Authors: Jeremy Robert Johnson
I forced myself to my feet, pushing off the couch with wet spaghetti arms and waiting for my head to stop swimming. My blanket fell to the ground and I didn’t retrieve it. What was modesty after what I’d just seen? Besides, I couldn’t take another ass-over-teakettle tumble without something finally shattering in my chest.
I stumbled toward the table where I’d been restrained, figuring my clothes had to be close by. Nothing. I leaned against the table to take a series of short, cautious breaths.
“Doyle!”
I turned. Dara approached, her earlier grace turned to panicked swiftness.
“Look down, and do not look up again.”
What? Why…
The heads of the scarabs had returned to life, their jaws pulsing and clamping in the paper-thin skin over my heart. Twin rivulets came from each puncture: thin blood, black jelly.
Dara said, “You should have listened to me. You should have trusted me.”
I started to look up, to tell her I was sorry, that it would never happen again, but she slapped her hand across the top of my head.
“Jesus! Simple fucking instructions. Keep your head down.”
I heard her walk behind me, then the tiny sound of a plastic cap dropping to the floor.
“You looked, right? That was all they needed to tune in, and now you’re transmitting again. Those beetles won’t muddy their signal much longer. We have to get you back to Ms. A. before they know where we are.”
“I could wear a blindfold. Maybe some earplugs, too.”
“Where we’re going we can’t risk any kind of information being sent through.”
She stepped closer, the smell of her still sweet through stress sweat and gun smoke. I could already feel the pressure of that place gnawing at the back of my eyes.
“This is the only way.”
Her hand touched the left side of my neck, pressing in, and I felt goosebumps spread across my skin before she pushed in the needle. Then my vision swirled and I felt her arms tucking in under my shoulders as I dropped.
I returned to the same strange haze I’d escaped a day prior, before Tim’s heart was turned to ashes and I saw a man pulled into nothing.
The first time you go through a mystical cleansing of otherworldly forces and subsequent resurrection into the human world, it feels like a miracle. The second time less so. It feels like a procedure, another thing to endure to survive. My new context gave their chanting a veneer of reason, turned magic scarabs to detox medicine. The biggest difference this time was that I understood enough about the world, and the forces in it, that remaining in the ether seemed preferable.
Alas, consciousness found me and kicked my ass back into the world of the hated, hunted, and haunted.
And, yeah, I was strapped to a table. Again.
C’est la vie.
“Forgive us the blindfold. We’ve decided to increase our security given recent events. I’m sure you understand.”
Ms. A. was near me. I recognized the mix of caring, light condescension, and weariness in her voice. I could smell sandalwood. Maybe a hint of pastrami. I pictured her as some kind of furry, dwarven woman with one cyclopean eye and fingernails like claws. Perhaps she ran a new age bookstore. Perhaps she slept on a bed of writhing snakes or made love to a minotaur each night to reset the heavens. Who knew? It was tough to get a proper assessment given the whole bound and blindfolded thing.
I was happy, though, to realize that they’d at least clothed me after this last procedure. The fabric was thin and papery, maybe some kind of post-surgical garb, but I felt less like a cosmetic company’s test monkey.
I heard Ms. A. move closer, then felt her warm hand lightly caress the right side of my chest.
“Can you please take a deep breath for me?”
I knew I couldn’t, but she’d saved my life twice by my count, and I wasn’t really in a bargaining position, so I gave it my best, braced for the sharp shock, inhaled and…nothing.
“You…you fixed the break. How?”
“Your feelings about the answer to that question would be directly affected by how you feel about having ground sea slug eggs injected into your bone marrow. Would you still like to know?”
I couldn’t tell if she was messing with me, but I remembered the scarabs and decided it was best to shake my head No.
“Fair enough. Questions tend to prompt more questions anyway, and it’s best we keep things moving. I think we can both agree that there have been some unfortunate losses of late.”
I shook my head Yes. She continued.
“These kinds of losses shift a balance which is very important to us and to our mission. Losing Tim, in particular, comes at a great cost. He had a knack for finding those who’ve fallen into the realm, some kind of perception which guided him to the lost. He found you just moments after you’d collapsed, and I have no doubt he saved you. I also have no doubt that he’d do it again, given the chance.
“But he won’t have any more chances, and that saddens and worries me greatly. Which brings us to you, our catalyst. You caused this imbalance—though I have no doubt
their
influence was upon you—and now you must set it right.”
The idea of Right, of anything being right again, almost made me laugh. I couldn’t fix Tim’s death. I couldn’t undo any of the bullshit which had brought me into Ms. A.’s world. And I couldn’t fathom a world where Right mattered when monsters were allowed to exist and our reality sat on the narrowest precipice above an endless void. We were meat to the grinder, fucked beyond unfuckability.
Ms. A. said, “I can see the doubt on your face, but you’ll move past it. You’ll find it’s of no value to you once you have purpose.”
“You want me to replace Tim or something? I don’t have any kind of special perception.”
“No, you could never replace Tim, just as he could never replace you.”
“You want my money?”
I heard a metal folding chair smash against a wall, then footsteps rushing toward me.
“
Fuck your money, Doyle!
Tim’s fucking dead and I sent someone into the realm just to keep us alive and you think we want your goddamned
money
?” Hot, angry breath. Jasmine tea.
Shit. Dara’s been in here the whole time.
Ms. A.’s soothing voice stepped in. “Dara, I must ask you to go. Please. Give him a chance to understand.” Then whispers, a disagreement in which Dara eventually acquiesced.
“Yes, Ms. A. Let me know if you need anything.”
A door closed.
“I’m sorry. She’s grieving.”
“Tim meant a lot to her. I could tell.”
“It’s not only that. She and Tim understood the perils of our occupation, and I would hope they’d been wise enough to mourn each other while they were still alive. I believe she’s suffering because she knows what a terrible thing she did to save your life.”
Please. No.
That place…I felt a twinge in my chest—the scarabs working overtime to purge me of…what?
“Your brow is sweating at the thought of them.”
Her hand was on my chest again, but this time she grabbed the flesh of my belly and gave it a hard, fast twist.
“Aaaaah!”
“Apologies, but I had to clear your head. Every moment you think of them, their path to you becomes clearer. Dara will need to teach you meditations which can be of assistance. I don’t know that you’d survive a third ceremony without your insides melting.”
“But you’re speaking about them now. Aren’t you creating a connection to them?”
“That’s part of the mystery. Speaking of
them
doesn’t have much of an effect, but triggered memories of their realm in specific seem to do something in the visual cortex which allows them to transmit.”
And she tweaked my belly a second time to clear her mention of that place, just to make me feel a little bit more like maybe I’d died during my Hex overdose and slipped into some kind of mystical dipshit purgatory where nobody would ever give me a straight answer and I’d spend eternity strapped to a variety of tables in a miasma of confusion and disbelief.
I shook my head from left to right, an uncontrollable physical manifestation of the shitshow my existence had become. How was this my reality?
“I know this is a difficult adjustment.”
And the award for Understatement of the Year goes to: The Magical Ms. A.!
I said, “I can’t take this shit anymore. I can’t. Please. Let me go. I’ll run far and fast, and I’ll never think about any un-named forces or anything, and I’ll see how long I can go before some bank goon blows my head off and that’ll be just fine.”
I almost expected another slap to come swooping down on my still-tingling cheek. Instead, I felt her hand against my brow, pushing down, like she was shutting off some third eye that wouldn’t stop staring straight into the madness.
Then her voice—stripped of its prior placations and kindly seductions—was in my head. “You will listen to me and you will take this to heart. Let it sink in deep as unassailable truth, and hold it there as you would the last flicker of flame on a black forest night. There is a force which wishes to imbalance and consume our existence. You have perceived the nature of this energy, as much as any human mind can. If we allow this force into our world, it will unravel all order and swallow all light. Time and matter and creation and destruction will all be undone, and there will be no cycles, no new light born, and anything that was ever capable of perceiving its existence will instead know only pain, everlasting.
“And you, with your self-pity and your poison ego, have unwittingly become an agent of this force. You have survived this long because they wanted to use you. Whatever you have revealed in your ridiculous quest for money and revenge is of concern to the Vakhtang and the power they foolishly serve. They knew who you worked for. They wanted you in their sphere of influence and they needed your information. You are only alive because you have served as an instrument for something worse than death.
“So, we’re going to offer you the opportunity to make things right, as much as any one person can.
“You can choose to work for us, to help us discover whatever it is in your files that caused the Vakhtang to take such an interest in you.
“Or, you can choose escape. We know you’d never willingly serve the Vakhtang, but without our protection they might ensnare you again. The business you used to work for also seems determined to end your life. And given how much you know about us and the importance of our mission, we’d be hesitant to see you fall into the wrong hands. Considering all those facts, the only reasonable escape for you is sitting on an end table near the door to this room.”
Her hand lifted from my forehead. She unlatched my restraints and walked across the room. I heard the door open, and then she spoke, her voice returned to its maternal gentility. “And should you choose escape, Mr. Doyle, please be considerate and make certain you’re in the corner with the plastic sheeting.”
Tonight’s very special episode of Point/Counterpoint comes to you live from a crinkled plastic tarp in the corner of a dimly lit room. In a very rare moment of thoughtful introspection and analysis, both Points and Counterpoints will be delivered by Former Banker/Hex Junky & Current Cult Compound Prisoner S.P. Doyle.
Moderating tonight’s event will be the often-silent-but-periodically-explosive-final-say-on-all-matters known as Shotgun.
P: You saw what happened to the man Dara hit with the cell bomb. Why go on in a world where that could happen?
CP: Because that’s the same fate Tim and Dara and Ms. A. saved you from suffering. You owe them. What if you can stop that from happening again? And what’s the point in dying? I doubt your remains would leave this building. People will just think you’ve disappeared. And if the bank, or Delta, or the Vakhtang, or anybody else who wants you dead still thinks you’re alive, what will stop them from finding your mom?
P: How do you know they haven’t already found her?
CP: I don’t. But if you’re alive then maybe there’s a chance to protect her.
P: Right. Instead of “maybes,” let’s talk facts. Nine, possibly ten people are dead, and at least a few of those are my fault. Tim for certain.
CP: Most of those deaths stemmed from occupational hazards. You get paid to murder, don’t act surprised when it’s your turn for a dirt nap. Or if you sell fucked-up drugs and make tweekers show you their junk, sometimes a giant mutant eats your brains. That’s the streets. But Tim?...Yeah. Poor Tim. Could be the only way to reconcile that is to put the screws to the fuckers who killed him. You could take down the bank and expose Delta MedWorks, and then devote the rest of your life to fighting Tim’s fight. But you have to go on.
P: Why?
CP: Because of the worst-case scenario: These wingnuts are telling the truth, and that terrible place you went to wasn’t a nasty O.D. hallucination, but really and verifiably was some kind of realm ruled by an unmerciful destructive force which, due to the absence of anybody giving a damn about fighting it, makes its way into our world and tears everything woefully fucking asunder. And I’m not just talking about all those shitty adults being sucked into the realm, the murderers and rapists and CEO’s. Nope. Everyone. Everything. Baby humans, baby pandas, little kids who still high five and hug and mean it, wise old ladies, monks, turtles. It’s like the whole universe getting cancer. Everything is death. Worse, everything is nothing at all.
P: …
CP:
Nobody
deserves that.
P: But I’m useless.
CP: Stop living in the past. If you’re worried about accomplishing something, walk out of this room right now and tell Ms. A. that you’re ready for duty. Find a way to protect your mom. Take care of Deckard. Make things right with Dara.
P: Dara hates me.
CP: Dara is grieving. Remember how sweet she was before Tim got killed? Remember the way she touched you, the way she smelled, the way she moved?
P: She hates me. I’m useless. Mom’s probably dead.
CP: Hey, buddy, focus here.
P: Tim’s dead. My fault. Dara hates me. Mom’s dead. I ruined everything. Everyone is suffering. It’s all my fault.