by V X Lloyd
The Sphinx’s golden light swelled with brilliance, and it it actually moved Moony to tears. She continued, “The situation is rapidly changing. What once was tolerable can be endured no longer. Know this: The next iteration of the enemy’s plans for conquest is already underway. Many humans are now at work to produce a next-generation substance under the enemy’s supervision. Though it will bestow supernatural mental abilities to a few, these powers come at the expense of others. Instead of a linked network, they will build a hierarchy in which the supermental clarity offered by the enemy feeds on the inborn vigor of other minds. Furthermore, as they perfect their potions, the enemy claims more and more of alien humanity’s link with me. This coming war on earth is a lynchpin for the cosmic battle.”
Moony gathered his thoughts, trying to restate what he had heard in terms he could comprehend. “You mean like there is some kind of drug that is turning the whole universe to darkness?” As soon as he had asked, he felt stupid. If this radiant being wanted something, how could Moony possibly do anything besides get in the way? He had no special training or expertise that could be useful for such an important mission. All his knowledge depended on what he could nab from someone else’s thought-stream or read in the Universal Documentation.
As he opened his mouth to speak, she continued. “Part of you knows the answer. Part of you can still remember what it was like for you and I to travel through the spheres together, long ago. There were many of us. After the Great Turn, something in the fabric of many stewards twisted, and many among you were lost. Dark forces covered their link to me. Your blankness comes from the many trials the enemy has put you through. Though I am a guardian to a realm of immense mysteries, the world has become an alienated place. But I have not given up on you. The enemy's compounds are no match for a network of alien humans in league with the Hall of Stewards.”
“Wait. You mean my telepathy -- the telepathy that I have always used -- is a link to dark forces?”
“Many things the enemy gives are but incomplete shadows of the true power. You must judge this for yourself. If I were to set you on a path, and darkness were to befall you, then darkness would befall me. You are a free agent, dear one. Let your innate link with the Hall of the Stewards help you on your way. Whenever you are in doubt, you can call on me for illumination. I am forever willing to give as much assistance as cosmic law affords me. For now, know this: Hidden somewhere on Earth is a formulation that spells the undoing of the enemy: the checkered potion. One of the True Stewards must brew and imbibe the mysterious substance. That person may be you. I believe you will be ready when the time comes.”
It sounded awesome. Too awesome for a guy like him. “What’s the catch?”
From the galaxy-wide golden warmth surrounding him, he sensed a smile.
“No, no catch. But plenty of riddles. Only the information you need at the moment will be revealed to you. No more and no less. And, as you might have guessed, this journey will change you. One can’t follow the plan of the Sphinx and stay the same. You will become a target. Others will want what you have, what you are, and what you seek. As long as you remain in the clutches of the dark one, nothing much will befall you; you will simply resume course along the path of the fallen.”
“I’m already fallen?”
“You are attuned to a sense of numbness and absence that, in time, crescendos to existential agony without reprieve.”
He gulped. “The potion. What will it do to me to drink this thing?”
“When imbibed by one who resonates with the true power of the Stewardry, the crucial bond that the enemy holds to my Hall will be severed. The Earth will again know my wisdom.”
He knew that he wanted to be on a quest to drink a magic potion. But he had little notion of where the potion was, or for that matter who the enemy was.
He saw himself taking road trips and traveling to different eras. He saw immense palaces and heard intoxicating music. He saw himself dissolving into light and bliss, shaking hands with what he took for deities and floating through the eons in brilliant star-filled vastness.
Then, a thought descended on Moony. His grin, which had stretched from ear to ear, faded. In the background of his mind, he could hear his impulse to look at the Sphinx and say “Yes, sign me up.” But from somewhere deep inside him he had the irresistible urge, like an itch, to bow out.
The more attention he gave to this self-doubt, the more it became something he believed.
He shook his head. “You’ve definitely got the wrong guy. Sorry, but I'm not remotely capable of -- whatever you’re asking. Even if you give me all the answers and walk me through it. I'm --” He wanted to say “I’m not a hero,” but it sounded ridiculous that he was even insinuating that someone anywhere could mistake him as one. “I’m not your guy. You should find someone else. Everyone who knows me knows I’m no damn good for anything.”
The shimmering light and hypnotic patterns began to fade.
“But wait -- If I wanted to, all I’d have to do is check in with you and you’d tell me my next step, yeah?”
Moony’s eyelids flitted.
Galaxies swirled out of focus.
The warmth of the Sphinx's voice resonated within him: “All is clear enough when you know you can do anything.”
The light of the Hall of Stewards vanished to a terrible greyness that appalled him, then he realized that greyness was his sense impressions of the physical world. The world hadn’t become more grey -- it only appeared this way in comparison with the pure lights saturating the Hall of the Steward of Mysteries.
No more did he feel the physical closeness of the Cosmic Sphinx. The contrast was devastating.
His ass had fallen asleep. He was sitting in a hard chair at a screening, now almost at the end of the original King Kong. As bullets from biplanes filled the giant ape, the power in The Frog Regal cut off. The grey, grey world had turned black. Perry jumped to action and ran through the bar's darkness to open the blinds.
No light filtered in. Celia snickered. Moony felt her nervousness, but did not know what she was thinking.
*
The scene back in the physical world was boring and strange, and Moony still had no sense of telepathy. Even more annoying was that, despite his repeated attempts, he was unable to access any of his bookmarks within the Universal Standard Human Documentation. Nothing for what might be happening in the Frog Regal, nothing for King Kong, or even himself. Because of its multilayered, complex and convoluted format of data storage, Universal Standard Documentation was incredibly time-consuming to peruse without relying on his existing bookmarks. It had taken him time and a lot of cross-referencing to build up his bookmarking system. Without it, the documentation was next to useless. It would be like hoping for an answer to a specific problem and receiving a single page from an entirely randomized internet.
Without his bookmarks, how was he to make headway on his quest for the checkered potion? Now was hardly the time to do any database rebuilding. For the time being, he would simply have to live as terrestrial humans did, and direct his sensory apparatus to the environment around him and learn things that way.
He found it concerning that not only were the bar’s lights off, there was no sunlight coming in through the windows. It was still early in the day. And why did he notice a subtle pulsation in the air?
More clomping sounds as Perry made his way to the bar's front door to investigate. A bit of grey light from outside illuminated the room. A massive snowdrift had formed a wall against the bar.
“Christ.” If Perry had been in the Wild West, he would have spat on the ground. But since he wasn’t, he just snapped his fingers and stood there shaking his head. The wall of snow begged for his body warmth.
The bar projected a startling and vacuous energy without the familiar sound of gas heaters, refrigerator motors, and an occasional pop from ice machine or radiator. Everyone just sat there – not many situations made Moony want his occasional cigarette more than the sight of bor
ing stability. His hands needed something to do, so he sat on them. He didn’t want to have an addiction. He wanted, maybe, to be an important part of saving humanity's link to the Hall of the Steward of Mysteries.
Celia made a joke about a skeleton and a prostitute. Moony hadn't been paying close enough attention to the first part, but he heard the punchline: “I said I wanted a stiff one, pal, but if I’m going to bone you, I’ll get more than I bargained for.”
It wasn’t funny, but Deb and Moony laughed with her a bit. Moony was the first to stop laughing. For the first time in his life, he caught a glimpse of real darkness. That sense of emptiness he felt -- it was so familiar and ever-present. A kind of existential background noise he had been ignoring his whole life.
Perry appraised the smooth, subtly cleft wall of packed snow. It looked like the backside of a huge reclining snow goddess.
The snowdrift groaned and dumped a mound into the bar’s open doorway.
“Christ,” he said again and struggled to get the door closed. At first, it looked like he had it under control. He was just slipping on the snow, which anyone is ought to do, but then he tumbled face-forward into it. Flustered by his embarrassment, much, much more snow rolled over him in a thick, suffocating dome. His natural impulse to close the door overrode his perception that he was pushing, rather than pulling, and when it closed he had sealed himself outside the building under a Thanatos midnight of packed snow. Death was touching Perry, and the reality of its fingerprint gave him a strange sense of recognition. Slippery, shivering and frustrated, he could no longer find the entrance.
From the inside, Moony ambled to the rescue, taking a little extra time to glance back at everyone else who sat without doing anything. Were they really that adamant about staying in movie-watching mode, or did they just not care?
Moony was sure of one thing: he cared. He was becoming a man who cared about things.
He had mixed feelings about that.
He freed Perry by swinging the door open and offering his smooth hand.
Moony wondered about this new heroic path he was taking in life, and was finding it thus far to be intriguing. Clues, he decided. That could be his next step. Clues as to the potion's whereabouts. It seemed absurd. But he was intrigued.
Standing on scared-to-death feet, Perry was the Yeti shivering in coveralls. His face, especially his beard, was caked in snow.
“Jesus Kee-riist,” said Perry. Luckily for his credibility, his tears of fright were disguised behind clumps of white snow. He stood like an accused child. If he were outside, one could say that Perry stood on a small hill, but since the scale of snow becomes magnified once it intrudes indoors, Perry stood on a large mountain of snow.
An awkward moment passed. Moony asked please if it would be all right if he had a cigarette, but the landlord shook his head, dropping globs of white from him as he did so.
“Well, I’ll be!” said Deb. What Deb meant was that she’ll be damned, but Deb was horrified at bad language, especially the word damn. Fear of damnation was what propelled her through adolescence and kept her from having a steady relationship with men. Relishing the allure of damnation was what propelled her to have relations with her best friends’ boyfriends, and therefore kept her from steady friendships with women.
She raced toward the bar and mixed herself a drink. All this excitement encouraged her to crave the state she normally associated with excitement, which was the state of being intoxicated.
“Anybody care for a drink? I’m having one!”
“I’ll have a Vodka tonic,” answered Josh, a Satanist.
“I'll have a Tom Collins,” said Jon-Jon, a part-time clown.
“Keystone Light?” asked a person without friends.
“Guiness,” said Bachman.
“Sam Adams, please,” said a man who resembled the God painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Heath went to sleep in the corner. He had been awake for three days and enough was enough. He laid his head on a book whose title was identical to the book you are now reading.
Through his snow beard, Perry muttered to Deb as to the existence of a few dozen tea light candles under the bar. The candles brought a ghastly sort of illumination to the very green tiled, very wood panel, very dusty bar. Moony was familiar with mixing drinks and entertaining guests, and so he proved helpful to Deb, who looked to him as a Swiss army knife of gentlemanliness. He didn't mind entertaining her belief that he was something greater than himself. The theme of what he was taught during childhood was: good things come to those who take and take and take. It was a warped kind of Americanism that suited most alien humans perfectly. For Moony’s eleventh terrestrial birthday, when his parents hired Digital Underground to play, he asked the band if he could have one of their synth modules with all the beats programmed into it. They politely laughed at him. Later when the crew loaded up the band’s trailer, Moony had some of his friends create a diversion while he nabbed the synth module, which, without a manual or any equipment to connect it to, he would never be able to use. The band, having discovered later that the very same piece of equipment was conspicuously missing, charged an extra $1000 to Moony’s father’s credit card and performed a song called “The Fan who Stole Humpty’s Nose.”
Perry made his way to the bathroom to get out of his damp clothes. No one noticed he was gone until they all had their drinks in hand, when their muscle memory brought them to recognize the hospitality of their host. A few people looked around and in the end did little but catch the eyes of the others looking around.
*
Clicking on the Frog Regal bathroom’s hand dryer sent Perry Whitecomb a steady blast of heat which eroded his mind into sensations of Elysian pleasure. Moderately delusional for the sake of increasing his gratification, he entertained himself with the fantasy that numerous small kittens licked the moisture off his cold skin.
“Who’s the lion in this den?” he muttered as if challenging himself, eyeing his bare backside, then the unlockable bathroom door. He watched a soft clump of snow from his hair melt in the bright metal sink. The liquid pooled and disappeared.
As he grew warmer, he felt invigorated, full of a strange new life. He imagined himself as a great yawning cat, a creature full of comfort yet willing to devour the young of other males. He leaned back and scratched his hairy chest, moaning deeply. His skin reddened and swelled a little as his circulation restored itself. Above him he noticed fresh water spots on the ceiling tiles he had just replaced. “Aw, dammit,” he muttered, hands finding their way onto his penis. For Perry, what followed after this discovery was unavoidable.
Leaving the bathroom wearing a slightly dry white shirt and wet slacks, he made himself a Long Island iced tea in a tall and slender glass.
*
You might be wondering what all this had to do with the Sphinx from the earlier scene. Moony himself was wondering the same thing.
He wanted what he had just lost: the amazing sense of emotional telepathy. And despite his inborn self-centeredness, he found that he very much wondered what could happen if he grew able to interact with other people with that magical sense of fullness and nuance.
He closed his eyes and tried to reach out from the place where he could sense other people’s emotions.
A wash of sun-yellow luminescence.
It came, then it faded.
If that was to be his grand clue, then maybe he had been correct to simultaneously refuse and accept the Sphinx’s offer.
He scratched his head and tried to quiet his thoughts to see if he could sense any clues.
He sensed that he felt the urge to have a cigarette. He did what he could to squash that urge. It felt like he was holding an unanswered question in the foreground of his heart.
A familiar sense of isolation fell over him, and he once more felt a tingle of his usual cerebral telepathy. Not nearly as strong as it could be, but enough to work with. Perhaps he could sleuth out some useful information this way. His own way.
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br /> In a fraction of a second, simply by triggering a deep impulse somewhere within his being, he transmitted his request for documentation on the checkered potion.
In an instant, he saw a series of flickering mental images. The documentation for the potion gave a few glimpses, but nothing really richly factual. It contained a unique substance that had been mythologized by various secret societies on Earth since 2000 BC at least. Whether the potion had ever existed was not indicated. Many legendary properties had been attributed to it, but no careful chemical analysis of the liquid had been done, except in theory, and the conclusion was that it was not a remotely safe substance for anyone to drink. Plenty of the ordinary sections of the manual were blank. It did show a cool visual depiction of a clear glass vial with a long, ornate stopper containing a fluid that instead of precipitating into horizontal layers, also grouped itself vertically, so that the fluid looked like a checkerboard, each square about a quarter-inch across.
Eventually, Moony grew disappointed with his findings and he re-shelved the manual in its nonphysical source.
*
Meanwhile, Heath dreamt peacefully about giant gorillas. As he begun to snore, somewhere in Deb, a switch flipped. “Have you all heard those strange noises coming from the Q block apartments?”
Josh, the lonely devout Satanist who lived in the Q apartments on the second floor, perked up.
“I have,” said Deb, and only Deb. “I’ve heard some strange noises coming from the third floor.”
Moony took a swig from his beer. His mind, of its own accord, had lazily gravitated back to a reliable center of gravity: he was thinking about sex. In general, about how sex was great.
In fact, Deb was alluding to sex in her monologue. Her interruption was timely.
“I’ve heard a lot of moaning, screaming, but a good sort of screaming,” she nudged Moony, “and lots of banging. I am positive this noise is bothering other tenants, I myself heard the racket while I was performing some regularly-scheduled maintenance --” she paused for effect “-- near the third floor.” She leered at Moony as if she were telling a ghost story.
