CHAPTER 55: Under The Rock

Doug has escaped the murderous clutches of Gavin and his mercenaries, as well as the attention of the remaining new age acolytes. Into the dark forest, to Arbiter’s Perch, and to meet a kindred spirit, of sorts…

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HE STUMBLED THROUGH the forest, dragging the weight of his heavy clump-arm along with him, his hand crushed inside by the bronzed cylinders. The voices in his head had slowed to a more hypnotic pace, fading in volume and intensity. “Moon… Regret… Ancient… Hungry…”

As he passed a bluff, on one side the downward slope was clear of trees and he could see the server building below in the distance, glowing, and getting smaller as he traveled further through the undergrowth. Just before it left his view, there came a flickering of shadows, of bodies in front of light, cast up against the translucent walls.

He hobbled past Cassandra Lake, the black pool mirror-still, even in the gales. His limbs felt like they were flapping about, becoming ever more weak and disjointed. Above, the powerful winds cleared away the remaining scrappy clouds, the cold stars twinkling up in the vastness.

He pushed into the pitch-black forest, the low branches of the evergreens whipping against him. He struggled up over the soft stump of a tree so rotted that it must’ve died a hundred years ago. He slipped down the other side, the clump of cylinders on his hand clinking as he landed hard on his backside. He stifled a yelp. Moisture seeped through the bottom of his trousers, soaking cold on his buttocks. He leaned back against the fallen tree in exhaustion, and looked up. Through a gap in the canopy, the stars slid and spiraled about, cutting long traces across outer space. They sparkled behind the black-on-black silhouettes of heavy branches that twisted like a kaleidoscope, tails flitting and maws chomping. He closed his eyes and the blackness took on radiant depths. The nervous force which had carried him thus far was failing. He was lost.

After a while, he opened his eyes. The moon had moved close to the western horizon, and shone a little metallic light through the trees. He was in the middle of a clearing, around him loomed rocky mounds covered in ferns and moss. Bits of jagged, rusted metal stuck out from the undergrowth, old car doors and vulcanized tires, the remains of ancient spring mattresses, motors, wires, and tubing. A locking-style fridge door from the 1950s rose up from a mound to his left, like a standing stone, its chrome handle wrapped in dead, thorny blackberry vines. Only a few flakey patches of the original white paint left after so many decades. He was in the old dump.

“Hello?” He called out.

After creeping onwards for several minutes, his good hand hit cold rock. It was the sheer stone wall of Arbiter’s Perch. He felt along the surface of the boulder. He could only hear his breathing, and his heart beating loudly in his ears. He would soon pass out from exhaustion.

In a hollow at the boulder’s base he squeezed his long body into the small crevice where the stone met the earth. His gangly limbs contracting and releasing, burrowing into the soft soil. His clump hand lay on the ground just outside the hollow, burning inside with excruciating pain. He let his head go limp and closed his eyes.

He remembered once being told that focusing on breathing would help after fight or flight reflexes took over. Breathe and then think, he told himself. Breathe then think. Think. Think.

His phone vibrated. With his good hand he pulled it out and held it close. Two bars of signal, a small miracle up here.

A message had been sent through to his Sternumcoin app. He opened it.

“Dear Douglas, I am Stanley, a friend of July’s. I will help you get rid of the voices now…”

Doug squinted at the rest of the message, and then tapped the microphone icon.

“Moon,” he whispered. The clump on his hand blinked dimly with some bronze and emerald light.

“Regret… Ancient… Hungry…” he repeated each word as the voices in his head chanted them. With each whispered word, the clump pulsed with light, a large green checkmark popped up on his screen, and his phone vibrated lightly.

He recited the last word in the sequence, “… Kingdom…” then his phone vibrated and a grid of blurry thumbnail images popped up on the screen: “Verify that you’re a human: tap each image with a fire hydrant in it. Then press ‘Next.’”

He squinted his bleary eyes and tapped each square that showed a fire hydrant, then pressed “Next.”

A message popped up on his screen: “Timeout error. Please email info@gy-app-it-group2.org to report.”

Above, the stars swirled in the clear night sky. The thick branches of evergreens shifted about in the occasional gust, making the stars seem to flick on and off. He could feel himself fading again. But it was silent now. The chanting in his thoughts had stopped, his clump-encased hand had numbed.

Then there was the stench. “I’ve been waiting for you, Douglas…” Decaying guts in a stew of maggots and shit, old wet dog farts, half dried urine, and rancid dead-mouth halitosis. The Boy In The Wood’s mouth wreaking so close that Doug could feel the small hairs on his ear tickle at each word.

“… Is that you?” Doug sputtered. “From the woods?” He still couldn’t see a thing. “July said you would help me.”

The boy continued in his phlegmy prepubescent voice as if he hadn’t heard Doug, “Translated roughly, it’s called Apocalypse Rock. The white men named it Arbiter’s Perch. But you can’t judge anything from up there, really. Can’t see the forest for the trees,” he giggled.

Distant gunfire echoed through the woods.

“That’s what they’re all here for. The end times of the old times all to start the new times. They can’t have it. No one can,” the child continued. “But where are they, Douglas? Where did you hide them?”

“My hand…” Doug tried to shift the weighty clump. It tinkled a bit in the dark.

The Boy In The Woods giggled again, “Good, Douglas. You did so well!”

Doug thought he was going to vomit from the stench. The child’s hand passed over him and lightly stroked his forearm, up to the clump and then back to the soft skin of the elbow joint, then back again, and again.

“Let go of it. Your hand, Douglas, try to let go.”

“I can’t, I think it’s stuck in there.”

“No. It’s all in your mind, Douglas. Just let go…”

There was a tinkling sound, and a shimmer of light from the cylinders. Then everything went black. Doug’s hand, now free, felt the cold air hit it. Then more pain.

“Just breathe, Douglas. I’ll help you, but it might hurt.”

The Boy In The Woods gently unraveled the bandage from Doug’s hand. The dim dirty green light  of the cylinder reappeared. Doug could see the indistinct and crushed lump of flesh that his hand had become.

The Boy In The Woods held the cylinder in his palm, gently caressing it with his fingers. But rather than the hands of a child, his hands were gnarled, veiny, calloused. The hands of someone older than the hills. At every caress, the cylinder pulsated. It hovered in front of him, a bioluminescent creature in the deep sea.

A dog barked. More distant gunfire.

“Who are you?” Doug asked.

“Don’t worry, Douglas,” the boy’s voice continued. “No one will ever know what you did. No one will know you ever came up here. It’s like the mountain. You can’t take it. It takes you. Them? They want to make a kingdom here, but it only goes one way. We’ll let them in, but there’s a price to pay.” He giggled.

The dim glow from the cylinder in the gnarled hands came closer. In it, Doug saw swirling stars, constellations of dust as deep as galaxies. His hand throbbed quicker and quicker, like it might explode.

More gunfire echoed through the woods. Ramses barked.

“Moon. Regret. Ancient. Hungry…” the boy’s voice recited. “Refuse. Actor. Witness. Dolphin…”

The sound of people shouting through the woods.

“Myth. Bomb. Never. Witch. Collapse…”

A searing pain ran up his arm. He watched the cylinder as the gnarled hands of The Boy In The Woods pushed it into the open flesh of what was once Doug’s hand. Slowly further and further in. Until it disappeared.

“… Practice. Feed. Shame. Open. Despair. Creek. Road. Again. Ice. Least. Kingdom…”

•••

Doug is inside the glass cylinder, surrounded by millions of silvery star-like speckles, the infinite expanse of the universe in a pack of gum, in a tube of lipstick. Under him froths a briney green sea. Upwards, out of the choppy waters, a craggy mountain, like a tower rises into the starry night sky. On top of the mountain, a luminous fortress of elemental shapes comes into being — glowing, fundaments, pulsing around Doug quicker and quicker, then passing on by him. Now, Doug falls into the shapes, now travelling at the speed of light, now shooting through the wondrous cosmos. Rings of energy exploding around him. In front of him, out of the frothy green sea there comes a donut, a donut the size of a galaxy, its syrup nebulae, its colored stars fizzing miniscule candies and sugared speckles. Doug rockets through the massive black hole in its middle. Beyond him, in infinite regress, reflecting out into eternity, are more perfectly exploding donuts of beautiful energy. Doug passes through them, he’s an atomic spark, an infinitesimally small grain in the infinitely expanding feedback of everything. Through the black donut holes came faces with gaping mouths open through which emerge more faces: Shining Wind, Marcus, Bruno, July, Bear, Brandi, Gus, Sharynne, Gavin, Charlene, Siobhan, Dora, Irene, Mike, Stan, Farleece and so on and on and on down through his life. A procession of endless faces coming up in the throats of more faces. Finally, the sleek black head of Ramses emerges from a wet throat, his snout opens wide too. Inside, behind his bloody red tongue and looming over the massive sucking whirlpool of his gullet, a new mountain rises up. Upon that, a fortress of clouds and lines, shapes and wind, from which came flocks of birds shrieking, seagulls and geese squawking then herds of deer running, packs of dogs howling. Out of Ramses’s mouth comes a smooth and round boulder. It just pops out, then sparks and sputters little embers. It explodes into the night, sending up a riot of colored fireworks over the island. Now it’s engulfed in flames that reach up and lick at the sky over Sternum, like a snake’s tongue. Then two yellowed eyes, eyes of an old man but with the voice of a young boy, a child’s voice, “See? Apocalypse Rock.”

The haggard face of an old man, jagged folds of grey wrinkles, windblown and craggy, dried skin flaking. The old man smiles, his teeth glow green, little cylinders plunged into infected gums. And the stench again.

“… The Kingdom… I built it after I escaped from prison. I built it for my friends in the forest. A place to keep all the things that I found, all the things that I made my own. This is where you where born, Douglas. This is where you will live.”

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