Solace & Grief

by Foz Meadows

  ‘Right,’ said Jess. ‘I guess that's my cue.’

  Stretching, she walked over to the table and proceeded to gather up the mess of bones, stones, beads, shells and feathers that conspired to clutter the surface. When she finally sat down again, cross-legged, her hands were cupped in her lap and full to overflowing. Almost as an afterthought, she craned her head back and looked at Solace.

  ‘I thought you said you could see the future, too? When we did the surveys?’

  ‘Technically, yes, but not on command. I can't exactly make myself dream a true dream, or I would – but you can do this at will. Or so Evan tells me.’

  Her friend sighed impishly, blue eyes sparkling. ‘As you wish, my buttercup.’

  Turning back to the table, Jess cleared a space and closed her eyes, blocking out the sight of glasses, bongs, ashtrays and the ever-present skull with its ridiculous pink ribbon. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, almost imperceptibly, her lips and throat began to tremble with the low, soft cant of sound, more like a buzz or hum than actual words. The noise grew louder, broader – impossibly so, as Solace couldn't see how Jess was maintaining the cadence without pausing to breathe. As if sensing her question, Evan reached out and placed a hand gently on her shoulder.

  ‘Watch,’ he whispered.

  With ritual slowness, Jess raised her arms, holding her cupped hands straight out in front of her body. Abruptly, the timbre of her murmur changed, a warm, soft tone now weaving its way through the dominant burr. Then three things happened at once: Jess's head snapped back sharply; a high, piercing, impossibly beautiful note was shot into the air; and her hands splayed out as she tossed the bones and oddments she'd been holding onto the table. Everyone craned to look as she swayed, coming loosely to her knees to bend over the patterns.

  ‘Sorrow – grief? – in a place both known and unknown. Dead who are dead but not dead die, but their grief lives on beyond knowledge and solace, beyond and before and beyond. Finding and taking, searching and hiding, blending and bleeding them dry, deep underground and far away, with a twisted sky.’

  Jess's eyes were still closed, but her hands moved of their own accord over the table, touching this piece and that as her sing-song prophecy burned her tongue. Swift and deft, her fingers brushed a long, brown feather which, somewhat grotesquely, had landed in the left eye-socket of the skull. Suddenly, despite the ribbon, it didn't look so comic.

  ‘Blossoming life from the bones,’ she said. ‘Life that isn't, stolen lives and stolen time – grief is behind it all, grief which seeks solace.’ And then, in a different, deeper, impossibly male voice which made Evan jump and Electra swear, Jess spoke again.

  ‘Trust in the blood. What needs to be found and known will be known. Go to the place and time, but not before. Go!’

  With a powerful shuddering spasm, Jess collapsed backwards, one hand knocking the skull to the floor. Evan and Solace leapt up almost as one person to grab her before she hit the ground, Manx and Electra following a split second after. Deadweight, Jess lolled in their arms. Her blue eyes rolled back in their sockets, fluttered and closed.

  ‘She's never done that before!’ Evan yelped. ‘She always snaps out of the trance!’

  At Manx's quick suggestion, Jess was manhandled onto the couch, where she lay as if in a coma, her breathing slow and shallow. Evan was frantic, alternately shouting at her to wake up, slapping her cheeks when Electra couldn't grab his hands in time, or rambling his confusion. Desperate to do something, Solace grabbed Evan's wet shirt from the kitchen and sponged Jess's face, hoping the cold might wake her, but nothing happened. Ashen-faced, she turned to Manx.

  ‘We should get her to a hospital.’

  ‘And tell them what?’ Evan interrupted, angry with fright. ‘That she passed out after a prophecy? That this wasn't caused by drugs, even though there's probably still some in her system? We couldn't –’

  ‘What do you suggest, then?’ Electra snapped.

  Evan went pale and quiet.

  ‘I think –’ Solace bit her lip. Her heart felt leaden with worry. ‘Maybe –’

  ‘Let me see her,’ said Glide.

  Everyone jumped. No one had even heard him come downstairs, let alone noticed that he was standing in their midst. Solace wondered momentarily how long he'd been there. Had he been with them the whole time, seen everything unfold? Or had he only just arrived? Startled into silence, the four of them parted to let him through. For the first time, Solace noticed how he moved: slow, heavy and dreamlike, as if gravity worked more strongly on him than on everyone else. She shook her head and watched as he knelt down next to Jess's head, placing one hand on her breastbone and one on her face, his fingers pressing gently on her lips and eyes. Before she could recover her composure enough to ask what he was doing, what was happening, his eyelids shivered and closed, just as Jess's had done.

  ‘Oh, terrific!’ Evan shouted. ‘Now he's gone, too. Why don't we all pass out? Why not make a game of it?’

  ‘Shut up, Evan,’ said Electra, her voice calm and firm.

  ‘Have some water,’ said Manx, picking up a flask of whisky from the table and bringing it to his lips by way of show. Evan all but snatched it from him, tipping the whole thing back and drinking deeply before realising what it was, at which point he spluttered then gasped, clutching frantically at his throat.

  A loud, unexpected boom rattled the warehouse, hard and sharp as a whip crack.

  ‘Awaken,’ said Glide, into the abrupt, shocked silence. All eyes turned to Jess. Her limp body twitched.

  ‘Is she –’ Solace began, but cut herself off at a look from Glide.

  ‘Many and many,’ Jess murmured. Slowly, her blue eyes opened. Seeing her friends, she let out a low chuckle, her eyelids slipping half-closed as she did so.

  ‘Has someone died?’

  ‘We thought you had!’ exclaimed Evan, somewhat indignantly, trying simultaneously to wipe alcohol off his chest and look daggers at Manx.

  ‘I'm not dead.’ Her voice sounded oddly soft, as if it were coming from a long way away. ‘Oh, Ev. It's like I'm made of glass. There's places where the walls are thin, and everyone on either side can see me. See through me. It's all so big, you'd never think that such small atoms held so much. But it's Christmas inside, all fairy lights and broken shells and the wrong side of mirrors. Everything twisted, bright. It's where she's trapped. He'll never let her out. The music stopped.’

  ‘Trapped? Who's trapped?’

  ‘Hmm?’ Jess smiled, vacant as a dropped doll. Boneless, her head lolled. Glide and Solace swapped a worried glance. ‘Nobody knows. The truth has turned to ash. It's a parlour trick. Can't tell you how it's done.’

  ‘She's delirious.’ Evan stared up at Glide, helpless and angry. ‘Sweet Jerusalem Clancy, Glide, what did you do to her?’

  ‘It'll wear off in a minute or two. Trust me.’ A brief pause; Glide put a hand on Evan's shoulder. ‘Please. She'll be fine. It's just the after-effects.’

  ‘After-effects of what, though?’ Electra muttered.

  ‘“Sweet Jerusalem Clancy”?’ mused Manx.

  It was another five minutes before Jess truly began to come back to herself. As though she were sobering up from a week-long binge, she slowly regained proper control of her body and breathed more easily, silent after her initial ramblings. Throughout it all, Evan knelt at her side with Glide behind him, a mismatched pair of sentinels. No one spoke – not with words, anyway. By the time Jess finally sat up and looked around with clear, focused eyes, it felt like an aeon had passed.

  ‘I'm all right,’ she croaked. ‘That was –’ she managed a half-smile, ‘– deeply, deeply weird. I need a drink.’ Seeing Evan's face, she reached out and squeezed his hand. ‘Thanks for looking out for me, little brother. And thank you for bringing me back.’

  Glide shrugged and smiled. ‘Don't mention it. You're not the only one in need of a drink. That was harder than it looked.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Evan coolly, finding his voice
again. ‘Alcohol and an explanation sound like just what I need.’

  ‘The Gadfly, then?’ Jess suggested. Almost instantaneously, Evan's face changed from one of anger to comic disbelief.

  ‘But you almost died! You can't just, just – ’

  ‘Evan. In the absence of a doctor, if I say I'm alive and well enough to go out – no, look, please don't make that face, I'm fine! Where was I? Oh, right – then nobody, especially not my little brother, can deny me. Particularly, and this is important, particularly if said brother has no desire for me to recite the Pineapple Incident in detail. Is that clear?’

  ‘Crystal,’ Evan grudged, a thoroughly routed campaigner.

  ‘Pineapple Incident?’ queried Solace.

  Jess made a face. ‘Don't ask.’

  ‘Don't tell,’ said Manx, quickly. As Evan glowered, Manx reached out and flung an arm around his bare shoulders.

  ‘Oh, cheer up! You like the Gadfly, remember? Tell you what – I'll even lend you a shirt.’

  Evan disentangled himself from Manx and stormed off upstairs, although it was difficult to tell if this was inspired by genuine pique or mere theatricality. On the stairs, he turned to deliver a retort, but was caught off-balance by the sight of Manx waggling the whisky flask, and promptly forgot whatever clever thing he'd been about to say.

  ‘Your best shirt, dammit!’ he shouted instead.

  Manx only grinned.

  An Apple-Box Infinity

  It was, Solace later thought, surreal.

  After Evan came back downstairs – clad, as promised, in Manx's best shirt –they all smoothed the wrinkles out of their own clothing and trooped outside. To Solace's consternation, it was still early afternoon: since she'd woken up, so much had happened that it felt as if hours had passed, instead of less than one. This realisation left her feeling disoriented and oddly small, as though her encounters with Sharpsoft, Glide and Jess were diminished by dint of having occurred within such a short time frame. Sensing Solace's discomfort, Electra linked arms with her and grinned, which brought a measure of reassurance and prompted Solace to ask, given the hour, whether the Gadfly might be closed.

  Electra shook her head. ‘You'd think so, but no – it's always open. At least, I've never seen it closed. Which is lucky for us, really; I can't remember the last time we kept normal hours.’

  Also luckily, the weather was overcast, thereby sparing Solace the ironic hindrance of appearing drunk on sunlight before they could even reach the Gadfly. As they walked, she couldn't help but wonder about Glide, who had not only rescued Jess, but was thus far one hundred percent more lucid than anyone present was used to, chatting and laughing normally. With no polite way to broach the topic, however, she – and, it seemed, everyone else – was forced to push the thought aside, one more oddity in a day already brimming with surplus.

  As promised, the club was open. They weren't even the only patrons, which Solace found surprising. Don't these people have homes to go to? she thought, and then realised, with a mental shrug, that the same question was equally applicable to them. That's different, the Vampire Cynic argued, but only half-heartedly.

  Somewhat expectedly, Evan and Manx started up an argument as to who should buy the opening round; somewhat unexpectedly, it was Manx who lost, even agreeing to Evan's request for a large Long Island Ice Tea, which was inadvisable at the best of times. He returned laden with drinks, prompting an outburst of laughter as Evan all but downed his cocktail in a single gulp, gasping at the effort, which was, even by Gadfly standards, excessive.

  ‘Has my brother declared war on sobriety again?’ Jess asked, raising her brows as Evan set out on a solo trek to the bar. ‘Behold, my prophetic powers: woe unto any who sculleth the spirits, for verily, they are stupid.’

  ‘Well, it doesn't take a seer,’ Electra quipped.

  ‘True, but it doesn't not take a seer, either.’

  There was a pause, during which this statement was given due consideration, and found lacking.

  ‘Huh?’ said Solace.

  Airily, Jess waved a hand. ‘It'll come to you.’

  ‘All right,’ said Manx, taking a first sip of his own concoction. ‘We have our alcohol, but are still lacking an explanation. Which, by the way, I'm kind of curious about. So let's hear it.’

  All eyes turned to Glide. Now that she'd managed a decent look at him, Solace was startled to realise that he was handsome: tall and broad-shouldered, with a sleepy tousle of chestnut-brown hair, dark green eyes, and a wide, slow smile, which he now turned on Manx. Leaning back, as if uncertain of where to start, Glide inhaled and spoke.

  ‘All right. So. The universe is made up of infinite realities. Everything which could ever happen, has ever happened, might ever happen and will ever happen, has already happened or is in the process of happening somewhere within it.’ He paused. When no one rushed to repudiate this statement, he nodded. ‘The thing is, though, that there's more than one kind of infinity. More than one level to it. And the only reason I could find Jess – no, look, I'll get to the rest of the actual how in a minute – the only reason I could find her is that she was in the simpler one.’

  ‘A simple infinity,’ echoed Manx.

  ‘A simpler infinity?’ queried Solace.

  Glide nodded at them both. ‘Yes. How can I explain it? All right. Imagine an infinite line of little wooden boxes, about so big –’ he motioned with his hands, ‘– stretching away towards the horizon. Every time you think you've reached the last box, there's another one after it, right? Because that's what infinity means: that there's always one box more.’

  ‘Like a bottle of whisky!’ said Evan, staggering over with his arm around Phoebe's shoulders. Evan, it seemed, had met her at the bar, and was well on the way towards fulfilling the more recent of his sister's predictions, with another exorbitant cocktail in one hand and a foolish grin on his face.

  ‘Shut up, Evan,’ said Jess, pleasantly. She handed him some money. ‘If you're not interested in an explanation, then go and get more… drunk.’

  Evan saluted cheerfully, somehow managing to spill none of his drink in the process. ‘Can and will do!’

  He and Phoebe wandered away again. Glide watched them go, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth, before continuing.

  ‘So. An infinity of little wooden boxes. And inside one of the boxes – one of the infinite boxes – is an apple. Now.’ He finished his drink. Jess handed him another one. ‘Imagine you're immortal. If you keep walking along the line of boxes, sooner or later, even if it takes you centuries, you will find the apple. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ they chorused.

  ‘Right,’ said Glide, nodding firmly. ‘But now imagine an infinite three-dimensional grid of boxes: height, width and depth. Even as an immortal, you could never find the apple, because there would be no way to conduct a coherent search of every single line.

  ‘When Jess was in her trance, she was looking down a linear march of infinite reality: one line of boxes. I could sense her doing it, which is why I came downstairs. But what you heard, that deep voice at the end? That was someone else – possibly something – which noticed, too. They spoke through Jess, and either intentionally or by accident, their presence broke her link to the here and now: the box she'd started from. Without it, she was floating through infinite threads of infinite realities – in the grid of boxes. If the push had been any stronger, she might've gone spiralling out forever. But she was lucky.’

  ‘And you found her,’ said Manx.

  Glide shrugged, smiling shyly, a gesture that only emphasised his good looks – which, by the look of things, Jess was feeling particularly well-placed to appreciate. The thought of it made Solace smile; as did Glide himself, but in a different, more exhilarating way. She didn't imagine that Evan would find it easy to draw on Glide again, although as it was, there were still a couple of pheasants on his arms from the last time, inked faintly in blue ballpoint.

  ‘Wait,’ said Electra. ‘That thing – searchin
g the boxes, I mean – couldn't you only fail to find the apple by doing a linear search? And assuming that the apple wasn't in the first ladder? Or that you didn't just get lucky – I mean, all right, the boxes are infinite, but that doesn't mean the apple can't be near your starting point. Searching randomly might even increase your chances.’

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Glide. ‘That might be the case, but either way, it's down to luck and exceptionally long odds.’ He grinned. ‘It's a complicated subject and not the best analogy. Suffice to say that luck was with us this once, and that's all that matters.’

  Electra clinked glasses with him. ‘Fair enough.’

  Something in Glide's speech was nagging at Solace, an incongruous phrase. How could he possibly have sensed what was happening downstairs? Was it his Trick? And how, exactly, had he been able to rescue Jess – not just what he'd done, but how he'd done it? She was on the brink of asking when, as if from nowhere, an answer occurred to her, albeit so strange a one that she almost didn't believe it. But then, she thought, nothing else that's happened lately makes sense, either. And his dreams were all in fragments.

  ‘You don't sleep,’ she said abruptly. Surprised, he glanced at her. ‘Whenever you're in your room, talking to yourself – you're not dreaming. You're in the universe. Watching it, jumping through it… surfing it. It's like…’ She fumbled for words. ‘It's like infinity is your internet, which, yes, is the lamest analogy not yet used in a budget sci-fi flick, but I'm right, aren't I? None of this makes any sense unless that's your Trick, or something very much like it.’

  Leaning forward, Glide took a sip of his drink, looking mildly impressed. ‘It might be.’

  ‘Solace,’ murmured Jess. ‘I just remembered what I was saying before I was – well, before I was interrupted. I was talking about Solace.’