Dead Man Walking

by Zach Adams

  Collapse imminent…

  Chapter Fifteen: The Study of Everything

  ?2018?

  “I am unsure how you could tire of spending your life in a place such as this, Isaac.” L’æon said gleefully as he skipped up and down the aisles of the library. Isaac had planned to sneak him in once everyone was gone, but the elf had other plans.

  It had been a slow day at the library. A slow couple of days, really, since Christmas. So far, no one had come calling about the nightmare in the museum. Isaac had begun to cautiously suspect that he had actually escaped that particular situation, although his blood pressure spiked every time he heard it mentioned in the news.

  In the meantime, L’æon insisted Isaac go about his life as usual, drawing no attention to himself whatsoever and holding nightly study and investigation sessions with him after hours. Tonight was the first of their planned meetings.

  “Alright everyone, it is now 5:50 PM, please finish whatever you are doing and check out any books you are not finished with.” Beige rattled off his well-rehearsed, lifeless speech with the dependability of a morning rooster-a-doodle-doo over the building’s intercom.

  At the sound of his command, computers rang one after another with their shutdown noises and people either filed toward the door or toward the checkout desk. Isaac rang up eleven books while the remaining library team bailed, minus Olivia who had departed after lunch for an appointment.

  Isaac was already getting ready to run to the back of the building when the last customer came forward.

  The stranger, a short middle-aged man, was in a shabby black tuxedo and bowler hat, with a short moustache and a mischievous grin splitting his grayish face. He leaned on a thin, wooden cane and stared at the librarian in silence, flapping his unoccupied right hand in greeting. Isaac almost didn’t notice.

  “Good evening will this be…” Isaac trailed off as he made eye contact with the grinning, tuxedo-wrapped stranger. He blinked a few times, certain he recognized the face he was looking at, and wrestled to get the transaction over with.

  “…All for you?” Isaac finally finished asking as he noticed the customer hadn’t arrived carrying any books. He also hadn’t stopped grinning. Instead, he proceeded to adopt a sick expression, turn to his left and collapse to the ground. He gracefully caught himself in a forward somersault not unlike Willy Wonka, then popped up to his feet, extending his arms as if to say “Ta-da!”

  The librarian took a step backward and the stranger dissolved into hysterical laughter - at least, he looked like he had dissolved into hysterical laughter. The movements and expressions were there, but no sound came. After a few seconds of this the man snapped his fingers and disappeared, replaced with L’æon, still chuckling and wiping a humorous tear from his eye.

  “It is me!” The elf exclaimed. “I was wondering if you would notice. It seemed best to keep our profile low and I understand Æ’géminë are not a common sight these days so I thought, perhaps, the form of another human would be best. I picked an old favorite… Good, eh?”

  Isaac nodded as he lowered himself into his chair. I’ve found a new Donny that can magically turn himself into Charlie Chaplin, He thought to himself. The universe really is ending.

  Isaac’s thoughts were interrupted by a chirp from L’æon. He felt a creepy sensation up and down his spine as he was heard, without having spoken.

  “You are indeed correct,” L’æon said. “Time is quite literally running out. To work we must go!”

  Without waiting for Isaac to stand, he spun on his heels and skipped to the opposite end of the room, giddy at the sight of so many books.

  Isaac pushed himself to his feet, made sure he could not be seen, and pulled out one of the Book of L’æsälum Pages he had collected. He left the tale of Næ- N- whatever the hell that character’s name was in his bag and forgot the third, untranslated Page at home when the sun decided to do a 180 and rise two hours after Isaac should have been at work. He stashed the story of Äl’khäshæ in a slim gap behind the file cabinets in Olivia’s office before he rejoined L’æon.

  Should be safe there for now, Isaac thought.

  L’æon was already at Isaac’s favorite table, speed-reading a copy of the King James Bible with a curiously raised eyebrow. His left hand, holding the book, rested at the elbow atop a stack of other texts next to him on the floor. He had taken Isaac’s usual seat, so the librarian took one on the opposite side.

  “But that was not what he… Oh L’äpáll, you tricky unicorn of an Æ’géminë. Very clever.” He mumbled to himself as Isaac approached, breaking his concentration.

  “Isaac, there you are. I had meant to ask before - why were you in the museum when the moura attacked? It seems quite the coincidence that such a thing might happen to you so shortly after the hollow incident. Was it simply fate that led you there?”

  Isaac’s thoughts scattered, intentionally for once. Since meeting the elf, he found himself incapable of silencing his thoughts enough to prevent them from being overheard. Without a mental barrier between the two of them, or even as much as an imaginary mute button, he had begun to practice turning up the noise in his head so the elf could not interpret any of it.

  Let’s see him listen to my thoughts through ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’, Isaac thought smugly when he had the idea.

  “There was a big comic book exhibit I wanted to see,” Isaac lied, feigning embarrassment. He kept the half-fiction as prominent in his mess of thoughts as he could, afraid the elf would find the truth buried in his head. “My boss made me go to a doctor because I fell off a step ladder the other day, so afterward I figured it was my only opportunity to check the exhibit out.”

  L’æon finally turned to face Isaac, raising his right eyebrow and tightening his mouth, pondering the young man’s story. After a few seconds, his face sunk, and he turned away. Isaac could hear a shaky exhale leave the elf’s lips.

  “That must have been the painting I saw as I entered the museum. The leaping woman on the field of red. I thought it was her…”

  Isaac looked over at the elf, who was staring longingly into the sky through the window.

  “You mean the Wonder Woman poster? Who did you think it was?” Isaac asked. The elf shook his head, returning to the conversation.

  “Mär - um, ol-old friend.” L’æon stuttered, and he cleared his throat.

  “Isaac,” He continued, becoming more serious. “Is there anything else you can tell me? Has anything unusual occurred since first we met?”

  Isaac recalled his dream the previous night, with the vanishing book, the very same one he had stumbled upon the night the hollows attacked. He didn’t mention that the book had vanished at his command, or the Pages he had found, or the half-assed spell he shot off in the museum.

  “You are thinking in the right direction,” Was L’æon’s reply. “I fear it may not be of much immediate use, however.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “While dreams can be entertaining and occasionally informative, their vague nature can lead you down an endless path of meditative naps, with no guarantee of actually learning anything. This is precisely why so few of my kind studied Úë’mæsömníä – that is, oneiromancy, or dream magic - though it has been said that true masters could rewrite reality itself. Keep your mind open but let us keep our focus on the waking world for now.”

  Isaac clenched his jaw, working out how to direct the conversation in his favor.

  “I did magic in the dream, that’s how the book disappeared,” Isaac finally blurted out. L’æon didn’t even flinch, keeping his eyes pointed at the document in his hand. “It all felt so real… Maybe I could help more if you taught me some.”

  “No.” L’æon said flatly, without even a second’s hesitation. The rejection came like a slap to the face. Isaac opened his mouth to argue but was cut off.

  “It is a matter of evolution, not a reflection of yourself. We Æ’géminë, we lived in a world surrounded with this chaot
ic energy where time is nonexistent. We are shaped in these conditions to be sensitive to these energies, literally created for it, and humans are not. Your minds are less attuned to the pulse of nature. It is my theory that violation of these natural laws is precisely why reality is suffering as it is now. There are species that have their own diluted version of what mine could do, mostly with greater limitations and vile purposes. For example, what your kind call vampires can use psychic powers to break into a victim’s consciousness, creating the hollows like you met before.”

  “Y-yeah, you mentioned that” Isaac said. L’æon blinked once and then shrugged.

  “In fact,” The elf said. “It is not impossible a vampire could be nearby. I have not detected the other usual signs of them, but where there are hollow, a vampire is nearly always present. I doubt one of them alone could pose a threat as great as the collapse of reality, but we must be careful.”

  Isaac asked him to tell him more about vampires. L’æon made a face like someone about to vomit but feeling indignant about the inconvenience.

  “A plague. The lot of them are murderers and slavers. And when their bloodlust takes over, the monstrous form they take… They call it a gift. They take joy from the pain of others.”

  Isaac gulped.

  “Luckily, however, you have me! I can handle a vampire; you worry about the search.” L’æon said when he noticed the look on Isaac’s face.

  “Remind me what we’re looking for in a bunch of novels and encyclopedias?” Isaac asked.

  “It is my belief that marks of any fracture in reality would show in collections of knowledge, but only the ones relevant to the source of the disruption. Discrepancies, contradictions, paradoxes.” L’æon waved a hardcover copy of ‘A Brief History of Time’ by Stephen Hawking as an example. “As of yet I am unsure what or who is the culprit, so any text could be relevant. Time, space, philosophy, fantasy, anything. However, during your working and resting times, I have been attempting to narrow the search.”

  They resumed reading quietly. Isaac’s thoughts wandered through his personal soundtrack. L’æon swore no human could do magic, and yet…

  Did we imagine it? Did the moura just respond to the sound of you yelling? Panic chattered.

  No way, Rage scoffed. You didn’t imagine that book showing up and smacking it in the face. L’æon is hiding something.

  Isaac drowned out his thoughts with the last song he had heard - ‘In Transition’ by Floater - with his mental volume set to max. With no further questions from either side, they powered through a portion of L’æon’s stack of books - he managed to complete seven compared to Isaac’s two - and returned them to their shelves. Isaac learned little from his reading as he scrambled to think of more questions.

  “Could you tell me more about the elves? There must be something about them, or where you came from, that you can share.” Isaac asked politely. L’æon paused for a moment, staring off into another world as though he hadn’t heard. Isaac had noticed that the elf was easily distracted by his own thoughts and did his best to be patient during these times and allow him to buffer like a YouTube video for a bit.

  “There is little to tell,” L’æon finally said as he drew a heavily used leather-bound notebook tied in a gold ribbon from inside his coat. The edges were frayed, and a perfect circle seemed to be burned into the cover. He gently untied the ribbon and flipped through the pages.

  How did he do that? There was no bulge in his jacket, and that thing is massive, Panic said.

  “Even now, I have but scattered memories of the Lost World. As I have said before, we lived and evolved in a realm where time does not move in ways you are familiar with. It is from this dimension, the exposed nerve in the brain of the universe, where Úë’mæ - sorry, ‘magic’ - originated.” L’æon made a gesture just a twitch shy of finger-quotations as he said ‘magic’. Isaac couldn’t tell exactly why, but the gesture seemed a bit condescending.

  “Before the endless winter, my people lived in harmony with our world. Beyond the forest was a land of nightmares but the dendra, our garden of guardians, protected us on the ground, while the only known phoenix colony watched over from the mountains to the North. We all studied and used our powers for the sheer joy of it. I once knew a friend who composed the most incredible melodies and used her musical enchantments to help improve our writing system.”

  L’æon hummed a bar of what Isaac assumed he was talking about. The air buzzed around them. When he stopped humming and opened his eyes, he looked back at his diary mournfully.

  “What did you do?” Isaac asked. L’æon pondered the question for several seconds.

  “Úë’älmælectía, epistemancy, the discipline of knowledge. I studied everything,” L’æon finally told him. Isaac chuckled softly.

  “You were a magical nerd,” Isaac said with a chuckle. L’æon raised an eyebrow in confusion and then grinned broadly. His cheer dissipated almost as quickly as it had appeared.

  “But the side effects… The curse of the Æ’géminë, which I believe ultimately led to our downfall, to possess greater knowledge than any other and a nearly endless lifespan besides but separate from the passage of time. Unable to evolve unless by force, unable to remember a bloody thing… I believe we began recording our thoughts shortly before I Ascended, but it seemed as though the Zätæwäpræcü, what you would call a librarian, had always been heroes to our kind for doing just that. If I search my thoughts, I can find an impression of a young me, before being sung through adolescence, dreaming of spending my days among their number, preserving and protecting knowledge for all. And yet, I know it could not have been - was I a dreaming pixie, looking up to heroes, or was I already an adult when they took on their mission? Do you see? This curse plagued us for as long as any could remember - because no one could remember. Look at this book of mine -” L’æon showed Isaac the inside cover of his notebook.

  “It says Vol. 1,995,817. I can scarcely recall writing, much less where I left the preceding one million, nine-hundred-ninety-five thousand, eight-hundred sixteen. Potentially eons of Æ’géminë history are lost because of this very problem. The effects are weakened in Däcälí and Mänádëa, where time makes slaves of you all, but…”

  As the elf began to trail off, Isaac asked what the last two words were. L’æon looked up at him, startled out of a thought bubble.

  “This universe is technically three - each interconnected, each sustaining the others, all created by an eldritch being we called the Eternal Lightbringer. Between them all is the None, sort of a cosmic transit system of interconnected pocket realms, but to us most of it looks like infinite nothing. Beyond their limits; Dätánímä, the true Empty Place. Anything other than that, even I cannot know.”

  “Infinite nothing, you mean like outer space?” Isaac interrupted.

  “There are many regions, what you call outer space is one of them,” L’æon continued. “Some have theorized that the realm from whence dreams come is another such region. What I know for a fact is that terrible things hide in the None, things no one would want to imagine. Which, sadly, means someone had to imagine them at some point.”

  As he spoke, L’æon traced a series of circles over the table with his left index finger, and glowing white lines appeared as he traced. When it was completed, a Venn diagram with three circles hovered over the wood. Continuing to point, he guided the diagram so it would hover vertically instead of horizontally, giving Isaac a clearer view.

  “So, if we take this image to represent the whole of creation… you are here.” L’æon stuck the tip of his pinky finger through the lower left circle, delicately with one eye closed and the other squinting, to indicate the exact point within this representation of the universe where Isaac would be, relative to his actual location.

  “Mänádëa. The universe which your scientists have observed thus far. Your kind have barely scratched the surface of all there is to know here… But as you say, spoilers. Now, this one…” He stuck his finger thr
ough the lower circle on the right.

  “… Is Däcälí, the Port of All Things. I have not visited that one since… Oh, when was it… I believe Lamia had just been founded by that brute, what was his name, Dräg-something.” L’æon froze again, and Isaac said nothing.

  “Yes, yes, I recall. I had just left home for the first – only - time. I saw a great violet ring floating around the mountains that seemed to be a window to another world, I heard a divine being’s voice, so I stepped through. But something was dreadfully amiss, what was it… Right! The entire place was on fire.”

  “I’d call that a red flag,” Isaac quipped.

  “Indeed, I thought the same,” L’æon said with a nod. He pulled a folded, laminated map of the city, shut one eye, and stared over the streets. Isaac peered from around the edge of the map to see the elf holding his pinky against a street downtown, near the transit center.

  Before asking what he was looking for, Isaac glanced out of the window, which was blackened by the night sky and battered by rain. He then turned his gaze toward the nearest clock, across the room to the right.

  “Oh damn, it’s almost midnight,” Isaac said. “I have to go home, or Chloe will lose her mind.” He quickly retrieved his backpack and jacket. L’æon nodded and instructed his collection of reading material to return home. One by one, each book hovered before zipping off in whatever direction it had originated from.

  “Well, this has been fun, I guess I’ll see you -” Isaac looked up to see that L’æon had vanished as well.

  “- Tomorrow.”

  Chapter Sixteen: A Pebble in Glass

  ?2018?

  “Hello, Earth to Isaac, anybody home?”

  Isaac was rudely pulled from a daydream. He looked up, startled to see Donny standing across the counter in a bright orange hood, the same one he held onto since high school. A fuzzy gray ghost mimicked his stance until Isaac rubbed his eyes. Two days had passed since the museum, and the nightly meetings with L’æon had robbed him of much-needed sleep, which did his eyesight no favors.