1.
Wade's eyes cracked open with the speed of a haunted house's front door creaking open. A white plaster ceiling above him, and a narrow, soft surface beneath him. His left arm was pinned to his side by another soft surface.
He rolled of Theia's couch, and fell silently into a crouch before he pushed himself upward, stretching out into his full height, pulling his spine straight with a series of cracks.
The sound of something cooking in a skillet could be heard through one door. He poked his head around the corner, and saw Theia's short, compact form in the kitchen. She wore a bathrobe, and when she turned, he could see that it hung open over the t-shirt and bike shorts she had on underneath.
“Morning,” she said, “hungry?”
“Yeah. Please.”
She nodded, and returned to the stove.
It was a large breakfast: fried eggs with cheese and (leftover) black beans on corn tortillas. Bacon. Eggplant cooked in bacon grease. Orange juice.
“What was that last night?” Wade asked.
“The sky?”
“Yeah.”
“Fucked if I know,” she said, before wrapping her egg in the tortilla and ripping a bit off, “I'm a bit out of my depth with all this weird shit. Never heard of anything like it.”
“How do you know so much in the first place?”
“Novs have been around for a while. Since the thirties at least. That's when the first symbol started showing up. A Goetian one, from the Lemegeton.”
“What was it?”
“I forget, really. Something about prosperity and riches. It was a massive effort to ward off the Depression. The first Novs were mainly migrant workers, and you can still tell if you talk to some of the older ones—some of that sensibility still remains—Okies, Mexicans, a few of the pure-blood Palestinos.”
Wade nodded.
“You think there's any connection to the Carvers?”
“Probably. They were a weird bunch. Especially that old bastard Charles Carver. Grandfather...no...great-grandfather of the current bastard.”
“So you've heard?”
“A bit from Algernon, a bit from you.”
Wade bit into his bacon. It crunched, and tasted a little burned, but he ate it with gusto.
“So, you going to class today?” Wade asked.
“I have class at two, and a rugby game at four,” Theia said, “but I was planning on watching Algernon for a while first.”
Wade slumped with relief, nodding a bit.
“Thanks,” he said, “I've still got to take on work to pay for everything.”
Theia nodded.
“It's okay. Go do your work.”
2.
"What an ass you are!" he said. "Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. Only the mad can be happy, and not many of those. The few that imagine themselves kings or gods are happy, the rest are no happier than the sane. Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time, but I have been referring to the extreme cases. I have taken from this man that trumpery thing which the race regards as a Mind; I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction; you see the result -- and you criticize! I said I would make him permanently happy, and I have done it. I have made him happy by the only means possible to his race -- and you are not satisfied!" He heaved a discouraged sigh, and said, "It seems to me that this race is hard to please."
Wade stepped away from the street side coffee stand, affixing the strainer to the top of the cup before screwing the lid on, and sipping at the Arabic coffee. It had been flavored with stale spices, but it was strong, and he appreciated that.
The rain made a soft percussion, and the late-morning traffic ambled slowly through the streets, the drivers not used to such heavy precipitation.
“Maybe I should buy a hat,” he muttered, stepping under an overhang.
He glanced up and down the cross street, along the riverside.
A cloud bank drifted up, counter to the current of the swelling river, a gray wall of oblivion, silently drifting in and erasing all view of what was behind it.
It muffled all that was contained within it, but passed without incident.
Standing on the bridge after it had drifted on was a large man, a small wooden box strapped to his shoulder. The man was almost a head taller than Wade and slender, with stork-like legs and long, bare arms. He wore a white button-up shirt and black pants.
On his arm was a tattoo: “#44.”
The man glanced towards Wade, and raised his hand in a gesture of surprise, stepping back, his right hand brought up in front of him, his eyes widening.
Immediately, the man turned and fled.
“Hey, wait!” Wade cried out.
Someone behind him cleared his throat.
“Hold on, Larkin. We're not to that stage of the game, yet. Why don't you turn around and deal with me, first?”
3.
Theia found Algernon sleeping on his desk, having pushed everything aside, and wrapping up in his blazer.
Sighing, she bent, and straightened the papers as best she could, putting them into rough stacks in front of the desk, with the pencils laid out in front of them.
Turning, she returned to Unreal City, where Jacob was cleaning the taps.
“Can I borrow the broom and dustpan?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said, “knock yourself out.”
Algernon had flung his bottle of cheap whiskey at the wall, and shattered it neatly in two. Some invisible fault in the bottle had broken it around its equator almost perfectly. She meticulously gathered up the two halves and the extraneous splinters of glass. The floorboards would forever taste of cheap whiskey, though.
“What're you doing?” Algernon asked, his eyes slivered open.
“Cleaning up your mess, you twat,” Theia replied.
“You're the twat,” he replied.
“Shut up. Go back to sleep.”
“There's a glass under me, it's not comfortable.”
“Is it broken?”
“No.”
“Then give it to me,” she said, holding out her hand.
He handed her the chipped glass he had paired with the bottle of whiskey, and she set it on top of a stack of papers.
“Where's Wade?” he asked.
“Out earning rent.”
“He hasn't taken up stripping, has he?”
“No. He gave himself a promotion to Junior Partner.”
“Oh.”
He rolled over, and screwed his eyes shut.
“Where's Mari?”
“Somewhere else. Go to sleep, Algie.”
“Right...”
She gathered up the errant pencils on the ground, and put them in the whiskey glass before sweeping the office, and moving the chairs against the wall. She picked up the “welcome” mat and put it on the chair.
Reaching into her purse, she pulled out a small box of chalk, a grease pencil, and a salt shaker.
She put a line of salt across the doorway, and another on each windowsill. After that, she crouched down, and put jagged lines emanating from the doorway in chalk, before dropping the welcome mat over the whole assembly, satisfactorily hiding it from view.
On each window, she used the grease pencil to put a formula in Greek and Arabic that she had memorized. One line in Greek, one in Arabic, one in Greek, one in Arabic, continuing to alternate.
Behind the desk, in chalk, she drew a six pointed star with a Greek invocation around it.
It all boiled down to, essentially: “No more bad luck. No more sorrow. This space is off limits.”
“I hope this'll do,” she muttered.
4.
Wade turned, and looked at the figure behind him. A tall man, dressed in a shirt with “NOMAD” across the chest and jeans. The man's fingers were streaked with automotive grease, and his sneakers were dusty. The very picture of a wanderer content with his lot, a man willing to travel any distance to see and hear things he would not otherwise.
Wade looked into his Duplicate's face. The other man lacked eyes, having only a halo of Arafel-smoke emerging from two vacant holes.
“Well, well, well...” the Duplicate said with a smile.
“Who are you?”
“Me? I'm you. Or at least, I'm intended to be. Not a perfect replicant, but I'm just as my Maker made me.”
“Your maker? That man...?”
“Yes. #44. You should be honored. I'm the first such Simulacra created since 1898.”
“Fine. What do you want?”
The duplicate stepped forward, and struck Wade across the mouth, causing him to reel back.
“I want you to think, Lark. You've been a very bad boy...not at all how your Maker made you. You abandoned your family...your future...and for what?”
Wade felt the Arafel boil up inside of him, but he held onto it.
“To keep a promise to a dead man...and you can't even do that. What would Georges think?”
The Duplicate smiled, its mouth pulling up into a grim, boneless parody of a smile.
“You've gotten stuck here! What kind of a wanderer are you? Refusing to return to your family when they need you...killing people? And not even knowing their names! You lobotomized that poor twat, Cincinatus...but at least he was a monster, right? You saved someone...unlike that poor girl at the Convenience store. What was her name?”
Wade grimaced, baring his teeth.
“Oh...not like it matters. Does it? She's not a real person, just something there to give you what you think you want and then disappear into the background. But that's how it works, isn't it? You tried, you tried. Just like with that woman that Carver made into his puppet...and just like with Mari. Face it, Wade...you're poison. Your presence doomed those people, whether you like it or not.”
“Shut the fuck up!” Wade screeched, his face twisted into a mask of fury.
A lance of greasy gray-black smoke emerged from his forehead, and shot towards the Duplicate.
The Other Wade reached up and grabbed it. The lance writhed, serpentine, and he pulled. Wade was dragged forward, falling to his knees.
The Duplicate put a foot to Wade's chest, and pulled out the Arafel by the roots. Emptying Wade completely of the demonic power.
The world began to dim.
The Duplicate leaned down over him, his face a boiling mass of Arafel.
“I'll give you one small, small bit of mercy, to prove that I'm not like you, to prove that, of the two of us, I am the greater:
“At Twilight's End, the shadows crossed...
“A new world birthed, the elder lost.
“And on the morn, we wake to find,
“what mem'ry left so far behind.
“To deafened ears, we ask, unseen:
“Which is life, and which the dream?”
5.
Mari huddled in the corner, as the symbols she drew twisted around into threatening, profane nonsense.
On one window:
“YOUR DAYS ARE NUMBERED, ABANDON ALL HOPE, ABANDON ALL HOPE, BABYLON IS FALLEN.”
“I WILL CAUSE THE DEAD TO RISE UP, TO OUTNUMBER THE LIVING, TO DEVOUR THE LIVING. YOU WILL BE MANGLED AND DEVOURED BY WHAT YOU LEFT BEHIND.”
“HUMANS ARE NAUGHT BUT POSSESSED MEAT. HUMANS ARE A VIRUS.”
“THE MORNING STAR IS FALLEN! THE MORNING STAR SHALL RISE! ASCLEPIUS WILL BE DEVOURED BY THE SERPENT OF OLD NIGHT!”
“WHY DO YOU FIGHT? WHY TRY TO LIVE ON? DON'T YOU KNOW THAT THE WORLD WILL FUCK YOU OVER? DON'T YOU KNOW THAT YOU WILL BE FOOD FOR THE WORMS? YOUR SKULL IS THE HALL IN WHICH THEY WILL HOLD COURT, YOUR RIBCAGE IS THE HALL OF THEIR SYNOD.”
On another:
“HUMANITY IS A VIRUS! HUMANITY IS A VIRUS! HUMANITY IS A VIRUS!”
“AGUCCUGACCUUUGGAUGUAAAACUCCCUAUUCGGUCCCUGGUAUGUCAGAAGAGGGAUUG”
“know-that-you-are-mortal. accept-that-you-will-die.”
“Neither Hope nor Future.”
The wall over Algernon's desk boiled, the plaster bubbling and folding outwards, mixing with the chalk, and becoming the symbol of a staring eye.
The welcome mat decayed, fraying and splitting open, revealing a strangely genteel message on the ground:
“I just thought you should know. Wade Larkin, though not dead, is now in hell.”
Theia stood, and woke Algernon.
“Huh, what?”
“Look at the walls,” she said.
Algernon glanced around, and furrowed his brow.
“Why did you write this shit on there?” he asked, and sat up, “what did you do to my welcome mat?”
“I didn't do this. It just happened.”
“What?”
“Look. Wade's in trouble. I'm going to go find him. You can stay here, but I'm not.”
She turned, and ran from the office.
Algernon stared at the open door, and took a deep breath in through his nose.
“Fuck it,” he said, and laid back down, pulling his blazer up over his head.