by Steven Welch
“Well, you’re wrong. Dreams are what keep us moving forward.”
She was close to him now but she wasn’t afraid. The bolts robbed him of his power, his energy, and she wasn’t afraid.
This was the man who killed her friend. This was the man who killed others, other friends, in Paris. This was the man.
The tranq gun was harmless but the 9mm in her other holster was not. Elise slipped the tranq gun back into place and pulled out the other weapon.
Her hand was steady. Elise could not stop seeing this man and what he did to the Octo-Thing. She could not stop it from playing out in her head, a film on a loop that would not stop.
We do not kill.
But she had killed. She had killed many times. She had killed men first in Bodrum and she had killed men since. It was not a thing she enjoyed but it was a thing she had done.
We do not kill.
Elise felt cold. Her heart did not race and her hands were so steady that she might have been carved of stone. She looked down the sight of the gun and there was Jack the Dream Butcher’s forehead, right where it needed to be if she wanted to fire and maybe by doing that she would make the film in her head stop playing.
There was a film in her head that came at night sometimes when she was weak and in it was Jules Valiance, there was her Dad, there were the men in Bodrum, there was that family on the road out of Lyon, and now there would be Zuzu and the Octo-Thing and all the others besides.
No.
No, I’m stuck with that, Elise thought, I carry those deaths and more, and then her heart felt as if it would break.
I cannot do this anymore.
She removed her finger from the trigger.
And the air shimmered then. Jack’s face was lost in the blur and the face of something else, something skeletal and terrible was there instead, for just a moment.
Jack screamed.
“Did you see that?”
She didn’t answer.
Jack touched his face with his good hand.
“What’s happening to me?”
He stared at his fingers as they stretched, as they elongated like the legs of a spider.
“I don’t understand,” he said, and then the air seemed to explode all around, a light storm of color and chaos.
Jack was gone and the thing of white bone and many eyes stood in his place. The arrows were there, imbedded in the dense pale fiber of the thing, but their wounds did not seem to give it much bother because it stood easily on those two, impossibly thin legs and it raised its two slender arms in the air and it beckoned.
The glow of falling threads revealed a dozen of the things, a dozen of the Men of Many Eyes, as they emerged from the waters of the lake and clambered onto the island of stone.
Elise was surrounded and there was nowhere to run. She jabbed a button on her wrist device. Nothing happened. She looked at the screen again, just a glance.
Nothing.
Damn.
THE LAST STAND OF ELISE ST. JACQUES
Not sure if tranqs will work on those monsters, she thought. Pretty sure bullets will though.
Elise pulled a 9mm from her side holster. There was another, loaded, in a hidden holster on her back and she slipped the tranq gun back into its home and withdrew her other Glock.
She stood in a pool of amber light as the Men of Many Eyes moved toward her with measured calm. The thing that had been Jack stood now as well and the two bolts in its body appeared to be of no consequence. It walked the steps up to the top of the island platform below the Fabric of Eternity. The air shimmered and Elise braced for the shift in realities that seemed to always come with that coruscating rip in the fabric of everything around them.
The thing that had been Jack stood tall atop the island and reached up to the Fabric of Eternity with those long fingers. It began once more to pull the tapestry apart.
A voice came then. A shout.
Taariq. He was on the island behind the Men of Many Eyes, dripping wet as he emerged from the water.
The shimmering energy around them became more intense.
The thing that had been Jack stopped its work and held its arm high in a motion that might have been a wave and might have been a command.
The shimmering of the air stopped.
It controlled the shift of realities, thought Elise. I think that thing is controlling all of this.
The Men of Many Eyes stopped as one and their heads turned back to Taariq.
He was still.
The thing that had been Jack smiled and when it did a tiny spider, the color of blood, crawled from the slice of its mouth and skittered up and along its skeletal head.
“Mother calls me. She calls us all. We will unmake this place and we will be fresh again. We will be new and we will be right. Right as rain.”
The mouth slammed shut and the eyes went wide. The creature visibly trembled and the air around it burst into light.
Jack was there again. He dropped to his knees. Blood shot from the bolts in his legs.
“Kill me,” he shouted.
The Men of Many Eyes turned their attention back toward Elise.
Her guns were double stacked and fully loaded but were stored in glass for at least fifteen years and there was no guarantee that they would fire, that the weapon’s mechanisms wouldn’t be locked up with rust, that these two guns would be anything more than useless lumps of steel.
No guarantee of anything.
“Tell them to stop,” she called out.
Jack waved her off.
“I don’t think I can.”
“Try it.”
Jack shouted as loudly as he could, not words, just a noise, a howl.
The Men of Many Eyes did not pause. They continued to crawl and caper toward Elise.
The echo of Jack’s howl reverberated along the walls of the cavernous chamber.
Taariq ran then, as quickly as he could, through and around the Men of Many Eyes. He went up the winding steps of the island platform and he tackled Jack hard to the stone floor. He struck with his fists, tears running down his face, his mouth a silent cry. Jack didn’t even try to cover up his face, he took the assault, his face twisting side to side with each blow.
The creatures paid no attention to Taariq and Jack. They were within ten yards of Elise.
This was close enough. If her guns could fire, she would hit a few of them before they ripped her apart.
Better accuracy with one gun, she thought. Without hesitation she held up the other gun in her right hand.
“Taariq. Catch.”
He looked up and their eyes locked.
Taariq caught the gun.
The Men of Many Eyes came then, as one, and Elise opened fire, turning as she did because there were things all around and there would be no telling where the fatal attack might come from.
Excellent guns, thought Elise with a smile. Good old Aquanauts. It’s been fun.
Taariq fired as well, and he fired true. Black chitinous skin burst where the rounds found their mark. The wounded creatures made horrid, wailing sounds, while the others paused in their attack and scrambled backward.
The bullets hurt them. They were afraid. Maybe there’s a chance.
Elise went to her back in a fast roll and was up again, taking the stairs two at a time, until she was at the top of the island. Taariq’s eyes were wild and he was gasping for air. Jack knelt on the ground. Elise’s head was swimming from her wounds and from her fatigue.
No, focus, can’t pass out. Breath deep.
Better here, I have the high ground.
She aimed and fired as quickly as she could and her bullets found their targets. The creatures weren’t dead, but the wounds were enough to stave off the attack.
“I’m out of bullets,” said Taariq.
“Did you hit anything?”
“I think so.”
In the chaos Elise could not count how many of the things were still active, perhaps as many as a dozen, probably more. The gunfire had
pushed them back but this wouldn’t last long and she thought she might only have two or three bullets left in her chamber.
She felt something touch her leg. Jack’s bloody hand. Elise looked down into his eyes.
“I won’t kill you,” she said. He nodded.
“Roger that, kid. This life has been a bitch though. We can do better the next time around,” said Jack. He tried again to stand and this time he made his way to his feet.
The space around him burst apart in curtains of light.
“Yes,” he said and his voice was a soft cry, “let’s make it clean. We need to do better.”
The transformation this time was almost instant and it seemed as if Jack burst apart at the seams. A Pale God of Many Eyes, because that’s what it had become, erupted from within the flesh of Jack in an explosion of blood, bone, and tissue.
Elise and Taariq were spattered with gore. They stepped back.
The creature came as if born and all that had been Jack was left on the floor of the chamber in ribbons of his flesh.
The air shimmered now, more violently than before.
The other creatures moved toward Elise and Taariq, no longer afraid.
The Pale God of Many Eyes stood tall at the center of the chamber and its fingers grew. The knitting needle hands had much work to do, much to rend and much to unmake, and the skeletal white fingers extended until they fanned out like the wings of a dead angel.
“My Mother tells me it is time to begin the next Turn. We are blessed,” came a voice that did not speak in a language that Elise recognized but she understood the words just the same.
The Pale God of Many Eyes grew then as well, enveloped in a cascade of blood red light that swirled and gushed like the effluent at the bottom of an abattoir. Three meters, four, and more until The Pale God stood above them, a great statue of bone, and the Fabric of Eternity rustled and billowed to an unseen wind.
Elise watched, and she remembered another moment like this, on a pirate ship of emerald star glass on a distant planet, when she had seen a god, an ancient thing, grow and grow until it was like a mountain. This thing was like the Old One on the ship, it had the same energy, there was something about it that told Elise that it came from the same place and it had power but it would not help, not this time, not like the other.
This Pale God would end everything and would laugh as it did.
The Fabric of Eternity was glowing crimson and it tore free from the ropes and rods that held it to the ceiling of the dome, all of it, a cloth the size of a ship’s sail, circling freely around the Pale God as he danced and waved his impossible fingers.
There was a sound, a chant, as if thousands of voices called out together and cried in pain, in rhythm, with hate and fear.
The Men of Many Eyes stopped in their tracks and stood. They turned back to the strange tableau, the dance of the Pale God and the Fabric, and they joined the chorus of voices with sounds so shrill that Elise and Taariq flinched in pain.
There was another sound then. A deeper rumble. The chanting was becoming more intense but the other sound was growing louder too.
Elise checked her cartridge. Two bullets.
The Fabric of Eternity was dying. The seams, the threads, the impossible and countless stories woven into the fabric bled crimson light and loosened, ripped, decayed, decomposed.
Elise trained the sights of the gun on the head of the towering Pale Man.
What is that rumble, she thought.
It sounds familiar.
The Kevlar and metal band on her wrist vibrated.
Elise smiled.
“Holy crap, it worked.”
She smiled because when Elise was in The Arsenal she had programmed the coordinates for Jack’s Aengus into the location beacon of an old friend.
The burst of light was so bright that the entire chamber went white. Elise tried to shut her eyes in time but it happened so quickly. There was an explosion of limestone, quartz, and debris.
It wasn’t a shift in realities. It wasn’t a rending of the fabric of time and space.
The sound was the engine roar of the Aquaboggin as she erupted from the side wall of the chamber and blasted up and then down again as fast and as hard as her engines would fire.
Elise grabbed Taariq and together they jumped to the stone floor below.
The Pale God looked up just as the bow of the ship slammed into its face, two dozen meters and five tons of steel and emerald star glass descended at three hundred kilometers per hour.
The thing that had been Jack was horrible and magnificent but, apparently, was not immortal.
There was a sound as if an enormous watermelon had been dropped from a great height onto a nest of bees.
The impact reduced The Pale God to a puzzle of bone and flesh, a white and dark red jumble.
And in the center of the mess, saved from damage by the cushion of flesh and bone, was the great, wonderful ship of The Astonishing Aquanauts. She hovered then, spun in a circle and fired her engines. The Men of Many Eyes burst into flame and smoke with screams so piercing Elise and Taariq thought their ear drums might burst.
The incinerated bodies of the Men of Many Eyes fell down and around Elise and Taariq. The stench was overwhelming.
The Aquaboggin soared up and down again, into the lake and back up, where she came to dock against the white stone of the island. The side doors of the ship powered open with great hisses of steam and the golden light from the ship’s interior beckoned.
Elise looked up. Above them, the Fabric of Eternity erupted with coruscation’s of light once again. Elise watched as the infinite threads of the weave circled and twisted and curled like so many tentacles, reaching out for each other, touching, embracing, then, recreating itself.
The sound in the great dome was the rustle of the threads as they moved, and somehow, somewhere, the distant voices of song. There were voices, somewhere that Elise could only possibly imagine, and these voices sang with such beauty and triumph that Elise wept as the Fabric of Eternity stitched together its ancient stories. She wished in that moment that old Jules Valiance could be alive to see such magic and impossibility. He would have thought it wonderful.
So, Elise sat on the limestone floor of the chamber and watched as unseen hands weaved the great majestic tapestry. It was as if the fabric was being stitched by spirits and voices that guided every weave, and so it resumed its place along the dark and colossal walls of the dome.
Minutes passed. An hour. Then, the voices grew silent, the glow of the fabrics went dark, and the tapestry was whole once more.
Elise smiled.
She turned to Taariq, who sat on the ground next to her with his face in his hands, as he did not have the courage to watch what had happened in the place.
Elise pointed at her wrist gadget, at the little red dot of light on the illuminated map.
“This is the corpse of my friend and we’re not leaving here without him.”
THE ZOMBIE HEART
For hours, Elise tracked the tiny red dot through the deep flowing river beneath the streets of Cairo.
Taariq followed and didn’t say a word as they went. He was exhausted, cold, hungry, but he knew Elise would be even more so. Her wounds were greater, her efforts more strenuous, her loss heavy. He watched her as she ran, climbed, and sometimes swam through the chill gloom of the ancient passages. Taariq watched this girl who was younger than he was and who had seen so much more as she chased an impossible hope. She had not told him what she was after, but he understood. He knew by the way she kept checking the mechanism on her wrist, by the relentless pace, never stopping, never pausing, it was clear to Taariq that she hunted for the corpse of the strange creature that was her friend.
So much effort for the dead, he thought. He did not understand. Dead was dead. There was no purpose to the dead unless they were needed for fuel or for gardening. The little creature’s corpse was of no value and yet this girl was chasing after it as if her life was on the line. No, more
than that. She was putting as much effort into retrieving the dead friend as she had put into her fight with the thing that had been Jack the Dream Butcher. More so.
Why?
Taariq was raised in a world without magic, without hope and imagination and all the things that seemed to inspire Elise St. Jacques. He did not understand the concept of belief in the impossible.
He only knew black and white, life and death, a choice with two paths and no branches off to the left or right.
Taariq understood few things, really, perhaps cruelty most of all.
And cruelty was not native to only our world.
On far distant Orcanum the fisherman would use many methods to capture food and all of these methods were cruel to a degree. They would harpoon, net, trap, and dive for the free hand capture of fish, crabs, and even the intelligent but gentle creatures known as Prinifa, or to Elise St. Jacques, Octo-Things.
Animals hunt other animals, kill them, and then consume them. This is not unusual but it is cruel, particularly to the thing being eaten, as you can imagine.
So, after the hunt The Orcanum would gather around their tables carved of sandstone and driftwood under lanterns of flying jelly oil and there would be feasts where all manner of sea creature was steamed, fried, and poached.
The dominant Orcanum at the table, the chief fisherman or the Mother or the elder, would be given the right to consume the first delicacy, a tidbit found in one of Orcanum’s creatures known as the “zombie heart.” This organ was considered the tastiest and the most extraordinary. There would be fights, sometimes, for the right to consume it. There were songs and poems written about the zombie heart.
Only one species of Orcanum had such a curious quirk of nature and that was why it was so rare and why it was seen as a delicacy after the hunt was over and the table was set.