Chapter Forty-Eight
There’s an art to self-amputation (or so I hear). I never learned it, and figuring it out on the fly under these constraints was not working out so great for me. The clone-turned-Benjamin-turned-killer had started snoring. I didn’t know how long it would be before he woke up thirsty for blood.
I pulled against the cuffs with every ounce of strength I could muster. I’d heard stories of junkies snapping handcuff chains like they were Mardi Gras beads. I’d seen those bodybuilder motivational speakers break out of handcuffs before ripping phone books in half through the power of Christ. I’d watched escape artists on television slide free from shackles like they were made of hot butter. So why the hell did I have to resort to cutting off my hand to get free?! It just didn’t seem fair.
The tools at my disposal were worse than limited. A shoelace to form a tourniquet. A wallet full of expired plastic cards I could break into jagged pieces sharp enough to get through the first few layers. A heart pumping pure adrenaline. Would it be enough? Probably not.
“You’re going to have to act fast,” Spencer taunted. “If you’re too slow, the blood loss will get you first.”
“Shut up, Spencer! I know what I’m doing!”
“That tourniquet doesn’t look very tight. If your hand isn’t purple, the blood is still flowing.”
“I said ‘Shut up!’”
“I’m just trying to help.” What an asshole.
I pressed the jagged card up to my wrist and slid it across as hard as I could stand. It didn’t even break the skin. All it did was leave a dark red welt.
Spencer laughed and said, “Why don’t you use the blade in your pocket?”
“I don’t have any blades!”
“That isn’t your jacket.”
He was right. This was Travis’s jacket. One he let me borrow after agreeing to let us use his trailer as a safe house until things blew over. That felt like an entire lifetime ago, but it had only been a couple of hours. He lived long enough to earn my forgiveness, then died in a storm of bullets. I wondered if that meant he’d be more or less likely to haunt the gas station.
My fingers felt metal at the bottom of his inner jacket pocket. I retrieved the item and tried not to freak out too badly.
It was a box cutter. Spencer laughed his ass off as I clicked out the blade and touched it to my skin. I closed my eyes, tried to work up the nerve, and jerked my hand down. Searing pain shot up my arm. I clenched my teeth and waited for it to go away or at least subside, but it did neither. The pain was stubborn and steady. When I looked at the blood flowing freely, I realized that Spencer was right about two things: The tourniquet was not tight enough, and I was in a serious race against blood loss.
I tried to line up my next cut exactly atop the first. The pain I felt when I stuck the blade into the open wound was almost as bad as the anticipation.
Spencer crouched in front of me.
“Jack,” taunted my old spectral nemesis. “If you’re going to do this, you have to think ahead. A box cutter is great at severing soft tissue and blood vessels.” He took a moment and rubbed the wound on his neck before continuing. “But it won’t be enough to get through the bone. You’ll have to break your wrist manually. And it’s going to be easier to do that before the blood loss weakens you any more.”
He made a lot of sense. I lowered my bloody arm to the ground, rested my knee over it, put all of my weight onto the spot where I needed it to break, and pulled. And pulled. And pulled. The pain was excruciating, but now that I actually wanted to break a bone, I couldn’t do it.
I tried braiding my arm through the bars to use them as leverage, but the handcuffs made it impossible. I was already feeling the effects of the adrenaline spike reaching its end. I was fatigued. No, I was exhausted. I sat on the ground with my back to the cage and watched Spencer laugh.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” For a hallucination, he sure did look incredibly real. “Tell you what, I’m willing to help out.” He pulled up his coat and retrieved a handgun. Then he held it out to me, barrel first, and said, “The first shot will obviously be the easiest. After that, your body is going to want to go into shock. Don’t fight that. You’ll need it. It’s gonna take at least two bullets at a minimum to break the bone apart, then you’ll need to use the blade to slice through any remaining flesh and tendons. It’s going to hurt. A lot. You’ll want to bite down on something.”
I took the gun from him and looked it over. This wasn’t like any that I’d stolen from the dead Benjamins, but once you’ve fired enough guns, they all start to look alike. I pressed the barrel of the gun into the steadily bleeding wound on my wrist as Spencer rubbed his hands together in eager suspense. Pulling the trigger would be the easy part. What happened next was going to suck. And if I survived long enough to get to the shapeshifter... then what? I’d have to find out when I found out, but first, I needed to finish removing my own hand so I could finally be free of these handcuffs and—
OH GOD DAMMIT YOU STUPID PIECE OF SHIT!
I was so laser-focused on the job at hand that I almost missed the obvious. Spencer howled with laughter, falling backwards to the ground and cackling, “You almost did it! I almost made you shoot yourself!”
“Spencer, you’re a special kind of dick.”
I hated him. But I knew he was a necessary evil. Spencer was self-serving. He was conniving. He was the only reason I was still alive. The only reason the Collector hadn’t already won. I knew Spencer better than his boss did. I knew why he sent me the head in the mail. He was playing both sides. A professional killer and saboteur, serving no true god but himself.
I put the barrel of the gun up to the middle link in the handcuff chain and fired. It snapped free, and I fell over onto my side. An instant later, the gun was gone, and so was Spencer. Almost like he’d never been there in the first place.
I stepped inside the cage and found the jewel-encrusted bone knife on the ground by Rosa’s body. When I picked the weapon up, it felt warm and heavier than I remembered the package ever being. Almost like there was something else inside the tool now.
I plunged it into the chest of the elderly woman on the bed, driving the weapon all the way to the hilt. The woman’s body writhed and shook, then went still. When I yanked the blade back out, it was glowing yellow. Now, it was time for the hard part. When I was done with this, my mind would be a temporary vessel for a being of power beyond my comprehension. And if we were lucky, maybe it would help. Or maybe this was all a giant waste of time. Only one way to find out.
I put the business end of the blade over my heart, closed my eyes, and fell forward, imagining that I was diving off a cliff far above the water. I had plenty of time before I landed. Time to think and reminisce and enjoy the ride. But no time to second-guess. No time to wonder what was waiting below the water’s surface. No time to remember how bad I am at swimming. Only time enough to—
I distinctly remember my face bouncing against the floor. I felt the blade puncture my heart. I was hoping for an instant death, but at least I didn’t have to wait too long. The darkness crept in. The shadows absorbed me. And at the very moment of my expiration, I felt another soul enter my body. Then the whole world went off the fucking rails.
***
I fell into a realm that was more idea than place. Causality was obscene, time was spaghetti, and reality was a water balloon with a pin prick in its side in the shape of a gas station. I was, all at once, the number three-hundred-and-twelve, the color green, and a hat-obsessed ship captain from 1717. These identities didn't remain long. The thought of a clean slate manifested itself in the form of a grand nothingness overwhelming all reality, soon replaced by a cosmic ocean. But "soon" wasn't right. The span between one frame and the next was a literal eternity, where I lived and grew old and ancient and divine until I'd made it to the temporal singularity at the terminus of time and instantly forgot everything I'd learned in that pocket reality. Paradoxically, I could never forget what I had forgotten, even as the new universe exploded in a big bang, restructuring and reordering infinity to fit the minimum boundaries of its own new requirements.
At the dead center of the new everything, there was a live nothing. At the center of that, a second everything. At the center of that, another nothing. And at a small island close to one side of that nothing, there was a bookstore.
I walked inside with newly corporeal legs and took a look around while my sense of proprioception acclimated to the fact that my body wasn’t the correct shape or state of matter for this plane of existence. The building wasn't anything to write home about, but it was a bookstore, so I took comfort. The smell of old pages lingered on whatever surrogate this place had for air. A small table near the entranceway displayed a stack of "gently used" pre-owned paperbacks. A life-size cardboard cutout of a cartoon Nancy Drew pointed the way to the “Mystery” section. Also, interestingly, everything was on fire.
The door shut behind me to the sound of moons melting. It tasted like cherry. I took this as my cue to approach the clerk behind the counter by the cash register. Except that wasn’t how it went down at all. I’d already approached the clerk. I’d already done everything, not after, not before, but together with the moment I walked in. For the sake of formality, I excused myself and put moments into order based on cause and effect. Pietro told me it was fine. He was used to it. When I was already done, my energy ran through the line and—
I walked inside with old corporeal legs and took a look around. My sense of proprioception had caught up to the edge of my skin but no further. Good enough. I wouldn’t be able to move things with my mind, and if anyone asked me to, I’d have to let them down. I noticed the cardboard cutout of Nancy Drew was now a cardboard cutout of Stefan King (Stephen’s older and much more talented brother who only exists above the Monadic plane). The table full of discount used books was now full-priced, but that’s to be expected when you try to rearrange things like this. The walls and floor and carpet were still on fire, but as luck would have it, the fire was burning in reverse. A halfway charred shelf slowly reappeared as black ash converted into solid wood and paper. Squiggles of melted plastic that were once fabric mixed with dark smoke to become a green, shag carpet. Shattered glass reordered itself on the burst window frames into a complete puzzle of solid transparency.
I walked up to the shop keep behind the counter. They looked down at me and asked, “Better?”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Right. Are you living this for the first time?” They spoke with the chorus of a thousand angels wailing in pain.
I looked at their head on the right (my right, their left) because that was the one that was smiling. “Am I alive?”
“You want answers like that, go find a doctor. I’m just a bookkeeper.”
They turned their attention back to the two-dimensional circle in their hands.
“Wait,” I said. “I’m a little confused.”
“I’ll say!” They looked back up. “You’re not supposed to be here. I can tell that much.”
“Where is ‘here,’ anyway?”
“Wherever you want.”
“Who are you?”
“I told you already, I’m Pietro, the bookkeeper. Why do you keep asking?”
“My memory only goes in one direction.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would you like to go and put these events in order of your memory?”
“Yes, I think that would be lovely.”
“Go ahead then.”
“I think I just did.”
“What’s my name?”
“Pietro?”
“Good. Perfect. You made it here again. Now ask your questions.”
“Was I supposed to ask questions?”
“Yes. You have five more questions before this conversation is over.”
“Why do you have three snouts?”
“One for each head.”
“But you’ve got two heads.”
“That’s not a question.”
“How many more questions do I have to ask before the conversation is done?”
“Six.”
“How about now?”
“Three.”
“How about now?”
“Five.”
“Numbers don’t go in the same order here that they do where I’m from.”
“Numbers aren’t supposed to go in any particular order.”
“Wait.”
“I wait.”
“What?”
“What what?”
“Oh.”
“Oh what?”
“What?”
“Oh!”
“Oh no!”
“What? What’s happening?”
“We’re getting too close to one another.”
“How what?”
“I can’t remember. We’ve been talking for so long.”
“You can’t remember? Or I can’t?”
“Exactly?”
“What?”
“I can’t remember who I am. Am I me? Or am I you?”
“I could go back and dissect time and see who was talking.”
“Wait!”
“I wait. Why?”
“That was your last question!”
“Oh good! This was getting weird.”
I took a step away from the counter and tried to shake my head. Surprisingly, my head stayed perfectly still while the rest of the bookstore shook around me. Books fell from the displays. The chandeliers swung wildly, crashing into the beehives. Pietro clutched their desk tightly with a dozen arms and a million claws.
I stopped, and Pietro glared at me with all ten of their eyes. “Please don’t do that again.”
“Sorry,” I said.
Pietro pointed their eyes at a newly formed door near the back of the building.
“You can go now,” they said. “He’s waiting for you.”
“Who’s waiting?” I asked, pushing my questions-remaining tally into the negative.
“Who do you think?” They answered my question with another question, pushing my total back up to zero.
“Well, if I had to guess, I’d say it’s probably some sort of metaphysical representation of God. It’s a bit of a trope in stories like this. A way to shoehorn in some profundity by having the protagonist meet God and have an abundantly pretentious conversation. Is that what’s about to happen?”
They sighed. “It’s the Guardian, Jack. That’s who you came here for. Did you forget?”
“Oh!” I said. “Actually, I did forget. I’ve been tied up in the echoes of eternity.”
“Yes,” they said with a chortle. “We were all watching! That was quite hilarious.”
“This is dumb. This whole scene is dumb. It’s a dumb scene pretending to be a smart scene.” Suddenly the fires reached the end of their reverse-burn and started reverse-reverse-burning. Which is to say, they started burning. The air-equivalent was growing hot and toxic, and my linear arrangement of moments was coming to its end. I gave Pietro a hug goodbye. We laughed and cried and grew old together and raised neighboring empires and became mortal enemies and then reconciled over a common threat and died next to each other in battle and resurrected as champion immortal saints and got each other’s names tattooed on our backs (this, I came to understand, was Pietro’s version of a formal goodbye—the equivalent to a handshake or wave where I was from), and then I went to the door at the back of the bookstore, pushed it open, and saw the shapeshifter waiting for me. Now I knew without any doubt that I was looking at the shapeshifter’s true form.