by R. E. Vance
Inch by inch, I drew closer to my sword. Finally the tips of my fingers touched its hilt. Just a bit farther and …
“It requires a lot of energy to summon Heaven. A lot of time must be burned. To search for the Void without knowing where it is would be suicide. But with you here … Ah, yes!” Grinner said, his finger fixated on a specific point in the sky. “There you are!”
Then something happened that I’d never seen before. The sky got darker. I don’t mean that it became overcast and the light of fewer stars was reaching Earth. I mean the sky literally started to blot out. First the Moon disappeared, then the light from bright stars, then the most distant stars extinguished.
Gemini’s brightest, as well as Castor and Pollux, were reduced from being reflective diamonds in the sky to pinpricks in a heavy wool blanket, until they disappeared altogether. The stars of Hydra and Leo flickered out like dying bulbs.
One by one, I watched the night sky disappear until all that remained were Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, shining in a belt across the sky. Grinner left those four planets in the night sky, and they were the only real sources of light left.
“The doorway to the Void requires a ladder,” he hummed as he swayed in his trance, “but for a ladder to exist, it must be hinged both above and below.”
He pointed up to the four planets and then, with a violent gesture, pulled down, falling to his knees as he touched the ground with his hands. The four stars ceased being spots of light in the sky, morphing into beams of illumination. Hell, not beams—that conjures up images of lasers and Buck Rogers. I’m talking more like columns of light that extended from their source in the Heavens all the way down to the cleared-out field in front of PopPop’s cabin. Hellelujah—if I lived to be ten thousand years old, I seriously doubted I’d ever see anything as beautiful as this again.
“Don’t you see?” Grinner panted, and suddenly I could see him aging. Back in Paradise Lot, he had seemed to possess an inexhaustible amount of energy, but now—now he was out of breath. I guess bringing down Heaven can really take its toll on a guy. “I do this to give us all a chance at a new beginning.” He grinned.
The columns of light moved across the Earth and gathered closer to Grinner—not like the planets’ beams were twisting in his direction, but as if the planets were actually being pulled closer together across light-years of space—as he exerted his gravitational will with a growing ferocity. I could see flecks of gray appearing, adding texture to his jet-black hair as shallow but noticeable wrinkles began to crawl out from the corners of his eyes.
The four columns converged onto Grinner, four spotlights that entered him, turning his body into a transparent shell—now I could see what the inner workings of true magic looked like. It was a universe within a universe, a thousand galaxies orbiting his heart. But unlike the heart of our Milky Way, his was black and void, a force of absence. The stars from our night sky ran into that black heart, losing their effervescence as soon as they touched it.
And Grinner grew.
The stars themselves nourished him, and he grew.
First, he grew to twice the size of a human.
Then he was a hill giant, then a stone giant.
A dragon.
And still he grew, and all the while I watched the process unfold far too fast to be natural—an odd scene viewed through the lens of a camera that filmed only in fast-forward.
“Truly, Human Jean, you must now understand that no matter how hard you resist me, the new world will be,” Grinner bellowed, pulling Joseph’s box from his pocket.
The air got thick, and with every breath I took, I felt as though I were sucking in honey, and still I crawled forward, toward my final trick.
Grinner looked to the sky, which was now filled with a darkness that was not the absence of light, but an entity in and of itself. “Look there,” he said, pointing up. “That is where your Bella is. Just one embrace. One connection and the bridge will be established, and I will be able to hold it here forever and for everyone.”
And from the Void that hung in the air like a black balloon, I could see Bella’s face against its cusp. She looked down at me, less than a hundred feet away, anguish in her eyes. When we saw each other, my heart lurched and I felt something being drawn out of me, like a long breath slowly released. Gray wisps of smoke were filtering out of my chest, and when I looked up at Bella, I saw the same wisps emanating from her, toward Joseph’s box.
“You see?” Grinner cackled. “The connection wants to be free. Embrace her, let it go and save the world!”
“It’s now or never,” I muttered to myself, getting on my one good foot. The sack that was once my right foot wiggled from my ankle, each swing sending blinding pain through my body. I screamed. Taking deep breaths, I hopped up the cabin’s steps, each jump agony, and managed to collapse just in front of the door, where my ace card awaited me.
I pulled out a .50-caliber Beowulf that I had rubbed with the candle wax Hermes gave me. I remembered how the candles had protected him, hiding his magic from the world around him. I had mulled that over in my mind ever since. Why else would he have thought to give me that piece of wax? If the wax could shield me from magic, maybe it negated magic altogether. It was a gamble, but it was all I had.
I loaded the bullet into the magazine and slid the bolt home. Then I prepared to shoot, figuring the heat of the shot would melt the wax and burn its power long enough and strong enough that Grinner would not be able to block it with his gravitational tricks. Taking aim, I said a silent prayer to the GoneGods.
You left us here with so many problems. Let this bullet put an end to one of them.
I pulled the trigger.
Chapter 4
The Deepening
What happened next took less than a second, and yet I was able to perceive it as if in slow motion. The shot rang through the silence with a rippling sound and pierced the gravitational bubble surrounding Grinner with a thud. He must have felt his sphere being breached, because he looked in my direction. I saw him fan out his fingers, seeking to stop the bullet, but just as I had hoped, the wax shielded the lead missile from his powers. Understanding what was happening, he tried to lift a stone to block the bullet’s approach. A good plan … if only he had thought of it a millisecond earlier.
The bullet ripped into Grinner, shredding apart a body that was created to be Gravity incarnate. From the wound a torrent of darkness billowed out, like black air escaping a pierced balloon. I tried to dodge the Void but I was too slow. It enveloped me, wisps grabbing at me with relentless power, and suddenly I was no longer at my cabin in the woods. I was no longer on Earth.
I was no longer here.
I was nowhere.
↔
What happened next came in degrees. First the chaos of the darkness’s approach immediately ceased and I found myself standing at a crossroad, a single light hanging overhead. The gloom was so heavy I could not see more than ten feet away, four paths leading from me into the eternity beyond. I was in the Void and Bella did not come to save me. I was alone. Slowly, inch by inch, the ten feet of visibility became nine, then eight, until the emptiness was less than five feet away. I couldn’t stand it, the claustrophobic approach, like being boxed into a room that was shrinking. And with every inch that was taken away, I was closer to the Void’s embrace.
Screw that! If I was going to die, I wanted to have a hand in it, not wait for it to take me away slowly but surely. I took a step forward, down the path that was straight ahead. Then another, until finally I stepped into the darkness itself.
What I felt is damn near impossible to describe. It was a sensation I had never experienced before and pray I never will again. I entered heavy air, a lukewarm aura—like walking into a wall of water—and then all at once it was like being a thousand feet beneath the surface, the pressure of the depth crushing me under its immense weight. I was floating in the Void and I suddenly had the thought that I was back in my mother’s womb, the amniotic flu
id hugging me tight, suspending me in the darkness where up and down, left and right, no longer mattered. All that did matter was simply being. I even found myself curling up into the fetal position. I was suspended in nothing.
And that is exactly where I was. In nothing. I don’t mean peace or tranquility or any other kind of Zen bullshit. I mean nothing. A complete and total, all-consuming emptiness. Darkness, sure. But this was more than darkness, because even if you stood in a pitch-black room with a blindfold, you still wouldn’t come close to what I mean. And the silence—I can only say for sure that it did not come from the absence of sound, because that would imply that sound exists somewhere else. No sound existed here. It never had and it never would.
In the Void, I wasn’t floating—that would imply that I was some kind of corporeal form. I was not there. Rather, my body was not. Only my consciousness, and that, I’ve learned, was not enough to negate the nothing.
I felt that if I stayed in this place too long I would die, not out of hunger or thirst, but because my body would eventually be absorbed by the nothing, my heart’s vibrations syncing with my new surroundings, joining the perfect harmony of the Void. I could feel that already happening, my mind losing so many memories.
This was not like the Void I had been in with Bella in my dreams. There, I suspected, I was just a visitor. Like being in a movie, except I could walk around the set, watch what was going on, but not actually be able to touch anything. Certainly this was true every time I tried to embrace Bella, draw her close. We were together, but not. And although she wasn’t a hallucination, she was a hologram of herself. Where I was with Bella had felt like a dream.
This place felt real.
And I was suddenly gripped with a suffocating terror that I was dead and this was all that was left. Lonely, empty, lost—these words don’t even come close to how I felt. It was as if there was absolutely nothing in the Universe but my consciousness—it was awful. Already I could feel the utter lack of anything pierce my mind, crushing me under its overwhelming absence.
But then … well, remember how this all started. Me running from the darkness and her saving me. Perhaps we had come full circle, because from the emptiness of nothing, she came. And without doing or saying anything, by the simple act of being there, she saved me from a broken mind and lost soul.
Some things never change.
From out of the darkness Bella appeared. Not in my dreams, not a hallucination, but Bella made of flesh and blood. Bella, my wife, my best friend, my lover. My soulmate.
Bella, oh how I would have died a thousand times for you.
The joy of seeing her there and the overwhelming nothingness of this place made me forget everything. Grinner, Earth, the Others, the GoneGods. But no emptiness could ever make me forget Bella. “Oh, my love,” I said, “I am so happy to see you.”
↔
“You have to go back,” she said, denying me as I approached her.
I was so desperate to be in her arms. “I don’t want to go back,” I said. “I want to be here with you.”
She shook her head. “That is this place talking. It was how I felt when I first arrived. But you are not dead. Not like me.” Her voice was calm, soothing.
“No,” I said, “but this time I don’t have to wake up. We can be together forever here.”
Bella gave me her You know that’s not true look and said, “Jean, don’t you remember what’s happening?”
“Remember?” I said, the word slapping me as I spoke it. Remember what? What else was there to remember? But like the opposite of waking up from a dream and it slowly fading away into oblivion, her words brought it back. Vague images, until all I saw were Joseph and Penemue, Tink and CaCa, the destruction of the One Spire Hotel and the devastation of Paradise Lot. All of it slowly trickled back into my consciousness. It was terrifying. I was seeking the embrace of the one who had soothed my nightmares a thousand times before, but with each new memory, a chasm grew between us.
“Am I dead?” I asked.
“No,” Bella said, “not yet. But the longer you stay here, the harder it will be for your soul to find its way back.”
“Would that be so bad?” I reached out my hand, determined to hold her before the divide grew too far. “We’d be together.”
Bella didn’t reach out for me. She did not take my hand in hers, instead rejecting me with a look of pain in her eyes. A single tear ran down her cheek. She shook her head and said, “Look, the darkness is already changing. You have to go back.”
“I don’t want to leave you here alone.”
“Remember the beach, the mountainside, your toys that I brought to life?”
I nodded.
“I’m not alone. They’re memories, but they are also real. I will learn to make those constructs more permanent. I’m getting better at filling the Void. And as I get better, I’m going to fill this place with things that remind me of you. Of us. Jean-Luc, I may be alone, but I am not lonely. This world is my canvas and already I have made so many wondrous paintings.”
“I won’t leave you.”
“You’re not leaving me,” she said, giving me her I love you forever look. “You can’t.” She looked down through the portal and at Grinner, who continued to hold on to Heaven. “He’s weaker than he has ever been. He needs to build the bridge and enter this realm before he can be whole again. If there was ever a chance, now is it.”
“Maybe … but he’s so strong and I’ve run out of tricks.”
“You have. But I haven’t.”
She pulled off the silver ring she had made in our dream and threw it to me. I caught it—and unlike all the times before, I actually felt the hard, cool metal in my hand.
“Remember your promise, Jean-Luc. And remember how much I love you.”
And from beyond the chasm, she blew me a kiss that hit me like a physical force, jarring me to life in the world beyond the Void. With a gasp, I was back at the cabin, on Earth and without Bella.
↔
Bella’s kiss had blown me back into the world. I looked up and saw the window from where Bella had thrown me out of Heaven. It was a shimmering, glossy black hole, as if someone had ripped open the sky. Bella’s face appeared at the threshold and her hand slammed against the inside of the portal, her palms flush against its barrier as if she were pressing against glass. She could not cross over. Like Michael said, death is the only one-way valve from which there is no return. Well, Bella had made that journey already, and the path to Heaven was closed. Even death would not reunite us. Not anymore.
Still, there was one hope. We knew that Joseph’s box was powerful enough to hold the connection. Hell, it had already drawn it out of us. With it, I could get back to Bella. So, new plan. Get Joseph’s box and kill Grinner, and not necessarily in that order.
Simple. I mean, how hard could it be to kill a god?
↔
“Oath-Breaker!” Grinner screamed, drawing my attention away from Heaven’s window. I looked behind me to see Penemue flapping directly above Grinner, exactly thirty feet away.
The cavalry had arrived, and from the way he flopped about in the sky, I was pretty sure the cavalry was drunk.
“Hellelujah!” I cried out.
“Tell me, Fallen,” Grinner said, “have you come to repent for your sins, or are you here to witness the ascension of your new god?”
The angel grinned, removing those rimless glasses of his and tucking them into the small pocket in his tweed vest. “In Hell, I was a hero,” he said. “For my sin gave humans the capacity to sin from eternity to eternity. Why corrupt a single soul when you can damn them all? Perfect strategy, don’t you think?
“In Hell, Belial built me a vast library and Mulciber a palace. They showered me with gifts and riches, praise and accolades. Even the Morning Star consulted me when contemplating the more subtle aspects of sin. All the while I nodded and imparted my knowledge, because if any of them were to suspect that I taught humans wisdom not out of malice but out of ad
miration, and, dare I say it, love, they would cast me out—and then where would I go? Better to survive in Hell than wither elsewhere, I thought. Well, I am tired of surviving.”
Penemue cast a glance at me. “What was it you said? ‘We’re all going to die. Might as well die for something worthwhile.’ Very well then.”
From out of nowhere two daggers appeared, their hilts attached to a chain that bubbled out of his skin and wrapped around his forearms. He threw them down at Grinner, and both pierced his back as the fallen angel yanked on the chains and pulled upward. Grinner rose, wriggling like a fish caught on a hook. All this time I had thought of Penemue as a celestial librarian, never once imagining that he had a few tricks literally up his sleeve. GoneGodDamn! Penemue was a badass!
Penemue took to the sky and I noted that his chains were over thirty feet long. He was keeping his distance. The angel pulled up, but Grinner quickly anchored himself to the ground. Penemue’s arms and wings struggled to get enough power to lift him.
He yanked again, rope-thick veins straining to provide enough blood to his massive muscles, but the huge Grinner did not move. I doubt he even burned time to hold himself to the ground, his newly made massive body enough to anchor him down. But he was in pain. I could tell from his faltering smile.
Grinner reached for the blades, but Penemue had planned his shot well. There was no way a body of human design could reach those meat hooks stuck in its own back.
“I see that a leopard does not change its spots, just as a Fallen cannot do anything but fall!”
With this last word, Grinner spread apart his hands and tried to force Penemue down. The angel was outside of Grinner’s thirty-foot sphere of influence, and Grinner couldn’t get a hold on him. But he wasn’t trying to pull down the fallen angel—he was focusing his powers on the chains from which he hung. Penemue must have anticipated this because he was flapping his wings for all he was worth, the air beneath him stirring up the earth and ground below. Leaves and loose twigs were to be expected, but the torrent of his wings was pulling up the roots of full-grown trees, their tendrils popping up from beneath the ground. Man, oh man, I’d seen jet engines throw less air around.
