Mason’s head was pounding and he was hunched over his desk, nauseated and sweating. What had gone wrong? The code should have been perfect, and he had diverted the necessary concentration of electric power to generate an adaptable tracer, one that wouldn’t be limited to adhering only to emerging big bang particulate matter and womb-bound foreign bodies. He knew it had worked, he’d seen it register on his computer screen. Something must have intercepted the tracer. Maybe something was wrong with the power tunnel? But what could have caused that negative feedback that shocked him even all the way out here at his control panel? More and more, that realization that for all his stature and credentials, and his carefully-cultivated man in black image, he was still fallible and still vulnerable to danger as Chelsea had been was burning itself into his brain. This office space was supposed to be his safehouse. Base. But something had spoken to him when he was caught in the freak electric current, and hallucinating himself the condemned prisoner in the belly of a brazen bull. A voice without tone, pitch, or language, had told him that his fortified safe zone with all of his fancy equipment was nothing more than a dark holding cell. He wasn’t safe from the freakshows out there, or whatever dimensional anomaly was corroding spacetime in Station Bay. Why, of all places, did it have to be happening here? Or maybe, that would have been preferable. From the foreign reports, nationwide and internationally, the ether fog breaches were not an isolated occurrence. But he couldn’t remember the last time he had heard from any corroborators outside the country, or even outside the state. It was as if a fog had encircled the borders of the city and locked it up tight, where no information could go in or out.
But that was a ridiculous notion. Wasn’t it?
His mind was spinning. He needed water. He wanted a smoke, but he felt like that would just make him feel worse. Maybe now was a good time to quit. He’d think about it after he splashed his face with some cold water. He stood up from his swivel chair and crossed the length of his room when suddenly, he felt something thin and fine tickle his nose. A stray hair hanging down? That shouldn’t have been possible, he kept his hair cut too short for any danglers to trail that far. He caught the hair between his thumb and finger and lifted his sunglasses with his other hand. With the darkened shades removed, he could see that what he had pinched still was a nearly transparent silvery thread. Mason’s eyes narrowed, and his hand went to his waist to seek his concealed magnum.
His fingers barely brushed the gun grip before both arms were lashed to his sides by an encircling snare of garrote-wire-like threads that bound him so tightly stretches of the string had begun to dig into his skin. A light form was on his back like a koala, hooking a hand over Mason’s mouth and stifling any speech, while another hand brandished a long scissor blade with its edge pressed against Mason’s throat. The hand covering the Director’s mouth infused threads into the man’s thin lips, stitching them together and sewing his mouth closed, as they had the bunyip in the battle for the reservoir. All that could escape Mason’s mouth were muffled grunts.
Cuppy pressed the blade against Mason’s throat with deadly seriousness, holding that pose as he lowered his face to the Director’s ear to whisper his instructions.
“Move out of turn, and I kill you. Try to fight back, and I kill you. Press a button to call for security or backup, and I kill you. Break my rules in any way whatsoever, and I kill you. If you understand, blink twice. My strings will feel it. You have five seconds to think about it.” Cuppy said in a low, dangerous tone.
Mason cooperated and blinked twice.
“Okie dokie. I have some questions to ask you. I’m going to release the threads holding your mouth shut. Call for help if you want to take a gamble. I’ll wager I can cut your jugular wide open before reinforcements make it to your door.” Cuppy said.
Mason blinked twice again, and Cuppy snapped the threads free, but still clung to Mason’s back. He didn’t lower his blade, and the hand that had covered Mason’s mouth moved to hook the reins of the string bundle at Mason’s waist where his binds wove together.
“It looks like you aren’t accepting my offer of a non-aggression pact, huh?” Mason asked Cuppy. “I thought I made it quite clear that I would leave your lot to your own devices as long as you didn’t become inconvenient for me and my organization. I’ve kept my end of that arrangement. Why this sudden overt act of hostility?”
“I don’t remember pinky swearing on any kind of agreement with you.” Cuppy said. “All you are is a bully in a suit, and you aren’t going to get your way. I know you want to eradicate all of the critters coming through the gates. I’m not going to let you do that.”
“Containing the interdimensional invasion is the only thing keeping this city anything close to safe. You’d have fairy tale freaks of nature stomping through the streets freely?” Mason said.
“You don’t get to decide that on your own, I don’t care what the dumb law says. Did you stop for a second to think maybe you’re provoking creatures into war that don’t want to fight you?” Cuppy said.
“Those creatures are nothing more than glitches in the program of reality. They don’t even have true bodies, they’re echoes of some abstract ideas leaking out of the greater singularity beyond our world. They have to synthesize false proteins out of the ether clouds to have a physical presence on Earth. They’re pathogens hijacking the power of creation itself to infect our planet and put all our lives at risk, and not just you and me, and the human species. All natural forms of life endemic to this world - your keystone species, your protected rain forests, your goddamned pandas that don’t know how to fuck when zoo-goers can see them - everything within the natural order that developed through millions and millions of years of natural selection is at risk. You suddenly introduce a wild, uncontained alien element into the mix, you’re looking at the next global extinction event. Game over for all of us. Then the blood is on all our hands. Just cause civilians like you who get to spout optimistic idealism never have to get your hands dirty-”
Cuppy pressed the scissor deeper into Mason’s neck, and drew a thin line of blood.
“Don’t pretend you’re waging this war for anything or anyone other than yourself. I don’t know what the so-called ferals did to you, but you’re overreacting to something that’s just a symptom of the real problem in the bigger picture. If you’re likening the invaders to a pathogen, then that makes you an autoimmune disorder. You’re an antibody that’s massively overstepping its bounds and hauling off in the opposite extreme. I’m not an idgit. I know how dangerous the monsters can be. We’ve almost been killed enough times to see that. But they’re scared too. They’re lost. They don’t know why they’re here any more than you do, and they’re lashing out because that’s all they know to do. And something is making them think that’s their only option. Something or someone is pulling the strings, and you’re playing right into its hands.” Cuppy said. “I won’t allow that to happen. It stops here.”
“How do you know all this?” Mason asked skeptically.
“You already know that, don’t you? Isn’t that why she disappeared?” Cuppy asked.
“Why who disappeared?” Mason asked.
“Don’t play dumb with me!” Cuppy growled. “Holly!”
Mason’s eyes widened. “How do you know my subordinate?”
“You already know, right? Isn’t that why you got rid of her? For not keeping her fat mouth shut?” Cuppy asked.
Mason sighed. “I see. So I’ve been undermined. That saddens me.”
Cuppy raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying you didn’t kill her?”
“I’m not the monster you seem to think I am. Human life is precious. That’s why I won’t let anything threaten it. Not the ferals - and not you!” Mason growled.
He raised a hand - covered in a biosuit glove interwoven with electric shock pads - and clutched Cuppy’s sword. Ten thousand volts of electricity raced through the metal and ripped into Cuppy.
Cuppy went rigid as his muscles locked up on him, the fist threaded through the grooved loop handle of his scissor blade clenching shut in a white-knuckle hold. His nerves were dancing particles in a thunderstorm, and his heart fluttered madly, flashing bright red warning lights that it was on the cusp of cardiac arrest. White fire engulfed Cuppy's vision as electricity seared his brain and arced across his synapses. He would have gone limp like a convict in Old Sparky's lap if it weren't for the live current keeping his body tensed. Then, as suddenly as it had sparked to life, the deadly voltage ceased, and Cuppy's body ragdolled, held up by his arm still looped through the scissor handle, fingers twitching. The blade had slipped from Mason's neck as he clutched it, palm protected against the keen edge by the resilient microscopic mesh of biothread fabric.
Cuppy's eyes were rolled back into his head, short, choked clicking sounds coming out of the back of his throat. Steam and smoke rose off of his body, and out from the folds of his cloak. Mason huffed and swung the boy by the blade he still gripped, and let go, sailing Cuppy across the office and into a wall. It was almost comical, the sight of the dazed moppet pancaked against the surface, but his blank white eyes and twitching fingers confirmed through their uncanny appearance the gravity of the situation.
Cuppy's body peeled off from the wall and he fell on his face, spasming even as steam poured off his upended rump. After a few seconds, he began to move and wriggle like a caterpillar, trying to stand through what felt like inverted controls. He found his strength and pulled himself up by his scissor blade, stabbed into the ground, using it as a crutch. He had great difficulty, even so, raising himself onto his feet, which had broken out in pins and needles. His left arm was dead-numb below the shoulder, dangling uselessly like a wet noodle. A few huge pulls of air happened automatically, trying to re-oxygenate lungs that had been paralyzed.
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Mason readjusted his collar and pushed his slipping sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose.
"I take no pleasure in harming a child, but you really shouldn't point the gun and not expect your target to shoot back. Point of fact is that you're enacting a felony crime of breaching a federal research institution and task force with national - nay, global - security as its chief interest. Treason." Mason said.
Cuppy wiggled his fingers and uncrossed his eyes, forcing his vision and other senses to come back to him. He glared back at Mason.
"I never said a pledge of allegiance. Keep that government junk to yourself." Cuppy leaned his back against a wall to further prop himself up.
Something with a hard edge seemed to be digging into the center of his back. A hinge?
Mason pulled his .44 on Cuppy.
Cuppy turned his scissor flat and hid his face behind the broad side of the blade.
What's the point of hiding from a headshot, boy? You're not getting up from this. Mason thought, bemused.
Cuppy's strings felt the click of the trigger, and his gut felt something hot and heavy push through it. He heard a sickly splash as blood exploded out the gaping exit wound in his back. There was no pain in the area of the shot itself, but the thunderous bang left Cuppy's ears ringing with a dull, thumping ache. Then, all at once, as if momentum and recoil had missed their bus, the rest of physics kicked in. The punch of the gunshot threw Cuppy's meager weight backward, and he realized that he was probably perceiving things in slow motion like when people were near death and their lives flashed before their eyes.
Unfortunately for Cuppy, he didn't have much to go through a highlights reel with, so it was a dull watch.
The hinge behind him had been to the flip-in door of a garbage chute for discreet disposal of sensitive documents. In a sense, Cuppy counted, and that had been the logic chain Mason was following when he tossed Cuppy in that direction. Loose lips sink ships; down you go, little guy.
Cuppy dropped down the shaft.
"Crime and punishment." Mason said, and returned his gun to its holster.
-
Rolling hills of green grass stretched over a boundless field, interspersed with titanic steel windmills that cast long shadows over the slopes and ridges. All sat under a clouded twilight sky. A figure in a heavy cobalt cloak and hood stood eerily amidst the windmills, vacant hood inclined down at its feet. The coming of a new wind set the blades spinning faster suddenly, and the Faceless Man looked up toward the sky.
-
Cuppy's eyes opened onto darkness. He blinked a few times and realized he was standing. A hand went to his stomach to feel the gunshot wound, but found neither cloak nor skin broken through. As his eyes adjusted to the low lighting and he realized there was a clammy chill in the air, Cuppy recognized the familiar dungeon-like stretches of damp tunnel synonymous with the sewers. His strings felt the echo of moving water, and registered the percussive beat of drops falling onto pipes from the ceiling somewhere further down. He followed the contours of the sewer, realizing it seemed mapped to the layout of the Station Bay combination sewer he and Richie had explored on that ill-fated day. Cuppy doubted Mason's shaft had led to the underground, and wondered passively if his brain, even now shutting down, was cycling through random images and memories and compositing them together as he crossed death's threshold. The sensations, namely the stink of raw sewage and festering garbage, were sharp and vivid. This certainly wasn't Heaven - Cuppy felt terrible, like he had been flushed down here with so much poop.
A sudden light broke his chain of thought, and he looked forward through the parted gloom to see an electric lantern swiveling mid-height. A yellow rubber glove gripped the handle. Cuppy took in the full picture, and realized someone around his size was buried under layers of an improvised stitched-together hazmat suit that looked partially composed of rain slickers and galoshes. A gas mask was woven into a stark white hood, obscuring the face entirely. Despite this, Cuppy could tell it was a child under that getup. The suited kid replaced the lamp on his waist, and Cuppy saw that the kid had a beach pail full of what looked like empty glass bottles that sparkled in an oddly pretty way under this lighting. The gas mask kid gestured toward Cuppy as if briefly confused. Cuppy was right there with him.
"I didn't know anyone else liked to dumpster dive down here." the kid said, youthful voice garbled and distorted through the mask. "Sunday collections for bottles and stuff. Heavier pockets for the candy shop." the boy explained. "I don't know if it's the wind and rain moving the bottles down here, or if litterbugs just chuck garbage down the drain for chuckles, but it's opportunity either way. You want a few? Getting kind of heavy."
Cuppy shook his head, smiling. "No thanks. That looks like a big haul, you earned it. No pain no gain, right?"
"Uh huh." the boy nodded. "So, if you aren't collecting, what are you doing down here?"
"Got lost. Is there an access point back to the surface near here?" Cuppy asked.
"Yeah. Follow the tunnel straight ahead and take a right, you'll find the grate that opens up into the complex strip. Main Street and the river are a stone's throw away from there, you can't miss them. You a tourist?" the boy asked.
"You could say that." Cuppy nodded.
"Swell. Stick around for the Crawdad Festival, only one of them a year. Catch you later." the gas mask boy said.
"Toodles." Cuppy tipped a non-existent hat.
The boys crossed paths and parted ways.
Cuppy moved through the slicked sewer hall he recognized so well by this point, and came to the vertical concrete shaft leading up to ground level. The square slotted grate cover fit perfectly over the mouth of the shaft, right where he had left it when he and Richie both descended in search of trolls. Since then, someone had apparently built an improvised ladder to the top from discarded boxes and palettes. Cuppy ascended easily, and struggled a bit more with the lid - but not as much as he expected to. It was a hefty lift, but there was no wobbling or straining as there had been before. Perhaps he was getting stronger too, same as Richie.
Cuppy slid the cover aside and emerged from the underground to find himself standing in the narrow strip of green grass running the length of blue duplexes he had come to think of as home. However, the apartment at the row’s edge was not as he remembered it. The concrete patio was cluttered with plastic shelves, a stationary exercise bike with a cracked seat, and an actual bike hanging upside down from ceiling hooks. The model and color of the bike weren’t a match for the one Richie had found abandoned either. The smells in the air, and the colors were all wrong too. It was supposed to be the very end of September, yet the sun was warm and the air lush with the smell of spring blossoms. Interwoven with the floral scent was the unmistakable smell of fresh cut grass and lawn mower fumes. That wasn't right - this place was supposed to be abandoned. The only ones doing upkeep had been Cuppy and his friends themselves.
Cuppy, disoriented and his head spinning with the strangest sensory overload, turned toward the forest and saw yet another idiosyncrasy. The picket fence was still there, but hidden behind a sturdier light brown brick wall, like twin bulkheads with a narrow space lined between. Cuppy’s strings could feel the fluttering of garbage strewn and caught on the brambly weeds within. The forest itself was sparser, more a grouping of several tree groves with ample space in between, revealing little rises and falls dusted with last fall’s compounded detritus, a permanent arboreal stain that reminded Cuppy of peat bogs and how nothing ever decomposed fully in them. A few rustic houses were spread out across the woodland, and beyond the furthest treeline, Cuppy saw a suburban-style cul de sac encircling a large, vacant white house. He let his strings trail freely in the wind, and felt them blown toward the right of his body. From the left end of the complex, the air carried the sharp, salty smell of brackish water, and more gasoline fumes that Cuppy realized would have signified motorboats.
He looked up and saw the early morning sun had just begun to climb the clouds into its throne atop the sky. Beyond the tufts of white was a picturesque blue sky that seemed a perfect reflection of the apartment color scheme itself. His exposed ankles brushed against dewdrops cradled in individual blades of grass. Birds called from somewhere off in the distance. Cuppy pulled himself on top of the stone wall, pinwheeling for balance as he almost fell down the space in between the walls, and looked out beyond the woodland’s edge, toward the source of the salt smell. In place of the inward-curved concrete reservoir he and the others had claimed before it was invaded and desanctified, there was an immense, powerful-looking river that stretched some few hundred feet from bank to bank. It was a gorgeous dark blue, with little whitecaps flickering in and out of existence in the ambient breeze. A vertical lift bridge with two tall watchtowers marked the threshold where the river passed out of whatever town this was.
Cuppy somehow knew it was a town, rather than a city. The atmosphere was far less congested than Station Bay, and there were less vibrations weighing on his senses, indicating a sparser population. He threw his arms wide and enjoyed the breeze, as the lingering feeling of having been electrocuted, slammed, and shot, gradually faded. He felt good with the wind in his face, and the smells of the grass, dew, and river water in his nostrils. He reflected on a conversation he couldn’t remember having actually been real or dreamed up or not, when his determination to map the sewers had brought him into a headbutt war of attrition with his roommate.
“I’d like to know exactly what I am and where I came from. Wouldn’t you?” Cuppy had asked.
“No. I know where I came from. All I want to know is where I’m headed, and the goddamn sewer wasn’t at the top of my list.” Richie had answered gruffly.
“I have no memory of anything. If I find out my origin, it may open the floodgate for other memories to come rushing back. It could help us determine the nature of the wandering corridors, and the creatures that are appearing where they shouldn’t. Maybe this isn’t just happening in the city. Maybe it is, and there’s nothing beyond the city. Maybe it could all be just a dream. We’ll never find answers by standing here.” Cuppy had said.
Again, a vision of that windmill-scarred place invaded his mind and absorbed his senses. It was still twilight there, as though the sun and the darkness were caught in an eternal deadlock over some no man’s land. The Faceless Man glided across the grassy hills in his flowing cobalt robes, the long hem brushing past the blades of grass not betraying any evidence of true feet or a walk cycle. He was a half-existence, like the phantom pain had been. Immaterial. Unreal.
Cuppy heard - no… felt - a sentiment flip through his being like the pages of a picture book printed on his soul.
Where do we come from, and where do we go?
Are we seeing the whole truth?
Or just shadows dancing on the cave wall?
I want to know what there is.
Even if it is forbidden.
Will you follow me to Hell?
The field was gone, and Cuppy was standing on the floor of the grassy strip again, swooning a little. He leaned against the stone wall for support, clutching at his head.
“Look out!” a voice warned him.
Cuppy turned his head and was struck full-on in the face by a runaway soccer ball. His vision blanked out.
-