Even in my partial stupor, I had enough sense to wonder why she would tell me all of this. I was beyond questioning the reality of incredible things at this point, but I was troubled by her willingness to share such things with a stranger. Unless… “You don’t plan on letting me leave, do you?”
Her smiled widened, reminding me of an old gray wolf that used to prowl around my parents’ farm when I was a boy. My father would hunt it, but always without success, and I remember one time it stood watching us from the edge of the woods, regarding us with a breed of indifferent contempt as my father fruitlessly rushed inside for his rifle. Thinking back on it now, I think that wolf was smiling, perhaps even laughing at us. It understood a terrible truth that we were still learning.
You will never beat me. I will come when you don’t expect it and will always know your tricks better than you know yourself. You should give up. You should give up. You should…
”Well, I plan on making it so you don’t want to leave, though I suppose that’s a thin distinction to you at this point. I want you to stay and make this place your home. I want your help exploring all the many places I have found and will find. The workers I have here…they lack the spark I need. But you…I think you could be something very special.”
****
The journal entry ended there except for a short postscript that simply said, “When you see her, go with her.” I wasn’t sure who “her” was, but the idea that it might be Angelica Lemark filled my stomach with a queasy, fluttering fear.
And while I didn’t recall those last passages I had read from my own past memory, I did feel I was sharing some of the brain fog he had described. I have heard that some animals, when heading toward their own death and destruction, enter into an almost euphoric state of calm. The lemming tumbling toward the rocks, the mantis feeling the pressure of its deadly lover’s embrace—did they feel fear? Or a sense of rightness? A conviction that they weren’t being obliterated by bad luck or the ill will of others, but were instead playing their part in the grand design of some larger plan?
I stumbled from the train station toward the taxi stand, but was only halfway across the lot when I saw the older woman standing near the taxis watching me. My breath caught in my chest at the sight of her. She was in her fifties now, but still so beautiful that it made my heart hurt. My Alena, here after all this time.
I couldn’t say if my fog lifted or just crystalized, but I felt clear-headed and strong as I rushed toward her, sweeping her up in a fierce hug. She laughed at that, but I could feel tension in her too, so after a moment I released her and stepped back.
“I’m sorry…But it is you, isn’t it?”
She nodded, tears shining in her eyes as she smiled. “It is. I was on the train as well, but I wanted you to have time to read the pages before we met. We want you to understand as much as you can before you hear the last of it. Did you read it all?”
I frowned. “I did, but I don’t know what any of it means…I just…my God, I must be going crazy. I remember you, remember loving you so much, but I also remember my other life in America. How is any of this possible?”
Alena reached out and touched my cheek tenderly, her joy seeming to give way to an abiding sadness. “It is better for him to explain it to you. It is not my story to tell. Come, I have a car nearby.”
****
We traveled the few miles to the town of Pripyat, and even at a distance I was amazed by the juxtaposition of the town’s ruins with the trappings of tourism. Buses, hostels, and even a few spots selling snacks and souvenirs. It felt like watching a party in a graveyard.
I guess in some ways, that’s exactly what it was.
But soon enough we were turning away from the town and heading into the forest between Pripyat and the plant. I could already see security blocking the way a few hundred yards ahead, but before long Alena was pulling down into the trees with the surefootedness of long-developed habit. She gave me a quick smile and said we had to walk from there so the car wouldn’t get stuck.
Before long we were in a clearing, and in the center of the clearing was the ventilation pipe that Alexi…that I…had written about. I felt only dim surprise when Alena went to it and opened it easily. Within moments, without any words between us, I was following my lost love down into the dark.
The tunnel was nearly pitch black, but when she turned on a flashlight, I saw it was also surprisingly clean and ordinary-looking. I wanted to ask so many questions, but something held my tongue. I felt as though I was in a dream and the wrong word or action might break the spell. And although I was afraid of what was to come, I was more afraid of waking back up in my old life with all that had occurred having been wiped away. I didn’t know if that made me crazy or a fool, and frankly I didn’t care. I knew the path I was on was the right path, the important path, and I was going to see it through.
Just then, the monster stepped out onto that path.
It was just as the journal described, just as I remembered it—tall and glistening yellow, with flesh stretched painfully and filled with gaping holes that showed the black meat restlessly stirring in its chest. And its eyes…its terrible purple eyes. I recognized those eyes, and that recognition filled me with a kind of terror I had never known before. Perhaps it was similar to the terrible realization of the lemming—or the man—as he plummets to his death: there are some things you can’t take back.
I wanted to take it all back as I looked into those eyes, those damned familiar eyes. And then the monster spoke with a deep voice that was coarse but intelligent.
“Hello Brian. Or do you prefer Alexi? I have so little use for names now, it is hard for me to decide.”
I swallowed, my fear of the monster having been wholly subsumed by what the monster seemed to represent. The inevitability of my own doomed past and future.
“You’re…you’re me, aren’t you?”
The thing made a rough, rasping noise that might have been a laugh. “You’re smarter than I am…or is that even possible? I don’t know. I know too much and too little now, I suppose.” It swung its head up and down in an approximation of a nod. “But yes. I am you and you are me, after a fashion.”
I took a step forward, needing to know it all now, needing it to be over. I felt like a man who wanted to vomit just so the pain and pressure would stop building, even if only for a short while. “How is any of this true?”
And then the monster told me.
****
Angelica called them “delves”—deep excursions into the multitude of worlds that make up what she calls “The Incarnata”. I spent over a decade conducting delves for her, which I soon learned largely meant scouting out places that she could easily exploit in some fashion. It was dangerous and terrifying work, at least at first, but I was almost fully under her spell by that point, and ashamed as I am to admit it, I enjoyed much of the work even from the start.
The Incarnata is a place formed from ideas and beliefs and shaped by will and desire. The thousands or millions of worlds that live within it are all interconnected and constantly changing with the ever-shifting tides of its inhabitants’ individual and collective thoughts and passions. It literally is, in many ways, a dreamland, though it would be a mistake to think that it was overly-chaotic or lacking in substance. To the contrary, what happens there is very real, and much of that power can and does bleed over into our own world as well.
It is also a very dangerous place, particularly for visitors. Angelica is unique in that, for whatever reason, nothing touches her there for good or ill. For all her candidness with me on many matters, she never liked talking about that particular topic, either because she didn’t know herself why nothing could affect her or because she was protective of her greatest strength.
Because Angelica, in her own calculating way, is a great conqueror. Between her immunity to most opposition in Incarnata and her ability to bend others to her will, she has subjugated several worlds there and enslaved entire groups. She sees them all
as monsters, you see. As lesser than her and thus only worth whatever use they have for her greater design. For many years, I was a part of that design.
The risk to Angelica in Incarnata is typically minimal, but her time is limited and her reputation precedes her there. It was much easier to send me in her stead. First as an explorer, then as a spy, and eventually, as a monster to frighten other monsters.
For I don’t have any immunity to that place, and there are many places there that can…infect you. Change you. And then there is the fact that you can alter yourself there as well. The more betrayals and atrocities I participated in, the more I hated myself and what I was becoming. But I never stopped, never refused to do my part for my queen, and with each trip I would come back more warped and twisted in mind and body and soul, growing closer to the abomination you see before you now.
My grandmother…our grandmother…always used to say, “If you run with wolves, you learn to howl.” I thought of that many times as I reflected on what I had become. A creature that was very powerful and knowledgeable, but also very cruel and widely feared even among fearsome beings. It was during one of these periods of introspection and self-loathing that I began to formulate a plan.
I couldn’t kill myself—Angelica had too strong a hold on me for that—but perhaps I could kill an earlier version of myself. Time and some aspects of reality had become much more…fluid and exploitable for me over the years, and I knew it was possible for me to go back along my own timeline to before I found the Bowl.
So that is exactly what I did. In the original timeline of events, I never saw “the monster” in the woods. The killings and such happened, as well as the fake meltdown to cover-up the deaths, but they were all related to something else that had escaped the hotel through the Bowl, not me coming back to kill my earlier self. When I originally fell into the Bowl, I was trying to get away from the guard that had stabbed me, but without any intervention from my monstrous future self.
When I came back to 1986, I found my younger self with the hunting party, and I killed those men—men who I had once known and called friends, without hesitation or pity. The only effect their deaths had upon me was to further demonstrate what a despicable monster I had become. So I approached the younger Alexi with every intention of ending his life before he could become the monster that I am.
But then I found I couldn’t. Whatever magic Angelica has, it had found its way deep into my bones. So deep in fact, that I couldn’t do harm to my past self any more than I could to my own body. I had a moment of panic, but I’ve grown exceedingly clever in my own terrible way, and I quickly saw another solution.
When I licked Alexi, I split him in two. Half would stay as he was, following the unassailable path that would lead to a version of me. The other half would become Brian Favors—an infant orphan soon found in another part of the world. My hope at the time was that, at the very least, I would be sparing some portion of my soul from rotting under Angelica’s gaze.
And it worked, after a fashion. I watched the part of me that was still in Pripyat over the next few days, even protecting him from the guard at the end. I would like to say that was due to Angelica’s bewitchment, but I don’t know that it was. Even after all my efforts to right my wrongs, I am fearful and selfish, and I know I have become far more like Angelica than I care to admit.
But at least there was you. You were living a good life and seemed to be a good person the few times I got to check up on you. But I had to be very careful. You were my one secret from Angelica for the longest time. And then I had another.
A few years ago I managed to trick her. Trap her deep within one of the darkest recesses of Incarnata. It freed me and many others from being under her will, and allowed me to finally leave the hotel once and for all. I returned here, to the only true home I had ever known.
In the years since the Chernobyl Plant incident, the Bowl isn’t visited as much anymore. It is guarded, but never studied or approached more than a handful of times a year. Most of the tunnels connecting its cave to the outside world have been filled with cement, and the few places like this that are left are largely forgotten by the outside world.
I am part of the reason for the forgetting. I am not seen unless I mean to be seen, and I have made it so people do not remember the Bowl much, if at all. My original plan was to just guard the Bowl myself and stay in exile until this unnatural form finally died.
And then one day I heard Alena praying.
She had been evacuated back in 1986, and once the area had been cleared for visitors again, she began making yearly trips back to Pripyat. In part, to visit all that had been lost. In part, to look for me, despite what logic and her worried family kept telling her.
It was on one of these trips that she found her way to the strange ventilation pipe in the clearing above us. She spoke to it like it was my gravestone, telling it how much she still loved me, but she needed to accept I was gone and finally move on. The miracle of hearing her voice joined with my terror at her never coming back, and before I had time to reconsider, I showed myself. It was a terrible ordeal, but not in the way I had anticipated.
For she had found my first journal, and when I changed the past, I had changed the journal as well. So now she remembered reading about how I had encountered the monster and what it looked like. Rather than running from me in fear, she railed against me, demanding to know what I had done with Alexi. It was only when she stopped to look into my eyes and hear me speak that she realized the horrible truth.
Somehow, through some miraculous love that I don’t deserve, she has come back to me frequently in the years since. I was more than content with the time she could give, and for a time I thought to live out this part of my life in peaceful solitude while comforted by the life you had so far away from all this death and sorrow.
But then I began to feel a troubled stirring in the depths of my bones. She is growing stronger again, somehow, in the depths of Incarnata. I don’t know if she is free yet, but if not, it won’t be long. And despite my best intentions and worst fears, I won’t be able to resist her call when it comes.
That is why I had Alena send you my journal. That is why I had her deliver my account of my introduction to Angelica and the Imago Hotel. I needed you to remember more, to understand more, so you will not refuse what I have to ask of you.
****
I swallowed, my tongue thick and numb in my mouth. I understood now, and I even believed, but I wasn’t sure what I was willing to accept. I was created as an offshoot of a Russian guy by the reality-warping future monster version of the same man? What the actual fuck?
Not knowing what to say, I just nodded.
The monster swallowed, its slick, bulging gorge rising and falling twice as it struggled to meet my gaze. Its next words were almost too quiet to hear.
“I need you to go with me to the Bowl. It is empty now, so there is no risk of going to the hotel or anywhere else. But it is the only place close by where I think this will work. Once we are inside, with my help, I need you to consume me. Literally eat my body from start to finish. It will not be as long or as daunting a task as you might think. I can ease the work of it greatly, at least until the last. But it is the only way I can fathom that might finally bring an end to me while also saving you and Alena.”
I shook my head. “What…how does any of this make sense? How is me eating you going to help anything? Why can’t I just stab or shoot you or something?”
Its large eyes grew sadder, and I knew it hated what it was asking of me. I felt a pang of sympathy for it. I think this part of Alexi was very well practiced in hating itself.
“It isn’t an act of killing. It is an act of consuming. Absorbing. I will still be in you, after a fashion, but this identity, this will, all of that will be ended. You can go on living your life and making your own choices, no longer bound to my mistakes or Angelica.”
I tried to find a kind way to ask the next part, but any nuance had fled from me somewhere
between Kiev and Pripyat. “Will I become a monster like you?”
Another rough laugh. “No. At least I don’t think so. But if you learn any lesson from this, let it be this one. I am a monster because of what I have done and let happen, not because of how I appear. Some of the best and brightest souls I have ever met were in Incarnata, and yet many would call that place a land of terror and monsters. As for what you will become? Like all of us, that is ultimately up to you.”
****
The Bowl was smaller than I remembered, though perhaps that was merely because I was sharing it now. Alena had said her tearful good-byes to my other self before it climbed into the Bowl beside me, and she called to me that she would be waiting outside near the car when I was finished. I wanted to ask her to stay, but I knew it was a selfish impulse, and so I just told her to be careful as she went.
I looked into those eyes one last time and asked if it…if he, was sure this is what he wanted. He said it was, and reaching down he plucked off a piece of his flesh as though it were a wad of cotton candy. He offered it to me, and I ate it down with little trouble. I remember as a kid going to a science museum in Kentucky. They had a machine that pumped out a thick fog, and before the teacher came and stopped me, I stood near it and bit at the mist that came pouring out. That was what this was like. Eating something that was next-door to nothing.
At the end, all that was left was a small and hardened coal that I think had once been his heart. This part had more weight and texture, and as I swallowed down the last of it, I gagged a little at the greasy residue it left behind. I waited a second, tensing for some change, but felt none. All things considered, I actually felt pretty good.
Not wanting to press my luck, I scrabbled back out of the Bowl of Pripyat and went up to find Alena waiting. As we traveled away from that doomed town, I found myself feeling a sense of hope I hadn’t had in some time. I worried about what he had said about Angelica returning, about what future dangers the Bowl might pose, but those were concerns for another time. Perhaps for other people.
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