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IV

Holding to the promises he’d made himself was not easy. Not when there were so many simple pleasures to be had from the power he’d gained; pleasures he made himself forfeit for fear of depleting his little strength before he stole his way to greater.

His first priority was to locate a fellow quester; someone who could aid him in his search. It was two months before his enquiries threw up the name and reputation of a man perfectly suited to that role. That man was Richard Wesley Fletcher, who’d been – until his recent fall from grace – one of the most lauded and revolutionary minds in the field of evolutionary studies; the head of several research programmes in Boston and Washington; a theorist whose every remark was scrutinized by his peers for clues to his next breakthrough. But his genius had been flawed by addiction. Mescalin and its derivatives had brought him low, much to the satisfaction of many of his colleagues, who made no bones about their contempt for the man once his guilty secret came out. In article after article Jaffe found the same smug tone, as the academic community rounded on the deposed Wunderkind, condemning his theories as ludicrous and his morals as reprehensible. Jaffe couldn’t have cared less about Fletcher’s moral standing. It was the man’s theories that intrigued him, dovetailing as they did with his own ambition. Fletcher’s researches had been aimed at isolating, and synthesizing in a laboratory, the force in living organisms that drove them to evolve. Like Jaffe, he believed heaven could be stolen.

It took persistence to find the man, but Jaffe had that in abundance, and found him in Maine. The genius was much the worse for despair, teetering on the brink of complete mental breakdown. Jaffe was cautious. He didn’t press his suit at first, but instead ingratiated himself by supplying drugs of a quality Fletcher had long since been too poor to afford. Only when he’d gained the addict’s trust did he begin to make oblique reference to Fletcher’s studies. Fletcher was less than lucid on the subject at first, but Jaffe gently fanned the embers of his obsession, and in time the fire flared. Once burning, Fletcher had much to tell. He believed he’d twice come close to isolating what he called the Nuncio, the messenger. But the final processes had always eluded him. Jaffe offered a few observations of his own on the subject, garnered from his readings in the occult. The two of them, he gently suggested, were fellow seekers. Though he, Jaffe, used the vocabulary of the ancients – of alchemists and magicians – and Fletcher the language of science, they had the same desire to nudge evolution’s elbow; to advance the flesh, and perhaps the spirit, by artificial means. Fletcher poured scorn on these observations at the outset, but slowly came to value them, finally accepting Jaffe’s offer of facilities in which to begin his researches afresh. This time, Jaffe promised, Fletcher wouldn’t have to work in an academic hothouse, constantly required to justify his work to hold on to his funding. He guaranteed his dope-fiend genius a place to work that would be well hidden from prying eyes. When the Nuncio had been isolated, and its miracle reproduced, Fletcher Would reappear from the wilderness and put his vilifiers to flight. It was an offer no obsessive could have resisted.

Eleven months later, Richard Wesley Fletcher stood on a granite headland on the Pacific Coast of the Baja and cursed himself for succumbing to Jaffe’s temptations. Behind him, in the Misión de Santa Catrina where he’d laboured for the best part of a year, the Great Work (as Jaffe liked to call it) had been achieved. The Nuncio was a reality. There were surely few less likely places for labours most of the world would have judged ungodly than an abandoned Jesuit Mission, but then from the outset this endeavour had been shot through with paradox.

For one, the liaison between Jaffe and himself. For another, the intermingling of disciplines that had made the Great Work possible. And for a third the fact that now, in what should have been his moment of triumph, he was minutes away from destroying the Nuncio before it fell into the hands of the very man who’d funded its creation.

As in its making, so in its unmaking: system, obsession and pain. Fletcher was too well versed in the ambiguities of matter to believe that the total destruction of anything was possible. Things couldn’t be undiscovered. But if the change that he and Raul wrought on the evidence was thorough enough it was his belief that nobody would easily reconstruct the experiment he’d conducted here in the wilds of Baja California. He and the boy (it was still difficult to think of Raul as a boy) had to be like perfect thieves, rifling their own house to remove every last trace of themselves. When they’d burned all the research notes and trashed all the equipment it had to be as though the Nuncio had never been made. Only then could he take the boy, who was still busy feeding the fires in front of the Mission, to this cliff edge, so that hand in hand they could fling themselves off. The fall was steep, and the rocks below plenty sharp enough to kill them. The tide would wash their blood and bodies out into the Pacific. Then, between fire and water, the job would have been done.

None of which would prevent some future investigator from finding the Nuncio all over again; but the combination of disciplines and circumstances which had made that possible were very particular. For humanity’s sake Fletcher hoped they would not occur again for many years. There was good reason for such hope. Without Jaffe’s strange, half-intuitive grasp of occult principles to marry with his own scientific methodology, the miracle would not have been made, and how often did men of science sit down with men of magic (the suit-mongers, as Jaffe called them) and attempt a mingling of crafts? It was good they didn’t. There was too much dangerous stuff to discover. The occultists whose codes Jaffe had broken knew more about the nature of things than Fletcher would ever have suspected. Beneath their metaphors, their talk of the Bath of Rebirth, and of golden Progeny begotten by fathers of lead, they were ambitious for the same solutions he’d sought all his life. Artificial ways to advance the evolutionary urge: to take the human beyond itself. Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius, they advised. Let the obscure be explained by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown. They knew whereof they wrote. Between his science and theirs Fletcher had solved the problem. Synthesized a fluid that would carry evolution’s glad tidings through any living system, pressing (so he believed) the humblest cell towards a higher condition. Nuncio he’d called it: the Messenger. Now he knew he’d misnamed it. It was not a messenger of the gods, but the god itself. It had a life of its own. It had energy, and ambition. He had to destroy it, before it began to rewrite Genesis, beginning with Randolph Jaffe as Adam.

‘Father?’

Raul had appeared behind him. Once again the boy had stripped off his clothes. After years of going naked, he was still unable to get used to their constrictions. And once again he used that damn word.

‘I’m not your father,’ Fletcher reminded him. ‘I never was and never will be. Can’t you get that into your head?’

As ever, Raul listened. His eyes lacked whites, and were difficult to read, but his steady gaze never failed to mellow Fletcher.

‘What do you want?’ he said more softly.

‘The fires,’ the boy replied.

‘What about them?’

‘The wind, father –’ he began.

It had got up in the last few minutes, coming straight off the ocean. When Fletcher followed Raul round to the front of the Mission, in the lee of which they’d built the Nuncio’s pyres, he found the notes being scattered, many of them far from consumed.

‘Damn you,’ Fletcher said, as much irritated by his own lack of attention to the task as the boy’s. ‘I told you: don’t put too much paper on at the same time.’

He took hold of Raul’s arm, which was covered in silky hair, as was his entire body. There was a distinct smell of singeing, where the flames had risen suddenly and caught the boy by surprise. It took, he knew, considerable courage on Raul’s part to overcome his primal fear of fire. He was doing it for his father’s sake. He’d have done it for no other. Contrite, Fletcher put his arm around Raul’s shoulder. The boy clung, the way he’d clung in his previous incarnation, burying his face in the smell of the human.

‘We’d better just let them go,’ Fletcher said, watching as another gust of wind took leaves off the fire and scattered them like pages from a calendar, day upon day of pain and inspiration. Even if one or two of them were to be found, and that was unlikely along such a barren stretch of coast, nobody would be able to make any sense of them. It was only his obsessiveness that made him want to wipe the slate completely clean, and shouldn’t he know better, when that very obsessiveness had been one of the qualities that had brought this waste and tragedy about?

The boy detached himself from around Fletcher and turned back to the fires.

‘No Raul…’ he said, ‘… forget them … let them go …’

The boy chose not to hear; a trick he’d always had, even before the changes the Nuncio’s touch had brought about. How many times had Fletcher summoned the ape Raul had been only to have the wretched animal wilfully ignore him? It was in no small measure that very perversity which had encouraged Fletcher to test the Great Work on him: a whisper of the human in the simian which the Nuncio turned into a shout.

Raul wasn’t making an attempt to collect the dispersed papers, however. His small, wide body was tensed, his head tilted up. He was sniffing the air.

‘What is it?’ Fletcher said. ‘You can smell somebody?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where?’

‘Coming up the hill.’

Fletcher knew better than to question Raul’s observation. The fact that he, Fletcher, could hear and smell nothing was simply a testament to the decadence of his senses. Nor did he need to ask from which direction their visitor was coming. There was only one route up to the Mission. Forging a single road through such inhospitable terrain, then up a steep hill, must have taxed even the masochism of Jesuits. They’d built one road, and the Mission, and then, perhaps failing to find God up here, vacated the place. If their ghosts ever drifted through, they’d find a deity now, Fletcher thought, in three phials of blue fluid. So would the man coming up the hill. It could only be Jaffe. Nobody else knew of their presence here.

‘Damn him,’ Fletcher said. ‘Why now? Why now?’

It was a foolish question. Jaffe had chosen to come now because he knew his Great Work was being conspired against. He had a way of maintaining a presence in a place where he wasn’t; a spying echo of himself. Fletcher didn’t know how. One of Jaffe’s suits, no doubt. The kind of minor mind-tricks Fletcher would have dismissed as trickery once, as he would have dismissed so much else. It would take Jaffe several more minutes to get all the way up the hill, but that wasn’t enough time, by any means, for Fletcher and the boy to finish their labours.

There were two tasks only he might yet complete if he was efficient. Both were vital. First, the killing and disposal of Raul, from whose transformed system an educated enquirer might glean the nature of the Nuncio. Second, the destruction of the three phials inside the Mission.

It was there he returned now, through the chaos he had gladly wreaked on the place. Raul followed, walking barefoot through the smashed instrumentation and splintered furniture, to the inner sanctum. This was the only room that had not been invaded by the clutter of the Great Work. A plain cell that boasted only a desk, a chair, and an antiquated stereo. The chair was set in front of the window which overlooked the ocean. Here, in the first days following Raul’s successful transmutation, before the full realization of the Nuncio’s purpose and consequence had soiled Fletcher’s triumph, man and boy had sat, and watched the sky, and listened to Mozart together. All the mysteries, Fletcher had said, in one of his first lessons, were footnotes to music. Before everything, music.

Now there’d be no more sublime Mozart; no more sky-watching; no more loving education. There was only time for a shot. Fletcher took the gun from beside his mescalin in the desk drawer.

‘We’re going to die?’ Raul said.

He’d known this was coming. But not so soon.

‘Yes.’

‘We should go outside,’ the boy said. ‘To the edge.’

‘No. There isn’t time. I’ve … I’ve got some work to do before I join you.’

‘But you said together.’

‘I know.’

‘You promised together.’

‘Jesus, Raul! I said: I know! But it can’t be helped. He’s coming. And if he takes you from me, alive or dead, he’ll use you. He’ll cut you up. Find out how the Nuncio works in you!’

His words were intended to scare, and they succeeded. Raul let out a sob, his face knotted up with terror. He took a step backwards as Fletcher raised the gun.

‘I’ll be with you soon,’ Fletcher said. ‘I swear it. Just as soon as I can.’

‘Please, father …’

‘I’m not your father! Once and for all, I’m nobody’s father!’

His outburst broke any hold he had on Raul. Before Fletcher could take a bead on him the boy was away through the door. He still fired wildly, the bullet striking the wall, then he gave chase, firing a second time. But the boy had simian agility in him. He was across the laboratory and out into the sunlight before a third shot could be fired. Out, and away.

Fletcher threw the gun aside. It was a waste of what little time remained to follow Raul. Better to use those minutes to dispose of the Nuncio. There was precious little of the stuff, but enough to wreak evolutionary havoc in any system that it tainted. He’d plotted against it for days and nights now, working out the safest way to be rid of it. He knew it couldn’t simply be poured away. What might it do if it got into the earth? His best hope, he’d decided – indeed his only hope – was to throw it into the Pacific. There was a pleasing neatness about that. The long climb to his species’ present rung had begun in the ocean, and it was there – in the myriad configurations of certain marine animals – that he’d first observed the urge things had to become something other than themselves. Clues to which the three phials of Nuncio were the solution. Now he’d give that answer back to the element that had inspired it. The Nuncio would literally become drops in the ocean, its powers so diluted as to be negligible.

He crossed to the bench where the phials still stood in their rack. God in three bottles, milky blue, like a della Francesca sky. There was movement in the distillation, as though it was stirring up its own internal tides. And if it knew he was approaching, did it also know his intention? He had so little idea of what he’d created. Perhaps it could read his mind.

He stopped in his tracks, still too much the man of science not to be fascinated by this phenomenon. He’d known the liquor was powerful, but that it possessed the talent for self-fermentation it was now displaying – even a primitive propulsion, it seemed; it was climbing the walls of the phials – astonished him. His conviction faltered. Did he really have the right to put this miracle out of the world’s sight? Was its appetite really so unhealthy? All it wanted to do was speed the ascent of things. Make fur of scales. Make flesh of fur. Make spirit, perhaps, of flesh. A pretty thought.

Then he remembered Randolph Jaffe, of Omaha, Nebraska, sometime butcher and opener of Dead Letters; collector of other people’s secrets. Would such a man use the Nuncio well? In the hands of someone sweet-natured and loving, the Great Work might begin a universal papacy, every living being in touch with the meaning of its Creation. But Jaffe wasn’t loving, nor sweet-natured. He was a thief of revelations, a magician who didn’t care to understand the principles of his craft, only to rise by it.

Given that fact the question was not did he have the right to dispose of the miracle, but rather, how dare he hesitate?

He stepped towards the phials, charged with fresh conviction. The Nuncio knew he meant it harm. It responded with a frenzy of activity, climbing the glass walls as best it could, churning against its confines.

As Fletcher reached out to snatch the rack up, he realized its true intention. It didn’t simply desire escape. It wanted to work its wonders on the very flesh that was plotting its harm.

It wanted to recreate its Creator.

The realization came too late to be acted upon. Before he could withdraw his outstretched hand, or shield himself, one of the phials shattered. Fletcher felt the glass cut his palm, and the Nuncio splash against him. He staggered away from it, raising his hand in front of his face. There were several cuts there, but one particularly large, in the middle of his palm, for all the world as though someone had driven a nail through it. The pain made him giddy, but it lasted only a moment, giddiness and pain. Coming after was another sensation entirely. Not even sensation. That was too trivial a description. It was like mainlining on Mozart; a music that bypassed the ears and went straight to the soul. Hearing it, he would never be the same again.