by Fawver, Kurt
“I waited only five years before Thalak came. With its entrance into our world came my own destiny. I knew what I had to do. I had to sail into the ocean and meet the great thing.
“But shaking hands with Thalak is easier said than done.
“Using the unique skill set that comes with carrying a gestational god, I escaped concentration zone roundups in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, then made my way east. For months, I wandered the desolate, uninhabited regions of the Mid-Atlantic. Alone and frequently near starvation for lack of survival skills, I hiked up and down the coast, scouring docks and harbors for a boat I could steal. But every one had gone missing. I hadn’t counted on the Order confiscating or destroying all seaworthy vessels.
“So I improvised. I broke into the Baltimore CZ, collected some supplies, and put on a show in front of the Hall of the Order. I set up hundreds of candles in a series of concentric semicircles—the chevron of the Voidists—and lit them with Void flame. I bellowed a few nonsense words, held my hands aloft, and, before a crowd could even form to witness the spectacle, bishops rushed outside and began to stomp out my meaningless ceremony.
“However, the candles, as I said, burned with Void flame—a flicker of the Void itself—so when the first several bishops kicked them over and tried to crush them underfoot, those bishops evaporated into the Void, their every particle dissolving to waveform and returning to the primeval gulf.
“Quickly enough, the bishops realized they couldn’t possibly quench the fires. But they didn’t have to. My purpose fulfilled, my crime committed, I called back the flame. As I’d hoped, they arrested me, tried me for sacrilege—incidentally, a sin greater than murder in the sight of the Thalic Order—and sent me out here, on the tub, where I needed to be all along.
“Now here I am, with you gentlemen, gliding on toward the end of the world. Or, should I say, a better end of the world.”
Curry cupped the end of the candle in one hand and its wick exploded in a burst of dancing obsidian. He held the candle out to Hickson and Castro.
“And, since we’ve all become so close, let me ask: would either of you would you care to join me in my task?”
Castro rose, wavered on his feet, and stumbled to Curry. He stared into the Void at the tip of the candle, watched it bend and contort, sucking up minuscule bits of reality.
He snorted.
“Your god is more nothing. Don’t you see? This,” he shook his hunk of bread at Curry, “is all there is. We already live in the end of the world, and this god,” he clenched at the bread, “is all I need.”
Curry shrugged and, with a quick stab, touched the Void flame to Castro’s bread. Instantly, it vanished.
Castro looked, horrified, on his sweaty palm. He slumped to his knees and balled his hand into a fist.
“No,” he whispered, eyes glazed.
Curry smiled.
“Yes.”
“No,” Castro again whispered. “No. No. No.”
He began to beat his chest with his emptied fist, chanting his mantra all the while.
Curry squatted beside Castro and nodded.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Yes. Yes. There are always bigger gods, bigger deaths, bigger ends to all things. There is no release. Even now, I’m sure that some greater presence is plotting the demise of the Void. But what that thing is and what its purpose might be, I can’t possibly imagine. None of us can. There are realities atop realities, existences atop existences, schemes atop schemes. To claim that we puny humans are the height of all intelligence and knowing, all being and doing, is the height of hubris, my friend. Your ignorant disbelief is as foolhardy as your ignorant faith once was.”
Curry grabbed Castro’s wrist mid-strike and held it immobile.
“And still, Gravebaker, I ask: would you care to join me? Would you leave your bread behind?”
Castro wrenched free of Curry’s grip and continued to pound his chest, a trickle of “No” dribbling from his lips. He began to rock back and forth, transfixed by his own denial.
“A mercy, then,” Curry sighed and touched the flame to Castro’s cheek. The baker winked away, into uncertainty.
Hickson watched from his side of the tub. He reached down, picked up his cleaver, and twirled it between his fingers. He turned and surveyed the ocean.
The crimson line on the horizon had expanded. It flooded the firmament. Pillar-like tendrils easily the size and girth of skyscrapers whipped up from the mass. They seemed to stretch to the sun and back.
Hickson watched them snap and wave their dire greetings, their hateful goodbyes. One of those tendrils had wrapped around his daughter and pulled her from a tub just like the one he rode. One of those monstrous flagella had crushed the emerald life from her eyes and absorbed her childish hope.
Across the water, in other tubs, in every known language, men, women, and children sent up rage-scorched shouts and futile screams.
“Same offer to you, Mr. Butcher,” Curry said, somewhere behind him.
“What would be the point?” Hickson asked, still watching the Thalic dawn.
Curry drifted closer.
“Immortality. And the opportunity to explore that ultimate of all questions: ‘Why?’ ”
“Would I ever be with them again?”
Silence.
Silence.
Absolute, stark silence.
Not even the shriek of the tub-bound multitudes found purchase within its sphere.
Hickson shook his head.
“Immortality. Alone. It’s not worth it. I never wanted to live forever. I just wanted to live long and well and happy. I wanted to live to see my wife’s hair turn silver beneath my hand. I wanted to live to see the nervous love in my daughter’s smile as I walked her down the aisle on her wedding day. Living forever isn’t worth anything to me if I have nothing to fill that life with.”
Somehow, Curry had slipped his shackles and was beside Hickson. He patted the butcher’s shoulder. “I suppose it’s possible that something of them could be . . . reformed.”
Hickson ran a hand over his face, wiping away years of grief. Beneath, he found a new man.
“No,” he said, shrugging off Curry’s consolation. “I don’t want cheap substitutes—of my wife or my daughter or my life. And I couldn’t care less about all your whys. My wife and my daughter are gone. You and your god can’t do anything about it. And neither can I. What you’re offering is . . . inhuman. I don’t want any part of it. So if you’re going to take me, take me. Send me to this Void. Send me to my family . . . whatever’s left of them.”
He threw his cleaver into the sea and held out his open hands to the stale, salty air.
Curry snapped the candle up, under Hickson’s chin. The flame twitched just below the butcher’s stubbly beard.
“You understand, of course,” Curry said, “that some battles are worth fighting forever and some surrenders aren’t surrenders at all.”
Hickson stared into Curry’s eyes. The distinction between pupil and iris had disintegrated; it was simply all one darkness, one interminable possibility.
Hickson smiled. “That’s why I have to go to them, even if it’s only as a thought or a dream.”
Curry nodded slowly and raised the candle.
Hickson lowered his head and was gone.
Then, as so often before, as always, Curry floated alone.
He strode to the prow of the tub and sat cross-legged upon it.
He wondered what it might be like to hold convictions as dearly as the baker. He wondered what it might be like to love and be loved as fiercely as the butcher. He wondered what it might be like to have not been himself.
And he floated on, still alone, still accepting, still searching, to the end of the universe.
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Kurt Fawver lives in that dark land of swamps and simulacra known as Florida, but is originally from the Pennsylvanian wasteland that lies between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. When he's not writing nightmarish arcana, he's ei
ther teaching college students the joys of reading Clive Barker's Books of Blood or trying to corral two semi-feral chihuahuas with his ever-patient wife. Kurt owns a Ph.D. in literature, but won't require that you call him "doctor" unless you're a complete douchebag or an unrepentant philistine. His favorite cryptid is the Mongolian death worm and his favorite zombie movie is Pontypool. [CLICK ANYWHERE ABOVE FOR THE LATEST INFO]
Carrion House
Luke Spooner currently lives and works in the South of England. Having recently graduated from the University of Portsmouth with a first class degree, he is now a full time illustrator for just about any project that piques his interest. Despite regular forays into children's books and fairy tales, his true love is devoted to anything macabre, melancholy, or dark in nature. He believes that the job of putting someone else’s words into a visual form, to accompany and support their text, is a massive responsibility as well as being something he truly treasures.
CarrionHouse.com
[CLICK ANYWHERE ABOVE FOR THE LATEST INFO]
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