Clack goes the door, and then with a wolfish intake of breath, the ship sucks us up. The lights around us spark, melon-sized comets, dying quick but succeeded by brighter and brighter flashes until the lines of our faces are blurred pasty white, as if we’re all shining like Crick was, startlingly blinding. Amara’s hair whips around her face, and I see her smile for the first time since Crick revived her. Maybe it’s the lightness in my stomach as we fly upwards, higher and higher into the ship, but I can’t looking at her. Her eyes are unlike any I’ve seen before, a neon blue, and her dreaded hair has bright fabric weaved into it. She’s beautiful, like a dream you don’t want to end, where your heart is already aching because it must and you know it.
Suddenly, we’re still, at the center of a breath, floating in a soundless white expanse, three dirty, tired souls suspended in a soft luminescence. Gravity wraps its gentle fingers around my ankles, slowly begins to pull me down. My feet touch down, then Crick’s, then Amara’s, her bare feet landing without a sound. There is no sign of the passageway we flew up. The room we are in is dome-like, with a smooth white wall. There are no doors or windows, or even sconces for the lights.
“Phyrxian!” Amara’s voice echoes back as if on the tips of a boomerang. The echo keeps building on itself, until it’s so loud that Crick covers his ears and I’m scrunching my head into my shoulders. Then it’s gone, passing into the other direction. The white light in the room dims, becomes gray, then dark blue. The smoothness of the wall has faded with the light, and now looks like a squirming carpet of veinous worms, all trying to burrow deeper into a soft, fertile loam.
“What is this place?” I say.
“This is Phyrxian. It is yama man ink ship.” Amara says. “Phyrxian, this is Amara Mona, voice code H3449 Violet.” The floor we’re on has gone from white to a hard, dark gray, like pencil lead. “Yama man doctor must have changed the voice code.”
“What? What’s wrong?” Crick sits down on the ground. He doesn’t look like he can take much more.
“Nothing. There is another way to the control room. Come on, we have to move quick. Yama man will notice I am not in the Oisin and will come back for us.”
She runs towards the wall, beckoning for us to follow her. Crick waves me ahead, but I can’t leave him behind. His breathing is short as I get him to his feet. “So this yama guy is bad news, I get that. But who is he?” I ask Amara. “You’re all from other worlds? Like, aliens, or something? I’ve never seen anything like this ship, or you, for that matter.”
Amara is at the wall, feeling around her pocket, deep in thought. “His name is Rolando Pacheco. He is from the walking city, Yama Dempuur,” I get to the wall just as Amara pulls a slender hand from a hidden pocket in her dress, revealing a small turquoise rock in her palm. “We are all from other worlds, Will, from different parts of teh spiral.” She closes that hand into a sun-baked fist, and lays the knuckles on the squirming wall’s surface. Almost immediately, the wall creates a whirlpool of thin, black worms around her wrist, then consumes it.
It’s when she begins to moan and squirm that I realize something is wrong. “Amara?” I say, looking from her to the wall to her again. Her moans are growing louder and louder, bordering on the verge of screams. “Amara!” I yell, finally realizing that this wasn’t part of her plan. I grab her submerged arm around the elbow and pull. Crick crackles back to life, his boatyard muscles tightening like tank pistons beneath snow. Without hesitation, and with a newfound strength, he grabs her around the waist and begins to pull as well. The wall finally releases her, and we all fall back in a pile of limbs. The wind gets knocked out of me as I crash to the floor, but I still feel Amara as she lands atop of me. I can feel the hardness of her hip bones through the spandex of my bike shorts, as they dig into my thighs. “Are you alright?” I ask.
“Yes,” She’s straddling my stomach, her hair a curtain of weeping willow branches, shining silver in the low light. “Are you?” She asks. The wall she placed the stone within clicks in tandem with my nodding head. We hold each other’s gaze, her body nestled on mine like water along the curvature of a balloon.
“There’s a door.” Crick says, snapping me back to reality. He combs through the crust in his beard with one hand, and points with the other at the large set of stone doors that have appeared in the wall. Amara smiles at me shyly, then gets up and moves towards them. “That small stone... it was a key?” Crick says, his brow hanging heavy over his watchful eyes.
“It was an empathy stone,” She says. “One of the few things I have left from home, from the Coral Islands. Ma’atha use them for much. In marriage, these stones cement the love between two people. In disputes, the stones make just agreements possible. They bond minds together.”
“So that stone bonded our mind to this ship’s?” I ask, coming up to the doors with Crick. “This ship, Phyrxian, is a... person?”
“A person? No, but it is alive. It is capable of feeling and perception. It sees and knows, and acts like a world too. That is how it moves through the Fade. Yama man make these ships with magic they knew long ago,” The blue walls glow softly, as if agreeing with what the girl is saying, from dark blue to a deep, leafy green. Amara puts her right hand on the softly squirming wall, and nods to us to do the same. My spread fingers sink slightly into the warm, squirming wall.
“It needs to make sure you do not mean it harm,” Amara says.
“We have a pond back home, and every summer, there’s this carpet of algae that runs along the shoreline. As I kid, I used to pick it up and run it between my fingers. It feels like that,” There are eight scenes carved into the door, reliefs of some sort of ceremony. The central figure in the carvings is a tall, stern man with a long cape. He performs operations on other, smaller men while reading from a book. In one scene, he is tearing the heart out of one of the smaller men. In another, he is drinking the blood that pours from an eviscerated man’s gut. Though they’re only carvings, they send the hairs on my neck to standing up. But then, the doors open, as fast as a magician pulling off a tablecloth. We follow Amara as she runs inside, though I can only go as fast as Crick, his arm being draped over my shoulder.
“Algae?” She sounds amused, calling back to me, as we enter into a long tube, flickering with a slow phosphorescence. “The scholar say that the ink ships have skin like algae. Cyanophythic skin, he say. It stores much energy, each of its cells like a bottomless well. With this energy, it can make an electromagnetic field, which keeps the gray wave from swallowing it up. The scholar taught me all this. He say we would be a happier people if yama man forgot the ink ship magic like he did many things after the Great Schism. Many Ma’atha, my family and friends, would still be alive if they did not become conduits.”
The walls of the tube are clear, an aquatic world of bubbles and ferns swimming on the other side of them. A long black shape flutters by, its movement like an eel’s, its nose pointed and long.
“What is that?” I say.
“I saw it, too.” Crick says. “Some creature_”
“Look, I’ll say this as nicely as I can, but we’re trying to outrace two really bad things right now: the Fade and Dr. Pacheco. And if we don’t get this ship off the ground soon, and I mean now, one of them will catch up with us. It doesn’t even matter which, because either way, we’re dead.”
“That man outside. That’s...”
“That’s Pacheco. Doctor and Hyperion hunter. Decorated lieutenant with all the bells and whistles, but he operates on his own agenda. He’s a megalomaniacal madman, and is not going to be happy that I hi-jacked his ship again.”
“You already stole this before?”
“No, not this ship. The Oisin, the little lifeboat I escaped from Phyrxian with.” The tube runs perpendicular into another; at the far right end of the new tube I can see light, and hear the humming and grinding of machines. “You probably saw the Oisin. It was what Pacheco was running to, when we were running towards Phyrxian. He wanted to find me in there, drag me out and put me back in
to the engine of this ship. You see, without me, he can’t travel the Fade. Not for long, anyways. Here, hurry!” Amara pulls ahead, sprinting for the lighted room at the end of the tube.
Crick’s face is washed-out tired; I can tell he doesn’t have much left to give. He’s struggling to move forward, but his steps are dragging. He’s been keeping his left forearm on the glass of the tube to steady himself, fresh blood a long brush stroke on the glass, his collarbone wounds oozing open from exertion. His pallid skin shines like rice wine on a porcelain plate.
“Crick, are you...”
“Go ahead, Will. Just, go. You got to... save yourself...”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not leaving you. Come on, we’re almost there.”
Amara turns in the doorway of the lit up room. She’s a silhouette, light streaming around her limbs. “Hurry!” She screams.
“He’s hurt,”
“I know, but there’s not time. Pick him up and bring him in here. We have to take off, and now!”
Crick’s arm is all stocky muscle, hangs like a limp seal over my shoulders.
“I got you, big guy.” He shuffles along until we make it through the doorway at the end of the tube. There are two columns of blinking lights at opposing corners of the room, square stacks of metal boxes. The room is the shape and color of a bleached egg, with a visual of the Digger’s wasteland stretched along one of the oblong walls. In the middle of it all, is a leather chair, which Amara has seated herself in. Two skeletal robot arms, with piston elbows and loose hosing for ligaments, hang from the ceiling, each hand spiked with a long needle.
“Get in here.” Amara says. The door slides shut behind me as I shuffle in with Crick around my neck.
“Ever wonder how a piece of lettuce feels as it’s passed through your bowels?”
I shake my head.
“Well, you’re about to find out.” She says. As if on cue, the two machines whir around, their needles poised over Amara’s outstretched arms. Then they plunge down, the needles with audible thunks as they go into her veins.
Amara screams. Crick slumps to the floor, his legs folded over one another like a teddy bear, my legs growing weak as I see the blood rushing up the lengths of the needle, through the hosing and into Phyrxian’s far off belly.
“Oh my god...”
“I’m okay, Will. Phyrxian needs the energy I get from sunlight in order to fly through the Fade. It’s a sick little ingenious invention of Yama Dempuur. Now listen, go by the screen. Okay, okay, now pinch your thumb and forefinger together, and then slowly pull them apart. Slowly. That’s it, that’s it. Okay, now that screen that appeared, pull it apart with your hands, make it bigger. See the green light? Slide it over to the yellow, er, no, the red. Okay, okay, good. God damn, I forgot how much this hurts.”
The ship lurches, and as it does, my ears ring with a sound of breaking glass from all around me.
“The Fade... it’s on us. This world is... done for...” Phyrxian violently shakes. The lights on the two columns burn brightly, moon rings of color dilating as the ship rises into the air, as the Fade eats up the wasteland outside, and washes over us. The visual of the wasteland cracks like a ceramic saucer dropped to the floor. One by one, the broken pieces are eaten up by the red lightning that crackles atop the Fade’s gray surface.
In the midst of the neon red lightning, Phyrxian’s black tendrils reach, grasping for a jagged piece of time and space before it is consumed by the Fade. The tendril is the only thing that has real dimension; the gray is simply nothingness, infinitely vast but depthless. The red lightning crackles with a half-realized quality to it, like aged 35mm film, but as the first of Phyrxian’s tendrils wraps its inkiness around a piece of cracked reality, the piece grows more real, like a sharpened piece of flint, an arrowhead. The other pieces slip under the surface of the gray, as does the red lightning, until it’s only the Fade on the screen’s surface, with Phyrxian’s tendril holding the piece of the wasteland in the bottom left corner.
“That was close,” Amara says.
“No kidding, that was close. But now what? Where are we going?”
“We go deep into the Fade, until we come out on somewhere else.”
“Well, that’s just great. Vague, as usual, and I don’t understand a thing... oh god, Crick!” The jostling of the ship must have thrown Crick about, because he lies in a tangled heap in a sullied corner of the white room. There’s blood on the walls and dirt from his boots, as if to say, ‘this spot is reserved for a man whose had a really tough time out there.’ Even the comatose man’s beard has faded, from a merry orange to an otter’s slick winter coat. I hold his head in my hands, unsure of what to do.
“I’m just a bike mechanic, goddamn it,” But my excuses aren’t going to help matters. His cheeks are drawn, the skin weather beaten with the tightness of polished wood, a coffin lid. It’s a face I’ve seen before, a mask that all men must wear in the throes of death and dying. He looks like my dad.
“I can’t imagine him dying from his wounds. He couldn’t have lost that much blood.” Amara says. The whirring of the needles sound like buzz saws on fresh cedar.
“It might not even be the blood. It might be all that... stuff he did. All that light.”
Amara is quiet for a moment. She makes a pained swallowing sound, then, “So many different beings and worlds. One can never know the different shapes life will take on, what different abilities and powers.”
“I thought I kind of got it. I mean, before all this. I thought I had a good handle on how life worked.” Hyper awareness crowds at the corners of my eye, and I’m washed over with a helpless sort of prescience, akin to that which occasionally meets you at the border of sleep and wakefulness. Suddenly, there’s the winter, the big hole yawning, the blue tarpaulin flapping in the wind. I see the fireplace, the orange reflecting on the creamy white paint, the wall billowing like a brahmin’s robe.
I find it hard to shake awake.
“Hey!” Amara’s voice brings me back to the ship, to the needles suckling on her veins, to Crick’s head in my lap. “Don’t lose it. You’re in the Fade now. You have to be extra vigilant. You let your concentration slip, and you’ll lose yourself. There’s all this detritus floating around us, grasping on to the ship, the last remnants of destroyed worlds. Even Phyrxian has to hold on to something. It has the piece of earth from the wasteland in one of it’s tendrils. See? It keeps Phyrxian grounded, keeps it from being consumed by the nothingness all around us.”
“How do I ground myself?” I sound like I’m sleep talking.
“Just stay focused on the here and now. Stay focused on my voice, on the ship.”
“What about Crick?”
“You have to wake him up. Dreaming in the Fade is dangerous business.”
I pat Crick’s cheek a few times, with nothing but nothing happens but his head rocking back and forth. I look to Amara, who watches with a consternated bend in her brow. “Hit him harder,” She says, so I do. It takes two hard slaps, but a moan trickles from Crick’s lips, and his eyes crack open. His teeth are lacquered black with dried blood.
“William?” His eyes tear up. “Who am I?”
“Crick! You’re Crick!” Amara yells. “Don’t doubt it, don’t lose it! Hold on to what you said, whatever you do. Doubt’s a bad road to go down in the Fade. Please, trust me.”
“Doubt...” Crick mumbles, saliva leaking from the sides of his mouth. It trickles out in an unbroken line, just like the blood in the scene on the door, which had been carved as a mere line pouring from a small man’s open stomach into the caped man’s waiting cup. As I think on the door, and what the sequence of carvings could have meant, I also notice that there is an additional presence in the room other than Amara, myself and Crick. It seems to creep in like a cold fog, but it’s invisible, and almost imperceptible. Actually, I feel like I have to be slipping a bit in my concentration to even realize it’s there.
“What is Yama Dempuur?” I ask, though I’m not
sure why. Something moves me to pose the question.
“What? Not now, Will. Stay with it.”
“But you’ve mentioned it before.” My voice doesn’t even sound like my own. “I’d really like to know more about it.”
“Fine. It was the walking city. The last vestige of a once great empire, made up of the descendants of the people who tried, and failed, to imprison Hyperion for their own purposes. They figured out the way to the center of it all, to where father and son, Helios and Hyperion, spun around each other perpetually and forever, in a perfect balance. The force at the center of all existence, from the smallest atom to the most enlightened mind, Helios and Hyperion were the foundations of all space and time, knowledge and ideas.
“The Yamass thought if they harnessed Helios and Hyperion, that they’d have control over reality and creation. They could manipulate the very framework of existence as they saw fit. Unfortunately, once they removed Hyperion from the orbit and imprisoned him in a mechanical suit the size of the Coral Islands, the spin was disrupted, Helios crashed and faded, and reality cracked,”
“The Fade...” Crick whispers. “Helios... Hyperion...”
“The Fade,” Amara continues. “Nothingness, the absence of the dynamism that propels life and existence forward, came into being.” She’s talking fast, manic, the story like a chant. “A paradox of sorts, but so are the times we live in. The end of days, the end of worlds. The Yamass, the great explorers of time and space that they were, relied on hubris instead of foresight and good judgement when they split Helios and Hyperion apart. Most of the worlds that they had mapped out in the great framework of reality and the bridges that connected them are washed away now, consumed by the Fade. Only barely realized vestiges of worlds remain, like the Digger’s wasteland, or the Coral Islands, my home.
“Yama Dempuur roams around the burnt out remains of its world, a walking city, constantly on the watch for the Fade, always ready to outrun it. It isn’t quite alive, like Phyrxian, but it has some biological properties, or so I am told. When it is airborne and not touching the ground, it can traverse the Fade unscathed. It has six great legs, and looks like a beetle. Under its dome lies the city. It is where many of my people, the Ma’atha, or who the Yamass call ‘barkskins,’ spend their lives, subjected to life in ghettoes and indentured servitude.
“It’s pounded into each barkskin’s head that becoming a conduit in a Hyperion hunter’s ship is the most noble of callings. But there are a few of us who see beyond this brainwashing. The scholar showed me the truth. What else are we Ma’atha doing but giving ourselves up these missions meant to find Hyperion in his mecha so that they can then find Helios, and bind them both, and reclaim some unrealized past glory... God it’s all so crazy. All of them, every last one of them, from the majority who live these lavish lifestyles as kept aristocrats of unblemished bloodlines, to the few who answer the calling of the military, who traverse the Fade in ships like Phyrxian, searching for the lost route to the center of it all, for the lost Helios and Hyperion, in his giant armor...”
“What you gonna do with me?” Crick yells, his words slurring. But he snaps me back from sleep, where Amara’s story had almost sent me, and from which I may not have returned.
“He’s... he’s delirious. He needs water.”
“Hopefully, wherever we’re going, there’ll be some. Phyrxian’s coordinates seem to be for a world deep, deep in the Fade. Pacheco must have made a breakthrough in his navigating, but he sure as hell couldn’t go anywhere without a barkskin to power his ship.”
“She lies...” A voice says from somewhere deep in the ship.
“What was that?” I say.
“What was what?”
“She’s full of lies...” The same voice says, but closer, now in the room, floating around my head, whispering into my ear. It has a hypnotizing effect.
“You lie,” I say.
“What?” Her lips make the shape, but there’s only silence, except that same raspy voice, now firmly implanted in my mind.
“Come to me...” it says. I look at Crick, who has crawled out from my cradling hands. I haven’t even noticed him moving away from me. He’s taken refuge against one of the walls, his head between his legs. He’s muttering to himself, and oddly enough, I can hear him. His and the beckoning voice melt together, making the otherwise silent air tremble around them.
“No, no, no... I am, I am, I am...” His voice brings light to the cabin, like a streetlight coming on as dusk slowly settles. I hadn’t even realized it was growing darker. Amara looks at me, her eyes wide and panicked.
“What’s happening?” I can hear her again. It’s like I’m coming out of a drunken stupor but still don’t have any control over my legs. “Will! Don’t go too far with your thoughts. Look, you still have to find substance in Phyrxian, in me. Don’t lose it.”
“Come to me...” The voice sounds like thunder over an orange plain, a scrubland of plump echeveria and tumbleweeds. I close my eyes, try to shake it from my head. Amara yells out my name, but she’s only shimmering wind chimes beneath the roar of a hurricane. And I see it, the Digger’s wasteland, only it’s like I’m looking at the sand through a fishbowl, and the sky is all stars and bright blackness, with streaks of azure run through it. Clouds, like torn cotton, wisp across the sky, like they’re being pulled down a drain.
I shake my head, and the scene flashes, cracks appearing. I’m trying to get away from here, to get back to the ship, but something won’t let me go. The wasteland becomes a broken funhouse mirror. In one of the pieces of glass, I see him, a tall man, with ruddy purple skin, an eye patch and no lips. His clothes are heavy and defined, a black suit of armor. But it’s his cape that is most striking. As the figure moves from one piece of glass to the next, the cape contorts into shapes on his back, first a set of bat wings, then a spiked ridgeback. He’s the man from the carvings in the door, the man who ate the hearts of the smaller men and drank their blood.
“Come to me...” Pacheco says again, his vocal cords caked in mausoleum dust. “Come to me...” The cracks in the mirror fall away like pieces of thread, and the man is standing before me, his boots chalked with orange, the cloak loosely draped over his chest and hanging from his back, the tattered ends tapping their frayed tips on the wind.
Amara is screaming, but I can’t see her. Her voice is quickly eaten up by the wind, which is rising in intensity. I’m reminded of the time I was in the flats of Missouri, two weeks before New Mexico, when the sky turned green. I was by a town called Poplar Bluff and I thought a twister was going to touch down. Wipe me and my bike clear out of the midwest. The wind kept rising, and keeps rising now, ripping at the man’s cloak, clouds torn asunder, flayed cirrus.
Pacheco. It’s him, Hyperion hunter, Yama Dempuurn expeditionary leader, with all the bells and whistles Amara was talking about. Pacheco, with his terrible, withered face. He looks at me as if he hates me more than anything, before putting his thumbs under his jaw and unhinging it. His mouth stretches open, a snake’s, a gaping maw. His eye gets buried under folds of flesh, while the skin around his lips cracks as it stretches wider and wider. There’s an echo from deep within his mouth, like a furnace breathing to life in the bowels of a basement. The wind changes, starts pulling me towards the mouth, the lower jaw hanging down by his navel.
“You really just going to go with him, kid?”
Straining, I turn my head around. “Dad?”
“The one and only.” He takes the cigarette from his mouth, crushes it beneath his Carhart boots. He’s shirtless, his ribs like xylophone bars. The U.S. Coast Guard hat is still on his head, and his jeans are faded somewhere between a whale’s skin and the bones underneath.
“Dad, you have to help me...”
“Don’t worry. Just stay focused on me, and you’ll be...”
“COME...” My Dad fades out, replaced by Pacheco’s mouth. It takes up the entirety of the sky, gray gums leading to a bottomless well of darkness.
?
??Whoa, Will, hey! Turn around, kid!” My neck muscles react like a lawn sprinkler to my Dad’s voice, as if at odds with itself. “Hey, that was a close call. That guy, that Pacheco, he’s a conniving one. Won’t eat your skin like that last guy, but will probably kill you pretty quick, just the same. He wants that girl you’re with. What’s her name?”
“Amara Mona.”
“Beautiful. Now listen. This, all this, is real. You can’t doubt it anymore. That guy you’re traveling with, be careful around him, alright? He may have got you out of that pickle you were in, but I don’t think you can trust him as far as you can throw him.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“Well, I was in a land of dying, Will. I wasn’t at my best. The only thing I can really do there is whisper the truth, anyways. Haven’t you noticed I look a lot better?”
“Yeah, well, you’re still really skinny.”
“Look who’s talking. You eat anything at all on this bike trip?”
“Anything I want, actually. I had Fig Newtons, milk and a box of Cheerios for dinner last night. And this morning I had the best, most greasy omelette I think I’ve ever had.”
“Doused it with ketchup, I bet, like you did with most things. Fries, hamburgers, eggs. Your mom used to say, ‘you want some eggs with your ketchup?’ You might not remember this, but, okay, when you were a kid, we used to go out to the henhouse, and you used to have to pick all the eggs up in a particular order. You couldn’t just put ‘em in a basket. No, it was important which one came first, second, third. And you’d be humming this tune to yourself, and I asked you once, I said, ‘Will, what are you singing there under your breath,’ and you just look up at me, with those big eyes you had as a kid, and you just start speaking nonsense. All nonsense. So what do I do? Well, I start speaking nonsense back...”
After collecting all the eggs, my dad would close the door on the dusty coop and then we’d walk back down the gravel to the house. My Dad held my hand in his, the roughness of his hand like warm wool on my skin. Our nonsense talk made sense to me. I felt the words came from somewhere far off, and had meaning. They connected everything together, and made it all fit. They clicked together in perfect harmony, the perfect language between me and my Dad and the world we lived in.
I’m back in front of the house, having just collected the eggs. The memory is so vivid, I can see the brown lines between my father’s teeth as he smiles and laughs. He lifts me up in his arms, my hands wrapped around the handle of the basket full of eggs. The sun licks up from behind the house and catches me in the eyes. I squint, and my grip slackens. I can feel an egg come loose, and fall to the driveway below.
Two loose chickens run over, and immediately start to peck at the yolk. I look at my father, concerned. “Da Nava Da Nava Di?” I say.
“Dibayanda Do.” He says.
This is all real.
I look back at the broken egg, and the yolk isn’t yellow anymore, but black. The membrane has broken, and it’s spreading on the ground, like a stream of cooling lava. The gravel has turned orange and sandy, and the chickens are dead. Their lifeless beaks are hooked to the oozing black yolk, which proceeds over their faces and necks and bodies. Soon, their bodies are completely lost, as the yolk grows so large it is now a gaping hole with rows of blunted molars and incisors appearing at its edges.
“Dad...” But he’s no longer there. It’s only me, as a child, crying as the mouth rises up from the sand, unhinging itself further and further, until there’s nothing but blackness and a putrid wind pulling me in towards it. I lose my footing on the ground and I’m falling, falling...
“Dibayanda Do,” I say, and am consumed.
Chapter IX: “Lady Magdala”