Chapter Ten - Zōḗsis
The world was a shattered diamond. The world was a migraine. The world was a throat flooding with vomit. And through that world and all the others, through all their nooks and crannies and closets, echoed the horrible breathless wail of infinite discordia. An eye-melting nuclear jellyfish spreading out across a blue August morning.
Discordia, pain. Discordia, fear. Discordia, the world beneath the sea, and all of the things Man had become while dwelling within it.
He sensed/saw it: a pale shape was rising, knotted roots now unwinding, taking tepid warmth with it as it went. The figure shifted and jerked, lines blending and splitting, flattening and extruding out, questing, a mind-obliterating orgy of motion rendered in shiny white, all of which eventually arrived at protomorphic consensus approximating a human figure, which pulled itself (...herself) upright and off (...of the bed), one bare shoulder rolling with the motion of an unseen hand. Infinite and unrelenting discordia shifted, before being silenced entirely.
And then Shinji came awake, all the way awake, to the shriek of ancient springs and shift of a rising mattress as weight departed.
The world was still a migraine. Vision was smearing bright blindness he couldn't seem to blink away. Probing fingers ground away the crust gluing one eye shut, but two open eyes didn't improve things any. The light flooding in from a window on one side of the room was lightning bolt bright and unrelenting.
Bare feet slapped on wood. A figure passed in front of the window. The thing that had found him in the woods.
That recognition hit him on a vague, stale register he didn't understand. His mind was as blurry as his vision.
"Concussion." He couldn't even think the word. Had to say it out loud to complete the thought.
"English." The word was a command, and his irritation at it was focusing. Like leaving the bar after long hours of drinking and stepping out into a frigid winter night, saltslush splashing underfoot.
He looked around. Was in an elaborate four poster bed roofed and curtained in a black pleated cloth. The blanket (also black) was some kind of rugged material, thicker than canvas. Maybe hemp. He pulled it aside and confirmed that, yes, he was naked.
The last he remembered, it had been on top of him. Skull in hand. He half remembered the first strike. Had a sense that others had followed. Beyond that? A migraine-soured void in which danced dripping sparks the color of a dim, distant galaxy.
"Your alarm," he said, trying English out. It pushed out hard, right through center mass of the pain. He palmed an eye and kept on going. "That was… Pen-dur-ekusi?"
"Hiroshima," the thing agreed from deeper in the room, confirming it was just about as insane as Shinji could imagine.
He slipped off the bed and was was immediately on the floor, gasping and gripping a raw muscled leg that still had a hole in it just above the ankle.
The thing emerged from the near light haze and approached him like it was nothing, like it wasn't the cause of this.
"Get up," it said.
When he remained right where he was, it dropped a pile of clothes at his feet, sending up puffs of dust from the ancient dark wood. He fished out the familiar blue and white mass of his underwear and carefully, painfully, and somewhat pointlessly, pulled them on.
It crouched down beside him, as it had back in the cemetery. No shovel now, just arms hanging out in front of it, fingers laced together in what looked like an easy contempt.
"It's sepsis," it said, probably looking at his ankle. "Early stages. Just hints of rotting fruit and nut musk." It did not sound concerned.
Shinji pulled a rictus grin, the blooming pain from moonburn giving him a moment's peace in the aftermath, sucking focus from the cold sharpness of the migraine and the muggy molten heat in his ankle. That sharpened his vision up to reveal a cobweb-choked room, the tracks his kicking leg had left in the thick dust on the floor, and the thing with its immobile expression. It was also at this point that Shinji first noticed the shiny black mass perched on the thing's shoulder, spiked and moving.
"Su-supaida," the word was an easy cheat, Japanese you could hear as English. Loanword. He said it on his way back up the side of the bed. The thing in question was the size of an apple, it's legs lifted and waving in a clear threat display.
The thing from the woods turned and looked at the spider, and…
And suddenly 'it' became 'her' again. He saw something there, some flicker of a human expression.
"Homer," the girl said, for whatever reason.
Another rictus grin to keep the other pains at bay. "Where am I?" He asked.
The girl did not answer immediately. Stood and reached out and laid a hand on one of the bed posts. Not for support, just to touch it.
"I… am in my family's home," she said, with the precise cadence of a mantra that had been kicking around in her head for a while. She slide her thumb across the wood, like there was an eye there she could drag open. "This is my room. It's real." She looked at him, and more humanity was there, at the edges and cracks. "I'm back."
And at that last word Shinji understood what had happened.
Those with the will to return always did so in the same way: on a beach, crawling free of the surf, naked and quasi-catatonic. Far as he knew, there had only ever been one exception. Well, until now.
It was clear, looking back at the so-called Path of Conquest, where reality had been mutable, ambiguous, capable of diversion. Like the chaotic interplay of water, foam, and sand when wave hits beach. He had no idea how, but it seemed that mechanic had been harnessed, shifting him out of the world and then back again, to bring him to this absurd location.
He knew the Sea Under the Sea. Sun hanging above, Moon below. Afloat on a ribbon of arterial blood. Ayanami above him. Ayanami, waiting with him, until all the screaming was done, and the lights had gone out, and the world had dimmed until he had found that constellation in a whorl of tile cement on the damaged wall of a tunnel leading in to the village of Akari.
But the woods where the girl had come from, that was someplace else. Not the Sea Under the Sea. She was…
A twitch at the back of his scalp, and the thought faded away. The girl wasn't the reason he was here, and he had just realized where 'here' had to be.
"House", he said. "The big house by cemetery. We are inside?" It took an effort to get the words out.
He was so excited, suddenly, that he couldn't breath.
He was looking around the room, seeing the old plaster, the dark wood. Seemed to fit with the exterior of the house, what little of it he had made out.
The girl said something. Maybe even what he wanted to know, but he was already beyond it. She did not matter. He was already moving, scarcely pausing to scoop up his clothes before pushing past her and the just-audible clicking of the enormous spider's churning mouthparts.
Past her, through a door that creaked and squealed as he pulled it open, and out into a hallway lined with doors, lit by shafts of lunar light. The air was dry and had the nebulous stink of age to it. The dust-covered floorboards were dark and cold and solid as iron ingots.
Nothing. No memory tugged, no half-dreams bubbled to the surface. He did not know where he was. She must have hit him very hard.
There was no room for this. No time. He looked to where the girl stood in the doorway, a question half-translated in mind, and…
That was the first image, a link in a chain. Her leaning half out a doorway. It was something he could grasp onto and haul up from the stinking red muck of his healing brain.
Yes. It was all there now. The sound of teeth scattering along the concrete pavers, of old bones cracking. The thing he had pulled free of that forest was moving. Cursing, gathering, picking up bits of the browned skull. Overhead the Moon was a ceiling, a coin, a wedge, a crumbling six billion year old tombstone. It was red and purple, and pulsed with a lambent glow that matched his heartbeat.
A moment: the thing had gathered the shards of bone to itself, cradling them to its stomach. Not worth it, it said/spoke/sang. You were not worth this.
A moment: being dragged to his feet and pointed at the house. His legs didn't work. He kept falling down, down steps and slopes and into all the funny hard places. It must have been funny, because he just kept falling down.
A moment: he had stopped by his discarded travel pack. Kept close out of instinct, not for any sapient reason. The first flush of agony pushed into him then, a horrific intrusion into the numbness of brain damage. He waited there as the thing that had done this to him went on ahead, up the boulevard, toward the big house. The place where the Other was.
A moment: tugging the pack along because he couldn't get it on. Didn't have the coordination for that. There was a set of broad stairs at end of the boulevard, and he started up these carefully, treating the pack with exaggerated care. He raised and lowered the pack from one step to the next.
A moment: at the top of the boulevard, stepping onto the paved drive that ran before the great house. His thoughts kept rhyming with 'mansion' but he just couldn't remember that word. Big house. Compound. Those things he could recall.
A moment: dragging himself off the drive and beneath the portico. Climbing the first step and feeling the weight of a journey ending, even as his legs began to itch from lack of circulation. His heart's beat was erratic, kept going still, sending him sinking down, down, until he reminded it to beat. It kept forgetting.
He had to pause there, who knew how long, waiting for things to build, for cinders to fan back to fire, dead eyes looking up at the house, which was probably not really shot through with the yellows and pinks he was seeing.
A moment: that first return of a true heart beat, sending stinging blood shooting through his system. The world went hyper real. Everything rhymed with a Super Sentai theme song, and his spatial awareness was telling him he was standing in the house he had shared with his teacher in 2011. He felt/expected/remembered the hum of an oscillating fan and roar of insect night life. Damn crickets.
A moment: as life returned and he became more orientated, Shinji noticed the Word above the entryway of the house. A bad Word. He knew it, even though it was in alphabet. He started working his way up the stairs, repeating the careful work he had done back at the boulevard. Toward the landing he could see through the door, could see a dark shape in the lit space beyond. Through the doorway it waited. It turned to look at him. He had a moment of uncertainty as the thing before him shivered between 'monster' and 'person'. Couldn't resolve. Couldn't process. Instead of figuring that out, he jabbed a finger up to the bad Word. "It killed the world too" he tried to say, but it came out "kishrilldarou." Which was true. It seemed to be spelled funny, but the Word was as close to an equal as he had. Yes yes. One Impact apiece.
A moment: the monster shaking its head and waving him into the space. Entranceway was large. There was a grand staircase. Felt like they were in the lobby of a skyscraper. It took a hallway off to one side, and he was glad, because he was tired of stairs.
It led him to a door, and said it was his door. He opened it and there was a room beyond, and that was his too. It told him where the bathroom was. Another anonymous door it pointed at. Then it left, and he spent hours or days or a handful of microseconds learning the room and building it into the first solid part of a fresh continuity. Accumulating intent.
Hard wood floor, the dense braided rug that sat upon it, black waves converging on a stylized "A". A chair and dresser of old wood, beaded amber with sap drawn out from too much heat and dry air. A bed with a metal frame, a bare mattress with bed linens folded at its foot that crumbled at the creases as he lifted the top edge of the pile. The walls were lined in wood paneling up just past his hipbone, a continuation of the style outside. The plaster above that was pale and unassuming and likely infested with asbestos. Upon the wall above the writing desk a large weapon rested upon iron hooks. A mace. He was pretty sure you called it a mace.
Against that reality, these attested-to facts, was the sizzling soup of his brain, and the equal reality of shadows and bloody wet skin (his birth, the return of memory beginning right at the start). Something, not a cat, watched him from the writing desk, head cocked. A pale shape gibbered in the corner. The wood at his feet warped, threatened to resolve into the rubber sheet decking of a train car headed to the outer wards of Tokyo 3.
A moment: wandering up the hallway, fluorescent yellow toiletry bag cradled in his hands. The Super Sentei theme song was starting to fade away. The call of crickets continued. The thing he had pulled from the woods was watching him from a doorway on the other side of the hall. He decided that he would kill it, if it came close. He tried two doors before locating the bathroom. The lights did not work. He wandered in. The light from the hallway would be enough. He unfolded his toiletry bag by the sink and started wiping at his face with the ginger swipes of someone with the physical coordination of a toddler. At some point, he noticed the thing from the woods in the reflection of the bathroom's large mirror. It hung in the doorway opposite the bathroom, a pale blur shaped like a person. He made another clumsy pass at cleaning his face, turned to take in the room, shrouded in manageable dimness, then went to the doorway.
He looked at her now, the layout and orientation of the world snapping into place.
"I'm using the bath," he announced, turning away from her. Returning to the bathroom she had lured him from before.
She had been waiting for him just like that, before, hovering in the doorway, framed in black, a plump cigar sprouting blue-green embers pinched between thumb and index finger. He had watched her from the relative safety of his own doorway. Watched her bring the cigar to pale lips and breathe in. Saw all those parts of her body flex as she did so, the rise of shoulders, skin sliding over ribs, the subtle inward bow of abdomen… And she had been staring at him with those large eyes, dark but shiny, corpse coins in moonlight. For a long moment, the two of them regarded one another, backed by unlit spaces.
And then the girl had exhaled a cloud of pale blue green smoke, and flicked ash in Shinji's direction. This was not a dismissive motion. She took a step back into the dark room, and Shinji found himself taking a step forward.
A bad idea. A lethal mistake. He continued forward. The girl took another step back, and then there was just a blue green ember, beckoning Shinji across the hall and into darkness.
The door closed behind him. Sour, cool smoke was blown in his face. The blue green ember danced and pulsed, sketching a vague shape in the void. Hands tugged at his clothes, silent and unseen orders, and when he had stripped, those hands pushed him down onto a bed. Every part of the girl was cold. One hand held him in place as the bed springs shrieked. The girl groaned like ocean wind churning through ruined skyscrapers. Shinji squeezed his jaw in time with his heartbeat, which was thundering in his ears. He could feel what was coming, could feel where it would go. A fuse was burning down to the bomb set between his ears.
The hand on his chest lifted, and the motions involved grew more frantic. The blue green ember pulsed bright. The fuse burned down, and the pain in his head began a terrible compression. But he could not stop. Didn't want to stop. In the darkness, it could by anyone up there. In the darkness, Ayanami had heard him.
Fingers clamped down on his nipple and gave a savage and unexpected twist, and everything collapsed into singularity. Shinji's brain had erupted in an explosive cascade of agony that drove away everything.
The bathroom was a cross between a boiler room and a morgue. Old brushed steel, white tile, and exposed iron pipe work that snaked up one wall and across ceiling, then to stab down, freestanding, to various fixtures. When he twisted the valve on the pipe that fed the large porcelain tub, the whole room quaked and whined as water burbled up from deep below. He observed this all with the detached interest of someone that was used to testing the tolerance of abandoned plumbing and wasn't sure if every joint and solder seam in the room was going to explode or not.
The rattle and quake died away, no whine or knock of shattered pipe work filled in the silence, so he went over and turned on the tub. The water was red orange and stank like rotten eggs. He made sure the drain was open and let it run. Went over to the toiletries bag, looked at himself in the mirror. Grimaced. Reached up and plucked a chip of bone that had been sticking out of his forehead. There was more there, a rough and jagged Stonehenge. He picked the shards out. Ran a hand through his hair. Drew out a few more bits of old bone. Encountered a few bumps that suggested the healing response had dragged a few in under his scalp. He'd deal with those later.
The water was thinner now. Clearer, but still filthy. The rotten egg smell had receded somewhat. He left the room, headed to his door, his room.
It took the water thirty minutes to clear up enough to use. He had his clothes set out and most of the bone fragments out of his face by then. The hole in his ankle persisted, but had stopped weeping. His suit was hanging from ceiling pipe work, stretching out. He's managed to keep it folded up careful, with only a couple creases to buff out this time. Six years. He was going to be impressive, for once.
He squatted in the unstoppered bathtub. Washed himself with liquid soap in a column of freezing water.
A moment: Red hair, red plug suit. He'd stared into the audient void, black-purple eternity and the flecks of light that ruined it, and then he had turned his head and saw, finally, saw the most important think in the universe.
An Other.
The ancient water burned. He washed his hair and rinsed twice. Made sure it washed out clean.
And then he was out in the hallway, black shirt, black slacks, black shoes, white tie, black jacket tailored to hug his slender waist. The best clothing and tailoring Vietnam could provide. The travel pack was hefted behind him, one handed, lighter than air, just like the rest of him.
With all things good and right, he resumed his walk along the Path of Conquest.