Whitley Strieber The Night Church

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Monstrum.
He turned his gaze to Jerry, just as he had when he had needed help as a boy.
Friend and teacher, Jerry had also been his bodyguard. A confused welter of
memories flooded him as he looked at his friend.
The old man soon shattered the moment. "Come on, Jerry. Leave him to
his memories for now." He indicated an envelope on the desk. "There's a
letter that will explain a great deal. 1 suggest you read it."
They began to leave the room. "Wait!" Jonathan cried, but before he could stop
them the door was closed and locked.
Jonathan was furious. This time he lunged at the window, smashing the glass
with his hands, uncaring of gashes, and grappled with the bars. He yanked them
and yanked them and kicked them and tried to spread them. And was defeated by
them.
He picked up the Hallicrafters, which Jerry had placed neatly back on the
table, and threw it against the door. It shattered into glittering electronic
bits but the door did not move.
What in hell was going to happen next? He realized that this playing on his
emotions, dehumanizing him by calling him "It," suggesting that he was
brutal beyond his own self-understanding, was all part of an attempt
to break him. And a much more skillful attempt than he had expected. But he
told himself that he understood what was being done to him, and his
understanding would preserve him.
We love each other, and we want as normal and human a life as we can
have.
Patricia had said
that. He repeated it to himself like a prayer.
He longed for her strength. If he could just spend one more minute in her arms
he would have the energy to cope with another year of the old man's weird
emotional games.
"What have you done with her?" His voice was absorbed by the walls.
Frantically, aware of how wild animals must feel when first captured, he
tested them. Behind the familiar wallpaper of soaring rockets and moons and
Saturns and floating spacemen was plaster. And from the solid thunk when he
tapped it, the plaster was spread on concrete. The room was more tightly
made than any prison.
It was his old room, all right. The apartment he remem-bered was just a
hypnotic suggestion. This was where he had grown up, this prison.
As the realization sunk in, a change began to come over him. The curtains that
hid his past were being made to part by the glut of familiar associations.
Nineteen Rayne Street was the Titus School, where he had been a privileged
student. The Prince, they had called him. With a cold shudder he remembered
his own tragedy: he was a seasonal king, doomed to die in the very act of
procreation.
The most excruciating sorrow filled him. If that was true then all their
dreams of happiness, of escaping to the world of regular people, were
hopeless. He had learned at his mother's knee there will come a day, a
glorious day. . . .
He looked at the letter the old man had referred to. Should he
read it, or did it contain some further confusing trick? He picked it
up.
On the envelope were three words: "For my son."
It was from Mother!
He opened it. The words leaped at him like fiery beasts, tearing away the last
vestiges of the hypnosis which had held him in its thrall.
When the letter said "remember yourself," he did just that.
He remembered his pride in being the monstrum, and his love of the demons.
"I will speak to you in the voice of the dry leaves," Belial had
said. As Jonathan read of his vision it returned to him: Belial, so
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hideous that he was beautiful, his unblinking eyes filled with so much
intelligence that it was shattering to look into them. Belial was freezing
wind on a winter's night, moonlight playing on empty snow, clear space pierced
by stars.
Belial was a skull, brown and cracked, bursting with worms.
"Mother! What have you done to me? Mother! Mother!"
He rushed through the rest of the letter, squinting at it as if the words
might jump off the page and pierce his eyes. At the end he threw it to the
floor, turned away from it. Remem-brance blazed in his mind: [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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