I'll never forget the eyes. The left socket was empty, a hole clean through the back of his skull. Tiny wisps of smoke and bits of blackened, smoldering flesh seemed to float in the empty space where bone and brain had been seconds before.
His right eye… it was something that I had never seen before and whole-heartedly hope to never see again. Instead of a normal, human or even animal-like eye, there was a plain white sphere that pulsed with an unsettling inner light. It felt wrong, not just that it wasn't flesh and blood, but as though it was something that shouldn't exist. It reminded me of things I had seen in the darkness outside Ruth's house, not the Wastes but the Void—the strange limbo beyond Pocketville.
Anne popped out from behind the remains of Ruth's cabinet with her malicious tube pointed at me. She'd seen what I was doing, but not why, and had just enough time to dive for cover. Then she saw the incinerated corpse—more a hardened column of charcoal than anything else—standing in front of me, the barrel of my forty-five barely an inch from its face, and instantly shifted her aim.
"What is that thing?" she asked.
"I'm no—" I tried to speak, but my throat was so raw it came out as a strained croak instead. I coughed and started again. "I'm not sure. If I had to guess, I'd say it started out as a gestalt in the Wastes. One of the strongest I've ever seen."
Anne's knuckles went white as she clutched her weapon even tighter. "Is it dead?"
"Not quite," it said in a hoarse, barely audible voice. "There's is still some life left in me, Destroyer."
"Don't call me that!" screamed Anne, her eyes wild. "Don't you dare call me that, beast!"
"What does it matter? I'm already dead," said the creature, turning towards her in slow, pained steps. One arm broke free and collapsed into white, powdery ash. "Won't you acknowledge what you created?"
"NO!" she screamed. "It wasn't my fault! I had no choice! That bastard …"
"That bastard came for you," whispered the creature. "It came for you! Not us! Not any of us! You're the one who used the match."
She broke her gaze with the creature and looked at me, her eyes pleading. "You were there," she said.
"I was there," I said. "You couldn't …"
"Fools!" cursed the creature. "Blind fools! Are you so oblivious, so absolutely and fundamentally stupid that you… " The emotional outburst proved too much, and the other arm broke free along with most of its side. Unbalanced, the creature fell over and shattered into large chunks of carbon and a cloud of ash flying in all directions. Its strange right eye bounced and rolled like a marble made of otherworldly glass until it came to rest against my shoe—its pulsing light slowly fading away.
"Well that was anti-climatic," I said, trying to gauge Anne's mood. The creature had touched a nerve with her, forcing her to remember things that were better left in the past. She was still staring at what was left of it, her lips quivering as though she were on the verge of tears. "Anne?"
She looked at me, saw the concern in my own expression and shook herself. "We have to find Aden," she said.
"Can we track her with anything here?"
"Not anymore," she spit out. "That was the last functioning power plant and the blast from it ruined any sensors that were still usable anyhow." Her shoulders sagged, and she let herself fall against the cabinet. "Aden's going to use it isn't she?"
"We'll get there first," I said. "But we have …"
"You just don't get it do you? We're finished! We don't know where Aden is and don't even know where to start looking!" Anne was yelling now, waiving her arms about frantically. "That bastard Ed is hunting her down, and we both know what he's capable of. Aden has the only thing in all of Pocketville that is able to stop—"
"Stop! Just stop, all right? We take things one step at a time," I said. "We deal with one problem at time, and right now the problem we have to focus on is finding Aden. If we can't track her, we have to think things through logically and—"
"There's no time!"
"There is one way," I said quietly, already preparing my mind for the trip. "I can take a peek into the Archive." I sat down cross-legged on the floor—the pulsing marble rolled around till it was underneath me and I had to move it out of the way. The instant my hand touched it something yanked me backwards and up, pulling me away and through the wall. For a split second, I could see Anne, sitting on her knees in tears and my body contorted, fingers just barely touching the marble.
"Did you really think it was over?" said the creature's voice.
"My body may be in ashes, but I'm still here."
"Not for long," I replied. "Your power is fading. If you ask me, bringing me here has just about used you up."
He laughed, "Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't. Either way, you're here and you're going to listen to what I have to say. You're going to listen because I'm the only person who will tell you what's really going on."
"Well, don't keep me in suspense! I'm not a priest of any religion, but I'll listen if you want to confess," I said. There was nothing around us but emptiness, devoid of light and color. I knew where he was by a feeling, a sense like the way you're aware of your limbs in the dark. He was there, vaguely in the shape of a man, though not anyone in particular that I could recognize. I also knew that Pocketville was far below us, farther below us than I'd ever felt it before, and that the Founders Archive—the one other place my mind had traveled to—lay nearly as far below us as the City.
"Where are we?" I asked. I was feeling exposed and more than a little uneasy about the situation. I'd never let my mind drift this far out—even during Janus's misguided experiments when I was a child. We were so far away from the City already that I could only sense the faintest impression of where it was. What would happen if I couldn't feel it at all? There were no directions, no signposts, nothing that could be used as a landmark to orient myself. If I lost touch with Pocketville, my consciousness could wander in this void forever, and the City kept getting farther away.
"We're almost there now," he said. "There's something you must see to understand the nature of what Pocketville—"
"It's a prison," I interrupted him. "A prison built to hold one man, excuse me, one soul. To be precise, it was built from his soul."
"Funny, you people think you know so much about this place. Your family has been digging around in the Archive for years. Your mind is interwoven with the fabric of this world, and yet you still get it so wrong," said the creature, almost laughing. "It is a prison, but it wasn't built to hold any single man."
I could feel the glow long before my ethereal eyes were able to see it. Faint at first, then building brighter and brighter as we came closer to its source. The light seemed to be emanating from everywhere but directly behind us, almost as though a massive sphere of light were moving in to envelope us. Then I saw the source—thousands upon thousands of them, uncountable millions of floating people, drifting through the Void aimlessly. At least, that's what I thought at first. The closer in we moved, the more I realized these things only held the vaguest resemblance to the human form. Arms were too long or too short but never quite the right proportions. Hands had the wrong number of fingers or no fingers at all, but elongated blobs of flesh-like mittens. Their mouths hung open, exposing cavernous tunnels of emptiness, and their eyes were hollow pits that seemed to suck in light as though filled with a voracious darkness.
The further out we moved, the thicker the cloud of shades became, the more they seemed to notice us, and the more human they became until we came to an unbroken wall of writhing humanity. It was literally a sea of flesh, extending out further than I could see, filled with people fighting to get away, to climb above the mass of reaching hands pulling them back down again. One woman saw me and reached out to me, her face pleading, begging that I help her as she was pulled under by a hundred grasping hands.
"This is where the denizens of Pocketville end up when they die," he spat out. "The first time through they wind up here, fighting to stay out of the depths. Of course, t
here's nowhere else to go but down. Some do escape—they are the misshapen souls you see floating around us. Eventually, as the eons of time take their toll on the human mind, they forget what they were and lose their form. The lucky ones drift back into the masses below before that happens and sink to the bottom. The rest, spend an eternity floating in the darkness, alone, until they simply fade into nothingness, their essence diffused throughout the Void."
"What's at the bottom?" I asked, unable to think of anything more intelligent to say. He said nothing for a long while, forcing me to watch the throngs fighting to escape, fighting for the last vestiges of whatever it is that makes a soul human.
"Ah! Curiosity and the bliss of ignorance," he said with a sigh. "I can't show you the bottom. Even as we are, these creatures would tear us apart. All I know is that it's another kind of forgetfulness. A place where all form is lost, and these souls are ground up like grist to feed this world. This is what Pocketville is, Zachary Tekcop, it is a grand mechanism to wear human souls down until there's nothing but their raw energies left. There is no escape from this place, even in death it pulls you back under. But for you… there might be a way."
For a long moment, I didn't say anything, but sat watching the infernal carnage going below us, watched as an elderly man was torn limb from limb, and each part disappeared below the sea of grasping hands. His head, already mostly bald, was stripped of any hair, then the cheeks and eyes sockets were pierced by fingers before I lost sight of the gory scene.
I knew of this place even if I'd never seen it before. I'd read of it in the Founder's Archive, but never really understood what it meant to "purify the essence," and now here it was right in front of me. The bald-faced sadism of it all turned my stomach.
"What do you mean, there might be a way?" I asked.
Now it was the phantom's turn to be silent, waiting for the right moment—until he believed I had seen just enough of the torture below to leave me receptive to his offer.
"Nothing dies in Pocketville," said the creature. "Because nothing is alive. There is no life or death in this City of the damned, yet people die and children are born every day. They all come from here, this… this pit of tortured souls. But you, you're different. You were born in Pocketville but not of it. You're an Outsider who has yet to experience being homogenized, the dissolution of self, the loss of identity."
"Yes, I was conceived in the world outside and born here," I said. "My mother died here, and because the two of us went through transfer together, she exists as nothing more than a shade, trapped in the Wastes. Trying to unnerve me that way isn't going to work. I live with the realities of this City every day."
"Oh, but I'm not," he said, letting us float back into the Void. His voice sounded thinner, weaker than before—as if his strength were starting to fade. "You see, I was born in Pocketville. My flesh cast from the intermingled fragments of thousands of human souls. I lived in a house whose walls looked like wood and stone but were formed from those same tormented creatures. The very air I breathed and ground I walked on was nothing more than the condensed remnant of something that was once human and persuaded to believe it was something else.
"When the Wastes burned at the hands of the Destroyer, no one died," said the creature. "No, what happened was much worse. Our flesh remembered what it had been! It remembered this sea, remembered its former humanity, and lost what little scraps of sanity remained as the voices of those lost souls tore through our minds. The Wastes became a cancer on the fabric of Pocketville—an enormous uncontrollable mass of nightmares that would not obey the rules. Creatures like me are an amalgamation of thousands of fractured souls. You, on the other hand, are one complete being. You have the knowledge of how this world works, and more than that, you are already tied to the flesh. The real flesh that this world was torn from. The flesh whose soul is the foundation for all of Pocketville."
"And now we get right down to it," I said. "I already know what Pocketville was built out of. The gist of that story is in the Archives, about a thousand aisles in but it's there. If this is all …"
"What if I told you that the flesh still lives?" he said quietly. "That the final stage of the Sundering, where the host's soul is split from their body and the mind is burned away, never happened. That Pocketville exists in a precarious balance, populated before it was completed?"
"I would call you a liar and a fool," I said, but knew there could be some truth to his words. If the Host was still alive, was still tied to Pocketville, it would explain some of the odd things that had been happening to me. It would mean that my mind wasn't just in tune with Pocketville, but the underlying Host itself—a creature that inherently wanted to be whole again and would claim any soul, any mind it could if its own wasn't returned.
"You know better than that, perhaps better than anyone short of our mutual employer," said the creature with a laugh. "Oh, don't get me wrong, I understand the reasons you need to say it. I really do. Your mind won't let you do otherwise because that would mean accepting something too horrible for you to 'live with'."
"What's that?" I asked. He was stalling for time, hoping to keep me off-guard and distracted as long as possible, but what was he planning?
"That everyone and everything in Pocketville is nothing more than a parasite, a malignant growth, feeding off the stolen, disembodied soul of a human being!" He screamed and pulled in close to attack. I am still not certain precisely what happened between the two of us. All I know for sure is that the creature gathered as much of its will and essence that remained and tried to drive into my mind. I could feel the strangely soft and tenuous streamers of thought flowing through the outer edges of consciousness, mingling their basic notes with the fundamental beat of my own mind, rather than trying to suppress my identity.
"You don't want to do that …" I gasped out, barely able to maintain my own concentration under the Creature's subtle onslaught. "It won't go well for you …"
"… well for you …" he parroted.
"My mind is …" I said.
"… highly antagonistic to anything …" his voice finished.
"… of Pocketville," we said together. I could feel my own mind starting to lose hold, to fade away and be absorbed by the creature's aggregate consciousness. It was only natural, after all, that the one of us who had more experience at subsuming reluctant souls would come out on top. His attack was so subtle, so unexpected—something I had never even imagined as a possibility. Why hadn't I thought of it before …
I was almost gone when the creature touched it—the last mistake that despicable monster would ever make. He touched the thing I had spent my entire life trying to bury in the deepest, darkest part of my being—the thing that forever branded me as an Outsider.
You see, the average denizen of Pocketville lives what they believe to be a normal, reasonable life. They are born, screaming their first breath like any human, they live their lives—sleeping, working, loving—just like any human—and they die, passing on to what awaits beyond—just like any other human. Except, that is only how things appear to work in Pocketville. I'd seen the ravages of it all my life without ever really realizing what I was seeing. The souls, the very being of everyone around me were tired, and ragged, almost as if they had lived through thousand upon thousands of generations of humanity.
On a purely physical level, they were no different, they were whole and fully functional, with no obvious deficiencies. Nor was there anything lacking from their mental capabilities. The all important foundation of life, the part of a human being that transcends physicality was faded—from the youngest child to the oldest matron. Sometimes the damage would peek through—an extra burst of emotion here, a cold that wouldn't go away there. Other times, they would fall apart, ranting wildly in broken words that matched their fractured selves. Every last person in the City suffered from it, and yet they never seemed to feel it. How could they, since they'd never consciously experienced anything else?
But I wasn't conceived in Pock
etville. The creature never dreamed of what he found waiting in the depths of my mind, hidden from view by years of effort. He realized that his weakened and fading essence, though half integrated into my own mind, could never hope to contain even the tiniest kernel of the power that an Outsider's soul held. A pure, complete soul that had yet to pass through the homogenizing Void of Pocketville—a soul with a connection to the very foundations of Pocketville itself.
That power exploded through me, rebounding against the ragged edges of my mind like shockwaves in a water-filled balloon. Where the creature's thoughts touched mine, unbridled emotion poured into him, burning searing paths through the fragmented remains of his identity until little more than an empty shell survived. Even then, raw, unfocused energy burst from that shell—shattering it—until nothing of the creature's frail existence remained and my own mind resealed itself.
"I tried to warn you," I said to the charred, quickly fading strands of thought floating next to me. "An Outsider was a bit more than you could chew, and I'm no mere Outsider."
"That's… more… like it …" what was left of the creature gasped out. "Embrace what you… are… and claim this world… as your possession. When you do… the gate… will be… yours!"
"Be gone!" I yelled, pouring the freshly awakened power into my words. It had taken me years to bring that power under control. To bury it so deep in my mind that I barely felt its existence anymore. I had to or there wouldn't have been much left of the world around me. Ruth—Mom—and anything she had built was all but immune to the energies that wove themselves into my speech. Dear old Dad just took the brunt of whatever came his way head on and then threw enough back at me to rattle my teeth. He always seemed happy that I had inherited that particular family trait. But it hadn't sat well with anyone when I accidentally turned the neighbor's dog inside out. I was five at the time. A bark from the dog, one startled child screaming in fright, and poof, the dog gets smacked in the face with all the power my immature reflexes could muster. Ever since, I did everything I could to avoid drawing on that ability to the point that I had all but convinced myself it no longer existed.
The Erasable Man: Chronicles of Zachary Artemas Page 18
