“Rock me to Sleep”
*
LOCATION: EARTH(8); SUBJECTS: A(84)(2), RATKILLER, A(79), KID, VARIOUS DEMONS, LOCUST, LOCUST SWARM(S), DEATH; DATE: “Day of L”+393 DAYS
*
The profaned fed-truck’s halogen headlamps illuminate the beast, the tumor, the chitinous thing half-out and looming over the earth. As Ratkiller approaches carrying Kid, a protrusion, a beaked maw emerges from the Locust’s side, slithering tentacles creep forth to sniff at the air. The whole of the mountainous alien parasite shudders and writhes, sensing a meal that is more-than-meal.
Ratkiller cradles the child in one arm again, holds the IV bag high in his right hand. The child, the ritual sacrifice, remains drugged to a stupor. She is ready to “ascend.” As Ratkiller walks, the child groans in the dream, her matted hair crackles and stands on end as sparks leap mat-to-mat.
The locust shrieks, and the man and his demons brace at the sound. Spines rise from its writhing hill-back. The beast shakes the Earth. It’s protrusion bursts open, revealing a crude jaw.
The pop of quiet lightning. There, on the locust-burnt plain at Yellowstone, between the beast and the sacrifice stands a figure in the dress of an early modern plague doctor. Left hand holds a curved blade low. Right hand grips a cane. On it’s chest, secured somehow to its chest, a glowing slow-strobing time piece.
Pop. Another Plague Doctor. Pop. Again, a Plague Doctor and again-again continuously till they litter the plain surrounding the Locust where Yellowstone used to be.
Out in the dark, watching the strobing time pieces like fireflies in the country-dark plus, in the night of ashes and low clouds and no stars. There is death. Waiting so very patiently.
*
LOCATION: EOT; SUBJECTS: A(84); RINGER
*
A(84) filled the .gif ghost, the husk of another iteration of himself, one quite identical to himself (even had an intact nose). He fills this husk of himself with loose ash from a dune on the edge of the Great Waste. He found himself laughing at himself for buckling its seat belt. “You poor bastard.” To himself or the ghost -husk, he wasn’t sure.
On down the road he thinks he hears it sigh. When he offers the ringer a hit of his joint, it accepts.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” You offered.
Why? You thought me back. Yeah, smells like cigarettes and shame in this car.
My shame or yours, suicide? Easy, tiger. So what’s the shame about: is it dragging me off the pile or is wherever it is we’re going?
A(84) tells the passenger, the residue of another version of himself, the one that succeeded at the suicide he had fallen-through-failed-at. He tells them where they are going: Yellowstone. They are going there for the Ringer, the ghost, to be sacrificed to Ratkiller’s knife so that he might “live”. Oh you get to live, for some very important purpose, I’m sure. How about this: I ascend to whatever-the-fuck-you-are and you go die?
You already died. But I am not obliged to die again, and sure-as-shit not for you. It’s. It’s like Abraham and Isaac. I am not your Isaac.
No. Isaac is some place safe. You’re the ram.
*
In a pocket dimension off to the side of Ypsilanti, MI, A(84’s) nose stumbles over a book left on the floor by a witch. The book was left for him.
He examines the object that hurt his toe. The Nose growls at it. Nibbles the corner (as he has observed the smaller cat to do when classifying a find). He opens it, and not knowing how to read, he admires the script glow-flowing–dancing across the pages.
It’s worth noting that the consciousness, the beings, woven into double-bodied books are both vast in their knowledge and utterly obsessive in their need to be understood and to share what they have. They’re noble entities, absolutely certain that all sentient/semisentients can learn. They are totally and completely committed to the task of teaching any who open them.
But no one prepared the book for what a dumb bastard this poor lump of flesh was. When the book went to work things, things got heated, less angry more sexy (but neither entity realized, one was a book, the other a nose). The machinery of the text, those microscopic whirring gears in the warp and weft of paper-pulp and sacred ink. They got hot. Real hot. The book got so hot the nose juggled it in his hands trying to keep his eyes fixed on the dancing script, as he knew he must do. Finally a bolt of electricity leaps from the page to his fool forehead. The book and the fool collapse, exhausted. Smoking.
Later, a long time later, the book is still passed out from exhaustion, still smoking. The cats are contemplating eating the Nose’s face. It’s been that long since he’s moved.
He rises, puts on clothes for the first time, and rushes from the pocket dimension. The Nose is certain of what he must do.
*
FRAME: EOT; TRAJECTORY: YELLOWSTONE, EARTH(8) (“Day of L” +393 days)
*
And if I refuse to be your fucking sacrificial ram?
You’re a sack of ash, I will knock you out and stuff you in the uniform. You made a choice that eliminates all choices, forever.
And how exactly did you get to the afterlife? What choices did you make?
Pop. “He has a point.” Flannel Man is in the back seat. “So what’s the plan? You’re going to replace yourself at your moment of death with the Ringer right? Please tell me you see the flaw?”
Silence. Flannel Man: “How many times have you attempted this?”
“Once”
A(84) drives on in silence. Flannel Man pulls his dead, cracked phone and projects a shimmering graph on the windshield like a HUD. “X and Z axes are all we need. See this is you” and a bright red line begins running it’s length. “This is your death at Yellowstone” and a bright blue brilliant explosion, a small marble, marks the end of the red line. A new red line, a “Hail Mary” lobbed backward appears. “This is you fucking with time.” It follows an arc back toward the beginning of the red line’s journey. This happens, again and again again, opposite-of-amen, the read lines proliferate on/off the x-axis of time until there is nothing but a solid red-spheroid on the graph.
“You have done this thousands upon thousands of times. You’re stuck in a recursive loop. You don’t realize it because of temporal psychosis. You, or someone, violated causality. And you’re not moving forward with this plan because it’s not possible to.”
A(84) slams on the brakes that groan. The 1990 something Ford shudders to halt on the scorched plain at the End of Time
“You cannot save yourself without irrevocably cocking-up time. Someone else, some other iteration has to do that.”
Pop. A fourth figure, backseat with Flannel, A time-piece embedded in its chest: “I can help. Let me help.”
Who the fuck? What the fuck are you?
The new passenger: “I am instrument of god, formerly a lump of flesh. I am his nose.” Reaching forward, gripping A(84)’s shoulder.
*
The chaos around the wound on the Earth where Yellowstone was moves at glacial pace (or at least, the speed glaciers used to move at). A Plague Doctor swings a sword at a demon, the blow will not land for a day, at least. Elsewhere, two demons moving at the speed impossible eviscerate a freshly deposited Plague Doctor before it’s brain and nervous system can register shock.
All of the above is happening relative to the frame of the observer: Death. An enormous towering thing that looms, walking, stalking unperceived through the proceedings, the tapestry of near-frozen/supersonic violence, as time eddies and flows and roils at different speeds, beginning to tear iself apart. As it walks through the battle, death is imperceptible to all but one.
They’re standing, long-nosed mask off and under an arm, a watch embedded in their chest, different from all the rest. It’s the one named REDACTED, designation A(84) (actually just the tip of his nose). It stands in the headlights of an impossibly-slow 1990-something Ford.
In the car, the passenger is in a stupor, the Witch driving grips the wheel like marble statue in motion–its motion imperceptible. The car moves the speed that glass drips. The car would hit the unique Plague Doctor in many-many years time (if given the time). The man in front waves in real time to Death, shouts “I surrender.”
It is a 50-something year old REDACTED, more fit that the man has ever been. Weathered face. Gleaming white teeth (and a full set of teeth, to boot). Salt and pepper hair. Sad-eyes. Shit eating grin. Death stalks toward it, convinced the Nose is the genuine article: A(84).
****************************
Death accuses in a low voice: “What did you do, mortal?” As if addressing a dog who had shit on its carpets.
“This is all for you, oh great force, oh Lord of Decay. Accept my offering and be done. “What did I do?”, you sack of rot, oh Lord of the Long Sleep?”
Death growls, the sound of bones grinding and sinew snapping. It stalks toward the mortal, growing larger, towering building tall and growing. It’s robes, composed of void-itself hissing with the friction of its passage.
“Oh inevitable one, I truly lived.” The Nose laughs. “I fought the Locust on a dozen worlds, and we even won on one. I knew love. I feasted. I smoked the finest. I read many books. The fuck you gonna do to me?” It looks up at the force of-and-beyond-nature and does not flinch.
A dry chuckle from Death.
The Plague Doctor born-mortal takes a knee. Bows it’s head, “take this offering and let the rest of mine be. Amen.”
Death ignores the Plague Doctor’s prayer. It stretches until it’s figure touches the low sick clouds over the dead plain on the dying world. The Lord of the Inevitable, looms over the scene.
*
Ratkiller snatches the Plague Doctor by the throat. He lifts, grips, stabs the man once, twice–under the ribs and up. Drops him in a heap.
With great effort and their last bit of energy, the Plague Doctor A(84) taps the profane time piece soldered to his chest. The glass cracks, the device detonates. All that was Yellowstone, all that was profaned by the Locust’s re-emergence, is consumed in blue fire.
*
Death inhales, drawing in the burnt offering of the A’s and all else on the plain, the mortal it was owed plus interest (many times over).
And there, at that moment, death consumes the true Ringer: The Nose of A(84) and all else that was burnt-past-nothing. And there for the first time ever (and never to happen again) death was sated, if only for a moment.
The force of nature, the Lord of Inevitability, forgot. It forgot, if only for a time, to chase a witch/fuckup/a kid who had cheated it.
There are those, scribes and commentators, who insist that the prayer ignored by death was answered by some other force. But without an HVAC system in ear-shot to catch the Nose’s prayer, and in the absence of the Author, it’s highly unlikely any entity could have heard the prayer.
*
On the scorched plain at the End of Time, a 1990-Something Ford sedan drives on perfectly flat road from nowhere to nowhere, holy hot-boxing. Sweet weed smoke a burnt offering to the occupants and whatever absent author once presided over the place/unplace.
“My nose is” The only reamaining A(84) blows smoke out his missing-tip schnoz. “Is a better man than me.”
Flannel Man is riding shotgun while the .gif ghost flips through one of the many of a satchel of hand-written journals and keepsakes of the Nose of A(84). “Well, more eager to self-sacrifice doesn’t necessarily mean better, but yeah, I’m familiar with the particular flavor of jealousy you feel.”
Flannel Man: “I guess you should strive to be worthy of that.”
“Thanks dad.”
*
With a parasol poached from some time on some Earth balanced over her shoulder (she’s been busy), Mary Mitchell walks the wastes of the scorched plain.
She did not retire to the church under the Ghost Grove, and has no intention of doing so, ever. Rather, she found a new shack, some lonely liminal at an undisclosed location on the edge of the Great Waste at the End of Time. And under normal circumstances G-Men and all the forces of the heavens would search for (and find) this one, this witch free of the constraints of time/place and the limits of flesh.
But the Locust infestation that threatens the whole of creation, that is/was/will be happening, it has them otherwise occupied.
She walks the dunes singing a tune she learned in another Earth and another time, many arms arrayed behind her as a peacock’s feathers. One hand holds the parasol, twirling it. Another carries a poker to skewer the locust spawn she finds. A third hand holds a carpet bag in which she deposits her harvest, the skewered, half dead, hissing-farting spawn.
Back in her repurposed shack, in cauldron (the remnants of a slow cooker) over low fire, she adds the locust spawn to her brew. Singing to herself, she stirs, as the vile things hiss and dissolve but never truly die.
After a long while, she ladles the brew into a hubcap-bowl, says a few words under her breath and drinks. The pain is immediate and immense, language is gone from her body, but a single clear animal wail emerges from her throat and reaches out across the Great Waste. Her call finds two sets of “ears” lost in that vast ocean of ash dunes: “I” and his band of former Custodians and the wandering congregants from the church beneath the tree, the ones wandering off to war (or trying to). Both bands march in the direction of the sound.
*
FRAME: EOT(HEADQUARTERS). SUB-FRAME: FLOOR 666 (BUREAU OF BLASPHEMY AND HERESY)
*
A .gif ghost reports to his first day of work at a new job. Hiring standards have fallen, and word ’round the holy-water cooler is that the new hire only got hired because he has a friend in HVAC. Management has lost it’s damned mind.
The .gif ghost, now a scribe, sits and does precisely the opposite of what’s expected of it. Rather than censor, it writes. It composes fresh blasphemies and publishes new heresies. First, it transcribes the handwritten journals, There and Back Again-Again: Memoirs of the Nose of A(84). As it types at a cheap plastic keyboard, the words and deeds of the nose are etched in acid on the silver screen above and transmitted to the archives for forever-past-forever keeping, amen.
After lunch he sits at his desk in a cubicle identical to countless others in HQ and begins typing anew, recording the recollections of the fuckup A(84). He records them as honestly as the man wrote them, not censoring a single word:
“I cannot well tell you how I entered there, except that I can and I will. Before, things didn’t make sense, but they were linear (or at least we said they were). When you’ve been two places at once you lose the ability to lay it down in a straight line. It’s a knot that can’t un-knot. You’ve got to follow it through each kink and crink. Not a path less-traveled, it was well worn when the world was young. It’s a passage that exacts a cost. This was in the before times, my before and yours, when the ‘Rona’ was “over there” and people in a lot of other places pretended it would stay. Before the isolation, the grief, the numbers, and the graph that looked like a roller coaster. Between the worry and the wrath. Before the bubbles and the pivot and the lonely and the shots and the masks. My world ended right when ours caught a cough that wouldn’t be, couldn’t be.”
As he writes, thin cracks and fissures begin to form in the façade of headquarters. The cement of the brutalist block begins to crack and split–fissures so small and fine no eye could hope to perceive them.
*
END SYSYPHUS AND PROMETHEUS: PART 4
MORE TO COME