The Crooked Letter: Books of the Cataclysm: One

by Sean Williams

  That was the turning point, then. Even Kybele had listened to the old god's advice. If there was no way to avoid the Cataclysm, there might be ways to minimise it or contain it.

  At the turning point in Sheol, an array of options spread before him. He couldn't see the moment itself; everything within Sheol was excised from his life-tree, as though it stood outside him. And that made sense, he supposed. What would happen if he were able to look in and see himself? It would be like standing between parallel mirrors. The existence of an infinite number of reflections did nothing to warp space and time, but it did bend the mind of the person contemplating the fact.

  The echo of the thought spread around him, as his earlier shout had.

  Although he couldn't see Sheol, he could see the roads leading from it. He could see where world-lines had been severed and grafted onto new ones. One future could be traded for another by taking the present—within Sheol—and crossing it with another. It wasn't so much rewriting history as turning it into a Frankenstein's monster: this past and that future connected by a present removed from both of them, set free to lurch off on its new path, most of its inhabitants none the wiser. The success of such worlds was varied. All featured the Cataclysm in one form or another. If Seth went back to the First Realm, the Cataclysm went away until Yod murdered one of them again. If Hadrian stayed in the Second Realm, Yod found another way across—by killing either of the twins a second time and forcing a Cataclysm between the Second and Third Realms. When that happened, the alien predator was able to stroll through life-trees at will and choose the one that resulted in the conjunction it actually wanted. One way or another, it always got into the First Realm, and there its feasting on human life began in earnest. Hadrian's days, whichever way he looked, seemed always to end in a wasteland steeped in ruination and despair, as Yod willed it.

  It was ironic, he thought, that the link between he and his brother, which they had spent most of their life defying, could bring them to that end. Yod wouldn't want them apart if they weren't mirror twins. If they weren't mirror twins they wouldn't belong together. There was no way out, as far as he could see.

  But there had to be a way out, and he had to be able to find it, or else why would Ana have left him there? He doggedly considered all the directions in which the escape might lie—along which of the many possibilities he had considered thus far. Existence or nonexistence? Life or death? First or Second Realm? Cataclysm or no Cataclysm?

  Where was the third way?

  He almost missed it. The sole exception was just one branch among millions, a single, solitary world-line stretching away from Sheol at an odd angle, branchless and, at first glance, completely empty. But it wasn't empty. Hadrian could feel its presence when he stumbled across it, and he was able to navigate along its length back to Sheol, then forwards again, by following its geometry. It existed, and he existed in that world, even if very little was happening to him. There seemed to be precious little left of him for anything to happen to.

  The branch extended for a disproportionately long time. Far past the ending of all the other lines, it was still going strong. He began to wonder if he had made a mistake after all—if the branch was a weird flaw in the Third Realm rather than a genuine feature of his life—when suddenly a flash of colour and motion rushed over him. The world burst back into being with a torrent of browns, whites, and reds.

  He slowed his headlong rush and looked around in amazement. This wasn't the world he had known, either before or after the Cataclysm. Hints of what it had been and what it might become lay buried beneath deserts and mountains, under seas and mighty glaciers. It was a world that hovered on the brink. Barely had the transition begun when that world-line exploded into a multitude of possibilities, too many to take in at once. His death was in all of them.

  There, on the cusp of oblivion, he found Seth sitting despondently on a rocky outcrop, staring out over the barren mountaintops.

  “Where were you?” his brother said, looking up briefly then turning back to the view. “Took you long enough.”

  “I didn't know you were waiting for me.” He followed the direction of Seth's gaze. The weird thing was, he knew the mountains around them. He had been there, and recently. “I'm sorry I kept you waiting.”

  Seth waved his concern away. “You haven't missed anything. I can't believe Agatha died for this.”

  “Who's Agatha?”

  “She got me here. And what for? It's pointless.” Seth's voice was full of bitterness. “I've been pushed around and kept in the dark right from the beginning. They never had any intention of giving me what I wanted.”

  Hadrian had no idea what his brother was talking about. “What do you mean?”

  “I asked them to take me to the moment I died, meaning the train in Sweden. The knife.” He swallowed. “Well, that's not where I ended up. Meg dumped me here instead.”

  Hadrian looked around. The metal hut was gone, but there was a stone structure in its place that looked weathered and ancient.

  “I'm sure she did it for a reason.”

  “If she did, I fail to see what it was.”

  “Well…” Hadrian moved cautiously closer to his brother, trying to show sympathy even though he didn't understand the deep sense of powerlessness that undermined him. “You don't have to stay. You can move—”

  “Oh, I know about that. And fine viewing it makes, too. How does it make you feel to know that we were always for the chop, that no matter what we did the world was going to end?”

  Hadrian stared out at the mountains, at the crisp dawn light setting the horizon on fire. The view from that point in his life-tree was one of scars and cancerous growth, but there was healing, too, and the chance of recuperation.

  He remembered Kybele saying: It's time you accepted the fact that the life you once knew is gone.

  “I don't know,” he said. “Some people might love to be in our position.”

  “We're not some people.”

  “And it hasn't been all bad.”

  Seth snorted. “Don't lie to me, brother. I've looked down your world-line. I've seen what happened to you. No wonder you looked so shocked when you saw Ellis.”

  “You've—what? How?” The thought that Seth had been rummaging around in his history—all his histories—made him feel violated and angry. Hadrian fought it. He hadn't known what to expect, seeing Seth again, but he was certain that being thrust back into his old way of thinking wasn't right.

  “This is an intersection,” his brother said. “A join. You can look at mine, too, if you want. I can't stop you. Our life-trees overlap.”

  Was that why you did it? Hadrian wanted to ask him. Because I couldn't stop you? Or because you actually wanted to?

  “That's exactly what I'll do,” he said, letting his anger fuel the desire to do unto as he had been done to. He sought the opening to Seth's life-tree, found it all around him, in the very fabric of the reality they had stumbled into, and stormed off into another past.

  Metallic meteorites hurtled around Sheol and pleaded in soft voices to be allowed to live, while a living ship swam in response to its pilot's song and dreamed peaceful dreams. Ancient gods in ancient cages whispered with hope of Hadrian's coming, and a captured hurricane bayed for revenge with darkness at its heart. A glowing goddess stood trapped in a statue of gold, betrayed by the child of her love, while a sailor in the sky wished him peace. The snake-toothed monster Hadrian had dreamed of in the First Realm saved Seth's life, then the monster's identical twin tried to kill him.

  Words assailed him:

  In the times to come, we will all lose something and gain something.

  Does he know who he is?

  I'm sure you'll find the rest of you soon…

  Hadrian pulled out of his brother's life with a cry. It was too much. He couldn't take it all in: the faces, the places, the names, the issues. How could he pretend to understand what Seth had undergone when he could barely comprehend his own experiences—the ones he himsel
f had lived through in this life alone?

  “I'm sorry.”

  The moment he had been viewing froze around him in a blur of motion. Xol had been fighting Quetzalcoatl in a bid to break the terrible deadlock binding them both to the Second Realm. Little did the dimane know that they were as trapped as Seth and Hadrian. Without Xol's betrayal, Yod would never have known how to bring about a Cataclysm using the Castillo brothers. One preceded the other.

  Seth had joined him.

  “I know you're sorry, too,” his brother said. “It's not your fault it has to end like this. Horva told me it wouldn't fix anything, coming here. I should've listened.”

  “Would it have made any difference?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe if it had just been you, things would've worked out all right. Maybe you would have known what to do. Maybe Agatha would still be alive.”

  Hadrian stared at his brother, wondering where the twin he had known had gone. Who was this weakened, hollow thing before him?

  That's me, he thought. Or it was me. We're still reflections. We've just changed sides.

  He wanted to tell his brother that there were no easy fixes, that coming to Sheol was only the beginning of the solution, not the end. The woman called Agatha was dead, but so was Kybele. There was at least some sort of balance.

  But there were no easy ways to say that, either.

  “Let's go back to Sweden,” he said.

  “What would be the point? We know how it ended.”

  “It hasn't ended yet.”

  “What I saw in the hotel room? I'd say it's pretty much over and done with now.”

  “You didn't see what you thought you saw. I mean you did, but—” He stopped, knowing words alone would never be enough.

  “I'm going there now,” he said. “I'll expect you soon.”

  He willed himself through his branching lives, sweeping back to the world-line he had followed to Sheol, to this strange reunion with his brother. The suite was exactly as he remembered it: much better than they'd become accustomed to elsewhere on their trek, but nothing terribly special. He and Ellis were on the bed. The door was ajar. A hand pushing it open was visible from the perspective he had chosen.

  What came next was burned in his memory.

  (“I knew it,” said a voice from the doorway. All passion vanished at the bitter chill in those three short words. “I fucking knew it.”

  Hadrian pulled away from Ellis. The doorway was empty, but Seth had been there. There was a black hole in his wake, as though a winter storm cloud had invaded the room. The void sucked away all of Hadrian's contentedness and replaced them with guilt and panic.

  He leapt out of bed. “Seth!”

  The door to the suite slammed. Footsteps thumped down the corridor outside.

  “Bloody hell.” He pulled on the bare minimum—pants, a T-shirt, sneakers—and grabbed his coat.

  “I'll come with you,” said Ellis, but he didn't hear her. He was out of the room before she was barely on her feet and reaching for her clothes.

  The corridor outside was empty. Elevator doors closed on a lonely figure punching the cab's opposite wall. Hadrian hurried to the fire stairs and ran down them two at a time. His brother was just crossing the foyer as he burst out of the stairwell on the ground floor.

  “Seth, wait! Let me explain!”

  A slight quickening of pace was the only sign that his brother had heard. Head down, hunched like a turtle into his coat, Seth strode out of the hotel.

  Hadrian doggedly followed, wincing at the blast of cold air that greeted him. The pavement was slippery beneath his feet and a wintry sun hung low over the horizon, glinting off ice crystals. Seth was already at the nearest corner. Hadrian ran after him, calling his brother's name. When he turned the corner, Seth was running too, shouldering his way past sensibly dressed pedestrians. Warm air puffed from mouths in startled curses, puffed again as Hadrian followed in his brother's wake.

  “Seth—for Christ's sake!” Hadrian's chase took him across a busy road, down a lane, through an empty market, and into a narrow park where trees reached for the sky with skeletal hands. The ground crunched beneath his feet.

  Seth's pace finally slowed. Exhaustion was taking a toll on both of them.

  “Fuck off, Hade,” Seth snarled as the gap between them narrowed. His face was pale apart from bright circles of red on his cheeks. Hadrian had never seen such a look in his brother's eyes—of hatred, desperate and cruel.

  “We need to talk.”

  “I said, fuck off!” Seth pushed away the hand Hadrian tentatively proffered in a gesture of peace. “Just leave me alone.”

  Hadrian's lungs burned, but the pain in his heart was worse. He'd just wanted space—to be with Ellis, to be himself. Words came haltingly between gasps for air. “Seth, I'm sorry. I didn't mean it to be like this.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Seth lunged forwards and grabbed Hadrian by the front of his T-shirt. Hadrian hung from his brother's left hand as Seth's right hand pulled back and punched once, twice into his face. Pain exploded between his eyes, flashed through his entire head. “Was this part of your plan?”

  He couldn't reply. Seth let him go. He fell to the ground, clutching a torrent of blood pouring from his nose. Stars wheeled around him and he thought for an instant that he might black out. Under his moan of shock and surprise, he heard his brother running away again, across the frozen ground.)

  Seth brought Hadrian back to himself, arriving in a cloud of distaste. “Want to rub my face in it again? Is that it?”

  Fatigue filled him. He was tired of reliving the anger of that scene. He felt as though he had been doing it all his life, before it had ever happened.

  “No.”

  “It wasn't enough that you got what you wanted. You had to take it from me, right under my nose.”

  “She's not an it.” He reminded himself that it wasn't just Ellis Seth was talking about. Caught up in both their feelings for her were other equally complex issues—of identity, independence, self-worth. The spasm of rebellion in Sweden had been the culmination of years of resentment and frustration. It had come out badly, but that didn't mean the impetus behind it wasn't justified.

  “Yes, we were lovers. Yes, we hid it from you. But was that any worse than what you did to me? You were lovers first, and you rubbed my face in it. How do you think that made me feel? Did you stop to think even once about how that must have hurt?”

  Seth looked down at the faded grey carpet. “Yes,” he said. “It didn't stop me, though.”

  “Me, either. And don't forget that it wasn't just our decision. Ellie was part of it. She knew what she was doing as well as we did.”

  Hadrian remembered their mother once saying that you could argue for the existence of love for a lifetime, and disprove it in a moment. The reverse was true, too.

  He took his brother by the shoulder and physically turned him away. “Look by the bed. What do you see?”

  “El's backpack.”

  “What was it doing there?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Ellie was packing, Seth. She was leaving us both and continuing on her own. I caught her in the middle of doing it.”

  “So she was saying good-bye?” Seth's expression was sour. “That's a funny way to do it.”

  “I'm sure the decision wasn't an easy one. I'm sure there was a whole raft of complex, conflicting desires. I'm not even sure she'd decided for certain to go for good—not until later, anyway, when we were arguing in the train. Maybe—” He stopped to take a deep breath. “Maybe she was trying to find a reason to stay.”

  Seth shook his head. “I thought—” His brother looked confused and helpless. “I knew she didn't love me. She loved you, if anything, but that didn't mean it was hopeless. I thought we were going to work it out.”

  “Because she wanted both of us? Because both of us wanted her? I don't think that makes for a stable relationship. Not in our case, anyway. Even without all the supernatural shit, it still wasn't go
ing very well. It was screwing us all up, coming between us. It's not as if we were being terribly mature about it. We were probably going to explode one way or another, no matter what happened.” Hadrian wanted to touch Seth—grip his shoulder or put an arm around him—but he didn't know how to any more. “We drove her away. It was going to happen whether we wanted it to or not.”

  “I suppose so.” Seth's tone was wooden, and Hadrian heard in it that his brother had accepted the truth—had, perhaps, known it all along, just like Hadrian. Accepting the truth and letting go of the lie, however, were two very different things.

  Betrayals within betrayals, Hadrian thought to himself. What would it have felt like to return to the hostel room an hour later and find her packed and gone? How could he have possibly explained it to Seth? Or vice versa?

  “Some holiday,” said Seth with a hint of his old self. “We were supposed to be finding ourselves—and look at us.” He indicated the scene before them with a contemptuous flick of one hand. “It's like a French farce.”

  “I think we did find ourselves,” Hadrian said. “Only it wasn't what we wanted to see.”

  “You and me thrice,” said Ellis.

  Hadrian turned, startled, to face the bed, but it wasn't that Ellis who had spoken.

  She was standing behind them, a muted expression on her face.

  Her face…

  “Your veil!” exclaimed Seth, beating Hadrian to it by a split second.

  “Yes, it's all very symbolic. The truth is revealed; the clouds are parted. Everything is supposed to make sense now.” She rolled her hazel eyes, and looked around her, at the room, at herself on the bed. “I thought you might come back here, my little perverts.”

  “That's ‘inverts,’” Hadrian said without smiling.

  “Are you one of them now, El Paso?” asked Seth.

  She turned back to him. Her expression was one of anger kept tightly in check.

  “Apparently,” she said. “Apparently I've always been one of them: the third Sister, the one who's missing. I may have lived an ordinary life in the First Realm, they tell me, but before that I wasn't human. And when that life was over, I didn't come to the Second Realm the way humans normally do. Oh, no, that wouldn't do at all. I tried to come back to Sheol, where I apparently belong—only I wasn't very good at it, having been a human for so long, so I got stuck halfway. That's where Shathra found me, and that's why the Ogdoad wouldn't let me pass. The Fundamental Forces know who I am, even if I don't. Apparently my name isn't Ellis now, but Nona. What sort of name is Nona, for Christ's sake?”