Broken Angels (30 page)

He watched silently as Verdad, Victoria, and the woman in periwinkle-blue walked to stand against the white spaces of the room’s walls. He then rolled his head and looked at the woman in red, the one Vonda called “Vesuvius.” She was using the iron poker to jab at something in the fireplace. When she’d finished, Vonda thrust a shovel into the same spot. She pulled the shovel out of the fire and looked at the mound of smoldering black-white ashes with a satisfied smile. Darryl stared as Vonda gracefully approached him, not spilling a single ash, looking at him with a grin the entire time, until she was close enough to dump the shovel’s heap into the tub.

“The allegory is no more,” Vonda said. “In Reality, we’ll do things differently.”

In another state of mind, Darryl’s reaction might’ve been different; as it was, he just barely felt the hot ashes reacting with the tub’s liquid as they were subsumed, altering the liquid’s properties so the golden-brown eels were finally able to dissolve and fully mix with the rest of the concoction. The bath soon had the appearance of liquid sunlight, but Darryl had no reaction to the sight of it. The property of the liquid that had entered his nostrils like incense had been successful in putting him into an altered state of consciousness. The long-legged ladies no longer worried or scared him. What they were doing seemed one part elegant and one part absurd. Darryl stared with removed fascination as Vesuvius and Vonda walked to stand at another point in the room.

“We don’t want you to follow the path of an anonymous poet’s sad creation,” Vonda said. “We think you’re destined for greater things. You’re going to start all over, play a variation on a bad poet’s theme, revise the book by living it, in accordance with how The Beautiful One instructs you to.”

Darryl had just enough of a stake in the reality before him to determine that the five women were standing equidistant from one another, defying the room’s hexagonal design by standing against three walls and in two corners. If lines were drawn from each to the four others, the resulting design would resemble a pentagram within a pentagon. The suspended coffin was at the exact middle of the ladies’ design.

“Get set,” Vesuvius said.

The electric lights shut off, and the ceiling began to recede, sliding away to be hidden by the room’s upper corners, revealing in its place a grand skylight. The large window not only allowed the overhead moon’s light into the room, it also seemed to amplify it. The usually wan moon glow was more like bright baby-blue sunlight that spilled into the room and was amplified even further by the walls’ many mirrors.

“It’s time, ladies,” Vesuvius said.

“Five,” the lady in periwinkle said.

“Four,” Vonda said.

“Three,” Verdad said.

“Two,” Victoria said.

Vesuvius said, “One,” a cracked second before all five ladies released a harmonic wail that pierced the air, changing the atmosphere of the room.

It seemed with each breath Darryl took, twice as much air left his body as he brought in. The sound of his heartbeats increased in his ears; he heard them skip, jump, stop, and thump, playing music at war with the continuing song of the women. And his eyes…

Darryl lost complete sight of everything except the glass coffin. He stared as the eyelids on the redheaded girl twitched twice before jerking apart, as if pulled by fishhooks. And the coffin itself…

As cracks, hairline fractures, and wider fissures appeared in the glass, the coffin’s shape transformed from rectangular to oval. The coffin appeared as a painted, glass egg a moment before the glass shattered. Its shards carpeted the floor under the girl, who was now unencumbered and hovering in mid-air.

Darryl couldn’t blink. His eyes and hers had linked. His peripheral vision was being extinguished. Those green eyes were dominating him. Comely, expressive, endearing, it seemed impossible to look at anything else, even when she winked her left eye and the iris of the right flashed a bright fire-truck-red before the left eye reopened with a brighter puff of scarlet light. Both eyes were then a slightly different shade of green than they’d been before. They faded to yet another shade after she winked again. And they changed soon again, as if she were trying to find just the right color for whatever task she had in her newly awakened mind.

Darryl had little in his conscious mind. He gazed without words at the color-shifting eyes. He had nothing to say even as his peripheral vision returned enough for him to notice the pinpricks of white light flaring up and out from every pore of the girl’s skin. He saw but didn’t comment when the particles of dust in her immediate presence began to sparkle and move about her as if alive and dependent on her. Darryl saw and didn’t question the bat’s wings of light as they extended out, flaring, from her bare shoulders, displaying colors beyond the most exotic parrot’s. Darryl thought nothing of the disappearance of her body’s many blemishes, scars, bumps, and bruises. He was almost oblivious to the fact that the surface of her skin was tightening, smoothing itself out. He was just conscious enough to notice the skin’s refinished tone looked like vanilla-bean ice cream, with cinnamon-brown freckles.

But the overall metamorphosis meant nothing to him. Darryl was only focused on those eyes, whose irises had finally settled on a bright-green jade.

He didn’t care to see her smile. He didn’t care to see her take the unsure-but-secure steps on the air as she approached the tub, as she approached
him
. He was like a drunk drowning in those eyes, one of them still winking, both of them still flashing several varieties of red, and both of them returning to the same glimmering shade of jade. He’d no desire to save himself. By the time the redheaded girl had perched herself, crouching, at the foot of the tub, Darryl was ready to do anything for her, this beautiful one. All she had to do was ask.

The girl gracefully positioned herself so that her hands and feet remained on the tub’s rim, her unclothed body remained untouched by the sticky yellowish-brown glop, and her face and eyes hovered just a few inches away from Darryl’s.

He was speechless. She wasn’t.

“Hello, honey,” she said with a slight rasp. “Are you ready to come into me, so we may beautify the world?”

Darryl said nothing. She didn’t need to say anything more.

With those big, beautiful, green eyes, the girl winked one last time at him, bit her tongue, and exhaled. His vision began to get cloudy.

Darryl didn’t know anything about beautifying worlds, but on some level of his subconscious, he knew he’d never again see the only world he’d known intimately.

FIFTEEN

Darryl was lifted down into XynKroma. Plunged into the hole of his own mind, he fell into the pit of Ultimate Reality, a plane of existence ruled by dangerous metaphors, a dimension where killer poetry held sway. A modern-day Dante on the ultimate psychological trip to Inner Space, surfing the Scalp of the Creator—he should be so lucky to live to rhyme about the experience.

He initially felt and knew nothing about his situation, perhaps for the best. Between a boundless sky of honey and equally limitless sea of syrup, a grape-colored glob of jelly hovered, convulsed, and undulated, gradually becoming self-aware it was the essence of Darryl Ridley…There wasn’t much he wanted to feel or know about the situation prior to that.

So close to the Source of Creation, the only way Darryl or any human could exist in the extra-dimensional realm was by a figurative representation of the essence of his consciousness—his “soul.” He was all too familiar with the realm polluted with the detritus of every sentient being’s imagination, but it was rare for Darryl to visit involuntarily. And the fact his soul was represented by a glob of jelly did not portend a happy journey.

Those afflicted with the ability to manipulate light usually had an advantage in taking control and maneuvering through the dirty-light realm’s nonsensical, ever-shifting, ethereal terrain. At the moment, Darryl was having trouble maneuvering his senses within his own unshaped and uncontrollable soul. Despite the lack of blood or bones or organs, and in spite of his transformation and transfer to this lawless, old realm, the senses were still present. But with the exception of his sense of hearing, they were all garbled within him, and Darryl couldn’t manage to untangle them or position them so they might be of some use.

His attempts to make sense of himself had the unintended consequence of stretching his soul in multiple directions. The jelly glob sprouted gooey limbs that reached and stretched (and twisted, when becoming too close to one another) as they went on and on, the tips extending farther and farther beyond their source. This process continued as the honey sky and syrupy sea underwent their own changes—in tone, in currents, and in contents.

The sky more and more resembled the roof of an icy cave; rows and rows of icicles resembling stalactites jutted downward. If Darryl’s seeing-sense had been in order, he would’ve looked and—if sensibly possible—expressed horror at the images of these long, thin, and pointed ice-lances, each of them impaling a partially transparent human body. Ghosts were stuck through their centers, hanging upside down, and—whether living spirits or truly dead— positioned so they were forced to face and perhaps see the sea as it became suffused with the color of indigo while rushing upward, toward the sky.

By the time the sea had engulfed everything, Darryl’s soul was stretched in ninety-nine different directions.

He needed assistance. He desired help. He wished to be saved.

Granted.

Something with multiple appendages snatched at the ends and captured the wayward limbs of Darryl’s confused soul. This same something brought everything together, molding Darryl’s shape into a ball, before destroying the perfect sphere to fashion it into a shape to which Darryl was much more accustomed: a humanoid body.

He felt much more comfortable. All his senses were now in place, except one. He noticed it right off. He’d been left blind.

“Like the creator who cares nothing for its own creation.”

Darryl heard a voice. He also felt it as an immediate then quickly subsiding sensation of warmth surrounding him in the water.

Whatever the symbolic material composition of his soul, he was now imbued with pure fear. He didn’t want to see what had spoken to him, what had read his thoughts. He very well knew there was no limit to the type of phantasmagoric beings that lived in the realm. There were no constraints of any kind to Xyn, neither in its expanse nor in its variety of contents. The wisest of its visitors knew to succumb, submit, and operate within whatever was imposed, until the moment a sure advantage could be discovered. Darryl considered himself nothing if not wise.

“What’s happening?” he asked in a near-whisper.

“You will see for yourself,” was the water-warming response. “Then you will see much further.”

This time the warm-water sensation did not fade when the voice went silent. It grew warmer, hotter, until Darryl’s soul felt as if it were enveloped in steam. He felt the hot-then-warm water droplets settling onto his soul’s skin. Once settled, the droplets dropped further in temperature, altered their shapes, changed their composition, and became harder, became like crystals, became sharper and more pointed as they burrowed under the surface of his soul.

He was all too sensitive now. Darryl felt every single gelid particle within his soul moving, each of them making its way upward toward his soul’s neck, into his soul’s head, where they began to amass in the area that, on Reality’s surface, would’ve been occupied by gray matter. The crystalline structure resulting from the innersoul migration raised its temperature and, while inflicting tremendous pain, melted away the sticky, viscous substance surrounding it. Darryl was left with nothing but a diamond-like brain, sitting alone atop his soul’s shoulders, a gem that allowed him to see in every direction, at every angle, simultaneously.

Unfortunately.

He was now able to take in the entire scope of the monstrous leviathan that had been addressing him. The deep indigo hue of the watery environment didn’t matter. Darryl’s vision was of such a quality that he could pierce through it, clearly taking in the giant’s entire form.

In spite of his enhanced vision, though, it was difficult for Darryl to determine the amount of distance that actually existed between the giant and him. He hoped it was much farther than it seemed. From his fresh perspective, it appeared his soul was one-third the size of the leviathan’s head, which resembled a giant squid’s. The tentacles coming out of the being’s neck were most likely what had gathered Darryl’s wayward soul, rolled it into a ball, and fashioned it into a human form. It wasn’t surprising the creature chose a human form for Darryl. Below its tentacles, it too had the body of human. It was neither male nor female, but a hermaphrodite.

Clothing was uncommon among the visitors and permanent inhabitants of XynKroma. Although parts were revealed that Darryl would’ve preferred hidden, the creature did have some covering on its arms and legs: scales, which were congruous with the claws it had as hands and feet, and with the dragon wings protruding from its back.