The Penny Drops as does Declan’s Heart

The floor brought him no comfort. It had been his decision to forego snuggling with Second Sarah this evening, and he’d opted to simply lie down in an empty room. He had slept on enough floors in college that it wasn’t a foreign concept for him to even consider napping there. The problem wasn’t that he was tired. He was exhausted. His body was hale as could be, but mentally he was walking a thin line. If he was still allowing Mother to access his Hnet he had no doubt that he’d be feeling fine. She would make an attitude adjustment and a new Declan would wake up ready to go out and obliterate billions of lives.

The truth of it was he was wearing thin. He was being beset on all sides, and all he wanted to do was get some sleep. Declan had just taken in a ton of information via Hnet (filtered as it was by Kristine, but it was still a huge amount of knowledge for him to absorb), and then Mother lobbed another grenade onto his lap. He was always one of those people who said that he would never ask the universe what more it could pile onto his shoulders because the second that he asked that question it showed him just how much more it could give. The universe, as he knew all too well by this point. was very generous. In fact, there were days that it was downright charitable. He hadn’t even had to ask the question. Just the thought had been enough for it to open its heart to him, even though he didn’t realize it at the time. Considering that he was no longer dealing with a singular universe he could only surmise that his problems were compounded with extreme prejudice.

He had just closed his eyes when he found himself pulling his blanket up to his neck. His first thought was that the temperature controls in the room had malfunctioned, but then he knew that Mother would have never let things get that bad; because the temperature in the room suddenly and inexplicably plummeted to a point that he could see his breath. Then, he noticed that the lighting in the room had also dimmed. He normally didn’t sleep with lights on, but he had just laid down and hadn’t done more than dim the lighting.

His stomach did flip flops as the hairs on the back of his neck stood up and his arms became covered in goosebumps. Every fiber of his being was screaming that he was in danger, but he could not tell where the menace stemmed from. Instinctively, Declan dodged to his right, rolling away when his sense of impending doom peaked. He had no idea why he’d done it, only that a sense of urgency to move had overwhelmed him. Like a feral cat, he sprang to his feet and came up in a boxer’s stance unsure of what he should expect. His eyes methodically scanned the room and stopped on a dark shadow in the corner. He could just make out what appeared to be a vaguely man-like shape. Despite the lack of visual information, he could feel the dark intent that the shadow carried from across the room. He could sense waves of hatred, anger, and even jealousy roiling like an agitated honey badger.

“Ah’m impressed,” came a hollow voice from across the room. “Ah had aimed my pistol at you, and you simply moved away without even knowing why. Ah kin see why the Invigilator chose you. Your other selves, sadly, were not as finely tuned to their surroundings as you. Of all the Declan Mason’s that Ah’ve killed you are the only one to even sense my presence.”

Declan crinkled his nose and squinted in the area the voice was snaking from. He still couldn’t see his foe, but he knew where he was, “So, you’ve come to kill me?” Something stirred within his breast, and he felt an unknown power building in the core of his being. He felt like he was ready for anything. The fatigue fled from his mind and he became more alert than he ever had before. It felt like his blood had been swapped out for lightning and his senses flew into overdrive.

Declan watched as a ragged figure slipped from the shadows in the corner of the room. It seemed to struggle to enter the light as if it were pressing through some dense invisible barrier, unmelting from the form to grow into the shape of a man. A man, he saw, stripped of flesh and wrapped in a ragged black robe. Immediately, Declan saw the deliberate resemblance to the Grim Reaper. Whatever he was looking at wasn’t this man’s natural form. This was something he’d taken as a symbol of his power. He was death incarnate. Well, Declan pitied the asshole, because he was the Revelator and death worked for him.

“Not at’all,” continued the invader with the woeful countenance, “Ah have come to make you a deal. To give you a little something on chew on for a bit. I don’t,” he said languidly, “expect an immediate answer from you.” He paused and put his pistol back into its holster on his side. Declan noted that while the thing that his shadowy visitor had gripped so tightly was a handgun it was far from being a pistol. The device seemed to bear a malice of its own and looked as if it could vaporize a man on a low setting. After his visitor had snapped the gun’s cover in place he brushed off his ratty robes. “Sorry,” he declared, “Interdimensional travel does wrinkle my mantle something awful.”

“Who are you, and what do you want?” His voice was steady and calm, belying his thoughts, which were racing like a horse on dermorphin. Declan began wondering why Mother hadn’t sent a squad of guardmechs or even set off an alarm, she should have been doing something; it was only then that he realized that Hnet was down again. He wondered what the hell Mother was good for if she kept going down all the time.

“Quite right, introductions, I say, introductions are in order.” The man stretched forth a skeletal hand, “My name is Poe. Poe Machivelli,” he chuckled, “Ah know what, what you are thinking, suh. Right now, you are saying to yourself, “He doesn’t look Italian.” He dropped his hand slowly when he realized that Declan wasn’t going to shake.

Declan couldn’t tell if the corpselike being as angered at his recalcitrance to shake hands, or his failure to laugh at his pitiful joke. He hadn’t put his guard down and remained in his ready pose, fists in the air poised to lash out at the first hint of danger. The skeleton ignored his aggressive stance. And began rambling again.

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“Ah, am a southern boy. More of a gentleman, than a boy, in truth but I do try to stay true to my Baptist roots.” The grim figure gestured and a chair composed of shadows formed behind him and he sat down and steepled his fingers as he studied Declan. “You, are Declan Mason, and you hold a position that until recently, was mine own. Ah served the Invigilator for centuries until I realized that life was sacred and that I could no longer go forth and erase countless lives. It was a long time before Ah could break my mind free of the Invigilator’s spell. A spell that, Ah am certain, you are currently under.” Empty eyes drilled into the back of Declan’s skull. “Ah must wonder, do you feel sympathy for those you’ve killed? Do you miss those who died on your world?”

Declan dropped his boxer’s pose and warily faced the anthropomorphization of death itself sitting before him. “I feel nothing. No regrets, no guilt, no shame for what I have done or must do in the future.” He lied. He felt agony for every life he’d taken, but he would never admit that to the undead man before him. Instead, he said, “There is one soul that I miss with all my heart, but she is dead and gone. Her absence makes me glad that I cannot feel much, because if there was a glimmer of hope for me to see her again I would go mad. Her name was Sarah, Sarah Crowe, and she was my whole world.”

He paused as the realization that a man that could span galaxies and dimensions had been hobbled with the loss of one world. With the loss of just one woman, he’d been undone. He would never recover. His vain attempt to replace her loss by saving simulacrums was pathetic.

“Hell, I lost my whole world and the only thing that I cared about was her not being here anymore.” He stopped as tears welled up in his eyes. He sniffed and wiped below his nose with his forefinger. “The Invigilator has spared me the madness that would come from my loss and allowed me to keep her memory alive by saving her counterparts on other worlds. I do what I must to keep her memory alive.”

Machiavelli chuckled, “And if Ah could give this person back to you . . . what would you do?”

Declan felt his teeth grit together and before he realized what he was doing his hands had clenched into fists so hard that his fingernails were digging into his flesh so hard that he was drawing blood. “Do . . . Not. . . Go . . . There,” he snarled. “I am not to be trifled with, not matter how scary you think you are, and no one desecrates her memory. Not unless they want to face me.”

Poe waved his hands in a “settle down” gesture and said, “The Lord visited Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did to Sarah as he had promised.”

Declan looked at him confusedly, “What?” He was unused to having bible quotes tossed at him.

“Declan,” he couldn’t see it, but he could hear the smile in the death’s head’s voice, “Think of me as the Lord. Ah have visited your Sarah, and Ah have saved her from the death that she was destined to have, and Ah can return her to you.” He stopped for dramatic effect, “Provided, of course, that you are willing to work with me.”

Declan didn’t know what to say, let alone how to react. Seeing him speechless the Horseman took it as a sign that he should continue, “Ah will give you time to think about it, too. Ah’m no monster. Ah want you to work with me against the Invigilator. Together we can stop him; I know it!” Saying that he drew forth a chain from his pocket, at its end dangled a glass tube with a silver top and bottom. Inside the crystalline tube was a small figure that looked like Sarah.

Declan knew that there were billions if not quintillions of Sarah’s out there, but he somehow recognized his Sarah as soon as he saw her. He had no idea of how he knew that this was his Sarah, the woman he’d been mourning the moment his world was destroyed, but he just did. Somewhere in the back of his mind, a voice said that it was because she matched his universes vibrational frequency, but he couldn’t hear it. His Sarah was here. She was real, and she was alive. Alive, and she was in the literal clutches of the poster child for the Blue Oyster Cult. She pounded on the sides of the container and screamed for his help, but he could not hear anything she said. He could only see the terror on her face, and her urgency to escape her confinement. It was her absolute horror that pervaded his mind. He had never seen such fear in another living thing and it overwhelmed him.

Declan snapped. He had no notion of what he was doing but he was atop the dark framework of death that sat in the shadows before him before his opponent had realized he’d moved. His left hand grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the chain and twisted. He heard a snap just as his right hand came up from below and landed a terrible uppercut to the skeletal man’s lower jaw. His right hand, acting on its own accord then struck Poe in the ribs repeatedly. The incarnation of death reached out for his holster, but Declan swung his left hand around the broken wrist and held it firmly. His right hand shot out and struck below the elbow, driving it upwards further than it could go so that like the wrist it snapped with a sickly, but very satisfying, crunch. He was vaguely aware of the glass vial dropping to the ground with a clink as his rage drove him onward.

“You come into my house,” he said as he released the Horseman’s broken arm, “Point a gun at my head, and try to intimidate me!?!” Again, his hand reached out and snatched the gun from the boney fingers that were drawing it from its holster. “You pull a gun on me! In my house!!! No one comes into my house and threatens me! No one threatens Sarah, not any Sarah, not anywhere, not anytime.” He emphasized his point by holding the handgun like a hammer and striking the fleshless skull every time he nailed down a point. Cracks formed and ran across the ivory surface of Poe’s head as chips of bone flew by Declan’s face like snowflakes in a blizzard.

“You trap my beloved Sarah and dangle her in front of my face and you want me to join you?” Spittle showered the shattered skull as he screamed. Declan snarled and brought his leather shoe up between the man’s legs. His foot came away unsatisfied as there had been nothing of substance to strike, so he drove his sole onto the undead monster’s knee. There was a crack, but nothing broke this time. Two failures made Declan’s rage double and he resumed pummeling the personification of death like he was trying to revive him.

Poe tried to back away, but the rabid assault that Declan was performing made it impossible for him to think or retaliate. He had not expected the level of ferocity that the man unleashed upon him. The man’s rage was unsurpassed in his experience. He had never seen such a transformation take place in another human being before, and he was shocked at the levels of power that Declan was drawing on to attack him. Power, he suspected, that not even Declan knew that he possessed. He had come too early, his own power was still just a ghost of itself, and the Revelator had already become more dangerous than he would have thought possible. He could see the man’s eyes were utterly void of mercy and were swiftly becoming empty of all rationality. There was far more to this man than Poe had realized, and if he didn’t do something he was going to die.