Episode 9: Revelation

The door opened and there stood Mary Brach, looking the way Jen had remembered—a smooth-skinned old woman with eyes like algae. Mary Brach’s body, angular and statue-stiff, looked as though it contained more energy than the woman was capable of using. She seemed to vibrate with it.

“You’re just in time.”

The words were icy in their effect, for as she stood on the porch of the nondescript house, Jen had already gotten the feeling that she was about to drop into some hole of despair that had been prepared for her. It was bad enough she was still brimming with the pain of poor Kyle from the funeral. Her guts twisted at the memory of it.

And there was something that beckoned to her from within the house itself, something that was behind the old woman.

“Come in, come in!” said Mary Brach impatiently.

Jen crossed the threshold, and Mary rushed to close the door.

The air in the house was electrified. Everything she saw—the living room with its matching fabric ottomans, one more worn than the other, the antique sewing cabinet with the metal corners, the small stack of mail on the mud-colored end table, itself perched on muscular iron legs with a wood-tipped crank in between; beyond that, the quaint kitchen with its tiny round table, its lazy Susan heaped with dry condiments, a ceramic rooster with napkins in its back; the gray and orange upholstery, the checkered wallpaper—all of it vibrated ever so subtly like the momentary fluttering of an eyelid.

“The pain,” said Mary Brach, her voice flat.

“I have it.”

Mary held out her hand. An awful invitation. She might as well had asked Jen if she could stick two fingers down her throat.

Jen reached out and grabbed it.

There is nothing quite so exquisite the sudden loss of pain.

And then... there was a flood of it back into her.

And out once more.

A rollercoaster queasiness began to take over as the pain rolled in, rolled out. It was flowing between them like current. The old woman’s body remained steadfast while hers twisted.

Sadness, bleak sadness, and then hope, and elation, and calm, and overwhelming grief, then satisfaction with the amount of pain, and the process cycled through again and again.

She was being dragged across the room. Mary Brach was leading her into the center of the quaint little space.

Something glinted purely in the orange light of the living room. In her swoon, Jen could just catch it for a moment as it swung around the old woman’s head.

A knife.

Mary Brach brought it down through the open air between them. For a moment it looked as if it was going to slice right through their clasped hands. But it didn’t. It sliced the air itself.

Blackness poured out.

Darkness. Only worse than darkness. Eternal night. But worse than that.

Emptiness and oblivion spilled out of a slit in the air between them. It flowed like a bubble of lava over their clasped hands, which did not so much sink into the blackness as they were swallowed by it. Jen felt the suck of it.

It was only then that she noticed that the current of pain which had been flowing back and forth was now situated between them like a sick, ugly dog waiting to die. How she knew this, she couldn’t tell. Could she smell it? Hear it buzzing like a million drones?

It began to fade, the pain. The blackness was eating it.

“T’lich!” cried Mary Brach in a voice that was not her own. It was a croaking howl, baritone deep, and she held the knife in a bizarrely vertical position, her eyes like yellow plates.

“T’lich izza-neemuth! Imlogga!”

The blackness rolled off their clasped hands and receded into the slit, which became no more. And there was only the quaint little living room with its outmoded furnishings.

Two men approached the hospital reception desk where a beefy man leaned, bent in the direction of his elbow toward the diminutive brunette seated behind it. As for her, she was no more than a talking head with eyes turned down. A soft glow threw the shadow of her nose onto her forehead like a gray smudge.

“Pardon me,” said Miss Tork, removing his derby and covering his heart with it, “We’re here to visit a certain personage currently under treatment at this fine establishment.”

The brunette tilted her head. “Visiting hours end at nine, I’m sorry.”

“Ah, well now,” said Miss Tork, producing a pocket watch from a fob concealed in the breast of his overalls. Flipping it open, he frowned at it. “Of course,” he said, his eyes growing wide. “It seems I’ve forgotten to wind the ol’ gal!” He smiled, clapped it shut, and replaced it.

The two men stood and stared at her.

“Is there...” she said after an uncomfortable moment, “Anything I can do for you?”

“We’d like to see someone here,” said Miss Tork, smiling.

It should be noted that Miss Mithras, with his Fred Astaire lemon face, stared as well. Only his stare contained something of a curiosity about it. Anyone would have thought so.

The beefy man, who was no longer leaning on the counter, thought so.

“Do I know you?” he said.

“Hm?” said Miss Tork. “No, I believe we do not. You are...?”

“No, no. Not you. Him,” the man said, his never never deviating from their target.

 At this point, Miss Mithras broke eye contact with the girl behind the desk and looked over at the beefy man, who wore a badge with the name “Carl” on it.

He did know the man. And the man knew him.

“You went to Countrywood Elementary,” said the man.

“Yes,” said Miss Mithras, whose collar began to heat up.

“I remember you. You’re... man, I’ll be damned. How long has it been.”

“Thirty two years, sixteen days, seventeen minutes. Exactly. As of eight seconds ago,” said the skinny man.

The beefy man laughed.

The brunette shuffled her gaze between the two men. “You guys know each other. That’s so weird.”

“Went to his house once,” said Miss Mithras.

“That’s right,” said Carl.

“Birthday party.”

“Yeah, yeah! What’s your name again?”

“My name is Steven Lovelace, and I dance at night when the folks are gone,” said Miss Mithras.

One might as well have taken a stun gun to the groin of the beefy security guard.

“Wait... hold on...”

“Miss Mithras,” said Tork, “don’t you think you’re being a bit disingenuous to our potential hosts?”

“He don’t know Steven Lovelace when he sees him?” said Mithras.

“That’s not who—” said the man, wincing as if having caught whiff of a tremendous stink. “You... you wer at my party but...”

“Oh,” said Mithras, “you mean I’m not Steven Lovelace? My mistake.”

The man winced again and shook his head.

The girl giggled nervously. “What’s up, guys?”

Mithras put a hand to the side of his mouth. “Steven Lovelace used to dance for him when the parents went out at night. Carl Lovelace, here, had to sit and watch.”

“Okay,” said the beefy man, taking a step toward the two.

“Please, sir,” said Tork, “I’m sure this is a misunderstanding.”

“Carl Lovelace,” said Mithras, “Don’t you remember the sight of your mentally diseased older brother, stripped bare as Adam, humping the couch pillows in your living room?”

The beefy man lunged forward, pushing Tork aside. Within seconds, he had the skinny man’s wrist twisted behind his back.

“Sir,” said Tork, “Mister Lovelace, I beg of you, don’t do this.”

“Who are you?” said Carl Lovelace.

“Thank you for the pain,” said Mithras, closing his eyes and receiving.

Carl Lovelace’s grip relaxed. The sense memory of the night of the pillow-humping dance, which had been vibrating at the edge of his skin, left him, as did another sense memory from the night—a stabbing pain that went from his rectum to the base of his throat and back again.

The man released his grip. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know... please, forgive me.”

Miss Tork bowed slightly. “Not a worry, Mr. Lovelace, not a worry at all. We are very forgiving people and we come from such. Miss Mithras, are you full?”

“I am, Miss Tork.”

“Ah,” said the fat man, his smile lugubrious. “Then, please...” He gestured to the brunette.

“My dear,” said a smiling Mithras, extending his hand to her.

Confused, the poor girl took it.

A few sense memories from a certain night flooded her brain. This was evident from the inhuman sound that came shaking out of her throat.

Mithras looked at Tork. “Father hated her. Died hating her.”

“You got that from a one-second handshake?” said Miss Tork.

Miss Mithras smiled close-lipped, closed his eyes, and nodded once.

“Outstanding!” cried Miss Tork, clapping his hands together.

A touch of the beefy man’s shoulder was all the contact the skinny man needed. Carl Lovelace flinched as if startled.

“Jesus,” he said.

Meanwhile, the brunette, whose father actually loved her only she never knew this (emotions travel over oceans of space and time and an Agony Rat can catch them), crumpled back in her chair and tried to control her breath.

“Are you okay, ma’am?” said Miss Tork.

“What did he do to me?”

“You remembered something terrible that happened to you. Quote alright. Happens to the best of us.” He turned to the security guard. “And you, sir, if you don’t mind, there is an urgent matter to which we need to attend. Give our best to Papa, will you? You know, he loathed you very much.”

With this, the two men hurried toward the elevator.

“Hold on!” said the security guard.

Tork put a hand to the side of his mouth. “You may want to tend to your compadre, Mr. Lovelace! She is having a hell of a time. A hell of a time.”

The elevator doors opened. They two men stepped in. They looked at each other, straightened their ties, nodded in unison. The doors closed.

“I never took to tea,” said Mary Brach, pinching the last few tinkles of instant coffee from the bag between two steady fingers. “Moved here from Kent, you see. Grew up in Newton, Iowa. Thank goodness I’ve retained my other Britishnesses, eh? Still soften my shedules, eh? My color has a u in it? You’re not drinking.”

“It’s too late for coffee.”

“Mm,” the old woman said after a slurp. “Pity that.”

“Enough. You owe me answers. What the hell is going on here?”

She spoke softly over the rim of her mug. “What brought you here, then?”

“A dead body. And there were these... creatu—I don’t know what the fuck I saw. Maybe I was tripping, I don’t know. And there was another body without a heart.”

“Creatures, you were going to say, eh?”

Her stomach lurched at the mind’s image. Black, baby-headed, mewling.

Mary Brach put down her mug. “Imlogga.”

She got up and moved over to a set of cookbooks next over on the kitchen counter and chose one, seemingly at random. As she turned it over and began leafing through it, Jen caught a glimpse of its innards (why that word?) and its illustrations. Its cover was blank, old and flaking, but the pages themselves seemed in pristine condition.

One thing was certain: It wasn’t a cookbook at all.

Mary turned the open book toward her. “Look familiar?”

On the right leaf was an illustration. It was sketched, and yet somehow complete even with the fuzziness of its edges. It was a brood of bats with human baby heads, clustered within the empty chest cavity of a cadaver. The page began to vibrate. The image buzzed and blurred. Somewhere, there was screaming...

Mary closed the book and replaced it on the shelf in the midst of the others. “This is a rare book indeed. A recent acquisition, but it’s incomplete. Missing a leaf here and there. Got it through special means, you see. Went through alternate channels, eh? On the down low?”

“Kataar Urrabsu,” said Jen Quill, her voice in tatters.

“Mm-hm,” said the old woman, once again taking her seat at the kitchen table.

Jen took a sip of coffee in an attempt to shake off the weird, dizzy loathing she felt. Mary Brach sat and stared, a strange smile on her face—as if she knew.

“What the hell were those things?”

Mary Brach leaned forward. “What do you do with the pain you receive?”

Jen shook her head as if to dislodge the question from her ears. “What do you mean what do I do with it?”

Mary raised an eyebrow. Jen shrugged in reply.

“God,” said the old woman. “Surely you must realize that there are those in this world that can benefit from a little pain that isn’t theirs, eh? Balance the scales? Hm?”

“I’m not...”

“You’re not wise to the ways of the world, Jennifer. An Agony Rat should be. You wouldn’t want to abrogate your responsibility to your fellow travelers, now, would you? One might say it’s your duty?”

With these words, Mary Brach leaned forward and released her grip on the coffee mug. Dangling it by one finger in the handle, she allowed the mug to tip, spilling the entirety of its steaming contents into her lap. She winced once, and a tiny, pinched moan escaped from her throat.

“Oh my god,” said Jen, rising and making a grab for the empty cup. “Let me—"

Mary grabbed her wrist. The old woman’s grip was gentle, yet firm and unyielding. Jen found herself staring into the green eyes, which suddenly lost all color and faded to a dead gray. The mug fell to the floor and shattered.

Stinging pain flared in Jen Quill’s lap. She screamed and beat at her legs with her free hand.

“What the... fuck?”

“Our pain,” said the old woman, her voice as flat as her eyes, “was not intended for us, or any of the creatures of this world. We generate it for a reason. It is to serve Vyatha.”

At last, Jen broke free of the old woman’s grip, employing both hands in the service of beating out the invisible fire on her legs. “The fuck did you do?”

“Useless what you’re doing,” Mary said, bending down to gather the large shards of ceramic at her feet.

Jen wiped at her legs repeatedly. “You weird old fuck, what did you do?”

“Stop rubbing yourself. You’re going to have a burn there. Live with it for a bit.” The old woman got up and walked to the kitchen counter, where she pulled out a thin door, exposing the garbage receptacle within. The shards clanked unmusically into the pail.

Jen’s legs stung, and her body trembled from it. “You did this to me. You burned yourself on purpose and gave it to me.”

The woman smiled, revealing a mouthful of teeth the color of a stained coffee pot. “Has anyone ever told you that you possess a flair for stating the obvious?”

“Fuck you!”

“Good, yes. Emotion. We generate it well. Where does it come from? Hm? And what purpose does it serve?”

Jen’s head was swimming with thick ooze. “I came here for answers, not questions.”

The woman turned fully to her and leaned against the kitchen counter. “There is a beating heart to the Universe, not our universe, mind you, but the greater, overarching universe that exists outside our own, the one the ancients used to call the Greater Sky. That beating heart belongs to Vyatha, who eats our pain and shits out worlds. And on those worlds are other creatures who generate their own pain and continue to feed the Chaos of the Greater Sky. Soon Vyatha will expand and obliterate. That is when there will be no more truth, you see. There will only be Vyatha, serving Vyatha, and us in it, serving and becoming and serving. Pain will be no more, you see, because it will be equalized into one smooth, continuous, unyielding ray of light that shines across and through us. We are now in the process of becoming that light, eh? Understand?”

She wanted to understand, truly, but found herself unable to grasp any of the words. She had a feeling she wouldn’t have been able to grasp them even if she hadn’t been burned by proxy by this... what? Witch? And this after what happened when she first arrived...

Did it really happen at all?

“Oh,” said the old woman, her eyes green once again, and wide, and shining, “yes, it will be a glorious time for us. This is what we’re here for, you see. But all is not right at the moment. Those creatures you saw, they are all part of Imlogga. The part you can see, that is. And they belong to Vyatha. Think of them as a bunch of neglected little wastrels. Kidnaps. But what their true purpose is, we cannot know. All we can know is that someone brought them here and that they’re most unwelcome, you see. Vyatha... oh, Vyatha is off, eh? Pissed, you would say? She is stretching out her arms across the oceans of the Greater Sky so that she can gather her brood. Beware those arms.”

A thought occurred to Jen. “The Darkness.”

“The Creeping Darkness,” the old woman corrected. “Yes, you saw it here. That is one arm of Vyatha. There are others.”

“How did it find you?”

The woman smiled wryly. “The Darkness? It’ll find anyone who knows, you see. Certain minds attract it. Hearts too. And now... you know.”

Those last words hung in the air for a moment, then formed into ice crystals around Jen Quill’s neck.

Because it wasn’t necessarily the words themselves, or their implication.

It was the look on Mary Brach’s face at this moment.

Her eyes, wide and staring.

Jen Quill turned around.

A swelling bubble of darkness was creeping toward her.