Authors: Harry Manners
Shaking, Jack returned his gaze to the tree. It wasn’t black, he noticed, nor obsidian, or even of the cavern’s crystal. It was just
not
, a tree-shaped hole in space. Yet when he put out his hands, braced for pain or death or worse, his palms touched cold, rough bark.
I have no damn idea what I’m doing…
… yet his body and mind operated independent of him. His arms stiffened to iron rods as current thrust into his body, and he became aware of another presence, something more than random chaotic power, something thinking, alive, distinctly female. Far more ancient than the squabbling demigods behind him; elemental, and angry, and afraid.
Something unrolled him laying him out flat and scrutinising him; some titanic, irresistible hand. At the same time his field of view expanded, the floor falling away and the crystal walls shooting back, plucking him from mere corporeality and lifting him to something else.
Somewhere far away, music played, ever shifting, soft and scratchy.
“What is this?” He no longer knew if he spoke aloud or in his mind—whether he still had a mouth, or indeed, a mind. He no longer cared.
The answer came from the deep feminine voice. “You should not be here.”
“No. No I shouldn’t. I should be at home nursing a hangover.”
A brief pause. “You should not be here.”
Jack let the words come, not resisting, just speaking, trusting. “I had to. You’re in danger.”
“I cannot be harmed.”
“But you can be used, can’t you?”
Silence.
Jack tried to look around, but there was nowhere to see, an infinite mash up of many places, what seemed like dozens of places all over the world. Together, they bent into a hyper-dimensional avatar of the tree itself. But as to where he, himself, stood… to think of it suddenly made no sense.
I’m nowhere.
“Everywhere is somewhere,” the voice answered.
A ringing echo punctured the din of eternal silence, that of two warring creatures. At a great distance, yet only feet away. Barry cried out, the naked pained sound of a brute shocked to feel true pain, like a grizzly bear stuck with a spear. Harper’s echoing laugh followed, high pitched and jeering.
Barry’s time was running out.
“He’s coming. Harper,” Jack said. “You know what he is, don’t you? What he wants?”
“I see everything. That is my purpose.”
“Help me stop him.”
“I can do nothing.”
“Then help me help you.”
“I can do nothing.”
“Then what good are you?” he yelled.
Silence.
Jack took a steadying breath, trying not to wonder if it was air he breathed, or nothingness. “The Web? All Where? Kaard? You know those words?”
The silence almost held, then the voice uttered, “Yes.”
“If that thing gets here, it’s all over, isn’t it?”
“The beginning of the end of a great age.”
For the first time Jack caught a glimmer of emotion in the voice, a fear as strong as that he had felt when he had put his hands on the bark. “You have to let me help you. Help me stop him.”
“I do not see you.”
“I’m here.”
“I do not see you.”
Jack tried to tear at his hair, but there was no hair to be gripped, nor hands with which to grip. Not here. “I don’t have time for riddles!”
The music played still, shifting away from formlessness toward an amalgamation of song lyrics and notes he recognised, dredging up long forgotten memories.
A hopelessness stole over him and he fell away from that voice, turning instead to images appearing all around him. His apartment, empty and bleak in semi darkness, the curtain pulled. All his things, his DVDs and books and video games. His awful mess of unwashed cups and dishes, opened packets of chips strewn on the floor.
Yesterday it had meant everything, his sanctuary from the world, where he had been able to find some peace. But now he saw it for what it was: empty and uncared for, the sad hovel of an owner desperate to escape it. Because that was the truth: he hadn’t ever really lived here, he had lived inside books, crawling into the pages to reach the part of himself that all this madness had finally released.
I don’t care about this place... This isn’t my home.
Had he ever really had a home?
Music again, this time distinct. The punk rock of his youth, then the coarse head-nodding metal of his emo years.
The picture changed, shifting, travelling. Passing a brick wall where a strange tea room had so briefly stood, the cordoned off street where Harper massacred the police. Faces watching, people who might have seen what had happened but had now forgotten, or perhaps never quite understood what they saw. The insanity of the last few days would forever be a smudge in the narrative of their lives, protecting them from the absurdity of something better off lost.
If they lived. If Jack didn’t fail.
Travelling again. More music:
Strauss, Verdi, Chopin
: performances of his university philharmonic. Down into the subway to Kat, crouched in a huddle of shattered tiles and plaster, her hair turned white with dust and her cheek grazed by a stray bullet. Behind her, Gant lay in a bloody pile, and against the far wall, Joblonsky breathed in great heaves, staring wide-eyed at a sucking chest wound.
Kat fired bursts around the corner, holding shadowed forms pinned down on the stairwell. Harper’s people. Converts in the employ of his vast empire. Street merchants, clerks, bankers. Hiding in plain sight.
Tears dripped from Kat’s nose, but she didn’t sob. Her teeth gritted and her eyes like twin pyres in the subway gloom, she held the station.
Jack reached out to her, ignoring the fact he had no arms here, needing to let her know that he saw her, that he was almost there. But as he did so he was whisked away, his sight expanding once more, multi-layered and elevated far above the ground.
It was like looking at all the feeds back at Kat’s town house all at once. The Beacons lay spread out before him, along with subtly concealed complexes built into mountainsides and beneath cities. The vaults belched slivers of black smoke, spilling from ragged tears in the ground nearby.
Kat’s people had done their work. The vaults were breached.
The music shifted once more: Arabic strings, eerie and smeared. The memory of buskers’ tunes from all the nights he had sat drunk on the last train home.
Around the Beacons’ bases, men and women stood in wide circles, hands linked together, their eyes closed. What had Harper told them? That they would be saved when the End came?
The End... It’s really here. One bad step, and I lose. We all lose. It all goes away.
“See me, you have to see me!”
Barry. Fighting for his world, for fallen Highcourt, for All Where. As Jack looked upon him, Barry felt Jack watching. It showed on his face, a flicker in his brow. Skidding back from Harper’s blows, he looked right at Jack, into him.
The defensive edge to his stance slackened in that moment, as though some revelation had come over him. He stood straighter, smiling.
It’s on you, Jacky Boy.
Barry, Kaard, the Scot-but-not, smiled right until Harper’s clawed arm sank through the oxblood leather over his back, and plunged into his torso. Barry’s eyes bulged in their sockets, his mouth falling open in a blank gape. A terrible tearing sound came from inside him and he jerked as Harper skipped almost daintily up to stand at his back, canines working in a glistening grin.
“No!” Jack struggled to get back, to leave this non place and return. Screw the universe.
But it was like trying to move an amputated arm. He was trapped. He could only watch.
Harper whispered in Barry’s ear, something so quiet Jack knew he shouldn’t have been able to hear. But he heard very well. “Did you tell the boy what you tell them all? That we don’t die? That we live forever?”
Another minute tug, and a tiny gurgle whistled from Barry’s throat.
“I bet they all believed you, even this one. He’s a bright spark. Power like that will come in handy. I’ll enjoy taking him apart piece by piece.” Harper peered over Barry’s shoulder to look Jack in the eye. Black liquid dribbled from Barry’s lips. Harper smiled. “We live forever, huh? Let’s see what happens to an
immortal
when you take away his heart.”
With a ruthless lunge, Harper tore his arm back, coming out glistening red and black. Barry fell straight forward, a lifeless mass, slamming full length upon the crystal floor.
Jack felt him go. The last transmission he got from Barry almost destroyed him.
I’m afraid.
Everything faded, a grey curtain cascading down from the heavens. Barry’s prone body, lying in a pool of spreading black tar on the crystal ground, sank into a grim fuzzy blankness.
It took everything Jack had to resist, and no small part wanted to surrender and go to that blissful nothing.
But Barry’s last thought refused to fade like the rest, echoing down along with him.
I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m afraid.
Each iteration brought a gnawing in Jack’s heart ever more bitter, and with it, the realisation that he was gone. The Scot-but-not, his captor, his nuisance, his comrade and protector, was gone.
Jack alone remained against the monster.
“No!” he grated, pulling himself back. Fear threatened to overwhelm him if he delayed, but he would not, could not. With an internal bellow he threw everything he had into the darkness.
See me. See me. SEE ME!
Some lumbering attention high above his perception shifted, a vast eye turning on him.
The music changed again. Familiar now, familiar enough to pull cords in his chest. Billie Holiday,
My Man
, so smooth and sweet that his mother appeared before him as though she had stepped from the ether in flesh and blood. This was her song, had always been her song. She had danced to this while doing the housework when Jack had been a young boy—young enough that his memory’s perspective was only two feet off the ground.
The great eye blinked, watching. Jack felt it move over him, inside him, pulling out strings of memory and reading him like a book. All the while the music changed.
Since the madness had started, power had leaked from some hidden place within. By the time he hit the cavern floor, he could
do
things, things even Barry could not. Yet right now, pinned in place like an insect under a collector’s magnifying glass, he had never felt so powerless.
No, that’s a lie
, he thought. He had felt like this, once. Another memory popped into his head. The summer of ’95, the year they moved to Minnesota. His first week at school had been hell, a maelstrom of taunting gaggles of kids, Chinese burns, and taking soccer balls to the head.
“Don’t give them anything to use,” his father had said from behind the morning newspaper. “Don’t stand out. Just fit in for once, won’t you, Jack? Try, at least, for your old man? Seeing you get your ass handed to you every week is giving me an ulcer.”
He had taken a great slurp of black coffee and the end of that little speech. Jack had sat across from him, nibbling his toast, nursing grazes from his latest pounding at the hands of Harry Bentmann’s gang. He remembered every detail, because the music now trickling from the ether was the very same record that had been playing on the radio. Pink Floyd’s
Another Brick in the Wall.
Jack wondered if his father ever got the irony.
His mother stood at the counter, frying eggs. She had looked at him with a softness in her eyes he had never seen before or since, a moment when perhaps she showed a hidden part of herself underneath, wanting more for him. Her lips parted, then closed.
She never said anything.
Voices in the void. The whispers that had bound Harper, now speaking as one, screaming song titles seeded throughout his life:
Blue Moon, Paradise City, I’m Alive, Suspicious Minds, Summertime!
Images came fast, rolling together like a spliced reel of film. Running from Harry and his gang, shielding a copy of
Fahrenheit 451
from the eggs they pelted at him. All those nights hiding under the covers in a cloud of dragons and sorcery, while his friends tried for second base. Leaving Minnesota behind, stepping on the Greyhound to head out East.
See me!
he screamed into the dark.
One Day I’ll Fly Away, I’m a Believer, I Will Survive!
All his life, it had been wrong. But now it was right.
A life spent living for one moment. And that moment was now.
He stared down a deep dark well at a small boy. Himself. His inner, real self, the over-imaginative little kid he had been in ’95, who he had so long tried to forget. In his palm, little Jack held a bob on a string, swinging back and forth. Hanging from the pendulum, a tiny black spider, spinning a delicate, intricate web.
SEE ME!
Swirling, tumbling, the whispers became a wail, stretched cackling undulating between pinhole squeak and leonine roar. “Hit the road, Jack
—HAPPY JACK—Jack Daniels, if you please!—
JUMPIN’ JACK FLASH!
”
With a deafening
whump
, silence exploded into the void. Then, the deep voice spoke a final time. “I see you, Jack Shannon.”
A tug yanked at his spine, pulling him in a direction that human beings could not be pulled. Elation filled him.
I’ve done it!
Then another grip, cold and crushing, upon his wrist. Agony lanced up into his chest. Bones snapped. Then, Harper’s voice in his ear. “Yes, you have. Congratulations. Now let’s go for a ride together.”
A scream kicked up all around him, and Jack knew it was the tree. He had come so close, so very close. But things had just gone very, very wrong.
Nononononono!
But it was too late. Black and white exploded from the space between spaces, and Jack was torn, body and mind, somewhere altogether, elsewhere.
Reality itself fractured and Jack Shannon flew, through space beyond spaces. Bent through impossible angles and cast across a gulf that could not be traversed by any mortal in a million years, he flew. His screams warped, his body tortured by deathly cold, he fought a viscous struggle with the demon that had seized his arm.