by Rune Skelley
The portal tipped upright, a gaping hole in the wall between reality and madness. It was oval, bowed like the chessboard it once was, and rimmed with the chessboard’s alternating dark and light squares. The chess table opened itself entirely, blossoming into their entry to a vivid green hellscape.
“I have to go in there,” Rook whispered.
“We have to,” Fin corrected gently. He kissed her for what he hoped was not the last time.
Holding hands they stepped forward together and crossed the threshold.
*** *** ***
When only 100 subjects remained, the spiders contacted Kyle, happy to catch him between coitus sessions.
It has been twelve hours, Kyle Tanner.
“Are you ready?” Kyle asked.
The final humans are being positioned now.
“I wasn’t talking to you. Rook, are you ready?”
She smiled and said, “Yeah.”
“Put on your wedding dress.”
The aliens began the fine adjustments necessary to bring the portal into alignment by directing specific humans to shift their position.
“They look like they’re drunk,” Kyle commented.
It is more akin to somnambulation.
“Whatever.”
The thousands of pieces came into perfect alignment and the long-anticipated moment arrived.
We are ready, Kyle Tanner. Unite us with all of humanity in the glorious oneness!
“Rook and I will go do that.”
We will follow you!
“No!”
Kyle radiated anger the likes of which the spiders had not felt since his brother destroyed their previous unity. They cowered.
“You will wait here,” he ordered, “until I call you. Do you understand?”
Yes! Yes!
“Start it up.”
Ripples like ultra-violet heat shimmers lit the sky above Kyle’s mind control marching band. As the formations shifted and spelled words in secret alphabets, the glow coalesced into a burning green landscape of electricity and fire.
Rook gasped. “I know that place!”
Kyle lifted her into his arms. “Send us through. And Do. NOT. Follow.”
The terrified spiders rushed to comply. Kyle held Rook and kissed her as the transporter whisked them from the asteroid and into the maw of the writhing green storm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
TIE-DYE FIRE
A Completer, an Unknowing angel with Shadowed Wings,
Shall heal the Divided Man and restore Light upon the Earth.
from New Revelations, by Rev Brian Shaw, unpublished
A babble of voices washed over Kyle and the air felt greasy and overly familiar.
He set Rook down beside him and took in the landscape of green fire. During his coma, the bubbles of light told him so much he didn’t want to know. He couldn’t see the bubbles now, but he could feel them clamoring like gnats, suffocating him with their eagerness to be his friend, crowding his brain with their ceaseless yammering.
Definitely the same place. It looked different when you had actual eyes.
Rook clutched his shirt and he kept his arms around her, resting his chin on top of her head.
On the periphery of his vision, massive, indistinct shapes loomed out of the rolling green waves and sank again without leaving a ripple. Crop circles flowed over the surface of the undulating landscape like alien hieroglyphics. Everything anybody thought was in here somewhere.
“Rook, we’re home.”
She looked up at him, her eyes all the bluer in contrast to the green, green world.
Kyle brushed his lips against her ear and whispered, “We’re going to kick the Id out of here. Send it to the asteroid with the spiders so they can annoy each other forever. We’ll close the portal and live here, in the empty shell. We’ll take over. And,” he kissed her earlobe, “you’ll be safe.”
Her smile was bright enough to scatter the cloying bubble-voices. For a few blissful moments he felt and heard only her, felt her erotic thrum inside his mind.
“That’s so romantic!” she breathed.
Kyle turned and saw an enormous shape breaching the surface of the waves of fire. A dollar-bill pyramid, complete with its creepy floating eye. It was glowing white-hot, a massive stone chunk adrift in this place, radiating a warhead’s worth of unspent energy.
Panic froze Kyle. His heart pounded, pumping fear throughout his body. They could never outrun it! He brought Rook here to keep her safe and instead they would be incinerated, turned to ash and scattered through the Collective Id forever.
Baking heat like an iron foundry slammed into them, the slanted pyramid wall just a yard away. Kyle could see the texture of the stone, the mortar lines between the massive slabs, and an incongruous patch of black.
A charred handprint.
*** *** ***
Fin expected something momentous to signify the crossing of such an important barrier, but there was no outcry, no fireworks, no alarm bells. One moment he stood with his wife in the retro decor of their suburban home, and a moment later they inhabited a viridescent landscape of liquid flame. A cold knot of fear oozed from his brainstem and down his spine.
Rook looked around with wide blue eyes, her grip on his hand tightening past the point of pain.
Thumper was in here somewhere, lost in this tie-dye ocean of endless green fire. Rook was counting on him to find the baby, but he didn’t have his sea legs yet. The babble of voices drowned him in meaninglessness. He found no handholds and was in danger of being washed away on a tsunami of crowd noise, his self eroded and mingled with the rest of humanity.
“Fin?” The terror in Rook’s voice galvanized him, driving his own fear and confusion back. He snapped his head around to look at her, tried to project confidence.
“It’s a lot to take in,” he said.
“Fin, I don’t feel Thumper.” Panic rose in her voice and made her mental signal shrill. “I thought I would, but I don’t. I can’t feel my baby.”
“Our baby’s in here, somewhere,” Fin said in the most reassuring tone he could. “We should move around and see if we can get a fix.”
Rook’s eyes showed panic. “We’ll get lost. What good is it to find Thumper if we can’t get home?”
Fin didn’t like the idea of being trapped here, either. The terrain shifted and surged like a rough sea. There were no stable landmarks. Moments ago they stood in a tiny valley, but now it was a hilltop.
“I think we’ll be okay,” he said. “We can look for the portal whenever we’re on high ground. It stands out, what with Vesuvius’s color coming through.”
“Follow my voice,” Vesuvius said. “You can hear me, right?”
Fin looked at Rook before answering. She nodded. “Yes, buddy. We hear you.”
“Then you can use me to home in. Go now, find the baby.”
Fin said, “I think we should listen to him.”
Rook tried to smile. “He’s never steered us wrong before. Which way?”
Every way looked pretty much the same, except a nearby gully where the green flames had taken the shapes of trees, reminding him of the firs that made up so much of Rook’s interior world. He was about to point that way when he spied movement, a huge apelike creature sidling deeper into the woods.
“This way.” He pointed in the opposite direction. Fin kept one ear out for Vesuvius, who commenced a spoken-word rendition of Hush Little Baby at a stately pace.
*** *** ***
Visitors!
Oh, this is indeed excellent, like fried cheese. Fried cheese is the most popular appetizer at Mama Leone’s Pizzeria in Hoboken, New Jersey, but is among the five least popular nail polish colors at Bambi’s ‘Quality’ European Nail Salon in St Paul, Minnesota. St Paul is one of the Twin Cities, the other is Minneapolis. Twins are best because two is better than one. One is the loneliest number. Who ever heard of tea for one? Two by two the visitors came. Two couples, and a couple is two. Two’s company. Two heads
are better than one, and two hearts beat as one. Two heads and two hearts means two babies. Divide the chimera? No! Division is less. A divided chimera is just two children. Multiply! Multiply the chimera. Two perfect chimera babies. Like looking in a mirror. But not reversed, no. Never reversed. The same, always. Always the same. Identical. But raised apart, one in Minneapolis, one in St Paul. Apart, apart, apart. Identical and apart. Separate but equal. Two! Two is better than one. One chimera is good because it is two in one. But two chimeras is better because it is two in one twice. But if one is good and two is better, what is three? Or four? Or six billion? Too much! Noise, confusion, no peace.
Two.
The Texas Two-step can be danced to tempos between 130 and 200 beats per minute.
*** *** ***
Brad parked behind the small blue car in the driveway of the retro-modern house, but no one came to the door when he knocked. He knew Fin didn’t care for the doorbell, but after knocking again and waiting, he pressed the button. Still no answer.
The door was unlocked. He said “Hello?” as he stepped inside, trying to tell himself he shouldn’t panic.
Another few steps gave him a view into the living room.
In the middle of the room hovered an oval-shaped hole filled with seething green fire. Fin’s cherished lava lamp burbled away nearby. The lamp’s red-gold tone seemed all the more intense beside the hot green glow.
Brad stared at it stupidly for a few seconds, then darted back around the corner.
The kids did it.
Brad edged up to the corner, unable to go any nearer the thing. He knew the only way to help them was to go through. Also he knew he’d already spent too much time thinking about it, and more thinking would only make his legs more rubbery.
He walked up to it, meaning to stride right through. He stopped. Were those flames actually hot? What if the portal closed behind him? What if it closed on him? Cut him in half? He felt sweat on his scalp, on his torso. His heart beat too fast. He thought about having a heart attack in that weird green place, where no ambulance could find him.
Brad reached up with one hand. He wanted to reach through, to prove to himself that it worked, but even there he hesitated.
Someone had glued his feet down.
Just step through, already, Brad thought he heard someone say, but it was clearly his own frustration with himself for stalling.
He clenched his eyes shut, constricted his held breath.
He stepped through.
The green fire didn’t burn.
It was everything, it was the ground he somehow stood on. The air seemed to be made of voices, a raucous blather of conversations and screams and laughter, and someone droning Camptown Races.
Spinning around, he saw Fin’s living room through the oval hole. The portal looked even more out of place from this side, which Brad found staggering.
He scanned the horizon and the nearby waves for any idea of which way was the right way.
The landscape moved like swells on the open sea, but its surface shimmered like wind-teased grass. He watched as the random dappling on the flank of a hill organized itself into a Starbucks logo.
*** *** ***
Off to their right Rook heard a raucous din composed of thousands of tweedling ringtones. She and Fin both ducked as the swarm of cellphones buzzed overhead, antennas lashing to propel them like sperm racing to fertilize the world’s unluckiest egg.
Fin tripped over a hula hoop that rose from the glowing swirls. Soon they were popping up everywhere. They wafted above the waves and spewed immense, crystalline orbs, like the bubble wands Rook loved as a child.
All of the bubbles drifted away, except for one. It was smallish and emitted a golden-green glow.
“Look out,” Fin warned, tugging on Rook’s arm. She shook him off.
The bubble was not empty. Inside the glow, a fetus, tiny and peaceful. Her baby. For only a second Rook drank in the sight of the perfect little fists, the bald head, the closed eyes. She reached out to the bubble and it disappeared.
The emptiness she’d felt for an entire week turned inside out, replaced by a comforting, familiar fullness and a tickling vibration. Inside her womb a tiny, fluid movement told her Thumper was home.
Fin grinned and rested his hand on her belly where it peeked out between her zebra-stripe tank top and the waistband of her miniskirt. Thumper gave his hand a kick.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Fin said, turning toward Vesuvius’s comforting intonation of Camptown Races.
“Wait.” Rook furrowed her brow and concentrated.
“What’s wrong?” Fin asked.
“I don’t know.” Rook looked at Fin, pleading with him to understand. “Something’s missing. Thumper’s vibration is off. Incomplete. Fin, we can’t leave yet.”
*** *** ***
The massive, glowing pyramid bobbed on the surface of the green sea for a long second before toppling backwards into the trough between waves and beginning to subside.
Rook laughed with relief. Kyle looked down at her, his eyes a swirling green like their new home. He kissed her hungrily and she responded in kind, the adrenaline surge from their near incineration feeding her libido.
A slow, warm breeze ruffled her hair and carried a cloud of enormous soap bubbles overhead. One by one the bubbles popped, chiming out Bicycle Built for Two like a music box, and raining soapy mist that smelled of baby powder. A single golden bubble, smaller than the others, sank straight toward Rook like a helium balloon in reverse.
Kyle pulled her aside, but the infernal orb swooped down and pain shot through Rook’s belly like she’d been punched. Her beautiful wedding dress cut off her breath, suffocating her.
Kyle looked alarmed.
The side seams on her dress split with a terrible ripping sound and Rook could finally scream. Her hands flew to her stomach and confirmed the truth. She was pregnant, huge and swollen and filled with something battering against her from the inside, trying to escape.
“No!”
Rook felt herself fracturing. The agony of her soul rending in two brought fiery tears and incoherent screams, but then Kyle was there. He held her tight, pressing the jagged edges of her psyche back together, forcing her to stay whole.
“You can’t go,” he told her. “I need you.”
Painfully Rook felt her disparate personas coming together in uneasy alliance. “I can’t have this baby,” she said.
“We’ll figure something out, Rook. Just stay with me.”
*** *** ***
Willow felt like giving up. It was devastating to have the jewelry within reach but be unable to affect it.
By now there were thousands upon thousands of glowing filaments, each linking Willow to one transceiver worn by someone standing out in a field outside of Donner. The mass of tendrils was enough to blot out everything else. She sought a clear vantage, rising up within her own thoughts until she could survey the pulsing skein in its entirety.
The strands swayed and undulated with gentle waves, intertwining like ribbons on a möbius maypole. Their green-gold glow rose like steam to form tall, shimmering curtains, northern lights reaching into the infinite distance.
Well, not infinite, but mind-bendingly far.
Odd such soft energy should be organized into such a cohesive beam. Willow sighted along it. She soared up, racing into the stratosphere and beyond in the blink of an eye.
In a moment that might have been a second or a day, she reached the terminus of the auroral beam at a lumpy chunk of stone far past the orbit of Mars.
The asteroid was riddled with passageways and chambers, many lined with equipment far more sophisticated than Willow could grasp. The beam reached through the thick rock to a chamber holding dozens of huge, pseudosentient spiders.
Willow recognized them instantly, despite all the years since she created them during her first visit to the realm of swirling green fire.
She hadn’t expected them to persist, much less grow to such ga
rgantuan size.
Their involvement with the jewelry was less of a surprise. Like them, it was something Willow called into being, and they were responsible for the interfering signal that prevented her from reversing the process, from rendering the nanotech inert.
The spiders upgraded the transceivers, but no one upgraded the spiders.
Willow touched her left thumb and right forefinger, then pivoted her hands, walking the itsy-bitsy spider up the water spout.
She felt tension building with each step. The spiders felt it too, but they didn’t know what to do about it.
The longer Willow kept up the ritual, the more discordant the arachnids’ thinking became. The mass intellect crumbled, and when the individuation was complete Willow brought down the rain to wash the spiders out.
One moment they were there, the next they were gone, sent back to the nothingness that spawned them.
Unmade.
Willow leaned on the table, lightheaded. She took several deep breaths. A quick peek in the playpen confirmed that Zen was playing happily. Only then did Willow check on the jewelry again.
It was there, still indicated by myriad silky strands, but the color and intensity of their glow had changed. The towering aurora was gone.
Willow selected one filament and plucked a few notes. In seconds she located the key frequency and burned out the hoop. By erasing the spiders, she also erased their signal generator. The transceivers were again within her grasp.
One down, 10,000 to go.
*** *** ***
While Rook wept in his arms, Kyle struggled to formulate a plan. Something simple and elegant, something that would evict the Id from its realm and simultaneously evict the fetus from Rook’s body, solving both problems at once.
Kyle could feel the spiders lurking around the edges of his thoughts, too scared to disobey him, at least for now. Soon they would overcome their fear and come charging in, and he’d be stuck with them forever.
Fuck elegance and simplicity.
Flexing mental muscles he hadn’t used in a long time, Kyle reached out to locate the Id’s core. He would choke it into submission and toss it back through the portal to the asteroid.