Davor Mondom

Apocrypha

The pounding of blood filled Senior Chief Aris Eberhart’s ears. Not even the helicopter engines could drown it out.

They were flying over grassland. Storm clouds lingered though it had long since stopped raining, rendering the helicopter practically invisible. Another helicopter flew a few hundred feet behind. Each carried a dozen commandos. Aris followed the progress of both craft on a tablet. They were approximately a half-mile out from their destination.

For nearly a decade the Directorate had been at war with an assortment of terrorist groups that targeted government buildings, military installations, even members of the Directorate. In each instance, the group in question would dismantle itself or go underground before its leadership could be neutralized, only for another to take its place. The Directorate theorized that the groups were fronts and that a single as-yet unknown entity was responsible for the entire conflict, and convened a task force to identify and locate it.

Tonight was the accumulation of twenty months of intelligence gathering. The task force uncovered a network of couriers linking all of the supposedly independent terrorist groups to a compound that, the task force theorized, served as the planning and operations center for the war against the Directorate. The capture and interrogation of one of these courtiers led the task force to the compound’s location. Aris was put in charge of the raid on the compound. The Directorate insisted on scorched earth — no prisoners were to be taken, and after any actionable intelligence was extracted, the compound was to be destroyed.

The helicopters were minutes from the compound when the pilot called out to Aris.

“Sir! You’re gonna wanna see this!”

Aris entered the cockpit. The pilot pointed out the window.

Using drone and satellite imagery, the task force constructed a full-scale replica of the compound, where Aris’s team trained for the past month. The compound was formidable, constructed entirely out of concrete and surrounded by thick walls topped with barbed wire, with sniper turrets and slitted windows too narrow to crawl through. The task force even speculated that the grounds between the walls and the compound were mined.

Aris saw none of this. Instead, there was a wooden two-story farmhouse surrounded by a simple wire fence.

Aris stared down at his tablet. “Do we have the right coordinates?”

“I triple-checked, sir!” the pilot insisted. “The compound should be right there…but it isn’t.”

There wasn’t time to idle, or to contact central command for new orders. If they didn’t land immediately they risked detection, assuming they were even in the right place.

“Continue with the operation as planned,” Aris ordered.

The helicopters hovered over the farmhouse as the commandos rappelled to the ground. The commandos fanned out, encircling the farmhouse. The farmhouse had clearly seen better days — its gray paint was faded and chipped, and the roof sported patches of moss and missing shingles. Aris and three other commandos passed through the gate and approached the house. A single light glowed faintly from somewhere within. No noise came from inside. Aris half-expected to hear a dog barking.

They stepped onto the wraparound porch. One of the boards squeaked. Aris raised a fist, signaling the other commandos to stop. They listened for hushed voices or frantic scurrying and heard nothing.

Aris turned the doorknob. The front door was unlocked. The hinges groaned, and again they waited for a response, and again they were greeted with only silence.

They passed a dining room to their right and stairs to the left. The interior was rustic, the walls and the floors unstained and unvarnished. Nothing hung on the walls. A grandfather clock stood sentry in the hallway, the swing of its pendulum making a soft click. When they walked past the kitchen, Aris noticed that it had a cast iron stove. The farmhouse seemed transported from another time.

The first floor ended in the living room, the source of the light they’d seen outside. Two worn leather armchairs faced a brick fireplace, wherein red-orange flames danced and crackled. Bookcases lined the entire perimeter of the living room, most of them crammed to capacity. The only other furniture was a wide desk in the center of the room, at which sat an old man, scrawling furiously in a black notebook. Though thinning, the man’s hair was still mostly intact and combed back, and he sported a trimmed salt-and-pepper goatee. His glasses clung to the tip of his nose, owing to his being hunched over the notebook.

The old man looked up when they entered. Their assault rifles were trained on him, but he seemed unfazed. He set his pen down. With his middle finger he pushed his glasses up. “Welcome, Mr. Eberhart. I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”

Aris lowered his rifle. “You know who I am?”

The old man nodded. “Who you are. Who you were. And, with any luck, who you will be.”

Aris turned to the three commandos. “Wait outside.”

The commandos nodded, leaving Aris alone with the old man. Aris removed his helmet, setting it on the desk. He tried to sneak a glance at what the old man was writing, but he closed the notebook.

“You’re the one we’re looking for,” Aris declared, without a hint of triumph. “The mastermind behind the attacks on the Directorate.”

The old man nodded. “In a manner of speaking.”

Aris walked over to the bookcases, inspecting them. It turned out they were filled with notebooks of many different sorts — composition, spiral, pocket, leather-bound.

“This wasn’t what we expected to find,” Aris said. “But I think you knew that.”

The old man nodded again. “The Directorate wouldn’t have let you within a hundred miles of this place if they knew what it was — they’d have leveled me from the sky.”

Aris took one of the notebooks off the shelves, studied the front and back, and returned it without opening it. “And what exactly is this?”

“You’re smart,” the old man said. “Look around you. Put the pieces together.”

A hypothesis had already formed in Aris’s head. It was outlandish, but in keeping with what he was seeing. He’d had no firsthand experience with it. It was before his time in spec ops, before he’d even been born. Few others would’ve reached the conclusion so quickly, but Aris was a student of history.

Aris turned to the old man. “You…have the Craft.”

The old man smiled. “You don’t disappoint, Mr. Eberhart.”

“But how? I was under the impression that the Craft died out after the Directorate relocated the last living practitioners.”

The old man’s eyebrows shot up incredulously. “Relocated? Is that what they told you?”

The old man stood and shuffled over to one of the armchairs by the fireplace. He had a short, stiff gait and his back was arched slightly. When he sank into the armchair, he exhaled sharply.

He pointed to the other chair. “Sit.”

Aris did as instructed, leaning his rifle against the armchair. The old man stared at the fire for a while. Then he leaned forward and took a fire poker that hung adjacent to the fireplace, his hand trembling. He gave the kindling a few gingerly stabs before regarding Aris again.

“What did they tell you about the Directorate?” the old man asked, crossing his legs.

“I know the Directorate arose in response to the Craft,” Aris told him. “But not only that. For a long time, people thought that they could govern themselves, but this led to division, paralysis, a loss of the common good. Then, after decades of lurching from one crisis to another, the Craft was discovered, and that pushed civilization to the brink of collapse. By then, the masses were ready to give up their freedoms, their voice in government, if it meant that yesterday and tomorrow were a sure thing. The Directorate promised that it could restore order if given full power to do so. The people obliged, and the Directorate kept its promise — it solved the Craft problem, and it’s maintained stability ever since.”

The old man let out a throaty chortle. “‘Solved the Craft problem’ — I like these euphemisms.” He paused before continuing. “They were bureaucrats at first — the Directorate, that is. You can’t exactly blame them for wanting to put a lid on it. I wasn’t alive at the time — I’m not that old — but I heard the stories. The more people who discovered they had the Craft, the more things got out of hand — past, present, and future rewritten over and over, every day a new reality, free will nullified at the stroke of a pen or the click-clack of a keyboard.”

“How did you find out that you had it?” Aris asked.

“By accident,” the old man answered. “There was a girl, I was thirteen, maybe fourteen, I had the biggest crush on her, couldn’t focus in class, couldn’t stop fantasizing about her. One day during lunch, I’m sitting by myself in the cafeteria, I start writing this story in the back of my notebook about her and I hooking up after school, and sure enough, when the last bell rings, she’s waiting for me outside the school and says she wants to go home with me, and it all happens exactly how I wrote it. I didn’t even know what the Craft was at the time.”

Aris raised an eyebrow. “What happened after that?”

“Well, being a dumbass teenager, I bragged to a couple of my buddies about how I’d scored with this girl after writing about it in my notebook, and then one of my buddies gets DEAD serious, I mean the color drains from his face, and he tells me that I need to rip up the story right now and to never do it again and that we shouldn’t tell anyone else about it. I had no idea why he was getting so bent out of shape, and that’s when he told me about the Craft, about what the Directorate did to people like me.”

Aris frowned. “And what did they do, exactly?”

“Those with the Craft didn’t ‘die out’,” the old man sneered. “They were exterminated.”

Aris sprang to his feet. “You’re lying.”

“I know what you believe, because it’s the same thing I was taught,” said the old man. “After the Craft was outlawed, those with the ability were ‘managed’ to ensure they weren’t a threat to themselves and others. ‘Management’ meant, however, deportations to faraway camps with dilapidated housing and sanitation, round-the-clock surveillance, no contact with the outside world, it meant forced sterilization, it meant testing for latent abilities in children and ripping them out of their parents’s arms if they passed, and, yes, once they were too weak and isolated to do anything about it, it meant mass murder. But even that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

“What do you mean?”

The old man got out of the armchair and ambled back to the desk. He picked up the notebook and held it up to Aris.

“The Craft is dangerous, yes, but also an opportunity. Forget the atom bomb, bioengineering, even artificial intelligence, this —” He waved the notebook aggressively. “— is the greatest power the world has ever seen. I could make you put a bullet through the heads of every one of your men and then yourself if I wanted. Do you think the Directorate would let that power slip through its fingers, let it rot away in some concentration camp?”

Aris’s face hardened. “The Directorate — they’re using the Craft.” It came out somewhere between a statement and a question.

The old man tossed the notebook onto the desk. “From a tiny basement office to the highest authority in the land — the story you know is the story they wrote. A carefully-curated canon.”

“How?” Aris asked.

“The children, of course,” the old man said, as though it were obvious. “The adults were a lost cause, but if identified early enough, the children could be effectively propagandized into believing they were performing a noble duty for their country. Of course, once you got a critical mass, you didn’t have to go hunting anymore — you could just make as many as you like.”

The old man sat at his desk again. Aris put his right hand on his sidearm. The old man wasn’t a physical threat — if he shot him, it would only be to stop him from revealing more. Aris sensed he was at a tipping point, beyond which he’d be unable to return to the life he’d led. He could live with the Directorate manipulating reality to keep itself in power forever. It was an unfree system, but one that worked, that kept the lights on and the water running and the supermarket shelves full. Maybe there was nothing the old man could tell him that would make him turn his back on the order he served. But part of him wanted to test that hypothesis — he sensed that the old man was still holding back his biggest revelation.

“What did you hope to accomplish by going to war with the Directorate?” Aris asked. “If you knew they were using the Craft, then you must’ve also known the numbers were against you, that sooner or later you’d lose.”

“Oh, I was counting on it,” the old man insisted. “I was never the hero of my own story.”

“Who was then?”

“You.”

He’d come to it. A knowing grin formed across the old man’s face — he knew that he now had Aris in the palm of his hand.

“What makes cancer so malicious is that it’s just normal cells that have mutated and are growing out of control,” the old man said. “Our immune systems are well-designed to fight threats from outside — bacteria and viruses — but they’re not as good at going after the body’s own cells. So the cancer cells grow and grow and grow, and then you die. I handed the Directorate a threat from the outside, kept them busy, and all the while the threat from within grew.”

Aris could accept the Directorate authoring his story, but not this old man.

“Seems like you’ve done a pretty shitty job,” Aris remarked. “I’m no revolutionary.”

“Not yet,” the old man replied. “First I had to give you the tools. You cut your teeth on this war, didn’t you? You enlisted not long after the first attacks, then got recruited into special forces, where they turned you into a living weapon and, most importantly, let you in on their most clandestine operations.”

“And all that —” Aris motioned to the bookcases. “— is in there?”

The old man nodded. “Apocrypha. From the Greek apókryphos — that which is hidden or secret. What better place to hide than in plain sight?”

“And now that I’m right where you want me, you bring me here to tell me the truth about the Directorate in the hopes it’ll inspire me to tear down the system,” Aris finished. “Shit, I guess you already know exactly how I’ll take this. Just how much of this story have you written anyway?”

The old man tapped his pen on the notebook. “I don’t have much time — my body’s failing, and my mind won’t be far behind. This here’s my last chapter.”

“Your last chapter?”

“You didn’t think I’d send you into battle against the Directorate without the only tool that can really defeat them?”

The old man really had saved the best and most devastating for last. Aris’s eyes widened, his heart racing more than it had in the helicopter.

“They’ll kill me if they find out,” he breathed.

“Then don’t let them,” the old man shot back. “You’re one of us now, Mr. Eberhart. However loyally you serve, however enthusiastically you ape their slogans, you will never be one of them. I made sure of that.”

Aris drew his sidearm and pointed it at the old man.

“You — ruined my life,” Aris hissed.

The old man was clearly unbothered by this threat, leaning back in his chair. “I’m the only reason you have a life. You stand astride two worlds and you think that makes you weak — on the contrary, I think it makes you the most powerful person in the world. The Directorate, me, we’re prisoners of the stories we’ve told — we lost perspective a long time ago. But you, you can create something neither of us could.”

Aris cocked the hammer. “I don’t want any of this.”

“Then change it,” the old man said flatly. “I gave you the power.”

Aris gestured to the notebook with his pistol. “What do I do?” he asked. “Do I shoot you or do I let you go?”

The old man pushed the notebook across the desk to him. “See for yourself.”

Aris looked down at the notebook. If he opened it, would he find his own indecisiveness staring back up at him? Somehow either choice seemed to vindicate the old man. He insisted that Aris had his power, but Aris was incapable of discerning the border between his and the old man’s wills.

“Do you know why so many people welcomed the Directorate?” the old man asked. “Yes they wanted peace and security and all the things on the posters, but they also wanted someone to take away their freedom to choose. When you have the power to choose, you also become responsible for the choices you make. And responsibility is terrifying. Don’t you agree?”

The bullet struck the old man in the temple, just above his right eye. His body fell forward, his head slamming into the desk. A pool of blood spread across the surface.

The three commandos outside turned at the sound of gunfire. They raised their rifles, aiming them at the door. A minute or two later, Aris came out, and they relaxed.

“Everything alright, sir?” one of them asked.

“Blow the place.” Aris’s face was blank, unreadable.

“I thought we were supposed to collect intelligence first,” another protested.

“You have your orders.”

The commandos exchanged glances but then nodded. Aris relayed the order to the other commandos via walkie-talkie, while also calling on the helicopters to land.

Aris boarded his helicopter as the blades powered down. He looked back at the house. The commandos were all inside now, setting explosive charges throughout the house. Some of them would probably linger in the living room, maybe steal a notebook or two to bring back to central command, to prove that they were good soldiers.

Aris inhaled, waiting.

A gunshot rang out from the cockpit, then another. Aris released the breath he was holding and stepped into the cockpit. The pilot had shot his co-pilot and then himself.

Aris looked out the window. The other helicopter exploded, then the house too went up in flames, shards of wood and glass flying in every direction. The commandos hadn’t even had time to scream.

Aris took the notebook out of a pocket and opened it to the last page.

Just as he’d written it.

END

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Davor Mondom was born in Bosnia. He and his parents came to the United States as refugees following the civil war in the 1990s. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in history from Syracuse University. He currently lives in Syracuse with his wife Meg and their Siberian husky, Izzie. He can be found on Bluesky @dmondom.bsky.social.