Back of the Envelope

The Rest of the Story: Chapter 15 can be found here, or you can read the whole story on one page.

This is it, the final chapter. All the conflicts are resolved and all the mysteries are explained, except for the ones which aren't. Okay, enough chit-chat, here it is. Enjoy!

---

Chapter 16
Resolution

Click.

That was not the sound Ryan had expected to hear. To be honest, he hadn’t expected to hear anything at all. He hadn’t thought that his brain would have a chance to register the sound of the gunshot before the bullet passed through it.

Though he had to cross his eyes to do so, he stared at the gun, astounded that it hadn’t fired. The hand grasping it trembled and shook, then viciously whipped the weapon back and forth as if it could be shaken into working order. The iron sight tore his lower lip as the barrel clattered across his teeth, the pain causing his eyes to blur with tears and his cheeks to twitch. In contrast, his stupid, disobedient arm didn’t feel a thing, unless that was a tickling he felt near the scar. Click. The finger squeezed off another would-be shot. And yes, there was definitely a tickling in his arm. The sensation reached his index finger as it convulsively pulled the trigger again. Click. The hand started to repositionthe gun, but Ryan clamped down on the barrel with his teeth, unwilling to risk Emily’s life in this insane game of Russian roulette. His jaw ached as his hand twisted the gun, trying to pry his mouth open, but his head moved with the weapon, trying to manage some control over it without breaking his teeth. The tickling spread to envelope the whole arm just as it crossed the threshold from ticklish to painful, becoming the familiar prickling that had plagued him for the past day. Click. The prickling grew into full-fledged pins and needles. He felt something crack in his mouth as the hand continued to jerk the pistol around, and he hoped the gun had only chipped a tooth. Click. The pins and needles graduated into stinging, a swarm of bees crawling over every inch of skin from the tips of his fingers to his palms, from the back of his hand to the inside of the elbow, from his bicep to his shoulder, each one taking the opportunity to sting him again and again. Click. The pain ratcheted up in intensity, the stinging becoming blistering heat, as if his arm were being consumed in an inferno. He finally released his aching jaws from their hold on the gun so he could howl in pain. Six… six shots. The gun… it’s emp—empty. The pain washed out further thought. His hand convulsed and the gun fell from twitching fingers. He was vaguely aware that Dominic was no longer trying to restrain him, for his left hand was now free to wrap around his right wrist, pressed against the small cut that was at the center of the pain. It throbbed in agony as if someone were driving a white hot iron spike through it one hammer stroke at a time. He heard someone speaking—Emily, and she was speaking quickly and loudly, the words tripping over one another, not in that sparse, slow, dazed whispering of her trance. She sounded… Angry? Worried? Confused? He couldn’t tell, he couldn’t understand the words. But from somewhere he heard words he could understand, a deep, resonant voice, coming from a great distance, as if echoing up from a deep pit. “Damn you!” As the speaker fell deeper into the pit there was one final word, a familiar one Ryan had heard before, twice now in his dreams, though he’d been unable to remember it. This time, he’d remember. This time… His vision filled with brightness, until everything was hidden by the brilliant white light, and his ears filled with a rushing wind, drowning out the word as he repeated it to himself, shouting it in defiance of forgetfulness and unconsciousness and pain.



“Majus!” Ryan cried. Though his mouth was wide open to yell the word, the sound that came out was no more than a choked whisper. He coughed, then swallowed, and his throat burned as he did so. It was raw and dry, and he desperately needed something to drink. Ryan kept his eyes shut as he tried to remember what had happened after that blazing pain in his arm. Everything was a blank. A dull ache still suffused it, and that was enough to make him sob with relief. His right arm hadn’t felt so much like a part of him since… since… had it really only been a day? Ryan made a fist and opened it, pleased at how readily his hand obeyed him, pleased that he could feel it doing so. He shifted, trying to get comfortable, and realized that he was lying with his back on soft cushions, his head propped up on a pillow, and a blanket covering him. This definitely wasn’t the position he’d been in when he’d lost consciousness, if that was what had happened. His left arm was trapped between his body and a vertical cushion, which meant… he opened his eyes, and the first thing he saw was Emily’s worried face surrounded by a golden nimbus—the midday sun backlighting her, undaunted by the blinds trying to shut it out. She was sitting on one of the dining room chairs, bending over him, and she smiled when she saw him open his eyes.

“I’m so glad you’re okay. Dom said you would be, but I wasn’t sure, and I wanted to call a doctor, but Dom said a priest would be more appropriate, except that we’re not Catholic, and I thought about calling Pastor Dan, but…” That was where Ryan stopped listening long enough to glance around. As he had expected, he was still lying on the plush green couch, but he’d been placed in a more comfortable position and accoutered with a pillow and blanket.

“What—?” Ryan began, then paused to clear his throat. “What happened? And what the Hell is a Majus?” His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears.

“We were hoping you could tell us what happened.” That was Dominic. Ryan couldn’t see him from where he lay, but judging from the direction of his voice, he was sitting in the easy chair in the corner, next to the gun cabinet. “As for Majus, it sounds like the Latinate singular of Magi.”

Emily handed Ryan a glass a water, and he propped himself up against the couch’s arm so he could sip some of the cool liquid. Once he’d moistened his throat, he said, “You mean, like the guys who brought gifts to Jesus in the manger?”

“There’s more to it than that, and he probably wasn’t in a manger at the time, but yes. Before we discuss that, however, perhaps you should tell us your perspective on what happened. From our perspective, after threatening to shoot me, you tried to shoot Emily, or yourself, or maybe both. The gun didn’t go off, though, and then you started screaming, dropped the gun, and passed out.”

“Dom’s exaggerating,” Emily said. “Well, not about what we saw, but my vision told us what really happened.”

“Your vision? What did you see?” Ryan asked.

“Em, maybe we should wait until he tells us what he thinks happened,” Dominic interjected.

“Don’t be silly, Dom,” Emily said. “It’s over now. The vision said so.” After waiting a moment to see whether her brother would protest, Emily continued. “I saw a dark shadow standing behind you. It was really weird looking, with an ugly bird-like head, and claws, and arms that bent the wrong way. One of its claws was blocking your eyes and it was whispering in your ear.”

“Are you saying I was possessed?” Ryan asked, a chill running down his spine.

“Not possessed,” Dominic inserted. “But you were definitely being influenced: lied to, shown things, maybe more”

Ryan wanted to deny it, but too much of what had happened didn’t make sense unless his perceptions had been altered in some way. “You eyes were red. I was so sure you were possessed,” Ryan said. “Was that just a hallucination?”

“I don’t think it counts as a hallucination if a demon is making you see it,” Emily said.

“And my arm… was he controlling it? Because I wasn’t.” That part he preferred to think of as demonic possession. Otherwise, he was going insane, thinking that he had no control over his arm, and the mad part of his mind which did have control was homicidal.

“Maybe,” Emily said. “I think so. In my vision, you had a gun in your hand, and the demon had one hand—the one that wasn’t blocking your eyes—wrapped around your wrist and it was trying to make you point it at Dominic, then at me, but you were wrestling to turn it around. Finally, you had it pointed towards your head, and that’s when you pulled the trigger and the gun went off. I thought you were dead, I really did, but somehow the bullet went right through you and hit the demon instead. And when it hit him, he vanished. Just poof.”

“Okay, that’s… interesting,” Ryan said. “But it does sound a lot like what happened. I couldn’t stop what my arm was doing—it was as if it were someone else’s. All I could do was block it. I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, though. I’m just glad it wasn’t loaded.”

“Oh, the gun was loaded,” Dominic said.

“What?!” Ryan sat straight up. The motion made him dizzy, but he placed a hand on the couch’s arm and twisted around so he could see Dominic. Emily’s brother was leaning back in the easy chair, wearing his trenchcoat. He held the gun in question in his right hand, resting on the chair’s arm. Obviously he doesn’t trust me now. Well, I can’t really blame him.

“I checked,” Dominic said. “There are bullets in the cylinder.”

“Then why didn’t it go off?” Ryan asked.

“I dunno. They could be duds, but the rest of the bullets from that box were good.”

“I think it’s a miracle,” Emily said.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Ryan said, running a hand through his thinning hair. “You’re saying a miracle saved my life?”

“Why not?” Emily replied. “If a demon was out to get us, why couldn’t God come to the rescue?”

“If God could come to the rescue, why didn’t he do it before? Why did we have to go through all this?”

“I… I don’t know,” Emily said. “Dom and I were praying for that, but God works in mysterious ways. Maybe he wanted to teach us something or whatever.”

Dominic cleared his throat. “Why give the demon free rein at all? Why let it possess and kill Richard Majison? Why let it influence you? ‘Why’ questions are notoriously hard to answer.”

“Okay, then what about a different type of question? What drove it off?” Ryan act. “I hardly think it was my suicide attempt.”

“Don’t call it that!” Emily said. “You weren’t trying to kill yourself, you were trying to save me even if it meant dying yourself. There’s a world of difference there. Anyway, I think that selfless act broke its hold on you, and God rewarded you by keeping the bullets from going off.”

“Er, if you say so,” Ryan said, embarrassed. I’m not selfless. I’m as greedy and self-serving as the next guy, and more conceited than most. So… why did I do it? That was the question. What had possessed him to place his life between the gun and Emily? Love? He still barely knew her. Whatever he might feel for her, it had very little of romance. Some sort of honor? That little-used word just didn’t mean a lot to him. “I still don’t understand this,” Ryan said.

Dominic shrugged. “Maybe we’ll never completely understand what went on here, but I think it would help if we knew the whole story.” He looked at Ryan, his brows lowered and a small frown touching his lips. “I want to hear your version of what happened, and anything else that you haven’t told us.”

Ryan bowed his head. He had been holding out on them both, partly because he was worried about what the dreams meant and partly because he hadn’t trusted Dominic. Did he trust him now? Well, Dominic had the gun now and he wasn’t shooting anybody, and that was a good sign. And somehow, the fear and suspicion just didn’t seem as deeply settled in him as before. Maybe Dominic was right and he really had been under the shadow-thing’s influence. The idea that he might have been at least partially controlled by the demon was still horrible, but it was no longer unbelievable.

Ryan decided that whether he trusted Dominic or not, he owed them both this. Anyway, even if Dominic was possessed right now, confiding his experiences to him couldn’t be any more dangerous than letting him hold onto the gun, and there wasn’t much he could do about the latter. “Okay,” Ryan said. “There have been a few things that I haven’t told you two about. The weirdest happened right after the first time we escaped Red-eyes, while we were staying at the hotel. I had a bizarre dream that night…” After telling them about the dream, he described how the shadow-thing in the mirror had reached out and scratched him. He showed them the scratch, which now looked like a normal cut, not an open wound on a corpse. As the throbbing pain he’d woken up with faded, it had begun to feel like a normal scratch, with none of the odd pins and needles he’d been experiencing or the cold, dead skin around it. If the cut’s healing, maybe it really is over. Ryan then told them how he had seen the shadow-thing appear at the gas station, becoming Red-eyes as it came out of the wall. He hesitated before telling them about the red gleam he’d seen in Dominic’s eyes, but Hell, he’d already told Emily. Finally, he explained last night’s dream, and waking up with the gun in his hand. “What I don’t understand is what the dreams meant. Were they true or false?”

“Both,” Dominic said. “I think the first dream was truthful, while the second one lied. The demon was probably trying to manipulate you through your dreams. Lies are more effective if they’re mixed with the truth. But you still haven’t told us what happened today.”

Ryan sighed. “When Emily had her vision, your eyes turned red again, and you were acting strange—your expression, your words and tone of voice, little gestures—I knew you had to be possessed, and that I had to get you away from Emily. So I pulled open the drawer of the gun cabinet and grabbed the gun. It was weird that it was unlocked; I thought I had locked it. And it’s also strange that my arm, which had been practically paralyzed all day, worked fine when I picked up the gun. But when I tried to put the gun down, it was like it was someone else’s arm. I couldn’t control it any more than I could feel it.”

“And that’s when I tried to tackle you,” Dominic said. “But were you trying to shoot me or Emily?”

“I don’t know!” Ryan said. “First it was pointing at you, then Emily, and when I saw that my own damn finger was pulling the trigger, I did the only thing I could and tried to catch the bullet with my skull.” Ryan wiped his hand across his eyes. “I… I’m still not sure why I did that. I’d like to say I did it out of love or something romantic like that, but I just… When I saw that I was pulling the trigger, I had to stop it. If I killed Emily, I’d be a murderer. It wouldn’t matter that some demon made me do it, I’d be evil, and I’d rather be dead than the kind of person who would do that. Does that make sense?”

“It’s all right,” Emily said, placing a hand on his shoulder.

Ryan didn’t look at her. He wiped his eyes again, surprised that they were tearing. Damn it, I’m not going to cry! “You’re not disappointed? I like you, Emily, and I didn’t want you to die, but I don’t know that I’d die just for you.”

Emily smiled. “Jesus said that no man had greater love than to lay down his life for his friends, but we’ve known each other for less than two days. We’re still practically strangers, and you’ve already given me more than I have any right to expect. And no matter what you say, you were willing to sacrifice your life for mine, and I’m not going to complain that your motivations weren’t pure enough or whatever.”

Ryan heard motion behind him as Dominic got up, followed by a metallic click. Alarmed, certain that Dominic was about to finish what his own arm had been unable to do, Ryan whipped his head around. Dominic was standing next to the gun cabinet, the revolver in his hand with the cylinder open as he removed the bullets, carefully placing them on top of the cabinet. When he was done, he closed the cylinder and placed the gun in its case and closed the still-open drawer. When he saw Ryan watching him, he said, “I don’t think I’ll be needing the gun. As for the bullets… I think I want to test them. I for one want to know whether or not they are duds.”

“I’m not sure I do,” Ryan said, sniffing. “So I’ve told you everything I remember. Do you understand things better? ’Cause I still don’t.”

“I think that I was right in my earlier assessment that the demon couldn’t hurt us directly, but I was wrong in what I thought he was trying to do. I was expecting a spiritual attack… although I can’t say exactly what that would be like. Something like spiritual rape, I imagine.”

“Damn, that’s what it felt like,” Ryan said very softly. Idiot, do you think you have any idea what rape feels like? No, but was having some… thing alter what he saw and thought, or taking control over a part of his own body, any less of a violation? He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to think about it.

Dominic continued, either not hearing him or pretending not to, “What I didn’t see is that he could use a spiritual attack to cause physical harm. He tried to trick us into hurting one another by making you think that I was possessed. Then, when Emily was vulnerable because of her vision, our desire to protect her and our suspicions of one another created a very dangerous situation.”

“And then he tried to make me shoot you by taking over my arm? How is that any different from having Red-eyes kill us?”

“Hmm, I dunno. Maybe it was desperation. I don’t think the demon was incapable of physically hurting us so much as forbidden, and it tried to break the rules and was stopped. Or maybe it would have worked if you hadn’t resisted the way that you did, as the responsibility would have fallen on you for not fighting it.”

“So who did he want dead? You, Emily, me? At one point or another he tried to shoot each of us.”

“If things had gone exactly as planned, you would have shot and killed me, then probably gone to jail, and Em… well, how do you think you would have reacted, Em?”

“I don’t know what I would have done then,” Emily said. “If you were… gone, and Ryan did it… It doesn’t make sense! What about the vision that I’m supposed to marry him? How could I marry the man who killed my brother? But… could the vision be that wrong?”

“Which may be the point,” Ryan said slowly. “If she begins to doubt her visions...”

Dominic nodded. “Yeah, maybe. Or maybe you’re going one step too far. You two are supposed to be together, like it or not. I think he was trying to prevent that.”

“But could it be prevented?” Ryan asked. “If it’s prophecy, isn’t it inevitable?”

“Obviously, the demon thought it wasn’t,” Dominic said. “He might be right. God isn’t the Delphic oracle, where every attempt to avert the prophecy just brings it closer to fruition. There are examples in the Bible of people convincing God to… change his mind, for lack of a better phrase.”

“Emily said something along those lines, but even if God can be convinced, I doubt that a demon killing the people the prophecy’s about would do it.”

“Good point. I guess that’s why he tried to get you to kill me. After that happened, you two wouldn’t want to marry. You’d be the ones trying to change God’s mind about the prophecy.”

Back to prophecies I don’t really want to believe. “I don’t suppose you have any idea why we’re supposed to marry.”

“Not really. But I wonder if it has something to do with what you said when you first woke up.”

“You mean ‘Majus’? You did say you knew more about the Magi.”

“Just a little, most of it speculation,” Dominic said. “The term, the same one that’s used for the Magi who visited Jesus, refers the priestly caste of the Medes, who were a powerful influence in the Parthian Empire at the time of Jesus’s birth—Persia, Assyria, Babylonia, that area. They were Zoroastrians.”

“But why would Zoroastrians be interested in the Jewish Messiah?”

“Well, there are similarities between Zoroastrianism and Judaism, possibly due to the fact that Zoroastrianism’s rise to prominence roughly corresponded with the Jewish exile in Babylon,” Dominic said. “And as there were still Jews living in that area centuries later, when Jesus was born, it’s likely that the Magi were familiar with the Jewish prophecies.”

“So what happened to them?” Ryan asked.

“I dunno.” Dominic shrugged. “I had assumed they disappeared, not dying out but losing their identity through interbreeding and generational forgetfulness. Now I’m beginning to wonder. You said that the demon called you ‘Majus’? And your last name is Maji-son.” He said the name differently, emphasizing the first two syllables with a long i, rather than the short i Ryan pronounced it with.

“Do you think I could be related to them? I don’t look Middle Eastern.”

Dominic smiled, “That’s at least sixty generations back. You could easily be descended from the priestly caste of the Medes and not look like you’re from that region. The problem is that you probably wouldn’t know. Nobody would. Very few people these days have that much of a sense of history, and I didn’t think anybody had accurate records stretching that far back, but something’s different here. Your name, Red-eyes’ name, the demon calling you Majus… somebody knows. And more importantly, somebody cares. Do you know much about your family’s genealogy?”

“No,” Ryan said. “My father never spoke of it, and he disappeared when I was fourteen.”

“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”

“It’s a long story,” Ryan said. It wasn’t that long of a story, but Ryan didn’t want to talk about his father. He never wanted to talk about him. I don’t even want to think about him. “And right now I’m just worried that this might not be over.”

“It is over, Ryan,” Emily said, taking his hand in both of hers. “The demon’s gone. I’m sure of it.”

“I think Em’s right, Ryan,” Dominic said. “The demon is gone.”

“I guess so,” Ryan said. But if someone, or something, is so interested in me, in us, then will the shadow-thing be the only one who comes after us? He looked at Emily, who was smiling at him, and he forced himself to smile back. “Well, if it is over”—for now—“then I’m going back to bed.”

The End

---

This is the final 3,997 word chapter of my 50,426 word novella.

It's done! Eyes in the Shadow has been my main writing project since October, about nine months now. It's not the only thing I worked on during that time, but it is what my focus has been. For most of that time, I didn't have a clue where it was going. I didn't know what Red-eyes was--I suspected that he was a demon, but I didn't know for sure--or what he wanted, or how--or even if--he could be defeated. I didn't know where Ryan and Emily would go, or who they would meet, or what they'd try and whether it would work. I basically made it up as I went along. That's a lot of fun, but it can also be dangerous. When I follow my usual writing process, I write a dozen chapters but don't publish the first until I'm done with the twelfth, so I always have the ability to fix my mistakes. If I get my characters into a situation that they can't get out of, I can go back and change things, preventing that situation from happening or preparing a way out in advance for when they arrive there. The way I wrote this story, publishing each chapter before I was done with the next, if I got my characters into such a situation, I'd either have to pull a deus ex machina or end my adventure with a tragedy. And I was determined not to pull a deus ex machina. There was also the danger of inconsistencies. It really does take me months to write a story of any length, and all sorts of little details that occurred in chapter one can be forgotten by chapter ten. This is usually caught in the first revision, where I read through all the chapters I've written and make corrections, taking advantage of the ability to read it all together in the course of a couple of days so I can see how well it all fits together. I wasn't able to do that either. Finally, sometimes ideas that I have late in the story either aren't compatible with or just don't flow from the previous chapters, but if it's a really cool idea and it doesn't require extensive changes, I can just run with it and smooth out the earlier chapters to make it fit. It frustrated me immensely that I couldn't do that this time. What was already published was all but set in stone. That "but" refers to some small mistakes that I corrected where two parts of the story I had already published disagreed, and one of them had to be changed. That happened once when I had given Ryan two different majors with different research topics, chemical engineering studying zeolites (which a friend of mine had done) and electrical engineering studying semiconductor failure modes (which I did as an undergrad). I don't recall any other times I went back and changed a part of the story.

You may wonder about how I ended things: my hope is that you find it satisfying. I established pretty early on (Chapter 4) that you couldn't get rid of the shadow-thing just by killing Red-eyes. The demon, or evil spirit, or whatever it was, would live on. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, I wanted to limit the extent of Red-eyes' power. I wanted him to be dangerous, but I did my best to be ambiguous over how superhuman he really was. The most frightening thing about him was that you never knew the full extent of his abilities. I knew that if I left the obvious solution of fighting back open, the characters would eventually find guns and start shooting, and then I'd either have to kill Red-eyes or make bullets bounce off of him, and then so much for ambiguity. So I made it so they could kill Red-eyes but not solve the real problem. The second reason I focused on the shadow-thing is that I find spiritual beings much more terrifying than physical beings. Physical creatures can hurt you, true, but you can either avoid them or hurt them back. Spiritual beings are different. How can you get away from them? How can you hurt them? This of course gave me a new problem. Now that I have a spiritual entity as the enemy, how do I keep him from becoming too powerful? How do my characters get rid of him? Well, presumably God has the power, but I was trying to avoid a deus ex machina. I can't really have God solve the problem while giving my characters nothing to do. It might make a good allegory that way, but not a good story. On the other hand, theologically I believe that there's not really a whole lot human beings can do about demons. They will try to destroy us, and all we can do is resist. So that's what Ryan, who was the central character and the main target of the demon's influence, had to do. He had to resist the demon, and it would flee from him. This was complicated by the fact that Ryan's pretty skeptical about God and demons. Christians can pray for help, and while Ryan's thrown off a prayer or two, he's not a believer, and having him convert just didn't feel right. Committing to God is a profound decision, and not something I could see someone as skeptical and cynical as Ryan doing after a mere two days of really creepy experiences. He would need time to process what had happened, time I didn't give him. Ultimately, there was only one thing he could do to end it, and that was an act of self-sacrifice: interposing his own life between the demon and Emily. By doing that, he'd show real commitment to resisting the demon's influence, and such a commitment could be honored by a bit of subtle divine intervention without seeming cheap or easy.

So now I've wrapped up the story and explained all the mysteries, except for one. What's the deal with the Magi? Or Maji, or however you want to spell it? Well, that part I'm not saying. It's an idea I've been playing with for a little while, and I made the decision to connect Ryan to them pretty late in the story, when I was wondering whether Eyes in the Shadow would have a sequel. (The answer to that question is maybe. If so, I'll definitely explain more about the Maji then.) The late introduction of the Maji connection shows, due to the serial nature of the story and my aforementioned inability to prepare the way for important plot twists that only occured to me around Chapter Eleven. I will eventually do a rewrite of this story, maybe even see if I can get it published, and when I do I'll deal with the complications which cropped up due to the limitations of a serial story.

Update: Cleaned up the commentary at the end of this chapter, since it turned out to be pretty disjointed.