The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [107]
Jack leaned back, shrugged, and casually picked a piece of lint off his sleeve.
"This ... place ... is hellish but not without interest. Picture happening upon a street fight: You come around a corner and find two strangers trying to kill each other with every reserve of viciousness in their bodies. The outcome means nothing to you, but the flow of blood, the raw naked spectacle, rivets you; you can't tear your eyes away. Embrace the emptiness and it exerts the same mesmerizing hold on the imagination: How perfectly and regularly human beings embody a vast, horrific meaninglessness. It would almost qualify as tragic if it weren't so deeply hilarious; all the pomp, the effort, the strained, puffed-up self-importance of people, handing out awards to ourselves, parading around; achievement. Working, striving, worshiping, loving. As if it mattered.
"Why didn't I kill myself?" Jack laughed, a harsh, brutal rasp. "You might well ask. Because life is so cruel that it makes me laugh, and that's the only reason to go on living."
Doyle struggled to keep any judgment or emotion from his voice; any appeal to the man's fellow feeling offered no avenue to reach him now, if he could still be reached at all. "How did you come to ... this place?"
"Oh, I suppose you want the facts, don't you? Always the facts with you; fine, why shouldn't you have them? I won't spare you a detail. You can use them like bricks and build a wall to hide behind or put them into one of your little stories. I haven't read them, by the way; I gather you've used me as a model of sorts for your dear detective."
"I suppose that's true, in a way," said Doyle, feeling a rush of anger.
Jack leaned forward with an almost friendly smile and lowered his voice. "Then my advice to you is this, old boy: Don't incorporate a breath of what I tell you into your characters. People won't like to hear a word of it; not sentimental enough, no warm and happy turn. You know how to give them what they want: lies, gilded and framed like a hall of mirrors. Beware of telling them the truth: You'll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs."
Jack laughed again bitterly. Doyle felt himself go cold inside: to bear this much and now an assault on his dignity. Why should he subject himself to another word of this bullying? What lost quality in the man made him certain he was worth the trouble? The Jack he had so admired was nowhere in evidence; this one sounded like an utter stranger and like no one else now so much as Doyle's memory of his mad brother—and if Edison's moving pictures were to be believed, Alexander Sparks had somehow survived the fight at the waterfall as well. Twin ruptured souls, damned and irredeemable; blood ties run deep. This was not his business: easy enough to walk away and leave them both to burn in their private hell.
But a deeper responsibility rose up in him; if either man posed a danger to other people, to simple common decency, then Doyle knew his obligation to proceed along the path he'd chosen outweighed any wounding to his pride. He possessed reserves of faith and strength they knew nothing about and until proven otherwise he would continue to assume they were a match for the darkness that had flowered inside Jack Sparks. Doyle called on those reserves: If that flower could still be cut, Jack might be redeemed. He needed more information.
"Obviously you both survived the Falls," said Doyle matter-of-factly, giving him nothing to scorn. "Why don't you start there?"
Jack smiled as if the memory were fond. "And what a fall it was; endless, like flight or close to it, a dream of flight. Clutching each other, rocky cliffs whistling by as we dropped.
Pure hatred in my heart; the desire to kill him stronger than any emotion I had ever known.
"I didn't lose hold of him until we hit the river, two hundred feet, that's how far we fell together. Death seemed a certainty, but over thousands of years the Falls