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The world ended in a flash of scorched heat and light. For a brief moment, Tim could almost believe that the stuttering rise and fall of his chest was the final settling of peace washing over him.
“You think you’re saving anyone?”
“I don’t care.”
Soot and charred splinters of wood rained from the sky, splattering every inch of skin not covered in months-old scars. It should have burned like hell, what with the inferno raging two storeys above him. But, with some bitter irony, even his body, it seemed, was long past feeling.
“You can’t even save him!”
“But I can hurt you.”
What little sensation left in his hand shrieked as the torn muscles twitched involuntarily. The detonator had melted completely in his grasp, the scent of molten plastic and acid cauterizing the air as it drizzled across his palm and down to the elbow in rivulets, carving into the flesh as steadily as a surgeon’s scalpel. And yet the pain did not entirely feel his own. Like he was trapped in a dream; a mere spectator to a body restrained by sleep paralysis.
How long did it take for the body to realise it’s dead?
“I don’t expect I’m going to be coming back from this. I don’t know if I want to.”
“I am not losing you as well!”
He choked on a bitter laugh, the acrid taste of blood stinging the back of his throat. Jon’s body had to be close by—or rather Jon was. Alive, that is. The cops too, maybe, but Jon… Had to be. Serves him right to be the last one standing, shuffling over their broken, dead bodies like some eldritch harbinger turning over bone and stone to pick at their corpses. Like some… some bloody Eye creature plucked from ruins and strung up to drink in the damage they had left behind. The spooks loved him too much to let their precious toy perish so easily.
It would be his luck that Jon had truly died and Tim survived.
His hand spasmed again. Tim winced, trying to ride out the pain and the ringing in his ears that had yet to fade. Damn Jon. Damn him. Damn the entire world while he was at it.
It was never going to make a difference, was it? Not the research, the planning, the time spent staking out this place, the explosion itself. He’d known it was never going to work. Gertrude had spent decades fighting these things, and all it took to off her were three bullets to the chest. They were just another damn sacrifice down the long list of casualties in a never-ending crusade. So what was the fucking point?
Only one thing had really mattered, and Tim didn’t have the shame to hide it from himself: revenge. Killing that stupid clown, burning the whole circus to the ground, taking everything that had stolen the only people he’d cared about down with him. Because Danny was dead, Sasha was dead, and for all that Tim was concerned, his bridges with Martin and J— his bridges with them had started burning the moment he’d locked eyes with the man who’d once been his friend through the window of his flat. What else was there for him?
Tim helped build the pyre and dove right in after.
Chunks of liquid pooled into his mouth and he fought the instinct to swallow. Whether he’d bitten his tongue in the initial blast or had punctured something, he didn’t know, but he didn’t have the strength to turn his head to spit the gunk out. Debris piled up around his body, though Tim could hardly begin to move, prone as he was, or feel his extremities. Uneven stone dug roughly into the small of his back while some sort of beam pressed onto his lower half. His face, and what other surfaces he could sense crinkling beneath his torn clothes, sunk under the pressure of something charred and wet, and Tim entertained the morbid thought that Nikola had gotten around to successfully flensing them all. But no, he realised. The mutilated flesh was still his own.
It really would be his luck that an explosion at point blank refused to kill him immediately. Whatever powers that be, it seemed—the entities, Beholding, the things behind the tapes, whatever—sought fit to revoke such mercy for himself.
If his body could’ve allowed him to laugh, he would have. They were watching, whoever—whatever—they were. Of course they were. Even outside the walls of the Institute, even without Jon’s shaking hand on that stupid recorder, even dying—here, alone—they were still there. Staring. Leering. A cold flash of revulsion and apathy surged in his chest. What the hell did it want? To watch him love, cherish, befriend, and fumble, then strip it all away like peeling the epidermis from sinew? Letting him grow comfortable again and laugh as the masks of everyone around him topple away one at a time? Destroying his life and relegating it to having only ever been bad luck?
(Bad luck, he thought wryly. Danny’s haunted face, pretend or not, his skin sloughing down his arm while Tim watched. Martin’s pinched look as he stared between Tim’s unkept desk and Jon’s stupid office, the terseness of his voice as he’d hissed, “And you know what? If we were all happy, that wouldn’t actually be the end of the world!”
Sasha’s laugh as warped as cola bottles while she brushed past him to kiss a boyfriend he’d never heard of before, the upturned smirk she’d worn when he’d crashed onto her sofa with his concerns about Jon’s behavior and Gertrude’s murder and—and that had never been Sasha, hadn’t it? Not since Prentiss. And even then he… he couldn’t tell what emotions, what secrets, what years they’d known each other, were ever true or not.
The stupid cursor blinking on his monitor opened to that unsent email, mocking his attempts to cling to the illusion of a normal job as his fingers refused to submit his damned resignation letter. Over and over again.
Jon, and the frayed sentiments they might have once held for each other, watching instead the thousand yards of barbed words tear through the other like a serrated sieve, whisking them apart until there was nothing left but the tatters of what once was.
Bad luck. Tch.)
If he really wanted to, he could almost imagine the faint whirring of that damn tape recorder flicking on beneath all the rubble. Wouldn’t that be the final joke to end this charade of life? One last thing to record before letting him die with whatever dignity he had left.
How long did it take for the body to realise it’s dead?
Scraping. A tick-tacking echo broke through the tinnitus somewhere off to his left, like children pattering on the pavement or pebbles dribbling off a ledge. It was barely perceptible with how the remains of the building groaned. Its basement walls curled in on themselves like a withered leaf, seeking to sink Tim into further oblivion. So why hadn’t it taken him yet?
Scrapes again. Then a soft humming. No, not humming. Scatting. Singing. A voice warbled down from the ruined corridor to a psychedelic tune as Tim’s chest rose and fell again.
“‘Un ensemble d'enfants, la galaxie s'étend, jardin de l'imagination,’” the voice lilted, followed by squelching steps as whoever it was made their way towards where he lay. “‘Combler la lacune, voler face à la Lune! Vois comme nous évoluons~’” There was skittering then tapping as the voice hummed again and… was that… were they dancing?
Tim peeled his eyelids apart, gritting his teeth at the film of blood and grit that immediately tumbled into his eyes. He furiously blinked the tears away and forced his head to turn where that all-too cheery voice was coming from. Tiny beams of fading sunlight had penetrated the broken corridor, reflecting off the lingering flames from above, and offered just enough light for Tim to parse out the outline of the figure sauntering before him.
What could have passed as a man—but Tim knew too well that whatever left alive in this museum could not be considered human—was tiptoeing jauntily in the dark, bending one way and the other as it walked like a garden eel, all while giggling that same song to itself. A tattered suit hung from its shoulders, perfectly tailored down to the stitch, though the cuffs danced in black shreds around its wrists and ankles. Something dark dripped from its fingers and the thing painted it across fallen wood and plaster with a winding grin that Tim wondered if that Michael creature had taken on a new form. Ditched the creepy hallways for eerie singing and stalked them to the museum to watch the fallout for shits and giggles.
There was a flash of red—and it was only a color it was a crimson river undulating and hungry it was a promise it was a prayer it was desire and freedom it was the universe the untethered void at the cost of piles and piles and piles and piles and spiraling beautiful nonsense—and the thing sang again.
“‘It feels like flying, but maybe, we’re dyyyinggg—’ You see first it’s funny because you are, in fact, dying.” Tim started as the thing casually turned to address him. It spoke with a springy, sharp American twang, but every careless word stung like a chisel to his skull. “But then you get to the last bit of that verse—‘sHe kNoWs yOu hEaRd hEr, staging music mUrDeR!’ and the rest about the line for the show yada yada yada—now THAT gets fun the second time ‘round considering you’re here with that silly detonator Right On Cue- oooh! You all just play your parts so well for the fans here, don’t you, worm boy?” Its fingers flicked something off a discarded mannequin that’d haphazardly fallen, twisted, onto the basement’s bannister. It landed next to Tim’s face with a crispy thud and, oh god, that had not been a mannequin. The vague memory of swaying victims, held aloft by dancing strings just before the calliope’s music scrambled their reality, mingled with the stench of roasted flesh and he couldn’t hold himself back from retching.
“The hell?!” he tried to scream, but all that came out was a garbled cry while he choked on his body’s response. He managed a shoulder under him, just in time as he heaved out the sick of blood and bile, recoiling as the viscous liquid leaked past his lips and crawled down his cheeks and jaw.
It was as if Tim had never spoken. “‘Course you wouldn’t know what I’m talking about though,” the thing pretending to be human continued, toeing away debris with its bare feet, its bare bloodstained feet, without a care in the world as it gestured this way and that. “A couple thousand sickos staring aggressively into a screen and replaying the worst moments of your life? Ha! You probably wouldn’t believe me even if I showed you, but what can I say? They really strike a chord! Freaks after my own heart of hearts!” The thing broke out in piercing laughter, leaving Tim’s ears ringing again. This… wasn’t one of Nikola’s pet clowns nor did it sound like one of Elias’ pretentious voyeuristic monologues. Was it some new kind of spook they hadn’t had the chance to be traumatized by yet? Or something worse?
The creature clicked its tongue.
“I gotta say though, this stage was really lacking that really special something, you know? Maddening grip on unreality is fun and all—and believe me, I love a good unraveling of the self—but, well, call me biased, but Gregor‘s rising star,” it sucked air through its teeth like a disappointed parent, “left a little je ne sais quoi to be desired. Cute, but not Quite There Yet.”
The words kept dissipating into the fogginess of his mind before Tim could fully process them. There was something more, something behind the gibberish this thing was spouting, but he couldn’t find it in his heart to chase down that inquest. His voice came out of his lacerated throat with a soft wheeze.
“Who the… fu…?”
The figure rolled its eyes before crouching down by his head. Tim couldn’t tear his gaze away from the way the vast emptiness within those deep red orbs held him in place. “Don’t worry, bleach head, I’m not here for you. More curious about the whole baby god business old Jonesy’s got going this time. Kinda interested to see if the kid will stick the landing here or not. Frankly, I’m just shocked you’re still kicking.” With a swift motion, it bounced back onto its feet and dug its toes into Tim’s ribs. He let out a jagged cry as something stabbed in there further. The bastard tutted. “Though not for much longer it seems. Hey, tell me, what’s it like being watched while you die?”
It took a moment for the pulsating pain to subside enough for the question to register, but Tim’s blood ran cold the instant he understood. His eyes narrowed.
“What.”
“You know—the eyes, the ears, the everyone listening in to your final moments after heroically blowing up a defunct sham! What’s it feel like to be on that side of the coin, huh? C’mon, tell me.”
The expression the spook wore was one of wolfish intrigue, the kind Tim had begun to recognize on Elias whenever the bastard dropped by the Archives to check in on their so-called progress. It was the look of a self-assured prick who knew something they didn’t, someone who took pleasure in its subjects of interest eating each other alive as some sort of sick experiment. Like a god, subsumed by watching, consuming every drop of foreign human experience it would never try to understand.
His functioning hand clenched into a fist.
Something in Tim’s glare must have tipped the creature off because its face morphed into a condescending smile, plopping its chin into its hands. “Oh, I don’t mean those Eyes, darling. The grand pervert in the sky? Blah, it wishes it had one iota of the load I carry. No, mutton head, the others. The ones I know for sure you’ve clocked behind those silly little webbed tapes your baby god clings to like a chew toy.” It snapped its fingers and a recorder materialized in its hand, whirring tinnily and pristine, as if it had only ever been resting on the corner of an office desk and not buried beneath the rubble with the rest of them.
The air abandoned Tim’s lungs as his vision petered out at the sight of it. His eyes watered and blinked, once, twice, and the bloody thing was still there. Sure, he recognized the flush of adrenaline flooding his veins, the way his head began to fuzz and his heart thrummed loudly in his ears. He knew, objectively, that his SNS was working overtime in reaction to something he had long perceived to be a threat, trying to get his body prepared to escape its vicinity. He also knew that the panic was actively killing him faster, lungs deflating with each shortened breath, more blood pooling past his lips, leaving him colder and vulnerable on the floor.
But Tim didn’t care. He couldn’t control whatever thing controlled fate, whatever force dictated how his end was always going to be. He couldn’t even control his own body. There was no point in fighting that eventuality. But it had all started going wrong in the Archives. With Gertrude’s mysterious death and that damned recorder. If there was anything, anything, his futile efforts could do—
(God, he’d given that recorder to Jon. And he’d been right. They’d both been right all along.)
He deserved to know why.
“What… are they?” he managed. Damn him; if he was gonna die, he had the right to know.
The thing blinked once thoughtfully before shrugging. “Don’t know.” Hysterical laughter filled the space. “Sadists. Teenagers. The minimum wage grocer bagging your food. Some chump thinking they’re edgy enough because they recognize themes. Sweet old Granny knitting her shroud. They’re all the same. They’re all different. People, you know. Stupid, ordinary, boring people living out their small, meaningless lives.
“The thing is, kid,” it continued, twirling the recorder on the tip of its finger, “you’re in a special place right now that I—and this is one of many firsts I’m admitting to because it’s So INTERESTING—rarely, rarely Reader!, get to witness. Someone tied up to the horrors of this world and yet somehow so close to unraveling the truth that only few gods, and mortals I guess, have seen.” It grinned, tossing the recorder aside before punctuating its next few words with a finger to Tim’s chest. “So Close, Timmy boy! So close! I’d say it’s a shame, but that’d be saying that I expected more from you. I mean come on, you pieced all the edges of the puzzle together—your creepy job not only being an eViL temple to an eViL power but hinting that Jonesy knew more than he let on, sorry, you still know the blowhard as Elias, tracking the circus down like some sort of psychic bloodhound, even started to gander a peek behind that ol’ wall after third—and you threw away all that progress just because your little soul friend got cut in the first act—“
“What,” Tim repeated, mustering as much venom in his voice as he could, wishing he still had the axe in his hand, no matter how useless his limbs were, “are they?”
The creature stilled over him. With a slow, creaking movement, it tilted its head upwards until its eyes fell upon a corner of the room, just behind Tim’s line of sight and beyond the white screen. A grin stretched across its face, skin tearing as the smile curved impossibly that even reality started to waver.
“You.”
The world snapped back to what it was and the bastard cackled again.
Breathless at whatever that thing had done, Tim scrambled to regain his footing, reaching for any insults he could spit back out while trying to understand what the hell was going on. Grousing about it wasn’t going to change anything, he knew that, and Tim could already feel the cold creep up his legs, but why. Why the hell was it talking to him in the first place? What did it get out of watching Tim die? Satiating some inhuman curiosity? It knew more than it was willing to share, and it wasn’t above taunting, so why even bother? Why care about his answer?
Why did he care?
It’d mentioned going after Jon—Jon, who should be gone by now; Jon, who should be dead by now—but honestly, there was nothing meaningful he could do to stop anything anyways. Tim had never cared before and he wasn’t going to pretend to start now.
“You…” he inhaled steadily, “don’t… care about us.” He set his jaw and glared up at it. “You’re one of them. The things who call themselves gods and monsters and see the rest of us humans as bugs to squash just because they had a little snog with power. You’re like me. You don’t care. You’re just another watcher. So what—” he coughed, choking on the loathing and despair that bubbled up in his chest, “—are you fucking getting at talking to me?”
A myriad of emotions crossed the monster’s face before it turned bright purple and then… calm. Its expression smoothed out as fluidly as clay as it flicked a bit of blood from its fingernails and adjusted the lapels of its suit. Gone was the antic whimsy in its voice. “That’s a good question, I’ll give you that. I respect a good question. I’ve got a special someone who’s just great at asking most of the right questions. ‘Course, you don’t hold much of a candle up to him, but you’re just lucky you’ve got his pretty little mouth.” It licked its lips before mocking a pout. “And dying too, I suppose. So I’ll be generous here, dear.”
Tim didn’t have time to blink before a gust of rotten wind rushed through the tunnel and there it was, its face looming mere centimeters from his own. It still physically resembled a human, but there was no mistaking the raw energy of wrongness that exuded off it. If he’d thought getting lost in the deep red had been mesmerising before, he now had lost all sense of time and space, of physicality and reality. Was he still under the wax museum or hurtling through the yawning void? Had he spent an eternity dying or was he experiencing the aftermath of a second? Was the monster pinning him down, limbs straddled around him, or was his body nothing more than the empty lightyears of desolation between the atoms?
He couldn’t even gasp.
“There are universes out there. Countless. Infinite. More than your tiny mortal mind can fathom. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you were this close to seeing the truth about your meaningless existence and that’s not something you see every day. So imma help you out there.” It jabbed a finger into his chest and it dug right through the ventricles of his heart and smiled. “Every single ear that has listened to you suffer knows you don’t exist. You’re a plaything to them, Timmy. A bauble to be picked apart, scrutinized, cut up into itty bitty snowflakes and tossed together under their silly little microscopes. Every word you say, every move you make, every bond you break, the very people on the other side of those tapes have always been watching you and your little band of coworkers-to-enemies squabble and truss each other up to feed the eventual Big Bad Wolf. And worst of all, most of them actually care about what happens to you.”
Its head twisted with glee, trailing blood and universal residue with its fingers as it caressed the side of Tim’s face.
“So tell me, little matchstick who thought he could jump ship from the story: what’s it like to be watched by the very thing you hate as you die?”
The piece of Tim that had once been a researcher, the part that had once taken great pride in his ability to latch on to the smallest detail and string it back along to the rest of the picture, that had once had him relishing in promising reports with the literary agents and authors he’d worked with, that had once had him grinning with satisfaction over a single innocuous detail that made or broke a statement’s follow-up, the piece of him that had all but been tossed aside and killed when the truth broke—that piece of him longed to analyse every bit of detail this thing had said and not spoken. To pretend he was back then when hope was still a thing with feathers; running another dodgy follow-up with Sasha, convincing Jon to get piss drunk because only one of them deserved to waste away at work, and even gravitated to taking Martin under his nonexistent social wing because damn it, no one pretended to be that earnest without reason. Maybe, in another life, they might have fared better. Seen through Elias’ machinations, found some way to break their chains of supernatural corporate hell. Maybe Tim was never eaten by worms and maybe Sasha had never died and maybe Martin never let them roll over him and maybe Jon never turned into a spook and stopped pretending to be a stuck-up prat all the time. Tim could fantasise all he liked about choices he never made, but to what end? A few moments longer just to figure out what the hell was going on in some devil’s head? It was always going to end this way, and he was never good at pretending for so long.
So there was nothing to hold him back from latching on to a hunch, one single detail—the lines between the lines—and throwing any sense of self-preservation to the wind.
“You tell me,” he spat, the same giddiness he’d felt when taunting Nikola suffocating him. “What’s it like losing something you never had in the first place? Fucking sucks.” Tim bared his teeth with a glint in his bloodshot eyes. “Let me know when you get there too, arsehole”
The thing froze, like a record screeching to a halt and running into a smear frame. He was keenly aware of fingers clawed into his face and chest, toying with his skin and organs like a child carelessly would. Then it laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed. Tim’s vision greyed out as the figure—god? entity? monster?—sat back, cradling its chin with its hand, and glanced back down with a picture of cruel fondness.
Piss off, he thought.
“You really are a chip off the old unpredictable block, aren’tcha? Thought you could upset me by connecting fuckall together? It really is a shame that you’re long past saving!” Its voice dropped to a cosmic reverb, rattling his broken bones to dust, but Tim was long past feeling. “I think I was starting to like you.”