April 1st, 2019 - 07h33 pm
It still amazes me how quickly my brain shakes off anxiety. It only took one sentence from Five for me to put the apocalypse behind me, for the stony cloak that had weighed constantly on my chest for a week to lift, for me to start making plans again for a day, a week or a month from now. I feel stupid for having believed that I could be the cause of the end of the world. And I can't help wondering if - in the end - it was ever certain that it would happen.
I have been nice to Rodrigo today, I haven't been reluctant to restock the plumbing supplies section, and I've managed to sell ten flush floats for a kindergarten renovation. Klaus hasn't called. I imagine he's spent some time practicing materializing Ben, and the thought alone makes me want to hum: this time for free, with no ghosts to bust. I sincerely hope they make it.
It was with a remarkably light heart that I boarded the bus back to Hargreeves Mansion this evening, with the aim of collecting my things and going home for good. This week has probably changed me, perhaps for the better. I'm almost thankful to Reginald Hargreeves for his decision to kick the bucket.
Now that the bus is on its way along the straight avenues of The City, I look at the crowd in the early hours of the evening. Those walking alone to their destination, those holding each other's arms, those with children in tow. Usually, one doesn't even look at them, but these lives depend on all the others, and on the generations before them. No doubt, this world is not perfect, but it exists in an unstable and beautiful state of balance, which will go on.
The bus heads north, and traffic becomes heavier, as it often does at this time of day. The red lights of the cars' taillights streak through the windows, and the driver is exasperated by the way some people are driving. For once, I'm in no hurry to push its engine with my power. I almost don't mind the traffic jams. I can take my time, because it's no longer running out.
I take out my Walkman and put the track on where I'd left it. Solsbury Hill's unusual rhythm fills my ears, never seeming to stop. Inspired lyrics, calling to embrace change. I watch as a group of people cross in a bit of a hurry, right in front of the bus, and the driver continues to rant. Transport headquarters has just radioed him a detour order, and I silence Peter Gabriel for a moment to listen to him spell out which stops will not be served.
"Argyle Public Library, Argyle Park, Rainshade Square and Seventh Avenue".
I frown. These four stops are the ones that literally circle Hargreeves Mansion. Suddenly, I turn off the tape, stuff my headphones in my pocket and step up to the driver, asking for permission to get off, even though it's not at a stop. Since traffic has come to a complete halt, he allows me to do so, and I make sure that no scooters sneak up on me while I reach the damp sidewalk. The night is pitch black with a clear sky, but there's a strange smell in the air. Something unusual. Dust, perhaps gas. All around me, people are walking massively in the opposite direction now.
*Crack!*
I've just covered 650 ft, and I turn the corner of the Central Bank annex, hurrying along. The air is vibrating in my ears in a way that makes me squint. Further on, some of the street lighting seems to have stopped working. It doesn't matter, it's a clear night and the moon is full. I don't mind not being able to see very well anyway: in this neighborhood, I could teleport with my eyes closed.
*Crack!*
I'm now only a few dozen feet away from the backstreet, which runs along the side of Hargreeves Mansion below the bedrooms. What worries me now is the noise, dull, jarring the ground asphalt, similar to that of a wrecking yard. The dust in the air is more thick than ever. And my heart is now pounding in my temples.
*Crack!*
I've barely reappeared near the dumpster where Klaus has been searching so hard, I freeze and step back by reflex, my eyes wide. My gaze drifts up the fire safety staircase, which shakes as if it's about to fall off. The electricity is still working but shivering: Klaus's room is lit, and Luther's too. I don't know what's going on beyond the facade, but from the way the dust is rising, I fear that part of the other side of the house has collapsed. My breath is short, my legs trembling, my thoughts staggering.
I don't have time to think: not about the apocalypse being called off, nor about the relief I'd felt, which is now painfully gone. I ache to see these cracks, as if I wanted to prevent them from opening onto this building to which I shouldn't be particularly attached. But I am, or rather to those for whom and by whom it exists. The bathroom light flickers, and its ceiling seems to bend as it tears at my heart. Did they all get out? Fuck, is Klaus still in there? A twitch of my eyebrows is all it takes to make me intangible. Now no matter the chaos, no matter the stone, glass, metal and wood.
*Crack!*
In the blink of an eye, I'm standing at the door of Klaus's room, which, like the whole corridor, is empty. On the walls, the writings he left crumble, one after the other, on his mattress, on the carpet, on the tumbled hookah. His words disappear, all the thoughts he once exteriorized there: "Years gone by without a word, but now in ink that's soon to smudge", "All must be ground to dust to start anew". And precisely, the dust, takes them away, away, as I step back. The beaded curtain by the door has just fallen near the bookcase, and I step out into the corridor, abandoning my belongings to the chaos of magazines and darts that room 33 has become.
*Crack!*
I reappear in the trophy gallery. For a reason I don't comprehend, the corridor from which I've just come explodes, room after room. A piece of the ceiling breaks off, and my arms reflexively protect my head, even though I can't feel it. It goes right through me, crashes to the floor, literally through my feet, and I look around me, not comprehending what I'm really looking at.
I can't believe I had this conversation with Pogo right here, a few days ago. I can almost see his posture in that armchair again, and his aching back beneath his incomprehensibly British manners. Eight days spent here come back to me, and I stand still, my gaze searching everywhere for a trace of anyone who might have stayed.
Suddenly, the glass display cases explode as if by a high-pitched sound. My hands reflexively protect my face again even if the broken glass can't hurt me, but through the opacity of the air, I catch a glimpse of Klaus at the end of the gallery, running off with Diego, with Ben, towards a window and the frail metal staircase that descends into one of the brick alleyways that once separated the composite building.
*Crack!*
Trying to reach them, I reappear in the middle of the dust of the Grand Staircase main landing, which seems to have only a few moments left before collapsing. Disoriented, I don't even know which way to turn. I'll only be able to teleport once more, maybe twice, as I've crossed long distances already. A large section of the gallery floor collapses nearby, and I shudder, as I see the night sky through what was once the Moorish-style skylight, which I have so often judged out of place. I must at least reach the lower level. I try to focus...
*Crack!*
All around me, the entrance hall is rumbling now. On the floor, the chandelier is drowning in a chaos of rubble. For a long moment, I'm speechless. I've always thought of Hargreeves Mansion as a form of creature, growing, decade after decade, like a sprawling organism engulfing the neighborhood. A being of brick and gilt, devoted to its founder, with a mission to both abuse and protect. The only place that - against all odds - Klaus had ever called home. And before my eyes, this monster is dying in its turn, gaping cracks gnawing at the vertical colonnades in a senseless thunder.
Upstairs, the rest of the gallery crumbles, and with it the entire section of wall it supported. Hargreeves Mansion seems to weep all its tears of brick, metal, glass, trophy copper. Sinking down. On and on. But I freeze, because I've just sensed something more than just the sound of this meltdown. The air, all around... has just changed.
A vibration, like the one I'd already felt in the distance when I was on my way down the street, without really paying attention. But now I perceive it clearly, powerfully, closely: a terrible sound wave, outside the audible spectrum, with a power that makes energy rumble everywhere. In every single brick, in every single girder, and possibly in the flesh for anyone who isn't intangible. I shudder, my eyes locked on the place from which these variations spread, and then...
I see him.
He's no taller than me. Viktor, in his blue shirt. I become acutely aware of this as he turns at the door of the reception room, collapsing behind him. The sofas, the display cabinets, everything crumbles to dust. Our eyes meet, but I don't know if he can see me, even though I'm clearly visible. A beam passes right through me, and I don't even react. I just stand there, in the middle of the chaos of the collapse that doesn't affect me, looking into his white eyes that don't even blink anymore. If his face had once been gentle, sensitive and sad, it now expresses nothing but cold, disconnected indifference. And now I sense them around him, those sound waves, as he makes them vibrate like the living tuning fork he now seems to be.
I get it, right now. I understand that Viktor has always had this power, possibly stifled by Reginald Hargreeves whose exuberant madness is now crumbling everywhere. A power linked to the material waves of sound, themselves capable of mobilizing energy in the same way I bend space-time secondarily. An immense power, far beyond his violin. A power he never had the chance to learn how to curb, just like his emotions, stifled by anxiolytics. Five had told me that the issue had never been the kind of powers we had, but the extent to which we were able to control them. To ~control ourselves~, actually. And on that matter, Reginald Hargreeves literally abandoned Viktor after adopting him.
I open my eyes wider, as the entire living room has just given way to a pile of bricks, wood and glass, the immense sky above spreading moonlight over the marble that should never have seen the wind seep in.
Harold Jenkins is dead. I don't know what he did to him, I don't know how he manipulated him, but I can see what this trauma has awakened. That, and possibly the way they all treated him: his siblings, no doubt in a way even worse than they treated Klaus. I've felt it at times this week, and it pains me to have witnessed it. I've seen his vulnerability, I've seen him take medication, I've seen him smile sweetly. But beneath his shy, trembling demeanor, Viktor was probably just ready to implode.
I don't believe he deliberately intends to do any harm: he's all instinct now, and what's going on around him is just the unfiltered expression of his emotions. He now strides across the hall without looking at me, with a slow, detached step, as if he were simply going out to catch his cab, like so many times in the past. Except that all around us, everything is falling into a chaos of rubble and shards of glass, in the terrible ripple he creates. He disappears in the direction of the main door, once adorned with stained-glass umbrellas, blown up, while the outside and inside merge under an impassive Moon.
I turn around: the steps of the Grand Staircase are now tumbling down, one after another, like a terrible domino game reminding me that we'll never climb them again. Above my head, all that remains of the Hargreeves Mansion floors are collapsing. Downwards, towards me. And I understand something else: what Five meant when he said that my power would allow me "to stay after the end", even if everything was swept away. Omega could probably stand there, intangible, motionless and sorrowful, letting the chaos or even an apocalypse unleash, just waiting for it all to be over. To open the eyes again in the midst of the steaming ruins: alone after the end, just as Five had been.
But I don't want to. I can't, viscerally, and I'm desperate to get out of here. All around me is dust, and I can't make out the sky or the edges of the art-deco debris that is falling on me and burying me inexorably. *Crack!* I teleport one last time, towards the only thing I can still distinguish: Ben's spectral energy, somewhere beyond the chaos, possibly outside. Unfortunately I don't go far enough, I guess, because once again I encounter nothing but incoherent rubble, all around, on top, underneath, and I crouch where I am, just clutching my knees as I wait for the blocks and dust to settle.
The resounding thunder is not that of the sky. It's the Academy's last lament, in the demise of what had once stood there with a form of oppressive majesty. Gradually, the blocks of brick and cement, the shards of glass, Klaus's writings, the plumbing pipes, the woodwork, Five's equations and the smashed luxurious furniture... everything seems to find a new place, without order, but back in stillness. I stand there, my eyes open to the wreckage across and around me, hearing familiar voices, just beyond. Diego. Luther. Five?
Trembling, I stand up, I move forward, I step out of the rubble that hasn't scratched me, and I become material again while letting the wholeness of this devastation hit my eyes. There's nothing left, and all around the rest of The City continues to stand, legitimately unmoved and untouched. I remain breathless, speechless. Sounds of sirens and helicopters overhead fill the sound space, and soon the rushing of footsteps.
"Shit, Rin, you were in there..."
Klaus's voice has just brought me back to reality, and he's already pulling me by the arm, while helicopters flash their spotlights over the smoking rubble of Hargreeves Mansion. I put my hand over my eyes, and see the remains of the "Kids' Lounge's" table, the red billiard, the coffee machine. The shards of crockery, on the floor, bearing umbrella fragments. And he pulls me away again, as I struggle to take my eyes off what - he - has already left behind.
" Dammit, hurry up!"
And then, by instinct, I start running too. Running, even if I don't know to what.
Notes:
I knew it would be a sad scene to write, and an important one at the same time. Writing the first part, where Rin was still in a positive mindset, but knowing where her bus was going, was particularly tough. Especially the way she gradually realizes that something abnormal is going on.
This chapter is a farewell to Hargreeves Mansion, in this version anyway, and I wanted to bring it to you from the inside. Like Hermes, this big building was for me a character in its own right, now gone with Grace, with Pogo, and I feel a kind of sadness about that, because I too felt as much resentment as affection for it, in the end.
Rin understood a lot of things in the rubble: about Viktor, about herself. Now everything is unfolding at a rapid pace: it's almost strange for me to have come this far.
Any comment will make my day!