Tranziltor Park: fruits (7/7)

copyright (c) JMD, 2006

     A whistle-howl wind struck his window.  Coyotes bayed.  His jeans were on as fast as he could manage, his shirt over his head, shoes tied.  The pitch of night gave him shivers – a finger of fear lit cool flame on the nape of his neck.  
     Out here, out here! the cry rose, an ever quickening pulse of noise that throbbed at the base of his skull.  He crept down the stairs once he overcame the thought of his parents waking, and pushed himself out the screen door into darkness.  
     
     The shredded corn field beneath his feet remained invisible as he tore up the mottled ground.  He kept tripping, but he was prepared for that, and caught himself each time.  His arms leapt from his sides out to the nothingness of black.  Fear shivered – no, convulsed.  It made him alive.  All around he could hear the coyotes, and their presence made his hair tingle.  The more he actualized his terror, the more the energy whipped through his body like an internal hurricane of electric juice.  His strides brought him to the edge of a wood, and as the unknown of that ominous coagulation of shadows and sounds turned to face him, his terror ruptured.  He could not go there.
So he ran and ran.  And he kept on running his entire life, until age made him thirty, and in his apartment in the bustling city of Amsford he waited until night doused day, black bled sight, and stars stole sunlight.
     Now, when he had finished playing his video games, and forgotten about the Doctor’s medication for at least six hours, he shuffled into his mangy jeans.  
     Out here, out here! the fear called again, even in the sprawling chaos of metropolis.  Oh, it had been silenced once, when the Doctor had come, when the pills had begun to speak to him.  But now he had his power back.  He could resist the pills, push them to the remote corners of his mouth and cough them into his toilet afterwards.  He had beaten the Doctor.  He had beaten monotony, and the gray uselessness of placidity.  
     He tore down the streets like a madman.  He could smell the corn again, and over the thrumming waves of cars his hair stood at the pierce of yelping coyotes.  He ran and ran and ran, and his breathing became stronger, deeper.  Terror shot up his nerves, coated his synapses with viscous juice, slid over his heart.  Out here, out here!
     His strides brought him to a wood, the sign said Tranziltor Park, and just as it used to, the shadows and sounds played on him as though he were a badly-tuned violin, screeching and squealing and crying.  But he would do it this time, he would go in, because this was his one chance to do what he had only dreamed of doing since the tranquility of chemicals had robbed him of the perpetual fermentation of thrill.
     Down a staircase he proceeded cautiously, alert, struggling against insanity, or sanity, whichever one it was that threatened him with oblivion.  He nearly slipped on the crumbling stone, and then onto the pathway beneath looming oak trees his steps took him.  The trail twisted into the recesses of the park, over uncertain mounds and jutting roots, then past two opposing boulders, and finally to a red bench beside a river.
     A group of fluttering moths batted mindlessly against a lamp.  He spun at a noise, then whirled back to see the moths gone.  A terrible munching sound reverberated above the giant trees.  
     And the sound of wings!  
     Like leather flapping against leather, and a keening wail that was not the wind.
     The creature flopped down not ten feet away, scuffling towards him.  Beady, garnet-eyes blinked hungrily, talons scraped the dirt.  His terror matrixed, and with the newfound energy he fashioned himself a sword of pure dread.  The weapon materialized in his hands, and holding back a loathsome shout of fear he sliced at the bat-beast until all that remained were shreds of red string.  
     No blood.
     He stooped, shaking, and picked up some of the material.  It was leather.  He let out a whooping laugh that caressed the terror.  As if in response, a cacophony of rodent chatter erupted across the park.  He had just enough time to swing his dread upon the head of a poised snake slithering near his feet, its fangs bared, venom dripping, until he saw he was surrounded.  Terror multiplied.  The matrix fisioned and lines of electric juice sprayed his reflexes with interminable speed.  Snake skin flew until at last the onslaught ceased, the ground awash in venom and teeth and stains.
     No blood.
     Then the squirrels came biting, clawing, chattering until his head filled with the noise.  Terror scraped the sounds back out, emptied him of thought, and spat them back at the incessant rodents.  His sword made them inert, one by one.  But pain needled his legs, they had hurt him there, blood oozed and refused to mingle with his jeans.  The stickiness made him feel claustrophobic.
     Terror collapsed.  His sword fizzled into the air.  He mourned for the touch of his juice, but it had been depleted – he knew because the weakness in his knees and the ache behind his eyes told him he should have eaten the damn drugs.
     “Shane,” someone said.
     Through a daze he saw the man approach.  Fear refused to come back though, he didn’t have anything to fight with.  
     Out here, out here--
     “Shane,” the voice repeated, insisted.
     “Shane, I am Madring.  Come, you are hurt.”
     He felt a moment of hope, but then another voice interjected violently.
     “Stupid old man!  He is ours!”
     Shane spun to see the bearer of the second voice.  A tall figure, garbed completely in black, eating something –  it crunched in his mouth as the muscles in his jaw clenched, chewed.  But the first voice did not belong to an old man, as the black-clothed one suggested.  He was young, with fiery red hair and a tight beard, lithe and spry and looking ready to leap.
     “Stay back,” the black one warned, brown chunks of something dropping from his lips.  “He is ours.”
     “No,” Madring countered, “he is not.”
     A hiss escaped from the black one, he raised his hands like cudgels.  But he was backing up:  afraid perhaps, of this fiery-haired one who seemed so sure of himself.  He retreated until his back pressed against the trunk of an oak, and then with brilliant eyes flashing, shot something from his hands.
     Madring leapt as his pose had promised, and he landed in a feral position, crouched and squinting vicious intent.  “Now, my friend,” he gestured with a hand.
     An ear-splitting crack! attacked Shane’s ears, forced him to duck his head and hold his temples.  Staring in wonder behind the black one, he saw the tree move, move, and giant limbs encased the hissing man.  With a groan the tree fell and collapsed upon him.  Its roots screamed as they ripped loose from the soil.   Dirt rained around Shane, and the whole ground trembled in protest.
     The seconds seem to pass in stutters and stops, matching the uneven beat of Shane’s pounding heart.  A hand touched his shoulder.  He flinched, but a delicate, urgent voice soothed his nerves.
     “Rise, Shane.  We do not have much time!”
     He looked up, and what stood before him wrung tears from his eyes.
     She was radiant beyond compare.  With spider-silk hair and eyes like the shifting colors of a covenant rainbow.  Dots of silver wisped from her head, and around her small shoulders hung a cape of leaves.
     He stammered disconnected syllables.
     “Rise!” she pleaded, her eyes beginning to frown in worry; the anxiety of all children in all places.  That made him move.
     The fiery one joined them, and clasping Shane in a gesture of friendship, urged them to follow him.  At his bidding they waded into the river that moved gently beside the red bench.  They followed its slow course hastily, splashing their way to a small copse of trees.  Here they left the water and huddled inside the hovel that the trunks provided.  Shane bunched down over his legs and rocked himself over them, comforting them, for they stung to no end.
     “She comes,” Madring whispered.  
     “What is your name?” Shane asked, oblivious now to the tension that held his companions.  “What is your name?”
     The girl turned to him as if she wasn’t sure that Shane was really there.  She looked through him, beyond him, at a place somewhere that was...not here.  
     “Etherea,” she returned distantly.  
     “Etherea,” he repeated.  “Etherea, you are beautiful.”
     “Hush!” the man insisted, placing a hand over Shane’s mouth.
     A cackle rolled like the cracking of bones throughout the park.  Some of  Shane’s visceral terror returned – he felt the juice forming around his shoulders.
     “She is close, now.”  Madring whispered.  
     “Does she know we are here?” Etherea asked, her eyes wholly white.
     “Yes,” he nodded, “yes.”
     “Come out,” shrilled a woman’s voice.  “Come out, out here, out here!”
     Instantly Shane’s terror re-matrixed.  His sword appeared, oscillating in his right hand like the destroyer of nightmares.  Or the maker of them.
     “We have to face her, we have no choice!” Etherea’s voice quivered.
     “Then we will,” Madring’s steely words contrasted hers.
     “Who is she?” Shane asked at once.  All of his life he had relished the fear of the unknown.  It had fashioned him alive, but there was something about this “she” out there that made him want to know what he was facing.  He needed a name.  Terror demanded it.
     “She is Babylon,” the fiery man whispered.  Some of his ire had drained away.
     “Nimrod’s Daughter,” the girl added, as if the additional information were needed.  “Cancerous and inflamed, boiled and poxed, gushing and foaming with virus.  Nimrod’s Daughter, faithless Babylon of decay and rot.”     
     As if answering to a summons, the cackle resounded yet again, and Shane could practically see the bones splintering this time.
     “She knows,” Madring said stolidly.  “Let us face her.”  
     He and the fantastical girl stepped out of the copse, but Shane hesitated.  The bones that he yet heard breaking – the twisting roll of her laugh – might as well have been his.  
     “What is she going to do?” he flustered.
     “Just come!” Madring tensed.  “We need you!” his voice receded as he walked away.
     “Me?” he could hardly think of why.  Nevertheless he pushed himself to his feet, wincing against the needles that sizzled in his calves.  The scene that greeted him spliced his terror – his sword split into two halves and fell to the ground.
     She sat, squat and laughing, on a boulder surrounded by dust.  Her face was bunched and covered in exaggerated makeup – it made her eyes seem like black holes, her mouth like an open red wound.  She had a brown purse around her shoulder, and as she caught sight of Shane, her hands stroked it in calm assurance.
     “Shane, Shane, little Shane, Shane’s come out to play insane!” and she stopped laughing.  The sudden silence made the seconds refuse to follow one another – time slowed, the wind had died.  
     “We are ready to withstand you, Babylon!” Madring bellowed with a voice that shouldn’t have belonged to him; deep and rumbling like a storm.  He gestured to the trees, twice, and they commenced to rip their roots out of the ground.  With the sound of screaming, vegetative resistance, they surrounded the woman until she was no longer visible.
     “Now!” shouted Etherea.
     The giant circle of trunks compressed suddenly.  They warbled and melded into one another, until a writhing mass of knotted wood replaced their individual forms.  Babylon hissed within the cyclonic gale, loud enough to be heard over the shrieking trees.
     “This will not do!  Will not do!” he heard her whine.  For a moment he caught a glimpse inside the eye of the wooden maelstrom.  She was digging into her brown purse...and pulling out a handful of...dust.
     Dust?
     She flung it at the trees.  Nothing happened initially – the trees whirled, screamed, threatened.  But in a flash they began to be eaten alive.  They looked as though they were being undone, unraveled, like their particles were breaking away and fizzling into empty space.  And the dust was doing it.
     The dust?
     “My precious children...!” the woman regaled.  Then her grotesque face turned vile; she breathed, “Eat them!”, and pointed at Shane and his companions.
     A wall of dust slid up into the air.  It solidified, shook, and began to take on a shape.  To Shane’s increased Terror, a replica of Babylon’s face leered down at them – impossibly huge and snapping its teeth sadistically.  It fell upon Madring and the girl, and he heard their shouts for help as his fear began to augment.  
     The terror siphoned off to a place it had never gone before:  the stars.  Shane looked up, at the silver dots that winked in cosmic jest.  He drew a sudden parallel to the silver seeds that wisped from Etherea’s hair, and revelation struck.  
He knew who she was.
Consequently he knew who this hideous woman-beast was.  What she represented, what she meant to accomplish, and how.  The dust hardened around Madring and the girl; a strange buzzing noise accompanied their frantic movements.
      “That’s not all!” Etherea’s voice implored, distant beneath the drone of the buzzing.  
     “Not all what!?” Shane shouted back over the din.
     “There is more!”
     “What?!”
     Babylon rose then, her nostrils flaring, face flushing.  “You are mine!” she squeezed a fist at him, as though she already had him trapped in her palm.
     The terror froze.  It became cold, like ice, and slicing through his veins he realized that it was not terror at all.  It was...hopeful longing; a desire yet also a sorrow, painful and sweet.  The stars.  What about the stars?  He lifted his head up to the night sky.
     “Come to me now, Shane!  Out here, out here where you belong!  I own you!  I OWN YOU!” Babylon’s voice shredded under the force she exerted – her neck bulged and veins imperiled popping.
     What about the stars?  
His nameless emotion, that which used to be his terror, condensed around the center of his chest.  Unconsciously he started to moan, ache.  It was so strong.  It yearned to reach, to go, to fly to something, somewhere up there in all those stars.  
     “NOOOO!” Babylon roared.  She had grown, impossibly huge, and her eyes had expanded to such a state that they looked as though they might slip out at any moment.
     The ache burned, smooth and cold, like a focused crystal-fire.  He released it.  As soon as it shot up he received something back.  He didn’t even see the ice-flame reach the stars, just saw the flash that had returned to him.  Returned in him.  Settled there.  Breathing.  
     Living.
     Instantly he turned to Madring and Etherea.  The dust swarmed them.  He extended his hand over the surging mess and ordered “Stop!”
     The buzzing weakened to a low hum.  
     “Back!” he yelled, pointing to Babylon.  It fizzed, snapped, then whirled back towards the monstrosity which had sent it.
     Madring struggled to his feet, bleeding, and pulled Etherea up onto hers.  They stared in gaping wonder at Shane, then Babylon, then back at Shane.  Etherea placed a glance up to the stars.
     “He comes,” she trembled, “just like I told you.  Not death.  Life, Madring.  Life.”
     The fiery-haired man shook.  He almost smiled.
     Babylon, however, stood over them like a tower.  She seethed; gusts of putrid wind blew at them from the repeated flaring of her nostrils.
     “Come close!  Quick!” Etherea shouted.  “To me!”
     Shane obeyed instantly.  Somehow he knew what to do, knew what was about to happen.  And although he couldn’t believe it, that living force in his chest intuited obedience.
     The girl handed him and Madring one of her seeds.
     “Eat it,” she entreated.  “Please.”
     Shane popped the silver pod into his mouth.  His tongue exploded.  Light shimmered across his field of vision, he could smell lilacs, like the ones at funerals, and time staggered, flipped, and broke.  Thought shattered into millions of indiscriminate fragments – sight vanished.  Then returned.
     “We are one.” Etherea, Madring, and Shane said at once.  “We are ONE!” they repeated, again in unison.  They looked down at themselves:  one body, the beautiful form of a woman, arraigned in white and gleaming glory.  
“W-Wow,” they said, from the part that was Shane.  
“I understand now!” they blurted, from the heart of Madring.  
“The day has finally come,” they sighed, from the glowing soul of Etherea.
     “Look!” She cried, upwards at the sky.
     Life descended.
     He took Her and spoke inaudible words to Babylon.  The Daughter of Nimrod cowered, screamed then, and gave one final lash with her long nails.  They caught the robes of Life, drew a crimson gash across the whiteness of His garments.  
     Babylon laughed, frantic with glee.  But Life smiled:  heaven breaking glory.
     “Into me,” He spoke, parting His ivory robes to reveal the wound that had just been made.
     “No!” the monstrosity wretched, scraping at the ground.
     “Into My wound.”
     Babylon sizzled.  Against her will she was pulled into His red-stained robes, yelping and cawing and howling.  Life winced.  His Face almost broke, but then He sealed the Rift that had been created there before Time itself had made things physical.  
     He clutched Her hand with gentle strength and, turning to gaze across the stars, took the land beneath His feet and rolled it up like a garment.
     
d

     And here, I am afraid to say, writing by conventional means becomes obsolete.  In order to continue with this story a whole new set of rules and laws must come into effect.  Indeed, a new universe must “be” before we may peek into that chapter.  So suffice the end to be left here.  For when we come to understand that all stories are not Fable, we set ourselves free from the desire to be entertained by them.  And when we similarly realize that all experiences are not Reality, we set ourselves free from the desire to be controlled by them.

copyright (c) JMD, 2006