The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [106]
"What's that?"
"Animals are born with instinctual drives for survival and develop techniques to ensure it. Man is the only creature that needs to delude himself into believing there's a more elaborate reason he's alive; we flood our minds with lies and fantasies about love and family and a benign God in the heavens watching over us.
"But it's only a survival instinct, drilled into each of us from our first breath; it's vital to a society's survival that its members be prevented from discovering how squalid and meaningless their existence truly is. Otherwise we might lay down our tools, leave all this soul-destroying work behind, and where would your precious society be then?"
The silence lay deep between them, broken by the distant, rhythmic clacking of the rails. Jack never blinked, never moved his eyes from Doyle's: Doyle looked through them to darkness, thick and churning.
"Picture another possibility: What if the origin of our world is worse even than this? What if there is a Creator who worked to give our earth design, forethought, shape and contour? And what if this creature is completely and utterly insane?"
"Is that what you believe, Jack?"
"Do you know what you find, down here"—he stabbed a fist sharply into his gut—"when every article of civility, every habit, cherished memory, every manufactured shred of this puppet we assume ourselves to be is stripped off us like the skin of an animal?"
Doyle swallowed hard. "Tell me."
"Nothing," said Jack, his voice barely a whisper. "A void. No sight, no sound, no thought; not a ripple or the faintest echo. That's the secret at the base of the stairs no one is supposed to find. They warn you when we're young: Don't look down there, children; stay here by the fire and we'll tell you the lies our parents beat into us about the greater glory of man. Because they know coming face-to-face with that emptiness would obliterate every trace of who you thought you were like a beetle crushed under a jackboot."
Jack held up his ruined hands. "And this is the glorious mistake you see before you: I entered into the emptiness. I'm there still. And I'm still alive. And it means.. . nothing."
Sparks smiled, a death's-head grin, eyes shining with a diseased and twisted triumph. The train shot into a tunnel, plunging them into darkness. Doyle clenched his fists, not knowing if he was about to live or die, but he would have welcomed a physical fight, pain, anything palpable and real in place of Jack's spiraling fall.
"So with this cheery whisper in my ear, I greet each new dawn," Jack continued quietly, his voice worming sinuously out of the dark. "It never leaves, I have no relief, and in this way I go on living. Mentally disturbed? Don't waste your pathetic shopworn judgments on me, Doctor. Posing at enlightenment. No better than the rest of them; you put a name to what you can't begin to comprehend to push the darkness away. That's the first refuge of a coward. There was a time when I could expect more from you than the parroting of empty screed. Or has success seduced the better part of your mind as well as your pockets? Maybe that's it. They haven't cut you down yet; you're still a fresh face, drunk on the adulation of the masses. Prepare yourself, Doyle; a reckoning is due. They won't tolerate any success from one of their own for long. They cut down all the tall poppies."
The train left the tunnel; lights flickered back on. Jack sat only inches away; his eyes trained on Doyle, who didn't know how to keep the fear and disgust off his face. Doubt crowded in on him: This man's sickness was not only of the mind but of the soul, and its profundity crippled his ability to respond.