Renaissance | ON HOLD

Aric

I bend down beside the table and pull out the heavy metal casket. With a four-digit combination and a few clicks, it opens. I lift the lid and stare down at the body. Now headless, it only serves to remind me of my past failures. Failures that this project could remedy.

I pull a blank-paged volume from the shelf. Its pages are yellow with age, and thin, flowing patterns of gold border its binding. I breathe. It was bound so long ago. I made it, but I couldn't use it. Spells and sciences I twisted and tested, altering and combining formulae with sorcery until I lost hope. But if my latest theory is correct, then someone, something else may be able to use the hidden knowledge in these pages. And, in the process, maybe I can redeem myself a bit.

Five years. For five years I worked, tirelessly testing procedure after procedure until finally I discovered a material that could bond with human minds. It was....dark. Dark and shapeless, like smoke. Only, unlike smoke, it could bond with flesh to become something physical, but greater than a human. I found it in a wall. A wall between this dimension and another. Once it connected with the convict's left brain hemisphere, a new creature was born. Something with a mind only half-man. Something with a body that looked mortal, but was powerful. Powerful and too fast to be seen as more than a shadow. A ghost. That's what I called him. Ghost.

For the next three years, Ghost used his power for good. What the inter-dimensional matter let him do was extraordinary. It was unbound by space. It bent normal matter to the will of its host. It could absorb light and bend darkness. With it, Ghost brought justice to the world. When he cast wicked men into the second dimension through the wall, their minds transformed from lawlessness to justice. Life in the world started to brighten, like the cracking of dawn.

And then, something changed. Not with the matter, the ex-villains, or the second dimension, but with the convict's mind. He was seduced by evil once more. He squandered his second chance at life for the sadistic pleasures of torment.

From across the universe, Ghost gathered powerful beings with twisted minds to come with their armies and spill blood on this world. My world. There was a war too terrible to speak of. Not in a thousand years had I seen anything like it on the face of the Earth. By the time all the nations had stopped squabbling and joined together against the invading forces, it was too late.

Were there heroes? Of course there were. There are always heroes. But there are also always villains. And the villains had a shadowy, clever man on their side. Lewis Venustus. More a puppeteer than anything else, he ran the show of the war from behind a curtain of alien technology. He tipped the balances of an interplanetary conflict and gained a position of absolute power for himself on the conquered Earth. And he did it with the people's applause.

There was half a moment—a few months maybe—when we had a real chance. We had found the weak points of the invaders, and were about to exploit them. The heroes and I had learned about Venustus, and we were ready to topple his background operations with a single, fatal blow. But, as twisted fate would seem to have it, Ghost came. He took the heroes, all of them one by one, and cast them into the second dimension. If you remember what I said about the wall, and how it can change wicked men to good men, then you will realize that all our world's heroes are now villains in that other reality. 

I place the book down on the table above the body, where its head should be. I gaze down at the bare neck. An image flashes before my eyes. The head is on the body, and I am cutting it off. More memories flood into my consciousness, like water rushing through a dam: Searching for a material to fuse with human cells. Finding the dimensional wall and using its matter to create Ghost. Ghost turning against me, and killing his first victims—a pair of twin infants.