Penult (Book Four of The Liminality)

by A. Sparrow

  “Yeah, well, I got kind of knocked in the head, too.”

  “No worries. He will fly with me,” said Karla.

  I plopped down in the sand and brought my knees up to my chin, staring down the coastline at the freshly fractured bluffs. It bothered me that Urszula and Mikal had still not returned from their scouting missions. As time went on, the prospects of them returning grew ever bleaker. But I knew Urszula to be tough and resourceful. All hope was not yet lost.

  “Okay. He is patched,” said Solomon. “I think we are ready to go.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for the others?” I said.

  Karla shot me one of those looks. “Don’t be silly. We need to go.”

  “What if they come back and nobody’s here? What if they need help?”

  “If they are not here by now they are not coming back,” said Karla. “There is nothing to be done.”

  “We don’t know that. Not for sure.”

  “Mr. Olivier needs a flesh weaver or he will lose his leg,” said Solomon.

  “Not again, Goddamnit!” said Olivier.

  “Then take him back. I’ll stay.”

  “You have no bug!” said Karla. “And the Pennies will be coming for you! What then?”

  “Let them come. I don’t care.”

  “What is wrong with you? You act like I killed your mother or something. Why do you hate me?”

  Karla’s eyes bulged as she struggled to contain an outburst.

  “This is not about you.”

  “Urszula! You are worried for that Urszula!”

  “And Mikal … and Tigger.”

  “You are unbelievable!” There was fire and confusion in her eyes. But I just wanted her gone. It hurt my head and heart just being around her these days.

  “I will stay with James,” said Ubaldo. “You three can go.”

  “We will send you an escort from the other side,” said Solomon, as he helped Olivier into his saddle.

  “Remember. Go east of north when you cross,” said Olivier. “That will keep you away from the beachhead.”

  “Do not linger here too long,” said Karla, her cheeks suddenly damp with tears. “Come home soon.”

  With a tremendous crash, a cliff-face crashed into the sea a short ways down the coast. Karla kept her eyes on me as she mounted her insect. Solomon squealed like he was calling a hog and the bugs exploded off the beach and out into the strait.

  Chapter 67: The Black

  We watched the flies and their riders grow smaller and smaller until they dipped below the arc of the way too near horizon and vanished beneath the waves. I wondered if I would ever see the other side of this strait again.

  My head was a bit muddled on the topic of my continued existence. Part of me wanted to cling to life with every ounce of my strength. The other part wanted to just let go like Gandalf clinging to the ledge in the mines of Moria, even though I had no Hobbits to save from Balrogs.

  It didn’t really matter to me what came next. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about any of my future prospects, at least none of the practical variety as in—likely to happen. Sure, I’d love to be a rock star or a famous writer or a billionaire inventor, but mere pipe dreams could no longer sustain my taste for life.

  But that was okay. I was calm and accepting of whatever freight train full of fate was coming my way in either realm. No use freaking out. What good would come of that?

  I mean, what was the worst that could happen? That I might blink right out of all existence? Was that so bad? At least that would get my head finally clear.

  Vanishing into nothingness was actually one of the more favorable options available, but also the least likely to happen. There were worse places to end up than nowhere-ville. But many better ones, too.

  Back when I was suicidal, nothingness was a big draw. But Root turned out to be way cooler than I imagined. So was the Deeps, for that matter, though that might be pushing it. But it was tolerable, unlike my life at times.

  Knowing that souls more often than not keep on trucking regardless of what happens to their mortal shells really changed my perspective on things. It quelled a lot of my life and death. It lowered the stakes immensely, made risks less risky.

  Yeah. Sure. I would prefer to live. Who wouldn’t? But if that simply was not going to be possible, then no biggie. Odds were good I could manage to find a semi-comfortable realm somewhere out there.

  True, I might just as easily get stuck in some shit hole place, difficult if not impossible to wriggle free of. Like the Horus of the Deeps, that great trash compactor of spirits. And then there were also those creepy, de-souled Cherubim to think about and keep me from being completely at ease with the universe.

  On the other hand, the unbounded freedom of the Singularity might be pretty sweet. Where souls roamed like winged wild horses, impossible to rein.

  Wild or not, let’s not put the cart before the horse. I still lived. And life is life. Accept no substitutes, if you can avoid it. Though, that last sentiment was starting to ring hollow.

  Cool wavelets lapped at my toes. The tide was coming in, which was news to me. I didn’t even know that this place had tides. It had a thing that looked like a moon but I could never be sure that it was real.

  I was probably due for a fade, so it was time to take Olivier’s advice more seriously. I sat cross-legged on the damp and gritty sand and practiced how I might exert my will to track down and neutralize the poison in my body. Why not give myself every option instead of slamming the door on life?

  So I sent my will probing down to my fingertips and toenails. It was a clumsy and uninformative process, like sticking a plumber’s snake around the bend of a dark drain pipe. My perceptions of my inner workings remained distant and vague. I’m not even sure I would be able to discern self from non-self.

  In the Liminality, bodies were different in fundamental ways than the ones we possess on the other side. Here, if I wanted, I could stop my heart and make my blood flow backward. This place was not life, just an approximation, one step removed from the real thing. The Liminality allowed biology and physiology to break some of the usual rules without repercussions. That’s why the Old Ones could enter the long sleep, practically mummify and then pop up years later all spry and nimble.

  Probably, the key to licking this poison would be to reach out and get the Singularity to help me. I had difficulty imagining where this ricin would go in my body, where it would disperse and how it would look at the cellular and molecular level. My will needed a visual or conceptual target to latch onto in order to exert any influence. That, only the Singularity could provide.

  The Pennies were starting to get a little bolder. A pair of unusually sleek and jaunty flying contraptions with swept back wings bounced in the turbulent air along the fractured bluffs, but curtailed their approach before they reached our stretch of beach.

  “I wish they would come,” said Ubaldo. “Only two. You and me, we could kill them. Easy.”

  “Um, yeah.”

  Ubaldo’s wasp chittered and fanned its wings, all fidgety and antsy to leave. He went over and rubbed the plate between her eyes and mandibles.

  “Easy, Sophia. Take it easy.”

  “I didn’t know your wasp had a name.”

  “Why shouldn’t she?”

  “I don’t know. I just … didn’t know.”

  Sophia settled down and preened her antennae.

  “You and the girl. Karla. You still have problem?”

  “Well, yeah. We did,” I said, a little surprised by the question. “But it’s no big deal now. I’m over it.”

  He just nodded and sat down beside me, saying nothing more, as if that were all the explanation he required. The crash and rumble of shifting rocks began to ebb. The root quake was finally winding down.

  “Where are you from, Ubaldo?”

  He gave me a queer look like it was the last thing he expected me to ask.

  “Does it matter?”

  I sighed. “Just making sma
ll talk. You don’t have to—“

  “When I die, I was in New York. Upstate. By Hudson River. I worked in a brass mill. Making wire. But I come from a small island, smaller than this one. Filicudi. You know it?”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  He frowned. “No one ever does. It is a small place. Isole Aeolie. Near Lipari.”

  Something large glinted above the remains of the bluffs where we had just seen the falcons patrolling. It was coming at us fast.

  “Shit!”

  I tried to rise but only got as far as my knees but a sharp jolt of pain in my middle kept me down

  “No worries,” said Ubaldo, smiling. “This is one of ours. A dragonfly.”

  ***

  My heart leaped, thinking it was Urszula returning safely, but the bug coming our way had striped wings and bore no riders. It was Tigger, which was great, but I kept watching the bluffs, hoping another bug would appear around them. But it was all in vain. Tigger came alone.

  He seemed lost, tacking aimlessly back and forth over the far end of the strand. Ubaldo hopped on his wasp and took off. When Tigger spotted them in the air, he immediately made a beeline over to us. On arriving, he hovered low over the beach, using the stiff and steady the sea breeze to help keep him aloft with minimal effort. He refused to land, maybe still spooked by the root quakes.

  Ubaldo came back down and together we tried to encourage Tigger to descend but it was no use. The poor dragonfly seemed really agitated. He had some goop stuck to his huge compound eyes, partially obscuring his vision. I could also see a crack in his hind femur and some singe marks on his abdomen. I feared the worst for Urszula.

  More falcons appeared at the bluffs. This time there were four.

  “This is not good,” said Ubaldo, keeping his eyes on the sky as he climbed back into his saddle. “We must go now. Before they come.”

  I hesitated. I still kind of wanted to stay and see if Urszula came back or not. Maybe, find out what happened to her. It didn’t matter to me if the falcons came after me or not.

  In fact, the more I thought about it, the less I cared about what happened to me anymore. It had been a while since I had held such a strong death wish, but the feeling was building again. To hell with life. Maybe enough was enough. Or maybe I was coming to terms with my inability to deal with the ricin percolating in my real body back in Wendell’s car.

  Of course, the idea of suicide no longer had the allure it did back in those Florida days when I thought it meant relief from the burden of existence. Now I knew it just made for a change of scenery—continued existence in another form, in a potentially even less desirable place.

  “Come! We go now! Call your Tigger.”

  Grudgingly, painfully, I dragged my butt off the sand.

  I looked up at Tigger drifting in the wind. “Um, Tigger doesn’t usually come when I call.”

  What the hell? I give it a shot, clapping my hands and whistling. “Here Tigger! Tigger-tigger-tigger!”

  The dragonfly did not react one bit to my call. He just faced out to sea and bobbed in the wind, his membranes rippling in the air currents.

  Ubaldo glanced over at me and did a double take. He narrowed his eyes and leaned forward.

  “What is that on your arm?”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “The black.”

  I lifted my arm. Lobes of utter and absolute darkness were spreading slowly across the skin of my forearm. These were not stains, not transparencies, but voids as dark as the gaps between stars.

  “Am I … is this … fading?”

  “No. This is not a fade. It means you are dying. On the other side.”

  “Fuck!”

  “You are not dead yet or you would be gone. But the transition is coming. You are becoming a shade.”

  “A shade? What the fuck’s that? Where the hell do shades go?”

  He shrugged. “Many places. Lethe. Avernus. And of course, the Deeps. Depending on the state of your soul.”

  Two of those names were news to me.

  “These other places, are they better? I mean, better than the Deeps?”

  “No. Avernus is not good. Lethe, at least you have some chance. Avernus, never. Avernus is doom.”

  “Oh, bloody hell.”

  Ubaldo’s eyes suddenly swarmed with purpose. He shifted back and slapped his hand on the front of his saddle “Come now! Sit here. You ride with me on Sophia.”

  “But … why bother?” I said, the defeatist in me taking full control of my psyche and abandoning what few shreds of ambition and hope I had left.

  “We will take you up. High. Get you away from the core!”

  Chapter 68: Above

  While dragonflies have powerful flight muscles, evolution had supercharged the wings of wasps. It was the difference between a World War II fighter and an F-14. Sophia accelerated upward, generating G forces on our bodies worthy of a rocket launch. I felt myself slipping in the saddle. I clung so desperately to the saddle’s loops that my fingers ached.

  The air was frigid on my naked skin. Ice crystals stung as we hurtled through the frozen mists. Frost collected in my stubble.

  Tigger gamely came alongside and tried to keep up, but he was a low altitude cruiser and Sophia kept soaring to heights no dragonfly could tolerate. Tigger fell back, dropping down to just below the few puffs of cloud that graced the sky.

  The extreme altitude gave me a new appreciation for symmetry and beauty of the road systems and urban networks of Penult. Nestled in a broad valley among the hills was a sprawling metropolis worthy of Paris, Rome or Tokyo. Loomis was a mere hamlet by comparison. The larger city seemed relatively unscathed by our root quake.

  Ubaldo had Sophia level off at an altitude that seemed to me like overkill. We must have been far above the height of the glaciers over Frelsi. My breathing quickened as each breath seemed barely adequate to oxygenate my body.

  The blackness seeping through my limbs had not spread much since we left the beach. I took some solace in knowing that my death was not all that imminent. We had time. But that time was also a problem.

  Sophia could only generate so much heat from her flight muscles. She would only hold out so long in these freezing temperatures before her cold-blooded organs began to fail. And even warm-blooded creatures like Ubaldo and I were at risk of hypothermia if we stayed up here too long, especially since neither of us had much left of our clothing by this point.

  None of this seemed to bother Ubaldo.

  “This is good,” he said, smiling smugly. “I am certain the core does not reach us here.”

  “Baldo, it’s freezing!”

  “No worries. I can handle it.”

  “Listen. It ain’t happening. Not any time soon, anyhow. Maybe we should go back down.”

  He wrinkled his brow. “But … you have the black.”

  “I know, but ricin kills slowly, they tell me. Let’s go down. A little bit, at least. For a little while? Warm up a bit?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t mind to wait. But … okay.”

  He scraped his heels against Sophia’s side and she dropped like a meteor, catching me off-guard and nearly leaving me behind as I had loosened my grip on the saddle loops.

  We plunged to a level to just below the lowest layer of clouds where the temperature was much more moderate. My skittish dragonfly gladly joined us, tailing Sophia the way he had often done with Lalibela. If only Tigger could speak. He could tell us what had happened to Urszula and Lalibela.

  There was a lot of activity in the sky now over what remained of Loomis. A large number of bulky and slow flying contraptions were landing and taking off from every flat and rubble-free space in the ruins. I couldn’t tell if they bringing relief supplies or evacuating souls. Maybe both?

  “How are you feeling now?” Ubaldo said, glancing over his shoulder. “You should check yourself again.”

  I held up my hand and it was the weirdest mosaic. I was a calico cat. Patches of normal skin were now intersp
ersed with black blotches and transparencies. I was not only dying. I was dying and fading.

  “Holy shit!”

  “What’s wrong? Is it happening? Should we go back up?”

  Before I could answer him, I was whisked right out of his world.

  ***

  I faded off right to the back seat of Wendell’s Bentley. We were on the road again, weaving around tourist buses and Sunday drivers along the shore of Loch Ness. The strangest sense of déjà vu struck me queasy. This was the same road we had taken after my rescue from the basement of Edmund’s church. I had been in bad shape then, as well, on the verge of death, but oodles better than how I felt now.

  After a time, we turned away from the lake on a road that rose through a pass in the hills. I felt beyond horrible. There was a pain in the pit of my stomach and a nausea that no amount of dry heaving could relieve. Acid splinters jabbed at my every joint. My head throbbed harder than my worst hangover ever.

  “He’s back,” whispered Jessica.

  “Is he? Cool,” said Wendell, peeking up into the rear view. “How’s he doing?”

  Jessica squirmed around in the front seat, her expression grave.

  “Not so good.”

  “Yeah, well ricin will do that,” said Wendell. “As quick as it’s happening, looks like they weaponized it. Some kind of quick-release formulation. Hang on. We’re almost there, kid.”

  “Guys. I was told this might be treatable.” My voice was ragged. I practically coughed the words.

  “Pfft. Who told you that?” said Wendell.

  “My friend. Olivier. He said the toxin could be neutralized, the way we transform paper … and wood ... stuff.”

  “That’s different,” said Wendell. “We’re talking molecules here, kid. Individual molecules.”

  “I know, but … could you … do you think you could help me?”

  Wendell swerved onto the shoulder and pulled up next to a clump of wind-sculpted fir trees. He loosened his shoulder belt and twisted around in the seat. Jess was already staring at me. She seemed stoic enough, but a stray tear had snuck out of her left eye and clung to her cheek.

  “Kid. You’re grasping for straws. Get over it.”

  “Why can’t you help me?” I said, my voice cracking. “You’re a master too.”

  Wendell’s eyes lost their focus. He seemed to be searching something. His mind? His soul? The Singularity? When his gaze returned, so did a frown.