Chapter the Nineteenth
In which another Conversation is had
Delia woke up on her own. She showered, dressed and grabbed her knapsack, throwing in the work that hadn't gotten done since all the crap with Alexander had happened. She then went downstairs, where Damien had made BLTs for her breakfast.
"I don't know how long this will take. You'll be taking care of yourself today. Are you okay with that?"
"Why wouldn't I be?"
"I don't want it to seem as if I'm abandoning you for Alexander."
"I don't think that. You can't be in two places at once, well, you kind of can, but not physically. I'll be fine."
"Now, the other option is to go over to Anna's house, it's her day off. Thomas is at work right now so you can't go over there, unless you want to spend the day with Caroline."
"How can you think that I'd leave you and Alexander at a time like this?" Delia looked at Damien with her crazy talk look, "this is family stuff. That means the whole family is here and we deal with everything together."
"I'm not going to argue with that," he took a sip of his coffee.
"I'll take some food downstairs and do my work. Since Alexander was taken, neither one of us has had a chance to do any work and our teacher is a real task master," she went into the kitchen and began rummaging through the fridge.
"Are you sure, because I can talk to your brother upstairs somewhere."
Delia's head popped up over the door, "And break family tradition by having an important talk not in the study?"
Damien smiled, "Okay, but if you go outside, don't go far from the house and if you don't want to do your work that's fine; I think your teacher will let it go given the circumstances."
"I need something to concentrate on while you're having your life altering discussion with Alexander and I think we both know that I can take care of myself."
"I don't care, I don't want you far away from the house," Damien got up.
Delia couldn't help but smile at her father's overprotectiveness, "Okay," and she watched him leave to go get Alexander.
There was a kitchen downstairs, but no food, so she grabbed things that didn't take much effort to prepare, including junk food and soda, and brought the food and her knapsack to the rec room and came back up and finished eating while she waited for her father and brother.
Damien returned five minutes later looking noticeably annoyed and sat down at the kitchen table. "I hope that Armageddon doesn't happen in the morning, or we are going to be one man short."
Delia laughed, "You should have let me go up and get him, he can't ignore me." She finished eating her breakfast and once she was done, she brought her dishes to the kitchen. She was rinsing them when Alexander, still wet from his shower, came in and began putting together his breakfast. "Morning, Sleeping Beauty."
"Morning, nagging one," Alexander got his food and brought everything back to the table, where he devoured everything that was on his plate and as he stuck the last piece of bacon in his mouth, he looked up at his sister, who had joined him at the table, "Care to have another go at baking a cake? I'll let you drive this time."
"I think father has other plans for you today."
Alexander looked over at Damien.
"We are going to have a talk today."
"About everything? About what Delia knows? Everything?"
"As much as I think you can handle in one day."
"Are you coming?" Alexander looked at Delia, who shook her head.
"No, this is a special time for you and father, a bonding experience. As much as I would have liked for you to know everything sooner, I wouldn't trade the day that father and I had for anything."
Alexander was once again filled with doubt and anxiety. What if what Damien told him was horrible? What if they were bad people? Would his family still love him if he hated them after he found out the truth? Everything just kept spinning in his head until he thought he was going to explode.
"Xander, please stop. What Damien will tell you is big, but you're already more equipped to handle it than you realize."
He reached out to his sister to feel what she was feeling, "Why are you jealous?"
"You get to find out about everything for the first time. You get to go upstairs and feel..." Delia stopped herself before she blurted out the rest, "it's all new for you."
Everyone got up from the table, Delia made her way to the rec room door. She turned to her brother, "Don't be scared, no matter what you feel from father. He's worried, but that's all him." She turned to her father, "Don't scare him," she hugged Damien and took her and her father's dog downstairs with her. Alexander's dog stayed with Alexander.
"Come on," he put his hand on Alexander's shoulders and walked with him to the study. Once inside, Damien closed the door.
"Should I do something or..."
"No, this is all me. This talk with Delia was a little different because I had a way of opening up the conversation."
"That was the night that she woke up with a nightmare and you stayed home from work the next day."
"Yes, let's sit on the couch," Alexander sat at one end and Damien sat in the middle, but both were turned to face the other.
"D-man, why don't you just tell me?"
"It's not that easy and I'm interested in knowing your take on some things. I was trying to think of an 'in' and I came up with something. When I had this conversation with Delia, we got on to something that happened at school. I don't know if you'll remember."
"Hit me."
"She told me that one time one of your teachers had you read from Paradise Lost."
"Mrs. Travers."
"Delia said you both had an...unusual reaction to the story. Do you remember what that was?"
"Steve Paret, moron, and I don't care if he is dead, told Delia that if it weren't for Eve listening to Satan, we'd all still be living in the Garden of Eden. I asked Mrs. Travers what they did all day and she said not much and I said that that sounded boring and Delia agreed."
"What else?" Damien had made himself relax knowing that if he were tense, his son would be too.
"Delia and I said that we didn't want to be stupid, or have to depend on God to decide what we should and shouldn't know. Delia said that Eve wanted to know stuff for herself and that's why she listened to Satan. I told Steve that he was too stupid to learn anything and called him an idiot."
"In class?"
"No, that was after, at recess when we went outside. So then Mrs. Travers talked about how God threw Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and Delia was appalled that any father could do that to his children, especially God. I said Satan was like Prometheus and had given Man the ability to think for himself. Did she tell you what happened at recess?"
"Yes, but tell me anyway."
"Steve wouldn't let up and said that all women were sinners and that the Bible said so. He said women had to get married so that their husbands could tell them what to do because women couldn't think for themselves and had to have a man tell them right from wrong; otherwise all women are whores if they're not married because then they commit fornication and make men be sinners too. Then Delia said that she wasn't ever getting married and then Steve said she'd be a whore and she beat the crap out of him."
"That's pretty much what I heard, but when she first told me about it, she left out the part where she beat someone up."
"And she never got in trouble for it because he didn't tell anyone that he got hit by a girl." Alexander went quiet for a moment, "He really expected me to take his side over my own sister just because we were boys, but she's my sister." He shook his head, unwilling to believe that anyone would side with a stranger over their own flesh and blood, "Anyway, that's when I told him that he was too stupid to learn anything anyway and Delia and I laughed at him. Then I ran to get the recess monitor and when she came over, I told her that Steve fell out of the tree he had been climbing. Father, I'm sorry if I don't understand what this has to do with our talk."
"Do you believe in god?"
"Do you mean believe in him or believe that he's real?"
"Both, either."
"No to both questions."
"When I first had this conversation with Delia, I didn't bother asking her if she believed in god, that was a given when I was growing up; but the world is changing, at least this part of the world, anyway and belief in god can't be assumed anymore. Would you call yourself an Atheist then?"
"Sure, I'd go with that."
"Well, let's start with this: god is real."
"You can't know that, nobody does."
"I know it."
"But you can't...you can't know that God is real, that's...crazy."
"Then I'm crazy because he's real."
Alexander was looking at Damien not knowing what to do, because for the first time in his short life, he was calling into question something his father had said. Now much more comfortable with what he could do, he reached out and as far as he could feel, Damien was telling the truth.
"Am I lying?"
"You don't think you are."
Damien smiled, "Interesting."
"Did Delia think you were telling the truth?"
"This conversation is not about Delia, it's about you so I want to keep your sister out of it as much as possible, but she was different. The nightmare that precipitated our conversation made her believe. Okay, pretend then that god is real and if he were real, would it change your opinion of what happened in the Garden of Eden?"
"Would I still think that it was boring and that Eve didn't do a bad thing by listening to Satan and that God is a bad father?"
"Yes."
"Yeah, but it would be worse because it really happened...that God really threw his own children out of their home because they pissed him off."
"Well, I'm sure you know that that's not the first time that he's done that."
Alexander thought for a minute, "Oh, Lucifer. So we're saying that that happened too? God throwing Lucifer out of Heaven?"
"Yes."
"What did Delia dream about that was so convincing for her?"
"She dreamed about someone killing me."
"Was that someone God?" The question came out more sarcastically than Alexander intended, but he wasn't sure where all this was going and he was starting to get frustrated.
"What if it were? The dream wasn't exactly like that, but the person who tried to kill me was able to be in a position to do so because of their god," Damien got up, went to the bookshelf and came back with the same magazine that he had handed to his daughter three years ago.
Alexander took it, read it and handed it back to Damien.
"The near collision of the three stars was meant to herald the birth of their christ."
"So someone tried to kill you because Jesus was almost born again?"
"Seven someones, actually."
"Why?"
"I know that their god exists because Satan exists. I know that Satan exists because I am his son. I am the Antichrist, the Beast who was foretold in the Book of Revelation."
Alexander was starting to think that his father had gone out of his mind.
"Who of us has ever been sick? A cold? The flu? Mumps? Measles? Chickenpox? We can feel what each feels because you are my children; you possess no human DNA and neither does Delia. You are part of Satan. When you scratch or hurt yourself, you heal very fast and you've seen what Delia can do, but you may not remember because you were just shy of seven, but think about Matthew Patterson's birthday party.
"Brian Hughes, that's the man who took you, hit you hard enough to create a minute fracture in your jaw and your wrists were raw from pulling at your restraints, yet in the morning you were fine.
"You've always been very good at getting people to do what you want them to do. And what you have done is nothing compared to what you can do. You're better at it than I am and that's saying something.
"It was always obvious to Delia that she was different; for you...you've been able to hide it better from yourself. Today is not only about you learning how different you are, it's about helping you accept it."
He looked at his hands: they had been free from marks or bruises when he had woken up in the morning. Then there was Delia. After Benjamin had pushed him, when she had taken back the helicopter, Alexander had always known she had done something to him. His hand went to his mouth. He had bit his lip when Benjamin had pushed him but in the morning he had been fine.
"What am I?"
"That's what we're working on right now."
"And Delia's the same as we are?"
"She's female, but apart from that, yes, your sister is the same as we are."
"And God is real?"
"Yes."
"So The Bible is real? I mean, what happened in The Bible is real?"
"Alexander, if you need to know history in order to help you come to terms with all of this, then okay, we can do that; but fair warning, I don't have the answers to many, many questions. I don't want this to become a discussion about the flood, or Jonah getting swallowed by a whale or big fish, or evolution, but it will if that's what you want or need."
Alexander shook his head, "I want to know about me and our family...is God my family?"
Damien smiled, "Their god is everyone's family, and yes whether or not anyone wants to accept it, Lucifer was their god's son, his first son. Lucifer was made differently than the other angels, made to be the so-called god's right hand. But Lucifer knew he could do a better job of running the so-called heaven than their god, so He tried to overthrow him and because the so-called god sincerely dislikes it when his children disobey him, and because he was jealous, he cast out my Father and he made another child, one who was more obedient and listened to his father."
"Who is your mother?"
"Satan can't do what the so-called god can do, create life by simply thinking about it, so he needed to engage in sexual activity to make a child. But he chose not to make a baby with a human...he possessed a male jackal and mated with a female and two months later, there I was."
"I'm sorry...a jackal?"
"Do you want to see what you really are?"
"Okay," there was more than a little uncertainty in his voice as to what exactly his father would show him.
Damien got up, went to the closet in the study, took out a box and handed it to Alexander, who had followed his father. Damien then picked up another box and brought it to the desk where he removed the item from the box, which turned out to be a microscope.
"Take a sample of your blood."
Alexander looked in the other box; it contained slides and everything necessary for him to prepare a sample, in this case, of his blood. Once it was ready, Alexander carefully placed it on the stage and looked into the eyepiece and made whatever adjustments were necessary to see the cells.
Damien put two pieces of paper on his desk, each sitting in a plastic sleeve, "I want you to compare what you see in the microscope to the pictures and I want you to remember that you're not alone right now. Whatever you will feel, we will work through it together."
Alexander looked at the blood sample and turned his attention to the pictures in the plastic sleeves. When he found the picture that matched the blood sample, his eyes moved down to the bottom of the page. Beneath the diagram of the cell was written, Canis Mesomelas /Black-backed Jackal. The second picture was that of a human blood cell and he looked again, but what he saw in the microscope matched the picture on the right, the one of the jackal.
He had taken the blood from his finger using the lancet that he himself and unwrapped from its paper wrapper. He picked up the lancet and looked at it; there was nothing suspicious about it. He looked at his finger...it looked like a finger. Alexander looked back into the eyepiece but the cells still looked the same.
He closed his eyes as the truth about what he was seeing overtook him, a wave washing away all that had stood before it. He had accepted that he was different, but not this different. He was silent for a long time, until he felt a hand on his shoulder. "I'm not a person," he turned and looked at his father, "it wasn't that they weren't people, it's that they're people but I'm not; that's why they were different.
"That's right. While we are created in their image, and we share a psychology with them, strictly speaking, we aren't people."
"Delia?"
"She's not a person either."
"What am I?" his voice was a whisper full of uncertainty and fear.
"You are my son, whom I love. Your are the great-grand son of their god, the grandson of Satan and the son of the Antichrist, me. When the time comes, you will take my place as my successor."
"What was my mother?"
"She was a human woman," Damien went to the filing cabinet and took out a folder and brought it back to the desk. "Delia doesn't know who your mother is, but she won't mind if it helps you accept and understand all of this."
Alexander opened the file and picked up one of the pictures inside. She was slender and her hair was light brown and short. Her eyes were sharp, focused and keen. She wasn't especially pretty, but she looked smart.
"Who was she?"
"Her name was Kate Reynolds and she was a journalist. She hosted a current affairs program on the BBC called...The World in Focus and that's how I met her. I was the youngest Ambassador ever appointed to the position so she wanted to interview me."
"Did you love her?"
...oOo...
AUTHOR'S NOTE
I am in the grips of a dilemma as to how the rest of the story, after the next two chapters, plays out, even though I've written ahead. I didn't have to worry about anything when I was writing this for just me, but now that people are reading it...one tends to worry about choices one makes when one has an audience.
