WnW 10.7

The car came to a rest on its roof, black streaks painted across its path to the shoulder of the road. The broken glass on the road reflected something green and I looked up to see the newly formed imperfect sphere, like a piece of deep, earthy green seaglass growing distant in the sky. She was getting further away.

I bent down, picking up a discarded deer mask and stroked its soft velvet fur.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Everything felt wrong and I was lost on how to fix it.

Chase coughed and pulled himself through the windshield of the flipped car. The wheels still spun in the air like it was trying to get away. A shard of glass was embedded in Chase’s madly fluttering eyelid. He spat blood onto the brown grass and pushed himself to a sitting position.

I hugged the mask.

“I remember I had a cat,” I said. “It’s not really a priority, but I really wish I could hold him right now.”

Chase pulled out the glass fragment and opened his eye. Splotches of red stained the white. He chuckled and shook his head. 

“How’d you do it, Nick? I’m dying to know.”

“I-” 

I held a hand to my throat. Was there something wrong with how I sounded? It was all so unsettling.

“I’m not Nick.”

“Oh? Chiara, then? Or am I speaking to Nell, somehow implanted into Chiara’s body? No, my hunch is you’re Nick.”

Nell. Her name was enough to start a chain of links, memories clicking together.

“Do you know how to reach her? Nell, I mean? I feel like she’s the only one who can put me back together. Everything feels wrong, like I lost something I shouldn’t have.”

Chase gave me a bemused look. “Are you seriously asking me that? Me, the guy who made all this happen?” 

He tilted his head. “Wait, you don’t remember me?”

“I know of you. I stole that knowledge from your followers.”

“Fascinating.”

Chase leaned his head back and basked in the carmine hue. 

“I’m afraid there’s no stopping it now. She’s completing her Lacuna. It takes an immense amount of energy, taken from the unwilling, but she is wrapped up in her emotion. Without it, the Lacuna wouldn’t form, things would fall apart. I would hazard a guess that she would die if she had to shoulder the burden of providing all that energy herself.”

I felt a pit so deep I expected it to crumple me up and suck me inside.

“Why did you do this to her?”

“You’ll see soon enough. I promised you the world would change. This is the process. I can’t wait to meet whoever is in there,” he said, stretching a hand up to the red planetoid.

“Then why am I here?” I whispered.

“Beats me. You lost. I killed you. Story over. Are you asking for an encore, Nick?”

“That’s not me!” I shouted, frustration ripping free from my control. I felt like I could start screaming and never stop.

“Fine then, Mx. Nobody. No name. Nameless. Nil. Should I call you Nil?”

Nil. Zero. A circle with an aching hole in the middle.

My stomach churned.

“I could eat you,” I said. “Maybe that would make things make sense.”

Chase held his own stomach. “Haha! I like that. My Shape is telling me a lot of things about you right now. Theories about what is happening under the hood. Go on. Become something, eat me and take my thoughts. I’ll make you into something unimaginable.”

I clenched my teeth and blinked back tears. “Shut up.”

Chase just laughed harder. “Now that sounds like Nick. If you were born a Witch, I would’ve used your rage to call down the Lacuna.”

I wanted to hurt him, to smudge him out of existence. But something was holding me back. It came with the waves, an outpouring of tears that was a refusal to do anything but be still and let them flow. 

Nell didn’t want me to hurt people? That made no sense.

I stared up at her, watching the surface of the Lacuna pulse.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

A black shape passed in front of the alien planets. Small and fluttering, I watched it come tumbling down, barely controlled in its flight. A butterfly of dark violet. 

It landed on my cheek and the pain knocked on my heart.

I ate it. Letting the sting travel inward, until it found the deepest place inside me and dispersed into nothing.

A solitary memory sung out, like a single note played on a guitar. 

Moments before a kind of death, this person looked into my eyes and was okay. They were calm. The emotion wasn’t born of helplessness, rather, it was acceptance. Let the pieces fall where they may. It’ll be alright.

Suddenly I became aware of the great hoard of things I was holding with trembling arms, stopping myself from making any wrong moves. What-ifs were paralyzing. What if I forget something important? What if I forget someone important? What if I remember wrong? What if I’m a different person after? What if I don’t like who I become? There’s no going back.

I let the winter air fill my lungs.

And then I let go and everything fell to the floor.

There were still holes. Nick was gone. But I was okay with that, because I remembered the people who he had wanted to be close to.

“Nil, then. Until I find a new name.”

Chase stood up and his eyes reflected a shimmering red light.

“Get ready, Nil. Something wicked this way comes.”

I turned to see three streaking comets of light that were descending towards us. Like ruby droplets they plummeted to earth and they were getting dangerously close. The air rumbled like it was on fire.

BOOM.

On impact, the ground shook and great plumes of dust and debris were flung into the air. Wind whipped past us and I leaned into it, squinting.

Something moved in the haze of dust.

I jerked back in surprise as something small ran over my foot. More shadows darted past, low to the ground. A chittering sound seemed to come from all directions. Another creature scrambled between my feet. It was a rat. More followed, running towards the landing site like they had been summoned. More and more rats came out of hiding, more than I could have guessed were in this bit of countryside.

The wild animals amassed and began to crawl all over each other, forming a frenzied mound. The mound grew until it was a pillar of blackened rats.

Then they fell away and a man stood in their place.

His flesh looked as though it was patched together, with many sections of flesh sliding against each other, perpetually adjusting how they all fit together. Black ooze dripped from the seams. The man had long black hair and a well-maintained beard and moustache. His eyes held many strangely shaped pupils which swirled about the whites like microorganisms moving under a microscope.

The man looked down at his naked body and the rats returned, twisting their bodies together until they formed a dark fur cloak that draped over his shoulders.

Two crimson monsters flanked him, taller than him by several feet. They were glistening red and had grooves running across them like exposed muscle. My eyes were drawn to the massive curved axe head that hung from the end of one of the creature’s limbs. That one had the face of a human, although it was a caricature, eyes popping out and trembling, the mouth was a huge maw of many teeth that stretched diagonally from near one of its eyes to halfway down the neck.

The other creature’s face was a pillar of white stone, seemingly jammed straight into where the neck should begin. The musculature attached itself to the stone with many tiny tendons. Strings ran between the upper arm and the forearm of the monster. They hummed each time the creature moved.

The cloaked man looked at us with utter contempt, like he was looking at the shit on the bottom of his shoe. He opened his mouth and a black sludge burbled within. 

Then words pounded inside of my head.

“Is this a bad time? I hope it is.”

Chase bowed with a mocking flourish. “Not at all. Greetings from us Earth-dwelllers. Who do we have the pleasure of speaking with?”

The man smiled and his teeth were stained like he had been drinking ink. 

“On Earth, I was a Marquess. Now I am the Herald of God.”