Around him the air undulated with ropey tendrils stemming from the tree’s branches, diaphanous and ever-moving, tied around Harper’s wrists and ankles and neck.
As the last traces of the radio’s screech faded, Jack became aware of the whispers emanating from the great obsidian tree. Voices of deep time. The tendrils that held the creature shifted to the rhythm of those voices.
Whispers, it’s the whispers that bind him.
The crucified terror hung limp before the great tree, one dark sliver against the blinding light, one terrible voice above the thousands that imprisoned it. Upon it all, basted on top without grace or ceremony, a biting chill that might have sent any ordinary person mad.
“Subtle,” Jack said.
“All Where doesn’t do subtle,” Barry said.
Harper giggled, a quiet and constant tickle that seemed to crawl up between Jack’s legs and shrivel his particulars. “You feel it?” Harper turned his head skyward to the strange shifting clouds and breathed deep. “Sweet wonderful Frost. I have waited so long, so long, but finally, it’s time. At last, Highcourt lies in ruins.” His fangs protruded through the smiling lips. “The End is coming.”
Jack twitched as a mental prod came from Barry’s direction. Together, they began their approach unto the monster and the thousand-limbed tree.
The quasi-vampire hung aloft, watching them approach with childish interest written onto its face. “See the warriors of light, come to save the world,” Harper announced to the cavern, his sibilant tongue cutting through the swaddling whispers.
Will they hold him? Jack thought, finding it easy to push outside his own head, now, projecting in Barry’s direction.
Barry looked at Jack, a flaming purple firefly in the dark, but Jack got no transmission in return. All the answer he needed.
“Sorry that you came all this way, but you’re too late.” Harper’s face, a paper-thin mask of youthful skin intermittently visible over the leering devil’s jaws, stretched into a hideous pout. “The party’s already started, Barry and Sally.”
Jack focused on the tree, following the tendrils of ectoplasmic goo back to the tips of the branches. Something was wrong, the strands’ glow tainted and riddled with threads of darkness as they drew close to their prisoner. Before Jack’s eyes, the darkness spread.
“He’s done something to it,” Jack said.
Harper bared his teeth in a great cheesy smile, an expression caught between comical and blood curdling. “You guardians always think you’re outsmarting us, stalling us with your boxes of tricks. You always underestimate the power of the light.”
Jack guffawed. “The light? You’re the good guy, now?”
“Oh, dear me. You people have your heads so stuck in your own culture, you’re blind to the truth. The fool beside you—the Good Guys—they’re the creatures of the night. It’s us who follow the light.”
Jack caught a glimpse of something through the monster’s eyes, a bright and insane, staring radiance he had seen before. Something once divine and fair, fallen. Eternal laughing insanity.
They stopped ten feet before the monster. Suddenly, the binding threads of light around Harper’s limbs didn’t seem half as secure. This close, there was no denying they faded and darkened further by the moment.
“What have you done?” Barry said.
“What nobody had the gall to do before. I used it.” The contempt in Harper’s voice could have melted lead. “The greatest crime your kind ever committed was to turn your back on the power right in front of you. And now your people are gone. You’re nothing now, one of a handful of scattered survivors. Just like anyone left in his world will be,” he jerked his head in Jack’s direction, “once I’m done.”
“Our job is to safeguard it, not use it. We could never use it. It destroys all it touches.” Barry spoke with defeated resignation, the unchanging rhetoric exchanged by two sides since time immemorial.
Jack cut in. “What was that sound? From the radio?”
Harper’s brows twitched in affirmation. “The End. As soon as this is done, it will cover all the world. I might have been stationed here a long time—too long—but it had its benefits. When all this is done and the two of you are bled out on the ground, I’ll have an army waiting out there for me. This world will be ours.”
“We’ll fight you. Even if we can’t stop you. Whatever’s left, will fight you,” Jack said.
Harper pulled a mocking baby face. “Without their precious gizmos? All those computers and radios and television sets, turned to dust? With that sweet song you just heard whiting out every channel?”
“You’re lying.”
Harper’s laugh came suddenly, with the force of decades’ pent up malice, possessing the great underground geode and magnifying it a hundredfold.
Jack pushed it away. Think of Kat and the others. The rigged vaults. He’ll have no army.
It gave him the strength to stare Harper in the eye, just.
Harper sighed, the satisfied whistle of a diner after a succulent meal. “All that planning finally paid off. Beautiful harmony.”
The threads binding the monster frayed, falling away one at a time. Harper closed his eyes, smiling, as the darkness effusing from his body rotted the whispering threads.
“I’m sorry, boy, but things haven’t played out in your favour. With Highcourt gone, this little munchkin here doesn’t stand a chance,” Harper said, shaking his head with feigned sadness.
Jack couldn’t help turning his inner eye on Barry. The Scot-but-not was right. Something was missing, as though a roaring flame had been beaten down to a cinder by some great, merciless gale.
The monster floated closer to the ground, his toes approaching the crystal floor.
Jack reached out to Barry desperately. What do we do?
This time, the reply came immediately, as loud as if Barry had spoken right into his ear. Get to the tree.
And do what?
What you were made to.
Jack tentatively moved to the side, making to sidestep Harper.
Harper’s brow twitched in Jack’s direction, his lip curled upward subtly. His eyes were still closed, but he too saw everything.
Jack swallowed, turning back to Barry. What about you?
Barry’s glowing form shrugged. A look of sadness that scared Jack more than anything else. I’ll hold him.
You said…
Barry’s voice from earlier that night, loud and clear in his head: “He’s above my level, to be quite honest.” Then, another snippet from beside the dumpster. “Dying’s not my style. We don’t go in for that.”
Barry winked at him. Hurry.
Jack hesitated a moment, then said aloud, “Hold him.”
The monster’s tiptoes touched ground at the same moment the Scot-but-not roared, “GO!”
Then Jack was sprinting over smooth crystal, and the air was full of the reverberating hiss of a serpent unleashed.
The cavern blurred. Jack’s footfalls fell silent as panic took hold, and he pumped his legs for all they were worth. Behind him a calamitous roar chased at his heels. Through a mayhem of jeering voices, the slap of his feet on the ground and the whistle of breath in his lungs, he heard Harper’s loafers tap over the ground.
The nape of his neck crawled, the primal sense of having a predator at one’s back.
Somehow he squeezed more from his legs, ignoring the tearing in his chest. He had been sure the tree had been close—so close he could have reached out and touched it. Yet as he ran, it drew no closer.
He passed spurs of crystal, jumping over forks in the nucleated floor, weaving his way toward the great obelisk. Yet, while his feet ate up the yards, and the roaring voices of Barry and Harper lost their deafening volume of proximity, the tree seemed ever distant, as though space itself warped to keep him at arm’s length.
Puffing, he reached out from within, and found the source: a strange push at his shoulders and shins,
unseen and unfelt by any bodily sense. He ran into a ghostly wind.
It’s a skin, a shield, to keep things out. The same thing that snared Harper.
Nobody was supposed to be here. That much was obvious. Not Harper, nor Jack, not even Barry.
This was a place for no living thing. And it had its defences. He ran, never once stopping, yet still he made no progress, held in place by invisible hooks.
Yet he knew he could break those barriers, just as Harper had done. The certainty came along with the urge to flex, to open up, to let it see him.
See me. See me.
A momentary repulsion, a reluctant extra push, then he stumbled forward as the intangible resistance vanished. The tree grew closer.
Behind him, Barry roared in the manner of some Homeric Ajax. With each grunt came a percussive crunch as the reverberations of a great impact made Jack’s eyes shake in their sockets. Jack didn’t dare look back. He didn’t need to. It was clear Barry fought for life or death.
It would have been comforting, were it not for Harper’s absolute silence.
Jack stumbled to the base of the tree, gut trembling with strange resonance. Power dwelled here, so rich and potent he felt suddenly fragile, like a glass in danger of shattering from an opera singer’s voice.
Groaning, Jack went against every instinct and looked over his shoulder.
Jack’s light-starved eyes watered at the flashes of very real light erupting from points of contact, as Barry blocked Harper’s barrage of blows with unveiled distress etched onto his face. Harper had become a mere blur, claws and snarling jaws. Jack watched two battles; one of top-level flesh, fists and sweat and nails flying, in the manner of some furious bar fight in pitch darkness; and that of their true selves underneath, where the real battle raged. A battle of wills.
Harper’s steak-knife claws moved so fast the air made a sound like tearing cloth, missing Barry’s torso and neck by inches. Jack had run for over a full minute to reach the tree, yet now he stood amidst its roots and looked back, he saw he had covered a mere twenty feet. If Barry’s luck ran out, and the beacon could do no more to keep the monster at bay, Jack would have moments.
He had power, sure. But being handed a bazooka wasn’t any use when he had no idea how to use it. Maybe he could match Harper, in some way at least, but how to do that? He had no idea.
“Jack, hurry!” Barry bellowed, backing away a bounding step with each blow Harper unleashed. “I can’t hold him. Hurry!”
Harper let fly a sound not merely serpentine, but saurian and primal, caught between the hiss of an alligator and the burner of a hot-air balloon. He landed blows with his fists upon Barry’s forearms, uttering a booming roar with each word. “This—place—is—MINE!”
“Jack! Now!” As he spoke, Barry stumbled back, gasping, sent sprawling upon the floor. He scrabbled in the direction of the tree, avoiding being disembowelled only by rolling clumsily on his stomach. “NOW!”
Shaking, Jack returned his gaze to the tree. It wasn’t black, he noticed, nor obsidian, or even of the cavern’s crystal. It was just not, a tree-shaped hole in space. Yet when he put out his hands, braced for pain or death or worse, his palms touched cold, rough bark.
I have no damn idea what I’m doing…
… yet his body and mind operated independent of him. His arms stiffened to iron rods as current thrust into his body, and he became aware of another presence, something more than random chaotic power, something thinking, alive, distinctly female. Far more ancient than the squabbling demigods behind him; elemental, and angry, and afraid.
Something unrolled him laying him out flat and scrutinising him; some titanic, irresistible hand. At the same time his field of view expanded, the floor falling away and the crystal walls shooting back, plucking him from mere corporeality and lifting him to something else.
Somewhere far away, music played, ever shifting, soft and scratchy.
“What is this?” He no longer knew if he spoke aloud or in his mind—whether he still had a mouth, or indeed, a mind. He no longer cared.
The answer came from the deep feminine voice. “You should not be here.”
“No. No I shouldn’t. I should be at home nursing a hangover.”
A brief pause. “You should not be here.”
Jack let the words come, not resisting, just speaking, trusting. “I had to. You’re in danger.”
“I cannot be harmed.”
“But you can be used, can’t you?”
Silence.
Jack tried to look around, but there was nowhere to see, an infinite mash up of many places, what seemed like dozens of places all over the world. Together, they bent into a hyper-dimensional avatar of the tree itself. But as to where he, himself, stood… to think of it suddenly made no sense.
I’m nowhere.
“Everywhere is somewhere,” the voice answered.
A ringing echo punctured the din of eternal silence, that of two warring creatures. At a great distance, yet only feet away. Barry cried out, the naked pained sound of a brute shocked to feel true pain, like a grizzly bear stuck with a spear. Harper’s echoing laugh followed, high pitched and jeering.
Barry’s time was running out.
“He’s coming. Harper,” Jack said. “You know what he is, don’t you? What he wants?”
“I see everything. That is my purpose.”
“Help me stop him.”
“I can do nothing.”
“Then help me help you.”
“I can do nothing.”
“Then what good are you?” he yelled.
Silence.
Jack took a steadying breath, trying not to wonder if it was air he breathed, or nothingness. “The Web? All Where? Kaard? You know those words?”
The silence almost held, then the voice uttered, “Yes.”
“If that thing gets here, it’s all over, isn’t it?”
“The beginning of the end of a great age.”
For the first time Jack caught a glimmer of emotion in the voice, a fear as strong as that he had felt when he had put his hands on the bark. “You have to let me help you. Help me stop him.”
“I do not see you.”
“I’m here.”
“I do not see you.”
Jack tried to tear at his hair, but there was no hair to be gripped, nor hands with which to grip. Not here. “I don’t have time for riddles!”
The music played still, shifting away from formlessness toward an amalgamation of song lyrics and notes he recognised, dredging up long forgotten memories.
A hopelessness stole over him and he fell away from that voice, turning instead to images appearing all around him. His apartment, empty and bleak in semi darkness, the curtain pulled. All his things, his DVDs and books and video games. His awful mess of unwashed cups and dishes, opened packets of chips strewn on the floor.
Yesterday it had meant everything, his sanctuary from the world, where he had been able to find some peace. But now he saw it for what it was: empty and uncared for, the sad hovel of an owner desperate to escape it. Because that was the truth: he hadn’t ever really lived here, he had lived inside books, crawling into the pages to reach the part of himself that all this madness had finally released.
I don’t care about this place... This isn’t my home.
Had he ever really had a home?
Music again, this time distinct. The punk rock of his youth, then the coarse head-nodding metal of his emo years.
The picture changed, shifting, travelling. Passing a brick wall where a strange tea room had so briefly stood, the cordoned off street where Harper massacred the police. Faces watching, people who might have seen what had happened but had now forgotten, or perhaps never quite understood what they saw. The insanity of the last few days would forever be a smudge in the narrative of their lives, protecting them from the absurdity of something better off lost.
If they lived. If Jack didn’t fail.
Kat fired bursts around the corner, holding shadowed forms pinned down on the stairwell. Harper’s people. Converts in the employ of his vast empire. Street merchants, clerks, bankers. Hiding in plain sight.
Tears dripped from Kat’s nose, but she didn’t sob. Her teeth gritted and her eyes like twin pyres in the subway gloom, she held the station.
Jack reached out to her, ignoring the fact he had no arms here, needing to let her know that he saw her, that he was almost there. But as he did so he was whisked away, his sight expanding once more, multi-layered and elevated far above the ground.
It was like looking at all the feeds back at Kat’s town house all at once. The Beacons lay spread out before him, along with subtly concealed complexes built into mountainsides and beneath cities. The vaults belched slivers of black smoke, spilling from ragged tears in the ground nearby.
Kat’s people had done their work. The vaults were breached.
The music shifted once more: Arabic strings, eerie and smeared. The memory of buskers’ tunes from all the nights he had sat drunk on the last train home.
Around the Beacons’ bases, men and women stood in wide circles, hands linked together, their eyes closed. What had Harper told them? That they would be saved when the End came?
The End... It’s really here. One bad step, and I lose. We all lose. It all goes away.
“See me, you have to see me!”
Barry. Fighting for his world, for fallen Highcourt, for All Where. As Jack looked upon him, Barry felt Jack watching. It showed on his face, a flicker in his brow. Skidding back from Harper’s blows, he looked right at Jack, into him.
The defensive edge to his stance slackened in that moment, as though some revelation had come over him. He stood straighter, smiling. It’s on you, Jacky Boy.
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