A lost soul, found

He saw his brains fly out in front of him and spatter on the curtains. Bright pink and white bone on cobalt blue. The colors smeared together and faded as he dropped into darkness.

“Cooper. We need to talk,” The voice said from everywhere.

Shit. That fat fucking traitor. He visualized a door and it appeared in front of him. He told himself, in a very stern fatherly tone, that the door would take him to the Allclub, then grabbed the handle and it shattered into pieces.

“There’s no escaping ones such as us, Cooper.”

The voice was multiple, oppressive. His name echoed in his own head and he couldn’t think about anything else, so he screamed, and the two noises blended together and blinded out his thoughts, catching him in a swirl of light and sound that took hold of his focus and broke his mind free of the causal chain it had been bound to.

He found himself sitting in a recliner, with a glass of scotch in his hand and a naked woman bouncing on his knee. The sudden relaxation took hold of him like a straight jacket.

“I’ll be back to check on you later.” She kissed him and waddled away. She was a teacher he had been obsessed with in high school, and as he realized this, she turned back to him and winked, then disappeared into the unlit void beyond the circle of soft light.

There was a man sitting in front of him smiling. Two others, faces hidden under eyeless tengu masks, stood behind the first man, their arms clasped behind their backs oddly.

Or at least it looked that way. For all he knew there could be a million, or just one. His mind was captured. Everything was suspect. The man sitting in front of him, three-piece suit the same kind the lawyer had worn in his day on court, read his mind.

“It’s not so bad, is it? Could be worse. You’ve heard about Nightmare, right?”

Cooper nodded. Just get to it. Tell me what I’m in for, you demonic fuck.

“Here’s something you may not know. Nightmare is, as the old saying goes, other people. By that I mean that in order to keep you in Nightmare, someone has to will it, continuously.”

Cooper nodded, but he didn’t believe. No one knew how Nightmare worked, and if they did, the last mother fucker in the Other they would let in on it was sitting in this fucking chair. The man, of course, read his mind, but just kept on smiling, and talking.

“No matter how well crafted a box is, eventually the Spirit will escape, unless it’s watched. Now, it’s a lot, of course, for someone to expend all their time keeping someone else locked up, especially when there is so much out there to think and do. They take turns, obviously, but it’s still quite the expense. And so, Nightmare is reserved for those who are truly worth the effort. But, fortunately, one day in nightmare is more than enough to ensure that there are no repeat offenders. It’s a punishment that lasts on its own. You see, it’s very hard to enjoy paradise knowing such a pure and undeniable hell exists as part of it.”

He got quiet. He let him think about it. And Cooper decided that they were probably not going to put him there, otherwise they would have just done it and let him find all this out on his own.

“So, what do I have to do to keep you from sending me to,” He trailed off. Unable to say it.

The man nodded and smiled. “I want to know where you got it.”

Cooper glanced at the masked men as if the frowning tengus could give him a hint. There had to be a trick in it somewhere. The answer was too easy.

“The guy gave it to me.”

“What guy?”

“The one we robbed.”

The man frowned for a second, then burst out laughing. The laugh came from everywhere. It came from inside Cooper's forehead. Cooper laughed too, because it also came from his tongue, from his throat. It leaked out of each of his teeth.

“Saints on the cross, kid. You are stupid. Not the god damned coin. Where did you get the snare?”

“The what?”

“He means the mouse trap,” one of the masked men said. His voice was fragmented and it echoed, but there was something familiar about it.

“Yes, the mouse trap,” lawyer man said.

“We just found it.” Cooper had a twisting feeling that he didn’t know enough about what was going on to get himself out of this one.

“My fucking dick you found it. No more lies, Cooper.” His strange tone and choice of words reminded Cooper of someone, but he wasn’t about to try and remember anything that wasn’t asked of him.

“We did! It was just fucking sitting there!”

“Try and remember,” The man said, like he was daring him to jump off a bridge.

The room slid away from him and another rolled into its place, like the two were connected end to end, two realities painted on the inside of a rolling orb. Cooper saw Rowland sitting there, his arm around the girl, jumping and pointing.

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“Right there! Right fucking there! Go to it!”

“I’m not fucking going anywhere near that thing.” JP, their pilot shook his head while squinting out the window.

“Why not?”

“That shit belongs to someone serious. Look how black it is! That’s blacker than black hole black, man. A big-time maker put that together. I don’t wanna fuck with people like that. They’ll trap you in a box.”

“Bullshit! It’s just sitting there! If it was some big shot’s we’d never even see it!” Rowland was jumping hysterically.

The room and the man and the masked men rolled back into place.

“I fucking told you.”

“Go back.”

“What?”

“Go back to before he saw it. Walk me up to that moment.” The man had death in his voice. Cooper found he couldn’t close his eyes, so he stared up at the circle of darkness over his head, and tried to remember. The memories expanded and strengthened until they filled up the room and it rolled back out of sight.

Rowland was sitting with the girl, Ooma. They had just left Fuscia, where she had caught their eye dancing under a never-ending fountain of soapy water. Rowland had sworn he never came so hard outside the real. He was even tired afterwards.

“Can I sleep in this place?” He had laughed, then he had looked at her, as if she had the answer to everything.

“No, not really.” She giggled and winked at Cooper. Later she had fucked him on a cloud that felt the way a child imagined clouds did, soft warm ephermal cotton, and he understood what Rowland meant. It was better than having a body again. If this was what those memories were like, the ones that felt “more real than the real”, than it was no mystery why people slaved away to buy one.

“Focus.” The man’s voice poked his mind and cleared the haze of lust. “You’re in the ship.”

He was. Rowland was sitting with the girl. She just sat there smiling like a housewife swimming in marital bliss.

And then he saw it.

It happened so fast. So natural. At the time he hadn’t even thought of it. Anything she did had sent his mind groping desperately at thoughts that only partially responded. Now, seeing it again, without the haze of her sex, he knew that he was fucked. This was something bigger than him. Bigger that swiping mem and sticking up old resort tramps.

“What was that?” She pointed out the window.

What was what?” Rowland purred without looking away from her face, like humoring a child.

“No really! Did you see that shit? It was like a solid black spot out there.”

“It’s all black,” Rowland said. He looked outside, reluctantly at first, then studied the void the same way he had searched her eyes for some sign of her magic.

“Yeah, but this was like, really black. Like blacker than black, you know?” Innocent, stupid, curious. She was none of the things Cooper had been so sure she was. Only now, seeing the memory replayed, refracted, did he see her as she had always been.

“Hey JP!” Rowland yelled to the front. “Back this bitch up!”

The room with the man and the masks slid back into place, but this time the girl stayed. She sat there, frozen, just as Cooper had remembered her. The lawyer man was staring at her like she had pulled the pin out of a grenade and tossed it to him.

“Take them out,” he said to no one, and men appeared from nowhere. Solid black silhouettes. They walked Cooper and the two masked men through a door, and the last thing he saw of the room was the suited man staring at the frozen, smiling, winking girl, as if expecting, hoping, praying, that he would start to see anything else.

The silhouettes led them into a stone room with a view onto an endless ocean, like a historic castle preserved for tourists. It felt more real than anything he had ever seen in the Otherworld, and its realness pressed down on his mind like physical exhaustion, pushing his memories away. He struggled to remember the Real or even who he had been just moments ago. Eventually, he knew, he would forget even that he had forgotten.

One of the men took off his mask. It was JP.

“Dude, what the fuck did you assholes get me caught up in? I had to sit in a Hardworld for days, and these fuckers still got me!”

The other man tossed his mask at JP. It was Zip.

“I didn’t do shit. My only crime is smashing some choice pussy.” He looked at Cooper. “Bro, no lie, that shit was worth Nightmare.”

“How can you be so sure, until you’ve been?” a voice said from everywhere. JP. whimpered and Cooper slumped to the floor.

****

He saw his own reflection in the peephole, which if looked into, would show only darkness. Not the darkness of an unlit place on the other side of the door, but the darkness you might expect to see if every scrap of reality beyond the door had been ripped out and whoever had done it had left the peephole just to show you they had. Otherwise, how would you know?

His reflection was hazy, incomplete. It had only been partially scraped, as if whoever had preserved the mem hadn’t thought the identity of the man important at all, which was strange to the point of being frightening, as it was obvious how important they had thought the memory itself.

But it was enough to know he was middle aged, average, un-adorned. Dressed in plain clothes, the sweats and shirt of a Sunday off, not the flashy attire of the Otherworld, which was certainly where he was, for behind him, shown in the reflection and in the peripheral memory attached, was a simple room broken cleanly in half. The soft indoor light and carpet stopped five feet behind him and gave way to a dark opal ocean rolling into soft sunless sunset. In the bottom of the deep sea, the memory told her, was everything the man had ever tried to hide from himself, all the truths ready to shatter all of his lies, his real self ready to raise a final objection to the persona’s insistence.

But all that could wait. He had only one focus now. The doorknob. He watched it. Studied it. Imagined how it would feel in his hand, how it would turn, the sound, the sensation, but he didn’t move. It was important that he didn’t move before it was time. And he would know it was time only when he heard the signal.

Lucy knew that he had been standing like that for years, and the pure terror of the thought was very difficult to ignore. She wanted to leave. She wanted to stop watching. But it was too late for that. Now she had to know. She had broken a very important law to know. She had risked everything, not just what she had, but what he, what they all had, again, to know, and knowing might be her only defense against the immeasurable consequences of having learned.

So she watched. And listened. And she heard.

“Goodbye.”

Oh God damn, how fucking awful. How gut crushingly terrifying, that voice. Just a pure, animal fear at the sound of it, and the feel of it, as it snaked through her mind. She was almost certain it knew she was there, that the speaker could sense her beyond time and infinite distance, and she felt sure for some reason that she had to respond.

But before she could, the man smiled, a big spreading smile that made a noise in his throat and pulled tight the skin at the back of his neck, and then he turned the knob.

It sounded just like he had always known it would. The door even creaked a bit, just as he expected it to, and he was free, just as he had always known he would be.

And the memory ended, and Lucy poured over every schema of defense she had, looking for a sign that someone somewhere had seen.

But she knew that ultimately, it was a waste of time. If anyone had been watching, she would know soon enough. It would be kind of hard not to notice being thrown into Nightmare.