Felix gives up and looks himself in the eyes for the first time in almost fifteen years. He blinks hard from the sheer oddness of it. He’s had to imagine what he looks like for over half of his life and seeing the reality now–
Then it starts as pinpricks of impossible black in his pupils. It’s stronger in his brown eye but not by much.
Felix starts breathing hard and the harder he breathes, the more he freaks out and the more he freaks out, the larger the black pulsing gets. He has fractal shark eyes now and his face starts to melt and break apart and go all prism-cutout on him. In the name of fun and/or new experience, Felix has ingested Acid, DMT, Psilocybin, Mescaline, Molly, Special-K, PCP, and even Salvia at least once depending and this is weirder and harder than any of them in its own way.
It’s like Felix’s body, head, and face are connected abstractly to his emotions. There’s no body fry but the drugs already in his system are being amplified by the intense weirdness to make up for that and the effect of the whirling liquid madness has its own physical effects which are all but ineffable. It fuses in a kind of synesthesia with the visuals into something like an unseen cosmic butcher touching and showing you your prime cuts with lasers, clear hyper-prismic blades, and a sonic see-through acid-thrower. There’s a mixture of dissociation and perception-altering hallucination but the difference is it seems to actually be happening in front of him and the weirdness comes from his mind actually grasping that it’s real… or a layer of the reality, more like. He can see through his new shark eyes but his peripheral vision is all shifting layered fractal symbols he doesn’t recognize.
Felix tears his eyes away from the mirror and looks at Siobhán and her chaos-surrounded, lens-covered left eye.
Siobhán nestles back into her bucket seat and says, “Trippy, yeah? You get almost used to it a few decades in. It can even be fun sometimes if you’re bored and have a mirror around.” She cracks her neck and moans as she massages her temples.
Felix begs, “What does it mean?” and his voice echoes around inside the Bentley and his head.
Siobhán produces the crimson beedi from behind her ear and lights it with a snap of her fingers this time. Felix is far too gone to care how it was still in place all this time and just watches her drag off it then let out a huge cloud and a sigh.
“You’re one of us,” she answers.
“What are we then?”
She considers her words more than usual before saying, “Your… lovely, not the least bit homicidal Audrey and I are one thing, you’re something close but I don’t know how close, and I’m still trying to figure out what your Stretch X-Ray-lookin’ friend is. I say us ‘cause we’re all seeds spread by the machine.”
“STOP IT! JUST TELL ME WHAT THIS MEANS!”
Siobhán cringes from Felix’s yelling and what he realizes is his own shrill and booming bizarro-voice.
She says, “Okay, but keep that shit down, man.” She breathes in and sighs, then says, “We’re ‘unstuck’, as Wahrheit put it with surprising accuracy. I am curious where he gets all that information.
You and I are from Cork originally but I guess that’s not proper literal and not at all true, get me? Not sure myself. You look so much like him, other than that blue eye.
The only fact I can give you is that less than fifty years from now, our version of this place gets lit up bad. It starts over water and other resources then religion and jingoist nonsense comes back with a vengeance to take away any progress we had made since now. My favorite part is that we were days… days away from completing the orbital and ground defense mesh when the fuse was lit.
It’s getting weirder for me the closer it gets to then ‘cause it’s looking more and more like the world of our childhood and this city as it was… and will be then. It’s a little different here, but mostly the same.”
Felix is glitching on his cutout-riddled hands and the strong echo and reverberation of his breathing and he only caught a bit of that, but it was enough to ask, “But you’re that… What was it? ‘Taste raw yolk’?”
“Thae’st Ra’yho.”
“Yeah, and you’re their princess,” Felix says quietly to lessen the echo.
“It’s even more religious than that, sadly. It’s my own fault in a way. That’s what I am now and what I’ve been for a while… but I’ve been so many things.”
Her voice is different on the last part. Distant. Sad. Felix looks over at her through his fractal-pulse eyes and her distortion is slowly shuddering more than fracturing.
She chokes up sporadically as she continues, “I wasn’t even sure until I saw you with that ‘Grieves’ thing. I can’t imagine what it’s been like for him, considering what I’ve endured. But when you’re close to him, I can see it clearer.
”I’m not the same woman anymore. It’s been so long. I’ve done so many things because I thought–“ she has to stop for a moment. Why does this busted car feel like a confessional all of a sudden?
”I’ve seen so much darkness, pain, and cold brutality. I tried to be good but I caused my share too, if I’m being honest. I’ve stolen and tortured and murdered and… enjoyed it, God help me whatever you may be.
I’ve f-fucked so many people. But what’s worse is I’ve loved others too. Deeply. I won’t apologize for that because you were gone. And I don’t expect forgiveness ‘cause I don’t deserve or want it. I won’t betray the memory of those others as I betrayed you, unknowing as that was.“
Felix can just make out mascara tears sliding down her lightly freckled cheeks through the pulsing weirdness.
”But I’ve seen so much beauty too, each time like a bright, warm oasis in the dark. And part of me always wanted to share those moments with you, no matter what man or woman I loved at the time. Now I don’t know how to feel.“
She cries openly for a stretch before Felix asks, ”Who are you talking to?“
”My husband, Ciarán. From another life I guess you could say. Many lives ago now. I don’t know how but you’re him.“
”No, I’m not.“
Felix looks back at his shark eyes in the mirror and a glowing section of bone and sinew he can see through a prism cutout in his right hand that’s holding it.
”It’s you. You’re in this boy somehow, but it’s you, Ciarán.“
”My name is Felix Brewer.“
”Your name is Ciarán Aodhan O’Shea. We were born in Cork City, County Cork and were lifelong friends, then lovers. I taught you Braille so you could write me emails on a special keyboard when you were blinded by low altitude nuke and in the hospital then rehab for a while. Eventually, they gave you new eyes and you studied physics in school.“
”None of that’s true.“
”Your science prowess and my own talents got us selected along with almost five thousand others to get in that horrible machine and come back here to stop our lovely mushroom holocaust from happening again. These people’s worst nightmares became our reality.
They sent us back selfishly to warn these idiots not to make the same mistakes so that our layer would be fixed. But, smart as they were, they didn’t account for parallels. A nightmare it will stay.“
”BULLSHIT!“ Felix’s distortions flare and the layered fractals fill his vision until he breathes through his anger and confusion. ”If we made it here, why don’t I remember any of this? Why did I grow up in this time?“
”Because you didn’t make it. I don’t know what you are.“
Felix says, ”I don’t believe you. None of that is possible. How did this machine work then, huh?“
”I don’t know how the machine worked and if I ever did, I can’t remember. But it did work and phase one was a success, if you factor in the unpublished estimated survival rate. But after what happened to you, I just didn’t care anymore.
“I’ve been drifting since then. Longer than you can comprehend. Then after all this time not caring, I find you again at a stupid party. I just crashed it to find some stranger to fuck into a coma to get over my
silly, young Violetta. Let the healing begin, so to speak. Imagine my surprise finding you there.”
She curls her fingers and flicks the last of the beedi out through the hole in the windshield where the mirror used to be and watches it slow down abruptly as it hits the sludge of proper time a few feet from the car.
Then she looks at Felix. He’s staring at the mirror and looking around once in a while but it’s like she’s not even there.
Felix is entranced by his warping image in the mirror and organic see-through mercury rolling down through his hands and arms. He didn’t hear anything Siobhán said after “phase one”.
“What’s wrong with you?” Siobhán asks.
Quietly, Felix answers, “I am crazy. You’re a delusion and I’m crazy. I guess they’re wrong about knowing when you are…”
“No, you’re perfectly sane.”
“Blah, blah, delusion, blah. I’m not listening. You aren’t real,” Felix whispers. He whispers more words but those are more to himself and almost inaudible. His eyes roll back and forth between his hands and the mirror and the raining clear molasses pelting the hill outside the car.
Siobhán starts saying, “Felix, stop being stupid and–” but Felix starts singing a song to himself to drown out her voice so she cuts herself off. It’s something about hoping things are ‘alright’? I’ve heard it before but I can’t place it. He’s singing it like a mantra.
Felix’s singing seems to backfire because he starts tripping on his own voice again but doesn’t stop or get quieter this time. He just repeats the same line, changing his tone and pitch and glitching on the intense, layered reverberations.
Siobhán just watches him for a while before realizing what she has to do.
“This was too much for you. I’m sorry I hit you with so much at once. I… I just couldn’t hold it back any more. Maybe in a way you’re right. Maybe you aren’t him exactly.”
She looks out through the shattered windows for signs of activity and sees none.
“It definitely seems like they’re more after me, at least from my achin’ head and body. If you’re still alive, your girl couldn’t have been too sore at you.”
She unlatches her safety belt, reaches toward Felix’s chest, and pulls his Warp sphere off.
Felix is instantly pulled into the sludge and his shark eyes take several seconds to blink once and his mouth barely changes shape while forming the words to his mantra.
She kisses him on the right temple and holds there for a long moment before saying, “I’ll see you later, ah chuisle. I promise you that.”
It takes Felix a moment to realize he’s back in normal time but the fast-pouring rain is his first clue. It’s falling down into the car through the holes in the windshield and bursting explosively against the vague pink and black surfaces inside the Bentley, which is vibrating and blurry all around Felix. There’s something in his right peripheral vision.
A second later, the car shudders into normal speed and the passenger door is open.
Siobhán is gone.
If she was there at all.
Felix looks back down at the mirror in his hands. His warping image starts to pull him in again but this time he isn’t having any of it and flings it at the passenger side windshield. When it connects, a bit less than half the safety glass that was held in place precariously collapses and showers onto the passenger seat, followed by the rain.
But if this isn’t real, how did I get here?
He opens the driver door and starts to crawl out, nursing his hurt leg. His right foot connects with something heavy but moveable on the floor of the car.
The Mayor.
Crazy or not, better take it in case there be more monsters about.
Felix picks up his pistol and gingerly pulls himself out of the car, sliding backwards out onto the wet grass and brush. He scans the area through the haze of pain.
Down the hill a ways there’s a path of some kind.
Up the hill the heads of tourists and their umbrellas and cameras are visible once in a while from the scenic view park on top but they are distracted by that scenic view.
Don’t know where that path down there leads. I could die getting lost if there’s bleeding or something.
Okay then…
Felix rolls onto this stomach and starts up the hill, going between a heavy limped walk/crawl and sliding up on his stomach and chest. He makes it about a third of the way up but fatigue and a growing nausea, dizziness, and weird chest pains halt his progress. It feels like he’s sweating a lot too but the rain confuses that.
He decides a rest would do him some good and he rolls onto his back, letting the rain pelt him all over. It keeps him with it, he decides. The fractal layers are still at the edges of his vision but after some un-related blurring and light-headedness clear, he can see the bridge and almost the whole city.
The rain and fog make the view a little dim, but he can definitely see a large cloud of the green gas peeking between and even above some of the buildings all around downtown. He looks over at the Golden Gate Bridge and the cars zooming north and south through the still-growing clouds of the gas coming from and clinging to it. A few low-cruising black chunks of whatevertheyare pass through the air between the bridge towers and Felix is pretty sure they subtly disturbed the gas cloud where they passed through.
If I didn’t know the purpose of that gas, these might be almost beautiful sights.
Watching the chunks slowly rotate in their different revolutions is calming. Felix’s eyelids start to droop and he almost gives himself over to his overwhelming exhaustion. Felix feels something near him and forces his heavy head back to look up the hill from his lying position.
Something impossi-black is watching me from up the hill.
I don’t suppose that’s a good thing.
Felix strains to aim the Mayor up the hill but the thing disappears. He blinks a couple times and looks around. The thing looms at his feet. Without thinking, Felix swings his pistol down to fire at the dark figure. The Mayor is much heavier to his weakened arm and almost smacks his left leg as it passes his intended firing spot. He uses everything he has left to raise it back up and fire–
But as the Mayor’s hammer comes down, the pistol collapses in on itself like an imploding, revolver-shaped Rubik’s Cube. Felix looks at his empty hand in disbelief then at the figure which he now sees, from its shimmering outline and the absolute dark of its vague human form, is a ‘Ref.’
The next part starts silently in the distance as a light from the southern horizon. As it approaches, it swallows the south bay, the city, and the bay into a stratosphere-high tsunami of blinding liquid light, then the bridge implodes into complex, abstract shapes and his vision goes the way of the Mayor, everything left in sight collapsing into itself like fractalized 120-cell planes.
34
Felix feels his weight shift as the surface of the hill becomes flat ground.
As the fractal mesh dissipates and his vision returns, he can see that he is somewhere quite foreign and bordering on alien.
Felix is in a desert at the base of a valley between large dunes. The sand is fine and grey with specks of black. Almost too fine and it seems to come apart as he rubs a handful.
He stands and looks around.
The white cat with the obsidian eyes is poised atop the big dune on his right staring down at him. It patters away out of sight. His leg doesn’t hurt anymore so he starts up the dune after it. It’s slow going but he reaches the top and surveys the area.
The sky is huge and black. Not like night. Like an overcast sky of inky black thunderheads and storm clouds. Rays of swirling, kaleidoscopic light break through the clouds sporadically only to be swallowed up again. There’s thunder in the distance and lightning cracks but it’s silhouette-black like the arcs across the Alptraum flying platform’s turret so the bolts are hard to make out at first amidst the varied shades of black and dark grey in the sky.
Felix can’t see the cat anywhere.
Behind him, the dunes stretch to the horizon like an ocean of frothy grey waves. Ahead, the dunes get smaller and he sees red past the lowest one. It looks like a red salt flat.
“Sure, why not? I’ve got nowhere else to be today.”
Felix slide-hikes down his dune and up the next and continues onward like that until he’s almost down to the flat.
All across the flat in the distance on to the horizon there are what look like oil fires burning but the flames at the base of the diagonally leaning plumes of deep black smoke are brilliant white.
As he reaches the flat and takes his first steps across, Felix’s feet splash gently into six inches of red fluid. The liquid reflects the swirling of the clouds in the big, black sky but not their darkness as it stretches to the horizon. The liquid reacts to disturbance strangely, not giving the level of resistance Felix would expect. Plus it smells awful.
The surface of the flat that can be seen through the odd fluid is like an endless patchwork made up of translucent fossils of amorphous creatures of all structures, shapes, and sizes formed together and filling in each other’s gaps then frozen together. Malformed organs, tissue, and bones are visible in the layers closest to the surface, sometimes shared between the suggested separate bodies. It’s like organic nonsense aged then eroded to be flat and smooth as alabaster.
“Nhhnnnn-kay…”
Something in the distance catches Felix’s gaze. It looks like two sharply pointed artificial structures or smoothed angular obelisks. It’s the most obvious landmark in sight and Felix can see a white speck near them that could somehow be the cat, so he starts off toward them through the ankle-high liquid, trying to ignore the weird forms suggested in the fossil surface.
A few miles on, Felix notices a dark, circular plate in the ground off to his right. He stops and looks at it from where he is but something about it he can’t place keeps his curiosity in check and he errs on the side of caution, even now.
As he continues toward the pointed structures in the distance, a slight breeze kicks up and he gets a chill and shudders. He buttons his dragon-sleeved jacket up all the way but soon it’s a bone-biting cold wind that cuts through the smooth fabric and he wishes he could get to the structure faster to take cover. Little ripples spread across the red fluid like on a lake.
A Tear in the Veil Page 46
