Broken Angels (31 page)

While Darryl’s primary attention was diverted toward the primary inhabitant of the surrounding sea, he did notice it was also populated by much smaller and more nebulous beings whose bodies seemed almost gelatinous. Some of them swam about like jellyfish, while others swam about in the manner of eels. All possessed a certain electrical quality. There was a bright flash of palegreen light when two or more almost touched. When two or more passed through one another, branching veins of dark green lightning traveled through their immaterial bodies, tangling with the gossamer innards. They were far more fascinating than frightening.

Darryl’s gemlike brain did more than allow him to see all around. The multifaceted organ also gave him knowledge of the immediate past. He could see the entire progress of his soul’s most recent journey through Xyn, from its emergence between honey skies and syrupy seas down to the present. He knew the beings swimming around him were the ghosts who’d formerly been impaled on the sky-roof ’s icicles; they were now free, half-living, and adapted to a new environment. As for Darryl’s own immediate environment, a pocket of air had been created around his soul. He was no longer in the water, but suspended within a transparent bubble surrounded by water.

“What are you?” he asked his current master.

“I am MadaMadaM,” it said. “The sentinel at the beginning of your path to redemption.”

“Redemption?”

There was no response.

“How?” Darryl asked.

“First, by not asking me any more questions,” MadaMadaM said. “Second, by answering one of mine. One and only one. If you do not guess it, your fate will be worse than anything you can comprehend.”

Of course, Darryl thought. So no need to bother using words to describe what might happen.

“How many faces can a man wear,” MadaMadaM asked, “before he wears himself out?”

Darryl recognized the question. How couldn’t he after what he’d so recently endured at the hands—and feet, and teeth—of five vivid women in a dark room? The question was a quote from the very last poem in the first volume of
The Blackbook of Autumn Numbers
. After violently confronting his falsely loved female acquaintances (one-day lays) in a dream, and then confronting his true love in a heated, damning argument in reality, the young-but-repentant womanizing protagonist of the story put the question to himself and followed it with: “Inquiries such as these find their answers in my tracks.” But MadaMadaM didn’t want that line as a response. It wasn’t an answer, only a pointed line, an arrow leading to the answer.

Darryl in his younger days had been much like the main character in the book, pursuing whichever female caught his fancy until he caught her. Shortly after he was done with her, he would run away—fast enough to duck and hide so she’d lose sight, or far enough for her to be dissuaded to pursue. But it had all caught up with him. All of it—in the form of one virus, a virus that made his skin ultrasensitive to light, that gave him epileptic seizures, that gave him constant bouts of queasiness, that had affected his nervous system, that enabled billions of parasitic microbes to live in his skin and blood, and that made him unable to survive without the parasites and unable to exist happily and healthily with them. There was no telling which girl or woman had given him the virus. Darryl didn’t remember most of their names. He remembered numbers. The numbers in his own little black book. He had kept score. And in the end he’d lost. After all the scores of women and girls, he’d ended up with nothing. Zero. Love.

“Seventy-eight,” he said in a whisper.

That was it. The number he’d wantonly bedded before he knew he had the White Fire Virus. The number he’d happily and carelessly seduced before he became sick and scared. The number he’d played with before he began to wonder, ponder, obsess over how he’d gotten it, who may have given it to him, how long he’d had it, and to whom he may have given it. He had wondered in circles, and ended up with zero. Nothing. Love.

Darryl said it again, louder. “Seventy-eight.”

The number of recognizable faces three of the five women in the dark room had worn as they exacted bloody and indirect revenge on behalf of the unknown seventy-eight. These dark avengers probably hadn’t known the names or faces of his seventy-eight either, but they somehow had known about his charity cases, and they’d selected seventy-eight faces from them. And Darryl, for each of those unknown seventy-eight, when he had been with them in reality, he’d blindly put on a different face, an indifferent act, whatever it took so he could get all he desired from them. Now he was so, so tired.

“Seventy-eight!” Darryl said one last time. “That’s how many faces!”

The beak on the leviathan’s face couldn’t show any expression, but MadaMadaM seemed satisfied with Darryl’s response.

“The answer is different for each individual,” it said. “The key to answering correctly is to answer honestly. And the only way to answer honestly is to exercise all available faculties to remember past moral crimes. Remembrance leads to absolution. Absolution leads to Salvation.”

MadaMadaM stopped speaking, but Darryl continued to sense vibrations of sound emanating from the leviathan. It was the equivalent of humming, but it wasn’t meaningless sound. It was a communication. While Darryl remained motionless, trying to determine what it meant, he saw jets of pale-blue ink shooting out from the neck of the giant. He watched and soon understood. The leviathan was communicating with ink and noise, communicating in order to scribble out and redraw the environment. Although they were still in XynKroma, still in that ambiguous dimension of damaged archetypes, the symbols were changing.

Darryl’s spherical range of vision began to extend farther and farther, providing even more detail as the indigo sea receded from view. When the process was complete, the entire ground was overlaid with white cirrus and gray stratus clouds. In patches where there were no clouds, there was a blue soil, dotted with little black stones. Standing securely on a cloud, Darryl looked down at a nearby blue patch and followed his attention to some of its ebony pebbles. He found that the stones operated like peepholes, giving him as he concentrated a view of the orange and red forests, all situated amid turquoise-tinted blades of grass, miles below the ground of clouds and blue soil.

Darryl shifted his focus. The air surrounding him was replete with tri-colored rings, floating about like incomplete bubbles blown by a playful child, all of them bouncing away from one another when two or more came close enough to almost touch. The moody sky not-too-far above him churned, appearing one moment like a thick, reddish mud and the next like a more fluid, creamy substance that appeared to be milk. Even though there was no sun or other source of light, much of the atmosphere was as bright as that of an afternoon on a clear spring’s day. But the leviathan overshadowed the ground on which Darryl’s soul stood.

Although he now saw it in a different environment, Darryl still had the same level of fearsome awe when looking at the giant riddle-maker. It was positioned on all fours, standing on dirty-white cushions of clouds. Darryl stared and studied its silvery green scales, its orange-brownish claws, it blue-grayish squid’s head, and its tentacles, each featuring a variety of colors that tangled together while maintaining the integrity of their distinct hues.

“As you have answered your question correctly,” MadaMadaM said, “I shall give you the gift of a helpmeet in your quest.”

Darryl wanted to ask “What quest?” and “What’s a helpmeet?” But he remembered the leviathan’s earlier admonition and kept silent, hoping it would explain all he needed to know.

“The quest to earn redemption for your soul,” MadaMadaM said. “At a particular location in Xyn, well guarded by the minions of another, the soul of a young one, a beautiful one, is being kept prisoner. She is a prisoner of twisted love. The soul was imprisoned by a very sick lover who now walks freely on the surface of Reality. You shall be well on your way to Salvation if you free her.”

“If I can’t?” Darryl found the courage to ask.

A chain appeared out of nowhere. One end of it was buried underground; the other trifurcated and ended in manacles shackled around Darryl’s neck and wrists. Darryl couldn’t speak. Even though his soul had no mouth and no larynx, somehow the manacle at his neck took away his voice.

“What should happen to a man unable to save his own soul?” MadaMadaM said.

The patch of blue soil in front of Darryl shook, experiencing a very localized quake. Among the clods of speckled blue clay thrust upward and outward leapt a creature with the shape and face of a wolf, the size and skin of a tiger, and the spanning wings of a mutated eagle. A chimera. Darryl saw the other end of the chain that bound him was attached to a collar on the beast’s neck.

MadaMadaM said nothing more. There was no advice, no warnings, no riddles, not even a nonsensical explanation of what was happening. There was only a silent signal that prompted the eaglewinged creature to spring into the air, dragging the shackled soul of Darryl behind it like a slightly weighted kite string as it flew higher and higher, faster and faster, toward the sky of mud and milk.

After penetrating the sky’s barrier, Darryl saw sights he never could’ve conjured words to describe even if he’d been able to speak as they travelled through mixed terrains, bizarre environments, and impossible habitats. As his soul was dragged through it all, he experienced a sensation similar to the one his body of flesh had felt when pushed into the tub of spiced honeymilk.

The chimera eventually stopped, bringing them to rest in an area of XynKroma consisting of dark green trees and brown, red, and silver leaves. Most of the trees were rooted and stretching upward for miles, but others had fallen to lie on a foot-high bed of foliage. The chain and shackles that had bound and connected Darryl and the chimera were now gone; they’d dissolved at some point during the journey. Darryl briefly considered maybe the reason they stopped was because the chain was gone. He then considered another one.

The chimera was resting on its haunches, gazing at Darryl’s soul. Darryl didn’t like the look in its eyes, nor the manner in which its mouth hung open, but rather than engaging it in a staring contest, he focused his attention on the appearance of his soul. It was revolting. Humanoid shape notwithstanding, his soul’s composition resembled something a disturbed child might concoct if left unsupervised for too long: a milky blood-mud-honey pie. He then understood the look in the chimera’s eyes. He was only thankful that, after the beast opened its jaws wider and pounced, he didn’t experience the sensation of being devoured. Darryl didn’t feel his sloppy self being chewed, swallowed, and consumed. The sight and thought of it were confounding enough; to actually feel the pain and torture of it would’ve been too intense for him to withstand.

While his soul slipped into darkness, Darryl sensed he remained in one piece. The chimera’s teeth weren’t rending him into parts; its teeth, tongue, and jaws only helped reshape him, making him easier to swallow. As his substance mixed with the acids and other substances in the creature’s stomach, through the immediate sounds of swishing, churning, and rumbling, Darryl heard a more distant sound of gagging, heaving. He realized exactly what it was when he felt a sudden shift in the processes inside the beast.

The chimera was vomiting. After being swallowed and partially digested, Darryl was being regurgitated. Since no part of him had ever been separated from the whole, Darryl’s soul came up and out all in one piece, out and down all over the body of the beast as it stood on its hind legs, its face pointed upward toward the blank, wintry sky.

Darryl’s soul covered every single inch of the beast, leaving not even the smallest part or patch of skin or fur exposed. Freshly introduced to the atmosphere, the regurgitated soul hardened, and the shape of the body underneath it transmogrified, assuming a human’s shape, a human male’s shape, with broad spanning wings jutting out from its back.

Darryl stood erect. He folded and respread his wings before picking up a fan of silvery leaves in order to examine himself in their reflection. His head had a wolf ’s shape, with tiger-striped eyes. His skin had a violet tone. He was nude, but he wasn’t cold. The surface of his form was firm but soft, similar to the skin of his body on Reality’s surface. And his vision, much like that on Reality’s surface, was limited; he could no longer see in every direction at once. All in all, he felt comfortable. It was a change, but was it an improvement?

“That is irrelevant.”

Darryl heard a voice speaking simultaneously with the appearance of a transparent bubble in front of his face. The bubble contained black letters clearly spelling out the words as he heard them. It gave him the impression of a bubble one might see in a comic strip, but it wasn’t a cloudy thought bubble or a clean speech bubble; it was something in-between the two, and something beyond.

“You are now outfitted for battle.”

The bubble popped after Darryl heard and read the word “battle.” He looked all around for the source of the voice and its accompanying visual effects. He discovered it only after he’d turned a full circle and stopped to look directly above him.

Another chimera. This one also had wings, but these were colored like the most exotic parrot’s, shaped like the most horrific bat’s, and flapping in a manner contrary to a hummingbird’s, something approaching the slowest motion—but it was apparently enough to keep the two-foot-long, silvery crimson fish’s body afloat. In Darryl’s current condition, neither the chimera’s hawk-talons nor its piranha-teeth were enough to scare him. The incongruent creature provoked only one reaction.

“What next?” Darryl asked.

“Now that you have been acquainted with your helpmeet, Sprat—”

“Who?”

Darryl’s interruption of the creature’s words didn’t cause the bubble containing them to pop. The black letters inside the bubble only disintegrated into a nectarine-shaded mist as the bubble’s skin took on a tint of coral-green. The letters and bubble went respectively back to black and clear when the creature resumed speaking.