The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One

by Sean Williams

  “Well, you're here,” said Seth, the expression on the empty shell of his face complex and hard to read. The bitterness in his voice, however, was undisguised. “I guess it's all going to be okay, now.”

  Hadrian felt surprisingly alienated by what he saw in his brother. “Seth—about Sweden and Locyta, the knife—everything—”

  “Don't say it.” His brother looked away. “That's all irrelevant. Or soon will be, anyway, when we rewrite history.”

  “How?”

  “You'll see.”

  Seth held out his hand. Hadrian was about to take it, thereby completing the circle, when both Ana and Meg shook their heads.

  “Ellis,” said the shorter of the two, “join us. You're part of this, too.”

  Ellis backed away a step. “No.”

  “You wanted a chance to have a say. This is it.”

  She reluctantly stepped forwards to complete the circle. Seth took her right hand and Hadrian took the other. She smelt the same as she had in the First Realm, and tears sprang to his eyes at the sense-memory. Images of the draci came and went.

  This wasn't a trick. His brother was real. Hadrian had followed him to wherever they were now, and he could feel his presence thrilling through Ellis's hand. They had been reunited—had literally, for a moment, been in the same body. He couldn't have been fooled by that.

  The demonic figure with the gash on his face stepped forwards to talk to Seth. His expression was a closed book to Hadrian, but there was no denying the intensity of the moment.

  “Let our lives be a lesson to you,” the demon said.

  Seth looked uncertain and upset, but nodded.

  Light flashed.

  The Second Realm vanished in a roar of noise. Metal wheels screeched and the roar of a giant electric engine echoed off stone walls. The floor rocked beneath him. His nose hurt.

  “Stanna.”

  Hadrian turned to see the pale-skinned, elderly Swede facing him, one hand tucked in the folds of an expensive-looking black coat, head firmly attached to his shoulders.

  He was back on the train with Locyta. Seth was about to die.

  “This is the moment your brother wanted to relive,” said a voice.

  Hadrian turned. Ana was in the train with him. She clicked her fingers and time froze. The noise ceased. The Swede's hand stayed inside his coat.

  “What's going on?”

  “You are being given a chance to decide the course of your life,” she said. “We can take you anywhere along your world-line and show you how events might otherwise have progressed. There are many paths your lives could have followed. The Third Realm allows us to choose those paths at will.”

  The scene in the train flexed and morphed like something out of a movie. Locyta's position slid from side to side, varying in small ways: the folds of his coat; the expression on his face; the precise angle of his elbow. Seth, caught in the moment at Hadrian's side, moved similarly. Hadrian felt himself sliding through a cross section of lives, glimpsing the same moment from many subtly different angles.

  He turned, remembering the rest of the mise en scène. Ellis was frozen in the act of moving away from them up the aisle of the carriage. In some lives she was in midstep; in others she was half-turning. In one she had almost reached the far end. The passengers around her were looking up, alarmed by all the commotion.

  “This is an obvious moment to choose,” said Ana, “but it is not optimal. There is little room for variation. So many lives intersect at this instant that the range of possibilities is relatively small. To find one in which both of you survive is very difficult, perhaps impossible.”

  The view slid fluidly into the future, then sideways again. Hadrian saw the knife plunging into Seth's chest. In some worlds it was his own chest. They struggled and kicked, but always the knife stabbed into one of them. Always Yod's plan succeeded.

  “Does Seth want me to die instead of him?” he asked, his heart sinking. “Is that what this is all about?”

  “It's difficult to say. Would it anger you if he tried?”

  “I don't know.” He could understand the temptation. If he had been the one murdered in order to facilitate Yod's vile plan, he might be seduced by the thought of trading places with his brother. Seth wouldn't know what he had been through. He might think it had been relatively easy back in the First Realm.

  “In your life,” said Ana, “you have made many decisions. Which would you change? Which would you keep? This is your one chance to prune the tree of your life. Don't waste it.”

  Hadrian wondered which moments he would like to reconsider. When the draci in Ellis's body had “rescued” him from Lascowicz's lair? When Kybele had “rescued” him from the streets? When Pukje had “rescued” him from the hospital? Could he choose them all?

  The moments that most defined his life since Seth's death were those when people had lied to him or manipulated him and he hadn't noticed. He had been so used to being overpowered by Seth that he didn't think that there was anything wrong with being pushed around.

  Perhaps, he thought, he should pick somewhere earlier in his life, when he could assert himself over his brother, change the dynamic between them so he would be better able to cope with the new, dangerous world.

  The view skidded and shifted in response to his thoughts. He was a child again, exchanging his brother's broken Christmas present for the one he had played with carefully. He was a teenager new to high school, coerced into supplying cheat sheets for a test Seth hadn't studied for. He was a very young baby, squashed against the side of a crib by his wriggling, squalling twin. As he skimmed through his life, sensing countless possibilities branching off each and every moment, he saw bountiful evidence of Seth's domination over him.

  It wasn't that simple, though. He also saw moments of automatic selflessness, reflex responses that could not have been calculated although they might later have been turned to Seth's advantage: Seth warding off bullies in primary school while Hadrian lay in the mud behind him, choking on tears; Seth pretending to be Hadrian and inviting a date for him to their school dance, a girl he had liked but never had the courage to ask out; Seth encouraging him to come to Europe on a holiday that would get them out of the rut that had risen up around them both and threatened to swallow them whole.

  (“Don't,” breathed Seth, then, louder: “Don't you touch him!”

  Locyta's gaze left Hadrian's chest and fixed on Seth's. The Swede said something that sounded very much like, “Okay. You, then,” and the knife plunged forwards.)

  Everywhere Hadrian looked, he saw Seth. They were Mirror Twins. There was no getting away from each other, and no easy way to change the dynamic between them. The solution to the problem, if there was one, had to lie beyond them, then. He had to look elsewhere.

  Where had they got the idea of going to Europe? He couldn't tell. It might always have been there. Europe and Australia were bound by more than just political ties. It would be generations yet before the former British colony shrugged free of its past. For many teenagers, an overseas holiday automatically meant Europe, not America or Asia or other southern lands.

  There was the occasional exception. Hadrian wandered freely through versions of his past that took them elsewhere. He discovered that it didn't matter where they went. Always, without fail, one of them died, murdered by Yod's minions, be it Locyta or any of a number of the quasi-supernatural creatures that had allied themselves with Kybele and the invader. On the same day, at the same hour, the killing blow fell.

  Their lives to that point were nothing but a prelude: their studies, their friends, their arguments, their family. They were defined by their relationship with each other and by Yod's plans for them. Even Yod didn't care who they were. It was interested only in what they were.

  Hadrian skimmed ahead to see what lay in store for him after Yod had had its way. He saw a depopulated Earth despoiled by the Change. What Mot and Baal didn't destroy in their astral duel, Yod's forces inevitably finished off. He walked alone,
the sole survivor of a ghastly apocalypse, among ruins of the city, in crumbling suburban wastelands, endless deserts, and brown, sterile fields.

  Everywhere the smell of death, in his nose and in his soul. And the mantra running endlessly through his mind: I should have avoided this. There must've been something I could've done.

  The end came as a relief in those universes. Yod was his only companion, a vast, hulking shape that swallowed the sky: unknowable, impossibly alien, too removed from his world ever to comprehend what it had done. Did a doctor employing an antibiotic care about what happened to individual germs? Did a rat catcher stop to ponder the fate of every rodent killed? Hadrian was pivotal in some ways but, at the end of it all, after years of insatiable gluttony, he was as irrelevant as everyone else. Once the realm was empty of food, his importance expired. As the invader tensed to spring to another hunting ground, another realm fit for the raping, Hadrian's essence, his ability to will, to choose, to be, was sucked up into Yod's lightless maw and devoured just like every other soul in the world. Darkness fell, and he was glad. Death—true death, for there was nothing left of the Second Realm to move on to—was the only release.

  Hadrian averted his gaze from such worlds. He was certain there had to be others. But there were, to his surprise, no futures in which the collision of the realms, in some form or another, never happened. He reasoned that this was because Yod always acted whenever he and his brother were born. The worlds in which there were no mirror twins were, by definition, worlds in which they didn't exist. As he was confined to worlds in which a version of himself existed, any other worlds were foreign countries he couldn't visit.

  But there were worlds in which the Cataclysm didn't happen as planned. These were, more often than not, worlds in which he or his brother died young and before time, of relatively natural causes. Yod was therefore taken by surprise. There was one world-line in which Seth was hit by a car while they rode their bikes home from school. Environmental and social catastrophe swept the globe; nuclear war broke out; millions died. But the Cataclysm wasn't directed. It afforded no one an advantage. And when Hadrian died in the mess that befell the world, the Cataclysm ended with it.

  Death, chaos, despair…Everywhere he looked he saw nothing but Yod and the results of its ambition. There were no threads in which the world wasn't destroyed or severely damaged. Unless he was prepared to write himself completely out of existence, he was stuck with a far-from-normal life—or at the very least, an abnormal death.

  “I suppose Seth is seeing the same as me,” he said to Ana, who accompanied him through the many and not-so-varied worlds of his life.

  “He is seeing what he asked to see,” said the Sister.

  “This is pointless!” Frustration rose up in him. He was back in the train with Locyta. The knife came out of the coat and thrust forwards, over and over again, no matter which world-line he followed. He was thwarted by the geometry of his expanded existence: all converged on one moment. “There's nothing we can do! It just keeps happening, one way or another!”

  “It might seem that way.”

  “I don't see any ‘might’ about it.”

  “Your eyes are unaccustomed to the Third Realm. You see the details, not the connection between those details. You see the tips of the waves, not the currents and winds that drive them. This is your life: I understand that it is difficult not to be caught up in its many endings and convolutions, but you can stand back if you try. You are in the Third Realm now. Unexpected themes become visible from afar.”

  Hadrian stared at her, at the truth of her, hidden behind the endless skein of possibilities. He wasn't seeing her with his eyes, but with a sense belonging to his Third Realm body that had no analogue in the First or Second Realms. She looked like Medusa, with many heads; she was in numerous world-lines simultaneously, observing his life in a way he could not.

  “Are you helping me?”

  “I am trying to.”

  “Why?”

  “You hold the fate of many in your hands. If the Cataclysm goes ahead as Yod plans, the First and Second Realms will permanently merge. Should that happen, the geometry that allows us to exist and the role we exist to perform will both be undone. The Flame will go out, in its present form, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.”

  “What will happen to you then?”

  “There are possibilities.” The Sister gestured vaguely. “They should not concern you.”

  There was a finality to her voice that unnerved him. “What should concern me, then? Where are you telling me to look?”

  “I can only guide you, Hadrian. There are a vast number of windows in the Third Realm. Through them we can see a multitude of potentials. We have enjoyed long lives as the keepers of the Flame, but we have always known that our time must eventually end. The Holy Immortals keep us posted on what they have seen in their past, our future. Although they are confined to single world-lines, like humans and most creatures in the First and Second Realms, their retrograde passage through the realms gives them a unique perspective. They tell us which lives we are about to intersect. They are, if you like, harbingers of our doom.”

  She studied him with a calm, self-assured eye. “When we sensed the imminence of your lives, we took what precautions we could. The Cataclysm had to be met one way or another. We had to be prepared, while at the same time owing no allegiance to Yod or Kybele or Barbelo—or anyone else who claims to be a player in this grand game. We are servants only of fate. We are slaves to it as you are. The difference between us and you is that we face it knowingly, and can choose the best position from which to observe. And we do reserve the right to choose which particular path to follow to our ends.”

  A succession of deaths flashed by: Seth in the subway, in a public toilet, in the dingy room of a backpacker hostel, on the street; Hadrian in a taxi, in a bus station, in a coffee shop, at home. It was relentless, and he was tired of it. He averted his eyes and thereby saw something he hadn't noticed before.

  Standing off to one side, half-full coffee cup spilling from numb fingers—

  Running into traffic as blood splattered and dripped from an open door—

  Backing away in horror as crimson splashed under cold fluorescent strips—

  Running up the aisle of the train, screaming for help that never came—

  Ellis.

  The look on her face was unchanging in every world-line. She knew as little as the twins did. There was no way she could have known more—and her actions in Sweden and elsewhere, as she travelled with the twins only bore that out. The murder came as an absolute shock.

  But she was there, every time.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “This is the first thing you have missed,” Ana said, evading the question. “You must find the second on your own. I will give you just one more clue: remember what the raven said.”

  Then she was gone.

  “Hey!” Hadrian's voice echoed along the tangled web of his alternative lives—through the deaths of his brother and past Ellis's face, startled and shocked, over and over again, from the beginning of his life to its many and various ends. It was like shouting in a labyrinth. Echoes of his cry came back to him loud and soft, staggered over a surprisingly long interval.

  They weren't echoes. The cry came from all the versions of himself who had reached Sheol and entered the Third Realm in an attempt to end the Cataclysm. He sensed them clustering around him, each overlapping the others in a bizarre aura, shadowing his every movement and thought. To all those other versions of himself, he was just a phantom, another life clustering around another version. At some point—no, the same point, for he was now outside time, as he knew it—all of them ended up alone.

  He wanted to yell again, to vent his frustration at the Sisters for leaving him as much in the dark as everyone else had. What was the point of bringing him to such a place and leaving him to get lost? There was precious little choice open to him. All the lives he had seen ended in Cataclysm, one way
or another. It was either that or he didn't exist. What difference would it make if he wandered the empty halls of his life for eternity? Nothing was ever going to change.

  Even as he fumed, Ana's parting words sank in, triggering a memory.

  Don't be fooled, boy, the raven Kutkinnaku had told him. There is a third way.

  A third way?

  He picked a life at random. In it, Hadrian was run down by a speeding car and died in a German hospital when a nurse administered the wrong drug. The first incident was an accident, but the second was deliberate; Bechard's lips were pursed sensually as he administered the fatal dose. Hadrian plunged into a dark landscape of hideous creatures, with hands like knives and limbs of bone. They snapped at him, chopped off his arms and legs, and took him prisoner. While he languished in a psychic cell, the Cataclysm came as planned and Yod overtook the world. He was reunited with his brother an instant before they died, when everything had been devoured and the world itself was dead. In the depths of Yod's belly, they clutched at each other like babies and wept as darkness fell.

  No sign of a third way there. Ellis had been present, though. She was in the ward when he had been murdered. She'd called for help as his heart had stopped. Her frantic cries were the last thing that version of himself had heard.

  He tried another life, and another. A dagger to the heart, a knife across the throat, a bullet in the head. Poison. Incineration. Evisceration. Every death he could possibly imagine, he or his brother suffered it. His life-tree was a nightmare.

  It dawned on him, eventually, that the moment of death wasn't the turning point he required. He needed another one, another point of reference from which to search. The act of rescuing Ellis wasn't an event common to all universes. Neither was the ascension to the top of the mountain with Pukje and the confrontation between him and Lascowicz. There was, in fact, only one common point across all the lives he visited, regardless of who was murdered, Hadrian or his brother: All roads lead to Sheol, Mimir had said.