The Return of Nathan Brazil

Olympus, the Chamber of the Holy Mother

The elevator door opened and a man stepped out into the chamber. That was sacrilege—that he was not even an Olympian male was simply impossible.

Nikki Zinder was aware of his presence as soon as he stepped into the chamber; she would have been aware of him earlier but she alone controlled the elevators and they had not been operating. None of them had been. It was as if he had simply appeared in the elevator out of nowhere.

“Who dares enter the chamber of the Holy Mother so?” she thundered.

The man stopped, looked around, and nodded, a thoughtful pout on his face, like a tourist strolling through some dead shrine. He took out a cigarette, lit it, and stood dead center in the chamber looking at the far wall. “Hello, Nikki,” he said casually.

Bells and alarms went off all over the Temple several stories above them and computer monitors struggled to bring her cybernetic juices back under control. The Holy Mother was blowing her top.

“Who are you that you dare to come here so?” she demanded.

“You know who I am, Nikki,” he replied calmly, quietly. “You have only to look at me to know.”

“You are the Evil One Himself!” she screeched through electronic voice centers. “You dare to come here, Evil One, particularly in that guise? How dare you!”

Bolts of lightning shot out from all over the chamber, arcing and aiming directly for the man who stood in the center, still puffing on his cigarette. Though hot enough to fry anything living and to disrupt the flow of even a creature of pure energy, he stood at the center of the furious storm as if protected by an impervious bubble. None of the strikes found their mark.

Realizing this, Nikki turned off the electricity while considering what else might have some effect on him. There was a smell of ozone in the air.

“It’s time to go now, Nikki,” he said, still, quietly, calmly.

“No, Evil One! You shall not take me!” she thundered.

He smiled. “It’s your time, Nikki. It’s past your time. Long past. Your world is ending. Parts of it should never have begun. Parts of it are needed elsewhere now.” There seemed to be tears in his eyes. “I’m sorry, Nikki. Yours is not the life it should have been—but none of us can fully control our fate. You were born for an unhappy destiny. Perhaps you would have been better unborn. Perhaps, then, none of this would have happened, none of this would have been necessary. But it is, Nikki. It exists. Cheated of life, your time is still past. You must go now.” He said it sadly, the sincerity so deep it almost penetrated her senile brain.

“You are the Enemy!” she persisted, but now she . felt fear.

He smiled. “I am the Friend,” he responded. “Look at me, Nikki. Tell me what I am.”

“You’re dead!” she shrieked. “Dead! Dead! Dead!” There was a rumble and the dim lights in the chamber went out completely except for a glow that emanated not from the machines in the walls but from the man himself. He, too, underwent a transformation. Suddenly he was very tall, caped, and hooded, and inside the black garments his form could be seen, a ghostly, ghastly form.

A skeleton. A skeleton looking at her, peering deep through the walls and the machines with eyeless sockets into the reinforced cell where her brain and nervous system were imbedded in a semiorganic substance that nurtured her.

A skeleton with a cigarette gripped between flesh-less jaws.

“You are death!” she screamed. “Away with you! Away! I am beyond death!”

“I am rest,” he replied. “I have come for you, Nikki.”

“No!” she screamed, panicked to the core of her soul. “No! Away, I say! No!”

Computers struggled to correct the imbalances, restore normalcy, but deep inside the ancient brain something welled up, beyond control, and vessels burst. Dials flickered, reflected the struggle briefly, then zeroed.

Terrified Olympian technicians, summoned by the alarms, knew even then that the Holy Mother was dead. Still they made for the elevators, tried to reach the chambers. Eventually somebody remembered the emergency bypass system and activated it. Elevators rose to the Temple levels and quickly filled with High Priestesses. Back down they rode, nervous, unsure of themselves, and then burst through the doors into the Holy Mother’s chamber.

No one was there. No one. And yet, on the floor in the center of the oval room were the crushed remains of a still-smouldering cigarette.