by Micah Thomas
Whatever secret agenda Black Star has, once shit goes down, it’ll be our choice and they know it. She fucking knows it and if we choose to say fuck them, that’s what we will do. Thelon pushed this thought towards Cassie and Henry as hard as he could.
We hear you loud and clear, Thelon.
Cynthia nodded. “We will guide you, but the rest will be on you. What you see—more accurately, what you perceive—will be very strange, but again, you will be lucid. We only have the one shot, so you must remember the objective is to close the door.”
Thelon said, “But the EP is like in NYC and we’re in bufu Egypt.”
“Distance like that doesn’t matter at all,” Cynthia explained. “You will have help, but trust the process. There is a lock out there, and you three are the key.”
A collective stillness fell upon them. No thoughts now, just doing and breathing. It was time.
Cynthia and Lena brought in fresh clothes—the white linen garb of the commune. Though awkward, they stayed in the sitting room to dress.
Then, Lena brought out the drugs. “This will be much more potent than last night. Do you understand and accept this sacrament?”
Rather than science fiction evoking vials, a muddy mulch in a wooden cup was passed around and they all took a sip.
Another member of Black Star opened the door from the outside and led a processional, like that of a wedding, in the candle-lined march through the rain and wind of Henry, Cassie, and Thelon out the back and along the path to the mound. Their march split off as they passed the sweat lodges, Black Star old people filtering into the smoky, steamy heat.
Through a grassy tunnel, they walked into the belly of the earth to the thrum of a delta beat. The dirt, warm on their feet as they entered a great round room, had been dug out centuries ago for a purpose none present could guess. The three of them followed, shepherded to the center of the room, and lanterns placed at the far points cast low light in smeary globs of red brown hues. Neither Cynthia nor Lena had entered with them, and after their unnamed guide exited, they were alone.
“I hope they don’t plan on sacrificing us,” Henry said, but with a smile.
“Me, too, especially because I’m not a virgin.”
“You’re not? What the hell, Cassie?”
“Guys,” Thelon said, aiming for seriousness.
“Yes, Dad?” Cassie mocked.
“I love you,” Thelon said. “I love you both.”
“Oooh, that’s sweet. We love you, too.” Cassie said with a smile.
Henry laughed. “I think we’re going to die.”
Cassie said, “Everybody dies.”
Thelon faced the entrance and saw someone new enter as the drug took hold of him. The grandfatherly black man—Black Santa—was barefooted, loose white linen clothes wet from the rain. There was more gray in his hair and beard than black. Thelon wanted to cough, to alert his friends that someone had joined them—their guide—but his throat didn’t work anymore.
The room filled with a tremendous pressure which started compressing Thelon and the whole room downward. The entrance was lost above them, some fifty feet and climbing as the floor continued to drop with this massive weight upon it.
The weight clamped onto Thelon’s head, squeezed his spine as he sat, and he wanted to lie down. He swiveled his eyes to Henry and Cassie and saw they already had keeled over, so his body joined theirs in a circle.
Are you still there?
Yes.
Are you both okay?
We don’t know.
I’m scared.
So am I.
So are we.
We are falling.
We are falling.
We are falling.
CHAPTER SEVEN
GONE. THEY GONE. We gone. Pretention gone. Barriers gone. Down the hole and through. A strange world buttonholed. Fertilize it with the rotting bodies of dead Gods. Something went wrong with the world. Live long enough to see the beauty go out of it. Close your gap. Magic was reduced to metaphor to protect you. Everyone is selling something. Dead things where God used to be. Hesperus is Phosphorus. We crawl beneath the dark sky. Everything ends in time.
One of them said, “Oh, shit.”
Thelon felt Cassie’s mind on top of his. Then, like his own thoughts, he knew Henry spoke to him, too. A fast train of words slipped together in an apology of the babies they had/hadn’t had together.
Thelon said, “Wait. You killed me too many times now. Stop,” but it wasn’t his friends who had shed his blood. The not him, the not I—the Nestor—had done it, and it didn’t matter if his friends knew anymore. The reclaimed memories of the Thelonious who was not T nor Thelon, but the one Nestor had slain over and over, using his death to head hop to each timeline.
Then, they merged, a three-headed angel. All their instances at once. Henry, Cassie, and Thelon together exclaimed, “No!” and stopped the spinning.
“I need a minute to breathe,” Thelon said, himself distinct. They floated head to toe, in fetal curls.
From their lungs and lips came satisfied sighs. Unhurried stillness. Contentment. Loose limbs. No need filled the silence held by their breathing as they descended.
Down. They perceived the motion of the floor beneath them, falling and them falling with it at tremendous speed. They were sinking deep into the earth, further than any shaft had ever drilled. Their bodies rose to a seated position again and they faced each other in the circle.
They saw one another as figures, illuminated and surrounded by perfect blackness as they plummeted.
Henry watched Cassie’s hair dance upwards, away from her face in the wind.
Thelon wept freely, tears and snot streaming flowing off his eyebrows.
Cassie loved them both and herself.
They weren’t in Illinois anymore. Thelon didn’t know if they were anywhere at this time, or even if they were still within time itself, but he had a feeling they were not. But hadn’t Cynthia said time was change and they had changed, and in their circle, they continued to change?
Thelon heard Henry shout and knew he was not afraid but crying out with the joy they all experienced during their descent.
The sublime! They felt exalted and free. They were communal, comprised of joy and grace. They were forgiven in the circle, which was all they had ever been.
Exceptions. Cassie begrudgingly acknowledged Cynthia had been correct. Henry and I are incomplete still, and that is our tragedy. We will change that in just a matter of time.
Observing dawn on an alien world, the black nothing around them gave way to shifting shades of deep blue. Membranous envelopes of differentiated hues, jellyfish the size of mountains and moons swam around them, radiating bioluminescence. Sparking lights showered down from their long, flowing tendrils like intangible branches of trees, maps of the internet cloud; connecting points of light in flashing particles and waveforms.
“We aren’t seeing with our eyes,” Henry stated, and they accepted this declaration upon perception.
At any point beyond their circle upon which their attention might fall, knowledge imparted itself beyond comprehension, resulting in a series of instant cognitions without language. They also knew they could be lost here forever. Knowing all things and becoming locked into attentiveness of the bizarre functions of it all. Everything. Nothing. All things. For them, reference and images, ghost and icon, Eidolon and Eikon found no purchase. While completely literal, their observations did not connect to analogies in their human experience. This was not like anything in the knowable world. Knowledge tessellated. Fractured. So above, so below. The secret language of the body of time and all universes comprised of a sea change strata, bound by the reasons only time allows.
Their circle made a barrier between them and the overwhelming immensity outside. Their circle contained them in a sphere. Made of the thinnest glass, or power, or shell, or encasement, this Christmas ornament of a light bulb carried the three as a vessel, bound by their connected energies. In it
, they found directional control, traveling without moving.
A faint green fog approached from above, rotating itself over and over to move forward and down. It was the man who was not a man; the one who was there to guide them. They knew it together, and knew it did not belong here—neither did they. Likewise, the jellyfish mountains knew, and so those things began to shift in hostile animation of sparks towards them and their proximity to the fog.
Lucid as they’d been promised, Cassie, Thelon, and Henry consulted each other wordlessly: Should we allow him to touch us? To share in our protection? He will move our attention and we will lose this place. We were not meant to stay here. He will take us back to where we will be useful. He is a deceiver.
In the end, they agreed, though accepted that contact would come at a cost to be paid later.
Their ornamental shell allowed itself to be permeated by the green fog that hovered and around Thelon, but not too close to Henry or Cassie. Before any peril came to them from that strange land of hideously beautiful giants, the fog removed them from that blue land to a world on fire.
Time moved forward again. They became literal and material once more, distinct from one another and rational with the return of meta cognition. Though still connected, the dreamlike confusion of being immortal in an immortal place, but also in danger was gone. In its place were the horrors of a physical world in rupture. Gnat-like clouds of grotesque monstrosities, deformed thought shapes given insectoid flesh and terrible teeth, raged over vast plains interrupted only by flares; arcs of magma hot as the sun.
“This was my home,” Thelon said. “This is what we did to the Earth and everyone on it, Henry. Henry Prime and Cassie Prime are somewhere here.”
“My God,” Cassie said.
Though they flew protected in their bubble, safe from the heat and stench, they understood that hundreds of feet below them, oceans had boiled. Nations of humans had died in a single fire event. Billions dead at Henry’s hand.
“It was terrible indeed,” a voice said, “but it was the right thing to do, given your choices. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”
Only now did the three become aware that the green fog was still with them, but once again, it took on the form of a man sitting behind Thelon.
“Oh, yes. I’m still here. You really don’t know how close to dying we were back there, do you?”
“What was that place ?” Henry asked. “Will we ever go back there?”
“I don’t know. I suspect it was the truth. You three traveled faster and farther than I ever have, and following you was nearly impossible. Thank the good gracious you are all so brightly shining that I was able to see you from very far off. Of course, that also meant everything saw you and heaven help us if those beasts had gotten their teeth into you. I shudder to think. I really do.”
“What are you? Really, what are you?” Cassie asked, seeing more truth behind the materialized man with them. “You aren’t shaped like us. Like a person.”
“That is a story for another day, but you may call me Wiseman, or the Green Fog, as you seem to like to construct me in your imagination.”
“Okay, Wiseman,” Cassie said, straight to the point, “how do we find ourselves in this shit show? How do we close the gate?”
“I should warn you, they—your others, the Primes—are not…well, they may not be amenable to your plan. They have been stuck here, pointlessly killing self-resurrecting monstrosities of the soul for an exceptionally long time. Creatures capable of inflicting pain you cannot imagine. I believe it may have had some effect on their minds, but there is something more no one has told you yet: they are not entirely themselves alone in their minds either.”
“Old wise man, old green fucking fog, what the fuck are you talking about?” Henry asked.
“Oh, Henry, how happy it makes me to converse with you again.”
“What?”
“What I mean is, both of your Primes bonded to another entity—like me, but different than me. I am a compassionate ghost from yet another dead world. In fact, another world that your Prime killed. I am a mere refugee, whereas what Henry and Cassie found once upon a time were, respectively, a warrior of flame and a truly angry mother of monsters.”
“Whatever. Where are they?” Thelon asked, unable to mask his growing impatience.
“We now approach this side of the gate. What you call the Energy Portal.”
As he spoke, they sped over a canyon so large several Grand Canyons could fit within it. Upon the edge was a series of spires of black volcanic glass. A bright white light like a welding arc sent pulsing beacons from which flying blister packs of hairy bugs teemed like ugly schools of fish.
Wiseman said, as if talking about abstracts, not the literal disaster scene beneath them, “Yes. Moths to the flame. Fitting.”
Thelon asked, “That’s where the things are crawling into our world?”
“Just so. This puncture likewise represents the chronological bleed of time and space as well. This tear exists in all universes.”
Cassie asked, “How the fuck do we close that?”
“Close it? Focus yourselves only on Henry and Cassie. Worry not about the gate.”
“They’re there. I feel them,” Thelon said, fright in his voice. Wiseman is right. They are fucked up. Seriously something wrong with them. Although it was a Henry, the presence he sensed did not remind him of the man he’d known on the Moon. All he sensed was anger. An inexhaustible fury.
“This is where I part with you, children,” Wiseman announced. “Good luck.”
“What do you mean? Wait!” Thelon shouted, but it was no good. Wiseman dipped out of their shiny bubble and headed down towards the light of the Energy Portal for business none of them could guess.
“Welp. Let’s get on with it,” Cassie said, glad to be rid of him for reasons she could not quite pinpoint.
They zoomed towards the light, following a line of energy which grew stronger. A tendril from within Henry and Cassie’s midsection lit up and connected to this line, and they reeled in like chasing a gigantic catch.
A wall of plasma and flame erupted before them. A hundred miles high, ash and debris whipped around their sphere, which flashed blueish white , but remained intact.
“Was that meant for us?” Henry asked no one in particular.
“I told you, Henry. You were really, unbelievably fucking powerful.”
Henry peered down and asked, “Are we in danger? Like, is this bubble made of us—I think it is, cause I kinda feel it, but like, we are really here. Like, really, really here. This isn’t a dream.”
Thelon said, “Yeah, no. I don’t know. Yes, though. We are in terrible danger.”
“Shut it, you two. There we are.” Cassie pointed as the flames weakened into a sea of molten coals, a lava field where the exoskeleton of giant bugs popped like gross green and gray mucus filled popcorn. Above it all was a small speck. Growing larger and clearer as they traveled the line of force towards them, were Henry and Cassie. The group didn’t see them, but they felt them. What they saw was a floating ruin of a castle.
“Hakim’s palace,” Thelon said. “I don’t know how it’s still hanging on.”
“They’re keeping it up for old time’s sake,” Henry said knowingly.
They descended to the entrance. Huge doors, stories high, swung on broken hinges and not a soul was there to greet them or bar their way. Their bubble lifted but extended itself in triplicate over each individually; small fairy lights of wispy energy drifted back and forth between them so lightly it was barely perceived.
“I guess we walk from here.” Henry stretched his back, reaching his arms towards the sky.
“Fine,” Cassie said and led the way.
They could tell from the ruins that this place had really been something majestic. The skeletons of trees stood bald and dead, and not a trace of a human anywhere amongst the dried up fountains and darkened light orbs.
“The city had been in several places at once,”
Thelon said. “The palace had been in each of them. It’s hard to explain, but Hakim had been next level magic. Like I said, he’d given paradise to anyone who wanted it and could play by his one rule: don’t hurt anyone.”
“Sounds like a cool, Jesus-Gandhi-Buddha dude,” Henry remarked.
“Yeah, kinda, I guess. We still had prison, though.”
Cassie continued to walk a few steps ahead, alert, head swiveling to listen for any sounds and seeking any movement. “Well, what the hell happened? Not the part about Henry nuking the planet. What happened to break all this? Why did he have to do it?”
Thelon stopped in his tracks. “I don’t know. We—Henry and me—were up on the Moon, fighting off the demons you saw outside. They were coming, and it sucked, and then something happened back here. I don’t think we ever knew what it was. Our plan was to…um, send the souls or whatever that makes up a person out of this world and into another timeline where these things couldn’t follow. I guess we were wrong about that.”
“Yes. We were wrong about that,” a voice echoed into the antechamber where they stood.
“That’s me. That’s the other me!” Henry shouted, excited as he ran up to the large door.
“Wait,” Cassie called, but he’d already swung it open, revealing the throne room.
An imperious expression on her face, Cassie Prime sat on the throne with a skull in her lap, a purple robe draped loose over her bare shoulders, hair long and reaching the last step before the throne itself. To her right stood Henry Prime wearing black jeans and a ratty gray t-shirt—he was an obvious twin to Henry except for the flames dancing in his eyes.
Cassie Prime said, “What do you want with us?” Her voice was louder than it should have been. Though calm and direct, an undercurrent of power vibrated as she spoke.
Cassie squinted and forced her mouth to close and not gawk at this woman who was her. Regal. Cassie Prime looked like an imperious queen. Chin up, a mean, contemptuous squint in her eye which Cassie had never ever put on. Cassie whispered, “What happened to make you this way?”