The Hereafter
(His Moment Of Truth Was Yet to Come.)
Lucas had to avert his eyes from the pulsing blue light but could do little about the sound. It was the noise of massive nails drawn down an equally huge chalkboard. It reverberated deep down in his stomach, threatening to force whatever was there to spill out any moment. His sister held his hand and urged him forward step by painful step. The sound pushed him back as she pulled him towards his tale’s conclusion.
He felt in his heart that he was being dragged to his end. Each step solidified that notion more acutely than the last, and he found that this newfound certainty gave him something like strength. There were just the two of them now, he had tried to look behind him to see whether the others had followed but the light was far too bright to see anything but the vaguest forms in the distance. It turned a hundred feet into a thousand, a hundred thousand. They could be walking past another group of people and they may never see them the pulsating light was so intense it bleached out the detail in the world around them.
But it was all okay, it was as it should be. He didn’t need help. With his sister alongside him, he felt unstoppable. However, he would have felt better if he had the book. It contained a lot of what he had learned. A lot, but not everything, he thought of the pages the boy had given him, and Lucas was thankful that God had given him the time to understand their meaning.
He started to speak the words. He didn’t shout, there was no point, they would not be heard over the screech of the portal, but words had power whether they were heard or not. There was always Someone listening when you spoke, but He rarely answered.
The words were part of what he had read and part of what he had written. They were the distillation of everything he had read since he was old enough to read, and he had honed them like a blade against those who would attack him.
As he spoke the words there was a change in the tone of the portal noise. It now sounded pained to Lucas. It was not agony he heard, but the pain of a thorn in the heel of the foot. His words stung, and the stinging irritated, but soon the thorn of his words would work their way into what served the creatures for minds and then their agony would surely begin.
The journey forward felt easier now, Charlotte’s tug on his arm was less urgent. She knew he was with her and would walk with her to the end of the tale, regardless of where it led them.
Matty was floating in a sea of light. In the light, he saw beings flutter. They were like nothing he had ever seen. Even in the movies. Even in his imagination. There was nothing like them and no way they could be described. Not by him at least. Not by a boy who had barely started life. They made him think of the twisted things on the floors below, the foul creatures with too many eyes, too many legs, and far too little of anything good. These beings of light were those who steadied the balance. They were alien in every respect as well. But where the twisted things were a perversion of life the fluttering beings were the perfection of it.
He turned to look around and realised that he moved without moving. He didn’t move but existence around him moved instead. Something fluttered on the edge of his vision, and he turned to try to catch it. It fluttered out of his line of sight before he could, and he tried again. He twisted and chased the sliver of light until he realised he would never catch it because it was him. It was his being that was drifting out to touch existence. He had not recognised it as such, because he was no different from the indescribable beings around him.
They are life without form, he thought, and it was at the moment he knew he was dead.
The sound of the parent’s grief was more horrifying than any sound the portal could make. Whatever differences had driven them apart were forgotten in the pain that wrenched at them. The mother had felt it immediately. The boy’s body suddenly gained weight as his limbs no longer had a consciousness controlling them. They slipped from where she had placed them, and his body tried to move from her embrace as if it had gained a new will. One that was hostile to her.
Greta stood apart; she had seen the boy fall near the woman’s feet even as his body lay in her arms. Even death made no sense here. There had been no reason for the child to have fallen. One moment he had been running to his mother, the next he was gone.
Ryan had fallen to his knees where the mother had placed the body. The other body, the one she had carried, not the one that had fallen. The mother hunched over the boy, nursing his hand as if she could rouse him.
Greta fell to one knee, then folded the other under her. She was close enough to touch Ryan, but she knew he was unaware of her existence. The realisation hurt, but she knew he hurt far worse.
He had seen the ending of the tale. It was easy to flick to the end of the book of time and peek. He saw what happened with interest, glad for some of what he had learned, and less for other things. He knew none of it mattered. The ending was mostly good, but the being had once been a boy and now had a different view. He realised that no one had ever won the game of life. The enlightened ones knew this and played the game for its quality of self, while those less enlightened played for the gathering of things that would no more survive than they would themselves.
He had been neither enlightened nor bewildered by life. He had just been a boy. But being just a boy had its perks. He had never developed a need for things. His imagination was all he needed. He fed it and it fed him, and now that he was the centre of his very own universe, he knew that what you conjure from imagination alone was worth more than anything in the world he had left behind.
He had visited a multitude of other times and spaces. They had been as real, and unreal as the one he had left, and each undulated with the infinite possibilities that only consciousness could create.
He didn’t know if he imagined those worlds, or if they had they had been real. But it didn’t matter. He knew that because he now knew that the world, he had left was just a creation of the overlapping imagination of those who lived there. Those who created horror would live within that horror, and those who created joy would partake in that too.
They were close enough now to see that the robed figures around the portal wore faces that could not decide to whom they belonged. They looked like no one and everyone while no two faces looked alike. Only one face remained stable, the one was stolen from Natalie’s husband, it no longer looked like that man, but whoever had taken it had sole possession of it and it was that which set it out as Lucas’ target.
Lucas had not stopped speaking the Word, and his volume had increased as his strength had increased. He had not turned up the volume of his Word, the Word had turned up the volume of him. It had parted the way before them. It wasn’t a wide path, but it was a path, nevertheless. It was nothing less than the narrow end of a thorn being driven into a beast’s side with the Word as its sharpest point.
Charlotte led the way, leaving Lucas to pull the words from memory.
It was working but Lucas didn’t allow him to think of what might happen once they arrived at their destination. He had faith that the Word had the power to pierce but he feared his faith was not strong enough to defeat what he might find. He didn’t fear the Word would not be enough to end it, he feared he lacked the delivery system to use it to its fullest potential. Lucas could find his way into the dark heart of the Gatehouse Apartments, but he had no idea what to do once he got there.
All he could do was to continue to drive in the thorn.
It wasn’t until it had no hold over you that one realised that everything was warped by the concept of time, the fear of not having enough, or the fear of having too much marred every experience. While still subject to the flow of time, people worried about the future or ruminated about the past while the present was always left as the victim. It was a cascade of errors that only occurred because so few thought of the here and how.
He understood it all, life’s tale should be written a line at a time. There’s not enough time to elaborately plot the future and no option at all to rewrite the past. The only moment you have is the one you are living, and to make the most of it requires your complete attention.
The faceless beasts that gnashed at the portal were pre-time. They had never felt its inexorable pull and like all creatures addicted to the flesh they craved the sensation of flesh’s decay. They craved time for the same reason those who had experienced it were joyful of its absence.
The boy’s spirit drifted towards that moment, to the end of the tale, and took up its seat in the spectator’s gallery. A multitude watched, each one knew the ending, and some had been there, but to watch the pull of time was far more fascinating than it was to feel it.
The man sat on the rooftop, and the other ran. The woman cried and the other sat in nerve-jangling pain. None of them knew their piece in the puzzle any more than anyone did, they saw themselves as minor cogs in minor machines. But when time released them they would realise that there are no minor cogs, and the machine they are in is the machine of existence, and there is nothing minor in that.
Everyone feels like the hero of their tale because that is what they are. You are only a minor character if you allow yourself to be.
The boy’s spirit had died a moment before, but he had lived a thousand lifetimes since. He had felt the pull of time for a few short years, but he had still been the hero of his tale and he was still.
His moment of truth was still yet to come.
Ryan sat on the rooftop. He was empty. He had stopped his howling of pain and with that gone he was nothing. Something had shorted within his mind somewhere. He looked at the body of his boy but could not fathom what had happened. For so long all he felt had been anger. It had been like a boiling pot that had simmered for so long that he had no idea where it had begun. In the last year, it had boiled over and he had lost his son, his wife, his home, and now his life.
Matty’s body lay in front of him so he knew that his life was over. His wife howled in agony, but the sound was a murmur against the rending steel sound of the portal. He felt something touch his shoulder and he turned to see Penny. Pretty Penny, he thought, that’s what I’ll call her, Pretty Penny. She smiled at him, but it was a sad smile, and he nodded in response. It didn’t matter that they couldn’t hear one another, there was nothing to say.
He turned his gaze to Natalie, she was sobbing, her body heaving, but if he reached for her, she would recoil, so he left her alone. She was a good person and a great mother, but he had not been a good husband and he could not help but wonder if she had been such a good wife. He was certain he had ignored much of what she needed to thrive, and he knew she had for him. They had both become their day-to-day chores, rather than shaping themselves into something they wanted to be.
The only thing good to come from their union had been Matty.
He had become numb to the sound of the rending of reality. The child lying on the ground between them had made him numb to everything. His mind was never silent, even when he appeared still. Matty’s mind had never stopped. He was a living cascade of ideas and thoughts. He would never have given up. It wasn’t in his DNA.
Ryan pushed to his feet, and he saw Penny grimace in pain as she looked up at him. He pointed to her and indicated that she should stay. She shook her head and tried to stand but he put his hand on her shoulder and shook his head. He leaned down and kissed her. It was brief and over before either of them realised it, and Ryan turned and walked towards the circle of witches.
A multitude of souls pressed against The Firmament watching the tale unfold below. A sea of faceless faces drifting within a water-less ocean where matter was just an expression of thought. The Firmament held them from the passage of time, as it held the passage of time from their all-knowledge. One could do nothing but erode the other. Time would scatter knowledge, and change its meaning in infinite and varied ways, while knowledge knew that time was nothing more than the inevitable decay of one more thing that had been created.
He felt eyeless faces turn to him, knowingly, they had all seen the ending of the tale and knew of his involvement. All his actions, those done and those yet to be done had been recorded in the telling of his story. Some had seen those actions, and some would see them now for the first time even while knowing the outcome.
He would experience both, knowing and unknowing, doing and viewing simultaneously. Without time’s restraint, he knew everything and nothing as and when he was supposed to know. It was natural as not breathing, and as human as not needing sleep. He knew now why no one intervened in mankind’s woes. The ending was always the same, it was the only certainty and the myriad ways to arrive there was the sole unique thing a person could hold as their own, after it all, you saw it all and felt it all through the lens of those brief few years where time had you in its clutches.
Once it relinquished its hold it was everything and nothing all at once, and the only thing that made you unique were those brief moments when you were alone with time breathing down your neck.
It hurt Greta almost as much to see him go as it did to try to follow him, but she watched anyway. Her forearm was clutched to her chest to try to ease the pain, and she breathed shallowly. Beside her, his wife sobbed inconsolably but there was nothing Greta could do. The boy was gone, and nothing would bring him back. Matty had just dropped, and he was never getting up again.
Greta looked at the boy. His eyes were closed, and he appeared to be sleeping, perhaps Matty went to the same place we all go when we sleep, she thought.
Her eyes moved to the place where they had been. She had woken and the boy was already running away from her position. The man had been knelt near her, Greta looked around and couldn’t see him, so the boy had started from that point and had run no more than fifty feet before he dropped.
Why did any of this matter?
It did; she knew it did but didn’t immediately understand why.
It mattered because there was no reason for the boy to be dead. The only thing he had done was run towards the woman.
Greta’s mind stopped dead.
All he did was run towards the woman with the child in her arms.
The child that looked like him.
She pushed herself to her feet and the pain made her head swim. The world around her turned into a drunken man’s paradise without any of the benefits. The pain tore through her, but she pushed through it until she was standing on shaky feet. She looked up and saw Ryan in the distance, walking towards the sickening blue light and the man standing beside it.
The man who looked just like he did.
Even if she could shout, he would not have heard her, and even if she could run, she would not catch him, but neither would stop her. She moved painful step after painful step, knowing that she would be trailing long behind him but having little choice. The only other option would be to sit and wait, and that wasn’t her.