tryptych of the Damned part three...
The train home was empty at 7:45 P.M. It was a relief to get of off the tube shaped machine, as the loneliness had permeated the scene so violently, it felt like the eerie quietness at a scar riddled battlefield.
Having forfeited the safe ride home by his driver and with the Vicker case sealed, he strode home from the station, ignoring any passing strangers, solely focused on getting out of there. Luckily for him, their faces were fixated to the massive screens that were mounted to the station walls, allowing a quick escape. He wasn’t feeling sociable today.
The journey home seemed to last an eternity, but took less than five minutes. Slamming the door shut behind him, he stumbled onto the stairs, taking off his tie on the way up. Once upstairs, his apartment door was the only obstacle between him and the outside world. With a swift move, he unlocked the door and went inside into the darkness.
It could have looked like any other drug induced dreamscape, but in fact he acted in a silent lucidity as he took off all his clothes and threw them onto a pile in his living room, while in between switching on several lights and getting a drink. He strolled across the room, taking a seat in a chair that was, like the rest of the furniture, still shrouded in the plastic used to protect them when he moved in. His breathing ragged but under control, he took in his surroundings.
As the phone started ringing, he stared at it for what couldn’t have been longer than twenty seconds before he finally picked it up.
“ Hello?”
“ Sir… It’s Janis.” She sounded nervous.
“ Is everything ok, Janis? You sound…” He searched for words but decided that being silent would say it as well.
“ Sir, please turn on your TV. Just… just watch. Oh my God, it’s… it’s…” The rest of Janis’ words drowned in her sobbing and weeping.
“ Okay Janis,” his calm and unmoved voice replied, “ I’ll see you back at the office tomorrow.” As he hung up, her incessant crying still drifting through the phone, he made a mental note to fire her the next day, before switching on the TV.
Slowly, as the fires shown on his widescreen were dying out, he drank from his whiskey, letting the alcohol gain momentum before downing it, as he witnessed the reporters run back and forth from one hellish scene to another.
He remembered the words he read seven years ago. How he had considered them inferior, a mark of history, a blast from the past that brought nothing but dust. How wrong he found he was.
“Let not His unholy word taint your very thoughts as his tongue laps against your heels. Let not His Mark come upon your skin like a bearing of recognition, lest the sight of Sodom and Gomorrah turn you to a salty pillar, entombed in the deserts of eternity.” His raspy voice shivered briefly as he quoted the words from the pages he had read.
“His Mark comes with a number, and that number is 666.”
He closed his eyes again and for a brief moment felt the eeriness of the words seep through his skin. He quickly finished his drink, thinking for a moment while refilling it.
His Mark comes with a number, and that number is 666.
He looked at the table, the Vicker case file wide open, allowing his eyes to quickly scan the words in front of him that weren’t registering to him at all. It was as if it didn’t really matter. As if all that was important, was finding the significance between the document and what was happening right now on national, if not, international TV.
“The tower ordered to be built by the King of Babylon will be the conduit by which the Whore will herald in the End of Days, before the Beast will divide itself among the water and the land and let its seven heads scour the world. And the Tower shall crumble to dust and the people shall weep. ”
He briefly touched the barcode tattoo on his left shoulder before turning off the TV and getting up from his chair. He walked towards the window and looked down upon the city, its roads pumping veins clotted up with the traffic. How insignificant the mortals were, rejoicing at being connected without touching, staring at their screens for as long as their lives would carry them. What a waste of eyes it was. He smiled to himself and raised his glass to the window, before closing his eyes.
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in the streets of an unknown city. No one looked at him. His nakedness was not noticed; they couldn’t see him anyway. He looked up to the sky to see what had their attention and saw the massive dark cloud of dust and debris as it slowly rose up into the skyline. There was no escape. In the brief moment where he relished the revelation of what he had wrought, the cloud touched down and broke the ground, shattering the road. Everything else was lifted into the air, as if gravity lost all its purpose for a moment, and was strewn about the place. The devastation was evident.
He closed his eyes and cheered as the storm continued to raze the land, the screams of the dying now slowly fading into oblivion. When he opened them again, he was greeted by the New Troy skyline. He grinned before bursting out into a horrifying laughter. This was when the baying would start.
But not before he had fired Janis in the morning.