“Don’t do it, Vincent!” Mister Hide yelled, more out of greed than genuine concern. “Don’t you realize what he’s going to do?” He stood in shock, his neck craning and his eyes wide. “My god, are you a fool?”
“No,” I answered. “Today, I’m an astronaut.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The machine rose like the metal skeleton of some gigantic mutant, its denuded bones an impractical hodgepodge of nature’s blunders, creating the perfect vehicle for the execution of a singular, if only accidental, function—time travel, of a sort. Imagine the wonders that might haunt the world if only nature indulged some of the more radical—and perhaps unreasonable—creative processes. A thousand mistakes and happenstances could be collected into the same space like so many imprecise pencil scratches, melting into exquisite amalgams of unbidden oddity. But such is not the way of the Deadworld, where routines of trial and error are carefully balanced against the production of a dismal and mindless functionality. Regardless, beyond everything the machine could have been, it was merely a door—leading back to the Great Darkness.
The chair proved to be far less comfortable than I had supposed, but after a few moments I forgot all about the loose springs corkscrewing into my back. I focused my attention on the massive computer screen filling up with all manner of systematic absurdity—laughing caterpillars, dancing skyscrapers, singing tornadoes, that sort of thing. The visual ridiculousness intimated volatility, as if the imagery concealed a great power which could, given sufficient levels of nonsense, disrupt if not destroy the surrounding ordinariness, leaving a candy-coated crater where once only concrete and steel predominated. Despite the instability of it all, I could feel my thoughts being gently untied from the inimitable arrow of time, logic, and causation. This dissolution of bondage allowed my mind to recover its proper dimensions and function, unfurling like a massive sail within a hurricane—flying full, fat, and foolish.
I could hear Dr. Coldglow attempting to guide my mind to certain prescribed psychological signposts along the way to my destination, so as to assure my safe arrival. “This journey you’ve made before, back when rabbit holes and tornado tails were one-way tickets, when wandering and whimsy were solid organs within the body of living mystery. When darkness ruled over the light and the wretched world cast off its many names and incalculable numbers.” I appreciated the good doctor’s well-intentioned guidance—but I knew the way.
My memory became a palpable force, clawing past the years which had gathered between itself and the Darkness—years which hoped, no doubt, to smother illimitable mystery within their potentially infinite ranks. But time proved incapable of overcoming the momentum of my inspired remembrance, and soon I was centered once again upon a world forsworn of light and sensibility—a world that bound itself in a nutshell and counted itself a king of infinite space.
The soft dim of old memories caressed my unwaking mind, gently opening my inner eye to the forgotten past. I could feel portions of my subconscious withdraw from the moment, expecting a violent rejection to the opening of preternaturally sealed memories. Yet my mind was still and calm. I had been delivered into the fleeting few moments preceding the Darkness. Suddenly, with a dangerous and precious curiosity, I remembered.
I was traveling the September Woods when the sky turned the deepest grey, darkening to a near blackness that resembled a congregation of storm clouds or the approach of night. Yet not a single cloud loitered the air, and the sun hung high and visible, now but a muted smudge of struggling light caught behind the strange overcast. One thing was clear—something incredible was taking place.
It was the sun that first quit its station, dismissing its courtiers of cycle and structure beyond the vast courtyards of sky and space, which spilled and tumbled infinite and untended through newborn gardens of lush unnamed nebulae and the glint of foreign stars. From beneath the limitless, vaulted grey sky came the smolder of twilight, blushing upon every horizon, equally infinite but understated, like a child’s first words. It dragged its own shadows behind it, each one licked red and stretched lean and lank. Yet, as I marveled at the rearrangement of the heavens and their ancient habits, my view of the alien sky became obstructed by tree branches heavy with fall leaves and ripe fruit. The forest began closing its massive canopy of tree limbs and vines high above me, forming an endless ceiling of interlocking foliage. The darkness thickened beneath the roof of the woods, but did not deny my ability to see. And while they weren’t needed for any practical purpose, a drowsy orange light seeped from ancient copper lamps that appeared from thin air, swinging and glowing from the high places within the newly built houses of the woods. Perhaps most wonderful of all were the stars and the moon. No longer beholden to the orders of space and time, they frolicked the heights of the great wooded ceiling, still tucked into their infinite distances, but no less visible for their transgressions against the rules of the last world.
Plumes of rust-red leaves lifted from the ground at the behest of a soft wind. They summersaulted across my body, drawing a smile upon my scarred face wider than any I could remember. It was then, when autumn light mixed with summer shadow, that I first heard my reborn sisters speak to me, their voices made from sweets and screams dancing upon the lilting unrest of hungry children. The wind had brought them out of their sleep, and from their place on my hips, I could feel the heat of their thirst as they spoke to me.
What a shrewd dream this is, dear brother. The sun has been taken unawares, and now the good shadows of the world rush to take its place. Whenever has such sweetness been set before us? You must take us up now, into your artist’s hands, and treat us to all the reddest candies you can find. Look at all this lovely darkness. Why, it goes on and on! Who can tell what syrupy goodies it might shelter. Now brother, don’t you dare wake father, lest he eat everything on his own and leave us to gnaw upon the ashes. Please, take us quietly into these lantern woods, walk with us upon the darkest paths. Take us down into the oldest cellars, let the moon stain our teeth with its cold light until they are dimmed with all the sweetest blood you can find us. Oh please, brother! You must let us play here for as long as we can! We just can’t go back to sleep, not after seeing all this! Please, please don’t make us go back to sleep!
They were the most wonderful girls, but they knew my rules—their thirst could only be slaked as a consequence of my art or in defense of its pursuit, not merely for the sake of gluttony and laughter. I loathed to disappoint them, yet just as I was about to deny them, I heard music—a traveling circus! The girls would love that.
As the wind began to deliver more of the festival music, it became clear the melodies were sickly rather than saccharine, like cotton candy that had fallen to the ground, infested with ants. Nearby trees began to wilt and stumble at the sound of the approaching jubilee, their copper lamps twinkling to the ground like disgraced Christmas ornaments. The autumn leaves turned dead and brown, curling in on themselves like burning paper. This darkened world was unapologetic, even brazen, showcasing strangeness with the speed and crudeness of a traveling snake oil salesman.
The circus music grew louder. Again, I felt the scorch of my sisters’ thirst. They stared up at me, vibrating with giddy impatience, barely containing their eagerness for my permission. I sighed and brought them giggling and grinning into this new world, two happy children clutching tickets to the big top. How could I deny them? Children loved the circus.
I saw it first as a dancing moon in the displaced sky, spinning like a giant top. The circus was descending the impossible stretch of night caught beneath the ceiling of the forest. Instantly, the cavernous woods became the backdrop upon which was projected a gigantic magic lantern show, coagulating light and shadow sculptures of lurching freak shows, crooked lines of groaning carnival rides, secreted shadow puppets pressed grotesquely against the taut skin of lurching circus tents.
Then glided down nameless, faceless crowds, whispering out from the deep reces
ses of the surrounding woods. They took their places among the congealing spirits of the spectral circus, gawking and cheering at the solidifying sights.
Once the circus was entirely manifest, I felt myself drawn to the tent with the brightly overstated banner that announced, The Inimitable Mister Gone and His Magic Box from the Great and Vanishing Nowhere. I merged with the surging crowd pouring beneath the banner and into the high-steepled tent, the sounds of blazing autumnal leaves cackling underfoot. I eagerly took my seat among the spectating specters, hoping to see what might pass for magic in this newer, darker world, where wonder walked without worry or consequence.
Within moments, intricate lanterns dimmed where they squatted atop alabaster pillars, all of them semi-circling a stage of polished stoned, now wet with bleeding light. The darkness created by the dying lanterns gathered at the center of the stage, wheeling and tumbling like a galactic spiral, ever growing. A form, tall and gaunt, stepped without the curling dissonance of sight and shadow, its leanness broken only by a ridiculously oversized magician’s hat. Here was Mister Gone, no doubt.
Against a sheet of cosmically embroidered blackness, stars and nebulae turning through endless ink, the magician delivered a magnificent bow to the cries and coos of the audience, his eyes points of strange light against a rippling canvas ceiling. Upon regaining his not insignificant height, he began, “What is magic to the magical, if not the common furnishings of a new world banality? This game of lost causalities must be elevated to a new level of absurdity, to a plane of impossibility that draws cries of incredulity from even the insane. Why, I must illuminate the impossible, without spilling so much as a drop of mystery. A balancing act performed upon the cutting edge of a moonbeam, to be sure. But rest assured, my friends, I know the words and ways of the most calamitous magic, if such an outmoded word supplies the things I speak of with even a speck of specificity.” I belonged to the magician, body and soul. His words were brilliant lights at dusk, zipping just above the trees, setting off radon detectors and casting radioactive shadows. I was in awe.
Mister Gone retreated from the edge of the stage, tracking the bleeding lamplight across the gleaming stone. Darkness rose up behind the conjurer, assuming various geometric confusions until alighting finally upon the shape of a tall box, carved from equal parts shade and wood. The inimitable illusionist entered the vessel, only his glittering eyes visible, ice chips upon a pillow of infinity. The box closed. I was on my feet, my eyes searching but not wanting to see. I was desperate not to comprehend, if only to prove the magician an honest man.
The lanterns died into a universe of cooling pitch—the silence before and after the world. The gloom was unending. I could wait no longer, so I tested the darkness with my hand. My touch cracked open a tall, narrow door—which looked out upon a stage of dull stone, rows of toppled empty seats wrapping around it on both sides. I stepped out of the box, upon a stage, behind the ancient remains of rusted lanterns and beneath the torn and flapping rags of a canvas ceiling. I now stood beneath an open sky, from which tumbled the remains of the day—illuminating the ruin of an ancient circus that stood crooked and ruined amid the sprawl of a dead forest. I clapped until my hands stung. Here was the Great and Vanishing Nowhere.
I was thrilled to think of this new world as a ripped hole in the universe, a fracture in the mechanism of solidity, allowing for passage into everywhere and perhaps nowhere all at once. I might very well have been strolling through an inversion of a perversion of a petrification of dream. And despite the perhaps deliberate attempt at melancholy, I found the aesthetics of the Vanishing Nowhere to be likeably bittersweet, a blackened toy in the basement of the universe.
The dead forest gradually vanished into a field of diseased corn. There was no sun that I could see, save for a few fractured remnants of daytime, scattered here and there throughout the mostly dark and clouded sky. Occasionally, I glimpsed the passing of orange and gray balloons drifting high overhead. Out of idle curiosity, I decided to backtrack their course. Perhaps I would stumble upon fresh wonders to behold.
The landscape slowly sank into a sea of widening shadows, and a single beam of dimming daylight became a mere vertical horizon in the vanishing distance. I noticed that in areas of most concentrated shadow, I could feel a slight bit of resistance to my movement—a pleasant otherworldly physics, that.
The wind blew just right, bending the stalks of a nearby wheat field sufficiently downward, and I saw a man standing midway into the swept-back turf, behind what looked like a carnival booth festooned with orange and grey balloons. He appeared to be holding one out for me. Having found the source of the high-flying oddities, I made my way over to what I soon realized was a poorly made-up clown.
The wind intensified and began gusting from all directions. Quickly, I found myself in the stormed-tossed waves of a grain field, and no less steady for the solid ground beneath me, as it seemed to be deliberately quaking and twisting, trying to steal me from my feet. I was lashed by wind-whipped stalks and buffeted by monsoon-strength squalls. Even some of the pockets of denser shadow began to uproot and tumble towards me. The gelatinous patches struck me and spread like clots of spiderwebbing, entangling me in a sticky fabric of tangible darkness.
From close beside my ear, I heard my father roaring into the wind for me to take him up. I did just that, raising him high into the twisting, perpetual dusk. I swung him without reserve or design, allowing my benefactor’s hunger to deliver him where he wished to go. The satisfying crunch of failing bone occurred in tandem with a brief interruption to my father’s momentum. The wind died immediately, and my rageful ancestor lay on the other side of what was once a whole clown, now only a dead thing that lay in two pieces among the flitting stalks and pooling shadows, a gray balloon still clutched in its hand. Fascinatingly, the clown’s innards consisted of little more than a fragile scaffolding of cartilaginous-looking plant matter and a smattering of transposed decaying human parts—finishing touches perhaps, to make the whole thing marginally believable. As I drew closer to the false clown, I observed the multitude of corpses scattered all around its booth of drab inflatables. The bodies were honeycombed with feasting roots—even the soil seemed to be leeching blood directly from the pores of the reposed husks.
I had just turned to leave the killing field to its strange business, when I heard the gentle sound of soil being slowly displaced. Something in the likeness of a towheaded little girl was being methodically pushed up through the topsoil, her dirty hair barely catching the honeyed glimmer from the remaining fragments of daylight. At the very moment the thing’s eyes opened, it spoke in the sweetest voice, pleading, “Please help me. I’m lost and I can’t find my mommy.”
Just then, the wind picked up again and the patches of thickened shadow stirred. I patted the clever decoy upon its overly soft head, eliciting a wet and brittle sound. Quickly departing the patch of monstrous earth and its sugared lure, I couldn’t help but wish it luck securing its next meal. Indeed, the lovely Dorothy was wrong—there was truly no place like Nowhere.
At this point I’d theorized the Great and Vanishing Nowhere as a badly damaged dream—whose, I had no clue— forsaken to the hungers of time and purpose, just a body anchored in brambles, barely resisting the pull of surging currents. Nonetheless, I began to see a unity despite its sundered parts, the fusion of subjects enabled by the monochrome of an ancient photograph, a web of infinite connection. A theme, quite possibly. Or perhaps that’s just the way it appeared to a mind too long denied the fresh air of a proper dream. Either way, the place was entirely delightful.
The Nowhere had passed the torch of light to another and equally unconventional form of illumination. Gone was the freestanding shaft of broken daylight—in its stead, a brilliant rain, liquescent fireflies falling like tiny comets from an uncertain sky. I cursed myself for trying to deduce its nature and function, realizing I’d been too well fed upon the doldrums of solid worlds. I lifted m
y face into the sky’s offering, allowing the rivulets of light passage into the deep scars of my face, filling my smile with flowing fire. I summoned forth my sisters, their own smiles set ablaze. The journey was its own destination—another unity, another mystery.
I soon glimpsed a structure in the distance, a huge house soaring unstoppable against the falling sky. Its uppermost portions were visible despite their impossible height, slipping the limitations of ordinary spectacle. Fantastically, this was not only a house of grand design, but an aggregation of dilapidated tenement buildings, a beautifully endless complex of apartments.
As I approached the spiraling marvel, I alighted upon the cracked stone of a narrow walkway. The path led into and around a forest of crooked property markers, broken birdbaths, and close-packed hordes of tacky lawn ornaments. At last, I stood before the building, beneath a second rain—cartwheeling paint chips, cast off from the curdling exterior of the towering hovel. The wind narrowed to a whisper, allowing a single, contrasting note of air to sound out the appropriate awesomeness of the moment. In its turn, stepping out from behind the thin curtain of sound, came the relentless creaking of the rambling monolith, the unsteady balance of countless buildings standing atop each other’s rickety shoulders. I drew as close to the structure as I could without losing sight of its swaying top, enjoying how it conducted my vision into the boundless sky, my sight pulled into forever. Looking back over the path I’d followed to arrive at such a marvel, I watched as the ghost of the glowing rain rose again as a softly radiant mist, threatening shapes wandering its dimly visible interior. It was only this specter of violence that at last caused my father to stir from his rest. Yet I was in no mood for the distraction of bloodshed—the spire called.
The place admitted me without resistance, the large door atop a teetering, rotting porch swinging open upon barely solid moorings. The heady odor of melancholy tumbled beyond the threshold. The wood of the lobby was so soft, it felt like carpeting beneath my footsteps. The surrounding walls wore their water damage like museum art, each tone of orange and brown expertly laid into their death and the consequent birth of mold. Failing pillars of counterfeit alabaster barely hefted the cathedral ceiling above my head. They had failed altogether in numerous places, spilling the guts of the second story across the fungal floor. The discount simulacrum of a Grecian lobby contrasted wonderfully the unapologetic cheapness of the succeeding rooms, each more wonderfully warped than the previous. The barely perceptible lights were like the grey stars of some forgotten, dilated sky, hanging limply atop clouds of meandering dust. Faint sounds of movement, television game shows, and domestic disputes dripped down from beyond dense barriers of water-swollen support beams and mold-fattened insulation. Every inch the miserable glory of abandoned things, the idols of truest depression, the art of despair—all of it squeezed into a single, infinite dung-hole.
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