Folk'd Up Beyond All Recognition (FUBAR)

by Laurence Donaghy

  Okay, so maybe some of it isn’t as far-fetched as I always imagined. So…am I alone here? Hello? I can’t see anything. Well, of course I can’t see anything. My eyes are probably fifteen feet from the rest of my body.

  Wait. If I can’t see anything because I don’t have eyes, then how come it hurts? How can I feel pain if I don’t have a body anymore to send…what is it…electrical impulses or something along the nerve cells, isn’t that how it works, to my brain?

  Try to move. Try to move in the black. There’s got to be something more to this than just blackness. Time. Is time passing? How long did it take me to think that? How long since I got here? Okay – it takes a second to say one Mississippi. Okay. One Mississippi.

  Was that a second?

  How come this HURTS so fucking much? Oops. Better not curse. Seven years in Purgatory for every swearword, that’s what Miss Highland told us all back in P2, the evil oul witch. Is that where this is? Purgatory?

  I can’t believe they just killed me like that. I mean…I thought I was getting all these powers for a reason. I thought I went on that fucking vision quest thing for a purpose, that it was going to unlock some abilities or something. Maybe I’ve been playing too many computer games. Oh well. Least that’s not gonna be a problem anymore.

  I’ll never see them again. Ellie. Luke. I fucked up everything.

  That’s why it hurts. It’s not my body. It’s my…me. I’m hurting. I’m alone in the black and all I have for company is myself and the knowledge that everyone I love is probably going to die because I got myself torn to shreds without so much as a whimper.

  Time is passing here. Time’s going to pass here, because how else would I measure the hurt?

  I can swear all I want.

  This isn’t Purgatory.

  This is the other place.

  Time passed. After some of it – hours, days, weeks, the disembodied nowhere that had once been Danny Morrigan could no longer tell one from the other than he could tapdance – he came to the realisation that nothing was ever going to change.

  This is what Hell is, he thought, for the hundredth time, for the thousandth. It didn’t matter. The repetition was comforting somehow. It’s ourselves. Being locked away inside your own mind and there’s no escape.

  He was lying to himself. He knew it, but tried to keep the thought from surfacing for as long as possible because of the implications it brought with it. Finally, he could deny it no longer, and it materialised in the void; here, where nothing was everything, thoughts were the only form of matter that existed and after so long here, they felt almost like physical entities.

  Something is changing.

  This place isn’t staying the same. It’s the hurt. The hurt is getting worse. Every time…every time I go round the loop, every time I cycle from desperation to grief to screaming myself stupid trying to find something, someone, anything else inside this place, and back again…the hurt gets a little bigger, a little more unbearable.

  I’m losing it.

  He giggled a little at that. The giggles seemed to pop in the emptiness, little stepping stones of black on a sea of deeper blackness.

  Going out of my mind inside my mind. Like stepping outside the universe. Stop the cosmos, I want a wee-wee. That’s a good thing, right? Maybe that’s my out. Going completely bugfuck crazy until this place seems normal and boom, there’s my doorway of light and I can step through. Extra life. Continue. Back to level 1, with cheat codes.

  Another lie. Crazy wasn’t the way to go.

  I’m all that’s left. Literally, all that’s left. If I lose that, there’s nothing left to lose and out I go like a fucking light. Some part of me is still around.

  The Ordeal. That’s what they called it. Death is the Ordeal?

  This was different. This wasn’t part of his usual cycle of thought. He clung to it like a drowning man to a rubber ring, exploring the thought from all sides. Here, that seemed easier than normal to do, as if it really were a three-dimensional object that he could turn over, examine.

  No. How can Death be a test? Unless they were simply fucking with me and always going to kill me. No. No, that’s not cruel enough for them. If they were going to do that, they wouldn’t have let the things that tore me apart do it so quickly.

  Think. If Death isn’t the ordeal, then I’m not dead. Or maybe not permanently. So that means there’s a way out of this. I don’t have a body. This place goes on forever. So how to get out? It’s like a prison and I’m locked inside. What’s the key?

  Fuck the key. Where’s the door?

  No. Focus. Some prisons maybe don’t need doors. Just keys. I’m just thoughts, so thinking has to be the key. The right thought. It can’t be as simple as “get me the fuck out of here” or “I’m sorry” or any kind of regrets about Ellie, about Luke, because Christ, I’ve done all of those a million times. If they’d been the key, I’d have been out long ago.

  I am this universe. I’m all that exists within it.

  So…I control it?

  What can I create?

  If it were possible, self-conscious embarrassment radiated out from the centre of the Morriganverse as he gathered himself and thought the words-

  LET THERE BE LIGHT.

  And lo, there was fuck all.

  Bollocks, Danny sulked. I bet God never had this trouble. Mind you, he was the real deal and I’m just some dead twat going round the bend and imagining I have Godlike powers.

  Wait a minute. “Imagining” I have powers? I DO have powers. Even back in the…in the real world, I was able to see through the illusions. The synaesthesia. Take it down to the Otherworld, their world, and it’s indistinguishable from magic. You take one thing, and you turn it into another.

  But here…here that won’t work. There are no sights, no sounds, no smells, no tastes. Nothing but me and my thoughts. And it’s not like I can turn thoughts into…

  …reality…

  I’m doing it wrong. I thought LET THERE BE LIGHT, but all I really thought were the four words. I didn’t actually for a moment believe that just by thinking about bringing light to this place, I could light it up, as if I could-

  And lo.

  There was light.

  Bright, shining light that seared through the nowherescape he inhabited. Radiance that burst forth and turned the black to white. If he currently owned eyes, it would have seemed like every nuclear warhead on Earth had detonated. A bring your own Supernova party.

  Moments passed. He dealt with the shock of the transition, and then the thought emerged from the snide little side of his brain.

  Brilliant. You made a big black nothing into a big white nothing. Whoopee-fuckin-doo.

  He bristled, if that were possible without skin. He was so sick of that snide little internal monologue. If only it were a separate entity that he could-

  “Oh. Oh great, thanks. Now look what you’ve done.”

  Huh?

  “You’ve made me a separate entity, you idiot. Wonderful. All the things you could be doing with your time, and so far you’ve whitewashed the cosmos and made your self-doubt corporeal. Oh superb, Danny. Bra-vo. If I had hands, I’d be clapping.”

  Don’t you ever shut the fuck up?

  “I would if you gave me cause to! But you keep fucking things up on such a regular basis that I have such endless material to work from!”

  Oh piss off. I’m young, Irish, and I’m the centre of the universe. And I’m done talking to you. Come back inside and shut up.

  He tried. To his surprise, he couldn’t recall the voice, much to the voice’s evident pleasure.

  “Looks like I’m sticking around for a wee while yet,” Doubt said smugly.

  Right, fine. Now…I’ve had enough of this disembodied shite…

  His body popped into existence, arms and legs and head, oh thank Christ for the wondrousness of heads-

  “OHHHHHHH FUUUUUUUUUCKKKKKKK-!!!”

  -and immediately began plummeting downward (upward? sideward?) through end
less white space.

  There was something extremely disconcerting about this; in the back of his head, memories of the set from How 2 were surfacing. The face of Fred Dineage suddenly loomed from the cosmos like the visage of the Almighty.

  “And that’s HOW…for now!” the cosmic Dineage boomed, at a volume that dwarfed existence.

  He closed his newfangled eyes and wished Dineage into oblivion with more terrified urgency than he’d ever mustered in his whole life.

  His eyes opened, slowly, reluctantly. It had worked. Thank fuck, thank fuck.

  I need something solid under my feet. Nothing fancy. A field’ll do-

  He hit the turf of a thin space-time slice of Wembley stadium at what seemed to be a fair approximation of the speed of light.

  There was a sound like a splat, but with a faint hint of splintering thrown in.

  Dying hurt just as much the second time, it turned out.

  Bollocks.

  “Doing well so far,” Doubt chortled. “God had the world knocked out in six days. At this rate you’ll be lucky to produce the arse end of Ballymena by the end of the millennium.”

  With another pop, a replacement body appeared. He patted himself down. He was clothed in his normal kind of outfit; jeans, casual shirt, trainers.

  “See,” the Doubt said conversationally, “what your problem was, as soon as you had a body in this place, you imagined gravity applied. And then when you imagined the field beneath your feet, you imagined that you were travelling really fast and that there’d be an impact…and…well…”

  Danny glanced around the Wembley turf, bordered on all four sides by the endless white. His first incarnation had made quite the splashdown.

  “If I’m gonna have to listen to you, you can stop being disembodied an all,” he said, and brought forth the voice of Doubt into the physical universe.

  To his complete lack of surprise, it looked like-

  “Ohhhh,” the body of Tony Morrigan said, a slow smile spreading across his face as he patted himself down, just as Danny had done a few seconds earlier. “You imagine a physical form for the nagging little voice that keeps telling you that you’re not good enough, and this is the one you pick? Hmm…” and the voice grew singsong and playful as his father’s head bobbed from side to side like a bird, “does someone have Daddy issues?”

  “Fuck you,” Danny replied evenly. “I don’t have time for this, anyway. I have to figure out how to…how to get out of this…wherever this is,” he waved a hand airily to indicate the alabaster cosmos.

  “Fine,” his father shrugged. “I understand. You’ve had – what? – a decade, decade and a half, to build up some serious psychological baggage over you and dear old Dad. Trying to deal with that…sheesh,” he sucked in a breath, “that would be a bit of a tribulation…you know, a stern test, a bit of a hardship…”

  Danny got it. His father rolled his eyes with relief at seeing realisation dawn across his son’s face.

  “Oh good,” he said, “for a minute there I was afraid I was going to have to hit you over the head with a big fucking sign saying THAT’S THE ORDEAL, DICKHEAD.”

  “So I’m supposed to sort out my,” Danny paused. He hated the word; it was so American, “…my issues with who? With you? You’re not even my Dad. You’re just every annoying part of me, distilled.”

  “Oh not every annoying part. Believe me you’d be here for hours imagining different bodies for all the annoying parts of you. This pitch’d make the pilgrims going to Mecca look like the crowd at a Daniel O’Donnell concert.”

  “You gonna answer my question?”

  “You gonna answer my question?” the visage mocked, puppeting its hand as it spoke. “Listen to yourself! You’re asking a part of yourself to answer a question that you already know the answer to!”

  Doubt was right. Somehow it had been easier to think when he lacked physical form. Or, of course, maybe it had taken him centuries to get this far. Still, he did know the answer to this. There had to be some effective way of getting the questions, the fears, he’d always had over his Dad’s decision to vanish from his life.

  If only he could go back and…

  As Wembley began to dissolve around them and an entirely different landscape to form in its place, Doubt smiled, so faintly and so subtly that even the Cheshire Cat wouldn’t have caught it.

  **

  Co. Wexford, 2000 AD

  “Ach, in the name of…” Tony Morrigan sighed, as the picture before him dissolved. The cottage’s miniscule little television had the world’s shittest indoor aerial perched on top of it. He used an outdoor one whenever possible, but with the cottage a good few miles from any kind of shelter, come winter the winds hit the place hard and inevitably any aerial, no matter how strapped down, broke its moorings and was scattered across the fields.

  “ffffsshhshshshhhhhhh am I this time, Al?” Dr. Sam Beckett was saying on the screen, when he wasn’t endlessly whirling from the top of the television to the bottom, as if on some invisible Catherine Wheel.

  “fffshhhhshshshsHHHHHSSH teen sixty-eight. Your name is ffshshshshss. Ziggy thinks you’re here to-“

  Al got no further as a particularly fierce gust howled outside and the meagre signal the indoor aerial was able to scrape together bent in acquiescence to the fury of the elements.

  “Fuck it anyway,” Tony said, switching off the set and wondering whether to really push the boat out excitement-wise by going to the kitchenette and whipping up a cuppa. It’d only been his fortieth or so of the day, after all.

  That was when the knock came at the door.

  Tony moved with muscles that hadn’t been used regularly enough in recent times. The silver-tipped dagger was in his hand in only a few seconds. He moved toward the cottage’s front door, balancing on the balls of his feet, ready to spring back or roll out of the way if required, cursing the fact that despite “getting round to it”, he still hadn’t installed the peephole in the door that he should have. A glance from the side window revealed nothing – whoever it was must be standing in the eaves under the overhang.

  The knock came again.

  “Who is it?” he called.

  “It’s me, Da,” came Danny’s voice.

  His legs turned to jelly. He grabbed to the nearest corner of the table for support, mind racing, heart pounding. Danny? Here? Now? How? Scully? Dother? Why?

  This will ruin everything, was the first thought. Your son is out there, was the second.

  “Danny…?” he croaked.

  “Aye, Da,” the voice came again. “Are you gonna let me come in? It’s windy as fuck out here…”

  Tendrils of doubt crept into Tony’s mind. The voice didn’t sound right. It sounded deeper. Older. The cadence was off. And his ten year old son had just casually dropped the word fuck…?

  His hand tightened around the silver dagger. So. They’d found him, detected the safeguards he’d put around the place. Everyone knew you could put all the mystical defences in the world down and they didn’t count for jack shit if you were stupid enough to invite the fuckers inside.

  “We had a deal!” he shouted, over the howl of the winds, going from one window to another, trying to spy where they were lurking. There’d be more than the one at the door, he knew. They’d be in the grass, low against the earth, biding their time. When the deception worked and the one at the door got in, presumably his mission was to bring down the warding charms from the remainder of the house and allow the rest to storm in.

  There was a sigh from outside. An honest-to-God sigh.

  “Dother and I had a deal!”

  Silence from outside. It went on for seconds, stretching to moments, until he began to think that the invocation of their boss had been enough to scare the bastards away. His grip loosened – not by much, but a little.

  And then…then, someone looking an awful lot like an aged version of his ten year old son walked through the front door. Literally, through the front door.

  The winds died outs
ide. The television flickered into perfect life, just in time for Al to step through his shimmering white square of light and out of Sam’s world.

  “Huh,” the ghost of his son grunted, eyes on the TV, “if only it was that fuckin easy.”

  Tony gaped. He backed up, felt the kitchen table behind him, manoeuvred himself around it so the comforting slab of wood was between him and this invading apparition. The back door was only a few feet more away. It was bolted, of course, but a few well-timed arm movements…he could be through…and away from this nightmare.

  “Oh would you stop with that look, Dad? I feel like you’re about to tell me there’s more of gravy than of grave about me or something. Jesus.”

  What are you? How did you step through the wood? How did you get around the defences? Three very coherent and reasonable questions Tony Morrigan framed in his mind. By the time they reached his mouth, they had somewhat lost their lucidity.

  “Buh?”

  “It’s me. It’s Danny. I know this is nuts, but I’m real. Well, I think so. I’m reasonably sure. I’m as sure I’m real as I’m sure you’re real, put it like that.”

  Something about this rambling nonsense actually gave Tony cause to pause in his determined crabwalk toward the back door and the freedom it promised beyond. Nothing evil was ever that incoherent.

  “Who are you?” he managed. “You’re not Danny. You can’t be. My son is-”

  “-ten years old and, what, two or three hundred miles northeast of here. Yeah I know. And he is. But I’m…” the image of Danny shrugged, “…I’m here too.”

  “From the future,” Tony said numbly.

  Danny had the decency to look embarrassed. “Er. I know how it sounds.” After a slight pause he added, “If it makes you feel any better, this is my first time too.”

  “How did you get here?”

  “I…I kind of…I had to come,” Danny finished, seeming to struggle for words.

  “But that doesn’t tell me how.”

  “Well it’s all I’ve got, Da, to be honest.”

  Tony sat down on one of the kitchen chairs, on rubbery legs. He kicked one of the others out. Danny followed his eyes and, slowly, gingerly, lowered his transparent form.