Koosh didn’t have time to look surprised, as the blow sent him wheeling through the air down the stairwell to Alex’s left. He cleared every step, landing on his neck and shoulder on the welcome mat below. The popping sound his body made echoed once up the narrow entrance, and was done, forever. In his peripheral vision, Alex saw him float down through the static of the event, heavy and perfectly resolute, before becoming instantly still at his landing place.
Not a body in waiting any more. Now an object—fixed, quiet, limp and dead forever. Alex didn’t turn his head to look. Crink shouted out from the darkness, somewhere, “I guess there’s more ways to...um, what I mean is that...he just cashed his last...um...fuck it, I had something for when that asshole died...”
“Clark!” Alex charged over to his brother, away from the mess at the foot of the stairs.
“I’m fine,” he said, although he looked shaken. “Go check on Sheila.”
He swung from Clark’s side and sprinted over to the dark corner where Sheila sat. As soon as he got there, though, he dropped to a knee, tired and heartbroken.
“No.”
Sheila Kingston lay with her eyes half open in an alcove formed by the chair backs near the sound desk. Aside from a nick on her forehead that was had already stopped bleeding, there were no visible marks on her. But she’d become nearly transparent. Like a ghost, her outlines were still there, but her face, her clothes, her hair and most of her body were pastel washouts and starting to look indistinct. It was difficult to see her, as she lay there breathing heavily, because she resembled more of an outline or transparency of a person than someone in front of Alex. Electricity traced slow, marching lines along her veins. She was pale, like the dead. Her head hung exhausted to the side and she buzzed with static.
She flickered—in his arms, before his very eyes, like a bad picture on a TV, as he picked her up. Around her hair was a vague outline, like a mirage, as if the walls behind her were bending, shaking like tabletops under jelly in a heat wave. The light and energy of her seemed to dim and reignite—a light bulb, plugged into the socket, slowly going out.
“You just gonna stand there all night, Van der Haar?” She barely opened her eyes as she spoke.“Don’t you want to tell me how pretty I look?”
He spoke softly to her. “Sheila, what’s—”
“It’s happening, Alex,” she interrupted, more firmly.“I don’t have much time left. Did you do it? Did you beat him?”
A piercing scream cut through the room from near the stairwell. Alex spun, to be greeted by the sight of the battered and bleeding Chuck Daedalus at the top of the stairs, his arm firmly around Julie’s neck from behind.
“No.” Alex took a step towards them. They took one back.
Then he stopped, as Daedalus smirked with a mouth full of blood from behind his girlfriend, half hanging from his grip. “Yeah, hero. Take a good hard look at what you’ve done before you decide to pull any Superman bullshit in here.”
He moved his gaze from Chuck’s face, down along his other arm. Alex’s heart sank as he saw the knife jammed into Jules’s side. It was buried up to the hilt, that evil son of a bitch. There was no blood, save for that directly around the wound, but it was clear, even at this distance, he’d pushed it in to the hilt.
“I’m going to kill you for this,” he snarled.
“This is for your own good, Alex, you need this to finally see. And, while were here, it is some of my best work. You see, when you’re friends with the friends I’m friends with, you learn things you don’t find in fancy university textbooks.” He dragged the girl forward, her eyes scared and wide.
“Alex, baby...” she groaned, but Alex didn’t dare move.
“Take your little girlfriend here.” Chuck pushed minutely on the handle of the knife, prompting another pained scream from Julie. Tears wet her face like rain. She shut her eyes like she didn’t want to see. “What I’ve done here is something I learned from a Yakuza gangster I met in Sandton. Really mean freak. He taught me that you can stick a man of any size in three or four specific places—Exhibit A—as deep as you want, without killing them. Instead, you just kind of...plug ’em up. None of the bleeding, all of the fun.”
He laughed and pushed on the blade, but Jules only screamed for a second this time before she passed out in his grip. Daedalus frowned. “Of course, you do run the risk of the weaker ones burning out on you.”
Alex lunged towards him, but stopped as Chuck tutted in disapproval.
“You see, champ, the draw to this kind of torture is that the second you remove the blade—Exhibit B—your patient, or victim, or bargaining chip, let’s say, will bleed out instantly. There’s no stopping it without a full medical team or a miracle on site. So, you see, what you end up with, even if the bitch does pass out, is this sweet little power play I got going on here.”
“What do you want, Daedalus?”
“To help you, friend. That’s all I ever wanted. To help everyone. You see, my gift? The ability to bring people back to their demise. It’s not enough. I want you to help me realise my full potential.”
Alex frowned in confusion.
“You really don’t know how powerful you are, Alex van der Haar. In all the history of this fucked-up little lie, there have been six other people with your gift. That’s all. And the most impressive of that entire lot, the one who really wowed people, was a time-travelling carnie named Edgar Rutridge.”
“Time travel.”
Chuck shrugged. “Wasn’t no big diff, man. He still met his maker, same as the rest of us. It’s just a matter of time, you see? But you. You’re the whole package. The ability to change reality as you see fit. To alter the shit around you...and, oh my god, to lay off fucking flying for five minutes, while you’re at it, maybe? You can do it all. And tonight, I want you to start by doing something for me.”
“You know I came to Grahamstown only one time before, Alex. When you were just so small. To find you. You see, I knew if I could just find you, I could make you see. But you were a kid. Still too young. A kid with, oh my god, so much of the world to see. You and your little white suburban cliché upbringing, you could never grow into the soldier I needed unless I could introduce a little tragedy. I knew that, and I was a fucking teenager myself, you cooshy little poof.”
He laid Jules on the floor carefully, appearing certain Alex wouldn’t rush him again while he was still by Julie’s side. “It’s why I blinked your grandpa, Frank.”
“It took everything I had, little laaitie like me, but I got the job done, and nobody knew any better. Snuck in under cover of dark one night, caught him on his own. Same with your little galpal, Ruthy. Not saying I don’t love this kind of thing, personally, but it’s all business when it comes to you, Alex. You’re special to me. See, I can tell what kind of push a man needs to do anything. Got me out of prison. Got me a lot of places a man like me shouldn’t get to. I knew that if I could just make you see things the way I see them, you’d go along with it.
“I can show you how to access the reality reflex. Like I do, only with so much more power. You could touch the world—everyone. Use the incredible power inside of you...that well of ability, and rewrite this sick nexus as you see fit.”
“You mean as you see fit?”
Chuck Daedalus smiled and shrugged, looming over Julie. “A boy’s gotta have a dream. You see, Alex, I’d be doing all of this myself, and leaving you and your little friends alone, but I’m not strong enough. Sure, a couple car guards here, a few pesky landlords or probation officers there, I can blink ’em, no problem. I’ve pushed it before, but I could never make it reach as far as I really wanted.
“And even if I could, what would be the point? Everything would find a way to right itself. You Anchors, so high and mighty, you always find a way. No, what I need, is to go back.” He drew the next words out, lingering hideously on each one. “And make sure none of you were ever a factor to begin with. To erase the entire god-awful string of Anchors and Imprints, all of y
ou little bastards from the fabric of history, and end this bullshit existence.”
“You’d die too, idiot,” Alex said through gritted teeth.
“I want to die, stupid! I want to die, and for everyone else to die, and for us all to stop fucking pretending, Alex. To end this charade of living. To blink out the pain around us. That’s what I’m willing to do. What are you willing to do?”
“You’re insane.”
“Yes! Yes, and you’re a hero. You’re the hero, Alex. You can do something—be somebody! A saviour, in the making, if you can find it in your pisswilly little worldview to break a few eggs—”
“Stop it.”
“And make an omelette—”
Alex screamed at him, overcome and reckless with Julie’s safety for a split second: “ You’re going to kill everyone! Not eggs—people! You’re fucking evil, and I will not help you do this.”
“Not everyone,” Chuck protested, softly, his hands out in a gesture that seemed like good will but felt more like an invitation to a trap. “Just us. Just the glue in the art project, the Anchors, the Imprints, all of us unnecessary problems who keep this bullshit alive. Just enough for the whole thing to come tumbling down on its own.”
From behind Alex’s shoulder, Sheila croaked, “You don’t know shit, Knife Boy.”
Chuck lifted a foot and held it over the hilt sticking out of Jules’s side and into the air, and Sheila Kingston went quiet.
“I’m his counterweight. The nothing to his everything, and I know he wants this to stop as well. You think I won’t fucking gut this little trout if you or him decide to get smart? Alex? Your granddaddy wasn’t the only one of you I put an end to to get you here.”
“What does that mean?” Alex’s voice was shaking. How could this man have possibly violated him any more than he had just admitted to?
“I’ve been planning this for years,” Chuck answered. “Every day, watching and waiting – shaping your whole life from the shadows.”
“Stop this.”
“How could I? I started it so long ago. Sacrificed so many to be here tonight, with you Frank. Ruth. Your dad.”
Alex didn’t move. His whole body stuck in its own air, frozen except for his mouth, which curled into a sneer and said, “My father was murdered.”
“You think I need superpowers to get rid of an alcoholic gambling wash-up like Otis van der Haar?”
“Fuck you, how could you possibly have known-“
“Alex, do you have the time to be arguing something like this? I camped out in front of a convenience store in my car for two weeks straight, watching your old man go in and out. Same time, every day. Like clockwork. One day, he walks in. So do I. I point a gun at the back of his head. I can’t help myself - I let out a snigger. The look of annoyance on his face as he turned around was just too priceless. He must have thought I was laughing at that dumb fucking comb over. Tell you something, though, man – his hair didn’t bother him for very long.”
“You’re lying!” Alex screamed. “Why kill him? You don’t...you wouldn’t need to do that.”
Chuck smiled, hiking Jules up on his knee and pressing his face up against the nape of her neck. He looked Alex in the eye from behind a long tuft of his unconscious girlfriend’s hair. He bared his teeth, and spoke. “I find violence to be a far more effective motivator than plain old tragedy. Don’t you?”
As if on cue, Jules shook her head slowly and opened her eyes, up into the floor lights, then straight onto Alex’s face. “Babe?”
“Honey! Are you alright? I’m so sorry. I...he’s saying he’ll hurt you...hurt you more if...if I don’t...I have to do something bad, baby.”
Julie smiled, as if it were the first time she’d ever smiled at Alex, the pain of her injury manifested in her wet, bloodshot eyes. “No. You need to do what’s right.”
“Baby, I’m so scared. I don’t know what to believe anymore – I just fought a man, flying. And he’s saying...I don’t know. Everything I know is...it’s all wrong... It’s all gone to shit, and I’m so scared, for you and...and Clark, and...and just look at you! Oh my god, I am so sorry, look at all of this. I’m so sorry!”
“Don’t blame yourself.”
“How can I not, Jules? I am literally the only reason this is happening.” He narrowed his eyes and took a deep breath. It felt like the last he would ever take. “I love you, baby. I...I have to do the right thing here, no matter whether this asshole’s telling the truth or not. You...you’re my bottom line, and, um, I might not... I might not make it out of this, but...I love you, and I hope you know that.”
Jules exhaled on the edge of the blade, wincing with pain as she did. “I love you too.”
“It ends. All of it, tonight,” he said, turning to Chuck. “Here, with you and me.”
17. Off to the Gallows
They sat across from each other, on stage. Metres away, at eye level to a room full of Alex’s friends and family, bathed in the hell glow of red-and-green heat lamps that drenched their moment in the surrealist shine of a thousand small-town gigs.
Crink’s voice bounced in from offstage. “So, are you guys going to have to make out in the middle of a giant pentagram like on Buffy?”
Chuck sat across from Alex, cross-legged and bleeding, a woozy, smirking mess of tattoos and stubble. He seemed lankier at close quarters. He was a sweaty, matted string bean of bones and cartilage, now breathing in high definition, mere inches away from Alex’s face. He was a snarl in the making, ready to bite off the head of the world.
Alex sat there, an unfit, unrefined chunk of varsity living. Ragged from the day’s events, his windswept, maddening haircut in his eyes, as it had been since birth, he presented, to Daedalus, a laughable offering from the universe. His life—the end result in a cosmic joke. He squinted into the stage lights, then back at Chuck, off towards his friends, then at the floor at his feet.
He was tired, and scared.
“Does your friend ever shut up?” Chuck asked woodenly, looking over at Crink, then back into Alex’s eyes.
“Never when it’s funny. Hey Clark, did you fart?”
The younger Van der Haar stepped heavily over to the side of the stage, coming up at face level to his older brother, a tightly bound knot of the unspoken drilled into the air between them. He punched Alex in the shoulder.
“You know how ridiculous you are, right?”
“You got a better idea, bra?”
Clark smiled. Alex always overemphasised that word when he was being a snarky bastard. “Than doing some kind of Vulcan mind meld with Bobo the Stabby Clown here? Yeah, I’ve got about a dozen.”
“Let’s hear them.”
Clark dove straight in, “I read about these guys in Peru who hollow out one of your eye sockets without anaesthetic as a rite of passage. We could start there.”
“Are we talking ‘hollowed out’ like with a spoon or a knife?”
“Oh yeah, like that Jack-O-Lantern guy from Spider Man.”
“Yeah man, if it’s missing eyes, this cat’s got to get his spoons or you can hawk your mutilation elsewhere.” Alex sounded sad. Beyond that, Clark couldn’t tell. “Now, if we could arrange for a butter knife, maybe I—”
“Excuse me.” Chuck’s interjection cut through the air like an axe. He hoisted Julie up and adjusted her body onto his knee. The knife jutted out unforgivingly from her side, a patch of red now formed around it. It looked excruciating. “I hate to break up this—”
Alex spat his response back, ruffled and not even looking at him. “Yeah, hold up, sunshine, I’m talking to my brother.”
“Just hustle it along, Porkchop, or I’ll pull a really painful plug out of your little woman.”
Alex slanted a begrudging smile at his captor then turned to his brother. “If we make it out of this, we’ve got to find Mom a nice guy.”
“Dude, don’t do this.”
“I have to. He’s got Jules. Listen, man. I don’t feel like I need to explain this to you, but you’
re my best friend. I’m never going to let anyone do anything to hurt you.”
“But...”
“I have a plan.”
Clark pulled his hand from out of his pocket and offered it to his brother. In his fist was his aviator’s pin. Gold wings jutting out from a circle-and-star centre, framed in black. Alex laughed. “I thought you thought this shit was lame.”
“Sometimes, it’s okay to just be lame. Besides, Flyboy, you’re going to need all the luck you can get.”
18. A Return to Formless: Conclusion the First
So, like I said when we came in to this story, the world is a dangerous place, and none of what happened up until this point was ever fully explained to me. Not exactly fair, but what was I supposed to do?
I’m still not sure what the answer to that question really is...
–
Sheila woke at the last minute and begged him to stop. So stupid, it was just like her, to come out of nowhere with that kind of shit when she’d been so pleasantly unconscious just before. Unconscious. Like when she showed up in Grahamstown, phased in from the clear blue sky.
Alex felt like, if she hadn’t been there on that day, none of this would have happened. This was all her fault. This blockbuster of a woman, glimmering and dangerous in her nun’s habit, and so goddamned evil with all of her truth. All of this chaos, dragged behind her. A lifetime of, well, nothing, he supposed.
Yet, here they were, because of her, and now this idiot was pleading with him to walk away. As if he’d ever had a choice. He told her to “take Julie and run the second shit gets crazy”. If there was any justice in the world, he’d find a way to join them, and forget this awful mess ever happened.
He didn’t feel what happened between Daedalus and himself next. It was just an experience that was, like anaesthetic. They turned to one another, still across from each other, but the world had shimmered out of itself. They became instantly isolated, and all direction, form and gravity, was gone. From being there, on the stage, to instantly nowhere. Alex felt sick from the sudden and distinct experience of weightlessness. Formless light shifted sickly around them, with nothing tangible. They had no bodies. Not within, and nowhere without.
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