Chapter Nine

Isidora screamed as the green fluid burned her face. She frantically wiped her eyes and cheeks in an attempt to get the acidic venom off her skin, but couldn’t seem to get rid of the pain. She felt something cold drag across her face, followed by a sense of relief.

“Holy water from the River Mersey,” said Father Peter, wiping her with a white hand towel.

She opened her eyes and they met his. They were joyful as ever.

“Is the old man gone?” she asked.

“He’s gone.”

“Thank God you’re all right,” she said, and threw her arms around him.

“Great choice of words,” said Father Peter.

“Thank God he’s all right? He attacked me!” said Quentin, pushing Father Peter aside. “And none of us is all right. Look at the bloody sky!”

The bright blue sky was growing increasingly pixelated, like a low-resolution image. The buildings and the river followed, fading into a series of coloured dots outlined in black. The three looked at one another and realized that they themselves were becoming pixelated. The colours of the world around them were reduced to various fluorescent shades of red, green and blue. Any distinction between the sky, the warehouses and the people blended into a series of pixels. The number of pixels increased exponentially, until they appeared completely black. Isidora, Father Peter and Quentin found themselves inside a dark void of non-existence.

“No wonder the old man took off,” said Quentin.

“Are you all still there?” asked Isidora. Though nothing was visible, nor audible, she could feel their presence and hear their thoughts echo in her mind.

“You say that as if it were possible for a soul to disappear,” said Father Peter.

“What a rubbish afterlife,” said Quentin.

“If the old man got out, so can we,” said Isidora.

The empty, seemingly eternal void was oddly claustrophobic.

“It’s important not to get lost in here, so try to keep it together,” said Father Peter, though it was unclear whether the advice was for the others or for himself.

Isidora gathered her wits. She visualized how the world used to be.

“Father Peter, the old man got into the virtual world because you blessed the water, correct?”

She felt his confirmation. Concentrating and visualizing the lost world, Father Peter sensed the image she was recreating. He added himself to the image, standing over where he blessed the water.

“The barrier broke in the River Mersey,” she said. “But how do we retrace that in here?” She stopped visualizing, snapping back to the reality of endless darkness.

“Based on the pattern of the pixels, and relying on your mental picture, I’ve managed to map it out,” said Quentin. He felt Father Peter’s astonishment and Isidora’s skepticism.

The truth was, Quentin loved maps, graphs, charts, and any visual representation of organized data. But he especially loved maps. His fondest childhood memories included boxing, football, studying the topography of southeast Asia, creating a 3D map of the London Underground, discovering Canada through its federal electoral results per constituency over the years, travelling through America by memorizing the routes of the country’s major highways, and learning about Spain’s regions by analyzing their climatic variations. He considered himself a successful cartographer; he’d made quite a bit of money drawing out maps of prisons with details of their inner workings and selling them to inmates wishing to escape. They were annotated with recommendations on different breakout strategies, assessing their risk levels.

Above all, star maps were Quentin’s favourite. Historically, these grids allowed navigators to discover new worlds using the stars as their sole points of reference. Without the stars to guide them, sailors upon the vast oceans would have surely felt trapped in an eternal void of non-existence until they finally reached land at the end of a maddening journey.

Dalton was no astronomer nor geographer. Constellations were not replicated in his afterlife. And there was something off about the Albert Dock. As the world pixelated away into nothingness, Quentin observed a logical, orderly pattern in which Dalton had carefully placed each building, each wooden panel, each inch of concrete and each cloud in the sky. It greatly simplified interpolation for Quentin. The sun was the upper limit of the afterlife, which Quentin somewhat arbitrarily assigned a value of +100 on the Y axis measuring height, for simplicity’s sake. The bottom of the River Mersey hardly respected nature, but rather Dalton’s own pleasure in symmetry. -100 on the Y axis. The Dock formed a perfect square around a part of the River Mersey, stretching on the X axis of length and Z axis of depth. The centre of the square was point 0 on all three dimensions. Point 0 was the heart of the afterlife and it was likely where the barrier was broken following Father Peter’s ritual.

Quentin recalled that after Isidora had been sprayed by the old man, the ghost had vanished. Father Peter had come back to his senses and had brought Isidora back onto the deck along the water. The three of them were therefore on the water level when the world disappeared.

“We have to head in a straight line that way,” said Quentin. Isidora and Father Peter found “that way” to be a rather unclear instruction in the void.

“Go on then, get in me head so you can see me map. It’s not so bad in here.” He could feel Father Peter and Isidora’s reluctance to enter into his mind, like it would taint their souls. But they were out of options.

Entering Quentin’s mindspace was hardly the angry, harsh and impulsive environment they had imagined. Rather, it was rational and calculating. On the level of the water, he had created a perfect epitrochoid which mapped out the shape of the afterlife on a flat surface. Based on the formations of the clouds, Quentin had created a grid, which enabled him to establish the distance between different points in space. He transposed the grid onto their level to adequately measure the distance between themselves and point 0.

“Why… How…” started Father Peter, failing to decide which of the many questions running through his mind he should ask.

“The scientist is a real bloody madman, creating a world this bloody symmetrical. It’s unnatural, the whole thing,” said Quentin.

“He used Clyde!” said Isidora. “I recognize this pattern. Dr. McGovern intended to create more to the afterlife. Just like Father Peter, he did something to Clyde, altered his personality and his abilities—probably by changing his code, certainly not by tossing him into holy water. The radius of the epitrochoid follows the pattern by which Clyde would burrow and swim about. The radius grew ever so slightly each time Clyde made his rounds, extending the delimitations of the virtual reality. Brooke was likely programmed to do the same, and she was bigger, more efficient.”

Isidora thought of Father Peter’s strange rodent baptism. “But you ruined it all. Whatever you did to the water, to the rats, you changed Dalton’s code, likely because of the abilities within your own code. Our power over our environment was too great and you somehow managed to destroy the structure of the virtual world.”

“It was God’s will,” said Father Peter, defensively.

“Who gives a fuck about any of that,” said Quentin. “Let’s get the bloody hell out of here. Follow me map.”

The three made their way to point zero. It was difficult to say whether they travelled in a nanosecond or a year; in the void, time seems to stand still while simultaneously accelerating. It gave Quentin motion sickness. Yet when they reached point zero, they found themselves in Dalton’s laboratory.

* * *

Stephen the student had few followers on social media. He wasn’t an attractive fellow, nor a particularly sociable one. He liked to tell himself that none of that mattered because he was clever, but the truth was, he wasn’t. Stephen was a man of only little talent. However, for the first time since he broke his personal record playing Mario Kart in June, Stephen was treated with a wonderful dopamine hit. Like. Retweet. Like. Retweet. Stephen’s post had gone viral. #HackTheAfterlife was trending on Twitter. Thank God I recorded Dr. McGovern’s discussion with his sister in class. Perhaps now I will finally get a girlfriend. Or at least a female Twitter follower, he thought. Alas, his most recent follower was not at all a potential girlfriend, but rather Pope Clement XV.

The Pope read the Tweet while he groomed his docile, though opinionated, caramel-coloured Shih Tzu, Sébastien. Combing the dog’s fur with one hand, he scrolled through tweets with the other. Enfin, tabarnak, he thought. The moment he’d been waiting for throughout his entire career in the Catholic Church had come. He called a meeting with the Church’s elite cardinals in the Vatican’s underground wine cellar. He brought Sébastien.

The cellar had been modelled off the catacombs in Paris, only the walls were lined with French wines, not French skulls. Sébastien liked sweet white wine from the Alsace region. The Pope preferred red wine. Sébastien deplored this preference.

Three cardinals approached the Pope, wearing dark red cloaks. Their hoods were pulled up over their foreheads, leaving only their wrinkled mouths visible. The Pope wondered how they didn’t trip more often considering their compromised vision.

“Your Holiness, for what reason have you summoned us?” inquired an Italian cardinal.

“It work. The virtual afterlife explode everywhere,” said the Pope. The cardinals looked at one another, confused, and looked back at the Pope. Once again, the Pope found himself having to explain everything to old cardinals who weren’t on Twitter. “The barriers are breaking between the unnatural, the natural, and the supernatural. Angels and demons will wander around and soon, the apocalypse is going to be starting.”

The cardinals nodded.

“Has the void begun to expand, yet?” asked a cardinal from Mexico.

The Pope shook his head. “I believe, for now, it is still contained just in the laboratory in Liverpool. There is probably a dozen demons in there now, either coming out and possessing people or lurking in some corners and wherever, waiting for the war to start. I will fly into Liverpool myself tonight.”

A cardinal from Spain cleared his throat. “Your Holiness, what about the exorcist?”

“He is still thinking I just want him to test his theories in his bullshit report. He doesn’t know about the apocalypse.”

“Has he figured out who he is?” asked a cardinal from Italy.

“He doesn’t know none of this. It will stay like that,” replied the Pope.

The meeting ended, and the Pope left Sébastien in the Mexican cardinal’s care. The cardinals scooped up as many bottles of wine as they could hide under their cloaks and entered the Vatican’s secret elevator, only known to the Pope, a handful of cardinals and Sébastien. Before the door shut, the Spanish cardinal shouted, “God’s Paladin shall be victorious!”

The Pope glared but ignored this declaration. He wasn’t going to let some radical cardinal ruin his day.

Shortly after, the Pope boarded a flight to Liverpool, on which he enjoyed a variety of snacks and beverages. He watched the impeccably dressed flight attendants walk up and down the aisles in their high-heel shoes. How do they keep their hair that nice and shiny? he wondered.

Passengers whispered to one another and pointed in his direction. He smiled and waved at them. Some people came over to tell him it was an honour to meet the leader of their faith, and others came over to tell him how much they liked his tweets. Many were astonished to see the Pope flying economy on a commercial flight, but he never liked to make a fuss about his travels. For one thing, he judged luxurious travel to be a terrible use of offering-payer dollars. In addition, the Pope believed that it was his duty to engage with the people, not to stay locked away in the Vatican like some princess trapped in a hexed palace, giving the odd speech from his balcony. He enjoyed meeting people, it reminded him why he spent so much time trying to save their souls in the first place. Sure, his odds of being assassinated were greater, but that was almost ideal, since his death would be epic and forever remembered. However, an even better death awaited him than assassination: an apocalyptic death. The best way to be remembered forever is to be the last Pope of all, the Pope who valiantly led God’s soldiers in the War of the Heavens.

* * *

Stanley slowly brought his index finger to his lips, informing Father Peter, Isidora and Quentin to remain quiet. However, this gesture informed Dalton, who had his back turned to them, of their arrival. He stepped down from the chair and turned around.

“I’m glad you found your way out,” said Dalton, grinning. His eyes were empty.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Isidora.

“The old man’s in him,” replied Edward.

Dalton walked toward Isidora, who crossed her arms.

“You should see your reflection,” said Dalton. “Your inner beauty is shining through.”

Dalton pulled back a lock of her hair. She hit his arm away.

“Auntie Isidora, what happened to your face?” Stanley asked.

Isidora brought her hands to her cheeks and realized she’d lost all sensation in her face. Her skin had a thick texture. She turned to Father Peter, hoping for an explanation.

“You’re a bit pink,” said Father Peter.

“You look like all the skin on your face was peeled off,” Quentin clarified.

“You don’t look so good yourself,” said Isidora.

Quentin’s brown eyes seemed to grow dimmer by the minute, and his skin began falling off in flakes.

“Well, you look absolutely gorgeous,” said Chief Constable Evelyn Glasgow to Father Peter.

He flashed her a smile. Father Peter’s eyes shone brighter than ever.

“The thing is, we’re dead,” said Father Peter. “Our souls are transitioning to their true form.”

Isidora fell to the floor, screaming in agony, as her skin blistered across her body. The pain felt similar to the green substance the old man had sprayed on her face. Dalton cackled.

“Hurts, doesn’t it? Hell fire,” he said.

Dalton looked at Quentin. His skin was peeling off gradually. Quentin’s face showed no emotion.

“You’re always so stoic, so hard. You feel nothing, do you? No remorse… what a good soldier you’ll make,” said Dalton. He looked at Quentin’s clenched fists. “Oh, are we in a bit of pain?”

Quentin’s uppercut reached Dalton’s nose and knocked him unconscious. Edward and Stanley cheered. Karl ran over to Dalton and knelt by him, his hands still cuffed behind his back. Every time he took a breath, he felt like he was being stabbed in the chest from the rib the ginger broke when he’d kneed him.

“That’s not your mate, that’s the old man,” Quentin said to Karl.

“Actually, it’s also Dr. McGovern,” said Father Peter. “When someone is possessed, their soul shares their body with the demon. It’s a bit like having a shitty roommate.”

Quentin shrugged. “He deserves it for ruinin’ the experiment.”

* * *

Isidora screamed in agony. She felt her eyes fry and her heart burn from the boiling blood it pumped through her body. If only there were some way out of this, she thought. She looked at unconscious Dalton, and then Darcy, who both lay on the floor, motionless. What if it were possible to visit people’s minds like she could in the void?

“This one’s mine,” said the old man, as she tried to visit Dalton. “Quite something, this mind of his. Sometimes he has a bit too much fun with knives, cutting his wrists… his sister has had to bear the weight of it,” he continued. “Go ahead, Isidora. Try it. It’s good fun.”

The old man sent an image into Isidora’s mind. It was Dalton’s suicide attempt. She watched Darcy rush to his rescue. Perhaps that could be a way of luring her in, thought Isidora.

“Yes, try it,” said the old man. “Her mind is so weak right now, can’t you feel it? It’s so easy to play tricks on a failing mind. Why not ask our friend over there for help?”

Isidora looked at Dr. Whalen’s dead body. The neurosurgeon’s severed head turn toward her. Dr. Whalen grinned, winked, and her head dropped dead on the floor once more. Isidora saw through Dr. Whalen and felt another entity occupying her body.

Darcy sat up with a gasp. “Dalton!” she cried, looking at Dr. Whalen’s body. The Chief Constable wrapped her arm around Darcy, trying to calm her down. Darcy pushed her aside.

Where Dr. Whalen had last stood, Darcy thought she saw Dalton, holding a razor to his wrists. “Put it down, love,” Darcy said, shaking her head.

The Chief Constable followed Darcy’s gaze, perplexed. “Who are you talking to? There’s no one there, only Dr. Whalen’s corpse.”

Darcy ignored the Chief Constable. Her eyes were glued to her hallucination of her brother. “It’s all right, Dalton, I can help you. Just give me the razor.” She slowly reached out her hand.

The Chief Constable looked around the room. Dalton still lay unconscious, across the laboratory. “Whatever it is you’re seeing, it’s not your brother,” she told Darcy.

Darcy stepped towards what she thought was Dalton, and he cut open his wrists, blood flowing out forcefully and drenching the entire laboratory, spattering across the walls and spreading along the floor. She watched Dalton fall and saw his body lying on the floor where Dr. Whalen’s corpse truly lay.

“Not again,” said Darcy, her heart racing. She tried to make her way toward the spot where she believed him to be, but the Chief Constable pulled her back.

“Don’t go there,” said the Chief Constable. “There’s something… bad… over there.”

“Let me go! I have to help him!” Darcy cried, struggling against her.

“What are you talking about? That’s Dr. Whalen’s body.”

Still holding her back, the Chief Constable tried to keep Darcy away, but Darcy pulled them both closer to the body. Darcy turned to face the Chief Constable and shoved her in the chest, trying to break free. The Chief Constable resisted, and Darcy pulled harder toward the body, dragging the two of them down to the floor alongside Dr. Whalen’s corpse.

Thank you, said the entity inside Dr. Whalen to Isidora. The entity entered Chief Constable Glasgow’s mind while Isidora’s attention turned to Darcy.

Darcy grabbed Dr. Whalen’s arm, believing it was Dalton’s.

“Someone, help me, please,” said Darcy, looking around the room. She felt faint, her head pounded, and the flickering lights of the laboratory overwhelmed her. She thought she might be concussed again.

She looked at Karl beseechingly. He knelt by Dalton’s actual unconscious body. Darcy, upon seeing Dalton over by Karl, became aware of the stiffness of the arm in her hands, looked at it and realized it was not her brother’s, but Dr. Whalen’s, tensing up as rigor mortis set in. She dropped it in horror. Darcy heard Isidora’s voice inside her mind.

“I’m terribly sorry,” said Isidora to Darcy. “The pain was unbearable.”

No, no, I haven’t had an episode in over a year, thought Darcy. She began braiding her hair with shaking hands. “Focus on the braids,” she told herself, controlling her breathing. Isidora searched Darcy’s mind, looking through memories of Afghanistan.

Lying on the floor, her wicked soul streaming into Darcy’s mind more and more, Isidora felt like something hit her from behind. She became overwhelmed with an urge to kill Karl. A voice inside her own mind—not the old man’s, but another one, more authoritative, spoke to her.

“We’ll need all the numbers we can get for the upcoming war,” said the voice. “Karl is one of ours. Get her to kill him so he can join us. But don’t get her killed. She’ll join them.”

Dalton sat up and ignored Karl, who had been kneeling by him with his hands still cuffed behind his back. Through empty eyes, he stared at Stanley. “Finally, I can punish you properly,” he said. Dalton grinned and slowly made his way over to the boy. Karl thought of following him, but noticed Darcy staring at him, braiding her hair.

“Darcy, are you okay?” asked Karl. Her eyes were glued to him.

“Don’t you remember, Darcy?” Isidora told him. “You’re United Kingdom Special Forces. He’s an enemy of the Crown. Supplied weapons to terrorists across the northern hemisphere. You’re on a mission to kill him.” Isidora played with the memories in Darcy’s mind, altering them at her will. It startled her to see naked Father Peter in there.

Darcy stared blankly at Karl. She’d finished braiding her hair, and her arms dropped suddenly. He struggled to move toward her, still on his knees.

“How’s your head? How are you feeling?” he asked. He was now just a few feet away from her and could see that her pupils were not evenly dilated. She glared and took a few steps towards him.

Karl tried to get up on his feet, but Darcy pushed him back down. She stomped on his shin, which snapped in half. Karl cried, feeling the bone rip through his skin and press up against his skinny jeans, which became soaked in blood around the wound.

Despite sharing Darcy’s mindspace, Isidora still lay on the floor, her body hardly recognizable from all the blisters. She cackled.

“Yes! Do it!” she ordered Darcy, her voice raspy. Father Peter looked at Darcy and turned to Isidora.

“Isidora, I know a part of you is still in there,” he said to her. He bent down and gently touched her shoulder. It burned his hand, and he pulled it away.

Father Peter’s voice drew Isidora out of Darcy’s mind and made her once again aware of the pain she felt. “I can’t bear it,” she said weakly. “I can’t stand the pain. I have no choice.” She tried to focus on Darcy’s mind, but Father Peter kept speaking to her, splitting her mind between herself and Darcy.

“There’s no escaping your own soul,” said Father Peter. “You can leave, take over innocent people’s minds, but when you do so, you lose control.”

“That’s not true,” said Isidora. “I can be free from this pain if I want. Why should she get to have that body all to herself, when souls like mine suffer? I want to be free of this pain.”

Father Peter pulled out the cloth he’d soaked in holy water from his toolbox. It was still a bit damp. He pressed it against Isidora’s cheek. She winced, looked briefly relieved, but then screamed and convulsed.

“You aren’t free. If you accept Hell, you accept to be under the reign of a False God. That’s how he lures you in. He makes you believe sin is freedom. But sin leads to a greater loss of control, and to greater suffering. You become his pawn, and your suffering will be endless. He’s doing this to you to control you, to use you. Fight back!”

Isidora cried and struggled to form sentences in spite of the pain of her bleeding vocal cords. “I can’t. It’s where I belong.”

“It’s not too late for you, Isidora,” said Father Peter. She was surprised to find comfort in hearing her own name. “There is marvellous grace in redemption, and eternal love in salvation.”

Between convulsions, Isidora managed to whisper a few words. “It’s too late. It’s too late.”

Father Peter held her hand, despite it burning his own. “So long as you’re here, it’s not. Hang on, and fight.”