Outside Existence

Chapter 5

She concentrated on the feeling. Trying to block out the senses. It was hard trying to cut yourself off from all the things you based your survival and day-to-day life on. She ignored them. She could feel herself fading out of existence and into Kaligo. She could feel. It wasn’t the feel that you touch with your hands. It wasn’t the feel that you experience through your nervous system or any other part of your body. It was the feel as if all your emotions had suddenly taken place over everything else. Sight became irrelevant, sound and taste were non-existent, touch became a foreign concept. You felt. It was the same way that you felt laughter, or you felt tears, or you felt anger. The four dimensions no longer mattered, they existed, but they existed somewhere else. She knew that she could feel him, but she had to see him, in a way that didn’t require sight. She pushed herself, her entire self, through the fabric of reality. And then she stopped. She had hit the point. The white wash at the tip of the wave, the point at which, if you put any more drink in that glass, it will spill, the edge of the cliff. She could see him. Well, not see him, as much as see him. He was there, she knew it, but she also knew exactly where his borders were. It was like having the difference between drawing a vapour, and an outline of a barn. One was faint and had no definitive space or edges, whereas the other was solid and had big fat lines that you knew to colour inside. He looked the same, same hair, same clothes, same build, but he had a glow to him. Not like there was light coming out of him, but more like light wisped around him like a visible smell.

“You did it!” He yelled. “You really did it!”

“I did.” She assured. “What did I do?”

“You crossed the border, in a healthy state, I think.” He suddenly looked very worried and started fussing over her, checking her for…something.

“What are you doing?” She asked as he began circling her.

“Making sure you’re all here, sometimes bits of humans want to stay behind, and they get stuck in previous levels of the Kaligo.” He elucidated.

“What, like my kidney got stuck on level four while I continued on to level seven?”

“Not your kidney no, that’s still in Existence, more like your ability to see and hear me, I’m assuming you can do both of those things because you’ve responded to me, but yeah pretty much the same thing.” He clarified.

“But how can I see and hear you if there’s no air or light here, right?” She ventured.

“That’s very intelligent of you to ask, but unfortunately, unless you have a great handle on para-sensory universes and aligning two in order to get a common-place mid-ground, you’ll have a difficult time following, and I don’t have a good enough grapple with it myself to simplify it.” He excused.

“Just try,” she pleaded. Her tone of voice and something in her big, puppy-dog eyes tugged at him.

“Fine, ummm…” He tried to think, it was difficult to explain these things, especially since he had never had to before, he’d never even really had to think about them himself. He thought of human things, like her explanation of leaving behind herself.

“This part of the Kaligo, is like the middle part of a Venn Diagram, it is the central area, the headquarters. Like on the top of a building, if you know where to look, you can see every other part of the Kaligo, and since it aligns with your Existing world, it adopts some of its senses. We are on the top level of the building, and we can see pretty much everything from here, if we wanted to, the only things that can see more, are birds, they see pretty much everything.” He exampled.

“Or a bat,”

“What?” Now he was confused.

“Bats are the only mammal that can fly.”

“Oh, ok. I live here, on the rooftop.” He was going pretty well.

“Who can go beyond? Who is a bird?”

“Rex, he’s more of a bat. But Rex only goes beyond to talk to Princip.” He continued. Ekan looked at Astah and saw that she was even more confused now. “Princip is the…being that created all of this.” He gestured around. Ccreated your world too, he actually created our world for your world, but he knew he would need us, so he created us at the same time.”

“Like, God?”

“Yeah, that about says it.” He admitted

“You’ve met him?” She asked astounded

“Yeah, well, seen him. In the same way I’ve met Pratchett.” He reasoned

 “Still, doesn’t that make you an angel, since you go around and you work for God?”

“Well, I thank you for the compliment,” He had the kindness not to look at her already burning cheeks. “But that’s just one higher than me. They’re birds too. Met some of them. Crossed paths with them, even going to the same people. Quite often I’ve passed by them, because usually, when they go to see someone, I often end up having to fix the person and keep tabs on them for a while, they usually end up going on some massive adventure, or get a kid, so they don’t cause too much disturbance.” He talked of them as if it was some fairly decent business trip. Astah reminded herself, it was a business trip, for him at least.

              “So what is it that you do to guard the Kaligo?” She inquired casually, as she managed to conjure up a sort of solid object, about chest high and two feet away, it had no real colour or shape, she just made sure it was solid enough to sit on. She pushed herself sitting onto it and crossed her legs. He opened his mouth to speak and then opened his eyes wider to make sure he wasn’t imaging things.

              “How did you do that?” He questioned.

              “What?” she asked, he nodded towards the almost imperceptible, solid thing she was sitting on. “Oh, well I figured if we are outside existence, there aren’t any molecules or gravity, so if I could just…sort of…will it to be, then it would, because there wasn’t anything stopping it from being there, it just wasn’t there, so it stands to reason that if I made it there, it would be there. If that makes sense.” She tried to make sense of something that she only had a gut feeling of. “But don’t change the topic, what do you do?” She insisted.

              “I make sure there is a balance, that there isn’t anyone who knows about Kaligo and there isn’t anyone who can control Kaligo.” He realised his mistake too late. Her face had become white as a clouded sky, her eyes had opened to their full width and her body had tensed to run. “Not you. You’re fine. Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill you or anything.” He reassured her unreassuringly, the fact that the words had been said had triggered a primitive sudden urge to escape in any way she could. Her sense caught a hold of her, he could have killed her if he had wanted to, but he hadn’t which means that he wanted something from her.

              “What do you want from me? Why am I different?” She asked.

              “Well, what I said before about you being able to control the darker parts of the Kaligo, that was true. We only had four people in all of human history, who could see it, but you reacted to it. It reacted to you, something happened that shouldn’t have.” He looked away from her. He couldn’t tell her the whole truth, not yet. He wanted her to live. But why? Why was she different? He knew the dangers, he had seen what Thane had done, she could do the same thing, but she learned faster. The damage she could do was intense. If he screwed it up with her, he would watch another Thane incident all over again, and this time, it would be his fault. So why was she still standing? Why did he let her live? He could have killed her in that emergency room and no one would have even blinked an eye. Letting her live was also betraying the others. He liked the others. But why was he risking it all for her? If he couldn’t answer the question, he would lose everything. There was something he could do to find out why she was special, but that was a last resort, that was only going to happen if every single other option had been completely exhausted to the point where it was waiting to explode.

 “You’re different because the last person who could control the pain, killed most of the population of Britain. ‘The Black Death’ that’s what they called him. After a couple of generations, we managed to do some damage control and alter it, so they thought the Black Death was the colloquial name for the Plague.” He explained.

“What does that have to do with me directly?” She was still mostly confused.

“Well, we shut him out. We thought if he never sought us out, he would never learn how to inflict pain on others…We were wrong. So very, very wrong.” He went on. “He learned how to kill, but after a while, he learned that people became suspicious when the person suddenly dropped dead. So, he learned how to send a disease to cover his tracks. Instead of killing them by stopping their heart, he would send a disease after them. His first victim had to watch their family all die via either his disease, or suicide, or starvation, before the person themselves was infected and died. He would make people feel the most pain they could before they died. The disease was tailored to make people hate themselves first, to be a burden to their families, to see their skin itself become red and blistered, before they could die. I don’t even think he meant it to go so far.” He showed sadness and hurt like a clock showed the time.

              “I’m sorry.” She apologised, but she knew she didn’t have to.

              “When we found out that you had a power over it too, we had to do something different than before.” He was only partially lying and still wondering how this could possibly end well, especially if she was who the others thought she was.

              “I have powers?”

              “You can manipulate the layers, yes. But, please, don’t.” He pleaded on the outside, on the inside he was desperately begging.

              “Why?”

              “Because the more you use them, the easier they become to summon, the easier they are to summon, the easier it is to lose control.” He explained, this time, there was a shade of irritation in his voice, she was wondering if it was safe to ask some more. She didn’t want to push him too far.

              “Surely you could develop better control if you use it more often?” She was honestly curious. The words approached him like a bird watcher approaches an injured chick of a rare species.

              “You would think so, but not with all the examples I’ve seen.” He couldn’t let himself think of all the lives that he had taken, because they couldn’t afford to let humans control the Kaligo, and now he was inviting one in, and asking her not to use her powers. He knew the risks, but they had to try another way. Doing the same thing wouldn’t help anyone. He would have to train her. They had to know what she was, they had to know for sure, because if they tried to kill her, and she was who they thought, killing her would just be like poking a dragon awake from a peaceful slumber into a very tempting looking meal.

“But I’m hoping you are different from who everyone thinks you are.” He gazed at her. She returned it. She didn’t want to, not really, but she could see it all play out in his eyes. The pain was too near the surface. The countless lives that were claimed. The numerous more that he had to confuse, the thousands of children that watched the most terrible event of history play out and dance upon their parents, siblings, loved ones. The scenes played across his irises like actors on a stage, exactly where they were supposed to be.

“Who do they think I am?” She inquired, wondering how they perceived her.

“Someone very dangerous.” He prayed he was doing the right thing. “You can’t use your powers. At first, you didn’t want to use them any more than we wanted you to, but now that you have, you have to prove that you can control yourself. That you can stop yourself.” He looked away for a bit. This wasn’t supposed to be his job, there were others for this. This was going to be messy. “I have to train you.”

              “But I thought I wasn’t supposed to learn.”

              “You’ve put yourself behind the wheel. Now I have to teach you how to pull over, while you’re going down a busy highway. I’m not going to teach you how to control your powers, I’m going to teach you how to ignore them.” He sounded as if there was a threat that he had preparing, or like he was doing something he hated doing.

              “Ok.”

              “It’s going to be hard.” He warned.

              “But I learn how to stop myself from hearing them?” She inquired hopefully.

              “Yeah. I will teach you how to ignore them, basically. But I won’t always be there. Any time that they become extra provocative, or you feel really angry at someone, you have to promise me, you will use this.” He held out a horn of sorts. It was shaped like a horn, that had been split into three sections. The left section twisted towards the centre and faced downwards, with the very end flicked up, the same was mirrored on the right side. The centre one faced upward and forwards, with a single slit in it, with such a horizontal slant, it began at the divide between the three sections and finished just before the end of the horn. It was made of what looked like swirls of orange, white and cream shells and dark green marble. “It’s a Kallivoca horn. The last of its kind. Take care of it, it can switch between Kaligo and reality, so you can bind it to your Kaligo self, let it follow you in the Kaligo, and then summon it when you need it.” He handed it over to her. His stunning smile broadened.

              “Then-”

              “Shh.” He said, his head perked up, eyes becoming alert. “Someone is coming, you have to go back.” He disappeared. She faded back into reality.