Dances with Death

Big canadian spaceships and evangelist biker gangs~ Who will win?
Hurrah
The cult of the body beautiful
The (Word deleted) must be destroyed
Rule by omniscience is obsolete: Rule by ignorance is now a viable option? Investigate.
Seven cornered unicorns fly like seahorses through lava
Self-conception: See parthenogenesis
Blowing neural pathways in the mind of the Enemy; a feat quite easily achieved by the experienced practitioner.
When the salesmen phone up you can tell them that your mother’s dead

~Excerpt from notebook of F. Crowe. Page torn

Half a year passed. I did my exams, left school. Read the bible. Again. It’s surprising how few people bother to, you know. They learn a few stories from Sunday school or television, and think they know it all. A priest’s sermons are very much affected by what I would call fashion, the public mood of the time. It’s religion, tailor made for YOUR life, yes, that’s right, you can have total salvation at a time that suits YOU. I heard that the Americans no longer distinguish between Elvis and Jesus. Good for them. I’m sure all of these fucked up suicide cults make people happy. But the pursuit of happiness is a dangerous one. It blurs the line between reality and dreams, and that’s generally a bad thing to do. Read Valis. It might blow your mind, might not, might cause you to shoot your spouse and drive your three children over a nearby cliff in a car, but that won’t be my fault, will it?

Anyway, it was June when I moved out of my parents place. I spent a few months moving about the country, sleeping in the front rooms of various friends. I still did stints with the Order of the Black Cross, and from what I could tell, their following was growing. People would see me at parties and then stare at me, point me out to their friends. It was at one of these parties when I had my first contact with the one they claim is the anti-Christ. A guy walked up to me, handed me an envelope, and walked away. No explanation. I walked into the kitchen, where bleak faced addicts stared at me with unseeing eyes, sat on the counter next to the fridge, and opened it. It was a handwritten note, on unlined, unheaded paper, in black biro. The edges of the paper were sharp, crisp, unusually so. I ran my left index finger along the left side, giving myself a paper cut. The words went thus;

Nullomancer,
I know who you are. By now you probably know too. Meet my agents in All Saints church at the below date. They will not tell you the truth.
Kindest regards,
J.C.

13/8/2014

That was all. It left me little choice. Chemical auras meandered like lost souls under bright glowing filament bulbs in decaying fixtures. Like I said before, there was no counter culture anymore, no underground. There were no further depths to plumb, no escape except the end. The limits of sexual depravity and substance abuse had been reached, and their tolerances stretched. In what was then the now, there was no transition, no change but death. When the churches failed them, the people sought spirituals, when the spirituals failed them, they sought new churches. A fruitless quest for a god that had forsaken them long ago, an endless cycle that brought forth nothing new. It was like the last days of the Roman Empire; they even had specially trained fighting dwarves to entertain the masses. Stagnancy precipitated change, and of that most were sure. Some said that it would bring forth the revolution, others said the end of the world. I wasn’t sure, or maybe I just didn’t care about it enough to formulate an opinion. Apathy becomes me, you see.

I meditated a while on the identity of the note’s sender, but in the end, I was there just the same, no surprise. The agents’ identities were equally predictable to me. The sun went down, a disc of blood, bathing the steeple of the church with its light. The trees were green and I pushed open the door. The stone floor of the church danced from the efferisceral layer of water that clung to the outside of the stained glass, which was enclosed from outside with a mesh of wires. Saints were born, lived in sainthood and were martyred in the paintings on the walls. Virgin Mary cries over the stillborn foetus that is cradled in her arms, yet still manages to appear beatific, for she is a mother. The christ figure seemed to be staring at her from above the altar, its eyes glazed and accusing, as if in the final throes of death, smile made out of bronze. The new becomes the old and the old becomes the new. A cycle, unchanging. I wondered briefly if the God really percieved the meaning of human existance, or he/it was just faking it, for the sake of it. Then I saw them. Waiting for me.
“Hello Thomas.” I greeted him before turning to the other. “Hello Stephanie.” I had seen neither of them for a while, not since last year.
Stephanie smiled slowly. She had been expecting this too. “Hey Frank.”
“You know why I’m here.” I said.
“We know. Do you?”
“The society of the Black Cross, and the continuance of the Cause of Change.”
“How did you know that?” she was puzzled now, or pretending quite well. I wondered what reasoning lay behind such an action, if any existed at all.
“You’re not the only one with power, Steph.” I drawled. But the note had said that I would be told not the truth. For the umpteenth time, I wondered why.
“You think too much Frank. You overestimate things. There are never reasons, not in the way you seek them.” she said. Was that untruthobabobably.
“Are we here to change the world?”
“No.” That was Thomas. Too fast. He didn’t believe it. But maybe that was untruth too. In the reality of his mind, truths could be untrue. I didn’t follow the line of conversation.
“What are the motivations behind the entity that sent you?” I asked. Steph paused, looked at Thomas. Stumped them. I waited for them to decide on an answer.
“The new war.” said Steph.
“There is no new war, only the prolongation of a continuous conflict between different factions of a variable nature. You should know that by now. What is the motivation behind this factor?”
“To.. . to conquer.”
“Be more specific. Why meet me, right here, right now?”
Steph looked at me like she had just woken from a trance. She looked scared. “We don’t know.”
I nodded. “Good. Now, what were you told not to tell me?”
“You are a nullomancer, you control the powers of unbeing. You are to fight with our faction against the Sorcerors who corrupt our world, thus we will assist the Antichrist in order to cleanse it and start anew.” She looked like she was about to be sick. I noticed that she was a lot thinner than she had been, almost an anorexic. Thomas put a protective arm around her waist, and she collapsed gratefully against him.
I grinned like death. “That was what I needed to know.”
Thomas stared at me with eyes that were both hurt and accusing, and I found once more that I did not care if he lived or if he died. All was relative, and I was no-one’s messiah. I turned to leave, but the girl called out for me to wait. She was close to crying, and I felt something strange. Did she want to die? I remembered with vivid agony the length of cable tie in the pocket of my coat. But she reached into her bag, and I knew it was not the time.
“This is yours.” she sighed, and passed me a small white envelope. “I’ll probably never see you again.”
I shrugged. “Goodbye, Steph.”

Then I left them. I felt nothing but the weird that burnt within me as I walked home through the woods in the dark. I was a monster in the shadows, and I found my way to a tree by a stream where I liked to sit sometimes. Then I got out my torch and opened the letter Steph had given me. I read it twice, refolded it, and put it back in the envelope. Also enclosed was the first blue bangle I had seen on her wrist. Nothing with any relevance to my current quest. This required that I partake of it myself.

But now I had a word. A key to the mind of my opponent.

I wondered who it was, challenging me like this.

Then I wondered if it mattered.

She was in my dream that night. Waiting for me. Naked. Her body glowed, skin soft and supple in the eerie blue light. I felt no remorse, no guilt as I watched her, waiting. I felt a word within my dream, not spoken, but written, as if on paper.

Rhea.

I frowned.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What’s what supposed to mean?” Here in my mind, in my dream, her eyes glowed blue like metal, and her lips were glossy, black as her hair.

I shrugged. “My dream. Why are you here?”

“To tell you that I have no agenda.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know that yet.” She tried to step near me, but stopped. Do you want to know whether or not we made love in that dream?

We are in an ancient and battered white ford Fiesta that we had commandeered from a ditch by a field near the woods and we were driving down Doomsday lane. There are eight of us in the car, and we have to hold onto the doors at corners to stop them falling open. The speedometer is missing, probably stolen by some tramp but Harry reckons we’re doing at least seventy. I am driving. Nerves of steel, or maybe I just don’t worry about getting killed. We scrape some hedges, and the side of a blue mercedes, which beeps at us as we go zooming past, all cheering and drinking and the like. I am wearing leather Cavaracci gloves, with cut off fingers. We hit a white picket fence in the dark, but we carry on going anyway. We get to a place where there are no streetlights, then Harry tells me to stop. We found Micheal Jackson’s body on my old school astroturf.

I woke up, covered in sweat, begging her to get out of my mind. The second movement of the ninth symphony echoed in the confines of my skull like some decilious worm, and I wondered if I even had a soul.