HOW MOTHER NATURE
ASSERTS HERSELF
an Earthbound fanfic by Tenda
Howitzer keeps the rifle aimed at the door because this is what Ness told him to do, and in the heat of the moment Howitzer Xavier Aggerate does not have time to think for himself. The black and ivory beast, obviously an antique, a showpiece, a weapon not meant for this place-- this situation-- keeps its single menacing eye on the portal.
The door thunders in its place, echoes rhinoceros' crashes with each pound against the hinges. Boom slam smash!, the door shudders and reverberates and the old wood holds strong but Ness knows it won't last, boom slam smash.
"Just keep the gun steady, Howie!" Ness shouts with tears of determination in his eyes, "I'm going as fast as I can!" Ness shouts as he stands behind Howitzer, two swollen hands wrapped tight around his bat. The baseball dynamo is adding to the commotion with alacrity, is putting golf swings and overheads and old-fashioned step-up-to-the-plate panache to the back door of the mezzanine. Boom slam smash!, whistle crack crash!, at opposite ends of the room opposite antique doors are being rendered splinters in a delirious race.
Beads of sweat roll down Howitzer's forehead, and he blinks away tears, and his hands are shaking something fierce but he is doing just the best that he can to keep the rifle steady. It is easily his height. It is easily an eighth his weight. But Howitzer does what he is told, Howitzer the tin-foil soldier with his straining bowl crown and glimmering wristbands knows his role and just how important it is to follow directions.
In a moment's space the doors come crashing down and the cacophony reaches its feverish apex, boom slam smash whistle crack crash snap and a single reverberating explosion that punctuates the crescendo. "Freakin' Hell!" screams Howitzer as he drops the smoking rifle to the ground, staring at his crumpled and bloody hands where the black and ivory beast has bitten in its misfiring. In the same flash of the frying pan, Ness has paused before the back door to pay heed to who is at the front door, and what has happened there just the same.
"Howie, you shot him," Ness begins, nonplussed. His sentence trails off. The boy with the blood on his hands is too busy minding his own injuries to look up for a few seconds. There is a body lying half inside the Beak Point mansion and half in the dwindling twilight. Howitzer Xavier Aggerate can recognize old Mister Sitgraves in a heartbeat. The events of the night flicker panoramic across Howitzer's eyes, and the walls of the mansion melt away and in turn there Howitzer is again in his father's basement alongside Ness, staring at the cedar gun cabinet.
"Come on, what's the fun of playing soldier without a gun," Howitzer hears himself repeating, repeating, reiterating to Ness. "What's the fun of playing soldier without a gun?"
"Everyone will think it's just a toy, there's no harm in it. We'll put it back tonight once we're done, my father won't even notice it's gone," Howitzer hears himself repeating, retelling, walking himself through the story turned tragedy.
Two thirteen year-olds sneak out of Lier X. Aggerate's house in the evening and go unchastised through Onett, unimpeded by strangers and policemen and everyone just the same because everyone has more important business on their minds than two teenagers with a toy gun, and a baseball bat, and mischievous grins-- so Howitzer reasons, and condemns.
The boys have been planning this excursion for weeks now, have been plotting since before the Autumn about this big night, the grand epic that would be their travels into and about the old deserted Beak Point mansion.
The boys have been very excited. This is the first trip into the field for the fledgling Onett Psychokineticists' Club, for all its two members, master and apprentice. They know the rumors about the Beak Point mansion, the stories of hauntings and Satanic powers and magick all the same, but they know just as well the truth behind all of these rumors: this is just a psychokinetic hotspot. This is just a locale that has been waiting for the boys to stumble upon it, and turn its mystery to profit.
Tonight, Ness promised way back in August as a birthday present, he was going to divine the identity of the tin-foil soldier's mom.
When the boys reached the city limits they noticed Mr. Sitgraves immediately, saw him standing outside his old Lincoln Continental, parked at the back of the hospital's lot all by its lonesome. There was no exchange of words, just a mutual exchange of glances and the chase was on. The boys didn't think about why their school principal had shown up to chase them down, or why they weren't just willing to let him catch up and explain themselves. Like a blossoming fire the panic only fed itself, and by the time the boys reached the mansion, though exhausted, they were relieved to see both the front door unlocked and Mr. Sitgraves lagging behind. Howitzer locked the door behind them and thought that would be it, there'd be no more interference from here on out, but Mr. Sitgraves proved impossibly persistent.
Where does a grade school principal get off breaking down doors, Howitzer mutters to himself, considering the absurdity of the oblong statement. The iron-backed door began shuddering, and they found the only other exit in the room was locked, too, and in moments' time Ness was barking orders and that's what brought Howitzer onto a knee to put the rifle into position.
And that was everything.
These are the thoughts Howitzer thinks he will find himself repeating for the next thirty years of his life while he rots in prison.
"Howie, Howie, snap out of it!" Ness grabs Howitzer by the shoulder and is shaking him fiercely. "I've got an idea, don't worry, we can fix all of this."
Howitzer, still reeling, has no response but to continue gently shaking of his own fear's accord in Ness's arms.
"We can heal him, with our powers. We can heal him! Help me lift the body and we'll move him in deeper where no one can see what's happened," Ness offers reassuringly but in a commanding tone.
Howitzer follows orders, of course, but only resignedly. Howitzer Xavier Aggerate does not really believe in the power of the Onett Psychokineticists' Club to raise the dead. The more he thinks about this, the more infuriated he gets, the more absurd he realizes this entire scenario is.
Why did he agree to point a gun at Mr. Sitgraves? How did he manage to stretch the imagination of both Ness and himself far enough to accomodate the theft of a loaded rifle as a smart thing to do in the first place?
The Beak Point mansion is a mess, but not disorderly. There are no more locked doors that require breaking, and the maze of passages is easy to navigate as the lighting is still intact and functional. There is no furniture in any room, there are no signs of life save for the occasional spider. Ness stumbles upon a stairwell and in his infinite wisdom suggests that the basement of the mansion is the perfect place for a psychokinetic ritual and the body of Mr. Oliver Sitgraves is lowered onto the cold concrete floor.
Howitzer takes a jar of red paint out of Ness's backpack and gets to work setting up the environ with the practiced ritual of the Onett Psychokineticists' Club. He begins drawing would-be arcane symbols in seemingly random patterns across the basement floor. Candles are lit, and incense is set to burn. For the first time, in the dim dusty light, Ness takes a moment to inspect the wound on Mr. Sitgrave's chest.
There is no bloodstain to be seen as Ness removes the suit jacket with its pinpoint hole, and even stranger, the hole through Mr. Sitgrave's undershirt reveals metal instead of skin. Ness peels back the surrounding cloth to get a better look and there it is, plain as plain can be, a patch of metal on an otherwise plainskin body.
There is a simple character imprinted on the metal, right above where Mr. Sitgraves's heart, and the bullet, should be: an upside-down triangle, two bars below it, and a single bar beside that. Ness does not recognize the symbol, but recognizes in it a strange sense of the word "foreign"; without hesitation, Ness places it not merely as unusual but as something otherworldly. Something is amiss in this situation, for sure, the champion figures as his grip on his baseball bat intinctively tightens. Howitzer finishes the manufacture of the faux-blood psychokinetic circle and, as trampling footsteps echo from upstairs, instinctively reaches for the still-warm ebony-and-ivory hunting rifle. He is not alone.
Frank Fly and Howitzer X. Agerate are at odds as the two rifles stare at each other, and each of the barrels is warm and smoking, and even stronger than the smell of the burning candles is the stench of something broken. Frank Fly slowly makes his way down the staircase, rifle trained and unerring the whole while, and following him are a cadre of ragmen with plastic shark fins attached to their heads. Ness and Howitzer recognize the whole of the troop; these are the Sharks, and these are the thirteen year-old criminals of Onett. This is Onett's first and only gang, and the adages of the Sharks-- let alone their deeds-- are reason enough for Howitzer to be petrified with fear again as Frank Fly's rifle stares unflinching.
The two are at odds.
"Frank, what do you and your cronies want with the Onett Psychokineticists' Club?" Ness blurts out in an entirely rehearsed fashion because "psychokineticists'" is a word that can only be spoken in a rehearsed fashion. Where Howitzer quivers, he is tall and strong still, he is more menacing with a baseball bat than Frank Fly with a bolt-action .375 caliber rifle because he is monolithic. Frank Fly needs thirteen steps below him, seven-and-a-half feet of added height, and eleven pounds of cold-wrought iron to appear similarly monumental, similarly cold and threatening; Ness is stone without trying.
"We want to congratulate you on taking down old man Sitgraves," Frank smugly offers as Alice Feist hop-skip-jumps downstairs to check the pulse of the dead man on the floor. Ice cold, she smugly offers, and the Sharks give a simultaneous and apathetic cheer. The Sharks are not a complicated gang, they are not a complicated worldwide union; the single unshakable faith of each and every Shark is that the world belongs to the young, and the young should rightly inherit it. Frank Fly sees one ice cold victory on the floor and comfort that this one makes his own ice cold trail even more poignant.
There are dead bodies in Onett tonight, there are corpses strewn across the Halloween landscape but nobody in Onett seems to pay much mind to them as trick-or-treaters step over and step onward in a single-minded pursuit of tricks and treats. This is perfectly in line with the Sharks' strategy, this is perfectly in line with Frank Fly's modus operandi, because the Sharks are perfectly content making as many miniscule murders as they may be able to. Frank Fly is smiling smugly as the rifle barrels smoke across Onett because this Halloween is the day where everything really will change, and Ness and Howitzer have become a part of this.
"We didn't mean to do that, Frank, we didn't mean to do any of this! Ness is going to bring him back, Ness said he will!" Howitzer X. Agerate offers his scripted rebuttal and Frank Fly is just laughing, just laughing with it all because he is cocking the rifle, the barrel is warming in anticipation, smoke is being conjured in the chamber in anticipation of the trigger being pulled.
"You're not going to bring anyone back from the dead, dimwit," Frank Fly is cool and collected as he turns his own weapon to face Ness as three other firearms poke out of the shamble of Sharks and turn to focus on Howitzer. He drops the black-and-white weapon to the ground in disbelief as what seems like a hundred bottomless eyes face him, and even Ness loosens his grip on the bat as the notion of death actually reaches his desensitized pupils and the stench of blood and singed flesh ten feet behind him sing songs of mortality. There is a tense but terse silence that ends as Ness about-faces and drops to the floor beside Mr. Sitgraves in a single-minded attempt to work his psychic magicks.
On cue, the illusion cast over Mr. Sitgraves melts, the skin stretched over the metallic body drooping and falling in heavy pink drops to the floor. A gleaming arm rises from its limp state and grabs Howitzer's arm, effortlessly tossing him aside. Howitzer's body rolls across the floor, leaving streaks of red paint that breathe and tint like blood in the flickering candlelight. Mr. Sitgraves grows, he expands, he takes on a monstrous height and shape as his clothes turn to tatters and fall to the side. Seven feet, eight feet, spectacular and gleaming even by candlelight, the golem throws itself onto its feet with monstrous agility and towers over the child that is Ness. It twists a steeled tentacle around the boy's throat, and then, for a moment, everything freezes. The room turns red, turns blue, turns green and yellow and the lights flash on and off, flicker in and out, and everyone in the Beak Point mansion capable of screaming is screaming just the same as the flow of time resumes its normal operation, but Howitzer is screaming a little louder and a little more painfully, "Ness, Ness, I don't know what's going on!"
The ruckus ceases and desists in a single moment as Howitzer buckles involuntarily, curls into a ball and explodes into a face-down heap. From him you can see it slip through the air, a disturbance, like sonar like radar like something secret and military sweeping across the room and slamming Ness and the metal man who are torn apart and tossed like dolls to separate sides of the room. Howitzer's sobs are the only noise, grating and metallic and echoing as the Sharks are frozen in time, barrels pointed wildly and firing bullets that swish about the room erratically only to stop midair, suspended in an ethereal and incandescent web. "It hurts, it hurts, Ness..."
A whir breaks through the barrier of sound, and a click, and a beep. The metal man is on his feet again, shaken but no worse for the wear, and turns to face the sobbing Howitzer who seems to be moving a hundred times easier through the invisible muck than everyone else. He begins to cross the room in his strange spaceman's gait, limber and curvacious limbs twisting and slamming onto the ground with definitive clanks; Howitzer looks up, and his eyes meet the visor of the starman, and the screams of the Sharks fade into the distance as they depart, leaving Frank Fly standing on the staircase, arms limp and mouth agape as the ineffectual rifle drops to the floor. The whir of the spaceman intensifies as he looks to the ceiling, and in common tongue mutters to the stars above.
"There was - only supposed to be - one," he speaks in electroplated English, unflinchingly keeping his gaze focused to and through the cracked and crumbling ceiling. "But - no matter - I will take care of it - they are only - children," and as the starman says this he reaches out with his tentacle and it is inches away from Howitzer, and it's changing shape, it's becoming sharper and sharper and it's a needle now, held at the ready at the tip of the boy's nose. There are sparks. There is thunder. There are rivulets of bolts that crackle across the floor, trace winding paths that sprout blue sparkling tributaries of evanescent electricity that peel and tear at the floor. Bricks are falling out of the walls, the tile floor is being ripped to shreds, there is an ever-intensifying cry of pain from Howitzer as the starman's needle creeps ever-so-slowly towards his head, and it's shaking fiercely as the resistance mounts, and the contest of the invisible forces has the whole of the basement shaking side to side and front to back.
Ness has his back against the wall just the same as Frank Fly now, is doing his best to avoid the strands of lightning that stretch and sweep the room's width. The flickers of energy that scatter from the conflict of the starman and Howitzer hang dangling in the air and take on lives of their own, mimic the birth and destruction of worlds in miniature, slowly coalesce and settle at the center of the mansion basement floor where they writhe like dying snakes. The needleknife of the starman creeps so much closer, so slowly but so definitively, and Frank Fly is sure that another youth and another Shark and another life are about to end, and Frank Fly does the only thing Frank Fly knows how to do.
There is a rifle at his feet, it is his rifle after all, but it is different now. It is a grim thing, it is a tool first and foremost, and in Frank Fly's mind the sound and light in the room cut out as he bends over, picks up the terrible instrument, and fires a single hardly-aimed shot at Howitzer. The bullet connects in an instant and it happens very quickly, it is a process impossible to measure and entirely Escher-esque, but Frank Fly is caught somewhere far and away from the ordinary and is able to watch in slow-motion as the explosion unfolds.
The slug enters Howitzer's head near the left eye, and the wound jettisons a small quanta of fluids before something less expected works its way out, something far more colorful and interesting. Fingers of cold lightning escape the wound, push the blood back in momentarily, and touch each and every crevice of the room. They sweep over the entirety of the basement, gently brush across the three boys and the starman and the walls and floors and ceilings. They dim, and then they grow, and the paths they traced become trails for blue fire that shatters without noise and Frank Fly does not know anything of the aftermath because at this point, Frank Fly is obliterated along with the basement of the Beak Point mansion.
There are no bodies in Onett on November 1st. There were three the night prior, washed up on the beaches, but only one of them was unmoving and headless and dead at all. There are scars, though, on Frank Fly's face and underneath Ness's blue-and-yellow shirt, and some on the fields and floors where figures of authority were shot or stabbed by marauding Sharks. There are strange and otherworldly insignias where Mr. Sitgraves and his advisors fell, where the Deputy Sheriff and Mayor Pirkle were laying unbleeding last their corpses were inspected. The insignias are strange and all the inhabitants of Onett recognize them instantly in a strange sense of the word "foreign": not merely unusual, but distinctly otherworldly. The insignias are an upside-down triangle with two bars below it, and one beside those, and there are a hundred such insignias permanently burned onto the landscape of suburban Onett.
A wave of kidnappings is uncovered, or hypothesized on, as these authority figures wander out of strange tube-shaped cages and back to the positions they had left. Their shadowy impostors are never caught, and neither are the kidnappers, and because of this it never makes the newspaper more than one brief time-- people are not interested in dearth of progress.
Ness in a blanket being chastised by his mother as Mr. X. Agerate is informed of his son's death will not remember this moment two years down the road when the invading Starmen are driven away from Eagleland in full, and he is again sitting at home draped in a blanket and being chastised by his mother. The nature of nature in Eagleland is a strange sort of precognition, and when the Apple of Enlightenment predicts that a boy and his three friends will defeat Giygas in 1997, there is no point in being a revisionist. A hundred Starmen assassins sent into the past to kill a helpless child are not invincible, are not just fighting a helpless child but are fighting a strange sort of precognition where the Apple of Enlightenment is not above being revisionist to defend its own right to assert itself.
In 1997, the newspaper headlines sing the praises of the Chosen Four but Ness Lanley will always remember an impromptu fifth. Ness will keep his promise, and Ness will divine the nature of Howitzer's mother and whisper it to his gravestone, but it's not something either of them expected as thirteen year-olds; in retrospect, though, it is appropriate. Howitzer's mother is the Earth, and he is not of mundane flesh or blood, and Ness Lanley lays a flower on Howitzer's grave every morning because he is the Chosen One that allowed the Chosen Four to prosper.
Ness in a blanket being chastised by his mother in 1997 can only wonder who the man on the other side of the telephone is, and if he has ever had any sort of relations with his mother that would produce a child at all. Ness hears echoes of immaculate conception, and wonders if he is even willing to provide divination for himself.