“Well, that’s not great,” he whispered. I made some strangled noise in response, babbled for a moment, then found my voice.
“What? What’s not great, Gregor? I mean, shit. Shit!”
“It’s a bridge. They’re gonna make a bridge. A Salientia bridge.”
“A what?”
“Latin for frogs, Den. A bridge of frogs. They’re highly mutable, is what I figure, with a basic gene structure that makes them good for building...well, the things they build. Seen frog structures before. Shit, knowing them, they probably dig the symbolism, too. The Leapers, yeah? Les voltigeurs. See how everything feeds into everything else they’ve got going? Obvious fuckers at the end of the day.”
I had no time to press him for details, as the construction, for lack of a better term, began. Any questions would have been instantly moot. The archons stepped up to their work, all of them; even the drooling Anal Andy left off its masturbation to join in. Only the one called As You Know Bob remained where it was, the plank of its hand upon the throbbing gristle stream where it flowed across the stone. Hands like glowing spades plunged into that stream and drew out thick threads of reversed frog-flesh. Slim, translucent spinal cords and graceful femurs clung to pulsing, exposed muscle fibre and twined through archon fingers that twitched like eager scalpels. There was a nauseating blur in the spaces around their hands as they pulled and teased, each at their own twisted rope of mangled life.
I began to feel physically ill as I watched. Or perhaps I had been the whole time, and was only beginning to notice. Noticed, too, was the stiffening in my cock where it was pressed into the ground. Arousal, and sickness, deep in the gut, and a kind of dizzy, vacuuming sensation through the top of my skull. There was a cord in me, being pulled through me at high speed, generating heat and light, a terrible frictionless burning. I retched, producing a small quantity of pale, yellow fluid that spilled from my lips.
“Okay! You’re about due for a time-out, boyo,” I heard Gregor say, and in the next moment he was hauling me to my feet, and chuckling at the front of my pants.
“Why, that’s a full chub right there! Here, have a sit down.” He pushed on my shoulders and I collapsed into a messy lotus. “Good. Shows you’re normal. Or at least that things are functioning...—” he sighed “—...as per their ridiculous specs. Jesus.” He dug in a pocket, produced a packet of disinfectant wipes. “Here. Clean yourself up.”
I took the packet, struggled to pull a wipe from inside. My fingers were numb twigs, impossibly far from me. Gregor moved behind me, and just as I managed to extract the damp cloth from the packet, he struck me between the shoulder blades with the flat of his palm. Again, though, it was as if I’d been hit by the moon. I could feel myself begin to fall forward and down, in extreme slow motion, a descent through tar, or cement always on the verge of setting. After an age, Gregor’s hand came down on my right shoulder, halting me in mid-air.
“Not going anywhere this time, Den,” I heard him say. “You can stay.” His voice sounded distant, reedy.
“Okay?” I said. “I’ll stay, then. I’ll stay.” I felt unusually clear, the rising panic of moments before dissipating like pollen on the wind, becoming a memory of panic, then not even a memory, only a word.
“Got a little panicky there, Gregor,” I said, trailing my fingers through the moss underneath me. They felt absent, still, but they were my fingers, my body. I could at least feel them again.
“Oh, a little? A little, he says.”
“What did you do?”
“Much as I hate to do this, I need you to watch what’s happening down there, in the ravine. And I do hate this, Den. If you take nothing else away from this, let it be my regret that you have to be a witness here.”
I raised my eyes from the ground. In the ravine, the work continued. The assembled archons moved at an unreal speed, in a kind of spastic, primitive ballet, their forms becoming loose and provisional, their furred borders blurring. They stooped and scooped at the thickening ribbons of amphibious flesh and bone, threw bleeding gobbets of slick and shining gore through the air. Linked ropes of bone and sinew made glowing arcs across the ravine. Some of it still croaked. The fount of life still poured from the birthing stone where As You Know Bob knelt and pressed and grunted. Raw materials. An impossibly foul spigot of organic material.
“I’ve shifted your perception. Or rather, triggered in you a different set of perceptual tools. If you like, imagine you’re dreaming this.”
“I’m not, though. Clearly.” Gregor laughed at this.
“No. No, you’re not. But let’s say you’re seeing it now with eyes of dream, so you can watch, and learn, and not fly apart with astonishment. Apocalypse is hard on a body.”
The ropes of tissue began to harden in the air as the archons worked. It was definitely a construction of some kind, a span. A bridge, as Gregor had said. Their hands pawed and squeezed at the flesh, made knots in it, spread it like putty, or clay. They teased strands apart, built tubes and spheres and asymmetrical shapes, linked these shapes with others. Space distorted around them in ways difficult to describe. The world became less physical, somehow. If I focused on the bridge as the whole it was rapidly becoming, it did not appear to go anywhere, or to cover much of the ground at all; it was barely as wide as the ravine itself, and maybe only a metre taller than the tallest of the archons. The Laird could reach up and touch the highest part of the arc of it.
If, however, I brought my attention to a small part of the bridge, a shelf of latticework here, a twitching pylon there, I would immediately sense that it covered a great distance, that it had an end point beyond where I could perceive. The thing spanned a huge gulf, or void. A gulf I couldn’t actually see, but felt was there, felt with some sense I had not used before that moment, or even knew I had. I would turn my head slightly, or cast my sight on a different part of the thing for a moment, and reel with the vertiginous sensation of suddenly finding myself on a cliff edge.
Throughout, I was possessed of a preternatural calm. Understand that the work being done was profoundly wrong. The materials were abominable. Palpable anguish radiated from the mortified and transfigured amphibian flesh. The archons worked with an industrious glee that registered, to me, as criminal. To watch the bridge being built was to experience ugly, transgressive intuitions that went beyond mere perversion. To watch the bridge going up was like watching a rape, of what I couldn’t say. Nature, perhaps, and yet that wasn’t it. Something more fundamental. The fabled Ground of Being rendered into paste, riddled with holes, made unstable. The poor animals, at the very least. And yet, again, through all this appalling activity, the strange calm was all I felt. That, and the realization that Makarios had not answered my question...
“What did you do to me, Gregor?”
“What?” He was as rapt as I, watching the dirty business in the ravine. “Who did what now?”
“When you hit me. Just now. What was that? You didn’t say.”
“Oh. Call it a perspective shift.”
“Yeah, the dreaming eyes, you said. I feel different. Much different.”
“It’s an old shaman trick. Think of it as swapping out one camera for another. A literal change in your world view.
“We construct our views. Why? Because we can, simple as that. To construct something like that requires making choices about what we view and how we view it, what perceptual apparatus will best suit the task. Then we make choices about what to think about it. Or whether we think about it at all. Your standard-issue perceptual tools, your individual apparatus, wasn’t working well in this—” and here he waved a hand at the ravine with evident distaste “—...situation, this, ah Jesus. It’s a clusterfuck, and no mistake.”
“You did it to me once before. On the day we met. When my knee...”
“Son, there was no way in hell you were going to be moved in the state you were in. I certainly wasn’t going to carry you, and there was a long way to go still. Your little slip-n-fall happened more than
five kilometres from Stonefish House. What was I supposed to do with you? They had me by the balls, Den.”
***
Here in the shitbox, I wonder now how I could have been as stupid as that, to not notice the obvious when it was presented, and presented clearly. At the end of the day, I think it was a willed suspension of facts on my part. Gregor had somehow transported me to Stonefish House, went my thinking. Out of my head on morphine, badly injured and struggling in an environment that frightened and threatened me, I had constructed an interesting hallucination to pay attention to. That sea of blood in an acorn cup, the island rising in the middle of it. Entertaining shit and no mistake, distracting as fuck. It did the job, I know now.
Doctors, real human surgeons, had been waiting for me at Stonefish House, because how could they not have been? Perhaps already resident or flown in that same day at Gregor’s special order, and paid handsomely for their discretion. These were the habits of the super-rich, I told myself. Drugs and isolation, edge therapies, secret networks of only the finest fill-in-the-blank, available for assorted uses and abuses at a moment’s notice.
The trials of the night before my injury, the sonic and psychological assault I’d endured through the hours of darkness, this had been shunted aside, just a strange thing that had happened and little more, put away in favour of the exquisite agonies of my injury, and the surprise of meeting Makarios.
This is what I told myself about my knee, about Gregor, about my arrival at Stonefish House. Something bitter and unhinged in the tone of his voice, though, triggered a revelation in me then. What was I supposed to do with you. There at the ravine, the scales fell from my eyes. They had me by the balls, Den.
Watching the beasts build their bridge, I began to guess at the nature of the emergency transport Gregor had employed and the singular vision that accompanied it. What had actually occurred? Even supposing a massive dose of opiates, beyond what had actually been administered to me, the idea that I would remember nothing of the move to safety and medical aid, nothing of the surgery, nothing, in fact, until the moment I awoke healed, strained credulity. Gregor had left me there under the log for a brief period, had mentioned having to make arrangements. Gotta talk to some motherfuckers about travel, he had said. Credulity snapped completely.
So, too, did my assumptions about Gregor suffer a cascade of failures. He was a hermit, if hermit was even the right word. Whatever the next level up from hermit is, that was him. Gregor had left the world and the things of the world, and he had come here, gone to great lengths to hide and transform and camouflage himself. He had run out of money, or at least, run out of enough of the stuff to make the kind of under-the-table operation I was imagining impossible. Super-rich he was not, not anymore, not for a long time, and even if he had been, knowing him now as I did, the idea that he would compromise his hermitage by bringing in expensive outside help for a stranger rang false. He’d have sooner left me there in the woods to die, I thought, and the thought felt right. Uncomfortable, but right. Gregor Makarios was no longer concerned with the human world he had left. Gregor’s chosen society was that of electronic ghosts and primeval monsters, his preferred environment the savage mistforest and the fragrant interior of his own skull.
It was then, as these clarifying thoughts scoured the lies from my head, that I looked through the blind and down into the ravine at the sick industry of the sasquatch below. In that moment, Babayoko looked up. Our eyes didn’t meet but the sense that it knew I was there entered my perception like a spear hurled unerringly at a target. My knee (my new knee, as I was now thinking of it) pinged its awareness of Babayoko’s attention at me.
I was looking at my doctor. And it was looking in my direction, or so it seemed. Later I would realize that it didn’t need to turn its head to scan the area where our blind was secured to see us. To notice me there. Babayoko had no need of eyes, even. It was all for show. A seeming.
Something that was more leer than smile, more a stiffening of the jaw apparatus in preparation of a bite than a social cue, made a rictus of the creature’s face.
I smiled back, and here, in the shitbox, I’m still smiling, I imagine. Smiling in that way we all do, all the time, whether we feel like it or not, the charnel grin, behind the lips, in back of the teeth. I smile, still.
***
“Hold up,” Gregor said.
Their hands grew still, their arms fell to their heaving sides. The archons were finished with their build. There was an aura of completeness to the structure now, though I could not say what it was I was looking at, truly. There was no longer any sense of it being a thing that sat comfortably on the rock and moss of the ravine, no longer any way to think of it as local at all. It was present, sure, but not just in the ravine, and no part of the structure, no matter how hard I focussed on it, was without the vertiginous sensation now.
Gregor had used the word bridge many times by then, and so I thought of it as such, tried to see it as a bridge, but if I’m to be as clear as possible here, it didn’t look at all like a bridge. Or rather, it looked like something pretending to be a bridge. The spans and spars, the fluted arches and tortured spirals shone blackly, glistening with fluids, blood and plasma, water, and soft organs gone liquid beneath the strain. It was a framework, a lens, a scaffold, and a hole in space. My eyes hurt to look at it, struggling not only with the horrific nature of the building materials but with the apparent scale of it, the optical illusions it forced on the mind. If it was a bridge, then it was a bridge only in the sense that it allowed something from one side of a thing to arrive at the other side. Ignoring everything else, that was my takeaway perception and I expressed as much to Gregor in the moment...
“You’re being too dualist, there,” he grunted. “Can’t blame you, but still.”
“I don’t understand.” I was whispering now. “There’s something coming, isn’t there?” I could feel it, like a wave of pressure, a change in gravity. The air itself, in the ravine, and where we were, behind our hide above the ravine, hummed and popped. It seemed that the atmosphere wanted only to tear itself apart but did not have the strength. A war of molecules, perfectly matched. Gregor hummed, too, and nodded his shaggy head, eyes never leaving the scene below.
“They wouldn’t build the thing if they weren’t expecting visitors, Den. But there is no other side, not to this. There’s just this, the Stonefish. To say they come from another side is to misinterpret what they are, how they move, where they’re from. If it’s a side at all, it’s Outside, but even that idea falls apart with a little prodding. Watch. How long have we been here, watching, already, Den?”
“I don’t know. Hours? Feels like hours.”
“Barely ten minutes, more like. In that time The Laird did his sleight-of-hand with the water. They had their little singalong. As You Know Bob did his Hand of God routine. Then the fucking build. Ten minutes from standing around like idiots to an impossible flesh machine whose sole purpose is to make a tidy tear in the fabric of spacetime. Fuck. You can’t even look at it properly without hurting yourself. But yeah, not long.
“Longer than you’ve ever seen one of these things before, though. In the flesh, I mean. The footage back at the compound doesn’t count. That time with Horvemoan and Andy and their shit-moths took a couple minutes, tops.”
“That felt like hours, too.”
“Yeah. I remember, ages ago, when I’d talk to the poor bastards who would brush up against these things in the woods. A smell, a track, a glimpse. Only ever a glimpse. Matter of seconds, maybe a minute, if they saw it at a distance from the edge of a clearing in the trees, or in a river bed. My point is, no one ever saw one of them for very long. And what did they see, those poor bastards?”
“Sasquatch.”
“Sasquatch, sure. Like you’re seeing now. Giant, hairy hominids. Sloping brow, conical heads. Glutes like boulders, massive chests, prize-winning breasts if they thought they were looking at a female. I mean, Christ, next time Babs turns around, please, a
ssess, and get back to me, I’m interested in your take.”
“Huh.”
“Like I said, minimal exposure. A literal sighting. Never the long view. Never ten minutes. Let’s call it fifteen now. Keep watching, Den. Don’t bother with the bridge, you won’t be able to cognize what’s going to be happening there. Watch them.”
I experienced a needle of panic through the calm he’d induced in me. “Why? What’s going to happen on the bridge? Gregor!”
“Once they arrive the first time, they can come and go as they please. They ladder in and out. The first time, though, that takes effort. I imagine The Laird probably did it on its own, once, at the dawn of things. The rest need a bridge their first time. To ground themselves here. I said watch them, Den. Watch.”
Gregor reached across the space between us and lightly chucked my chin with a rough knuckle; my head turned away like a balloon on a string, back to the ravine, to the archons, gathered now at the base of the bridge.
“And the masks come off...” Gregor breathed.
The bridge pulsed, and shone, and shrieked; Gregor was right, there was no way to look at the thing. Gregor was always right. I only had eyes for the archons. Each of them raised their arms in a series of peculiar hieratic gestures. Then, as Gregor said, the masks came off. There was a shedding, of sorts, and a projection. Their hair evaporated in matted clumps, becoming steam or spider silk in the air, then disappearing. Their skin, if skin it was, thrummed into transparency, exposing bare musculature and obscure glowing organs that quaked and slid over and around each other within body cavities that were quickly changing roles, becoming windows, or weapons. Batteries? Zones of power. Joints unlocked and extended, so that fingers probed further into the air, legs and arms akimbo and awkward.
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