See this previous post for a communication to any who would join me in writing.  For a thought on David Lynch, see this article.  And see this article to read the story from the beginning.  Meanwhile…

–

Xihuani was so much human meat.  Could there be anything else left of her?  Once there was a sense of self, a sense of a place in the world.  Pride, people, humanity.  She had let herself be swept up in grievances, in annoyance at the ways the system just didn’t live up to her ideals.  But that led to murder.  So many murders.  How many had she personally killed?  It was impossible to be certain, when all her friends were pulling triggers at once.  And there.  The linchpin.  The beast.  Blasfemia.

The very fact that the heavens fell when she slew the pope, that justified the idea that the Church truly was special – truly deserved its place of primacy over all the peoples and cultures of the Stars of Weal.  Who was she to question that?  To seek to undo it?  The shreds of her childish daydreams seemed so provincial after all that.

And more importantly, after the consequences of it.  The hours of terror, running, cowering in darkness, knowing that it was all so inevitable.  The dragging, the beating, the stripping.  They were all the same, in that room where Blasfemia had cut down the sky.  They were blood and bone and flesh suffused with cruel, cruel pain.

Then it was off to be healed, to be put in proper order for a no doubt even more sadistic sentence.  Deserved, perhaps, but what was right and wrong no longer had any meaning at all.  There was only a body – a vehicle for torment – and a soul that would never know hope again.

Jorge was atomized, so many grains of experience spilled across the tiles, adding up to nothing.  Coherence had been beaten out of him.  His last thought was to escape to the spirit world, to set his soul free.  He had learned something of the principles of transubstantiation in seminary.  But he was still a novice, and worse, he could not focus enough to exercise the most basic workings of all.

The spill happened over and over again.  Gather as much of yourself as you can, put all the bits back in your skull, and focus.  Just focus, if you can, on anything.  The pain itself, why not?

But he couldn’t see anything.  It was all bursts of this and that, moments like firecrackers on a string, flying apart one after another.  He was nothing.

Zochino had, under the ministration of the Church’s medical scientists, come farther than Xihuani and Jorge, able to make more sense of what was actually happening to them.  They were being held in a normal enough hospital – the only one within the Walled City.  The floor had been cordoned off to serve no one but the assassins.  The security was performative, but what a performance!  There was always, always a line of men outside that door, side by side by side, like paper dolls.

He had his own room, and imagined that was true of the others as well.  By that time, their identities must be known, and who knows what was happening to the other people in their lives?  To friends, to families?

Jailbreaking Blasfemia was the real beginning of the end for them.  It made them – especially Christina and himself – feel like anything was possible.  It wasn’t just principles anymore; it was praxis.  And then she entered the discussion.  It went so quickly from destroying the Church to just killing all the priests.  Her sister was humiliated before the whole damn Universe, and she wanted to see that Universe drown in blood for its insult.  How could such a savage turn the minds of civilized people?  What power did she possess?

None.  Zochino had let her do it.  He reveled in feeling powerful, feeling like he could do something – anything at all – in the face of an eternal status quo, an unbreakable dogma.  It all just seemed so abstract, from that hospital bed, knowing that all his remaining life would be spent in unimaginable punishment.  He cried for himself, but there was enough left of his former idealism to weep for everyone who had suffered and who was going to suffer for his weaknesses.  Especially for his comrades.

And a scant ten meters away, in another room, the last of the comrades felt another way entirely.  Christina’s tortures had never stopped.  Some part of her mind was convinced her fingers had been burned away, and strapped down and drugged, she could not tell it otherwise.  Her body was mutilated, unjustly.

Who would be called to account?  How could it be made right?  It could not.  Only God could make it right, by dying.  Jorge used to say there was an old legend that God had come to earth as a duende, killed by barbarian persecutors, and that the sacrifice of that body had given some gift to the whole human race.  Why had the legend been forgotten?  Who cared?  It was forbidden knowledge by that point, because it was heresy.

She’d always liked heresies, and that’s why her only prayer was to see that one come to pass.  To see God in the flesh again, suffering as she was.  To burn off his fingers, to burn off his dick.  To slash his throat and pull his tongue out through the wound.  Her body was her own.  How dare anyone, no matter if it was the creator of the Universe, take from Christina any part of herself?  If the saints wanted her fingernails, she wanted their fingers.  If god wanted her fingers, she wanted his life.

Burn, o Heaven, burn.  Hatred kept her alive.

–

See this previous post for a communication to any who would join me in writing.  For a thought on David Lynch, see this article.  And see this article to read the story from the beginning.  Meanwhile…

THE BEGINNING OF ACT TWO.  Satan, let me at least finish this act as well, before Monday at midnight.

–

The fachasistema of Borland 1 had never borne pleasing fruit.  The world was too cold for unsupported life to take root, outside of certain algaes and bacteria.  In the millennium since people had come to the world, whatever ancestral spacefaring civilization they had once shared with the Stars of Weal had been lost to memory.  Now pitiful algae farmers skirmished with company brutes that controlled trade routes within Borland, as well as the spaceports that let one travel and trade without.

The farmers didn’t hear much about the worlds beyond, just a very loose sketch of it.  There was a wall of ice in spirit space patrolled by forces from the Stars of Weal, who occasionally made their disdain known by sending beasts to torment the heathen planets.  For their part, the company brutes knew that even other heathen planets were largely hostile, only trading with each other out of sheer desperation.

So why was a spacecraft landing in farmer territory?  Didn’t they know they were supposed to use the spaceports?  The farmers didn’t care as long as it didn’t stay overlong, or attract company attention.  The little white thing looked like an airhopper, with larger legs and much more elaborate decoration – each leg carved like the head of a horse.  Those carvings might as well be abstract gibberish; nobody on Borland 1 knew what a horse was, nor had they the resources to support one if by chance it had been available through trade.

Boxy two ton robots gathered around the craft, awaiting orders, should anybody have an opinion on how it should be best dealt with.  People began to drop out of a hatch on the bottom, and quickly encountered the local toughs.

A dozen men and women stood around the new arrivals in a semi-circle, staring and waiting to see what would happen.  They had light eyes, rosy faces, and pale brown hair in somewhat foreign styles.  The “fur” lining their cold weather garments had rubbery looking fibers in densely packed ribbon-like strips, and the scuffing and patching on their clothing spoke of limited resources.

The new arrivals were two dark-haired women and a fuzzy black monster that may have been a man of its kind, with eclectic styles and attitudes.  One of the women held an infant child tightly to her, bundled invisible.  The one thing they seemed to have in common was a lack of preparedness for the weather of Borland 1.

The creature tried to do the speaking for them, coming forth to meet the village’s bravest man, Carr.  It tried speaking aloud, encouraging Carr to speak aloud, and using a mobile computer to see if some linguistic common ground could be reached.  It turned out they must have been some kind of refugees from the Stars of Weal, because their language was closest to Lenko – the secret trade speech of the Companies.  That wasn’t of much use to the people present, so they resorted to pantomime.

Clearly they all needed better clothing, and presumably food and water.  They also somehow nonverbally negotiated an assurance their spacecraft would not be attacked by the robots.  The robots communicated their part by simply walking back to their appointed chores.  The villagers had labors to return to as well, though several had no pressing engagements, and were curious enough to follow the visitors.  In the streets, every man, woman, child, and robot stopped to stare.

Carr gestured, did they want clothing or food first?  They chose clothing, and he brought them to Fank the Clothier.  The little entourage made efforts at helping the visitors, or having something like pleasant exchanges with them, but it was challenging.  The women were exotically beautiful, but a little wild and strange – like they’d been through a war.

It happened when the weirder woman took off her coat, to start trying things on.  She rested the baby on the counter – revealing it to be no baby at all, but a strange little monster.  The women Dolia, Jolia, and Kabel were the most intrigued.  The strange woman saw their reactions and put a defensive hand over her pet, but the curious ones were quick to make soothing gestures of their own.  As soon as the strange woman had cautiously accepted that and resumed shopping, the locals resumed chattering among themselves.

Jolia went to Carr and asked for confirmation of a rumor – had the village’s new boy once been a Company child?  Might he know Lenko?  He believed it true, and she rushed away to see if they could get a translator, and start to find out just what the hell these weirdos were about.

Jolia found the new boy wiping vents on the southern tanks, and talked his boss into letting him go.  His name was Darter, and he was the unhealthiest looking creature she had ever seen.  He must be alive because he was still walking around, but his skin lacked all color – seemed almost grey.  He was a natural-born Borlander, with hair the same color as anyone else, so it wasn’t a racial difference.  And seemingly he was not a spirit creature, fallen from the sky.  Aside from the ashen complexion, he seemed young and hale enough to work, so he earned his keep.

And now he could earn favors in another way.  Jolia brought Darter into the clothier’s shop.  They had already chosen overcoats for snow, and Fank had moved onto selling them more garments for wear about town.  He was willing to give them quality fare for free, just for the privilege of meeting such unusual people.  The old man was as fascinated as any, watching their every move, smiling awkwardly whenever their eyes met his own.  Darter and Jolia interrupted, soon joined by Carr and the whole crowd.

Darter cautiously tried to speak with the strange woman in Lenko.  She waved him away and the one-eyed alien took over.  It couldn’t understand him, but again used its mobile computer to try some kind of trick.  It coaxed Darter into rattling off a small litany of miscellaneous speech, and the device tried to make sense of it.  Darter used his own mobile in the same way, or his best approximation of it, and after a several tense minutes, they could communicate through translation.

Each would speak, and then the person spoken to would read a translation off of their mobile.  It was only possible because of the similarity of Lenko to the language of the Church, which the computers could sort out much more quickly than the living creatures could.

Darter said, “They just got too curious about you folks, and had to scratch that itch as quickly as possible.  I’m the only one who speaks anything sort of like your language here.”

“My name is Umbrifer.  Those are Blasfemia, Josefina, and Ombunculita.  My starship is called the Leveret.  What else does anybody need to know?”

“Well, not to put too fine a point on it, what the hell are you?”

“A spirit in the flesh.  You aren’t exactly a human either, are you?”

“How can you tell?”

“Big eye.  Do they know?”

“I was human, so close enough to true.  They can remain ignorant of me, but I don’t think they’ll accept a non-answer from all of you.”

“Alright.  I told you what I am.  My starship is also a spirit in the flesh, so don’t think you can use it for parts.  She’ll just die and rot if she gets pulled apart, right?  Ombunculita is a kind of imperfect clone of Josefina’s grandmother.  Like a living doll that she keeps for sentimental reasons.  The women, well, they’re as human as any of this village.  Except you?”

The young grey man stared at the words rolling over his screen, back up to the big pink eye, and down again.  It was all so absurd.  But who was he to judge?  “You couldn’t tell my secrets to them if you wanted to, and I’m tired of keeping them.  I was just another psychic for most of my life, until I made a terrible mistake and got killed.  I concentrated my intelligence and all my powers in one part of my body as I lay dying, and have been able to use those powers to drive around this awful corpse.”

“Amazing.  I feel truly privileged that you have told me.  Thank you.  But how are you are not rotting?”

Darter cocked his head, considering how much he should say.  “You may find out another time.  But for now, I will answer that question the same way you answered me.  Big eye.”

Umbrifer smiled for the first time in ages.  That was equal parts amusing and intriguing to him.  “Very well.  I sense your translations are in demand.  I’ll let you get to that while we start shopping again, although… one more question before we do.  Did we understand Fank right, that these products are given without a demand for recompense?”

“I’ll find out…”  He asked and confirmed it, and the tension was relieved for a time.

The best clothing in the shop which were close enough in size to the small visitors were leathers from Sus 7 and cloth from Tanis 4.  Everyone wanted to see them dressed up, but the women didn’t want to ruin the clothes by wearing them before they’d had a hot bath.  They used Darter and the mobiles to sort out arrangements for the other goods and services they’d require, before they even managed to escape from Fank’s now crowded establishment.

Meanwhile, Ombonculita proved a good distraction herself, drawing attention from the villagers, the bravest of whom would have inscrutable gestural exchanges with her.  The little creature liked to mimic gestures, and convince other people to mimic her own gestures.  She never seemed to attach meaning to the symbolic language, however.  It was all some kind of game to her.  And she was shy too, so no small amount of that diversion was from helping her feel safe enough to play again, whenever she grew upset.  Josefina threatened to hide her away whenever the villagers seemed too rowdy around her.

In the end, it was determined that the visitors could have all the food, drink, and time in lodging they required, for a time of one hundred days.  But the other thing they needed would cost some appropriate barter, and this was a problem.  Umbrifer needed food for the Leveret, which could be contrived by condensing and fortifying algae crops over a few weeks.  But none of the visitors had anything valuable enough to Borlanders that it they could afford to trade away that much of their harvest.  Still, they had a hundred days to work something out, and the subject was soon dropped – for the night.

At Bugaster Mallor’s grand house, the visitors were offered guest rooms, in exchange for entertaining Mallor’s family that night.  When the freshly groomed and attired visitors came down the stairs, Mallor’s children took pictures on mobile and sent them all throughout the town.  Everyone would see them.

Blasfemia and Josefina wore matching black leather dresses with uniquely fashioned sleeves and skirts, incorporating sparkling sheer fabric layered deep enough to protect their private places.  Fank had enough of the same materials to craft Ombunculita a little dress in similar motif.  The women had done up each other’s hair, Blasfemia’s with four tails atop her crown, closed at the base with short thick braids; Josefina’s with a single high pony tail cinched with decoratively embossed black leather.  They wore makeup to smooth their complexions, and decorate about their eyes, and completed accessorizing with cheap silver jewelry.

Umbrifer wore a dashing man’s ensemble from Tanis 4, with crisp grey-blue slacks and flowing ivory shirt.  With its weirdly narrow shoulders, the tailoring at that area was more like very precise butchery.  It wore high and shiny black boots from Sus 7, and a black leather vest with separate leather sleeves pinned in place by large silver epaulets.

Darter had no choice but to attend as well, leaving behind his miserable shack for the night.  Fank had let him take a cheaper new outfit, all close-fitting and thick black cloth from Sus 7, vertically ribbed and velvety.  He had cleaned himself up at the last minute, and his hair was still damp and stringy in the pictures.  He wondered that he shouldn’t also start using makeup for his complexion, but the thought was idle and soon departed.

After the fashion show, they were granted the best food one could get in farmlands, for the small cost of tooth-grinding, faux-genial, and endless interrogation.

The visitors together made for such an unusual ensemble that it was easy to miss more subtle things about them.  But for Darter, it was becoming impossible to avoid familiarity.  By her eyes, by her body language, by her reactions and reflexes, he could tell that Blasfemia was a woman of violence – as hardened at least as the company warrior that had ended his own young life.

Umbrifer was harder to peg, so incredibly banal compared to the rest.  When questioned it would not commit to a gender, and its personal history was quite exotic, but all it seemed to want to do was work for a living, travel, meet people, and solve the basic problems of life – food, shelter, and rest.  It could talk about anything, and its stories of spirit space were unbelievable.  But what was it all about?  Nothing but practicalities – perhaps the most unbelievable thing of all.

Ombunculita was a clever performing animal at best, and easily ignored.  But her granddaughter Josefina, that was a more compelling mystery by far.  She was Blasfemia’s older sister, and having heard this, one could easily see it to be true.  Blasfemia has a smaller forehead, thicker eyebrows, and larger, darker eyes.  With her tall forehead and prematurely tired, light brown eyes, with the softness of her face and hands, one could imagine Josefina to be an infant that had grown to a woman’s size with less development than it should have.  But still, the fundamental shapes of their faces were the same.  But why was Ombunculita always Josefina’s grandmother, and not Blasfemia’s?

Josefina was as shy and animalistic as Ombunculita, but it was expressed differently.  She could pretend to be human for a time, but avoided eye contact, and was worn down by social situations even worse than Blasfemia.  She was always seeking something, running her fingers over every new surface, watching people’s bodies, or just looking into another world.  And what for?  Maybe just escape from the tedious present, from the nowhere town.  Darter could relate to that.

She claimed they were just fleeing from oppressive religion in the Stars of Weal, but when asked what was so oppressive about it, she was vague – just that they had to imagine so-called Heathen Worlds must be a better place.

Watching her hands move and feel and fold like paper art, watching her slim mouth kiss a glass when she sipped her drink, watching the delicate change in the hairline at the side of her head, from long lovely darkness to downy sideburn to the pale fuzz at her jaw.  Admiring the sculpture of her narrow little ears, the rise of her thin eyelids as the lens passed behind it.  He wished he still had a sense of smell.  He could imagine her scent.  He could imagine her touch.

Darter wished he could not remember the lure of physical love, but it was creeping through his cadaver like a new form of rot, blossoming cruelly from the source of his only remaining life and power – the terrible third red eye that hid behind his lank brown hair.

–

See this previous post for a communication to any who would join me in writing.  For a thought on David Lynch, see this article.  And see this article to read the story from the beginning.  Meanwhile…

THE END OF ACT ONE.  Hooray for progress?  Less than halfway to where I want to be, with much less than half of my available time remaining…

–

Blasfemia had left the corsario alone with Ombunculita.  She could trust to its geas that it would not flee, but was also coming to understand where the duende was coming from, to see it as a person.

She had used the Leveret’s entire supply of utility cord to abseil the sheer and snowy mountain, used one of her shape-changing tools to nail it to stone along the way, then free climbed another ridge to reach the Torre Alucine.

It truly was a ruin.  How could Josefina be inside?  She would have frozen to death in a night.  All of the doors and windows had eroded to gaping holes, no protection from the wind.  Daylight flowed freely through the structure as it seemed completely hollow.  There were no bookshelves or workshops or furnishings – or even stairs.  Had there been wooden structures within, they must have rotted away before history began.

And yet, standing in the stone dust inside the base of the ancient tower, looking straight up, she could see something.  There was an impossible shadow, far above her head – perhaps two-thirds of the way to the pinnacle.  From seeing the outside, she knew there was light pouring in from every opening and crack in the place.  There was no uninterrupted stretch of wall long enough to allow an impenetrable shadow to form, yet there it was.

“Josefina!,” she cried out.  Of course, there was no reply but echoes and wind.  Blasfemia slumped against ice cold and ancient stone, nearly burned by the freeze.  A chill wracked her body, but she didn’t care to fight it.  There was no safe way to scale the inside of the tower – not with the equipment they had to hand.  She could try to free climb it, but the cold would make her hands too clumsy, and at height that would mean death.

“How do I do this?  How the hell do I do this?”

Why the hell would she do it?  That shadow could be nothing but an old piece of stone floor.  The Torre Alucine could be a dead thing, for a dead world.  How would Cora even know that Josefina had made it there?

Blasfemia wedged herself into the corner between the wall and the ground, covered what she could of her body with both of the shawls Cora had given them, and just watched the shadow, pondering.  White light flowed in from all sides, reflected from snow everywhere, and formed a thin haze between her and the shadow.  She could imagine all kinds of details in it.  A stone floor, just luring her to try something dangerous.  A clot of sticks and mud used as a nest by birds of prey.  A giant recreation of Cora’s face, made of flesh like her little monkeys, staring down in cold mockery.

The imaginings made her question it when it first came into view.  A pair of feet emerged from the darkness and slipped back inside it.  Impossible.  Then it happened again, but this time, they remained visible.  Someone was suspended in the air up there, or maybe just dangling their legs through a hole in some kind of floor.

She got up as fast as cold-stiffened muscles allowed.  “Josefina!”

The legs did not move.  Blasfemia lost her mind.  “Yeah, it’s me.  I’m comin’.  I’m comin’ on up.”  She at least had the sense to do warm-ups, whether they could be adequate to the purpose or not.  She stretched and rubbed her legs and arms, twisted every which way at the waist, and threw air punches through the clouds of her breath.  “I’m comin’ on up, hermana!  I’ll be there before you know it.”

She started the free climb, fingers burning from the cold.  Numb, too aggressively pushed into rough crevices.  Starting to bleed before she reached three meters.  Her hands locked up in claw shapes at nine meters, with no sensation at all, and she had to test the grip with her arms every time she moved.  “I’m coming.”

It was a shadow.  Nothing but a shadow.  She didn’t have the flexibility remaining to look over her shoulder at the dangling feet, but above her head she could see more clearly now – there was no substance to it.  Just a void of light.

At about eighteen meters, her body was beginning to fail in every way.  Only bloody will and creeping terror kept her from falling, but she could make no more progress – and it would be a miracle if she could climb back down.

“Josefina!  I’m coming!”

She fell, and saw the feet disappear above her as she tumbled.  But her body didn’t fall right.  She felt like she was jumping into and out of the astrocielo, like she had aboard the Leveret – queasy, with every cell burning – but only in fleeting moments that passed and began again.  The snowblind light flashed and flashed again.

Then quickly, so quickly, she landed in somebody’s arms, somebody who staggered to a knee under the weight, then held her like a child.

Josefina’s long hair fell all around Blasfemia’s face, and she remembered seeing this before on a warm day long ago, feeling safe and right.  But this world was cold and bright, Josie’s cheeks red, her lips chapped.  “Ximura, hermanita, what have you done?”

“Ahh, well… I came to save you.”

“I wanted to be here.”

“I came to see you.”

They embraced.  Josefina said, “Why did you kill him, hermanita?  It’s bad trouble.  So bad.”

“How did you even know about that?”  Blasfemia loosened the embrace enough to look her in those tired eyes.

“I’m a witch.”

“Then you know I couldn’t let his ass live.”  She held her close again.  “Anybody is cruel to you, I’m gonna kill ’em.  I’m gonna fucking kill them.”

“Stop it, baby.  Just be with me.  Calm down.”

Blasfemia’s eyes were crying, but she wasn’t at the point of sobbing.  She squeezed her sister, with the incidental benefit of sinking inside her parka, and getting some heat.  “I will now.  Just… Right now.”

Josefina helped her to her feet.  “You want to borrow my coat?”

“The ship isn’t very far away.  You have any stuff you need to get?”

The question seemed absurd to Josefina, with hands in her parka, wearing warm clothes and winter boots – looking at her little sister squeezed into one of her old dresses and sneakers, draped in loose-knit shawls. “what.”

“Like, upstairs?”  Blasfemia looked up at the void.  It was gone, leaving an unobstructed view of a completely hollow ruin.  Even the pinnacle was full of holes that let in white sunlight.

Josefina pulled Blasfemia halfway into her coat.  “There’s nothing in here but illusions.  I’m done with them, for now.”

Blasfemia smiled and chattered her teeth.  “I feel like I’m dreaming.”

Josefina squeezed her again.  “No way, kiddo.  You don’t know from dreams.”

Back in the Leveret, Blasfemia came in first, and helped Josefina climb inside.  The corsario clapped and Ombunculita copied him – until she saw Josefina.  Tears rimmed her eyes and she held out her little arms.

“Abuela?”

“Oh God,” said Blasfemia.  “That’s one of her little monkeys.  She wanted you to have it.”

Ombunculita trembled like a leaf until Josefina doffed her parka and picked her up.  “She’s precious!”

“The famous Josefina,” the corsario said.

“And you are?”

“Freed from my geas, as is your sister.  I’ll get you three back to a city, and then you’ll never see me again.”

Blasfemia picked up the parka, wrapping it around the front of her body like a blanket.  Time to start healing the frostbite.  “Oh yeah!  I don’t hafta change the diapers no more.  Sorry Josie; if you want that thing, it’s part of the deal.”

Josefina sat on the bench, cradling Ombunculita like a holy mother.  “I can do that.  Um, pilot.  What was your name?”

The corsario laughed.  “Called out.  The game is over.”

Blasfemia said, “You wanted to see how long before I’d think to ask.  Damn, I’m sorry.”

Josefina rolled her eyes at her sister.

“I’m sorry!  Well, what is it, corsario?”

“My name is Umbrifer Leporitem.”

“Corsario it is!”  Blasfemia cackled.

“Pleased to meet you, Umbrifer.”  Josefina was in a very matronly mood.

Umbrifer resumed its chair, but didn’t immediately turn away from its passengers, didn’t immediately begin takeoff procedures to escape this burden.  It was finding an odd beauty in the strange creatures, and then a bad memory crept over its mind unbidden.

At a cargo stop on Laia 4, it had seen Josefina in a papal transmission on the wall-mounted tele.  She was the one they called Beast Girl.  A sucia, famous across the stars for being caught in a disturbing sex film – with duendes like itself.  It grimaced its little cat teeth and turned to face the ship’s controls.

Sorry, Josefina.

–

See this previous post for a communication to any who would join me in writing.  For a thought on David Lynch, see this article.  And see this article to read the story from the beginning.  Meanwhile…

THE CLIMAX OF ACT ONE.  I’m never getting through this thing, am I?  Anyway, content warnings for edgy, edgy sex stuff.  Avoid if botherable.  I can’t make the time to get more specific right this moment.

–

Noise walked behind Josefina sullenly, a new cigarette in her mouth.  She’d fished out her pack and a lighter, but Josie hadn’t given her time to put the pants on before walking away.  Noise didn’t want to be left behind, and the khakis were over her shoulder.

Josefina led them down a ramping hall with a weirdly soft floor.  Felt over concrete?  There was a room ahead with one cold fluorescent light, some people within doing unknown things.  No door to conceal them, just the dim light and inscrutable nature of everything.

A child suddenly came out of the room, and walked past the women at a brisk pace.  It was a little girl, of no more than eleven years, but with eyes wrinkled from weariness, a strangely adult expression.  She said, “It’s almost time.  I’m coming for you.”

They came into the little room.  It was plain concrete, the wall-mounted fluorescent light leaving the felt-covered floor mysterious in darkness, and Peace stood in the middle of it all.  There were a few white people operating office equipment.  One – a man whose only visible features resembled the VIP – took a flash picture of Peace with a little silver plastic digital camera, and then walked to a computer station, with two outdated printers and a fax machine plugged in.  At another computer, a nerd in headphones was editing a trap remix of Limp Bizkit’s Faith.

Peace shook off the daze and welcomed his friends with open arms.  “Girls, I’m sorry.  I got lost.”

After the group hug, Josefina said, “We should leave, dude.  This trip is just bad news.”

“no shit,” Noise said with a voice quieter than the chug of the printer.

“But now you have both of us together, Josie,” he said.  “We can help you get through it.  A sip?”

She took a slug off his water bottle.  “Why is it so cold down here?  We’re half naked.”

“You’re this close to the bottom of it, Josie.  Come on.  I need to show you something.  Both of you.”

Josie rudely grabbed a fistful of his t-shirt and leaned close.  “I’m only doing this for you, then  we’re gone.”

He shook his head sadly, but led them on.  They were in darkness again, until they emerged in a theater lit by an old-time film reel that was playing on the big screen.  It was like a bootleg Betty Boop cartoon up there, in glorious limited color.  They took seats in the middle of the theater, no one else to consider, tall or small.

Josefina was in the middle, Peace left, and Noise right.  Noise was the last to sit down, awkwardly pulling her pants on first.  “What’s up with that?,” Peace asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Josefina said.  She wasn’t paying attention to the cartoon, leaning over to embrace Peace.  “Sorry, I have to do it,” she said, rubbing his chest.  “I have to know you’re real. Nothing feels real anymore unless I touch it, or smell it.”  She breathed deeply on his shoulder – slightly stale laundry, shampoo, dry sweat, the dust of the huge empty theater.  The ecstasy blended it all into a heady potpourri, a tingling over her skin.

He picked up her hand and kissed it, before pushing it back into her lap.  “You got to pay attention, wild girl.  This is all about you.”  He pointed to the screen.

At this, her blood ran cold.  Why would she be in a movie?  There was nobody else in the seats, but who else could be watching?

A cigarette burn flashed and film scratches let them know it was time for a new scene.  A clapperboard clicked, scrawled with the title Pony Up in Here, and hands pulled it away, revealing a film of the peep show runway they had just left behind.  Only this time, Josefina was alone there.

“Where am I?  Where?”  Noise nervously hotboxed her cigarette, leaning forward in her seat.  “Oh no, oh no.”

Josefina was arrested, barely breathing.  On the screen, she was dancing to Ginuwine, kicking off her shoes.  Muffled voices may have been yelling “faster baby,” “take it off,” but were a little too quiet to hear, even at theater volume.

“I didn’t strip,” she said.  “I didn’t.”

Screen Josefina shook her hips as she dropped trou, and stepped out of the mounded cloth – now wearing nothing but her bikini and little black socks with pink hearts.  She quickly switched to more provocative moves, dry-humping one window, slapping her ass on another, twirling and bouncing her tits.

She looked so human, so ordinary.  There was no screen magic, not even to the level seen in cheap porn.  It was point and shoot, at a gangly young woman shaking her unthrilling baby chub, prematurely aged eyes drifting between closed and barely open.  Was she dreaming?

“It was you, Josie,” said Peace.  “You were exposed.”

Noise gripped Josefina from the other side, body rocking in terror, cigarette bouncing dangerously near her face.  “You were right!  I was wrong to make you dance, Josie.  It was always wrong!”

Josefina slapped her cigarette and it flew off, rolling under the seats.  That snapped noise her out of fear, for the moment, and she returned to rocking in her seat, debating internally whether to go crawling after it.  “Why’d you do that?  Why?”

Screen Josefina slid her bikini top to the side, letting tiny breasts out to wobble side-to-side, so boring they may as well have stayed concealed.  Was one of the muffled voices booing her?  It was either dog braying or jeers, and she couldn’t tell at all.

“It was Noise who was naked.  Not me.”

Screen version put a leg up on one of the windows and pulled on the straps of her bottom, sliding it back and forth through the crack, exposing herself.  The Josefina in the seats gasped and shuddered.  “Wasn’t me.”

The muffled voices from behind the windows were definitely jeering.  Snippets of phrases could be gleaned.  “ugly ass” “don’t wanna see that” “ugly ass” “put it back on”  Trays started sliding out from the booths, holding brass knuckles, knives, chains, and crudely scrawled death threats.  Screen girl looked like she was getting off on it, or in spite of it, sliding against the glass, bumping on it, pleasuring herself obscenely.

“It was you,” Peace said.  But his voice was too close, too small.  Josefina felt a thrashing at her chest and looked down.  She was holding two babies – one who was Peace, with improbably long hair for an infant; the other was wriggling and fussy Noise, with pink face and the tiniest eyes – a sliver of a drop of shine the only hint they were open at all.  “It was me!,” Noise cried, begging to exist.

Josefina looked up at the screen again, as Peace said, “Don’t look away.”  She obeyed as a dracula victim, transfixed, needing to die.

Cigarette burn, scratch, a new reel.  No board, just a title screen, of elaborate motion graphics – the sign appearing from baroque gold foliage between two marble pillars, “The Perils of Brujeria – an Infallible Transmission.”

A character appeared, and it was apparent that she was not a real human being – a cartoon contrivance, of extreme graphic fidelity.  Her skin was luminous, her hair glossy, her eyes reflecting every phantom light in the most aesthetically precise way regardless of which direction she glanced.  The doll’s costume was like a nun reimagined by Coco Chanel and Hugo Boss, in black pink and white.  Her name wrote itself in gold vines and then erased itself in the same movement, Donatella Cheri.

She said, “Blessed are we in harmonious purpose to serve to the Lord, our God.  Today the Office of Holy See has released a dire admonition indeed, that we should all take upon our hearts.  In Heaven we will never have to witness such things as this, but in the fallen world of the material, it is vital that we know the adversary – that we recognize sin, that we may rebuke and revile it.”  Each syllable bounced the pink-blonde curls, each fleeting breath was a chance taken to convey the sensual energy of this intensely false creation.  It felt, to Josefina, like an artifact of Japanese pop culture.

What was Japan?  The concept surfaced and disappeared, like everything else she had known at the beginning of the night.

The “woman” was replaced by a serious “man,” with profound voice.  “An agent of the Inquisition uncovered video of a witch engaged in congress with unreconstructed spirits – bestial servants of Hell.  The pontiff would have us all look upon this misbegotten creature and ask ourselves, could any temptation ever be worth this?”

He slid away from the screen to reveal mobile phone footage of a forest glade, the floor broken with mossy stones, and upon those stones a wild sexual orgy – with Josefina in the center.

Josefina watched herself.  Baby Peace said, “You were exposed for who you are, for what you love, and the world has vomited you out.  They hate you, Josefina.  Everyone in the world considers you to be the lowest of the low.”

She felt for him in the darkness, not looking down, unable to look away from herself.  But the babies were gone, leaving only moist creatures on her shoulders like fat amphibians.  Frog Noise said, “It is the worst!  The most terrible thing ever!  We should never have done this!”

Shafts of magic light came and went like ghost images on the scene.  Screen Josefina was being vaginally penetrated by a man that looked like Jesus Christ, bits of the cross still nailed to his feet and hands.  She strained hungrily to lap at the labia of a tattooed and pierced woman whose midriff had somehow been replaced with a giant chain link.  That woman was stroking the cock of a skeletal being in flamenco garb, and skull face.  A plump androgyne with little brown bird wings rubbed their micropenis on her belly and mashed her tits.  A goat-headed and goat-legged woman slid a huge dildo in and out of herself, while balancing Josefina’s ass on her thigh.

The man’s stentorian voice resumed, laid over the scene.  “We remind you that these creatures have minds like animals.  This is like having intercourse with hounds and cattle.  Look upon her hideous flesh and despair.”

She looked upon her flesh and felt something else.  She remembered them: The Libertines.  Their minds were not as deep as those of humans, but they were intelligent creatures, with agency and desire, and so much charm.  Spirits of nature incarnate.  They were her friends.  The contrast between living bodies and the Holy See’s fascist dolls had long been used to make the despised look ugly.  To Josefina, the feeling was inverted.

Frog Peace asked, “All the Stars of Weal have seen your true self and found you to be vile.  The expression of this hatred is shame, shame to isolate you from them, to feel like they are safe from ever being like you, in any way.  The gentlest of their number see this shame as a tool of pedagogy, a mirror they can hold to you, help you see that you must change.  Become like them.”

“How can this be real?  It’s impossible for anyone to be hated like this.  Isn’t it?”

The dapper cartoon characters receded in a flourish of gold vines, replaced by a video of the pope.  His features had been run through digital filters to look more clean, unblemished, more kindly – elderly in the only ways that could be accepted by masses swimming in illusion.

And yet his tall hat – his papal crown – was in flames, and his heart was marked out on the cassock with a brutally carved X, leaking blood with every word he spoke.  “This is what awaits the so-called intuitive, the witch.  To rut like a dog, to offend the eye of god, to make filthy his creation.  In the place in your mind where you keep knowledge of all terrible things, seal this experience away.  When this transmission ends,” his head lolled sharply and then snapped back upright, “Pray that your understanding of God’s Will remain strong,” his neck bent as if broken and his eyes rolled up, “That you may live in chaste serenity.”  His tongue fell past his teeth and lips, distended to unnatural lengths.  “God bless you all, and good night.”  His body fell away, and the celluloid melted away to a blank screen and a flickering sound.

“You are the most hated person who has ever lived.”  Was it Peace?  Noise?  Her own voice?

“No,” she replied to herself.  “Now I know who is.”

The projection died and Josefina remained floating in darkness.

–

See this previous post for a communication to any who would join me in writing.  For a thought on David Lynch, see this article.  And see this article to read the story from the beginning.  Meanwhile…

–

Somehow they had slipped all notice of security forces at the Wall of Ice, through judicious switching between long space and the astrocielo.  But Ombunculita had begun to cry inconsolably, near silently.  She didn’t seem to have a tongue, but that wouldn’t prevent a nonverbal wail, would it?  Blasfemia held her close and cradled her head, fingers carefully run between the thorns.

“Ombona~ombona~ombona, what’s the matter you little freak?  Why did Cora make you come with us?  You don’t belong here.  This is so fucking stupid, I’m sorry.  Ombonculita, you need to take it easy.  You’ll get all gross.  Come on.”

“God, is this what Dio 6 looks like now?”

Blasfemia grew concerned they’d somehow got switched around, headed to the last place she’d ever want to be.  She stood from the bench, homunculus still in her arms, and walked to the front of the ship.  There was no proper division of a cockpit, just a wide open dashboard with one swiveling chair floor-mounted in front of it, off center toward the left.  That made plenty of room to stand on the right, to take in the view.

They were in the astrocielo around – presumably – Borland 1.  It was a largely frozen planet, and looked as such even in the spirit world.  But the spirit world had a few dramatic features lacking in the material realm.  One was that its small moon looked like luminous furry insect.

And two, there was an incredibly vast skeleton slouched over the world like a man over an exercise ball, pinned to the planet by a giant sword that ran all the way into the crust itself – possibly out the other side.  They couldn’t see that much from their angle of approach.

“Is the planet cold because the spirit is dead, or is the spirit dead because the planet is cold?,” the corsario wondered aloud.

“Why couldn’t I see one of these things with its flesh on?  Like when we stowed away to Dio 6, there were no windows on our hideout.  It would just be fun to see a ding-dong as big as the ocean.  You’ve probably seen that, huh?”

“Oh yes.  It is fun.  But I think it’ll be safer to fly in long space on this deal.  There could be a lot of tough guys living on what’s left of that thing.  Borland 1 doesn’t have the resources for space defense.”

“Yeah, yeah.  Cool.  Do it.”  She could only ignore the silent wailing for so long.  “Ombonculita, come on!”

The corsario hated how long it took to get through an atmosphere in long space, but it would be worth it.  The Leveret descended in an easy, long, time-consuming arc toward her destination.  Cora had given them the coordinates to the Torre Alucine – another witch tower.  Like hers, it was in a fairly remote place, but this one was on a mountain range.  It was less parking than perching, but that’s what legs are for, and the Leveret had ’em.

They were navigating by lights and sensors, coming upon the tower at night.  There was a chance the landing could set off an avalanche.  The ancient structure would be safe, but the astronave and her riders, not so much.  The corsario was as skilled as could be – not a move out of place – but perfection was impossible, and disaster the opposite.

With disconcerting rumbles and several minutes of settling and adjusting, they secured a grip on the mountainside.  Was it close enough to the tower?  They’d find out in the morning.  The only cold weather garments they had were shawls from Cora – and Blasfemia’s clean loan clothes had been a full length midnight blue satin dress and emerald green canvas sneakers, courtesy of Josefina, age seventeen.  The back barely zipped and would break under the most trivial exercise.  Best to do everything when it was easiest.

But was she in the tower?  It looked even more ancient and desolate than Cora’s home.  Blasfemia did her best to care for Ombunculita, but had to give up on giving her a proper bath.  It just wasn’t going to happen.  She slept in a hammock, with the grubby little monster close to her heart.

–

See this previous post for a communication to any who would join me in writing.  For a thought on David Lynch, see this article.  And see this article to read the story from the beginning.  Meanwhile…

–

CONTENT WARNING:  This gets a little sexual assault -esque?  Depending on how broadly you draw that?  Best avoided if you’re at all sensitive to that.  Also may remind one of being physically bullied or sexually shamed by a girl?  I can’t really do full CWs and write this fast at the same time.  Watch yourself, buddies.

–

Josefina held arms across her chest, holding down her long hair, for whatever warmth it could provide.  At least she still had her pants.  Why was there a walk-in freezer in the sub-sub-basement of Razzmatazz?  She could no longer ask herself because she couldn’t remember anything in the world except for the ecstasy – which reminded her of itself with every stray sensation, and her friends – Peace for being the object of her hunt, and Noise for being the nuisance along the way.

The freezer was very simple in design – almost more like another length of hallway, lined shelves holding frozen appetizers destined for a deep fryer.  There was a door at the hobo end, and a door up ahead.  She recognized the way they work, from her own menial jobs.  Outside the door would have a flexible latch, inside it used a push knob, like something stolen from a foosball table.  She punched the knob and walked through, Noise chattering away behind her.

The next room was barely less cold than the freezer.  What kind of room was it?  There was one door, locked from the other side, and what looked like a short runway of grooved stainless steel, like the kind they use on escalators.  It was surrounded on all sides by plexiglass walls that sloped out – one could lean on them, from this side.  There were metal roll-down curtains on the other side of the glass.  in all, there were two windows on the left, three on the right, and one at the end of the little hall.

Noise said, “Seems like a dead end.  Let’s go–  Huh.”

Josefina turned around.  The freezer door did not, in fact, have a handle on this side.

Music began to play.  Some extra bassy trap remix of Pony by Ginuwine.  A voice came on the speakers, tinny.

“Gentlemen of the club, behold.  Who just fell to Earth tonight?  Some heavenly bodies indeed.  What are your names, little girls?”

The roll-down curtains began to open, but the lights over the walkway turned them into mirrors, where all the women could see was themselves.

“Ah shit,” Noise said.  “Wrong kind of club, haha!”  She spoke up, for the audience.  “I’m Noise, and this is Josie!  We’re hot to trot!  Woo!”  She did not look hot, cold sweat shining on her nose, ringing the cheeks under her tiny eyes.  Her t-shirt was clinging to her chubby body.  Her grease-stained khakis were in extra dumpy mode, her slip-proof black sneakers encrusted with bits of fast food detritus.  Normally, Noise was pretty shy about dancing, but she must have felt obligated.  You step onto the strip, you entertain the paying customers, right?

Josie felt no such obligation.  She went to the window at the end of the hall, presuming it was the VIP booth.  “Hey!  Hey!”  She beat on the window, unfortunately aware from the reflections of how that made her little titties bounce.  “This ain’t the champagne room!  Let us out!”

There was a little sliding tray at the base of the window, she hadn’t noticed until it was pushed in from the other side.  Other trays began to open, all containing crumpled bills and other unsavory things.  Josefina spat on the glass and shoved the tray back through the wall.  “I don’t want your money!  I’m not stripping, culo!”

“Hey, nice!,” Noise said.  “They don’t even let us get tips at work.  Yes, and thank you, sir.  What should I take off?”

“Nosy and Josie, two smokin’ chiquitas, ready to mount up!  That pony, girls!  Ride it!  You’re horny!”

Josie wheeled to look at Noise.  “What the fuck is this?  What do we do?”

Noise had stopped dancing, seemingly more disturbed by this turn of events than she had let on.  “I mean, I guess we could take it all off.  Not like we hafta get AIDS off any of these jokers.  I could use a couple bucks, ya know?”  The cigarette bounced, slowly filling the narrow hall like a smoke machine.

The DJ kept trying to prod them.  “Go cowgirls!  It’s your birthday!”

Noise noticed something behind Josefina, Josefina noticed her noticing, and she spun around.  The man inside the box was turning the light on and off, revealing and concealing himself, until he knew he had Josefina’s attention.  He was holding a hand-written sign over his face.

TAKE IT OFF
JOSEFINA

She shook her head and kicked the fake glass, which barely rattled in its frame.  The man turned the light off, then turned it back on, holding a different sign over his face.

I CAN GIVE YOU
WHAT YOU WANT

“Bullshit!”

The light went off and stayed off.  The DJ said, “Anytime now.  Gonna get.  Spicy?”  The track segued into a trap remix of Nelly’s Hot in Herre.  The DJ said, “With a little bit of hot-uh-hot!”

The tray was pushed out again, with a rumpled picture.  It looked like a cheap color printer reproduction of a cheap digital photograph, of Peace!  He was in a plain concrete room, looking disturbed, with red eyeshine.  The flash was directly in front of him, his head haloed by his own stark shadow.

Somehow, boos and complaints reached them through the glass.  Not completely soundproof.  Mostly, the men expressed a predictable desire to see tits and ass.

Noise asked Josefina, “What is it?  What did you get?”

She banged on the darkened window again.  “Where is he?  How did you get this?”

The light came back on, with a new handwritten sign over the man’s face.

TITS AND
ASS NOW

It went out and stayed out.  Nelly rhymed “seasons” with “heathens.”

So that’s the deal.  Strip to find out where Peace is.

The DJ said, “Is this it?  Is it going to happen?  It is pretty hot in here.  Humid, even.  Nudity: The remedy.”

Josefina slumped so hard that Noise was able to reach her face over her shoulder, pushing the cigarette through her hair.  A whiff of burning hair joined the stifling stench of the cigarette.  Noise said, “Cheer up, girl.  Let’s dance for these dudes.”

It was true.  She had come to dance.  Josefina pulled herself up to her full height, jerking with the rhythm.  The muffled voices became so many dogs and apes.

“Yeah!,” said Noise.

“Yeah!,” said the DJ.

Josefina did a dance.  She wasn’t an amazing dancer, but that was hardly necessary.  Pulse your body on the beats, one way or another.  Slide your body between the pulses in alluring ways.  A little hand jive to make them think of medieval enchantresses.

Noise always loved to see it.  Why?  Because she couldn’t get the same attention if she did it, and something in Josie’s quiet demeanor made a non-entity of her, a body that easily facilitated a vicarious thrill?  She was at it again, no mind to the circumstances.

It was offensive.  Josefina hated it.  Noise did her usual lazy move, resting a hand on her hips or ass, waving the other hand in the air as if she was riding a pony – but without any of the other motions that sell the routine.  Then she thought of something.

“He just said tits and ass now, not whose tits and ass they had to be.”

“Huh?  Can’t hear you, girl!”

Josefina hadn’t taken her pants off yet, hadn’t stripped anything for these dogs.  But she started to strip Noise, pulling her nasty T-shirt up at the waist.

“What the fuck?”  Noise stopped moving, more still even than during her lazy dance.

“What’s this?,” the DJ asked, “A little girl-on-girl?  Hey-Ohh!”

“Time for you to dance, Noise!”  She heard it that time.  Josefina didn’t quite get the shirt off, but it was going to happen.  She grabbed and pushed at Noise, rocking her this way and that.  “To the rhythm!  Come on!”

The cigarette dropped from her lips and rolled into one of the grooves on the floor.  She had a strange expression, like a lost little girl – completely uncharacteristic.  But the crass blonde let herself be coaxed into dancing.  “Is this what you want?  Want us to be even?”

She took off her shirt, with a perfunctory effort at strip-tease style, and flicked it away with a snap.  It landed on one of the windows and slid down.  The unseen weirdo caught it in his tray and pulled it back into his booth.

Now both women were in pants, but with a revealing scrap of a garment on top.  Josie kept Noise dancing.  She leaned in close and whispered to Noise, “That’s not the deal.”  She spun them together, and left Noise twirling in front of the VIP booth.  She kept Noise’s body rocking side-to side, while reaching around to unbuckle her belt.

“Oh my God, Josie!  You’re so fucking crazy!  Hah!”

“Josie loves Nosy,” said the DJ, “Just look at her go!”

Josefina pulled Noise’s pants down in one dramatic motion, making the blonde stumble awkwardly out of her shoes.  She’d barely managed to keep her underwear on, and fell forward, palms catching herself on the VIP window.

The Latina straddled Noise’s back and pulled her bra up by the straps, freeing her breasts in front of the VIP.  She pointed at the dark mirror with a long finger.  “Just for you, pendejo!”

Noise pulled her bra back down and stood up angrily.  “Josie!”

Josefina looked genuinely sad, but also resigned.  “He said ass, too.”  She tugged down Noise’s panties and pushed her back onto the plexiglass.

Suddenly the lights went out, the speakers died, and a soft click sounded from behind them in the little hall.  Noise was initially too shocked to react, but started squalling and cursing like Lucy van Pelt.

“Hush hush hush,” Josefina said, trailing off and drifting away.  She lit the way with her cellphone and tried the side door.  It was unlocked.

–

See this previous post for a communication to any who would join me in writing.  For a thought on David Lynch, see this article.  And see this article to read the story from the beginning.  Meanwhile…

–

The sky had mostly stopped burning.  The cries and moans of the astrocielo diminished to a dull roar in the back of Michael’s mind, and he found it much easier to feel out the measure of his power in the physical world.  No more accidental lobotomies, or subjects so fear-wracked they tinged the air with urine.  Those were a result of barely controlled psychic energy.  He could reel it all in now, or roll it out slow, one wavelength at a time.

So great was his control that he had found the assassins.  It was just a matter of time before they were brought to heel.  He tapped the bravest and holiest of the papal guard to be his escorts, and had the Tiemplo Santo Pietro cleaned and blessed – reconsecrated by no less  than the gathered cardinals.

The putti had settled down again for the night, clustered for warmth atop the all the buildings of the Walled City.  They would wake sometime after dawn, letting early birds fight for the scraps.  Considering they ate angelfly larvae to survive, they would have some rough times soon, but for now it was a big relief from the horror of the assassination.

A few thousand people had gathered outside the temple, waiting for some official word, something to tell them what to do.  Michael was still too disconnected from mortal affairs to process that, but he was beginning to feel a sense of peace, and let that radiate from within.  The crowd would remain civil.

A papal robe had been tailored to fit the great angel, embroidered also with violet marks of regency, carefully designed openings allowed for his wings.  No more nudity, which he had come to understand was part of what rendered him so terrifying to behold, in this pure-hearted society.

Michael knew he’d need to assume the papal palazzo, teach himself how to eat, sleep, and drink, but there was one thing that kept him in suspense.  One buzzing that he couldn’t quell – a burr in his psychic equilibrium.

The crowd outside parted peacefully for the guards, who carried four glass-topped coffins up the steps, into the great temple.  They stood them upright before the pontiff-regent.  Each contained a captured assassin, beaten and stripped to their undergarments.  The stands secured in place, each guard prostrated himself on the marble tiles, awaiting their orders.

“Well done, well done.  But this was not the death of that ancient emperor, the work of so many knives.  Who plunged their dagger into his pontiff’s sweet heart?  Whose most singular act of depravity has brought an angel’s feet to walk this earth?”

Michael walked down from the throne and looked over their bodies.  What a sight!  Nothing had ever looked quite like this to him before.  He was becoming fast acquainted with human frailty, with biological realities.  It was endlessly fascinating.  The angel pawed at the glass like a monkey, or a child in a candy store.

These were youths, far from the time when their bodies would sag, when everything they were would be rewritten in shorthand, scratchier strokes, again and again, until they were no more.  Did they think it better to die young?  If so, then why did they flee arrest?

He could see the potential in each of their bodies, every nascent polyp or cyst, every developmental pathway that would change their body, if they had a future.  He could see every wound they’d sustained in their struggles, imagine every possible way any given one of them could spiral beyond repair, crippling or killing.  They were clay, they were water, they were a moment in time that had not been before and would never be again.

But this was his power talking – his angelic birthright.  His eyes were now human enough.  Rein in the psychic power, feel the moment as it was for them.  It was only fair, and the only way to understand them, on their own level.

On closing his mind’s eye, they looked so different.  Man, woman, woman, man.  The two on the left were shorter and thicker, the man fully bearded, both soft and vulnerable – saved from utter ruin only by the resilience of youth.  The two on the right weren’t as strong, but blessed with a natural conformation that would lead to fewer injuries and illnesses in life.  Slim, broad-shouldered, a natural athleticism to them.  This man had a much shorter beard than the other – just a few days of growth.  This woman had drained the color from her hair with foul chemicals, and painted her face – the paint now smeared and ruined.  She wore no bra, her pert breasts were as bruised and flecked with blood as any part of her body.  But what was this injury?

He looked closer, hypnotized by the canvas of all their exposed skin, but particularly the tips of her breasts.  They had metal bars crossed through them.  It could be no accident.  Had someone begun to torture them already?

Michael called his holiest guard to stand beside him.  “Who did this to her breasts?  Their punishments should be more carefully considered, not so strange and … indecent.”

“I believe she did it to herself, pontiff-regent.  It is a habit of uh… shameless people.  Some of them like to pierce their bodies.  I don’t know why.”

The angel shook his head.  The feathers of his wings flattened, and has he turned to examine her again, they rose – puffing up like an excited dove.  “It is said a fallen angel taught man to paint himself.  Only this one has taken that lesson…  It is her, isn’t it?  The one I sensed!  The one who designed to kill God Himself!”

He stepped back a pace, drawing up an arm in fright, his wings flapping nervously.  His guard hustled back to the ranks.  The angel’s agitation raised a wave of nervousness in all present, though not as bad as on his first arrival.

Michael calmed himself, straightening his cassock.  “She is the one who hates God the most.  The one so fallen that there is no innocence left in her heart.  She must have slain the pontiff.”  He gestured to his bravest guard.  The man came to his left side.

“Yes, pontiff-regent?”

“Who are they?  And most importantly, who is she?”

“They are college students from a world called Corazon 2.  They were suspected in helping another violent radical escape incarceration there.  Names,” he pulled out his mobile, “Jorge Lactoque Salas, Xihuani Omerta, Zochino Olivares Tavernetti, and, most importantly, Christina Violeta Chaco Mondragon.”

“Christina.  The anointed one.”

They all lay there, slumped against the backs of their coffins, beaten insensate.  The angel resumed his throne and looked across the assassins, and across his people.  “I will know all there is to know about them, before I decide their ultimate fate.  That they may experience it in full awareness and understanding, I would have them healed of these injuries.  But remember what they have done, and leave not the slightest chance that they may try to escape again.”

The guards rose, taking down the coffin stands, and readying themselves to carry the heavy burdens away.

Michael said, “They shall be the Seal of Murder.  None shall dare to design death for another, when they reflect on what has befallen these four.  It is not for man to kill man.  That is the Will of God.”

He said these things, but his heart was racing.  What was this feeling?

–

See this previous post for a communication to any who would join me in writing.  For a thought on David Lynch, see this article.  And see this article to read the story from the beginning.  Meanwhile…

–

They had to get out of there.  They’d both been burned by the witch.  But they couldn’t make themselves leave just yet.  They had to clear the air.  Blasfemia and the corsario glared at each other, slumped against the walls of the Leveret.  At least they had gotten a change of clothing for Blasfemia, so the ship could be cleaner – at least, until the homunculus needed its diaper changed.

The little creature sat in nearly the same position as Blasfemia, back against the wall, but it was looking back and forth between its two new giants.  Cora hadn’t been lying that it was her most perfect creation.  The thing barely looked deformed at all.  Inhumanly proportioned, like some aesthetically pleasing large-headed doll, with cornsilk hair neatly combed away and cloched with a net of pearls.  Her moony silver eyes were the very image of Cora’s own, but the strawberry blonde lashes were thicker and longer, almost cameline.  Her most unnatural trait were the several small horns protruding from her skull, shaped like larger rose thorns.

Neither of the giants regarded her at all, piercing each other with savage hatred.  At last, Blasfemia lost the staring contest, and opened fire.

“You little bitch!  What did you do to us?  I was going to take this nasty little thing to my sister, no question.  No fucking question.  I didn’t need a motherfucking hex.”

“She called it a geas.  Isn’t it enough that I got one too?  Why do we need to fight about it?  This just gives us more of an impetus to get the job done and part ways.”

“I’ll give you a fucking impetus, you ugly-ass kitty cat duende motherfucker.  As soon as we’re done I’m gonna pop your big eye like a grape.”

“Thanks for that.  Thanks a lot, you unthinkable bastard.  Now I’ve got pain if I don’t serve your venal whims, and mutilation or death to look forward to as my only reward.  This is going to be so much fun.  What a way to go.  What a way.”

“What do you expect of me?  You rat me out to the witch queen and get me fucking geesed on, and I’m just gonna say ‘bygones, bygones’?  But I feel ya.  I never wanted to kill nobody that wasn’t mean to my sister, so it’d be pretty fucked up if I kill you.  I’m heated, alright?  I’m fucking heated.”

The duende motherfucker covered its face with its paws and let out a deep sigh.  Suddenly the hands dropped to its stomach, and it lurched at the waist.  “Oh no.  It’s starting.  I feel sick because I’m not getting you there fast enough.  This is terrible.”

“Yeah.  Yeah, alright.  I’m sorry I took you captive.  Here.”  She helped it up from the floor, and took it to the pilot seat.  “You get us off Corazon 2 and I’ll make sure Ombunculita doesn’t bust open her weird head.”

The corsario nodded, glad they’d cleared that up, but more glad the illness subsided as soon as it touched the Leveret’s controls.  The astronave clambered upright, dropped its wings, and kicked off into the sky.

Blasfemia held the little shitter in her own approximation of Cora’s technique, but with all arms folded under the seatbelts.  She called out to the pilot, “At least when we get outside the ice, the Church won’t have the balls to hunt us down.”

“You’re probably right.  Hell, maybe I’ll like it out there.  Did I tell you, the astrocielo around Dio 6 was my home?  I had a nice little house on Michael’s heel.”

“No shit.  Well, if I’d known you then, maybe I’d kill the pope nice and easy, like in his sleep or something.  Prob’ly woulda been less raw for the big man.”

“Still would’ve done it, then…  Does that mean the pontiff was personally cruel to your sister?  To Josefina?”

“I’m not gonna talk about it, but yes it does.  Are you starting to put it together?  Remembering the right news shows?”

“I don’t watch tele.”

“That’s a good fucking idea.”

They spent almost all of their flight time in astrocielo, far now from the disaster she’d made of Dio 6.  Changing diapers wasn’t any worse than the last time she’d done it, and mercifully the creature she’d dubbed “Ombunculita” had a much smaller and slower digestive system than a human infant of the same length – her body was proportioned a bit more like that of an adult.

Out of morbid curiosity, she gave the thing soft little squeezes and pokes to feel out its anatomy.  She looked well-formed enough at a glance, but the joints in the leg were very soft.  Any structure must have come from cartilage too flimsy to support her weight.  Still, she could crawl with her arms.  Maybe she could be potty trained, and Cora was just too much of a light touch to make that work?

When Blasfemia squeezed Ombunculita’s little body, she smiled and made coy looks, like “oh no, don’t tickle me.”  Blasfemia tried to minimize the creature’s stimulation, but at the height of her excitement, she almost looked like she was laughing, and made a creepy wet noise in her throat.

Still too disgusting.  Blasfemia felt ill.

The corsario was alone with its thoughts, leaning back in the pilot seat, wondering at what would come next.  Cora has said Josefina was outside the Wall of Ice.  Never had the spirit imagined it would try to fly through that particular stretch of space.  Unbelievable.  It could already see hints of the thing, past the nearest string of stars, reflecting their lights with glint and sparkle.

In some barely comprehensible epoch of the past, when the Stars of Weal were being consolidated under the Church, the Wall of Ice had been created.  Nobody could imagine how, so they waved away the question as “the Will of God.’  The corsario had its doubts.

The Wall of Ice was a feature of the astrocielo – an absolute impossibility in long space.  It was an orb of ice, incredibly thick but hollow in the middle, that held all of the Stars of Weal, and many uninhabited planets and stars besides.  Outside the Wall, the nearest inhabited worlds were considered “heathen,” with a reputation for irreligion, heresy, and misfortune.  It was taken as the Will of God that the Stars of Weal were all so pleasant to live around.  Heathen worlds were too cold or too hot or radioactive – never quite right.

As such a construction was impossible in long space, one had only to travel in that realm to bypass it – as if it was nothing at all.  But the long space corresponding to the thickness of the wall took nearly a year to travel at the best subluminal speed – impossible without a ship large enough to hold vast resources.  Some centuries ago, a few heathen worlds had tried to wage that war, to no avail.  There were too many ways to intercept and destroy them, for a side backed by the Celestial Hierarchy itself.

On the other hand, it was much easier to get out than to get back in – presumably what Josefina had somehow achieved.  The Stars of Weal only cared about keeping heathens out, so they focused monitoring efforts on the outside of the wall.  If you could find a weak enough area – one with hollows in the ice – you could get through a lot faster by slipping in and out of long space along the way.

Unsanctioned traders and radicals had developed a map of such routes, updated whenever possible, as the geography of the unstable substance was subject to change.  Did the corsario have a copy of the map?  Of course it did.

Any given route was possibly outdated, no longer good, due to cryological or astronomical events, or shifting security activity on the outside of the wall, where one had to emerge.  In judging the best one, you had to consider how likely it was to be outdated, and how dangerous that would be if it turned out to be true.

Well, it thought, if we run out of food, Blasfemia can eat the homunculus and I.  Maybe drink her own pee for a few months.  It laughed darkly.

“What’s up, Capitan?”

“We’re close.  This passing isn’t close to stars that might melt the ice, change its shape – but also not too far from Borland 1.  Downside, proximity to a Heathen World means security.  They have dogs.

“I never thought about the Wall of Ice much.  If the Church really made it, I’d sure like to break it.”

“As you will.  I think the Leveret is small enough to slip notice.  Based on the alternatives, I’m betting this is the route Josefina took.  Improves our odds of not getting stranded ’til we die.  Are you ready?”

“Yes I am.”

“¿Y Ombunculita también?”

“Sì.”

–

See this previous post for a communication to any who would join me in writing.  For a thought on David Lynch, see this article.  And see this article to read the story from the beginning.  Meanwhile…

–

Astronaves are spirit creatures re-fashioned to function as spacecraft.  Angels are spirits re-fashioned to replace their individuality with conformity to the Celestial Hierarchy.  The astronaves of the Church suffer from both of these fates.  If the spirit is too large to be made into a Bishop Class Freighter, you cut it down to size.  A shipwright’s work is cruel.

That conformity allows them to use standardized technology and replacement parts, but its all an iron maiden for a space whale.  The revolutionaries had gotten themselves onboard a standard freighter, stowed away in sealed utility space that would seldom see used on a short run between worlds.  As long as they timed the exit right, they wouldn’t even get drowned in grain, end up dead in some griddle cakes.

But the ship wouldn’t move.  They’d been there over a day, unable to see the light that would mark that time, just running mobiles on efficiency mode, sleeping on bare metal, and defecating in a box.  As the unexpected nature of their attack helped them execute the plan, would it also help them execute the escape route?  Would the strangely apocalyptic fallout of that assassination serve as a distraction?  Or would it inspire them to implement much better security protocols in a short time, and lead to capture?

Xihuani and Jorge were practical lovers, which helped.  In the dire situation, sweet emotions were unavailable, but a practical lover didn’t need such motives to engage in a needful embrace.  The held each other, which took some edge off the fear.  Zochino wished Christina was like that, but respected her enough to not even suggest it.  She was clearly not into him.  They slept apart.

Whenever they were awake, they would hold hushed conversations that ran around the circle like clock hands – repetitious.  Affirmation of principles, questioning principles, affirming them again.  Planning their next move as if they could hope to survive, wistfully pondering what they would like the world to know about them, as if they were going to have any control over how history would see them.

In the peace of dark black sleep, the ideology and the years all stripped away, lolling mindlessly in a stew of images and sensations, telenovelas and commercials and cartoons, a vague light poured through the minds of everyone within the walled city.  It coalesced in each mind as a vision of God, in His perfect beauty and love.  Rendered innocent as children by the depth of slumber, most would behold this vision as they had at their first communion, and weep in simple joy.  Jorge and Zochino’s inner children were as peaceful as any in the land.

Xihuani felt a sour taste in her mouth that she could not place, the beautiful vision ached like a commercial for a product you could never buy.  But this was not so different from any good worshiper, of the kind troubled by doubt.  The mist paid this no attention.

In Christina’s mind, the beautiful vision reminded her too well of a recent experience from real life, and lofted her out of the reverie of deepest black.  She swam toward a light above – a heaven on fire – and the joy in her heart was of anger satisfied, of bloody triumph.  She felt the passion of hatred, and reached out to put her hands around God’s throat.

Her fingers burned away and she cried out in terror, waking in a cold sweat, gripping her hands over and over again, feeling for fingers, afraid this was the dream and that nightmare was real.  Then she fell back to her bed of steel, and moaned.

“Tina,” Zochino said, “that was a pretty bad nightmare.  Are you alright?”

She choked to clear her throat.  “Yeah.  Thanks, Chino.  God damn.”

Jorge said, “Am I still dreaming?  What’s going on?”

Zochino said, “We should try to go back to sleep.  Tina just had a…  Christina, do you see that?”

“I don’t see anything.  It’s all fuzzy in here, like night vision.  Like it’s made out of ashes.”

“The light,” he said.

Jorge sat up abruptly, shaking the sleep out of his head.  “You can see it too, Zochino?”

Everyone was sitting up.  Christina asked, “What the hell are you talking about?”

She had a wisp of light trailing from her head to the ceiling.

–

See this previous post for a communication to any who would join me in writing.  For a thought on David Lynch, see this article.  And see this article to read the story from the beginning.  Meanwhile…

–

The cardinals returned to the throne room behind the hushed and disturbed whispers of a hundred papal guards.  A medical scientist sat over the pontiff’s corpse, brushing his face with light strokes of the hand, lost in a little song – mind broken.  An angel had assumed the throne, and taken the Mandate of Heaven.  The men were utterly shaken.

Michael had to measure his words carefully.  He had let the medical scientist into the temple to attend the fallen pontiff, but something in his voice or his presence had burned the woman’s mind.  He couldn’t afford to lose the use of valuable intermediaries to mankind.  “Approach me, my cardinals, yet not too close.”

“Yes my lord,” one breathed, eyes bulging.  His brothers followed, not quite as disturbed in aspect, and all knelt in a piteous heap at the further reaches of the room.

“We must all take care in how we speak.  You know by now that I am the angel of your world, and to see that world set right, I have come to restore the Mandate of Heaven.  It belongs on the brow of a man, and to that end, I will entrust its care – ultimately – to one of your number.  But first there are things that must be set in order…”

The chapel was a shambles, cracked and scorched from gun battles and celestial chaos.  The pontiff remained there, hideously dead and attended by a febrile woman.  All of the soldiers were white in the face, wracked with sweaty terror, staring at the ground to avoid losing their own precious minds.  The cardinals cowered like children who had been found guilty of murder.

But at the heart of this horror, a greater one sat in triumph.  The beautiful man with his glossy black hair, well over two meters tall, the wings of a colossal eagle folded awkwardly at the sides of the throne.  His full nudity was that of an Olympian, with birth-moistened skin of rosy marble.  What need did an angel have for a belly button?  For male genitals?  For nipples?  Michael was the manifestation of all that made no sense in scripture.  He claimed to have come to restore the Mandate of Heaven, but that papal crown sat upon his head wreathed in ghostly white flames.  Might he actually destroy it?

“…First, do not call me ‘lord’.  Our only lord is our God.  You shall address me as Pontiff-Regent Michael del Cielo”

“Yes, Pontiff-Regent!,” they cried.

“Most people are quite good and holy, striving to live in grace and light.  Would you not agree?”

“Yes, Pontiff-Regent!”

“But even these good people have forgotten that the Will of God is a living thing, to which all must pay proper respect.  We will teach them, and this begins with finding the ones who struck down your true pontiff – and making them to know.”

“Yes, Pontiff-Regent!”  One cardinal crawled free of the others and flattened himself to the ground, held both hands over his head to avert any possible wrath.  “But forgive us please, oh angel, for matters of violence have become strange to us!  We know not how to find these murderers, to our very great shame!  Please!”

“Rise, good fathers.  Come not near to me now, for I am not yet accustomed to this earthly form, and you may be harmed by it.  But for this one prohibition, do not fear me.”

They looked at each other in hope, still heavily laced with terror, then rose on shaking legs.

Michael continued, “You have the divine science of your forefathers.  Use this above all other methods.  For my part, I will attempt to find them with my own powers.  Ten thousand years I have not had need of such devices, and so much as using my voice can do you grievous harm in my present state.  This is to say, I will help you find them.  I will help you punish them.  But you should take your dead and your living from this temple, before I begin.”

He stood up and everybody quailed away instinctively – even the babbling doctor.  His nudity shone magnificently, but the power inside him was too terrible to admit any possibility of lust.  Then the mortals set themselves in motion, knowing again the living Will of God.

–