CBITH:(D) We Two Are Legion

[jack_babalon]

Terminus Early Morning
February 10th, 2007
~Rob M.

Adam stands there with his eyes closed. His breaths come quick and jagged. Blood pounds into the chest, tightening the heart with the growing strain. A Rage heat burns red in his belly. He grips his temples with the fingers of both hands to hold back the explosion building up in his skull. Sarah says nothing. She's made up her mind. Gently she reaches into her jacket pocket and removes a hand painted tiger striped Walther p99. She aims it calmly at him.

"Adam..."

"Not another word!"

"You don't understand..."

The Gomchicoth step out of the silence of their invisibility forming a rough circle around Adam. His pain has stoked the fires of their hunger into an insatiable demand. They will feed off everything that his pain touches; every emotion that it is not, every memory it has come into contact with... everything but the pain itself, so that when they are done feasting their prey is left a catatonic wreck of amnesiac suffering. Hunched over and buried in shells of rotting coats, sweaters, blankets, stuffed duffel bags and rags. Each one bears a pale, hideously unformed face (a prenatal car crash victim given birth) with lipless mouths that form a crown of tiny teeth around the edge of a hollowed out gray-pink tunnel. They seem to almost resemble giant beetles who have been taught to walk upright. Sarah aims into the center of the nearest one patiently, closing off what she see's and then seeing them for what they really are. In their 'true' astral forms she recognizes them immediately as the Gha'agsheblah: A series of cat headed giants whose skin glistens an oily black. Each one connected by a pale blue phosphorescent umbilical line that runs from their bellies all the way into the gateway of Da'ath, the Abyss, the black hole sephira that allow the residents of the Qliphoth to gain access to our world ever since the first days of the 'Fall of Man'.

She focuses her attention down the barrel of the gun. She withdraws from the distance of difference between her and her pistol. Still try as she might she can't be sure whether her bullets will hit their target or pass through them harmlessly into Adam.

"Run!" she barks the order out.

"I see them" he whispers remaining motionless, he raises a single finger to his lips to hush her. But it's too late. Moving as one they pounce into a swarm around him. A sickly sweet buzzing drowns the room out. Sarah leaps up incanting a strange mix of condensed words removed of both vowel and repeating constonants while firing the p99. Ten shots burst without miss and ripple like pebbles into a lake across the hides of the Gha'agsheblah. They don't even seem to notice. She lowers the pistol and scrambles for scrambles for another clip. She knows it's too late now but maybe she can get a clear shot to put Adam out of his misery.

But then a single word tears across the rising din:

בהיר!

She barely has time to drop to the ground and huddle into a ball before a beam of white light fires down from somewhere beyond the ceiling into the middle of the Gamchicoth swarm. The last thing she see's is a contraction of the darkness, the sucking sound of all the shadows being drained into the center of the frenzied creatures... the almost inaudible popping nosie immediately followed by a wideing bubble of pure illumination that floods the entire building.

There is a hiss of static in her ears. A cold wave hits, crisp as stepping out into a winter morning somehow impossibly mixed with the heat sensation of opening a oven door. Thoughts freeze and then melt. Fight-or-flight panic scenarios dissolve into smoke. Her skin crackles and crawls with electricity. Speed tingles wash over her nerve endings in a sudden wave of goosebumps. Memory shrivels into the moment. Awareness fragments into countless pieces. Each one spinning out across the building, the city, firing into the depths of no-thingness, until their velocity slows down and each one floats in the blanket of Not, burning as bright as a star in the perpetual night that lies behind closed eyes.

Glittering. Perfect. The peace of knowing your face before you were born.

Forever drips in drops of seconds.

"You can get up now." She hears Adam say from the height of some great mountain. She lifts her head slowly as if being awoken from a dream to soon. She looks around and for a moment doesn't recognize the strange man standing over her with his hand thrust out. Vague patterns crystalize back into the ego mask. She recognizes that the man is Adam, only without the blond stubble-beard, wino chic and hermit hair.

"I'm alright." she dismisses his gesture and picks herself up off the floor. "The Gomchicoth..?"

"If you mean those things? Gone... far as I can tell, anyway."

"What the hell was that?" she brushes the dirt from her outfit.

"Pretty cool huh? Kinda like one of those anime cartoons or something..."

"There was this word..."

"You used to know Hebrew better than me."

"You used to look like shit warmed over too, until about roughly thirty seconds ago..."

"Yeah, well what can I say... I clean up nice." he shrugs, "Besides you've been out for about twenty minutes now."

"Fuck me running." she mutters then it hits her. "You've looked like that all along haven't you?"

"Here, you dropped this." Adam tosses her her p99 ignoring the question. She catches it in mid air without looking. She quickly has it vanish into her coat and it's replaced by her cigarette case.

Adam walks over to the large hole in the brick faced wall. It overlooks a field of brambles and trash out into the looming Terminus skyline.

"So anyway... before we were so rudely interrupted." he says and she's not sure whether he's talking to her or the skyline.

"I need your help."

"You said that the last time. Why should I?"

"Because we're all that's left."

"And?"

"Because i'm asking you to."

"Should've thought about that before..."

"'Before' what, Adam? I'm sorry that I broke your heart, okay. But I couldn't lie..."

"That's never been a problem for you..."

"...to myself." she continues forcefully. "I don't know what it is you wanted. I mean did you think we were going to get married, that i'd pop out a few kids and have dinner waiting when you came home from drug dealing?"

"No... I got... I got comfortable around you. I know that. It's just sometimes this... this life of ours. It gets to be too much, okay? Things like those Gom-Chia-Goths or whatever. Who wants to deal with that shit everyday?"

"I do." She says matter of factly walking over to Adam. "And deep down inside so do you. You were never interested in being a magickian... to be honest you can't stand 90% of them, you just liked the magick. The rush of the poetry made flesh. Outrunning death and taking the madness from behind. The ability to make the world just that much less ordinary. You love that shit. You live for it. That's your edge and yeah even if I had stayed or if you had found someone else who would you'd have gotten bored eventually... then how long would you have lied to me, to her, to yourself before you left?"

He says nothing.

"Am I lying now?"

"No." he admits. He looks at her, shakes his head slowly to himself to her to anybody else who might be watching, "Look I don't know what it is you think I can do here. That thing you've invoked..."

"created" she corrects.

"...it's not just going to be simply named and back under your thumb. It's gotten too strong for that now. It's got a whole cult behind it now..."

"An army actually ... but there must be a reason it wanted us all dead."

"'Us'?"

"Yeah 'us'. It's hunting down the magickians that don't join up with it. Picking them off one by one until there's none of us left that can jeopardize it's existence. Do you think it'll just let you rot away here until you've drunk yourself to death. You came after it."

"Because you blackmailed me..."

"And that's something It's really going to give a shit about."

"There must be others. What about the Circle?"

"Now that Louisiana's turned into the occult version of Dodge City after Katrina, half the operators in the southeast have gone down there to make their name and fortune. Which means most of the Circle has been overwhelmed trying to keep the peace down there."

"The Lodge?"

"The Black Lodge has been laying low since It started gaining power. I don't think even they know what to make of it. I know it's hard to believe but it's just us now."

Adam stands there for a second weighing the options.

"So what's your plan then?"

"We stop running. We stop hiding. We bring the fight to It. Pick off It's army until there's no one left to believe in It. Then it'll be weak enough for us to finish It off."

"That's a plan?" he snorts "And what were you gonna do when I said 'no', again?"

"Then i'll stay here with you... for however long I may have." the words fall heavy from her, "I don't want to die alone. It's that simple really. I know I have no right but you're the only one that's left. How many times do I have to keep telling you that you're my last chance either way?"

Neither one says anything. Terminus sparkles in the last dregs of night. They stand there soaking in the situation. Finally Adam speaks.

"Y'know I always had this theory that none of this is real."

"How so?"

"The magick, the monsters, the strange shit we seem to be able to do. You remember my motto when I took the Probationers Oath?"

""Credo Querum Absurdum"... I believe because it is absurd. You got if from an old Eliphas Levy book."

"I know we're playing a game that doesn't exist unless you're playing the game... but sometimes I just wonder." he trails off and kneels down to scoop up a handful of dirt and broken glass.

"What're you doing?"

"I'm tired of being scared Sarah. I'm tired of waiting for the day when the magick won't come no more and the law finally catches up to me. I'm tired of hiding from the monsters and the bastards of the world. I'm just sick of the guilt and the fear. So for what it's worth... I got you back."

Adam holds the palm filled with the dirt-glass mixture and blows into it. The glass particles sparkle as they rise on a sudden wind that has synched with Adam's breath. Each piece reflects what little light is offered by the sinking moon and the distant street lights. They float up higher and higher until Sarah can see what's he done. Above the entire skyline of Terminus the stars and constellations shine down for the first time in years on impossibly clean sky.

Sarah looks at him and he shoots her that goofy wink of his.

"C'mon then... let's get out of here." he takes her by the hand.

"Where?"

"Wherever you want."

Kinetic graffiti tags light up on the walls inside, they come to live flowing like neon rivers into one another cascading down to the ground, forming a puddle around Adam and Sarah that bursts into a blue-white flame. He takes her by the arm and folds her into his body. The flames begin to engulf them both until there are only two superilluminal bodies in what appears to be a lovers embrace. Together they both sink into the puddle of fire. When the top of their heads vanish the flames flickers, flares up and is swallowed into the dark earth. The colors recoil slowly back up the crumbling walls of the ruins.

The first light of day inches across the dawn. The glass particles fall back down returning the sky back to a starless morning.

Comments

[catwalk.livejournal.com]

even the language i don't quite follow and the images i can't quite get my mind's eye around fascinate me and keep me engaged...

and that's a rather sentimental stopping point ;-)

A sentimental stopping point

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

Yeah i'm just a big softie at heart.

[gaeasdaughter.livejournal.com]

Realllly good one.

Can't wait for next "issue."

[jackbabalon23.livejournal.com]

Why thank you... but then again you've always been my biggest fan.