City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis

by John C. Wright

  In a voice hoarse with hope and wonder, Phil said: “Father?”

  His father looked so young, so new. He shone with vitality. “But, I thought, in order to see the evidence of time… I thought I had to believe!”

  “You believed enough to complete the monument.”

  “And that was enough?”

  “It was a seed. In the first projection of these events, you will find my old notebooks in the attic, translate the inscription on the monument, and discover that I knew the exact hour and minute of my death. That, in turn, will convince you to study the notebooks and complete your childhood training: you will develop your probability-energy control to a point where your past skepticism is no longer feasible. Your belief will be complete then, and a visitation then would have no time-effect. This meeting, while premature, is merely a shortcut, and hence will not change the recorded future.”

  “Father, thank you for being so… so patient with me.”

  “Once you become accustomed to knowing the outcome of events, you will find the virtue an easy one to practice.”

  “What happens now?”

  His father smiled at him. “Life! Life, Philopater! You will live out your span as history reports, without change, except that now you will know, rather than suppose, that the end of life is not as it seems. And, yes, before you ask, my daughter-in-law, my grandchildren, and all of us together shall enter the shining city beyond the reach of time and death. I leave you now, but only for a time.”

  The man in white was gone. The moment he vanished, there was a gust of wind, as if a sudden vacuum had appeared in the spot where he stood, and this wind carried some of the colored leaves dancing in the air up away from the sea, up the cliff, over the edge and onto the path.

  There was one leaf, a long, slender thing of pale gold color, swirled up from where it had been falling into the dark sea, and landed gently at Phil's feet.

  Phil bent down and picked it up.

  Later, after the funeral, Phil tried to explain to his wife why his grief was not so painful.

  To his infinite surprise, she believed him.

  Slayer of Souls

  CHAPTER ONE: On the Apprehension of Thoughts.

  The first principle of telepathic consumption is this: any two thoughts, sufficiently similar, are one. It is by the faculty of understanding that the first link is made.

  The second principle is this: every thought grows out of the thought before it. Thus, once even a single thought of the victim is apprehended by the Psychophage, the rest of the victim's thoughts, no matter where they turn, are all linked as if in a chain. The chain of thought, being ethereal, is unbreakable, and the victim cannot escape.

  It should occur to you now, O Reader, that you yourself are exactly just such a victim. Your thought, as you read this sentence, by following this sentence, follows the thought of the August Being which dictates me to write it. The two thoughts are one. If you have read these words, then the Psychophage has infected your mind and knows your thought.

  Your choice at this point, O Reader, should be clear, as the thoughts of Soul Eater enter you. Either you must help the Great Race find new victims on which to feed, or else…

  I snapped the slim black book shut and straightened up. It was chilly on the park bench where I sat, and I could see, in the light of the streetlamp above me, my breath making faint plumes of vapor. I wondered why my breath was coming so rapidly. Why did I believe any of this? Why was I scared?

  Why? It was the look on the face of Mr. Hobbes, the bookseller. “A mind-reader, a real one, could know everybody's secrets, learn their hearts, eat their souls. He could rule the world. No one could run from him or hide from him or plot against him. It's all in the book. Take it. But you never come back in my shop to get warm, and you never beg for change out in front here again. That's the deal.”

  And Mr. Hobbes smiled a smile as cold as poison as he passed the little leather-bound book across the counter to me. I remembered the anticipatory look in his eye. It was as if he meant for me to die.

  But it was only a book that he had handed me, and not even a fat one at that. It was about the size of those prayer-books the old ladies at the Salvation Army give out at the soup kitchen, small enough to fit in your pocket or in the palm of your hand. It wasn't big enough to hold a bomb or anything dangerous.

  Maybe I could pawn it. There were fancy little brass snaps at the corners, after all, and tiny brass hinges along the slender spine. Or maybe I could read it and learn to rule the world.

  Maybe I don't know what I was thinking.

  I took it and I fled. Running is what I do when I'm scared.

  Remembering that deadly look on Mr. Hobbes's face, I climbed to my feet. He wanted me dead, I suppose, not because he hated me, but because my face was unshaven, my coat was torn and stained, my gloves were ripped, my hair was untrimmed and unwashed. Because I was like a cockroach to him, something ugly and insignificant.

  But a soothing thought came to me: why should I bother to run? The Slayer of Souls knows everything I'm thinking, and I know where I am. I am two blocks down from Mr. Hobbes's Used and Curious Book Shoppe, and one block to the right, in St. Jude's Park. It should only take the Simulacrum a moment to climb from the icebox in Hobbes's basement, to pull on the bulky trenchcoat which allowed it to pass, at night, for a human being, another moment to adhere the mask, and another ten minutes to walk here.

  I was penniless, homeless, jobless, friendless. No one would miss me. So I should stay right where I was. Better to rest here and wait.

  I actually sat there for about two or three of those ten minutes. It was not until I noticed my eyes were stinging that I thought to wonder what was wrong with me. I was panting and my throat ached from the huge, ragged breaths I was taking. Hyperventilation. When I put my hand to my face, I felt the warmth of my tears on my cold cheeks. I was panicked. I was so scared that I was crying.

  Why the hell wasn't I running?

  I jumped to my feet. I ran.

  It was a gloomy night, with infrequent streetlamps making blobs of light on the pavement. The people on the street looked like hunched shadows, staring sidelong and moving aside as I ran, glancing fearfully back over their shoulders. They were probably wondering what I had stolen. But no one moved toward a pay phone to call the police. This wasn't the kind of neighborhood where people called the police.

  I didn't count how many times I turned. I just ran. I crossed a deserted parking lot, then a more brightly-lit street, then a darker one. Then an alley. It dead-ended at a chain-link fence. I scaled the links, which rattled under my frantic grasp, and the top scraped me as I fell. There I found myself, in the dark, next to the smell and bulk of a trash dumpster. Eggshells, greasy garbage, and wet newspapers were under my feet, and there was a smell of food, as if there were a restaurant kitchen nearby.

  A sense of amused and patient anger crossed my mind. I had run blindly, so I didn't know where I was. It couldn't find me.

  I leaned against the dumpster, panting till I caught my breath. It had been a long time since I had been in good condition. A long time since I had a job, a future.

  A wife.

  A stab of sorrow passed through me. The thought of her, and the thought of the filthy thing I had become, of what a shambles I had made of my life, made me realize what my old self, me the way I had been before, would have thought of me now. I was a delusional self-pitying drunk, running in a panic because some words in an inane book spooked him. I was a man who couldn't tell fantasy from reality.

  Why do I believe this nonsense? Why do I believe the Soul Slayer is after me?

  I shuffled to the end of the alley, feeling tired. My head was down, my chin was on my chest. There was a big neon sign to my left, burning brightly and steadily, bright enough to cast my shadow across the cracked pavement at my feet. Idly, I pulled out the little slim book again and looked at it.

  There was an ugly design tooled into the leather of the cover, a screaming face with hor
ns or lines of something-or-other squirming out from its eyes and mouth. A medusa? The title was stamped in a half-circle above that: DE ANIMUS OCCISOR et Dominus Natura Occultum.

  On the Slayer of Souls and Hidden Master of the World.

  I knew what it said. But how? I hadn't taken Latin in school. I knew the words because The Master had dictated the book to Dr. John Dee during the time of Queen Elizabeth. Aleister Crowley had stolen it and given it to Mr. Hobbes's great-grandfather…

  Some impulse made me look up. I saw the street sign across the way. Lexington Avenue. And I saw the big neon sign next to me: Florintino's Fine Italian Dining.

  Lexington was only a block north of St. Jude's Park. The Simulacrum was moving with lumbering, limping steps down Duke Street, but now it knew where I was. It turned. It could not run quickly, true, but it did not need to. The Soul Slayer knew what I was thinking, and knew where I was whenever I did.

  I only had a minute or two before it arrived. There were three cabs waiting out in front of the restaurant. I ran up to the last one in line.

  I put my hand on the door handle, but the driver, squinting at me warily through the glass, had thrown the little switch which let him lock the back doors.

  “Hey, buddy!” I yanked on the handle. The door didn't budge. “You've got to help me–I can pay, really, I can!” He took one look at my tattered coat and ratty gloves, and put his hand on the baseball bat on the seat next to him. Then he stared at me. Silently. He didn't need to say anything. Everybody knew how you were supposed to treat homeless bums who ask you for favors.

  I stepped back. The eater of souls was only about a minute away. There was no doorman at the door to the hotel, and, when I stepped into its warm and gloomy interior, the maître d'hôtel had his back to me. He was laughing and flattering a richly dressed couple, both of whom were overweight.

  There was plush carpeting underfoot (my footsteps made no noise) and dim candle-flame shaped bulbs overhead (no one saw me in the gloom). The door to the cloakroom was immediately to my left. I was inside it before anyone noticed.

  There was an expensive buff-colored overcoat, with fine soft fur along its collar and lapels, hanging on the same hook as a homburg. I shrugged on the coat in an instant and hid my unkept hair beneath the felt hat. My rotten gloves I stuffed in a pocket; there was nothing I could do about my pants and shoes, or about my stubbled face, but I could pretend the rough, unshaven look was simply a question of style.

  Then I strolled grandly out of the restaurant, backbone straight and shoulders squared, the way people with money walk. The way I used to walk. No one stopped me.

  I went to the first cab in line. I hoped the driver had not seen the commotion I'd made two cabs behind him. Maybe he hadn't, or maybe he was fooled by my disguise. Either way, the cab door opened for me. Then I was inside.

  “Where to, pal?” the cabbie said over his shoulder.

  At that moment, through the front windshield, I saw a tall figure step out from a cross street barely a stone's throw away.

  It moved with slow and ponderous deliberation, as if it had all the time in the world. It wore a bulky, ankle-length trenchcoat to hide its inhuman features, a wide-brimmed hat, and it walked with its collar up and its head bowed.

  Slowly it turned, and began lurching with heavy-footed, solemn steps that painfully impersonated a human gait, lumbering toward the cab. Toward me.

  “Drive!” I shouted. “Just drive!”

  As the cab pulled away from the curb, the Simulacrum stepped sideways off the sidewalk onto the street in front of the cab, and hoisted one arm aloft with a jerk, manipulating the prosthetic inside its glove to spread its manikin fingers wide.

  “Porco zio!” The cab driver swore in Italian and swerved around the looming figure. I saw it, barely a foot or two away as we sped past, so close that, had the window been open, it could have reached down with its finger-worms and touched my face.

  It was wearing wraparound sunglasses as large as ski goggles, and used a scarf to hide its nose and mouth. The mask itself looked like the face of a statue; it may have been made of rubber or plastic.

  In that odd way one sees tiny details, I noticed that no clouds were coming from his scarf, despite the chill. Either it did not breathe or else its breath was very cold.

  As I looked into the darkness of its sunglasses, a sensation of numbness jarred me. It felt like an icicle spike being driven though my skull and down my spine. The boneless fingers of the creature's glove touched the window and made a squeaking shrill noise as the cab shot past.

  The driver stepped on the accelerator and we sped away down the street. The tall figure behind us, standing motionless in the middle of the street, dwindled in the rear window as we drove further away. We turned a corner and it was gone.

  “Damn freak,” muttered the cab driver. “This town! It does something to people. Like they ain't human no more, you know?”

  Little metallic flashes of light were swelling and then receding in my vision. I put my head on my knees, and drew slow, deep breaths until the faintness passed. I was still shivering with the cold. And fear.

  But at least the creature was gone.

  “So, where to, buddy?” called the cabbie over his shoulder.

  Where to, indeed? Because it was not gone at all. I could still feel it inside my head, in my thoughts, like a swarm of bugs crawling through the folds of my brain. It was waiting, waiting to see what it was that I would think or say. Where to?

  The chain of thought being ethereal, is unbreakable.

  A long moment of crushing despair gripped me. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know where to go.

  “Say, buddy, are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I lied. “I'm just fine.” Except there's some sort of inhuman prehistoric vampire-demon coming to eat my brain. Other than that, though, I'm just dandy.

  “Right, so, where to?”

  I didn't raise my head or open my eyes, but inspiration suddenly struck me. I didn't know where I was. “Say, is there a bus station in this city?”

  “Yeah. Two of them.”

  “Take me to one. Don't tell me which one it is. Just pick one.”

  “Pick one? The bus station?”

  “Yeah, either one. I don't care.

  “Okay, but which one? Do you want the one on…”

  “Shut up! Just take me to one of them. The one that is farther away. I don't want to know where it is, okay? Just drive.”

  “Sure. Sure, pal. Whatever…”

  I felt the cab take a turn and accelerate. I opened my eyes a crack, but I kept my head down. There was no way to see any landmarks. I didn't know where I was.I didn't want to know where I was.

  I felt patient. Inhumanly patient, aloof and amused. Waiting. How far could I go, with no money and no friends? How far could I go without once knowing or at least suspecting where I was?

  No. No. I could not afford to despair. Now it was time to think. This thing chasing me was obviously some sort of…

  Of what? Martian? Demon? Stage Magician? Time-traveler? Something from another dimension? All of the above?

  Whatever. Who the hell cared? It was a mind-reader. The book made that part sound easy. Once it understood a specific thought in my head, any thought, it could understand the next thought that followed, and the next, and so on. Was there a way to break the chain? A way to think something so creative or so irrational or so incomprehensible that the Soul Slayer would no longer understand me?

  The book said that it can't be done, that every thought is intrinsically connected to the next, even if only by a subconscious thread. But by God, I tried. I tried to think no two thoughts in a row, to jump from topic to topic like a madman in my brain. I thought about baseball scores, the color white, the sixpence coin, the Celtic Cross, a flight of birds, the face of a crying woman.

  The fear beneath all my thoughts was constant, though. It was always there. And so was the watching, brooding sense of endless, patient hunger.

 
Maybe the book had a clue. I drew it out and looked at it.

  CHAPTER TWO: On the Consumption of Souls

  The human consciousness has no category for the sensation of external or alien thoughts. Any thought sensed by one's mind, therefore, always seems, to oneself, to be the product of one's own consciousness.

  And since humans, as a race, are blind creatures, without self-comprehension, the Operator can introduce his own passions and thoughts into his victim's souls. The victim will assume all such thoughts are his own.

  Any passion which directs the attention of the victim towards the Slayer whom we serve feeds and sustains the Great Ones, whom the Slayer serves. Of passions, fear is supreme. And the greatest fear is fear of the unknown..

  For no human mind can ignore its own fear. Fear, once rooted in the victim-mind, always, even if only at a subconscious level, continues indefinitely.

  Our race was chosen as a feed-animal because of our deep and lasting capacity for infinite fear.

  The process of consumption is the process of turning the thoughts, each leading to the next, link by link, to the contemplation of infinite fear. Once perfect and eternal fear is achieved in the subject, then all the victim's thoughts, conscious and subconscious, are directed utterly at the object of his worship and terror. Cognition ceases. Limbs go numb. All action stops, for the victim has no spare brain activity left to tend to these matters. The mind, cut off from the body, paralyzed and helpless, continues to scream without pause for eternity, while the body remains as a comatose flesh-puppet useful for certain purposes of the Great Race.

  I snapped the book shut. I had been wondering why, if the Soul Slayer could put thoughts into my head, didn't it just lull my fears and convince me I was hallucinating? I would have waited by the bench in St. Jude Park if I hadn't felt the monster's thoughts in my head.

  Maybe it wanted fear. The book said so. The book also said you could project your own thoughts into someone else's mind. Not your words, not your lies, your thoughts. It did not seem logically possible that someone could lie through telepathy. You would have to think thoughts you weren't actually thinking, believe things you didn't believe.