The Devil's Shadow | The Empty World Sequence

Eleven

Paris, circa 1780 AD.

Paris. City of Enlightenment, if not light. Crowds pressed against the large black carriage as it came into the city. The first real prejudices against the aristocracy having taken seed bred distrust of anyone with money. And, where this made Shade want to strip down to modest black clothes and teach the wretches to read, it made Louis scoff and sneer. "It's a miracle, an almighty miracle the wretches have gotten this far beyond living in caves and fearing the sun and moon."

"You used to be Human," Shade would say.

And then Louis would send him a beautiful smile from his arsenal of disarming and seductive smiles. "I know."

They didn't bother with buying a house, too much trouble in this city. They simply picked an apartment they liked the look of and moved in, never minding that it was already occupied. And Shade's own cruel streak begun with the turning of Troy he didn't even complain the game was unfair. In fact Shade became a brilliant player of Let's Drive Phillip Mad.

Shade and Louis took Phillip's bed for themselves, the "demonic women" the second bedroom. They slept only in the brightest part of the day, the hours Phillip was out of the house. Even though they had no real use for the beds at night they kept Phillip from sleeping, thinking, he'd be too worn in the day to be trouble to them. If he got the courage to invite someone in they'd conveniently disappear, convincing the guest only that Phillip was seeing things that weren't there. When Shade or Louis felt daring they stood or sat right in the room while visitors came to listen to Phillip rave. All the time that Phillip pointed at them and shouted in their direction they suggested to the visitor they were seeing nothing.

When Phillip was alone with them they spoke of killing. Even if they had not committed any very horrible murders recently they improvised stories, the gorier the better. If Phillip should come close enough to touch them, they touched first, making Phillip all the more convinced there were real demons in his house.

Phillip might try to explain to his friends that demons were real and four of them and their pet hellhound lived in his flat, but his friends would only laugh. Science had killed God.

This philosophy amused Shade. He had once been atheist. He had not believed in gods, only in what logic proved to exist. But then he had seen the gods, touched them, spoke to them, and seen the "miracles" they performed could all be explained by their science. How ridiculous to think science could kill God, when God used science to manipulate Humans daily.

Daily Shade visited the University and listened to their arguments. Every day he was more in love with the child-like arrogance of all Humans, the self-centredness and greed that kept the race going. But how else could a slave race survive without its masters, but to become arrogant and self centred? The whole concept of freedom relied on acknowledgement of the self, the ego as modern men would say.

How else but by vying amongst themselves for those few positions of leadership, to fight wars in urgent need to find out who was the master and who were the slaves, to separate the sheep from their shepherds, the doms from the subs.

No other way to live, not for Humans, not for the blind. And the few who realise the absurdity of Human reality are always denounced as mad. And it's so rare that a really enlightened madman becomes a leader, rarer still that the position of leadership does not blur his original vision, that lackeys, disciples, do not move in to distort his message for the followers.

So heart-breakingly sad, these creatures groping in the dark for the lightswitch. Another ten thousand years might pass before they have another true revelation toward being superhuman. Another ten millennia before they unite the power of their wills and move toward the light as one.