Twilight has a chagrined look that just appears sheepish.
“I thought of something that might help you,” he says.
“Oh, you want to help now? What is it?”
“Don’t laugh. I made it myself,” he says.
And in his hand he reveals a small container of what I first mistake to be lip balm. And I mean my mistake. The lip balm is actually eye shadow. Magic eye shadow, Twilight quickly assures me.
“Wow, you’re an . . . amateur cosmetic, uh, cosmetician . . . beautician, or something?”
“The stuff came from Fortuna,” Twilight says.
“Oh, Fortuna’s here?” I look around, wondering if I can make any fish jokes, but Twilight jostles me back to the present (or to the “Now” you might say).
“Here, let me . . . dab a little on you –”
“Dude, you are not touching me with this stuff.”
Twilight gets my vibe straight away and the prick just laughs, a dot of the now metallic green-looking stuff on the end of one finger (he’s jacked the gloves).
“Aw little boy, let me put some ointment on where the bad man touched you.”
“You can’t put ointment on my soul, nimrod,” I tell him.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Twilight replies, snapping back into seriousness. “I ensorcelled this shit special for you, Zeph. Least you could do is put a little on.”
Again I bat his hand away. “What does it do?”
“I don’t know how you think you’re going to spot Matrioshka if she could’ve hijacked anyone’s body,” he says. “That was what I was thinking, anyway. So I thought I could rustle up a spell that might help. I empotioned it – that’s totally a word, by the way, or it is now – so you could use it too.”
“You whipped this up in, what, first class?”
“Na, I went home and cooked it in the lab.”
“You went . . . home?”
Twilight shrugs. “Once I’m at my destination, I can carve a sigil for jumping back and forth, but I can’t do it some place I’ve never been before.”
I sigh, getting it however reluctantly, then I submit to the gayest of acts as Twilight daubs the glittery green eyeshade over my lids.
“You would look awesome in drag.”
“I’m gonna misquote Gimli from The Two Towers here and say no one ever hears about this, right?”
“Don’t worry, Priscilla, you can thank me later.”
And I open my sticky eyes again and survey the scene.
Zephyr 18.13 (Coda)
HOPING NO ONE will start ringing a bell or anything at my sudden ascension into flaming queerdom, I move back into the main hall and surreptitiously if not a little self-consciously resume my standing position on the yoga mat.
Twilight’s magic cream radiates a gentle warmth which is off-putting, and a few moments back in among the crowd it seems like the fumes are getting to me, with a faint translucent film over everything that wobbles and distorts with my perspective. Fighting off nausea, I concentrate on my breathing a moment more and let Sting’s telepathic public service announcement wash over me – that is, until my vision slowly calms and I notice something I couldn’t see before.
It is as if the world imperceptibly changed, not while I wasn’t looking, but sometime earlier in history and only now am I coming awake to notice several kinds of gigantic insects occupying the hangar.
One of them is all but superimposed over the figure of Shade, standing next to Sting and working her like a marionette. The creature resembles a giant louse with the strange colorlessness of a photographic negative or an X-ray or a microscopic entity blown up to giant size. My ensorcelled eyes pick over the weird, multi-legged creature, which has four of its many limbs seemingly embedded in Shade’s back, manipulating her expertly as she checks and rechecks her clipboard and Sting continues his diatribe against the selfishness of our minds which seem to only want to save their host bodies from destruction. How ironic that the Enlightened One should preach that our thoughts are parasites when his followers are the ones under alien control. A similar creature occupies St George’s space, and when the curvy nameless French super enters the edge of the hangar seemingly to monitor that all’s well and dandy and perhaps to take numbers for breakfast, I see a similarly gigantic and disturbing extra-dimensional bug has her in its claws too.
A quick scan of the hangar throws up nothing else out of the ordinary, and I’m pleased to note there’s no immediate sign of other infested masks, but when I turn my gaze back to Sting – in the expanded range of my magickal vision throwing off light like a military signal flare, a human firework as he struts back and forth discoursing between Shade and St George – there is something about the emanation that strikes me as equally far from normal as the insectoid parasites, however many more stages subtle it might be.
“Can’t quite put a finger on it, huh?” a feminine voice sounds beside me.
I look askance to see Cusp grinning back at me.
Except it’s not Cusp. A nimbus of sickly purple-black energy surrounds her otherwise angelic features that all but screams Matrioshka.
“You,” I say to her.
The telepath nods, pleased with herself, but her hand on my arm stills me before I can make a scene, and apart from a few of the surrounding masks shooting us STFU looks, the rest of Sting’s faithful rock out with their cocks out in the washout from his psionic lecture unawares.
“Don’t jump the gun on this one, big boy,” Matrioshka-as-Cusp says to me.
She all but guides me back to looking at Sting as he moves like Christ risen again among the lepers of the first few rows.
“Look closer,” she says.
Just as Matrioshka’s infection of Cusp comes with the thunderhead purple aura, the calamitous human torch that is Sting suggests another powerful, almost golden presence I cannot recognize simply by staring at the pretty colors. But once I cease trying to identify it with my eyes, and open my mind and my intuitive senses to the very vibration of the presence, it is only a couple of heartbeats before my dread certainty returns.
Matrioshka’s presence in the hangar is a trifling concern – and her ever-widening grin shows me she knows it.
“Look familiar?”
I nod. Cusp all but preens herself next to me.
“I don’t have to be the bad guy here,” she says. “Not next to him.”
And I swivel back to stare at Sting, and now the whole passage of the last few months – the emptying of our cities of superhumans, the hackneyed dime store philosophy, the zealous recruitment of masks, the preached disillusionment, and now the prescribed body-jacking of the Ascended – it all makes startling and lucid sense.
The golden mask-shape that forms above Sting’s head is not of his face, but of another – one I know practically as well as my own, for it belongs to my one-time father John Lennon, the aptly-titled Preacher Man.
Zephyr 19.1 “Opprobrium”
I AM FILLED with a sudden deep and morbid disquiet. It feels as if I might foul myself at any moment, my spinning mind trying to catch up to understand exactly what it is I’ve found myself caught up in this time. I’d sought to infiltrate Sting’s Afghan love-in to uproot the body-swapping Matrioshka, never guessing for an instant that she was just the tip of the iceberg in this particular shit sandwich (to mix metaphors).
I guess I should’ve questioned how weird it was no one tried to bill me for anything.
“If you want to talk, see me in the town tonight,” Matrioshka-as-Cusp says, seeming to love the intrigue as well as my own crucifixion in delay.
I snarl low, aware there are blissed-out advocates of their own potential suicide all around, but as desperate to stop Matrioshka as I was, now I just want to haul her tidy ass over the coals – however complicated it might be that her tidy ass has become Cusp’s even more comely one. A further double bind, if such a thing were possible.
“You’re inside someone I care about,” I hiss, knowing this reveals more than I r
eally wish, yet equally displeased to know her possession also entails probably wholesale access to Cusp’s thoughts and memories – what few of them remain.
“Why do you think I chose her, doofus?”
This time there’s nothing I can do or say to stop her skittering away. Self-conscious now in my glam metal make-up, I shoot looks at the gigantic mysterious ethereal insect things and furiously scrub my eyelids, conscious that whatever magickal power was in Twilight’s concoction, it has now soaked into me, irrespective of the gaudy accoutrements.
“This is a fucking goddamn clusterfuck,” I mutter to no one in particular.
“Man, could you keep it down?” some asshole in a leopard-spotted leotard and cat mask says standing next to me on the left. “I’m really betting a lot on Ascension.”
“Yeah, well I hope you fucking get it.”
“Aw thanks, Zephyr. Coming from you, that means a lot.”
It means so many things, I think privately, disturbed and more than a little repulsed to see one of the big invisible bug-things enter via the side corridor, no human host for this one – which I can only assume means it’s got a hand free if Lennon decides he needs another puppet.
Before they can get any wise ideas, I shunt sideways from the hangar, ignoring someone softly calling out my name as my booted footfalls echo off the polished concrete.
*
I’M SWEATING BULLETS not too much later, squatting on the edge of the cot and wondering if I should just pack my meagre things and get the fuck out of here. A little like Twilight and his magic circles, now I know where Sting’s camp is located I can find my own way back if needs be. Staying on-site no longer feels like the safe option with the Preacher Man’s creepy crawlies patrolling the corridors, yet at the same time I’m aware I’ve got precious few answers and more than my fair share of natural curiosity. It’s push-pull inside of me, conjuring a rare headache.
I pull out my phone and ring Twilight as I get up from my bed and hurry from the male quarters, shooting looks every which way like a full-flowering schizophrenic.
“What’s happening, Zeph? That potion work for you?”
“We have to talk,” I whisper urgently into the phone. “Where are you?”
“Bath house, bottom end of the town. Come on down.”
I disconnect, shaking my head as I tap the phone against my palm, then pocket it, chagrined to know even in the middle of the end of the world, Twilight will probably find someone to give him a back rub while he takes in the fireworks.
Daylight does a curious thing to the small settlement astride the mountain: its native population gathers with trinkets and cardboard boxes selling cheap handicrafts, Twinkies and cans of Sprite, hawking to the itinerant stream of gaudily-dressed idiots coming and going from the ancient sepulcher-cum-human abattoir masquerading as a New Age re-education camp. I give a kid with buck teeth a fiver and snag a drink and some Reeces’ Pieces, gobbling the pure sugar as I pace down the slope snaking through the town, casting about until I find the bath house built into a spit of land projecting like a ledge over the panorama below, the last building in the street on that side before the road just gives out and shits itself, turning into a wintry slurry descending over sharp rocks twisting hundreds of yards below.
At least it is warm inside the bath house. I brush off the seedy-looking Afghan doorman and quest inside, pushing down a cedar-walled hallway and opening doors at random on truant enlightenment-seekers either zoning out in the warm suds or getting nasty with others of their kind. Fortunately, Twilight is alone blowing bubbles with his farts in a big square stone-lined vat that looks barely big enough to contain him all the same. Arms outspread along the lintel of the tub, he grins back at me broad-chested and all handsome and in love with himself and shit, only bemused as normal by my squinting demeanor.
“For a guy who’s almost as fucked up as me, you sure do a great job of making out like you’ve got the troubles of the world on your shoulders, Zeph,” he says. “Get in the tub.”
“I’m not here for a soak,” I tell him. “Frankly, I don’t know how you can relax. We have a situation here.”
“Oh yeah? Hop in and tell me about it.”
I look about until I find a white towel hanging on a peg, but just when I’m about to hand it to him with an order to abdicate his soapy throne, the door quietly opens and a lissome Afghan girl wearing very little enters sheepishly holding hands with a slightly older, no less attractive woman wearing absolutely nothing.
“I ordered refreshments,” Twilight says.
“We really need to talk.”
“I can talk and –”
“I know you can, but I don’t know I can sit here while you do it. Five minutes, OK?”
Twilight shrugs and nods and somehow conveys this to the two houris without much more than a quick ushering motion. The big guy somehow makes it like he’s being considerate.
“I just added that nudity to make things interesting,” he says with a self-amused grin. “You know, for when they make a film about all of this.”
“You’ll be pleased to know your concoction worked,” I say, ignoring him. “It told me more than I could’ve wanted.”
“Then you found her?”
“Oh, I fucking found her alright. Well actually, it’s more like she found me.”
“Somehow I am getting confused already. Must be the hash-cookies I ate for breakfast,” Twilight says. “Maybe you need to tell me what’s going on?”
“We have a bigger problem than Matrioshka.”
“I love how you say we,” he says. “Go on.”
“Sting and a bunch of his other Jonestown posse are possessed,” I say. “That philosophical mumbo jumbo he’s talking out there is a smokescreen. It’s not even Sting.”
“Sounds like his brand of self-absorption.”
I stop a moment to put my gaping jaw back into place at Twilight’s opprobrium. This is a guy who’s cultivated vanity into an art form. But I am loath to say anything because – quite apart from not wanting to distract him – it’s probably all just a deliberate niggle designed to throw me off.
“It’s Lennon,” I say with a dread finality. “He’s body-jacked Sting and there’s some sort of weird fucking alien creatures in control of Shade, St George and that hot French chick with the clipboard.”
“That’s Whisperer,” Twilight says, then gives me a “what” look. “She has a great ass. I make it my business to know the identity of every great ass in my vicinity.”
“Well your hot-assed French woman has a gigantic nictitating fucking bug thing with its appendages so far up that hot ass that she can’t tell you if the sun’s shining or it’s raining lemonade.”
“That whole sentence doesn’t make sense, but I’m still hung up on ‘nictitating’,” Twilight says.
I fob him off. “We’re in serious fricking peril here, dude.”
Twilight eyes the sumptuous bath water and scowls at me.
“Seriously?”
“You have to extrapolate the facts a little,” I admit. “This is bad news. I don’t know who the bugs are –”
“But that’s what we’re going with? We’re calling them the Bugs? Because –”
“Stop getting distracted. Ideally, we’ll find out exactly what they really are called and that will maybe help us determine what the fuck they actually are, right?”
“If you want to know,” Twilight says off-handedly. “If things are that dire, normally I’m not sure I’d want to know. It just sounds like work. And that other thing you said: peril.”
“Look Twilight, are you gonna help me or not?”
“What’s the big deal?” he says. “Raise the alarm. Tell everyone else. We’ll have a big epic slugfest and if we’re lucky, you know, hand Lennon his ass, and that’ll be that.”
“My . . . initial feelings . . . are that this thing might have bigger ramifications than that,” I tell him slowly. “I know the history is a little hazy here, but there are two Lennons, ri
ght? The Doomsday Man, who tried to basically destroy the world or take it over or whatever. And then there’s the Preacher Man, who hid inside my head for most my life when our two parallels crashed together and only escaped by jacking one of his other parallel copies. . . .”
Twilight keeps watching me even as my mouth dries up and I start staring off into space. After a few seconds, he snaps his finger.
“Yo, Zeph. Come back to papa, man.”
“Those things, the bugs, they must be the Editors . . . or their servants.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means we’re fucked.”
Zephyr 19.2 “Allergic To The Daylight”
AFTER A FEW seconds to contemplate the latest ramifications, Twilight politely intrudes by clearing his throat and rising from the tub, taking the towel I still hold and vigorously drying himself as I stand and move off a few paces, resisting the urge to gnaw my fist.
“Excuse me for saying,” Twilight says, “but I thought you told me it was the Doomsday Man who recruited these Editor fuckers from subspace to screw up our parallel. Is the body-jacker him or is he the Lennon who was inside your head and hiding from the splice you say happened in . . . whenever it was. The 70s?”
I pick this over a minute, lost in my own convoluted back-story.
“You’re right,” I say. “I mean, the titles Doomsday and Preacher are just arbitrary ones I sort of gave them, given, you know, the muddled history. Right now, I couldn’t tell you which one’s in league with the Editors. Shit, I don’t even know if it’s safe to say their names, especially here.”
“There’s a whole heap of people in newspapers in trouble if that’s the case.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Twice in one day. Papa would be so proud.”
“Listen, Twilight, I don’t even pretend to know what’s going on here anymore,” I tell him in a burst of earnestness that only makes me sound like a bad-acting sidekick from one of those crappy black-and-white 1940s serials. “We need to tread carefully.”
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