A sound that might’ve been a moan came from her.
“We never transfigure twice – because we’re told that we can’t take it. Our bodies. Our minds. Our souls. Like looking God in the face, you will go insane, or is that looking at the sun? I don’t know,” he smiled, “but you’re about to find out, Lai’leen. I’m going to be your second time.”
She shook her head fervently. Her eyes were wild and streaming with tears.
He tapped into his soulwire, made the sign, and – done – her eyes were gone.
Blind and mute. He could close her ears as well, and deaden her nerves, but he wanted her to hear what was coming and feel it too. He’d chosen a selection of suitably rusty knives for this performance. The sound they made when they were drawn over bare bones was exquisite.
Yes, this was it. He’d needed someone else and she was perfect.
He whispered in her ear one last time, “Say hello to God for me.”
And then, Jaiq Banquo began his finest work.
“Don’t you see it?” Valys thrummed.
They had returned to the murder scene. No-one had cleared it up yet, at their instruction. The transfiguration chamber had been preserved in a stasis field.
“No,” Owl responded, “not at all. It’s a mess.”
“It’s all there. It is a design. She’s here, but not here. It’s beautiful in a way. He didn’t want her dead. He wanted her gone, to unexist. No trace to remain. He was going for utter obliteration rather than pure oblivion.”
“It’s sick to me,” Owl hooted. “Why would he want her to not exist?”
“Because she made him. She made him realise he wasn’t as good as she was, or anyone else here. He couldn’t create a transfiguration no matter how hard he tried. He was canvas, not artist. She made a mistake letting him in and this is… something else. An act of hate and crude destruction towards reality itself.”
“A decreation. The opposite of being transfigured.”
“Right, she’s been decreated,” Valys sighed.
“That’s why there’s no data to be read. It’s not there because it never was. It’s all gone backwards. Her timeline unravelled, that’s why he looked so junked. He fried his mind doing this, scraped a dirty hole in reality for her life to drain down,” Owl twittered, “you’re right, it is beautiful in a way. Incredible and beautiful. The divine made desecration. Does that mean we’ll forget her?”
“Could be more than that. We’re here, part of events. It might spread to us, to everyone, everything around. Jaiq Banquo’s pulled the thread for all to come undone. Illuminarium and transfigurators gone too. Poof!”
“That’s some deep damage.”
“If we go, I’ll miss you,” Valys droned.
“Will you? I guess I’ll miss you too, my friend,” Owl whistled, “but I hope my last thought is an ice-cold beer. I did love beer.”
“No more ice for us. Sorrow and loss, that’s what the universe is made up of.”
“When God laughs,” Owl asked, “is he laughing at us, himself, or nothing at all?”
“Ask me another time,” Valys said.
Dedicated to Philip K. Dick
End Program
The light was as grey as the worn, tattered edges of her soul. The single, cracked bulb illuminating the bedroom was dressed with threads from a dead spider’s web. Outside the window, she could see the burnt sodium streetlight glow illuminating the council-owned cul-de-sac of red-brick houses she called home. Home was a part of Ipswich. The bed she slept in was single, with sweat-dulled sheets and its wire frame creaked under her weight. The bedroom walls and ceiling were covered with scraps of paper blu-tacked and stapled into place. At first glance, the decoration appeared to be nonsense scribbling in dark blues, blacks, reds and miserable shades of grey. However, upon considering the obliterated patches of paper further, shapes could be discerned; humanoid forms, soaring brittle structures, and what might be vehicles or trains of some description passing through streets where there were pavement equivalents but no roads. “Where we’re going, there’ll be no roads,” she whispered to herself, smiling.
In these dense impressionistic scenes, she had outlined the architecture of an entire world. It had always been with her. There wasn’t a day or night when it hadn’t been there as a dream or nightmare. So many stories. So many people. Stacked on top of one another. She’d been told her first words weren’t mum or dad, but the name of the place that’d been growing inside her head since she was born.
“The Crawl,” she said, out loud.
Her name was Tori Walker and she was a God.
Realities are not born as the average physicist supposes. No-one knows what there was before the Big Bang, and we do not know the soil in which our universe was seeded. It is understood by a select few that the truth of reality resides in the mind. To pass through the doors of perception is to understand existence is no more than what a mind constructs around and within itself. Dream and fantasy, truth and reality; the boundaries between them are not merely thin but non-existent. This being the case, it naturally follows that worlds and entire universes might be born inside a mind that is correctly attuned. It also naturally follows that the name of God is as incomprehensible as the knowledge of Him (or Her) because comprehension would mean the mind in question understanding what it has done. Think about that, a unique, creative but mortal consciousness discovering that it is Creator but also Destroyer of countless lives, as death would be a very necessary part of any universal existence. Responsibility and deep, abiding horror would collide and the universe created would likely collapse into chaos. Thus, the conclusion must be such Gods dwell among us and the reason these unique minds and their creations endure is they are insane – those who are unable to fully comprehend themselves. Truly, for them, ignorance is bliss.
It was Tuesday morning, time for her appointment at the daycare centre, but the Crawl tasted real and she wanted to go back there. She could feel it at the back of her throat. Blood and oil. Flesh and aging machinery. The last dream-traces lingered on, hangover-heavy. The rhythm of a headache was pounding away as per usual. It would soon settle down as part of the background noise of her day. A couple of paracetamol would sort it out. Rummaging through the bathroom medicine cabinet, Tori found a squashed blue packet of paracetamol. She broke the seal with a chewed-down thumbnail, tugged the instructions out of the way, and peeled open one of the tinfoil-covered cavities. Empty. She opened another, and another. Empty. Empty. Empty!
Frowning, Tori shook the packet. Nothing. She tore open both sheets of paracetamol. Every single cavity, empty. Serves me right for buying the super-cheap ones, she thought.
“Fucksake,” she muttered, throwing the useless packet into the bin.
Her head was pounding harder than her heart, and it wouldn’t stop. She blinked away tears from her eyes. There was bitterness gathering in her throat. Keeling over the sink, she vomited. The world smeared. Her eyes ran with tears. Her stomach clenched and twisted until the sour pressure eased. Winded, she wiped her eyes clear and looked down into the sink. It was half-full of clear bile mixed with a viscous black substance. There were things floating in it; some were small sacs of nascent flesh and glutinous fat, others were hard and angular – bits of broken machinery – and the smell coming from the sink wasn’t that of pungent vomit but something else. She recognised it. Blood, petrol and oil.