My love for you became my guiding star, the light I follow through the darkness of this world.  Long have I sought you.  Can you not remember Paris?"

         "Will you stop with the purple prose and tell me what's going on?" she demanded.

         "Hun, well mostly, it's all about the Precautionary Principle," he explained, soundly rather deflated. "That's the idea that if a plan involves a possible danger, you can't ignore it because it appears highly unlikely or absurd.  If you can't prove that a risk isn't real, you have to act as if it is.  When Dr. Maguson proposed doing experiments to test the Wolfram hypothesis, he discovered that, thanks to the Precautionary Principle, neither he nor any other scientist could get funding for such an experiment.  There he was, with an idea he was sure would win the Nobel Prize, and no way to get funding.  That made him so angry that he had another idea.  Since President Martha Millhouse was using the Precautionary Principle in her re-election campaign, he'd use it to blackmail her. According to Wolfram, the universe is a woven structure and Maguson could threaten to do an experiment that might unravel it.  NSF's past actions would give this threat enough credibility so that she'd pay hush money."

         "That doesn't make any sense," she said.  "How can they cover up kidnapping us?"

         "They're going to say that you're senile and imagined the whole thing."

         She started to protest this absurdity and stopped herself.  Maguson had managed events so that she was the only witness to his misdeeds.  His thugs could swear that they were just doing community service, taking the old folks on a tour of a museum when an alarm accidentally went off and the Boston cops overreacted.  They'd be using a well-planned lie, while the truth she'd be telling included a demon and time traveling back to...  Her world was shifting.

         She was 16, dressed in the robes of a postulant, and... her hands were tied behind her.  In very bad French an SS captain said, "Does Mademoiselle wish a blindfold?"

         She was, she now saw, standing in a convent garden, a high stone wall behind her back.  In front of her eight German soldiers were raising their rifles.  A firing squad! The whole of her 84-year life now seemed a dream from which she was just awakened. They were her firing squad! 

         Without waiting for her answer the captain was stepping quickly to her right, far enough away so that blood wouldn't spatter onto his well-pressed uniform.  She tried to compose her mind, to prepare her soul for death.  She couldn't.  A horrible mocking laughter was filling the garden, making it impossible for her to concentrate. 

         The captain whirled about, looking this way and that, gesturing angrily with his pistol.  Fear began to replace his anger, and he started walking toward his men.  As the walk became a run, a shadow, a black place on the stone wall, stepped forward, revealing itself as a man.  Dressed in black clothes with random swirls of gray, he had been invisible against the wall.

         As he stepped between her and the German soldiers, twin 45 automatics appeared in his hands.  A brave and useless action.  A rifle bullet, she knew, would pass through a man's body and kill someone behind him.  If she stepped out from behind him, that would divide the Germans' fire.  The odds would be a little better, still hopeless, but better.

         Before she could move, the shooting started, the 45s answering the thunder of the German rifles.  One bullet struck the stone wall high above her head and sprayed her with stone fragments.  Her stomach tightened into a knot... it was over.

         The man in black stood unscathed.  The eight soldiers and their captain lay motionless on the ground.  Her lover had just won an incredible victory against overwhelming odds!

         Except that the whole idea of a firing squad was to dilute the guilt of killing someone.  The members of a firing squad knew that, with one exception, their rifles were loaded with blanks. None of them knew who had the live round.  Seven of the men who lay dead at her feet had been unarmed and there was so much blood!

         She wanted to scream but you can't scream in a nightmare and, blinking her eyes, she saw she was back in the confessional.

         "You," she told the demon, "are a monster!  A fiend without conscience!"

         "Yes," it replied, "I am a creature of darkness and you are my light.  Farewell, my Beloved."

         "Wait!" she objected, "There are all these people held hostage! We need to talk, to plan how we can rescue them! We..."  Her voice trailed off as she realized that she was alone.  Didn't Ying Ko know he'd need her help to rescue everyone?

         Did he plan to rescue everyone without her help... or... was there some dark game going on, something in which thirty-two elderly people were expendable pawns?  There was no way she could know.  She could be sure of only one thing: her duty.  Saint Paul had urged believers to put on the whole armor of God.  She must don that armor and face a gang of heavily armed thugs.

         The frightened henchman had dropped his gun.  It still lay on the floor where she could pick it up.  Instead she walked past it with all the speed and determination that her old legs could manage.  Love and forgiveness were the weapons of heaven and she would use them to wage war on Earth.

        

Chapter 4.  HIGH NOON IN THE VAULT OF DARKNESS

 

         With a take-no-nonsense expression firmly fixed on her face, Sister Helen Mary walked down a long dark corridor.  At its end there was a large, very brightly lit antechamber. The still-closed door of the Black Museum's vault stood facing the antechamber.  Six of Maguson's henchmen stood in front of that massive door waiting for their master, and one of them was wearing a bus driver's uniform. For what she was planning, that was good.  If she acted swiftly, if she could do what she must before Maguson's return, she'd pull this off. 

         In addition to the corridor through which she was walking, the vault's antechamber had corridors leading off to the right and left.  She was close enough to the antechamber to see that the right-hand corridor was well lit and empty.  The left hand corridor, however, was quite dark.  If Maguson were still wearing those black robes, he could be standing there, invisible to her.

         Her attention fixed on what was ahead; she never glanced back to see what might be behind her.  Simon Maguson had put aside the hooded black robes that gave him the appearance of a horror movie villain.  Now he wore plain well fitting jeans, a shirt tight enough to show a broad chest, short sleeves to show well muscled arms, and a single action colt 45 in a holster buckled low on his right hip.  While all of this was copied from John Wayne's costume in Stagecoach, Maguson had had the originality to add a police riot squad helmet and Kevlar vest. 

         As he moved quietly down the dark hallway, Simon Maguson paid careful attention to everything, his gaze wandering here, there, and everywhere.  At one place in the hallway a black shadow stood motionless, a void in the gray darkness.  Maguson's gaze shifted toward the black shadow and slipped off it.  On either side of the shadow there were things that attracted his attention.  Having looked without quite seeing, he moved on. 

         As Sister Helen Mary entered the vault's lighted antechamber, Simon Maguson stopped and watched, smiling an unfriendly smile.

         Behind him, unseen, the darkness moved. 

         On entering the antechamber, Sister Helen Mary fixed her gaze on the man in the bus driver's uniform.  In the voice that had made schoolboys obey, she announced, "We're taking everyone back to their retirement homes. I want you to go get the bus. Here's a note for Lieutenant Gray so he won't give you any trouble about it."

         The man's face showed a complex mixture of surprise, hope, and doubt.  As he reached for the note, one of the others objected, "Hey, wait, the Boss–"

         "All of you are looking at life in prison and eternity in Hell," Helen Mary told him. "The Boss isn't paying you enough for that.  Take everyone back and there won't be any kidnapping charges because there won't have been any kidnapping.  You'll have taken a group of old people on a nice outing, and as far as any of them know, that's all you ever meant to do."

         "Yeah," the man replied, "but most of us are out on bail, facing pretty heavy charges.  The Boss promised—"

         "What about the demon that guards the vault? Did he also promise to protect you from it?" she demanded.

         Focused as she was on the men in front of her, Helen Mary didn't notice that the room lights were becoming a great deal brighter, as bright as the lights of a television studio.  Since that was his cue, Simon stepped out of the darkness.  While this situation was not quite what he'd planned, it would do.  "Demons are superstitious nonsense," he declared.

         Giving no sign that she was surprised by the scientist's sudden appearance behind her, Helen Mary whirled and snapped, "Liar! You told these men that this vault contains an 'anomalous object,' something supernatural that would be bound to have a supernatural guardian!"

         Simon Maguson's habit in scientific debate was to ignore everything his opponent said and plow ahead with his own argument.  Following this habit, Maguson continued, "Men, there's an explanation for everything that's happened.  Those marks—somebody touched you with a pad wet with silver nitrate—that laughter that's got you so spooked.  You can't tell where it's coming from because these rooms have elliptical ceilings.  Someone standing at one focal point sounds as if he's at the other."

         While Helen Mary heard what Maguson was saying, her brain was filing it in the Interesting-Stuff-I'll-Think-About-Later bin.  For the moment her priority was winning this argument, and she could see that whatever the merits of what Maguson was saying, it was making little impression on his men.

         "Any of you guys," she asked them, "ever see a movie in which a vault like this didn't have a—"

         Helen Mary didn't finish her sentence because Maguson struck her, a powerful openhanded slap that dropped her to the floor.  "There are no demons!" he shouted.

         Stepping over to Helen Mary and helping her to her feet, the man in the bus driver uniform looked Maguson in the eyes briefly.  Before he could speak, his gaze shifted to Maguson's left and his eyes widened with fear.

         Turning, Maguson saw two impossibly bright eyes of red fire staring at him out of the left-hand corridor.  As he gaped in openmouthed astonishment, the bus driver grabbed the note from Helen Mary's hand and sped away down the right-hand corridor.  The five other henchmen followed swiftly upon his heels.

         Drawing his 45 with remarkable speed, Maguson shouted for them to stop and brandished the weapon much as John Wayne had during stampede scenes.  Since, however, his men were long gone, it was too late for theatrical gestures.

         From behind Maguson there was laughter; horrible, taunting, sardonic laughter and a dangerously gentle voice saying, "I'm your demon.  Why don't you tell me about my nonexistence?"  The voice came out of the darkness of the central corridor as the speaker moved slowly forward into the light.

         For a moment Sister Helen Mary felt terror mixed with fierce joy.  This was her lover, her demon lover, come to defend her.  Simon Maguson had struck her, threatened to kill her, threatened people whose safety was her responsibility, and now her lover was coming for a reckoning.  The joy she felt at the disaster that would soon overtake Maguson was morally wrong, as was the pride she felt at being loved by such a terrible and powerful being.  God forgive me, she thought, I–

         Her eyes widened in astonishment.  Instead of a demon, the figure that was moving into the light was an old man!  Old Mr. Grant!  He couldn't be Ying Ko!  It was impossible!  That was absurd, yet even as her mind filled with denials, she began to see the truth.  Maguson had been right.  The confessional was in a room with an elliptical dome ceiling and was at one of the ellipse's focal points.  The spot on the floor marked with an X was at the other.  Regarding the ancient Mr. Grant as harmless, Maguson and his henchmen had allowed him to wander.  When she was in the confessional, Mr. Grant had stood on the X spot, seemingly a senile old man mumbling to himself.  When Maguson was examining her, Helen Mary was on the X spot and Mr. Grant had whispered to her while hidden in the confessional. All of the other apparently demonic phenomena had also been fakes.  Those glowing red eyes had been produced with a laser toy and now the brave and foolish man who'd done all that was in mortal peril.

         "Oh, Lord, please forgive my sin of pride!" she prayed desperately.  "Poor Mr. Grant is a feeble old man.  Don't let him confront Simon Maguson.  Maguson's young and strong. He's got Kevlar armor and that horrible big gun.  All poor Mr. Grant has is that dumb spear that's way too heavy for him.  He can't use it as a weapon.  He's too old and bent by years to walk properly and he's facing a young powerful foe that's well armed and armored.  Lord, it's not fair!"

         Gesturing with his gun, Dr. Maguson ordered, "That's far enough!"

         As he continued to advance, the ancient Mr. Maxwell Grant smiled toothlessly and replied, "Why, Simon Maguson, surely you're not afraid of a feeble old man.  You know I'm not a demon because there aren't any."

         "I said don't come any closer!" Maguson snapped.

         "But, Simon," Mr. Grant asked, his tone mild, "You don't have any reason to be frightened.  You have a powerful gun and all I have is this Spear of Destiny."

         "One step closer," Maguson shouted, "and I'll shoot!"

         Mr. Grant took that step forward.  He was acting as if he knew the weapon could not harm him, and Helen Mary suddenly remembered that, according to medieval legend, firearms were useless against the demonkind.  Demons want men's souls.  They go to great lengths to trick men into sins that damn them.

         Was that what was going on? 

         While Helen Mary hesitated in confused wonder, not sure what to believe, Grant struck!  Lunging with the butt end of his spear he smashed down on the scientist's right foot with terrible force—a direct hit on one of the scientist's bunions!  Screaming in agony, Maguson thrust his revolver toward his opponent, the muzzle only inches from Grant's face.  Grant smiled satanically as the scientist squeezed the trigger.

         Nothing happened.

         With a confidence Lucifer Morningstar would have envied, Grant told him, "That's a single action 45.  It won't do anything if you don't cock the hammer."  As he spoke Grant shifted his spear and stabbed down again, the butt end of his spear smashing the bunion on the scientist's left foot.

         Crashing to the floor, Maguson waved his gun at Mr. Grant who now towered over him.  Grant's eyes were full of calm calculation as he tried to decide where he could strike next to inflict the greatest pain possible.  Maguson thumbed the hammer back and pointed his gun up into Grant's face.  The man was staring down at him, his face glowing with eager anticipation.  He wanted the scientist to pull the trigger!

         Throwing away the weapon Maguson screamed, "You are a demon!  You want to make me a murderer so you can get my soul!"  Turning around the scientist threw himself at the aged nun's feet, pleading, "Sister Helen Mary, save me!"

         As Mr. Grant approached them, Helen Mary raised her crucifix and declared, "Demon, in God's name, depart from us!"

         Turning, Maxwell Grant disappeared into the darkness of the center corridor.

         Looking down at Dr. Maguson, who was hugging her about the knees, she said, "You'd better go before it comes back."  Without a word Dr. Simon Maguson fled.  A moment after his departure, the room lights dimmed back to their normal brightness.

         In the White House Situation Room President Martha Millhouse, who'd been watching all these events on CNN, smiled.  Dr. Simon Maguson had planned to use this broadcast to blackmail her.  Instead he'd self-destructed. 

         When he stepped back into view, Helen Mary scolded him. "Maxwell Grant!" she said, "You just got into a fight with man with a gun!  How could you do anything so wrong?"

         The man's face changed.  A smile that might have been worn by a happy child was replaced by an expression of fear and disappointment.  Sometimes a boy or girl will work very hard on a project that he or she really should not be doing.  The news that all the child's efforts were wasted could produce an expression such as Mr. Grant now wore.  "Are you telling me that what I just did wasn't morally right?" he asked.

         "No, of course not!" she snapped.  "He deserved it and more besides!  But not from you! You're 105!  You've got no business getting into any kind of fight!"

          He smiled, obviously relieved that her moral judgment of his actions was favorable.  "Actually," he explained cheerfully, "dealing with people like Dr. Maguson is my business.  It's how I make my living and, besides, 105 isn't all that old for a demon.  I lived nearly all of those years in semi-starvation.  That retards aging a lot."

         Before she could reply to this outrageous claim he was turning to go.  As she shouted, "But you're not a demon!  You're just a man with mental problems!" he was gone.

        

Chapter 5.  FLOWERS

 

         Despite her protests that she was fine, Lieutenant Gray insisted that Sister Helen Mary be taken to hospital and examined.  Simon Maguson had struck her with some force, and even a bump that a younger person would hardly notice can be fatal to the elderly.  In the hospital they insisted that she stay in bed until they were sure she was all right.

         Helen Mary argued with them at every turn. It seemed to be grotesquely unfair that she knew she was right, but they won these arguments because all the facts were on their side.

         Before her frustrations boiled over, Lieutenant Gray came by to take her statement. Mostly he wanted to know about Maxwell Grant, but he kept referring to him as "the man who identified himself as Mr. Grant."  The bus, Gray explained, had taken all the old women back to their retirement homes but without the supposed Maxwell Grant.  That man had disappeared. At the real Mr. Grant's retirement home several nurses were sure he'd never left.  While he'd been scheduled to go to the museum, somehow he'd missed the bus.  They'd seen him after it left.  Since there hadn't been anyone to take the old man to the museum, he couldn't have been there.

         As a result of all this Gray was going to have to write a report that made frequent use of the phase "unknown subject."  He didn't like that and, though he thanked Helen Mary warmly for her statement, she could tell she hadn't helped him much.

         After Lieutenant Gray left, Helen Mary began feeling tired.  For a woman of her years it had been a very demanding day.  Falling asleep, she did not wake until late the next morning.  On the table next to her bed there was a letter and a vase of flowers.  The letter was, she knew, the standard get-well message that the Vatican sent every ailing nun... except it wasn't. 

         It was a letter from His Holiness the Pope:

 

         I have received an odd request from my friend CIA Director Cassidy.  He states that in the television show Worldsavers one of the characters discovers that her new husband has a strange disability: he can't make the simplest moral judgment.  Like a blind man trusting others, he's always relied on the guidance of his superiors at work.

         Now he followed her advice in all matters relating to their lives together.  Gradually she begins to see that this strange disability is matched by stranger abilities.  He understands the mechanics of how people notice one thing but fail to notice another so well that he can become virtually invisible.  He also doesn't talk about his work.

         Only late in their marriage does she learn that he earns their living by killing drug dealers, terrorists and other 'bad' people.  The man she has loved with all of her heart for many years had proven to be a monster.  Though leaving him would be unbearably painful, that was what she must do.  Fate, however, spared her from this painful task. She received word of his death.

         Resolving to build a new life, she took vows, becoming a nun.  After years of doing God's work she learns that her husband had faked his death to spare her feelings and set about the task of making himself a better person.  Still lacking a conscience, any ability to distinguish right from wrong, he has decided to follow Torquemada's example.  Instead of killing bad people he subjects them to hideously painful and embarrassing experiences in the hopes that this will bring them to repentance.

         That was the purely hypothetical situation Director Cassidy described to me.  He said that he owes an independent contractor a favor and that it would help him repay this favor if I would answer a question.  Since the woman has taken two sacred vows, only one of which can be kept, what should she do?

         My answer, of course, is that vows, oaths, promises, duties and our other obligations to our fellows are all petty kings who hold their thrones only through their fealty to the Great King. All are subject to the Law of God, the Law of Love.  This imaginary woman should do what anyone with conflicting obligations should do:  fill her heart with God's love and follow her heart.

 

         Helen Mary knew that the shaky signature at the bottom of this letter was that of His Holiness.

         The note that came with the flowers was from the real Mr. Grant.  He was sorry to hear she'd had such a terrible experience.  Was the hospital at least protecting her from all those reporters?  If so, maybe she'd be wise to stay there a day or two.  They were besieging his retirement home, even though he'd never left and knew nothing about what had happed at the museum.  In fact it was so bad that he was moving to Sunnyhill retirement home.  Wasn't that where Sister Helen Mary resided?  Perhaps they'd see each other. 

         So, she thought, smiling to herself, His Holiness tells me to follow my heart and Clark Kent sends me flowers.

.

 

 

Copyright 2006, Richard K. Lyon

By profession Richard K. Lyon is a research scientist specializing in combustion.  Writing is a much enjoyed hobby.  In collaboration with Andy Offutt he's had four novels published (Demon in the Mirror, The Eyes of Sarsis, and The Web of the Spider—the Tiana trilogy—and Rails Across the Galaxy) and on his own, done quite a few stories for Analog etc. 

 

 

Cover: "Surrender" 

Copyright 2006, Rachel A. Marks

Rachel A. Marks is a homeschooling mom to four beautiful kids. She's Managing Editor for the Christian Literary Magazine, Haruah, and is currently working with her agent to publish her first novel. You can read more about her on her webpage: < www.shadowofthewood.com >.

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