Messenger of Fear Novella #1 by Michael Grant

Author:Michael Grant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

3

I PRAYED THEN TO MY OWN GOD, NOT TO ISTHIL who I served and despised, but to the God in whom I still believed and hoped was watching, for it all to end.

But there was no succor for Barton Jones, who had murdered.

The snake had swallowed Barton’s entire length with only the head and arms still free.

He looked at me then, Barton did, with eyes that no longer pleaded for mercy but simply needed to see something human and real. I think he believed my face would be the last thing he would ever see.

His body was now a huge bulge in the snake’s body, but he no longer writhed or kicked. The blood was being squeezed from his lower body, and the air from his lungs.

Then, with a final powerful undulation of that snake’s whole twelve-foot length, Barton Jones was gone.

The snake closed its jaws over fingers, and suddenly, without a sound or a warning, it was gone.

Barton Jones lay now on the clean tile floor of his classroom. He was not covered in blood. He was not covered in the bodily fluids that had been squeezed from him. He merely lay, a boy, barely breathing, eyes squeezed shut, motionless and silent.

I knew he was not dead. I knew that all of it had been an illusion. But when an illusion can be seen and smelled and tasted and touched, it ceases to be something even the strongest mind can resist believing.

The snake was real to Barton Jones. It was real to me.

I felt dirty and ashamed. I was sick in ways that went far beyond a queasy stomach. What I had witnessed had been an atrocity. The fact that Barton Jones was a murderer, that justice demanded punishment for him, or even that this worst of fears was the product of his own imagination did nothing to lessen my own sense of the savagery of this punishment.

Was this truly the price Isthil demanded? Then She was a savage, barbaric creature.

And yet I served Her. As did Messenger.

Daniel was with us; Daniel, that deceptively average young man in the jeans and hoodie.

“Barton Jones,” Messenger said, “your punishment is completed. The balance that you disturbed with your wicked deed has been righted. You are free to go.”

Had I had within me any remaining vestige of humor, I might have laughed. Free to go. He would never be free of this memory, and neither would I.

But was he so destroyed that he had permanently lost his mind? Would he find within himself the strength to go on?

Daniel was watching Messenger, as he does, knowing that Messenger himself has been pushed as far and perhaps further than any feeling creature could endure.

Messenger removed the black hood and stuffed it into his pocket. His face shone with perspiration. He was breathing hard, as was I, almost as if it were we two who had endured Barton’s agony of body and mind.

“Rise if you are able,” Daniel said to Barton.

Barton’s eyes flicked open. I believe he may have briefly lost consciousness, which could only have been a good thing for him.

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