The day had started like so many others, waking up to breakfast just being made, he could smell the bacon and biscuits. That meant his wife was in the kitchen unless her mother had come back from the grave. Praise the Lord Christ that not be the case.
He had come to love this life of his, outside of the war that had defined him as a person as indelibly as a tattoo. He still thought of himself as a soldier, a warrior. That in spite of his current life as a reporter, it was as if he had never even left.
War had changed him from that charming rogue to a hard and hating man. The evil he had seen had crept its way into his soul and made its nest. Worst of all he had brought that vengeful hate home, it fed off of his drinking and discontent.
His son Tobias would be there watching Jane, with those unnerving, knowing eyes of his. Truth be told his boy scared him, an not just a little. His boy had the eyes of someone far far older, and was careful to not let on how quick he was of mind and body. The Doctors had no idea how he could speak, read, write and talk before he was even a year old, not even baby talk, full damn sentences.
He had beaten Tobias more than once after stumbling home drunk, it was those god forsaken eyes, always staring. Of course Jane would try to step in, he would beat her too. It was a weekly ritual at best, nightly at worst. Worst of all he was beginning to enjoy it.
Jack had always been a horrible person, hell his mother in law saw that from day one. Didn’t stop him from falling in love and whisking her daughter away to elope just before being sent to war. He smiled at the memory.
Glancing at the clock, Jack cursed vehemently. He was late to that imbecilic Boy Scout Jamboree. His boss’s son was there and that made it the most important story this decade, maybe even this century. Jack’s eyes rolled at the thought.
“No time for the idyllic routine this time, Jack my boy, roll your lazy ass out the bunk and drive on.”
Jack got up and dressed quickly and efficiently as his years in the army had taught him. He wore a brown suit that was of good quality if not made of the finest materials.
“Jane! Make me up a plate, I’m late for that ridiculous Jamboree. Why the hell did the alarm not go off?” Jack had raised his voice to be heard all the way down in the kitchen and was shocked when Jane just stepped in the door being trailed by an attentive shadow named Tobias.
“I was coming to get you, looks like you shut it off instead of getting up.” Jane passed him his plate and brushed off his shoulders some dust or Devil he didn’t see. She pressed a quick kiss to Jack’s cheek before adding “You had best be off, your boss will be in a fury already.” She looked sad, worse than Jack had ever seen before.
Jack looked into her eyes, one of them still freshly blacked from the night before. He felt a familiar tingle of self hate and rage. He crushed it down with violent dedication. This was not the time or place for such things. His eyes reflected her sadness as he brushed her face gently, pain and anger almost breached the surface of his control as she flinched from his touch. “You called the sitter for Toby right? What’s her name Nicci, Nixie, something like that? She a foreign girl or something, what’s with the weird names on people lately?”
“Yes dear, I did and her name is Nyx. I’m pretty sure she is from somewhere else, she is an odd one. She is nice enough though and seems to enjoy spending time with Tobias.” Jane reached behind her and pulled the silent Tobias close.
“Very well, I’m off, hopefully Ted dies of an aneurism before I get there and I get to cover a real story.” The house was silent and still as he left, grabbing his brown fedora on the way out the door.
It was some time later before he actually reached the Jamboree, he stopped off at the liquor store to buy a fifth to put into his pocket flask to make the day tolerable. He drank even as he drove and before he knew it there was barely enough left for the flask.
Undaunted but slightly dizzy, Jack got out of the car and did a very good imitation of walking straight. Soon enough the devil came knocking in the form of his boss who would have done wonderfully as a storm cloud. Jack braced himself from the coming onslaught.
“You’re late.” Ted’s voice was full of fury, not the loud and petulant fury of a child but the quiet fury of a man who was deeply wronged. Alarms sounded in Jack’s mind. Something about his voice and movement was off, like he was watching a professional actor play his boss while looking exactly like him. He felt a cold chill wind through him, not unlike the chill of seeing first hand what happened in those concentration camps.
“Late but alive. Now, how about....” Ted cut Jack off with an upraised hand.
“How about you’re fired Jack? You reek of cheap liquor and despair. Your wife leave you yet, or did you kill her and your boy with the beatings? How could you do that to such a fine woman Jack? How can you be so base and vile? When we went to war, you were a man apart but now you are a wreck and everything left in your life is crumbling, go home, clean out your desk by Monday or I burn it and everything in it to the ground.” Ted began the tirade with a small smirk but by the end it was a wide and feral grin.
Jack was just stunned, this man was a friend no matter the insults flung back and forth, to have him do this so openly and brazenly meant he had planned it. Jack couldn’t even defend himself, all Ted had said was true, to a degree. Tears welled up uncontrollably as Jack sank to his knees and cried out like a damned soul. He felt the eyes on him, he just couldn’t control himself anymore.
Jack somehow picked himself up and fled to his car, Ted’s laughter chased him like some predatory beast. He got more liquor and decided to stay at a local park and drink the pain away.
Sometime late that night Jack stumbled through his front door. The house was deathly still and all the lights were out. The strangeness of the situation made the hair on his neck rise. Jack pulled the M1911 he kept concealed from the inside of his suit jacket. He moved through the house on silent feet. No one was home, not Jane, not Tobias, not even the foreign girl who was supposed to be sitting.
Walking into the kitchen Jack spied a note stuck to the fridge. He grabbed it with shaking hand, walking over to the table as he read it, “ Jack, Tobias and I will be gone by the time you get back, don’t bother looking for us. We have endured enough of your drunken beatings and rage. Tobias is a special boy, he already knows so much and I fear you have poisoned him with your violence. My only regret is not leaving you sooner. You were a good man before the war, but it seems more and more like you died over there and was replaced with some evil that enjoyed the violence you gave to Tobias and I. Honestly, I could have withstood it if it was just me you beat and cursed at, but doing that to our son, that was far too much. Goodbye Jack, I pray we never meet again.
Once again tears flooded down, it was long hours before he crawled to the barren bed and laid for what anyone would call an eternity.
Six Months Later
Jack Cairn had no idea what rock bottom truly looked like, but he imagined it must be staring at him in the mirror of a seedy gas station bathroom.
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He glanced down in disbelief at the revolver next to his hand. He hadn’t heard of a revolver failing to fire very often but this one did, six times in a row while he was using the barrel as a tooth pick, no less.
Jack had then pointed it at the stall and fired those same rounds without a hitch, six times. To top it all off, he had tried to hang himself only for the rope to break, and the chain that he tried after that. Both times he barely had a bruise. Then he tried jumping from the tallest buildings he could find only to have various and improbable things happen to save his worthless ass, such as trucks filled with wool or mattresses, even a stiff breeze that stood him back up every time he tried to fall. The world wouldn’t let him die. He already lost his wife and son, Jane and little Toby, to his rampant alcoholism and violence. He swore he wouldn’t be like his father but that was a shit promise just as his “for better or worse” was.
Now he had nothing, not even his job as a reporter for the Chicago Sun Times, his hat still bore the press card in it from his last gig reporting on a Boy Scout Jamboree. Jack snorted at the memory as if to propel it from his mind before it showed him when he was fired and cried like a child in front of two dozen or so impressionable youths. He had spent the last of his money on alcohol and any drug that could kill his humiliation and loathing. Of course, he clearly couldn’t die by overdose either.
A fat repulsive man had walked up to the stall and opened it while he reloaded. “That isn’t going to do it Jack, you are a man I am not allowed to touch, why not find something more productive to do…” Fat Man trailed off with a laugh as Jack pointed the revolver at him. “Jacky boy, it won’t work on you so what makes you think it would work on Me, good Ol’ Grim Himself?” With a blink the fat man was gone and Jack had pondered if he had really saw what he did. Either everyone was wrong and Death wasn’t skinny after all, or a random fuck had barged in, said things he couldn’t possibly know, and then vanished silently like a fucking fart. He left a rancid feeling behind too, just like a fart, like the fart when you shit yourself. Either those or he was still high as Holy Mother Mary and none of this was happening beyond his fucked-up brain sending it to his peepers.
Jack stared more intently into the mirror seeing his own ice blue eyes wreathed in red from too much, too much alcohol, too much drugs, too much stress, too much loss. His eyes filled with tears, he would never watch his boy grow, play catch with him, slap his back after his first fuck, nothing. Jack’s life was emptiness. He needed cash to keep drunk and high. Fortunately, a reporter has a reason to know the mayor is out of town and god damn rich. Time to go pay that historic pile of Victorian styled timbers a visit. It wasn’t long before he was there, or it was a while and Jack was too high to really know. He climbed the wall with rather astonishing ease for how hammered he was, had he mention high already?
The Mayor’s Mansion was different from what he remembered when he took that bribe for not exposing the mayor’s mistress to the general public, such easy money. Of course, he just sold it to another paper and got double the money at the cost of being banned from contacting the Mayor ever again. It was a good deal. Jack stumbled to lawn and saw a vixen of a woman walk into the house’s front door. She was someone you fantasize about, tall, hair like golden moonlight, and a figure that surely made any jaw drop. Hell, Jack was drunk, high and married, and he was damn well staring to do the Sphinx proud.
Oh wait, he’s not married. Jack felt that familiar crush of misery but was undaunted by the fact a gorgeous gal was hiding out in the Mayor’s place. He needed the damn money, if he couldn’t die he might as well be drunk enough to not know anything anymore.
He went for the front door, brazen as the Boys that stormed Eagles Nest to kill that prick Hitler. He felt a jolt of thrill still, ten years later, thinking about his Arty boys giving those defenders a hell of a shellacking before the Infantry kicked in his front door, which he now tried to emulate. the kick hit weakly and the door didn’t budge. Jack kicked again and again, the back of his mind somehow registered there was no sound from his sad kicking. Sobbing Jack threw the beer bottle he never knew he had and it shattered on the door, with no sound. Tired and feeling hopelessness close its jaws around his throat Jack sagged against the door, catching a glimpse of light through the keyhole. “What the hell is this shit?” Jack managed to work himself around to his knees to stare through the key hole. It was like one of those kaleidoscope things, shifting fragments of colorful shapes, he felt like he couldn’t pull away. Images began to appear, the birth of his boy, the assassination of Archduke whatever the fuck, The Salem Witch Trials, Normandy being sold to the Vikings, Churchill making one of his speeches, People in furs and not much else making a fire. Jack had no idea how he knew any of this. he was a shit student with a talent for digging up dirt on people, that was why he was transferred to army intelligence after the war, why he was a damned good reporter.
“You know, I hate you. You’re not that bad a person, hell Odin has you beat by a thousand miles on his mild days, but I hate you all the same. So weak, so sad. I hate you because you are the First.” The woman had somehow snuck around on him. Jack recoiled in shock and tried to get up to flee but instead stumbled a few steps and vomited two years of food, so it seemed, and collapsed to the ground laying face up, he could choke to death like that, maybe that would work. “You can’t die like that either, Death told you so, you get to be miserable and live eternally here in this single frozen timeline, OR, you could just open the door without all the kicking and screaming, and yes you really were screaming. You act as a child who has had toys taken away. Get up Drunky, you are a lightweight, Thor would drink you under any surface you care to name. Let me help you up.”
A slender effeminate hand reached out and dominated Jack’s vison, and he grabbed it like a drowning sailor, he was hauled up effortlessly by this broad, did she mean lightweight literally or was she something out of Nietzsche’s nightmares? What a woman. “Don’t act like you know me or talk like one of my boys from the war, you have no right.”
Eyes squinting Jack jabbed an accusatory finger at the woman only to have her grab it and bend it back painfully, driving him to his knees. He was beginning to spend too much time on them for his liking and tried to stand but the Bitch just popped the finger out of joint and continued her tirade as if he never spoke or puked all over himself.
“WHY! Why is such a pathetic man the First? I met your wife and son by the way,” the Bitch smiled coldly, “I had a good time with them. My sister Nyx has laid claim to your boy, they will make a fine couple, they will even have a daughter. I will be as a Mother to another daughter your boy Tobias will care for, all of this while you are given the gift of gifts, to see it all, all the variations and twists, all things that echo in the eternities in their various forms. Just open the Door and be glad the Universe told me to be here, otherwise you would be a sad drunk for all of time, now you get to be the First Witness. A gift given to humanity alone, and here I am the jealous Atlantean, immortal, with all the goodies you idiots dream come with it. I watched my world, this world, die and end in fire taking all but a handful of my brothers and sisters. Why do I bother, you’ll see. I am called Freyja in case the question went through the organ you unsettlingly call a brain.” Freyja pulled along Jack remorselessly.
It seemed to Jack that the world was fucking nuts and maybe he had died after all, a woman, maybe a goddess, was dragging him into a house. She stopped at the door however and told him to actually try to open it rather than kick or cry at it. Jack believed nothing and was still processing through all this woman had ranted at him in an either remarkably short time or a god damned eternity, he couldn’t tell.
Jack reached out and grasped the door latch and the door swung open like a Friday night whore’s legs. Smooth and not a squeak of the hinges. The inside was bright, but not the one where you are dying, he saw that one in the war and walked away, it was the brightness of a well-lighted room with no furniture or anything really. It was a vast moment before the woman spoke again in tones of awe rather than scorn. “This is the universe Jack, when you go in you will see it. All of it. I only get to See the Now of Everything when I look at this but you will get it all. You can spend eternities drifting and meet amazing things and people. This suits you, as hard as it is for me to say, I guess that is why you are the Suit. A dual meaning, I guess. Enjoy Life, its all there for you and the Others who will follow. The Witnesses will need you and your guidance. You know despair intimately and from that intimacy empathy will be born and flourish.” Jack felt a light shove and looked up at the most dazzling smile he had ever seen, she even had tears in her eyes. They weren’t for him they were for what she could See. Feeling for once of clear of mind and soul Jack walked in fearless of the Future and embraced who he was. Suit straightened his suit jacket, even worn out he wore it proudly, and adjusted his hat with the Press card still stuck in its band and took a last look at Freyja.
“You know, you have a harsh way to you Freyja but I Like it, tell your sister to do my boy good or I will find a way to fuck her world over.” Jack smiled and stepped into the Universe and Opened his mind to Everything.