‘No!’

I felt myself pull the trigger. Everything was red.

Everything was red.

I opened my eyes, transfixed by the reflections looking back at me from all directions. I stared at the blood running down the mirror, at my broken face, as my legs gave way. I was falling, everything was falling, and then I stopped. Everything stopped, and I was standing again. Drop by drop, the blood from the mirror began to leap from its surface, hitting my face like rain, crawling up over my lips and nose, my eyes and hair; back into the hole in my head. The skin around the wound started to heal, stitching together skin and blood, brain and bone, until the hole had almost disappeared completely. The gun was still in my hand. Smoke swirled around it, closer and closer, until it disappeared down the barrel. There was a flash of light and an implosion. I released the trigger and slowly lowered the weapon.

‘You have no power over me…’ I heard myself say. ‘I say when my story is over. Not you. Not anyone.’

There was no reply. I saw a door open in the mirrored wall and I walked through it.

My eyes opened. I was lying inside a chalk outline, a patch of dried blood beneath my head. The conference room was empty, chair and tables overturned, lights off, cameras abandoned. I got to my feet, pushed open the double doors and walked outside. The hotel was deserted, but it wasn’t the lack of people that concerned me, it was the silence. It was so complete, so overwhelming.

The air was so dense I felt like I was passing through water. Every step was painful. Tiny corrosive needles burned and scoured my exposed skin. I had a vision of myself dissolving as I walked, digested by the acidic atmosphere of this strange world, which seemed to have changed while I slept. I was the outsider here, the foreign body in a new land, and my presence here was wrong. It was rejecting me.

The streets outside were the same, silent and cold, but not empty. It was clear to me now the air was filled with something invisible and deadly, and I wasn’t the only one it was affecting. The city itself was falling apart, the buildings crumbling as if they had suddenly aged a thousand years. Without people, the world couldn’t exist. Was that it? I was the last person left, but my mind alone wasn’t enough to sustain it. Life needed more than a single conscious observer, it seemed. The world remained because I was still here, but it was falling apart, disintegrating without its inhabitants, without all their thoughts to perceive, and create it. Was this what Maas wanted?

‘Why don’t you ask me?’ a voice called out behind me.

I spun around and saw a man with a gun standing in the middle of the road, looking back at me. It was him. Ezra Maas stood before me, at last. My own gun was still in my hand. We drew at the same time, two gunfighters facing each other at the end of the world, but only a single shot rang out. The bullet caused a crack to form in thin air. It grew larger, until everything began to shatter, the road, the buildings, the sky, everything before my eyes, like the whole world was made of one large glass surface with nothing behind. I pulled the trigger again and again, but the figure looking back at me stood motionless. Two reflections becoming one, divided into shards, shattering into fragments, the sound each piece of glass made as it hit the ground was the music of infinity. I realised I was looking at a mirror of the world in the middle of the road, nothing more, and when it finally fell apart, collapsing with a great crash, I saw there was nothing and no-one behind it.

I kept walking, past abandoned cars and along a hundred empty streets, until I was finally back at the hotel. Throughout my journey across the wasteland, I had become aware of a shimmering in the air, a blur of ghost images, people and places, sounds and colours, appearing and disappearing, waves and particles, sparks of potential drifting in and out from somewhere else, as if the walls between worlds had grown thin, or the atmosphere of this dead land was eating through into other places. Different worlds were coming to life and dying before my eyes. I saw myself walking away from the book and leaving London with Isabella, I saw a world where I was living with a wife and two children, another where I moved to New York and met a girl from Long Island, another where I was dead or never existed, the pictures were constantly shifting until finally, colour and sounds bleeding out into the air, they faded away altogether. Those lives weren’t mine.

I was here at the end, and I was alone…

At least I thought I was. Behind me I could hear whispers. I turned around and saw the shadows twitch and move. No, not shadows exactly, such things weren’t possible here where the dying air was stale, and the sun was missing. They were flickers of darkness, shades, moving fluidly along the ground, along the buildings, like ink, the raw material of words and illustrations. They were coalescing, forming pictures, on the walls, on the road, fusing into scenes from my mind, from the story, things that already happened – receiving the call that changed everything, travelling around the world, finding Jane’s letter and watching the film, the discovery of Ezra’s apartment, finding the numbers, the actor, my escape from the ugly spirits and their animal masks, running through the train station, the art gallery, Elizabeth and all the others, the press conference…

The shadows were shifting, taking the shape of things that were happening right now – the last man alive, walking through an empty city – and things that were yet to come. I tried to look away, but it was too late. They were changing again, but this time it was not past, present, or future, they became figures and began to peel themselves off the wall. They were coming for me.

I ran back to the safety of my hotel, the four walls of my room and the typewriter waiting inside, the pages of the book neatly stacked on my desk. Outside, the shadows had emerged from all their hidden places, between buildings and dead-end streets, their eyes black and empty, faces blank, tearing and clawing at each other, moving back and forth, standing still, sitting in the trees…waiting.

They were all waiting for the book to be completed. They needed it to come to life, to cross over into the world.

I looked around the four walls. It was a room like any other, except that it was full of holes, and behind each one there were eyes watching, mouths whispering, shadows willing me to reach the end. I sat down and began to write. One last time from the beginning, once more without feeling…

Until we get to the present moment, until we reach…

The End.

The room is on fire, the ceiling alive with black smoke, writhing and undulating like a bed full of bodies. I rise from the desk as the walls blister and bubble, the air shimmering with heat. The book has just one final page left to write.

Flames dance like frightened animals, as thick, snaking, tubes of black smoke swirl around the room, devouring themselves and being reborn. I know what I have to do now. I have to erase him, every trace of the man who defined more than half a century of world history. I need to give him to the fire.

You will only know that I have succeeded if you do not know who Ezra Maas is, if the name means nothing to you. If he lives now, it is only in the pages of this book, so I must destroy what I have created. He will die with this text. You might think this is just a book, you might question what difference destroying it can possibly make, but I know the truth.

I know what you’re thinking. Whether Ezra Maas is dead or alive, he still existed in the world for nearly seventy years; burning my book page by page can’t change what has already happened.

But you’re wrong.

You assume the world, the past, is fixed and immutable, but it’s not. What if the words I am writing here, which you are reading now, are already changing things?

It’s just like quantum mechanics. Observations change the outcome of experiments, not just in the present, but in the past, and if the past is altered, the present changes with it. Maas knew that, now I know it. Maybe the world is always changing, but we just don’t notice because we are a part of it, and change with it.532 I couldn’t solve the problem of ‘Ezra Maas’ for the same reason. I just didn’t realise the truth, until now.533

Notes

532. Like Max Planck said we “cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature…because in the last analysis we are part of the mystery we are trying to solve”.

533. There is a sense running through the end of the book that Daniel, in his search for the truth, was trying to prevent some great cataclysm from taking place, an epistemological crisis perhaps even greater than the psychological trauma caused by the outbreak of the Great War. Several years have passed since Daniel disappeared, leaving this manuscript in my hands. His story took place before the phrases ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ were coined, before a new wave of narcissistic, capitalist tyrants rose to power in supposedly democratic countries on a wave of racism and greed, and before whole continents were torn apart by political opportunists beating the old, familiar drum of jingoistic hatred. But as I look at the world now, in late 2017 as I write this, I find myself wondering if the cataclysm Daniel was trying to prevent actually came to pass? Are we living it now? And what of Ezra Maas? Was his plan to trigger these end times, to make way for a new world, or was he trying to prevent this too? And in the end, did he win or lose? Both Daniel and Ezra are gone, leaving us only ashes behind as clues to their final intentions – Anonymous.