The lighter hit the ground and fire erupted almost like a fireball. Where Terry and Deb had stood was now a pillar of flames and screams. It wasn't over quickly; they both struggled. Terry waved his arms in futility against the flames. He finally tumbled against the wall and fell to a spot where the gasoline had pooled and flames now raged. Then he screamed but no longer moved - he never moved again. Deb instead ran into the now-burning Creature Room, as if looking for salvation from her god. She received none.
Meanwhile, across the room I was being stabbed. After I threw the piece of scenery and took in the sight of two people dying in fire, the Seer had run at me and stabbed me in the gut. It was a completely different experience than before. This was not the cold, sucking wound of death. This was a flesh wound, painful and deep, but not mortal. She may have even missed my internal organs. It hurt like hell, but I still felt alive. My life wasn't ebbing, pulling me somewhere dark and cold. That didn't mean my body didn't freak out, panic and adrenaline coursing through my veins. The continual ache I had been feeling in my stomach now felt so much worse.
Seizing my moment of weakness, the Seer climbed on top of me, pushing me down. She held her dagger at my neck.
"Now we'll end this!" she said. There was relish and joy in her voice, even as there was murder and fanatical anger in her as well.
Maybe this was the end. At the time I thought it was. So rather than looking at her, I stared across the room, into the fires. Even if I died, it looked like we were successful in what we had set out to do. The show's puppets were burning and the fire would reach the Hornswaggle puppet and that scrap of paper. I didn't want to die, but at least we were stopping him too. Perhaps this was the best outcome we could ever have hoped for. My stomach churned, as if all the acid in it was boiling.
Or was this going according to someone else's plan? My eyes focused on a tall dark form that stood before the fire. Hornswaggle had finally arrived. His eyes were taking in the fire. He was moving his arms. Was he trying to put out the flames? Could he retrieve the scrap? I went cold, wondering if that would be easy for him. That would make all of this - my death, Terry's death, hell, even Deb's - pointless.
I coughed, my chest struggling against the Seer's weight. "There's your evil. Right behind you." My words were weak, but I knew she could hear them. My stomach felt icy cold, swirling as if something was swimming in it.
"No more tricks!" the Seer said in anger.
I gave a half shrug. "Look behind you." God, my stomach felt horrible. I had been stabbed, yet I remembered the pain in my stomach more.
I believe the Seer stared into my eyes for a long moment, but with the blindfold, I really wasn't sure. I just know her face was motionless. Then she finally turned her head, looking back at the flames. I felt her body tense the moment she saw it: the dark demonic form standing in the flames, yet unharmed by them. If that wasn't an unholy, apocalypse-creating demon, I didn't know what could be.
"There's your evil," I said, my voice choked as I suddenly felt my gag reflex triggering.
I felt the Seer get off of me, vaguely aware of her standing. She looked toward this new threat, body slack. "Sisters, I know not what this new evil is, but I shall fulfill my vows and vanquish it." Then her body tensed for violence again. I heard something like a battle cry as she ran toward Hornswaggle, dagger out.
Behind her, my stomach felt like it turned inside out. And though there was a roar of flames and combat, I heard one sound clearly in my ears: Drip drip.
I'd like to give a play-by-play of the Seer's fight against Hornswaggle. I'd like to tell you what specific actions made me shocked and surprised that she could effectively fight him. I'd like to highlight the awe I felt when it appeared that her super fancy dagger seemed to actually hurt Hornswaggle as he shouted in pain and retaliated with his claws.
But I can't, because my experience at that time was dominated by pain and discomfort. It wasn't the wound - my stab was largely forgotten in the waves of pain I faced. My body convulsed, spasms crawling within me. All my abdominal muscles clenched and unclenched, my alimentary canal doing the same. I turned over as I began retching, an endless convulsion of vomiting. At first I retched nothing, not even stomach acid coming out. But as something like a lump pushed its way up out of me, spasm by spasm, I realized that my stomach acid was blocked. What was coming was thick and preventing everything else from coming out.
When it finally rose to my throat, I prepared for what I thought would be relief as this horrible obstruction would finally be gone. Instead, there was the greatest pain yet as it pushed out of my throat, spraying out of my mouth like a garden hose. Blackness, thick and icy gushed out of me onto the floor. Not just in one moment, but continuously for what felt like minutes. It was probably much shorter than that, but my body still spasming destroyed any sense of time. In agony, this inky blackness forced itself out of me.
And then it was over as the last spasm ripped through me, leaving me exhausted, sweaty, and almost feverish. There was a black pool of liquid beneath me, and to my disgust, I noticed a long strand of it trailing back into my mouth. I couldn't quite sense the tendril with how terrible I felt, but somehow I knew that it stretched all the way back into my stomach. Repulsed and exhausted, my arms shaking, I flopped over on my back away from that dark puddle, half propped up by some discarded scenery.
Maybe it was exhaustion and fever, maybe it was real. I wish it was a bad memory, though I'm positive it wasn't. In my hazy vision, I saw that pool of blackness roll across the floor in a way I have never seen liquid do. It glided across the room, not leaving a trail as water would, but as if it were a solid disc. It moved to where the Seer and Hornswaggle fought. I knew that mass of liquid meant harm. Its essence was malice.
From that black pool, a dark figure rose up, as if leaping out of the water to grasp its victim. There was nowhere it could have come from and so I knew it was formed out of that black liquid itself. I wished that it grabbed my enemy, attacking Hornswaggle and saving all of us.
But it wasn't after him.
The black figure shot up from the floor and wrapped its arms around the Seer. She shrieked, as if its icy touch was painful - and I would not have been surprised if the very touch of blackness was caustic to her. She struggled against it, pulling away, but I saw as she jerked away from it, the stuff adhered to her, as if she were pulling away from a mass of tar. The more she struggled, the more of it that attached to her, covering her in inky black sludge. Her screams grew higher, changing from shouts of anger to wails of panic and pain. She was doomed and I knew it as I watched her - which made the spectacle so much more horrible, her struggling so much more depressing to watch. Blackness coalesced around her, over her face, her mouth one of the last uncovered parts, allowing her screams to continue.
When she was almost completely covered in blackness, she was suddenly yanked downward. She wasn't pulled to the floor to collapse prone. No, as if that black puddle below her was a portal to the beyond, she was pulled straight down into it, disappearing in a single moment, just a lock of blonde hair and an aborted shriek marking her sudden disappearance.
Then that black pool of liquid began rolling back across the floor toward me.
I saw the massive form of Hornswaggle look upon all this with an emotion I felt was curiosity, his head half cocked. As the dark puddle came for me, Hornswaggle looked into the burning room. I think he knew it was too late, the fire too advanced. He could neither save his puppet nor the old scrap of paper that had conveyed him here. Instead he turned and watched me. As the puddle moved to me, still tied to me yet absolutely repulsive, Hornswaggle watched me, as if a witness to my horror. But he didn't see it all. One moment he was there, another he was gone, all his images burned in the rapidly increasing fire.
And then came round two. Pain, intrusion, violation. That black pool of hate and darkness was coming back to me, as if reeling back on the thin strand that went down my throat. I knew it wanted back inside me, and I had never wan
ted anything more than for it to go away, to somehow flee from it. I was weak, but even still I found energy to work my legs, to push myself across the floor away from it. My movements were slow, lacking anything to fuel my body other than panic, so while I inched away, the blackness was gaining on me. It seemed inevitable that it would reach me, and still I tried to get away, down to the last second, where it touched my foot and began to crawl its way up me. Its touch was like ice water as it made its way up my toes, then over my calves, up my knees, and across my thighs. That frigid horror moved across my stomach and up to my chest even as I tried to shake it off.
I tried to cover my mouth with my hands, but that did not stop it. My action only slowed it down, prolonging the horrible experience. That mass of icy, sticky liquid forced itself into my mouth and past my throat. My body convulsed as it forced its way down, every muscle twitching from contracted to spasming release. Against my will, against the instincts of my body, it forced all that blackness deep into me - deep down into my hell. It was not quick, not an experience I could ignore. I felt every twitch and convulsion. It was another eternity-long agony as that horrible blackness that had killed the Seer forced itself back down into my stomach, trying to curl up in my bowels like a sleeping dragon or a ghastly parasite. Only there did its movements cease and my body shuddered into calmness, not quite accepting the invader, but giving up on the struggle as the blackness stopped moving. I was left only with exhaustion and revulsion. The blood no longer seeped out of my wounds, miraculously healed. But perhaps "miraculous" would again be the wrong word to use.
The fire continued to burn, the room filling with smoke and heat. The experience with the black sludge had left me so exhausted, I didn't know if I could get up to get out of the studio myself, much less try to save my friends. For the second time in so short a period, I contemplated resigning myself to death.
This was not to be my time, a fact decided by fate or my friends. I found hands pulling me up. My eyes focused on the person in front of me. Ben. He had no quips, no exuberance, not even a smile. He had just a confused and grim look on his face, his eyes tearing from smoke, ash streaking his face. He lent me his shoulder as we both coughed and made our way across the room. When we reached the door, I saw Charlie. He was standing, clutching his wound. He looked like he was peering through the smoke - he had been trying to find a sign of our life to see if it was worth risking his own life for us, even as he was bleeding. His face lit up as he saw us. He opened his mouth but I knew what he was going to ask. He was going to ask about Terry. Before he could, I caught his gaze and shook my head sharply. Charlie's face fell, but he nodded. He made a few halting steps toward us, then grabbed my other shoulder. With both of them helping to carry me, we outpaced the spreading fire and made our way through the halls of the studio, coughing from smoke.
Once outside the building, we paused only a moment to take a deep breath of air. Then we continued going. From outside, smoke was coming out of the building, but it didn't yet look like the studio was burning. Someone might have already called 911, but if not, they would soon. We needed to not be here when they showed up. Charlie's car was the closest, as he had parked two blocks away, so we made our way there. It took us ten minutes to get there with how wounded and exhausted we were. Ben loaded us both in the car and then got the keys from Charlie.
We drove by the studio, slowing down in the street to watch, as a few other cars had. The studio was now obviously burning and sirens were in the distance. We took one last look to memorialize the burning studio and the dead show. We saluted the end of many people's months of work and the demise of Nick's dreams.
Twenty
I know it's a big cliché about the criminal returning to the scene of the crime, but I couldn't help but go back to the studio. A week later I drove by, pausing in the spot at the lot across the street I had used to watch the building. There was a lot of police tape and a makeshift chain link fence setup I guess to keep kids and animals away from the wreck. There really wasn't much of a building left. There were some blackened stumps of walls, open to the sky. There was an enclosed and somewhat intact section in the corner farthest from the Creature Room. But most of the studio was destroyed, collapsed and burned. It no longer smoked, but the air had a smell like charcoal and chemicals. PBS Studio Austin was gone.
And with it, Hornswaggle.
That's what I kept telling myself. What worried me is that I felt like I needed to keep telling myself that. As if that fact was in question, as if a part of me suggested that all-consuming fire wasn't enough to destroy that monster and end it all. I looked back at the wreckage, as if expecting to see the tall horse-headed creature pulling itself up out of the debris like the last frames in an old horror movie. Instead, a dead building stared back to me, reminding me of the part I played in its destruction. I shook my head and drove off, knowing I shouldn't linger too long at the site in case I was considered a suspect. The police could be watching.
The news had picked up the story of the studio's destruction, both as fact and outrage. First it was reported in Austin as a thing that had happened - local interest, local happenings, local color. A building and a business went down in flames, locals wanted to know. That was fine. But once it went on social media and became national, it was the source of incredible outrage for three days. It was no longer a building, it was no longer people's jobs. It was a symbol - it was attack on values, on children's programming, on our children's future. "How dare someone burn down a PBS studio!" "This just shows the extremists we have in the world!" Everyone pointed fingers, yelled their disgust, retweeted, rehashed, shared, commented, and argued. It was a lightning rod for lazy outrage discussion, a whirlwind of hashtags and hate for three days. And as quickly as it rose, it died. Three days later there was some new event, some new outrage. The studio fire was forgotten, and for all the outrage, nothing was done. Almost no money was donated toward reopening the studio, so PBS quietly ended their Austin operations.
After I left the studio's wreck, I drove Downtown to see Charlie. He buzzed me into the garage and I told him I was coming up. I walked out of the garage, taking a moment to look where Nick had died. You wouldn't even know someone had died there. The damaged cars were moved, the broken class cleaned up, any blood washed away. Life went on, the dead forgotten.
During this time, Sally's tech guy got back to me: he had finally recovered some of Nick's hard drive. I expected to find some revelation, some final thing to cap this whole event. Maybe he had been architect of a better plan to stop Hornswaggle or he had found the weakness we had missed. Unfortunately, all I found were his browsing habits, a few seasons of anime, and a folder named HORNSWAGGLE. What was in that folder? Eight first draft scripts for future episodes of Hornswaggle & Friends. Even on the run, he couldn't bring himself to delete those. But nobody would be filming them. Not anyone at the studio, their jobs were all gone.
I paused to think of Meredith. I hadn't gotten in contact with her since this was all over. I expected she was now out of a job. Would she get out of television production, or was PBS offering her a job at another studio, maybe Boulder? I wanted to talk to her, to confess what we had done, to make her understand what had happened. I wanted her not to hate me for something I didn't do, I wanted her to understand why things occurred. But that was never going to happen. If she hadn't noticed the strangeness at the studio, nothing I could tell her now would convince her. And since she was now out of a job, she would probably find it necessary to turn me into the police. It would probably seem like both justice and revenge. I couldn't risk that. I had to let any hope of Meredith knowing what we did fall away. She wasn't my client anymore.
The inside of the condo building was less ominous in the light of day. It was still not as well kept as I would think, but it helped me to ignore Nick's death and keep my gaze from drifting toward the roof. With everything over and all evidence of Nick's death removed, this was just a place people lived. Life moves on.
Knocking on h
is door, I was told to come in. I found Charlie was on one of the couches, and across from him was Ben, which was not unexpected. They were drinking whiskey, even though it was a weekday afternoon. They nodded when they saw me, smiles on their faces, but it was a weak emotion, still somber, the energy low.
"Are you sure you should be drinking in your condition?" I asked.
"Not being high is not a condition, John, it's a choice," said Ben, raising his glass to me. "Besides, he won't let me smoke here anyway. I'm stuck with whiskey." I had never heard anyone ever be so disappointed with whiskey.
"I meant him," I said, gesturing to Charlie, who was laying back, his feet up, his back propped up against the cushion. His stab had been mostly superficial, but it still had to heal and he needed to take it easy. I didn't think alcohol was helping. I felt a little guilty, knowing my own stab had healed itself very quickly.
"I'm just taking a few sips to keep him company," said Charlie. I didn't believe that, but he was a grown man who could take care of himself. If he was going to dismiss my concern, I knew not to push it.
"Still no luck on job or home?" I said to Ben. I didn't bring up his own near depression. Terry had been not only his coworker, but his best friend. The two had even been roommates. Terry's death had completely changed Ben's life. Besides the sadness, Ben now had two reasons he couldn't afford his rent: lack of a roommate and lack of a job. He hadn't been evicted yet, but it was inevitable. Ben had already moved all his possessions into his car. He was spending his time here at Charlie's, claiming he was helping the older man with his injury. I think it was also that he didn't have anywhere else to go.
"I'm looking," said Ben. "It's just hard, y'know? Especially with... all this going on, y'know? I'm not a man made for wallowing, but it's hard moving forward with all the crap jobs in this town. It ain't easy being a grip. I don't want to move and I'm hoping I don't need to use the fallback plan."
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