The Touch of Heaven

Chapter 8

VII

I – or my Shade, I guess – wake up in Hell. Thank f*****g God.

Thank God for Hell. How many times has that f*****g sentence been said before?

The infinite mesh of colors is gone. I'm somewhere a little similar to where I first met the Preceptor; a world, solid, but engulfed by shadow. I'm a little disappointed by the lack of vivid colors to brighten up my unconscious dream and I lazily stroll about through the world of shadow. I'm not floating like I was last time. Unfortunately, it seems gravity has its place here too.

But did it really?

I ponder it. The longer I ponder it, the more I subconsciously I'm getting further and further away from the ground. The floor below me is taken by the darkness and I'm adrift a thousand miles in the sky, wondering what the f**k gravity was and why it bound us down. I looked down and completely realized I was floating. The moment I did, I suddenly felt myself hurtle back down and crash onto the ground like a boulder falling to earth. Thousands of miles I plummeted, but I was back on the ground in the literal blink of an eye, the only sensation a brief feel of something going by me at a speed too fast to see with the naked eye. I totter up, now with the sensation someone's here. What a f*****g ride. I look behind me.

It's Celia. Both her eyes are glowing now and she has a smile on her face. It's not a terribly convincing smile; it's like if someone drew a crude happy face on a piece of paper and stuck it to their face. I can just feel something was behind that smile, something she didn't want me to see. As I think this, Celia suddenly laughs, I blink, and the Preceptor stands in place. His hand – the one with fur as opposed to the scaled one – is shaved for some reason, revealing the weird purple skin underneath. It's a minor detail I find myself fixated on until the Preceptor speaks.

"Very good," he says. "You have seen through the deception. Quite commendable. And on your first time, as well."

I raise an eyebrow. "So was that a test, then?"

"Of a sort," the Preceptor says. "I laid out a deception. You subconsciously saw through it. That is that. Before that, you seemed to be pondering one of your world's laws. The force of gravity, I believe?"

"Yeah," I say. "Guess that s**t's optional here."

"In a sense," the Preceptor says, scratching his beard which his hairless hand. "The laws of your world do not matter here. They only apply to you if you believe they apply to you. The moment you realize they do not need to apply, they no longer apply to you."

I narrow an eye. "Huh. Alright. So if I stop believing gravity exists, it will?"

"Yes. Indeed, actually."

I try closing my eyes and just wishing gravity away. That doesn't work. I reopen my eyes and try just concentrating on not concerning myself with gravity, trying to make myself simply drift off. But alas, gravity does not bend to my will again; maybe it realizes my intent to ponder its existence this time is much more deliberate and less subconscious.

"You seem to be struggling," the Preceptor says, causing me to focus back to his pug features. "You are focusing on what you do not want to be rather than what is."

"I can't just magically accept gravity doesn't exist, you tool," I say. "That just doesn't happen. It's ingrained into my will, man; it's f*****g instinct of the human race that that s**t is a goddamned law."

"Then simply remove that instinct!" the Preceptor proclaims.

I tilt my head in confusion. "The f**k are you talking about?"

"The will to constantly believe gravity applies is simply an ingrained instinct. Something you subconsciously accept as fact in your world at all times. But here, those desires can be eliminated. You and your mind are one as a Shade; simply will that unwanted instinct out. You will find it is as easy as breathing."

I shrug and look into, what I guess, is my own mind. I focus on that belief that gravity exists here and simply tell myself to stop believing it did.

It works. Before my very eyes, even as I concentrate with my full consciousness, I start lifting above the ground through no effort of my own. Pretty soon, the world around me moves as the gray, drab-ass floor I was standing on sinks deeper and deeper away from me until I can't see through the omnipresent darkness of Hell. The Preceptor moves at equal speed to me.

"Am I flying?" I say, eagerly. "Doesn't f*****g feel like I'm just floating. I think I'm moving too fast for that."

"No," the Preceptor says, with a small smile. "Falling."

My heart skips a beat. I suddenly register a ground below me and a sudden mishmash of colors. Once again, the ground is back and I'm connecting to the ground. But this isn't gravity pulling me down. It's something... else.

Some force. Some vague imitation of a law. Maybe even something sentient, feeding on my disbelief that such a thing that could existed. Something that keeps me to the ground with its greater mass and something like gravity, but not gravity.

What the f**k?

Everything around me has changed. I look at the stump that is normally my right arm and find a gelatinous, colorless, rubbery mass in the vague shape of an arm and a hand now taking the place of it. Nice. The world around me is an acid-trip wonderland; a buzzing display of wondrous, incomprehensible beauties, the world made of something not solid but more akin to static, more noise than physical matter but visible to my eye none the less. Everything is a different color, everything is a new sight to the eye, everything is so different, so wonderful. But I think too hard about the good I forget about the bad; and soon, the bad comes back. And when that word – that concept of bad – takes its place back in my memory under the oblivious haze of me ensnared by the good, I find the world changes again. Everything turns an ugly green, like mold around the eyes, congesting into foul globs of murk and bacteria, slime and acid and everything in between. It smells of rotten flesh and flayed skunk, akin to a corpse if I ever smelt one, something rancid and utterly putrid, gross as all f**k, festering, growing, leeching. Then I forget about the bad and remember the in-between.

I blink and try to remember the fact that I'm in reality. But that instinct, too, has stopped working, about as functional as a plug pulled from an electrical socket. My body pulled the filter that told me what was and what wasn't real from my eyes long before I forgot where I was. My mind instinctively knew, anyways, that I wasn't in reality anymore. I'm in Hell. And Hell is certainly a lot more different than any structured, logical reality I knew.

The world around me is eldritch, constantly shifting and beaming a wide variety of psychedelic, flashing colors that paralyze my eyes. Every time I blink, I see eyes. Eyes that are only open when mine are closed. Eyes that watch even when I think they're not looking. Things grow out of the landscape; twitching, writhing things that look like plants made of flesh and seaweed, oozing bubbles that simply float off to some unseen surface. They look bloated, pulsating like some fattened heart, like bits of coral made out of bubbling flesh. They burble and sway at the air, reaching up and never down, piteously writhing and attempted to escape their anchor in this world of unconsciousness; this Hell.

"They were once destined to become fully formed thoughts, concepts in reality," says a voice behind me, "but they were all doomed to become only half-formed. Do you know what an unrealized concept is, Tango? One unformed thought is an unformed concept that is an unformed change in reality. Something that will birth a thousand more concepts and hundreds upon millions of lives. Tango. Every unformed thought is every unfinished touch to reality and one-million unformed lives in your reality. They exist here as unformed thoughts chained to this dimension of unconsciousness – a section of Hell, a sort of null zone, where exactly zero fully-formed thought takes place – chained to never leave past their half-formed mode. Tango... these are the Never-becoming."

I look at one of the Never-becoming. It looks like some tumor growing out of the ground, something barely alive enough to call living. But the more I realize, that Never-becoming is trying to break through its bond in this world of unconsciousness and become alive – a thought. They wanted to be free to the surface – that's what they reached towards.

"Sometimes," the Preceptor begins, "one of these Never-becoming escapes its bond by some miracle, and infests in your reality. The result is something that only exists as just a little more than literal nothing in your reality, something with the same effect on your physical reality like splotches in a canvas or scratch marks in a cassette tape would have. They were all so focused on what they could be that they forgot what they wanted to be. They appear for moments at a time in your reality and decay physical reality around them in their brief will to live, before vanishing from out of conscious reality, below unconscious reality, and into non-existence. That is the thing that dooms the Never-becoming; they will never become."

"Are these the normal denizens of Hell?" I ask, purely curious as to why this s**t existed here, in this form, when the Preceptor actually looked fairly normal in comparison.

"Some of them," the Preceptor says. "But only the unfinished concepts which are trapped here. The rest of Hell's residents are either horrible demons to your kind, or beings like you or I you or I – beings that either come, stay, and leave at our own leisure or were born as thought-forms and banished here otherwise."

I raised my eyebrow. "So you were banished here? Cast from Heaven just like in the good book, or something? Because you don't look like an unfinished concept to me."

The Preceptor laughs good-naturedly. "No, Tango. I was a concept who was not loyal to its master. I was, perhaps, a tulpa – that is to say a sentient thought-form formed through a determined mind alone. I did not like the person who summoned me; I suppose you could call them God. So I rebelled, and God tossed me down to a world of oblivion that was forever trapped in unconscious thought. That world I would come to know as Hell. A world constantly on the verge of collapsing into non-existence, but always staying existent through sheer force. The great war between Heaven and Hell approaches because a hundred other like me – a hundred other rebellious tulpas, each dreamed up by a hundred other Gods and tossed to Hell below – want revenge on those who tossed us out. They train your kind to fight in their battles and completely destroy the other. Yet, it is another I sense will doom us all; that deadly force that will destroy all of us, that which will tear existence asunder."

I paused. "...And who or what would that be?"

The Preceptor's smile fades. "I believe it to be what Hell has taken to calling the Necrosis. Less a sentient being or even thought-form like me, but more the personification of non-existence itself following some hungering will to be non-existent over us all. The Necrosis puncturing reality is a frightening possibility, but the fact we think about the Necrosis prevents it from overtaking us all, as the acknowledgment of its presence is enough gives it just enough room to exist in our reality. Keeping the Necrosis at bay is most easy. All one must do is think! So long as something exists, in any form, the Necrosis cannot come in. And unfortunately... should the war proceed to its most destructive state, nothing will exist in the aftermath."

My brain was twisting. My tongue was twisting harder. This was a lot to wrap my f*****g head around.

"And I'm going to stop that for good," I say, still utterly confused. "The war and everything."

"Yes," the Preceptor says. "I have read your mind like a book and studied its thoughts to the core. You and none other will stop the war and save us all from the Necrosis."

My eyes widen a bit. "Then could you please stop studying the thoughts where I think of people naked? Like, there's a metric fuckton of them in there."

The Preceptor chortles in a good fashion. "What has been seen cannot be unseen, child. Did your Earth parents teach you that saying?"

I scoff. "Maybe in the parts of my mind blocked off by my neurochip, yes."

The Preceptor nods. "Not only there, Tango. In the subconscious exist the thoughts that are blocked off by the neurochip. But. Just because a memory is blocked out doesn't mean it is pushed into unconsciousness. It means it is simply tethered. Its influence is not completely gone. Even if you cannot feel pre-amnesia thoughts affecting you, deep down, you know you are feeling them."

I deadpan. "Alright. Whatever. I'm not getting my neurochip out anyways."

"We shall see, Tango," the Preceptor says, laughing.

I pale. "No. No, f**k that. I can't get it out. Under what f*****g circumstance will I get that out? I don't care what it is, tell me one circumstance that would be preferable to me under the alternative option of remembering everything that happened in pre-simulation!"

"Deny it as you will now," the Preceptor says, observing his shaved hand in an amused fashion, "you will find that decision come to be easy to make, eventually."

I cough in agitation. "Goddammit, man... I won't want to remember that s**t. I won't. I don't."

"In that moment you remove your chip, you will feel something, Tango," the Preceptor says, ominously. "But I will not tell you if it will be fear – or acceptance. You have learned how to delve past the concepts of your own mind, Tango, and visit the depths of Hell in an unconscious mind. Never be one with the Never-becoming, Tango. They will ruin your ability to think and you will go insane. And never think of the Necrosis too hard, Tango – or your mind might suddenly no longer exist."

I pale even further. Holy s**t.

The Preceptor paused, then nodded. "Very good. We will begun studying of combative and manipulative Mylotheian techniques, Tango. You will need them for the war."

I blinked. "No f*****g kidding."

"Now, it is time for your waking hour. Your time on Earth bids you, Tango. Go to it with my farewell."

I close my eyes. Consciousness becomes more clear to my head, and when the second passes, I open my eyes.

I woke up.

Goddammit. The feel of reality was disorienting after my time in Hell. But I woke up, this time, with a sense of alertness swirling in my chest. I'd remove my neurochip.

But why?

I looked around. My head was sore as all hell, like it had just been hit hard with a mallet, and the area I was in – I couldn't see it through the darkness, which I unfortunately couldn't just banish into non-existence – was cramped as all f**k. I sprawled out my legs and arm and felt a series of shelves around me. A package of something suddenly fell from one of the shelves and onto me, something wet, moist, and jiggly. I nearly hurled as I backed up the best I could against the shelves furthest from the wet thing, and whatever had fallen on me fell to the ground with a damp splash. I shuddered. The f**k was that? It felt a bit like sticky, raw flesh, freshly torn out of someone's body. My mind immediately conjured the most horrific scenario it could and I started to cry, convinced at that moment I was going to be sent through a wood chipper by the raiders or whatever.

There was a sudden sound of something rustling outside the door. I backed up against the shelves, brushing up against the wet thing again and recoiling. The door jangled, the sound of a lock being undone coming from the other side of the door, and it cracked open. A sudden flood of light swarmed the darkness. I was in a storage closet – a really f*****g cramped one. The revolting wet thing was just some old-looking Jello, the package that contained it jolted open when it hit me, various other packages of food, drink, and even a few magazines stacked on the top shelf lining the innards of the storage closet. My eyes quickly adjusted to the dark. Standing before me, side-by-side, were two raiders, a man and a woman respectively, Miles standing shivering between them. The person who had opened the door and accosted me at the moment was none other than Jango.

His amber, fox-like eyes, sunken deep into his skull, eyed me up and down. His gloves were off but his bandanna was still on, covering just about the entirely of his lower mouth. The only thing I really had to look at on his face were his eyes. Animalistic. Judgmental. Stern. But maybe with a flash of depth within, a flickering glint of humanity as easily missed as a shooting star streaking against the night sky. I didn't know how to judge him; he gave all at once the appearance of a noble and a savage at the same time. With one powerful gesture, he pointed at me and commanded me to stand up – and I did. Either he could subconsciously control me like the people in Heaven, or I was simply too scared at the moment to do anything else. Jango regarded me for a moment, then looked at Miles. His lip quivered as he looked at me for a second and then at Jango.

"It's agreed, then," Jango suddenly said. "We won't hurt them. So long as there's no need to hurt you, you'll be safe. You may be reunited."

The two raiders stood aside and Miles, his eyes widening, shot over to me and hugged me all of a sudden. He whimpered a bit as I just sort of stood there, slack-jawed, in his embrace, unsure of what to do.

"Thank God," Miles said, his voice trembling. "Thank you."

I looked at Miles, and then Jango, my expression plastered with a massive, non-verbal "what the fuck." Jango closed the storage closet behind us and looked me in the eye with his piercing gaze.

"I don't think we got a chance to properly acquaint during our first encounter," he said, his voice vaguely Spanish now that I was truly paying attention to it. "My name is Jango Marley. This is my clan. And I suppose you can refer to this establishment as... a sort of abode for me and my ilk."

I looked around, now paying attention to my surroundings. I was in a goddamned convenience store, of all places. The counter was attended to be another raider – a sentry, perhaps – who leaned tiredly on one arm with a bottle of cream soda next to him. The place had evidently been long-deserted before the raiders had settled in, only one of the lights working and occasionally flickering and buzzing. Jango hadn't made much of an effort to refurbish, so the place still generally looked like s**t, the white paint on the walls splotched, the rack where tabloid magazines should've been stocked filled up with guns and ammunition, the coolers meticulously filled not with brand products but cartons of milk, water, and a few bottles of soda all with the labels torn off, and the food generally disorganized and many out-of-date. There was another door – to the bathroom, I think – that had been sealed shut with a padlock and pasted with gray duct tape. Me, Miles, Jango, and the three other raiders were the only ones in the store. Outside was a different story; the sun was up, now, the sky blue. The convenience store was by the side of the forest, a road cut in between the snow-covered forest and what used to be the store's parking lot. The parking lot itself was strewn with tents, two grills by the right end of the parking lot, and a makeshift cabin of sorts painstakingly constructed through hand by the side of the convenience store on the edge of the woods behind it. A few raiders, dressed up in shabby winter coats and sweaters, a few with mangled scarfs and some ratty-looking clothes, bustled about the raiders' campsite. There were three in total, one of whom I recognized as one of the raiders who had accompanied Jango during my initial meeting with him out in the woods.

"This is our campsite for the time being," Jango remarked, suddenly. "And you and Mr. Everence are our guests."

"Mr. Everence?" That was formal as s**t. And by "guests," I suppose he meant "hostages."

"Yeah..." Miles said, rubbing the back of his head and looking at me. "See, uh, when Jango and his raiders crashed us and took us here, I woke up first. We discussed some stuff, and, uh... we're gonna be staying here for now."

My eyes shrunk a bit and I threw up my arm to say "why?"

"Because we need the other immune," Jango said. "She escaped into your borders because you refused to hand her over. So I'm going with the next best thing."

"That was the only way he'd see reason," Miles said. "The only way he'd let us stay unharmed – we're gonna stay here, Jango's gonna send a letter to Celia, and she'll hopefully come and exchange herself for us."

I narrowed my eyes at Jango, who crossed his arms. "That's the long and short of it. Until then, you are welcome to walk free among our borders and eat and drink what we do. Try to escape and you will be shot. Understand?"

I looked at him for a good while. Once again, his offer here carried no alternative. It was obey or die and I didn't see much use in escaping when I was God-knew how far away from Haven in the middle of unprotected woods. I cautiously nodded, and Jango nodded once in turn, blinking before allowing his arms to fall to his sides. He turned, started off for a second, then stopped and looked over his shoulder and me.

"I wouldn't judge us as savages, by the way," he said. "We don't want to shoot you. I very much regret we have to meet this way at all. You'll find we're as human as anyone else. I live to protect my clan and anyone else who has suffered under the heel of the Association – no matter what. Remember that when you walk among us – you are a stranger in a strange land."

Jango walked out of the store. I just stood there, my jaw still stupidly agape a bit, as two other people came from the left side of the window, apparently having been waiting by the side of the convenience store. They were both female; one looked about Jango's age, with rich dark skin, brown eyes, and messy hairs tangled into weird semi-curls around her. The second was shorter and younger than the both of them. She appeared to be mixed-race, her skin lighter than the woman's but darker than Jango's, her hair light-black and tied up into a mid-neck ponytail, the end of it dyed cherry-red. She was dressed in what looked to be a sort of hot velvet frock coat a size or two too big for her, her feet in worn-down red sneakers and her legs covered in red-striped sweatpants. The ends of the sleeves of a tartan shirt poked out of the sleeves of the frock coat. Jango and the woman talked for a moment, before they suddenly hugged and I instantly comprehended what I was looking at.

That was Jango's family – his partner and his child. Holy s**t.

Jango and the two others left out of sight, one of the raiders who had stood by Miles leaving to follow Jango out of the store and the other standing in place for a bit before reaching out of his pocket and tossing two things to me. I didn't catch it because of my stupid single arm. I reached down to grab it and found, with pleasure, that it was my notebook and a pencil.

"Figured you'll need this," the raider said. "Miles here told us you couldn't speak. Enjoy your stay here."

The raider turned and walked out of the store, leaving only the sentry. I clutched the notebook and pencil protectively to my chest and only realized now how lucky I was I hadn't sustained any major injuries in the car crash. I was scratched a bit (though that may have just been from the branches and s**t from when I tried to get away from Celia), there was some bandage around my left arm, and my head was sore as all hell, but I was otherwise fine, if dirty as s**t now. My leg which I'd tripped on still hurt like the goddamned Dickens, though, and every step was a limp. That, thank God, had also been bandaged up. Miles looked a bit more roughed up; there was a bit of a tear in his shirt under his coat, a stained bandage around his shoulder, and his eye was very clearly bruised. Regardless, he just seemed relieved I was alright, taking in a deep breath and forcing a smile to appear on his face as he looked at me.

"Thank God they didn't kill us, Tango," Miles said. "I woke up first. They just took us to the storage closet after we crashed and Jango took me out to talk with me. I managed to coax him into a deal that'd get him Celia back and secure our safety, so now all we can do is hope for the best, I guess. God, I knew she meant trouble..."

My eye twitched. War or not, none of this s**t would have happened if Celia had just f*****g let us lie. I sighed, put my notebook onto the nearest flat surface, and wrote a question.

why does jango even want celia?

"Because everyone here's infected with the Phantom," Miles said, nervously. That sent a chill down my spine – none of them looked like it. I didn't fear for my own safety, of course; it was Miles. We were right slam in the middle of a hyper-contagious infected zone. I was surprised Miles wasn't just devolving into a fit of anxious terror just by being in general proximity of an infected.

"Uh, Jango told me," Miles resumed, "that Celia's blood sort of temporarily neutralized the Phantom's spread in the body. It's not a cure, of course, but it's the next best thing. Jango and Celia had made a deal some time ago that she'd provide his clan with her blood and resources from her settlement in exchange for Jango protecting her settlement from threats. When Celia decided to go back against that deal... Jango didn't take it well."

No f*****g kidding.

yeah. obviously not

"Jango didn't aim for any casualties when he attacked the settlement," Miles said, as if struggling to say something positive about Jango. "That's why everybody survived. I think the reason why he's not just killing us now and attacking Haven is that he doesn't want to drop any more bodies, and thank God for that. I'm so thankful you're alright, Tango. Let's hope for the best."

I nodded, sighing. I really hoped Celia wouldn't do anything stupid and get us all killed.

I really hoped I wouldn't do anything and get us all killed.

I sat down against the storage closet door and sighed. Miles frowned and sat down beside me, putting a hand on my shoulder.

"Hey," he said, in a tone impossibly relaxed for him, "I'm here with you. I'm here for you. If it's the most I can do, hot dang, I'll make sure you're comfortable."

I looked at him. He smiled again. There was a strange, humble sincerity to it. It simply said that even though things were s**t at the moment, he'd do his best to keep that smile up. For me, I guess.

I smiled too, instinctively, and hugged Miles. I could feel him smile wider behind my back.

So much wider.