Drip. Drip. Drip.
Cuppy's eyes rolled back out of his head.
"What the?"
The boy looked around blearily. He was in a scorch-marked stone room that was otherwise featureless. The floor was grate, and an ambient red glow carried warmth wafting up through the holes. Above, the chute Cuppy had fallen down was shut. He smelled iron, and felt wetness in his palms. He smelled his own blood cooking where droplets had fallen through the cracks, into the embrace of the resting pilot lights beneath his feet.
He was in a large furnace.
Of more immediate concern, there was a hole in his torso, with a crater-like exit wound out the back where the shrapnel remnants of the magnum bullet had blown his cloak out to shreds. He remembered the moments just before impact now, how he had guarded his head from Mason's aim. At the same time, anticipating where Mason would fire, Cuppy gambled. He conjured puppet strings inside his body, carefully threading and tying them through and around his major organs. A blink before he was shot, Cuppy managed to pull his strings taut and tug his organs as out of the way as he could without tearing them loose, widening an area in his core where the projectile could pass through with comparative less lethality.
But the caliber was potent enough that Cuppy could feel a fragment or two wedged in or near his spine, dangerously close to his spinal cord. Additionally, his small body meant that the proportional blood loss was already staggering. He needed to act fast. He slid his hands across either end of the tunnel that had been bored through him, threading an orbital web of strings over both holes. He cinched the strings tight, and drew the holes closed. That would momentarily slow the bleeding. He stood, woozy, and began to sway dizzily. He staggered toward a wall, and placed a hand there to steady himself, leaving a smeared bloody handprint. He focused his blurry vision on his red-soaked hands.
May as well use this again. Cuppy thought, cupping his palm out in front of him. Strings sprouted from his open hand and rapidly swirled together with the blood, riding off, up, and out of his palm. The blood became a spherical globule as the strings disappeared within, and then the globule budded into smaller ones. Five smaller nodes appeared, one at each corner, and one top and center. The blood construct defined itself, like a marble statue being chiseled out of an undefined block in rapid fast forward. The blood took on a humanoid shape as the nubs became arms, legs, and a head. The voodoo doll faded from red to sock puppet white, and went limp in Cuppy's now-clean palm.
When he had made the apparently bad decision to save O'Gravy, the doll he sacrificed in its place had required a pinprick from a concealed needle. In this situation, there had been no need. When life gave you lemons and such.
There had been no time to waste. The floor under Cuppy's feet began to vibrate, heralding the coming of the firestorm. He looked up and saw a flue guarded by a vent cover too narrow to pass through, and had an idea. He strung the doll to himself on a very long string with plenty of slack, and tossed the doll skyward toward the vent. He piloted the end of the string that served as his lifeline, and wove it with the doll between the slots. The doll on the string emerged in the chimney throat equivalent like a cobra rising out of a snake charmer's basket. Going by vibration, Cuppy swiftly guided the puppet through the ventilation system paths, toward an exit to the outside. He assumed swapping with the doll while it was in a space too small for him to fit through would crush him.
The fire roared out from the ground beneath him, and his cloak was engulfed. Then, the doll, having taken on his likeness, was incinerated in his place.
-
Mason holstered his gun and wiped his hands clean of the situation. All at once, those hands began to shake, and he stuffed them in his pockets. Behind the shadowed lenses of his inscrutable sunglasses, his eyes were suddenly stunned and lost. His stomach felt sour, and he wondered if he might have drank too much on an empty stomach.
At his ear, a toneless voice seemed to usher a cold whisper.
Well done, Director. Delightfully coldblooded.
Mason shook his head and looked to the far corner the drawl seemed to have come from.
Nobody there.
-
Cuppy trudged through the street, shivering. He pulled orb-weaver nets of string closed, knitting his gunshot wound closed. He had lost a lot of blood. Even without a direct hit to a major organ, the boy's small, childlike body didn't have a lot of resources to spare. His breathing was labored as he grew more pale, eyes limp. The strain weighed on his heart, still reeling from the massive electric shock.
This isn't good. Even after patching myself up, am I still going to kick it? That zap threw my system into arrhythmia, my heart isn't pumping correctly.
Cuppy felt the muscles in his chest tighten, and he broke out in a cold sweat. He cramped, swaying woozily on his feet. The bullet hole had been cinched tight, not spilling a single new drop of blood, and yet Cuppy was still finished.
His heart slowed.
Slowed…
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...slowed…
Stopped.
Cuppy's eyes rolled back in his head, and he collapsed face down.
-
Cuppy was plunged into a deep ocean expanse darker than black, yet glowing a faint cobalt. On his paint palette the color would have been called stygian blue - would have, purely as a hypothetical, because that was a color which could not physically exist outside of eye fatigue optical illusions. And yet, here he was, steeped in it. There was neither a sky above nor a trench floor - pure, bottomless sea. Cuppy felt that he was sinking gently down through the murk, his body light and weightless, all pain and fear sifted from his being. There was only a gentle sense of being cradled and soothed off to sleep. He felt warm and peaceful.
As he sank, he perceived the floaters in his eyes stretch out and become great ropes spanning the unfathomable abyss in all directions, like a great silk web. These threads intersected and trailed out from each other infinitely, and Cuppy could see little impulses carried down their lengths in each one, like the electric signals coursing through a living brain. The threads were dense with layered information that seemed so heavy they should have sank with Cuppy, yet the web held aloft. More threads seemed to trail around Cuppy as he sank further, and the ocean seemed to unravel and unspool into nothing but those energized threads. Wherever he brushed one, he peered into an open window to worlds unknown - he saw dense, dark jungle crisscrossed with roaring brown rapids and moving with the thunderous tread of bewitched behemoths. He saw great craggy peaks piercing high above a sea of mist, lined with perilous wooden pegs as makeshift steps up to a lofty temple bearing a crescent moon and circled by a giant pheasant with a trailing electric blue and red spotted plume. He saw floating islands hanging miles above a great valley, each landform like a mystical planet in and of itself, waterfalls spilling over the edges into fine mist. One of these planetoids was ringed like Saturn, and seemed to comprise a vast expanse of desert speckled with red dust and the dried bones of giant serpents.
A thread each from the fingers on his right hand tangled in the web, and Cuppy caught vivid glimpses of scenes of himself and his friends - he saw Richie’s orphanment and life on the run, culminating in his great escape from the child kennel. He saw Freyja’s demonic rampage and battle with Hraesvelgr. He saw the three of them together, laughing in the comfort of their refurbished home and talking about things he couldn’t hear - but they all looked happy. Shouldering himself, Richie, and Freyja, there were other silhouettes that hadn’t been filled in yet. There could have been dozens, or there could have been hundreds. It was difficult to tell. The empty shadows were clipping into and overlapping each other, fading even as they vied for attention, as if possibility itself was in flux. He felt the soul of the disembodied drifter floating through the Void in the wake of his planet’s erasure from existence pass through his own, and briefly saw great iron catwalks spanning a black gulf in some cold and clinical concrete bunker. He saw vials that reached the ceiling, filled with strange artificial embryonic fluids, gestating multitudes of faceless hominids. He saw a police badge whose name he couldn’t make out. It wasn’t Dean’s, but it embodied his spirit.
If pressed, Cuppy wouldn’t be able to explain any of these things. There weren’t enough words in any vocabulary, or enough portraits to paint in all the world that could convey the immense power of this Abyss all around him. In the bubbles escaping his lips, he saw snapshots of his life cycle through, and began to remember life before Station Bay - and, he realized, any longer and he might begin remembering countless lives before that one. He might see the conception and birth of Richie through Richie’s own eyes, or that of any stranger selected at random from every population that had ever existed. He might feel nutrients drawn through his roots as a great, thousands year old tree. He might feel the quiet, consolidated subconscious beat of the stones on the Earth. He breathed supernovas and traced constellations. The flutter of his fabric was the expansion of the universe. The ether fog clouds that spawned the foreign bodies were little more than bubbles from air pockets hidden out of sight.
So… sleepy… Cuppy thought. His thought echoed around him.
Then, the threads he had released seemed to intertwine with the great confluence of synaptic strings bearing cosmic information - data streams, Mason might have called them - and influenced the tangled mass to take on a new shape. The loops of string and rope molded themselves into a bulge that eclipsed the backdrop of cobalt, and stretched itself out into a humanoid shape. Cuppy gazed upon a wicker-like doll in the generic outline of a person, floating in front of him. His being turned inward, and he perceived that this effigy was forged from the strings of a marionette cross embedded in his own heart, the threads wrapped around it up till now.
“This is bad. You’re clinically dead, and in a few minutes you’ll be irretrievably so. You’ll go from technically dead to just dead-dead.” the cross vibrated through Cuppy’s heart.
Cuppy had a sense that he wasn’t really looking at his heart, which was with the rest of his physical form back in Station Bay. The entirety of this ocean of knowledge and the threads of fate was some kind of metaphysical construct generated by his fading life. Was the alternate version of the apartment complex an extension of that? Maybe this was the truth behind the wandering corridors and the secret doors between realities. Maybe data passed between them constantly, not the least of which was when a deceased soul passed on. Perhaps, at the edge of transfer to wherever he was going, Cuppy had brushed another one of those world threads and seen a world similar to the one he and Richie had briefly occupied together.
Far out. Cuppy thought, smiling dopily. I guess I bit off more than I can chew. Richie, Freyja, and of course my brother - they’ll be sad I’m gone. But, we’ll see each other again someday, somewhere, somehow. I may not know it’s them, and they may not know it’s me, but our paths will cross again. Just like these threads all weaving into one.
Cuppy’s avatar crumbled away.
-
“Screw that.” the silhouette of the puppet cross said in its host’s absence. “You’ll see them today if I can help it. You give up too easily.”
While the cursed artifact buried in Cuppy’s heart improvised a plan to resuscitate the boy’s physical body in real time - a few seconds at most having passed since he hit the floor - Cuppy’s perspective took a vacation elsewhere.
Simultaneously, while this was all happening, Cuppy’s marionette brother back home stood up straight suddenly, knowing something was wrong. He swiveled his head around, looking for Richie and Freyja. They weren’t there - they had gone to examine the frozen trough of black rain. Cuppet cloaked itself in his brother’s visage and fled the unit, automatically locked onto his brother’s location. There wasn’t time to wait for help or permission, or a person to take an order from. He’d be gone when their roommates got back, and if all went well, the puppet brothers would be able to write this off as just another random pleasure walk around the city. There was no need to worry their friends - there was already plenty to worry about.