He answered the door in a housecoat and holding a cup of coffee, seemingly unfazed by the fact that he was covered in spiders.
“Goddamnit Nick, put on some clothes.”
I pushed by him and started digging through the piles of old magazines and newspapers scattered around the house, looking for the notes I had made several months ago. I could of sworn I used that ragged scrap of paper as a bookmark. It was around here somewhere. Nick trailed after me, unconcerned, still sipping his coffee. The spiders swarming across his bare chest, neck, and face were relatively calm today, which was a nice change. They tended to get defensive around anyone except Nick, and they’d crawl across any surface he came in contact with. If the surface was another person, well… spiders are not sympathetic to the personal struggles and inner life of others.
They didn’t give a shit that you might want to stay alive, for one.
I tripped over a boot and petulantly kicked it back toward the ever-present pile of clothing in one corner. Nick watched me with interest, still drinking his coffee. His housecoat was tattered and covered in unidentifiable stains, swirling lazily around his bony knees and skinny chest as he drifted along behind me. If he had an ounce of fat on him anywhere, then I was the Queen of England, and, come to think of it, England didn’t even have a Queen anymore.
“I left a note in here- it would be on a ripped piece of paper, about yay-big-” I gestured with my hands “-had some diagrams, a ritual circle on it. The whole bit. Have you seen it?” I asked Nick in frustration. He considered for a moment.
NO.
“Are you sure? It’s important. You haven’t picked up since Friday?” He took a sip of his coffee and reconsidered. Talking to Nick was a lot like talking to one of those new AIs. Not that he ever said anything stupid or nonsensical, but there was a pause between any question you asked and his answer that was just long enough for you to get distracted. The dark void where his eyes should have been swirled slowly, despite being entirely, comprehensively, black. Don’t ask me how that worked.
NO. I DO NOT CLEAN.
“Yes, I know you don’t fuckin’ clean. I’m aware that you don’t clean. I’ve lived with you for six years. We’ve established that you don’t clean. But you know where it is.”
YES.
“Just this once, as a favor to me, could you just tell me where it is? No games, no consequences?”
Nick took a slow sip of his coffee, looked into his cup for a moment, then stared out one of the living room windows. Or, he would have been, if the window weren’t covered with black spray paint. With his eyes though, who knew. Finally, he smiled gently.
NO.
“God damn it Nick! For once in your miserable existence, do something that benefits other people, instead of sitting around like a fuckin’-”
YES.
“What?” I was caught entirely off guard as he spoke again.
YES. I WILL HELP.
I was immediately suspicious.
Nick never did anything that benefited anyone else. He had some useful qualities, but altruism wasn’t one of them. His motives were, as my ma would have said- ineffable. In the entire time I had known him, he had only explicitly helped someone when his help would lead to worse outcomes than his normal lack of help. The man… or, more honestly, the entity that wore the face that I thought of as “Nick”, wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.
“Why?” I asked slowly. “Me finding those notes is going to start World War 3 or something, isn’t it? Or is it that I’ll reject your help, and me finding the notes would have stopped something? Or…” I trailed off, scratching my chin. This wasn’t the first time I’d been frozen in indecision while having a conversation with Nick. It was weirdly comforting.
Other people wondered if their actions might have long term consequences, but I got to know my actions had long term consequences. I’d lived with Nick, off and on, for more than half a decade. At first, I was terrified that every interaction between the two of us would lead to some terrible cataclysm. I used to have panic attacks, wondering if passing the cereal at breakfast would accidentally start a genocide. It mostly didn’t bother me any more though, although old habits were hard to break. I got the feeling that genocides were more of a hobby of his than anything else- if he wanted one, he would get one, whether you talked to him or not. There was no way to know whether any particular thing you did would lead to widespread death and destruction tomorrow, a hundred thousand years from now, or at all.
Which, honestly, was about like not living with Nick, when you really thought about it. Everything anyone did had consequences, but mostly no one knew what they were. Living with Nick just meant that sometimes, mostly when it would cause you the most discomfort, he would tell you what those consequences were. Normally, I would have said no deal, but I was in a rush and frustrated.
“Ok, cool. Where is it?”
I WILL TRADE.
“You will trade…” I trailed off. This was genuinely new. Nick never traded, cut deals, or gambled. He just drifted around petting stray cats, drinking coffee, and making normies disconcerted for no clear reason. “What?”
I WILL TRADE.
“Trade the location of my notes? For what?”
I WILL TRADE KNOWLEDGE FOR KNOWLEDGE.
He took another long sip from his coffee, still facing the window, as if the whole conversation were nothing more than a distraction from the dried runs of black paint and faint gray light.
“Ooooook. Sure. I’ll give you whatever knowledge you want, and you give me knowledge about the location of my spell, yeah? Fantastic. You might not be quite the dumpster fire of a person that I thought you were.” Trading knowledge didn’t seem like it could go too wrong. Well, maybe finding the notes led to every redhead in the world dropping dead from a bio-engineered disease or something- that was always a concern, obviously. But at least he wasn’t trying to convince me to sacrifice the neighbors dog in some dark ritual.
Don’t ask.
I AM NOT A PERSON.
“Yeah, yeah. So where is it?”
I waited through another long sip of coffee. Finally, he raised one pale arm and pointed at the floor near the couch. I dropped onto my knees and found a mess of papers mixed up with a few paperbacks and one hard copy of the Two Towers. I riffled through the stack and found my diagram.
“YES! Fuckin’ awesome! Thanks man!” I folded it and tucked it into my back pocket. Nick didn’t respond, so I awkwardly waved and then headed for the door with my breath held. He sometimes lost track of conversations in the middle. This, unfortunately, wasn’t one of those times.
MY KNOWLEDGE.
I sighed. My hand was on the doorknob. Ok, ok. Just answer whatever question he had, then bounce. Easy peasy. My girlfriend was waiting in the car, and we had a weekend plan that included some light sorcery and a fair amount of ritualized sex. Also un-ritualized sex, obviously, but black magic and sex went together like honey and peanut butter (which is to say- delightfully), and I was very much looking forward to it. Just answer and leave. Answer and leave. I walked slowly back into the living room where Nick was still standing in front of the window.
“Sure, what do you want to know about, man?”
I WOULD KNOW OF MORTALITY.
“Oh.” I hesitated. Living with Nick had taught me to answer questions completely and without deflection. He would just stare at you with those eyes until you answered to his satisfaction, so it was just easier to tell him everything you could think of up front. “Eh… ok. So mortality is like… you have this sense that time is slipping away, and you only have so much time to do whatever you want to do with your life, so there’s sort of a pressure to do something worthwhile. At the same time, things feel like they don’t really matter, because at the end of your life, everything that makes you you gets wiped away.”
I hesitated for a moment, but he didn’t speak, so I wracked my mind for anything else that he might want to know.
“Some people feel like having kids is a way to, sorta, live on after death, but whether you have kids or not, you’re going to be gone some day, so I’m doubtful. Uh… well, I’m not sure what else I can tell you. It’s kind of hard to describe what it’s like. You just have to experience it, you know?”
YES.
“Yeah, you get it. Anyway, I’ve got to go…”
YES.
“Fantastic. Well, have a good weekend, and I’ll see you…” Nick turned to look at me directly for the first time since I had entered the grungy basement apartment, and I realized that the darkness in his eyes was swirling madly.
I WILL KNOW MORTALITY.
I backed nervously away, tripped over another old shoe and fell on my ass. The person- the thing walked toward me and squatted only a few feet away. I noticed that when he did, the only parts of him that moved were his legs. His upper body stayed perfectly upright. Not a single ripple appeared in his coffee.
The darkness in his eyes spun like a vortex in a dark ocean, and I suddenly had the unnerving feeling that I, the room, and the rest of the world outside the stained walls, were scum growing on the damp stone around the deep, deep well hiding behind that placid face. The darkness began to writhe, crawling out of its face and reaching for me across the sliver of space that stretched between us. I began to scream, and the scream rippled out from me, rebounding from the walls and going nowhere because there was nowhere to go. I clenched my eyes shut, but nothing can stop nothing, and it slipped in through the gaps between cells in my eyelids, invading my mind.
I was nothing. I was always nothing. We are nothing. Little disturbances in space, playing games with probability. Tag and tug-o-war across vast stretches of emptiness. We think matter and time and distance are different things, but it’s all one. One vast, simple thing playing in the darkness for a little bit. One day, I suddenly knew, it would stop playing and get out of the pool and all the little disturbances would slowly still and all the nothing would go back to what it always was. The universe would become silent and cold and empty, and the vanishingly small things pursuing their own tiny plans, all the little fleas that we called people would go back to what they always were.
Nothing.
My eyes are open wide and I see. The universe in it’s full breadth and length extends around me, but it is a poor, cramped thing. Every movement cascades into the future, turning my body into an undulating snake that thrashes and writhes as is darts from one place to another. Things are moving around us, in directions that were never directions until Grejolki has spoken to me. Nick, I think desperately, until Grekolki has spoken to me. Before he gives me his eyes. I will scream again, but for that brief moment it is taking my breath away. My world tunnels through the true world much as my body has tunneled through my world. It is surrounded by things that were not worlds, and will not be worlds, but that may look like worlds if you squint just right.
I scream again, and it doesn’t even bother to touch the walls. My scream lay on my tongue like roadkill, filling me with the scent of failure and the deep sadness of all things ending.
“Goddamnit Nick!” I will shout. He will look at me and smile his mysterious little smile and then he’ll pull back. The darkness is drifting away from me and disappearing back into his eyes. He takes another sip of his coffee as I scramble madly across the floor toward the exit, cursing furiously.
“Keep that shit to yourself, you fuck!” I shout, panting, as I finally come to rest against the wall by the door. He stares at me curiously, and then is distracted by a fly. The fly may or may not have experienced any of the same things I just had, but whether it had or not, it was corkscrewing madly through the air, trying to figure out where it’s next meal might be found. For a nauseating moment, I could sense the universes inside universes that filled its tiny body. I shook my head to get rid of them.
I HAVE KNOWN MORTALITY.
“Fuck you! We’ve lived together for six fucking years and now you decide you want to give me some sort of crazy-ass vision!?” I was beginning to calm myself, but I still remembered the answer to my own question. If you see like I just saw, if you existed across all time, then to experience something, at some point that writhing path of you has to actually do the thing. Otherwise past and future you never remember it.
Just my fucking luck Nick decided today was the day.
I grabbed the rest of my things, furious, and stomped out of the front door, slamming it as hard as I possibly could. Five minutes later I was sitting in my shitty car with my girlfriend, who was trying to apply makeup in the back-facing camera on her phone. She glanced at me as I slammed the car door, but continued to work on her mascara. We sat in silence for a moment.
“How’d it go?” she finally asked, and I remembered, rather than saw, the glucose in her brain being converted into ATP. The crackle of electricity between the clusters of neurons inside that said ‘I am concerned for your well being, but also, you do stupid magic shit on a regular basis, and I can see you have all your limbs and are behaving like yourself, so not super worried.’
“Bad. It went bad.” I said angrily. I cranked the car and pulled out, narrowly missing a minivan.
The driver of the minivan slammed on the brakes and gave me the finger. As it happened, she was on her way to the airport, and just missed her flight. She went home to her husband instead, and, unwilling to take his abuse anymore, nailed him in the forehead with the edge of a tennis racket. Then she took his gun from the nightstand and called the police. The police, that bastion of fair dealing and reasonableness, arrived and immediately shot her twice when she didn’t drop the weapon quickly enough. A nosy neighbor filmed the whole thing.
It went viral, of course, and led to a series of local protests against the department. The department took this personally and beat on some of the protestors. The protests grew, the police response stiffened, and the National Guard was called in. Two weeks later, a team of soldiers, pelted with bricks by protestors, opened fire and killed twelve. Two days after that, they were ambushed by civilians with AR-15’s and killed. The second American civil war was, as it happened, even bloodier than the first.
I wouldn’t know. I sat in traffic, looking back at the angry woman with her middle finger extended, and considered jumping out of the car and giving her all of the money that I had, just so she wouldn’t go home. But there were other paths. There were always other paths. No matter what you thought you knew, Nick always knew more. There was no escape from the future.
I put my foot on the gas and the tires squealed as I pulled out into traffic.
Two days after the first protest, we moved out of the country.
That was fucking brilliant!
Legit, a master class in short story effectiveness.
Great story!
I greatly enjoyed that. You made me “lol” a few times. Thank you for sharing.
I’m glad you enjoyed it :)
If you’re aiming to be a writer you should know the difference between phased and fazed.
I’m not, I just like the community. Corrected the spelling. Thanks.
I hope it didn’t come across too harshly. I appreciate the update!
Not at all. I thought it was kind of funny, and learned something new.
