The kids plunged into their soft white beds. Much like Freyja had done, Richie began to rut and roll around in the silky sheets. Cuppy, for his part, had maxed out his mental credit card, think lump swirling with numbers and rules. He crawled like an inchworm deep under his blanket, burrowing the wrong way into bed. Then he went limp and fell immediately asleep.
Cuppy’s mind drifted idly, like a boat tied to the shore of a beach, being rocked gently by the ebbing tide. All at once, a coldness shattered the peace as though a bucket of ice water were poured on his face, nearly jolting him awake. Stirred by the foreign sensation of being hyper alert in a time when his mind was meant to relax, he began to pick up on his surroundings. A lush field of green jungle stretched before him, and he began to float through it, brushing through trees and vines until he came to a broad clearing, where a city of megalithic stone revealed itself, its occupants rushing towards a circular area that reminded Cuppy of a helicopter landing pad and staring into the sky. A sense of abandonment filled Cuppy’s thoughts. “Why weren’t they here yet?” Beyond the distant pyramid of dark hewn rock, the moon began to pass in front of the sun, an eclipse. The villagers looked skyward in panic. Had they upset their benevolent friends of the skies? Cuppy’s perspective shifted up, following the gaze of the villagers and honing in on a craft far above. In an instant, he was inside the ship and among its residents, hearing arguments in a language he couldn't make out exactly, words that weren’t even words, more like ideas loud enough to be heard. One of them, familiar in some way despite her inhuman appearance, turned away from the observation port, a tearful expression on her face as the ship warped away, leaving Cuppy alone in space for a moment.
The galaxy itself seemed to stretch, the Earth below him spinning rapidly for a moment as eons passed, only to slow again when Cuppy began to fall back towards the earth astride a comet. The trailing ice-rock skipped like a pebble across the atmosphere, dumping Cuppy into the Western side of North America. The distant sound of an old-fashioned steam train echoed through the sky as he was lowered into an arid ghost town, where a lone outlaw stood on the rough-hewn wooden porch of a decrepit saloon, a whiskey bottle in hand. Cuppy saw flashes of gunfire, smelled blood and smoke in the air, the alluring sight of gold bars stacked high in an iron safe, and the yellow-hazel eyes of the outlaw, obscured partly by the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat, locked onto his own, widening. Cuppy launched into space once more, fleeing the intense stare.
Cuppy was amidst creaky stands overlooking a yellow-brown lane of dirt with a long wooden banister dividing it. Armored knights on either end, surmounting powerful, neighing horses, charged each other, cumbersome lances poised forward. They grazed each other, and neither man was knocked from his horse. One lost his lance, breaking to wood bits on his opponent's pauldron. As they circled back, an attendant tossed the disarmed rider a new lance. His horse reared up, and they charged again. The throngs of peasantry and nobility alike cheered at the joust.
Then Cuppy was tailing a deep sea submarine, a spectral presence at its back, watching the whirring watercraft sink into a dark crevice, like a fissure into the bottom of the ocean itself. He fell through the murk, reminded at once of that great Abyss he had seen within the Nocturne River of Riverview.
Cuppy floated to a stop at the bottom of the trench. The atmosphere was warm, light, and airy in contrast to the expected cold, crushing depths. Cuppy stood in a spotlight, as though a lone figure illuminated upon a stage.
It's the Origin. a voice said.
Cuppy looked - up? - up, and saw officer Dean float down toward him, boyish face smiling despite the stab wounds running clear through his torso. His badge was missing, of course it was. He had bequeathed it to Cuppy as a protective talisman.
"The Origin? Where are we?" Cuppy asked.
Yes. Dean said.
"Everywhere?" Cuppy asked.
More or less. That bottomless Abyss you saw is a representation of all that is, was, will, or can be. All possibilities unfurl from a singular point. The universe I lived and died in is but a single thread. Far out, huh? he smiled, with just a twinge of sadness.
Cuppy frowned. "I'm sorry I couldn't save you."
Dean chuckled. I knew the risks when I put on that uniform. Granted, I never thought they'd come via no-clipping through the natural order of reality. He frowned a bit. I'm the only one who made it here though. The rest of my team were barred from the other side, condemned to purgatory when they died on that bastard's claws. Something vile and vicious hangs over Station Bay.
"Crocus. The shades." Cuppy said.
That's right. And it isn't just the city, or Earth. He is a poison, or a virus, one whose corruption is settling into the Origin. Corroding it. Corrupting it. The great patchwork quilt can't come undone, or what happened to the distant planet will happen everywhere.
Cuppy cocked his head, thinking of a world that had crumbled from the inside out, gas plumes of the underworld belching out from within, carrying chittering shades to feed on all life that clung to that cosmic stone. He saw it come unraveled, and its sun go out. He felt the intertwined aura he had tasted when he passed through the disembodied soul of the lone survivor drifting through the Void, hallucinating endless Hells.
"I wasn't really there for that." Cuppy realized. "How do I know all this?"
The scenery shifted back to that great Abyss, and Cuppy laid eyes once again on the great intersection of countless threads, bearing electric impulses and compact jets of data.
You left these strings, didn't you? Dean pointed to stray tangles of white thread, caught in the network of reality. When you went to the brink and back, and took a little tour of someone's living memory.
Cuppy touched his chest where he had been shot. "That boy, Dares - he saw this place too, didn't he? These are his memories, his vision of the afterlife. He lived in that town. Crocus does too. He drove him to his death."
He lives in you. All of you. The corridor adjoined to your new home was bound there with the threads of memory. The bad guys think it's their way into Station Bay, their ticket to spread that malign influence and consume this world, as they had others. But a door can open two ways. A double edged sword. Take up that sword, won't you?
Cuppy nodded. He touched his lingering strings, caught in the tides of space and time, and saw many things.
He saw rumbling rust buckets on wheels, revving their engines as they raced along a rough track within a barren wasteland baked by the sun. He saw soldiers in gas masks materialize out of the yellow haze of mustard gas, stepping over the twisted corpses of their fallen, tangled in sprawling shrubbery of razor wire. He saw amazon rainforest basins, he saw the shifting Antarctic continent freeze over into inhospitable icy desert across the punishing onslaught of time, he saw liliput footsteps echo across rainstorm puddles, splashing with sounds like music notes. He saw a shifting labyrinth of hedge, heard the bellow of the patrolling minotaur within. He saw a lost cosmonaut shuttle fall out of orbit and burn up upon atmospheric reaction, saw a skull within the face shield, he saw cavemen spurt sparks from knocking rocks together. He saw a great pirate flagship trading cannon volleys with a pursuing Navy vessel upon tropical seas with sparkling blue waters off the crescent coast of a hidden lagoon island. He saw crumbling ruins and lost treasures, heard the wail of lost spirits, felt the psychic radiation poisoning of their curses. He saw a great hole open up in the sea, saw waterfalls pour into a great temple amidst lava lakes and basalt islands. He saw floating runes above the clouds, strewn with olive vines and surmounted by a rising doomship releasing merciless battle robots to rain hellfire down on the fleeing denizens. He saw abandoned fairgrounds shrouded in fog, saw a giant pterodactyl fly overhead like an organic jet, shrieking.
Cuppy’s out of body gliding concluded with a hard thump as he was restored to a very real-feeling body again, catching his breath as he lay in an alleyway beside a lamp-lit cobblestone street. Cottage-like buildings lined the quaint road, and in the distance, atop a grassy hill, a grandiose castle was illuminated by the full moon’s light by a temporary gap in the approaching storm clouds. Rustling in a nearby crate made Cuppy scramble to his feet, eyeing the box with suspicion. A familiar puppet poked out of the box, tilting its head at Cuppy with sewn-on button eyes. “Oh, just you. C’mon bro, let’s get out of here before it rains.” Cuppy said, feeling relieved. He held open the satchel that hung at his waist and the little puppet hopped in, nestling into the cloth. Cuppy’s small footsteps echoed in the quiet streets, a few passing chimney-sweeps going about their duties in their long and swooshy duster coats. Cuppy felt strong wind at his back, the storm cresting over the castle beginning to pick up in speed and intensity. Pulling up his hood, Cuppy quickly dashed to stand beneath the overhanging roof of a bakery, hearing the pitter patter of raindrops against the cobbled street and the wooden stakes of the bakery roof. He breathed in the sweet scent of the rain, and eagerly sat on the deep-set windowsill of the bakery behind him to take in the scene. The tranquility was quick to fade though, the wind beginning to howl and make the wooden buildings all along the street creak and groan, and extinguishing a few of the streetlamps.
Cuppy grimaced as an unwelcome scent cut through the lovely ambient rain smell. Rot. Like a weeks-old corpse had just stuffed its armpit in Cuppy’s face for a second. Lightning struck, and the thunderclap echoed from the skies like a giant gasp. Deep whooshing undercut the intense wind, like something massive was stirring in the clouds. Cuppy felt a sense of foreboding, and stood from the windowsill, apprehension seizing his little heart. The storm growled, lighting flashing in unnatural crimson in the blackening clouds, which were beginning to spin like a hurricane, the eye of the storm dilating to reveal what looked like an enormous clock face of cracked porcelain, ticking with ominous booms. Cuppy felt fear grip him at the unnatural sight, and the clock’s hour hand echoed deeply as it struck midnight, sparking a sudden clamor of distorted church bells from above.
The bells grow louder and more hellish, a smoky black fog beginning to fill the streets. “What’s going on?!” Cuppy’s voice shook. In the shifting wind, he felt drops of rain hitting his face. They were warm, and bore a metallic smell. Cuppy wiped his face with his sleeve, seeing long streaks of red smear across it. The air itself seemed to thicken, a fetid, humid heat permeating the wind. Suddenly it was as if a lighthouse was shining through the storm from above, a deep red glow scanning over buildings in the blooded storm, searching for something. Cuppy stepped out from under the bakery roof, clamoring up a fire escape to reach the roof of an adjacent building as he tried to locate the source of the light. The bloody rain stung his face, and he blinked in disgust as he scanned the horizon, freezing at the sight of the light’s origin. A massive, lidless, glowing eyeball, hanging from a meaty stalk which extended from the sky. It hovered there, scanning up and down the streets when fleeing footsteps caught its attention. The eye turned around, honing in its eerie red beam on a fleeing villager. As the eye's light hit the man, he screamed in pain, his clothing tearing off as his body swelled and rapidly grew, like a tumor. His skin was quickly torn away, exposing bare muscle to the blood rain. His skull split down the middle with a sickening crack, a long slit opening up in his torso as his whole upper body flayed outward like a peeled banana, his ribs cracking out and snapping, becoming jagged fangs that lined either side of his split chest. A horrible, hoarse scream emanated from the mutated creature, and it ran into the night with terrifying speed.
Elsewhere, more banshee-like cries of horror and agony rang out, and Cuppy clutched at his ears to muffle them, his breaths rapid and panicked. The massive, dangling eye began to sweep its gaze toward Cuppy’s roof, and he quickly dove to hide behind the roof’s outcropping to evade its stare, trying to quiet his own breaths as he saw their puffs in the cold wafting into the red beam. Trembling in fear, he held his breath, trying not to give himself away despite the severe discomfort of the blood rain that began to soak through his clothes. Eventually, the eye’s gaze moved on, and Cuppy stood from the roof, surveying his surroundings for a way out. In the flashes of lightning, he saw the disfigured silhouettes of more of the fleshy creatures, some crawling up walls to access rooftops adjacent to his own. The sounds of breaking glass in the distance were followed inevitably by screams of horror, and heavy chills ran up Cuppy’s spine. The lightning flashes grew more frequent, bathing the overrun town in a near constant flicker of red. Cuppy felt the ground shake as the enormous clock overhead shattered, huge shards of porcelain raining down on the city and crushing several buildings. Looking towards where the massive eyeball now lurked, dragging across the cobblestones as its connecting nerve began to pile around it like a dropped rope. The stench of rot magnified again, and Cuppy retched, looking skyward to see where the giant eye was connecting to. The huge, cavernous socket of a mottled, plague-ridden face, like that of a late-stage syphilis victim filled the sky, shards of the broken clock cutting into its rotten flesh. An enormous grin spread through its maw as huge flows of greasy slobber rained down from browned and jagged teeth. The stench of decay grew unbearable, Cuppy shrinking away in panic. The giant corpse-face’s jaw unhinged with a thunderous snap, its remaining eye rolled back in its head, and it bit down into the very earth, shrouding Cuppy in the consuming darkness…
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…
His strings felt a pulse. A rhythm. A rhythm that was made of many. He felt the breath of the trees and stones, the sigh of the wind, the calls of the oceans. The voices of land, sea, and sky were in unison. Beyond the azure sky, behind the distant clouds, he ricocheted across the stars like a pinball, kicking off dancing notes and lights. The great tapestry of the Abyss mirrored the hidden puppet cross buried in Cuppy's heart. As he had seen its face manifest out of the data threads back then, Cuppy now saw a new configuration weave itself together. The threads took on the aspect of a heart, one that was beating with a sound that was the totality of all. A poem flashed through Cuppy's mind.
I am the rocks and the trees, the birds and the breeze. I am the eye in the sky, I am you when you're born and die. You are me and I am we, the cosmos and eternity.
Cuppy felt a great shadow open below him, and was drawn down, as Richie had been in his dream when he clung to the sun. Beneath, cast in the distorted shape of that heart, was a great shadow. Cuppy could hear whispers in it, growing louder, like the accusations of schizophrenic voices, or the sorrows and temptations of the damned. Slipping into that shadow colder than absolute zero, Cuppy flew over the city at night, suddenly naked and vulnerable. He heard the nagging worries of mundane days, the prodding fingers of encroaching psychosis, the rage of a drunkard breaking a bottle over another's head, the whimpers and sobs of a rape victim left in a gutter. All hurts, regrets, grudges - all the cracks in the human psyche, sealed away on the other side of the heart - here they had physical weight and potency. The shadow of the Abyss - was that the Void? Cuppy felt the infinite weight of all negative emotion churning and bubbling within the Void. Roaring.
Then, the scenery flipped, and Cuppy was upon the streets again, looking up into the weeping sky amidst a sudden downpour. Rain fell endlessly from the sky.
The Black Rain.
Blurring Boundaries
Cuppy, having had quite enough of being rained on by things that weren’t water, grimaced amidst the storm, analyzing his surroundings. He stood in a kind of plaza, recognizable to him as an area in downtown Station Bay. At its center, a large fountain stood, though its centerpiece, a horse on pedestal, was missing. The falling ink from the sky was beginning to cloud up the fountain’s waters, dying them jet black one drop at a time. Eventually, the fountain was an utterly opaque void, and even in the heavy downpour, Cuppy noticed an eerie stillness in that black mirror, as if it were some creeping predator, muscles tensed to pounce. The shadowy liquid began to ripple and swirl noisily, drowning out the sounds of each dense drop thudding against the concrete around him. Cuppy heard bassy creaking, like a pirate’s galleon in a storm, and a forked shape began to poke through the level surface of the inky sea, rising slowly from the depths.
“A…tree branch?” Cuppy muttered, confused as the oil-slicked limb of a great and tall tree began to stretch skyward, dozens more like it following until at last the final length of coal-black trunk emerged, and all was still once more. The leaves were lightless shadows, trailing wisps of vantablack that hung from each crooked arm of the tree. Cuppy’s breaths felt loud, echoing in his head as he stared up at the hellish tree. He was deafened to the storm entirely now, deprived of all sensation it seemed, but what his quickening uneasy breathing and the unsettling croaks of the shadowy wood produced. He felt eyes on him suddenly, like a thousand snakes were peering out at him from every shadow, and black roots began to unfurl like grasping tendrils from the fountain’s edge, spreading through the plaza with a malicious hunger, unbecoming of a plant.
Cuppy stepped back from the tree, disturbed. His footfall echoed deep, like he’d stepped onto an enormous bass drum, and the roots ceased their crawl. Every leaf on the tree began to flicker, little flashes of too-familiar crimson sparking off of them. All at once, they flew off of the tree, scattering skyward in the form of an enormous swarm of red-eyed crows. The dead-looking tree remained, twisted and hunched like some ancient hag.
Cuppy felt the cold bite of sharp bark twisting around his legs as the roots seized him, lifting him towards the branches as another root snaked around his neck and looped itself around one of the limbs. Cuppy began to panic, kicking and flailing his legs as the noose tightened, the tendrils around his legs beginning to pull tight and increase the pressure around his neck, strangling him slowly as he struggled against them. A horde of crows swept down, starting to stab at him with their icepick beaks, and he did his best to shield his eyes from prying talons. He managed to suck in a single breath, screaming with anguish into the dark.
“HELP ME!”
-
Freyja, curled up in wolf form at the foot of her bed, began to stiffen, and her ears perked up. Then, her eyes shot wide open, yellow bands tightening. She flipped over, standing on the bed, and listened. Her hackles raised as she felt immense cold wafting out from the vicinity of Cuppy's room, reeking of that same nightmare aura that sent chills down her spine when she passed over the sewer junctions where the black rain pooled. She burst into Cuppy's room and saw the transparent grey shadow of a figure straddling him. It seemed to exist in two simultaneous forms, as if two interpretations of the same creature were overlapping each other, taking turns being on top, both having difficulty maintaining their shape in the presence of a third party observer. At first, Freyja saw a gnarled tree replete with ominous crows, the roots buried into Cuppy's chest as if growing out of him, a scraggly branch with a skeletal aspect shoving itself down his throat and throttling him. The yellow bands of Freyja's eyes tightened till her pupils were constricted pinpricks, and the image faded. Now it was decisively a humanoid figure of inky black shadow, kneeling on Cuppy's chest and fixing him with its foggy deadlight gaze.
A shade, she presumed.
"Get AWAY from him!" Freyja roared. Her jaws parted, fangs glowing red hot, and volcanic light lit up the back of her throat, hot sulfuric plumes spewing from her nostrils. "Sin Flare!"
A burning sphere of destruction fired from Freyja's mouth like a cannon shot. The fire, far denser, heavier, and hotter than her flamethrower back in the forest against Luchesi had been, slammed into the shade like an infernal wrecking ball. The monster's limbs were vaporized to wisps of black smoke on impact as the hellfire engulfed the apparition and rocketed across the room with it. Within the fire, the shade burned from the edges in like crinkling newspaper tossed into the fireplace. It screeched and howled as it disintegrated into nothing. The fire's intensity faded with the shade's liminal body, and when the flare reached the far wall, it had peetered to embers that left nary a scorch mark.
It wouldn't do to have questions about why there were burning holes through several walls cropping up, after all.
Richie burst into the room thereafter, dragons coiling and glowing blue. "What happened?"
Freyja stood like a werewolf, superheated smoke rising from between her burning fangs, and scanned the room. "Shades. Be on guard."
Richie stiffened, then turned his back to the others, keeping his eyes toward the relative darkness of the way he had just come from.
Why here, why now? Richie wondered.
They exploit fear to manifest. It seems one was feeding on your friend over there just now. one of his dragons sniffed toward Cuppy, who wore a grimace with his eyes closed, clutching his stomach.
"I see." Richie seethed. "Frey, check on Cuppy." Richie said, then sprinted into the darkness, the way lit by his azure halo.
The floor creaked under him as though he were suddenly in a haunted house, and he began to picture spreading cobwebs and miniature cyclones of dust.
"Not falling for this shit." Richie growled, punching his knuckles together.
He heard a creak above him, and looked up. Spider-like, a shade was affixed to the wall, limbs splayed, face down, and pulsing. It craned its neck up at Richie at an unnatural angle, cracking its neck, and unveiling its hollow deadlight eyes.
Freyja heard crashing from the central common room as she roused and held Cuppy. Her ears folded, unsure if she should go help or not. Then she remembered how the priority had been to shield the wampus cat from the manticore, and hardened her resolve to stick to the plan and do her job. Cuppy had been made vulnerable. Richie was a big boy, he could handle himself. A few soul-sucking shadows from the Void weren't enough to kill him.
"Cup? Cuppy, you alright?" Freyja cradled the boy. Cuppet poked up from the side of the bed, frowning, and poked his brother hesitantly.
Cuppy grumbled a bit. "Five more minutes." - then started snoring, drooling in his sleep for good measure.
Freyja twitched.
"Get the fuck up!" she lifted and started shaking and thrashing Cuppy, like a wolf shaking a rabbit.
Cuppet jerked upright, horrified and outraged, making angry wooden noises. Cuppy did indeed wake up.
"Ack!" he went limp, floppy and dangling upside down from the waist where Freyja's paws clutched him.
"Oh, morning Freyja!" Cuppy chirped.
"Don't you morning Freyja me!" Freyja growled, dropping the moppet. "You got bad-touched by a living nightmare, how the hell do you bounce back to chipper so quickly?"
Cuppy rolled his shoulders, thinking about that face in the sky, back at the castle within his dormant memory.
"Moping won't change the past." Cuppy said, eyes narrowed. He withdrew his fishing pole from under the covers. "What matters is now. I have a bone to pick with those Void-jerks."
They both heard a crash from the common room, and rushed out. Richie had gotten his head slammed through the ceiling, leaving him buried the wrong way up to his shoulders, dangling. His hands pressed against the ceiling, trying to pry himself free. The spidery shade, admiring its handiwork from the ground, vibrated with a sickly crunching noise that visibly broke and reset its ribs with each breath. It made an echoey, chilling noise. Was it laughing at him?
"Richie," Freyja said, "are you ok?"
"Do I look ok, you fucking idiot?" Richie's muffled voice asked.
"He's fine." Cuppy said, knocking the shade across the room with a bullseye ego check courtesy of his forty pound float ball.
Richie's eyes adjusted to the darkness. Either they had some kind of cramped pseudo-attic space between floors of the hotel, or else the shades were warping reality to create one where instead Richie's head should have popped out of the floor of the room above theirs like a concussed meerkat. Once his eyes adjusted, he saw another shade inside the space, doing an army crawl toward him. Freyja yanked him out of the trap before the shade could lock lips, and he dropped onto his ass, hissing at his struck tailbone. The shade poured out of the hole like a leak in a dam, and reformed on the floor, hunched yet towering over them.
Richie growled. "We're on vacation, you fucks! Save it!"
-
One would have expected commotion - concerned neighbors, a security response - but none came. There was an aura of silence about the room, as if there was a bubble surrounding it and cutting it off from the rest of Station Bay. Evidently, they had plenty of trauma to go around to bulk up on.
One of the shades flew out an open window, the wolfen Freyja clamped upon it. Suspended far above the ground, the shade melded with the darkness of the night, becoming an immaterial shadow, and slipped out from under Freyja. The shapeshifter realized she had essentially thrown herself out of a skyscraper, and felt her stomach drop, followed by the rest of her. Cuppy's strings caught her, and Cuppy himself was pulled out of the window by her weight. Cuppet plunged a scissor blade into the ground, grabbing Cuppy's leg, and held the chain of people, dangling from the side of the hotel. The shade, a flattened circle of darkness against the tower wall, zoomed upward.
"Come back here!" Richie dashed straight up after the shade, enabled by a burst of his Level 2 super speed. Unfortunately, he ran headlong into a trap. The shade stretched its form out into a stygian guillotine blade, and held aloft just long enough to net a collective "oh fuck". Then the execution blade fell swiftly and cleaved through everyone.