Mirrorworld

by Daniel Jordan

  The dark figure frowned, or rather a set of shadows passed over its pearly white face in such a manner that might be taken for a frown in a face capable of expression. “Few can truly say they have known me, Marcus,” it said after a moment, “but I certainly know you. Look, you’re in my book.” A bony hand retrieved from somewhere within the depths of the figure’s cloak a small address book, and delicately flicked through it to a certain page, holding it up in the bar’s dim light. “Marcus Lathir Chiallion,” the figure intoned. “Twenty-nine years, three days, twelve hours and fourteen minutes living out of twenty-nine years, three days, twelve hours and eighteen minutes total. Six feet tall, raggedy brown hair, sense of perpetual loss. Oh yes, that’s definitely you. You see me well, as I see you. That is interesting, but only for a little while. Thank you,” it added grievously, to the barman, who had finally worked up the courage to approach with the figure’s drink, “put it on his tab.”

  There was silence as the dark figure idly chased the ice cubes around his glass, while the man named Marcus, piqued by the figure’s words, studied him intensely. “You know, I’m not actually drunk,” he confided after a few moments. “I’m just practising how to pretend to be.”

  “Pretending by drinking heavily isn’t really pretending”, the dark figure replied absently.

  “No, listen,” Marcus said, waving his hands about. “The sixth sheik’s sixth sheep is asleep. Wait, was that right?”

  “That is a remarkable impression,” the dark figure intoned soberly. “I could almost believe you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Listen,” Marcus said again, then decided to give up. “You’re the Grim Reaper, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Death.

  “So you’ve come to kill me?”

  “What? Of course not,” Death said, a particular cast of shadow adding an offended tint to his skull. “People always get that wrong. Death doesn’t kill people. Life kills people. My job is to pick people up after they’ve died, and point them in the right direction. It’s important work.”

  There was another quiet moment whilst Marcus digested this. In the corner, the jukebox stuttered and made a noise very much like a female voice saying “hello?”.

  “So I’m dead?” Marcus asked.

  “Not yet. In about two minutes you are going to fall off that bar stool, and you won’t be standing up again. It’s really going to be quite undignified, though I’ve seen worse.”

  “Well,” Marcus said blankly, “I’m not sure I believe that. For starters, I’m not even drunk! Also, if that were the case, shouldn’t you be here in two minutes and not right now?”

  “I’m ahead of schedule,” Death said. “And I like to take an interest. But believe me, while I can’t comment on your internal state of mind, you are definitely going to die. I’m kind of the expert when it comes to that. Even if you can’t feel it, you’ve drank four whole bottles of sketchily sourced whiskey, and that never goes down well.”

  “Actually,” Marcus said cheerfully, “they went down very well.”

  In the corner, the jukebox made a sound very much like a female voice saying “I can’t make contact, just bring him in.” Amidst the bongo bongo noises it was already making, the effect was jarring enough to make the barman look around from where he had been eavesdropping on the conversation at the end of the bar.

  In the meantime, Death was drumming his fingers on the bar, in itself a rather jarring sound. “You’re taking this very well,” he said.

  “That’s because I don’t believe you,” Marcus said flatly. “Any hobo can dress up in black and paint his face and tell people that they’re going to die. You don’t even have a scythe. You’re the worst death I’ve ever seen, and you can trust my word that I’ve seen his work before. Now leave me alone.” He moved to turn away from the dark figure, but found himself incapable as their eyes met.

  “Trust and belief are not necessary,” Death thundered, rising from his seat to tower over Marcus. “I am Death, and you have seen me before, reflected in the eyes of your nearest and dearest as they pass. Do not doubt me, Marcus, for I am your salvation as your life ends. You see it, do you not? Deep within my eyes..”

  Marcus did see it. Transfixed by the gaze of the Grim Reaper, he stared into the infinite chasms of those eye sockets, and saw the tiny blue supernovas that lay within, destroying and recreating themselves endlessly in a single instant of annihilation repeated for as long as there was life in the world. And after all existence was finished, those eyes would flare one final time, and all would come to a close. In one horrible moment all of this flashed through the mind of the man named Marcus, and then it was gone as he sat before Death and the final seconds leaked out of his life. He twisted on his bar stool, futilely considering an attempt to run for it. Death, for his part, reached for his staff and assumed a ready position. Both paused in a frozen moment, waiting for the inevitable, and it was right then that the jukebox made a sound very much like a female voice saying “no! Don’t do that!”, and exploded.

  The ridiculously disproportionate explosion took out most of the bar and the building it was based in. Debris was flung outwards from the centre of the blast, one swinging piece of detritus cleanly decapitating the barman, whose body was buried beneath a shower of rubble before it could even fall limply to the floor. Another hit the Grim Reaper, who exploded in a shower of bones. Marcus reached out for the nearest solid object as the world lurched around him, and found Death’s staff. Hugging it tightly, he felt himself toppling from his seat as everything exploded into pretty lights, and was aware of a strange sensation of being lifted through a tunnel of searing heat. He heard more explosions, and screaming, and then everything began to go dark, but not before he had thrown up approximately four bottles worth of barely-digested whiskey.

  2

  By the time full dawn had broken over the shattered ruins that had so recently encompassed a dingy basement bar, the devastation had acquired quite a crowd. Where once wall-to-wall buildings had closed off the claustrophobic streets in this quarter of the city, the force of destruction had shattered the tall building that the bar had lurked beneath, and the collapse of this structure had taken with it the majority of the two buildings that flanked it. Cobblestones that had lain hidden in shadow for decades rolled over in dusty embarrassment as the sun hit them, rising gently from beyond the far side of the river that lay just past the detritus. For the people of this quarter, it was quite the spectacle, and they stood with bemused interest behind the hastily erected barriers that the emergency services had constructed around the broken husks of human construction. Appreciative of the spectacle even at such an early hour, the observers were ready with oohs and aahs every time another piece of what was left standing gave up the ghost, scattering panicked rescuers, or quick with a shriek or gasp every time another mangled body was dug out of the wreckage.

  Despite this willingness to be entertained, however, the crowd remained somewhat subdued. Those who had arrived on scene early enough had quickly spread word of the scattered bones they had seen, dragging themselves along the ground to a central point. A certain few even claimed to have seen the bones reformulate themselves into a skeletal figure, whom had glared at his observers with unparalleled menace before disappearing mysteriously, though few were foolish enough to believe that particular story. Somehow, though, they couldn’t bring themselves to dismiss it, and a certain dark mood had infected everyone present. No-one voiced it, but everyone felt it; somehow, this was wrong.

  Midday came, and since it had long been apparent that the excitement was over, people began to drift off in search of food. News bulletins spread word of the disaster, with blame being appropriated to terrorism, the government or God depending on the individual’s choice of news channel, whilst in the background a large clean-up operation began. By midevening, the streets were clear, and the story had been relegated to a human interest report about an ingenious old lady who had escaped t
he devastation with a bit of quick thinking, a coat hanger and a washing line. Sunset bought an eerie glow to the reduced pile of rubble and those still busily working to clear it, and the cobblestones sighed in relief as the shadows reclaimed what was rightfully theirs. Night fell, and those few who had been there from the start whispered that the Grim Reaper had claimed all but one of his would-be victims, and that this would all be over soon enough.

  It was around this time that the man called Marcus finally woke up.

  It was not a pleasant wakening. As consciousness returned, his eyes blinked open in shock at the remembrance of pain, and he was instantly blinded by the aggressive light of a noonday sun. Rolling over, groaning and blinking spots of colour out of his eyes, he was surprised to discover that although the memory of powerful aches remained, he wasn’t actively hurting. A quick check of his various extremities revealed that they were all belligerently present, and so he made use of some of them to pull himself to a sitting position, regarding the cold sunlight balefully.

  He checked his watch. It said 00:17. He shook it a few times, and it changed to say 00:18. Frowning, he looked again at the sun. Though low overhead, it was at the height of its power, bathing him in selflessly-given light that soothed but did not warm. Marcus disregarded it and set about staggering to his feet, which took a couple of attempts.

  The sun moved incrementally across the sky as Marcus attempted to gather the scattered remains of his wits. Memories of the previous night passed in and out of focus as he wandered around, trying to figure out where he had ended up. There had been a poker game, which he had won. It had been easy enough to drag out the game until the other players were too drunk to bluff. He’d taken his winnings in pursuit of more drinks. He’d found more drinks. His last memory was of a conversation with some stranger, whose face he could not quite recall. Shortly after that, nothing.

  And now he was, apparently, on a roof. It was a large roof of various levels, sloping tiles giving way to small plateaus that were decorated with half-constructed chimneys and abandoned building materials. Someone was having work done, someone who owned a very big house.

  Marcus felt funny. Over many years and many hangovers, he’d never once failed to find his way home. Waking up on the roof of strange mansions was simply not in his repertoire. Perhaps he had finally succeeded in getting drunk last night. Vague memories of a resolution to drink as he had never drank before floated through his mind, seemingly supplanting this success.

  Wrapped up in his thoughts, Marcus failed to notice at first that he had come to the building’s edge, and that an impressive view now unfolded before him. In his immediate vicinity, the grounds of the mansion on which he found himself stretched languidly ahead awhile, coming to an end before a pointed, angry-looking fence that divided the greenery from the paved square that lay on its far side. People milled through this square, all of them somehow managing to avoid looking at the strange statue that dominated it. From this distance, Marcus couldn’t figure out what it was meant to be.

  Past the square, the land sloped downwards, taking the incline of the city with it. The relative workmanship of the buildings diminished along the same sliding scale until it reached the city’s end, a tangled array of ship masts that appeared to mark an industrial harbour. To Marcus’s left, a river cut through the city, briefly touching against the harbour before opening up into a wide bay, the far headlands of which were visible in the clear weather. Beyond them lay only open ocean.

  Marcus stood and took it all in, feeling slightly bemused. His city, the one in which he had been drinking the previous night, was built along a river too, but some distance inland. Unless there had been some serious changes overnight, this was not that city.

  In the opposite direction, the geography of the area peaked not too far away, where there stood some large, impressive looking buildings that seemed to be arranged in a circle around another square. Most striking of these buildings was the impossibly tall, crooked tower that rose and rose until it ended in battered battlements several hundred feet above ground level. It had the air of a greatly elongated pyramid, and served as a notable landmark that definitely didn’t exist in Marcus’s city.

  Must have been a good night, he thought, that I ended up so far away from home. Patting down his pockets in search of his cigarettes, he suddenly became aware that his clothing was torn and singed all over. Pausing, he raised his hands, which were unmarked, and memory sparked. He had been in that bar, drinking like a champion – he shuddered in remembrance – for hours. Then he’d spoken with that stranger awhile, and then… Chaos. Noises. Destruction. That had been the end of it.

  Marcus studied his surroundings again with an increasing sense of bafflement, noting the absence of any nearby smoking craters strewn with the remains of a seedy basement bar. Somehow, he had gone from point A to point B to come out unscathed in a place that he had no memory of. Or did he? Looking at that tower, swaying slightly in the crisp, wintery wind, it almost seemed familiar..

  Marcus sagged back into a sitting position, legs dangling off the edge of the roof. Something clattered beneath him as he did, and he turned to regard what he had taken to be a piece of roof debris, but what instead appeared to be a tall walking staff of some description. Focusing on it, he almost recoiled, as it seemed to exude an almost tangible sense of menace and gloom, augmented by a slight tint of whiskey. Marcus pushed through it to pick up the staff, and at once the aura of menace faded to a muted buzz in the back of his brain, the sort of sensation that made his more lizardly instincts want to freak out. He didn’t notice this, however, because the sensation of the staff in his hand had bought back the last of his missing memories, and the clouded face of the stranger he had spoken with the previous night cleared to take the form of a pearly white skull that beheld infinite eons of destruction in its deep eye sockets.

  “I met the Grim Reaper,” Marcus said aloud, wondrously. “I met Death.”

  He came to kill me, and I escaped, he continued inwardly. No, that’s not right. He came to watch me die.. so did I? Is this the afterlife? Marcus stared blankly out at the city again. Somehow, it didn’t seem like it was any less than completely real. If not, then where? He lowered his gaze to Death’s staff. It had a slightly crooked curve, and was lighter than it looked. He remembered reaching out for something, anything to hold on to as he’d been thrown from his perch by… whatever had happened. He remembered his skeletal nemesis being shattered by a stray piece of debris. I did escape him, he thought. But how? And to where?

  “I should really throw you away,” he told the staff severely. “No good can come of this.”

  The staff did not respond.

  “Bah, fine,” Marcus said acidly, and took it with him to search for a way off the roof.

  As it turned out, the owners of the house Marcus had landed on, or rather their guard dogs, were not particularly thrilled by his visitation. Death’s staff had served him well as an impromptu pole with which to vault the fence, and he now dropped unnoticed into the crowds of people milling about the square. A large amount of them appeared to be listening to the various speakers who were jostling for position beneath the central statue, orating to the masses by committee. The current speaker seemed to be winding up for a big speech, and so, with a head full of fluff and no pressing calls on his time, Marcus decided to stop moving for a moment and listen to him.

  “You cannot deny the evidence of your own eyes, my friends! Parliament has not opened its doors to us for over a week now. They say they are closeted, discussing ‘courses of action’, but they are not! They have no idea what to do! They are unfit to rule us! Months have passed, and the threat posed by the wizard has only grown greater and greater, while our grand and glorious leaders have sat on their heels, pushing forward this bloody war with the south, wilfully ignorant of the greater threat gathering to the north! Mark my words – the wizard will come. The Viaggiatori will not surrender to him – they too are fools! These people have a
ll the power, and politician or Linewalker alike, they would lead us to our doom!”

  “What would you have us do?” called a voice from the crowd.

  “March on the Parliament of Rooks!” the speaker cried back. “The power of the people far outweighs that of our glorious leaders! In one fell swoop we could take back the power – make our own decisions! Make better decisions! Move to counter the Keithus threat before it is too late! And then we’ll march on the Viaggiatori, who caused all this in the first place! And then the Bedlam Palace – let us remove all of these oppressive systems of governance! Let us-“

  “You fool,” cried an older speaker, stepping up to push the first speaker off the podium at the statue’s base. “You would deny the will of the gods beneath their very vision? You would spit in the eye of the Goddess of Destruction and Chaos? Tell me, who would rule your new world? Would it be you, sir? Would you pull this statue down and face off in defiance against Java herself?”

  The first speaker began to splutter a response, but Marcus stopped listening, focusing instead on the statue. Even this close, he hadn’t been able to identify it at first, but now he saw that it for the most part took the form of a barely-robed young woman, with the head of a squid. Long tentacles dangled like dreadlocks, some styled to fly free and others wrapped around her limbs, holding them as if the body were but a puppet. Sucker marks decorated her exposed flesh. It was a rather disturbing image, and Marcus could understand why people would want to consciously avoid looking at it, especially if this creature were also a harbinger of destruction and chaos. He couldn’t understand why anyone would have built such a statue in the first place, though.