An implicit timer hung over the Imperial Apartments. Sooner or later, CPUSA mercenaries would reach the neighborhood and deploy, searching for the Baron, the Zombie, and their “innocent man,” Marco. Nevertheless, the Baron instructed the teen to use the restroom and drink several gulps of tap water. Experience had long taught him that hunger could be delayed, but excretion and dehydration were ruthless opponents. Best to eliminate them now, in safety and privacy, instead of risking witnesses while seeking facilities later.
After Marco exited the restroom, Phyllis took her turn, promising to be quick.
The Baron and Zombie waited with Marco in the parlor. Quiet fell onto the room for some seconds. An air conditioner rumbled into life, fans and compressors at once, low and steady like a mechanical lullaby. It was a sleepy Sunday hour, if not for the threats bearing down on them and the world alike.
“You’re both… really old,” Marco observed. It wasn’t a brilliant thought, but it was the kind of bland thing a man said when he needed to take his mind off his feelings.
The Baron recognized two needs here, and indulging Marcos’ curiosity could sate both. First, it’d be far easier to help the young man if he were fully inducted into the mysteries of the occult, and second, the truth in its enormity could temporarily eclipse grief.
The Baron leaned against the parlor’s unstocked bar. “It’s true, but before you ask, we don’t have perfect proof. We can only demonstrate a little about what we are. The rest is rightly called mythology, though it’s a good time to learn it. You’re part of the occult now.”
“I see,” Marco muttered.
“Do you have a pocket knife?” the Zombie asked Marco.
“Yeah?” Marco reached into a pocket and pulled out a little folding Swiss Army Knife, far nicer than any of the penny knives that the Zombie had destroyed over the last couple of days. He hesitated with this valuable tool cradled in a soft palm. “Why?” he asked carefully.
“I can show you a cool trick,” the Zombie said.
“He’ll try not to break it,” the Baron offered, setting expectations for both Marco and the Zombie simultaneously. This would be a great demonstration, assuming Marco believed.
“Sure,” Marco said, passing the knife over.
The Zombie unfolded the steel blade. “Watch.” He stuck out his tongue and ran the sharp edge over the meat of it, pressing down with visible force.
Marco flinched away, but the Zombie just laughed around the weapon, a hollow, carefree sound like the knife was a tongue depressor. He pulled it away. “Aaaaah!” He tried to show as much tongue as possible.
Marco relaxed, peering closely. “You aren’t cut?”
“Got you!” the Zombie yelled as he slashed the blade across his eyeball.
Marco winced, cringing. “Ok, ok, you’re invincible! Stop!”
“That’s the polite version of the trick,” the Baron said. “I’ve seen strong men upend their stomachs when he does his favorite version.”
“I jam it under my eyelids,” the Zombie elucidated. He glanced over at the bathroom door. “Still got time if you wanna see it and don’t care about losing the knife.”
“God, no!” Marco briefly raised his hands in surrender. “Please, just give it back.”
The Zombie wiped the blade on his damaged sleeve, closed it, and dropped it into Marco’s waiting hand. “Were you feeling skeptical?” he asked.
“A little, yeah. Before the demonstration.” Marco pocketed his knife. “It’s some weird shit.”
The Zombie grinned, chuckling. “Good! Don’t let the big lies fool you, because after we’re done here, you’ll hear a lot of them.”
Marco nodded to the Zombie, taking a deep breath. “So I get why you’re old. You’re invincible, like really invincible, yeah?”
“Oh yes! Time can grind even mountains to dust, but I’ll outlast the mountains.”
Marco eyed the Baron carefully. “Why are you so old though? You’re not invincible, right?”
“I’m not,” the Baron agreed.
“So what’s your story?”
Phyllis walked into the parlor, wiping her hands on her pants. “I’m ready.”
“Phyllis, Marco is asking me why I’m so old,” the Baron said. “I was thinking of inducting him, fully and thoroughly. What do you think?” The Baron’s plans weren’t changing, but asking for Phyllis’s approval altered the power dynamics between her and Marco. It’d be good to push the boy to trust in women, especially in his future dock boss.
Marco rubbed his thin mustache and gave them all his manliest glare. “Does it matter what she thinks?”
Phyllis eyed him. “It matters. He’s basically asking me if I trust you.”
“Well, what about it?” Marco asked her. “I’m my father’s son.”
Phyllis stared flatly. “Do you believe in my authority, even though I’m a woman?”
“Well—”
“Because they’re treating me like one, Marco. I’m an authority in the occult.”
Marco blinked as if he hadn’t considered the possibility before. “Really?”
“It’s true,” the Zombie said. “Women cultists are strong, but her talents don’t stop there. I saw her wrangle ten Anastasia men in your father’s place. She’s got steel.”
The Zombie’s buttering up seemed to lubricate the social dynamics better than any words from Phyllis ever could. “Yeah—I mean, of course,” Marco said, tacitly agreeing with the machoest man in the room. “She’s always been my dad’s right hand.”
Phyllis grunted, smirking. “Yeah, Baron, induct him. I’ll help him after this is all over. Just remember, Marco, follow your father’s example. Don’t tell people I’m a cultist, all right?”
“Sure?” Marco said noncommittally.
“Her advice is good,” the Zombie added. “Keep her secret. That’s trust. Loyalty.”
Marco nodded. “I can keep a secret.”
The Baron clapped his hands together for attention. “We’re all ready, so let’s go.” He opened the door to the parlor and marched out into the broad hall with the slanted ceiling, following the dim cast of sunlight towards the elevators.
Marco fell in behind him, and the Zombie and Phyllis brought up the rear.
The Baron talked as they walked: “You’re about to become a practicing member of a religion which has no name. I call it the system of prestige. You and everyone else will call it the occult.”
“The occult,” Marco echoed dutifully.
The Baron pressed the call button at the elevator and turned to his new student. “It’s a global religion, but scattered, messy. There are dozens of stories for every city; hundreds of heroes and villains; thousands of variations on core myths. Yet there’s basically no books, at least in the West. Almost everything is passed along by oral tradition.”
“No books?” Marco asked.
“Almost none. Writing anything down is considered blasphemous. Only record books are widely accepted, and only because they can’t be used to prove the existence of the system.”
Marco furrowed his brow in concentration. “But there are real books?”
The elevator started grinding its way up to the fourth floor.
The Baron answered, “There’s one ‘real’ book about the system of prestige, and it was written by the only other ageless person. Her name is Elizabeth.”
“The Apostate,” Phyllis added.
“What’s that mean?” Marco asked her.
The Artemisian folded her hands at her waist. “It means she renounced the occult. She put one foot outside the boundaries, and the cults of the world loathed her for it.”
“What did she do?” Marco asked.
The Baron waved off the question. “We’ll address that later. For now, know that she wrote a book, and there’s a chapter dedicated to each of us, our natures—” The Baron paused, seeking a word to capture the aim of Elizabeth’s writing “—our principles,” he concluded.
“So you’re famous,” Marco said.
“Infamous,” the Baron corrected. “According to most cults, there are three living villains. The Zombie came first, Elizabeth came last, and I’m the second one, the middle child.”
“The middle evil!” the Zombie said gaily.
“The middle evil?” Marco asked.
“Yeah,” the Zombie said. “The lesser evil is Elizabeth. The greatest evil is me.”
Marco looked at him cautiously. “Evil like what?”
The Zombie cackled. “I’m a murderer.”
“He’s not that dangerous,” the Baron said dismissively. “Just treat him with respect.” The elevator bell dinged, and the door automatically opened. He pulled on the cage and stepped inside. Everyone sidled past him.
“I get you,” Marco said to the Zombie. “You’re strong.”
“Damn right,” the Zombie murmured with pleasure.
Phyllis spoke up. “You’re approaching this the wrong way, Baron. You two are outliers, exceptions. Everyone else has to start from the same basic beliefs.”
“Like what?” Marco asked.
The Baron closed the cage and pressed the button to go down. “It’s a religion, Marco. There are common doctrines.” The elevator shuddered into life and began to sink. Meanwhile, the Baron enumerated his points with his fingers. “First, it’s believed that gods exist. Their evidence is the miracle of prestige itself, the magic of wishing. For them, the supernatural is real, and what are their occult masters but gods?”
“Makes sense,” Marco said.
The elevator passed into the brief darkness between floors, where the hollow mezzanine of steel and insulation lurked between sheets of oil-treated wood. “Second, it’s believed that man has free will. The past is locked, immutable and unchangeable by divine decree, but the future will be defined by our choices. Their proof is in the system. One of the primary rules is that no wish can alter or impede man’s free will, and they say the gods would never make a rule to protect a freedom that doesn’t exist.”
“I follow you,” Marco said.
“Third, the vehicle for free will, the locus of interest for the gods, is a man’s soul. Their proof is in the afterlife. Almost everyone in the system of prestige is aiming for one wish—to go to the gods when they die. If they do, then they will surely survive death, and the living can speak with them, even if their body is buried or burned.”
“Did my dad go to the afterlife?” Marco asked.
The Baron paused; he didn’t know what arrangements Barilla had already made.
“Nobody knows,” Phyllis answered, jumping on the question. “He didn’t have a chance to wish for the afterlife, but it’s widely believed that the gods will take the best among us to live with them.”
Marco had a tense expression, lips stretched thin like rubber bands about to snap. They passed down between the third and second floors. “What if they didn’t? What if dad isn’t saved?”
“Nobody knows,” Phyllis insisted. “The rules of the gods maintain the mysteries of death. If you’re worried though, have hope. Your father was brave. He argued with the enemy, right up until he was shot. If there’s a judge of the dead, they’ll treat him well.”
The Baron was impressed. Phyllis was plainly mischaracterizing Barilla’s final seconds, but there was no reason to tear down the reputation of a dead man in front of his son, and plenty of reasons to pull Marco away from a straight drop into grief and despair.
“Yeah,” Marco said shakily, “yeah, his soul is in a good place then.”
The elevator stopped and the door opened. “I’m a universalist of a kind,” the Baron added. “I think there’s no god of moral authority. Nobody judges the dead. They don’t even care to reward us for our labor. I think they preserve us—all of us—because of what they are, because there are many of them and few of us. But I have very strange beliefs, Marco. Very strange. That’s why I’m called a villain.”
Phyllis opened the cage.
Marco didn’t notice. “I don’t understand.”
The Baron stepped out into a hall beside the foyer, a space of waxed wood floors and off-white wallpaper, like the bottom of a wooden drawer lined with old folders. Everyone filed out, while the Baron explained himself. “They call me the Philosopher, the Atheist, and Doubting Henry. Despite all of the so-called evidence, despite knowing everything I’ve told you, I believe there are no gods, no freedom, and no soul. I am an atheist, a determinist, and a materialist, and nothing I’ve seen has given me reason to doubt my philosophy. We live in a system of nature, and these occult elements aren’t supernatural. They’re unknown science, reaching out of the dark abyss of our ignorance and directing our world with purpose.”
“What purpose?” Marco asked.
“We don’t know. They obfuscate their goals with tasks.”
“Phyllis said there are gods—”
“There are things that men call gods, nothing more.”
“But you said there’s choice—”
“We are agents of our own action, Marco, but we are chemical machines.”
“And the soul?”
“Something is preserved,” the Baron said, “but everything the so-called gods do has the flavor of manipulation, not violation. They adhere to the natural order as we know it, and nature is materialistic. We are nothing but matter, and I believe they have the science to save and manifest the patterns that we call minds.” He pointed beyond Marco. “Go on now.”
Phyllis started towards the foyer. The teenager followed quietly, and the Zombie, grinning from ear to ear, walked with eyes trained steadily on his back. The Baron brought up the rear, finishing his story. “I am the great doubt that haunts the cults. I am the eternal skeptic.”
“Why?” Marco asked a question so empty of direction that it could only come from a mind similarly lost. He’d been told so much, and then told none of it was true.
“The Baron doesn’t believe,” Phyllis said. “He never has.”
“He never will,” the Zombie added. “That’s why I saved him. He’s fascinating.”
“These two believe,” the Baron said, “but my disbelief keeps me alive.”
They walked through the foyer of the apartment complex, a two-story room padded with more thick, cream-colored wallpaper and flexible hardwood floors. It was hard to imagine many people lived here, but New York City wasn’t a homogenous place. Despite the density of the population, there was always room spent poorly, empty or unused most of the time. In one sense, this was to their advantage. Nobody but the doorman would see them leave.
Yet the silence of the place was oppressive. The Baron felt the urge to talk more, simply to lift the atmosphere. Instead, he waited for Marco to digest his words.
When they reached the entrance, the doorman opened the outer door and bid them goodbye. “Well wishes to your father,” he added, smiling at Marco.
“Thank you,” the teen replied flatly.
They went down the stairs as a group. The Zombie walked tallest among them, still wearing ruined clothes. He whispered over Marco’s shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell him?”
The teen shrugged. “He’s an asshole. He doesn’t need to know.”
“A secret kept out of malice,” the Zombie muttered. “Simply delightful.”
The streets carried their regular Sunday traffic, both vehicles and pedestrians. A passing couple in their late 50s gave the Zombie a brief glance, but the normal appearance of his companions convinced them that none of this was their business. Foreigners were eternally unacceptable to men and women born in the 19th century. It only confirmed their suspicions to see one dressed like a madman in the middle of the afternoon.
“Hello madam!” the Zombie shouted to the old lady. Her thin hair had been puffed up by her beautician like a headful of dandelion seeds. “Do you like my fashion?”
The rest waited and watched. The Baron knew what was happening; Phyllis seemed ready to accept whatever happened. Only Marco was visibly worried.
“Don’t speak to my wife, sir,” warned the old man.
“She dresses like a woman of good taste,” replied the Zombie. “She’s been eyeing my finery. If she wants it, I’d gladly hand her my other sleeve.”
The husband put an arm behind her wife, and they huddled closer, ignoring the Zombie and moving on without answering his madness.
“I’ve vindicated your fears about the Orient!” the Zombie shouted after them.
“What are you doing?” Marco asked quietly.
“The Zombie does this instead of killing people,” Phyllis explained. “It’s in Apostasy.”
“He’s intimidating them,” the Baron added. “Come on. Let’s get moving.” They started up the sidewalk, heading east along the block, past a long line of fine cars facing uphill towards the actual heights of Crown Heights. Quickly, they fell into a line, letting the rest of the foot traffic stream past them on the left. People glanced but never paused. It wasn’t their business.
“You don’t kill people anymore?” Marco asked the Zombie.
“I only kill for good reasons,” the Zombie answered. “Not like I used to.”
“What happened?”
“I met the Baron.”
“He’s lying for fun,” the Baron said. “The Zombie has been on the path to civilization since the turn of the 13th century, ever since Constantinople was ransacked during the Fourth Crusade.”
“Ah, right!” The Zombie laughed. “I was in the court of the king of the Byzantines!”
“The city was ruled by an emperor,” the Baron corrected him, “and last time you told me about the sack, you said you were pretending to be the slave of a merchant.”
“Of course, of course, I remember now.” The Zombie grinned, winking when Marco glanced back at him. “I was a slave in the emperor’s court.”
The Baron shook his head. “He’s still lying. I spoke with an Ottoman pirate about a century ago, just before the Fall of Truth. He told me that during the Crusade, the Zombie smashed through the breadth of the outer walls by slamming his body against them for four straight days, all while defenders threw oil and torches down onto his head. The Sack was the last time he killed for fun alone. At least, verifiably. For certain definitions of fun.”
The Zombie squealed with delight at his own legend. “I’m awesome.”
“You’re egotistical,” the Baron teased.
“I’m a story! I only wish I remembered the Crusades.”
“You don’t?” Marco asked.
The Baron answered for the Zombie: “We’ve carefully tested his memory. It’s hard for him to recall anything more than three centuries ago.”
“Damn,” Marco said. “That… actually sucks.”
The Zombie chuckled. “No, it’s great. It means I keep changing.”
“Where are we going?” Phyllis asked them, interrupting their banter. “Looking for another cab?”
“That or the subway,” the Baron answered. “We need to reach Manhattan as soon as possible.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “There’s a station a few blocks east of here. Checkers are usually waiting outside.”
“We’ll decide when we get there,” the Baron suggested.
“What about you, Baron?” Marco asked. “Have you forgotten stuff?”
“No. I’m not like the Zombie. I’m only two hundred, and I won’t know if we’re the same kind of ageless for at least another century.”
“You’re not invincible?” Marco asked.
“That’s right.”
“Huh. But you aren’t old?”
“You mean physically? No, I’m not.”
“Why is that?”
The Baron rubbed his scalp thoughtfully. “I guess this is a good time to tell you my legend. It started a hundred and ninety-nine years ago, in the winter, when a particularly powerful Diviner called upon me at my home…”
Author’s Note:
Learn the lore, induct yourself into the mysteries, and become occult yourself.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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