Falter Read online

  Imri set down the glass.

  “He didn’t actually sell blood, did he?” I said. “You lied to me. I bet he didn’t kill anyone either.”

  “Of course he did,” said Imri. “My best friend.”

  “So, it was about revenge.”

  “It was about numerous things,” he said. “You were very instrumental in helping me with it. I appreciated everything you did for me.”

  “You forced me to do it.”

  “You needed some convincing, that’s true,” said Imri. “But you and Azazel are really magnificent. So bloodthirsty. So efficient. I’d like to work together again.”

  “No way,” I said. “I’d kill you if I didn’t need you to tell me where Chance was.”

  He chuckled. “I think you would. It would be a lot harder to do, of course, now that I’ve ingested that blood.”

  “You’re not going to tell me what he was,” I said.

  “I’ll tell you,” said Imri. “You call yourselves Nephilim, because you assume that you’re descended from the pairing of humans and angels, right? Well, if you’re a Nephilim, then Gaston Fleming was an angel. Of course, Fleming wasn’t always his name. He’s had others.”

  “An angel?”

  “I wouldn’t call them that,” said Imri. “We simply call them old ones. They mate with humans and create immortal offspring.”

  “So that means that the theory is true. There were gods or angels or some kind of being on earth that created our race.”

  “Near as we can tell,” said Imri.

  “So, why did we have to kill him?”

  “For revenge,” said Imri. “For his blood. Because I’ve never liked him.”

  I supposed I’d killed people for worse reasons. For no reason, in fact. I probably shouldn’t judge. “And why did you need me? Why couldn’t you do it yourself? Fleming said you’d been around for two thousand years. Why would you need help from the likes of me and Azazel?”

  “You and Azazel are special,” said Imri. “And besides, I didn’t make it for two thousand years by taking stupid risks like that.”

  “So you had us take them for you,” I said.

  Imri shrugged. “Yes.”

  I glared at him. I really didn’t like him.

  “I really would like to work together again,” said Imri. “You have no idea how useful we could be to each other. You and your people are ruthless and cutthroat. And I wasn’t lying when I said that I wish that those who sell blood would be wiped from the face of the earth. I have many more people working for me. I could give you quite a staff. We could eliminate all the blood sellers. Every one.”

  “And then what?” I said. “Then we help you with your fucked-up religion? Spreading blood for Jesus?”

  “You don’t understand,” said Imri.

  “I think I do,” I said. “I’ve had some run-ins with religious types before. The Sons had their own pagan-based way of doing stuff. Then there were Satanists and a bunch of crazy Wiccans. None of that has ever gone very well. I know you think you’re legit because you’re basing it on Christianity, but honestly, Christianity is just stolen from a lot of other sources—”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, boy.”

  “I studied this stuff,” I said. “There are Christ characters all over pagan religions. Dionysus, Balder, Mithras, Coyote, the list goes on and on.”

  “Oh, there are embellishments and incidents that are poorly related,” said Imri. “They borrowed things. They made things up. They got a lot of things wrong.”

  “Who got things wrong?”

  “The writers of the gospels, of course,” said Imri. “You know, there were more gospels than are collected in the bible, you know that?”

  “I know that,” I said. “I had a pretty first-rate education. The early Christian church had a lot of factions. They all wrote their own gospels. Most of them weren’t included the final New Testament. None of the Gnostic gospels—”

  “Really it was the Gnostics who got everything completely wrong,” said Imri. “They influenced the entire movement, muddying everything up. They took this very Platonic ideal of spirituality and tried to graft it onto what had happened. And it didn’t work, because nothing about it was spiritual. The place that Christianity goes wrong is trying to make everything metaphorical. When it was really literal.”

  “It was.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “What are you talking about?”

  He smiled. “Well, we’ve got a long drive in the car to get to where I’m holding your son. If you’d really like to know, I’ll tell you all about it on the way.”

  I shook my head. The pieces were coming together now. “You think you knew Jesus, don’t you? You’ve been alive long enough. And you think there’s a wrong way to tell the story. You think you knew him.”

  “I did know him,” said Imri. “He was my best friend. We quarreled over a girl. Fleming killed him. And now, finally, he’s been revenged.”

  “That’s just…” I tried to find words. “That’s stupid. There’s very little evidence of a historical Jesus. You’re crazy. You’re making that up.”

  “Like I said, they got a lot of things wrong. Starting with his name. We called him Yeshu.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ~imri~

  They got a lot of things wrong (said Imri as he drove the car towards the place where Chance was being kept). All kinds of things. It seems that is what happens when people pass along a story. They get the details wrong. Perhaps the first person doesn’t. But the next person gets confused about it when he repeats the story. And the man after that makes things up when he repeats it. And soon, everyone’s embellished it a little bit, and it doesn’t even seem the same anymore.

  By the time they got to writing down the gospels, so much time had passed. He’d been dead then for a long time. They still had the skeleton of the story, but they added all this meat to its bones. Ridiculous things. Virgin birth. Yeshu being descended from David. King Herod killing children just like in Egypt. Half of the time, they didn’t even cover their tracks. They’d say, “This happened to fulfill X prophecy,” or “As it was written in Y, this happened.” As if it weren’t obvious that they were making up whatever they said so that they could fit Yeshu into their precious beliefs. They so badly wanted him to be their messiah.

  But everyone got his message wrong.

  He wasn’t there to free us from the rule of the Romans.

  And he wasn’t there to save us from our sins.

  He told everyone why he was there.

  To give everyone eternal life.

  Of all the gospels, the one they call John got it the closest. It was written last, and it wasn’t written by a man named John. His name was actually Jacob. I knew him, and I did my best to instruct him so that he would properly get down the teaching of Yeshu, but I don’t think he quite believed me.

  What Yeshu was able to illustrate so easily and plainly to us, I couldn’t do.

  I wasn’t like him, you see. My blood didn’t give anyone eternal life.

  Jacob modeled his gospel on the other gospels he knew of. But he got some of it right. He focused the most on eternal life.

  I’ll do my best to explain it to you then. Perhaps it will go easier with you, since you will believe me that it is possible for the blood of an immortal to heal and extend life.

  I met Yeshu when I was young. And they got everything wrong about me too. My name? They called me Judas. I was from Judah. It wasn’t my name.

  And while we’re on the subject, Yeshu didn’t have twelve disciples. There were five of us in the inner circle. Then there were numerous others, a pack of people who followed us around. Thirty or forty people maybe. It varied. Sometimes there were more, sometimes there were less.

  But at any rate, when I first met him, there was no crowd following him around. He was only a young man, and he did work as a carpenter. He didn’t work with his father, however, because his father had disappeared when he was younger. His father w
as believed dead. The truth, of course, was that his father was immortal, but we didn’t know about those sorts of things then.

  Back then, we thought Yeshu was unique.

  It was amazing. Here was a man who could throw himself off a tall building, fall and break every bone in his body, and be up and laughing in minutes. He couldn’t be hurt. He healed instantly.

  It wasn’t much of a stretch to think he was the son of a god. Since his father was gone, that only seemed to lend more credence to the idea.

  But we were chided for it, because we believed that there was only one god, not like the Romans who ruled us, who had a god for everything under the sun and in the sky. A god for the sun itself, in fact. Apollo.

  Our elders told us that we’d only got a silly idea like a man being born from a god by listening too much to the heathens around us. In the Roman religion, there were sons of gods galore and daughters too. Our elders accused us of wishing to be like the oppressor. They said we were lovers of Rome, and that we had abandoned our culture and roots.

  Of course, we hadn’t. At least we hadn’t meant to.

  But I suppose we all knew, somewhere deep down, that Yeshu must be bigger than anything we had learned in a synagogue. We knew that there was something else out there.

  No one could explain Yeshu’s miraculous ability to heal.

  For his part, in the beginning, he treated it as good fun. Nothing serious. He wasn’t a very serious man. He never was. He liked his wine and his enjoyment.

  That’s something else they got wrong. Of course, they tried to reconcile it. There were too many stories about Yeshu with people who weren’t considered respectable. So, they put in all the stories about the tax collectors and sinners. But they made him a conscientious objector, as if he spent time with them but neglected to ever do anything that wasn’t sanctimonious.

  He was the direct opposite of sanctimony.

  He was my friend.

  But it wasn’t until we figured out that his blood could heal other people that anything came of his abilities. If he’d never discovered that, we might have spent the rest of our lives playing jokes on him with hammers and nails in the carpentry shop. We thought it was great fun to watch him heal, after all. And he thought it was fun too.

  But his mother took ill. It was a very fast sickness, and she was near death within a day of falling ill.

  Yeshu cared about his mother deeply, and he grew restless and angry. It was the first time I saw him ever contemplate anything serious. I remember talking with him as we stood outside his mother’s sick room.

  He was pacing. He was angry. His face was red. His hands were clenched into fists.

  He told me that he couldn’t understand how his mother could have given birth to him, but not have the same ability as he did. He thought that she should be able to heal as well. Didn’t he share her blood, after all?

  I told him that the ability must have come from his father, as we’d always said.

  He raged. It wasn’t fair. He couldn’t bear to lose her. He banged his fists against the wall, and they started to bleed.

  She called out for him.

  He went to her.

  And when he touched her face, the blood got in her mouth. She recovered so quickly.

  He gave her more.

  And that was when everything changed.

  He wanted to do experiments with the blood, and that was the beginning of the inner circle, what you might call the disciples, I suppose. We all took the blood. Then we attempted to wound ourselves. We were amazed when we were healed.

  We spent a long time experimenting, figuring out the limitations of the blood.

  And during this time, Yeshu began to talk about the gift he’d been given. He’d healed his mother. He’d made the five us invincible. As long as we drank his blood regularly, we were just as impervious to harm as he was.

  And there was also the fact that his mother, who’d been given a large amount of the blood, was now more youthful than she ever had been.

  “I can cure the sick and wounded,” said Yeshu. “And I can make people live forever. My blood.”

  It’s another thing they got wrong. It didn’t happen at the end. There was no Passover meal where he sat down with us and passed us wine, telling us that this was his blood, or giving us bread and telling us that this was his body. He didn’t do anything of those things, as much as the Christians feel the need to duplicate it.

  Which reminds me, as well. Christian. What a ridiculous name. Christ simply means messiah in Greek. The religion isn’t even named after him. Yeshu wouldn’t have wanted to be called that. He wasn’t trying to deliver people from political oppression. He was trying to save people’s literal lives.

  What he did was to sit in a room with us five and pass us a cup full of his blood. He didn’t command us to do it again in remembrance of him or anything like that. He just passed it around, and we all drank. We did it once a month, because that was the amount of blood we needed to stay strong and young and impenetrable. That’s the true story of the Holy Communion, whether you like it or not.

  He was a good man, because he saw that he had a gift, and he wanted to share it with others. He could have hoarded his blood. He could have hidden himself, like all the others of his kind have done. But he didn’t know who he was, and he didn’t know he was forbidden to tell the world about his abilities. So, he went out amongst the people, and he healed them. And he told them that if they drank his blood, they would live forever.

  Some of the bible gets it almost right. He who believes in the Son has eternal life. You’ve heard it before, haven’t you? That or some version of it. That phrase, over and over again throughout the bible. Eternal life.

  And there are churches all over the world, reading the words, and claiming it’s some kind of metaphor for going to Heaven.

  But that, you see, that doesn’t make much sense. There was no need for Yeshu to introduce the idea of an afterlife. We believed in Sheol, an underworld, a place where all souls are placed after death. In that sense, all souls already were eternal, weren’t they? If they all went to the underworld?

  The pagans had a similar idea. Their underworld was divided into Elysium and Tartarus—relative equivalents of Heaven and Hell. Sheol had divisions as well. Good souls in one place. Evil souls in another. And somehow, Yeshu’s message, so simple and plain, got strangely twisted into some kind of metaphorical nonsense.

  Heaven was eternal life, while Hell was eternal death.

  What Yeshu said was to drink his blood and live eternally.

  What they changed it to was to believe in Yeshu and go to Heaven.

  It wasn’t what he meant. It wasn’t what he meant at all.

  No, he really wanted people to live. Literally live. On earth.

  “Why should I be the only one with the gift, Imri?” he would ask me. “Why should I be the only one to live forever?”

  And I had no answer for that. He was right. He was blessed. He should share his blessings.

  And so he did. And so we helped him. He traveled all over. He healed people. His blood allowed cripples to walk again. It made leprosy vanish. And those who drank his blood could even come back from the dead.

  It was truly miraculous.

  Other stories popped up, that he could do other miraculous things like create wine or make endless amounts of food. But they weren’t true. They were only rumors. What Yeshu could do was heal. It was his mission. His life. And his joy.

  He loved to see people happy and whole. He loved to be able to give their health and youth back to them. He was a giver, and he took true delight from giving whatever he could to others.

  Not everyone is like that. I have to admit I’m not like that. But he made me want to be that way. And it’s in his memory that I attempt to continue his good work. I want to make as many people happy as I can. I want to bring life and healing to everyone.

  You have the blood, Jason. You could bring life and healing as well.

  Inst
ead, you bring death.

  No, no, don’t try to make excuses. You wanted the story. Listen.

  As I said, we thought that Yeshu was unique. We didn’t know that there were others like him until we met Mary.

  They call her Mary Magdalene in the scriptures. They say horrible things about her, that she was a prostitute, or that she was possessed by demons. And she was none of those things.

  The man who wrote the gospel of Mark, in particular, seems rather obsessed with this idea of Yeshu as an exorcist. He tells story after story about him casting out demons and going on his merry way.

  There are no such things as demons.

  Yeshu was not an exorcist, and he didn’t cast demons out of Mary. Instead, he fell in love with her. Much as I did. I told you earlier that I had a friend once, and that we both loved the same woman. It was Yeshu and Mary and me. And I won her in the end, but it’s only because Yeshu died.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Mary came to Yeshu as a representative of the immortals. Yeshu was violating an unwritten law amongst them. They were not supposed to reveal their abilities to the general populace. Yeshu was calling attention to his blood and its power, and Mary said this would be dangerous.

  But Yeshu won her over. He was good at that. He spoke to her passionately about healing people, about giving people back their youth. He said there was no reason that they should keep their gifts to themselves. They should share what they’d been given.

  And after listening to him, she joined us, and she used her blood to help heal.

  It was ridiculous, of course, my falling in love with Mary. She and Yeshu were perfect together, both immortals, both charismatic, beautiful people. What was I to that? I was only a normal man. I needed the blood of Yeshu, or I would die the same as everyone else.

  I had no right to pursue her. I should have left her to him.

  But I wanted her too badly, and so I made myself close to her. I spent as much time as I could with her, and, in time, I began to see that she had developed a fondness for me as well. She loved Yeshu. It was impossible not to. We all loved him. But she cared about me too.