KOMODO

Jeff VanderMeer

Cheeky Frawg Books

Tallahassee, Florida

This edition copyright © 2014, Jeff VanderMeer.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

This novelette first appeared in Arc Magazine.

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KOMODO

Child, standing there in your flower dress considering me with those wide dark eyes while the band plays out in the courtyard . . . I’m going to tell you a story. It doesn’t matter if you can’t understand me—they can, and they need to trust me. But I need you, too, because every tale requires an audience, and you’re mine. Don’t worry—it won’t take long. I don’t have long, anyway.

I’ll admit my story starts in a strange place, but bear with me. It starts inside of a giant green plastic alien head because I was all dressed up and on my way to a party. Let’s say the party celebrated something like the Day of the Dead, and that I was in a hurry to get there not just because of the party but because of the after party . The after party is always where it’s at—if you can get an invite.

The weight of the head made me stagger back and forth like a drunkard until I got used to it. The funky smell inside had a kind of intoxicating effect, which might also explain part of the staggering . . . and it made me feel a kind of extra-terrestrial clarity coming on, like the mysteries of the universe might soon be solved, or some small part of them. So this is what it’s like to be free, was one thought, with this giant head on my shoulders, my arms pinned, and the second thought was: it’s so green out there. Even the birds were green. The garbage collectors were green, and so were all the cars. Did I say I was moving fast? Staggering, yes. Running, yes.

Such feelings overwhelmed me in that moment! The least among them a lingering sense of appreciation that the buildings accommodated people with giant green heads.

The weight of the head increased as my path took me through a local shopping center, and soon I felt a pressure pulling on my neck, which puzzled me. When I managed to find a reflective surface, I discovered that a rag-tag band of green children had attached themselves to my giant head by means of crude homemade grappling hooks and were by their combined mass throwing off my balance. I had no choice but to take drastic action. I sat down on the pavement and cursed at a rapid rate, in a variety of local languages. After half an hour, the children began to find me less interesting, and left. I was able to continue in my rapid progress without further interference.

No, child. No, I didn’t really sit down and curse. I rose in a fury and flung juveniles like ragdolls. The ones who had held onto their grappling hooks, which is always a fool’s chance.

Did I say it was a shopping center? It wasn’t a shopping center, or even a farmer’s market. I only said that so you wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. And they weren’t really children. But this is not entirely the truth, either. Your comfort level—and now I’m not talking to you, who can barely understand this language, but to the watchers , who, by the way, should know that this child has nothing to do with any of this; she’s just a bystander, and may or may not still grow up to be innocent . . . it’s beyond my control, mostly.

But your comfort level is only one consideration because, after all, I’m the one bleeding out.

So . . .

The rest of my journey in the giant head went badly—I think you saw that coming. I walked to the river, lost my balance, and fell into the water, head-first. I bobbed downstream, legs in the air, staring at upside down tadpoles and fish (yes, let’s call them fish) with just enough air to breathe. A strange murky beauty to it all, and from that perspective the river weeds draped down and the alligators (yes, why not?) all pale belly, long throat, and legs weirdly paddling above their torsos. They looked just enough like komodos to alarm me for a moment.

A while later, I managed to get caught in some branches just as the giant green head I was wearing filled up with water. Wedged thusly, I was able to get right-side up. By then, I was miles from the city and sopping wet. With difficulty, I made it up the steep bank, only to be confronted by a startling and horrible sight.

I may need to back up and tell the truth again. There were other people involved. There always are. I left the house that morning in such a hurry for a reason—several of them. Someone was after me. Someone had caught up. I had no choice but to jump in the river.

The head began to fill with water for another reason: the bullet.

The ones who pursued me smelled funny. Not hilarious funny, but funny —like lime mixed with pumice and salt and then put in a blender for a thousand years and taken out, shaken with ice, placed in a glass with a sprig of basil. When they got angry, though, all of that got sweated away and they smelled like thick, fresh brine. They did not always hold their shape. They appeared far off in the sky hoping to catch me unawares by diving down with silver wings folded. By the time they reached the ground, their wings were gone. If not for that, I would never have been able to escape them . . . although there is always a chance that they wanted me to escape. Games within games. Wheels within wheels.

Here’s another thing I haven’t said, child: I was expecting them. Just not so soon. Does that sound strange? It’s not nearly the strangest thing. You may have to brace yourself.

Angels, child. They were angels, and as terrible and transcendent as you might imagine.

In happier days, those descents, those burning wings, served to captivate me: the pratfalls of immortals. The dramatics that now were charged with fear and stress had, back then, made me love them, just a little bit.

They dared to take chances, which is what hooks you at first, even if you do find yourself among them largely by chance or fate. To return to their stronghold atop a living mountain—to really come all the way back home—they would eschew riddling their way through the Rips, and instead enter from the upper atmosphere, calculating how long it would take for their huge wings to burn up as they came hurtling down. Their wings were strong, but filigreed like a damselfly, and the flame tore holes. Weaving and diving, feet-first and head-first, they careened down in droves. Most of the time, they guessed correctly and made it to the ground, their wings crumpled and glistening black-brown like burnt sugar. The wings would grow back. Everything grows back on them; they even have a tolerance for the vacuum of space. Some of them get drunk on it.

The unlucky or dumb ones would smash screaming into the lawn and would smolder there until others tended to them. These angels lay there, shrieking and laughing at the same time. Writhing in a spasm of something that wasn’t just pain. They looked like heaps of smoking, quivering tar with just a suggestion of a head with a mouth by then, but smelled like lilies. Such cases would take a long time to heal, but by their standards a decade was just a blink. When you’re immortal or near to it, your idea of play just isn’t the same. Your idea of play is almost as important as the missions that take ages to carry out.

I can guarantee you will be confused for a while, but hopefully it’ll pass.

The startling, the horrible sight? Not the sudden field of what I’ll say were weeds and wildflowers, even though they writhed a bit more than you might expect. Not the two-story rotting shack beyond that looked like it had once been part of a farm. No, it was what stood outside the door to the rotting shack: a huge brown bear with matted flanks, standing on its hind legs. Or an approximation of a bear. (Some would say that I saw it also as a door.) It had been dead for a long time, its sides caved in along with the right side of its head . . . but still it breathed. I could tell it breathed because its ribs pushed slowly through its fur and leaves swirled up and out and then, with the inhale, fell back inside, only to reappear again, before being lost once more.

It had eyes that, even through the green wall that lay between us, looked human. Trapped in a staved-in bear skull. I had the impression that it had not been standing there, so tall, so un-hidden, until I had made my way up the river bank.

For a moment, I hesitated. Wouldn’t anyone? But from behind me, down the riverbank, I heard the unmistakable sounds of pursuit. Even without wings, the angels were fast. As I’ve said, they had no need to hold their shape.

I approached the bear-thing, the dry sedge weeds of the field sandpaper rough against my trousers; let’s face it, they were nipping at my trousers, and they weren’t really even close to being weeds.

Up-close, the bear’s eyes seemed green flecked with gold. Its muzzle revealed hints of greenish bone. Its paws looked soft, its yellow claws curling in toward cracked pads. Despite a crown of buzzing flies, the bear smelled like a body after the flesh had been worn away by weather and erosion and scavengers: clean but with some lingering hint of sharpness that bit into the nostrils. I knew this not from that moment, stuck in an alien head that suppressed my senses, but from all the other times. Oh yes, there had been other times. I wasn’t new to this, not anymore.

“You’re a sad shit brick house!” I shouted at the bear through my giant green head.

“You’re a pathetic puddle of flesh,” the bear rumbled.

“You’re a run-down monster, a walking zombie, a ramshackle disgrace.”

“Human.”

“Horlak.”

Never talked smack with a rotting bear? It’s quite the experience, especially we were speaking in his language, which takes a long time to master. But the bear and I shared a history of sorts, and I had been preparing for this moment for ages. Angels can’t control bears, and bears don’t particularly care for angels. It’s a grudging respect, a suspicious alliance. But in doing what I had done, what I planned to do, I had given up any pretense of angelhood.

There came a sound then like shards of glass smashing into a brisk wind and two huge gangrenous paws fixed onto the sides of green head and, as I braced myself, yanked it off without disturbing the breathing apparatus clamped like gills to the side of my neck.

The bear—Seether—tossed the head to the side. I stood there blinking in the sudden glare. Sodden. Real head bleeding from a bullet hole, the red leaking out. Hair slicked back from river water and sweat. Arms chaffed raw. Shoulder sore. I was humanoid, as usual. I could switch genders and emulate many races, but I always had to have four limbs, two of them made for walking. Which is one reason I’d required the green head.

“I need safe passage—now ,” I said.

A thin, drawn-out growl like a rusty gate being pulled open. “They’ll find you, no matter how I help.”

“If I fail, you festering maggot-metropolis, it’s all over anyway,” I said, with a smile.

“If you fail, I want your most succulent marrows,” Seether said with good humor. I think.

Behind us, at the river bank, they came closer, with their mouths that could see and their eyes that could hear. Together, the bear and I entered the hut and closed the door behind us. Inside, it was, my child, if you can believe this, wider than on the outside: a vast, tumbling, dark space. I felt as if I took a step in the wrong direction—any direction—I would be falling off of a cliff into nothingness.

“Are you ready?” I asked the bear that was not a bear, the corpse that wasn’t a corpse.

It took a moment to think that through. Was I really ready? A Seether is something ancient from the future, a refutation of everything you think you know about physics. It is not exactly immortal but not exactly mortal; it exists in a state between, continually resurrecting itself from the memory of the ghosts of its own decay. It absorbs the shadow of the valley of death to sustain itself, and for all I know it calls upon all the coiled energy of whatever black hole happens to be closest, too. You can forge an alliance but you must know that not all Seethers are sane. Not all Seethers can be controlled. When even the angels don’t know what end game the celestial bears are playing, you have a right to be wary about the ally you’ve chosen . . . especially one you’ve bribed with rotting honeycomb and a bag of ghost frogs.

“I’m ready,” I said, because I had no choice, really, but to follow my plan. A terrible, stupid, complex, simple plan.

As I said the words, Seether roared and tore out my throat with one slow smacking slap of his paw. Then, as I was dying, he leapt upon me and as I screamed in the surprise you can’t help expressing and became numb and lost consciousness, Seether feasted upon me, devouring my entire body until not even a pile of bones was left.

Dying in this way did not much bother me because I could block out the pain, and I had no choice. This was the only way to escape my pursuers, even if I would have preferred more conventional travel.

It did not bother me except for the terrible numb tugging and pulling.

You may still be confused, which is allowed. It’s okay to be confused—the world’s a far stranger place than you can possibly imagine, and although I’m trying to allow you blinders, trying to ease you into it gently, some dislocation cannot be avoided. And, as I mentioned, I’m not really talking to you (or you, child, although you certainly seem mesmerized by my English).

Questions, yes? Here are a few answers, for now.

Were my pursuers really angels? No, as I’ve said just because they had wings didn’t make them angels. Do you know why they weren’t angels? Because there are no such things as angels, not the way your culture understands angels. Think of them as alien beings who had long ago forgotten where they had come from and where they were going to, who nonetheless maintained ears and eyes on millions of alt-Earths and other inhabited planets. Think of them as an omnipresent version of a prying Uncle Fred, if you like.

Was I the only one wearing a giant green alien head in that place? No. Everyone was wearing a giant green alien head, except for the juveniles that had jumped me in the shopping center, driven by a pheromonal imperative common to their kind.

Had the bullet hurt me badly? No. I was already slowly dying from another wound as I entered the hut with Seether, one I’d sustained well before I ever donned the green alien head. A stray bullet wound couldn’t stop me at that point, not when I was about to be devoured by a bear, and especially not from a bullet fired by the local police, who had picked up my scent because of my sojourn at the “shopping center.” The angels had taught me to seal off injured parts of my body from the rest. At least, for a time.

What wound were you dying from, then? A bite on the calf from a transdimensional komodo. The normal variety of komodo, the type you might know, isn’t intelligent. The normal variety is somewhat ponderous and stupid. But the second kind—which are not really komodos at all, but that’s as close as I can come—are intelligent and they can thread and stitch their way across universes and time. They’re of a size between a crocodile and a dinosaur—and they can exist in more than one reality at once. Their skin takes on the texture and color of whatever they’re seen against. These komodos can travel where they like, and are deadly mischievous. Which is to say, theirs is a rambunctious and irreverent rule, and they trouble the angels much as a violent storm might trouble someone living in a cabin. You can’t take it personally.

Well, then, why should komodo poison trouble you more than a bullet? What you don’t know about the transdimensional properties of the komodo can kill you in more than one place. They can scent your wound through time, through space; it sporls out before them, like a mist that curls and beckons, while you’re more like a rabbit with a pocket watch who’s been stuffed with sawdust . . . and now that sawdust, that essential matter, is falling out of you in chunks and you’re feeling more and more like part of the background, the scenery. Everything is receding, except for the komodo. The komodo’s getting closer and closer. Reeling you in through its sixth, its seventh senses. That tongue forking out. The bandy-legged progression over rough terrain. The smell of rotting flesh that you can’t quite tell. Is it you or the komodo? Is it your life on his breath? Is this the last thing you’ll ever see or feel? That ugly, pitted bullet-head? That shit-eating grin? Because the thing is, you have to die to escape a komodo. You have to let your wound take you, and not many people are up for that.

Do you feel like you’re on solid ground now?

What if I told you the harbingers of the komodos are ghost frogs, apparitions that appear in hovering fashion just prior to a komodo’s appearance and feed off of their energy?

I didn’t think so.

After being devoured by a Seether, you exist in absolute darkness and silence for a long time. You are alone, floating in nothing. This can be peaceful, especially since a moment before you were being eaten alive. Or it can be disconcerting, especially since a moment before you were being eaten alive.

As I floated, unable to feel my body, as light and effortless as I would ever be, I relived my initial contact with the angels. It’s not the kind of thing you forget, even though you might want to. Their civilization has existed for millions and millions of years. Even as they pursue their purpose, they have somehow forgotten it. When you come into contact with them, you feel at first like you are encountering someone vastly powerful and vastly empty, as if their thoughts now only congregate along the thin inner surface of their skull, with the entirety of the rest of that space given over to . . . what ?

I couldn’t tell you.

All I can tell you is that floating in the after-shock of being devoured is very much like being rescued from an airplane that’s about to explode, while everyone else burns to death. You feel it outside yourself as much as inside, and you wonder if it’s worth it.

That’s how it happened, by the way. It’s not just a metaphor.

My husband and I were on a plane from one city to another—let’s say Seattle to New York City—and sitting to our left, looking out the oval window, was a large, athletic man with shoulders so broad I felt cramped. He could have been carved from marble. He had a continual smile because his lips curled up that way, which when he nodded and said his name, “Gabriel,” became both beneficent and the kind of sinister that some women think they like. He smelled strangely of cardamom and lime. I didn’t know he was going to change everything. I thought I was going to live out my life in the usual, the ordinary ways.

“Gabriel” was a joke, I would find out later. I’ve never learned his real name, if he has one. The angels don’t communicate in quite the same way as we do, child. He told me later he asked me “When the time comes, do you want to be saved?” and that I said yes. Was that a joke too? I don’t remember that.

My husband didn’t like him, I could tell, because he leaned in to whisper in my ear, “Do you want to trade seats with me? You don’t have to sit next to him.” That was William being protective. That was William being useful, and I didn’t mind.

No, I didn’t want to trade seats, even though I was scrunched in the middle. Maybe it was something about Gabriel’s eyes; perhaps he had already coerced me in some way. Then the plane filled with smoke and dropped with a lurch that sent anyone not buckled in flying down the aisle. I don’t even remember the screams.

All I remember is that William’s hand was in mine on the right, and that in that moment Gabriel locked his hand around mine on the left, and as the roiling wave of fire that was the explosion rushed to us from the cockpit, Gabriel’s grip became so strong that he ripped me up out of my seat as he stood, and I lost William’s hand, and couldn’t find it again in the smoke, and I was crying out his name but I couldn’t see him, and then there was a sense of limitless space and of rushing air . . . and I looked down to see the airplane below us, fragmenting in glistening orange lines of torque, blackness pouring out of it as if it had been filled with something evil, a torn off wing quivering as it twirled ghastly small and inconsequential down and through the cloud cover. Soon there was only the smoke and a spray of particles that hovered in a glittering cloud.

I realized that Gabriel had wings, and that they beat strongly, and that at that altitude I should have been dead. That William was dead. Or still dying.

“Is this Heaven?” I asked Gabriel.

Staring down at me, those features registering the question with a kind of bemusement, Gabriel opened his mouth wide and streams of light issued forth and a sound came like a thousand windows breaking. Gabriel was laughing.

No, I was not in Heaven. No, Gabriel was not an angel as I thought of angels. I was a recruit. I was just another human they needed to do something. And William was gone, and I had crossed over in an instant into another way of thinking about the world.

The feeling of floating after being devoured by a bear is almost exactly the same as the feeling of floating when plucked from an exploding airliner by an angel. Let life spare you such resonances, child. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. But these are the kinds of things that you think about in that void between death and reconstitution. Except, if you are also suffering a wound caused by komodo, infected with their poisonous saliva, you also become aware of a quick-silver, huge, darting presence somewhere in there with you. It’s unlikely that a komodo could hurt you as you’re traveling, but they definitely feel the velocity of your passage.

Even though I knew that this sensation could not harm me, I tried to will myself closer to my objective, prayed for the formless, endless dark to drop away. A stupid, too-human thing to do, but that was kind of the point.

I woke, reconstituted, in an empty hotel suite in Mexico City just one floor up and one hour away from the start of the most important party in the history of . . . everything, really. To me, at least.

The light coming through the windows had a dull yellow quality to it and rising up in the distance the pollution seemed to gather not just in the sky but at the top edge of the window itself, as if trying to get in. I could see the distant bulbous prows of the purifying dirigibles, too, but there was too much for them to eat and they were getting lost in the smog that was food.

The hum of the air conditioner seemed a prosaic thing to hear after listening to the snap of my own bones, the rip of my own flesh.

A stuffed bear stood in the corner, fur mangy, eyes glassy. Someone’s idea of a joke, to place it at this end point. An inexperienced traveler might even have thought it creepy, but you find so many objects put there by your predecessors, a way of saying “I was here once, I made it through.”

I checked my left leg. That glancing chomp from the komodo hadn’t gone anywhere. The outline covered most of the calf in fiery green splendor and the poison still sent out its signal. Had I evaporated into merely a soul, it would still have been there, as if the jaws were still clamped onto me.

It always takes a while to get used to coming back into your body, but I only had the hour, so I walked into the bathroom and shoved the back of my head under the cold water tap.

I don’t know if it’s the devouring or the floating in the void, or the sense that you’ve come back as a doppelganger that’s the most unsettling. But first it’s the sudden, incomprehensible weight of you, sagging into the bed, and then and only then the sense of that weight being whole rather than the rummaging, shattering violation of having been torn apart, of that weight being so strangely re-distributed in so short a period of time . . .

Because being eaten alive isn’t really what you might expect. The horror of the idea of it can be mitigated by the point of it: to effect such dramatic travel, across such a span. No, the real terror occurs because you are then so utterly known , down to the last scrap, with nowhere to hide. No part of you can be held back. That feeling has been known to drive more than one traveler insane.

What kind of travel is worth that price?

The kind no one but angels and komodos can do quickly: travel through both time and space.

You’ve been patient, child, or maybe it’s because I keep giving you candy. I would have been proud to think of you as my daughter, under other circumstances. So patient. So lovely. But in any child of mine, I’d remember William, I just wouldn’t be able to help it . . . and that’s beyond me now anyway. The sawdust is still falling out of this stuffed doll, and there’s not much left.

Perhaps we’re deep enough into my story that I should reveal how I came to possess that giant green alien head in the first place.

It’s not a fairy tale, or even a pleasant tale. The head wasn’t actually made of plastic. In fact, I had killed the previous owner, to whom it had indeed served as a head of sorts. I had then performed a hurried scooping-out of the former contents so that I might use it to walk unobserved through the city’s streets and courtyards. That might seem blood-curdling, I know, except it wasn’t quite that bad. This particular type of creature’s head is insensate, with its brain stored in the equivalent of its stomach, so it can fully digest its thoughts. The relationship between head and nervous system is looser than that between, say, the shell and body of a horseshoe crab, but not as loose as the relationship between a hermit crab and its shell.

I want to say I had successfully removed the head without death setting in, and then the shock took over and I couldn’t save him—that it was sort of accidental, like a killing that occurs in the middle of some other crime. But the fact is, I can’t tell you that at all. I can’t make any promises that you’ll see me in a good light by the end.

This particular “person” had been performing several experiments in a homemade lab in his basement, including one that fused komodo and angel blood. He’d been working for the angels without knowing it. The blood had been presented to him as something else entirely, something that would fit his understanding of science and the universe. The angels always had several of these side projects set up, usually running the logistics and admin through proxies like me so their imprint wouldn’t be as obvious. And, of course, the blood wasn’t blood in the sense we think of that rich red ichor.

“He” was “retired”—which in this case meant both a creature multi-gendered and six hundred years old, and cranky as hell. The substances had been sold to him by me (in disguise) some years before, and I’d kept an eye on him for the angels ever since, throughout the slow progress of his research. I had always known that someday, depending on his findings, I might have to betray him. As it turned out, I was just going to have to destroy all of his work, murder him, and burn down his house as I left. But that didn’t mean I wanted to kill him, even though killing comes more easily to me than it did before Gabriel plucked me from the dying plane. Gabriel’s present to me.

It also strikes me now, dear child, that I may have been vague about where all of what I’ve been describing takes place. But the answer to that is easy: It takes place everywhere . The green head and its owner lived on a distant planet in a totally different part of the galaxy, in an area that used to be where the not-angels devoted most of their time and resources. The “creature” I killed—an extra-terrestrial, just as you would be to him—was a scientist known across four planetary systems. In that time. In that reality. And I really needed his head so I could make it to Seether, so I took it. The greater good demanded his head, and sometimes, with so much at stake, I’ve had to make that assessment in ways that might seem cruel. But I’m paying for it, too, as should be clear.

Child, you should turn away if you are able. You should leave me here.

Gabriel didn’t bother to rescue my husband from the exploding airplane even though he could have. It just didn’t occur to him. But it occurred to me. As we rose higher and higher, I screamed those words to Gabriel, even though I thought I must be dying, and hallucinating as I died, somehow still attached to my seat, and flung up out of the plane, soon to fall.

Of course, as I would find out, my husband still existed across other realities, especially the ones where he didn’t get on the plane with me or the plane didn’t explode. In plenty of other realities, I was doused in flames—plummeted blackened and burning, throat closed by smoke and lack of oxygen, face cracking.

Gabriel showed me that, too, toward the beginning, when I was resistant to my recruitment. There’s only one reality in which I am plucked off a plane by Gabriel, because angels exist outside of the algorithms of possibility, and those of us they recruit. The rest of you are out of luck or lucky beyond belief.

We hovered across realities, watching me die over and over again until I became inured to my own death. Until I said, take me back. Take me back and I’ll help you. And even then I couldn’t remember more. I couldn’t remember if Gabriel asked me if I wanted to be saved, and what I said back.

William, if you ever see this, the Williams that remain, if you ever hear this . . . I did not abandon you. I was not allowed to go back. And how could I usurp the place of those other me’s by your side? What right did I have? None.

Soon, I grew accustomed to the hotel room and I felt better, even gave the molding stuffed bear a friendly pat. There was not much to do before the party; the clothes I’d arranged for had arrived by porter just a few minutes before. I stood by the window looking out across Mexico City. Seether had deposited me just as I had intended: right time, right place. Your reality, child: a 2032 desperately trying to adapt to and stop global warming by transitioning to airships and green technology while outlawing most internal combustion engines. The Brazilian rainforest was a postage stamp on the map. The Gulf Stream had begun to shudder to a stop, clogged by plastics. Eventually, this version of Earth would right itself, but by that time the human population would be down to about two million world-wide. That was still better than the probability for about eighty percent of all Earths.

My reality had been in the other twenty percent, but for my particular Earth surviving climate change had been a booby prize: we had lasted until approximately 3052, when a comet smashed into the side of the planet. Unfortunately, we still hadn’t made it to the stars by then, but other Earths had, so did it really matter? (Yes, child, it mattered.)

The angels didn’t try to stop such die-offs, and the few times they did reveal themselves rather than working behind the scenes, it almost always resulted in confusion or misunderstanding. Once, they’d even killed a rogue angel who had set herself up as a god-like figure in an Earth reality. Angels were hard to kill, but you could do it. At least, other angels could.

Above me, in suite 640, the drinks and appetizers had been set out and the waiters were being given their instructions, and perhaps a guest or two had showed up early. Thirty minutes until show time. The party was a political fund-raiser for a Mexican politician. Nothing all that important to the world, just money changing hands to help elect someone to a government seat. Nothing you’d cross time and space for, really.

Except I had.

I had turned my skin green to match my head while on the other world. But now, after having stared into the mirror long enough to visualize the change, my skin was light brown, and my hair black, my eyes a beguiling green. Female. About mid-twenties. I’d be wearing a spring-time skirt with a flower pattern, and silver bracelets. I’d have on a lapis lazuli necklace. No earrings—I had no patience for them.

Did I look pretty? Not as pretty as you, child, but, yes, I did look pretty. And I had no patience for that, either. The wound in my calf had begun to throb violently, sending pain-waves through my body that I imagined looked like the old-fashioned depictions of sonar or radar on the television when I was growing up.

I wonder what you’re thinking, there behind the camera. I know this is recorded surveillance, that you aren’t there now , but you will be there later . I can imagine you in some office somewhere, wondering whether to hit delete or pass it on to higher-ups. I can imagine you thinking that you’re listening to the ravings of a crazy person. I wouldn’t blame you. In some ways, I am a crazy person. When you’re taken off an exploding aircraft by an angel that is not an angel, you could be forgiven if you contracted derangement.

You might see the world just a little strangely if you had been bitten by a transdimensional komodo and then been devoured by a dead bear. It’s a cruel universe out there. If I could give you any advice, child, it would be: don’t go out there. Just don’t.

But what choice did I have, knowing what I knew, and with so little time left because I was careless, because I was stupid, because I let my guard down . . . and yet it must have worked, right, at least for a little while, because here I am, in this backwater tavern, talking to you (and them) in a language you don’t know that well, trying to get it all out. Every last little horrible bit.

After my initial resistance, life with Gabriel and the angel was fun because I forced it to be fun. It was either that or wallow in the past. It was either that or let Gabriel continue his reconditioning efforts, which despite his attempts to be gentle felt like someone shoving their thumbs into my brain. The surveillance across alt-Earths, the missions (give someone an envelope, a suggestion, a nudge) we were never supposed to question, the time off gazing across landscapes beyond imagination . . . I loved it on some level, even as a thorn of guilt had also lodged itself within me. I thought the angels, despite their alien quality, their distance from those of us who worked for them, somehow worked for the greater good. This was mostly my cultural assumptions about angels coming into play, their greatest propaganda tool. They need to let your impression of them work to control you.

Why? There aren’t as many of them as you might think. Millennia ago they had warred against one another, set entire solar systems ablaze with the fury of their rage . . . and after that there had been thousands of them, not hundreds of thousands or millions. The details of their reproduction were beyond me, but when a new member of their species came into being, it would float inert and cold in the vacuum of space for thousands of years until some miraculous combination of conditions brought it to life amongst its brethren. It was for this reason, I would discover, that they turned to special ops, to recruits, grew craftier and colder and more elusive. Lost the thread, didn’t realize. Went on anyway. Didn’t matter. Matter.

Still, for a time, I thought it all meant something. I trusted them. The surveillance was even presented as something that was for the greater good: something far up the time-stream that would affect all of the alt-Earths. Then, after training, that reason fell away and others replaced them, only for those to fall away again.

In some ways, too, those early days felt unreal. Standing on the lawn atop the living mountain that they used as a base, on a planet remote from Earth. Seeing in their laboratories and intel stations just how many alt-Earths there were, just how much life had duplicated itself across realities. The boy who died in poverty somewhere I had never been rose again on another monitor like some odd version of reverse time-lapse photography. The sheer volume of life. The sheer alternalities of it all.

There were other distractions. Suddenly, with what the angels embedded in my DNA, I could change race and gender at will—in a matter of minutes if I concentrated. Not only was the universe mutable and endless, so too was my body. My body was just an avatar, even if there was only one of it. Being thrust back into the heat and weight of the world again, having created a different body for myself, I became an actor with an infinite number of masks. I enjoyed being a man in some instances, received pleasure from playing that role. I could make myself as invisible or visible as I liked, depending on the mission and the situation.

I grew to be good at not caring. I grew good at debauchery. The party I was going to crash in a little while was nothing next to the parties I had attended during this phase. In palaces, in mansions, underground and high in the mountains. Pretending to be almost anything or anyone. Sometimes, I would even switch half-way through, come back through the door as someone else, and listen to what people were saying about who I had been before.

By the time the assignments grew more deadly, I was treating other people as if they too were merely avatars, skins, so that an order to hurt someone, and eventually to kill someone, meant only that one reflection in an infinite hall of mirrors had to be taken out. Just one, I told myself. All the others remained, grinning back at me.

When I got bitten by the komodo while on a mission, moving up all my timelines up, I was thinking this single thought: What if you could find the one reflection that, if you snuffed it out, made the rest all go dim as well?

Soon enough, it was time for the party, time for me to leave the hotel room, and I must confess I suffered a moment of hesitation. Child, you’re probably too young to have ever had to make a decision like I was still in the process of making, but hesitation happens. Because I still did have a choice. I could have stopped right then. I could have walked out of the hotel and melted into the streets and fled the angels. I could have done that. They would have hunted me down in a year or two, but I could have made those months count, I would have strung them out and experienced them in a slow-motion that seemed like an eternity.

But it would be an eternity of being alone with my own thoughts.

And I had come this far.

Sometimes it’s the banalities that pull you through, protect your resolve from your doubts.

So I left my hotel room and I started to walk down the hallway to the elevators. It was a long walk, a really long walk, and I cherished every frayed patch of beige carpet along the way, every stain from beer or something worse, the dull worn ache of door handles—all of it.

I was beautiful and young and wearing an amazing red dress. I had a red purse with a deadly weapon in it. I was going to a party. I hoped the angels wouldn’t catch up to me until it was too late.

A couple of minutes before, however, I had had to implement another part of my plan in a particularly visceral way. I had taken a bottle opener, and on bended knee I had enlarged the wound in my calf. If you’re going to make others suffer, shouldn’t you suffer, too? I lovingly drew the sharp, curved beak of the bottle opener deep along the outlines of the bite, pulling the slow-seeping poison farther into the meat of me. Simultaneously, I loosened my control over the individual compartments of my cells.

As I walked down that worn carpet to the elevator, I could tell my efforts had paid off. I could hear the far-distant howl of the komodos, approaching fast. I could hear them in the maze of realities, clambering up the walls of Time, looking for a way in, my scent suddenly hot and enraging. It was almost as if they had gotten to the hotel already, their eventuality forming ghostly swirls of scales across the floor, the wall, the ceiling. That probably did not even qualify as a hallucination, just a side effect of my flagging energy level.

Of course, no one could see the wound. Just as I’ve spared you, child, from the worst of the aftermath. No one should see what I really look like now.

From afar, I had spent more time than I wanted to with the researcher who used to possess a green alien head atop his neck. Although told to keep an eye on him, I don’t believe I was meant to spend quite so much time watching him. It just turned out that way, and Gabriel never told me to pull back, concentrate on something else.

But, in general, surveillance provided one area of freedom for those of us “recruited” by the angels. As we in our separate booths took in the full sum of the evidence transmitted back by luna moths and dust crabs and sand mites and fleas and flies . . . all of these creatures that embodied a nano so nano that no Earth scientist through the ages would ever be able to discern the difference between an angel’s or a god’s work . . . we saw and saw, and could not unsee.

My other main assignment was a seemingly pointless surveillance of an alt-Earth where a vast civilization pushed south from the Arctic, sending ahead their floating ghost-whale spirit weapons. These floating ghost-whales glided across the surface of the world and anyone they touched, anyone who came within the influence of their wallowing bodies, faded into the past of another, random reality---ceased to exist in the present. They emitted whale-song as they came, a deceptively sonorous psych-weapon that could break eardrums and brought fear to the invaders. The invaders had come from across the sea and had misjudged everything that could be misjudged. They had occupied territory and torn up the land while dismissing indigenous tech that was not inferior but simply different because it existed across dimensions, requiring only unity of purpose to bring forth. Those who retreated did so for strategic not tactical reasons. Now the invaders fell back in disarray, still unable to grasp the scope of their mistake.

But this Earth also existed in a kind of temporal hiccup where everything kept happening over and over again. The spirit-whale advance would reach a certain point, re-set, and begin again—so many times that now the commanders of the northern armies headed south, and their civilian leaders, knew like an echo of an echo in their brains what was happening—a subconscious message received from the near future—and in a thousand minute ways were intent on altering their decisions to try to effect some sort of change.

Gabriel had told me that eventually the hiccup would feel the combined psychic pressure of this and it would end . . . but not even the angels knew if that reality would then proceed normally or cease to exist.

Sometimes the angels hid their wings and traveled there and let the spirit whales dissolve them into the past as a kind of strange jest or joke. The most adventurous would wait until the very second of the temporal hiccup before diving in, and thus be subject to any number of dangerous and random possibilities. Those who survived their comrades would find and bring back and restore their memories. It may have been meant as some kind of adventure, even some sort of rite of passage, but I thought there was a hint of desperation and sadness to it. That the angels, Gabriel included, really wanted to forget, but had to disguise that impulse as play. But what did they need to forget? The cruelty of decisions they said they made for the greater good? Something much worse?

(Where’s your mother? Hypnotized in the corner, not even seeing me or hearing me, like the rest of the patrons at the bar; so, maybe, at the end of the day, I am as much of a monster as Seether, but I need an audience right now, I need you, child, to hear this.)

Eventually, even with the time-sink of that other assignment, I realized what the alien researcher was up to, what the angels might want from him. What made him get up in the morning after hanging all night in what looked like a trellis with stirrups, body dangling below his carefully wedged giant head. But it took a while because like a magician with misdirection, his laboratory process tended to mesmerize me.

A seemingly endless series of lab rooms lay beneath his house, all of them spacious to accommodate his bulk. Transparent beakers stood on green-tinged tables, the liquids that bubbled and swirled within purple or red or green or orange. Some of these were legitimate. Others, I found out soon enough, were his equivalent of alcoholic beverages, and before each lab session he would get roaring drunk. Oh, the weight of scientific endeavor. Oh, the objectivity of it all.

But the alien researcher whose name sounded like two crickets mating while being burned alive—a kind of charred series of exclamation points of varying intensity—wasn’t a mad scientist from a bad movie. He was a kind of 3D physicist, dealing in potentialities and living metaphor.

One day, for example, he worked with model galaxies while I watched from the twinned vantage points of an amoeba in a drop of water on the counter and the pupa of a moth-like thing that dangled from the ceiling.

Across a lab sink, Two Burning Crickets had strung a kind of porous material analogous to paper that I would later find had the feel of skin, almost as if putting thin-kneaded dough across the open face of a pie. At first the “paper” was pale white, but then he poured a purple liquid from a beaker over it. The liquid was the combination of komodo and angel blood that I had given him at Gabriel’s request. The liquid strained through but left a stain, and revealed a floundering of tiny creatures that resembled sharks and hippos and squid and catfish but were not. They were metaphors for different kinds of life . . . and out of that floundering arose a kind of clear smoke that formed a three-dimensional rotating representation of a spiral galaxy. A darkness encroached around the edges to illuminate it and the creatures beneath grew still and evaporated in wisps of green flame.

You would have been just like me at that point. You would have clapped your hands and asked for more. It was a kind of marvel, the sort of thing that captured me so utterly in the early days that I could ignore the other things.

The initial phase complete, a tiny golden globe now appeared, a tiny knife. A test tube of some clear fluid. Each of these things, he flung into the middle of that slow-moving image of a galaxy. Each reached a certain point in the matrix and winked out. Each time, the galaxy changed shape a little bit. Each time, the darkness encroached further, and what was left burned every more brightly. Finally, he picked up a canister of ashes that had ossified with a brilliant stream of turquoise frozen down the side. I recognized the canister—it held the remains of an angel who had chosen too rapid a path to re-entry into the atmosphere and burned up. In another ten years, those ashes would have been an angel again. I didn’t know where he’d gotten it, but it hadn’t come from me.

Two Burning Crickets pried open the lid like it was a can of beans and took a pinch of ashes, flicked them out into the middle of this apparition of a galaxy. The image became blurry, and then I realized that the blurriness reflected a change: now there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of overlapping versions of the same galaxy made manifest there, as if the ash had separated out the component elements of a sample. Then, without warning, the variations began to disappear, each vanishing making the image less blurry . . . until there was only the one galaxy again, and then not even that, leaving only the now badly singed and sagging paper and a swirl of colors in the drain. Not to mention, Two Burning Crickets, capering about like he’d won the lottery.

My first thought was that the angel in the canister would be furious when he reconstituted, if he became aware that his compatriots had volunteered him for this experiment, and even more so when he realized he was missing part of his mind, or a thumb, or half a wing, or whatever those particular ashes had meant to him. If it worked that way.

But my second and third thoughts were much more serious, as I investigated further. In his mind, Two Burning Crickets may have only sought unity, clarity, the solace of just one thing , and perhaps his six-hundred-year-old mind, could no longer hold all of the possibilities, all of the replicas. But when I better understood what I had observed—that he was close to giving the angels a way to destroy an entire set of realities; say, every alt-Earth in existence, even the one with the ghost whales—I knew what I had to do. I even knew how to do it, the blessing of having invested so much training in my surveillance work.

When everything was finally in place and I came to kill him and destroy his research, he met me at the door and said in his language, “Are you the one?” I remember that distinctly. “Are you the one?”

I suppose I was, in a perverse way.

Is it better if someone you love or used to love who kills you? Shouldn’t it be? Someone whose hand has slipped from yours but who knew you intimately? Like Seether or William would have been to me.

I knocked on the door to the candidate’s hotel suite and two bodyguards opened it and they let me into the party. Because I looked like I belonged. Because I had taken on the appearance of a television reporter the candidate had once dated, someone I knew was far away, on assignment in London. Flimsy, but it didn’t need to hold water for long—just a handful of minutes. I wasn’t much for parties, especially lingering at parties.

The candidate stood across the spacious room, behind the barricade of a table upon which had been placed a sumptuous spread of appetizers. The candidate was shaking hands and talking to potential donors. About forty or fifty people lay between us. About a hundred thousand iterations of Earth lay between us. Ghost whales and ghost bears and other spirits still.

He had a kind of haggard, dark look to him, not at all like the TV ads, and you could see the bags under his eyes that make-up would usually take away. His shoulders were stooped under his immaculate blue suit with the conservative dark tie. His hands dangled from the ends of his jacket sleeves. But there was about his gaze a kind of intelligence and animation that belied the stoop, the dangle. A way his mouth set firm that inspired confidence. In all ways, he projected the idea of the stalwart underdog, a kid off the streets who had been domesticated and risen through the ranks of the opposition party not like a falcon but, as his campaign ads exploited, like a barrio dog that, fed on scraps, had finally found a home after much hardship. If all went well, here and across a number of other realities, he would rise to become president at a critical time. (And yet, all of which was irrelevant, child. It truly was.)

For a short time, I just observed him. He didn’t deserve this, but there were a lot more of him where he came from. At least, that’s what I told myself. He’d never know that I meant him no harm, no harm at all, even as I inflicted the greatest possible harm. His role was not to know, the same role as most people in the worlds. To not know. To receive hints, perhaps, to have faith, to believe in . . . something . . . but not to know . Even Two Burning Crickets hadn’t known the identity of his benefactors, his prodders.

Soon the number of people would swell, a flood of others arriving to replace this advance guard of the candidate’s admirers. So I smiled across to him, with a wave of a raised be-bangled arm, saw the corresponding sudden animation of his features, the gleam in his eyes, missile-sharp, the corresponding wave, which meant he was accessing a slew of salacious and no doubt satisfying memories. Beauty is a disguise. People rarely look past it to intent.

As I made my way toward him, the howling of the komodos in my ears was a gale-force wind and time seemed to slow and the ghost frogs that are the harbingers, the advance guard, the early warning, of those dangerous reptiles began to pop into existence, there in that room, photo-negative explosions of the purest, almost translucent white. Only I could see them. They floated in the air, these impossible party favors, staring at me with their luminous eyes, accusing me of something.

I’m doing this for William, I told myself. For all the Williams. Even though I could no longer recall what he looked like.

But my timing was off, child. All of the timing was a little off, maybe ever since I had donned the green alien head . . . I just hadn’t known it yet.

Thousands of alt-Earths, millions maybe, died out every year, some of them mundane and other positively outré. In addition to the amazing things I saw because of Gabriel, I saw these terrible things, too, because he forced me to see them. The world that experienced mass extinctions due to cat litter and plastics, compounded by nuclear holocaust. The world that remained verdant but person-less when warlike aliens that resembled large, land-going sharks appeared through a wormhole and declared the human race guilty of marine genocide. The world where the dominant species of intelligent ravens engaged in bio-warefare of such global proportions that it destroyed them and the human slaves they used as tools. And so it went, on and on and on. Trillions lived and trillions perished. Biomasses were inherently unstable, was the message, I thought. Bags of flesh and bones with brains didn’t keep well. They kept replicating, kept on going, but they were doomed.

When I expressed this thought to Gabriel, he looked at me as if I were the lowliest ant.

“Our enemy caused this,” he told me. “The enemy always causes this. And we cannot root our enemy out.” There was a cruelty to his fixed smile then, the kind of smile you do not expect from a being perhaps hundreds of thousands of years old. A smile you expect to see from a child who has revealed he has done something wicked but for whatever reason even as he confesses can’t help but show he is rather proud of this wicked thing.

He cared not for the destruction of worlds, but had fixated on this idea of an Enemy underlying all of it, like most of the rest. This was the point of the surveillance, ultimately, on a strategic level—to monitor the worlds, the realities, everything, for this presence, for the idea of it made manifest in the flesh.

“We need a way to flush the enemy out,” Gabriel told me. “We are finding a way to flush the enemy out.”

Looking through surveillance records, I began to realize that beyond the usual monitoring, they were also looking for the presence of Evil with a capital “E,” which is crazy. Which is evil. They had become deranged by this idea, or most of them. As if the impulse came from the echo of a ghost of a memory of a threat that had indeed once existed but did no more . . . and yet to them it was a real as anything real could be. An invisible enemy that must be rooted out. That’s when I turned my attention to other records and found dark spots. Places where it appeared the angels had destroyed to protect. Never more than a planet or two, you understand. Never a whole series of realities . . . until Two Burning Crickets had come along suggesting even greater possibilities.

How do you know when a near-immortal race of non-angels has reached the end of its tether? When that race comes to believe in the Devil, and believes that the Devil must be cast out by any means necessary.

From my training in surveillance, I knew that certain coordinates in space and time and reality are imbued with power and energy that accrete over time. A nexus can be used to effect tremendous change because of their connectivity. If you map them all and you know how to destroy alternate realities because of Two Burned Crickets, you can truly extinguish everything. If you’ve lost the formula for destroying on such a grand scale and your maps have been rendered useless, you can’t do much of anything for a while.

The candidate’s party—that suite, that particular series of moments, his presence—was one of them, a lesser-known one, a backwater. But the point is, you have to introduce enough chaos to wrench that nexus out of one path into another, muddy the waters in such a way that the mapping, the tracking, goes completely haywire. Thus the gun.

Nothing rewires a nexus like a murder.

The ghost frogs popped into existence with ever increasing velocity and rapidity as I strode across the room to meet the candidate, one hand reaching into my handbag as I did so because I wasn’t going to freeze him with a look. I wasn’t going to crush his mind with my non-existent psionic powers. Sometimes, and I hate to say this, but a good old-fashioned, reliable gun is the best, the quickest way to effectuate change. Or protect against it.

But I’d mistimed it all, and the komodos came thrashing into existence on my trail right then, and even worse angels were appearing through the Rips—like blood through paper cuts, seeping into clarity, and by the time I had raised my gun the candidate had shifted and I didn’t have a clear line of sight, and I only clipped him in the shoulder, and the angels were trying to reach him, and the komodos were trying to reach me, and the party was a screaming mess, with the humans there, the unwitting witnesses, trying to comprehend what was going on and failing, as they tried to get out of the way . . . while the komodos, semi-visible as gasps and gashes of light, quick-silver tongues of water flashing, a suggestion of a curious and brazen eye, thrashed and spun so much in that space that the sides of the suite buckled and swayed as if we were all just inside a cardboard box full of, well, full of the ordinary kind of komodos.

The komodo that had clamped onto my leg jumped onto my back shrieking “angel-spawn!” and curses much worse, even as I also saw the confusion of the rest, torn between attacking hated angels or hated me, who had bearded them in their lair and only been wounded . . . and in the midst of all of that confusion, whirling around frantically, I made it back to the door somehow, and with a herculean effort spasmed in such a way as to send the komodo gnawing on me flying back into the room.

I slammed the door, already changing into an old Mexican woman, and abandoned the wounded part of my leg in favor of a telescoping metal strut while the bedlam continued inside.

As I reached the elevators, as I pushed the button, as the metal halves shut, I saw the suite door smash open, and a writhing mass of humans, komodos, and angels burst forth, at least some of them surprised to find an upright foot, ankle, and bloody calf greeting them.

I was pretty chewed up by then. I was pretty much dead, and only by locking all the compartments of my individual cells was I able to function, to move at all, for a little while.

As I left the hotel limping and made my way through a series of back alleys, I was already pondering the oddest thing I had seen in that perfect mess: that Gabriel stood in the corner through the whole thing, as if he had been there the entire time, and did nothing. Stood there inhabiting a kind of perfect stillness. Which made me wonder about factions among the angels. Had he wanted me to do this? Had he shown me what he had shown me, put me on surveillance of the alien researcher precisely so I would do what I had done?

Had he even thought so far ahead as to take me from the plane for this exact reason? I have no answers. I only know that as I left the room, I had also seen that the candidate had been mauled to death by the komodos, and that was as good as a bullet to the head.

Here I have to tell you the most unbelievable part, considering how far we’ve come, child. Ghost frogs are easy. Komodos are easy, too. Even angels.

The truth is, I am completely ordinary. I grew up on a farm in Kansas, and I swore I would leave as soon as I grew up. I was a constant source of grief to my parents, I’m sure, because everyone else had always stayed with the farm, and without me there was always the chance it might go under. But I did leave—I was one of the me’s that got away—and I went to college and I pursued a degree in political science and began a career. I went from city commissioner of a small town in Georgia to state senator, and I began to date a city planner from Atlanta. His name was William. We got married. We built a house all our own. Somewhere along the way, we acquired two dogs, a lab and a golden retriever, both of which reminded me of my days growing up on the farm. We loved the same movies and liked to go hiking in the mountains. Neither of us wanted children until a little later. We had the rest of our lives ahead of us. Ordinary, usual lives.

In some realities, we still do, and it is some small comfort to think of William still with me, still sharing those same mundane adventures. Somewhere. Like snapshots of the lives of people very close to you, people you would have liked to have been. You want someone to have that.

I didn’t ask to be taken off of that plane. I didn’t ask to become privy to the secrets of the universe. I didn’t want any of this to happen. Knowledge is a terrible thing. Sometimes you can’t escape it any more than you can escape a komodo.

But you don’t want my life’s story. Only I do.

How would you have told this story if you were me? Would you have told it straight-out, let it roll across the floor like a tongue of red carpet until it ended at the feet of a conclusion? No, I didn’t think so. I don’t think so at all. You would have done what I have done, if for no other reason that in the moments of the telling you might hope for the audience to suspend disbelief.

But when you come to the end of the tale, that’s something different. You can’t expect much from the reader after that, especially when the end is a dead end. I’m bleeding out now for real, and there’s nothing to be done about it. Time does not heal all wounds. The komodos truly did me in, in a way Seether could not and I only barely made it here, across town, to this half-deserted bar with the party going on in the courtyard out back. There are only so many escapes for anyone. But I can still make it look like a magic trick to you, child, like red ribbon or sawdust, so I don’t scare you. Befuddle you, perhaps, but scare you? Never.

So I’m just an old Mexican woman now, leaking stuffing. To make you laugh. Always better if a death can make someone laugh, I say. The great amusement, the great love, the great revenge, and the great death. The incarnations. The skins. The stories.

What happens next, I don’t know because I don’t know if all possible scenarios truly exist even though the angels stand outside of time. Did I do enough? Did I do enough to redeem my trespasses? Is perhaps even the country with the army of ghost whales now advancing past the point of reboot?

Maybe Gabriel will still appear here in a blast of trumpets and explain it all to me, although he’s cutting it a bit close. No. Probably not. Probably they’re still dealing with their own after party.

You’ll find papers on me that give you my name and other basic information. You’ll also find a recording inside my bones—just split them open and it’ll come right out. Don’t be shy; Seether wouldn’t be. The recording will even play on your primitive equipment. (For good measure, I’ve attached a back-up embedded in your actual recording device, but that of necessity is microbe-small and perhaps beyond your ken.) You see, child, there’s government surveillance on this bar because it’s known as an occasional neutral meeting ground for drug lords. So I’ve not just been speaking to you, but to them, as they too try to make sense of the aftermath in that hotel room. Hiding in plain sight. Leaving a record for the Normals, so I don’t disappear forever.

So now you know a few things you didn’t know before, if you choose to believe me, and there’s nothing left to say. Seether’s coming now for me for real, but not to devour me, oh no. Now he’ll bend down and take me gently in his arms and comfort me as the light turns to darkness and whisper to me that it’s all been worth it, that it’s all okay. And I am going to choose, in this reality, to believe him.

As for you, child, run along now. The whole rest of eternity is the after party, and you don’t have to understand a word I told you. Hopefully, you can just live in it.

Table of Contents

KOMODO