#THE HIGHWAY

[kaithewhatever]

Me and the boys in rush hour traffic; ie new header

[meowmeow518]

I go bananas when ppl characterize Zim correctly

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Anima Mundi

Infinity could break a mind. Attempts to truly wrap the mind around the infinite were doomed because the mind was forever cursed with limitations.

Infinity could break a soul. Eternal it may have been, yet reaching for both things within its grasp and the unattainable would stretch it thin, to the point of tearing itself apart.

Inviolable laws of the cosmos.

The only path to infinity was in making peace with its power. Making peace with one’s self. One or the other: accepting the things within one’s grasp, or forever reaching for the unattainable. Surrendering to the limitations of one’s mind, or reaching out to infinity and seeing what lies beyond once the mind had broken like a dam, allowing the forever ocean to swallow all.

The Shadow knew this. A thousand tiny white dots glimmered in its intangible shape, thousands of eyes eagerly watching, eagerly awaiting while Michael worked his magick. It hovered and peered over his shoulder like an oversized parasite of roiling pitch-black. Like a demon. Liquid ink. Spiritual tar.

Dancing darkness, cast by the flames of tiny fires in the chapel, set among small piles of stone and old wood the necromancer had set ablaze with his lighter to illuminate the ruin’s bowels. In that starry night, Michael needed light to complete this magnum opus. The Shadow waited with great patience.

Michael dipped two fingertips into FBI Agent Parker’s open wound, like the painter wielding his palette. The decrepit old wall behind the altar served as his canvas. His fingertips kissed the coarse sandstone bricks, painting upon them the shape of a large triangle.

The beginning of a door to another world. To another time. The beginning of an end.

Parker moaned softly, though her consciousness had slipped into the arms of oblivion.

The Shadow smiled as it waited and watched.

The Shadow’s ghostly tar dripped from other places now, too. It oozed from all the cracks in reality it had wrought. It had invaded this world by crossing through a different door. Hailing from different times. Arrived from a different year, and a different era before that.

A dark traveler in the dark void of time and space. A projection, burnt into the fabric of reality. And yet, it had no true shape.

Eyes and dark tendrils extended like limbs of invisible mold, connecting all the people and places it had visited and infested.

Its tar-like imitation of SUBSTANCE still dripped from the dead machinery of THE HIGHWAY which it had corrupted, deep inside the Heart, in the basement of the Way King’s ranch house. Clockwork systems and steam engines no longer dripped with water, but with weightless matter, with the viscosity of tar.

Even the door where Klemens had opened a pathway between our world and the House of Change now oozed dark matter from its bottom crack.

It gathered in the cracks of a supermax prison cell in Kentucky, where Freddy Fletcher had been incarcerated. He stared at that shadowy stuff, pooling in the darkest corner of his small, confined space, pushing his sanity beyond its final frontier.

Droplets coalesced on the concrete of a basement wall in a mall in Kentucky, where the Shadow’s original form had originally crossed into this age. The sleeping wall, locked away in storage for nobody to see, sweated with tiny beads of dark matter.

In the train graveyard, far away, the same intangible matter pooled in a pit between two blobs of fleshy eyes and tentacle-like appendages. Once been human, THE SUBSTANCE had transformed. Evolved. A remnant of a lost world.

I am what awaits at the end of all roads.

The Shadow spoke in its Whispers to Michael.

Your king’s highway is dead, and I await you all at the end of its final road.

I am inevitable.

The sorcerer did not respond to the Shadow’s Whispers in his mind. He continued to work. Focused on the ritual he was conducting, he painted that triangle to completion, inch by inch, line by line, each edge of its shape drawn to the width of two fingertips pressed together.

Parker’s body lay motionless on the altar of this ruined chapel. Michael dipped his fingers into the wound on her belly again, salvaging more blood from the dying woman.

She was still alive. Barely. For once she died, the blood would no longer be useful to him. Beyond committing his focus and spirit onto the current ritual, keeping Parker alive continued to chew away on Michael’s focus. It sapped him of his meticulously harvested reserves of magick energy, sacrifices upon sacrifices of human lives he had taken in the past.

The Oracle of New York. A dark luminary in the world of occultists.

Spirit speaker.

Necromancer.

Behind even the Shadow, imperceptibly, a cloud of screaming souls swirled behind Michael. The many lives he had taken—most often against their will, sometimes through deception, and on rare occasion, even by honest seduction—all drawn to power his magick. They hated the living they could see through the veil, trapped just behind it. They screamed for his demise, and they screamed for freedom. Freedom from the prison he kept them in. The lives he had traded for arcane power.

Usurper of the throne. The Way King now slept, and his highway, the greatest glyph of all times—the totality of all roads in the world—slept with Klemens now. All owed to Michael’s winding path of dark machinations and betrayal.

Michael desired to open that triangle-shaped door. Just like the Shadow.

They dreamed of the possibilities. A new world shaped by their dreams. A new dawn.

Together, they yearned to usher in a new future.

Thus, Michael painted in the flickering light shed by small fires in the ruined chapel. A reflection of the primitive world they all came from. With Parker’s blood, Michael painted strange symbols along the lines of the triangle. In his other hand, he held the jade tome, the Thaum of Thritain, studying its alien hieroglyphs, and replicating them around the triangle in a fingerpainting in blood.

Getting closer and closer to completing this ritual.

And the Shadow watched with glee.

Outside the chapel, clouds cleared the sky for the moon and distant stars to shine through. They bathed the deserts of Las Vegas in an eerie, cold light. The winds howled, cold and unforgiving, and they fed the flames of Michael’s fire inside the chapel.

And a group of people stood outside the ranch house, down the path along the dead fields, leading to that ruined chapel.

In reality, this path extended merely over a few hundred yards of crushed gravel and sand, flanked by decaying fence and desert.

But the Shadow had altered reality. That pathway now stretched into infinity. The closer one got to the chapel, the farther that path became. And its Shades, its deranged spawn, lurked between the fence posts, and the stray stones, and the cacti. They hungered for human spirit.

Outside the ranch, four people waited. Helpless. Unable to cross that distance.

Special Agent Derek Wells stood out in the open and his tattered bureau jacket fluttered in the cold wind.

Aria Chambers in her dirtied designer dress, and her bodyguard, the bulky mountain of meat in a suit named Barry, stood behind Wells.

Behind them, in turn, FBI director Anthony Collins sat on the sagging steps of the ranch house porch, hands bound behind his back with cuffs.

All four of them gazed across that stretch of unnatural infinity, that warp in the way, stopping them from reaching the ruined chapel on Klemens Weidmann’s dead ranch.

Or, at the very least, the infinity stalled them long enough for Michael to complete his work.

Their palpable impotence filled the Shadow with a sense of sadistic glee.

A sense of victory.

The porch to Weidmann’s home, where hundreds of bullets had pockmarked and torn up the wood and windows, squealed. The fly trap door, barely hanging from its hinges, opened. Three figures pushed out from the bowels of the darkened building. Their boots and shoes clomped down on the porch steps as they stepped out into the open.

Two more people, and a copy of a human.

In their leather jackets, the fallen Way King’s knights, Jericho Kane and Karma, joined this strange gathering.

The Way King’s final homunculus, a clockwork automaton—a perfect copy of Agent Parker’s appearance—followed right behind them.

They, too, came to stare in awe at the impossible distance between house and chapel. At the dancing Shades, mocking with their awful and monstrous presence.

Wells shot a glance over his shoulder to the new arrivals. He grimaced, recognizing the vicious woman named Karma, who had almost sliced his throat open with shards of glass.

He still wore the bandages from that confrontation.

“Oh, fuck off,” she muttered while he glared at her. “Don’t look at me like that. Your partner shot me.”

His hand twitched around the pistol in it. But he held his tongue.

She exuded no threat to him. The symmetrical features of her face shed no spite for him any longer, and she stared like the everybody else into the distance.

“Cool your fuckin’ jets,” Jericho said. His eyes were reddened with recent tears, and that struck a first nerve in the FBI agent. Jericho struck a second nerve when he continued speaking, cementing that he was addressing the evil beauty by his side, and not Wells. “This ain’t the fucking time or place. We all wanna get to that motherfucking snake over there.”

“That thing is no demon,” Aria said, repeating what she had told Wells and Barry earlier, upon their first failed attempt to cross the infinite distance to the chapel.

Jericho peeled his gaze off the distant building and locked onto Aria. His eyes sparkled in the starlight and he swallowed emptily. He tried to find the right words, to convey his concern, or to convince her to get out of dodge before their world ended.

Instead, he only blurted out something stupid.

“Why the hell are you here? You shouldn’t even fuckin’ be here.”

“Shut up,” she snapped. “I go wherever the hell I want. And I have unfinished business with Michael.”

“We all do,” spoke the homunculus. The red-headed facsimile of a woman spoke evenly, calmly, in a monotone that rivaled Parker’s regular demeanor. Staring into the distance like all others, she added, “She is there with him, and dying. The longer we wait—”

“Nah, fuck that,” Jericho said.

“Well, what’s the fucking problem?” Karma asked. “We’re all here to ice that piece of shit, so why are we standing around like jackoffs and talking?”

Barry pointed a meaty finger towards the chapel. Aria spoke in his stead.

“Bad mojo. That entity warped the space around the chapel. And do you not see those things out there?”

As if to underline her words with a threat of ill-will, the Shades danced madly between fence posts, stones, and cacti. Hungry, and wiggling their shadowy claws in anticipation of human contact. Grasping at the gravelly path, like they wanted to slice through hapless legs.

“So fuckin’ what?” Karma asked. She smirked, showing teeth. Having escaped the House of Change unchanged, her sadism returned to the fore. “Are you all stupid? Do you not realize what I am capable of?”

“I don’t even know the hell who you are,” Aria fired back.

Wells swiveled, gravel crunching underneath his scuffed shoes, and his eyes went wide. He stormed up to Karma with wide steps.

He knew.

“Yes. Do it,” he ordered. “Take us there.”

“Yo, cowboy,” Karma said, the smirk fading from her lips. “Hold your fuckin’ horses. Are we all on the same page here? What do all you dipshits think we’re gonna do when we get there?”

A beat of silence. Then everybody answered at the same time.

“Save Parker,” Wells growled.

“Stop Michael,” spoke the homunculus.

“Find and destroy that fucking book, which I bet that asshole has already,” Jericho drawled out.

“Squeeze Michael on where to find the book,” Aria said.

“No clue,” Barry replied.

“Wait, you think he found the book? When? How?” Collins asked. His questions lingered the longest out of all their conflicting responses.

“Shut up,” multiple people told Collins in groans with varying levels of annoyance.

Karma’s smirk widened into a wicked smile. “You dipshits should be way more worried about that thing with Michael. You all know what I’m talking about. We need to get rid of that thing.”

“I don’t think we can,” Aria admitted, deflating more with each word she uttered. “I don’t even understand what it is.”

“It’s bad fuckin’ news,” Jericho growled. “It could just come and go in the House of Change, so it’s clearly out of this world, above our fucking paygrades.”

“Until we figure out how to deal with it, let’s focus on what we do know, and know how to do right,” Wells ordered again.

He puffed his chest out. The anxiety and stress gnawed on his nerves, but he recalled the bureau’s motto. Like a silent mantra, it repeated in his head. Echoed in his mind in Parker’s voice, from the time she had said it out loud in earnest to him, he let it loop.

Fidelity, bravery, integrity.

He let it repeat in his mind while the wind howled over the desert, and all their eyes came to rest on him with expectation.

Even the Shadow’s millions of starry eyes. Even as it smiled.

“We get over there, we save Parker, we stop Michael, and if he has that book, we take the book away from him. In that order. Then we can bicker about the consequences until we’re blue in the face, but until then, we’re in this one together. Ride. Or die.”

Jericho sighed. Jutted his chin out. “Yeah, okay, fuck it. Yeah, let’s do it. I’m game, let’s go, come on.”

Aria sighed and added nothing. She glared at Jericho, for she sensed where they were headed. He only stared ahead into the impossible distance of the chapel, avoiding all eye contact with anybody else. Aria wasn’t ready to let him burn his life away.

The homunculus stared in the same direction and she suddenly spoke, bursting out into a flood of words.

“Agent Parker and I both dreamed of a long valley, where rain fell eternal, and all the stones on mossy grounds were of perfectly geometrical, spherical shape. In the fog, at the end of that valley, a forest of crystal trees awaited, and in its clearing, a tar pit bubbled, from which Shadow rose. It assumed our shape, a dark mirror of the self. Shadow, we all are. It is neither here nor there entirely. SUBSTANCE in an incomplete, corrupted form, twisted by human ambitions. A corruption of all things that exist. It cannot be destroyed without destroying reality itself.”

She fell silent.

All stood stunned, mouths agape at the homunculus fashioned in Parker’s image.

The Way King’s final act of peace, as he had declared himself.

The homunculus expected no response.

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Jericho grumbled.

“Anima mundi,” replied the homunculus.

Aria squinted at the red-headed homunculus. As a true Witch of the West Coast, Aria was the only person present who knew enough to glean any sense of her cryptic message.

“Who gives a shit?” Karma asked. “Let’s go, people. Time’s wasting. Start holding hands like we’re some kinda hippie protest chain. Come on, chop chop.”

She extended a hand for Jericho to take. He seized it, grabbed Aria’s hand. She, in turn, took Barry by his hand, who snatched Wells’ hand in a meaty fist, the one not occupied by the FBI agent’s pistol. Wells holstered his service weapon in the confines of his jacket, and then took the homunculus by her hand, unsettled by how much she looked like Parker.

Karma led the way, back up to the fly trap door into the ranch house, right past Collins, still sitting on the steps dumbfounded. The train of people passed him by, steps thumping up the decrepit old wood, and he gawked at each of them.

“Uh, what—what about me? Hey! Are you leaving me here?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Jericho snapped at him in passing.

Karma stepped through the door, and they chain of people bypassed reality, one by one. Stepping through the darkness of the fly trap door, they did not enter the ranch house, they instead emerged inside the chapel.

Her strange and unnatural power had crossed the impossible distance with her improbable ability. The liminality of all thresholds in reality served her as gateways between disconnected places. It could boggle the mind, though the people present either already knew of her terrible power, or possessed the faculties to process its effect in action.

Or, as in Barry’s case—they tried not too hard to think about it. Like anybody exposed to the unnatural, trying to rationalize it with conventional logic, and filing it away in the dustiest and oldest forgotten drawers of the mind, before it could chip away at and erode too much sanity.

The six figures crowded inside the far end of the chapel.

They gazed across the broken pews, to the altar upon which the dying Agent Parker lay. Michael had crossed her arms over her chest, like laying an ancient Egyptian pharaoh to peaceful rest.

Dim light flickered from the three tiny fires Michael had lit. He paused amidst painting the final glyph outside the triangle’s lines, rearing his head to gaze upon the interlopers. Surprise flashed in his bright blue eyes.

And the Shadow, creeping in the darkest corners of that cavernous ruin, it blinked its thousands of tiny stars. It oozed with malice.

Hatred for those six who had simply bypassed its attempts at keeping them away. It had worked so hard to corrupt THE HIGHWAY, distorting the distances of reality to create a pocket of infinity around the chapel, and one of the people present was capable of ignoring that awesome might altogether.

Well, well, well, look at this. Just in time to play the party poopers?

They now all heard its Whispers in their minds, provoking shudders to run down every spine. Then the mental Whispers turned to menacing Growls.

DO YOU NEED TO FEAST ON HUMAN ENTRAILS LIKE VULTURES? TO BE TAUGHT OF THE FRAILTY OF YOUR FLESHY MEATBAGS?

The light from the three flames dimmed and flickered. But it had not been the Shadow to do so.

Nothing but the howling wind, sweeping through the ruined chapel, whistling through the holes in sandstone brick walls.

Michael’s wide-eyed surprise gave way to a half-lidded, relaxed gaze. He picked up the switchblade from the altar, where it lay hidden behind Parker’s dying body.

The threat was clear. The sharp little blade glinted in the dim light, hovering above the unconscious red-headed woman. Its tip, however, was pointed at them.

He smiled at the six witnesses to his ritual.

“An auspicious gathering,” he said.

They would empower the energy he invested in it. They would serve perfectly to seal the sacrifice. Witnesses were almost better than the faithful.

“Karma,” Michael muttered, staring coldly at her. Confidently. He clicked his tongue between uttering her name and his next words. “And here I thought the House of Change would leave you forever… changed. Maybe fix your attitude, or your lousy manners. A shame you show up to sabotage me at the eleventh hour. I really, truly, should have known better.”

Karma smiled at him, but there was no joy behind it. Then the trauma of her entrapment in the otherworld all bubbled to the surface. Her face twisted into a mask of rage and malice.

She screamed at him, “I’m gonna gut you like a fucking fish!”

“God, I’ve had enough of this shit,” Wells muttered.

His pistol was slung up in a flash, and the former ranger shot Michael in the dead center of his forehead. The necromancer crumpled onto the floor behind the altar.

“God fucking damnit!” Karma spat, yelling. “He was mine!”

“Holy shit. Are we already done here?” Jericho said, taken aback by the sudden turn of events. “I mean, fuck, I’m not one to complain.”

His chin crinkled and he took a single dauntless step towards the opposite end of the chapel, towards Parker’s body on the altar.

The entire ruin rumbled, quaked. Its walls shook, and dust rained from the crumbling ceiling. Howling winds swept through the abandoned abode, and the three fires flickered till they nearly died down. Only embers remained and the Shadow grew. Intangible claws crept across every solid surface, closer and closer to the six intruders. The shifting Shades crowded outside the holes in the chapel’s walls, peering inside with tiny white dots for eyes, like a hungry sky of glimmering starlight.

The Growls in their minds rumbled, matching the force of the earthquake.

WE ARE FAR FROM DONE, YOU AND I. NOW YOU ALL ARE GOING TO HELP ME FINISH THIS.

The six people huddled together, back to back now, surrounded by swelling darkness. Terror gripped their hearts, a fear of the unknown paralyzed them with inaction. The agents of dark matter closed in on them.

Get back up, Mikey. GET UP.

Michael’s hand smacked onto the top of the altar, leaving a handprint in blood. His splayed digits trembled as he slowly pulled himself back up.

Heal her. And I’ll take over from here.

“Gimme your gun,” Jericho told Wells. He grabbed at it.

The FBI agent slapped Jericho’s grabby hand away.

Jericho growled, “Just keep shooting him, for fuck’s sake! He can’t keep doing that shit forever!”

Barry and Aria reacted, drawing their own pistols.

“Stop!” Wells’ command sliced through the howling wind. “I don’t trust you to not hit Parker.”

Michael chuckled darkly. Blood wept from the third eye that Wells’ bullet had punched into his forehead. The necromancer poked a finger into it, and smiled upon seeing his own blood and bone, clinging to his quaking fingertip.

HEAL HER. I WILL DEAL WITH THESE INSECTS.

You can sacrifice your own blood, and heal from it again.

“That violates the laws of cosmic transaction,” Michael breathed in protest, wobbling as he stood on buckling legs.

He braced himself against the altar, leaning over Parker. The dark priest. His power was divided in every direction.

The walls of reality are already crumbling while this event ripples forward and backwards through time. Reality is as malleable and decrepit as this old chapel. Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel its flesh rotting away as the Way King now forever sleeps? His reign has ENDED.

You can remake everything. You can make up the rules as you see fit.

HEAL HER.

“This is bullshit,” Karma exclaimed. “These are just fucking shadows! What the fuck can they do, anyway?”

She pulled a large hunting knife out of her jacket. Then she snarled, casting a sneering grin at Michael.

“Now… to make good on my promise.”

Michael couldn’t help but shudder. She meant every word and she didn’t care about any consequences.

Everybody else hesitated as Karma charged at the altar, boots clomping down the aisle between all the broken pews, until others broke from their paralysis.

Karma had spoken true. The Shadow and its Shades only postured with menace. The touch of their dark tendrils instilled a dark chill in their hearts, yes, but it carried no substance. As the homunculus had said.

SUBSTANCE in an incomplete form.

The entire group advanced, three firearms drawn upon Michael, waiting for the right moment to shoot him dead.

DOOM.

An explosion of invisible energy repelled them. Karma tumbled backwards over the ground, struck strongest by that powerful blast. The others merely stumbled and stopped in their stride.

The cloud of screaming souls behind Michael had manifested momentarily, surging outwards from him in hateful waves. Each pulse that followed the blast deepened a feeling of sickness in their bowels. They all reeled with a sense of vertigo, feeling unable to reach the sorcerer.

He stood behind the altar, arms wide open, his head cocked back to the crumbling roof, like a dark messiah channeling divine wrath through his entire body. The vision of the cloud of screaming souls dissipated, but one thing was clear to everybody present.

Unlike the Shadow and Shades, Michael’s power was all too real.

The pulses from his cloud of death waned and the sinuous vision dissolved.

In its wake, the Shadow and Shades were all gone.

On the altar before Michael, Parker stirred. A pained moan escaped her parched throat. Uncrossing her arms, she pawed at her belly, where blood still soaked the fabric, yet skin no longer yielded to pressure in form of an open wound.

Healed again. By grace of Michael’s dark sorceries.

She sat up and let her legs dangle off the side of the altar, her back turned to Michael. Her head bobbed up and down, eyelids more closed than open, speaking to volumes of delirium, reminiscent of someone who had just woken up from a long coma in a hospital.

Karma groaned on the floor where she reeled, crawling towards the altar with painful slowness, her face twisted and cringing with agony from the blast, and a bloodthirst that raged in her, urging her to murder Michael.

All others stood still again, paralyzed with a new fit of indecision, and a deep-rooted fear of the unknown unfolding before them.

“Why?” croaked Agent Parker through her haze.

The embers and tiniest of flames in Michael’s fire cast a long Shadow behind her, looming above them.

The Growls had died down into Whispers, now isolated to Parker’s mind again.

As tender as they ever had been… just as when they had first met.

Because we can open the door, you and I. As I always said, and I will say again: you listen.

You let me in.

Tar-like droplets of dark matter began beading upon the lines of the triangle on the wall behind them, oozing from the cracks between the bricks upon which Michael had painted the symbol in Parker’s blood.

“What if I don’t want what you want,” Parker breathed. The pain subsided as Michael’s magick continued to work, and she recovered from all the blood she had lost. “You are threatening these people’s lives. You are… I don’t even understand what you are or what you really want.”

The necromancer tilted his head. The reflection of embers in his icy blue eyes flashed with curiosity as he blinked, listening intently to Parker’s side of her telephone call with the Whispers.

I want to be whole again. To fill the hole with THE SUBSTANCE your sister from another world deprived me of when we crossed over together.

“What does that… mean?” she answered in question anew. “Explain, and I will consider—”

“Parker! Please,” Wells shouted. His gun lowered by his side. “Do not negotiate with these God-damned Whispers!”

Wrinkles creased his forehead above his furrowed brow, and he stared at her with wet eyes, concerned for his partner’s well-being.

Yes. You listen. You understand. We open this next door, and we reshape reality. We cross the sea of stars. Dive into the dark depths of the ocean of time, where everything folds into the present.

The Whispers spoke to her with infinite tenderness.

But you’ve done me so much harm, she answered the Whispers in her own head. No longer speaking aloud. Becoming one with the Shadow, wrapping her entire being around that parasitic entity in a gentle embrace. You have threatened, and hurt, and endangered myself and others. Time and time again. Why would I help you?

As the fire in her being grew, so did the flames of Michael’s externals fires. A cold wind from the desert let the embers and dry wood flare up again with new flickers. Parker’s Shadow grew behind her, and even Michael’s fear began to grow while he craned his neck to behold the swelling presence, towering over them.

“Naw, fuck this,” Jericho muttered. Then he shouted at them. “I know you got that fucking book, and I’m gonna destroy that stupid fucking book, you stupid fucking assholes!”

He didn’t make a step towards the altar. He didn’t need to. His intent was enough. He was moments away from burning down his entire life to finish the job, to ride into the sunset, with all his connections, and affections scattered in the wind. His friend, Klemens, had wanted that book so badly, but Jericho believed it needed to stop existing. And as a final “fuck you” to all the “mystic psychos” around him, Jericho was hellbent on annihilating the tome in one final blast of his own. He only needed to see it to destroy it.

The Thaum of Thritain, the jade tome from another time or space, it rested on the altar, right behind Parker, between her and Michael. It radiated with unnatural gravity. An opposite pole to the screaming cloud of souls that followed Michael through the ether; the jade tome sucked everything in like a black hole. Everybody sensed its presence, even if they weren’t aware of it.

That unreal presence only intensified, as if it was responding to Jericho’s threat.

“Don’t,” Aria whispered. Firmly. Glaring at Jericho, her voice cracked. “Do not throw your life away.”

Jericho clenched his jaw and spat out a string of incoherent expletives before he settled on a plan B. “Fine, fine. I don’t even need to tap my own mojo. Klem gave me a little something and I’m going to make some good fucking use of it now.”

Look at how they struggle to grasp the gravity of what is about to unfold, the Whispers told Parker. They resist without understanding what they are resisting. We can bridge the future and past. Connect all humanity with a higher enlightenment, and move this world one step closer to a greater evolution. Take my hand, and open the door with me, and we will be whole again. You always wanted to see what lies beyond, right? Beyond the confines of the only reality you knew?

“Right,” Parker breathed. “I do.”

It was true. Not only despair had invited the Whispers and Shadow in.

Earnest curiosity drove her. Had always driven her.

Michael burned with the same intensity. He studied the profile of her face, his eyes glittering with adoration of someone he considered his equal, despite the disparity of their occult power. In a mystic sense, they had become husband and bride.

“Yes,” Michael whispered. Oblivious to their conversation. He sensed it beyond words, he caught the glint in her, that subtle change, shifting from resignation to determination.

Yes, whispered the Whispers. Yes.

“Yes,” Parker repeated. She locked eyes with the homunculus down the aisle. Her doppelganger stood still, and rigid, and she stared back at her, mirroring the same calm resolution. “Promise they will not be harmed, and I promise to open this door with you.”

I PROMISE.

The chapel shuddered again with a quake, causing all people standing to stumble, and more dust rained upon them. The desert wind whistled through all holes again, howling.

“No!” Wells shouted.

He whipped his gun up, held in both hands with the same discipline and drill that had allowed him to shoot Michael in the head. But he knew not what to target.

Wells stared down the iron sights at Parker. But he didn’t have it in him to pull the trigger.

Not after all they had been through on THE HIGHWAY.

THE SUBSTANCE, usurper of THE HIGHWAY, thrummed from beyond the triangle door. Dark matter oozed and dribbled from the triangle of lines drawn in drying blood. The walls wept with the intangible tar. The symbols pulsed with the same pull, the same gravity as the jade tome.

“Yes. It’s time, isn’t it?” Michael asked.

He walked around the altar, interposing himself between Parker and their unwitting crowd of witnesses. Michael walked as if he had never been shot, neither in his side nor his head. And he only stopped once he stood in Wells’ line of fire.

The artificial third eye on his forehead no longer wept blood, having healed entirely.

It is time.

“Parker,” Wells spoke up again, no longer shouting. Tremors shook his voice, but he spoke with sharp clarity. “Where do you see yourself when we close the lid on this case?”

His face flickered like the flames, fighting back the despair and finding it in him to muster a feeble smile.

The homunculus and Parker answered in unison, identical words, sharing the same cadence and pronunciation. A strange chorus.

“Kicking back with some damn fine coffee, cherry pie, and so many chocolate donuts that I might just grow sick of them.”

Parker’s lips curled into the same kind of feeble smile. Wells’ smile widened.

“No, absolutely fuck this, and fuck all of you,” Jericho growled. And like Karma before him, he charged at the altar to stop this ritual.

Michael’s cloud of screaming souls exploded outward again, blasting them back, this time yielding even greater force. Jericho learned the same hard lesson as Karma, the same hard way. Everybody else stumbled backwards several steps, thrashed by the hate-waves.

Jericho wound up on the ground, curled up into a fetal position, mere steps behind Karma, gripping his head as if it was about to explode. The teeming mass of screaming, angry souls were threatening to do exactly that. The paradox of their hatred towards Michael extended to his victims.

“Goodbye,” Parker said.

She swiveled on the altar and hopped off the opposite side. In the same fluid motion, she seized the Thaum of Thritain, scooped Michael’s jackknife up off the floor, and then approached the triangle painted onto on the wall.

As soon as she pressed her hand flat against the center of the surface, feeling the thrum of infinity hidden between all worlds, Wells clicked his tongue and shook his head.

He steadied his aim. He unloaded every bullet in his pistol into Michael. Barry and Aria soon joined in, discharging all three pistols in a blaze. The hail of bullets staggered the dark messiah. Every shot caused a spasm, made him dance, like a puppet being jerked around by countless strings, and spraying the world around him in his blood.

Perhaps he would have recovered even from that, with all his dark magick—

But Karma latched onto his ankle. Just as the others ran out of bullets, she clutched, yanked, and sent Michael hurtling sideways through the world, slamming his temple against the edge of the altar, only to bounce off that and crash into the ground where she crawled onto his back to straddle him.

Her hunting knife gleamed in the dark, raised high above her head.

The jackknife in Parker’s hand gleamed the same way.

Parker cut her own arm. Deep and wide. Letting blood flow onto the jade tome, and then drip from there to the ground. Spattering out in rhythmic, gushing bursts.

Sacrifice. Others readily sacrificed other human beings to power their magick, but Parker knew no other choice. Her honor demanded it.

Self-sacrifice.

A simple act, but an honest one. A powerful one. Its rule rippled backward and forward through the ocean of time, a cosmic law, eternal.

Yes. You are kind. And with you, I know, we will evolve together to be so much more.

So much more.

We are so much closer to being whole again. You complete me. Now… finish this.

Others shouted behind her, but their words all blurred into an unintelligible haze, a slurred soup of syllables which she was readily capable of shutting out.

Parker smiled as the warm fluid escaped her to the rhythm of her own heartbeat, painting the floor beneath her in a bright crimson.

The necromancer would ill have a chance to heal her like this, as Karma sat on his back, and plunged her knife into him, over and over again. Michael would only be able to heal himself.

Karma cackled and smiled as she stabbed Michael for the twentieth time. She could have been faster, even, but she relished it every time she sunk the blade into Michael’s back.

The others, meanwhile rushed to Parker’s side. She reached out to the triangle, ready to seal the ritual with the final act necessary: she and Shadow had become one, possessed the will to complete it, and the sacrifice was rendered.

Inches away from touching bloodied palm against stained sandstone, hands grabbed at her. Pulled her away.

Through the darkness, where her field of vision narrowed while the consciousness escaped her again, she saw their faces, huddled over her. Concerned, fearful, and confused.

And among them, the peaceful mirror of her own, that unsettling doppelganger; the homunculus stared back Agent Parker. A strange mirror. Blue eyes like crushed diamonds, fleeting and memorizing every inch of each other’s countenance. The short crop of red hair to frame the freckled pale face of one another.

Agent of Peace.

Damn it all. The Shadow and Parker thought in unison.

The Whispers caressed her mind. Maybe… you were just too kind.

Jericho’s face was the only one absent from those who rushed to Parker to save her life. Wells’ jacket flew off, and he tore up his shirt to improvise new bandages.

Jericho seized the Thaum of Thritain. He had wrestled it from Parker’s weakening grasp in the shuffle. His knuckles turned white as he gripped the tome in his hands, and the jade covers began to crack.

But the Shadow could no longer do anything to prevent any of this.

One vessel, Parker, was already too weak to finish the ritual; and the people present had dragged her away from the triangle.

The other vessel, Michael, was being dragged down the chapel’s aisle by Karma. She cackled again as she dragged her nemesis away from the group, all the way through the dark doors leading outside. Instead, she teleported through that portal, dragging her most hated foe with her, back into the Heart inside the ranch house; the center of the Way King’s machine, where she would continue to drag him to the next and final door.

To the door to the House of Change from which they had escaped, thanks to Klemens’ self-sacrifice.

Past where Klemens still sat on his brass throne alone, eyes closed, deeply asleep, and oblivious to the chaos of the world around him.

Karma continued dragging the bleeding, broken body of Michael. She stabbed him every now and then for good measure, preventing him from regaining enough strength to break free from her clutches. She spat out strings of expletives to spite both him and the screaming cloud of death he commanded, the angry spirits who hated the women who kept adding to their legion, until she booted Michael’s body through the door into its infinite corridor, her final act of disrespect towards the necromancer.

“Maybe you’ll come back out as something other than a flaming piece of shit,” she spat. She cackled by the end.

Michael raised a helpless hand, covered in his own blood, but Karma kicked the door shut between them, banishing him into the House of Change.

And Jericho, well, he indeed no longer needed to burn his life away with magick to destroy the Thaum.

We were too kind, Parker thought.

The Whispers answered her. No. To be whole again, we need kindness, too. You were the right choice all along. A shame we failed, so close to the end.

That kindness was mirrored in the mess of hasty hands, all scrambling to offer Parker first aid, to stop her intense bleeding, and prop her up.

Wells held her head against his chest and told her to stay awake, and stay with him, but everything sounded like she was underwater; a million miles away. They even looked like they were peering down on her through the shimmering veil of the ocean’s surface. Wells, Aria, and Barry all stared into her face, their expressions ranging from panic over dread to concern.

The face of the homunculus vanished from that group, appearing next to Jericho with the calm of a ghost. The flames of Michael’s flickered, and all shadows returned to normal.

Natural.

“Are you sure you want to destroy it? You nor anybody else will be able to use it again to open these doors,” the homunculus told Jericho.

He paused. Some part of him still hesitated from doing the deed.

Maybe Aria could still use the book and travel through time to prevent what was slowly killing her. Or maybe time travel would only invite greater disaster. They would find another way.

Jericho clicked his tongue.

“Nah, fuck all of this. This one’s for Klem,” he growled.

His nape bulged where the Way King’s clockwork spider had drilled into his flesh and latched onto his spine, and the inhuman strength it infused him with exploded outward with all his fury, an unnatural physical might once more unleashed.

The alien tome crumbled in his crushing grasp. The covers cracked apart into chunks. His fingers curled and ripped the ancient parchment to shreds, like a strongman tearing apart a phonebook, and then ripping it up into tiny pieces. He scattered the relic’s remains into the nearest of Michael’s fires, feeding the flames.

They flared up ever so gently, lapping at and then devouring the old parchment, all soon to be ashes joining the dust of the desert.

This is not the end. There is another way, said the Whispers.

But the Shadow was no more. Spread too thin, latched onto the dying Heart of the Highway, and the otherworld of the House of Change, its grasp on this world finally faded. The loci of power it had piggybacked on all waned, and fell apart, devoured by the sands of time. Gone was one vessel, crawling, bloodied, and helpless; lost in the House of Change. Asleep, another, a mind forever obliterated, liberated from his memories.

Only one vessel remained, though her grip on life slowly faded like the rest.

The oceans swallowed the Shadow. The Whispers remained.

Agent Parker’s consciousness faded to black.

[pattytacuri]

poetry: the highway

I wrote this poem in January of 2023. me right before I wrote this poem Consorting with this newfound empowerment is overwhelming and lonely at timesI finally understand that never again do I have to depend on a man for anything-and I breathe a huge sigh of reliefI no longer use them to determine my worth based on whether any of thempay attention to meI no longer use them for validation and no…

[dragons-hoard-reviews]

From beyond the horde...

Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man

This 1951 collection of short stories from the mind of Ray Bradbury is a wonderful introduction to science fiction reading that gives bite-size (at least five pages and at most seventeen pages in the Bantam Books Grand Master Edition that I was reading) stories that are perfect for those that want a bit of a dark foray into some classic literature.

When a man is hiking a walking tour of Wisconsin he comes across a man with a woolen shirt buttoned all the way up to his neck and all the way down to his wrists. When the woolen man takes off his shirt, the hiker sees mystical arcane tattoos that seem to show vivid scenes from the future. This collection follows what the man sees that night while he gazes at the tattoos all over the titular Illustrated Man's body.

Some personal highlights for me were the short stories "Kaleidoscope," which is a very interesting look at death and what the idea of impending death does to the human psyche; "The Highway," a short look at war and how it can affect all of us; and "The Last Night of the World," which is once again a sweet look at what happens when we all know the world is coming to an end that very night.

While this is not the darkest book in the world there are some looks into psychology, war, violence, and other topics that might be upsetting if you know these things upset you on a regular basis. There is also one use of a slur against Japanese people used in the last quarter of the book in the short story "Zero Hour."

All in all, this is an amazing collection of science-fiction short stories that leaves me wanting more of Ray Bradbury's writing that has certainly earned its spot on my bookshelf for many reads to come.

[fernsnailz]

i think we all need to complain about LED headlights more. please can we all complain about them more. night driving is nearly impossible for me to do now without having to white knuckle my way through a thousand evil suns. every time i see those headlights in my mirrors i take 2d6 radiant damage. i want to destroy every single LED headlight under my feet like they’re goombas

[zegalba]

I-80 highway through Wyoming. nicknamed The Sisters, for the three sets of hills that create an optical illusion of the road rising into the sky

[kyatra]

seeing a black and white cow is always so damn awesome it’s like Hey i know that guy.from my kindergarten abcs

[24hrsaturday]

THE AMERICAN WAY.

Greetings-

[bonefarm]

Deer season is upon us.

1.) Wear your seatbelt.

2.) If your choice is swerve at high speed or hit the deer you plow Bambis mom like you’re an IT specialist with a secret Twitter account and it’s anthrocon weekend.

Deer are softer than trees. Deer are softer than rolling your car 8 times.

[indiebandsgirl25]

When you actually spot a whole family of geese crossing the highway.

[huariqueje]

Did you check the weather? - Jeremy Miranda , 2024.

American , b. 1980 -

Acrylic on board , 7 x 8 in.

[spookyspaghettisundae]

And Then It Was Gone

Steam rose from the van’s mangled hood. Metal hinges squeaked where one of its broken back doors swayed in the desert wind. The airbrushed painting of a wizard, holding the world in his hands, had been defaced in the chase, both by one vehicle ramming into the other, and skidding through the sand.

Its final crash still rang in everybody’s ears. An afterimage of sparks flying lingered. The whine of metal bending under pressure. The violent thrash every time the limousine and the van had collided. The thundering of the van gone flying, tumbling off the road, and skidding through the dirt, now lodged between cracked cacti, sleeping on its side.

Gunshots still echoed in the vicinity. No rhythm to these small thunderclaps—interrupted by shooters and shootees repeatedly seeking cover behind boulders. The limo driver cowered behind his white chariot, blubbering with terror.

The battle wasn’t over yet.

Yet two of the people involved stood as still as statues. One, having left a trail of blood in the sand behind him: FBI Director Anthony Collins. Dragging his leg, he failed to get back up after crawling out of the crashed van. He stared into the barrel of an FBI service pistol before seeking its owner’s hardened gaze.

Special Agent Derek Wells gripped that pistol, trained at Collins, dead center of his face. Even several steps away, Wells towered over his superior, mentor, and former friend.

They both cast long shadows. The director’s eye glittered with despair. The other man’s eye sparkled with fury, focusing down the sights of his service pistol.

And every time another gunshot clapped behind them, Wells never even so much as twitched, but his index finger curled more and more around that trigger.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Collins finally spoke.

BANG.

Aria had shot at someone, elsewhere.

Wells stayed calm. His discipline overrode the emotions that gripped him.

“Then shut up unless I’m asking questions,” Wells said.

Collins displayed his open palms in surrender—one wept blood from a thin line, the other was smeared with blooms of bright crimson.

“Derek, I swear, I—”

“What did I just say?”

Wells clenched his jaw. Unlike Collins, he hadn’t budged an inch.

BANG.

Barry ducked behind his boulder as the mystery shooters retaliated at him.

The gunshot had made Collins flinch. He gasped for air like a fish on land but refrained from uttering anything. Wells, on the other hand, had found back to his old self—the ranger in active duty, abroad.

Desert sand, the sound of shooting, and the paralyzing uncertainty that straddled the line between life and death. Mirrors, one and all.

“How long have you been involved with Weidmann?” Wells finally asked.

Collins’ hands trembled and twitched upon every ensuing gunshot nearby. BANG. BANG.

Aria and Barry had entered a stalemate with the two remaining shooters. The bullets exchanged kept hitting rock, chipping away at boulders. A stray bullet THWUNKED as it hit the steaming van, offering dubious cover to both Wells and Collins.

“Two years,” Collins finally answered.

“How?” Wells asked.

BANG, BANG.

“How, what?” Collins asked, with mounting despair cracking his voice.

“How did you get involved with Weidmann and his cronies?” Derek shot back with anger.

“That’s… Derek, th-that’s a long story, we’re not in a—”

Derek Wells interrupted him with a growl and a sneer. “Do not call me Derek. Now’s the wrong time, Anthony.”

BANBANBANG—

Despite the sudden staccato of shots fired, Collins regained some composure, contrasting the awkwardly bent thin frame of his glasses on his nose, and one of the cracked lenses obscuring his vision.

“You’re probably hoping I say I was blackmailed or forced. I wasn’t. I started working with Weidmann because of… a fluke. I did the blackmailing to get to… to know. It’s so, so hard to stop scratching at the seams once you see what’s underneath. Don’t you feel it now, too? Now that you’ve seen? Look at you, holding me at gunpoint while there are still threats to neutralize around you… just to learn the truth.”

All the while of Collins rambling, Wells was grinding his teeth. Then he offered a reply, enunciating every syllable with the sharpness of a knife.

“I wish we never met.”

Collins no longer trembled. The words plunged deep into his heart like a knife. Their bond of friendship had always been an earnest and mutual sentiment. Now, it crumbled to dust under the crushing weight of revelations.

“I’m sorry,” Collins croaked out like words he hadn’t spoken in a very long time. Softening. “You… you must be wondering why I sent you to Chicago and why—”

“I don’t give two shits about that. Why did you turn on Weidmann, why ambush us out here like this? What’s your endgame?”

“I didn’t!”

BANG! BANG!

The shots punctuated Collins’ shift in demeanor, a face twisting from despair into anger. And a body had hit the sand in the desert outside of Las Vegas, accompanied by a soft thud in the distance. Judging by the audible distance, Wells wagered it had been one of the shooters, and neither Aria nor Barry.

“I didn’t,” Collins repeated more softly. “I didn’t turn on Weidmann. This—I think this was Michael’s doing.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Wells fired back. Through gritted teeth, he growled, “Don’t lie to me anymore.”

Collins shook his head and cemented what he said. “This was Michael, I swear. I can’t prove it now, but I know it. I always knew he was going to turn on Weidmann, but who was I to do anything about it? And I didn’t think… I didn’t think he’d go this far. I was the newbie in this cabal.”

With a despair of his own admixing in his gut—for fear of knowing that Parker was now alone with Michael—Wells smirked. Defiant, angry, and afraid.

“Oh, so, with these occult clowns, you are walking the mile in my shoes.”

The wind howled as they fell silent. Even the shooting ceased. Sweat beaded on their foreheads, baking instantly in blazing sunlight.

BANG.

“I know it’s going to be hard to believe, but,” Collins spoke softly. “Weidmann is a good man, even if he is surrounded by dangerous individuals.”

“Forgive me if I don’t take your word for it.”

Collins shook his head. “You know me, I—”

Wells’ expression softened. His jaw unclenched.

“I thought I know you. Turns out I don’t know jack shit.”

And the finger around the trigger loosened.

He just wanted an excuse. Part of him wanted to see Collins whip out a gun, and give him an excuse to pull the trigger. Any excuse to execute him on the spot, and drown everything in the tried and true American tradition of excessive amounts of alcohol.

All answers be damned.

Then why don’t you finish things?

A Whisper.

It surfaced in Wells’ mind. At first, he thought it was a thought of his own. Until more Whispers followed. They mimicked his voice, but something about them—

It was nothing like anything he would think.

If you wanna save Parker’s life, you’re gonna need to start batting in the big leagues, Derek. There’s no more turning back.

Whispers that spoke to him.

Don’t turn your back on this prick. Finish him before he can help spread any more misery. That’s how you justify each pull of the trigger, right?

“What’ll it be?” Collins suddenly asked with more confidence. His eyes narrowed. Glittering, scanning, studying Wells’ cracking demeanor.

I know it’s hard to override your sentiments. We’re all just human after all.

BANG.

Wells’ finger almost tightened around the trigger again.

Almost.

Another body had dropped in the desert.

But I can take over for a little bit. You will, of course, share the responsibility after the fact. But I can see the many ways you’re hurting, and believe me, brother, that hurt is holding you back.

You weren’t always like this, right?

So… vulnerable.

“Fuck,” Wells hissed out loud.

He knew of the Whispers from what Parker had told him. And hearing them himself for the first time had flooded his body with a new kind of fear. A sense of vertigo threatened to dizzy him.

Collins nodded. He mistakenly believed he was getting through to Wells—oblivious to the Whispers in his former friend’s mind.

I’ll help wrap things up here, Derek. All you need to do is…

LET ME IN.

Somewhere off a dirt road, far from THE HIGHWAY, Wells’ yelling pierced the silence of the desert.

“If I could forget everything I witnessed and turn back, I would! If I could forget who I am, I would!”

I can help you out with that.

Collins stammered, “D-Derek—

“Get out of my head!”

Confusion wracked Collins’ face now, barely comprehending how Wells was no longer speaking to him.

“Darling, are you okay?” asked Aria.

She and Barry both approached behind him. The cadence of her steps suggested she was stumbling here and there because of high heels unsuited for the terrain, and also owed to all the booze she had imbibed on the road. Barry trailed a few steps behind her, keeping his weapon raised, and his head on a swivel for any other potential attackers.

Wells refused to peel his gaze away from his mark, even with the Whispers invading his thoughts. Collins only stared at Wells’ wide-eyed.

“No,” Wells blurted out. “No, I’m not. I’m hearing some voice in my head. And I repeat. Get. Out.”

The wind howled as everybody around Wells stood in stunned silence.

Then the Whispers replied.

Tsk. I had high hopes in you, soldier.

As Wells responded to the Whispers, his voice cracked midway through the sentence, “I just want the world to return back to normal, to where it was before all this shit.”

“That’s impossible,” Collins said.

The FBI director’s expression twisted again, now to a pained one.

One of genuine sympathy.

Aria said, “You never turn back on the roads we travel. Even if you try to forget the roads, the roads remember you.”

She rested a slender hand on Wells’ shoulder. Though she partially used it help herself stand straight as she wobbled, it even shed an ounce of comfort to the FBI agent. The sense of vertigo subsided, the dizziness washed away while tension flushed from his body, and he rolled his shoulders, almost throwing Aria off; and with the motion, tears welled in the corners of Wells’ eyes.

Something he hadn’t allowed to happen in a long, long time. Now, he was ready to let them flow. It had been a long time coming.

They blurred the vision of his shadow growing.

The Shadow, growing. The Whispers grew into imposing Growls.

A SHAME TO WASTE MY TIME ON YOU.

Minerals glittered in the body of Shadow like tiny stars—or a multitude of eyes, blinking, winking, and sadistic. Sharp edges of rocks, and slices in the sand formed mouths, some vertical some horizontal, all opening, and smiling, and sinister.

They all saw it.

Not just Wells.

All the people present witnessed its manifestation.

The Shadow was taking shape. Solidifying. It grew to horrendous size, as large as a car, then a truck, until its monstrous tendrils shaped into arms, and sharp fingers, kissing the gravel and dust of the dirt road they had crashed from.

All four people looked upon the Shadow in horror.

GUESS IT’S DOWN TO MY TWO STAR PLAYERS IN THIS GAME. BYE-BYE, DUCKY.

Barry—a grown man and trained bodyguard who had just dropped several bodies with trained shots, and a discipline to match Agent Wells’—trembled. He aimed his gun at the growing Shadow but his meaty hands gripping the tiny pistol trembled.

They all heard the Shadow now.

And then it was gone.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[lovinglonerhybrid]

Optimus prime becomes a western highway ghost story.

If you’re driving in the dead of night along those long stretches of highway in the western US you might just encounter a lone big rig who will drive along side you for miles. The truckers will blow their horns as they recognize his custom paint and trailer the truck will slow its steady speed to match them. Those truckers with cbs say that there’s someone to talk to in there but he seams sad and lonely. No one ever sees him stop. Some say he’s an angel who will lead rescue workers to crashes at the dead of night. Those unfortunate enough to wander the highways at night tell story’s of the truck that stopped and got them somewhere warm and safe for the night only to wake in the morning with large sums of money in there pockets and a small note apologizing for the low sum. Children and parents smile as he always honks his horn when asked. The people of the western highways know when you see big red you’re always taken care of no matter who you are or where you came from.

[marlowe1-blog]

"The Swimmer" (The Stories of John Cheever)

This has really nothing to do with that Mad Men episode

I was actually looking forward to re-reading this story (as I let my ADHD take over and I've forgotten the stories that I've read) and it is definitely worth a re-read. It's not as brilliant as it seemed in the first reading, but it's still pretty great.

It's also the only story that can be considered science fiction but then again I'm sure that there are critics who state that it was a symbolic story or a story about memory going bad. But the time travel is happening in the story.

Ned Merrill is having a great time in summer. The first paragraph says that it was one of those Sundays where everyone says "I had too much to drink last night" so we are smack in the middle of the Cheever milieu, the suburban oasis where the best thing in the world is to drink and hang out and be merry in the lingering days of Sunday.

Of course, this is never going to be the case in a Cheever story, especially in the Cheever stories from the latter part of his career when drinking was taking a toll but he had yet to quit. Drinking sounds so fun in theory but in reality it's a short term high that makes you sick and miserable. Rarely do Cheever protagonists get to drink and enjoy their alcoholism without consequences.

Our swimmer Ned Merrill decides to "swim across the neighborhood", meaning that he is going to go from house to house and go swimming in the pools. He's in the prime of life. His neighbors are his friends and they are more than happy to let him into the back to swim. Some pools are abandoned. Some parties are giving away free drinks and some clouds are gathering.

But then it takes a turn. I'm not sure if it takes a turn on the highway where he is stuck trying to cross looking pathetic. He's half naked in swim trunks and everyone is honking at him and throwing things at him. Even when he gets half through he's still waiting for enough cars to pass so he can get across (I once crossed a highway like this - it's fucking terrifying. It's even more terrifying to contemplate)

And then when he gets to the last houses, the world has changed. He's changed. They've changed. Neighbors that were always friendly to him are suddenly hostile and gossiping about him. Others are telling him that they are sorry for his loss. In one gossip, the couple talks about how he came over begging for money but he doesn't know that they are talking about him.

He's too weak to even get out of the pool by himself. Other places are closed off. In one case, the couple doesn't even have alcohol because his friend had abdominal surgery three years back. He doesn't remember that surgery. He doesn't remember anything.

Time has moved past him. He's gotten older and sadder. His life has gotten older and sadder. His mistress tells him that she refuses to give him money, but he doesn't even know that he ever asked her for money. By the end, he comes to an empty house that he once lived in. Everyone and everything is gone.

There are so many themes to this one. Time passes by and your sins catch up with you. Maybe Ned only remembers a summer day where life was beautiful and everything was perfect when he comes back to the places where he once lived. Maybe these are many days coming in and poor Ned has Alzheimer's. But there are several places where they remember him and act as if he still lives there.

But I prefer to think of it as a time travel story where every swimming pool is a new time travel device. His life is going forward and he doesn't know it. Ok, now I just made it sound like the 1960s sad version of that Adam Sandler movie where he has a fast forward device.

Oh yeah, one bit from the headline. There was a Mad Men episode where Don Draper is swimming throughout. Either the writer or the comment of the episode (in AVClub when it was good) said that it reminded them of this story. Now that I've read this story, there's really nothing in that episode that should remind anyone of the story. But it did put this story on my radar which meant that I finally read John Cheever. So I don't know what to think about that dumb comparison. It's dumb, but I'm grateful to it.