“Prologue-Past-Prologue”
BEFORE THE END OF EARTH (8)
*
There’s a flop-fart on the scorched plane at the End of Time, then another and another again. A turd shower. Except the turds raining on the packed ash are Locust spawn. The Nose (of A(84)) naked as the day he was horrifyingly born, walks the scorched plain giggling at the “fart” sounds of the locusts flopping-to-ground from the roiling black night above.
“It’s not funny.” Yes it is a little bit most definitely. “Each one of those is going to go eat a world full of people “just cause” *Fart* The Nose chokes back a laugh.
A(84) leans on a broomstick like a cane. Bleeding in real-time, leaving a trail across the packed ash. He holds his right hand up, lightning leap-flicking from finger tips to fry any locusts that would fall too near. More turds on the ash. More farts and that idiot laugh from the Nose.
“I’m helping” Nose has both hands high, serious face. Contributing nothing.
“Yes you are, buddy. Yes you are.” We’re going to stash you some place safe.
“What’s safe? What am I? Why am I?”
*
The Locust spawn, the little apocalyptic turds littering the plane? Most die, self-predation/annihilation: they eat each other (many choking on their own kin in the effort). They get bored and self-annihilate (attempt to eat themselves).
Still, when one lands on/wanders onto a pool of light out on the scorched plane, it falls through and “does its worst” to the tune of billions dead and fresh Locust spawn. Exponential spread. Compound interest. Exponential growth. You remember it from math class whether you were sleeping or nodding along: rise-over-run. The rise that looks like a ski-jump, like your debt, like your employer’s stock price or rising rents in your town. That graph.
If you could hold it in your mind, imagine it spinning/hovering/hanging before you, and add the number of Locusts in the garden at the time(s) of my writing these words? The x-axis bends and breaks into the z-axis, bends back on itself an irregular spheroid tumorous thing.
Put another way they get “everywhere”/”everywhen” quite quickly. They achieve all of this with ‘mere’ bestial hunger, no intellect, barely any clearly defined organs (save mouth/stomach/anus). They ruin a world and sit consuming the wreckage, shitting out warped hive-mind imitations of what they devoured. The Locust is, above all, the profane reflection of creation.
It’s simply a matter of “time” before one of them encounters another of those truly “least-likely” humans–one-in-trillions, one like Kid. Then the Locust will consume it and learn brain and intellect and intention at a pitch and scale we have not yet seen.
*
FRAME: Earth (14); DATE: (1/MAY/1613)
LOCATION: PEAT BOG, SOUTHERN SCOTLAND; SUBJECT: MARY MITCHELL (THE WITCH (A (0x4D))
*
Mary is the black sheep of an otherwise respectable family (came over when the Normans classed the joint up). Some ancestor (a peasant with a spear) did something heroic, some of the “heavy lifting”, when Bill conquered and was rewarded with land and minor title. Shitty land, but their land. Good for the ancestor, it means fuck-all for Mary: she of the foul mouth, the quick wit, the sharp tongue.
Mary is a witch. In practical terms, it means she was a gossipy, blasphemous, sharp-tongued woman who was in everyone’s business. It meant she was a midwife. It meant she knew the plants if your ‘monthly’ didn’t show and it was real bad time to expand the family. She knew the plants to give to the very worst kind of husband (her husband, others like him). What’s more, she shared that information with her big, absolutely beautiful, blasphemous mouth. This is why the people who came for Mary one night called her “witch.”
Un-ironically/ironically: Mary is also a very powerful witch, as in woo woo, supernatural powers, a thing called magic (for lack of proper understanding).
Mary hears voices and has visions of things to come. She snatches stray thoughts out your head without even trying, by simply listening (which she cannot help but do). Keeper of a rare gift, she dreams what might-be quite clearly (and with an accuracy unmatched among “A” series mortals).
This is why, when the mob came to hang her the first time, when they marched up to the widow’s humble estate in the dead of night, they found it empty. But there was a fire, light refreshment, and a personalized letter for the leaders of the mob, those who held the noose.
Each of the five papers laid out, in Mary’s grandiose-hand, the personal predilections, perversions, and sins of those who had come to hang her. Each letter concluded with an exquisitely detailed description of how each addressee was most likely to die (all of them painful, and all of them would come to pass with disturbing precision).
This bought the witch time, but some six months later, they were back. This time at a shack out on some god-forsaken bog. “Found our courage, have we?” From the witch smoking something from a pipe, leaning on the shack, wrapped in a warm blanket.
The leader holds the noose high, takes a step.
“Keen minds. You see any trees? Anything of height enough to do a hanging?”
Muttering and mumbling. “Silence, witch!”
“Last chance. You can tuck them back between your legs and skitter on home, or I’ll call the devil’s fire and clip your sad little peckers off.” She holds her hands out claws out, ready to gouge an eye (certain that won’t save her). She is surprised (and begins to laugh at her fine luck) when her palms glow blue. When her voice deepens, she growls: “Go!” and cackles at their backs.
The cowards flee and take that dream that ends with her dragged to death behind a horse with them. Prismatic lightning deposits a man in a beaked mask before her. He tries to speak. Coughs, sways, and promptly collapses on a god-forsaken patch of bog in Scotland in 1613.
*
SOURCE: EXILE (GLOSSARY/LEXICON)
TERM: HUMAN
*
In the language of the heavens (including its infernal dialect(s) “mortal” and “human” have always been direct and interchangeable synonyms. They are the same word/character in Old Astral, and a language entirely out of time will not change (though potential mis/translations grow exponentially in a time frame with access to such a language).
Illuminated beings, having a more nuanced understanding of sentience (it is measured along a continuum), value that concept greater than physical form. They classify along those lines rather than by concept so crude as “species”, number of limbs, or sex organs. Thus a bipedal, hepta- or even septa- pedal species, may be referred to by a representative of management as a word you will inevitably translate “human” (homo sapiens or no)–this is particularly true of those who rarely-if-ever leave Headquarters.
*
FRAME: Earth (14); DATE: (5/MAY/1613 CE)
LOCATION: PEAT BOG, SOUTHERN SCOTLAND; SUBJECT(S): MARY MITCHELL (THE WITCH (A (0x4D)); A(84)
*
The moment Mary took the mask off the man, even without the tip, she instantly recognized the familiar nose of her estranged family. She caught his thoughts and knew for sure they were kin. She cleaned the blood that had dripped from his ears and nose and dried. And when she placed her palm on his forehead and repeated some old words she’d heard whispered by the wind, she gently pulled the “how” and “why” of his appearance on the bog from his mind.
Days in and out of consciousness. Fever delirious and getting by on a few spoon-fools of her brew each day before the dream took him back. She ‘watched along.’ she conjured his fever-fit nightmares of Locusts and monsters and unspeakable horrors consuming creation. She made them leap from the shadows of a low peat-fire to dance on the wall.
When he sleeps calmly, she reads the books he carried in his leather satchel, strange things, the words arranging themselves to be understood. The texts are sacred and profane and double-bodied: words bound to intention (the want to be known embedded in the weave of ink and pulp). She learns much.
She listens to her voices, to the wind, when everything is quiet. They give good council (all save the one that says “kill him and be done with it”, but rarely does she listen to that one).
Mary is sniffing at the wound beneath the poultice she’d placed on his abdomen. Sour, bad sour, sharp like cheese beneath the comforting peat bite. That’s when he wakes.
“So much for my mask. How long was I, How much do you know?”
“The gist. Why me? How did you even know I was here?”
I saw you in a church at the end of time, the first time I set foot there, and I knew I would see you again.
*
FRAME: EOT; LONELY LIMINAL (0x23); EOT (GREAT WASTES)
*
“I” is watched over by Flannel man. His cracked cell-phone glows, projecting the fever-fit of the poisoned former-Custodian. As the faceless figure with the ichor burns and smeared paint writhes the image tells the story of the Custodians: what was, is, what will be.
All present watch and pray and write what they see (each written account unique). When “I” wakes, they rise and speak. For the first time a Custodian, former or otherwise, speaks.
*
Lightning carries the two, A(84) and Mary Mitchell, to a 1990-something Ford sedan waiting patiently in a garage, a lonely liminal on the scorched plane at the End of Time.
“So this is a car…”
Cutting him off in the most bumpkinly and exaggerated emphasis of her accent: “Meh wee mind can’t comprehend your tin carriage, future man!” She glares at him. Silence. Mary fumbles for a second with the car door, gets in.
*
They cruise the scorched plane, always in (or near) the Ford. For just as death loomed in Mary Mitchell’s life, death (the thing-itself) stalks the man with big-nose across the plane at the End of time.
Mary reads. Mary leans the passenger seat back and naps. Her dreams dance holographic on the windshield because the two will it (and they know the words and the math to do it). When she wakes, he tells them back to her. They dance a second time on the windshield, ghostly HUD between two sets of eyes.
The windshield wipers tend to a light shower of locust spawn on a highway over the scorched plane at the End of Time.
From the double-bodied books, the Witch Mary Mitchell learns the proper metallurgy and soldering technique to embed Woland’s watch in his chest. There on the floor of a wrecked-abandoned gas-station garage. A lonely liminal. Whiskey. Gauze. A stick to bite. She solders, binds steal to flesh. She speaks the words to borrow time, so much time, from the time-piece profane. There are consequences, or there will be, but two beings born-mortal who have effectively cheated death have more immediate (and relentless) concerns.
The witch who cheated a death-by-dragging through a bog in 17th Century Scotland, she who was not playing the “great game”, had one more accomplishment of note, before joining the congregation beneath the Ghost Grove.
It was Mary, blasphemous witch, who crafted “the plan”, the “fuckin’ hail Mary” as it would come to be called.
*
FRAME: POCKET DIMENSION OFF TO THE SIDE OF YPSILANTI, MI; DATE: NULL
*
“These little rays of sunshine.” Two cats, equal and opposite in all things, save viciousness (for both are equally brutal), purr and compete for the attention of the witch, Mary Mitchell. A(84) is absolutely shocked.
The witch smiles, “You know what you have to do, collect him.”
The ignored nose, still naked and stupid: “Who is him? Is that me? Why am I? What am I?”
My nose. Again, you’re my fucking nose, and everything-lacking-in-me reflected back at me. You’re that too. Long silence. The nose seems to process. Loses the thought. “I saw a rabbit out the window. If I catch it, can I get a rabbit to be friends with me and the cats?”
A(84) looks at him a long time, examining the deep claw marks all over his mirror image’s arms and torso from attempts to hug the two infernal cats that protect this particular pocket dimension.
For fuck’s sake I can’t do this. Yes, buddy. You can raise rabbits, and we’re going to plant clover right outside the window so you can watch it grow.
*
Outside the apartment in the timeless pocket, where the air tastes like pennies and all sounds clock-radio speaker, and the colors are bleach-mute, A(84) lights a tin-flavored cigarette with shaking hands. He scratches a phantom-limb ghost-itch at his beak’s missing tip. “You predicted this, no?” The witch smiles. “So why did you tell me to kill my nose, to lead that fool thing to its death, knowing I couldn’t do it?”
“I needed to know if you loved Abraham or Isaac before we got any further.”
“I still need a ringer.”
She takes his cigarette. “And you know where to find one.”
*
On the scorched plane at the End of Time, off a lonely road, as unremarkable as any other paved capillary, there is a place where the road curves off left then curls down. When it straightens out, the land dips low to the left and the smoke stacks loom: the old power plant where they process the .gif-ghosts of the A-series.
It’s not raining locusts here, but the ends of the “A”‘s. They pile out on the plain like a landfill. And though they haven’t yet, the locust spawn will gorge themselves when they find such a repository of potential.
May many choke on what they consume, amen.
A(84) wades into the pile and finds a particularly grimy one: a suicide. A mirror image of himself that succumbed to the exhaustion sublime. The “how” is not important, so much as the recognition that this guy was certain of his decision–as confirmed by the Witch, Mary Mitchell who conjured the highs and lows of the ghost’s life before them.
A(84) drags the remnant-revenant, the ethereal thing out of the garbage heap of himself, endless iterations piling up by the silent powerhouse. He stuffs it in the satchel, the thing distorting to fit easily.
*
Two cars depart an old lonely liminal, the skeletal remains of a service station, out on the scorched Plain at the end of time. The first, a 1925 Rolls Royce driven by a 17th century Scottish witch with far too much grace for a new driver. The second a 1990-something Ford sedan driven by A(84).
Death desires, and is entitled to, both. And were death not so occupied reaping the results of the Locust infestation? It’s doubtful either would have reached their destination.
*
SOURCE: THE PERFECLTY ACCURATE BUT INDECIPHERABLE PROPHECIES OF THE WITCH A(79)
*
A downpour, water on the packed ash. Dust older than dust, parched eternal, washes down the brutalist block. Rain falls from nowhere to everywhere, water on the rooftop garden. The woman crouches beneath a short tree, looks down her nose at a heavy fruit on a low branch over a small pond. The rain is deafening.
At her barest gesture, a heavy drop strikes the fruit, it falls. The splash is enormous. The glow. The tremor. The new noise, louder than the rain. It blurs vision.
A whale so great it rips the building like ragged cloth, emerging from beneath the pond.
The black of its devouring mouth is the last the woman sees.
*
END S&P PT. 3