Felix sees that the ripples a ways ahead of him have a different pattern and upon closer examination, he sees through the reflection on the surface of the pseudo-fluid that it gets darker in a gradual arc. When he nears the edge, he can see that the fossil slop marble drops off dramatically at an angle like a continental slope might. It gets darker almost immediately below the surface and he can barely see past about ten feet into the dark red murk below.
The wind is getting stronger.
To his left and right, he can only see a gradual curve to the slope edge leading him to believe that this lake of sorts must surround whatever those obelisks are and they must be at the center of it.
Well, gosh, that’s too darn bad. I’m not going in there for anything, homie. If it’s my delusion, can’t I make changes, like a lucid dream or something?
The thunder rolls behind him, louder and closer now. Felix looks back toward the dunes and sees a sky-high storm of the ashy sand blowing toward him where they were. The desert is coming for him.
“Forget I asked, Spaznoid!” he yells toward the white speck near the obelisk in the distance.
Felix can only watch as the roaring wall closes in across the flat and it stretches as far left and right as he can see. He shakes his head, trying to think of any other option than swimming through the weird liquid.
I mean, who knows what that shit is? It smells like rotten animal carcass baked in acetone and vomit.
He has to shift his footing as the wind blows him about on the edge of the drop. The ground beneath his feet shudders then rumbles as it vibrates and shifts up and down in time with the howling storm approaching.
Felix holds off until the storm is less than fifty feet away, the wind is throwing him almost off his feet, and all the red fluid in the shallows is whipping around in spirals.
Felix dives into the red murk as the storm passes over–and immediately learns that he was right not to trust the fluid. It doesn’t resist like water and Felix loses little speed as he dive/falls down into the obelisk lake, but it also doesn’t let him drop like he expects after experiencing the lack of resistance. He tucks and rolls a bit and goes into a gradual tumble, which slows him enough to start descending toward the surface of the slope.
His eyes adjust and on the upturn of the tumble he watches the storm above roll over the lake, obscuring what diffuse light there was from the black sky. On the downturn he can see that the surface of the slope isn’t smooth like the flats. The jumbled, chaotically grown or formed bodies are bulbous here and jagged there but vague enough through the murky liquid that Felix convinces himself that he sees parts of the bodies in the slope moving.
His tumbling slows and he sees that the red fluid becomes more of a dark blue near what must be the “lake” floor.
He’s getting deeper fast and he’s almost at the end of his breath so he tries to swim back to the surface. The low resistance works both ways, though, and Felix can’t gain any purchase. He just keeps falling deeper and closer to the slope.
Felix realizes he’s going to drown but he keeps flailing in hopes of catching some friction to no avail. He holds the last of his breath as long as he can then his mouth opens and he breathes in against his will. The red fluid enters his nose and mouth and fills his chest and Felix kisses his ass goodbye.
Then he starts breathing again. The fluid is hard to get used to the first few times he lets it in, but he can breathe it.
Felix lets himself float down to the slope and guides himself the little bit he can, touching down on the distended, entrail and organ-filled belly of a warped, horse-sized trunk of abdomen. Its head and limbs are lost in the seamless continuum of organic alabaster.
He looks up the slope and considers trying to climb back up what looks to be about a half mile of angled weirdness, but he sees from the rolling darkness above that the storm has made it almost all the way across the lake. That didn’t seem like a friendly, nice ash-storm either. Down then?
Like an astronaut on a low-gravity planet or moon, Felix is able to make a series of long, slow jumps down to the foot of the fossil slope. It feels more like that than water, as the breathing of it makes the liquid seem less so.
Felix can barely see into the foggy blue layer over the lake floor but there aren’t any moving forms, so he chances going straight into it on his last jump. He breaks through, disturbing the blue mist but touching down safely about ankle-deep into some kind of sediment on the entire lake floor.
The base of it is blue and gray silt and multi-colored pebbles but there are broken white shells as well?
Felix crouches and scoops up some of it in his left hand then examines it as he stands.
The blue and gray sediment is the shredded remnants of decayed, soaked fabric; the pebbles are wet, waxy chunks of crayons; and the shells are crushed and shattered teeth.
He rubs the scar on his jaw through his facial growth and lets the sediment run through his fingers and meander to the lake floor before flinging the last of it down and scuffing his hand against the side of his soaked track pants a few times to get the residue off.
“Real classy, Spaz.”
Felix can make out a dark, skyscraper-tall form in the distance through the murky blue and decides that must be the bulk of a form that is topped by the obelisks. He sets off toward it, shuffling through his childhood living room and hundreds of thousands of his father’s broken teeth.
He sees a few more of the plates like the one he saw on the red flat poking up partially through the sedimentary junk but ignores them as best he can. As he gets closer to the looming form ahead, there are more and more of the plates randomly scattered around and he can’t help wondering what they’re for.
Through the blue haze, the form ahead is becoming clearer. It looks almost like a Gothic cathedral with a very tall main structure and two main towers jutting up past that. There’s a suggestion of many flying buttresses building from a wide base and climbing the main structure walls and a bit up onto the higher towers and even between them. It’s like a warped, vertically stretched caricature of the Reims cathedral in France.
He gets closer and sees that the cathedral comparison is spot on but not the whole picture. The structure is a dull matte orange due to its main building material being what looks like rusting machines of all kinds.
Some machines are still pumping and turning and slamming together slowly and awkwardly but most are just fused together and/or seized up. There’s the suggestion of the internal workings of cars, trucks, turbines, generators, pumps, etc. but none of it is clear. Some pipes still let out smoke or steam which hits the strange blue fluid and looks like a vent on the deep ocean floor. The whole thing sways a bit back and forth and creaks and moans. The rust and metallic ash of decay continuously flakes and falls off or clings to different parts, giving the towering structure the look of a pickled creature in a formaldehyde-filled jar.
Felix hears a thump and spins toward the source. All he can see is one of those plates. There’s another thump and he spins toward that one. It had to be from that plate over there.
He creeps to the plate and crouches down. As he brushes the carpet, crayons, and teeth aside he realizes it’s not a plate at all. It’s a transparent porthole looking down into a dark tube about three feet in diameter. All he can see down in the tube is a bluish black sludge, which catches the dim light a bit with a touch of iridescence on its surface.
Felix brushes more of the sediment off the porthole and sees a long barcode on the curve of the part closer to him. There’s another thump as Felix watches something move in the sludge. The thing writhes and twists and a grotesque, sludge-covered human face emerges then sinks back down out of sight. He can hear a low moan and sees thick bubbles form at the surface then more thumps.
“Uh…”
Thumps start coming from another tube behind him, then another and soon dozens of them are thumping.
The humanoid thing in the tube Felix is crouched at forces itself up and slams the portho
le with its face, causing Felix to straighten up and take a step back. It slams the porthole repeatedly and the other tubes start to make the same wet, meaty slapping sounds.
With a final thump and slap, the thumper closest to Felix pops the top of its tube off then drops back down. Wet sliding and wriggling sounds are followed by the man thing squirming its way up out of the tube into the faux-fluid of the lake bottom through undulation and lubricated sliding alone and it flops its upper half out onto the crayons, teeth, and carpet mush.
The malformed humanoid flops around like its muscles are badly atrophied but once it sees Felix, starts to flop and slide across the lakebed toward him. Felix backs away.
More tubes pop open and each produces a similar creature and they join in the pursuit of Felix. He has to keep changing the direction of his retreat. Soon, there are dozens of the things crawling all over and Felix has nowhere to escape to. They converge on him, clawing and pulling and a few get a hold of his feet and lower legs and upend him. Yeah, I probably should have just jumped.
Felix tries to fight them off but they’ve dog-piled onto him, all of them trying to get a piece. They seem to be attacking him but they’re too weak to succeed in rending him limb from limb like they want to. If it weren’t so disturbing to be the focus of this so far less-than-deadly attack, he might laugh.
Then he does laugh. He laughs hard in their muck-covered, ghoulish faces and yells, “If this’s gonna be that kinda party, I’ma stick my dick in the mashed potatoes!” and keeps laughing.
The would be killer man-creatures stop like someone pressed pause and proceed to collapse in on themselves with that hyper-prism puzzle implosion effect and Felix can see the light-sucking silhouette of the Ref standing in front of him. It’s not as tall as he originally thought.
The creatures disappear completely but Felix is still covered in their muck at first. As he hauls himself off the lake floor, the liquid he keeps forgetting he’s surrounded by pulls some of the oily residue off.
Felix glares at the gaping black of the Ref’s head region and says, “Is this supposed be scary or profound or something?”
It cocks its head a bit but he’s not sure if it understands or just finds his mouth sounds puzzling/amusing.
“I mean, I think I get what you’re trying to do. Metaphors and symbols and shit get you hard. I can respect that.”
Its head cocks the other way and now he’s sure it doesn’t understand him.
Felix can see that the border of its form that has the light sucking effect is like a constantly decaying and replenishing mesh of dodecaplex-fractals.
“The thing is, I just don’t care anymore. I don’t need to know. I don’t want to know. What you’re doing isn’t going to work, get me?”
The Ref observes him a moment longer, then straightens up and its form collapses into the lake floor like an illusionist disappearing under a dropping sheet.
There’s a long moment in which Felix feels like maybe he got through to the Ref but that’s immediately followed by another that feels like he’s alone and stranded.
The floor of the lake starts to vibrate and rumble and it’s strong enough that he has to half-crouch to keep his balance. Parts of the rusted cathedral fall off and glide down to the crayons and teeth, making little clouds of the carpet mush puff up.
“Now what, Spaz?!”
Without any more warning the floor of the lake rushes up toward the red surface like a set of locks was released on an amusement park ride. Felix is pulled down into an unintentional narrow “X” shape in the lake bed. There’s enough force for him to feel crayon shards and bits of busted teeth digging into the back of his head.
With effort he turns his head and sees that the fossil slope is breaking apart all around as the lake floor collapses upwards and myriad shattered parts of the amorphous frozen creatures are being forced toward the cathedral like waves toward a circular island.
They keep coming and Felix decides for the fourth or fifth time today that he’s about to die.
Just before the huge wave of translucent statue parts converges on him and the cathedral from all sides, the lake “floor” reaches the red flats level and stops.
The force of it stopping explodes the cathedral and its rusted machine parts, the fossil creature chunks, the teeth-crayon-carpet mush, and the fluid that made up the lake all explode up and out from the now level flats and into the ash storm.
Felix is thrown up through all this at remarkable speed and he screams the fluid out of his lungs only to have his mouth fill with ash as he reaches escape velocity toward the black swirling clouds in the sky. He’s swallowed by the stormy black abyss and his body goes cold from the wind as he flies sightless through the inky abyss.
There’s a shift in the pull on his stomach he can only feel as his scream finally trails off.
The clouds and wind fade out and he is moving through a black void. Then in the periphery of his vision dim specks of light appear. They get brighter and he realizes they are stars, planets, moons, comets, asteroids. White, yellow, blue, red, etc. and he sees them everywhere save for a huge circle of black that remains in front of him and seems to be growing.
The circle becomes illuminated as if with a celestial dimmer switch and reveals itself to be not just an enormous orb, but Earth itself. It’s not as blue, green, or white as he is used to seeing it, but it definitely has the right continental outlines.
He passes myriad orbiting satellites as he keeps rocketing toward the looming planet. He hits the first layer of atmosphere and starts to fall more than fly. Fortunately, even though his clothes and face are fluttering some it’s looking like he doesn’t have to worry about all that re-entry burn stuff.
As he falls into the lower atmosphere, he can see hundreds of spears of shiny gray and white metal arcing over the planet below him and as he falls closer, his pace matches their downward curves. He looks back and forth and every time he blinks the sky fills with dozens more of the thermonuclear phalluses, all falling toward Earth in a cartoonish yet incredibly ominous shower of doom.
Another blink and now there are “Fat Man”s and “Little Boy”s; then Fat man-like Mark 4s, smaller but similar Mark 5s, and Mark 6s; the longer, smoother Mark 7s and stubby Mark 8s; girth-blessed Mark 14s, 15s, and Mark 36s with ribs for Mother Earth’s pleasure; Enema-tip Naval sub-launch W47s; B28 anal intruders; and everything else from M29 Davy Crockett fired W54s on up to “Dunce-Cap”-spurting MIRV LGM-118 Peacekeepers and the foreign equivalents and alternatives of all of the above. Speaking of, who could forget the John Holmes of bombs and Peter North of nuclear ejaculation, the Russian “Tsar Bomba”? There are dozens of those throbbing monsters too.
Grieves is sitting cross-legged on one of these big boys, perpendicular to its length and facing the rear fins. He’s holding something like a newspaper in both hands but its thick, orange-ish pages are transparent and the block letters of the headlines glow bright blue. In between flaps Felix can see that the headline is in multiple written languages and the English reads:
THE END IS NOW
Felix becomes aware that he’s wearing a parachute when the yellow and black striped pull handle starts flapping against his jacketed chest. He pulls it out of instinct and the wad of parachute is pulled straight up out of its pack and opens, slowing him considerably.
As the bombs keep falling, Grieves notices Felix, smiles in his strange way, and waves.
The bombs fall until they reach Earth and explode in blinding balls of light as far as Felix can see in every direction. He can feel the heat on his face and hears a crackling and sizzling sound from above and looks up.
The parachute is disintegrating as if from invisible flame. He starts dropping faster as a hole forms in the fabric and quickly grows. In only a few moments, the parachute is useless and Felix drops unhindered toward the incredible heat of the continuous explosions.
Felix screams again as he falls into the blinding light of the ceaseless nuclear blasts.
&nb
sp; With no perceptible transition, Felix is standing in a line of people six across that extends as far as he can see in front of him. The phalanx is flanked by large blue military and refugee style tents and from the asphalt at his feet this all seems to be in what used to be a huge old lot around a large dark structure in the center.
It’s a bit cold but he’s already forgotten why that’s a welcome change. His hand is warm, though, and he looks down to see why. There’s a hand in his so he looks up at the owner.
Siobhán is holding his hand. Her beautiful green eyes twinkle with anticipation and nerves and she looks so much younger. The Siobhán Felix knows always looks physically young, but her eyes belie that youthful appearance with a look of profound worldliness and a touch of suppressed melancholy. This Siobhán has real hope and real fear in her eyes.
Her hair is a natural auburn and cut short into a loose, wavy bob and she wears no makeup so her light freckles are obvious. Actually, all she is wearing is something between and robe and a smock made of matte rubberized plastic with a barcode down its left-front in a vertical strip and slippers of the same material. He decides the getups must have something to do with the thin arcs of weird electricity biting at the ground all around and jumping from one small puddle on the asphalt to another.
That’s when Felix realizes that he is Ciarán, at least for the moment. He gets flashes of memories that aren’t his own and closes his eyes:
He remembers meeting Siobhán while she was kicking a ball against a wall in Cork City when they were children. They play tag. They wrestle. They kiss. When they’re older, they make love for the first time and they’re clumsy and nervous. They get better. He has a whole chunk of memory that is black with swirling imagined images and things he could only hear, smell, touch, and taste. Then more sighted memories of making love, walking, reading. Then the bombs and almost nothing else.
A Tear in the Veil Page 47