Rollerskater: Jerusalem
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This instalment contains some scenes of horror.
His eyes shot open.
Above him, there was the ever-present hum of fluorescent lights, and a smell that permated the environment, acrid.
He staggered to his feet.
The infinite corridors stretched out before and behind him.
Strange.
He couldn’t remember falling asleep. Then again, he couldn’t remember much of anything in here.
He heard a sound. A child’s voice – a lost, anxious child, crying for his mother.
It was behind one of the partitions. He followed it.
The child was hunched on the carpeted floor, dressed only in his pyjamas. He was covering his face.
“Mummy…” the boy sobbed. “Where are you, Mummy?”
Cautiously, he approached the boy, crouching down next to him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked the child. “Have you lost your mummy?”
The boy did not look, staring down at the ground.
“Don’t hurt me,” the boy said. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“I won’t hurt you,” he replied.
“Please,” the boy said. “Don’t hurt me.”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It can’t hurt you in here. You’re safe.”
He reached out to the boy.
The boy looked up at him.
His face was twisted in an expression of anguish and hate, and he lashed out, screaming and gnashing his teeth, and surrounded himself with a gold shield.
“I’ll protect you,” he said to the boy, who only cowered, shielding his eyes.
“He doesn’t need your protection,” a voice said, from behind him.
His eyes widened.
He turned, meeting the gaze of the Threnody, who was flanked on two sides by a naked old woman, and a younger woman in a suit patterned to look like the sky, whose face was covered by a white mask.
“Y…you…” he stammered, putting a hand up. “Get away. Don’t come any closer to the child. I’m not afraid of you.”
The Threnody stepped forward, as did the women beside it.
“You haven’t figured it out, have you?” said the old woman.
“Figured what out?” he replied, angrily. “You’re frightening the boy.”
“Are we?” said the younger woman.
“Yes!” he exclaimed. “Can’t you see?”
“THE BOY DOES NOT FEAR US,” the Threnody boomed.
“Then who does he fear?”
The two women looked at each other, and at the Threnody.
They both grasped the Threnody’s hands, closed their eyes, and, by some means, phased into one another, merging to create a single entity.
A tall woman, with lilac hair, wearing a pair of gold rollerskates.
“You…” he said. “Yes, I remember now. You came back…”
“When you killed me, you split me into three entities, each occupying a different level of reality,” the Rollerskater explained. “The Trinity, my superego, banished to the Notherethere. The Effigy, my ego, submerged in a self-contained pocket reality. And the Threnody, my id…contained within your mind. Haunting you, like a ghost.”
“But…how did you invade my mind…?”
“Your hand,” the Rollerskater said, pointing.
He looked down at his left palm.
It was scarred.
He recalled a time, a universe’s age ago, when he had succeeded in killing the Rollerskater – he had destroyed the Product, the ontological aperture by which she had been able to maintain her form in that world, which had enabled him to destroy her body entirely. In destroying the Product, he had forced a piece of umbric all the way through it, stabbing a hole in his hand in the process…
“You entered…through the wound,” he said. He faltered for a few moments, then recollected himself. “Nevertheless,” he said, “You are scaring the boy.”
“I already told you,” the Rollerskater said. “It’s not me that’s scaring him.” She looked at him, coldly. “It’s you. It’s always been you.”
He blinked a couple of times.
“What…?”
The Rollerskater pointed at the boy, cowering in fear behind his shield.
“That boy’s name,” she said, “Is Cosimo Chesterton.”
“But…” he said. “That’s my name.”
“No,” the Rollerskater said. “For you have so intertwined your identity with his that you have forgotten who you really are.”
She held out a hand, and out of the wall slid a large, round, reflective object – a mirror. It came slowly towards him.
“Look upon your true form for the first time in a very long time,” the Rollerskater said.
In the mirror, he saw a wretched creature – vaguely humanoid in shape, wearing a black suit, its body made of dark black crystal, veined with angry red. Its entire body was covered in bright red eyes, which blinked in unison.
He recoiled, looking down at his hands, and watched as the thoughtform he had projected on to them dissolved, revealing it to be true – he was a horror, he was that wretched creature…
He was Umbric.
“No,” he said. “This is a trick. An illusion.”
“There are no tricks,” the Rollerskater assured him.
“You lie,” Umbric said. “I am Cosimo Chesterton, Born August 9th, nineteen-forty—”
“You have convinced yourself that you are Cosimo Chesterton. You usurped the real Cosimo’s body on August 9th, 1945 – something I only learned by entering your mind. He was not born on that day, Umbric. He was born in 1937. He was eight years old.”
“Stop lying,” Umbric said, burying its head in its hands.
“Cosimo was a war orphan. He lost his brothers when they stormed Normandy, and his mother was killed in a bombing raid. He was scared. He knew death before he could even read. You used the ontological damage caused by the detonations of multiple nuclear weapons to slip back into this world, finding your place in his head, offering him an escape from death. You bullied him into submission. You were able to seize full control of his mind, overwriting his personality with yours…but it came at a cost. You forgot who you really are, Umbric.”
“No…” Umbric said, staring down at its hands. “No.”
“This is all you are, all you have ever been,” the Rollerskater said. “You feed on the vulnerable and the weak. The first time I defeated you, it was because you had possessed another person, submissive to your influence.”
Her lips curled in disgust. “You are nothing more than crystallised hatred, operating under the guise of order and stability. But the Universe, by its very nature, is neither orderly, nor stable, a contention most humans struggle with. You prey on that weakness – the fear of uncertainty, the fear of nothingness, the fear of death – so that you can remake the Universe in your own image, damn the consequences.”
The Rollerskater skated over to the boy.
“Leave the child alone!” Umbric roared.
“It’s much too late for that,” the Rollerskater said, placing her hand on the bubble. “Isn’t that right?”
The bubble vanished, and the little boy looked up at her, timidly wrapping his arms around one of her legs, as though she were his mother.
He hid his face from the monster, the Bogeyman, thinking, as small children do, that if he could not see it, then it could not see him.
“You,” Umbric said, pointing a finger covered in tiny, red, spider-like eyes at the Rollerskater. “You did this to me.”
“The truth is,” the Rollerskater said, “He never was frightened of the Threnody. He knew that the Threnody was there to help him, a kind of psychic bodyguard. The reason you lost your memories is not because the Threnody took them from you – it’s because they were never your memories to start with, Umbric. You are a thief, who stole the memories from a young boy, before taking his identity. The Threnody did not steal your memories, Umbric. Cosimo took them back.”
Umbric shook with anger, covering its head, backing away.
Then it began laughing.
A hideous, guttural, inhuman laugh, like a death rattle or a cat in pain.
“Of course,” Umbric said, straightening its tie as it stood up straight. “I remember now. How stupid of me to forget…”
Cosimo buried his face in the Rollerskater’s skirt as she watched Umbric turn slowly towards her.
Umbric walked towards them, grinning with sharp black teeth like needles.
“So you come to destroy me, Rollerskater?”
“Yes,” the Rollerskater said.
Umbric’s grin widened terrifyingly, stretching far wider than a human smile could ever stretch, a smile of pure malevolence and hate.
“Then there is something you should know,” Umbric said, taking another step towards them.
The Rollerskater held on to the boy’s head, backing away from the advancing monster.
“You see,” Umbric said, barely stifling its wicked jubilation. “I have encoded my own base pattern into the boy’s base pattern. From an ontological perspective, we are one and the same – Cosimo Chesterton is Umbric, and I am he.” He grimaced, pointing at the Rollerskater. “If you destroy me, Rollerskater, then the boy shall die with me.”
The little boy looked up at her in horror, and she glanced down at him.
“What’s the matter?” Umbric said. “Losing your nerve?” He walked around her as she clutched the child closer to her. “You’re weak. You have spent so much time living among these…people. You’ve started to become one of them, haven’t you? Sympathetic to their finite lives. The lives that you have a hand in ending. All I ever wanted was to create a world where none would decay. Where all could exist forever as it is now.”
“What you wanted was to halt evolution,” the Rollerskater replied, disgusted. “Everything dies, Umbric. It must. Change cannot happen if the old order does not die. What you stand for is not progress – it is regress.”
“But you don’t die,” Umbric said. “The lone goddess – the sole entity worthy of being called immortal, by its own value-system. A selfish eternity, that is what you are.”
“I have died, I will die,” the Rollerskater said. “The time will come that the universe will end. And in that time, of great darkness and sorrow, all things shall die. The nature of chaos is that it will one day devour itself and become nothing. Even death shall die on that day, for there will be nothing left to die. But that day is far away. I am not cruel, Umbric. Not evil, not motivated by any moral precept. It is simply the nature of reality that all things are finite. It is a purely human construction that death is a great evil. But the truth is that all things have their time. And so, too, do you.”
Umbric paused for a moment in thought, then grinned menacingly once more.
“But you hesitate to strike me down,” it said. “You cannot hurt me without hurting the boy. And you swore to protect the boy. Yet, you cannot protect him from me without killing me, which will also kill him.” It reached into its suit pockets and withdrew two chessmen – a black king and a white queen. Another fiendish grin. “It appears that we have reached the condition of checkmate.”
The little boy tugged at the hem of the Rollerskater’s skirt.
“Please don’t let it hurt me,” he pleaded.
The Rollerskater looked down at the boy, and at Umbric.
It was true; this was a no-win situation.
“Well?” Umbric said. “Which one of your principles will you abandon first? The sanctity of life, or the sanctity of death?”
The Rollerskater looked down at the boy one last time, running her fingers through his hair.
“Please,” she said. “Be brave, for me.”
“Wait,” the boy said. “Don’t go!”
She skated towards Umbric at full speed, beginning to glow gold with the power of her skates, and drew back a fist.
“You forget,” Umbric said. “You may have the boy on your side, but this is still my psychic domain!”
With a clawed hand, it swatted at the Rollerskater’s face. Her face began to bleed pink fluid, which ran like tears down her cheeks.
She clutched her face, wiping the fluid out of her eyes.
She lunged for Umbric and it caught her arms, and held them as if in some malevolent parody of the tango.
“Your ontology is a broken one,” Umbric said. “Free will, without permanence, is meaningless!”
“Permanence, without free will, is meaningless,” the Rollerskater countered.
Umbric headbutted her, knocking her backwards.
“Stop!” the little boy shouted.
“Shut the fuck up, you little shit,” Umbric said, and the little boy covered his head, cowering.
The Rollerskater tackled Umbric, taking its legs out from under it, only for Umbric to roll over, transforming its hand into a large, black, crystalline spike.
“I have waited so long for this moment,” Umbric said, stabbing it down at the Rollerskater’s chest. She stopped it with her hands, but they began to bleed pink fluid also, and the spike began to slip downwards…
“Those skates only offer you so much protection,” Umbric said, cackling, as the spike slowly moved further and further down…
There was a flash of gold light.
“Wha—” Umbric stammered, just in time to see a disc of gold light strike its back, knocking it into a nearby wall, which cracked from the force.
The Rollerskater turned.
Little Cosimo had thrown one of his shields at Umbric.
“Good work,” she said.
“Th…thank you,” the little boy said, timidly.
She turned her attention back to Umbric, skating quietly over to it. It looked rather like an insect crushed on a piece of newspaper, all twitching limbs and blinking red eyes.
“Is it…dead?” the little boy asked.
The Rollerskater got closer.
Umbric’s mouth hung open, revealing several layers of teeth going down to its throat. A primordial creature, produced by the catastrophic collision of two celestial bodies some billions of years ago, powered entirely by its rage and hatred at the inherent chaos and disorder of the universe; that same chaos that had been its progenitor, just as ordered chaos – that is to say, life – had been hers.
But rather than despise this contradiction, she had accepted it. Umbric hated that about itself. The stink of chaos pervaded its spirit. Before all things, it hated itself.
And now, it was dying.
She got closer to it, looking for a sign…
A third arm suddenly shot forth from the creature’s chest, clutching her neck tightly and lifting her off the ground.
“No!” the little boy shouted.
Umbric laughed a high-pitched, manic laugh, the sort of laugh that indicated it had lost what sense it had left. It was now fuelled entirely by rage, hatred, and spite.
It swung around, slamming the Rollerskater’s head into the wall, then again and again and again. Then, rather like an athlete throwing a hammer, it spun, throwing her at full velocity through the wall, which shattered on contact.
The walls and floor fell away. The corridor vanished. The three were now in an endless black void.
The Rollerskater staggered to her feet, the skates trying to find purchase on the smooth, black ground.
“I thought I was angry at you,” Umbric said. “But now – now I’m angry. I have never been so angry in my entire existence. I am going to tear you quark from quark, you worms. I am going to destroy you. I don’t even care about permanence any more. I have seen seen the light. The endless, blinding light. I shall accelerate your ends to the present, Rollerskater. I will be the one to destroy this wretched reality. Let nothingness consume all. A perfect nowhere, where there is no order, there is no chaos, there is nothing, permanent nothing, where none shall live and none shall die. The endless, screaming dark.”
The Rollerskater swayed, trying to face Umbric.
“Umbric,” she said. “Stop this.”
“NO!” Umbric roared. “FEAR ME, ROLLERSKATER. I AM THE DEATH OF HOPE. I AM PAIN. YOU WILL FACE ME, ROLLERSKATER. YOU WILL KNOW HELL BEFORE I OBLITERATE YOU.”
Cosimo ran towards the Rollerskater.
She turned to him.
“Run,” she said. “For my sake, run.”
“No!” Cosimo cried. “I won’t! Not after you protected me!”
“THE BOY WILL DIE AS WELL!” Umbric screeched.
It emitted a loud howl, as a maddened wolf, snarling and moaning animalistically, and its body began to change shape, liquefying, sublimating…
“WHAT IS…HAPPENING…TO…ME…” Umbric moaned.
“Your self image is losing stability,” the Rollerskater shouted. “You’re losing control of your abilities. Your psychic realm has started to disintegrate and with it, your identity. Surrender now and leave this boy and you may stand a chance of survival.”
The shivering black mass that was Umbric looked at her with red eyes, and in a voice terrible enough that it would shake stars from their mantle, it screamed:
NEVEEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!
Umbric lost all corporeal form then, becoming a swirling, red and black whirlwind.
Red eyes poked out of boiling, burning vortices, and a powerful wind raged around them, a maelstrom of purest fury and loathing, a screaming hurricane of pure evil, unstoppable, unyielding, and it wanted them both not simply dead, but erased, obliterated, irretrievably annihilated, and with them, all of reality and creation, every galaxy, star, planet, and asteroid, every dimension of space, every yawning chasm of empty black in itself reduced to nothing (as even they were in themselves a something), the end of all reality, all-consuming, all-devouring, hate, hate, HATE.
“Cosimo,” the Rollerskater said. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” Cosimo said. “I’m sorry. It was my fault for letting him in.”
“No, Cosimo,” she said. “It was never your fault. To fear death is natural. It’s human. Living in spite of being finite, that is far braver than any effort to control time and space. I’m sorry it came to this.”
The whirlwind began to close in on them.
The Rollerskater looked down at him.
“Cosimo,” she said. “Have you got taller?”
Before Cosimo could understand what she had said, a long, reddish-black spear shot out of the vortex, piercing the Rollerskater’s left hand.
Cosimo cried out as she staggered back, clutching her hand.
Another spear shot out from the void, piercing her right hand.
The two spears, by some unseen force, lifted the Rollerskater into the air, her legs dangling limply.
Cosimo looked up and saw where she was being carried.
There was a large, black, crystal structure hanging in the air, consisting of four cubes stacked on top of each other, and protruding from the faces of the secondmost cube from the top, four more cubes, creating a strange, cross-shaped structure.
And he realised what was happening.
The Rollerskater was to be crucified on this strange cross.
Her gold skates glinted against the swirling black, like a beacon of hope.
Two clawed hands shot out of the roaring vortex, slashing at the skates.
The Rollerskater screamed.
“No!” Cosimo shouted. “Stop! Please! You’re hurting her!”
The skates were destroyed, gold shreds and wheels raining down, and at the ends of the Rollerskater’s legs were two stumps, oozing pale pink blood from her ankles like melted ice cream.
There came a roar from the vortex. No complexity of thought remained. No eloquence. Umbric had lost all coherence and collapsed in on itself, like a black hole or an ouroboros, and it screamed:
DIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEE…
Cosimo fell to his knees before the shredded skates, squinting up at the crucified woman. She made no sound any more, but her agony was clear.
Cosimo thought about his life, many years ago, growing up in a middle class area of London. His mother had been the child of Italian immigrants, and his father a banking clerk, at least, until the war had come along. And his father and his older brothers had been called up and gone away. He lost his father a few years into the war, and his brothers not long after him.
His mother had always cared for him. During the bombing raids, she used to cradle him in their shelter, singing to him. She had the most beautiful, angelic voice. And when he was sad or angry or distressed, he would sing, too…but he was always so afraid, especially on the night she never came home, the night he had crawled into the shelter and awoken to policemen shaking their heads and tutting about how he should have been evacuated, and then he had been sent away to the country, to a small village by a river, a village with an old water tower that even then had been out of date…
Umbric had found it easy to get to him. All it had taken was to prey on that fear, that fear that, now his family was gone, he would soon be next, whether it be by pneumonia, or in a fire, or in another war. He had taken to obsessively reading about those big bombs in Japan. The cruellest bombs. The bombs that did not discriminate between military and civilian, combatant and non-combatant. Containers sealing in unspeakable death and destruction.
When the threat had come, some fifteen or so years later, that those cruel bombs may again drop, all around the world, on cities and towns and military bases and harbours and countryside, ripping and tearing and eating the landscape, he had finally allowed Umbric all the way in. It had seized him. Bullied him. Become him. People began to notice how much more confident he was. Not interested in romantic partners, of course, but driven by a need for success…but it was not him at the wheel. He had begged for his life, his body back, but he had been so weak…his only protection a feeble shield…and the song.
The song his mother had sung him.
And he had watched, behind those umbric eyes, as the him-that-was-not-him had slain the Rollerskater, and he had watched as he pierced his own hand, accidentally injecting material from the Product into his body, creating a portal, a portal through which that revenant of the Rollerskater had been able to survive.
And in that moment, he had remembered the song his mother had sung him. And the moment Umbric had, with his hands, clapped them together and erased that old universe to create another, he had managed to write in a new destiny.
Those allies of the Rollerskater, those who were not lost or outside of time at the end of the universe…he had imbued them with a power, a power that had, in exchange, weakened him, regressed him to a childlike state.
A power that could restore the Rollerskater, could defeat Umbric.
And in the process, Umbric’s memories had vanished.
He had not accounted for the woman with a thousand faces surviving, nor the man in the Notherethere, but he knew that if he stayed the course, all would be well.
And now here he was, on his knees, the universe ending above his head. His plans had been for naught. He despaired.
He lay on the ground, covering his head, sobbing. The vortex was drawing closer now. It would soon consume them.
He lifted his head, projecting another, weak shield, a feeble mark against the coming of the eternal night.
He remembered his mother’s voice.
Remember, Cosimo. Remember.
There she was. As beautiful as she had been the day she died. So young, so full of love.
Whenever you feel sad, remember our song.
He looked up.
That’s it, my son. You know what you must do.
He sat up, looking up at the swirling eddy of evil above.
He began to sing. Perhaps in defiance, perhaps to comfort himself.
The words tumbled out uncertainly, squeaky like an old metal door, the spasms of anguish still knotting his throat.
But, one by one, the syllables left his mouth.
“And…did…those…feet…in an…cient…time…”
The red eyes glared angrily at him, and the wind roared violently.
“Walk upon…Eng…land’s…moun…tains…green?”
The Rollerskater hung in the air above him. She had grown still.
“And was the ho…ly Lamb of God…”
He felt something stirring in his stomach. Warmth. Mother.
“On En…gland’s pleasant pastures seen?”
Hands whipped out of the hurricane, clawing at the shield, being beaten back by its surface.
“And did the countenance divine…”
What was it the Rollerskater had said to him, before her sacrifice?
“Shine forth upon our clouded hills?”
She had said something…
“And was Jerusalem builded here…”
He remembered what it was.
“Among these dark Satanic mills…?”
He stood, looking down at the torn pieces of skate, and then down at his hands. He hadn’t noticed it. He had been a meek little boy at first, but he had grown taller.
Of course. Umbric had usurped his adulthood from him…but now he was growing in his own way.
He was becoming a man, at last.
He knew what he had to do.
He looked down at the destroyed skates, and held out an arm to them.
Roaring hands swatted at him from the encroaching maelstrom, but they simply bounced off his shield.
The pieces began to glow, floating into the air, and he began to sing loudly, triumphantly:
“Bring me my Bow of Burning Gold…!”
The pieces coalesced, transforming into a golden bow.
“Bring me my Arrows of Desire!”
Smaller pieces rearranged themselves, transforming into arrows.
“Bring me my Spear, O, clouds unfold!”
A golden sphere floated into the air, lengthening and sharpening itself.
“Bring me my Chariot of Fire!”
Another, larger sphere floated into the air, and the Bow, Arrows, Spear and Chariot gravitated towards each other, combining. The skate fragments had all been transformed.
“I will not cease from mental fight…”
He held out his hand to the object that was now coalescing, and the Sword came to him, its rightful wielder.
“Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand…”
And he held the sword aloft – the Sword whose name nobody had spoken until now.
“Till we have built Jerusalem…”
The Jerusalem Sword.
“In England’s green and pleasant land!”
Umbric was close now. It was do or die.
The shield was hardening, he could feel it covering his body – a gold set of armour, the best armour the world had ever given him, the armour he had betrayed through fear.
The Armour was Love.
Forgive me, Mother.
With a terrible yell, he slashed at the whirling hurricane with the Sword, beating it back. Umbric’s voice screamed from all around him:
WHAAAAAAAT AAAARREEEE YOUUUUUUU DOOOOOIIIINNNNG
“Something I should have done a long time ago,” he said, and in that moment he stood tall – regaining his full height.
He had ceased to be Cosimo Chesterton, the frightened boy. He had become Cosimo Chesterton, the true Cosimo Chesterton – a man, a man at last.
He attacked the hurricane with the Sword, cutting holes through it like tissue paper, every blow weakening it more and more. Umbric screeched in agony.
Above him, the Rollerskater still hung in the air, slowly dying.
One of Umbric’s many eyes flew past him. He stabbed his sword into its pupil, causing Umbric to issue another scream of anguish, and was carried into the air.
Leaping from the eye and swinging the sword, he deftly destroyed the tesseract net from which the Rollerskater had been hanging, and cut to pieces the spears piercing her hands. She fell to the ground.
And he leapt from his height, dragging behind him his sword, cutting through the swirling, screaming winds, which slowly transformed into anguished howls of agony and despair.
The winds began to shrink and die down.
Umbric was gaining corporeal form again.
As he hit the ground, the winds began to swirl together, like water disappearing down a drain.
When they had all but vanished, he found himself in a white room. The Rollerskater’s prone body lay before him, unable to walk or stand for the loss of her feet.
“You’re safe now,” he said.
He looked across the room to see a crumpled, vaguely-humanoid heap laying curled in a foetal position, and stepped silently over to it.
Umbric was severely withered and broken. Black blood poured from wounds all over its body. It was totally naked, writhing and twitching on the ground like a gutted fish, shrivelled.
Umbric’s eyes looked up at him.
“You…can’t kill me,” it said, through agonised moans. “If I die…then so must you.”
“Then so be it,” Cosimo said. “All things must die, Umbric.”
“The…Universe…could…have been…ours…” Umbric moaned.
“The Universe is not anyone’s,” Cosimo said. “Not ours. Not hers. It belongs to itself as we belong to ourselves.”
Umbric looked up at him, its tiny, beady eyes filled with unfathomable hate.
“Then…you…are…lost…” it said.
“Goodbye, Umbric,” Cosimo said.
“No,” Umbric said, weakly. “Plea—”
Cosimo plunged the Jerusalem Sword into Umbric’s head, and it thought no more.
He withdrew the Sword, staggering over to the Rollerskater’s side, and collapsed to the ground.
“Quickly,” he said, weakly. “Take the Sword.”
“Cosimo?” the Rollerskater said. “Is it done?”
“It is…done,” Cosimo said.
Weakly, she propped herself up on one arm, and reached over at the Sword, and almost immediately felt herself being revitalised by it. The Sword transformed into skates once again, slithering up her arms, down her back and her legs, and on to her feet, newly restored.
Cosimo nodded, then fell to the ground, his breath shallow and ragged.
The Rollerskater crawled over to him.
She cradled Cosimo in her arms.
“You are a brave man,” she said. “Braver than most.”
Cosimo sighed.
“I no longer fear death,” he said. “Now that I know that it is as kind and gentle as you.”
“I’m sorry, Cosimo,” she said.
“Don’t be. My family have gone. Now it is my time to follow them.”
The Rollerskater sat with him for what felt like a thousand years.
After that time had elapsed, his eyes had grown dim, and no thought remained.
Her work was done.
Cosimo Chesterton was dead.
*
K-Os placed two fingers on Chesterton’s forehead.
He screamed.
A golden light pulsed through his body, and the screaming ceased.
And he fell, from a kneeling position, on to his side, no more an abomination.
He had died a man – and the expression in his half-opened eyes was one of peace. There may have been the barest trace of a smile in the corners of his mouth.
It had taken K-Os less than a few seconds to kill him.
A few moments passed.
A black cloud of evil vapour exuded from Chesterton’s mouth like ectoplasm, and dispersed into the air.
The demon had been exorcised.
“Out of the way!” Fenwick shouted, pushing his way forward and running over to the dead man, feeling his wrist for a pulse.
“He’s dead,” he said, shocked. “She…killed him with a touch. He died on the spot…”
K-Os lost her balance slightly and Socks quickly ran to her side, steadying her.
“K-Os,” he said, tears running down his cheeks. “Is it really you?”
“It is,” she said, wearily.
Chelsea Rose stood from her seated position, having listened to the scene unfold, and walked, cautiously, over to K-Os, feeling for her arm.
“Are you okay?” she asked, her voice thin and tearful.
“Yes,” K-Os replied. “I’m okay.”
“Good,” Chelsea said.
She drew her right hand back into a fist and punched K-Os very hard in the arm.
“Chelsea!” Dolly shouted, running to hold her back, but there were no more attacks to hold back.
Instead, Chelsea cried heavily, the years of torment and anguish finally pouring out of her, her usually aloof demeanour falling away.
“Don’t you ever die on us like that again, you stupid fucking cow,” Chelsea said.
K-Os slipped away from Socks, moved herself next to Chelsea, and put her arms around her.
Chelsea cried against her shoulder, both jubilant at K-Os’s return and anguished at the pain and sorrow it had taken to get here.
“I won’t,” K-Os said. “I promise that I won’t.”
Chelsea pulled away from her shoulder.
“It’s good to have you back,” she said. “Also, I just snotted on your new top.”
“That’s okay,” K-Os said, with an uncharacteristically warm smile.
Chelsea laughed.
“Oh, I’ve missed you, you freak.”
“Can somebody explain what the hell is going on?” Fenwick asked, looking at K-Os. “Who is she?”
“Her name is K-Os,” Harri-Bec said to him. “And she’s our friend.”
K-Os looked at Harri-Bec, Dolly and Ella Faux.
“Harri-Bec…Dolly…Daisy…” she said.
“It’s Ella, actually,” Ella said.
“I am so sorry,” K-Os said. “But you survived…you all survived…”
K-Os was, at this point, billions of years old. For something to amaze her would take a lot, Socks thought.
“A universe died,” K-Os continued. “I died, and the universe was totally obliterated. And still, you were able to survive. You found each other, across time and space. I just returned from the dead, but that you were able to achieve that in my absence – that is a far greater victory.”
Silence fell across the room.
“We won…” Ella said. “We didn’t even know it, but we won.”
A pause.
“So,” Lewis said. A man of as few words as his counterpart in the previous universe. “What happens now?”
K-Os looked at them, then down at the floor.
“This universe must be rebuilt,” she said. “Just as when Umbric killed me, I have killed Umbric. And this universe depends on Umbric to continue to exist. It will soon die.”
Dolly and Ella looked at one another.
“Does that mean…” Dolly said.
“…that we cease to exist?” Ella said.
“Your base patterns shall be returned to your former counterparts,” K-Os said. “But you, as you are now, will cease to exist.”
“After all we’ve been through…” Dolly said. “What do you think, Ella?”
Ella turned to the Oscillations, who both nodded silently.
“I think I’d like to go around again,” she said. “I think I’d like to be Daisy.”
Fenwick walked over.
“And what about me?” he said. “Will I be alright?”
K-Os looked at him and smiled.
“Oh yes,” she said, knowingly. “Quite alright.”
Fenwick was perplexed, but somewhat reassured.
Chelsea sighed.
“I’m gonna miss you, Dolly,” she said.
“We’ll meet again,” Dolly said. She blushed slightly. “But…I just want you to know…this past week has been pretty fun.”
She stepped over to Chelsea, brushed the the hair away from her face, and kissed her on the lips.
“For luck,” she said.
Chelsea blushed as well, clearing her throat, taking Dolly’s hand.
Dolly smiled, and took Ella’s hand.
Ella took Ollie’s, and Ollie took Lewis’s, and Lewis took Fenwick’s.
“As strange as you all are,” Fenwick said, “May you all live long and happy lives, wherever you end up.”
Socks held Harri-Bec’s hand.
“Are you ready?” he said.
“As I’ll ever be,” she replied.
K-Os surveyed the situation and nodded.
“Good luck,” she said.
She pushed herself away from them on the skates, sliding backwards and raising her hands.
The skates began to glow, and with them, her whole body.
She closed her eyes.
And there was light…
Another time, another place.
This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The illustration for this instalment is an altered version of The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun by William Blake, who also wrote the poem for which this installment is named. It is, to my knowledge, in the public domain.
ARC TWO: ROSE GOLD
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