Alex looked to Eerie apprehensively.
“He’s gonna kill them. I have to do something…”
He started toward the Representative, but Samnang caught him before he took his second step.
“You must act, but not like that,” Samnang said, holding on to his arm. “The Church of Sleep cannot be opposed or defeated, but perhaps it could be moved.”
“That fucking stupid plan, again?” Rebecca said. “Maybe I can help.”
She came to stand beside Alex, taking his bloodstained hand in her own. She reached her other hand out to Eerie, who hesitated before gingerly taking it.
“Okay, then,” Rebecca said, smiling confidently. “You guys know what to do, right? Because I have no idea. I’m just along for the ride.”
Mitsuru leapt at Representative Parson, burying her knife in his chest. He slashed her with his bladed fingers and knocked her aside. She smashed into the ground, bleeding silver from a dozen wounds.
Lord North lashed him with the Salamander Protocol, whipping coils of crackling energy across the Senior Representative. Parson caught the whip and tugged North from his feet, laughing even as his fingers disintegrated in the plasma.
Michael launched a stream of pure energy, burning a hole through the Representative’s bony shoulder.
Representative Parson spun the whip about, tearing the handle from Henry’s hands.
Xia waved his hands, and the whip wrapped itself around Henry, winding about the Representative’s neck and searing his flesh and as it strangled him.
“It’s now or never, I suppose.” Emily suddenly appeared, her hair crackling with static electricity from the transition. She separated Rebecca and Alex, taking their hands in her own. “Shall we?”
Alex barely heard her.
He could not feel Eerie’s mildly chilly fingers, or Emily’s warmer grasp.
The familiar activation process of the Absolute Protocol rolled over in his head, and he reached into the Ether with an ease he had never felt before, tearing down the boundary between it and the Church wholesale. He could see it all happening, with his good eye closed, the infinite lines of the Church of Sleep deviating from their perfect parallels, bending toward the Ether like a galaxy caught in the event horizon of a black hole.
It was terrible and perfect.
He felt as if his heart might explode in his chest.
Rebecca and Emily charged about through his mind like firefighters contending with a blaze, dampening some hormonal activities while encouraging others, soothing overloaded neurons and mitigating nerve damage.
The catalyst effect rippled through the four of them, as their protocols reached unheard-of heights. The Kismet Protocol ensured that they all made just the right decisions, and they felt a shared gambler’s rush, the elation and surety of a moment when the dice produce only the right numbers.
Alex opened his mouth, and exhaled pure Ether.
***
Mitsuru lashed out with spinning telekinetic blades, severing one of the Representative’s arms at the elbow. Lord North snatched the handle of his whip from the ground and swung high and level, catching John around the neck with his searing whip, the coil vaporizing his skin as it pulled tight.
A ray of violet light punched through the top of Parson’s head, leaving behind a smoking hole.
Xia sent wave after wave of blue flame against him, burning his flesh clean from the bone.
The Senior Representative laughed and tossed them aside as if they were children with a sweep of his skeletal hand.
Alice stepped from his misshapen shadow and tapped him on the shoulder.
Parson turned around and smiled pleasantly at her.
“Alice,” he said. “I had almost forgotten.”
He turned toward her, matching her stature unconsciously.
“That’s my line,” she snapped, knocking Parson upside the head with the butt of her revolver.
He toppled, and she positioned herself above him, so that he lay in her faint and unsteady shadow.
***
They held Alex’s hands until that became impossible, until the cold became too great and they had to snatch away their frostbitten fingers.
Ether seeped from the walls of the cathedral and drifted through the stained glass. Alex trembled and shook like a prophet amid an ecstatic fit.
***
Hundreds of arms wriggled out of her shadow like black worms, tearing bits and pieces from the Senior Representative’s damaged form.
There was no blood.
The arms removed bone and viscera, leaving nothing behind but perfectly smooth indents in the flesh.
“I can’t remember anything,” Alice said, grinning, her face very close to his. “But I remember you. Why is that?”
“You always come back to me,” Representative Parson croaked, watching his disassembly with an amused expression. “As regular as Halley’s comet.”
He reached out and touched her cheek tenderly.
“We should not be enemies, you and I,” Parson said. “We are so alike.”
The hands from the shadow snatched the first joint from his fingers.
Alice put her revolver to his head and pulled the trigger. The gun discharged, blood and brain matter spraying out of the other side of his head.
The Senior Representative rotated his head around, unimpeded by the gaping hole about his eye, opening his bizarrely hinged jaws as wide as a python.
Parson seized Alice by the hair and lifted her from her feet, tossing her into his grotesque maw.
There was a moment of teeth and blood, enough time perhaps for a single scream, but Alice made no more noise as she was swallowed into the consuming dark of the Representative’s throat.
Michael screamed and there was an explosion of violet energy.
Representative Parson deflected it into the sky and advanced.
Parson bashed Mitsuru into the ground and knocked Lord North aside. He stretched out his scissor-fingers toward Alex, who was slumped halfway to the ground, his head lolling on his chest and his mouth wide open, frostbite blackening his fingers and discoloring his lips.
Gerald Windsor stood between the Representative and Alex. He did not as much as flinch as bladed fingers poised over his head.
“I thought better of you than this, John, despite everything,” Gerald said, the air around him crackling. “I really did.”
The Senior Representative laughed and brought the blades down on his head.
The razor-edged bone bit into Gerald’s scalp, just far enough to draw blood.
The air crackled and popped, and a surge of Etheric energy ran up the Senior Representative’s blade fingers, coursing through the tissue of his distorted body. He tried to move, or to groan in pain, and found that he could not.
Parson could do nothing, not even blink.
Gerald stood in front of him wearing a look of disappointment, blood trickling down from his serrated scalp, wrapped in a similar crackling aura.
“Now!” Rebecca shouted, cupping her hands around her mouth. “Hit him now!”
Lord North swung the whip overhead and wrapped it around John’s neck.
“Hold him like that!” Hayley shut her eyes and grabbed on to Rebecca’s arm. “I just need—”
Mitsuru emptied her pistol into John, putting every round into his chest.
“I’ve got him!” Hayley squinted, her nails digging into her palms. “One more—”
The Senior Representative howled, and a Horror burst into flames and began plummeting toward the ground.
Mitsuru dove, knocking Gerald out of the way a moment before the Horror came crashing down where he had just stood, burning a crater into the cathedral floor.
Hayley screamed and dropped to her knees, her head in her hands. Rebecca stumbled and whimpered.
Parson opened his multitudinous eyes and grinned hideously.
Hayley’s head exploded, coating Rebecca with viscera.
The Senior Representative laughed and lur
ched forward, aiming for Alex and the Changeling. Min-jun quickly raised a barrier about them, but Parson lashed at it with his cruel fingers, shredding the lime-green shield before it could solidify.
The Senior Representative broke through.
Eerie put her arms around Alex, ignoring the frost that spread across her skin, and closed her eyes.
Anastasia Martynova stepped from nowhere, an animate shadow swirling about her silken skirts. She frowned, and the darkness sharpened, rippling out from her skirt in abyssal rivulets that crumbled the stone floor and desiccated the pews. A tendril of pure black lashed the Representative, severing his hand at the wrist.
“I know you,” Parson said. “Why is that?”
“I am the Mistress of the Black Sun.” Anastasia planted her feet directly between the Senior Representative and Alex. “Is it not natural for you to recognize your superior?”
The Church brightened, brutal white light refracting from its impossible angles, blinding them all.
Eerie rubbed her eyes aggressively, and her vision cleared just in time to see the Senior Representative reach directly though Anastasia and seize Alex around the middle. Eerie cried out and tried to stop him, but the Senior Representative shoved her to the ground, and then tossed Alex into his yawning mouth, swallowing him as he had done Alice Gallow.
“No way,” Eerie whimpered. “That’s not right.”
Representative Parson finished choking Alex down his distended throat, and then turned his attention to the Changeling, gnashing thousands of needle teeth.
***
Alex opened his eyes and knew immediately where he was.
It could only be the White Room.
The room did not conform to any sort of dimensions, like the Church itself, stretching in cardinal and noncardinal directions as far as he could see, and further, he was somehow sure. His back was to one wall, and while he could see the wall across the room easily, it was impossible to estimate the distance.
He knew that he would never make it, should he try to reach it.
There was nowhere to reach in the White Room.
His skin prickled and stung all over. He noted his own nudity without surprise or alarm, just a sort of exhausted disinterest.
“You think this bothers me? Practically my whole life has been just this.”
Alex leaned against the wall and covered his eyes with his hands.
It didn’t help.
“It’s the waiting that does it,” he said, crossing his legs. “You can only wait for so long before it destroys you.”
His skin felt flushed and unpleasantly warm, as if he were in direct and intense sun.
“That’s why it’s best to have nothing and expect nothing.”
His good eye hurt, waves of steadily increasing pain washing through his face and skull, but his other eye was worse. It saw so much more clearly.
The pain went on and on. It reduced him to a heap on the ground.
He cried out.
He screamed and writhed.
He bashed his head against the ground and tore at his hair.
Alex trembled and shook. He rolled to his back and drooled all over himself, staring at the ceiling that was no different from the walls or the floor.
Just white. White and nothing else.
Worse than nothing.
The pain waned and waxed without any regard for his feelings on the matter.
It was very hard to think clearly, when everything was so overwhelming white. His good eye was in agony, and it seemed to make no difference if he kept it open or closed. His other eye had gone entirely blind and cold, and his eye socket throbbed and felt raw.
He screamed, and then wiped his face.
Alex jammed his thumb in the socket and tore the dead eye from his head.
He cast it on the perfectly white floor, and then laughed at the stain it left behind.
He sat up and leaned his head against the wall, ignoring whatever was leaking onto his cheek.
“You can develop a tolerance to anything,” Alex said, burying his head in his arms. “Pain. Loneliness. Everything.”
You are not alone.
The voice came from nowhere, or from nearby.
Alex stared into the white until he thought his eye might catch fire.
There was something, perhaps. A stain, or perhaps a shadow. Barely visible against the brilliant monotone of the wall that towered over it.
Was I ever?
Not really.
I suppose I should introduce myself, Alex thought, sitting up. My name is Alex, and I’m pretty sure I’m dating your sister. I, uh, really wish I wasn’t naked right now.
Which one?
Eerie. The one with blue hair.
The youngest.
Yeah. I think so.
That explains it, then. I wondered why you were still so intact.
What do you mean? I just got here.
Do you really think so?
Oh, shit. Time dilation.
Worse. The absence of time.
I guess we lost, Alex thought, unable to clearly remember what had happened. Did I get eaten?
The Representative sent you to the White Room. It would have been kinder to simply digest you.
Not to be rude, Eerie’s sister, but I figured that much out.
It must have been rude, because the voice in his head went silent, and no matter how much he yelled or cried or apologized, he was alone again.
***
Henry North lashed the Senior Representative with his whip and was struck in turn with a backhand that bowled him over. Only a timely barrier from Min-jun saved him from being cut to pieces.
Michael and Xia doused Parson in flame and violet energy, burning him down to the bone.
The Senior Representative snapped his distorted fingers, and they were blown back and set alight themselves.
“Too bad,” Samnang said, pushing her sleeves back as she walked toward Representative Parson. “It must be done.”
“Samnang, no!” Eerie cried out, reaching for her. “What are you doing?”
“Stop her,” Samnang said, not breaking stride. “Don’t let her follow me.”
“No! You don’t come back! You don’t—”
Emily caught Eerie’s arm and held her, ignoring her protestations.
“You shouldn’t try and interfere, dear,” Emily said soothingly. “Samnang’s very smart. I’m certain she has a plan.”
Samnang walked up to the Senior Representative and stood calmly in front of him.
She did not even make a sound as he lifted her from her feet and tossed her into his enormous mouth. He swallowed her down without a hitch.
“Perhaps she doesn’t have a plan after all,” Emily amended.
Representative Parson belched, and then charged them.
He was stopped short, an intangible black umbrella poking into his chest.
The Senior Representative burbled, something that looked like motor oil streaming from the corners of his mouth.
Anastasia stood behind him, smiling haughtily as she took her hand from the umbrella handle.
The umbrella solidified, impaling Representative Parson’s chest.
***
“Wake up! Alex!”
It was so unreasonable to be bothered this way.
He was not asleep. He wasn’t. So how could he…?
“You must get up! Right now!”
He was shaken and struck and yelled at. He tried to wait it out, but his assailant was determined.
“Okay, okay,” he croaked, peeling his face off the gleaming perfection of the White Room floor. “I’m up! I’m up.”
Awareness was a return to agony.
Not that it had dissipated, but at a certain point, he stopped paying his suffering quite so much attention.
He opened his remaining eye and took in the small figure standing over him, the characters on her cheeks shining a familiar sickly green.
“Samnang?”
“Who else? I tol
d you I was never coming back here, so I expect your appreciation.”
“How long…how many years have I…?”
“Years?” Samnang scoffed as she helped him to his feet. “It hasn’t even been a full minute!”
“Oh, shit,” Alex moaned. “No way!”
“I thought I prepared you better than that. Listen to me, Alex,” Samnang said, raising his chin so he was staring into her eyes, which were the color of cartoon radioactive waste. “I need you to pay careful attention, because just being here is – I won’t last very long here. I’m already starting…”
Alex noticed that she was steaming and blurring at the edges.
“You’ve got to finish this, Alex. You were nearly there,” Samnang said, grabbing his hands. “You need to send the Church into the Ether. The White Room will burn you clean of yourself. You can’t stay here.”
“I know that,” Alex said. “But how?”
Samnang let go of his hands and looked around the floor.
She picked up his discarded eye, breathed on it, and then popped it back into his head.
Alex screamed and dropped to his knees.
“There is no inside or outside of the Church of Sleep. Here is as good as anywhere, Alex,” Samnang said, easing him into a sitting position. “You just need to finish it, okay? The Absolute Protocol. You were meant for this from the beginning. It’s the most natural thing in the world for you.”
Alex nodded woozily, his eyes trying to close despite his best efforts.
Samnang slapped him so hard that his ears rang.
“Sleep later,” she said, suddenly looking very translucent. “Please, Alex. Don’t let them do this to Ériu. I had to come back to where I never wanted to be. Make that worthwhile.”
He nodded and then closed his eyes purposefully.
With his dead eye, he could see everything just fine.
He watched the Yaojing collapse, the white walls gleaming through her already transparent form. Samnang writhed and diminished, scoured by the White Room into less than nothing.
Alex very nearly followed her, but then he was called back, by something less than a memory, the faintest ghost of a remembrance – the scent of sandalwood, and a vision of golden sparks and deep black eyes.
The Church of Sleep (Central Series Book 5) Page 86
