The Night Eternal

Bored, Zack pulled the plunger on his vending machine, and a Milky Way bar dropped to the bottom drawer. He ate it as he went back up to the first floor, then outside, looking for some trouble to get into. As though on cue, Zack’s mother came scrabbling up the craggy rock face that was the castle’s foundation. She did so with feline agility, scaling the wet schist seemingly without exertion, her bare feet and talon-aided hands moving from purchase to purchase as though she had ascended that very path one thousand times before. At the top, she vaulted easily onto the walkway, two spiderlike feelers following behind her, loping back and forth on all fours.

As she neared Zack, standing in the doorway just out of the rain, he saw that her neck wattle was flush, engorged and red even through the accumulated dirt and filth. It meant that she had recently fed.

“Had a nice dinner out, Mom?” he asked, revolted. The scarecrow that had once been his mother stared at him with empty eyes. Every time he saw her, he felt the exact same contradictory impulses: repulsion and love. She followed him around for hours at a time, occasionally keeping her distance like a watchful wolf. He had, once, been moved to caress her hair and afterward had cried silently.

She entered the castle without a glance at Zack’s face. Her wet footprints and the muck tracked in by the feelers’ hands and feet added to the grunge coating the stone floor. Zack looked at her and, for a fleeting moment—though distorted by vampiric mutation—saw his mother’s face emerge. But, just as immediately, the illusion was broken, the memory soiled by this ever-present monster that he could not help but love. Everybody else he ever had in his life was gone. This was all Zack had left: a broken doll to keep him company.

Zack felt a warmth fill the breezy castle, as though left by a being in swift motion. The Master had returned, a slight murmur entering Zack’s head. He watched his mother ascend the stairs to the upper floors and followed her, wanting to see what the commotion was about.

The Master

THE MASTER HAD once understood the voice of God. It once held it within itself, and in a way, it retained a pale imitation of that state of grace. It was, after all, a being of one mind and many eyes, seeing all at once, processing it all, experiencing the many voices of its subjects. And like God’s, the Master’s voice was a concert of flow and contradiction—it carried the breeze and the hurricane, the lull and the thunder, rising and fading with dusk and dawn…

But the scale of God’s voice encompassed it all—not earth, not the continents, but the whole world. And the Master could only witness it but no longer could make sense of it as it was able to once upon a time in the origin of it all.

This is, it thought, for the millionth time, what it is to fall from grace…

And yet, there the Master stood: monitoring the planet through the observations of its brood. Multiple sources of input, one central intelligence. The Master’s mind casting a net of surveillance over the globe. Squeezing planet Earth in a fist of a thousand fingers.

Goodweather had just released seventeen serfs in the explosion of the hospital building. Seventeen lost, their number soon to be replaced; the arithmetic of infection was of paramount importance to the Master.

The feelers remained out searching the surrounding blocks for the fugitive doctor, seeking his psychic scent. Thus far, nothing. The Master’s ultimate victory was assured, the great chess match all but over, except that its opponent obstinately refused to concede defeat—leaving to the Master the drudgery of chasing the last remaining piece around the board.

That final piece was not, in fact, Goodweather, but instead the Occido Lumen, the lone extant edition of the cursed text. In detailing the mysterious origin of the Master and the Ancients, the book also contained an indication for bringing about the Master’s demise—the location of its site of origin—if one knew where to look.

Fortunately, the current possessors of the book were illiterate cattle. The tome had been stolen at auction by the old professor Abraham Setrakian, at that time the lone human on earth with the knowledge necessary to decrypt the tome and its arcane secrets. However, the old professor had little time to review the Lumen before his death. And in the brief time the Master and Setrakian were linked through possession—in those precious moments between the old professor’s turning and his destruction—the Master learned, through their shared intelligence, every bit of knowledge the professor had gleaned from the silver-bound volume.