Chapter 3
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"For I am every dead thing,
... and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not." (J. Donne)
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A milky light was filtering through the room's only window, a narrow opening situated just under the ceiling. Too high for Archer to try and peep out. He could probably have tried to pull himself up, holding to the iron bars, but he really didn't feel up to any physical activity. His limbs felt numb and weak, his head ached, the left side of his face throbbed and unexpected waves of nausea and dizziness suddenly overcame him.
The place was eerily silent.
He had spent a good night, waking up only a couple of times shivering and huddling into the (new) scratching blanket, the solid ground a welcome change to the perpetually lurching van floor. He listlessly swallowed the colourless and tasteless mush a guard had left and drank iron-tasting water from a jug on the floor. Then he put some of the water on his throbbing face and forehead.
There wasn't much left he could do, so he just sat on the floor, his back to the wall, looking at the narrow patch of cloudy sky you could see beyond the window.
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Around midday, two soldiers entered the cell and carelessly went through the shove-him-up and pull-him-along routine.
They walked what looked like endless corridors, that became less barren as they went, until they stopped in front of a dark wooden door. One of the guards knocked on the door, and, at the brusque answer on the other end, entered the room. A few curt syllables were carried through the open door, but Archer couldn't see who was inside. His curiosity, however, was soon to be satisfied, as the first guard re-emerged and he was pushed into the room. The door closed behind his back, leaving him alone with the room's occupant.
Archer stood transfixed.
Before him was the creature he'd seen in the hospital tent and afterwards deemed a figment of his delirious imagination, the pale-skinned demon in a Nazi uniform.
As a starship captain, he had met alien species, some of them odd-looking, or even awe-inspiring, or downright unpleasant, but never before had he experienced the sheer revulsion and damp fear this unknown entity elicited in his soul.
The creature was sitting at his desk, in a sun-lit room brightened by a rusty-yellow Persian carpet and the green of a vibrant plant, perusing a paper and smoking, the everyday ease with which he performed these human acts making his out-worldly appearance even eerier.
He raised his fearful red eyes to Archer's face and a chilling smile curved his lips.
"An unexpected gift!" said the creature in a soft, cultured voice, in which resonated slight echoes of a foreign inflection.
"Wh…" Archer tried to croak out through the lump in his throat, but his long unused voice failed him.
The creature kept his smiling countenance on him, showing the same indulgence an adult would use to a child.
Archer straightened his spine and clenched his jaw, gratingly uttering: "Who are you?"
The creature graciously inclined his white skull, regarding him through narrowed eyes: "I do not have a name."
"You don't have a name?" repeated Archer hollowly, a blank stare in his eyes.
"No, I don't. I do not need one. But that is hardly the matter. I am very pleased to meet you, Jonathan Archer." His smile intensified, glowing in his red eyes. "Very pleased, indeed."
"You know my name?" reeled Archer.
"Oh yes!" he carelessly shrugged. "Your name and much more. I'm pleased you found your way to me. This is exactly where you should be, even though, as I said, it is an unexpected pleasure." He smiled again.
Jonathan Archer felt like a clueless, defenceless child. That creature, whatever it was, had obviously the upper hand on him, and was playing it so cool that each one of his repartees succeeded in leaving him even more disoriented.
He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, clenching his fists at his sides. He decided he would wait and see what his opponent's next move would be.
"This is not a game of chess, Jonathan. And there's no need to feel so… unsettled." The smile on his lips briefly tinged his voice with amusement, before disappearing into inscrutable blankness. "It is you, who have chosen to come to me. To come here." His hands indicated the room.
"I? I don't even know where I am, I certainly didn't decide anything!" Frustration and fear sparkled his anger.
"Do not try to delude yourself, Jonathan. This is what you chose. Answer truthfully to this question and you will know it." The creature paused a beat, to deliver the final blow with unruffled calm: "Is it not true that death is what you chose?"
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Jonathan's mind was suddenly flooded with another here and now.
He was back in the Xindi weapon, telling Malcolm to go, and saw again the look in his officer's eyes.
He was viciously struggling with the reptilian commander, raising every ounce of rage and hate and hurling it at his enemy.
He experienced icy cold satisfaction when he pushed the button on the detonator, and felt the warm splash of Dolim's blood on his face.
He finally felt the rush of the run mingle with the certainty that it was too late, and his mind's desperate dive into darkness.
His last thought, the fire and blinding light engulfing him already, was a desperate plea to blackness to embrace him and let him sleep forever.
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"Yes, Jonathan, exactly so!" nodded the fiend behind the desk, his elbows on his chair's armrests and his hands loosely folded together.
"Please, sit down now," he invited with a hand.
Jonathan dropped himself on a chair; he felt his legs couldn't carry him any longer.
"You see, this is a special time we are living," continued the creature looking through the window. "This war is almost over. It was a terrible, bloody war. For years people kept dying, and dying: under the bombs, because of the enemy fire, in the concentration camps, killed by political enemies, killed by their own countrymen, even died from starvation, or frozen to death on the Russian planes. And here, air is so poisonous with death that men do not know how to live any longer." His eyes met Jon's. "We are in the Reich's heart. Our beloved Führer is sending the last of his men to their death, and then he will send the children, and last he will follow. And we go after him, like the rats followed the Pied Piper of Hamelin, because we are drunk with death." He paused, his eyes lost in a vision only he could see.
"In reality, we are not marching forward, we are reeling, staggering. Our beloved Führer is dragging us towards the shades of darkness and everlasting nothingness," he uttered slowly, like someone who recites a poem by heart. "And I walk among them like a prince," his red eyes flickered. "They shudder and turn their eyes away when I walk among them, because I give them what they fear most and yet secretly crave: nothingness and blackness." The words resonated in the silence of the room.
The creature's stare unfalteringly found and held Jonathan's eyes. "Your heart's inner desire has been fulfilled , Jonathan." His name sounded like a caress on his lips, and Archer tasted the sickening sweetness of blood at the back of his throat. "And you are meeting it!"
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Jonathan Archer was listening in appalled silence.
The monster's speech was so evidently crazy, and at the same time chillingly familiar.
Yes, how many times he had wished to be delivered from the too heavy weight he had to carry. Walking along the darkened corridors of his broken ship, counting the bodies of his crewmen to be consigned to space, sitting in the blackness of his cabin and thinking about those he had wronged or killed, looking in the mirror and seeing a hateful face gazing back at him, he had wished he could pay for his sins. Every minute of the past months, without even being conscious of it, he had fed a darkness in his soul and chanted a soundless plea for nothingness and blackness and death.
As the realization hit him, he felt a long shiver pass through every fibre of his being, a heavy weariness enveloped his soul, and every thought fled from his mind, leaving behind dumb emptiness.