Chapter 76
I WAS HOPING to meet Miep Gies.
Hey, I knew that studying Abbadon’s past actions (killing, looting, plundering, and causing global devastation) was going to be pretty tough. At least I could try to restore my faith in humanity by seeking out one of history’s heroines while I was at it.
Miep Gies was one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank, her family, and several other Jews from the Nazis during World War II. She was also the woman who found and preserved Anne Frank’s diary after the Franks were arrested in their hiding place—a secret attic above Mr. Frank’s spice factory in Amsterdam.
Gies and her helpers could have been executed if they had been caught hiding Jews. But they did what they knew was right. You don’t find those kinds of souls wandering around in Abbadon’s circles of doom.
I was walking up Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht, the longest of the city’s main canals, toward number 263—the building where Mr. Frank had his spice mills and warehouse. I glanced at a newspaper drifting across the cobblestones. It was August 4, 1944.
Not the date I would have picked.
“Why not?” crooned a voice behind me.
I whipped around.
It was Abbadon. He was right on my tail!
“Did you really think you would find my weaknesses in the past, Daniel? Such a foolish boy. The past contains some of my greatest victories! This day in particular has always been one of my favorites,” he sneered. “This is the day in the Frank family saga that clearly proves my point: evil always triumphs. If it didn’t, hell wouldn’t need so much real estate.”
I heard a commotion up the street. Nazi soldiers and gestapo men in black trench coats were storming into canal house 263.
August 4, 1944, was the day Anne Frank and her family—after hiding from the Nazi occupiers for two years—were finally captured. Anne and her sister were taken to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, where they both died a few weeks before the British Army liberated the camp.
Three weeks earlier, she had written what would become the most quoted entry in her famous diary: “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
My feelings exactly.
But it was hard to picture people being “good at heart” with the Lord of the Flies himself, Abbadon, standing there, grinning triumphantly at me. He was dressed up in an appropriate period costume: a black fedora and a black leather trench coat with a swastika wrapped around its left sleeve. The red of the armband matched his sinister eyes. He laughed mercilessly when the German secret police roughly removed the Frank family from 263 Prinsengracht.
“Poor little Annie,” he said with a sigh. “It seems a petty thief who has fallen on hard times called the authorities this morning. Ratted her out. Can you blame the poor soul? He desperately needed the reward money.”
“There is good in this world!” I shouted.
“Oh, I suppose you will find a bit of it scattered here and there, Daniel. But when all is said and done, these accursed creatures would gladly watch you die if it meant they might live another day. Why do you think so much of humanity has already fled to my side while you were left to fight for the planet’s future with, what? Four make-believe friends and a pathetic, hodgepodge assortment of over-zealous soldiers?”
“This wasn’t the day I came here to see!”
“No,” sneered Abbadon. “But it was the one you needed to see.”
“You sent me here?”
“For your own good, Daniel. After all, we’re cousins.”
Things just kept getting worse.
How could Abbadon’s creative powers override my own? How could he continue to force me to see things I had no desire to see?
I had time-traveled into the past hoping to find his weaknesses.
Instead, I found another one of his strengths: He could redirect my own creative abilities. He could mess with my mind!
I definitely needed more information on this creepy cousin before I went up against him in a death match. I could think of only one place left to find it: our common home.
Alpar Nok.
So while Number 2 stood there disgustingly admiring the Nazis, who would someday be joining Abbadon in the circles of hell, I streaked off into outer space.