The Pale: Volume One - Jacob Long (10 ebook reader txt) 📗

From Adam’s point of view, it appeared taller than a skyscraper and perfect in its curvature. The wheel turned almost imperceptibly slow, and tendrils of fire skewed from it, seemingly in all directions.

Adam stared in unimaginable terror and incomprehension. The wheel was so massive he could have been gazing upon the radiant profile of the Milky Way. His eyes followed one of the tendrils along its lazy slope, down, closer, until finally realizing that the tendril was attached—to him! The burning skewer had him engulfed at the end and was pulling him in with every slow revolution of the immolating wheel. The life force it drained from Adam with every passing second flowed up the length of the tendril to be devoured.

Am I in hell? Adam wondered in terror, and then he called out to the deep. “Am I in hell? I’m in hell! Why? Why?”

Adam sobbed uncontrollably in despair. “Tell me why!”

Abruptly, Adam was released, and he fell once more. Utter silence once again dominated the abyss. The thunder of flame in Adam’s ears ceased. Cold comfort, like the embrace of a dark angel, replaced the pain. Once again lost in a dream, Adam’s eyes stared lidlessly but unseeing. Slowly, like a gentle leaf, he drifted. The terrible wheel shrank into the distance, and Adam slipped away into the dark. The tingling on his skin left over from the torturous flame wracked him to his very soul. Then whatever force removed him from his torment laid him gently on a cool, smooth stone surface. There he continued to shudder and tremble from the lingering pain and horror.

On his back, Adam slowly turned his head to examine his surroundings. He had landed in a large area walled by cavernous rock that sloped inward and transitioned seamlessly into the hewn stone on which he rested. Ambient light dyed everything in pale cyan. The great flaming wheel could still be seen in the infinite blackness above, but it seemed so far away then, harmless. It was no closer than the sun in the sky.

Tentatively, Adam lifted his head from the ground. It didn’t hurt as much as he thought it would. The tingle had already dissipated greatly. He was just exhausted from the constant spasms that wracked his quivering muscles, and it took a great deal of effort.

In front of Adam, as he lay prostrate and helpless, appeared to be some sort of totem, a large statue with a face carved on it reminiscent of pagan worship. It sat in all peculiarity as round as a giant tree trunk and infinitely tall. Its height extended into the darkness above and disappeared.

More disturbing was the view Adam got of his own body. It was burned beyond recognition with moist profane patches of under-flesh exposed where they shouldn’t have been. He was a grotesque facsimile of his former self, and he couldn’t help but utter a quiet shuddering sob.

Suddenly, a stern voice resonated within the cavern. It said simply, “Stand.” It sounded old and somehow powerful.

Adam flinched, and his eyes darted about the cavern. The voice sounded like it came from every direction or perhaps from inside his own head, and it caused his overworked heart to pump furiously once more.

“Stand,” the ancient presence repeated.

Somewhere in the deep parts of Adam’s brain that couldn’t help but respect such an authority, he found the will to respond. “I can’t,” he huffed.

“You can,” the voice rebutted evenly.

Adam’s breathing was laborious. “I’m too tired. My body is destroyed.”

“Not beyond use.” The voice had much more faith in Adam than Adam did.

After a few slow breaths, Adam decided it wasn’t any use arguing. He slowly and agonizingly rolled one of his shoulders off the ground. He steadied himself with his hand and got to his knees. From there, he pushed himself up to his feet.

His stance was unsteady, and he nearly fell right back over, but Adam’s remaining strength held. Successfully on his feet, Adam’s sight focused on the totem in front of him, and he looked at it tiredly. At least, he figured he was looking at it tiredly. Who knows of what his fried nerve endings were actually capable.

“Are you the devil?” Adam asked gruffly.

“I am not,” the voice replied. It possessed just a hint of insult. “The devil that humankind has invented does not exist, and this is not hell. This respite is the resting place of the Wheel of Fate.”

Adam looked up at the grinding green disk above him.

“Why was it killing me?”

“Killing you?” the voice asked.

Adam looked back at the emotionless face of the totem. He got the feeling he was thinking of all the questions that would insult the mysterious voice.

“The Wheel of Fate was not killing you,” the voice explained. “When souls are relieved of their corporeal form, they are simply returned here to rejoin the Wheel of Fate.”

“Rejoin?” Adam asked.

“Yes. Your soul is not your own. You are merely a fragment of the Wheel of Fate, a piece of the endlessly turning circle of life and death. You were to be dissolved in the crucible of its flame and recombined with the other souls awaiting reemergence, but I pulled you from its grasp before the process could be completed.”

Adam didn’t like the idea of being “processed.” “So then I—my soul was relieved of its corporeal form?”

“Yes, Adam. You have passed from the material world. This is the world beyond the pale curtain, where only the dead may walk.”

Adam’s eyes fell to the ground as he considered the idea. How could that have happened? Only then did it occur to Adam; Harun El-Hashem had killed him, blown his brains out, either from rage or to prove a point. Adam felt sorry for himself. He thought about Benito, his mother, his father, Christina, and Téa. He didn’t know what he was going to do if he never saw them again. They would all be at his funeral, a military funeral. Six gilded soldiers carrying his casket. The twenty-one-gun salute. A soldier would present a tri-folded American flag to his mother. Adam’s heart sank at the idea. His mother would be sobbing, Christina too. Téa would put on a brave face while secretly dying behind that black veil.

Tears began to well up in Adam’s eyes. When they fell down his cheeks, they did wonders to soothe his exposed skin. The tears drew cool glistening streams down his face that glowed in the eerie, pervasive, pale light.

Choked up and stumbling in his words, Adam asked, “How do you know so much about me?”

The voice answered succinctly. “You are a piece of the Wheel of Fate. I am the Custodian of the Wheel of Fate, forever in its service. I know everything about the Wheel of Fate. I know everything about you.”

Adam ran out of tears in that moment. There was only one question left, and he knew he wouldn’t like the answer. “Why did you pull me out then?” he growled disdainfully.

“Finally, we come to the heart of the matter,” the voice said. “I pulled you from the Wheel of Fate so you could serve it as well.”

“Why would the all-powerful Wheel of Fate need my help?”

“Don’t blaspheme,” the Custodian scolded. “You especially have no right.”

“What do you mean?” Adam asked.

“The human race has corrupted the world,” the Custodian explained. “For the millennia that you have been graced with your superior intelligence and dexterity, you have done nothing but make war upon your fellow man. You have increased your population over a million-fold and have increased the death toll with it. Your entire life was a symptom of this. Now there is no balance. Souls have been lost, scattered. I can no longer spin them in the Wheel of Fate. If it is not corrected, more souls will leave the care of the master. This light you see around you will instead shine onto the earth, and the world you knew will be desolated. And more than souls have become unhinged. The earth struggles hard now to shake off the pestilence that humans have wrought upon it. There are . . . monsters. Aberrations of nature have begun appearing on earth. They were unstable at first. They did not survive long enough on their paltry life force to become a real threat. Their energies were quickly returned to the Wheel. But now they are strong, and they have begun victimizing the human race.”

Adam did not hesitate. The implications were fantastic. “What do I do?”

Once again, the Custodian read him like a book. “You would be returned to earth, Adam. Your task would be to eliminate these aberrations and wrangle any and all lost souls you can find, but most importantly, investigate the cause of the imbalance.”

“The cause?” Adam asked. “I thought it was people?”

The Custodian actually hesitated a little before answering. “I am not in the habit of questioning the Wheel of Fate. I refuse to believe that it made a mistake when it propagated your evolution. You cannot be inherently evil, inherently injurious to the whole of life. I need you to help investigate the true cause, whatever it may be. Will you do this, or are you done sacrificing yourself for this world?”

Adam’s voice was ragged. His eyes were desperate and hungry. “I’ll do it. Send me back right now, and I’ll get started!”

“In time,” the Custodian said. “For now, you are weak. You must feed.”

Adam nodded. “That’s fine. Drop me off back home, and I’ll grab a Whopper, first thing.”

“No, Adam. You have changed. You can no longer be satiated by calories or proteins. Your craving for the unrefined energies of other organisms has been replaced by a deeper need.”

Adam did not like the way this was heading. “What are you saying?”

The Custodian continued, “As the champion of the Wheel of Fate, you are a conduit for the energies of this world. You can channel the energies of other organisms much more efficiently, much more directly.”

Adam became more agitated with every vague alien half-truth with which the Custodian was trying to ease him into the situation. “What. Does. That. Mean?”

“You have become a devourer of souls.”

Adam was quiet while he absorbed the information. “You must be joking,” he said.

“I would never,” the Custodian retorted.

Adam raised his arms to present his tortured grotesque corpse and said, “This is what you would have me be reduced to? A ghoul? Stalking the streets at night for some poor person to victimize in the name of your wheel? How does that make me different from the things you would have me hunt? I mean, how would you even make it so I could do that? Huh? You gonna give me some kind of a mosquito soul soul-sucking straw-organ that I stab people with and just start slurping away?”

“Nothing so barbaric. The soul siphon is our lord’s masterpiece. It will be as naturally a part of you as your own heart.”

“And what’s the process for that? Is it gonna hurt when you stick it in, or ya use lube?”

“I installed the soul siphon in your spirit before I released you from the crucible.”

Adam glared at the totem incredulously. “What? You just went ahead and put it in me? You made me into your monster without even giving me a heads-up?”

“Do you believe that the slaughtering of cows for your Whoppers is somehow more noble?” the Custodian tested. “If you want, you can feed from the cows your country keeps in its farms, waiting to be slaughtered. It is the same process, only you would draw the soul directly instead of ingesting its unrefined physical manifestation.”

Adam smiled a crooked smile. The Custodian was annoyingly efficient at pointing out flaws, but Adam shook his head. “There is no way I’m becoming a monster for you. No way. Why would you even do that? I could do what you want just fine eating what I was eating before!” He added sardonically, “I have more than twenty years of experience!”

“Impossible. The body that was designed with that function is rotting in the ground. The body I provide to you will use the soul siphon for sustenance. You will come to understand. There are benefits to consuming pure cosmic energy that you are unaware of. Your new body will be capable of processing the energy and using it to its full potential.”

“Oh, yeah, I’ll be Superman.” Adam pointed to his chest. “This is what makes me human, and I can’t just let it go. Not for this. Not for anything!”

The Custodian was silent for a time. Just when Adam was beginning to convince himself that he’d won that argument, the voice sounded once again. “I was hoping it would not come to this.”

In that moment, a hair-raising, inhuman, unearthly shriek rent the air. It almost sounded like a roar, but it sounded so painful. It sounded pitiful and tortured.

Adam turned around in the direction from which the sound registered. There was a tunnel-like exit to the room of the cavern that Adam was inside. It was bored directly into the face of the rock and then veered to the right, out of sight. Adam hadn’t noticed it before.

Adam stared expectantly at the tunnel, and then he glanced back at the totem.