This is my old – very old story – I posted on my profile 15 years ago, in 2009. I deleted it later on, due to its being on permanent hiatusI just didn't feel like updating any more. But recently I decided to return to the site after a long break and I accessed this OLD fic of mine via the Wayback Machine. It was still available in the archivized version of my profile, so I decided to copy it from there and post it here once more. It's the crossover between "The X-Men" and the "Lisey's Story" by Stephen King. If you liked it, leave a review :)


Beta reader:Slightconfuse from the Marvel boards :)

Disclaimer: Neither the X-Men nor Stephen King's works are my property. If they were, I'd be, according to the lovely saying of the jealous, "filthy" rich.


"The Play."

When the orange ball of burning African sun had already vanished from the horizon and in its place on the sky, a linen of impeccable blackness, only sparsely spotted by a bright point of some distant star, the silverish, sardonically smiled heavenly fatso - the moon - rolled in, Darweshi Bahame aka Afterlife, for the whole day impatiently awaiting the moment when he'd be able to give vent to the desires filling him, with a malicious grin playing on his lips, slid under the quilt. His desires were not less dark than the darkness which was now surrounding Zanzibar City.

Closing his eyelids to make sleep arrive as fast as possible to reopen the gate to the world the self-appointed ruler of which he announced himself so many centuries ago, Afterlife thought with satisfaction that The Play, although he participated in it almost every night since he only could remember, didn't lose anything of its attractiveness to him.

The truth about Darweshi's origin could get him into big troubles if only someone was to know it, but it was one of the last entries on the list of potential worries for the boy. Even if one day he was going to pay the highest price for who he was, it wouldn't actually mean anything. He would find a new body fast, just as he was doing it throughout centuries. Darweshi Bahame – that was the name he had in this life – was one of those, who, hated by ordinary people, started to appear more and more often in the second half of the previous century.

Many, many years ago, Mother Nature in her infinite wisdom thought fit to add to the genetic equipment of his original body an additional pack which for many turned out a burden impossible to carry, and which not earlier than barely several dozen of years ago waited to get a name – the X-Gene.

Even for a mutant (a filthy mutie as he'd be described by the members of organization like FoH who as early as that very night would very regret this mistake) Darweshi Bahame was someone extraordinary. Born in a tribe wandering the steppes of Mongolia in the sixth century of our era, having a different name back then, he discovered the nature of his mutation not before his death of that body.

In his real shape he wasn't a human being like those among whom he lived, a being of flesh and blood but a psionic entity, a sort of immortal astral parasite. The looks of a young teen was deceptive, Afterlife was older than almost all mutants living currently. Never so far, even now when the existence of the representatives of the homo superior species wasn't a secret for anybody, had he heard about someone with a power similar to this which he was endowed with himself.

The X-Gene, the carrier of which was his first body, defined his real form forever, stripping him off any corporeality and making him, it seemed, the only man in history before whom all secrets of the White Hot Room were spreading out very clearly.

It was this amazing dimension of reality, existing beyond time and space, into which the souls liberated from the ties of matter wandered, being at the same time the place where the Phoenix resided was a natural environment of this mutant.

It was where he rested between next incarnations, exploring the secrets of the universe and forgetting them almost completely when only, desiring a change from the perfection of this land, he made a decision about descending into the plane of the earthly dimension one more time to, clothed in body again, be able to sense them only in his dreams.

The choice of a new body and a new life waiting for him, for Darweshi being which would be making a decision about buying new clothes for an ordinary person, was preceded by long lasting preparations and thoughts. A man? A woman? A white person, a representative of the black race or maybe an Asian person this time?

Previous epochs dripping with prejudices accustomed him to a male sex and white skin; a woman or a representative of a different race than white (this time he made an exception) he used to be highly rarely in the past. Never also, but for just one time, he had a body containing the X-Gene.

It was in the 9th century on the Indonesian island Celebes using a name of Sulawesi back then. Darweshi, whose name was Tuti that time, lived there as a woman possessing a dangerous talent for total or partial morphing of her body into a sort of caustic, deathly venomous reddish mist, easily killing a person who was unlucky enough to breathe its lethal vapors. Tuti was worshipped as a goddess by the people from her tribe.

From time to time, having thought it's a good time to remind the islanders of the power she possessed, Tuti liked to roam pulmonary canaliculi of those she found too unimportant to be ever of use for her in the future.

Ah, delightful memories. Many centuries and lives later, Afterlife waiting for sleep in the cozy darkness of his bedroom, couldn't help the next cruel smile.

He remembered all his incarnations very well. Since the time of Tuti and her cruel reigns more than a thousand of years had passed, old habits die slowly though. The young Zanzibarian didn't belong to those who are described by the people from their surroundings by such adjectives as noble, moral and decent, that's no doubt.

Even if nobody's brain could ever produce a suspicion that he was someone more than only an extraordinarily intelligent (knowledge and experience gathered by him in the previous incarnations didn't leave him when he decided for the next one) teenager from one of the wealthiest families inhabiting Unguja (the honor of becoming his parents was as a rule credited only very affluent people) even a person most favorably disposed to him couldn't call him likeable.

Now he was waiting for sleep… for a real thrill to which even the most sophisticated pleasures of the earthly world couldn't equal. Waiting for the play he was giving himself up to almost every night when the whole house remained in deep sleep.

The possibility of exploring this amazing plane of existence where the material universe ended and the land of spirit and imagination started, the existence of which was sensed only by mystics and quantum physicists was one thing but the ability to create his own pocket dimension, like everybody who as a pure bodiless ghost descended into this place, was already a different story.

Unlike other beings, sometimes human ones, sometimes not, he had met in the White Hot Room, Darweshi Bahame, now at least, was alive, he had a body to which he could return in every moment but, just as those who were already just ghosts living their own versions of the afterlife beyond the cool, white walls of Death's towers, he possessed the ability to create his own world over which he had full control.

In the daylight, the boy didn't show any unusual abilities, at night though he got back the powers lost with the new day arriving and his waking up for the material reality. Like a blood sniffing hound, with ease he tracked down sleeping minds drifting on the astral plane, oblivious to dangers lying in wait.

Sleep is a deathly dangerous time about which few know the risk of, a time when it's immensely ease to lose your soul – especially if your mind got too close to Afterlife's domain.

Sleeping ones with whom the mutant got a mental connection, were lost for the world – until the daybreak… or for the whole eternity. In the latter case, the doctors hinted at an unexpected heart attack which took the victim by surprise at night although the truth was completely different. Darweshi Bahame's bloody gospel sang the praises of the most horrible atrocities known to human race as the highest and noblest form of fun.

First the cheerful, frantic excitation that accompanied the choice of a new plaything for this night and the hunting taking place afterwards; a cruel game invariably ending with the minds of the unfortunate ones being trapped in the world created by Afterlife's fertile imagination.

A random person whose whole fault was that they found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time could count on being released when the night started to flee from the first shy glare of daybreak, but, if it was someone unlucky enough to have incurred young Bahame's displeasure before… well, then the matters started to take a turn for the worse. For the very, very worst. Afterlife's pocket dimension was a true to life embodiment of the worst nightmare a human being can ever encounter.

Instruments of torture the inquisition would envy him, fire, the multicolored flames of which were licking astral bodies of those who found themselves in there, giant spiders and twining vermin, lakes of molten metal – all of those created by the power of imagination of the mutant but how realistic to his victims.

Many of questionable attractions of this world were taken from Christian descriptions of hell, about which the Church was talking rubbish for centuries, not going to let its, not that meek sheep out. Actually, many a vision of hell's torment was just a very clear memory of someone's not too delightful moments spent in Darweshi's kingdom.

The awaken ones, as a rule were able to recall all the events of the previous night although they took their experiences for exceptionally scary nightmares. One of the most emphasizing personality features of Afterlife was his willingness to dominate, to have total control over the victim.

Not being the embodiment of pure evil – the cruelest torture was just a play for him, an innocent joke he liked to make to others – he was characterized by deep maliciousness and the desire to make people suffer.

Living for so long, he had the time to have experienced everything and now only sadistic practices were able to keep his interest, other pleasures of life were already pale shadows of what they used to be.

Afterlife sent into the darkness one wide shark-like grin more before he felt he's falling asleep. Slipping out of his body, he was searching for the minds he'd use this night. He was waiting for a victim.