Unbelievable, Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen: Recreation

‘Are you ready?’ I asked, as we strapped ourselves in to the car.

‘This is potentially foolish,’ pointed out Arun. ‘Elyssa and I will be fine, but what about you? You don’t know the extent of your powers yet. This could be suicide!’

‘You were the ones who have been encouraging me to experiment!’ I pointed out, annoyed. ‘And now, now that I’ve constructed a big one, you’re chickening out.’

‘Has it occurred to you, foolish girl, that we rather like you and want you to survive in order to be able to continue liking you?’ he stared somewhat disdainfully across the car at me.

‘Just drive. Let me worry about my own mortality.’ I hissed.

‘But that’s the point, Neo,’ Elyssa leaned forward from the back and slung a friendly, if cold, hand around my throat, shaking it gently, ‘that you still have that mortality. Suicide is never an attractive trait.’

‘I have to know.’ I felt like a record stuck on repeat, my needle scratching at a surface that just wouldn’t budge. ‘Maggie doesn’t know, and you don’t know, so I have to find out for myself.’

Arun sighed again, pointedly. But he turned on the ignition and revved the engine.

‘It seems as if you’re determined to turn me into a murderer, as well as a car thief,’ he intoned, dryly, pulling away from the kerb.

‘I hasten to point out that if Elyssa hadn’t had her powers, you’d already be a murderer. You’re once again in command of your weapon of choice, so it should feel like second nature!’ I was teasing him now, and he glowered at me, throwing the gear stick into third and accelerating down the moonlit street. The half moon hung, bright and stark against the ink-stained sky. Orion was half-vanished below the horizon and it was Cassiopoeia now, that arched the heavens above us. I traced the moles on my arm in her likeness; the giant ‘W’ spanning most of my forearm, as Arun flung the car around a bend and headed for the open country.

‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.’ Intoned Elyssa, the high priestess in the back.

‘What?’ I demanded, as Arun chuckled.

‘It’s from the Book of Revelation (Revelation, 9. 6),’ she giggled.

‘I’m not seeking death,’ I justified. ‘I’m recreating the past. I need
To know what happened, that day on the road.’

‘It’s not summer, and the sun isn’t shining,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s a clear, still night in early March, it’s bloody freezing and the moon is doing her best.’

‘Your point?’ I demanded.

‘Well, it’s not exactly faithful to the original conditions. In scientific experiments, I believe you have to carefully control all factors and only vary one. Here, we have different time of day and year, different light source, different number of people, different mortality, etc, etc, etc. I bet it’s not even the same sort of car.’

‘It’s the car I could supply at short notice,’ Arun snapped, clearly unsettled. We were flying up the main road now, the speed limit forgotten.

I watched him manipulate the vehicle expertly. He had of course, had many decades of practice. Arun had been alive when the first cars were just a twinkling in their inventors’ eyes…

‘And what would your boyfriend think if he could see you now?’ Arun spat. ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t approve.’

‘Leave Mika out of this,’ I cautioned. ‘He has nothing to do with any of this.’

‘Yes, he does, Neo,’ Elyssa piped up. ‘You are determined to maintain your fragile human relationships, but how can you justify them when you spend nearly every night inventing new ways to damage yourself?’

‘What do you mean?’ I was unsettled by her comments.

‘If you’re going to draw human lives into yours and align yourself with human emotions, then you have responsibilities to those human lives.’ She attempted to explain, but her meaning was still obscure to me.

‘She means: how is Mika going to feel when he’s standing at your funeral?’ clarified Arun.

‘Precisely,’ Elyssa agreed. ‘You can’t do both. You can’t keep these experiments up and carry on normal life.’

‘Why not?’ I demanded. ‘Both you and Arun are hiding in a school, masquerading as sixteen or seventeen-year-old sixth formers, when in fact you’re what? Well, you haven’t told me yet, and he’s well past two hundred!’

‘But we don’t maintain human relationships,’ she pointed out. ‘We keep ourselves to ourselves. We live in society in an abstract sort of way. We don’t get involved.’

‘And how does that actually work?’ I questioned. ‘Moving on from place to place, altering slightly to fit, changing your stories, changing your names, even. This is just the most recent incarnation, isn’t it? What’s next? Another small town, another sixth form?’

‘It gets harder,’ Arun admitted. ‘It was so much easier to be anonymous, before the computer age. Nowadays, your every move can be traced. Unless you know enough to manipulate the system.’

‘You mean, you hack in to the Government records and change your details to maintain anonymity?’ it clicked.

‘Clever girl.’ Arun threw me a bone of admiration, briefly.

‘But nobody remembers us, because we don’t make ourselves memorable,’ Elyssa pointed out. ‘We’re set apart, different, unfriendly, unknowable.’

‘The way that you want me to be,’ I triumphantly clanged.

‘No, Neo, not the way we want you to be. If only we could all live normal lives, with normal human friends and relationships. If only we grew old and died when those friends did. If only we were human. But we’re not. We can only offer you the benefit of our acquired experience; that it is easier our way, in the end.’

I shuddered as her words wove themselves into my consciousness. ‘You’ve done it, haven’t you?’ I studied her face.

‘I’ve lost dear friends to mortality, yes,’ she admitted ‘and lovers, too. I’ve watched my friends grow old and die, while I still remained as I am still. I’ve explained what I am to some, and hidden it from others, moving on before my fixed state raised any questions. I was lucky; nobody betrayed me. But as the years passed, I hid more and more, as each new pain added to the weight of those already experienced. Now, I find it easier to remain completely detached.’

‘So you would rather not live at all than experience the pain that comes with living? You lied; our kind, if I am indeed destined to Become just like you, doesn’t automatically come with a lesser level of emotional feeling. It’s something you’ve both nurtured, in order to prevent yourselves experiencing pain!’

‘Self protection,’ agreed Arun. ‘You’ll understand, in time.’

‘But what if I don’t want to?’ I demanded, then continued internally: What if I kill myself before I reach full maturity? What if I never ‘Become’ like you two? Because, after all, who wants to live forever alone?

The car sped down the dark country roads, a strobe lighting effect as we flashed under trees, haunted by the moon. We were nearing the spot we had pinpointed for our destination; a narrow lane leading off the main road, and an ancient oak which was to be our target. Arun and I had spent the previous few nights driving around, searching for just such a spot. The tree echoed the size and shape of the tree which had obliterated David’s car; the lane was a similar setting also. Elyssa was right about the other variables being numerous, but what could we do? Sacrifice human lives as part of our experiment?

What Maggie had revealed about my Father and Grandfather continued on a never-ending loop in my heart. I was desperate to know more about my Father for, the more I considered it, the more I believed that he must be like Arun and Elyssa. It was the only way to explain what was happening to me. The only different factor between my mother and me: our fathers.

‘Hold tight!’ cautioned Elyssa, as Arun turned down the land and stopped the car momentarily.

‘Right, so the plan is: I drive the car as fast as I can down the lane, aiming for the tree. The car will be decimated, Elyssa and I will extricate ourselves from the wreckage, and then will attempt to extricate you from the wreckage and ascertain whether or not you have survived.’ He sounded so matter-of-fact, and I realised that he had detached emotionally from the situation. Emotionless, well-practised.

Elyssa tried one more time. ‘Neo, why don’t you wait a few weeks, or months, or even until you’re eighteen. Then we’ll crash a car for you.’ Her voice had taken on a slight whining quality. Perhaps the thought of losing female company after years and years of putting up with Arun was too much.

‘Because I have to be as close as possible to how I was at the time of the accident,’ I pointed out. ‘I survived that one; there’s no reason why I won’t survive this. I need to know.’

‘Know what exactly?’ Arun demanded. ‘What aren’t you telling us?’

‘In a few minutes, all will be clear to me, and then I can explain to you more thoroughly,’ I promised. ‘Now, drive!’

He revved the accelerator. Elyssa made sure that my seatbelt was secure, before buckling her own; even immortals pay attention to road safety, it seemed. It occurred to me that being in a car with Arun wasn’t perhaps the pleasantest experience for her, bearing in mind how they had first met, but I dismissed the thought. This wasn’t about Elyssa, or Arun. This was about me, and David, and Phoebe, and Hannah, and Isaac. This was a tribute. This was about my Father and his ominous name. Descent of the wicked.

The car leapt forward with a roar. The moon flickered, watching, waiting. I clenched my fists as the song again began to haunt me, as the faces of the dead swam before my eyes, followed by the faces of my new friends, Tienna and Mika most prominent. I stole a glance at Arun’s face, at his stone-like profile, fixed and resolute, at his hands steady as iron on the steering wheel. In the wing mirror, I could see Elyssa’s perfect face, another statue, flickering as the moonlight dazzled through the trees. I wound down the window and the freezing March air streamed in, sending my hair whipping across my face. I shuddered.

Only half a moon tonight, I realised. Was my ability tied to the moon, like my name? But even as the disturbing thought occurred to me, we were rounding the last bend, and the tree came in sight, waiting, just beyond the barbed wire fence, ready for us.

‘Hey!’ exclaimed Arun, as my mind locked on the tree. ‘Neo, what the hell are you doing?’

‘What is she doing?’ Elyssa demanded.

‘Neo, let go, you stupid girl!’ Arun shouted, a note of panic rising in his voice.

I could hear them, and yet their voices sounded unreal to me over the music. I realised I was once again singing:

It’s killing me, and taking control… But it’s just the price I pay; Destiny is calling me; open up my eager eyes…

‘NEO!’ screamed Arun, bursting suddenly across my
consciousness. ‘Let go of the sodding wheel!’

I glanced across, in a reverie, but my hands were still firmly clenched at my sides; they were nowhere near the wheel. And yet, we were nearly at the tree, bang on target, and my mind was fixed on its shape…

And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.

Back I went, back down through the months, and the cold of the night became the heat of the summer. Back to that perfect moment. I remember what I thought, as I gazed across the car: What if we could live forever this way, young and free, all of us together. That’s what I had been thinking, as we sang at the top of our lungs and the tractor came round the corner. I was staring at David’s face, but I had seen the tree, seen our destiny. The tractor was only a convenience, wasn’t it? Just a coincidence. But David hadn’t seen the tractor. David was singing across the car at me, eyes locked on my face adoringly; my beloved, oblivious to destiny as she bore down on us all. The last thing I wanted was the farmer in my perfect little eternity. The last thing I wanted was to be like my mother, still looking half her age while my friends’ parents’ faces wrinkled. They thought it was because she was rich and could afford fancy facials and lotions and potions, but I knew better. I knew how thick that blood was, and it was very hard indeed to swallow. I imagined the future; while David and Phoebe and Hannah and Isaac grew older, there I would be in their midst, looking impossibly young and impossibly out of place. That’s when I locked on the tree; that’s when Destiny was suddenly pliable in my hands, and I could feel the steering wheel turn in my mind.

‘NEO!’ screamed Arun again, trying to wrench the wheel, but it was locked tight in my mind’s grip, as the two crashes happened simultaneously in my mind.

Is time linear? I could not distinguish between the two moments, for I had been doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time, months apart. As the pain and healing heat spread simultaneously throughout my ravaged body, David’s crumpled and blackening face merged into Arun’s moonlit, pale, perfect features. I could see him, feel him lifting me from the wreckage, as the metal hissed and steamed, as the radiator exploded, as the roaring filled my ears and would not cease.

Of one thing I was startlingly, starkly, suddenly aware: I had caused the crash. Both of them, but more importantly, the first one. I had killed my boyfriend, his sister, my best friend and her brother. I had sought death, and not found it. I had sought a paradise that did not exist, not for me. And I was the wicked descendant of my Father. I was a murderer, four times over. And I could not die. I had sacrificed those short human lives I could have been a part of. I was separated from the ones I loved, a separation that was permanent and irreversible; I had sought eternity with them, and I had condemned myself to eternity without them. But how was it possible to live an eternity knowing what I knew now?