Unbelievable, Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen: Biblical

I was waiting in the kitchen, armed with two cups of green tea, when Maggie came downstairs in the morning.

‘More experiments that need more answers?’ She smiled, accepting the tea calmly.

‘You were expecting me.’ I accused, gripping my mug, my hands far too hot against the sides.

‘I can sense when you’re upset,’ she admitted, leaning against the side, pristinely turned-out as usual, today in a stylish deep blue suit.

‘Can you read my mind?’ I demanded, nearly breaking the mug in my clenched hands.

‘No, only your emotions, I suppose.’ She sipped her tea, and waited.

Where did I begin? I had so many questions and I didn’t want this to turn into some sort of Spanish Inquisition, but I think she was expecting it.

‘When you spoke of…our kind,’ I began, relaxing my fingers slightly and sliding them up and down the sides of the mug, a sort of self-calming reflex, ‘you implied that there were quite a few of us. More than just our family.’

She nodded, sipped, waited.

‘I think I might have found others.’

She studied my face, suddenly captured. ‘Go on.’

‘The trouble is…arrgh; it’s so hard to voice all my thoughts into sentences that make sense, to phrase the questions that I want to ask you!’ I was exasperated with myself, trying to juggle all the conflicting ideas and emotions in my head.

‘Stop thinking and just speak, then,’ she urged. ‘This isn’t new to me, remember?’

‘Mum?’

‘She had similar questions. She went through a similar process. I say similar, rather than the same, because you’re not quite like your mother or I, are you?’

I sipped tea to hide my shock at her intuition. For, lying in bed, unable to sleep after my friends’ moonlit revelations, the very same thought had occurred to me. For my mother had healed, but not as fast as I had in the moonlight. And both Maggie and my mother had the ability to age…

‘You’re different because you are evolving beyond what we are, what our family is,’ Maggie continued. ‘Your mother and I, and the rest of our blood relatives, and the others of our kind; we all heal unnaturally fast. We cannot get drunk on ‘normal’ quantities of alcohol; we age much slower; we live longer; we have certain other ‘powers’, such as my ability to heal others through various concoctions and my ability to ‘read’ a person’s emotions.

‘But you, Neona, you’re a little extra-ordinary, even for our family. Your healing process is quickening, perhaps has already quickened, beyond our experiences. There is a sense that you are…the next step, as it were, along our particular evolutionary process.’

She was going beyond the personal, now. She was starting to talk about us as if we were some sort of Darwinian theorem. Evolutionary process? Her words echoed Arun’s. But if Arun and Elyssa were right, and I was evolving into or Becoming one like them, then my Grandmother’s theories aligned. So what were we? What were my family, what were my friends? How did one come to grow into another? And had Arun and Elyssa evolved like me, or had they been born as they were?

‘Your friends; these others of which you speak; are they different in the same way that you are different?’ she prompted.

‘I don’t know.’ I admitted the gap in our collective knowledge. ‘One of them cannot remember being anything different to what he is, and the other…well, I’m not sure. They’re more evolved than me, to put it your way. They don’t heal, you see, because, well…they’re unbreakable.’

‘Unbreakable?’ she rose from the side, took a step nearer, her eyes glowing with curiosity.

‘As in they can’t be damaged in the first place. No bruises, no cuts, no breaks, no burns…well, I haven’t seen them try to burn, but definitely the other things can’t touch them.’ I swallowed a gulp of tea, nerves stinging me with tiny, sharp tentacles. Even though I was talking to my own Grandmother, I couldn’t help but feel that I was betraying secrets that weren’t mine to betray.

‘And these…friends of yours,’ she said, carefully; ‘they think that you’re going to progress to becoming like them?’

‘Yes.’

‘The healing has progressed further?’

‘Faster and faster,’ I agreed. ‘Last night, under the moonlight, it was ridiculous.’

‘And it was the full moon last night,’ she said, in a hushed voice. ‘So the moon might well be…’

‘There’s a reason we’re named for the moon, isn’t there?’ I demanded. ‘Coming Moon, Moon, New Moon. What are the rest of our family called?’

‘Many moon names can be picked out from the past and the present,’ she admitted. ‘Cynthia, Isadora, Kamaria, Levana, Philomena, to name a few.’ Yes, they all mean ‘moon’ more or less, in different languages.’

‘They’re all women!’ I exclaimed.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed. ‘It is only the women of our family that retain the family, as it were.’

‘What happens to the men?’ I demanded. ‘Why do they all leave? And if they’re not human either, and they’re not like us, then what are they like?’
‘They always have Biblical names!’ she exclaimed, suddenly, as if releasing a long-pent up breath. ‘They’re all Biblical!’

She seemed to be having some sort of epiphany. Her next revelation astonished me.

‘David. He was…your intended, wasn’t he? It means ‘beloved’. In fact, all four that died in the crash: David, Phoebe, Hannah and Isaac; they all had Biblical names.’

‘What does it mean?’ I demanded. ‘Do you mean that I was responsible for their deaths?’ the mug shattered in my hands and tea with a slight essence of blood pooled on the table as the cuts healed instantly.

‘It has just occurred to me,’ Maggie reassured. ‘I don’t know what it means; I am simply suggesting that it might be significant.’

‘Tell me about my Father,’ I implored, as she reached for a cloth and mopped the mess. I gathered the broken crockery carefully, piling it to one side in a precarious fashion. ‘And my Grandfather,’ I added, hastily.

‘Your Grandfather’s name was ‘Nathan’, which means ‘giver’, I believe,’ she began, a film of liquid just traceable in her eyes. ‘He, of course, gave me your mother. A blessing I never thought I’d have.’

‘Why not?’ I interrupted.

‘Because my mother had warned me what I warned you about; ‘no human man’, remember?’

‘Gotcha,’ I agreed, hastily, blushing slightly at the thought.

‘I never thought I’d meet someone…inhuman. But, of course, I did.’

‘What do you mean ‘of course’? I butted in, again.

‘Blood will find a way,’ she smiled. ‘Our power is such that it recreates itself, against all odds. All the women in our family are destined to bear a child and pass their ability on. The blood finds a way to survive. You, too, will bear a child one day.’

‘With a man with a Biblical name as the father?’ I laughed. ‘You forget; David died.’

‘But David was human.’ She pointed out.

‘No, he wasn’t!’ I exclaimed. ‘How can he have been? He died in a car crash. He didn’t die in a certain other way!’

‘You mean…?’ her eyes widened.

‘We were both sixteen,’ I pointed out.

‘But you weren’t at full maturity.’ She countered.

‘I’ve evolved beyond you now,’ I pointed out, ‘and I’m still only sixteen. If what you claim is true, then David would have died before the crash. That means that David wasn’t human; he can’t have been. Just thank your lucky stars that I’m not pregnant!’

Maggie clutched the kitchen side for support. ‘Neona!’ she chided.

‘Don’t start!’ I admonished. ‘We’re in the twenty-first century now, you know.’

‘Yes, yes of course. But if he wasn’t human…’

‘My intended?’ I mocked, harshly. ‘Yes, he was my intended. I saw my future vanishing in a cloud of burning petrol and metal and bodies. My future child died with him. With all of them. What of your theories now?’

‘There will be another.’ She reassured.

‘No, there won’t. Not like David. Because I’m different now; we’ve already established that. I’ve gone beyond the point of your experience, beyond the point of my mother’s experience. We don’t know what my destiny is any more!’

She exhaled, deeply. ‘Yes, of course; you’re right. These new friends of yours…they don’t happen to possess moon or Biblical names, by any chance?’

‘Nope.’

‘And have you been spending time with anyone who does?’

‘Nope.’ I knew I was being monosyllabically teenage, but suddenly my head was filled with Mika’s warm, brown skin and laughing eyes. There was nothing Biblical about my thoughts…

There was a pause as we both contemplated the possibilities.

‘Grandfather?’ I prompted, shaking my mind clear of thoughts in which David and Mika and Arun and Elyssa simply carouselled around me, the central pole.

‘Love isn’t always like Pride & Prejudice, Neona,’ she said softly. ‘Sometimes, people come into our lives for only a short time…’

‘Stop parcelling the truth in nice, protective packaging,’ I accused. ‘Just tell me what happened. He left. When and why?’

‘Normal life couldn’t take place,’ admitted Maggie. ‘His nature; his inhuman nature, meant that life inside the bounds of society was an impossibility. Too many questions would have been asked if he had been witnessed following his unusual lifestyle. He was bound to the cycles of the moon, as most of his kind are. I believe that most of the men that have been used to continue our line were of his kind, and herein lies the significance of our names.’

‘Used?’ I picked up on one word. ‘That sounds so cold, so calculating.’

‘As, I believe, some of our ancestors and relatives were and are,’ Maggie nodded. ‘We perhaps vary in degrees of humanity. Too much unusual blood is bound to have side effects.’

‘So he left because he couldn’t play Father in a nice little family unit?’ I judged.

‘He left because he couldn’t live my way; they human way, integrated into a human society, living as ‘normal’ people, even though we were not. But equally, Neona, I couldn’t live his way. He asked me to, of course. He wanted me to go with him, and follow a different destiny, but I chose to stick to my path and he chose to stick to his. He used to visit, sometimes, when the moon allowed. Once your mother was born, I knew I had made the right choice; the way that he lived would not have been safe for a child, however gifted. I know not of his fate; he ceased to visit many years past, and I have not heard hide or hair of him since.’

‘And that’s that?’ I asked. ‘You don’t want to know where he is, what’s happened to him, what his life is like now?’

‘As I said,’ Maggie reminded. ‘I chose my path; he chose his. If the fates decide to bring us together once more, then so be it. But he will still choose to walk his path, and I will not be swayed from mine.’

‘A hopeless cause.’ I pointed out. ‘Don’t you get lonely?’

‘Not any more,’ she smiled. ‘I had your mother, until she left, and now I have you.’

I fell silent, contemplating my Grandmother’s impossible choice. Would I have had to make a similar choice, had David lived?

‘Do you think David was like Grandfather, then?’ I asked. ‘Would he have been the same, once he’d reached what you call ‘full maturity’?’

‘Who knows?’ Maggie smiled. ‘I never met David. But his kind may well have been the same as Nathan’s. Nathan did tell me, once, that he thought he was human until he was eighteen. I’m not sure his family knew what he became. The blood worked differently in his kind, only throwing up somebody like Nathan every now and again. A rare condition, almost like a mutation. Strange, how genetics work.’

She’d gone Darwinesque again.

‘But of course, Nathan might well be dead.’ She threw another spanner in the works.

‘But I thought you said that he wsn’t human?’ I was confused.

‘Inhuman and Immortal are not the same,’ she pointed out. ‘If you did… sleep with David, and he survived, then you are right, he can’t have been human. And if you’re only thinking that now, then he can’t have shown you any other inhuman traits. Perhaps he was in the process of evolution, like you. Whatveer the explanation, if he was like Nathan, then the crash would still have killed him.’

I swallowed the information like a jagged little pill. It burned my thoat on the way down. If only I’d known… what else didn’t I know?

‘And my Father?’ I swept David aside for the moment.

‘A different kettle of fish altogether. I met him once, and could not fathom him at all. His face was almost expressionless, and he spoke as if he experienced few emotions. I believe he loved your mother very much, though. After all, he maintained the pretence of being human until you were nearly five.’

‘What do you mean?’ I demanded, desperate to glean any information that I could about the man I could barely remember.

‘Do you remember being small? Your parents were very respectable, after they got married. Your mother calmed down; I believe he was a very good influence on her wildness. They employed a babysitter frequently, and went out on the town; your mother never was one to sit at home with the baby, as you are probably well aware.’

‘So why did he leave?’ I could not understand, in the light of the information I had just received about Nathan. ‘He wasn’t bound to the moon, was he?’

‘No, your father was very different. Inhuman, of course, but how? I’m sorry, Neona. Sorry I didn’t make more of an effort to reconcile with your mother. Sorry I didn’t learn more about your father to pass on to you. Sorry that I cannot help you with your quest of self-discovery. But it sounds as if you have friends that can.’

‘I thought that you’d have the answers. I told them you’d have the answers we need,’ I admitted, my tiny ray of hope fizzling away as I spoke.

‘The only thing I can offer you is his name,’ Maggie said, cautiously. ‘Jared DeWitka. Jared is Biblical and means ‘Descent’, and ‘DeWitka’… well, you can translate that fairly easily yourself.’

‘Of the wicked,’ I finished, hesitantly. ‘And since I am his descendant, I suppose that makes me ‘the wicked’, doesn’t it?’

We studied each other across the space between us, my question hanging like unwanted pollution in the room.