Chapter 3: The Time-Lost Lovers
The elevator doors sighed open directly into the penthouse, revealing a slice of gleaming, minimalist calm. Stacy stepped out first, one arm cradling a sleeping Rick against her chest in his carrier, the other hauling a large, lumpy duffel. Hank followed, grunting with effort as he maneuvered the shrouded, upright canvas through the opening, its corners catching on the brushed steel frame.
“Almost there, big guy,” Stacy said, her voice low, more for the baby than for Hank.She nudged the door wider with her hip.
The scene that greeted them in the vast living room was not one of calm.
On the expansive, ivory Persian rug, under the cool light of a sculptural floor lamp, Lyra and Dawson were a tangle of sweating, moving flesh.They were naked, a stark contrast of bronze skin against pale wool. Lyra was on her hands and knees, her back arched in a deep, elegant curve. Her dark hair was a wild cascade down her spine, swaying with each brutal thrust from behind.
Dawson knelt behind her, his powerful thighs driving him forward. His hands gripped the swell of her hips, fingers pressing white into her skin. His cock, thick and ruddy, pistoned in and out of her with a wet, rhythmic slap. Each entry was a deep, complete invasion, the sound obscenely loud in the sterile space. Lyra’s head was thrown back, her eyes squeezed shut, mouth open in a silent, breathless cry that finally erupted into a guttural moan, a raw, ancient sound that seemed to belong to a different world entirely. Her breasts swung heavily with the force of his fucking, nipples taut and dark.
“Oh, fuck me,” Dawson grunted, his own language a coarse, rhythmic chant under his breath. He was close; his balls were drawn up tight, slapping against Lyra’s wet flesh with a lewd promise. He fucked her with a desperate, primal need, as if trying to anchor themselves in this new, bewildering century through sheer physicality.
Stacy froze in the doorway, her professional composure cracking for a fraction of a second. Hank, peering around the canvas, choked on his own spit, his face flooding with color.The movement caught Lyra’s eye. Her glazed, pleasure-drunk focus snapped to the doorway. She saw Stacy’s shocked face, Hank’s wide eyes.A sound of pure, mortified horror escaped her throat. She scrambled forward, breaking Dawson’s grip, her hands flying to cover herself. Dawson stumbled back, his erection bobbing, slick with her juices, a look of confused panic on his face.
“I— we—” Lyra stammered in her broken, newly-learned English, her face flushing a deep, shameful bronze. She snatched up a silk blouse Stacy had lent her, fumbling desperately with the unfamiliar buttons and straps. Dawson, muttering apologies in their guttural Phoenician, grabbed a pair of Hank’s discarded sweatpants and yanked them on.
“No, it’s— it’s okay,” Stacy said, forcing her voice into a tone of calm reassurance.She kept her eyes deliberately on Lyra’s face. “You’re safe here.We’re just… back early.”
But Lyra wasn’t listening. Her eyes, wide and terrified, had landed on the canvas Hank was still awkwardly holding. The rough blankets Stacy had wrapped it in had slipped, revealing a sliver of the painted scene beneath: a curve of a woman’s spine, the desperate grip of a man’s hand.
Lyra’s breath hitched.A low, wounded sound escaped her. She pointed a trembling finger at the painting, her other hand clutching the unbuttoned blouse to her chest. Her voice rose, sharp and piercing, cutting through the awkward silence.
“Nergal!” she shrieked.The word was a dagger of fear.“Nergal! NERGAL!”
Dawson’s head snapped up. He followed her pointing finger, saw the exposed fragment of the painting.His expression, moments ago flushed with embarrassment, hardened into something stark and furious. He took a step towards the canvas, his fists clenching at his sides, and joined his wife, his voice a deep, raging growl. “Nergal!” he spat, the name a curse that had waited millennia to be uttered.
“What are they saying?” Hank asked, his voice hushed.Stacy stared, the pieces clicking into place with a cold, dreadful certainty. “It’s a name,” she whispered. “They’re saying a name.”
The elevator chimed again.
Jan burst out, Fatima a step behind, with Godfrey trotting on his leash and Yukio looking pale but determined. Jan clutched the two figurines to her chest like holy relics. She took in the scene: Stacy and Hank frozen, the Bronze Age couple in states of half-dress pointing and yelling, the covered painting between them all.
“Whoa, did we interrupt a… thing?” Jan asked, her eyebrows shooting up.
“They recognized it,” Stacy said, cutting to the core.“They saw the painting. They started shouting a name.‘Nergal.’”
Fatima went very still. Her sharp eyes darted from the hysterical Lyra to the shrouded canvas. “Nergal,” she repeated, testing the weight of the syllables.“A Mesopotamian deity. God of war, pestilence, and the underworld. A bringer of… editorial correction.”
Lyra rushed to Fatima, grabbing her arms, babbling a stream of frantic Phoenician, her eyes wide with traumatic recognition. Fatima listened, her brow furrowed in intense concentration, occasionally nodding and replying in halting, careful phrases of the same ancient tongue.
“She says… this is his signature,” Fatima translated, her voice clinical but strained.“His… aesthetic. In their time, he took people from the edge of life.From battle, from fever. He would trap the climax of their struggle, their pain, in… in murals on temple walls.To honor him. To freeze the moment of their surrender to his domain.” She looked at the blanket-covered canvas, then at the figurines in Jan’s hands.“He is not just editing a story.He is collecting.Trophy-taking. He believes he is restoring sacred art.”
“And we ruined his original collection by rescuing these two,” Jan finished, looking at Lyra and Dawson.“So he’s starting a new one. With our friends.”
A tense silence fell, broken only by Lyra’s quiet sobs. Dawson held her, his face a mask of grim fury.
Then Rick, in his carrier against Stacy’s chest, let out a small, fussy sound. Not a cry, but a discomforted murmur.Stacy looked down automatically, shifting to soothe him.Her blood went cold.
On the baby’s soft cheek, just below his left eye, was a mark. It hadn’t been there minutes ago. A thin, perfect line, like a painted brushstroke in a faint, ugly yellow.The color of old papyrus, or a fading bruise.
“Jan,” Stacy said, her voice dangerously flat.“Look.”
Jan leaned in.So did Fatima. They saw it. The mark was non-physical, a stain on the air itself, clinging to Rick’s skin.It hummed with a faint, malicious resonance they could all feel in their teeth.
“He’s not just collecting the adults,” Fatima breathed, horror dawning in her eyes. “He’s marking the source. The… the narrative origin point.”
From the shadowed hallway, Polluck the cat emerged.His notched ear twitched. He took one look at the gathered humans, at the tension radiating from them, and then his gaze fixed on the blanket-covered painting. His fur fluffed out, making him appear twice his size. A low, rumbling growl vibrated from his throat, a sound of pure, feline threat. He slunk forward, placing his battered body between the canvas, the figurines, and the baby in Stacy’s arms.His golden eyes held no fear, only a promise of violent, scratching intervention.
The grand piano in the corner, silent and polished, let out a single, discordant note. The middle C key depressed itself, as if struck by an invisible finger, and stayed down. A bead of something dark and viscous, like India ink, welled up from beneath the key and began a slow, deliberate drip onto the bleached oak floor.The peace of the penthouse was shattered.The hunter knew where they were. And he had just drawn his first, unmistakable line.
The ink dripped from the piano key, a dark punctuation mark in the stunned silence. Jan’s eyes snapped from the stain on Rick’s cheek to the terrified Bronze Age couple, then back. Her freckles stood out like flakes of rust against her sudden pallor.
“No,” she whispered.Then her voice found its steel. “No!” She stepped forward, placing herself between the marked child and the room at large, as if her body could block a god’s gaze. Her head tilted back, challenging the empty, elegant air of her oldest friend’s penthouse. “How dare you?” Her shout echoed off the marble.“You ancient, dusty bastard! You turn your power on a baby?On an innocent?Show yourself, Nergal! Face me, you coward!”
The air pressure shifted, a sudden, profound drop that made ears pop. The distant skyline beyond the windows swam, the Sears Tower melting into the jagged, obsidian outline of a ziggurat.A voice spoke. It did not come from the piano, or the windows, or any one point. It was the sound of a desert wind scouring forgotten tombs, of clay tablets cracking in fire, dry and utterly merciless.THE INNOCENT? The voice scraped across their minds. Lyra and Dawson cowered, falling to their knees as if struck, their faces pressed to the Persian rug in instinctive, millennia-old submission. THERE IS NO INNOCENCE IN NARRATIVE.ONLY CLICHÉ. THIS ONE… The sense of a gaze lingered on Rick.…IS A MERELY A BORING PROLOGUE. A TRITE SET-UP.YOU AND YOURS ARE ALL DERIVATIVE. YOUR PLEASURES, YOUR STRUGGLES—PALIMPSESTS OVER MORE ANCIENT TRUTHS.I AM SCRAPING THE VELLUM CLEAN.
“They’re not stories! They’re people, you fucking monster!” Jan screamed back, her fists clenched at her sides, green energy flickering around her knuckles like static.
Hank, who had been standing frozen beside the shrouded painting, let out a choked gasp. “What the hell is—”
His sentence ended in a wet, cracking sound.Not bones breaking, but compacting. His jeans and t-shirt began to billow, then collapse inwards as his body shrunk within them. His skin took on a hard, painted texture, the healthy tan bleaching into the garish, uniform pink of fired ceramic. A pointed, red hat solidified from his ruffled brown hair.
“Hank!” Fatima’s scream was a blade of pure terror.
She was across the room in a heartbeat, throwing herself in front of him as he dwindled, his six-foot frame collapsing toward a one-foot-tall garden gnome. A nimbus of verdant green light—the formal, studied magic of the Green Moon—erupted from her outstretched hands, forming a shield between Hank and the pervasive, editing power of Nergal.The two forces met with a sound like shattering stained glass.
The blast of entropic magic was deflected, but not negated. It washed over Fatima instead.
Her elegant cry of power turned into a shriek of visceral shock as she, too, was seized by the transforming current. She didn’t harden into ceramic, but she compacted, her voluptuous frame shrinking uniformly, her clothes—a tailored blouse and slim trousers—minimizing with her.The process was swift and horrifyingly precise.The blast of energy dissipated.
Silence, again, but for Polluck’s ongoing low growl and Rick’s soft, waking fuss.Where Hank and Fatima had stood were now two three-foot-tall versions of themselves. Hank was fully a garden gnome, frozen in a comically cheerful pose, one ceramic hand raised in a permanent wave, his face a caricature of his own good-natured grin. Fatima was simply a miniature, perfect replica of herself, her sharp eyes wide with terror and fury, her small mouth open in a silent scream. She stumbled back a step on tiny legs, looking down at her own tiny hands in disbelief.
A PITY, Nergal’s voice echoed, a hint of dry amusement now in its timeless rasp. THE GREEN MOON’S LIGHT PROVES RESILIENT, IF CRUDE.A BLEMISH ON THE COLLECTION. YOU WISH TO CHALLENGE THE CURATOR, LITTLE RED SCRIBBLE?
Jan was trembling, tears of rage cutting tracks through the dust on her cheeks. She looked from the miniature, living Fatima to the ceramic Hank, to the painting, to the figurines in her own numb hand.
COME TO THE TEMPLE OF FORM. COME TO THE PLACE WHERE YOUR FRIEND STUDIES DEAD THINGS AND CALLS IT KNOWLEDGE. The voice focused, becoming intimate and direct, speaking only to Jan.THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO. I HAVE PREPARED A NEW EXHIBITION. THE OPENING RECEPTION IS FOR YOU AND YOUR… ENSEMBLE CAST.COME AND BE JUDGED. OR STAY, AND WATCH YOUR WORLD BECOME A VERY SMALL, VERY QUIET GALLERY.
With a final, whispering rush of arid wind, the pressure lifted. The skyline beyond the windows snapped back to its proper, modern geometry.The piano key released with a soft thud. The yellow mark on Rick’s cheek remained.
Stacy’s right hand, steady as stone, was already inside her jacket, resting on the grip of her 9mm.She hadn’t drawn it. There had been nothing physical to shoot. She exhaled slowly, her coach’s discipline keeping the panic at bay, and gently rocked the now-crying Rick. Yukio helped a sobbing Lyra to her feet. Dawson stood, his arm around his wife, staring at the three-foot-tall Fatima with uncomprehending dread.Jan knelt on the cold floor. She carefully laid the Amy and Jason figurines down beside the tiny, trembling Fatima. She reached out one finger, touching the cool ceramic of Hank’s gnome hat.
“Okay,” she said, her voice hollow but resolved. She looked up at Stacy, then at the painted canvas, then at her own distorted reflection in the black marble floor. “We’re going to the museum.”