by Vance, R. E.
The son of a bitch was showing off.
And that was OK—I wasn’t trying to kill him with a bullet. That would have been too easy. My tactics were a bit blunter. The ferocity of the sentry guns forced him to move just a few feet farther down the path and by varying the intensity of each gun, I was able to maneuver him to where I wanted. Just another step and … there! You see, the way I figured it was that Grinner was prepared for a sideways attack and even one from above. But from below …
I hit another button, setting off several mines I had buried beneath the spot he now stood. The earth shattered upward, sweeping Grinner off his feet. He fell with a whoop, flat on his back. The thing about these land mines is that they explode upward, leaving the ground on which they rested virtually untouched. That meant that there could be several layers of them and it was a good way to lure an invading army into believing they were safe. Let their sweepers destroy the top row, only to have them walk on the field and set off the second row. That was dirty tactics, and that was exactly what I did.
The second row of mines went off, tearing at Grinner’s back as bullets from the sentry guns managed to get through his defenses. He was literally being torn apart, piece by piece. I tore at him, bits of him flopping away, only to get further shredded by mines and bullets. And still he moved.
Explosions rang from all around us as I rained holy Hell on the bastard’s head. I was going to tear him apart, if that was what it took. I was going to …
Suddenly everything went silent. And I don’t mean quiet. I mean sound ceased to exist. Even the vibrations of the guns and mines stopped and at that moment the world went completely still. At first I thought that Grinner had removed all the gravity like he had done at the One Spire Hotel, but a quick look around proved that was not the case. The guns still rattled, empty shells falling to the side, dirt still went up in the air with each mine explosion and I was still able to move about normally.
With each bullet that ripped through Grinner’s body, bits of blood fell about. Unlike most Others that bled different colors, Grinner bled in the same crimson red as humans; it made the scene all the more sickening to watch. I was thankful for the lack of sound. Somehow watching all this on Mute made it more bearable. I prepared my next few tricks, expecting Grinner to do something, anything, but he did not.
The last layer of mines exploded as the sentry guns ran through their final thread of bullets. Grinner lay literally in pieces, bits of him strewn throughout the field. Judith had asked me to kick him in the balls, but I guessed this would have to do.
I noticed that his hand rested not ten feet away from me, ripped away by a mine blast. Grinner was dead. I had won. After all that power and magic, in the end all it took was the brute, blunt force of a whole lot of land mines to take down the Avatar of Gravity.
And still the world was silent.
If living in a mute world was the price to pay for having rid it of this evil false god, then so be it. Bella and I would just have to learn sign language.
I put down the remote control and the other weapons that I had thankfully not needed, and withdrew my hunting sword from its sheath. I wanted a piece of his heart, assuming that he had a heart and that I could find it in this mess.
The first time he did this, back in the hotel, I had no idea what was happening, but I’d had some time to think about it. Grinner was so powerful that even sound could not escape his pull—just like a black hole—and that was why I needed to stop him. A force such as his did not nourish, it did not enlighten—it pulled at you, never letting you go, never letting you become what you were destined to be.
Then I heard a crackle. “Good show,” Grinner said. “I knew you were a worthy opponent.”
“GoneGodDamn it!” I said, looking for the source of the voice.
In the center of the mess was a single black sphere, no larger than marble. It shot up. Bits of Grinner started to float up, orbiting the tiny ball. Bits of flesh and blood, bone and nail all circled that center point. I even noticed a few of Grinner’s abnormally large teeth joining the orbit.
The voice spoke again. “What is it you humans say? Earth to earth …”
Droplets of blood formed larger bodies, joining together to form larger parts of him. Organs were spawning—lungs, stomach, heart. And around them the skeleton began to form.
“Ashes to ashes …”
A thin filament of skin gathered around the organs and bones, like a jigsaw puzzle being constructed in 3D.
“Dust to dust.”
Damn it, I thought, piercing his hand that still rested by me with the tip of my hunting sword. I held it up and looked at it. He might be piecing himself together from the tiny shreds I reduced his body to, but by the GoneGods, I was keeping his hand. Petty, I know.
Within moments Grinner was fully formed, only his hand missing. He smiled. I could feel him using a bit of his magic, but I was too far away to be affected.
“You and I are not that different,” he said, pointing his stump at me.
I looked at the speared hand and grunted. “I am nothing like you.” I backed away slowly. I needed to get back to my porch and use my last trick.
“Yes, you are. There is a piece within all of us that holds us together. For me, it is my core. For you, it is Bella.”
“Don’t say her name!” I spat out, still backing away. Letting him think I was afraid. Just a few more steps and …
“I picked her precisely because she was your core. I knew that if we lost her, you would always be the map back to her. In a way, her ascension happened because of you.”
“Bastard!” I said, the back of my foot touching the base of the cabin’s stairs. I turned and started up them. There were only five steps and I could clear them in two strides. I just had to be faster than him and make sure I stayed out of the thirty foot radius.
Grinner’s hand moved on the tip of my sword. “Shit,” I cried out and threw the blade down to the ground. “Come on, you got to be kidding me.”
But it was too late—the hand freed itself from the sword pulled me off the stoop, somehow holding me down. Apparently, a First Law’s hand didn’t need to be attached to a body to work.
So. Totally. Unfair.
Grinner stepped closer. I was being pinned down by his force again and this time he wasn’t messing around. He crushed my ankle, bones compressed by tons of pressure, until all that was left was a sack of purple skin filled with powdered bone. I screamed in pain.
“It is because of you that we are here,” Grinner said. “Yes, she loved you. Loves you still. But what you felt for her was so beyond love. It was an attraction that could traverse solar systems. A connection that could defy even Time. Truly, amongst the human race, you are one of a kind.”
“Screw you,” I grunted.
“There is something I need of you.”
“Let me guess … a kiss?”
Grinner laughed. “A kiss, a touch—they are all the same. What I need is the attraction that you have for the human called Bella. Don’t you see? You are a magnet which can draw close only one person.”
“What? You don’t like my affable personality?” I couldn’t get up, but maybe I could move sideways. I inched forward, my fingers stretching to my felled blade. Just a few more inches. “And if I refuse?” I said, trying to buy myself some more time.
“By now you know that a kiss is just a … how do you mortals put it … a formality. All I need is for you both to join in emotion. Her witnessing your death is enough. But I do not wish to make a martyr out of you. Don’t you understand? It is you whom she loves …” His voice trailed off and he began swaying, as if dancing to music that only he could hear. His eyes closed and he hugged himself dearly. “And she loves you so, so much. No matter what comes next, you can take comfort in that certainty, Jean-Luc.” His disembodied hand pointed a finger at me, so close it could poke my eye out. Then he pointed another finger to the sky, twirling it as one might when selecting a song from a jukebox—and all the
while he swayed, entranced by the soundless music. “Yes … there. I feel it. She worries for you. Worries that you have failed and are now dead. Somewhere beyond, your love cries in fear for you,” he said, drifting off again, his arms outstretched to the sky—and the hand pinning me down zoomed up and reattached itself to his stump. I tried moving, but by now his gravity was weighing me down.
“Hey, Cheshire Cat,” I said, but he didn’t hear me. It was more than that—the way he swayed, he was so deeply concentrating that I sincerely doubted anything short of a nuclear bomb would break his trance. Since I didn’t have one of those on hand, I looked around for another weapon. All I had left was my hunting sword that lay a few feet away. In agony, I began inching toward it again.
Inch by inch, I drew closer to my sword. Finally the tips of my fingers touched its hilt. Just a bit farther and …
“It requires a lot of energy to summon Heaven. A lot of time must be burned. To search for the Void without knowing where it is would be suicide. But with you here … Ah, yes!” Grinner said, his finger fixated on a specific point in the sky. “There you are!”
Then something happened that I’d never seen before. The sky got darker. I don’t mean that it became overcast and the lights of fewer stars were reaching Earth. I mean the sky literally started to blot out. First the Moon disappeared, then the light from bright stars, then the most distant stars extinguished.
Gemini’s brightest, as well as Castor and Pollux, were reduced from being reflective diamonds in the sky to pinpricks in a heavy wool blanket, until they disappeared altogether. The stars of Hydra and Leo flickered out like dying bulbs.
One by one, I watched the night sky disappear until all that remained were Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, shining in a belt across the sky. Grinner left those four planets in the night sky, and they were the only real sources of light left.
“The doorway to the Void requires a ladder,” he hummed as he swayed in his trance, “but for a ladder to exist, it must be hinged both above and below.”
He pointed up to the four planets and then with a violent gesture, pulled down, falling to his knees as he touched the ground with his hands. The four stars ceased being spots of light in the sky, morphing into beams of illumination. Hell, not beams—that conjures up images of lasers and Buck Rogers. I’m talking more like columns of light that extended from their source in the Heavens all the way down to the cleared-out field in front of PopPop’s cabin. Hellelujah—if I lived to be ten thousand years old, I seriously doubted I’d ever see anything as beautiful as this again.
“Don’t you see?” Grinner panted, and suddenly I could see him aging. Back in Paradise Lot, he seemed like he had an inexhaustible amount of energy, but now—now he was out of breath. I guess bringing down Heaven can really take its toll on a guy. “I do this to give us all a chance at a new beginning.”
He grinned. The columns of light moved across the Earth and gathered closer to Grinner—not like the planets’ beams were twisting in his direction, but as if the planets were actually being pulled closer together across lightyears of space—as he exerted his gravitational will with a growing ferocity. I could see bits of gray appearing, adding texture to his jet-black hair as shallow but noticeable wrinkles began to crawl out from the corners of his eyes.
The four columns converged onto Grinner, four spotlights that entered him, turning his body into a transparent shell—now I could see what the inner workings of true magic looked like. It was a universe within a universe, a thousand galaxies orbiting his heart. But unlike the heart of our Milky Way, his was black and void, a force of absence. The stars from our night sky ran into that black heart, losing their effervescence as soon as they touched it.
And Grinner grew.
The stars themselves nourished him, and he grew.
First, he grew to twice the size of a human.
Then he was a hill giant, then a stone giant.
A dragon.
And still he grew, and all the while I watched it unfold far too fast to be natural—an odd scene viewed through the lens of a camera that only filmed in fast-forward.
“Truly, Human Jean, you must now understand that no matter how hard you resist me, the new world will be,” Grinner bellowed, pulling out Joseph’s box from his pocket.
The air got thick and every breath felt as though I were sucking in honey, and still I crawled forward, toward my final trick.
Grinner looked to the sky, now filled with a darkness that was not the absence of light, but an entity in and of itself. “Look there,” he said, pointing up, “that is where your Bella is. Just one embrace. One connection and the bridge will be established and I will be able to hold it here forever and for everyone.”
And from the Void that hung in the air like a black balloon, I could see Bella’s face against its cusp. She looked down on me, less than a hundred feet away, anguish in her eyes. When we saw each other, my heart lurched and I could feel something being drawn out of me like slowly letting out a long breath. Thin gray wisps of smoke were filtering out of my chest and when I looked up at Bella, I saw the same wisps emanating from her and toward Joseph’s box.
“You see?” Grinner cackled. “The connection wants to be free. Embrace her, let it go and save the world!”
“It’s now or never,” I muttered to myself, getting on my one good foot. The sack that was once my right foot wiggled from my ankle, each swing sending blinding pain through my body. I screamed. Taking deep breaths, I hopped up the cabin’s steps, each jump agony, and managed to collapse just in front of the door where my ace card waited for me.
I pulled out a .50 caliber Beowulf that I had rubbed with the candle wax Hermes had given me. I remembered how the candles protected him, hiding his magic from the world around him. I had been mulling that over in my mind ever since. Why else would he have thought to give me one? If the wax could shield one from magic, maybe it negated magic altogether. It was a gamble, but it was all I had.
I loaded the bullet into the magazine and slid the bolt home. Then I prepared to shoot, figuring that the heat of the shot would melt the wax and burn its power long enough and strong enough that Grinner would not be able to block it with his gravitational tricks. Taking aim, I said a silent prayer to the GoneGods.
You left us here with so many problems. Let this bullet put an end to one of them.
I pulled the trigger.
Chapter 4
The Deepening
What happened next took less than a second and yet I was able to perceive it as if in slow motion. The shot rang through the silence with a rippling sound and pierced the gravitational bubble surrounding Grinner with a thud. He must have felt his sphere being breached, because he looked in my direction. I saw him fan out his fingers, seeking to stop the bullet, but just as I hoped, the wax shielded the lead missile from his powers. Understanding what was happening, he tried to lift a stone to block the bullet’s approach. A good plan … if only he had thought of it a millisecond earlier.
The bullet ripped into Grinner, shredding apart a body that was created to be Gravity incarnate. From the wound a torrent of darkness billowed out, like black air rushing out of a pierced balloon. I tried to dodge the Void but I was too slow. It enveloped me, wisps grabbing at me with relentless power, and suddenly I was no longer at my cabin in the woods. I was no longer on Earth.
I was no longer here.
I was nowhere.
↔
What happened next came in degrees. First the chaos of the darkness’s approach immediately ceased and I found myself standing at a crossroad, a single light hanging overhead. The gloom was so heavy I could not see more than ten feet away, four paths leading away from me into the eternity beyond. I was in the Void and Bella did not come to save me. I was alone. Slowly, inch by inch, the ten feet of visibility became nine, then eight, until the emptiness was less than five feet away. I couldn’t stand it, the claustrophobic approach, like being boxed in a room that was shrinking. And with ever
y inch that was taken away, I was closer to the Void’s embrace.
Screw that! If I was going to die, I wanted to have a hand in it, not wait for it to take me away slowly but surely. I took a step forward, down the path that was straight ahead. Then another, until finally I stepped into the darkness itself.
What I felt is damn near impossible to describe. It was a sensation I had never felt before and pray I will never feel again. I entered heavy air, a lukewarm aura—like walking into a wall of water—and then all at once it was like being a thousand feet underwater, the pressure of being so deep crushing me under its immense weight. I was floating in the Void and I suddenly had the thought that I was back in my mother’s womb, the amniotic fluid hugging me tight, suspending me in the darkness where up and down, left and right, no longer mattered. All that did matter was simply being. I even found myself curling up into the fetal position. I was suspended in nothing.
And that is exactly where I was. In nothing. I don’t mean peace or tranquility or any other kind of Zen bullshit. I mean nothing. A complete and total, all-consuming emptiness. Darkness, sure. But this was more than darkness, because even if you stood in a pitch-black room with a blindfold, you still wouldn’t come close to what I mean. And the silence—I can only say for sure that it did not come from the absence of sound, because that would imply that sound exists somewhere else. No sound existed here. It never had and it never would.
In the Void, I wasn’t floating—that would imply that I was some kind of corporeal form. I was not there. Rather, my body was not there. Only my consciousness and that, I’ve learned, was not enough to negate the nothing.
I felt that if I stayed in this place too long I would die, not out of hunger or thirst, but because my body would eventually be absorbed by the nothing, my heart’s vibrations syncing with my new surroundings, joining the perfect harmony of the Void. I could feel that already happening, my mind losing so many memories.