[ti]key[/ti]The Unsealed Scar

THE HEIRESS - 2



Celestial lived in a small town, and the town was called Avarest, one with many secrets where it was easy to disappear, among the constant fog and towering pines of the forest, the grassy knolls and crested hills where her land stretched on and on. Of course everybody who lived there knew of her, in some form or another – mainly in whispers. In some senses, it was impossible to talk about her, but even harder to resist. And so the small town subsided on the gossip of the mysterious heir to the world’s most secretive fortune, and what was there to say about such a thing? Nobody knew anything for sure, only that the girl was rich, rich beyond any possible conception of what that word even means – elite didn’t begin to cover it. Nobody was certain how much money her family had actually had – when they’d been alive anyway – but they’d speculated amongst themselves that it flowed like the fountain of youth though every bank in the world.

Occasionally the town observed some very nebulous things, black helicopters or silver jet plane, hovering orbs of light – lovecraftian anomalies, that, were strictly gag-ordered by men in black suits who occasionally visited, interviewing denizens or bringing strange equipment out into the woods, scanning for…Heavens-only-know. But the people of the town tolerated the lonely heir in her endless mansion and her stretch of haunted woods, not only tolerated, but looked after fondly. Yes – she was very strange. Quiet, brooding, a bit intimidating, and rarely ever seen – but she was quite kind behind that piercing and standoffish facade.

The local schools in the city of Avarest were among the very best educational facilities in the world; they were completely funded by the young Heiress Defalcousse, and children who lived in the vicinity were admitted free of charge. As part of a charitable organization there, the schools also took applications for admittance from students around the country. But this school was very secretive, and we cannot release its name. Its existence was part of the bond between the lady Defalcousse and the town, and the two had an agreement – that they would help each other keep this special place as peaceful as possible, that they would help each other – and for Celestial, that meant ensuring that even the poorest of children, or the most obsequious and educationally uninterested cases would become something special and great. For the townspeople, that meant dealing with the occasional above top secret oddities and keeping what they’d seen, heard, and spoken of – secret. And what they truly knew, was very little to begin with.

The estate had been in Defalcousse possession for many generations, but the very existence of her family was, except for among the upper echelons of the very highest circles, little better then myth, if not virtually unknown. Even the surname itself, Defalcousse, is said by some to be a cover…for a name that nobody, with a capital EN, knows.

None of the townspeople ever got close to Celestial’s estate, and few knew where the physical mansion might even be, among the many acres of woodland the family owned.

EN did not exist at all, but he did know – he lived in the estate with Celestial. There was plenty of room for both of them, and even then it was quite lonely. This was not the sort of creaking croaking ancient mansion with history and dust and family heirlooms adorning the endless halls and rooms. Celestial’s estate was thoroughly postmodern – undoubtedly many decades beyond what any civilian could buy, for any amount of money. This was a home with things that only connections could ever earn you, and not the kind of connections you’d feel comfortable naming aloud. The kinds of connections that are never spoken of, because their names are so feared, they are only whispered, if at all – in utter secrecy, and with many furtive glances.

EN knew, that there was a breathtaking view from the estate’s backside. It existed atop the highest crest of Ma’crete Arbelos, the wooded forest where Celestial’s abode sprawled. It was haunted in the best kind of way, the kind of way where it seems every living feature seeped and teemed with life, the trees had hands that folded into spires in the night, and they waved, inviting you closer, and deeper, into the wildlands. It seemed to have a kind of dim glow, as if the slyphs and fae still could be found somewhere among the mists and warbling paths. From atop the estate, when you looked down the sheer, you could see the creatures of the forest buzzing atop the canopy, you could hear the animals speaking in the night and the creeks mumbling during the days. And the fog shrouded it all away under a blanket of cool stillness, and rarely did it break completely, but stayed until nightfall, dampening the gaze of even the sun.

The gates of the estate opened automatically, if you were supposed to be there. I won’t say that they had a mind of their own, but they know what they are looking for. And very few find these gates. Most who do were meant to come.

EN didn’t come in through the gates, though. He entered the dimension materializing outside the giant glazed chrome front doors and swung them wide open. The doors were never locked. We shall say that security would never let you get far enough, to check for yourself whether the doors were locked.

As soon as EN had entered, he knew where he would find her. It was airy, and huge – almost entirely electronic, a smart mansion, with many tricks. Glassy, so that you could always see the mist outside, the trees and greenry. All the walls dividing the inside from the outside were made of glass – almost. And some of the bedroom ceilings were transparent, so that you could watch the rain fall without having it fall on you. EN hated most things humans made and did, but he loved her home, even though Celestial was such a lonely young lady, and this house – the utter antonym of Disneyland’s “Haunted Mansion” – was as haunted as mansions come.

Celestial suffered from cerebral achromatopsia, which means that – neurologically, she could not distinguish among colors. Her color blindness was as serious as it comes, she was a monochromat, and could not distinguish colors outside of greyscale.

EN found her in one of the many giant empty rooms – these rooms had white walls and occasionally Celestial would spend entire days or even weeks holed up in them, painting endlessly. She painted visions of things from different realities, visions of things yet to come, or of people who existed presently – and her paintings always came to pass, depicting something real. Sometimes they were detailed portraits of histories no living human eyes had ever witnessed – for they occurred aeons and aeons ago. Other times they were prophecies of a time yet to come, a time that EN would seek in the Outreverse if it compelled him to so, sailing outside of time.

Of course, every single one of these paintings used only the colors in shades between black and white.

When he saw her painting today, he couldn’t bring himself to speak for some time – all he could do was watch in open-mouthed amazement as – he saw her, again, so beautifully rendered, in hues of lacing silver and dark shades of grey and pearl, outlined, just as her spirit form, crown emanating like a tiara of radiance from her third eye, and all around here – an aura of geometric beauty emanated, like a lattice of interconnected hands all warping the air and converging upon the singularity of her beautifully rendered imminence.

“-Sil, I”

She had been sitting cross-legged studying her painting, for who knows how long.

“Hi EN. My god, I am glad to be done with this abomination. It was giving me the worst migraine…”

“I saw that girl today, Sil, she – who is she? Great-Lords-of-the-9th! Sil, we need to talk…”

Sil was on her feet, towering as she did, her presence did not impose him – but although she was a waif, she had the hardest of steely blue-grey eyes, her jet black hair cut like daggers across the blade of her erect back – commanding seemed her birthright. EN did not buy that birthright crap – never had, but she seemed to embody it, nonetheless. She was pacing now, her hand on her chin. She’d already known what he was going to say.

“We can’t help her. I’m so sorry, but this girl is outside of even our power.” She looked at him, and what he saw in her expression turned his blood to ice. It was such a soft mixture of pain and just a tinge of fear – there was nothing in this world that scared Celestial, nothing she had ever flinched at in her life … had there?

“I’ve known about her, a long time before I painted this. You see…in a way, she is my responsibility. In a way, she is my fault...”

“You need to explain this to me." He saw the look of consternation on her face, a lip raised briefly in doubt. "Please?”

“The context is important.” She took a very deep breath, and settled her gaze upon him, as if resolving herself to what was to come. “There is something you have to know about … a failed experiment.”

“And…?”

“It was…my father’s experiment. And it wasn’t such a failure, after all. By the time They found out…it was too late. Too late for her, for us…too late for everybody.”

Thanks Ben! I will try to write more tonight
It's a good outlet for me

Oh lawd. Poor En.... I can relate to him so hard you wouldn't believe it. I wonder how this arch continues. I'll refrain from any guesses as to not impinge on your own vision, after all that is what I want to read! But I'm seriously on edge as to what connection Sil has to this girl... and why does it seem like she is afraid of El? She clearly is on par with him even though En doesn't have the same existential fear when faced with her. El has an obvious history with Sil, we saw that in chapter two when he implied that he knew her (well) by telling En to greet her.

Lawdy lawdy lawd! This will be a 13+ chapters story. I'd also love to read a little bit more about the different plateaus of existance and the laws that govern their interconnectability.

No pressure though, <3 Great work Caylus. This has the potential of a Harry-Potter universe.

[3]

[ERROR(UNDEFINED)]
[dat{syntaxerror!}3/33/2023]
[sphere=?falshexal]
[nullvalue(Lost Angelies, Kalifornia)]

SERENDIPIDY

Katy’s car, a shitty jalopy, didn’t see much action, but it ferried her from her small apartment in the Saint Ferdinand Valley to her job on the outskirts of Lost Angelies. She owed nothing on the car, and day-after-day it chugged thirteen miles each direction without complaint down the inevitably congested o’five-one-five [0515] (officially - ‘El Camino Real’ – ironically the least royal of all roads in Katy’s mind – she also tended to refer to the o’five-one-five dyslexically – “traffic on the fiftyonefifty” – she cracked herself up). Her shitty car rolled slowly adjacent to Escalades and Bentleys that shrunk habitually from the poorly-insured-looking vehicles, and too bad for them; all socioeconomic classes and their cars were inevitably petrified on the 609 (or as literally nobody called it: the ‘Sans Diablo Freeway’) equally.

Katy’s crappy car got her to her freeway exit and its speakers played music pretty well, though the base was blown. This job interview she would surely fail, as it was out of her league in a place like this. Lucerv City, where Japanese Ozyn Studios filmed movies, signed singer souls over to stardom, all while waggling a magic wand of corporate wonder into the hi-rez flatscreen, somehow making video games even more compelling. Ozyn neighbored Apple and Google, towering tech offices where if you were not only a genius but also lucky you could scrap for a position straight into lux. GMG’s (Goldwyn Metro Gaia’s) iconic wolf lived here– who could forget that lupine head howling inside its decorative square cage before the credits rolled and the movie began (not that it happened so much anymore, actually)? GMG made movies in Lucerv City – though they were not to be confused with ‘Wolves Door Productions’ who also made movies but towards Santa Monarcha on the coastline (Twilight Saga? The Hunger Games?).

Lucerv City shone today brightly as ever, penciled in like the smiling black grin on the face of a cartoon sun, right under our star’s super-slick shades. Everybody who lived in Kali unequivocally had a super-cool pair of shades hanging out in the house somewhere. But Lucerv City stood erect like a big happy dick which not just any taste could tickle. The so-called capital of entertainment which held its captive audience across America and the world spellbound with ‘godlike productions’ saddled pyramids of lucrative ownership under the nebulous banner of Hollywood superstardom. If you were a tourist, which Katy was not, you’d be self-conscious about your crappy car in a place like this.

If you weren’t a tourist, you knew the high-rollers couldn’t be damned to come outside their ivory gated Ozyn security towers if not in transit to Eyes Sewn Open sex parties where stars socialites and rich kids bonded while binging on high-quality experimental opioid dopaminergics. Actually, the only people who really know what superstars do at insider-only affairs, closed to paparazzi plebians and the common swinish multitude - were the people that would never tell, because the truth was that behind the curtain the wizard was just an old hunchback with a clever tongue and a background in psychology. Although Katy positively despised celebrities (mostly out of jealousy) she often wondered if they ever felt as big as they looked to their fans.

Gosh, how long had it been since she’d visited Santa Monarcha, despite living within twenty miles of it … ? and the world famous Venus Beach next to the Santa Monarcha pier - in the day time, enjoy the antics of funny painted silver kazoo black dudes and buy all the over-priced marijuana related apparel that would send Texas into cardiac arrest. Buy a man carved painstakingly out of soda bottles by a reggae beatnik who also paints surreal THC-inspired cityscapes in neon pastel when the sun goes down. Also faux-yuppie dress-up dolls in Venus allow you to pretend you’d been somewhere ‘edgy’ while staying far away from the actual edges the city concealed, knives and other implements of cutting, some less straightforward….

You’ve probably heard that tourists only see Lost Angelies with her nightgown on – what they don’t tell you, is that the natives don’t like her naked either. Nobody likes to spend time with the Los Angelies lazy eye- the one crusted over with drug-addled caricatures of wouldbe fame; tube tops and caked makeup eyeliner zigzagging with shaky palms where bulletproof gas stations protect the gainfully employed from hoodlum gangsters who run across the tops of buildings and staple wooden beams to the trees and paint the dour underbelly of the city in primary colors that trigger danger like the curling tail of the rattlesnake, and that’s why nobody goes hiking in the urban jungle, past the broken flickering neon of the nightlife where the streetlights fade into rusty shopping carts stacked next to a pile of old blankets on the sidewalk of an abandoned toy district. The sprawling and abandoned faces of wasted dreams as hope sinks for some optimists into the hopelessly polluted western pacific sea of psychosis and wishes dry up on the sidewalk in the ever-baking Kalifornia sun, listlessly becoming raisins alongside the oil stains and the paranoid schizophrenics.

Mutually, Lost Angelies agreed tactfully not to comment upon the ugly immediacy of its dirty laundry; no amount of butthole bleach and Brazilian waxing could quite shave away where the city’s hair, grown into dreadlocks, hid away the reminder that larger-than-life people, their larger-than-life accomplishment and their larger-than-life jewels, left larger-than-life footprints behind – and larger-than-life shadows behind larger-than-life glories.

Luverc City – Eastwood – Santa Monalisa and Heavenly Hills – tourists from the interstate, the airport, or the valley – behaved predictably when forced in their automobiles to pass by the haunted house of misfortune, here or elsewhere. It is easier than ever in America’s treasure trove of illusions to play pretend – but Lost Angelies forgot her credit limit somewhere in a loophole on the dotted line. Or maybe the signature pen got lost in the ferris wheel of lawyers or the languid musing of privileged hipsters at late-night coffee bars where Katy had once been the same fickle teenage creature she now snubbed – tripping acid like a deadhead, exploring sexuality with feelings of revolutionary awe - but always with the safety net sprawled out among the suburbs where it was okay to fail and be one of those stoners living off borrowed money with a useless liberal arts degree (at least they’d gotten through school, she reminded herself).

Los Angelies and the frill of her skirt had to be loved and forgiven for, she was - like the cellular system of a giant organism - merely the sum of her parts, capillaries swerving into the fast line honking madly on their way to the next big ‘event’ – the one that promised to deliver the zeitgeist to the prayers of the cult of cool: the bonfire at the beach with rave lights or the black tie dinner party in the penthouse. It was all the appendage of the same itchy squid. The city and her arms were all over, ever-groping for that moment of ecstasy that stopped at nothing to self-reveal until it burns itself into ash, the blazing wildfire of Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana, ending always with the same silence and cold, fading into death’s sweet forget.

An empty needle – a loaded gun – a dead hooker - a bad batch of whatever stupid shit you got sold by your friend’s asshole drug runner cousin. Who probably, Katy figures, blew his savings on a bunk batch of experimental failure dust which causes brain aneurysm and hallucinations of oompa-loompas… ones that sing in harmonized baritones about how junkies end up on the street after pawning off somebody’s wedding ring, or in hell with Kurt Cobain and all the white lighters cursed by his legacy. Now they, too, are drying like raisins on the sidewalk remembering how Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory originally was a book written for children about how the keys to the kingdom were handed off only to the worthy. It seemed unfair that instead of receiving a golden ticket, Charlie grew up and realized that the chocolate factory had never been anything more than a fable he dreamed up and published, probably chasing that same fantasy high as corporate executives with their Jaguars and alienated offspring and failing marriage….no different really from all the pornstars telling themselves that the money makes it all worthwhile, in the end – and truly maybe some of them like it. Maybe the whole world is happy and Katy is peculiar breed of contemplative cynic.

Ho-hum. And after all that thinking, with or without the music on, she saw that she had long ago arrived in the parking lot designated by her GPS, and tried to snap herself out of the philosophical cloud and remember that people were just people in the end. She needed to tell herself that anyway or she’d never get off her quaking ass and get out of the car and she’d be another raisin on the sidewalk forgotten like all the rest.

Katy was applying for a job at a strange and obscure occult bookstore. “Sept Umbra” – the only one of its kind. They dealt in rare books, from what she could gather, although there wasn’t such a big market for them.

Its owner, a wizened man of short-stature, rarely had time to come into the store, according to the ad he’d posted on craigslist. It was unclear how many applicants the elderly fellow had. She entered the brown maple doors, which led into a room between the outside and the inside, as the latter was locked. You had to buzz for entry. What constituted a good reason for coming to an occult bookstore? Katy was mystified.

He’d received her with considerable haste, considering his age and his cane. He ushed her into the crowded backroom, which had no tables or chairs to speak of and was cloistered with the spines of crowding books. The old man leaned on his cane, saying nothing but peering with one big open eye at her with great scrutiny it seemed. As he was elderly, her instinct was to offer him a seat, which was aforementioned impossible. This social irregularity left her fumbling awkwardly – not a great start for an interview, traditionally.

“Please don’t be overly concerned with formalities,” the old man started speaking. He spoke slowly and decisively, giving his thoughts time to steam. But he had a comforting voice, strangely. It made Katy want to open up (even more than her psychologist did).
“It can be hard to know what to say when you don’t know what’s expected of you,” the man observed, perhaps exhibiting the wisdom and age of his dusty book collection. Hunched over with that cane, he seemed awfully tortoise-like to Katy – a Chinese world tortoise, with smiling eyes.
“I’ll begin; my name is Eckhart Zahini. I hate doing this sort of thing.”

“Do you mean…interviews, sir?” She asked, tentatively.

“Interviews, yes. Horrible things, interviews. But here we are.” Interviews; horrible things? What did he mean by that? It was on odd question.

Eckhart reached for a notepad on a clipboard, which had probably been waiting in the back for this appointment all morning and was roughly eyelevel with him so he didn’t have to reach down. From what she could tell…was that her name? She tried to peep inobviously.

“Katy, was it? I took the liberty of printing a hard copy,” he adjusted his spectacles. “Reading on a screen disagrees with me. I never did take to technology,” he admitted.
His resigned sense of humor made Katy return a genuine smile, despite her apprehension.

“And this is the point where I am supposed to ask you, what qualifies you for this job?” Asked Mr. Zahini, his brow becoming bushy as it furrowed.

“I suppose it would be. I, uhm...”

She didn’t know what came over her then. At this point, the interviewee generally attempted to inspire confidence in her overwhelming ability. But she didn’t feel up to it. It was like all the carefully prepared speeches she’d rehearsed the night before vanished from the archive of her long term memory on some kind of union strike. Generally, she could have come up with something, but it was almost like the ringing quiet of the truly occult bookstore and the gentle kindness and sincerity of the old man made her artificial sales pitch turn to vapor.

Somehow, like a socially inept idiot, she fell back on honesty.

“Well, sir, I am not really that well-qualified. I don’t have much management experience, and I’ve certainly never managed a whole store by myself. I don’t even have a bachelor’s degree. I dropped out of UCLA in my senior year.”

“Dropped out? And why is that?” Eckhart Zahini’s face was a portrait of true empathy. Empathy that truly negates ego, an effort to listen for the voice of the heart. It was utterly unlike the prescribed behavioral script between an employer and potential employee. He had not been kidding when he’d said he hated interviews.

“Oh, well I lost my mind, in all honesty. I…begun researching, obsessively. Checking out books from their library. They had a magnificent library but…I couldn’t get myself to actually pay attention to my studies anymore. And I couldn’t stop trying to put the pieces together…strange things begun to happen to me. Missing time. I woke up on campus sometimes, with no idea what I’d done or how I’d gotten there. After a while…” she trailed off. After a while, what? What had happened? Well…she’d just dropped out, because she didn’t have the motivation to do it anymore. Yeah; she’d gotten tired of it.

“And what were those books that you found so enticing, they led you to neglect your scholastic obligations?” Mr. Zahini had both palms on his cane, his eyes half-closed like some kind of wizard. She almost desired to put a tobacco pipe in his mouth so she could take a better look at whether or not he’d pass for Gandalf, minus the robes and beard and flowing hair. Somehow, though, the countenance was the same. A wizardly bearing.

“Oh, weird stuff,” she mumbled – and recognized this was not very good behavior when trying to impress capability onto somebody. So she tried to speak up, but it was hard to get a good volume somewhere so quiet and still.

“The Golden Bough, Jung’s Red Book, there were some mystical works about the kabalistic properties of the Hebrew alphabet, The Shining Ones, Campbell’s works – The Hero With A Thousand Faces of course…some Blatvasky, I read a lot of her stuff… Isis Unveiled? The Secret Doctrine too. Crowley – that guy really had problems, but his work was intriguing. Oh, there were so many. Do you want to know some of the others?”

“I have a good picture what you call your obsession now, Katy. I think I could make a good guess at what you were reading.”

Almost as an afterthought he added, “I asked what qualifies you to work here, do you remember? This is a store that deals in esoteric works, specifically.”

“I have a lot of familiarity with esoteric works,” she piped. I mean, it was an understand of a sort, if you counted her mind into the matter – it was esoteric all the time.

“Now, that is a good qualification,” Mr. Zahini chortled, almost as if he was laughing at her private thought too, were such a thing possible.

“I guess it is a good qualification,” Katy smiled shyly, feeling doltish.

“Very few are interested in matters of the occult. In your university, it seems likely that those books rarely saw the light of day outside that dusty old library. But, in my store, none would be considered rare or obscure. The books we sell here are very unique. I don’t think you would know of them. I can tell you are a wise girl, but here we deal in things which even a discerning and well-connected collector would likely never get a hold of. While they are very expensive books, we are very selective of our clientele. You’d have to be very special to read any of the books we have here. Do you think you are special, Katy?”

“No, sir. I am not special at all,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I’m mostly a failure. All I really have is an abundance of curiosity and unanswerable questions. Who knows what use society could have for me. I wanted to change the world, but I am nearly a homeless person now, and a college dropout. I used to think I was special, but I think I was sort of innocent back then. Now things have happened to me that made me realize I am nobody at all, and I can’t remember who I thought I was to begin with.”

“Hmm,” Mr. Zahini pondered. “You know over half of all people think they’re better than your average person. Most statistics are made up on the spot of course, but this one seems to be true; I’ve talked to a lot of people. Most think they are something very special. In our own way, we all are of course. But you seem to mean what you say; you don’t think you’re special. Yet you don’t hate yourself. It strikes me as a profoundly dissociated attitude. Have you ever wondered where it comes from?”

Katy remembered what she’d thought about earlier – if maybe the wizard behind the curtain of the emerald city was a psychologist after all. Yes, a wizard. Maybe people didn’t understand magic the way they did. Could it be that wizards realized everything was in the mind, and so was magic? Still, she couldn’t figure out what he was angling at. There was nothing in this for him, that she could tell. He was not charging her for a therapy session. They were supposed to be vetting each other for a business relationship, and she’d been totally inappropriate – but then again, weren’t his questions out of left field too?

“I don’t generally ask myself questions like that,” she said slowly. “Why did I alienate myself? Because I can’t be trusted I suppose. And if I don’t trust who I am, why should anybody else? Yet I don’t believe in trying to be another person either. So whatever remains of me, here I am. A great big nothing.”

she trailed off. There was the flicker of something playing in the canvas of her memory, but she wasn’t sure what it was. Like a pinprick, which jabs sharply just for a moment but takes some time before blood bubbles at the tip of the skin where the tiny wound opens. It’s targeted, like a bullseye, honed for a specific target – this was the way her anxiety stabbed her when Mr. Zahini asked her to think about those kinds of questions. What could be lurking beneath that? But it wasn’t that she was just afraid to go there – it was like there was literally just a blank void beyond which nothing was written. When she tried to touch it, or pull it off like a cover, it turned into skin, and didn’t peel. It was just the silence of a shrug. And that was irritating, too. Some time had petered out between them as that realization spoke to her conscious awareness, and she discovered it like a new appendage, growing alongside the others – she wasn’t sure if she was gladdened now that it appeared, or if she wished she could just unsee it.

“I seek a human being.”

“Diogenes…right?”

“That’s correct. What do you think he meant when he said that?”

“The historians say he sought an honest and evolved man, worthy of being called something greater than an animal.”

“This isn’t a test question Katy. I just want to know, what do you think? Not what the historians thought about it. What does it mean to meet a real human being?”

Interesting, she’d just been mulling that over in the car. “I think we are pulled from need to need, without ever asking ourselves whether we are living at all. Or whether we’ll have regrets when we die. Most of our interactions never address the human behind the façade. We don’t talk to each other; we only talk to the mask on the surface. It’s just a script. Maybe Diogenes sought a true interaction, something sincere between people.”

“An interesting interpretation.” The clipboard with her name had been set down on a stray stack of books somewhere along the way. He unclipped the papers and crumbled them up. “Useless crap us humans do to keep ourselves in line, don’t you think?” He was probably speaking of the job application paper, which was now a crumpled ball. He aimed for the trash with his spare hand, the left, creaking with age, but his aim didn’t falter a bit. “I think I’m capable of making up my mind on who I want to hire without putting it in ink first.” He looked at Katy, propping his head to the side. He had a beige shepherd’s hat over his thinning locks of white hair, she observed as he scratched his head under the hat.

“Katy, this job is pretty simple. I think you’ll do fine,” he said, after the scratch settled down. “Close the store, open the store. I tend to work out the money with clients in advance. I just need somebody physically present in the store, giving the right books to the right people. Not letting someone in if their name isn’t on the list. Do you have any questions?”

“If you hire me, am I allowed to read the books here?”

“Yes,” he said, seeming amused, as if he’d been expecting this question. “I implore you do if you have nothing else going on actually,” he scratched his chin. “You see, our clients here have a lot of knowledge and they are going to expect you to know a thing or too. Nobody knows everything of course – I think merely given your interests and sentimentality you’ll probably satisfy their customer service needs. But I still expect that you read, although I cannot ever allow you to take anything from the store home. I cannot stress that enough. I believe you are trustworthy, but if I ever find out you have stolen a book,” his eyes narrowed, “you will wish I’d arrested you. Sound fair?”

“More than fair,” Katy shook her head in disbelief. “I mean are you actually saying you want to hire me? I felt that was an absolute disaster.”
Eckhart Zahini guffawed, arching his neck back briefly and at the ceiling for a moment. He then stretched out over his cane, like a cat resting on haunches. “I don’t blame you for seeing this as strange. It’s really not what you’ve been conditioned for, is it?”

“Nope.”

“Good. Well, that’s what I hope to achieve. I like to see people recognizing the way people are conditioned, so they can take ownership of their own conditioning, rather than being like most of us, lost labrats in a zoo of brain juice, compulsion and utter dismay. I seek a human Katy. I don’t want to alarm you, but I had already decided to hire you before you walked in. I don’t make my decisions like other humans, convincing themselves they are rational and they have good reasons for the way they behave when in fact they utterly contrived, deceiving even themselves to their own intentions. Most people make numerous mistakes in judgement every day.”

“But Katy, I’m old. I don’t make mistakes in judgement anymore. I know what I consider a good decision and what I consider a bad one. It is only possible to make a mistake in judgement when you aren’t sure what you’re looking for. Don’t feel too bad about it, it’s what being young is all about. Learning. You’ll learn too. Perhaps you’ll find that the quiet here will help you think more easily about those difficult questions. I think you will find the books quite interesting, too.”
“I don’t even know what to say.” Katy answered after a moment. “I really am more grateful than I can tell you in words. I know it’s not tactful, but I really needed this job.”

“My dear, the job needed you. Welcome to the Sept Umbra family. Careful on the drive home. I know it’s dangerous to use your mobile phone while you drive, but daydreaming can be just as lethal if you aren’t familiar with the roads here.”

It was an odd comment to exit on. But as Katy left, her relief glowed too brightly for anything to interfere.

SEPT UMBRA

[d-aterr:null Spring, 2025]
[Lost Angelies county – ‘Saint Ferdinand Valley’district ]

She’d been working at Sept Umbra for several years now. The old man paid her an obscene amount of money to do very little work. Because of this kindness, she could afford her modest one-bedroom in the outskirts of the Valley. It was not the nicest neighborhood, but at least she could afford the air conditioning.

As he’d suspected, she learned the ins and outs of the place very quickly. And she was utterly captivated by the product. Because so few customers ever stopped by, she always had hours each day to read whatever caught her eye. Her coworker was the only other employee that the store had, and it was his duty to vet potential buyers and handle transactions. More often than not outright purchases were not allowed, and the books were put on loan for a fee. Customer service problems were few and far between; if you came, you knew what you were looking for already, and were resigned to accepting the terms of the product.

Most of the work was handled by her coworker Alex, and she accounted for the inventory and closing and opening the store. Customers often sought her out for recommendations or simply to speak about the subject matter they dealt in there. One of the unspoken agreements was that she and Alex were never to bring up what the clientele did for a living, and they would speak of it only if it was spoken of first. The atmosphere of Sept Umbra was nearly as essential as the product. At times Katy found herself wondering if she was an object of interest to the clients, or even part of the reason they came to the store. But the notion struck her as the delusions a paranoid schizophrenic might wont entertain, and she needed to maintain the illusion that she was sane enough to walk among the living. She pushed those thoughts to the recesses of her mind. She always tried to keep smiling when she met someone new.

Sometimes she stayed long after hours in wrought captivation of a book. Other times she couldn’t wait for the day to be over, her head spinning for some odd reason, and she returned home desperate to think about anything other than the mysteries of the occult, and the nature of reality.




“Why do you think the Illuminati put us on their payroll?” Alex asked Katy one day out of the blue, practically bowling her over.

“Sorry?”

“Well, it’s kind of obvious that Sept Umbra is owned by the Illuminati, isn’t it? I doubt this place even exists in our dimension. I’ll bet most people pass it on the street and don’t see anything at all. I’ll bet their minds are just programmed to filter it out like noise.”

She hadn’t been anticipating any of this from him. In Alex’s own words, the occult was ‘crap’. He didn’t buy into any of it, and sometimes she wondered if old Mr. Zahini found humor in his contrarianism. Katy, by no means beyond schizophrenic musing herself, kept it basically confined to internal monologue.

“You believe in extradimensional bookstores, but Ars Goetia doesn’t cut it?”

“Demon summoning? Please. Different dimensions are real,” he intoned seriously.

Why had he even taken this job? She asked herself for the umpteenth time. Ah, yes. That’s what it was: Alex aspired to make it big in Hollywood as an actor. As of now he’d played a few extra roles here and there, and he practically wet himself with glee whenever a big face popped up (although schmoozing clientele was strictly prohibited). Suddenly, things begun to make more sense to her.

“Alex, are you here because you believe the Illuminati owns Hollywood, and if that by working here you can make some sort of inroads with them?”
He gaped at her, shocked – “Believe the Illuminati owns Hollywood? What do you take me for, Katy? An idiot? Of course they own Hollywood. Belief isn’t a factor.”

“Hmm.”

She wasn’t certain that they were allowed to talk about the Illuminati, and for some reason the subject matter created an odd uneasiness in the pit of her gut. This anxiety was a familiar feeling. A vague blur, the psyche equivalent of a sharp prod or a needle. It struck like lack of oxygen, and provoked a struggle of evasion – to get away from that feeling. Is that it? Fear? If so, it bore examining.

“Don’t tell me,” Alex seemed to have eaten some kind of Cheshire smile, struggling to keep it confined in his throat, it burst at the seams of his lips, making his tone vibrate with laughter – “you don’t think the Illuminati is real?”

The corner of Katy’s lip twitched in thought. Didn’t she? How long had it been since she’d asked herself the question? Oh…the black edges of remembering began to chew away at her blissful ignorance. She had been willfully ignoring it after all. The last time she’d spent a long time thinking about the Illuminati, she’d woken up on the asphalt, her head bleeding, with SWAT sniper rifle lasers trained at her head. No no no, I don’t want to think about that, no, please stop thinking about it. La la la. Head music.

She’d zoned out again, for the second time this week, came to her sense to realize that Alex was staring at her from behind the counter. There wasn’t any judgement on his face, but he was looking at her with great interest.

“Yeah, see. People don’t end up working here by accident, know what I mean?”

She couldn’t help hearing the old man again – I decided to hire you before we even began…

“Anyway, you look kind of out of it…it’s okay. Just hear out my theory, if you don’t mind.”

“Alex, why are you telling me this – why now?”

“I’ve been waiting for a while. I can just sort of tell the time is right. Hey,” he tapped his temple, brushing a fuzzy bit of blonde hair. “It’s in here, right?”

So he’d only been acting like a sane guy. Good acting. But, she remained silent. Sept Umbra, too, was silent. It was one of those rare days in Southern Kalifornia, a rainy day. That meant outside, the streets of Lost Angelies and the 609 and the 0515 were hazardous. People would die today, in their automobiles, in the rain. That didn’t mean nobody would come, but the way the day was shaping up…

“I think that this is a joke to them. Us, I mean. I think we are kind of like pets of the Illuminati, and this bookstore is the zoo.”

What could possibly be so funny about us? She wondered. She shook her head. Passed her thumb around the pages of an old work she’d given up on for the day, now that her coworker had come out of the closet as a conspiracy nut. What makes you different? Hissed the voice in her head. You don’t buy into sanity. Liar. You lie to yourself, but you don’t believe any of your own lies. She answered the voice, internally – I’m not sure what is real. That’s what scares me…I think I’m scared now.

“I bet some fucked up shit happened to you huh Katy?” This was true. “And you can’t explain it…and when you think about it you want to scream, or pull your hair out, or something.”

Speaking of that, her head had begun screaming itself, clouding her vision, the pounding felt like an aneurism. “Stop, please? I don’t want to think about any of this right now. I – can’t. Okay?”

Alex bent over with his elbows resting on the counter, his palms folded into a steeple, a triangle of self-assured concern. “You need to start thinking about it. I have a strange feeling that whatever chimeras you and I buried, they buried them…and they can unbury them, Katy…”

TO REMEMBER

Sleep never came easy for her, but tonight gave hellish new meaning. In the darkness and silence of her bedroom, Katy turned over and over, but the scenes in her mind broke against her closed eyelids, crashing waves on a sadistic loop. Were these memories? She could see whiteness, so much whiteness. She wasn’t dreaming, she hadn’t been asleep. She wished, longed for dreams. Whatever she was seeing now, it unpaused playback without her volition. She was in a white room, in a hospital gown. There were doctors shining lights in her eyes. She was on a table, a metal table, sitting up, clutching her shoulders with her arms folded over her chest. She was rocking back and forth and sobbing,

“I’m not a killer. I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t kill – ”

And the doctors were faceless, and they had no voices. And they were injecting her with something, and then she was somewhere different, lying on her back, and the burning white light in her eyes was coming from above. And they were shocking her, and she was convulsing, but she couldn’t feel any of it, any of the pain. The “her” of her was elsewhere, floating above the room, watching them crowd around her drooling convulsing body. But she wasn’t flatlining, the shocks were something different. This didn’t look like a hospital to her. From her vantage point above her body, she could make out two figures behind a glass window, scrawling notes onto a clipboard. Another was typing furiously and pointing to some kind of screen. There are electrodes and a bunch of other weird wires.

Now Katy shoots upright out of the covers like a springboard, throwing the blanket off of herself in disquieted horror. She doesn’t know who these thoughts belong to, and her desperation to understand what they mean battles an equally strong apprehension, that unraveling these thoughts could lead nowhere but to an inevitable dissolution. A meltdown. And the next time they put her away, there would be no coming back out again.

By now she’s flicked the lights back on in her dim one-bedroom and is pacing the hallway, flooded with voices. She is furious at Alex. She is furious that his questions have disrupted her carefully built and fragile stability. Now the voices come back. They caress her with a cold seductiveness, they say, give in to us. Give us everything. Surrender to us. What you want is to be ours. What you want is to give us everything. We know it is what you want. Surrender to us. Give us everything…you are ours.

Absently she throws on a pair of jogging sweats and a warm longsleeve. She does what she always does when the flood begins to wash out everything else, and there is no room to think, or breath. She disappears into the cool night and begins to run. Anywhere? No. She always ends up going in a circuit, and the navigation is always relegated to her brain’s autopilot anyhow. She just runs. It doesn’t matter where you are going when you aren’t trying to get anywhere.

This is not the safest place to be at night. She’d long ago stopped caring about her own death. It’s not that she actively sought it, because that seemed nearly as pointless as anything else. But a part of her taunted death, wondering if it might come after her for being so obsequious. And yes, a part of her dared for it to. Death had yet to take the bait.

She passed a homeless man propped up against the wall of an empty building, a For Lease sign hanging sadly from the barred doors. Unfortunately, this was not a rare sight. The homeless hit a little too close for comfort. Katy tried to pass them quickly, averting her eyes. Partly in shame, because it was no more than dumb luck she was not among them on the streets.

“Girl. Hey... Girl.” the hobo slurred , and she pretended not to hear. “I gots a message for ya girl,” and Katy slowed a bit – "from th' Loomminati”. She stopped at the end of the block, clutching her arm, her back turned to the man. She decided to turn around despite herself. A few feet in the distance, the hobo seemed to have settled in for the night. His legs splayed out over the sidewalk, and he clutched the outlines of a bottle beneath a brown paper bag. Even though he was seated, the man seemed to sway. “Girl, hey. Girl”

Feeling vulnerable she crossed her arms against her body, holding herself.

“Ets all a circle, girl. Ya can run around in it, but ya can’t ever leave. Ets a loop that repeats. Ets not real girl. Jus’ ta circuit over an’ over. You ain’t a real girl. Like me ain’t cha…they put you in an aig. An Aigg girl…try an fin th’end. None of ets real girl. Jus’ repeats. Ya just end up at the start….they plucked you out of bein’ real. An that place in yer mind…that’s where you really are…” he began to laugh. And laugh, louder and louder. It became a maniacal sort of insane laughter, piercing the night. And yet she was rapt by the homeless man’s rambling. Rapt and…rocking back and forth, swaying, just like him. And not even drunk. She snapped herself out of it with a frightened start, and the terror bubbled up inside her again. Not at him, but what he'd said. She didn't think he'd hurt her. What scared her was not the man's insanity, but her own.

Nobody accosted her. Nobody mugged her. Nobody else spoke to her. She could still hear the shrieking laughter. Almost on a playback. Repeating in her head, like the smell of Lasik gloves and the press of a needle against her neck. On a circuit…it goes round … you never get anywhere….
She wasn’t trying to get home, but in the end, she landed up where she’d started.

EN GOES BACK INTO HYPERSPACE, SEEING THE END OF THE WORLD FOR THE FOURTH TIME - 4

In the timeline he was watching now, everything crumpled into dust. EN didn’t mean to find it, but as he drifted over the streams of potentialities, he’d tripped on an electromagnetic anomaly and fallen face first into the broadest river beneath his crown. It was the widest stream, as it was the most probable future for everybody. He’d seen it already, more than once. Its propensity to constant widening had been one of the reasons he’d found that girl in the first place. In relation to this vision, he was nowhere. It’s impossible to exist in the end of time – you can only exist between it. So he wasn’t bodily, watching it. Instead he became the act of watching, from various angles of perspective.

He saw EL again. EL’s shining white hair, airborne in the static field of energy as he strode, and the screaming humans were less than fixtures to his surroundings. He took this seriously, whatever it was. His field of consciousness had such immense gravity that the buildings of Manhattan were pulled in freefall towards the ground as he passed by. Dust and explosions passed through him like air. Even if the humans could see him, they were probably already as good as dead here. EL is walking in a straight line forward, holding his left arm out in front of him. As he does so, a colluded ball of enormous force begins to condense. It is pure white like his hair, and so bright that it is painful to look at, even though EN is for the time being without eyes.

He is pushing through Space itself, and it splits apart like the impact of a buttered knife. The orb is held out in front of him. The city itself has unraveled into whirring debris, a hurricane of Earth. In this version of reality there is nobody to oppose him. The first time En had watched this he kept waiting for blood. Body parts, the aftermath of war. Something jarring, whatever would scar him about the end of time. In reality it was much too fast and the annihilation too complete for suffering. In this version of reality, there is no struggle. If you were living on earth and experienced it, at the point in time where that orb began to flash the equivalent of a dozen nukes would have torn your body to shreds with your consciousness as ground zero. There could be nothing deadlier then the End of Everything.

But where is the GFD? Where are The Watchers? Where is The Council? It is impossible that none of the demiurges are aware of this timeline in formation. All of those parties want his head on a spike, and he cannot approach any of them and ask. But in all his history of knowing them, they have always been dedicated to maintaining the order and dignity of sentience across the 9 spheres of manifestation. Even if he disagreed with their methods(…often).

Do they think that Earth is an experiment whose time has come? But this is more than just Earth. The spinning white orb, whipping particles through itself like a serrated radioactive chalice, is doing more than destroying anything in a planetary radius. It is harvesting this energy for something, En had decided. It was the only explanation…

The vision stopped as all living things ended. All of them but EL. It is possible he was no longer a mere living thing, even greater than that which ruled living things. Something new was beginning in that orb. A universe…

EN opens his eyes and he’s outside the stream entirely. That’s because the timeline he’s just witnessed has ended. And she had something to do with it, that girl. She may even be instrumental. In stopping it. Or…a more frightening possibility…starting it. But if she was responsible for starting it, why doesn’t she exist in this timeline in any form?

He rises slowly into the emptiness of Beyond All. It’s thick, dark, black, stifling beyond time and space. It’s like being very far underground, in a hole that falls forever. But in all directions. It’s not a trap, not for En. His right arm began to glow, becoming sharp and blue. He swiped deeply and precisely through the dark space of End, and wove the outline of his energetic containment through the hole. Where to go? Anytime, anywhere. Well, almost anywhere…

I hope you’ll be alright for a while, girl. I can’t come get you quite yet…

Oi, I am running a bit behind schedule with the next chapter aren't I?
I am going to do my best to get to it tonight, come hell or high water.

ENCOUNTER WITH THE STRANGER – 4.5B

Sometimes Katy worked alone, and enjoyed this the most. It would take a miracle to get rain two days in a row, but the weather in Los Angeles was doing something odd as of late – which in and of itself was nothing new. The clouds came up in a thick syrupy haze over the sun, blotting out the light, but not the heat. It was still sticky and humid out there. Katy was glad for the air conditioning. She’d received the occasional request today for book material pertaining to rituals (she tried to tell herself the books that called for ‘blood sacrifice’ were just for research, but…) as Samhain, called by the masses “Halloween”, was fast approaching. Her clients seemed wealthy enough to actually carry out some of these rituals, but it was not her job to question their purpose or deny them a rental, or upon occasion a photocopied page.

Alex had called out an hour or two before the shift started with a dramatic cough on his end of the phone.

“I’m sick,” he rasped, clearly overacting.

“Sometimes you need to learn that less is more, Alex”, she’d told him frankly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And then she began to sweep the glazed oak floors like she did every day before Sept Umbra opened for business. The books were terribly dusty, so she dusted them off as well.

Today, in between customers, something new had caught her eye. It was in the section of metaphysical treatises on occult cosmology. These were histories of the world that no sane man would be able to understand or interpret, not unless he had seen the end of a black hole and come out the other side somehow, a true initiate. Few of these men (or woman) existed today. The book that caught her eye was, The Nine Spheres of the World Tree: The Kabbalah, the Planes of Reality, and the Mythos of Man – she did what she’d often did when a book so curiously appealed to her.

From what she could make of her store’s private index, the author was a forgotten student of Pythagoras, who’d traveled far from his teacher’s domain and studied the many myths of the world, including the secretive domain of Jewish mysticism, which could not have been easy back in his time. He wrote under the pen-name, Tenebris Rex, but his name was not known to the majority of occultists. She flipped it open to a random page, and started reading.

“Most are not aware that the Kabbalistic Tree of life is split into dual quadrants, one that rises into the heavens, and another that descends into the earth. This corresponds to the hermetic mantra: As Above, So Below” Hmm. This was known to her; the tree of life had ten sephiroth. The sephiroth could be seen like spheres of a sort, different gates of creation, consisting of different fundamental elements of existence. In some cosmologies, there was an inverted tree of life, that descended from the tenth sephiroth, known as “Malkuth”. This tree descended downward…and it was seen as where “demonic” or “hellish” forces began to stir, through inversion of creations fundamental features – in a sense, their perversion, or their opposite. She continued to read the scrawl, the best should could manage:

“The Nine spheres of the world are collapsed in the sephiroth at their root, which is either Kether [1] or Malkuth [10], depending on whether the manifest aspect is resonant at a higher or lower plane.” This was a bit more obscure. She had to sit on it for a minute to make sense of it. Katy is merely a curious student, not a master. It seems Tenebris is saying that somehow, the TENTH sephiroth is the same as the FIRST sephiroth, but in another degree of order. For example, the TENTH sephiroth, Malkuth, is the FIRST sephiroth of the inverted tree of life.

“In this way, there is no true tenth sephiroth, as the passage through the tenth sephiroth is always a gate of the first sephiroth of another order. This is why the World Tree is said to have ten sephiroth, but only nine nodes or spheres of dimensional order….”

I have heard of the sephiroth many times, and studied their attributes…Katy thinks to herself. But Tenebris is implying something completely heretical to any occultist, or at the very least unheard of. He is saying there is not just one tree of life, but NINE of them, and that the “tree of life”, or “kabbalah”, familiar to our plane of existence as humans on Earth – is only one. But which one? And how or why could he have come to such an outrageous conclusion? Katy flips fiercely through the book again, this time landing upon a description of the “Ninth” sphere.

“The Ninth sphere is the final order of coherence before sentience is returned to its source at the divine, and no further perceptual lessons are necessary. In other words, the Ninth sphere is as advanced as sentience can get before it becomes in totality, divine, and one with the Origin of All, differentiated no longer. As such, the realm of the Ninth can be seen as the rulers of Kether [1] – they are not the fundament, the indescribable infinite [0, the AIN SOPH AUR] – but they consist of sentience the consciousness of which is so advanced, it is said to be able to craft entire universes – and rule among them. The demiurgos of all creation is he who inherits the throne to the Ninth Sphere.”

All of this is causing Katy to feel somewhat dizzy. She’d never heard any of it before, and could barely fathom to understand it. Not only did it go over her head, it made her head spin, and some part of her skull – a part that felt it’d been loosely bolted in place, some time ago – throb profusely.

“It’s the kind of description that words suffer to contain”, said a voice from behind her.

From her stoic wooden chair, Katy fumbled in surprise, and was saved from a precarious tumble straight backwards by the owner of the voice, who extended his hand easily, righting her balance again. She excused herself from the desk upon which she’d been studying the book and dusted herself off, trying not to look as flustered as she felt.

“You didn't sound the bell?” Katy was utterly baffled. Anybody who wanted to enter had to be buzzed in. She took a good look at to whom this voice belonged. He was tall, very tall – especially compared to her, and his hair was long and very pale. It was white, but it didn’t make him look old, because he was unwrinkled. His eyes seemed to shine.

“I didn’t want to disturb your studies. I am rather curious to hear what you think of the Katianeis.” He perceived Katy’s face crumble in consternation at this new name.

“The Katians,” he shortened it, his mouth handling the word in a dialect she could not recognize. It was something totally alien to her, new. “The denizens of the Ninth,” he explained finally. Now she was beginning to catch on. This strange man looked about ready to reach out and give her a pat on the head. He was that bemused. He had an umbrella, a black one. It rose above the winding endless rows of books, towards the ceiling, and he held it upright in his left hand, as if there was nothing strange about it.

Katy decided to drop the matter of the bell for the time being. She was not allowed to ask – quirk of the job, ‘who are you’? Although it was the question she most wanted answered. She was not allowed to ask if he was part of the Illuminati either – such things were either known or they were not. But this man wasn’t like her other customers. He emitted an aura of glowing, crushing power, and command. Frankly, he did not seem totally human to her –

“Oh Katy. You must truly feel like Alice lost in wonderland most of your days, and I often feel sorry for you.” He finally noticed his umbrella, and closed it swiftly, holding its U-shaped arc like a cane descending upon the ground with a clack. “It must feel like ten years have passed in the three since your terrible accident.”

She could see it again, when he said it in his silken smooth voice – your terrible accident - the screaming, the broken glass, the gun, the news footage of herself at the scene, the hospital, the vans – everything. The worst part was not remembering anything before. They said she had no family, that she’d never had a family, that her family was dead. She had nobody from before to inform her of anything, least of all who she'd been. And any friends whom she’d had before, would easily disown her, after her terrible accident. The people at the hospital had always referred to it as such, despite the constant reminders and reinforcements that it had not been an accident at all …

He held out a gloved hand toward her face, but it stopped before reaching her skin, hanging like an unfinished question in the air. He dropped it. His gaze was clearly a fond one.

“You will see everything for yourself, my little Alice. Soon enough. Careful of these books…” He wove his gloved fingers over Tenebris Rex’s thick tomb on the study desk. With one smooth movement, he shut the whole book, and it closed in a flurry of pages. “Some of them bite…” he finished with a wry curl of the lip. His eyes seemed to sparkle. The last thing he did with his free hand was swipe his black gloves over her eyes. It happened so quickly she could barely remember it.

What happened in between only the stranger could say.

When Katy opened her eyes again she was on the floor of Sept Umbra, and night had fallen. The man, of course, was long gone. Her watch read, 11:09pm. She hurried to her feet again, but encountered a familiar dizziness, seeing specks of light and stars. This brought her to her knees again. She had a strange feeling, a vision of a hallucination. Slowly, she read the spine of the book on the study desk again: The Nine Spheres of the World Tree – something sparked to life in her memory. A niggling feeling, or maybe a dream. She’d met somebody from the Nineth realm today…

And hadn’t we met before? She asked herself, a familiar terror welling up within her. But equally did something else rise, and it burned and burned like fire – perhaps it had always been there, even when things were the darkest. It was the desire to know the truth, at any price.

If it was out there, she would find it. Tonight, she would spend at work…and with some shuffling, she made her way to the cabinets in the back, feeling that candlelight was appropriate for her mood, and the atmosphere.

Slowly - and, hurting all over - she hoisted herself back up into the chair, and opened the book again, committing herself to understand the words of Pythagoras’s forgotten and disowned student.

HER FATHER’S OFFICE – 5B

The room was lit only by a dim lamp with no shade that sat squarely in the center of the room. The furniture had been stripped bare, all except for empty frames that had once seemed to hang pictures and art, and a very large chair. “The Bosses’ Chair”, came to mind, seeing her in it. It was plush and a shade of deep menacing red. Celestial was sitting in it and spinning with her hands folded in a triangle steeple. She had aviator sunglasses on for some reason, although clearly she must have been blind under them. And the whole picture would have been loads more intimidating, had there actually been a desk to separate The Boss from her underlings, rather than a giant spinning chair in an empty room. Behind her, where the glass once separated the end of the wing’s block from the empty space outside, were bolted strips of wood nailed together in a haphazard and awkward way, the only barrier between ten stories and the dirt of the forest floor.

Even for EN this felt foreboding, and the way Celestial spun in her chair with her fingers in an angular steeple, staring straight through him, made him clear his throat after a few seconds of silence had passed. “Celestial, are you going to fire me tonight?” He asked, ironically. It was what the humans called ‘a joke’ – but it was doubtful EN had learned this from her. One thing Celestial shared with most immortals was an awkward and dallying sense of humor.

“How long have we lived together now?” She said, ignoring his attempt at comedy entirely.

What was beneath her sunglasses that she felt the need to hide? Maybe – perhaps, had she been crying? He’d never seen this before, but it was possible. Slowly her chair stopped spinning, no longer propelled by her wandering foot. Her fingers breezed towards her sunglasses, and he strained to see her eyes in the dim light as she took them off.

They were slightly more pale in their steely blue than usual, but aside of that, they looked the same as ever. Should have known better then to expect to see this scary woman cry, he thought, amusing himself with his own tone of humor, if nobody else.

“It’s been a couple of years,” he replied, still hanging awkwardly in the doorframe. Having a body sometimes meant having it become an afterthought, and although to any human EN’s current form would resemble a rather dapper, handsome young man, of middling height, and attractive proportion, he suspected that extended contact with him would uncover his unfamiliarity with bodily matters – he held himself in unnatural positions for too long, made gestures that most human joints would never sustain. Right now he was pushing his fingers all the way backwards towards the top of his palms in his nervousness. One look at this could net an airing of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Tonight, it was less than the asterisks trailing an afterthought. “Yet I’ve never been here,” he said after a fashion.
Celestial was doing that weird thing where she stared right through everything towards nothing. Where her head at was difficult to say.

“There’s a lot more you’ve never seen,” she said slowly. “The joint force operations agents working with the G.F.D came by yesterday while you were gone…”

“The Galactic Federation Detainment unit sent agents?”

She nodded.

“But why?” he asked aloud, half-rhetorical. “Did we do something more illegal than usual? They never bother you here.”

“It’s that thing I made….”

“The portal.”

“Yes, that.”

“There are portals in and out of here all the time,” En pointed out. “Sure, they don’t last for long, but so long as there’s no entry to or from the property, I don’t see why it should matter.”

“I have a suspicion it’s not the portal itself that concerns them, En.” She said softly. “I think it’s where the portal goes that they’re worried about.”

“Ah…so we’re back to the girl again. Why is there so much red tape where she’s concerned?”

“That’s the thing…we need to talk about”.

He’d known ever since Celestial had mentioned her father’s experiment that she’d been hiding something from him, but he’d let it go when she did, having no desire to pester her about it. He was not so insensitive that he would press her on subjects pertaining to her father. She left it to her to decide when or if to discuss such things. She rarely ever did, with anybody, at all. And this was the contents that hung in the unspoken interstice between their dialogue, and both of them were reading the subject matter caught in the screen.

“I was thinking about my father’s experiments again today, and I wanted to confine thoughts pertaining to my father to his chair. This is where I left them twenty years ago, and this is where I come back to keep them if they find me,” she explained, and he sensed it was hard for her to say this aloud. It wasn’t the strain in her voice that cued him, but the strange pace by which her words stumbled out her mouth. The queen of grace's words stuck like hairy glue to the roof of her mouth, creating the awkward pauses and strange cadence.

“Celestial, I’ll find out the truth on my own. It’s okay…you don’t have to tell me what you know.”

“That’s the thing En…I can’t stop thinking about it. I think there’s a reason that these thoughts are coming back to me now. Emotions I haven’t experienced in years.” It was like that for him as well. The emotions, anyway. The ones he could scarcely name… “I can’t focus on anything. There must be a link between her and me somehow. And her and you. And you and I. And you and her. And…”

She was spinning in her chair again. “Okay. Okay…just stop.” He said, holding his hands in the “Stop” symbol. She put her foot down like a brake and frowned at him, as if she hadn’t even noticed herself doing it. She got up from the chair, looking a little lightheaded for a moment, and steadied herself with her hands out like an airplane, then sighed, and seemed to deflate greatly in the noise.

“Alright, let’s go.” She said, as if just finally committing herself to it right then and there.

“Go? Where are we going to go?” They never really ‘went’ places…

“Don’t you want to know who she is?” Celestial replied cryptically. She’d already begun walking. Because of the structure of the estate, the electricity began to fizzle out on its own when her biometric prints left the area. This room went dark the minute she passed through the oaken double doors. She brushed passed his awkwardly held manliness with the neutrality and certainty he’d soon be following on her heel, like a ghost. She was right.

THE WATCHTOWER REPORT - 6

MSM: News: Reporting: Compilation on “UCLA Shooting” – Subject “Kathryn King” –

“We’d never seen anything like it,” remarked an interviewee on the screen. This was footage on the scene from the day of the incident – “she just came out of nowhere with these two pistols and started gunning us down. All I remember was being pushed and shoved and people started screaming – and I was moving in the wave of them,” the survivor recalled for the camera. “I didn’t even know what was happening. I just ran.”

The narrative of a stern man dubbed overdubbed the session;
“It started as any other day in one of the world’s most prestigious institutions, the University of California Los Angeles. But it would turn into the worst shooting to ever have been instigated by a female.”

Blue and red lights flickered on the streets flanked by tall campus buildings. Police tape and ambulances flooded the streets. Crowds gathered, warded away in the background, horrified and fascinated by the gruesome scene.

“Nobody ever thought this could happen here,” sobbed a young African American woman, her features soft and crumpling with tears. “Maybe anywhere else, but UCLA? I still feel like it’s not real, like I’m trapped in a nightmare,” the young student wept, wiping her eyes on a ruffled pink blouse.

The narrators deadpan droned on, “The shooter, Kathryn King, was gunned down by a special forces unit on the scene, but not before her killing spree had fatally wounded eleven students, with at least twenty additional students in critical condition at Cedar Sinai’s trauma center” -

“Okay, stop - stop - stop.”

En shook his head, rubbing his fingers on his brow in a distinctly confused and human gesture. The data-stream that him and Celestial were watching jerked to a pause on every surface. “Don’t you have something better then what the human reporters told the masses? That information can’t possibly be reliable.”

“Yes, I thought the same as you…” Celestial frowned, flipping the output of the data from the Mainstream Media compilation to conduct a search for the files that had been obtained by the police. “There is additional footage; it was taken from police helicopters above the scene as the crime was carried out…”

From the sky, the small body of a petite female dressed in all black was visible. She was not inside any of the buildings, but walking stonily forward on the campus with her arms outstretched. It was a bright sunny day without a breeze or a cloud in the sky. In each hand the female carried a small pistol. A massive crowd of students were screaming and running past like a tide of bodies, pushing and shoving past each other in a rabid frenzy to get away, a stampede of shrieking.

The girl’s aim was undeniably perfect - every shot she aimed made deadly and fatal contact. How she decided on her victims seemed utterly arbitrary. She didn’t always aim for the head. A few students were shot in the knees or the arms. It seemed those she sought to injure were deliberately not killed. But once again, the basis for her macabre aim was unclear, even random. When she aimed to kill, though, her victims died instantly.

Celestial paused the footage and increased the resolution on the image of the pistol-wielding serial killer. It kept its quality without undue pixilation as the image of the girl became magnified. Eventually it was possible to distinguish her finer qualities. There was little doubt at what the police footage revealed.

“It is her,” EN admit, feeling a nausea that shouldn’t have been possible for an autotroph.

“Yes,” said Celestial. There was a pregnant silence that stretched between them for some time, with both feeling a strange dread at the horror of the murders and the deadpan expression of the young lady who carried these murders out.

“But there are huge holes in this case,” said Celestial, puncturing the tension. “The FBI’s investigation was terminated by the Department of Homeland Security, whose investigation was in turn terminated by the Director of Intelligence. The FBI had been trying to understand how a girl with no military training, whose records indicate she’d never held or shot a gun in her life, could have managed such an advanced level of precision and accuracy with a handgun. She didn’t waste a single bullet. She knew exactly when to reload.”

“The investigation was sealed?”

“Yes. And a gag order was issued so that the status of the investigation could not be reported to the public. Kathryn King went on a homicidal killing spree due to an untreated mental illness. It became a cautionary tale about the effect of stress and the stigma of insanity that often prevents people with psychosis from seeking and receiving treatment. It was a cover-up.”

“So what were these national security agencies hiding, Sil?”

“For one thing, she’d been placed on a watch list many years before the shooting.”

Celestial shuffled the information display on the lip of the dome, where they both watched the arc. She brought a slew of papers to the forefront, papers stamped with “EYES ONLY”, “REDACTED”, “TOP SECRET”. Katy’s face was present with a dot next to a small picture; it appeared to be the same picture from her driver’s license. Scrawled into the legible notes on the report file, it was possible to read certain excerpts, which Celestial did, aloud:

“Status [project name]: ARK33; Update [date]: 2017. Subject is an unlisted experimental asset. Experimental capacity: involuntary. Last assessment indicated normal adjustment and functioning. No neurological discrepancies compared to control group. No evidence of advanced abilities presently manifest. Recommendation to suspend monitoring indefinitely if neurocognitive functioning remains normal by 2020.”

“This is a lot of human jargon for me to swallow,” scoffed EN.

“In other words, this time it’s you who doesn’t understand,” Celestial smirked with a self-satisfied glow.

“Pshh,” En snorted disdainfully. “You humans could never appreciate the value of a simple and symbolic language.”

“And that’s why the Galactic Federation Detainment unit uses terminology like Active Field Containment? It could barely get more obscure. Let’s drop the petty chitchat. Listen; the short of it is that Katlyn King was an experiment, one of many, whose abilities they’d been monitoring since her childhood.”

“There were other subjects involved with this ‘experiment’?”

“Twenty other infants…all deceased before their first year…” Celestial managed, her voice strained with shame. “Katy was the only survivor among them, but all measures accounted her as unexceptional. She was earmarked as a failed subject. The agency involved in the experiment wanted nothing more than to wash their hands of it. Collectively, they planned for all records of her involvement to be shred from official records by a certain date – 2020. But…”

“Something happened before that?”

“In 2019, a separate operation begun to archive and flag certain anomalies surrounding Kathryn King. Electromagnetic distortions. Not to mention extra-dimensional intelligences began to crop up in direct correlation with the girl and her movements. Almost as if they were watching her,” Celestial explained. She’d flipped the pages on the updated report, and had flicked on her laser pointer to cue out some of the relevant information from which she’d pulled her synopsis.

“Not only that. All across the world, there are programs which are monitoring the output of the most advanced random number generators science is capable of creating. These generators create random numbers from an actual quantum void. They are constantly sending data back to computers which scan for anomalies in the randomness. Variables that somehow manage to change, or make coherent, patterns in reality, that deviate significantly from chance. They search for the cause of the deviations – pattern-makers. It’s a program that is above top secret and its data is warehoused off-the-record as a ‘Black Operation’ called SCAN - it constantly searches for people, places, or events in the present which have an abnormally high impact on what is likely to happen in the future.”

Celestial flicked a few pages past. A number of graphs appeared. They displayed the outline of a female, and a number of hovering numbers around her along a static grid. The picture had been polarized, putting it in a neon shade that seemed to indicate a greater amount of light for values that deviated the most from expected values. The outline, or silhouette, of Katy in this picture, was pure red, and the red shined.

“What does all that red mean?” EN asked her.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what red is,” Celestial frowned in annoyance.

“Oops. Sorry Sil, I’m so insensitive sometimes - I can’t believe I forgot. You must have missed this when you were going through the files on your own, because you didn’t know the importance of the color-coding in this image. Can you see that aura surrounding her in that photo?”

“It just looks like black. I can’t make it out.”

“That’s the red part. It’s all over Katy in that picture. Do you think the data for project SCAN is keyed to color?”

Celestial’s eyes flashed. “That’s possible. It might even be a major feature of the report…”

She scaled her search coefficients. The information she acquired begin filtering in accordance with her search terms, which she’d amended for EN’s suggestion: the significance of the color RED. Slowly, the graph’s key began to appear in blocks and chunks that Celestial quickly read and assimilated.
“Red is supposed to be a priority color. It correlates to the urgency of the anomaly and its importance in predictions. You said Katy in that photo was outlined by red?”

“Outlined? What an understatement. Looks more like somebody took a red highlighter and scribbled all over her.”

“If that’s true… somehow Katy flagged an impossibly high priority on the global coherence scale.”

“Global coherence scale?” En scoffed, dismissive.

“In other words, the highest possible urgency for these coefficients show up as the color, ‘Red’. The greater the density of the color, and the brighter the hue: the more abnormalities present in the algorithm, and the higher the priority of the ‘flag’.”

“So in this case, Katy became an anomaly so unpredictable, it basically crashed their system,” EN surmised, his arms crossed.

“Is it really that much red?”

“The red is screaming. But why do you humans need computers to tell you what sentience will impact the timeline? All I have to do is look at a person’s core to discern what relevance they will place on affecting the sea of consciousness.”

“Us humans are not capable of sensing field distortions with our five senses, EN. Even the equations that are monitored by these coherence algorithms are considered avant-garde and the theoretical applications are known only within the highest caliber of military scientists. Predictive analytics is a data science which uses known information and correlates that information to make predictions about the future. But this application of predictive analytics, ‘SCAN’, uses massive computing power and real-time, geometric self-referential pattern-making in order to find ‘outliers’ which are likely to have the greatest impact on events in the future.”

“Meh, more useless human jargon. Total gobbledygook.”

“I’ll just put it this way, EN; the agencies which had planned on scrubbing Katy from the program in 2020 began to have their most advanced computers spitting out urgent warnings about her left and right. At first they thought it was just a bug in the programming, but once that was ruled out the truth was apparent. While she appeared average, this girl’s involvement in the future was extreme to enormous magnitudes of deviation from chance. That couldn’t be left alone. Rather than scrubbing Katy from the program, they stepped up their monitoring on her from the bare minimum to the greatest covert surveillance possible without directly interfering in her life or alerting her to their presence. Moreover…”

Celestial lifted an eyebrow, scrolling through the agency reports which, appeared to have been elevated to an even higher level of requisite security clearance. “It looks like in 2021, the case file was sealed at the highest level of classification and handed over to the Joint Anomalies Task Force. EN, what precisely is the Joint Anomalies Task force?”

“Joint Anomalies–? Hmm. I believe that is the crossover unit between select human personnel and representatives from the official galactic hyper-dimensional anomalies security and containment agency – humans who are basically G.F.D. slaves. They have undergone extensive mental reconditioning to ensure they are incapable, biologically, of revealing metaphysically classified secrets to the rest of humankind. Essentially, they are less human than cyborg after all is said and done.” EN explained disdainfully, scratching his chin.

“Or in plebian terminology, the ‘Men in Black’,” nodded Celestial. “Their agents stopped by our estate the other day. I knew they were G.F.D, but I had no idea that the G.F.D utilized humans in any manner of their operations.”

“You learn something new every day.” En shrugged. “But never mind that! All you have to do is see what the G.F.D. case reports indicate for the incident involving Kathryn King and the shooting at UCLA, and we’ll know what really happened to her.”

“Right…” Celestial highlighted the range of variables covering the data-stream and replaced them with new ones, bringing the G.F.D files to the forefront and matching them against the official records of the terrestrial government authorities. But after some time, the results had still not populated the empty canvas of space.

“Almost everything that was written by the G.F.D about this incident has been scrubbed. It’s just…gone. This is never supposed to happen. The records calibration here is impeccable. The only possible way for it to miss anything is if the records were never kept. They must have never been recorded. It must be a very urgent security matter if they didn’t want to report the incident…”

Celestial continued, “There is something though…there is some information about Kathryn ‘Caydee’ King here. Status: ACTIVE FIELD CONTAINMENT, as of, April 13th, 2022. The day of the incident. That means…”

“Her death was a hoax.” EN nodded. “She’s being kept at a secure facility somewhere. Her mind is probably engaged in an active simulation of day-to-day reality. While her body is kept sedated…I’m willing to bet they are studying her.”

Celestial and EN stared at each other, the implications crossing the contemplation of their respective expertise. Both were baffled by the results of their probing, and each were unable to answer the questions that had bubbled up in their minds.

“We have a portal,” said EN, beginning to pace. “If we want to learn what made this girl so dangerous, and why the G.F.D intervened, and whether Katy was really responsible for so many deaths…we have to go and get her”.

“Are you insane? Do you have a deathwish?”

“There’s something huge here. I don’t know where this girl fits in, but she must, or the G.F.D wouldn’t be all over it. They only get involved in multi-sentience-extinction-level protocol on the timeline. It could mean the end of everything. Isn’t that important enough to take the risk for?”

“And what meaning will the ‘End of Everything’ have to us?” Sneered Celestial in retort. “We’ll be rotting in Active Field Containment until we die. Which need I remind you, EN, as an immortal, that’s eternity for you. At least I have an expiration date.”

Behind them, the monitors, which had gone black, suddenly flared to life. Celestial’s mind must have wandered without her conscious awareness. They turned around to see a memory begin to playback, unfolding on the screen…but it reached out, and begun to occupy every facet of their senses. They were no longer just watching…like suction, invisible tentacles pulled them into the scene.

The playback was more than just a static rendering. Both were transported from themselves. They could feel what she could feel. They could hear her thoughts. And there was no pulling away from it. The harder they struggled, the more it gripped and caught them. After what seemed like the briefest of interstice, they had begun to fully experience Katy – as Katy experienced herself.



Like a blast of lightening, they felt the bullets rip through their skin, pulling them to the ground with a gasp, the mind-numbing shock blurring out the pain. Katy was on the floor, on the concrete pavement. The gunshot had ripped through her lower abdomen which bled profusely, and all thoughts erased from their brain, leaving only the bare semblance of the animal in the wake of realization and the wet pooling of blood that flooded out over her clothes and skin, turning everything red. Even Celestial could understand red, now, watching it from Katy’s eyes. But red was an animal horror, knocking against the bones of death.
There were people rushing towards her body, pulling her away from the cameras, away from the scene. She could hear them speaking over her body, “incapacitated”, “dead”, but it just became a blur of words that stringed together and had no meaning…and she couldn’t see anything, her eyelids like lead, fading blackness, but her consciousness held on, just a tiny thread of it capable of recognition.

And memory. Coming to a brief respite of awareness, the pistols in her hands were the last things she’d seen. They were so bright in the light of the sun; they’d burned their outlines into the darkness of her closed eyes. She could remember when the cold steel pistols dropped out of her hands with a clang and hit the floor as the bullet tore through her body. She could hear the impact of the guns upon the ground and the loss of their weight from her hands made her feel so light and empty.

But what had she been using them for? Guns…? She couldn’t open her eyes anymore, but she felt herself being dragged like a sack of meat. So many voices everywhere, their words indistinguishable. They must have assumed she was no longer conscious. Killing. Guns were for killing. Even in the blackness and dead weight of her quickly fading consciousness some fragment of memory reached the surface. Screaming, blood. And finally, the impact of her finger as it hugged the trigger. Causality. Which meant…the one who pulled the trigger…who caused the falling bodies…the torn corpses…

And then Katy begun to scream, but she could not open her mouth anymore, she was too weak. In her mind, though, she was screaming. And by then her body had been dragged into an unmarked van that was far away from the scene. The cameras at the crime-scene had already caught footage of her still, unmoving body, bloody and torn by bullets. Reporters announced that her corpse would be taken to the local hospital to be identified. By the time that her body was dragged away and thrown in the black vehicles with tinted windows, every official authority had recorded her death as a fact.

But she was not dead. And although she could see nothing but the explosions of gore replaying on the empty blackness of her memory, her mind was still screaming, it could not stop. Nor could she open her eyes to look at where they were taking her, what was happening. She was helpless, and nothing but the pain kept her conscious, burrowing like a drill into every blistering nerve.

“sector six…”

Silently she willed for the blackness to take over everything, to end the torment and confusion and misery – the hole ripping on her body, to focus on the pain, was all that kept her from the insanity of being conscious still –

“unfortunate”

she focused on the pain of the bullet, the burning searing as the shock receded, but her mind made a record, of barely perceptible voices above her, speaking to one another, fragments of thoughts -

“capabilities”

And machines that she could hear, electricity, beeping, her clothes being cut from her body, she was jostled back and forth like a piece of butchered pork, she could feed the jab of needles being poked into her veins and tubes being shoved into her throat,

“flatlining…”

the murmurs of doctors and unintelligible medical lexicons, the hours that must have gone by tarnished into an endless void in which she was conscious and blind and her mind was divorced from its ability to comprehend what was happening.

“if she croaks you’re toast”

She felt purely as an animal, terrified and drowning in a pool of blood with the sound of gunshots replaying in her ears, each shot that had been made with her own hands, the echo of noise finally perceptible in a booming totality, tearing through her and making her spasm as the defibrillator made contact with her chest for the third time.

“pulse…stable”

Finally, finally – sweet nothingness, as the morphine swept her into a dreamworld. There was one flash of sight before it did, before her vision went black and the memory faded into nothing. Someone was standing over her. Looking down at her, in an all-white room. He was smiling, and his eyes seemed to glow white, as did his hair. And his skin seemed so fine, like porcelain, pale and otherworldly. Everything was pale and gleaming. He had his finger to his mouth, as if to say, “Shh”. And after that, finally nothing – blissful nothing.

…The room came back to light. EN and Celestial were both on the floor, opening their eyes slowly, regaining consciousness and becoming aware of what had happened to them.

“No…not him, no…” Celestial couldn’t bring herself to get off the floor. It was the last thing that had done it to her, the vision of EL fresh in her mind.

EN regained his composure much faster. He found Celestial lying down and scooted over to her ragdoll body, putting his fingers gently through on her hair; in the most comforting way he could muster with his alien awareness, he tried to sooth her. “It’s okay Sil. It was just a vision, a memory. This place must record what people experience, too.”

EN helped her to her knees, bracing her from under her arms and pulling her to eye level with him. Sil was shaking her head.

“He did something horrible to her EN. And it’s my family’s fault…my father’s…”

This time, her eyes really were welling up with tears. He’d never seen Sil this fragile and vulnerable. She collapsed into his arms, pressing her face into his chest. She held him tightly, with a deathgrip, like if she loosened her grip she’d fall into the abyss.

Her voice muffled by his shirt, she said, “we have to do something, or the nightmares will never stop”. He couldn’t hear it, but EN didn’t have to. It echoed in her mind, so clearly, that she didn’t need to speak.

It was like she couldn’t remember anymore ... how to forget.