Shadowman, page 11
part #1 of The Valiant Universe Series
Jack sputtered out an inappropriate chuckle. “I wasn’t laughing at that last part,” he said quickly. “You basically lost yourself due to your host’s lack of imagination.”
“You state it that way because Josiah orchestrated your being the exception.”
“I’m sorry but that’s pretty much what it boils down to.”
“I am saying your use of the word lack implies the absence of something reasonably expected to be present. Even the most imaginative of my hosts could only conceptualize my essence in the abstract bec—”
“So that’s why you denied it as a physical extension of myself? Because everyone treated it as alien.”
“Hmm, you are getting it, Jack,” Bossu replied. “I didn’t just forget aspects of my past self due to time. Rather, I was steadily forced to accept that they ceased to exist.”
“And that’s why you hated my predecessors?” Jack asked with a newly raised eyebrow. “Because of their limited dispositions? Is that fair? It seems kind of irrational of you to feel that way, especially when you could’ve just enlightened them for both of your benefits. You’re the type to shake a baby because they don’t know how to write.”
Bossu suddenly erupted with laughter so uproarious that Jack reflexively looked around for any signs of panic in the surrounding area.
“Bah ha-ha! Quite right, whelp, quite right. To be fair, I did do something similar to the enlightening you suggested, and it was a disaster. Do you recall what I said to you when you were demanding to know the extent of the powers you are to receive when you become Shadowman?”
“When I become?! I thought I was Shadowman?”
“So eager. Be aware, Jack, that once you are transformed, you will no longer be hidden from my brethren. Are you ready for that?”
“I am read—”
“Is Helena? What of your ruffian cohorts?”
Jack’s raised eyebrow dropped and joined its twin, a scowl of displeasure on his face. “I had hoped that I’d be able to protect them.”
“And soon you shall be,” Bossu said. “But to ensure that you attain what I predict to be destined for you, it is best for the process to be conducted meticulously and in proper order. These things I have told you are for your edification.” He waited for a sign of acknowledgment from his still-scowling host, who obliged him with a single, impatient nod.
“Good,” he continued, “now as I was saying, do you recall what—”
“Yeah, you said I would get myself killed!”
“Precisely, and from then until now, my hatred for humanity precluded me from expanding their understanding. I had no choice but to accept that humanity would never serve as an aid for my revenge on the pantheon. Before long I had developed a ravenous desire to use your kind for ends wholly my own. Unfortunately for them, the mortal mind is nigh impregnable when it is at peace.”
Raising his eyebrow once more, Jack let out three tuts of disapproval, increasing his pitch as he did it.
“So, the choice for me was clear, I had to tenderize them with madness. Rather than empower my hosts, I chose to corrupt them.”
“Wow, Bossu,” Jack responded. “That’s awful!”
“Yes.”
“And I caught that ‘until now’ you snuck in there at the start of your horrific admission.” The Lwa’s deep hums of contained amusement echoed in his mind. As Jack spoke, he simultaneously pondered how the monster could make such a sound without lips. “You intend to do the same to me, is that it? Your knowledge of the process makes it such a sure thing that you can warn me ahead of time, right? Well, like I told you the last time you used your so-called knowledge to doubt me: Better check your crystal ball.”
Bossu’s chuckle of pleasure intensified somewhat. It sounded gleeful, almost giddy with expectation. “Heh heh heh . . . I will do it!”
His host stayed silent but maintained his raised eyebrow.
“Jack, are you aware that the fearlessness you are currently utilizing to speak to me in such a way is my doing? I mean to say, it is not a passive attribute. I control it like a switch.”
“Oh yeah?”
Jack could see the man he had rescued on the bus, accompanied by the driver and the young woman. They were exiting the terminal’s waiting area and began making their way toward the parking lot.
The Lwa’s tone was thoroughly confident, devoid of any doubt. “Indeed,” he replied. “And if I remove it from such a tender branch as yourself, you will be quick to collapse. Your relatively meticulous nature will work against you, like triggering a fault line in a rock otherwise indestructible.”
“I thought I was unbreakable.”
“Hm hm hm, you will be. Now observe.”
A subtle effervescence began tingling in Jack’s chest, dissipating quickly.
“I’m not scared,” he announced defiantly.
The Lwa suddenly sounded curious, uncharacteristically so. “Of what?” he asked. “Dying like your dad?”
“Wha—”
For less than a second, the thought seemed like a joke before becoming totally warranted, and long overdue. As if under hypnosis, Jack could not help but examine his father’s death from a perspective previously ignored.
How could he be sure that he wouldn’t suffer the same fate? He barely survived Jamal.
And what of his mother?
With the rapid onset of dismay similar to realizing that something has been left behind, Jack was immediately beset with newfound concerns.
“Wh-wh-what am I doing?” he said. “This is insane. I can’t—”
“Of me?”
Jack froze at this, and although his mind still retained the knowledge that the voice belonged to his Lwa, it sounded different.
Alien.
The sound of the monster’s two-syllable question seemed to reverberate forever. Not only had the guttural quality of its voice somehow increased, but it also seemed to bear physical weight.
Jack quickly collapsed to the ground, squatting low as he covered his ears.
Upon doing so, he inadvertently toggled the play button on his once-silent earbuds. He caught the start to his favorite song, “Remorse” by Scattle, before it was promptly drowned out by the Lwa’s voice.
He tried to remind himself that it was just Bossu, but that only served to feed the seed of doubt that had formed in his soul, triggering something worse.
Jack felt the Fear, newly sprouted and blossoming with haste. While the newness of this emotion was concerning, what really had him shaken was how utterly incapable he was of stopping it from growing.
“No.”
The idea that monsters like his Lwa were real made him afraid. The fact that it had only now begun to do so made the Fear all the more poignant.
Despite the condescension in the monster’s remark, it was true. Jack had to be granted the fearlessness of a god just to stand in its presence, and he still felt trepidation at the time. But rather than take that as a humbling sign of how dreadful his situation truly was, Jack chose to regard the imparted boldness as his own.
But it was all a lie.
And now he was in for it.
He strove to prepare himself, attempting to steel his psyche by drawing comparisons to past highs gone wrong, but the Fear outpaced him by an order of magnitude. This was going to turn the most traumatic mushroom trip into a forgotten memory, the sound of the Lwa’s still-echoing voice guaranteed it.
Jack began pressing hard against his earbuds to try to block it out. However, this did nothing to stop the horror of his new reality from coming into contact with his mind. At last.
There were more monsters like this one, surveilling humanity with impunity and doing whatever they wished.
Privacy?
Knowledge?
Those were just illusions, mockeries no doubt created by the monsters themselves to keep humanity from seeing the true food chain. And Jack was not immune to the infernal hoax. His pursuit of distinction had blinded him from the Truth.
Just like everyone else.
If his fellow humans ever saw the punch line of the cruel joke, that the monsters had flattered them into disbelieving their existence, they would self-destruct for sure.
It was just so cruel, too terrible for humanity to imagine and yet, it was true.
“So much for distinction, eh?”
And the responsibility to protect his people from their devourers was now his alone. At least Josiah was fortunate enough to have been trained from childhood for this. But Jack was nothing more than an entitled brat, too smart to be interested in the terror of the real.
And his father knew it.
Josiah had thought that half-assed plan of his was enough to keep his son alive, but it only worked because Jack had been made incapable of looking at the big picture. The youngster’s false confidence had certainly turned him into a fool, but his father was worse.
“Dad,” he hissed, “I’m not gonna survive this nightmare. I . . . I hate you for this!!”
“Oh? Is that how you truly feel?” The Lwa spoke with a cadence that forced its every utterance to throb in Jack’s head, one after the other. “Or is it just a coward fleeing from his responsibility?”
The panic-stricken host whined pitifully as he felt his appendage being grappled with once more. It felt alien, too.
His shrinking awareness was barely able to recall what it was and, upon recollection, withered away with increased haste.
He could sense his insides recoiling away from the connection’s unseen root as the monster vied for his attention.
“Jaaack . . .” its voice rumbled, calculatedly slow.
The appendage willingly gave itself over, permitting itself to be contorted however the entity saw fit. Jack hated the fact that he could perceive these things and hated Josiah for exposing him to them.
Why couldn’t he have been fathered by someone else?
Then he would be free to live as he wished, free from the Truth’s fetters. If it wasn’t for that man, he would never have known the horror of this curse.
This nightmare inheritance.
“Can you see me, Jack?”
Several hate-fueled tears pattered across the grass as the appendage continued to be manipulated in a way Jack never knew possible. Like the hood of a cobra, the tentacle had been stretched to form a sprawling curtain of shadow.
Attempting to dissociate, Jack’s eyes rolled white in terrified revulsion as the misshapen tentacle enveloped something unseen, seamlessly transmitting the newly created impression.
But it proved futile, as the Fear merely gripped him tighter. Its squeeze was in grim sync with the tentacle’s constriction around its mold.
Unfortunately, Jack’s intuition seemed generally unaffected by the Fear’s stranglehold, enabling him to identify what the tentacle had been wrapped around. Though it currently hung loose like an oversized cloak of shadow, the most prominent distortions warped in a manner that could only be caused by protrusions within.
Horns.
Desperate to stop himself from beholding what he knew was coming, the fragile mortal clenched his eyes shut, though they had already been rolled past his pain threshold.
Another futile attempt to escape.
Seen through Jack’s sixth sense, the image steadily taking shape was the result of the impressions being made within the fabric of his psionically rooted appendage; his eyes played no part.
Though his panicked state made him feel repulsed by the appendage’s existence, the forsaken host could not shake the sense of betrayal as he watched it. He heard a strange buzzing as the constriction continued, the pace agonizingly slow, as if spiteful.
But Jack could already see it.
See him.
No different than a torture victim with propped eyelids, the Lwa was going to force him to experience the unthinkable. All his prior sources of anguish took a back seat to the dread that coiled about him as he felt his metamorphosed tentacle begin to lose its heavy appearance.
Why was the monster doing this?
He had not become even somewhat acclimated to this new state of Fear, yet the merciless Lwa would subject him to the perfect horror that was its appearance.
The loose shroud of shadow began shrinking itself against what could now be identified as the monster titan’s head. Its two lateral horns in conjunction with the two tusks ascending from his chin, stalled the shroud from clinging to his face, creating a harem-like mask from top to bottom that blocked its terrifying face.
To force such a sight on eyes of flesh was beyond a human’s capacity to bear, but to make Jack feel it through his exceedingly perceptive shadow sense, while being deprived of the fearlessness that came with it, was unconscionable.
Seemingly intent to deprive Jack of any moment of respite, the tentacle betrayed him further, adopting a texture more diaphanous in quality.
Jack was not even able to form another thought before the spectral tether gave one final squeeze. He suddenly felt like a cold stake had been plunged into his heart as the shadow stocking portion of the appendage snapped onto the Lwa’s head like shrink-wrap.
“What in the world?”
This statement of shock came from the group of fellow passengers. They had stumbled upon Jack writhing on the grass just outside the parking lot. He was rendered incapable of giving them any regard, completely immersed in the terror that was the Lwa’s image.
The appendage made it possible to see the unseeable. Thin as a stocking, it had molded itself around the monstrous Lwa with exceeding detail, even imparting its eyes of crimson glaring at him from the void.
The abominable pig demon’s appearance was just as grotesque as before, only this time the petrified youth could feel the hideousness.
Being deprived of the numbing effect created by Bossu’s fearlessness caused the sense impression to feel like countless hairy caterpillars performing their stretch-and-pull trudge through his veins. The itchy discomfort was so intense it hovered at the cusp of pain.
The penetrating buzzing sound was replaced by what Jack imagined to be maracas forged in the pit of hell, chattering in his eardrums.
It was the most unnerving thing he ever heard.
Amidst all this, Jack tried to avert his psychic gaze but, seeing as it was no use, ceased his resistance and allowed his focus to set on the monster’s face. He breathed sharply through gritted teeth, mimicking the Lwa’s fleshless maw that now brought forth speech.
“You see me,” it said, “now hear me. The alerting of my brethren is only one consequence of your full transformation. I purposely withheld the other.”
Attempting to decipher the Lwa’s speech through lipreading was pointless, forcing the young host to block out the penetrating noise from his ears before the words could register. Observing the titan’s teeth open and clench in correspondence with its utterances, Jack fought to listen through the mental and physical anguish.
“Son of Marius,” the monster began, his tone uncharacteristically soft and encouraging, at least initially. “Son of Julien, son of Maxim, son of Michael, son of Josiah, HEAR ME!”
Jack stopped his writhing and strove to regain himself through the sensory assault. He could hear the address more clearly, albeit with a slight delay.
“Though you are already markedly more . . . unique than these your predecessors, what you will be capable of when you become Shadowman will make your current abilities seem like nothing. However, if you can endure the unspeakable privilege that has been appointed for you alone to be broken, you will be so much more than even that. Your enemies, our enemies, will not see you coming. Heh heh heh, it will be glorious.”
Jack understood the words being spoken but derived no joy from them. They seemed trivial and hollow. His being had been brought to the point where the suffering could be put to an end, and he deduced the ability to give up the ghost whenever he saw fit.
Despite this awareness, Jack valiantly strove against it for his mother’s sake, trying to stand. But the thoroughly realized Fear continued to overwhelm him, repeatedly gimping his resolve whenever he attempted to rise.
Monsters were real and he had to take them on?
How?
The doubt would just not let up, making the macabre method of escape seem more appropriate by the second. Fortunately, the penetrating nature of the din in Jack’s head increased whenever he flirted with the idea. This compelled him to endure and give heed to Bossu’s words of encouragement, though he felt certain they were nothing but lies.
Just like everything else.
“Yes,” Bossu continued, “this also was orchestrated by the son of Michael, the other side to the coin that was his grand plan. We despised each other to the utmost for so long . . . heh heh. He counted on my being blind to it, so, you see? Josiah was not the irresponsible fool your despair has led you to believe.”
Jack managed an utterance from his state of seeming paralysis. “Dad?”
“That is the way, whelp! Shun the method of cowards and acknowledge the brokenness within your mortal frame. Gather the scattered remains of your will and recall how you once stood in the face of the Truth so that you may do so again. Present yourself as one having endured the fearful agony unknown to both gods and men, worthy of the destiny entrusted to you.” Bossu paused as he beheld the sorry state of his young host. “And me also.”
To Jack, the monster’s terrifying gaze seemed to suggest this was all a ruse of the sadistic sort. Its giant mandibular tusk fangs still managed to shine through the mesh-like tentacle, a glimmering promise to gobble him up at once if he made the slightest movement.
“Jack,” the Lwa said, his voice now tinged with a tone of desperation, “if I prematurely confer the fearlessness you long for, all of this will be in vain. Therefore, I have devised the simplicity of my instruction to circumvent the need for this to be drawn out any further.”
The horror of it all had finally taken its toll on Jack as his mind began to involuntarily dissociate, an act of self-preservation triggered by his subconscious, temporarily freeing him.
