Komodo
Jeff VanderMeer
Short story
C
hild, standing there in your flower dress considering me with those wide dark eyes while the mariachi band plays out in the courtyard… I’m going to tell you a story. It doesn’t matter if you can’t understand me – they can, and they need to trust me, need to know I’m telling them this for a reason. But I need you, too, because every tale requires an audience, and you’re mine. So I hope you’ll stay awhile. It won’t take long. I don’t have long, anyway.
It starts in a strange place, I’ll admit, inside of a giant green plastic alien head. I was all dressed up. I was on my way to a party. Let’s say the party celebrated something like the Day of the Dead, and that I was in a hurry to get there.
The weight of the head made me stagger back and forth like a drunkard until I got used to it. The smell had a kind of intoxicating effect, which might also explain part of the staggering… and it made me feel a kind of extraterrestrial clarity coming on, like the mysteries of the universe might soon be solved, or some small part of them. So this is what it’s like to be free, was one thought, with this giant head on my shoulders, my arms pinned, and the second thought was: it’s so green out there. The birds were green. The garbage collectors were green, and so were all the cars. Did I say I was moving fast? Staggering, yes. Running, yes.
I felt a lingering sense of appreciation that the buildings accommodated people with giant green heads. Still, sometimes as I made my way I flinched in anticipation of low-hanging doorways. Did I mention yet how I came into possession of a giant green alien head in the first place? I don’t think I did.
The weight of the head increased as my path took me through a local shopping centre, and soon I felt a pressure pulling on my neck, which puzzled me. When I managed to find a reflective surface, I discovered that a ragtag band of green children had attached themselves to my giant head by means of crude homemade grappling hooks and were by their combined mass throwing off my balance! I had no choice but to take drastic action. I sat down on the pavement and cursed at a rapid rate, in a variety of local languages. After half an hour, the children began to find me less than interesting, and left. I was able to continue in my rapid perambulations without further interference.
No. I didn’t really sit down and curse. I rose in a fury and flung juveniles like rag dolls. The ones who had held on to their grappling hooks, which is always a fool’s chance.
Did I say it was a shopping centre? It wasn’t a shopping centre, or even a farmers’ market. I only said that so you wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. And they weren’t really children. But this is not entirely the truth, either. Your comfort level – and now I’m not talking to you, child, who can barely understand this language, but to the watchers, who, by the way, should know that this child has nothing to do with any of this; she’s just a bystander, who may still grow up to be innocent, or perhaps not… it’s beyond my control, mostly… but your comfort level is only one consideration because I am altogether more selfish than that, and I’m talking for the benefit of so many on so many levels now that I think I’m probably saying anything I say in large part so I will feel more comfortable. After all, I’m the one bleeding out.
So…
The rest of my journey in the giant head went badly – I think you saw that coming. I walked to the river, lost my balance and fell into the water, head first. I bobbed downstream, legs in the air, staring at upside-down tadpoles and fish (yes, let’s call them fish) with just enough air to breathe. A strange murky beauty to it all; and from that perspective the river weeds draped down and the alligators (yes, why not?), all pale belly, long throat, and legs weirdly paddling above their torsos, looked just enough like komodos to alarm me for a moment.
A while later I managed to get caught in some branches just as the giant green head I was wearing filled up with water. Wedged thusly, I was able to get right-side up. By then, I was miles from the city and sopping wet. With difficulty, I made it up the steep bank, only to be confronted by a startling and horrible sight.
…But, in fact, I may need to back up and tell the truth again. There were other people involved. There always are, even if you don’t know that yet, child. I left the house that morning in such a hurry for a reason – several of them. Someone was after me. Someone had caught up. I had no choice but to jump in the river. (The head began to fill with water for another reason altogether: the bullet.)
The ones who pursued me smelled funny. Not hilarious, but funny
– like lime mixed with pumice and salt and then put in a blender for a thousand years and taken out, shaken with ice, placed in a glass with a sprig of basil. When they got angry, though, all of that got sweated away and they smelled like thick, fresh brine. They did not always hold their shape. They appeared far off in the sky hoping to catch me unawares by diving down with silver wings folded. Their wings were burning, ravaged. By the time they reached the ground, their wings were gone. If not for that, I would never have been able to escape them… although there is always a chance that they wanted me to escape. Games within games. Wheels within wheels. You never know.
Here’s another thing I haven’t said, child: I was expecting them. Just not so soon. Does that sound strange? It’s not nearly the strangest thing. You may have to brace yourself.
They dared to take chances, which is what hooks you at first, even if you do find yourself among them largely by chance or fate. To return to their stronghold atop a living mountain – to really come all the way back home – they would eschew riddling their way through the Rips to appear, miraculous, on the lawn, and instead enter from the upper atmosphere, calculating how long it would take for their huge wings to burn up, and come hurtling down, on fire. Their wings were strong, but filigreed like a damselfly, and the flame tore holes. Weaving and diving, feet-first and head-first, they careened down in droves. Most of the time, they guessed correctly and made it to the ground, their wings crumpled and glistening black-brown like burnt sugar but having performed almost like parachutes. The wings would grow back. Everything grows back on them; they even have a tolerance for the vacuum of space. Some of them get drunk on it.
The ones not so lucky or smart would smash screaming into the lawn and would smolder there until others tended to them. These angels lay there, shrieking and laughing at the same time. Writhing in a spasm of something that wasn’t just pain. They looked like heaps of smoking, quivering tar with just a suggestion of a head with a mouth by then, but smelled like lilies. Such cases would take a long time to heal, but by their standards a decade was just a blink. When you’re immortal or near to it, your idea of play just isn’t the same as for other beings. Your idea of play is almost as important as the missions that take ages to carry out. You could even distinguish between factions of angels by their approach to this ‘game’. You could begin to get a sense of… divisions and differences of opinion, even what they meant when they said the word ‘enemy’.
I can guarantee you will be confused for a while, but hopefully it’ll pass.
It had eyes that, even through the green wall that lay between us, looked human. Trapped in a staved-in bear skull. I had the impression that it had not been standing there, so tall, so unhidden, until I had made my way up the river bank, although this is exactly where I had meant to end up.
For a moment, I hesitated. Wouldn’t anyone? But from behind me, down the riverbank, I heard the unmistakable sounds of pursuit. Even without wings, the angels were fast. As I’ve said, they had no need to hold their shape.
I approached the bear-thing, the dry sedge weeds of the field sandpaper-rough against my trousers; let’s face it, they were nipping at my trousers, and they weren’t really even close to weeds, but why lose you in the details?
Up close, the bear’s eyes were deep brown flecked with gold. Its muzzle revealed hints of greenish bone. Its paws looked soft, its yellow claws curling in toward cracked pads. Despite a crown of buzzing flies, the bear smelled like a body after the flesh had been worn away by weather and erosion and scavengers: clean, but with some lingering hint of sharpness that bit into the nostrils. I knew this not from that moment, stuck in an alien head that suppressed my senses, but from all the other times. Oh yes, there had been other times. I wasn’t new to this, not any more.
“You’re a sad shit brick house!” I shouted at the bear through my giant green head.
“You’re a pathetic puddle of flesh,” the bear rumbled.
“You’re a run-down monster, a walking zombie, a ramshackle disgrace.”
“Human.”
“Horlak.”
What? You’ve never talked smack with a rotting bear? It’s quite the experience, especially since we were speaking in his language, which takes a long time to master. But the bear and I shared a history of sorts, and I had been preparing for this moment for ages. Angels can’t control bears, and I was not, strictly speaking, an angel, so he made a useful ally.
But the time for smack was over; now was the time for pull. Without warning, two huge gangrenous paws fixed onto the sides of the green head and, as I braced myself, yanked it off without disturbing the breathing apparatus clamped like gills to the side of my neck.
The bear – Seether – tossed the head to one side. I stood there, blinking in the sudden glare. Sodden. Real head bleeding from the bullet hole, red leaking out. Hair slicked back with river water and sweat. Arms chafed raw. Shoulder sore. I was humanoid, as usual. I could switch genders and emulate many races, but I always had to have four limbs, two of them made for walking. Which is one reason I’d needed the green head.
“I need safe passage – now,” I said.
A thin, drawn-out growl like a rusty gate being pulled open. “They’ll find you eventually, no matter how I help.”
“If I fail, you festering maggot-metropolis, it’s all over anyway,” I said, with a smile.
“If you fail, bequeath me your most succulent marrows,” Seether said with good humour.
Behind us, at the river bank, they came closer, with their mouths that could see and their eyes that could hear. Together, the bear and I entered the hut and closed the door behind us. Inside, it was, my child, if you can believe this, wider than on the outside: a vast, tumbling, dark space that I did not really want to explore. I felt as though, by taking a step in the wrong direction – any direction – I would be falling off of a cliff into nothingness.
“Are you ready?” asked the bear that was not a bear, the corpse that wasn’t a corpse.
It took a moment to think that through. Was I really ready? A Seether is something ancient from the future, a refutation of everything you think you know about physics. It is not exactly immortal but not exactly mortal; it exists in a state between, continually resurrecting itself from the memory of the ghosts of its own decay. For all I know it calls upon all the coiled energy of whatever black hole happens to be closest, too. You can forge an alliance but you must know that not all Seethers are sane. When even the angels don’t know what end game the celestial bears are playing, you have a right to be wary about the ally you’ve chosen… especially one you’ve bribed with rotting honeycomb and a bag of ghost frogs. (That was a lot to absorb, I know, but some of it has to come in bursts or we’ll be here all afternoon.)
“I’m ready,” I said, because I had no choice, really, but to follow my plan. A terrible, stupid, complex, simple plan.
As I said the words, Seether roared and tore out my throat with one slow smacking slap of his paw. Then, as I became numb from shock, he leapt upon me and feasted upon me, devouring my entire body until not even a pile of bones was left.
Dying in this way did not much bother me, except for the terrible numb tugging and pulling. The pain I could block out, and I had no choice, even as I kept screaming from the surprise you can’t help expressing. This was the only way to escape my pursuers, even if I would have preferred to travel in a more conventional manner.
*
You may still be confused, which is allowed. It’s okay to be confused – the world’s a far stranger place than you can possibly imagine, and although I’m trying to allow you blinders, trying to ease you into it gently, some dislocation cannot be avoided. And, as I mentioned, I’m not really talking to you (or you, child, although you certainly seem mesmerised by my English).
There may be questions, yes? Here are a few answers, for now.
Were my pursuers really angels?
No, as I’ve said, just because they had wings didn’t make them angels. Do you know why they weren’t angels? Because there are no such things as angels, not the way your culture understands angels. Think of them as alien beings, not celestial beings, who had long ago forgotten where they had come from and where they were going to, who nonetheless maintained ears and eyes on millions of alt-Earths and other inhabited planets. Think of them as an omnipresent version of your prying Uncle Juan, if you like.
Was I the only one wearing a giant green alien head in that place?
No. Everyone was wearing a giant green alien head, except for the juveniles who jumped me in the shopping centre, driven by a pheremonal imperative common to their kind – and the fact it wasn’t really a shopping centre but an ancient religious site, for which they served as ‘monks’.
Had the bullet hurt me badly?
No. I was already slowly dying from another wound as I entered the hut with Seether, one I’d sustained well before I ever donned the green alien head. A stray bullet wound couldn’t stop me at that point, not when I was about to be devoured by a bear, and especially not one fired by the local constabulary, who had picked up my scent because of my blasphemous journey through the ‘shopping centre’. The angels had taught me compartmentalisation, whereby I could seal off injured parts of my body from the rest. At least, for a time.
What wound were you dying from, then?
A bite on the calf from a transdimensional komodo. The normal variety of komodo, the type you might know, is somewhat ponderous and stupid. But the second kind, the King Komodos as they are called by some, are intelligent and they can thread and stitch their way across universes and time. They’re much larger than ordinary komodos – think somewhere between a crocodile and a dinosaur – and they can exist in more than one reality at once. Their skin takes on the texture and colour of whatever they’re seen against. These komodos can travel where they like, and are deadly mischievous. Which is to say, theirs is a rambunctious and irreverent rule, and they trouble the angels much as a violent storm might trouble someone living in a cabin. You can’t take it personally.
Well, then, why should komodo poison affect you more than a bullet?
What you don’t know about the transdimensional properties of the komodo can kill you in more than one place. They can scent your wound through time, through space; it sporls out before them, like a mist that curls to beckon, while you, you’re more like a rabbit with a pocket watch who’s been stuffed with sawdust… and now that sawdust, that essential matter, is falling out of you in chunks and you’re feeling more and more like part of the background, the scenery. Everything is receding, except for the komodo. The komodo’s getting closer and closer. Reeling you in through its sixth, its seventh senses. That tongue forking out. A bandy-legged progression over rough terrain. The smell of rotting flesh that you can’t quite identify. Is it you or the komodo? Is it your life on his breath? Is this the last thing you’ll ever see or feel? That ugly, pitted bullet-head? That shit-eating grin? Because the thing is, you have to die
to escape a komodo. You have to let your wound take you, and not many people are up for that.
What if I told you the harbingers of the komodos are ghost frogs, apparitions that appear in hovering fashion just prior to a komodo’s appearance and feed off of its energy?
I didn’t think so.
All I can tell you is that floating in the aftershock of being devoured is very much like being rescued from an airplane that’s about to explode, while everyone else burns to death. You feel it outside yourself as much as inside, and you wonder if it’s worth it.
That’s how it happened, by the way. It’s not just a metaphor.
My husband and I were on a plane from one city to another – let’s say Seattle to New York – and sitting next to me was a large, athletic man with shoulders so broad I felt cramped. He could have been carved from marble. He had a continual smile because his lips curled up that way, which when he nodded and said his name, “Gabriel”, became both beneficent and the kind of sinister that some women think they like. He smelled strangely of cardamom and lime. I didn’t know he was going to change everything. I thought I was going to live out my life in the usual, the ordinary ways.
‘Gabriel’ was a joke, I would find out later, a kind of calling card. I’ve never learned his real name, if he has one. The angels don’t communicate in quite the same way as we do, child. He told me later he had asked me “When the time comes, do you want to be saved?” and that I said yes. But I don’t remember that.
My husband didn’t like him, I could tell, because he leaned in to whisper in my ear, “Do you want to trade seats with me? You don’t have to sit next to him.” That was William being protective, which annoyed me sometimes. But that was also William being useful, which I didn’t mind.
No, I didn’t want to trade seats, even though I was scrunched in the middle. Maybe it was something about Gabriel’s eyes; perhaps he had already coerced me in some way. Then the plane filled with smoke and dropped with a terrible lurch that sent anyone not buckled in flying down the aisle. I don’t even remember the screams. All I remember is that William’s hand was in mine on the right, and in that moment Gabriel locked his hand around mine on the left, and as the roiling wave of fire that was the explosion rushed at us from the cockpit, Gabriel’s grip became so strong that he ripped me up out of my seat as he stood, and I lost William’s hand, and couldn’t find it again in the smoke, and I was crying out his name but I couldn’t see him, and then there was a sense of limitless space and of rushing air… and I looked down to see the airplane below us, fragmenting in glistening orange lines of torque, blackness pouring out of it as if it had been filled with something evil, a torn off wing quivering as it twirled like a child’s toy down and through the cloud cover. The rest of it then fell so swiftly that there was only the smoke and a spray of particles that hovered in a glittering cloud.
I realised that Gabriel had wings, and that they beat strongly, and that at that altitude I should have been dead. That William was dead. Or still dying.
“Is this Heaven?” I asked Gabriel.
Staring down at me, those features registered the question with a kind of bemusement, and then Gabriel opened his mouth wide and streams of light issued forth and a sound came like a thousand windows breaking. Gabriel was laughing.
No, I was not in Heaven. No, Gabriel was not an angel as I thought of angels. I was a recruit. I was just another human they needed to do something for them. And William was gone, and I had crossed over in an instant into another way of thinking about the world.
I tried to will myself closer to my objective, prayed for the formless, endless dark to drop away. A stupid, too-human thing to do, but that was kind of the point.
I woke, reconstituted, in an empty hotel suite in Mexico City, just one floor up and one hour away from the start of the most important party in the history of… everything, really. To me, at least.
The light coming through the windows had a dull yellow quality to it and rising up in the distance the pollution seemed to gather not just in the sky but at the top edge of the window, as if trying to get in. I could see the distant bulbous prows of the purifying dirigibles, too, but there was too much for them to eat and they were getting lost in the smog that was their food.
The hum of the air conditioner seemed a prosaic thing to hear after listening to the snap of my own bones, the rip of my own flesh.
A stuffed bear stood in the corner, fur mangy, eyes glassy. Someone’s idea of a joke, to place it at this end point. An inexperienced traveller might even have thought it creepy, but you find so many objects put there by your predecessors, a way of saying “I was here once, I made it through.”
I checked my left leg. That glancing chomp from the komodo hadn’t gone anywhere. The outline covered most of the calf in fiery green splendour and the poison still sent out its signal. Had I evaporated so I was only a soul, it would still have been there, as if the jaws were still clamped onto me.
It always takes a while to get used to coming back into your body, but I only had the hour, so I walked into the bathroom and shoved the back of my head under the cold water tap.
I don’t know if it’s the devouring or the floating in the void, or the unsettling sense that you’ve come back as a doppelganger that’s the most unsettling. But first it’s the sudden, incomprehensible weight of your body, sagging into the bed, and then and only then the sense of that weight being whole
rather than the rummaging violation of having been torn into bits, of that weight being so strangely re-distributed in so short a period of time…
Because being eaten alive isn’t really what you might expect. The real terror isn’t in the act itself, but because during the process you are so utterly known
, down to the last scrap, with nowhere to hide. No part of you can be held back. That feeling has been known to drive more than one traveller insane.
What kind of travel is worth that price?
The kind no one but angels and komodos can do quickly: travel through both time and space.
Perhaps we’re deep enough into my story that I should reveal how I came to possess that giant green alien head in the first place.
It’s not a fairy tale, or even a pleasant tale. The head wasn’t actually made of plastic. In fact, I had killed the previous owner, to whom it had indeed served as a head of sorts. I had then performed a hurried scooping-out of the former contents so that I might use it to walk unobserved through the city’s streets and courtyards. That might seem blood-curdling, I know, except it wasn’t quite that bad. This particular type of creature is insensate about the head, keeps its brain in its stomach, so it can fully digest its thoughts. The relationship between head and nervous system is looser than that between, say, the shell and body of a horseshoe crab, but not as loose as the relationship between a hermit crab and its
shell.
I want to say I had successfully removed the head without death setting in, and then the shock took over and I couldn’t save him – that it was accidental, like a killing that occurs in the middle of a crime. But the fact is, I can’t tell you that at all.
This particular ‘person’ had been performing several experiments in a homemade lab in his basement, including one that fused komodo and angel blood. He’d been working for the angels without knowing it. The blood had been presented to him as something else entirely, something that would fit his understanding of science and the universe. The angels always had several of these side projects set up, usually running the logistics and admin through proxies like me so their imprint wouldn’t be as obvious.
‘He’ was ‘retired’ – which in this case meant both a creature multi-gendered and over six hundred years old, and cranky as hell. The substances had been sold to him by me (in disguise) some years before, and I’d kept an eye on him for the angels ever since, throughout the slow progress of his research. I had always known that someday, depending on his findings, I might have to take action. As it turned out, I was just going to have to destroy all of his work, murder him, and burn down his house as I left. But that didn’t mean I wanted to kill him, even though killing comes more easily to me than it did before Gabriel plucked me from the dying plane. Gabriel’s present to me.
*
…It also strikes me now, dear child, that I may have been vague about where all of this takes place. It takes place everywhere
. The green head and its owner lived on a distant planet in a totally different part of the galaxy, in an area that used to be where the not-angels devoted most of their time and resources. The ‘creature’ I killed – an extraterrestrial, just as you would be to him – was a scientist known across four planetary systems. In that time. In that reality. And I really needed his head so I could make it to Seether, so I took it. The greater good demanded his head, and sometimes, with so much at stake, I’ve had to make that assessment in ways that might seem cruel. But I’m paying for it, too, as should be clear.
Child, you should turn away if you are able. You should leave me here.
Of course, as I would find out, my husband still existed across other realities, especially the ones where he didn’t get on the plane with me or the plane didn’t explode. In plenty of other realities, I was doused in flames, plummeted blackened and burning, throat closed by smoke and lack of oxygen, face cracking, down, down through the clouds like an angel taking a gamble and yet not at all like an angel taking a gamble.
Gabriel showed me that, too, at the beginning, when I was resistant to my recruitment. There’s only one reality in which I am plucked off a plane by Gabriel, because angels exist outside of the algorithms of possibility, and those of us they recruit. The rest of you are out of luck… or lucky beyond belief.
We hovered across realities, watching me die over and over again until I became inured to my own death. Until I said, take me back. Take me back and I’ll help you. And even then I still couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember if Gabriel had asked me if I wanted to be saved, and what, if anything, I said back.
William, if you ever see this, the Williams that remain, if you ever hear this… I did not abandon you. I was not allowed
to go back. And how could I usurp the place of those other me-s by your side? What right did I have? None.
*
Soon, I grew accustomed to the hotel room and I felt better, even gave the moulding stuffed bear a friendly pat. There was not much to do before the party; the clothes I’d arranged for had arrived by bell hop just a few minutes before. I stood by the window looking out across Mexico City. Seether had deposited me just as I had intended: right time, right place. Your reality, child: a 2032 desperately trying to adapt to and stop global warming by transitioning to airships and green technology while outlawing most internal combustion engines. The Brazilian rainforest was a postage stamp on the map. The Gulf Stream had begun to shudder to a stop, clogged by plastics. Eventually, this version of Earth would right itself, but by that time the human population would be down to about two million world-wide. That was still better than the probability for about sixty per cent of all Earths.
My reality had been in the other forty per cent, but for my particular Earth, surviving climate change had been a booby prize: we had lasted until approximately 3052, when a comet smashed into it. Unfortunately, we still hadn’t made it to the stars by then, but other Earths had, so did it really matter? (Yes, child, it mattered.)
The angels didn’t try to stop such die-offs, and the few times they did reveal themselves rather than working behind the scenes, it almost always resulted in confusion or misunderstanding. Once, they’d even killed a rogue angel who had set herself up as a god-like figure in an Earth reality. Angels were hard to kill, but you could do it. At least, other angels could.
Above me, in suite 640, the drinks and appetisers would be set out, and the waiters were being given their instructions, and perhaps even a guest or two had showed up early. Thirty minutes until show time. The party was a political fund-raiser for a Mexican politician. Nothing all that important to the world, just money changing hands to help elect someone to a government seat. Nothing you’d cross time and space for, really. Except I had.
I had turned my skin green to match my head while on the other world. But now, after having stared into the mirror long enough to visualise the change, my skin was light brown, and my hair black, my eyes a beguiling green. Female. About mid-twenties. I’d be wearing a red dress, and silver bracelets. I’d have on a lapis lazuli necklace. No earrings – I had no patience for them.
Did I look pretty? Not as pretty as you, child, but, yes, I did look pretty. And I had no patience for that, either. The wound in my calf had begun to throb violently, sending pain-waves through my body that I imagined looked like the old-fashioned depictions of sonar or radar on the television when I was growing up.
Why? There aren’t as many of them as you might think. Millennia ago they had warred against one another, set entire solar systems ablaze with the fury of their familial hatred… and after that there had been thousands of them, not hundreds of thousands or millions. The details of their reproduction were beyond me, but when a new member of their species came into being, it floated inert and cold in the vacuum of space for millennia until some miraculous combination of conditions brought it to life amongst its brethren. It was for this reason, I would discover, that they turned to special ops, to recruits, grew craftier and colder and more elusive. Lost the thread, didn’t realise. Went on anyway. Didn’t matter.
Still, for a time, I thought it all meant something. I trusted them. The surveillance was even presented as something that was vitally important: something too far up the time-stream to see properly that would affect all of the alt-Earths. Then, after training, that reason fell away and others replaced it, only to fall away again.
In some ways, too, those early days felt unreal, perhaps because I didn’t want to think about William’s fate. Standing on the lawn atop the living mountain that they used as a base, on a planet remote from Earth. Seeing in their laboratories and intel stations just how many alt-Earths there were, just how much life had duplicated itself across realities. The boy who died in poverty somewhere I had never been rose again on another monitor like some odd version of reverse time-lapse photography. The sheer volume of life. The sheer alternality of it all. There were other distractions. Suddenly, with what the angels had embedded in my DNA, I could change race and gender at will; in a matter of minutes, if I concentrated. Not only was the universe mutable and endless, so too was my body. My body was just an avatar, even if there was just one of it. Being thrust back into the heat and weight of the world again, having created a different body for myself, I became an actor with an infinite number of masks. I enjoyed
being a man in some instances, received pleasure from playing that role. I could make myself as invisible or visible as I liked, depending on the mission and the situation.
I grew to be good at not caring. I grew good at debauchery. The party I was going to crash in a little while was nothing next to the parties I attended during this phase. In palaces, in mansions, underground and high in the mountains. Pretending to be almost anything or anyone. Sometimes, I would even switch halfway through, come back through the door as someone else, and listen to what people said about who I had been before. It’s easy to lose yourself in something like that: to feel a deep, tidal surge of satisfaction in being both on a leash and off the hook. Missions for the greater good! Parties for my own good!
By the time the assignments grew more deadly, I was treating other people as if they too were merely avatars, skins, so that an order to hurt someone, and eventually to kill someone, meant only that one reflection in an infinite hall of mirrors had to be taken out. Just one, I told myself. All the others remained, grinning back at me.
But by the time I got bitten by the komodo while on a mission, I was thinking instead just a single thought: what if you could find the one reflection that, if you snuffed it out, the rest all went dim as well?
But it would be an eternity of being alone with my own thoughts.
And I had come this far.
I was beautiful and young and wearing an amazing red dress. I had a red purse with a deadly weapon in it. I was going to a party. I hoped the angels wouldn’t catch up to me until it was too late.
A couple of minutes before, however, I had had to implement another part of my plan in a particularly visceral way. I had taken a bottle opener, and on bended knee I had enlarged the wound in my calf. If you’re going to make others suffer, shouldn’t you suffer, too? I lovingly drew the sharp, curved beak of the bottle opener deep along the outlines of the bite, pulling the slow-seeping poison farther into the meat of me. Simultaneously, I loosened my control over the individual compartments of my cells. Contamination was the point.
As I walked down that worn carpet to the elevator, I could tell my efforts had gotten results. I could hear the far-distant howl of the komodos, approaching fast. I could hear them in the maze of realities, clambering up the walls of time, looking for a way in, my scent suddenly hot and enraging. It was almost as if they had gotten to the hotel already, their eventuality forming ghostly swirls of scales across the floor, the wall, the ceiling. That probably did not even qualify as a hallucination, child, but just a side effect of my flagging energy level.
Of course, no one could see the wound. Just as I’ve spared you, child, from the carnage of the aftermath.
As we in our separate booths took in the full sum of the evidence transmitted back by luna moths and dust crabs and sand mites and fleas and flies… all of these creatures that embodied a nano so nano that no Earth scientist through the ages would ever be able to discern the difference between an angel’s or a god’s work… we saw and saw, and could not unsee.
Eventually, I realised what the alien researcher was up to, what the angels might want from him. What made him get up in the morning after hanging all night in what looked like a trellis with stirrups, body dangling below his carefully wedged giant head. But it took a while because, like a magician’s misdirection, his laboratory process tended to mesmerise me.
A seemingly endless series of lab rooms lay beneath his house, all of them spacious to accommodate his bulk. Transparent beakers stood on green-tinged tables, the liquids that bubbled and swirled within purple or red or green or orange. Some of these were legitimate. Others, I found out soon enough, were his equivalent of alcoholic beverages, and before each lab session he would get roaring drunk. Oh, the weight of scientific endeavor. Oh, the objectivity of it all.
But the alien researcher whose name sounded like two crickets mating while being burned alive – a kind of charred series of exclamation points of varying intensity – wasn’t a mad scientist from a bad movie. He was a kind of 3D physicist, dealing in potentialities and living metaphor.
One day, for example, he worked with model galaxies while I watched from the twinned vantage points of an amoeba in a drop of water on the counter and the pupa of a moth-like thing that dangled from the ceiling.
Across a lab sink, Two Burning Crickets had strung a kind of porous material analogous to paper that I would later find had the feel of skin. At first the “paper” was pale white, but then he poured a purple liquid from a beaker over it. The liquid was the combination of komodo and angel blood that I had given him at Gabriel’s request. The liquid strained through but left a stain, and revealed a floundering of tiny creatures that resembled sharks and hippos and squid and catfish but were not. They were metaphors for different kinds of life… and out of that floundering arose a kind of clear smoke
that formed a three-dimensional rotating representation of a spiral galaxy. A darkness encroached around the edges to illuminate it and the creatures beneath grew still and evaporated in wisps of green flame.
You would have been just like me at that point. You would have clapped your hands and asked for more, just like with my candy. It was a kind of marvel, the sort of thing that captured me so utterly in the early days that I could ignore the other things. (Where’s your mother? Hypnotised in the corner, not even seeing me or hearing me, like the rest of the patrons at the bar; so, maybe, at the end of the day, I am as much of a monster as Seether, but I need an audience right now, I need you, child, to hear this.)
The initial phase complete, a tiny golden globe now appeared, a tiny knife. A test tube of some clear fluid. Each of these things, he flung into the middle of that slow-moving image of a galaxy. Each reached a certain point in the matrix and winked out. Each time, the galaxy changed shape a little bit. Each time, the darkness encroached further, and what was left burned every more brightly. Finally, he picked up a canister of ashes that had ossified with a brilliant stream of turquoise frozen down the side. I recognised the canister – it held the remains of an angel who had chosen too rapid a path to re-entry into the atmosphere and burned up. In another ten years, those ashes would have been an angel again. I didn’t know where he’d gotten it, but it hadn’t come from me.
Two Burning Crickets pried open the lid like it was a can of beans and took a pinch of ashes, flicked them out into the middle of this apparition of a galaxy. The image became blurry, and then I realised that the blurriness reflected a change: now there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of overlapping versions of the same galaxy made manifest there, as if the ash had separated out the component elements of a sample. Then, without warning, the variations began to disappear, each vanishing making the image less blurry… until there was only the one galaxy again, and then not even that, just the now badly singed and sagging paper and a swirl of colours in the drain. Not to mention Two Burning Crickets, capering about like he’d won the lottery.
My first thought was that the angel in the canister would be furious when he reconstituted, if he became aware that his compatriots had volunteered him for this experiment, and even more so when he realised he was missing part of his mind, or a thumb, or half a wing, or whatever those particular ashes had meant to him. If it worked that way.
But my second and third thoughts were much more serious, as I investigated further. In his mind, Two Burning Crickets may have only sought unity, clarity, the solace of just one thing
, and perhaps his six-hundred-year-old mind could no longer hold all of the possibilities, all of the replicas. But when I better understood what I had observed – that he was close to giving the angels a way to destroy an entire set of realities – say, every alt-Earth in existence – I knew what I had to do. I even knew how to do it, the blessing of having invested so much training in my surveillance work.
When everything was finally in place and I came to kill him and destroy his research, he met me at the door and said in his language, “Are you the one?” I remember that distinctly. “Are you the one?”
I suppose I was, in a perverse way.
I knocked on the door and two bodyguards opened it and they let me into the party. Because I was beautiful. Because I looked like I belonged. Because I had taken on the appearance of a television reporter the candidate had once dated, someone I knew was far away, on assignment in London. Flimsy, but it didn’t need to hold water for long – just a handful of minutes. I wasn’t much for parties, especially lingering at parties.
The candidate stood across the spacious room, behind the barricade of a table upon which had been placed a sumptuous spread of appetizers. He was shaking hands and talking to potential donors. About forty or fifty people lay between us. About a hundred thousand iterations of Earth lay between us.
He had a kind of haggard, dark look to him, not at all like the TV ads, and you could see the bags under his eyes that make-up would usually take away. His shoulders were stooped under his immaculate blue suit. His hands dangled from the ends of his jacket sleeves. But there was about his gaze a kind of intelligence and animation that belied the stoop, the dangle. He projected the idea of the stalwart underdog, a kid off the streets who had finally found a home, a purpose, after much hardship. If all went well, here and across a number of other realities, he would rise to become president at a critical time.
For a short time, I just observed him. He didn’t deserve this, but there were a lot more of him where he came from. At least, that’s what I told myself. He’d never know that I meant him no harm, no harm at all – that his identity was irrelevant to me – even as I inflicted the greatest possible harm. His role was not to know, the same role as most people in the worlds. To not know. To receive hints, perhaps, to have faith, to believe in… something… but not to know
. Even Two Burning Crickets hadn’t known the identity of his benefactors, his prodders.
Soon the number of people would swell, so I smiled across to him, with a wave of a raised be-bangled arm, saw the corresponding sudden animation of his features, the gleam in his eyes, the corresponding wave that meant he was accessing a slew of salacious and no doubt satisfying memories. Beauty is a disguise. People rarely look past it to intent.
As I made my way toward him, the howling of the komodos in my ears was a gale-force wind and time seemed to slow and the ghost frogs that are the harbingers, the advance guard, the early warning, of those dangerous reptiles began to pop into existence, there in that room, photo-negative explosions of the purest, almost translucent white. Only I could see them. They floated in the air like impossible party favours, accusing me with their luminous eyes.
I’m doing this for William, I told myself. For all the Williams. Even though I could no longer recall what he looked like.
But my timing was off, child. All of the timing was a little off, maybe ever since I had donned the green alien head… I just didn’t know it.
When I expressed this thought to Gabriel, he looked at me as if I were the lowliest ant.
“Our enemy caused this,” he told me. “The enemy always causes this. And we cannot root our enemy out.” There was a cruelty to his fixed smile then, the kind of smile you do not expect from a being perhaps hundreds of thousands of years old. A smile you expect to see from a child who has revealed he has done something wicked but for whatever reason, even as he confesses, can’t help but show he is rather proud of this wicked thing. (Nothing you would ever do, child.)
He cared not for the destruction of worlds but, like most of the rest, had fixated on this idea of an enemy underlying it all. This was the point of the surveillance, ultimately, on a strategic level – to monitor the worlds, the realities, everything, for this presence, for the idea of it made manifest in the flesh.
“We need a way to flush the enemy out,” Gabriel told me. “We are finding a way to flush the enemy out.”
Looking through surveillance records, I began to realise that beyond the usual monitoring, they were also looking for the presence of Evil with a capital “E”, which is crazy. Which is evil. They had become deranged with it, or most of them. As if the idea was the echo of a ghost of a memory of a threat that had indeed once existed but no more… and yet to them it was as real as anything real could be. An invisible enemy that must be rooted out. That’s when I turned my attention to other records, and found dark spots. Places where it appeared the angels had destroyed to protect. Never more than a planet or two, you understand. Never a whole series of realities… until Two Burning Crickets had come along suggesting even greater possibilities.
How do you know when a near-immortal race of non-angels has reached the end of its tether? When that race comes to believe in the Devil, and believes that the Devil must be cast out by any means necessary.
*
From my training in surveillance, I knew that certain coordinates in space and time, also known as nexuses, are imbued with power and energy that accrete over time. A nexus can be used to effect tremendous change because of its connectivity. If you map all the nexuses and
you know how to destroy alternate realities because of Two Burning Crickets, you can truly extinguish everything. But if you’ve lost the formula for destroying on such a grand scale and your maps have been rendered useless, you can’t do much of anything for a while.
The candidate’s party – that suite, that particular series of moments, his presence – was one such nexus, a lesser-known one, a backwater, the best one in relation to Two Burning Cricket’s location and Seether’s range. But the point is, you have to introduce enough chaos to wrench that nexus out of one path into another, muddy the waters in such a way that the mapping, the tracking, goes completely haywire and has to be completely redone. Thus the gun. Nothing rewires a nexus like a murder. If I was successful.
The ghost frogs popped into existence with ever increasing velocity and rapidity as I strode across the room to meet the candidate, one hand reaching into my handbag as I did so because I wasn’t going to freeze him with a look. I wasn’t going to crush his mind with my non-existent psionic powers. Sometimes, and I hate to say this, but a good old-fashioned, reliable gun is the the quickest way to effectuate change. Or protect against it.
But I’d mistimed it all, and the komodos came thrashing into existence on my trail right then, and even worse, angels were unexpectedly appearing through the Rips, like blood through a paper cut, seeping into clarity. By the time I had raised my gun the candidate had moved and I didn’t have a clear line of sight, and I only clipped him in the shoulder, and the angels were trying to reach him, and the komodos were trying to reach me, and the party was a screaming mess, with the humans there, the unwitting witnesses, trying to comprehend what was going on and failing, as they tried to get out of the way… while the komodos, semi-visible as gasps and gashes of light, tongues of flashing quick-silver, a suggestion of a curious and brazen eye, thrashed and spun so much in that space that the sides of the suite buckled and swayed as if we were all just inside a cardboard box full of, well, full of the ordinary kind of komodos.
The komodo that had clamped onto my leg jumped onto my back shrieking “angel-spawn!” and curses much worse, even as I saw the confusion of the rest, torn between attacking hated angels or hated me, who had bearded them in their lair and only been wounded… and in the midst of all of that confusion, whirling around frantically, I made it back to the door somehow, and with a Herculean effort spasmed in such a way as to send the komodo on my back flying back into the room.
I slammed the door, already changing into an old Mexican woman, and while the bedlam continued inside, abandoned the wounded part of my leg in favour of a telescoping metal strut.
As I reached the elevators, as I pushed the button, as the metal halves shut, I saw the suite door smash open, and a writhing mass of humans, komodos, and angels burst forth, at least some of them surprised to find an upright foot, ankle, and bloody calf greeting them.
I was pretty chewed up by then. I was pretty much dead, and only by locking all the compartments of my individual cells was I able to function, to move at all, for a little while.
As I left the hotel limping and made my way through a series of back alleys, I was already pondering the oddest thing I had seen in that perfect mess: that Gabriel stood in the corner in perfect stillness through the whole thing, as if he had been there the entire time, and had done nothing. Which made me wonder about factions among the angels. Had he wanted me to do this? Had he shown me what he had shown me, put me on surveillance of the alien researcher precisely so I would do what I had done?
Had he even thought so far ahead as to take me from the plane for this exact reason?
I have no answers. I only know that as I left the room, I had also seen that the candidate had been mauled to death by the komodos, and that was as good as a bullet to the head.
The truth is, I am completely ordinary. I grew up on a farm in Kansas, and I swore I would leave as soon as I grew up. I was a constant source of grief to my parents, I’m sure, because everyone else had always stayed with the farm, and without me there was always the chance it might go under. But I did leave – I was one of the me-s that got away – and I went to college and I got my degree in political science and began a career. I went from city commissioner of a small town in Georgia to state senator, and I began to date a city planner from Atlanta. His name was William. We got married. We built a house all our own. Somewhere along the way, we acquired two dogs, a lab and a golden retriever, both of which reminded me of my days growing up on the farm. We loved the same movies and liked to go hiking in the mountains. Neither of us wanted children until a little later. We had the rest of our years ahead of us. Ordinary, usual years.
But you don’t want my life’s story. Only I do.
But when you come to the end of the tale, that’s something different. You can’t expect much from the reader after that, especially when the end is a dead end. I’m bleeding out now for real, and there’s nothing to be done about it. Time does not heal all wounds. The komodos truly did me in, in a way Seether could not, and I only barely made it here, to this half-deserted bar with the party going on in the courtyard out back. There are only so many escapes for anyone. But I can still make it look like a magic trick to you, child, like red ribbon or sawdust, so I don’t scare you. Befuddle you, perhaps, but scare you? Never.
So I’m just an old Mexican woman now, leaking stuffing. To make you laugh. Always better if a death can make someone laugh, I say. The great amusement, the great love, the great revenge, and the great death. The incarnations. The skins. The stories.
What happens next, I don’t know. Did I muddy the waters enough? Have I perhaps even stopped what they could not stop themselves: the evidence of their own insanity? Did I do enough to redeem my trespasses? Maybe Gabriel will still appear here in a blast of trumpets and explain it all to me, although he’s cutting it a bit close. No. Probably not. Probably they’re still dealing with their own party.
I wonder what you’re thinking, there behind the camera. I know this is recorded surveillance, that you aren’t there now
, but you will be there later
. I can imagine you in an office, wondering whether to hit delete or pass it on to higher-ups. I can imagine you thinking that you’re listening to the ravings of a crazy person. I wouldn’t blame you. In some ways, I am a crazy person. But you’ll find papers on me that give you my name and other basic information. You’ll also find a recording inside my bones – just split them open and it’ll come right out. Don’t be shy; Seether wouldn’t be. The recording will even play on your primitive equipment. You see, child, there’s US-government surveillance on this bar because it’s known as an occasional neutral meeting ground for drug lords. So I’ve not just been speaking to you, but to them, as they too try to make sense of the aftermath in that hotel room. Hiding in plain sight. Leaving a record for the Normals, so I don’t disappear forever. So someone knows.
So now you know a few things you didn’t know before, if you choose to believe me. Angels that are not angels move amongst you. Along with King Komodos. Aliens exist. Other realities exist. You can travel through time.
I think that’s everything I needed to say. Seether’s coming now for me for real, but not to devour me, oh no. Now he’ll bend down and take me gently in his arms and comfort me as the light turns to darkness and whisper to me that it’s all been worth it, that it’s all okay. And I am going to choose, in this reality, to believe him.
As for you, child, run along now. The whole rest of eternity is the afterparty, if we’re lucky, and at this point it doesn’t even matter if you understood a word I told you: you can just live in it.