Jigsaw World (16 page)

He brings death when it is needed,
and he honors the dying as they fade. There is no pleasure in it,
only duty. It is always the way with his kind. He senses the
presence of another, and he looks up from his reverie. A form
stands shadowed beneath the olive tree where Tom had last seen
Yama.

The other is wearing a robe with a
hood. He throws back the hood, and reveals himself to be… Tom. The
other Tom grins, and loosens his blade within its scabbard. As he
edges out from under the tree, Tom rotates in place to keep him
centered in front of him.

“
You know we have to fight.” The
New Tom says. “In a thousand worlds, there are a thousand of me,
but in any one where there are two, one must die so that the fated
path is followed. We must fight in this place of death; our weapons
will be our blades and the days of our life. Only one may survive
this trial, and it is he who will return to his
comrades.”

Tom suddenly knows that he can
move
from now to then if he tries. He pulls his blade, and
concentrates. There is a fading, a distancing, and he now faces the
Other’s back as he waits to meet himself. The Other now fades, and
now he stands to the side, prepared to strike the Tom who stands to
stab the Other beneath the tree in the back. Now Tom steps back ten
minutes, and watches the Other as he walks up the path to surprise
Tom with his presence. Tom rushes out and his blade slides smoothly
into the chest of the Other, piercing his heart and a lung. Tom
knows that he has won this choosing, and he feels the energy that
will send him to find the others who survive this
trial.

Veritasia is home in Tucson, where her parents
were laid to rest, and where the many friends that she had made
while attending the University resided. She is in her family home,
where the clock is ticking audibly, the television and the radio
are silent, and she smells that mysterious ‘other’ smell that
distinguishes the house in which someone slept last night from the
ones where it has been vacant for some period. Somehow, the
nostalgic memories are flooding her mind just now.

She feels the need to do
something
, but is not
quite sure
what
to do. She almost wrings her hands
because she feels a little on edge and out of place, but she feels
something in her hand. In her left hand, she finds a single card,
and upon it is a single word:

Love

As she sees the word upon the
card, the world around her shimmers, and flickers, and fades. She
finds herself in the cemetery where her parents were laid to rest,
in front of their headstones. She feels the sharp loss of her
Father and her Mother, and tears come to her eyes. For a moment,
her vision is clouded, and when she clears her vision, she sees her
parents before her, looking as they did the day before the car
accident took them away.

***”Veritasia, don’t cry for us. We
are exploring all those parts of the world that we never could see
before the accident.”*** Her father said. ***”We feel no pain here,
and our lives are full of joy”***

This brings more tears to
Veritasia’s eyes, but now they are tears of happiness. She had
worried that their pain would continue after death, and this visit
relieves her. For a second more they tarry, and then the world once
more fades about her. When it returns, she is thirteen, and she is
crying as she holds her dying dog Jacky, who had been hit by a car
that never stopped.

For a second, she can touch the
mind of her dying dog, and she sees that she brings the best gift
for her dog that anyone can bring the dying, that she is there, so
that her dog does not die alone. She feels the pain, and there is
fear, but there are comfort and gratitude for the company. When she
finally knows this, deep inside her heart, the world around her
again shimmers and fades.

She is riding her bike, and the
woods are strange. They are far too deep and humid for the area
around Tucson, but how could they be anywhere else? She started her
bike ride on the canyon trail, and she hadn’t gone far enough for
things to be this different. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she
knows that she is no longer close to Tucson. She bikes around the
bend, and she sees an RV parking beside raging water. It looked to
be trapped by flood waters from going any farther. Somehow, she
knows that her destiny lies with the people in that RV. For a final
time, the world fades.

Markus is back at home, watching the jets
coming in from the Imperium. The war had been going badly for the
Western Republic lately. The Pacific Authority had destroyed
several of the Republic’s Moon Bubbles. The daily hack attacks and
limited attacks and counterattacks were so common, they hardly even
made the news anymore. Whole areas of the world were in chaos from
the EMP and nuclear attacks that smaller players had carried out.
New diseases were appearing on a regular basis now, and everyone
suspected biological warfare. The government was of no use to the
citizenry in this. Ever since the NA President had declared martial
law, and retained the office of president for the third and fourth
terms, the world had gone rapidly downhill. The Republic was formed
almost immediately after NA martial law was declared, with a series
of influential and powerful people falling into line, and the NA
military going to trouble areas to mop up. The Republic and the
Authority faced off over the decimated lands of Europe.

Markus sees that he has a card in his left
hand. The card contains a single word, and that word is

History

From this place, which is and is
not his homeland, he can see that the place he came from is a
failure of history, and the place he was recently in is a place
that is a mirror made of fragments of the place that the powers
desire. He sees himself as he was, with straw blonde hair, thin and
tall, a bookish man who had seen too little of the world, but had
so much knowledge of it. He saw that the He that now was, and the
world that would come of this one, was the man and the world that
should be. He was no longer the original Markus, but was Markus and
his host as one. The world fades around him.

Vera is back in hiding with Bobby. Some of the
others she had not met yet, and some were already dead. She has a
machete in her right hand, and in her left hand, she sees that she
holds a card. The card is blank except for a single word, and that
word is

Hunt

She is keeping as quiet as she
can. The demons have swept into this part of the town, killing or
possessing everyone they could find. There were a few strange
possessions where the body of the victim did not seem to house a
demon, but instead they contained what was essentially another
person. They were no danger, but the demons would kill them if they
found them, since the demons could not possess the
possessed.

Bobby is ahead of her when the
demon suddenly leaps from the nearest shed roof. He reaches out and
touches Bobby, who falls to the ground and kicks in the sort of
pseudo epileptic seizure that the newly possessed exhibit. Vera
rushes the demon, and with a sweep of her sharpened machete, she
takes its head. With her tears falling, she takes Bobby’s head
while he jerks, so that he will not know possession.

She was slowly growing desperate.
There seemed no end to the demons, and a simple touch could end
your existence as a human being. How do you win against an endless
and relentless enemy? The only answer she could come up with was a
question. Do you want to be the hunter, or the prey? The world
around her fades away.

George is sitting in a Texas café, sipping on
a cup of coffee and lolling about, eyeing the waitresses and
avoiding unreasonable effort. He defined ‘unrea-sonable’ as being
any effort beyond that necessary to maintain an open eye condition.
He notices that he has a card in his left hand. On the card is a
single word, that being the word

Apathy

He sees that his lazy nature is
just a way to make sure that he doesn’t fail. He cannot stand
failure, but he is too afraid of failure to risk success. As he
sits there, the world is just too comfortable with no movement in
it, and the sun is rising, bringing the morning light and warmth to
lull him further into lethargy. He feels himself sink even further
down, as though he is sinking into his chair. Looking downward, he
discovers to his waning horror that he is merging with the chair in
the middle of the café, and there is none who notice. The world
begins to fade to black around him, and he feels a small
anticipation of the sleep that comes to take him away.

The priests unchain Charla’s arms from the
altar. The ceremony is over. The High Priest looked as though he
was going to kill her with that Athame of his, but after waving its
suggestively over her naked body a few times, he set it aside, and
then he pierced her body with his penis instead. He took her in the
name of Yog Sothoth, and then he released her. She feels something
in her left hand. She looks, and finds a card in her hand, and on
the card was a single word. The word was

Sacrifice

The lower priests let loose the
last of the bindings, and then they all turned their backs upon
her, and walked away. She is relieved by surviving the ritual, when
she expected to die, but there is something wrong. She is free, but
now she feels a demonic presence in her womb. Her terror resurges
as the world fades.

*****

Tom is on a road of cobblestone,
hidden in the now familiar mists that seems to come with this
spirit quest stuff. In the distance, he sees movement. In the next
few moments, he finds Veritasia, who kisses him with a hungry
urgency, then they meet Vera, then Markus, and finally Charla.
There is no sign of George or of Sally. Tom had no doubt that they
had perished in the vision quest.

They walk in silence for a while.
The foot falls resound as though the mists form a solid wall,
reflecting back the sound redoubled. There are hints of sound and
movement in the places beyond the mists, but the group is not
inclined to leave the road to investigate. They all wish to go back
to the world they know, with all of its flaws.

As they walk, they see another
identical road running along the road on their right. Markus does
deviate just long enough to verify that it is a real structure, not
just some sort of reflection of their own road. After a time, they
see their doubles walking that road. They know them to be real, for
sometimes they include George and/or Sally, and sometimes, one of
their group was absent.

They walk along in silence,
keeping company with their doppelgangers on their right. After a
time, they are gone, and the group can see other forms that walk
that road, creatures that have the form of men, and some that do
not, almost human creatures with antlers, or cloven hoofs as feet.
Forms walked that could have been men in form, but the power that
surged within them defined them as gods. Tom suspected that he saw
Odin there, and some of the others would have passed as the gods of
Egypt, and of Sumer, and some of even earlier times.

Tom came to feel that some of them
were fading, century by century thinning as the attention of man
fell away from their worship. Not all gods drink at the fount of
worship, but those who do will spread themselves upon the wind and
fade away without it.

After a time, they emerged from
the mists. They thought that they might have emerged entirely from
the world of the vision quest, but soon Tom realized that the giant
Oak tree that they stood before was a bigger tree than he had ever
seen, save perhaps the redwoods on the west coast.

Below the tree, on the other side
of the great oak, they saw a man sitting beside a campfire. Tom
immediately realized that the man he saw before him, he had seen
before, in a dream. This was Tyr, and everything that Tom knew
pointed to him being a god.

Tyr met Tom’s eyes, and nodded. “I
have been called that by some.” He said. “I also answer to friend.
I am supposed to show you a glimpse of the worlds of man, and then
I must go.”

With those words Tyr threw
something into the fire, and the flames flared up. As though this
were a trigger, Tom was caught in a sort of mental review of
memories that were not his, of worlds and places that matched
almost anything that Tom had ever imagined. The sheer mass of the
visions was staggering, and when his head threatened to blow, the
visions suddenly were over.”

Tyr got up and dusted off his
trousers. “I did what they asked me to do. Now I have to go to
complete my part in this. You will meet me once again before this
is done.” As he said this, the mists rolled in from his far side,
and he stepped forward, and into them.

There was a flickering, and an
obscuring of movement. The mists washed over him, and when they
cleared, Tyr was nowhere to be seen. As this happened, the grassy
knoll of the oak faded away, and the five of them found themselves
in their seats facing Charlie in the café as though they had never
left.

******

The RV rolled down the rutted dirt road under
the shading trees. The bird song in the underbrush was almost
deafeningly loud. The sunlight was bright, but the limbs and leaves
that obscured it gave it that delightful mottled look. They were
rolling toward a cabin that they had been offered for the night.
The town of Fouke was about three miles back the way they had
come.