Ch27

Attempting to escape The Voices beneath the overcast skies of his apartment rooftop, his eyes dashed to each of the viewable clinquant stars.

But halfway into his nomenclature, a sudden, cold, and piercing tension snapped his exhausted head from the concrete. The crooning of a strange tuning fork now intensified in his skull and sat him entirely upright.

And then he saw, there in the darkness was the silhouette of a man, watching him.

Dex scrambled to his feet.

A dark-haired stranger stared at him from a nearby ledge, shadowed and laden with mystery.

But as they remained in the silence, Dex’s fear fell away. For a flicker, a disarming moment in time as the stranger’s dark glasses caught the glint of the moon, a note of familiarity rushed over Dexteras. They were both too comfortable in the dark, as though they’d known an eternity of sleeplessness.

The stranger leaped from his perch and drew near, extending a business card between tattooed fingertips.

“Who are you?” said Dex.

But the man only rolled his other wrist, manifesting a cigarette from a whirl of black plumes. He bit it in his teeth and again, offered up the business card.

Dex read the stranger’s scars, tattoos, and emanations of misplacement. They matched his own. He reached for the card and opened his lips to propose a question.

But before it could be asked, the stranger fastened around his outstretched palm with a lightning-fast grip, dosing Dex with the sensation of cold water in his veins.

His vision went dark.

His limbs went numb.

He floundered until his eyelids finally peeled open against the night. But it was worlds different from the night he’d just left.

It was nearing dawn now. And this wasn’t his rooftop.

The entire town of Corvid had spun around him and the stranger and had transported them someplace new. The gravel beneath him felt different. The shadow of an incinerator draped him in black. He was on the roof of Corvid’s Hospital. It looked morbid and menacing through the lens he seemed to be borrowing from the man who’d gripped him. His limbs moved thorough the space as though he were swimming through it.

A raucous shuffle crunched and cursed from behind.

Dex spun to see two men snarling in the dark, boxing, exchanging blows, and shoving one another into the concrete.

Dex pressed himself against the incinerator just as a showers of gravel pelted the bricks from the men’s dancing feet. The horrid cracks of grappling, kicking, pulling, elbowed eye sockets, and headbutted chest bones echoed across the roof and clapped against the brickwork.

Dex leaned from his cover to watch a man in a black coat and green eyes lift the other by the collar and sling him into the tower.

Dex ducked and darted from the bricks, surprisingly unnoticed by the fighting men. He spun to spectate just as the black-coated man pummeled the taller, lankier adversary.

Dex winced as the taller fighter’s head ricocheted against the smokestack stone with a slap, eyes rolling back, mouth bleeding. There, the rising sun’s fresh light just barely illuminated the poor bastard’s face.

Dex’s world dizzied and his limbs weakened. His gut dropped and he couldn’t breathe. It took several long seconds of staring for him to compute: the losing fighter was himself, a long past self.

And as his past self was torn from the bricks and tossed to the gravel, it was clear to see that the other fighter was the stranger he’d just encountered on his roof with the business card. This was a shared memory between them.

Then, amidst a vicious grapple, his past-self reached his pale fingers for the stranger’s skull and squeezed it like a melon. He plunged his thumbs deep into the furious green eyes until a horrid slurp of blood gushed from the sockets.

Vomit burned Dex’s throat as he watched the men scream horrendous carols of agony, melodious and harmonizing as though they were instruments of the same family.

Past Dex’s thumbs slurped and slipped inside the man’s skull. Blood seeped from the sockets and both fighters fell to the ground in a heap, unrelenting.

And then, a wash of black paint corroded the impossible memory like a house fire to a photograph. The world simmered and curled into the present time and day, into his own nighttime once more, back to his own rooftop.

The return to the real world flip-flopped his insides and his knees were scraped bloody as he collapsed onto his roof. His authentic senses flooded him at such an alarming rate, his stomach lurched with nausea and he became sick in shuddering gasps, clutching at the asphalt.

Dizzy and sick, Dex lifted his sloshing body to face the stranger who’d forced the impossible visions upon him.

But he’d vanished.

Dex’s fingers left damp, sticky prints on the business card beside him. Upon it, nearly illegible handwriting read: “What you’re looking for is here,” above a set of embossed coordinates that would eventually lead him to Oblitus.

Hours later, Dex gawked from the top of Oblitus’ staircase, beholding the expanse below. With each step down the bony metal stairs, electrical fizzles simmered beneath his skin. They were unsettling blips he’d experienced in brief moments of great stress or emotion prior, but this place reconnected the shorted wires and created a live charge in his blood.

He stepped into the crowd, taking in the realm’s countless doors, curtained thresholds, and shining bar tops. Then, within seconds of registering a pounding of feet behind him, he spun only to be snatched at the collar and choked.

A tanned beast held his arms behind him, leaving Dex to kick and flail and snarl as his wrist bones crackled. But as the stranger he’d met on the rooftop divided the crowd and approached, his attempts fell still and he huffed with wild eyes.

The two men stood toe-to-toe once more. Dex bared his teeth at his own reflection in the black sunglasses.

“What do you remember?” the man muttered around a cigarette.

“Remember? About what?” Dex stammered.

The goon behind him strained his limbs harder until Dex cried out.

“Don’t feck with me Dexy,” snapped the stranger. “Ya were gon fer feckin’ donkeys. If you want what ya came fer, I needs to know exactly what ya remember about being a Fig.”

For as long as he could remember, Dexteras could comprehend any language without thought or effort. But Cecil’s Cockney rhyming slang was out of his jurisdiction.

“A what?”

“A Figment, ya feckin’ lemon squeezer!” Cecil shouted.

A Figment? “Is that supposed to mean something to me?” His eyes widened with fear.

Cecil cocked his ear to Dex, listening keenly for something, brows stitched. Then with a great sigh, he whistled between his teeth and began rolling up his sleeves.

Dex swallowed with the unsettling gesture. His tattoos were covered by intentional swatches of black ink. Here and there, however, a bird with talons peeked through.

“Hold’em,” said Cecil.

Somehow, the brute behind cinched tighter around Dex’s wriggling muscles until he felt his shoulders might dislocate. He cried out again, evoking tears.

“Look at me brother,” stated Cecil. “I’m gonna reach into yer chest and squeeze the life from yer feckin’ heart. Understand?”

Dexteras tightened and shook. His heart drummed like a ballad.

“The only way yer breathin’ another breath again is to give yer best dog and duck, aye?”

“Wh-what?” the old man choked. The stranger held no weapon that he could find, but he was priming himself for an attack, nonetheless.

And then, before Dexteras could comprehend what was happening, the stranger gave a lightning-fast strike of his fist. And Dexteras felt an icy cold slice in and up through him. He felt his flesh and muscle split with ease and apathy.

Dex gawked down, expecting a massive blade, but instead beheld a thick, tattooed arm churning about his insides. The sickening sensation of his intestines and kidneys being relocated made him swallow bile. He could only gape, his brain unable to fathom the impossible pain.

With each of the stranger’s movements inside of him, Dex’s blood surged, leaving him to call out in great, shuddering gasps.

Then, as promised, scraping fingernails wrapped around Dex’s heart, blinding him with its razor wire grip. Dexteras screamed unto the heavens until he couldn’t breathe. It was a vivid, acidic agony that broken bones had never come near to.

The rims of his vision flickered black. Nausea drooped his chin to his chest. Before the dark consumed him, he heard the stranger a final time.

“Ya really don’t remember shite, do you Dexy? How the feck did the Unbecoming not brown bread ya out there?”

a+2

Dexteras came-to on the tile, glaring up into a hoard of violent thugs with strange bands of tattoos and eye colors. He lurched upright, his insides tumbling within like a bag of stones. A seasick vertigo made him clutch the cool tile and close his eyes to the crimson bulbs of the bar.

The beings around him goaded in countless languages, kicking, prodding, snatching his limbs, tempting him to his feet. Once he could comprehend their demands through the onslaught of The Voices in his skull, he realized they were attempting to instigate him into fighting. Above, a fighting ring’s gold chains dropped with black blood down its rusty links.

Dex didn’t want to fight. He wanted to know who he was. What he was.

Of course, that was until the creature known as Jezebel had said what he said.

The large tattooed bison of a man pressed his bloody body against the golden cage from above, a toothy grin painted across his face like a rabid ape.

“Dexy!” Jezebel called down with a drunken cackle. “I’ve heard you got yourself a pretty little skin-sack. What’s she called, eh?”

Dexteras closed his eyes and bit down on his tongue until it filled his mouth with salt. He fought to stay conscious, they to stay on his feet, and he limped onwards, towards the stairs, towards home.

Then, as though he were naming stars in the sky, Jezebel yelled over the booming music so Dex could hear, “Alice? Bethany? Claire? Destiny? Elena?”

The old man winced, furious on behalf of the women with such names that Jezebel now defiled with his demeaning jibes. He prodded onward, hot anxiety burning in his cheeks.

“Ooooo boys, we’re close,” whooped Jezebel. “Faith. Ginny. Hannah. Ingrid. Juliet. Kennedy. Lindsay-”

A desperate Dex fought to keep his stride kinetic, but the crowd grew thick and unmoving. They wanted to see a spar. To see blood spill. His own simmered like cooking stew, thick and tempting to boil over.

“Nearly there, Dexy!” laughed Jezebel from the stage, swinging against the chains like wedding bells. Each name was now more pronounced and dangerous on the beast’s tongue. It was enough to make any father enraged with protective fury.

“Leah. Louise. Linda,” Jezebel shouted.

Dex ground his jaw and closed his eyes. He could no longer move. He could no longer press forward. “No, no, no…” he whispered to himself, ears ringing.

“Lemon-meringue, lentil soup, lily blossom…” Jezebel chuckled, rambling like a madman. And then, the brute snapped his fingers and crooned once more.

“Lelani? Lilith? Lenore?” He cackled.

Dex’s eyes flashed open, so hot and wide that they welled with tears. His insides were armed and rigid like an ejected steel baton, alight with lightning, ready to obliterate planets into particles.

He spun, ignoring the unset bones and maneuvered insides within him. Those bits would solder and mend and blood would clot, but he would never unhear Jezebel tasting his dear friend’s name on his tongue as though it were something stuck in his teeth.

He also had no time to ponder the implications of his impossible healing abilities now. He dare not wonder about the kind of creature it made him.

“Lenore,” the man in the ring sang with shining eyes. “That’s it. Tell me Dexteras, she a looker?”

The crowd thickened around them with the rising tension, some grinning, some sipping their cocktails, others clapping bejeweled hands soaked in old tattoo inks. But they all implied a thirst for violence. This much was evident: fighting was the nightly entertainment.

Dex couldn’t hear anything above the thudding of his heart and the humming of electricity beneath his skin. He was wound wire and cable, alight with live current. He approached the ring, locked onto the fighter’s grinning red face with each step.

“You should bring her around, I’ll show her a good time,” Jezebel winked with a bruised and black eye. “Things her human brain can’t even fa-” but the brute had been cut short.

En route to the ring, Dexteras snatched a prosthetic leg from a nearby contender who was unconscious on the tile. Its rigged bits and precious metals fizzled in his hands with obedience beneath his charged fingers. Then, in one motion, Dex leaped, pulled himself up by the thick gold chains, and tucked and rolled onto the stage. He swung the limb with monumental force through Jezebel’s ankles. The mechanical weapon exploded into a shower of sparks and cogs as the massive fighter went down, like Achilles. Jezebel tremored with electricity.

Dex tackled Jezebel and pulled himself on top of him, delivering blow after blow against his opponent’s skull and face. Only when the body beneath him was limp and no longer grinning bloodied teeth, did Dexteras stop. The old man stumbled away from the nearly-dead Jezebel whilst sweat and blood and sparks of dripping electricity fell from his flesh. He hopped down from the stage with finality. Later, of course, Jezebel repaid the favor by smashing Dex’s skull from behind with a metal chair.

Now, in the blackness of his thoughts, was one of the very first moments he’d been gifted to stop. To process. To distance himself from the stranger he now knew as Cecil. From the blood thirsty Oblitus and its impossible beings. To fathom what horrid thing he must’ve been if they were his family.

He pulled at his hair in fistfuls, uncertain that he knew what reality was anymore, not that he’d had a stable grip on its luxury prior. There was a rift between possible and impossible and it was swallowing him, blending him like a food processor. He wanted to scream, so close to the precipice of insanity.

Dexteras.

Even The Voices were confused. Never before had they called out to him by name.

He felt so stuck, so trapped, as though he were folded into a coffin, suffocating, screaming, helpless, dead.

Dead.

“Dex!”

His eyes ripped open, wincing beneath a young, red sun.

His knees and hips ached and each inch of him pulsed with adrenaline. It’d seemed he’d kicked himself free, not from a coffin, but…

…the truck bed of a square-body pickup.

He was blanketed in a fleece throw and a man’s canvas jacket with leather elbow patches. It smelled of old cigars.

This was Norah’s car.

He’d busted the locking mechanism on her vehicle’s boot, which now gasped open. Silhouetted before it was Norah Kestrel.

Beyond, a Gothic farmhouse loomed with chipped rails and detailed spindles. Its tired eyes matched Norah’s on the morning he’d first met her on the hospital roof, dark and leaking. Hurting and haunted. But just as Norah’s kindness had all those moons ago, the house’s stretch of dark rooftop called to him with its quiet. Its massive shadow yawned across acres of dark foliage and swaying crops, blanketing the land around them in chaotic overgrowth.

Nor gazed down at her tailgate’s rusted lid to critically eye the torn hardware with tall brows.

He began to apologize for the horrid overreaction but when her eyes fell to his, they were not alight with frustration, but maternal doting and worry.

“I’m sorry, I should’ve been gentler,” she said. “But it’s been one hell of a long night and I thought you might like some coffee.”