ALL CHARACTERS AND EVENTS IN THIS FAN FICTION — EVEN THOSE BASED ON FICTIONAL PEOPLE — ARE ENTIRELY MADE-UP. ALL DANTE REFERENCES ARE RESEARCHED… POORLY. THE FOLLOWING STORY CONTAINS LEWD SEXUAL HUMOR AND DUE TO ITS LONG INTROSPECTIVE MONOLOGUES IT SHOULD NOT BE READ BY ANYONE. _|_|_|
Kenny
I wanted to give them a taste of their own fucking nightmare. Trouble was, I didn't know how. My own life had just turned into one big personal Hell.
They'd taken her. That was all I knew. I didn't know how, or when—I only knew why. To get to me. And they left me nothing. No breadcrumbs, no note, nothing. She was just gone.
I can remember Bebe babbling something out in tears, and Clyde trying to console both of us, though still shaken himself.
And then I was sleep-walking. Possibly. I still can't be sure. I wasn't then, and I never will be. But it felt like the puzzle of reality broke, and in my mind I was running to the rounded corners of the earth trying to fill in the gaps.
Only I couldn't, because I'd fallen through. I was drifting, in both mind and body, and I had no control.
Voices reached me—maybe they were speaking at that very moment, or maybe they were memories from years ago.
My vision flashed black and white—black and white—fire—black and white—red—fire—RED.
Bebe's voice: "They broke in, I don't know how, I don't know how, I don't—!"
Clyde's voice: "Iron Maiden, there was nothing, you're sure?"
The clanking of armor as the hero shook his head.
Clyde's voice: "Play back the security tapes! Kenny. Kenny, we're going through—"
Damien's voice: "Got a coin?"
Clyde's voice: "—the tapes to see if we can find anything. Are you paying—"
Damien's voice: "The fee?"
Red's voice: "I dreamed about you last night."
Clyde's voice: "ATTENTION?!"
I woke up.
Briefly.
Not having known whether or not I'd fallen asleep.
The world melted back; for a moment, the puzzle was fixed, and I could see more or less clearly. Focusing was hard. Breathing was difficult.
I felt a rope around my neck and cried out.
"KENNY!"
Two sets of hands were then shaking me, and I came to. I blinked once, but my lids felt as if they'd closed for a full minute; in front of my eyes flashed a remembered image of Damien in the Goths' office, grinning at me, mocking me. What did he want from me?
"Hell wants you back."
"Kenny, man, come on!" Clyde barked at me again.
One more shake from both him and Bebe, and I felt my feet on solid ground again, saw the world in front of me. I felt for my neck, discovering nothing. If anything was wrapped around me, it was guilt and failure.
"You back?" Clyde asked.
I cleared my throat and nodded.
The couple sighed, and stepped back. Weaker on my feet than I ever cared to be, I took a few steps back against the center table. My eyes passed over to the whiteboard at the head, bearing our particular goals, questions and targets, and found myself not even wanting to read it. I glanced over at Iron Maiden, who was watching the monitor, tape after tape from recorded security.
"I'm so sorry, Kenny," Bebe said under her breath. "I'm so sorry. I wasn't even with her, I thought Timmy was. I went to the bathroom, and when I came back, she was gone."
"And you didn't see anything?" Clyde checked with Iron Maiden.
"Timmy…"
Clyde sighed. I made myself breathe.
"Come on, dude," Clyde said, clapping a hand on my back a couple times. "Let's get moving, we're not gonna get at Damien if we just sit around here. You doing okay?"
"He's going to try to kill me," I felt myself say in response.
"What?"
"Damien," I grumbled. "He wants me in Hell for some reason. And I bet he knows that the only fucking thing that'd get me there is if they kil—"
I couldn't finish my sentence. I choked, and bit my tongue. I had no idea why I wasn't crying yet. Honestly. I don't fucking cry, but something had just fucking happened to Red, and we were left with no hints.
Seconds whirled past me like nothing as we left the building. Iron Maiden went ahead of us, revving the speed on his own set of wheels, while Bebe shakily opened up her Mini for me and Clyde. I lay across the back, watching the rainy streets skim by on our way back to The Tenth Circle, while Clyde retained his own silence, glowering at his blood-stained mask on the dashboard.
After a few minutes, I heard Clyde ask, "What's this?"
"What?" Bebe asked.
He'd opened the glove compartment, probably for something to wipe clean his mask, and had drawn out a narrow white envelope. "You get a parking ticket, babe?"
"No, that's not a—" Bebe started, then accidentally pounded the gas pedal, jerking us forward through the rain, her nerves rising as she continued, "Clyde… Clyde, hon, that isn't a—"
"Oh… fuck…"
Clyde spun in his seat, and handed the envelope to me. "Dude, they left you something."
"Give me that," I snapped, sitting up with a start.
The envelope was indeed addressed to me, in Damien's flowery, self-important penmanship. The back was not sealed shut; the triangle tip of the envelope had been securely tucked into the pocket, rather. Not bothering to be careful, I opened the flap, and extracted from the narrow envelope a simple sheet of parchment paper, folded lengthwise around thin red cardstock.
My eyes were blurry and my vision wandered, but I forced myself to read. For all that they were—persistent, infuriating, downright dirty in their methods—at least those involved with this so-called Carnival were informative. Denizens of Hell, from the Dark Prince himself and right on down to the lower-tiered minions and Hellhounds, seemed to like order, and abide by rules.
Hopefully, all we had to do to beat these sick fucks was break the law a little.
The parchment paper was deceptive in looking like a non-personalized note, but there was little chance that anyone other than me had or would ever see this particular memo. "Looking for the girl of your dreams?" it read. "The scavenger hunt begins in Attraction Nine, now open at the Carnival."
…Of my 'dreams,' huh? These guys were really not giving up certain themes when it came to making up these so-called 'attractions.'
Unless—
Unless this time they weren't just making references.
Panicking, I picked up the red cardstock. It was, as I should have assumed simply from the shape of the envelope, a ticket, very similar to the one Kyle had shown me, that Ike had received, several days ago. Admit One. There again was that 1920s font, the name of Infernal Majestic Management.
They were forcing those of us in the League to participate. Testing us to make us willingly head toward these 'attractions' of theirs… every last one of which had to be a Space in its own right.
Bebe parked before I could begin to explain what I'd found within the envelope, and as I felt rage rise inside me for the want to go after Damien and Tenorman right then and there, I felt my steps swagger upon hitting the pavement. I pulled up my hood, and either lightning flashed or my own sense of sight did; I could not be sure.
Grief weighted me down yet again, and my heart pounded for answers.
Dreams. Attraction Nine.
And then, all that mattered to me was that they'd taken her. Damien was snatching people away for this Carnival left and right, and though the GSM had 'recruited' several others…
What were they going to do to Red…?
I felt like I was having a nightmare.
For nearly five solid years, Red had been my sanity. She had been my air and water and everything that kept me alive. Thanks to her, I knew what living could really be. I'd learned that my life had potential, that I could be so devoted to one other person.
I felt like I had once locked myself behind bars, as Mysterion. I'd chosen the life of a vigilante, knowing that I could not die, and wondering if there would ever be a day when I could have a functional, mortal life. Almost to the point at which being just plain Kenny was the façade, and at night I would escape again back behind those bars into that prison of Immortality, fighting against fate in the only way I knew how.
She'd lifted them, broken them, unlocked that barrier, and for five fucking years, Mysterion had had more than just this little mountain town to fight for. Yes, I had Karen. I would always have Karen. She needed her angel and I needed mine. Red wasn't from our world originally. She wasn't the one who needed protecting, growing up in an unsafe home.
She'd just turned into the one who protected me. Supported me. Encouraged me. In every facet of my life. I could not have wished for a better partner than her.
She swam through my head, memories like ripples—I didn't want the effect to go away. I didn't know when I'd left the car. Focus returned to my eyes when I found myself positioned beneath a lamp post, one in a long line of many.
Through the rain, I saw shadows—twisting forms and figures, some slightly human, others like beasts.
I took out my pistol and fired at one of them.
"STOP!"
My arm was yanked back and my vision flashed white.
No, that one was lightning.
"Kenny, what the actual fuck, right now, dude, come ON!"
When I couldn't shake myself, I heard Mosquito—he must have re-masked—apologize right before smacking me across the face. Upon finally opening my eyes, I was looking down. In the tiny, hazy pool of light from the lamp post, my shadow was still. I wondered if it would move again.
The envelope containing the red ticket was tucked inside my clothes, at my shoulder, to keep it away from the rain; I felt it there like a scar, underneath the fabric of my uniform, becoming drenched and heavy from the downpour. Carefully, Mosquito extracted the gun from my hand, tucked it into his own utility belt, and wordlessly guided me the rest of the way to the coffee shop, Bebe staggering along beside us.
I didn't want to talk to anyone when we got inside and upstairs. I didn't want to look at the wreckage on the first floor, I didn't want to have to explain that I kept on feeling like I was falling asleep and drifting through dreams. I didn't want to talk to Kyle, above all—he'd suffered some damage himself, but for some reason the only thing that I could focus on was the fact that Damien had taken Red, and not him. Which was admittedly a shitty thing for me to be thinking about, but I could not control what was making me angry, or uncomfortable, or just plain tired.
I didn't want to talk to Ike, either. He should have stayed, I thought. Kept an extra eye on things.
Were we honestly this defenseless? If the GSM was excavating the Dreamlands, it stood to reason that attacks were bound to happen even in our sleep. Where we couldn't fight. Where we could only observe.
How the fuck could we break the rules?
I protested when Clyde, after stealing another look at the blood-marked mask Bebe had then taken from him, insisted that we change and get on the same page with the others. Butters still wasn't back, and Stan and Henrietta had both seemed to have come up with some crucial new information for us, but it was very hard for me to focus.
"That's exactly the problem," Clyde said, when I noted that as he, Bebe (borrowing clothes from my sister, who remained in uniform) and I changed into street clothes back in Henrietta's room. "Dude, trust me, I know what this feels like." Bebe made no comment. "I know, okay? And you know I'm here to take the lead if I have to, but you talked to Damien tonight. I know it's tough, Kenny, and I bet that right now all you want to do is go after that fuck, but we can't. Not yet."
I didn't have anything to say to him. Out of uniform, I felt my resilience fading. Lazily, I pulled on my shirt and jeans, then picked up the envelope from the glove box and extracted the note and ticket again.
Attraction Nine.
Whatever that meant, the answer was at the Carnival. Which Stan could track if we could just fucking leave.
I stole a look at Henrietta's standing cabinet, her stockpile of R'lyeh artifacts, our own small library of the things that had historically haunted men's dreams.
I'd blacked out at least twice that I could think of, since Bebe had informed me that Red was missing. Now, I felt exhausted.
Hell wanted me back. Hell wanted the Dreamlands.
Were they going to try to kill me with nightmares?
I glared at the note again, trying to keep my eyes steady. Scavenger hunt. Attraction Nine. Dreams. Fuck, I had to talk to Henrietta. We needed to sort out these circles, and Spaces, and rules and nightmares and dreams—
During one of my blackouts, I'd heard Red.
I knew I had, I knew I had, I knew, I didn't just think, I fucking heard her, because she… was—there…? My gaze shifted almost without my meaning over to Henrietta's desk, upon which was a copy of the chart from the Dhol Chants. Cautiously, I stepped over to it, and let the lines blur before my eyes. There were Spaces Between the circles. Lines connecting point to point.
Between, there was grey. There were dreams. There were nightmares. They were Spaces that existed on their own, ignored the Divine Rule of Three… but Spaces that could be reached by the awake and living nonetheless. Just because we couldn't see them all the time didn't mean that others couldn't be trapped there.
Stan had just found physical clues as to where the Carnival was located. Henrietta had the charts. Wilcox had those fucking horrible paintings, each of which, I was now convinced, was all a part of this Divine Rule-bending game Damien was shoving us into. That game that somehow would allow them to extend Hell's reaches.
And who plays a game unless there's a prize involved?
"That fucker," I muttered.
"What?" Clyde wondered faintly.
"That fucking asshole!" I shouted, smacking the desk.
I grabbed the chart off of the desk, and stormed back out to deal with the others. I blinked and saw three flashes of white light, but ignored it. I was exhausted. My shadow followed me as normal shadows do.
Maybe that nightmare was over already.
Damien had tired of it, and was pushing my limits in a different direction. Whatever was happening, whatever his plans were, I was through assuming. I'm not so much about rules as I'm just about business. It was my fucking job, as Mysterion, to stop his little project, and fast.
But he'd made this much, much too personal, as well. Red was in the Dreamlands… that was the only explanation that made sense to me. Maybe the best way to unlock anything about those was to sleep, to invite dreams and nightmares in, but Henrietta knew of another way. She had the charts.
She'd told me about Alhazred's lamp. The lamp that could illuminate the Spaces around us that we could not see. The artifact that shed light on the dreamlands. A veritable telescope from one dimension to the other. If it was something once truly owned by the madman who had penned the Necronomicon, then I believed wholeheartedly in its ability to help us. We just needed it.
If I could find that lamp of Alhazred's that Henrietta had talked about—yes, yes, that would give me a chance. And it didn't take me long to guess that Damien had it. He had to. It was a spy tool into the Dreamlands, it was their ticket around the unconscious version of the living world.
Despite this discovery I'd made on my own, when I took my place in the circle with the others, as I listened to Henrietta go on about fabricated creatures called Golems, as I listened to Stan and Kyle and Ike discuss soil, as I listened to Cartman complain and Wendy worry and Token and Clyde try to keep the peace… my brain just kept going back to that lamp. The charts.
Light up what shadows remained, Kenny. Go on that scavenger hunt.
They weren't going to use her, they weren't going to use her, they weren't going to kill me, the nightmares wouldn't spread. If we acted. Now.
God fucking damn this was exhausting to think about.
I wanted to move forward.
But in many ways, I just wanted to sleep.
I just wanted to sleep.
– – –
Butters
My bleak past nipped at my heels as I ran townward from the dismal Docks. Lightning exploded in the sky, illuminating the boxy silhouettes of the town I gave up one-third of my identity to heal.
Disarray.
Disarray… Disarray!
Why had I not connected the mind-numbing logic behind the possibility of that return?
Not even death in the maw of timeless, embodied chaos could break the strings that puppetmaster once had tied around this town. Everything was just another plot to him. Just another stepping stone to get exactly what he wanted. What a nightmare. What a bizarre, terrible, horrible nightmare. He really was pulling strings. Then, now, as long as he had a soul confined somewhere within some desolate circle of existence.
Pulling strings, breaching circles, and capitalizing on Tenorman's odd brand of personal insanity and bitterly violent tendencies in order to raise his status in Hell.
I knew that was what he was after. I remembered his methods all too well. He could not be underestimated. Even in death. Especially in death.
Hell was just a playground to General Disarray.
Just a curiosity.
Just a Carnival.
He really was just one darkness-drenched, miserable soul trying to destroy the world. But he wasn't a devil in the way that Damien was, not a fabricated creature like those GSM Infras we had been fighting. His was a human soul that, many, many, many years ago had known a glimmer of camaraderie and compassion.
Therefore, he was dangerous.
Now, I've read scriptures before. I've heard plenty of sermons about Hell. I have ingested my fair share of warnings about the Devil tempting Man, about greed and pride and lust and every other sin… but Disarray… Dougie—that kid, that young man, that tortured spirit—God, he could do more damage than any Devil I'd ever heard stories about. He could tempt, and pry, and twist and mold…
Was he really the one holding every last string in this Carnival operation…?
I certainly wasn't going to check that possibility off of my list.
His soul really was evil. I sure knew how to pick 'em, huh?
But—
But I was Harmony, now. Balance. Equality. I was the one who healed, and nurtured. Mended. Made right.
He wasn't going to tempt me back.
Disarray's Chaos, Nyarlathotep's Chaos, was not mine. Not that nightmare. Never again.
…Never? Never is a negative space. 'Never' is even a kind of tempting word itself, isn't it…?
NO. Never again. There were three things that I'd recently told myself I would never, ever do. I was never returning to my parents. I was never going to settle for less than who and what I wanted to be. And I was never, ever going to put my friends in danger at my own hands. Meaning no Chaos. No room for Chaos.
There is no perfect world.
But there is balance.
And that could not fall to Disarray.
It took me around an hour to realize that someone had been trying to contact me over the wire. When I finally snapped to my senses to answer, I had to duck behind a building, away from the rain; water pounded the pavement around me as I listened in to Wendy's frantic, worried tone, and Eric's forceful, short one. Both insisted upon the same thing, though:
"Come back to the Goths' place. We need you before we can make a plan, and things really aren't looking too good right now…"
I was booking it to the shop before I could hear more. All I knew was that I needed and wanted to be there. Re-group with my friends, reaffirm for myself that… well, that Disarray had no control.
When I returned to the Tenth Circle, chaos greeted me, all the same. The scene was a disaster unfinished: claw marks scattered here and there along the outer walls and pavement, shattered glass glistened on the tarmac when lightning struck the stars.
Iron Maiden was stationed at the door, which looked like it had just been fixed. "What happened?" I asked my teammate. He simply lowered his gaze, and motioned for me to go inside. He was a man of very few words, but I knew shock and speechlessness when I saw it.
Inside, tables were all askew throughout both rooms. The service counter looked like it had been hit by many different forms of natural disaster. The paintings looked much more at home. But resting on one righted, claw-footed mahogany table was a green military canvas bag, which I recognized as my own, right away.
I had purchased the bag among other things I'd needed to give Agent Harmony that sort of 'war-nurse' feel I was going for with the design; I darted for the bag, now, snatched it off the table and rushed to the ladies' room.
The mirror over the three sinks had been punched and scratched in several places. There was blood splattered at just below my own eye level.
I went to the mens' room.
Once inside the too-quiet facilities, I hefted the bag onto the sink counter and tore into it, discovering two sets of street clothes. If Iron Maiden was here, so was Red Serge; they would have thought to bring changes of clothes for everyone… meaning that I was probably last to have arrived, if only my bag had been there in the front room. Stuffed into my own was a choice of a couple of shirts, and either a knee-length white skirt and blue leggings or a pair of jeans; either a set of blue flats or beaten sneakers.
I debated for only a moment before insisting to myself that the circumstances more or less demanded that I remain Marjorine. I had to. Because a good part of me still held myself, Butters, responsible. Butters went off Disarray's deep end. Marjorine helped bring me back—over and over and over again she did that.
Moving at a fast and frantic pace, I pulled my sopping hair out of its tight bun and stripped off my soaked uniform, using the looser of the two shirt choices as a towel to pat myself dry. A quick heart skip had me diving back into the bag to check for… yes, there it was: my makeup case. Birthday gift from Red last year, a promo item from her store; I kept dry cloths in there as well, and cleaned off my face a bit more once I'd pulled on my ruffly blue top, the skirt and leggings.
My hair was tangled like a briar bush, and as much as I didn't want to deal with it, I made myself, just for the sake of getting my mind off of having seen Dougie. He wasn't a ghost… I doubted he was even a zombie. He was just right fucking there. There and then gone, like a bolt of lightning. Like a really bad dream.
I dug for my brush and yanked at my blonde snarles. Only a few brush strokes in and I was already shouting, "Fuck split ends!" I had to get upstairs. I kept hearing movement over my head, and I knew it was someone pacing. Kenny, probably, or Wendy while she waited for me. Maybe Stan, who'd been in contact with me as Toolshed in regards to my having followed Disarray.
I had to get upstairs, I had to get upstairs. No dallying, just do it—
Suddenly, I felt like time had slowed to a crawl. I was pushing myself to just get dressed, get made up, go, go, go… but as I threw on my foundation, my shadow, my liner, quicker than my normal routine, I just felt like I was stuck in a vortex. Or that time might even have been going backward.
When I stood back to check my reflection, I still thought I looked like a mess. I had to leave my hair down or it'd never dry, so it fell in untamed, half-brushed spindrels to my shoulders, the torn ends dripping rain water onto my shirt. For about two seconds, I screamed internally when I got thinking that I kind of looked like my mom, all messed up and troubled and sleepless and seething with nerves.
Hardly thinking, I grabbed for my foundation again, and before I knew it I was caking on another layer underneath my eyes, to hide the dark circles that sagged there.
Chaos hardly slept. That alone could have killed me.
"Stop, stop, stop, what are you doing? Stop," I muttered to myself as I blended in the perfect-match cream. "Stop, STOP!" I screamed. I threw down the foundation, and stepped back, grabbing at my hair.
Staring at the mirror again, I said, "You look fine. You look like Marjorine, not anyone else. You look fine, go upstairs, go, just stop, just go!"
Stop. Go.
I ran upstairs.
When I knocked on the door to the flat, I heard Wendy say, "Oh, thank God," and then it was she who opened the door to let me in. One look at me, though, and my good friend threw her arms around me and squeezed tight. "Marjorine, honey, you're shaking," she observed. "What is it?"
"I, um—I saw—" I began, suddenly at a loss for how to form words.
"Come in, come here," she beckoned, taking my rain-frozen fingers and leading me gently into the flat.
I was not the biggest fan of that bleak front room of the Goths' place, but I sucked up my numerous discomforts in order to join in the circle of my friends and teammates. Wendy sat me down on the floor between her and Eric, who grunted and moved over so that I could have one of the two pillows he'd been taking up. I noticed Token pass Wendy a little glance, but tried not to read too far into it.
Eric, though, in a weird moment of interest in others' well-being, checked over Wendy and me both as he grudgingly passed over the velvet pseudo-seat. Uncomfortable as I was with the Disarray issue, that glance, at least, made me smile. I'd accepted at this point that Eric and I were fated to be struggling friends—at best.
In the vein of caring so deeply for such good friends, I couldn't help but put much of my immediate focus on Stan, who seemed equal parts balanced and conflicted. He was seated directly between Kyle and Kenny, and Stan seemed to be the most stable of the three… which still wasn't saying much. But he was holding all three of them up, somehow, just by retaining neutrality, by looking ready to be the right kid of aide for whoever needed it. Kyle's arms were bandaged, wrists to elbows. And Kenny—
I knew that look.
Oh, shit, oh, shit, I knew that look.
Kenny McCormick was having a waking nightmare.
Now, we two had never been very close as friends… I was closer to Red than to Kenny… but for goodness' sake, he was the League leader. Mysterion. The guy who beat Immortality. He did not give up… not that I'd seen before. But right now, he just looked awful. Swimming. He couldn't find himself.
They'd done something to him. They, the Movement, the Carnival, everyone involved.
In that moment, I knew more or less exactly what Disarray and Damien were up to. They were poisoning him. They'd hit the bulls-eye of one of their targets.
Hell was trying to kill Kenny.
Those bastards.
I listened intently as the others caught me up on the macabre happenings in their own fights, but all the while, every lobe of my brain was still throbbing, aching, re-watching the exact moment General Disarray presented me with my old tinfoil helmet. I burned with the want to move forward. We all did. But the GSM—whatever kind of twisted legion they had now become—were tirelessly pushing us back. Back even further than just the past four years, now I thought about it.
Every weird thing that had ever happened in our town… the more I listened to what the others had to say, the more convinced I became that there had to be some connection. Something had drawn all those things here, year after year since we were little kids.
Whatever it was, the answer lay within the League. And that was exactly what Henrietta stated herself.
"Know what?" she said, puffing out a stream of white-grey smoke. "I think the universe hates you."
"Wow. That's real comforting right now," Stan lashed back, shooting her a scathing glare, "thanks."
"No," Henrietta defended herself flatly, "I mean, you guys don't play by rules."
"What?" Kyle wondered, when the Goth set her eyes on him.
Henrietta set the quellazaire to her lips again, and the room fell silent, all of our ears filled with nothing but the muted sound of rain at the window as we waited for her to expand upon her thought. "You don't," she exhaled. "Look at all of you. Weird shit always happened to all you guys."
"Ch'yeah," the red-haired Goth snorted from off in the corner, where he was rummaging through a side table drawer for a pack of matches, a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. "We used to make fun of you for it."
"This is all super nice of you," Kyle grumbled, "but can you kinda get to the point?"
Kenny heavily rolled his head in Kyle's direction, and Kyle shivered as if Kenny had just poured ice over him. Kenny really did not seem to be holding himself up well. He was drifting, and I saw on everyone else's faces the concern that he'd been dealt too many awful blows. With Red missing, Kenny's focus kept getting distracted. I mean, heck, I sure knew that if I had a kind of relationship like the two of them had, I'd be pretty sore, too, so it was painful to look at, from an outside, friend's perspective.
"The point is," said Henrietta, "Hell's army, or whatever it is this Thorn guy's got right now, is probably gonna try to weed some of you guys out, or else pull you in. Almost all of you have some kind of quirk. Kenny was Immortal. Craig, you, uh…"
"Yup," said Craig.
"Stan's died before, and you," Henrietta said, pointing at me, "you had all sorts of—"
"I know," I said, when she trailed off.
"As for you," Henrietta finished, looking at Eric, "I bet if they've got a list of most wanted for being rule-breakers, you're at the top of it. And Kyle, I'm surprised you even made it back here tonight." He nodded stiffly.
"Tenorman—" Kyle began, then sat back, to check in with Henrietta, since it was not always the best idea to interrupt a Goth mid-thought. She took another drag off of her stemmed cigarette, though, which prompted Kyle to continue. "Tenorman talked to me a little about what these guys are doing," he said. "They obviously know about my, um, my quirk; they've got dirt on all of us. He called me an 'attraction,' like, Carnival-type shit… and he was talking about Hell. Like, Hell being in your head. How it's personal, and they're trying to bring that kind of thing back, since Hell as a place has changed in recent centuries or whatever…"
Well, gee, I coulda told him that.
I'd been living in Hell for a long, long time before I finally broke out of it, before I left home, did things to better myself, and made efforts within the League.
Of course real Hell is in your head. And it's unforgiving, and violent, and it grips you, fills you with hatred, takes away who you were by altering what you love. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. I understood why Tenorman would know about it. His personal Hell must have been awful; traumatizing.
He and Chaos might not have been so different, that way. Maybe that's why Disarray had gone after him.
"Oh." At this point, Kenny shakily pulled forward a small envelope. "Speaking of attractions."
He drew forth a thin red ticket, nearly a twin to the one tacked up on the corkboard back at the base, and a note, which, rather than display them out for all of us to see, he entrusted only to his sister. Karen took the items, and sat back next to Ike, where they could study them further. "I don't get it," Ike observed. "Why would they send you a ticket and a letter?"
"I hate this," Karen commented, on a weaker tone than her boyfriend's. "Kenny, they just really want to get at you, don't they? I hate this."
"What's on the ticket?" Wendy asked. "Or, note, or—?"
"He made explicit reference to dreams," Kenny said, sounding short of nerves; none of us had to guess who the 'he' in question was. "They've got Red, okay? They took her to get at me, and well, congratulations to those assholes because this is really fucking low."
"Kenny," Stan tried.
Kenny ignored him and barreled on, "They took her, she's at one of their fucking 'attractions,' and I'm pretty damn sure he's got her in the Dreamlands."
"They shouldn't be able to make bridges—" Henrietta mused, looking off.
"Well, they are," Kenny interrupted. "So if we're going to stop them, can we just move? Stan, you can track them, so come on."
Oh, dang, maybe I wasn't going to be able to share my own terror-filled evening with the others just yet. With Kenny this mad, too, I wondered if it'd be worse or better for me to drop the news later.
"Kenny, it's really late," Stan tried to reason with him, "and there's more to talk about, too—"
"Then we can talk on the way. Come on. We're finding that Carnival."
"Tonight?" Clyde asked, trying to be firm in an argument against the idea.
"Tonight."
There was no swaying him.
Even though Kenny looked real tired—heck, even though a lot of us were pretty close to exhaustion—we, especially after a nod from Karen, worked out a fast plan that would hopefully be the best course of action for everyone. Stan agreed to pick the lock at the geology lab and run tests, but to only get as far as that for the night, which was a solution that Clyde seconded and Kenny eventually gave into.
Karen offered to stay behind at the Goths' with Bebe, and when Henrietta mentioned that there was still more cleanup to do, Wendy offered to stay behind as well. Since at that point it seemed like the guys would be leaving for the lab, and the girls would be staying, I opted to stick around at the coffee shop as well. Primarily because I had two people I really wanted to talk to about my brush with Disarray, and Wendy was more level-headed than Eric. Plus, Eric was heading to the lab, and Kenny might not be too keen on side conversations.
Before we could head out, though, Eric grabbed me by the elbow and yanked me aside. He drew me over to the Wall of Nazi Conformist Fucks that the Goths took such pride in, and as media and political icons stared blankly out at us from posted newsprint, he said, "Level with me, bitch."
"About what?" I asked pointedly.
"About wha—dude. You saw somethin'."
"Yeah, I did," I grumbled. "Disarray."
"What?"
"I saw General Disarray," I whispered. "Well, Dougie."
Eric's eyes flared open. "The fuck? He died!"
"Well, where was he gonna go," I realized, "Detroit?"
"Fuckin' shit, why didn't you say somethin'?"
"Cuz Kenny's all sore, and I'll talk about it later, Eric, sorry!"
I realized then that I didn't have much of an argument against discussing Disarray with everyone, but the plan was already in action for the remainder of the evening, and at least the truth was out. 'Course, now I wished I had more than thirty seconds to talk about it.
"Right." Eric paused.
"…So…?" I prompted, waiting for him to start up on some huge (if idiotic) revelation.
"So—Butte—Marjorine." Eric heaved out a forced sigh. "So you must get it, is all I'm sayin'."
"Get what?" I asked.
"Tenorman? Kenny's thing? That Disarray asshole? Dude, we buried all this shit a long time ago."
"I know. It's obnoxious," I admitted.
"Maybe. But…"
"What?"
"What if that's just how it is?" he noted. He folded his arms, and drummed the fingers of his right hand against his left forearm.
"What?" I insisted
"Fate. How you an' me an' Kenny're all kinda… what's it… predisposed to be, like—?"
"How dare you," I scolded him, getting in his face. "What, saying we're supposed to be, what…?" I challenged. Eric shrugged. "What, evil? That's just—just don't."
"Old Ones, Hell? I just figure, like, what if." Eric trailed off, then looked away as he muttered out, "Then there's Chaos."
I tried so hard not to snap. I spoke firmly, but I did not snap. "Eric, we're not supposed to be evil. Well, that's just stupid, and childish, and I don't want to hear it!"
"But what if."
"Then we fight it," I grumbled. "Fight even if it hurts you a little along the way. That's why we're all here, isn't it?"
"Here?"
"In the League," I stressed. Going the only route I knew, I shoved him into the wall and said, "None of us would be here, none of us would be heroes, if we didn't believe that we could do something about the nightmares the people of this town have to face. I believe in my work, Eric, we're people who do good things for others, and we've gotta do good for ourselves, too. I believe you're a good person. I like being your friend and I'm sorry if I've fucked that up along the way, but all I want from you is to just know that you'll see the good you're capable of doing, too. Okay? The Coon is a hero. Don't forget that."
"I wasn't gonna," Eric fumbled back at me, lightly shoving me off. "I just think other people might. Anyway, they're all after Kenny again, anyway."
Oh. Damn, I thought, Eric was going through a lot. He still hadn't been home to see his mother. He still pushed buttons on all his friends, like always. But he was hurting, still, from the information about Damien. But now that Red was gone, we weren't going to make any headway into Eric's ties quite yet.
"…Tell you what," I offered, eyeing him to make sure he wasn't going to turn the conversation around somehow, looking for the wrong kind of pity, "I want to help you. I want to help you sort out this whole Damien thing. If that means I talk to your mom, or if that means we just do some research on the side, whatever."
"Are you seriously?"
"I'm seriousl—I'm serious," I said. "I'd just be helping you out on your own hunt for answers. Remember, like how we used to?"
Eric blanched. "You're not gonna make me take you out again," he said, worried but solid.
"Oh, my God, Eric, just—can we be adults and… and move past that?" I asked him, sad to know that I'd burned that bridge. "I like helping you out, so I will. That's all. Plus, this is something we can't just ignore, you know? Don't go assuming that you have to be tied to the darker perceptions of Hell just because you're related to Damien. Maybe this just means you can push him back."
He thought about my words for a second, then was on his way with only a slight, "Thanks," after Clyde made the last call.
Things may have been scattered at the moment, but I had to hold onto hoping that soon, every one of us in the League could build our own bridges in between these disjointed facts. As long as we were all on the same page—that we didn't just have to push back, we had to fight back—we could keep ourselves alert, awake. Our enemies were making individual attacks. It was best to fight back as a team.
Chaos demanded balance, if it was ever to be righted at all.
When the guys had left (but for Iron Maiden, the two Goths skulking around their apartment upstairs, and the sleeping Wilcox), Wendy, Bebe, Karen and I began our clean of the two large service rooms of the first floor. Henrietta stayed back at the mangled circular counter, taking stock of broken ceramics and equipment, and stealing glances at her illustrated old copy of Dante's Inferno, scouring the weathered pages for hints toward the best move we could make next.
Wendy hung back for a few minutes, consoling Bebe and working with Karen on specifics for our individual tasks, while I made my way into the far room, where the band had been set up. I grabbed the Goths' old-fashioned straw broom, and started sweeping debris. Shattered glass, napkins, scraps of fabric, and dust… dust, dust, dust. Pyrite, according to Stan. I wondered if I should save any of it, before I figured we had what we needed. The guys were running tests. Tracking down targets. We'd make our way in, soon.
But I just kept thinking: what then?
We'd make it to the Carnival… and what then? Hell itself had always seemed so… final to me. But it really was a living, breathing thing all its own. Anyone with an active consciousness could perceive Hell. I hated being so tied to Fate; these things were always, always in my head, on my mind. Oh, I'd known Hell.
I'd known Hell like a brother. I'd grown up with it.
Which was part of the reason why I wished Eric would just talk to me. He was the primary outlier, the link between Earth and Hell and R'lyeh, not by curse, as Kenny had been… but by blood. Hell lived in him. Eric had caused nightmares himself, before. But here he was, still one of the heroes. He had to see that, before Damien could really crawl under his skin.
See, Eric wasn't usually the kind of person who could recognize such things about himself. The fact that he'd mentioned it to me at all made me hopeful, though: hopeful that I could help him if he needed it…
I had accepted, a long time ago, that I was the sum of three parts. That was what helped me understand harmony. I'd lived Hell, I got it, I got rid of it. I balanced out. Eric, however… oh, Eric was all his own. He had two other forces outside of himself, influencing him. Scott Tenorman, Eric's brother from his father's side, was the force of Eric's violent, sociopathic leanings. His worldly wrongdoings.
The sins that boy had committed.
Damien, brother on Eric's mother's side, tallied those sins, and I was afraid of what he'd do to use them against Eric in the long run.
Then, there was Eric himself. The guy who did a lot for personal gain, who acted out even into his adulthood with methods that would give him winning outcomes, no matter the situation. That made him a fighter. But what if, the more he recognized that Fate really was a force on his life, he finally gave up? Stopped fighting?
Eric made me so gosh darn angry sometimes. He pushed all our nerves. He'd say one thing, mean another, go along with something just to strike it all down. Whatever. But—I just could not help wondering—that big what if? What if his two blood relatives disrupted the already tumultuous sort of balance that made up his ego? What if whatever they were preparing at the Carnival pushed him over the edge?
What if Fate just really wanted him to be a part of their nightmare?
And then, after that, what about the rest of us, as Henrietta had been saying? What about Craig, and his tie to the Incan prophecy? What about Kenny—was Fate even going to let him stay alive? What about Stan's nightmares, Kyle's telekinesis, my balance, Wendy's all-too-eerie resemblance to the woman in Wilcox's Fraud painting?
What about Karen, too…?
I kept thinking about Fate like it was something just as breathing and vivid as Hell, as if it had a face and a personality. But, I realized, Fate was my perception of what Henrietta called that Divine Rule.
Fate was universal law. The rules Hell played by… up until now. I wondered if even Damien was going against certain rules by building bridges between the Spaces Between the three terrestrial circles of Earth, Heaven and Hell.
Gosh, my head hurt thinking about all that.
I started singing a little to myself as I swept up, just a little ditty I'd been humming for years and years that still didn't have all that much meaning to me, and looked around at the paintings. The one that got to me most was actually one of the simplest ones there. Yes, they were all disturbing in their own right. There was a carousel horse—what that had to do with Gluttony, I couldn't tell—and a forest with red nooses: Treachery. The blank white one called Pride.
But I just had this weird feeling about the one entitled Violence. It was the GSM symbol. Very straightforward. Yet jarring. Maybe because it was a hand-painted version, rather than the clean print. Something about it I didn't like, though.
The imperfect balance of it, maybe…? Three straight lines of three red circles; a large unbroken circle around them.
Something about the way that I was looking at it was bugging me, I realized. Like I could fill in the gaps in my head, where things weren't connected. Like I could see the spaces between.
"Marj?"
"Wahh!" I exclaimed, tightly clasping the handle of the broom. I'd been so lost in thought, I hadn't heard Wendy walk in.
"Hey, sweetie, sorry about that," my dear friend said, walking up to give me a pat on the shoulder. "How are things coming along in here?"
"Oh, uh, okay," I answered. "Sorry, I just kinda got really into my own head there, for a second. Thanks for organizing this whole clean-up thing. Poor place needs it."
"Yeah, it does," Wendy sighed. "A lot of things need repair."
"You sure can say that again," I agreed.
Wendy followed my gaze when I looked again at the Violence painting, and licked her chapped lips as she pondered its meaning.
"Is, uh… is Wilcox still upstairs?" I wondered.
"I don't think he's going anywhere," Wendy confirmed. "The Goths are keeping an eye on him, and I know Henrietta has a bone to pick with the guy. Before you got back, Kenny and she were talking about something to do with the fact that Damien was the one to commission these paintings."
"Huh," I said, glancing at the others. "I'm not surprised."
Wendy scrunched up her mouth in distaste, then walked up to the Heresy painting on the back wall. I followed at a steady pace behind, still clutching tightly to the broom, as if it were my last defense at a crumbling barricade. When Wendy leaned in to sniff the canvas, I asked, "Uh, you okay?"
"I'm wondering what materials he used," Wendy said. "Like, if there's iron in the paint. I don't know. I might be looking for connections that aren't there." She stood back and sighed. "We'll just have to see what Stan and Ike and them can get from the ore sample."
"I don't think we can rule anything out as being 'not a connection,'" I admitted.
"No?"
I shook my head, then, making sure I took the time to breathe, I took hold of her hands and pulled her to the corner, where I recalled my entire night to her. Wendy's eyes widened and narrowed at different points of the story, but I made sure to leave no detail out when discussing my unplanned meeting with my dead, former accomplice.
"Oh, my God…" Wendy whispered, when I'd finished. She took my shoulders, then pulled me in to hug me. The broom was still in my hands, and it crunched against both our ribcages, but I barely noticed. "Marjorine, are you okay? Holy shit, I hadn't even thought about that!"
"Well, neither had I, Wendy. But it might be one of those connections that'll help us out a little," I offered.
"Jeez, I guess, but… oh, God, we really all need to get on the same page about this."
I nodded, then let the broom fall. Wendy stood back, and the two of us looked around the dissheveled room together. She squeezed my arm tightly, as if to say, it's all right, you beat it, you're here, but even with that reassurance, all I could see was that one painting. Like it was glaring at me.
"…Hey, Wendy?"
"Yeah?"
"What do you think each of these paintings means…?" I wondered.
"What? I mean, they're sins, right?"
"Yeah, but… but they're really atypical, you know? And, like… why Clyde's mask? Why that red symbol?"
Wendy went silent for nearly a full minute. I couldn't even cue myself in on the discussions in the other room. All I heard was Wendy not talking, and my own breath. Then, she said, "Let's see what Karen thinks. And Henrietta. Bebe, too."
"You think?"
"Marj, cleanup is gonna take a few days. We might as well do some real work while we're here. I was hoping we could open up some kind of conversation about it. I mean, these paintings are really weird. And I just… I want to get my head on something like that."
"Sure thing." I patted her back, and, scrutinizing the paintings once again, I led her back to the main room. "It'd be good to get talking."
When we were back with the others, however, very little work had been done. It seemed that Karen and Bebe had done a bit… chairs and tables were righted, and there was a rubbish pile going, but Henrietta was being her usual catty self and giving the other girls nothing in the way of encouragement for their work.
Then again, Bebe, so wanting to do her part as a League adjunct member, was a strong personality, and was probably a little too on the 'conformist' side of things for Henrietta's liking. "Henrietta, isn't there anything written in those Chants about how to access the Dreamlands?" she was demanding as she dumped a dustpan full of swept-up nails and glass into a large tin garbage can. "If those Leng people you were talking about wrote that stuff, don't you think there'd be some kind of instruction?"
"Do you publish detailed directions to your back door?" Henrietta muttered, sorting out her books. "I don't think so."
"Okay, then, what about Hell? I know there's stuff written about the opening to Hell. Like, aren't there rivers and stuff? Isn't there something that can help the guys? I could call Clyde at the lab and we can compare notes. There's got to be something we haven't found yet."
Henrietta simply looked down and flipped back the cover of The Inferno. "Hold on, prom queen, I'm getting to it."
The Goth's tone didn't settle well with Bebe. Fed up, she stomped her foot and cried, "I'm sorry, but what the fuck is wrong with you?"
"Um—" Wendy tried as we drew closer.
"No," Bebe stressed, holding up one hand, palm flat, toward her friend, while still staring down Henrietta. "Look," she continued, "there's really aggravating and terrifying shit going on right now, and we're all stressed and I'm upset, and I think at heart we're all in the same boat, so I'd love it if we could, like, be nice."
"The world isn't 'nice,'" Henrietta observed.
"I know," Bebe sizzled. "Trust me, I know. But that's not a reason to be bitchy!"
"Oh, what?" Henrietta barked. "I'm being bitchy?"
"Bebe…" Wendy tried again. I could see the conflict escalating by the second, and tugged on Wendy's arm to get her to hold back.
"Yes," Bebe snapped at the Goth.
Henrietta scowled, and slammed her hands down on her now-open book. "I'm being bitchy," she scowled sardonically. "I'm just trying to help, but I could stop at any time."
"Well, I'm just trying to help, too!" Bebe insisted.
"You fucking major in dance. What the hell do you know?"
Her bright blue eyes swimming in uncried tears of frustration, Bebe screamed, "I know that people do favors for each other when they're in a tight spot! I know that you're pissed at the devil, and I am, too! I know what it feels like to be locked inside your own fucking head!" I shivered; luckily, Bebe did not notice. "And guess what, Elvira? I took a classics course, so I know damn fucking well what that THING was that ran us off the road?"
Henrietta grimaced at what I could only assume was a Goth no-no slur, and let her voice boil as she asked, "What was it, then?"
"A wolf."
I held my breath at the same time Wendy and Karen let out tiny, half-voiced groans of a sort of, oh, honey, you were so close nature. Bebe held her own, though, and slid the book out from underneath Henrietta's now drumming, impatient fingers. Not taking her eyes off of the Goth, Bebe flipped through the pages until she'd reached a spot near the beginning. "There," the blonde announced, holding the book up for all of us to look at. "Just like that. A wolf."
Henrietta's eyes went momentarily wide, underneath her increasingly heavy eyelids, while Karen sucked in a startled gasp. On the page that Bebe had indicated was an ink illustration of three large beasts, gathered at the foot of a mountain. The first, in the foreground, was a she-wolf, a large Hellhound-looking thing, teeth bared, bones showing in her ribcage.
"Fuck," said the Goth, plainly.
"And next is the Leopard," Karen observed, taking a step closer to the book. Bebe, casting a smug glance at Henrietta, passed the book to the youngest in our group. Karen took the Inferno with shaking hands, and pursed her lips tightly in contemplation before continuing with her thought. "The last one's a Lion."
"What're all those animals?" I wondered. Wendy left me to stand at Bebe's side, but we all ended up gathered behind Karen, still dressed, minus the utility belt, in her Angel gear. I could have sworn a light shone right onto the winged barrette she wore with her uniform.
"Hell's got quite the menagerie, if I'm remembering that class right," said Karen. "The Testaments mention all sorts of animals, I'm not surprised there are predators at the gate to Hell."
"At least they look like things we're used to," Wendy mentioned. "I mean, we can hunt down giant cats if we have to, a little more easily than some other monsters…"
"Well, we can hope it ends with these three, anyway," said Karen. "She was hard to bring down, but there's no mistaking it. That Hellhound was this wolf right here."
Henrietta snorted, getting us all to turn our attention back to her. She held out one pale hand for the book, and after a second of hesitation, Karen returned it to her. Wendy suggested under her breath that we get back to cleaning, so I busied myself with Karen so that Wendy could get some time with Bebe; we upturned another table, but Karen stopped to look at the scuffs on the floorboards.
"She's Avarice, you know," Henrietta said from the counter, just as Karen was getting a thorough look at what I knew to be claw marks. I had half a mind to check for splattered blood, though I didn't entirely want to.
"Who?" Karen asked.
"The Wolf, miss Angel."
"Can we do this without mocking each other?" I heard Bebe mumble.
Henrietta heard as well, but ignored the remark. She leaned over the counter, watching the rest of us try to work, and informed our group, "The She-Wolf, Lion and Leopard are three of the seven sins, according to this book. What's strange is that when Dante went through, he passed the Wolf last."
Karen stood, and glanced around. "Is there an Avarice painting?" she wondered.
"Greed," Henrietta observed, jerking her thumb in the direction of the painting of Clyde's Mosquito mask. "Over there."
"Oh, my God… Clyde…!" Bebe yelped, grabbing out her phone with shaking hands.
"I think he's okay," Karen assured her. "I was there when we beat the Wolf… Clyde helped bring her down, so—"
"But that's her blood on his mask, Karen!" Bebe fretted. "It's not coming off, is it? What if she did something to him? Oh, my God…"
"Calm down, prom queen," Henrietta commanded.
"Stop calling me that!" Bebe shrieked. "Excuse me for being concerned about my boyfriend! Bet you wouldn't know, since all you and Craig ever did was seethe and hate the world together."
"Bebe!" Wendy gasped.
"I'm sorry, but I don't like being made fun of for caring!" Bebe started crying.
Henrietta did nothing in retaliation but glare at Bebe for a moment. Bebe glared right back, her phone still poised, ready to make a call or send a text. Karen slipped past me to move back toward the counter, in hopes of stealing another look at the book, but once that movement had begun, Henrietta relented to say, "Fine."
She dug under the counter, and re-emerged from underneath it to produce from the shelves below a black memo pad. Out of the headless bat ceramic beside the register, she drew a black calligraphy pen, then flipped back a few pages, and wrote the date at the top of the paper. 6/6. "Let's make this a business meeting. Don't talk about that gushy crap with me, we're just talking business. Deal?"
"Business as in…?" Bebe asked.
"Hell. These paintings. The more specific we can be when that stupid painter wakes up, the better, but I need to talk to him about this shit, and what made him agree to take the commission."
"Let alone hang them all in your shop?" I guessed.
"That, too." Henrietta rolled her eyes.
Bebe looked down at her phone, and squeezed her fingers around it. She bit her lip, and shivered with the dripping of her still-damp curls, then quietly put that cute little phone of hers away into the pocket of the borrowed green and white dress of Karen's she was wearing. "Okay," she said. "It sucks without the whiteboard, but if it's okay, I'd like to take these notes back to the base when you're done so we have matching sets of info."
Henrietta attempted something like a nod.
Words we'd been throwing around before made their way out into the air at that point. We talked about the She-Wolf, about how hard she was to take down… about the GSM, and their numbers. Henrietta spoke more at length about what she thought they were:
Golems.
Karen was right about Hell having no shortage of beasts. Golems sounded, to me, like a mix of people, machines, and what classical texts would refer to as 'dumb beasts.' Hell's pack mules, I guess. They were creatures with form and function similar to humans, crafted to walk and talk just as any of Hell's minions could, and could be given life from an outside source… in this case, Damien's mysticism.
Damien and his father were the ones to lord over the dead. But they weren't Death itself, they didn't—or, at least, I figured they didn't—actually take life away. Souls ended up in their domain, but could not necessarily be re-animated into a physical body. No wonder Hell was pissed at Kenny, then; maybe even Stan, too. But that was where Golems came in… they were soulless creations, all of them thinking alike. And since they were made from raw materials of the earth, there was no limit to how many could be made.
Hopefully Clyde or someone would call with news from Stan's research soon.
More deserving of discussion, too, was the radio broadcast. Wherever the Carnival was, there we'd find, I was certain, a helicopter pad, and the radio headquarters.
"The radio told Kenny, 'some curses never die,'" Karen recalled. "And I mean, let's think about it. Other people had been to R'lyeh before. An ancestor of Clyde's had, even." Bebe nodded tensely. "People've passed through Hell before, I mean, that much is obvious. And according to this book, some people can pass through and get to Purgatory, and then Heaven."
"Says the Mormon who's a shoo-in," Henrietta muttered.
Karen flushed. "I'm not, really, I just really like the Mormons, okay? They're awesome people. But I mean, sure, some people are more pious than others and all, and there's just certain places in Hell for certain people.
"I dunno, I was never all that scared of it before, but now that they're coming up here, and these ancient trials are coming back…" Karen hesitated, and passed her glance around at all of us. "I feel like whatever curse it is Damien was talking about, it goes back pretty deep. I mean, Cthulhu was older than time, but so's Hell. Final resting place and all. And just—they're coming after us. We can't ignore that. They are coming—after—us."
"You?" I was the first to ask in a whisper. The others showed that they, too, were thinking along the same lines. I'd just been the bravest to voice it.
Karen slowly, stiffly, nodded. Then shrugged.
"And Eric," Wendy added quietly.
"And Kenny," said Karen.
"And Clyde, for some reason," Bebe whispered. "I'm not going to ignore that blood on his mask, and I don't think he is either."
"And somehow, Red and Kyle are hauled into it, too…" Wendy sighed.
"Kyle I get," Karen admitted. "Red's just bait."
She opened her mouth to say more, then shut it just as quickly. Hanging her head, the League's Angel seemed to be at a loss, projecting something akin to defeat. Moving tiredly, she brushed up against the counter and leaned back. She glanced at the notepad, and Henrietta's calligraphy detailing the few things we'd discussed so far, then let out her breath.
"It's really a nightmare," she said quietly.
"I'm getting really anxious to hear from the guys," Bebe said, glancing at her phone. "How long does it take to run those tests? I figured at least Ike might've gotten back to us by now."
"Yeah," Karen muttered. "Mr. Technology can't put down that tablet for a second, but he's not even gonna text me or anything…"
Henrietta got a sour look on her face, and started copying down a passage from The Inferno. "Come on," the Goth said, "let's work this crap out. Each painting has something red. Go look at them and tell me what they are. I'll see if I can match anything."
We did as she asked without arguing. Karen and I scoured paintings together, while Wendy and Bebe took the chance to talk as the second group. We made note of the shattered red mirror—Wrath. The red dice—Fraud. The red haze—Limbo. Red sash on the urns in Lust, red blood on the Greed mask, red Treachery nooses, red Violence circle, red Gluttony carousel pole.
The last one we came upon was Heresy. The angelic woman descending into shadows. Karen shivered, and backed up against me. I didn't take much of a liking to that one, either… that or the blank Pride canvas.
"Who is she?" Karen wondered in a hushed tone.
"I'm not sure," I admitted. "You think she's someone specific?"
"I'm afraid so."
She didn't want to elaborate, and I didn't blame her. I wrapped an arm around her thin shoulders, and she relaxed a little, gratefully, saying, "Thank you, Marjorine. You seem really nice. Sorry we haven't hung out much."
"Aww, well, that's all right, Karen," I said. "You seem real sweet, too." I passed a glance over my shoulder, to see Wendy and Bebe approaching. Henrietta trailed, and hung in the doorway, scowling at the mess that still lay all around us.
Karen perked up after a second, and left for the center of the room, speaking into her wire. "I'm here," she said to the other party. "What're you guys finding? …Okay… well, good luck, stay at it. Um, by the way? …I, um, I just want to talk to you. Like—no, not business. Please. …I know that's not protocol for wire but while I'm thinking about it. Please, I just wanted to get that out there. …Thank you. Really, I mean it, thank you. …Yeah, just us. Oh, hey, before you go, I—
"Dammit," Karen muttered, meaning that she must have been hung up on.
"Ike?" Wendy guessed.
"…Everything okay with you guys?" Bebe ventured to ask. I caught Henrietta showing just how unimpressed she looked, off in the doorframe.
"I don't know… Ike is such a glutton for punishment!" Karen lamented, grabbing at her hair. She stormed to the center of the room, where she took a couple deep breaths, and stared at the debris from the She-Wolf's attack, scattered around at her feet. The shadows from the piles of dust I'd swept up seemed to creep around the floorboards, but the better part of me knew they would not move.
While a part of me feared that Disarray could appear again at any second, I knew that he wouldn't. He, Tenorman, and Damien had done their damage for the evening. We were left in their rubble, each of us breaking a little.
We were, much as I hated to admit it. Karen's issue was just the problem with many of us: this was too personal. Hell is too personal. Dealing with a heightened form of already-existing insecurities was painful, and not something that just anyone could come along and fix. I was dealing with a buried part of my past; Kenny was dealing with the disappearance of the person he loved; Clyde was stuck with a warning, and no clues as to what it could mean, where it could lead; Karen was trying to keep peace, while at the same time fearing that her relationship was on the rocks. Henrietta's shop was in a state of disrepair.
While Hell built up, they were trying to take us apart. Little by little, without us noticing. And even that was just, at present, speculation.
Not wanting to see anyone hurting, Wendy put one of her best features to use, and went to Karen to console her and offer her guidance. "Hey," she said, "I know, it sucks. Sometimes being with somebody can suck. But if you can get past it, it'll be great, you know it will. Do you love Ike?"
Karen wiped at her eyes with the heels of her hands. "See, I don't know," she said. "I feel like he hasn't given me any time to even think about that. And I feel like… like we should've by now! Our brothers get it, ugh! Kyle and Kenny both have these… th-these awesome people they just—just love, and who get them, and—I just, what if Ike just doesn't want that? I'm sorry, I just haven't fucking been able to talk about it to anyone and me and Red were going to sit down and talk about it, and now we can't, and I'm afraid for Kenny, too and—Wendy, when do I get to be afraid? Can I be?"
"Karen, of course you can…" Wendy tried.
"But if Kenny's hurting, I want to help him," Karen insisted. "I just feel like I'm already in emotional overdrive because Ike just… I don't know!"
Wendy rubbed Karen's back, and said kindly, "I think you just need to take some deep breaths, honey… maybe get some sleep, and…"
"Sucks when even sleep is something to be afraid of lately, though," Karen admitted. "I'm afraid Kenny might not want to. I don't know if I want him to. What happens? Henrietta, can the Dreamlands take you when you're asleep?"
Henrietta pulled out her quellazaire and a cigarette, fitting one to the other. "I normally don't talk to people who cry like this, but I don't even have an answer," she said. "I was figuring that artist will, once we get him conscious again."
"So… what?" I argued. "We all just gonna let fear win this one before we even try?" The others gave me their full attention, so I pressed on, "Look, I came up against something I wasn't expecting tonight. We're getting closer to this Carnival. I don't think they're actually going to kill or take anyone else until we make it to that place. They're gonna try, and they're gonna make us pretty angry along the way, but the worst we can do is assume and ignore.
"I think we're all tired. And I think we all should sleep," I added. "If we don't, they win. You've gotta fight nightmares, and the best way to do that is by convincing yourself that whatever's wrong, you'll still wake up.
"Trust me," I went on, smiling at Karen. "If something hurts, you can make it better. You can always, always wake up from a nightmare. They're painted all around us right now, but they're just images. Hell might be a real, physical place, and so might that Carnival, but you can always fight and win against whatever's got your head or your heart hurting. Okay?"
Karen allowed herself to pause, then took a deep breath, hugged Wendy, then scampered over to hug me. She thanked us, each of us, even Henrietta, and stepped back to say, "Let's table nightmares for a bit, can we? I'm really hungry."
"We have some stuff," said Henrietta, lighting up, "but I'm not gonna go get it."
The night was throwing us through twists and turns, but the group of us opted to take it easy for a little while. We'd sleep on things, clear our heads. Besides—Wendy, Bebe and I had to admit—sometimes nothing could get us back on the right track like a little girl time.
We swept up a bit more, then laid out a huge black tablecloth on the floor. Henrietta brewed some herbal tea for all of us, and Wendy and I dug out some hors d'oeuvres that had been meant for the gallery opening reception. "Guess the Golems aren't really missing out," Bebe commented. "I wonder if they eat."
"That Hellhound wolf-thing sure wanted to eat us," Karen recalled.
I wanted to say, Oh, hey, speaking of getting eaten, General Disarray is working for Hell now, but I held my tongue. That would have just gotten us all worked up again, and I was kind of wanting to take it upon myself to make sure the girls got some rest that night. Hopefully the guys could, too.
"So she was disguised as a person," said Bebe, blowing on the surface of her tea. "Do you think the Lion and Leopard are gonna do the same?"
"That's actually a good guess," said Henrietta. In a turn of events, she was now the one straightening up, while the three of us on the table cloth stared at the open Inferno page bearing the drawing from earlier. "Lioness is Lust and the Lion is Pride. They could try to sneak in with the rest of these conformists somehow."
We let her predictable comment slide, and Wendy turned to Karen, who was ignoring the book. "Everything okay, Karen?" she wondered. "Is Ike really getting to you?"
Karen shook her head. "He's not getting to me, really," she said. "It just hurts to know he might." She went for a little brioche from the hors d'oeuvres plate, and munched on it quietly as she continued, "All I really need to do is just talk to him I think. How about you?"
"Hmm?" Wendy half-voiced, sipping her tea.
"You and Token. Or, uh, or Cartman. You guys went out once, right?"
Wendy sputtered into her tea and coughed as she set it down. "Eric Cartman does who and what he wants, when he wants," she said. "I don't know if I could ever date him again. And as for Token, um…"
"Hey, hey. I said no gushy stuff," Henrietta snapped.
"Oh, come on," I said. "No harm in talkin' out some of this stuff. Sometimes it's better to get personal things out of the way like this."
"Ugh, I don't get that candy-coated crap at all." Henrietta folded her arms, passing judgment on all of us.
Bebe looked at Wendy, then at me, then over at Henrietta. "You can talk, too, you know," she offered. "It's not all candy-coated. We can talk nitty-gritty. Don't tell me you don't like hearing stuff like this even a little. Plus, do you have stories?"
"No."
"From high school?"
"No," Henrietta stressed.
"So what happened?"
Henrietta paused, staring at a busted chair leg for a moment before she delicately lifted it to toss in with the rubbish. "You know," Bebe continued. "Between you and Craig."
The Goth shirked back. It was clear that she had not been asked something along those lines before, and she took the foreign question awkwardly. To my surprise, though, she answered. "He's a guy."
"Oh," said Bebe, carefully. "You're into—"
"No," Henrietta said quickly, "I mean, he's a guy. He wanted what apparently all guys want." She lit up the cigarette at the end of her quellazaire, inhaled, closed her eyes to exhale slowly, then finished up by saying, "And I didn't. There. Simple."
Well, at least it was an honest answer. I mean, I'd broken up with my ex-girlfriend over commitment preferences. Maybe I wasn't expecting an answer so normal from Henrietta. After all, I didn't know what at all she thought about relationships. She generally just didn't talk about them.
"Maybe he should fight the Leopard, then," Karen suggested with a slight shrug. "Get over his lust."
"Hmf," Henrietta snorted, walking back over to us to sit for a little tea.
"…You wanna talk about it?" I ventured, passing the Goth a rounded cookie.
Henrietta took it, and snapped it in half. "How are you guys always so positive about shit?" she wondered. "You guys out of everyone. The world sucks, and it's coming after you."
"And what're we supposed to do, let it?" Wendy argued. "We have things we really care about, Henrietta. Ideas, and places, and people. We do good for the town in the League, but we have to look out for each other, too." Smiling, she added, "That means you, too, whether you and your friends like it or not. You help out a lot."
"You make good drinks, too," I added.
Henrietta looked ready to say something to the effect of thank you, but held back, taking another drag from her cigarette instead. She took another cookie off of the plate, set it in front of her, and doused her cigarette into the center. "Let me give you ladies a tip to help you out, then," she said. "Each of these paintings is, according to this book, one of the Circles of Hell.
"There are nine of them."
"But there're ten paintings," I pointed out.
"And the name of this shop?" Henrietta said straightforwardly.
The Tenth Circle.
The Carnival was their version of that. The bridge Between.
– – –
When Henrietta's companions did not allow us to stay the night, and it seemed like the guys weren't coming back any time soon, the rest of us ended up at Wendy's. She set up the pull-out sofa for Timmy, and set up an inflatable mattress on her floor for Bebe, while Karen borrowed pajamas and rolled out a sleeping bag on the floor in my room. After taking turns in the shower, Karen was the first one to fall asleep.
She kept her phone right next to her, though, and slept with her wire on. Next to her sleeping bag, she had carefully laid out, on a white facecloth so I would not step on it, her Guardian Angel barrette.
I wished I knew Karen a little better, I realized, when I returned from my own shower. Dried and decent, I slipped my hair into pigtail braids for the night, and selected a blue lace camisole to wear with a pair of pajama capris. Even trying to soothe myself to sleep, though, insisting upon my role as Harmony, insisting that it was Marjorine's turn to be the hero…
I couldn't sleep.
After encouraging everyone else to get some rest, I myself could not sleep. Worse, I felt trapped. Yes, I felt more balanced in my life, yes, I wanted to give myself some time as Marjorine to heal and straighten out my thoughts and convince myself of my own words: that I could beat an old nightmare.
But part of me just wasn't feeling too great.
I'd already had plenty of nightmares.
I liked being awake.
Being awake meant balance. Meant being Harmony.
I knew corruption. I'd lived it. I'd built traps and fallen into them. I'd been the Chaos that Disarray ripped apart.
Once upon a time, Chaos had been mine. I'd let him go, and let him falter, and become the nightmares that had lived in my dreams when I was a kid.
No, I liked being awake. I liked being awake.
I hadn't had a nightmare in four years, but I was watching them play out in real life around me now. The others, I realized, did not know what it meant to live under such circumstances. What it felt like to have tar for blood, what it felt like to rage like fire when the soul felt consumed with bitter loneliness, helplessness, avarice and violence. What it felt like to want the world to suffer, because one person was hurting inside.
I glanced over at my Harmony gear. I was one of the medics, now. I fixed things. Mended things.
Sometimes when a wound needs mending, it leaves a scar. Sometimes things can't be fixed.
I just hoped that I could stitch whatever this problem was back together before the fabric of the League could start to rip apart for good.
I didn't want things to fall apart. They couldn't.
The last thing I saw before I fell asleep was the coin Dougie had tossed me, scratched number facing up, which I'd let sit on my chest of drawers. Kenny and Ike had tickets; I had a coin. Slowly, I realized, we were being admitted to that terrible Carnival.
That night, I had a dream.
It was about an angel, whose face I could not see, walking along a crack in a barren landscape. Dead trees splintered out of the ground at chaotic points. Nothing happened, really. She just kept on walking.
As the dream continued, the trees began to show red strings. It seemed that, at one point, the strings had all been tied together, but now they were frayed, leaving only one scrap hanging from a branch on each respective crumbling tree.
I could not see the features of the angel still, but I knew that she was sad. Because she could not mend the strings.
– – –
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Authors' Notes:
South Park is -c- Matt Stone and Trey Parker!
We're back! Sorry for the delay on this one. Things are gonna still be a little scattered as far as updates go, unfortunately… life keeps throwing crazy curve balls into our schedules, but we're going to keep going with this story, updates just may be slow. If we need to postpone at all, we always make note in my profile~ :3
And this is the chapter in which things start getting, well… more disjointed. XD Hopefully Kenny's nightmare narrative reads well (as well as a waking nightmare can read, I suppose, heh…); we're going to be playing a bit more with altered narrations and realities in chapters to come…
This week, we wanted to check in a bit with the girls, and coming up is a bit more on what exactly is going on with Cartman. I've been really looking forward to digging into his story more, though of course we'll hear from Kenny (and Wilcox…), and definitely Stan, who'll be narrating next, at the lab…
It's our hope to get up a new chapter by Wednesday,October 10th; if postponed, we should hopefully be back in business by that following Sunday. We'll keep you posted! Thank you so, so much for reading! See you around soon~ :3
~Jizena, and Rosie Denn
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