by Steven Welch
And so the Aquaboggin’s artificial memory discovered the membership in Les Scaphandriers of the man named Jack. There was his information, his photograph, a voice sample for recognition. He served as an off-site support crew member and he was there when the portals between worlds first opened. He was a survivor of the cataclysm that followed.
The other signal came from the Aengus of an Aquanaut who had disappeared while on a mission nine months ago in what was once Lebanon. Eloise Clark. Her body, and her assigned device, had never been found.
Rear sensors indicated that the creatures were returning. They would attempt to gain access to the interior of this structure by ripping away the bow of my fuselage.
I have fuel to prevent this damage by again firing my engines but will need to recharge for a time in order to be fully functional.
There will not be time enough for all of this.
Elise St. Jacques was in great danger, thought the ship, and there is nothing I can do about it.
TO UNMAKE THE WORLD
Taariq watched as the thing that had been Jack skittered back and forth along the tapestry like a spider.
Long fingers, no, they were knitting needles, white as a clean tooth, working so quickly that Taariq could not keep pace.
At first he thought the Jack thing was weaving, but he saw soon enough that it wasn’t creating. It was unmaking. The tall creature of bone and eyes was digging into the elaborate weave of the tapestry and pulling it apart. As it worked the thing that had been Jack made small sounds like bones cracking. Piles of loose thread fell to the slimy stone of the island below in bundles.
Sparks of light came from where the Jack thing’s thin fingers worked, as if some great energy was being released. As the threads came apart, they glowed and then the strange light grew dim as the material hit the floor, as if dying.
The thing paid no attention to Taariq.
I don’t understand, thought Taariq. The whole plan had gone to shit. He did not want Elise dead but now she certainly was. She had not surfaced in the lake. He wanted to believe in the preachings of The Truth.
There must be an explanation. This is madness.
“Jack,” he said.
The thing that had been Jack stopped its weird work and looked down at Taariq. Its great white head split wide as its jaw opened and fell near to its chest. A sound came, a keening high and alien, then it was as if the air between them became sick and fell apart, the thing’s face blurring and distorting.
Taariq screamed then and fell back as the sound and the sick vibration of light and space continued to drill at him. He rolled away, covered his ears, closed his eyes tightly, and tried to run.
His balance was off. There was something wrong with his ears. What had the thing done to him? He fell and looked up.
The sound stopped as quickly as it came. The air between them returned to normal. The thing that had been Jack turned back to its unweaving. It ignored Taariq as continued tearing the fabric apart at the seams.
This was not what I want, Taariq thought. Not at all. Everything was a lie, then. This wasn’t a man and his story, the belief in The Truth and their way of life, wasn’t true. It couldn’t be, not when the word is spread by this thing, this monster.
I do not believe in this. This is a horror. This is a trick.
He turned and dove into the water.
The cold shocked him. Taariq was not a good swimmer but he could swim well enough to stay afloat as the current pulled him along.
Jack saw his family. They were in a haze, difficult to focus, but his wife and son were there, right there, with him in this strange hidden city beneath Cairo.
No, they’re gone. He felt his heart sink, felt a great sadness, terrible loss, then he was no longer Jack he was something else and his ancient mother watched him with her thirty-six, unblinking eyes.
“I’m doing it, mother, I’m unmaking this horror, and when I’m done, everything will be ours again. As it should be, all ours, again.”
The thing that had been Jack clambered along the Fabric of Eternity like a great spider on thin white legs of bone and chitin and it unspooled the tapestry so quickly that its fingers were a blur of glowing thread.
THE ARSENAL
Bodrum, Turkey - Two Years After the Ocean Came Back
Zuzu and the others found little Elise wrapped in old sheets.
She was unconscious and there were bruises and lacerations, the worst an open wound along her neck where flies feasted. Her blood had seeped through and there were many dark stains on the dirty white linen. The Octo-Thing was tucked under a dusty armoire. He refused to come when they approached although he must have remembered that they were friends. The creature was missing three tentacles and showed signs of great abuse. The stumps of the tentacles were roughly bandaged with the cloth from the same sheet that held Elise and the bandage was held in place by a string from the adventure kit of Les Scaphandriers. In the coming years the tentacles would grow back, as strange and as strong as before, but they did not know this at the time.
This had been a fishing village near Bodrum, Turkey, before The Turn. Now it was a primitive trading post, and the trade was human. There were few people left in the world but some of them had returned to old habits.
Les Scaphandriers were there to study, to learn, to drink, to paint. Zuzu’s reluctance to allow Elise on the field trip was well known, but they went anyway. Four artists, one botanist, and Elise. She was the only one with any combat training and she was only fifteen years old at the time.
The expedition did not have a chance when the raiders descended.
Swim in the sea, paint what we find, save an artifact here and there. No, we won’t use the Aquaboggin, what’s the adventure in that? We’ll take a sailing boat, the old-fashioned way, and we’ll make our way from Istanbul south along Turkey’s coast.
The artists did not hear the raiders approach in the night. They did not even feel the blades that cut their throats. Elise heard them though and she ran. Her escape was short-lived. There were a dozen raiders in the port and they traded human lives with another group further south. Labor was difficult to come by so slaves came at a premium.
Zuzu heard all this and more when Elise shared the experience with her back in Paris. There was much she did not tell Zuzu but what she told was enough.
Breaking a prisoner so that slavery became more possible was the work of the first few days. Elise broke, just as anyone would, but there was still some of her left, a piece of anger and hope that wasn’t shattered. She fought, but she could not fight them all. Her little friend, The Octo-Thing, fought too but finally could only hide and hope that the cruelty would stop.
The raiders, though, made a mistake.
You see, they had not imagined how dangerous Elise St. Jacque truly was.
She did not take them all at once but she took them down just the same. On the third day, when the opportunity came, Elise justified the training Zuzu had shared. Escape was simple because she was sharp and they were sluggish and slow. She killed with a broken beer mug at first. This was how she became free to work. The second raider died from a cleverly placed noose. The third and fourth were burned alive when they stepped on the little gasoline trap. The rest of it came hard and easily, quickly and slowly, with care and with abandon.
They had hurt her. They had hurt her friend, the Octo-Thing. But Elise made them pay after all was said and done.
When the raiders were dead and her wounds were too great to bear, Elise cared as best she could for the injuries of The Octo-Thing. Then, Elise wrapped herself in the sheet, much as she once did as a small child, to protect herself from the monsters.
Elise did not think of her experience in Bodrum as she entered the cobra sphinx that held the Arsenal of The Astonishing Aquanauts deep under the desolate streets of Cairo. She kept those things buried where they could not be seen or heard.
But those experiences were there, nevertheless. They had been there when she returned to Paris, when she ran away ag
ain, when she killed, when she damaged. Bodrum was there at The High Place. Bodrum was there now.
Lights came to life with a spark and a blast of smoke as she entered the sphinx.
How did they power these things? No time. They were clever, Les Scaphandriers. Exterior solar panels, old power lines that snaked deep underground, who knows, who cares.
There was light. Elise stepped in. The air was thick with humidity and the smell of old metal and leather. There was not much dust, but this was clearly a place that had not been visited in many, many years.
The interior of the statue of The Old God was The Arsenal of The Aquanauts and every weapon they deemed worth preserving was here, from a centuries old Chinese blade to a bludgeon crafted by the court of Arthur to a wall of guns from the American old west.
Elise unzipped a pocket on her vest, one of the many, and withdrew a tiny plastic bag that held the simplest of suture kits. Thread, needle, blade, glue, disinfectant.
Need to close the wound on my face. It won’t stop bleeding. And so, she did, using the reflection from a Yuan Dynasty shield to do the job. It hurt, it was rough, her fingers shook from fear and exhaustion, but the fix would stop the bleeding so she could go on.
In another pouch was a small protein bar, smashed and disfigured. The wrapper had broken and salt water had seeped in. Didn’t matter. She wasn’t hungry, but she wasn’t stupid and she knew it would help. She ate in two bites. The sugar made her stomach clench but there was a rush to her head.
Better.
In another pouch, the last one of value, was a tiny metal flask. She knocked back the shot of cognac and tossed the flask aside.
The arsenal was a long hall that led down the considerable length of The Old God, items sorted chronologically to either side and grouped by civilization. Elise hurried past the first displays. These were ancient items and would be fragile, of little value.
Her step increased as she found energy and the displays took her closer to what she was looking for, lights snapping on and off as she went.
Eighteenth century blades and rifles. Nineteenth century pistols. No, none of that.
Elise stopped in front of a glass case that held a display of twenty-first century killing gear. Her reflection in the glass made her smile. She was a fright, clothing torn, skin dark with blood, eyes wide.
Yes, this will do. This will absolutely do.
The beep that came from Jules was soft as was the abrupt vibration.
A signal? Elise checked the screen.
There was the Aengus worn by Jack. It was a glowing dot on the screen and it listed him as Jack Erickson, a communications officer for Les Scaphandriers. The display showed his exact coordinates.
I’ve got you, thought Elise.
Another blue dot, her own Aengus, her own location. There was that she assumed was Taariq’s although it showed up as a name she didn’t recognize, an Aquanaut named Eloise Clark. Had Taariq killed that person to get the device?
There was another signal, a bright little blue triangle. She shifted the view screen to depth mode. The triangle was high above them, at what must have been the entrance to the museum.
The triangle symbol was a ship. It was her Aquaboggin.
Elise smiled. So this killer had used her own ship to travel to Cairo. So, if I don’t die, maybe there’s a way out.
Or maybe there’s something even better. She input several coordinates into the device. What was the football play? A hail Mary?
Elise moved to shut down the Aengus on her wrist but stopped. There was something else too, another little blip, smaller and bright red, and she cursed herself as a fool.
All the Aquanauts were chipped, including the Octo-Thing.
JACK THE DREAM BUTCHER
The chamber that held the vast tapestry was quiet now except for the skittering drum of bone fingers as they worked.
Nothing moved except those fingers and the threads of the fabric as they drifted to the stone floor of the island below. There was only the Fabric of Eternity, the length of a football pitch and nearly as tall, shimmering as if electrified, the wet walls that seemed to stretch on forever, the slight movement of the water in the lake, and the pale figure of the thing that once was Jack as it worked.
“Oh, I’m taking it all apart nicely now, thank you.”
Great swaths of the Fabric of Eternity lay unspooled around the skeletal foot talons of the thing that might once have been Jack. There was a glow about the stuff, a cloud of spark and fire that shed color as if it were a rainbow coming apart at the seams.
The face of the thing was visible in the tapestry’s glow, in the dim light from the wall sconces, and the many eyes were wide with concentration as it worked.
“It will all be right as rain,” it said, and the voice was a scratch of dry tendon on old bone, the sound of a vulture rustling feathers.
The fingers stopped. The eyes did not blink, but they narrowed.
“Mother, why did I say such a strange thing?”
The creature climbed with great care down the tapestry and stood at the summit of the little island in the lake. Glowing threads from the fabric continued to fall all around like strange fireflies.
The thing that had been Jack stared at its long fingers of needle and bone.
The air in front of the thing’s face shimmered and then, without a sound, the creature was gone and Jack was there in its place.
He grabbed a strand of luminous twine from the air and looked at it closely. His hands trembled as the glow faded and the string disappeared.
“What the hell is happening?”
He looked up at the Fabric of Eternity and his eyes filled with tears and then the tears streamed down his cheeks. Jack released a strangled scream and fell backwards. He scrambled away from the glowing pile of threads as quickly as he could manage.
Jack stopped and looked around. This chamber was familiar. He remembered being here with the boy, Taariq. He remembered the girl and the octopus. Then he remembered nothing but a nightmare. A nightmare of being something else.
Jack stood and made his way down the steps of the island. His zodiac boat was there, tied off to a cleat. He tapped a button on the Aengus. A map with light indicators popped up. It showed the path back to the exit, back to where his ship was waiting to take him away.
Yes, time to go.
His muscles felt strange, as if he were getting used to using them after a long rest, and his throat burned. He was thirsty, more thirsty than he’d ever been.
Plenty of water in the ship. There’s nothing to stop me, nobody still in this old place to get in the way. He untied the rope from the cleat. I’ll be gone soon, out of this nightmare, right as rain.
The titanium steel bolt was a surprise, then, when it went deep into his thigh.
Jack dropped to the stone. He stared down at the bolt shaft that was nestled in his leg and could be seen poking out of either side, like a comedians trick he’d once seen on television before The Turn.
He could see nobody, not left or right or up or down, but the light was dim and the archer could be hiding anywhere.
Whoever it was had a crossbow, he thought, and they had excellent aim.
The second bolt caught him in the left shoulder and it stuck hard against bone with a thud like a fist.
Now the pain came. Jack the Dream Butcher screamed.
Elise appeared out of the darkness.
Damn bitch, he thought, so tough. So tough. He had not heard her approach the island in one of the zodiacs. She had been quiet, and he had been too busy in his own head. He had been careless.
She wore a blue and gold jumpsuit of Kevlar. There was a gun belt around her waist, a quiver on her back, and in her hands was a composite cross bow. A thin golden helmet of polyethylene covered her shaved scalp and part of her face.
This was the gear of Les Scaphandriers hunting crew, state-of-the art before The Turn and still in damned good shape.
Jack waved at her with his right hand.
Elise stopped and notched a bolt but held it loose in the bow.
Jack tried to stand but his wounded leg gave out. He knelt instead and smiled.
“Do you have any idea what’s happened to me?”
Elise said nothing.
Jack laughed.
“I ain’t the man I used to be,” he said. He stopped laughing and stared at Elise.
“It’s too late,” he said.
“Yes,” Elise replied.
“No, I mean, really, kid. There’s an infection out there in the world and it’s called The Truth and there’s no stopping its spread. I get it. You’ll kill me, and that’s cool, but there are thousands of us now and we’re going to make it all good again. We’re right, you’re wrong, and what happens here won’t matter. We’ve already won.”
“You’re wrong,” said Elise. She raised the crossbow and took aim at his head.
No.
That won’t happen, she thought, and she felt her pulse pound in her temple.
No.
“Do it,” said Jack.
Elise smiled.
“You’re coming with me.”
She fired straight and true. The bolt pierced Jack’s other leg. He screamed.
“There’s been enough killing. No more.”
Elise set the crossbow down and reached to the gun at her left hip. It was a tranquilizer pistol that delivered a hypodermic dart filled with enough domosedan to drop a moose. The chemical was old but Elise suspected that it would still be enough to take down a man. She walked toward Jack and kept the gun trained on him as she went.
“That fabric, that cloth, it doesn’t damage easily. I’ve seen what it can take. Looks like you’ve been doing some work on it though. How?”
Jack looked up at the fabric, at the threads that dangled, at the glowing bits and pieces of the tapestry that were loose where he had only moments before been at work, unweaving, unknitting, destroying.
His face was wet with sweat from the pain of the bolts in his body. He was shaking.
“I don’t remember. Just flashes, just dreams and dreams aren’t true as much as we might want them to be. That’s why dreams are dangerous, Elise. That’s why our dreams must be burned away and that’s what we’re doing with The Truth, girl, we’re burning away all of those things that can break our hearts and drive us crazy when all we need is the land, the sea, the air, and our hearts.”