It’s an eruption of space-time – and I get about three-feet clear before it blows.
*
I’M NOT EXACTLY sure what follows is real. I’ve been in a lot of crazy situations in my life, not all of them thanks to my adventures as Zephyr, but yeah, mostly, and I think maybe this one takes the cake.
I am not sure what has happened with Twilight. He’s screaming, roaring somewhere close by, but everything for the moment is in merciful darkness. I say merciful because, when the darkness fades, a nightmare is revealed.
To be precise, it’s my nightmare.
My costume is in strips. Shards of exploded stone are embedded in my arms and up my sides. Something wet, scaled and slithery has my arms twisted above my head, but such is my exhaustion and disorientation it’s a while before I’ll even come to question how and why I got here.
The landscape is apocalyptic – and completely phantasmal. Sere cliffs, ashen ground, basalt protuberances like something from a Bollywood retelling of the Odyssey, roiling black stormclouds overhead just waiting the arrival of Thor or Zeus, except this god-awful interstitial state is neither Jotunheim nor Hades nor even truly Hell, but an Abyss of my own making.
As much as I can piece it together later, this dreadful realm that escaped when Twilight’s amulet collapsed in on itself can only be understood through a direct psychic translation. While the netherworldly dimension spills over into our realm, its epicenter now the smoking ruins of Twilight’s mansion, it seems the human senses can only digest and comprehend it via unconscious means. For me, that obviously means dog-headed babies the size of London buses crawling past with lava dribbling from their ends, rose-thorns like botanical spear-heads jutting from every inch of their wrinkled skins, snakes that weep acid, giant bees that more resemble enormous flying porcupines with the heads of rotting eels, darkly intellectual fountains of black ichor leaping from one fissure to the next, collections of bugs and spiders and silverfish that would, like passing clouds, at any moment resemble crabs or octopi or pinwheels or Greco-Roman portraits, enormous stalking creatures roaming the distant countryside with cunts for hands and living skyscrapers for heads, the insides like some baleful gigantic wickerman, lifeforms if not people, beings, somethings, living, alive and trapped inside them and yet really just fleshy components of some even greater machine organism, guided on vast leashes by strangely-robed figures, acolytes with hacksaws for arms and gaping black voids where heads should be within their cowls. And all around this incessant heat. And in the center, a king, or God, with golden skin and enormous horns and a bare chest dappled with beads of sweat like the dew of some alien world or the tears of a hundred thousand penitents.
Twilight. The Antichrist.
I am trembling with fear, so terrified that when I realize I am going to shit myself, there’s no guilt or shame, just an over-riding need to do so silently, to not attract attention, to not allow any of the dreadful things, most importantly the dreadful golden-skinned thing, be drawn my way because of the noise. And it slides down my thighs like the wet mud it so much resembles, and something of that feculent breeze must carry to where a great number of those weird dog-fly-ant-corpse servitors I glimpsed in the realm behind the red portal now gather at the base of the stone cairn on which Twilight stands writhing, as much a column of living fire as a man, because all at once their heads snap in my direction and I realize what they intend. And there’s something in my childhood, just a faded gel slide of a memory of stumbling around in my first pair of jeans with Squeaky McGonagill and Andy Foster behind the old garage on Colonnade Row, a purloined tin can full of one hundred per cent ethanol and the ants dying in their hundreds, dying angrily, Andy with his buck teeth chattering and lenses filling up with steam as he hee-haws how the ants think its water, but the alcohol burns through their gizzards.
As soon as I recognize the memory for what it is I desperately try to disavow it, to unthink it, but deep in my already-loosened bowels I recognize it for what it is: neither a precursor nor memory, neither destined nor avoidable, but an actualization of a deep and inevitable fear.
And the red ants in their thousands boil up out of the ground and around me and are up my legs in seconds and invading my tattered costume, my body, my sanity.
And I think: fuck being quiet.
That’s when the screaming starts, and I keep on screaming pretty much forever, or at least until I wake up.
Zephyr 3.4 “A Curtain Of Black”
FOR ALL INTENTS and purposes I should be dead. The screaming, my abject hollering, has been going on for so long these fucking ants should’ve eaten me a hundred times over. Or at least that’s what it feels like. Perhaps you can appreciate time sort of loses its meaning when you’re being torn apart one tiny pincer-sized bite at a time.
My skull is not much more than a pair of eyes and ears, my tongue nonsensically in place so that I can continue with the black metal vocals, the whole thing’s just an illusory scarp anyway, but as its happening, again and over again, likewise you might also be able to appreciate that this cold, clear logic evades me.
I’m just a screaming skull with chalk white bones, my skeleton and the remains of my central nervous system flayed like deli meats over the calcium-heavy stones, when I hear Seeker’s voice and feel the slightest of touches and I simply open my eyes – imagine opening your eyes when you think your eyes are already wide open, looking down where ants are crawling every which way but loose between your bones.
And what eyes. Words cannot describe. Seeker is a beautiful piece of work, let me tell you, and sorry to be so crass, between that ass that won’t quit and those fantastic boobs that seem to float just as buoyant as that thick dark hair of hers does, suspended interminably on the wind-between-worlds that only she, a creature of this world and the next can feel, and I am humbled and amazed that she would bother rescuing someone as low as I am, someone who spent a handful of years on the same team and never thought of her as much more than a choice hardbody and probably out of my league.
I look into those delicious golden-brown eyes and we both gasp, each with very different reasons. Seeker has always been a wild card, skittish with her sensitivity to the spirit world and the human emotions that come with it. She’s a psychic reservoir and her vulnerability in that moment is just as naked and exposed as my own deep and profound feelings of unworthiness and gratitude at her arrival.
“Zephyr!”
“Seeker, I – I don’t know . . . I don’t know what to say,” I gasp the awful cliché.
“Say nothing,” she replies. “Let me . . . let me help you up.”
I go to move and pain wracks my body, but I’m almost glad to feel it. It has nothing to do with the spectral horrors of death by formication I imagined, and everything to do with the pounding I received courtesy of Twilight and his pet earth demon.
“My God, Zephyr,” the beautiful, glowing lady intones, and there’s every sense in the world that when she invokes the big guy’s name, it’s on a very familiar basis.
This is the same lady, contradiction that she is, who earned a name as the team’s serial spoilsport at after-battle parties, back in the Sentinels’ heyday. Yet now she cares enough to cast her glowing gaze over my shattered ribs and twisted bones, my missing teeth and torn skin, and she neither flinches nor recoils from what she sees, telling me to hold still instead, and then there’s another miracle, her hands up, breasts barely restrained and leaving little to the imagination in that white durex skivvy she wears as the rolling warmth of her power washes over me and I am the pilgrim washed by Christ’s hand as the otherworldly energy pours through me. The feeling is like nothing I could describe except to say if they ever find a chemical substitute then the whole world’s fucked. I feel the bones and sinews knit painlessly together riding a wave of pure sweet warmth. I am mortified, but hopefully alone with the knowledge I also just creamed my leathers, and as a counter-point to this revelation, I know with sudden clarity that I have just experienced what the Christi
ans talk about as the Rapture, though this in inexplicably non-Christian.
I sit up, only to be stilled by Seeker as if I’m still a ruin.
“How did you. . . ?”
“We are no longer on the Earth, but in the Otherrealms where my powers are greater,” she replies.
I wriggle out from beneath her hand and we both stand, me shakily, jism oozing down my leg and disappearing from my awareness as I look around over the nightmare Judgement Day scenario that is still at least residually informed by my psychic perceptions in this weird Erehwon.
The skulls form ziggurats, small and great alike, dotting the uneven lunar landscape upon which timeless obelisks and vast albino mountains impose themselves like the enormous slumbering gods they very well might be, the sense of oppression, suppression, repression radiating through the very air enough to chill my soul, let alone kill the urge to wisecrack.
I’m still tentatively holding Seeker’s nimble hand and glance down while she remains beholden to her inner wonderment, and for all the cosmic seasickness and disorientation that would be enough to befuddle a mortal lifetime, I find myself wondering on what strange and unexpected new journey I have in no way tacitly decided to embark.
“Look,” she says, her lips not moving, and I follow her gaze as directly as if a vast hand turns my jaw.
There across the shattered terrain we can see a writhing column of flame gushing up like an oilfield disaster. Seeker gives my hand a squeeze and lets it go.
“You’ll need to distract him while I get the others,” she says.
“Him?” I ask.
“Twilight. Or the creature he’s become.”
“Others?”
“We’ll need others,” she nods. “Twilight has been overcome by his shadow-self, the part of him he has pledged at some point to become the Being he is.”
“He was . . . we were . . . friends,” I say and feel I lack conviction.
Seeker fortunately doesn’t ask me any curly ones, though I seem to remember she was a reporter in her secret identity, though actually this is just something I gleaned and eventually confirm isn’t true at all. Like me, Loren spends ninety per cent of her time “on”. Just another instance of me not paying attention.
The fact that I own large chunks of responsibility in this disaster stands pregnant between us. She turns her impossibly fine-featured face away, long lashes downcast as the cosmic breeze I can see but cannot feel plays about her in her hair.
“We will need others,” she murmurs. “The Fates are watching us. Someone must die and a new evil be unleashed to replace the old before this evening’s over.”
“Is this what your God says?”
She turns back with the kind of look that bad-hearted people like me reserve for particularly stupid dogs.
“Which God would that be?”
“Um. . . ?” And I gesture with a finger upward.
Seeker lightly tsks.
“Really Zephyr, after all this time, that’s what you think I’m about?”
“Well, you’re like . . . a spiritual warrior, right?”
I’m on shaky ground, quicksand probably, and we both know it.
“A guardian of this world and the next?”
“Maybe that’s as apt as any other description you could steal from a movie,” she says in a low voice. “There are only two worlds, Zephyr: this world, and every other. The rest is just perception.”
Before she can elucidate any further, the spiritual siren gives the merest of laughs, dismissive in its brevity, and launches into the air. By the time I turn to trace her path she’s gone.
Leaving me to refocus on the beacon, the morning star.
*
FOR A WHILE I am content to trudge across the horizon toward him. First, because I am in no haste to do this. Second, because I gather Seeker needs some time to collect a few more suicide bombers. Third, well, even though Seeker’s radiant shower trick has healed me completely, I feel as wrung out as an old sock left to dry stiff and scratchy at the bottom of a washing machine, fragile enough I might just shatter next time someone plays too rough. And playing rough – well let’s just say that between now and day’s end, that’s looking inevitable.
I’m still pondering some of what Seeker said when the earth begins quietly splitting open around me, the shale-heavy ground birthing skeletal, insectoid shapes that quickly fold out into more of the fly-dog-corpse-headed servitors with which I am now familiar and I must accept are almost certainly a construct of my own deepest thoughts, fears and too much H.P. Lovecraft in high school. For the first time in a mile or so I take to the air just to keep out of immediate grief – and unleash a white-hot coruscating death-ray on the closest two wee beasties. As before, they fry quite nicely, and when I drop beside another, I can punch my fingertips through its desiccated thorax and simply throw the bastard a few dozen yards away to where he tumbles and comes apart on the harsh, sharp ruggedness of this hallucinatory landscape.
“What is the point of this?” I scowl aloud.
Two more of the things buzz in at me with their nictitating wings and I flash-fry them both. They hit the ground like week-old roasts, hardly anything but charcoal in them as they crack open on the pale ground. A sixth creature comes lurching forward and I put my fist through its face with a satisfying explosion of dry meat and scales. And I back-hand another one sneaking up and its head comes clean off and the body just wilts away like a time-lapse flower. Further off, there comes another of them just emerging from its stony womb, and I give it a long dose of the old electrics until it falls back, cooked and jittery, and hardly raising a huff, I look around for more.
And more come. Now a dozen of the fucking things smash their way out of the ground, slightly faster, more menacing than the ones before. Their wing bones, angular over their shoulders, end in diseased-looking spear-points. While I virtually disintegrate the first one to come close enough, the next few mob me as a group charge, and after putting my fist through one’s jaw and pushing back the next, it’s only by electrifying my whole body that I get breathing space enough to roll free, shoot down the next two I spy and then whip around, blocking a deadly-enough downward thrust from a wing-point and bodily hurling my assailant over a city block yonder. The last three or four lack cohesion and go down easily, but by then I have more than raised a sweat and when the ground starts trembling beneath me like the adumbration of some city-wide disaster, getting airborne seems to be the only option as the world goes dark with the flying things, it’s a regular old double-page splash with me throwing enough lightning bolts around to make Zeus happy, though it would be hard to explain the weird targets and how they seem more supple, more co-ordinated each time.
So I fly toward Twilight, a curtain of black serrated winged things behind me.
Zephyr 3.5 “Afterlife 101”
IT OCCURS TO me I am once more in my erstwhile colleague’s domain as the sky fills in above me with stone and the wretched flaming column becomes the warm glow of some dungeon-like theatre set. There’s a stone throne large enough to fit a small giant and Twilight stands from it looking every inch the demonic messiah he may very well be.
“You continue to fight it, Zephyr.”
The words come out of his mouth the moment I land heavily on the flagstones before him. I don’t know where the chittering horde of space monkeys goes, but we feel deeply, claustrophobically underground now.
Twilight has no eyeballs. Sheer incandescence ghosts from his orbits as a kind of steam, phosphor burning within him. Gigantic horns stem away from his swollen brow. He still has the mask and the costume. Its grey chest turns imperceptibly black on the way to each of his extremities. The only thing different is the black cloak, which rises behind him now in the form of two enormous dragon’s wings. And it’s not just the eyes, there’s a radiance to his face that makes it kind of hard to look at. I swallow uneasily.
“Minutes ago I was being torn to shreds by carnivorous ants,” I reply.
“Just a
s you expected.”
He grins, well, demonically, and makes his dentist proud.
“Right, so I am making all this up,” I grunt, gesture around and give an unfortunately effete harrumph.
“Not any longer. You’re in my world now.”
“Cute,” I say. “Better the devil you know, hey?”
“That might turn out to be less true than you might’ve thought,” Twilight replies.
“My best friend is the Antichrist. Fuck me. I can see the headline now.”
“Just because I worship the Devil doesn’t make me a bad person.”
He delivers the line in a flat monotone and I have to give it to him, in there somewhere there’s a bone for me if I wanted to take it. I do, but I don’t.
“Afterlife 101 tells me your Satan and mine may not be the same thing,” I reply.
“Very good, Zephyr. You’re learning. There’s hope for you yet.”
“What, to survive?”
“No,” Twilight explains. “Just to learn something, before I send you on to your next life.”
While his response demands something witty, the well’s dry – as dry as my mouth. At this moment I would happily drink a cup of my own pee or possibly someone else’s. Perhaps it’s just as well neither materialize. Despite my complete lack of optimism, I plan to survive this – and this hasn’t exactly been my best day as it stands so far.
“You seem to be suggesting the road ends here,” I say finally.
“I wouldn’t want to disappoint you.”
“Is this more of the ‘creating the world of my expectations’? Because, you know, if so, I’m happy to be disappointed. I’m not really one of these guys who has to be right no matter what.”
A shadow of a smile plays across the face of my friend, at once so familiar and yet so remote, and I’m reminded of yet more lines of spurious logic from the beautiful Seeker, the only one really able to comprehend this place. I’m just fluffing it.
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