Barry, Kaard, the Scot-but-not, smiled right until Harper’s clawed arm sank through the oxblood leather over his back, and plunged into his torso. Barry’s eyes bulged in their sockets, his mouth falling open in a blank gape. A terrible tearing sound came from inside him and he jerked as Harper skipped almost daintily up to stand at his back, canines working in a glistening grin.
“No!” Jack struggled to get back, to leave this non place and return. Screw the universe.
But it was like trying to move an amputated arm. He was trapped. He could only watch.
Harper whispered in Barry’s ear, something so quiet Jack knew he shouldn’t have been able to hear. But he heard very well. “Did you tell the boy what you tell them all? That we don’t die? That we live forever?”
Another minute tug, and a tiny gurgle whistled from Barry’s throat.
“I bet they all believed you, even this one. He’s a bright spark. Power like that will come in handy. I’ll enjoy taking him apart piece by piece.” Harper peered over Barry’s shoulder to look Jack in the eye. Black liquid dribbled from Barry’s lips. Harper smiled. “We live forever, huh? Let’s see what happens to an immortal when you take away his heart.”
With a ruthless lunge, Harper tore his arm back, coming out glistening red and black. Barry fell straight forward, a lifeless mass, slamming full length upon the crystal floor.
Jack felt him go. The last transmission he got from Barry almost destroyed him.
I’m afraid.
Everything faded, a grey curtain cascading down from the heavens. Barry’s prone body, lying in a pool of spreading black tar on the crystal ground, sank into a grim fuzzy blankness.
It took everything Jack had to resist, and no small part wanted to surrender and go to that blissful nothing.
But Barry’s last thought refused to fade like the rest, echoing down along with him. I’m afraid. I’m afraid. I’m afraid.
Each iteration brought a gnawing in Jack’s heart ever more bitter, and with it, the realisation that he was gone. The Scot-but-not, his captor, his nuisance, his comrade and protector, was gone.
Jack alone remained against the monster.
“No!” he grated, pulling himself back. Fear threatened to overwhelm him if he delayed, but he would not, could not. With an internal bellow he threw everything he had into the darkness.
See me. See me. SEE ME!
Some lumbering attention high above his perception shifted, a vast eye turning on him.
The music changed again. Familiar now, familiar enough to pull cords in his chest. Billie Holiday, My Man, so smooth and sweet that his mother appeared before him as though she had stepped from the ether in flesh and blood. This was her song, had always been her song. She had danced to this while doing the housework when Jack had been a young boy—young enough that his memory’s perspective was only two feet off the ground.
The great eye blinked, watching. Jack felt it move over him, inside him, pulling out strings of memory and reading him like a book. All the while the music changed.
Since the madness had started, power had leaked from some hidden place within. By the time he hit the cavern floor, he could do things, things even Barry could not. Yet right now, pinned in place like an insect under a collector’s magnifying glass, he had never felt so powerless.
No, that’s a lie, he thought. He had felt like this, once. Another memory popped into his head. The summer of ’95, the year they moved to Minnesota. His first week at school had been hell, a maelstrom of taunting gaggles of kids, Chinese burns, and taking soccer balls to the head.
“Don’t give them anything to use,” his father had said from behind the morning newspaper. “Don’t stand out. Just fit in for once, won’t you, Jack? Try, at least, for your old man? Seeing you get your ass handed to you every week is giving me an ulcer.”
He had taken a great slurp of black coffee and the end of that little speech. Jack had sat across from him, nibbling his toast, nursing grazes from his latest pounding at the hands of Harry Bentmann’s gang. He remembered every detail, because the music now trickling from the ether was the very same record that had been playing on the radio. Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall.
Jack wondered if his father ever got the irony.
His mother stood at the counter, frying eggs. She had looked at him with a softness in her eyes he had never seen before or since, a moment when perhaps she showed a hidden part of herself underneath, wanting more for him. Her lips parted, then closed.
She never said anything.
Voices in the void. The whispers that had bound Harper, now speaking as one, screaming song titles seeded throughout his life: Blue Moon, Paradise City, I’m Alive, Suspicious Minds, Summertime!
Images came fast, rolling together like a spliced reel of film. Running from Harry and his gang, shielding a copy of Fahrenheit 451 from the eggs they pelted at him. All those nights hiding under the covers in a cloud of dragons and sorcery, while his friends tried for second base. Leaving Minnesota behind, stepping on the Greyhound to head out East.
See me! he screamed into the dark.
One Day I’ll Fly Away, I’m a Believer, I Will Survive!
All his life, it had been wrong. But now it was right.
A life spent living for one moment. And that moment was now.
He stared down a deep dark well at a small boy. Himself. His inner, real self, the over-imaginative little kid he had been in ’95, who he had so long tried to forget. In his palm, little Jack held a bob on a string, swinging back and forth. Hanging from the pendulum, a tiny black spider, spinning a delicate, intricate web.
SEE ME!
Swirling, tumbling, the whispers became a wail, stretched cackling undulating between pinhole squeak and leonine roar. “Hit the road, Jack—HAPPY JACK—Jack Daniels, if you please!—JUMPIN’ JACK FLASH!”
With a deafening whump, silence exploded into the void. Then, the deep voice spoke a final time. “I see you, Jack Shannon.”
A tug yanked at his spine, pulling him in a direction that human beings could not be pulled. Elation filled him.
I’ve done it!
Then another grip, cold and crushing, upon his wrist. Agony lanced up into his chest. Bones snapped. Then, Harper’s voice in his ear. “Yes, you have. Congratulations. Now let’s go for a ride together.”
A scream kicked up all around him, and Jack knew it was the tree. He had come so close, so very close. But things had just gone very, very wrong.
Nononononono!
But it was too late. Black and white exploded from the space between spaces, and Jack was torn, body and mind, somewhere altogether, elsewhere.
23
Reality itself fractured and Jack Shannon flew, through space beyond spaces. Bent through impossible angles and cast across a gulf that could not be traversed by any mortal in a million years, he flew. His screams warped, his body tortured by deathly cold, he fought a viscous struggle with the demon that had seized his arm.
As he and Harper tumbled and clawed at one another, lights screamed overhead. Stars, entire worlds complete with landmasses and oceans and clouds, glorious nebulae light-years across. Great multitudes passing in cascades so great they blurred into one continuous stream, all the while turning, rending.
“Stop it, stop it, take me back, let me go!”
Jack heard the voice only on the periphery of his perception. It took a moment to recognise that it was his own, the mindless bawling of a lost child.
The fireflies in the night whipped by only faster, a screeching hail of cosmic enormity so great that his mind simply gave up, ceased counting or even seeing. Jumbled sensory bilge passed before him in meaningless flux, faster and faster, until the lights finally grew farther apart, the screaming quieted, and Harper’s rattling breaths consumed the void.
Then, suddenly and absolutely, all was still, and at peace.
Frost covered Jack’s skin in a suit of snowflakes. His wrist wa
s whole, and Harper stood on the other side of the tree, which had appeared once more—a much smaller version of the black thing in the cavern, no larger than a Bonsai, made of a single piece of glowing purple crystal.
They observed one another, two entities with the fate of worlds in their hands. Harper wore none of his outer skin now. Before Jack stood a naked, milky-skinned creature akin to a deep-sea fish, an agent of the unbeing.
“So,” Harper said.
“So.”
A smile, perhaps. It was hard to tell. Harper no longer had lips. “How does it feel, to stand there and know all you can do is watch—”
“We blew the vaults.” Jack let his words work their way into the holes in Harper’s head that served as ears. The smarmy sneer vanished. Jack went on. “We took down your people at the Beacons, too. All that talk about your new world order? There won’t be anybody left. They’ll go along with the rest of us.”
Jack was already on the way to folding his arms in triumph when Harper started laughing.
“You have no idea what you’ve done, do you?” His laugh doubled when Jack failed to answer. “You have no idea where you’ve led me!”
Jack searched inside his head, trying to flex, to reach out to something, the tree, anything. But there was nothing here, nothing to help him. He was on his own.
“I have power that makes the fools of your world quake in their little cotton socks,” Harper hissed, taking a single step to the side. Jack took a counter step in the opposite direction. “But you… you’re one in an age. I could never get to this place alone. I can’t thank you enough for bringing me here.”
Jack’s knees tried to buckle. Only by thinking of Kat’s tear-stained face, and Barry’s lifeless corpse, did he keep standing. He and Harper circled one another, one foot passing over the other.
“I’ll stop you. You said it yourself, I have the power.” He glanced at the tree. “I won’t let you do this.”
Harper tittered, feinting a little to the right, laughing with spite when Jack jumped. “You don’t have that kind of power.” He moved again, and Jack was ready for another feint, but this time Harper’s body became a blur. Like liquid poured from a glass, he rushed around the tree in a smear of limbs and appeared snarling, a vision of hell-fire, in front of Jack’s face. “This is my power.” His hand closed over Jack’s throat, and tore him towards the tree.
Jack gargled. There was no pain here, not in this place, but he felt himself grow fainter, dim just like Barry had done. The throbbing little crystal tree floated closer despite his struggling, so pathetic and futile against the unbreakable clamp around his neck.
“Now, it’s time to do what you were made for: serve my master.” Harper paused, considering playfully, and turned Jack’s head to face him. “Our master. Isn’t that right?” He nodded Jack’s head and the two of them were joined in horrific pantomime, puppet and puppeteer; a sad show on the edge of the universe.
I’m totally alone, now.
Harper arched an eyebrow, hearing every note. “Yes. You are.” He turned them both back to the tree. “Now let’s clean up that nasty infestation we have back home. Too many people, tsk tsk tsk. It just won’t do.”
He gripped Jack’s hand and forced it out in front of them.
Jack struggled desperately, and for a while he was indeed able to resist, a fact that caused Harper to snarl with unfettered fury, all his suave charm stripped away along with his pretty mask. They wobbled precariously, joined like lovers, hands clasped, reaching and leaning.
But there was no stopping it. Inexorably, his fingertips inched down onto the sparkling branches.
Jack shook his head. “No, I don’t understand. Why me? Tell me. You owe me that!”
“Uh huh. And this is the part where you stall me, and I tell you my evil plans until you find a way out. Sorry, kid. The real world doesn’t play nice.”
Jack’s hand touched the tree.
Cold more intense than any flame lanced up his arm, filling his body. With it came knowledge, the whole story, unveiled and bare, laid out like a book. A place of eternal darkness lay spread before him, the source of all the blackness of All Where. Somewhere nearby, something swung back and forth, back and forth, a steady rhythm driving every clock’s gear wheel, every moment that ever was.
Something lurked in this space, filling it yet lost amongst it, imprisoned in this placeless nothing for so long that even divine things of purity and light had become tyrannical, twisted, and insane—even angels.
“See your people’s new home,” Harper said joyously. “My master has held the pendulum’s swing for far too long. Now its burden will be theirs, slaves to its weight for all time.”
“This is where we’re going, where you’re sending us all.”
“Sorry, boy, there was never any stopping me.”
Jack shook his head, only a little at first but then vehemently, enough to jar them both. “No. You’re a maggot.” He saw so far, finally saw the forces at play; like the vast eye that had turned on him, he felt the attentions of entities that dwarfed the stars turn upon him. “You’re nothing. That’s why you could only tip the scales and kill my world.”
Harper grunted, close at Jack’s shoulder. “I am doing this, you hear? I am doing this to you and everyone you ever met. I am taking everything, from all of you.” A hungry growl rattled deep in his chest. “And with your help, now I can do so much more. Like you say, before I could only tip the scales. With you, I can cut out the middle man. I’ll tear it all down at once.”
Jack knew it could happen. He had that power inside him. If Harper had brought the End down over the Earth, it would have destabilised things, thrown out of balance a precarious peace.
But Jack’s connection to the Web had taken him to this place, a place nobody should ever be able to get to. And Harper had followed. That meant all bets were off. None of the rules applied. The slide that might have been started by Harper’s work would become a crashing cascade.
The entire Web, all places, all times, All Where, would fall.
Then Jack was laughing. “No. No, you’re nothing. They’ll cast you aside as soon as your work is done.”
He had eyes only for the tree. Its voice was mute here, but he heard it all the same. It spoke to him through the light. There was a chance. But it meant big sacrifices.
The tree’s radiance throbbed ever more powerful, leeching into Jack’s flesh, consuming it. His arm had started to crystallise, becoming one with the tree. And as it did so, it whispered to him, and he knew what he had to do.
“I see now,” he said, knowing that nobody heard him. It didn’t matter. He said it anyway. Countless lives rode on these moments, and though nobody would ever know what happened here, it was right that somebody had spoken.
Harper flinched back from the encroaching crystal, almost losing hold of Jack. He hissed.
Jack laughed harshly in his face. “I see you.” He nodded to the tree. “We both see you very well.” He leaned close to a set of teeth that could have stripped the meat from his bones in a flash, and said, “I see your fear.”
Harper didn’t move. “Enough of this. Enough!” He took hold of Jack harder, pressing Jack’s hand back down. “Now you realise what you are,” he whispered. “Congratulations, boy, you get to end not just your own world, but all worlds.”
Jack waited.
Barry was wrong. It was never about winning or saving the world. It was bigger than that.
“I’m sorry for what you are,” Jack said at the last moment before the crystalline growths reached Harper’s fingertips. Then the creature squealed, smoke rising before them, the crystal shrinking back from him like water around a rock.
“What is this?” he screeched.
“You didn’t know when you followed me, did you?”
Shock beamed out from those cold beady eyes.
“The reason you could never get to this place is that you can’t touch it directly, not wit
hout it destroying you.”
Harper jerked fitfully beside him. “No, no!”
Jack held them. Harper had pulled him within reach of the tree like a rag doll, but now the balance of power shifted. He knew now, and with knowledge came power. Coupled with the creature’s very mortal fear, he held their hands but inches from the crystal.
“I see it all, now.”
“Let me go!”
Jack’s mind shimmered with untold leagues of images, each as clear as the devil beside him.
All across the world, people woke or turned in, worked in fields and laughed on beaches, screamed and cried, fought and died, were born and made love, read and imagined, destroyed and created. They would never see it coming.
It was he who would make it happen, to save countless more. His world was doomed either way. But, somewhere, things would go on.
Harper fought like a wild animal, clawing and biting and spitting. But not one blow made a mark. “What are you doing?”
“What I’m meant to.”
“It’ll destroy us both, fool!”
“I know.”
Jack’s fingers drifted closer, stopped and trembled, then approached once more. The battle for entire worlds, concentrated through a single hand.
Harper’s breaths came ragged and feral in his ear. “You cannot do this. You cannot. I forbid it.” The voice grew enormous, lost between the nasal protests of a toddler, and hurricane gales. “I was young when the first slime crawled from the oceans. I commanded legions of shadow. You will not be the end of me. I FORBID IT. I COMMAND YOU!”
Jack smiled, and wishing upon all the people about to lose their lives, looked into Harper’s eyes. “Go fuck yourself.”
His fingertips touched the crystal. “Forgive me,” he whispered.
Then it all went away.
24
The same scream that had wailed from the radio blared from the ether, pressing in so hard Jack was sure his eardrums would perforate. But he couldn’t move, held frozen in place, his body one with the crystal.
Harper screamed, a naked high-pitched sound that would never end. His pale skin fell away, exposing muscle and tendon, steaming and blackening as the crystal spread, spinning him all the while, combusted dust drifting up, twirling and vanishing.
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