Disclaimer: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and its characters are copyright Jhonen Vasquez. The Original Characters in this story are mine, not yours. Enjoi.
After one swift manipulation of reality, Mort was up the walls, standing on the ceiling, and entered the door he fought to find for so long. Once he stepped over its threshold all ties to the former reality he knew disappeared, and he found himself walking in a hallway crafted by strange dimensions. The windows were Gothic arches of stone and stained glass, each two-stories tall and reflected on a strange plane to sum up to huge four-story windows. The stones were the darkest pitch of black but each stood out from the other through a thick blurred outline of gray.
"What an odd chapel I'm in" Mort mused to himself. "I suppose one must discontinue his proper existence in order to safely travel here. My target has hid himself well. He didn't assume I could change my views and understanding of reality as quickly as he himself could.
"Incorrect, young infidel" Gore said, his soulless sneering voice echoing through all the chambers and landing bluntly in Mort's head. "I anticipated your arrival above all things. I knew some harbinger of doom, some living advent of penance would come for me at length, and thus I have prepared. Trevor was but one of my sheep who mastered my delicate arts of reality-substitution. The others are all dead from the previous attempts at my life."
"There were others?" Mort asked, mainly to himself.
"Many others" Gore answered. "Look below you." Mort instinctively looked up, remembering that he entered the while walking upside-down and was therefore technically on the roof. There was a distant floor identical to his with black light shining fiercely from the rippled glass of the stained windows.
"What am I looking at?" Mort asked.
"Oh" Gore's voice said. "Oh! You...you got it already! Most of them looked at the ceiling at their feet when I said- Never mind. These are the shadows of all those who have fallen in pursuit of me, and soon yours will join them..." From the floor far below an army of black figures, all of them rotted down to skeletons of shaking black from the countless ages, came into the perverse existence. "Also, you can't walk on the ceiling right now. I just cleaned it." Mort suddenly felt all his weight shift close to his head and realized what had happened.
I'm in his reality now Mort told himself. He slammed down hard to the floor where the staggering mindless creatures congregated and held his shovel in front of him, ready to fight. My legs aren't broken. I barely feel any kind of general fear or disturbance from these strange affairs. Apparently he is still in control of this existance, but I can still directly control my own existence. I am my own world, passing through this one so as to kill its heart, Reverend Gore...
"Fair enough" Mort said, lowering his goggles and twirling the spade around his biceps. He stopped it in the flexed grip between his right forearm and bicep, holding the back end with his gloved hand. "How much Raple-syrup would you like with your order of FUCKING DIE!!!!" Mort started roaring and ran forward. The skeletons shook violently, like cheap horror ghosts would, and made equally swift dashes. They all split apart from Mort's running line and stayed just outside his reach. Mort didn't exactly care if they weren't fighting him anymore. He could see the door leagues away. However, even with a cleared beeline for the exit of this strange place in sight, Mort felt the need to turn around and arm himself against the now attacking shadows.
One stabbed with its clawed hand, the shadowy aura extending out to form longer claws of immaterial force. Mort blocked the attack with his shovel, forced the attackers hand down and bashed the skull with the metal of his spade. Now with cracks of damage, Mort advanced his attack and stabbed between its slightly gaping teeth to pierce its jaw. Then he tripped it while spinning around and gave it a stern backhand with a flexed arm. That skull was shattered to pieces, but the body continued to move. Mort shoved his shovel into its shadow-covered sternum and pressed down with his foot on the blunt edges of the spade, piercing into the stone underneath the invisibly black carpet and dug up a scoop of dirt and broken, twisted bone.
That skeleton dissolved into the nothingness that made it, but a small army still stood in his way. Mort sighed and began attacking. He threw wide and powerful full-swings with his shovel, always hitting skull, while dodging the pounces and claws of the others that attacked. They were mad, though not mindless, as their tactics seemed to center around having only four fighting at once. This led Mort to make a vaguely-informed assumption while slashing a skull apart.
Gore must be controlling them Mort said from wherever he is. That's why only so many can move at a time, he can't handle the extreme pressure of moving so many of these things at once. Mort stabbed the upper vertebrae of one skeleton and balanced the skull on his shovel as the body shifted from side to side. Mort threw the skull at one of the skeletons in the back. It simply stepped to the side and glared out its eye-holes while the headless body Mort just made stopped moving and fell to the floor, dissolving a moment later.
However, the less he has to command, the more complex the commands can be. That presents somewhat of a problem for me to keep killing them, but something tells me he has blessed them all with some hideous one-hit kill power to fight me with. Mort made a powerful slash after that thought, one that started at the hips which were fully rotated and ended with his torso swinging the same way as his shovel and fully extended arm. Perhaps I've been playing too many video games with Thomas lately...'One-hit kill' is an unsophisticated term to use...Mort continued fighting, whittling away the numbers of the skeletal army with each skull he shattered and each bone-structure he de-structured. He was fighting out of necessity, not rage, and stayed perfectly focused on all his sides. When one skeleton stopped fighting him he prepared for another one to attack from the back of the line. They were becoming more powerful as he chopped them down one by one, the darkness around them growing into a sort of pseudo-muscular structure. Mort knew that when only one was left all the power would be transferred into it and prove to be a much more difficult prey than all of them combined. At least as a legion most of them stayed mindlessly away from the fighting.
"Is this the best you can do?" Mort asked as he chopped away another lifeless thing. The more he killed, the thicker the shadows became. Eventually he re-strategized and started fighting as he retreated down the hall for the distant door. Somehow the space between he and his objective had closed considerably as he was fighting, but before he could logically view his surroundings to solve the puzzle he felt a rush of wind at his back. He stopped, spun around on his heel, and delivered a madly powerful baseball swing to a skeleton's face, sending said face and body through one of the widows and out into an infinite void of nameless stars. Mort looked out as the huge glass started to shatter, freeze in the air, and then zoom away into the infinite blackness like stars in hyper-space.
I suppose this is proof Mort thought that I'm not in Kansas anymore. The light from his body was drained, leaving him in a super-high contrast shade of black with the outline of his figure in glaring white. The floor was white, the air was black, nothing seemed to make sense anymore. As the demonic skeletons came rushing through the hallway and into the anti-light they too changed form, becoming glowing white beasts with eyes of glowing blackness. Mort fought off the beasts in the bizarre warp of light and tried hard to exit it. He felt the wind of his fate, the wind he followed so intently and zealously, rushing out the window with incredible speed, although he felt no actual pressure from the apparent vacuum of reality that existed outside the existential-cathedral walls.
I can't tell Mort thought as he batted his lumbering foes away if I am to go out into that void, or if I am to find that door. This reality could very well be warping my own predestiny to lead me into a swifter death. If only I had a moment of peace to meditate on this perplexing matter, all would be well and resolved, but these fuckers won't stop trying to hit me! Mort found himself overwhelmed and rolled away, slashing with his shovel as he went, catching the jawbone of one demon and ripping it off. He then got up in the regular irregular light and held his weapon with the spade pointed forward and his off-hand casually gripping the length of the wooden handle like a billiard stick.
"HYAH!" Mort shouted. He started stabbing rapidly. The beasts that moved out of the light at him had a rotten-black muscular exterior now over their skeletal form and several even had normally reformed eyes. They were breathing in huffs of breath that Mort couldn't understand, finding even their slightest sounds incomprehensible in his mind, but stabbed at them nonetheless. He was able to shove his weapon into the face of one, which he then powered down onto the floor so his metal hit the stone through the demon's face. With the blacks of his goggles reflecting the white of nothing, he shoved down with his foot and separated brain from skull in one swift, malicious motion. The other skeletons stepped away warily, all of them having at least the conscious to move in evasion on their own. Mort held the remains of one ethereal brain up long enough to view the lightning-like static of its final synaptic moments detached from its body. It was marvelous, watching a brain work postmortem, but also incidental.
"I think I get it now" Mort said. He removed his shovel from beneath the brain and kicked it up into the air, hackey-sacking the moist half-pound of gray matter from foot to foot and hitting it once with a powerful shoulder shrug. "These things I am fighting were not men who were too weak to fight, but men who were too smart to realize the obvious answer."
"Is that so?" Gore's voice asked mockingly from all directions at once. "Are you stupid enough to understand, then?"
"Yes" Mort said obviously. He stopped kicking the brain with one final kick to throw it in the air. As it spun, all dented and mushy in the space above him, the other monsters gazed up at it with some strange longing. Mort glared hard through his goggles and took his shovel in hand like a sword with barely any cutting edge. He lurched forward and made a tremendous swing, decapitating five demons at once, then he took a mighty step back and stabbed into another one's gut. He wrenched his shovel in and twisted it like a terrible drill, the whole way around. Black amorphous lumps started spilling out, obviously the still semi-planar organs and other internal squishies of the thing, from the hole Mort made it its abdomen. Mort then took a step back, lining his feet up, and brought his shovel around behind him. Just as the brain started to fall he aimed at it and spiked it with an overhead swing into the face of one unprepared thing. It's face impacted and then its own brain-meat started oozing out.
"These things" Mort began "are neither human nor inhuman. They are beyond the realm of humanity, operating as one and many at the same time. They are superior beings, like army ants with telepathy. Although, who is to say army ants or worker bees don't already possess some strange connection through mental or aural energy? They can only coordinate themselves so much, and so when one thinks the others must act accordingly at the drop of a proverbial hat. Seeing the brain of one of their fellow things like that, totally unexposed and still working to give orders, it must have overloaded their receptive organs. No skull and skin to dampen the command, they were obviously overwhelmed, like an outlet receiving too much power. Am I at least close to being right?"
"You're close" Gore began "to being dead!" There were still monsters left, these ones adapting very pale or pink skin with nails and teeth and blinking eye lids. Mort blocked one blow and was thrown into the anti-light again. He dreaded fighting such strange demons with such disadvantageous odds, but he had a plan. That plan manifested itself from the grin of brown lips that shined out in the light of black and white. Mort lifted himself off the ground, crossed his arms, and flew out into the eternal blackness just out the windows. The monsters watched him fly and saluted him as he left, the window repairing itself in preparation for its next unfortunate visitor.
Mort now found himself flying at an incredible pace through what seemed to be the universe itself. Galaxies of spiraling green and blue, explosive red and orange, spaces of space that were blacker than black; all the cosmos spread out before Mort. But instead of flying, why not walk? Mort steadied himself out and began walking at a casual pace through existence, strolling about the cosmos with a total lack of impatience or worry. He raised his goggles up to his forehead and lowered his hood. Wherever he was, he felt like it was safe. And not just safe but incredibly exhilarating.
"Just being here" Mort began with a sigh "makes me feel so nostalgic."
"How so?" Asked Gore in honest curiosity. Mort had won Gore's greatest obstacle and earned the right to relax, it seemed. Now was his break from the action to just talk and breath calmly.
"This emptiness" Mort began, "it reminds me of my first kill. The hollow guilt inside me that filled as quickly as the hole that I had dug for my victim. Every kill after that was just a hole that needed to be filled, until that sensation was numb within me, and I never felt it again after the third one...I think."
"I understand what you mean" Gore said. Existence shifted. Mort found himself standing at the edge of a brilliant, shining white galaxy that was only a few meters across to him. "That feeling is...unforgettable. Some men cannot handle such an icy emptiness and they go mad with grief and loathing. They turn to hatred and insanity to fill that hole with other hollow and meaningless emotions. Other men try to fill that void with blood and continue to kill, unaware that the blood they use only succeeds in deepening that horrific hole and widening the depth of their despair."
"But I" Mort began "am no man like that. I took that hollowness and turned it into an unfulfilled objective. Where there was a gap in my soul, I would fill it with something material. What I found first was dirt, and since then it has been the only thing to hold my heart steadfast in the face of mighty winds."
"So you continued to kill" Gore said "but instead of blood you filled those guilt holes with dirt. Does that not make you a soiled, unclean human? Would that not make you filthy, a being more mud than man?"
"Is that a racist remark?" Mort asked.
"Certainly not" Gore said. "A human can be ugly, regardless of his skin, from the inside."
"I suppose it may" Mort admitted "but I've become consciously aware of that enough to attempt to correct it with my dignified behavior."
"All things considered" Gore said. Mort considered his interpretation, but as his eyes drifted from the core of the shining galaxy he found that reality had once again displaced him in this model universe. Now he saw a beautiful swirl of reds and blues and oranges and greens as the spun and spiraled around a center that Mort could not see. His eyes drifted away from the spectrum of beauty and towards a total nothingness. Black. Bold Black. EXTREME BLACK!!!!
"A black hole?" Mort asked. He gripped his shovel hard, then lost it to the cruel reality of the Event Horizon he stood so near. He felt himself falling down, then landed as a feather on a trail of cosmic dust as it was drained into eternal darkness. Mort could see the transparent outlines of many other figures like him, human shaped, as they waited for their sidewalk to end into an endless force of destruction. "What...is this...?"
"The End" Gore said. "Where else to things go when the wall of the universe is shown before them? Can you drive on through a black hole? Honestly? Not even light can escape it. Don't think idealism is faster or lighter than even pure light."
"So this is how you kill me?" Mort asked. "A symbolic gesture that ends in super-dense compaction in a lightless mass? Couldn't you just kill me like a normal man?"
"You say you understand" Gore said "but honestly, you're as lost as the rest of them were." Mort scoffed and smiled. He shook his head and sat down in the darkening blue.
"This is a dream then" Mort said in amusement. "That's somewhat disappointing."
"If I possessed the ability" Gore began "to selectively control my reality I would have white-washed this entire planet of pointless idealism by now! This is all just a distraction to suit my own needs."
"In other words" Mort began "I'm perfectly safe, or maybe I'm not. You just wanted to move my body without me knowing that I was moved. However, I know this isn't some extremely elaborate and super-effective drug. This isn't a brainwashing side-effect. This can't be a complex and perverse hypnotism. What exactly is this?" Suddenly the universe ended. As Mort reached the edge of the Event Horizon, the truest point of no return, the light all came rushing back from the formerly dark colors around him. Colors beyond his wildest imagining were made glaringly clear to him as he was rocketed into the center of another entirely new existence.
He zoomed with impossible speed through the blackness of the cosmos, came to a strangely familiar galaxy of wispy starry gas and dust, entered the outer reaches of one of its arms, came past a string of planets and finally came to one planet with a single pale satellite. His vision was thrown onto that green and blue world where he went into the darkness of the night, fell with the rain onto the roof of an ancient building, and then reached through the walls and entered the body of some man he knew.
Mort's eyes shot open with furrowed brow. The head he entered was his own, from all the way outside of his own universe, he now found himself sitting on a regally crafted chair with many nasty nail scratches and saw marks. He raised his arms and tested his feeling by gripping with each finger. Then he stood up, found the ground oddly hard, and grabbed his shovel that was sheathed on his back. He grabbed it with one hand and walked forward, his eyes adjusting to the dirty, plain colors of the real reality and taking in the brutal surroundings of the new room.
Upon the walls there was an armory of chainsaws and serrated blades of varying type and build. Some mechanical and some purely artistic in craft. The room seemed longer that wide, the ceiling eleven-feet up with lights built into its rafters and clouds of stagnant dust floating about. The wood was old and well-aged, carrying a tint of red in its natural brown. Tables were strewn out along two opposite walls and were covered with sharp knives and irons for heating and scissors for cutting through thin sheets of metal; tools for building weapons, obviously. Mort smiled internally when he saw on the wall of armaments a shovel, one with a longer spade and a sharper point, most likely one used for digging deep but narrow holes for gardening. Then the last figure of the room came into view: a man in a white coat with a pointed hood and an Omega symbol emblazoned in gold on the back.
"I am glad" Gore, the man in the robe, began "that I can exit life with such a wonderful climax!"
"I'll make sure" Mort replied "that you're neck whistles out one last whimper once I lop off your head."
"Haughty words" Gore said, his hood darkly covering his face. He drew out a long metal pole, onto which at the top was affixed a rotary saw, attached with a gas-powered motor with tubes and wires feeding into tiny holes drilled near the tip of the pole. Gore reached down on his malicious polearm and found a ripcord to start the motor with down at the opposite end of the shaft. He yanked it hard, starting up the horrible whining of a spinning sawblade, and aimed the terrible thing at Mort. Mort raised his hood, lowered his goggles and aimed his shovel in a nearly mirrored gesture.
Finally, the two remaining forces will clash in an epic struggle!!!
