Chapter 1
A young man, somewhere in his early twenties, waited by the pier of some random docks looking nervous about something. Or perhaps anxious is a better word. He lay in wait anticipating something that he was not altogether sure about. In his left hand he clutched what was supposedly his key to salvation: The payment.
A rustle came from behind the young man.
“Do you have it?” The voice was somewhat eerie in its airy tone. It sounded supernatural. It sounded as if it came from nowhere and everywhere at once. And yet he had a strange feeling the voice was actually whispering into his ear.
The man stuttered wanting to say he did have the payment, but the words would not come out. It took some very snappy coercion from the voice till he blurted it out as fast as he could.
“It’s here.”
“Very well. I wish to see it.”
The young man turned his head to the side. There it was smiling. The Black Wisp. It had a human face and a human body. But something about it was not human. His face was pure perfection: Cheek-bony with a perfectly angular jaw, emerald green eyes, skin as pale as a Japanese Princess, and black hair as luscious as it was jet black and straight. His face could have been either a man’s or a woman’s but its persona gave off an air of masculinity.
“Stop gawping and show me my payment. Do you have my payment?”
The young man snapped out of it. “Y-yes, yes I do.”
“Show it to me.”
The young man raised his left hand. Clutched inside it he had a steel suitcase.
“It means nothing to me.” The wisp said.
“I-I have to o-open it f-first.”
“I don’t have all night you know.”
“Yes, yes o-of course.”
The young man put the steel suitcase down. While he was working its intricate locking mechanism, the young man prayed. Now the young man was no religious person. He proclaimed time and again that he did not believe in God – Christian, Muslim, Jewish or otherwise. However he prayed, at this very moment, and hoped there was a God who would listen. A God who would reply to his prayers and let him remain alive. The scepticism was still there, somewhere in his heart, but still he pushed it aside and prayed.
The lock opened. With trembling hands, the young man pulled it open. He knew what was inside already since he had been told, but hoped deeply that it wasn’t true, that it was all a joke and that inside the suitcase was a mountain of cash or drugs or something interesting, worthy as payment. But no, inside the suitcase there was no money, no substance, nothing of remote interest to anyone. The young man gulped, daring to raise his eyes to see the expression on the Black Wisp’s face. There was none. No expression. No emotion. A complete poker face.
Inside the suitcase there was a book. It was weathered down by age, but it had once been an item of great value. It had golden edgings all over its leather casing. These edgings rose and fell in intricate patterns. Some of the gold had faded through time. In the middle of the leather cover, the title of the book lay sprawled in silver ink.
A copy of The Quran.
There was a prolonged silence. The Wisp stared at the book, with no visible expression. The young man was silently saying his goodbyes. Why would the great Black Wisp want a freaking Muslim Bible, he thought to himself, when he could have anything he so desires? This was all a joke. He was going to die. They say that the Black Wisp kills very slowly; they say he enjoys the torture. He relishes in the pain of others, he—
“All is well. Hand me the suitcase.”
The young man was dumbfounded. Was this real? So the Black Wisp was a fucking Muslim?
“Do I have to tell you again?” No annoyance in his voice. Even more creepy.
“I c-can’t d-do that, erm sir,” the young man didn’t really want to say this. He wanted to hand the Wisp his book and simply run in the opposite direction, as far away from this thing as possible.
“Of course you can! Come, come!” His tone wasn’t at all reassuring. Again it was blank. It sent chills down the young man’s spine.
“M-my boss said I sh-shouldn’t g-give it t-t-t-to you until a-after the t-task is d-d-done.”
“Would you like to find out if the rumours about my maliciousness are true?”
“N-no thank you…”
The Wisp raised his hand. He put his thumb to his first two fingers, as if he was going to snap. The young man knew what it meant. There was a particular rumour about the Black Wisp, one of great notoriety and caused much terror.
“They say that I can level cities with a simple snap of my fingers. Would you like me to try?”
The young man didn’t know what was worse: death at the hands of his boss or at the hands of the most powerful entity on the planet. He decided to go out on a limb and say his boss’s wrath was worth avoiding.
“B-but s-sir,” he gulped, “wouldn’t y-you rather f-feel like you earned the p-payment?”
The young man was completely at a loss. He had nothing else to say. Inside his heart, he said a prayer. He wished his family well. They would most likely never find his body.
“What?” was the only answer he got, blank as ever.
“N-nothing like that f-feeling of satisfaction,” the young man blundered on, “to m-make you f-feel d-deserving.”
He had no idea what he was saying. He figured it was now time to die.
“Oh.”
The young man screwed his eyes shut and waited for hell to descend (or ascend) upon him.
“Very well.”
The young man opened his eyes, once more dumbfounded. The Wisp was gone. But still his voice was somehow present.
“We will meet again here, when the deed is done.”
The young man fell to his knees and from then on, he was a religious man. He now believed in God. Or rather, a god. One would assume that institutionalisation would come later.
***
The job they had for the Black Wisp was simple. So simple, in fact, they did not really require his special services. Anybody could forcibly retrieve owed money. Anybody could kill or torture to get it. But what just anybody couldn’t do was make a very, very solid statement. At least no one could do it better than the Black Wisp him/herself. If the money laundering group could enlist the service of such a powerful entity, even just once, their reputation would rise from just a small time group to a full-blown underground dirt bank. The Black Wisp was just an idea. A symbol, a blazon, a message.
It did not take the Black Wisp longer than a minute to complete his task. He had been given few details about his quarry. He was supposedly a middle-aged man, who had loaned money from this merry band and had not paid his dues. By the judgment of the higher-ups in this company, the man had to pay instantly and if he could not, then they will force payment from him. And with the Black Wisp, that is what they intended to do.
The Wisp’s quarry, a certain Mr. Donavan, was said to be located in McDougal Street, Greenwich Village, Manhattan. Within the blink of an eye, the wisp was there, scanning his surroundings. The place was quaint. The multitudinous sea of red structures spanned all of the Wisp’s field of vision. In the night, they seemed to frown, as if disturbed by the supernatural presence. Flashes of lights culminated everywhere, cars whizzed by, like blurs, people walking looking but not seeing. In the midst of it all, the Black Wisp walked along; unfazed by any of the subtle beauty this place had to offer.
The Wisp suddenly stopped in his tracks having found what he was looking for: the quarry’s aural pattern. Aural patterns are like a human signature; they are unique and impossible to reproduce. Humans themselves are not aware of these patterns emanating from their very being. But the Wisp could see them as clear as the light of day; so clear in fact that they almost annoyed him. Almost.
The aural pattern seemed to be coming from one of the apartments towards the end of the street. The darkness made their brick-red faces blend into its blackness, as if it was engulfing everything. The Wisp himself stood tall outside of this building for a moment, taking his surroundings, and spoke: describing his surroundings – to no one in particular – as if relaying the sights to someone unable to decipher them for himself.
There was a particular fact one needed to know about the Black Wisp: – one that could be inferred pretty easily were one to meet him – The Black Wisp was not human. One must refer to him as a ‘he’ for no human lexis contains anything that could encompass what ‘he’ is. ‘He’ is indefinable. ‘He’ is a higher entity. ‘His’ motives are and will remain unknown to anyone other than ‘himself’.
The Wisp did not care for human conventions and rules. He (for I now have to refer to him as a ‘he’, ‘she’ or ‘it’ and ‘he’ seems to be the best option) did not care if humans did not like what he was doing. He did not care for blending in. He did not care for all the attention he brought upon himself. The few people who realized who he was whispered about him, in a hushed, frightened voice; they could not leave the immediate area fast enough. He could feel their fear emanate as if it were a foul stench rising from the ground.
He seemingly decided to finally enter the building. He did not enter by conventional means, he instead opted to dissipate several tendrils of black smoke and creep through the cracks in between the bricks. The tendrils were somehow like an extension of his being, he could use them and he could also become them. They drilled through the small gaps of the buildings, some only atoms wide, and infiltrated the building within seconds. On the inside, the tendrils came together to form the Wisp once more.
The inside of the building was damp and dark. The darkness stretched out like a minor abyss. Inside it, the Wisp could sense the despair and the frustration of its residents. They were like strange odours to him – he was fascinated by them to the point where he stopped in his tracks to fully take them in. It was a weird sight.
“Like serpents in shadows,” he said to no one in particular. “Like mesmerising beasts ready to kill.”
Then he snapped out of it. He continued onwards, still locked on to the Donavan aura, and found what he was looking for up five flights of stairs, outside apartment 505.
The Wisp stood outside the door, so close to it his nose almost brushed against it. He simply stood there for a long time. If he wanted to, he could have very, very quickly gone into the apartment and done away with any living thing inside it. He could have become those tendrils of smoke and suffocated the Donavan man. He could have snapped his fingers and blown up the entire building. Nothing stopped him from doing so. Nothing was in his way. But he didn’t do any of this; he simply stood outside the door, as if waiting for something.
“We have to leave, Martha!” The voice came from beyond the door.
“I don’t understand! Why are we doing this?” A female voice this time, possibly belonging to the one called Martha, “Why are you panicking?”
“I can’t explain now. We have to leave the country.”
“What about our child? He has a life here, Mario!”
“Not anymore.”
The Wisp listened intently. Despair and frustration. The odours were the most overpowering coming from this door. The Wisp closed his eyes and drew a deep breath from where he stood.
“Did you hear that?” The male voice again. One could only assume it was Mr Donavan’s.
“Yes, I did.”
“Is anyone out there?” Mr Donavan called out.
The Wisp did not make any movement. He simply stood there with his eyes closed as if he was absorbing the scene. There was no expression on his face, nothing I could tell you which would describe anything going on inside his head. The image of him standing outside a doorway with his eyes closed and no expression will simply have to suffice.
“We have to go now!”
The sound of a window opening, a baby crying and rustling of feet when they meet metal. The regimental tempo of the sounds as they occurred again and again. The Donavan aura slowly began to move farther and farther away. The Wisp did not move from his position. He still remained there, as if frozen, eyes sealed shut.
Time passed, but it was irrelevant. The Donavan aura was very far away now but that was also irrelevant to the Wisp. He opened his eyes and stared with intent at the doorway. It melted away before his gaze. He entered the apartment and stood in the midst of it and looked around. The place was a mess, as if there had been a terrible tempest which tore the fabric of a perfect world, leaving it in tatters. Strewn across the parquet floor were clothes and mundane everyday items like combs and a hairdryer. In the middle of it all was a small coffee table with half-eaten food, already starting to be feasted on by the small vermin which infested the place. The kitchen emitted a foul odour, a real odour this time. By the wall, was an empty cot. The apartment howled with rejection. It screamed abandonment.
“The apartment is howling with rejection, screaming with abandonment!” The Wisp shouted from where he stood. His voice did not echo. There was nothing of dramatic effect, although I could most likely say that there was and you would most likely believe me.
“Ho hum, most amusing.” Again, the Wisp was speaking to himself.
Then, the Wisp recalled he had a mission to accomplish. That wasn’t really how things went, the Wisp never actually forgot, but it is the closest thing I can say to what actually happened. Either way, the Wisp turned his focus to the mission he had been given. The Donavan aura was somewhat far away but the Wisp travelled to its location with a mere thought. When the wisp re-appeared, he was in an airport. His re-appearance brought with it a certain burst of sound to the Wisp’s ears, sounds of a crowd chattering away obliviously to each other, the sound of feet pattering on the ground like insignificant raindrops on cold surfaces. Nobody noticed the Wisp’s sudden appearance, he blended into the crowd though he had not meant to.
The Donavan aura was close. The Wisp moved towards it. He ended up locating the Donavan man in a queue for a flight. Now, the Wisp could just destroy him and the rest of the queue with a passing thought. He could quickly rush up to the Donavan man and slay him, torture him or simply turn him into ashes. Or all three at once – he could do that. But the Wisp didn’t. He waited at the back of the queue. The Donavan man got his tickets, checked in his one piece of luggage while his wary wife held their sleeping son cradled in her arms. Throwing shifty looks left and right, the Donavan man grabbed his wife by the waist and, with conspicuous subtlety, ran off towards the terminal. The Wisp waited in the queue. He could have just skipped ahead but he didn’t. When he came up to the counter, he asked for a ticket.
“Where to, sir?” The woman at the counter asked, a smile plastered on her face. It looked as if it was permanent.
“Wherever the Donavan family went.” The Wisp replied.
The woman was caught off guard. “One moment, please, sir.” She left the counter and went into the back room. She took hold of the telephone, hanging on the wall.
“It might be a bad idea to call security.” A voice, behind her. The woman screamed.
“I-I’m sorry, sir, I-I c-cannot allow you—”
“Spare me your futile justifications. You will never dictate to any higher entity what he is and is not allowed. I will have my tickets, whether you give them to me or I will make your cold, lifeless corpse do it for me.”
The woman understood nothing the cold, monotone voice said other than “cold, lifeless corpse”. Suddenly, she was very compliant. Soon enough, the Wisp left the counter and the backroom holding a one way ticket to Mexico and was wished a very pleasant flight.
Though he was an entity of intense power, the Wisp seemed to be following human convention to a strange degree this time. His earlier intrusions into the world of Man were always stamped with trails of destruction and all record of him, though sparse and minimal, struck fear into the hearts of all who came across it. Each event recorded a blatant declaration of himself as a higher entity unbound by the chains of human society. For some reason, in this event, he went against all that and adhered to queues and to human procedure. {ARRANGE THIS PASSAGE}
The Wisp walked through the airport and found his gate: number thirteen. There were seats in which passengers sat, waiting to board the same aircraft as the Wisp. The Wisp sat in one of them a distance away from the rest of the passengers. The Donavan aura was close. The Wisp looked up to analyse the situation, finding the Donavan family seated not too far away from where he was. He stared intently, seemingly thinking of something or other, when suddenly Donavan looked straight at him and met his gaze. Contact was kept for a few seconds. Then the Wisp simply got up and walked towards the Donavan family. Donavan grabbed a hold on his wife with a trembling hand, waiting for something to happen. The Wisp drew closer. Donavan closed his eyes. The Wisp bypassed straight behind them into the book shop which was right behind them.
“I could have sworn he was looking straight at me.” The Wisp heard Donavan utter. The Wisp smiled. He looked at the books on the stalls. Fiction, Biographies, Children’s Books; all of these populated the stalls and painted the shop with varying shades, a maelstrom of miraculous colours that filled the gem-like eyes of the Wisp to the brim.
“No place like a bookshop,” the Wisp iterated out loud.
Indeed, to the Wisp, there was no place quite like it except, perhaps, for his home in the Cave of Nymphs on Ithaca. But the Wisp would not think further of his home. I could try to explain to you all why, but it is not worth the time and the effort. You have to see that explaining the Wisp’s reasoning is a long and complex task. He thinks on many different levels than we do, it would perhaps take a year for us to figure out and explain why the Wisp would, say, decide to drink tea and not coffee. It is not as simple as: ‘he prefers tea to coffee’. On the contrary he might actually prefer coffee to tea but choose tea anyway for various reasons. Why? Does it matter? It doesn’t matter. The point is he chose tea and not coffee. The wondering of withertos and whyfores, especially over something so menial, is irrelevant. The end result will not change. So I will not go into the intricacies of a higher entities thought. You will just have to be satisfied with the fact that the Wisp stopped thinking about his home.
The Wisp browsed the stalls. He completely disregarded the bestsellers shelf where most of the other people lingered and walked into the classics section. His eyes wandered through the titles and authors, scanning each one with intensity and speed. He did not know which he wanted, he had read almost all of the classics many times over, but he would not mind re-reading something he had already read in search for new insight into its true meaning.
Anna Karenina. The Great Gatsby. War & Peace. Plato’s Republic. Kafka’s Short Stories.
They all stood some distance from each other, but it was as if they were glistening. The Wisp had some sort of affection to these books, and hence wished to read one of them. It wasn’t hard for the Wisp to choose but he pretended to deliberate long and hard on which one to pick. He set his sights on Anna Karenina.
Vengeance is mine and I shall repay.
He took it out of its shelf and walked to the counter.
“Will that be all, sir?” the man behind the counter said, trying to get the Wisp’s attention.
The Wisp said nothing. He flashed an undecipherable glance at the man.
“Is everything all right, sir?”
“Yes. How much?”
“Twelve dollars, sir.”
“Very well.” The Wisp reached into his empty pocket and produced a twenty dollar note, gave it to the man and left.
“Sir, your change!” the man behind the counter shouted.
“Hmm? Oh that. I don’t care for it. You may keep it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He walked away. Even while turned away the Wisp could hear the deep sound of greed as the man behind the counter stuffed the extra eight dollars into his pocket.
Humans, he thought.
The announcement bell rang.
“Aeromexico flight AM four zero one to Juarez International Airport, Mexico City is now boarding at gate thirteen. Passengers are kindly asked to start boarding.”
The Donavan aura was moving. The Wisp queued up with the rest of the humans at gate number thirteen. Within a few minutes they were seated on the aircraft. Humans stowed their luggage in the overhead compartments, the flight attendants greeted all passengers and the cockpit door remained ominously closed. Slowly, everyone began to sit themselves down and the Wisp began to notice something and sniggered to himself.
“I wonder if they realise they’re like ants,” he said to himself, not expecting anyone to understand, let alone answer. The woman next to him gave him a quizzical look, which he ignored, and stared at him, or rather his perfect face, for a few seconds, caught herself in the act and silently looked down at her feet. The woman cursed herself and her heritage for having such imperfect genes. She was a successful business woman, who could afford to fly first class to Mexico, but had intense insecurities about the one thing she didn’t have: good looks. She had had many Adonis-like boyfriends and lovers to compensate for this insecurity who whispered to her that she was that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, but she never believed them. They never stuck around for long after anyway. Once they got what they wanted, they left her. And what they wanted was her money. Even though she knew most of it was all lies, she didn’t mind. She didn’t mind at all.
“So you think everyone is like ants?” She said, trying to start up conversation with the beautiful boy next to her.
“I do believe I said that, yes.” The Wisp replied, not feigning interest in speaking with the woman.
“Well, sometimes I think we’re ants too,” she replied, trying hard to keep the conversation afloat, “we’re so regimental sometimes.”
“Oh. That’s not what I meant.”
“Oh.” Awkward silence ensued. The Wisp didn’t speak again. Neither did the woman. Then she decided to do something risky.
“Am I beautiful?” She said to him, turning her lust-filled eyes which were clawing their way to meet his. The Wisp turned to look at her.
“No,” he said, bluntly and without emotion.
“Am I beautiful now?” She produced a wad ten hundred-dollar bills out of her pocket and waved them in between her second and third fingers.
“A few pieces of paper don’t change your face. So no.”
“You’re a tough nut to crack it seems. Fine,” she stopped to fetch a larger version of such wads from her pocket, “how about these? They’re yours if you fuck my brains out in the toilet.”
The Wisp raised an eyebrow. She really was annoying, he thought to himself.
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, feigning human cordiality, “but I’m afraid it is against the evolutionary imperative of,” he paused, “our species if I were to,” he paused again, “fuck you.”
Silence.
“What?” She managed to utter, through the waves of rage that resonated through her entire being.
“You see I, being human, could only want to propagate good genes to the future generation. Hence I would rather not copulate with you, but copulate with a more attractive female. It’s basic biology.”
She could not believe this. This idiot was spouting biology, when she was offering him around ten thousand dollars for a quick pity fuck? She would not be denied. She would not have this. Her safety net began to fade away and insanity was seeping its ugly tendrils into the control cortex of her brain. She had to suppress an overwhelming urge to start screaming and crying and thrashing everything about. She also had to suppress the even stronger desire to throttle the perfect human being that sat next to her. If she couldn’t have him, no one should or could.
The Wisp knew all this. He could read her every facial expression, her every muscle twitch like an open book. And the Wisp tended to devour books. However nothing the woman thought or did not think fazed the Wisp. He simply sat in his seat, waiting. He was almost completely motionless in the seat which was lusciously comfortable and did not relax in them. Rather, he was quite tense, and motionless.
The Wisp, completely eradicating the woman in the seat next to him from his thoughts, turned to look at the rest of the cabin. The Donavan aura was not in the section of the airplane that he was in, but actually farther down. Still, he scanned the faces of the people in his area of the cabin. Many were rich-looking business men and women in suits, chatting noisily amongst themselves or into telephones and tapping furiously at some portable computer. There were two Arab businessmen, who seemed to be having a heated argument, a Canadian businessman speaking silently on the phone with a glint of disparity in his eyes and a small French business woman who simply did not say or do anything but tap at her computer. The Wisp, on the other hand, produced the book he had just bought: Anna Karenina. He opened its fresh pages and sniffed their scent, closing his eyes to heighten the sensation: the smell of a new book was one which he welcomed. He opened the first page and his eyes began to read. They flitted from side to side as he read each and every line, with no apparent look of deep concentration streamlining across his face.
“Excuse me, sir,” a voice from above. The Wisp looked up and met its eyes. It belonged to a security guard, not older than thirty. “Will you please step outside with us for a moment?”
The Wisp sighed in answer. He closed his book, stood up and followed the security guard outside.
“I’m sorry Mr Black, we’re going to have detain you for questioning,” the officer said, turning to look at his detainee.
The Wisp looked straight into the officer’s eyes. “I don’t think you are.”
“Don’t resist, sir!”
Tendrils of black smoke began to disembody the Wisp.
“W-what’s this?” the officer’s voice broke in terror. He looked around, shifting his eyes from side to side in a frenzy that was not unlike that of a person who was deemed insane. No one was around in the jetty, and the dispatcher was probably in his office finishing off the paperwork. Nobody would hear him scream.
Actually, nobody could have heard him scream, anyway. The Wisp’s smoky, black tendrils wrapped themselves around the officer, encompassing every inch of him within an instant. The Wisp’s eyes remained locked with the officer’s which were the last of him to be covered by the seemingly deadly smoke. The tendrils then instantly returned to whence they had come and reformed the Wisp. The officer was gone.
Within a few seconds the Wisp was back in his seat, boring through his book and the aircraft was ready to move. The Aircraft began taxiing out into the runway then it began to pick up speed. As it did, the noise of the engines and of the wind resistance filled the cabin with a slightly deafening roar, which fazed absolutely no one. Once the aircraft reached the correct speed it took off into the air.
During this time the Wisp read. Once the airplane reached cruising altitude and the cabin began to bustle with movement, the Wisp still remained motionless reading his book. The crew began service. The Wisp read. The crew finished the service. The Wisp remained reading. It sufficed to say that the Wisp did nothing but read.
The other passengers in the cabin did not read. Rather they chatted, they tapped, they snored and they scribbled. Restlessness was rife throughout the cabin. One passenger however, remained constantly motionless, unlike his peers. It was the Canadian business man, his eyes were shaking with fear. He was about to do something which he never thought, in all his life, he would ever do. He stood up and sheepishly walked to the forward galley.
“May I help you, sir?” The stewardess in charge asked him, concern streaking across her face silently as she saw the state he was in.
“I’m feeling very sick,” he told her, “I think I’m going to throw up. Do you have anything you could give me?”
“Please sit down, sir, I’ll be with you in a second.”
The man gulped. Here goes nothing, he thought.
“I think it’s detox,” he whispered, as softly as he could, “I need help.” And he collapsed.
The stewardess reached for the interphone and pushed the PA button.
“If there is a medical doctor on board could he or she please make themselves known to the cabin crew.” She said, her voice resounding throughout the aircraft.
The Wisp looked up from his book. He had arrived at the exact part were Anna met Vronsky, the man who would turn her world upside down, send her to a tumble and turmoil of incessant emotional distress. The Wisp always imagined Anna to be a graceful, elegant woman (or opposite sex of whatever he was) who would be interested greatly in art. She exuded an aura of knowledge in the novel, of knowledge of how one feels and acts. She was almost always in control. This reminded the Wisp much of himself. But he broke off his thoughts from the beautiful Anna and paid attention to what was happening in front of him. It was time now for the Wisp to take the action he had been delaying long enough. He stood up.
“I am a medical doctor,” he announced, his voice taking a deeper tone than usual. The Wisp was acting.
The stewardess sighed a sigh of relief. She had never been one for emergencies, least of all medical ones. Despite all the first aid courses she had taken through her work life, she practically knew nothing.
“Please take a look at this man doctor,” she gasped, concern leaking from her voice like gas from a punctured balloon, “he seems to be in a state of detoxification.”
“There is a very easy solution to his condition,” the Wisp said, his voice now taking on his usual, cold tone.
“Please do as you see fit, doctor.”
You see, the stewardess committed one fatal mistake here. Not that if she had done anything else, anyone on board would have been saved, but for completeness’ sake I think I should mention to you all that in the stewardess’ confusion and fear she forgot to ask for proof that the person who had just announced he was a medical doctor was in fact a medical doctor. Of course, nothing would have changed really, but perhaps the stewardess and the rest of the aircraft would have had an inkling of their coming demise.
“Very well,” the Wisp said. He closed his eyes and produced a tendril of black smoke which, in a split second, lacerated the throat of the Canadian businessman with an immense force, producing a cracking sound as the man’s collar bone snapped and an incredible burst of blood sprayed out at high pressure that would empty his innards within a few minutes.
The stewardess resigned herself to Chaos. She screamed as she saw the blood and fainted almost instantly. The rest of the cabin followed suit into Chaos. Screams echoed as blood splattered and spurted on expensive business coats, suits, onto business computers and business hands. The screams went across like a wave, starting from the people close and then moving towards the back of the cabin as people realised what was happening. Someone got up and ran towards the Wisp, yelling as though he was charging cavalry. The Wisp flashed a simple look at him and tendrils of black smoke extended out to envelop the oncoming man. They formed tentacle like structures which wrapped themselves around the man’s leg and lifted him upside down into the air and brought him so close the upside down face of the man was almost touching that of the Wisp. The Wisp gave the man a very fake smile and kissed him, straight on the mouth. The man, caught off guard, at first did nothing but then soon enough he began to resist. But for some reason the man could not be released from the Wisp’s lips. The Wisp kissed him with what would to anyone else look like a great passion. But there was no passion – the Wisp felt nothing. The man, whose skin was slowly shrivelling up like a prune, began to struggle less and less. When the Wisp withdrew his kiss, the man’s flesh was a sickly green colour and shrivelled up like a prune. The man was no longer breathing. The tentacles disappeared and the corpse dropped to the floor almost on top of the other one.
“Remain calm,” the Wisp said, not even bothering to raise his voice, “there is not much to worry about.” Seeing that the people kept on screaming and wailing and gnashing their teeth even though he had been so kind as to comfort them in their last minutes, the Wisp sighed and went to the aft galley where the stewardess had previously used the PA system. He pulled the interphone out of its socket and pushed a few buttons and spoke.
“To all the passengers of this aircraft, this is an announcement coming from the first class area of the cabin. Do not panic at all there is no emergency, albeit you are all going to die. I am the Black Wisp, an entity whom you will never know or come to understand. I have very little to say and shall not take much of the little time you have left, which is no doubt, albeit unfathomable to me, precious to you.
“I am here under certain directives to capture the one known as Mr Donavan and kill his entire family in front of him before killing Mr Donavan himself. I am a benevolent spirit and shall henceforth disregard this order and kill you all instead. I shall give you all ten minutes to call any loved ones and say goodbye or whatever meaningless manoeuvre you wish to commit before I bring this aircraft to the ground. I have no doubt you will all realise these may be the most meaningful ten minutes of your lives, I say this mostly for those who are here in the first class cabin most of whom would not know the meaning of meaning or its purpose. You would all do well to find meaning in your lives before it’s too late.”
Within seconds of the speech’s end came the cascade of wails and tears, screams, shouts, panic. Chaos spread through the cabin like wildfire eating everything in its path; telephone calls were made, I-love-yous were sobbed and lives flashed before people’s eyes.
What a fuss, the Wisp exclaimed to himself. He sensed the panic and the maelstrom of emotion inside the aircraft and stopped thinking for a moment. He stared blankly into the space in front of him, looking but not really seeing. He didn’t even hear the pleading woman in front of him, begging him to spare her life, nor did he feel her grabbing his leg in a vain effort to arouse him from his thoughts. But he was not thinking he was just staring.
He phased back into reality and looked at his feet, seeing the woman begging and crying.
“What’s the matter?” He said to her, “what do you want?”
“Please spare my life, it is all I have! I beg you! I’ll give you anything.” The screaming was annoying to the Wisp.
“There is nothing you can do and nothing you can give me.”
“I have a family! We aren’t happy but they are everything to me!” Why the woman needed to drone on about her life, the Wisp couldn’t see. He tried to look for what sense it would make in any logical context. He couldn’t find any.
“‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Whatever you want it to.”
The woman remained silent. “What does it mean to you?”
“That it is better to be unhappy than to be happy.”
“How does that even make sense?”
“There is more meaning that way.”
The woman just stared at him. “How can you even say that?”
“By opening my mouth, forming the words and willing my voice to speak them.”
“How can you even say that?”
The Wisp found this particularly irritating. He produced an exaggerated facial expression that in some form resembled that of an annoyed person. He narrowed his eyes and screwed his nose, making various elegant lines streak across his perfect face.
“You have annoyed me,” the Wisp announced to the woman in front of him with an emotionless voice, despite the seemingly great effort to create a facial expression, “so I shall tell you precisely that which I think. You are here droning on about pointless facts! Do you really believe you can bargain with a higher entity? You comprehend nothing! How can you barter with something you cannot comprehend? Your efforts are pointless as they are puny. You should be doing something meaningful, rather than begging and grovelling like some incompetent cur!”
The woman broke out into sobs. “Why do you do this to me? What have I ever done to you?”
“Sorry,” the Wisp replied, cold as ever, “you were just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
***
At that particular point in time, the AeroMexico flight number four zero one was flying over some fields in Pennsylvania at around thirty-six thousand feet. People passing around a certain point X in one of those fields, had they cared enough, would have seen several smoky tendrils suddenly descend from the sky into the ground and anchored themselves into the ground and with sudden impressive force and speed they pulled the AeroMexico flight number four zero one to the ground. Inside the aircraft, people where thrashing and screaming, wailing and gnashing their teeth, sobbing and laughing hysterically, but outside the aircraft there was an elegant silence. The aircraft itself remained as if composed and ready for a dignified demise. The wind brushed off its sublime wings and whistled almost a happy tune, even though it was most likely scared to death.
The Wisp, who had produced the tendrils out of his back and was bringing the plane down, cared not for anything that happened. He did not appreciate the contrast of the noise inside and the silence outside the aircraft. I would daresay he did not even notice. He instead waited for his task to be over, thinking of reaping his reward. An original thirteenth century Quran, written in exquisite calligraphy with designs that would amaze and poetry that would move to tears even those who had thought their wells had dried up long before. He did, however, pull his thoughts away from his prize for a while to look at the flames that burst into the air, a blazing dance of orange rising and falling, attempting to lick and nip the sky’s blue feet. The images beyond danced with the heat, contorted with the effort of movement. Reality was bent that day, for the Wisp at least. For others it just ended.
The Wisp did not make sure everyone was dead, not even his actual quarry. He didn’t care. If anyone actually survived the plane crash – an unlikely occurrence since the plane did not free-fall to the ground in fact it was pulled to the ground and hence accelerated to a higher speed than normal – it was not his doing. He walked away, unscathed by the crash, the flames, the emotional turmoil or the sudden silence of it all.
***
The man really didn’t know what to do. The Wisp had disappeared, possibly to do what he had been told and kill Donavan but he had not returned. It had been hours, morning had broken, the docks gradually erupted with life, people began to pass by him working and not caring what someone with a metal suitcase was doing sitting alone looking dazed and confused. Nobody really even stopped to say a simple ‘hello’ or ‘good morning’. The man himself didn’t even notice or care about this – he didn’t expect a ‘hello’ or a ‘good morning’. He just wanted the Wisp to turn up, take his bloody Islam Bible, hopefully not murder him and just be gone. Till anything happened he was stuck there, waiting.
Had he been a philosophical man, he might have mused about free will or had he been even the slightest bit ponderous he may have wondered why he was there waiting. Alas, he was not a ponderous or a philosophical man. He was just content, waiting and not asking why.
What he did note, however, was a sudden shift in the behaviour of the people at the docks. At first, they hustled and bustled around with little regard for each other. Then a few slight whisperings began; interactions that were easy to miss. They gradually grew from subtle to conspicuous as the emotion began to spread through the masses like wildfire. Soon enough, the man himself was noticed, and someone told him the startling news.
“Haven’t you heard?” they told him, eyes ablaze with panic and excitement, “a plane crashed in Pennsylvania fields! Again! Bloody terrorists!”
The man did not pay this much attention. This event did not coincide with the world he lived in, as sorry as he was for the people on the flight who were most likely there at the wrong place and at the wrong time, so he could not find enough emotion in him to spare on extra sympathy. He simply thanked his newly found god that it wasn’t him on that plane. Although now that he thought about it, it might still be better than being first in liaison with the awe-inducing, mad-as-a-hatter Black Wisp.
Just as he finished that thought, it seemed as if someone had heard it and picked it up. The man heard the words “the Black Wisp”, and perked up his ears. Had he finally appeared? Had he done the deed and finally come to take what is his? Would he finally be rid of this inner and outer demon of his? Hope, fear, anxiety took over him as he strained to listen further to what the people were saying.
“….did you hear that? It’s the Black Wisp’s doing! He brought the plane down!”
“Is the apocalypse finally here? It’s not even 2012 yet!”
“I thought the Wisp was just a fairy tale, a bogeyman!”
“What are you talking about?”
Oh, the man thought. His mind went blank. The Wisp’s job was to eliminate a family of four, not bring down an entire airplane. What happened? Why did he do that?
The man then realised that it was probably best if he didn’t ask questions.
“It is done,” a voice whispered, clear as crystal and unmistakable, belonging to a hooded figure standing right next to him. The whispering was so close he could feel the figure’s breath seep into his ear, the mouth so close to his ear it could practically bite his ear off. Fear ran through the man’s body like a chill, as he realised who the hooded figure actually was. From beneath the hooded cloak, all the man could see was a pair of rose red lips on skin as pale as a Japanese princess’.
“A-are you sure?” The man replied, aching to just give the Wisp the suitcase and run away screaming.
“Do you doubt my words?”
“No, no here you are, take it! Enjoy it!”
The man flung the suitcase at the Wisp, who caught it without any particular effort, and ran away as fast as he could, stumbling as he wept tears of joy, relief and release.
The Wisp did not give chase. He clutched his new reward tightly. It was his – he had earned it. There was no other change, visible or otherwise in him that I can describe to you as a reaction to this event. The Wisp simply thought of joy and disappeared with makeshift eagerness to place his prize amongst the rest of its kind.
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