Rollerskater: Clouds
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This instalment contains drug references and scenes of horror.
A pond.
The walk had been long since he had left the Spirit. Some time had passed. Enough time to watch a thousand fleeting ideals arise out of the cultural milieu, live out their natural lives and die just as suddenly, forgotten just as easily as they were conceived; superseded, as they were, by better ideas, newer ideas.
And yet, so quiet. No thoughts but his. No ideas but his. Just the task. The endless task. No sleep. Never stopping. The task. Find the world’s end and you will also find its beginning, its middle.
A pond.
It was the first thing he had seen in some time.
He had almost forgotten what water was. He had no need to drink here. But here was water. And sitting by it, the figure of a woman, with her back to him, long, straggled, dark grey curls running down her back like thin tentacles, and this skin, sagging off of bones like old cloth draped on stone. Her feet were in the water, which was pink in hue, and cloudy, as though filled with algae.
“Hello,” the Wanderer called to her. “I’m looking for the end of the world.”
The woman sat still for a few moments. Then, slowly, she stood, and turned, looking back at him. She was surprisingly tall. Her feet remained in the water.
She was old, very old – she looked older than time – and her body was not clothed. She looked at him as though in recognition. There was a slight smile on her face.
“Come here,” she said, softly, beckoning with her hand.
“I am looking for the end of the world,” the Wanderer repeated. “I need to find a way out of here.”
“Come here,” the woman repeated. “Please.”
The Wanderer looked out into the distance. There was nothing else for eternity. He relented, dismounting his horse.
“Oh dear,” the woman said, in a grandmotherly way. “What happened to your arm?”
“I don’t remember,” the Wanderer said. He really didn’t.
“You poor thing,” she said.
“Do I know you?” the Wanderer asked. “I’m afraid I don’t recognise you.”
The old woman smiled. “That is a question with multiple answers,” she said. “But for our purposes, I’m afraid the answer is ‘no’.”
“Why have you called me down here?” the Wanderer asked.
The old woman paused.
“What is your purpose in this realm?” she asked.
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“What is your purpose in this realm?” she repeated.
The Wanderer sighed. “I have already stated that I seek the end of the world.”
“Yes. But to what end?”
“I was told to seek it, by a spirit. She said there was someone I must meet.”
“I see,” the old woman said. “You were sent to find the end of a realm that has no beginning.”
“Yes,” the Wanderer said, somewhat annoyed. “Listen, if you can’t help me, then I will move on.”
The old woman held up a hand.
“I believe I can help you, Wanderer,” she said.
The Wanderer looked her up and down.
“Really?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Do not be fooled by this frail body, Wanderer. My mind is as sharp as ever.”
“Alright,” the Wanderer said. “What is your name?”
“In due time,” the woman replied. “For now, Wanderer, please step into this pond.”
The Wanderer looked at her, and took two steps forward, not removing his shoes.
The woman pointed to the object hanging from his neck.
“What is this?” she asked.
The Wanderer looked down. It had been there for so long that he had forgotten it was even there. He had even forgotten what the object’s original function was. It was shaped like a human foot, and wheeled.
“I don’t know,” the Wanderer replied.
“Fortunately for you, I do,” the woman replied.
“You do?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “It is a relic from another time and another place.”
“Do you know what function it serves?”
“That is for you to find out,” the woman responded, cryptically. “Now.”
She placed her hands on his shoulders.
“You will find what you need,” she said.
“Where?” the Wanderer asked.
The old woman smiled, and pushed gently on his shoulders, and he felt himself sinking, collapsing, unravelling, as he disappeared beneath the pond’s surface.
*
She had not told him where they were going.
They’d spent some time in and out of hotels and restaurants, careful not to leave a paper trail. Then, quite abruptly, the woman, who called herself Chroma, had forced him into the back of a taxicab to the airport, which was named on signs as “Oranje Luchthaven”. He had asked her where they were flying and protested that he was afraid of flying, and she had simply told him that what she was doing was for his own good, and that she was taking him somewhere that he could get some proper rest.
He had not slept for forty-eight hours. She insisted on keeping him awake, pushing pills into his hands and buying him coffees to wash them down with.
At first, it had been wonderful, and the world had become a sort of Technicolor phantasmagoria, a gorgeous sliding tapestry with no start or end, no rude punctuation of unconsciousness, but the drugs had worn off, and he was now drawing concerned looks from people around him.
They’d made it through security – she had at some point managed to have two passports falsified for them, and so for all intents and purposes his name was now Edwin McAloon, and her name was Penelope Frazer. She had changed her face, and now she looked a bit like a blonde woman he had seen in a magazine once.
They had waited to board the plane. She had produced tickets by some unknown means, though there were many things of which this woman was capable.
She frequently used those abilities of hers – to become invisible, to change her face and her body and become anyone, while evading police. She explained that she could remain invisible or take on any form indefinitely, except for when her rapier was manifested. While she was sure that nobody would have seen her face in the dark, she was understandably anxious about being discovered, after injuring that policeman.
Now all they had to do was board the plane and escape the country, and she would take him to this supposed place of healing. Privately, he hoped that this place would cure him of his affliction, so that he might know peace when he slept.
They were called to board the plane at around half past ten at night. He had lost track of how long it had been since he had last slept in the police station. The destination was not anywhere he recognised, but then, neither was the starting point. They had queued up, boarded and found their seats, in the middle row of a jumbo jet.
She had told him to relax, and so he had, and somewhere, in the depths of his brain, a switch flipped, and he found himself unable to hold his head up any longer. He missed the safety demonstrations and pre-flight announcements, and slipped under.
He was back there again, in the long corridor – tipped on its side, so that it resembled a very tall, impossible-to-scale tower. And he was standing on a dividing wall, on the precipice. It was dark. Below and above him, for eternity, the corridor stretched on and on, segmented by those walls.
Below him, he heard a noise.
A fluorescent light flickered into life. There was a small, gentle, rhythmic noise, gasping and squeaky. It was the sound of a child, weeping. He peered over the edge.
The child was on the floor, which, relative to him, was the wall.
In the dim light, he could see that the child had short, brown hair. It was a little boy, he could see – wearing pyjamas made out of a sort of ribbed, beige fabric, like corduroy but wider. The boy looked quite familiar.
He leapt from his height, and landed on the wall below the child, which to the boy was just to his back left. He looked up at the boy.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Why are you crying?”
And the boy stopped crying, turning to look at him, and his expression was one wracked with abject terror.
“Please don’t hurt me,” the boy said. “I promise I’ll be good.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he replied.
The boy’s terror did not leave him. He shrank away from the man on the wall, covering his head.
The boy began to sing.
It was a tune that the man on the wall did not immediately recognise – not a tune he could have hummed from memory. But it sounded strangely familiar, as though he had heard it before. The words were not distinguishable.
Around the boy’s body, a gold bubble formed, protecting him.
“Why are you hiding from me?” the man on the wall asked.
And then, he felt an icy presence behind him. He turned.
There was a figure standing behind him. Of course, he thought. He wasn’t hiding from me. He was hiding from—
“ATONE FOR YOUR SINS,” the Threnody boomed.
“What are you?” the man on the wall asked.
The Threnody said nothing, stepping forwards.
“ATONE,” it repeated, in a voice that sounded like the death rattle of a thousand worlds, as empty and cold as the space between galaxies.
And it forced a hand into his chest, and the boy continued to sing.
“No!” the man on the wall shouted. “NO—”
The pain seared through him like a hot knife, electric crackling, as though drawing the life from him.
And he screamed.
Again, he screamed.
He felt hands on him – one warm, one cold.
Voices shouting.
“What the hell is wrong with him?!”
“Is he afraid of flying or what?!”
“Please, my lord, calm down…”
“Hey, stewardess! I think this man’s sick!”
And all of it dissolving now, dissolving into white noise, and he disappeared from himself again.
*
Beneath the murky pink surface now.
He emerged into it, rising upward despite having sunk down into it. He had moved downwards and upwards simultaneously. It was clear that he had moved through some dimension of space that he could not see; though some doorway or portal or passageway whose physical nature was ineffable in the language of a three-dimensional brain, as meaningless as trying to describe the physical attributes of colourless green ideas.
He was standing ankle-deep in pink water, which stretched out, it seemed, forever, all around him. The water was warm, the temperature of blood, and a pink fog hung over the endless lake. There was a strange, familiar smell that he couldn’t place.
He looked down at the skate around his neck. It had turned white.
What was this place? He had never seen something like this in the Notherethere. It must not be the Notherethere, he thought, but some other aspect of the worlds between worlds; some pocket reality – but created for what purpose, he couldn’t say.
There was a sloshing sound, the sound of feet wading through the water.
He squinted as he saw someone emerge from the mists.
She wore her blue hair in a pompadour, and stood about as tall as the old woman. She, too, stood ankle deep in the water. She wore a blue double-breasted blazer dress patterned with white clouds, with shoulder pads, and whose hem that went down to her knees. Protruding from between the lapels, she wore a ruffled jabot. Her face was not visible, as she wore a featureless white mask, with two dark eyeholes.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” the Wanderer replied. “Where are we?”
“I’m not quite sure,” the woman replied. “Somewhere.”
“I see,” the Wanderer said. “Then who are you?”
The woman was silent for a few moments. “I am the past,” she said.
The Wanderer stood, silently for a few moments. Pink clouds of fog drifted past above the water. The smell lingered.
“What do you mean?” he said.
The woman paused for a moment, as if in thought.
“There is a scar in time and space, Wanderer,” she said, after what seemed like (and could well have been) many years. “A…hole in the real. Someone broke something…”
The empty black eye sockets regarded him in a way that proved impossible to read.
The woman continued.
“I am a manifestation of that scar,” she said. “You have already met my counterpart, for she is the one who controls access to this place.”
“Yes,” the Wanderer said. “And she is…”
“The future,” the woman replied.
Silence, for a few moments.
“Past and future,” the Wanderer said. “Then where is the present?”
The woman continued to gaze at him.
“That, Wanderer,” she said. “Is the question.”
“Listen,” the Wanderer said. “I’m trying to find the end of the world. Do you know where it is?”
The woman bowed her head.
“I am disappointed in you, Wanderer,” she said, after a few moments. “Haven’t you realised it yet?”
The Wanderer looked at her, then around him.
“This—” he said. “—this is the end of the world?”
The woman looked up.
“Now you understand. You seem surprised, Wanderer.”
“But that makes no sense,” the Wanderer protested. “I was meant to speak to…someone.”
The woman said nothing.
“…and tell her that someone is looking for her.”
The woman bowed her head.
“I am not that someone,” she confessed. “But I am by no means not an end in myself, Wanderer. You have found the end of the world, yes. Now the hard work begins.”
*
Restraining, whispering hands saving him from himself. He came back after a few moments. A mass of concerned passengers and flight attendants were holding his arms behind his back, while some sat filming on their mobile phones.
His eyes swivelled in their sockets.
Chroma leaned across and placed a hand on his chest.
“How are you feeling, my lord?”
He cleared his throat. “I’m…terrified,” he said, in a hoarse whisper.
Chroma nodded.
“My companion has calmed down,” she assured the other passengers. “He will not be a disturbance for the rest of the flight.”
The others relinquished, returning to their seats, looking back at him in confusion. He cleared his throat. It was sore, and he could taste blood. He was sure that he was forming calluses on his vocal cords.
He was brought a complimentary hot meal from a flight attendant, who smiled piteously at him, as though he were a frightened child, and he sat and ate it – mashed potatoes, peas, carrots and minced beef in gravy, with a small, cold pot of cheese and tomato pasta, a small, rectangular slice of carrot cake, and a can of Sunkist orange soda. He ate uncomfortably, his arms bruised from the firm grip of another passenger, cramped and unable to fully move his arms in the narrow seating arrangement.
As he was eating the pasta, he happened to glance to his right. It was night now, but the plane’s wing could be clearly seen in the dim light, a small green light on the starboard wing. He watched as it blinked on and off hypnotically, signalling other aircraft which way it was heading, and to people on the ground below that it was an aeroplane in flight.
The light flickered.
For a moment, he thought he might be seeing things – deoxygenation of the blood after screaming and hyperventilating – but he saw it flicker again.
It was tiny, barely perceptible, but it was there. He thought he could hear something humming, louder and louder, like a fluorescent light—
BLACK
It looked at him through the window. The shadow. The creature. Peering through the window at him. Terror at six thousand kilometres.
He wanted to scream, but all that came out was a whimper, a squeak. A frightened rabbit pulled from its warren by the jaws of a ravenous fox.
Chroma looked at him.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, quickly adding, “My lord.”
“There’s…something on the wing,” he said, terribly disturbed. He pointed at the window.
Chroma turned to check.
A small green light blinked on and off, rhythmically.
“You’re seeing things,” Chroma replied. “Just relax. We’ll be landing soon.”
“Al…alright,” he said.
He sat back in his seat, returning to his meal.
A scream.
Not his scream, no – a woman’s scream. Towards the front of the plane.
Immediately his hackles raised again, and he felt something awful, some terrible presence.
A flight attendant ran past, the terror on her face palpable.
Chroma stood up, and covered her mouth at the sight of it.
He, on the other hand, shrank, trying to cover himself.
For down the aisle was an apparition, cloaked in black, and it was slowly, menacingly moving towards them.
*
The Wanderer found his way out of the pocket-realm, exiting as he had entered – by sinking and rising simultaneously. The old woman was waiting for him, standing ankle-deep in the pool.
“Well?” she said. “What did you learn?”
“Not much,” the Wanderer replied. “Only that this woman claims to be ‘the past’, and you to be ‘the future’.”
“She is correct,” the old woman said. “I am the future and she is the past.” she paused. “More specifically, I am her future, and she is my past.”
“But what are you?” the Wanderer asked. “How is knowing this supposed to help me solve anything?”
The old woman placed a hand on the Wanderer’s shoulder, and brushed his cheek with her thumb.
“You have found past and future,” she said. “So the present should not be hard to find.”
“Wait,” the Wanderer said. “You mean that you have a counterpart that exists outside of the Notherethere?”
The woman smiled. “Finally, you understand,” she said.
“Find her and tell her someone is looking for her…” the Wanderer pondered. “The person I am meant to find isn’t you or the girl in the other world…it’s your counterpart.”
A light appeared in the empty sky, shining down on the pool. The pool below them shimmered. He looked down at the water’s surface, and saw the woman from the other world in place of the old woman’s reflection, upside down in the water.
“My name is Trinity,” the old woman said. “And she is Effigy.”
“And your counterpart?”
“We don’t know,” Effigy confessed. “But we must find her if we are to restore balance to the universe.”
“I see,” the Wanderer said. “So what do you want me to do?”
“Use the skate,” the old woman said, pointing at the skate tied around his neck, which now retained its white colour.
“I don’t know how,” the Wanderer said.
“Then perhaps I can be of assistance,” someone said, from behind the old woman. She turned.
There stood Magpie, on top of the water. And in the shimmering light, the Wanderer could see that his reflection was clad, not in black clothes, but in white. On his shoulders was a white cat, lazily napping.
“One for sorrow,” Magpie said. “Two for joy.”
*
It regarded them, faceless. It did not make footfalls as it came.
“My lord,” Chroma said. “What is this…thing?”
He was paralysed with fear.
“I-it’s c-called…” he stammered.
“What?” Chroma asked.
It had arrived by their seat row.
“The…the…Thr-threnody…” he said, shuddering.
It no longer followed him in dreams…it had found a way to pursue him in the real world as well. It must have been getting stronger.
Chroma stood, manifesting her rapier, and in the process, destroying her disguise. Passengers cried out in alarm.
“Shut up!” Chroma shouted. “Sit down and be quiet and it’ll be over soon.”
Someone was filming the situation on their phone. Chroma turned, raising her right hand, and fired two taser prods at the device, destroying it.
She turned to the others.
“Delete those fucking videos,” she said. “Or else.”
She turned back to the Threnody, which seemed to be dispassionately watching her actions.
“I don’t know what you are,” she said. “But you’re going to burn.”
The creature did not react.
She leapt from her seat, charging with the rapier, and stabbed the Threnody through its chest, neck and head, and then slashed.
He momentarily cried out in triumph, as though his saviour had come at last, come to protect him from the creature’s onslaught. He hoped that she would kill it and free him from it, finally.
Then, he noticed, to his horror, simultaneous with Chroma, that the attack had done nothing. The Threnody was a phantasm, nothing more, and the blade had passed through it as though through water or air.
It regarded Chroma in a way that seemed mocking, as if she were little more than a pebble in its shoe, and then turned back to him.
It leaned forward, and to his shock, its icy grip met with his left wrist. It pulled on his hand, and he looked down at it. In the middle of his left palm was a small scar. He had never seen it before.
It looked up and uttered but one word to him.
“SOON.”
And it vanished. Not comfortingly, with a soft dissolve or spectacular theatrics – abruptly, like a housefly seemingly vanishing as it is approached by a swatter.
“What…the hell was that about?” asked the passenger seated next to him.
“Don’t say a word about this,” Chroma said, returning to her seat. She turned to him. “My lord…explain what that was.”
“I…I don’t kn…I don’t know…” he stammered, shaking. “It…it found me…even in the sky, it found me…”
He felt something rise in his throat.
“Get me a bag,” he said.
Chroma hurriedly reached into the netting on the back of the seat in front and handed him a paper bag, into which he vomited. He shook, wiping his mouth off, and turned to Chroma, who looked at him in concern.
“My lord…” she said. “You…”
He did not study the contents of the bag for long, but what he saw was not his dinner – but something dark, dark as ink, dark as a lonely and cold lake in winter.
Hurriedly, a flight attendant approached and put the bag in a biohazard bin.
He remained agitated for the rest of the flight. Thoughts span through his head. Who was he, really? What was happening? Was he dying? And moreover, what had the Threnody meant by what it had said? Did it plan to kill him?
He was so distracted that he barely noticed the captain announce the descent, and Chroma had to buckle him in to his seat as the plane made its landing.
It was light now; they had travelled across the Atlantic, after all.
The captain came over the PA system:
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Heath Row Airport. You are currently about eighty kilometres from the centre of Winchester, our nation’s capital, and also very close to Tamesis National Park. Remember to set your watches to Winchester Mean Time, which is five hours ahead of New Amsterdam time. It’s a cloudy and rainy day, as you can see out of your windows. Once again, we’d like to thank you for flying with Brittonic Airways, and we would like to welcome you to the English Republic…”
*
Magpie stood with arms outstretched. Around his shoulders, the black cat stretched and licked its front paws plaintively.
“Nice to see you, Magpie,” Trinity said.
“And it is a pleasure to see you, too, Trinity,” Magpie said. “It’s been a few gigayears, hasn’t it?”
The Wanderer had begun to remember. How he got here. What his purpose was. The meaning of the skate around his neck…he couldn’t begin to understand how he had forgotten.
Then he realised: Something had survived the destruction. Even after the end of everything…hope survived. His act of despair – fleeing a dying universe – had also been an act of hope. He had carried the spark of survival with him.
“Alright,” the Wanderer said. “What now?”
“Glad you asked, my boy,” Magpie said. “It’s time to get you out of here. We would have got you out sooner, but it’s been a real bugger sorting things. A bit of an infinite-monkeys-on-typewriters situation, y’see – turns out that even with infinite space and infinite time, it’s damn near impossible to pull together the energy to manifest an exitway. At least, without her. You’re lucky, lad. You fell out of time and space and survived. Not many can claim to have survived that in one piece. After all…”
Magpie bowed his head, looking down at his reflection. “I didn’t.”
“What is it that you need me to do?” the Wanderer asked.
“One part of me is ‘there’, the other is ‘here’. The dancing and the still. But we are still connected, through time and space, just like Trinity and her counterparts here. Therefore, with some luck, I can act as a conduit that can get you out of this realm.”
“Can you get me back to the universe?”
Magpie paused. “Not right away,” he said. “There’s still one more thing you need to do.”
The Wanderer thought for a few moments.
“Okay,” he said.
“Mount your horse,” Magpie said.
The Wanderer left the pond and did so.
“Alright,” Magpie said. “Here’s what I need you to do. I need you to gallop full pelt into the pond, swinging the skate at me by the laces. With luck it’ll create enough energy transfer for me to open a six-dimensional passageway, and you should be able to leave through it.”
“And if something goes wrong?”
“Don’t think about it.”
The Wanderer nodded.
“Good luck, Socks,” Effigy said. “Please, bring our present back to us.”
“I will,” the Wanderer said. “I’ll make this right. I promise.”
“Try to be a stranger,” Trinity said.
The Wanderer smiled. It was the first smile he had smiled in a long, long time.
He removed the skate from around his neck. The horse drew up, forelegs kicking, and whinnied, and then he was galloping at Magpie, arms stretched wide. He swung the skate—
There was a flash like lightning, and he was gone.
Magpie staggered backwards, falling into the pool. The cat leapt from his shoulders and ran off.
“Are you alright?” Trinity asked.
“Never better,” Magpie said, standing.
Part of the right shoulder of his shirt had gone white, and his right iris had a familiar white ring.
“God’s in his heaven,” he said. “All’s right with the world.”
*
The Wanderer slipped through time. It was silent and dark. He saw nothing. His body ceased to exist here. His mind grew quiet.
Just as he began to believe that he had failed and died, after an incalculably long time of falling through nothing, he suddenly found himself exploding into consciousness again, out of Nothing into Something, like a newborn baby.
He arrived in a city.
There was no colour. Just dull grey, dark blacks and harsh whites. No people, either. No sound. The sky above was starless and black. He had entered a new, familiar realm. A realm with definite geography, but still out of time and place.
One more task, he thought. One more task to complete. But what?
He recalled what Effigy and the Spirit had called him, an eternity ago: “Socks.”
Was that his name? His old name, in the universe that died? The Spirit, too, had called him by that name.
He did not yet feel that he truly was this “Socks”, even if he resembled him bodily and facially. But with each passing moment, he felt that he was getting closer to understanding who he had once been. And that, he thought, would perhaps be the key to fixing the damage that had been done.
He held the skate in his right hand, and hung it around his chest again. It was the brightest white he had ever seen, especially in this grey city.
He looked down at the residual limb of his left arm.
He had escaped the Notherethere, but it was just as Effigy had said.
Now the hard work began.
Another place, another time…
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ARC TWO: ROSE GOLD
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