The Night Eternal

Gus wasn’t ready to drink the Kool-Aid yet, but he was ready to commit to the final leg of this journey. “I think we’re all going to find out,” he said.

Fet said, “The Master most of all.”

The Dark Place

THE THROAT WAS buried deep in the earth beneath the cold Atlantic sea. The silt around it had turned black upon contact with it and nothing would grow or live near it.

The same was true of every other site where the remains of Ozryel were interred. The angelic flesh remained incorrupt and unchanged, but its blood seeped into the earth and slowly radiated out. The blood had a will of its own, each strand moving blindly, instinctively upward, traversing the soil, hidden from the sun, seeking a host. This is the manner in which the blood worms were born. Within them they contained the remnant of the human blood, tinting their tissue, guiding them toward the scent of their potential host. But also within them they carried the will of their original flesh. The will of the arms, the wings, the throat…

Their thin bodies wriggled blindly for the longest distances. Many of the worms died, infertile emissaries baked by the merciless heat of the earth or stopped by a geological obstacle that proved impossible to negotiate. They all strayed from their birth sites, some even transported away along with the earth on unwitting insect or animal vectors. Eventually they found a host—and they dug in the flesh, like a dutiful parasite, burrowing deep. In the beginning, it took the pathogen weeks to supplant, to hijack, the will and the tissue of the infected victim. Even parasites and viruses learn through trial and error—and learn they did. By the fifth human host body, the Ancients began to master the art of survival and supplantation. They extended their domain through infection, and they learned to play by the new earthbound rules of this game.

And they became masters at it.

The youngest one, the last to be born, was the Master, the throat. God’s capricious verbs gave movement to the very earth and the sea and made them clash and push upward the land that formed the Master’s birth site. It was a peninsula and then, hundreds of years later, an island.

The capillary worms that emanated from the throat were separated from their site of origin and wandered away the farthest, for in this newly formed land, humans had not yet set foot. It was useless and painful to try to nurture or dominate a lower form of life, a wolf or a bear; their control was imperfect and limited, and their synapses were alien and short-lived. Each of these invasions proved fruitless, but the lesson learned by one parasite was instantly learned by the hive mind. Soon their numbers were reduced to only a handful, scattered far away from the birth site: blind, lost, and weak.

Under a cold autumn moon a young Iroquois brave set camp on an earth patch dozens of miles from the birth site of the throat. He was an Onondaga—a keeper of the fire—and as he lay down on the ground, he was overtaken by a single capillary worm, burying itself into his neck.

The pain awakened the man and he instantly reached for the wounded area. The worm was still not entirely burrowed in, so he was able to grab the tail end of it. He pulled with all his might, but the thing wiggled and squirmed against his efforts and finally slipped from his grip, digging into the muscular structure of his neck. The pain was unbearable, like a slow, burning stab, as it wriggled down his throat and chest and finally disappeared under his left arm as the creature blindly discovered his circulation system.

As the parasite overtook the body, a fever started, lasting for almost two weeks and dehydrating its host body. But once the supplantation was complete, the Master sought refuge in the darkened caves and the cold, soothing filth in them. It found that, for reasons beyond its comprehension, the soil in which it overtook its host body provided it with the most comfort, and so it carried around a small clump of earth wherever it went. By now the worms had invaded and taken nourishment from almost every organ in the host’s body, multiplying in his bloodstream. His skin grew taut and pale, contrasting sharply with his tribal tattoos and his ravenous eyes, veiled by the nictitating membrane, glowing brightly in the moonlight. A few weeks went by without any nourishment but finally, close to dawn, he fell upon a group of Mohawk hunters.