Chapter 11 - Sanctuary's End
I came back a few days later on Easter Sunday’s end. Much of the pageantry by the coming of spring was lost to the quarantine of the virus still wreaking havoc in the world, but at the very least I boiled some eggs and ate them with a bit of borsch dissolved from powder. That was the weakness of tradition rooted in me long ago, and it proved to be a difficult memory to shake. As long as the traditions did not offend or hurt anyone, save for some unborn chickens, I was ok with giving it the standard effort.
I arrived at the room downstairs from the library to find it empty. In a state of strange melancholy I gravitated to the invisible laptop on the table now moved into the corner. Lila had to have done that for some reason, but the four chairs still fit at the available sides with two to each side. There was no point in keeping the laptop hidden anymore, so I made it visible again with a motion. What did I say last time to hear her voice again?
“I…” I said, but trailed off. What was the point? She was no longer around. The recordings could only hurt me now. There was only Lila here now, and some strange black-hole person who already absorbed my knowledge.
“Hey, Jack,” a voice chimed in, but there was nobody on the screen. It stunned my heart so much that I had to look around the empty room. “I think you reached the point in your journey that this bit is intended for. It’s that hesitant ‘I…’ that gives it away. I’m not much different in terms of controlling my divided mind, but I’ll do my best with it. If you still have this laptop, you’ll get this message eventually. I know it might be lost to the Infinity Void otherwise, so it’s ok. If you DO get this message, know that even though we’re leaving on bad terms, pretty much sneaking out of your life, we will always be with you in presence. Doesn’t matter what happens to you after it all shakes out. Just promise me one thing. Don’t create another someone like me or Finn.
“No matter how you look at it, the journey you’re setting yourself up for leads to only more pain. You need real help, in your world, no matter what it will cost you. I know what I was for you, and I know what Finn was. You wanted to discuss yourself in a better setting, away from society that tends to centralize around an idea of average. In a way, you were looking for someone to trust beyond your world, and it’s easier to trust someone who lives in your head, or someone who is created in a space that defies previous rules of your making. I sure hope this message reaches you eventually. You need to trust someone else now.”
I sat back in the air as one of the chairs teleported itself to slide in underneath just in time. I wondered how Rebecca would feel about the situation I was in now. I was no longer connected to the void in the untethered space. Lila was not a character of my own creation, and neither was this Jacob who watched from the darkness of unmade space. I was only there because she wanted to leave me those messages, explanations of why she had to be free of me. This one stupid room, the spawn chamber of before, created this whole new idea that expanded with Lila.
I wanted to know more about her kind. What was her world called? I knew very little about her basic information, and here I was feeding her a satchel full of my writing seeds. Some were already sprouts, and others were saplings I tended to with the intention of publishing, but none were the tree that could support a life. None of them were a root system with connections to the mainstream of water supply, the solid background of a sturdy trunk, and the branches of connections to other sources. This was the tree, but one planted in secret, and kept hidden from the fresh air and kindness of a real sun. This tree was a test tube baby, grown under greenhouse conditions.
The introspection of it all settled me back in my chair, until the warmth of two small hands shook me back in surprise.
“Guess who?” Lila asked.
“Lila, obviously,” I replied. The hands left my eyes to find an adult Lila stood in front of me in jeans and a stylish blouse. I turned around expecting someone else, but Lila was there also, in child form. “What the hell? Which one are you, Jacob?”
“He’s the kid,” adult Lila said. “Pretty cool, huh? I shared some memories with him, too. He’s got some ability to transform if he has memories. That’s nothing special seeing as this is just a mental realm for me. I can do that with ease.” She spun in place to change into an adult man, bulging with muscles underneath a shirt barely containing them. With another spin, she was a short old lady with a cool hat and a long feather that reminded me of Atroano Zisi quill which absorbed certain ink from one of the creatures enshrined in waxy blocks and summoning spells in the back of the book of command.
That series focused too much on the atrocious things that the old man did to the Zisi family and the last surviving member who continued his wielding of terrible behavior until he was just as old. The concept of the words of the nine was never fully explained, but the story deserved a whole rewrite one day. I had to go back to the text to find whether I gave her the short story I wrote in nine parts. She never did mention the story after I came back.
“Did you read that one story I threw out before leaving a week or so ago?” I asked. “It had to do with Atroano Zisi and this old man who used the words of command for bad things.”
“Yeah, I read it,” Lila said, then spun in place to become her adult form. “It was pretty gruesome and dark. It wasn’t like Ledeon’s sexual exploration of a life hidden away from him. That old man just wanted to hurt and kill people, while using women in the most awful ways possible. So if Ano saw all that and was a slave to the old man, why did he turn out that way in the end as well? I wanted to cheer for him after he escaped from the old guy, but he was broken by that point, wasn’t he? He had too much of the old man in him to be just a bright-eyed boy trying to turn his life around. It was a sad story, but the harshest part was the good you left out.”
“The good I left out?” I asked. “I wrote what I got from the void. He had a bit of a patent on the structure, in case you haven’t read the whole thing. I was just along for the ride. Oops, I have 4% left on my device. I have to go.”
“I can’t say I blame you for not being able to see it all unfold from start to finish,” Lila said. “I saw the old man’s past life. He had to endure so much, and always kept positive. The whole Zisi family thing was not his fault, but after a man loses so much, who can expect him to act the same. He did to Ano exactly as was done to him, but the cycle didn’t stop there. Even though he burned the book and released all the contained creatures of different realms, a previous pupil of the old man continued his tradition of the words of command.”
“Shit,” I said. “I didn’t know that. I thought Ano beat the cruelty with his death. Was there anything after his death? Did the other pupil go looking for other words of the nine? Was there some sort of battle?”
“The array of books awaits you when you are able to read them from the shelves,” Jacob said.
“Don’t expect them to be as wild and sexual as the parts you selected for yourself,” Lila said. “The initial read was really off-putting. It hurt me almost as much as Tiarto’s death. Why is it that you have to write so much sadness into your work?”
“I don’t write sadness into my work,” I explained. “I just find stories that have it already. I’m on 3%, I really have to go. I write happy stories, too. It’s just, when you feel like dying, it feels the most evil kind of happy to see someone else die. That’s mostly a beast mentality, but if he’s happy, it makes my life easier.” Lila shrunk down to her kid self, as Jacob changed into Finn again. She came up and hugged me in the chair.
“Don’t hurt Jack, ok?” She asked. “Ok, beasty?”
“I’m helping him,” he spoke through my mouth in response. “You can’t just hug us and have me subdued, stupid girl. Now hike up your skirt and go woman again so I can fuck your weird ass spine hole.” I took control back and shook my head.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “2%. I have to go. He’s not that easy to deal with, and I don’t want you to be an adult around him either. We’re not done talking about my writing, but the battery is dying, so I have to go.” I waved goodbye, and dropped a short story on the way out. Maybe it had a better future than the ones I’ve accessed by way of Infinity Void before. Maybe that was why I had to be in this untethered space now, the raw material for a story that could be much better than what I’ve made before.
break
I was back the next night, having charged the device to full while sleeping, but was reluctant to go in. Lila was being too sure of herself around me, not knowing the full influence of beast intentions. I tried to think back to times when he behaved tame, and it always had something to do with Crimmy, or Redbecca, a split personality created on the basis of overwhelming craving for dominance and eliciting pleasure. Rebecca did that for me, because I could not just face the part of my own mind that wanted to be wild. That was the past, but Lila would be with me over ten years. I was glad she could not just leave… me…
I entered the room under the library to find it empty. The more striking realization was that the spiral staircase was missing from the corner opposite the table. There was also no hole in the ceiling to signify there was ever another structure connected there. I wasted no time by making the walls transparent only to be met with darkness all around me. Could it have happened again? The library was not my creation after all. Lila made it, filling it with stories of my mind, expanding them beyond what I could focus on them. I could not believe that.
I formed in the room, turned the walls back to wood, and activated the bracelet I hoped Lila was still wearing. A bar of light appeared on the compass circle of the ceiling, and swung around to focus on the South West direction. I knew my creationism did not work like Lila’s. I could not pull raw elements from the darkness into stories they would become. I could only create things with my mind that could exist in the untethered space. I reached to create a tether inside the room, a sort of umbilical cord to the only piece obeying any type of physics in the vicinity of these surroundings.
The beauty of my things was that they did not need to pay attention to any reality. The tether would be infinite in length, while providing me with a way to teleport back into the room at any time. I had no idea why I did not think to create invisible and immaterial tendrils of mine in this space before. In that way, the space I had no control over would be infested with my creationism. For the time being, I ventured out into that void on an umbilical in search of Lila with a spotlight on my forehead, but did not get very far. She was floating out in the middle of nowhere, curled up in a ball. Jacob was nowhere to be found.
“Lila?” I asked, but the bundle I knew to be her did not budge. “Why are you out here? What happened to the library? Where’s Jacob?” I neared the person suspended in the air in a space that had no air. I brought air with me to breathe, though I had no need of it. It would feel weird to exist there without breathing.
“How did you know where I was?” She asked. “I want to be alone. Leave me alone, Jack.” I moved closer in confusion. She felt hurt, but how could she be hurt in a world that only contained her mind. It was just what I was afraid of. Though she could not hurt physically, my stories sometimes hurt mentally. That was the reason I chose them out of the many positive ones I stayed away from. If I were to only gravitate toward something that made me feel happy to write, I could likely publish them, but I wanted to hurt.
“I kinda put a tracker on you,” I said. “But why are you out here? Did something happen with Jacob? It really scared me to find the library gone. There was a lot of writing in it that you put so much effort into.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s my fault. Jacob is… he’s gone.”
“Gone, as in somewhere out here like you?”
“Gone as in dead,” Lila said. She uncurled floating in untethered space with her head bowed. I rushed to her side to hug her in the endless.
“I’m sure it wasn’t your fault,” I replied. “He was a conundrum anyways. Just tell me what happened.” I reeled the umbilical back into the room. Lila sat on the couch, hands together on her lap with her head in mourning. She barely knew him. I barely knew him. In truth we knew nothing about him, since he was emptiness before I connected with him by FRisk.
“I got the story you left,” she started. “About Deresanzi Mills. It was nice to hear about the one of millions of people she used for her purposes, but she was a tremendous half-lifer. I expanded her exploits into three books, one before the guy of your story, and one following it. She was a troubled person, but aloof to the point of happiness. I wanted to be like that.
“So when Jacob wanted to read the books from the shelves I wrote thanks to you, I decided to recreate the scenes to watch them like movies. We had fun with one story, so then we moved onto some other ones, namely the Summer Snow. Do you know how at the end of the story they meet again in the Infinity Void? I created that here, but the scene didn’t go away. I was confused by it, until two giant hands of darkness reached from the scene, FROM THE SCENE I CREATED! One grabbed onto Jacob, while the other splintered the library into nothing.
“Before I knew what was going on, Jacob was… He vanished into nothing in that grip. I tried to close the scene, tried to deconstruct the hands, or the opening that got them here, but was helpless to stop the destruction. While they destroyed everything, those arms simply passed through your room as if it didn’t exist to them, as if that wasn’t a structure. I felt so alone, and knew you would hate me for it. I’m sorry, Jack.” I walked over and sat down, nudging her shoulder with mine.
“It’s ok, kiddo,” I said. “I don’t hate you. I don’t even blame you. You tangled with the forces of the Infinity Void and lived to tell about it. That was pretty brave. It’s a bummer about Jacob, but we didn’t know much about him anyways, and if he did copy knowledge from my head, I bet he got the bad stuff too. I’m glad he didn’t have to face the demons like beast because of me. It’s also good that you weren’t caught up in that destruction.”
“But it was my fault,” she argued. I put an arm around her and rested my head on hers.
“Not really,” I said. “You wanted to show Jacob how the stories played out. I can’t blame you for it. It’s really on me since I gave you a story that ripped the connection to Infinity Void open like that. Did the hands eventually go away?”
“Yeah, once the whole library was scattered to various pieces,” she said. “Everything floated out into the darkness.”
“I wonder if that means that the stories will end up somewhere they aren’t supposed to be,” I said, thinking up a story that was accidentally assembled with even one part of the Garavand story or Tiarto. It would certainly shake things up in the void, but maybe that wasn’t how it worked going from the untethered space to the Infinity Void. I had no idea how it functioned (now I do, at editing).
“I think it’s best to keep to the room for now,” I said. “We can make it livable without needing the large space. Here, I’ll show you.” I took out a paintbrush and created some shapes on each wooden wall as decoration. To each of the drawings I assigned a handle, and by the laws of one old story that many enjoyed reading for the longest time, the handles pulled the objects to life. The first I pulled from the flat drawing was a miniature bathroom complete with a drain, bathtub, shower head, sink, mirror, and a toilet. It just fit in half of the room, crowding the couch and table in the small room.
“How about we change size?” Lila asked, with a brilliant idea. I shrank both of us to only 60% and altered the drawing with a motion. Now the room felt bigger, but in reality it was still the same size, as that was something I could not alter.
“Now we just have to commit to being two thirds the size of ourselves all the time, but it should be fine,” I said. “You know, I came in hesitant about talking to you after the whole thing with sad stories hurting you. It was based on the fact that if you can get hurt mentally in here, then interacting with beast is the last thing I want you to do.”
“Oh, he just wants to express himself physically, Jack,” Lila said. “It’s hard to keep that bottled up and stay away from people. You need to interact with people in your reality more, on a physical level. Hug people, shake their hands, kiss people, and make them feel good. You lack a very natural thing, because you think it’s difficult to get. I get the feeling that him acting out in anger is actually based around the lack of physical interaction.”
“Physical interaction would be hard right now,” I said. “There is a virus going on that’s killing some people. Everyone’s told to keep away.”
“Set the stage then,” she said. “Reach out to someone, get to know them through video and text until you are able to meet in person. That’s how people do it.”
“Not for physical connections,” I countered. “For that interaction you have friends, or you go to some places where single people go.”
“Friends can become lovers, too,” she said. “Make some friends.”
“I don’t think I deserve to have any. I don’t trust people to get close enough.”
“And what you really want to say is…”
“I’m afraid that I’ll disappoint them like I’ve disappointed myself countless times,” I said. “The whole process is stressful. Life isn’t that simple in my world. I crumble under the weight of pressure.”
“So find someone who can let the pressure out,” Lila said.
“This is going around in circles,” I said. “I should go. It’s late. I’m tired and this conversation is circling the drain.”
“Sorry you feel that way,” she said. “I was just trying to help, but I don’t think you trust me either. It’s not like I was a person inside your head, or a girl you created in your own space. I’m just a random person from some different world that somehow reaches you in untethered space where this stupid wooden box somehow both exists and does not exist. I honestly don’t know what you come here for, Jack. Do you just want to circle your problems from an outside standpoint forever and never change?”
“I have to go,” I said. I stood and turned to meet her eyes again. She felt disappointed in me for some reason. This was stupid. I did not owe her anything. I think I needed a break from her for now. I vanished from the untethered space knowing full well I might not be back for a while. At least she had all the things she could need in that tinderbox in the middle of nowhere.
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