I wasn’t alone.
***
Here in the shitbox, I’ve done my best. To be alone, to stay alone. Not diving back into the noönet is a large part of that. Isolating myself physically and mentally. Gregor had that down, after all, the man knew what he was doing and why, and I know now that his reasons for it were sound. To connect is to invite them through, to open up further ways for them. To connect is to die a little sooner.
There’s the cable. And there’s the pistol.
I’ve done my best, but on a very basic level I know it will never be good enough. We opted, as a species, for a remarkable thing, a miraculous bond between us. The pundits and the gurus in the silicon towers of the Southlands are all about evolutionary advancement, the slow but steady grind upwards to airless heights of connectivity, novelty, unity. Singularity. Whatever the fuck that is. How would we even know if such a thing were actually to come to pass? If it hasn’t already.
I think it has. I mean, that’s my guess.
Hello, cable. What’s shaking, pistol. Connect or die. Connect and/or die. Quantum logic, my ass: the illusion of free will. Here, in the shitbox, it’s one or the other. Here, in the Stonefish, it’s the First Law all the way, even unto the end of all things.
“And there shall be a new heavens and a new earth,” Gregor said once, drunk. “I’m quoting scripture, Den,” when I asked him what the hell he was going on about. “Dad was Greek and lapsed Eastern Orthodox, Mom was an expat Brit rave bunny with a fondness for the Surrealists; can you blame me? New everything, kid. The former things will have passed away. And you shall look to the place where the wicked one was and he will not be there.”
Another guess: is that me, Gregor? Or was it you all along, neck deep in monsters, everything human burned away in the fires of creation. You thought yourself pure id, thought yourself a kid. And then you thought yourself out of the world entire, such as it is. What good did it do you in the end? The same kind of good it will do me? None at all?
So. Alone. Not lonely, though, I feel I should make that point clear. Their presence is all around, for it is as Charlie’s old náan said. There are landotters all around me, and I have been marked. I’m one of theirs. When night falls and the fly-specked glass doors to the balcony reflect my face back to me, I check my teeth for sharpness. I attempt to see if my eyes have gone fully black. Ophthalmologists call it an 8-ball fracture but if my eyes ever get that way, black through and through, black as blick, anyone would be able to tell how very not medical the issue would be. This sick is spiritual.
Here in the shitbox, they don’t have to announce their presence. What would be the point. They’re me, and the fly specks, and the stain on the wall, and these words being prepared, made ready to upload to the world, should I choose that. Ready for the cable.
Of course, they’re the pistol, too. Theirs, the pistol. Obviously. There’s the pistol. It’s right there, always within reach. Gregor. Gregor, you overreached, and ruined me over.
They don’t have to announce their presence.
***
They did not announce their presence that night, either. I’ll call the sounds they made unofficial but they were enough to precipitate the next events, which, if Gregor is right, is how they get things done in this world. Subtle pressure, anomalous irritants. Weird coincidence and sexy synchronicity. The original movers and shakers, in the shadows and cracks and the underneath spaces, crawling the bark on the Reverse of the Tree and sliding through the depths. In the dark corners of the earth. In the spaces between the stars.
They didn’t show themselves, but I heard them, felt them, all the same.
I shivered in my tent. The air, always damp, had turned claustrophobic and cold; the frosted halogen beams from my headlamp, when I dared to turn it on, did nothing to dispel the sensation that I was basically a meaty treat in a shrink-wrapped envelope. Mortal fear was only the first layer of the experience, though. There were other layers, heavier, weighted with a kind of ecstatic panic I had never felt before. Later, Gregor would describe it as religious terror. Awe, basically. I argued against that at the time.
They didn’t show themselves, but I could hear them. In the nights previous, there had been wind in the boughs of the spruce and cedar, and an occasional rustling of the undergrowth that marked the passage of a small animal in the dark. Their sound was different. When they moved their sound was as the wind, but a wind layered with a kind of crackling hum or howl. Static, or the interference noise one sometimes detects in the noönet when moving from one environment or level to another. That change in atmospheric pressure that you barely notice. Except with them, I couldn’t not notice, because it was persistent, strong. Coupled with this rushing sound was the noise of their actual feet, or what passed for their feet, those ridiculous paddles, on the ground. A curiously flat sound, dead and sharp and even. A cartoon sound that evoked clown shoes slapping tile. Not appropriate to forest litter, sticks and rich humus under feet built for stealth and careful, swift movement. I had not been in the woods long, could hardly claim to know a thing about how any animal sounded in its own environment, but even I knew there was something off about this. I could place my palms on the floor of the tent and feel the vibrations in the earth with each of their steps, vibrations that didn’t match the sounds. Everything about them was in the wrong register, out of sync.
My gorge rose with my panic, my spine and limbs stiffening with each passing second until I had to shake myself vigorously to stop myself from vomiting. I felt a profound need to scream but didn’t dare. I couldn’t, not because my voice would bring them down on me, I felt, but that something worse would occur. Being noticed by them was only the first bad thing that could happen.
That was my intuition at the time. Of course, I had already been noticed; otherwise, why would they be circling my camp? The intuition was such that I knew there were degrees of being noticed by these things. That the slow torture I was being subjected to was not about me at all and more about them figuring out what I was in the first place. The sensation of being scanned was very real, and violating in a way I still can’t articulate properly. The closest phenomena I can compare it to is that moment at a party when you know someone is looking at the back of your head, that psychic sureness, and you turn and there they are, sure enough, they are looking at you, and your eyes lock with them and that awareness beams between you both. That I know you know that I know you were looking feeling. It was like that, only much worse, a flirtation with knives.
They didn’t show themselves, but I could smell them. The walls of the tent did nothing to block the smell. Top notes of sour ozone, bitter almonds, and rotting citrus; a middle range of ferment and oil spill; bottom notes of sewage and something I can only describe as a paradoxically freeze-dried scorched odour. All of this was so intense as to move me beyond the gag reflex into a kind of stunned gasping for clean air.
I mention all these phenomena now as a warning. When it begins, they will have corrected for these sensations that I felt in their presence. Again, if Gregor is right, they may have already, or always have had such corrections available to them and just dropped the act for me. For fun. I imagine there may be moments, places, where they let down their guard, though. Where it won’t matter how they present, and when that happens, if you are there, and noticed, then these things, the smells and the panic, the sounds, these are things you will experience as well.
Here, in the shitbox, where despite my enforced isolation, I still cling to the dogged normality of the world, I feel faintly ridiculous saying these things, writing them down. That, I think, is part of their genius, this cultivated doubt that is their special gift, this inability to take seriously my own objectivity. These things happened. Everything that’s written down here happened to me, and yet there’s a part of me that negates that lived experience. My left knee will tingle and then heat up and before a minute has passed it will burn like a coal in a fire, and still that part of me says hey, could be anything. It’s so
mething they put inside me, this doubt. A firewall, of a kind.
What happened next is hard to write about. “From the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent,” Gregor would say later. A random, unexpected thing that changed everything. A small moment I should have survived without incident, but didn’t. In the days with Gregor that followed, he made a big deal of the accident, said it was a pebble in the pond, rippling out and back, creating the pattern of my end. He’d say that it wasn’t an accident at all, that it was a difficult thing that had to happen, that had been conditioned by them in order for us to meet at all, a circumstance laid down at the beginning of time, and I have to give him that. I have to give him at least a part of that, the bastard.
I endured hours of their torment that night. Sleep was out of the question, though I often descended into a drowsy fugue laced with the pallid zing of sour adrenaline. I’d check the time and find it unreliable, my consciousness unable to settle on an hour. Was it four in the morning now? Or still around midnight. I’d check again, and again, each confirmation of the hour before my eyes fleeing my mind the moment I covered my watch. And always the hissing, crackling wind, the agonizing slapstick sound of footfalls in the brush, the necrotic smell.
Finally, the walls of the tent began to show in the dark, a wash of timid yellow. Dawn, and I felt the courage that diurnal critters since the beginning of this fucked up enterprise must have felt. Light meant sight, and sight meant an effective defence, and defence meant food, and escape, and survival into another day. Daylight meant that what you saw was what it was. There was still a presence outside; the smell lingered, and the wind, but now I would see the source, see it for what it was. Knowledge would dispel illusion.
I squirmed painfully from the sleeping bag and hastily, noisily began to pack the few items I’d used in the night. The unzipping of the tent door was a breathtaking moment. An explosion of green and grey and black prismatic color rotating before my eyes, speared through on the horizontal by the russet brown of the fallen cedar I’d slapped the tent down next to. I left the tent, pulling on the tab that would collapse the thing as I did so. It began its farting procedure.
Standing up was painful. There was nothing to be seen except mist and leaves and the grey pillars of the trees fading away into the distance. Their wind still moved the air, though now it was less a thing I could hear, and more an intuition of movement. Knowing it was there to hear, having heard it all night in its maddening intensity, now I had to strain to actually hear it. The awful odour, however, was not reduced in potency at all.
I dragged myself with some difficulty atop the rotting cedar. Chunks of tree flesh half gone to water and moss fell away from my fingers and feet, the thick aroma of decomposing wood, fungus, and acrid beetle leavings nearly overpowering the other odour. The cedar had been huge when it came down, a real colossus, and its decaying bulk rose from the forest floor at least five feet. In the water, this one could have been a contender, a real kayak-killer. I’d spot them from here, I knew it.
Finally standing on the thing, I may have whooped in small triumph. I know I raised my arms in a short jabbing motion at the sky, for the same reason. I know, because that motion was enough to push the rest of me off balance. My footing on the mouldering tree was not secure; I’d been horizontal and curled up in fear for several hours, and verticality felt foreign, joyous, and ultimately, destabilizing.
I slipped.
That’s it. Nothing more dramatic, or less ridiculous, than that. A slip and a fall. A foot, I don’t know which one, came loose at the heel from the rotting cedar bark, slick with moisture and moss, and shot out into the empty air in front of me. Pinwheeling arms. The whole bipedal thing with gravity, the original downer.
It wasn’t a bad fall, even. My ass came down on the tree and I slid to the ground more than fell. So, call it five feet of slippery descent into the salal and devil’s club and the black rot of the forest floor. That floor is layered, though, and full of hidden things, some of which don’t soften with age and decay.
I landed, and my left knee exploded as it came down on something hard and sharp. I’m not sure I even made a sound, the shock was so sudden, the pain so complete that it filled the world with multiplying images and blinding whiteness. In seconds, I would black out, but I stayed conscious long enough to register the sight of a fire-blackened tusk of ancient hardwood emerging from above the ruined joint. It wore a band of gleaming white fatty tissue swiftly turning red at its base, and what looked like an abalone shell seemed clutched at the tip by spurs of wood like pincers. My kneecap, or at least a piece of meniscus, was all I could think at the time, if you could even call it thinking.
With that thought, finally, came my howling, a sound that was immediately answered from the fog.
They didn’t show themselves, not even then. But I heard them, their voices this time, for the first time. Theirs is a voice like no other, a howling as of molecules, galaxies, tearing themselves apart in pleasure. The sound of the imaginary changing state. A sound of arrival. Imminence.
Hearing them, I knew that my knee was the least of my problems, that I would die here, surely, and my corpse set upon by things I could not comprehend for purposes just as unknowable. My terror, in the moment before I blacked out, was ultimate.
I mean, so far as my life had been lived up until that moment. I didn’t know from terror. Not really.
***
I awoke to movement around me, the sounds of a shuffling pair of what must have been normal, human feet, and the jingle and crush of someone going through my bag. My knee was a white ball of pain and easily half the world. Gasping, I managed to raise myself high enough to see it: the hardwood spur still towered above the joint, the blood gone to steaming black around it. The knee itself was also a ball, swollen to an astonishing size, a livid, purple balloon. Each of my movements generated searing blasts of pain as my flesh and bone tried and failed to accommodate the impaling tusk. Again, I howled, tasting blood. I had bitten through my tongue at some point.
“Oh hey, it’s awake,” I heard a voice murmur in my right ear. I yelped, turning my head as quickly as I could, but the voice retreated behind me. They were on top of the felled cedar, I realized. Looking down on me.
“You’re a mess, son,” the voice said. “You literally cannot be too careful in this place. I mean, the neighbours? Lemme look at that a little closer, whaddaya say, huh?”
A man lowered himself from the tree, to my right. I don’t recall what he wore—a thick woolen sweater, maybe? So dirtied and decorated with twigs and lichen, I couldn’t tell. A cap of some kind?—only that he seemed to share the same roughened, rotting quality of the forest and the bush. He bristled and vibrated, sighed and slouched into position above me. Arms like whipping saplings, chest like a burned out and hollowed log. Hair like crusted lichen, long and plaited, grey and black and green. He wore a respirator below light blue eyes in a nest of wrinkled flesh. He brought those eyes within an inch of the spur where it erupted from my leg and whistled long and low.
“Goddamn! Check it out. I mean, the detail on this! Stunning. Look, you can even see the bigger nerve bundles twitching there at the ends.”
The eyes lifted up to mine. “Sometimes I gotta hand it to ’em, y’know? I mean, it’s amazing work. Only sometimes, mind you. Must hurt like hell. How you doing, anyway? Keeping it together?”
I must have nodded. The man reached a callused hand to my right eye and spread the lids apart, peered deeply into me. The hand smelled of wood smoke and damp loam, the nails black with dirt.
“Yeah, that’s a lie, right there, but I’ll let you have it, because you’re in shock. Fuck knows how much blood you’ve lost.” He rose up, clapped hands to his knees as he did. “And you’re stupid. I can help with the first two things, maybe even fix the knee, if the flesh is willing. As for the latter, that’s your tip, son, and I’ll leave you to it.”
He hopped over me like a gazelle, seeming to step on the air itself, back to the
other side of the log. More jingle and crush, and then he was back with a bottle of water and a hypodermic plunger. He brought the bottle to my lips and poured liberally; I caught maybe a quarter of the drink in my mouth. “Here, get more of that into you while I introduce your wretched self to my good friend Morpheus here.” He took the bottle and helped me wrap my hands around it. I drank again as he placed the cool flat disk of the hypo against my neck.
“Getting you out of here should prove interesting,” he said. I think I laughed or moaned at that. Both, likely. He laughed, too, a dry sound in his throat. “Drugs kicking in? All right, well, don’t go anywhere or anything. I’ve gotta go talk to some motherfuckers about travel arrangements.”
I half gasped, half screamed my question at him. The obvious one that I didn’t need an answer for, not really. Maybe it was the morphine, the shock, everything, but I felt mythic suddenly. Scripted, somehow, in that way that all the old stories feel scripted. Did I even speak my question, I wonder now.
“Me? I’m Gregor Makarios.” He made a fist of one hand and chucked me lightly under the chin. “But then, you knew that already, Den. Drink up, drink up, I’ll be right back.”
***
Makarios didn’t lie, but then, how would I have been able to tell. My perception of time was effectively liquified. He appeared to return, and quickly. His face hovered before mine in a fog of war between my pain and the opiate. I could dimly sense that his arms and hands were working around me. Seconds later I felt a cord or rope cinch itself tight around my ankles, and then another around my arms and chest. He took the bottle from my hands, set it aside. Makarios talked as he worked, his voice getting louder.
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