Chapter Twenty-One: The Church

We stood in an empty parking garage, the writer holding a notebook in one hand and a can of kerosene in another, Tulip in a white wedding dress, and me, holding a bouquet of flowers and trying not to sneak desperate glances at her, ashamed of the feelings that were stirring within me.

Would the ORACLE want this? Did she arrange it? She had been the most beautiful thing I had seen before this, but now...

My head hurt and I didn't know what was going on. The writer consulted his notebook again and then started pouring the kerosene in a circle around us.

"A burning ring of fire?" Tulip said. "That's the shortcut?"

"Almost," he said. "Give me the flowers." I did and he dipped them in kerosene as well. "Hold onto these," he said and gave them to Tulip. The bouquet included some of her namesake as well, until the writer lit a match and set them aflame.

"Whoa," Tulip said and nearly dropped them.

"Hold steady," the writer said and dropped the lit match on the ground where the kerosene circle was and a wall of flame erupted.

The wall of flame grew until it reached our faces and then shrunk downward and suddenly we were no longer in a parking garage. Instead, we were inside a church, huge and tall, but covered in ash and soot. The pews were burned out husks and the whole thing looked like it might collapse at any second.

"Where are we?" Tulip asked and I turned to look at her and gasped. The wedding dress she was wearing, pure white a second ago, was now as gray as the walls of the church, covered in the same soot and ash.

"Our Lady of the Immaculate Conflagration," the writer said. "And you are the substitute bride. The real bride isn't here at the moment, but she'll be back soon. We don't want her to catch us here, so don't let go of the burning bouquet, that's our way out."

Together, we walked down the aisle until we were a foot from the podium and the writer made another circle in kerosene. The flowers were almost burned to their tips now and Tulip was having a hard time holding them.

The writer allowed us to step into the circle and Tulip finally let go of the flowers as the fire burned them away and the circle of flames grew around us again and then died down and we were outside in a field of wheat.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"Near the center," he said. "Close to the turning point. Let's go."

We followed him, as we had followed him through fire, to unknown lands.

Chapter Twenty: Ceremony

I don't know how he got the wedding dress, but he did. We picked up the matches at a hardware store, as well as a can of kerosene. We went back to our hotel room, where we found the writer and a pristine white wedding dress, complete with veil.

"Put it on," he said to Tulip.

She raised an eyebrow.

"Please?" he said.

"Fine," she said and took the dress into the bathroom. The writer took out his notebook and started scribbling in it again.

"Do we really need to do this for a shortcut?" I asked.

"No," he said. "I can just write us there. But there needs to be a journey, steps taken. Otherwise it won't mean anything. Just words on a page. Besides, this is a place nobody's seen yet."

"What do you mean?"

"Never mind," he said and scribbled more. "I think she's ready."

She was. She stepped out of the bathroom in the white wedding dress and smiled and suddenly she was more beautiful than I realized. "Not the way I wanted to first wear one of these," she said. "But considering my life path before this, it's probably the last chance I'll have anyway. So, what's next?"

The writer stood up and said, "Parking garage."

We walked to the parking garage and I tried not to stare at her. I'm afraid I failed miserably.

Chapter Nineteen: Shortcut

"We're not moving fast enough," the writer said.

"How do you know?" I asked.

"I just do," he said. He looked tense and he had grown a full beard since he wasn't shaving. He squinted up at the evening sky. "We need to take a shortcut."

"There's a shortcut to the Wall?" I asked.

"There are shortcuts to everywhere," he said. "But I need some supplies. There's a ritual, a ceremony."

"What do you need?" I asked.

"Flowers," he said. "And a wedding dress, including a veil. And matches."

"Sounds like some crazy fun times I've had," Tulip said. "What do you need them for?"

"I told you," the writer said. "We're taking a shortcut."

Chapter Eighteen: Closer

"We're getting closer," the writer said. I didn't ask him how he knew.

Instead, I asked Tulip why she was traveling with us. "You don't even know where we're going," I said.

"Doesn't matter," she said. "I didn't know where I was going either. I was just...going." She refused to talk about what happened to her, only offering up information about "nobody," as she called it, and the other things that she has heard about. "It's better traveling in a group. I've heard of people targeted by something called the Cold Boy – he takes those that are alone, isolated."

This was the first I had heard of it and I had been isolated almost my entire life. I asked her about that and she said, "I don't know how it works. Maybe they are just picky about who they target. It doesn't really matter. From what I've heard, they all get you in the end."

"How many are there?"

"Lots," she said. "I came across someone who couldn't look in a mirror. Said a snake lady was just waiting in his reflection. And then there was the one who said his dead brother was after him. And another said they were being followed by a giant hound, black as pitch."

I sat back and thought about this. The ORACLE and the Ivory Woman were not the only otherworldly creatures out there. But they were different somehow from these things she was telling me – the stories she told me involved these creatures targeting a specific individual, driving them mad or simply killing them. While some ran, others decided to serve the creatures, saving their own lives by taking others.

The ORACLE was different, I knew. She didn't want me to serve her interests by killing. She had me find the writer so we could find the Wall.

But what was behind the Wall?

I put the question in the back of my mind and tried to listen again to Tulip's stories, tried to figure out some sort of logic, some reason in a unreasonable world.

Chapter Seventeen: Almost Dead

I almost died today. We were crossing a bridge when a car careened out of control. It swerved until it was pointed straight at me and I was frozen. I saw it coming and I couldn't move. I knew I should move, yet I was stock still, like a statue.

It was the writer who pulled me away, who pulled me down, scraping my hands on the hard bridge. And the car went off the side and down onto the road below us, making a horrific noise as it did, a crunching, crashing, breaking noise, a noise that still rings in my ears.

The Ivory Woman is not stopping. She wants me dead. She wants to stop us from reaching the Wall.

We ran from the scene – the writer and Tulip and I. We didn't want to talk to the police – we needed to create no ripples, as they say. No ripples in the pond.

I asked Tulip if she had heard of the Ivory Woman. "Sorry," she said. "I've heard of some weird shit, but nothing like that."

I wonder if anyone has?

Chapter Sixteen: Tulip

Her name was Tulip. We met her on the road to nowhere. At least, that's what the writer said it was and she didn't disagree. She said that it would have to have been the road to nowhere, since she was being chased by nobody.

I asked if that meant she wasn't being chased, but she said no. "I'm being chased by...myself. But it's not me. I mean, it looks like me and acts like me and everyone I knew thought it was me, even my own mother and father, but..." She stopped, as if she had said something that she hadn't wanted to, something that just slipped out. Her hair was a dark auburn, wavy at the ends, and her eyes were brown and she looked lovely. "When I had had enough, I finally confronted it. I asked what it was. It said it was nobody, like me. And I told it that I wasn't nobody." She turned away from me. "And it said, 'We'll see.'"

She didn't say much after that. The writer was busy scribbling things down in his notebook, which he had kept secret from me since the night at the motel.

Suddenly, he looked up. "Do you have a car?" he asked Tulip. "I think we're going to need a car."

And just like that, we were three.

Chapter Fifteen: The Third

"The third what?" I asked.

"The third man," he said. "Or probably woman, in this case, since we're both men. That's how it usually goes: two men and a woman. Or two women and a man. Or three women. I've never actually seen a story with three men - usually, in those cases, it's five people, three men and two women."

I stopped and finally said, "I have no idea what you are talking about."

"We're going to meet someone else," he said. "You didn't think it would just be you and me, did you? On a road trip to end the world? No, there's going to be a third. She'll show up soon and probably be in trouble. Or save us from trouble. One or the other."

"Why?" I asked.

"Three is a magic number," he said. "Lots of things come in threes. Three Wise Men, Three Billy Goats Gruff, Three Blind Mice. And it's lucky. Did you know that in Chinese, 'three' sounds like the word for 'alive,' whereas 'four' sounds like 'death'? So a story like this has to have a third."

"This isn't a story," I said.

"Of course it is," he said. "It's all a story. It's never going to stop being a story. And if you think you're outside the story, that just means there's a larger story around you, like a Russian nesting doll. That's why it won't work."

"What won't?" I asked.

"Breaking the Wall," he said. "She thinks breaking the Wall will bring her into the real world. But the 'real world' is also a story, so it won't work. She can't escape by using stories. It's just...impossible."

"So why are you doing this?" I asked.

He shrugged and said, "The show must go on."

Chapter Fourteen: The Secret Rose

I didn't trust the restaurant, so all I had was dry cereal, straight from the box. No way anyone could poison me with that.

He ate a plate of scrambled eggs, French toast, pancakes, hash browns, and a Diet Coke. He scarfed them down as I watched, un-self-conscious, uncaring of the bits and pieces of food that fell onto his shirt and lap. Occasionally, he would pick them out from his lap and eat them and then dive back into his plate of food. And then take a slurp of Diet Coke.

After each plate was emptied and he was done, he took a deep breath and then said, "So, where are we now?" I told him what city we were in. "No, no," he said. "Where are we in the story? Is this still the rising action? I know we're not at the climax yet, we can't be."

I didn't know what that meant, so I said, "I'm supposed to bring you to the Wall."

"Of course you are," he said. "She wants the Wall to collapse. She wants to live again. Not that she was ever alive, exactly. She's always been dead. She was born dead."

"The ORACLE?" I asked.

"The Vision," he said, "of Days to Come and Days Gone By. The Queen of All Our Yesterdays. The Secret Rose. Do you know the poem?"

"No," I said.

"It's about," he paused, "well, I don't really know what it's about. But there's this bit at the end: 'A woman of so shining loveliness, that men threshed corn at midnight by a tress, a little stolen tress. I, too, await the hour of thy great wind of love and hate. When shall the stars be blown about the sky, like the sparks blown out of a smithy and die?' That's what she is, you know."

"I don't..." I started and then stopped, because he stabbed his fork downward into the table.

"You would do anything for her," he said. "Thresh corn at midnight. You would bring down the stars in the sky for her, wouldn't you?"

I nodded.

He left his fork on the table. "Of course you would," he said. "That's what she does. That's how I wrote her. And you." He got up from the table. "Time to go."

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"To find the third," he said.

Chapter Thirteen: Awake

I had my mission. I knew what I had to do: bring the writer to the Wall.

There was only one problem: I had no idea where the "Wall" was. And my dream did nothing to illuminate it. In the morning, in the cold light of day, I realized that I had no idea where to go next.

Then the writer awoke. "Where am I?" he asked. I told him. "I'm not dead." It wasn't a question, so I didn't answer. "Who are you?"

"My name is Norman," I said.

"Norman," he said and rubbed his eyes. "I remember you. Conspiracy nut. Targeted by the Ivory Woman."

"Yes," I said. I didn't know what else to say, so I asked, "What were you writing in your notebook?"

"Ideas," he said. "I've been able to keep them off my back by writing stories, but lately...there's been too many. Too many ideas, too many stories in my head. I can't get them all down. I've become...overloaded with ideas. I started one and then skip to another. Too many stories trying to get out." He rubbed his temples and then seemed to realize he was doing it, so stopped. "I need food. You hungry?"

"Yes," I said. I had not eaten much in the past week.

"Let's go get breakfast," he said. "You don't happen to have any money, do you? Nah, I didn't think so."

As he got up and stepped to the door, he said, "I'll just write us some money. It'll be just like the real thing."

He stumbled into the bathroom then and slammed the door.

Chapter Twelve: A Dream

I had a dream. The writer had fallen asleep and I sat on the chair beside him, tired and worried. And my eyelids became heavy and I lowered my head down and sleep rushed forward to engulf me.

I was at work. Except it was also a forest. There were trees rising out of the floor, but none of my coworkers noticed as they went about their day. Only I could see the trees and the strange shapes that flitted between them, the shadowy forms and insubstantial things that always moved out of the corner of my eye.

And then SHE was there. The ORACLE. I heard her voice, even though her mouth never moved. "There is a Wall. Invisible and unbreakable."

She moved forward and brushed my cheek with her razor-sharp fingers. "You will bring him to the Wall."

I looked at her and suddenly knew something was behind me. I just knew that the IVORY WOMAN was behind me and if I turned around, I would see a blank white tunnel.

I made my mouth move and say, "What is she?"

The ORACLE looked at me with pupil-less eyes and her voice rang in my ear as clear as day: "She is nothing. She cannot harm you. She seeks to delay the inevitable. She cannot win."

All things. Another voice. Soft, like a susurrus. All things tend towards chaos. Breaking down, bit by bit. The arrow of time takes all things. Even us. You cannot go backwards.

The ORACLE's face changed then. One moment it was calm and serene and then for a split second it changed into a snarl, lips drawn impossibly back, teeth bared, eyes red, forward creased and cracked, as if something was struggling to escape. Was this a mask or the mask torn away?

And then it was gone. She was back to being serene. Her voice flowed through my mind. "Ignore her. She is nothing. You must go to the Wall."

"The Wall must come crumbling down."

Chapter Eleven: Sleep

He's finally asleep. I dragged him back to my motel room and tried to calm him down. It was a strange reversal - me, trying to calm someone else down. But I have felt strangely calm ever since I met the ORACLE. I know I am not simply insane now and this makes me do things I would never have done before.

He did not want to sleep. He kept insisting that some "grotesque" thing would take him if he went to sleep. But his eyes were bloodshot and I knew it was only a matter of time before exhaustion overcame him and he slept.

Finally, he scribbled more things down in his notebook and then dropped it and collapsed onto the bed.

I gingerly picked up his notebook and looked through. More snippets:

a world where they are completely human. a world where they are completely incomprehensible.

new mythologies. no gods only devils.

a house made of doors. each one unlocked by a different key.



And then below that, there was a snippet of poetry:

one missing piece that makes it all fall down

one for the seer, dead and buried in the ground

one for the baby made of bone and grinding gears

these are the things that every man fears

I wonder what it all means.

I wish I could ask the ORACLE more questions.

Chapter Ten: The Writer

I found him. I followed the pages, the pages that were scattered across the street and through the door and up the stairs and down the hallway and into the room. I followed the pages that were scrawled with bits of stories:

a garbage man who finds himself in the middle of an epidemic of cleanliness - people are so consumed with being clean, they die of it.

an astrologist who finds that her stars aren't right anymore: one of them is missing.

conspiracy of librarians. hiding memories. not hidden, hiding. seek and ye shall find.

the city is a woman. the woman is a city. a constantly shifting map is tattooed on her back. her lovers go insane tracing their way through her maze.

seven sleepers. twelve mansions. thirty-two silences. 

words without meaning. all conversations become gibberish.

And so on and on.

I finally found him curled up in a room, dark and dusty, with a small ray of sunlight peaking through the curtains. He was furiously writing in a worn notebook. He looked up at me and said, "Are you real because I wrote you or did I write you because you are real?"

I didn't know how to answer. I merely lowered my hand and he grasped it, a pencil still caught between his fingers.

"Time to go," I said.

"Time," he said. "There is no time. I can go back. I can backdate things. Time can be edited, revised, updated. Time and all things."

I led him out into the cold light of day.

Chapter Nine: Breadcrumbs

I am searching for the writer that the ORACLE needs. It has been difficult, but I know that I am getting closer. Closer and closer and closer.

I saw the WOMAN in WHITE again today, though. She was across the street. It looked like someone had cut out a bit of reality in the shape of a woman. And behind the thin film of the world was a world of bleak whiteness. Nothingness. Nothing in the shape of a woman.

I reeled from this sight and tried to run. Then I almost tripped and fell into the street. If I had, a bus would have hit me straight on and I probably would have died or be horribly injured. But I stopped. I stopped mid-trip. As if the law of gravity ceased to apply to me, I stopped. I managed to regain my balance and step backwards.

On my way back to my hotel room, I saw words carved into a concrete wall. Had she carved them with her fingers?

The words were:

INEVITABILITY VERSUS UNPREDICTABILITY

SHE IS THE IVORY WOMAN


I know now. The name of the conspiracy. The name of the one who controlled every aspect of my life.

The IVORY WOMAN.

Chapter Eight: LIFE

She took me by the hand. She took my hand. She held my hand and drew her fingers on my palm, outlining my lifelines in blood.

I was wrong. She is not DEATH.

She is LIFE. She is the ORACLE. She can see PAST, PRESENT, and FUTURE.

She smiles and her teeth are sharpened like razors. She does not speak. But I can see what she wants me to see.

I see a man. A writer of stories. He is filled with despair and will soon die without help.

She needs him to live. To write. The stories he writes are not important, per se, but they provide...solidity. I don't know what this means, but I don't have to. She wants me to find him and help him.

She already knows I will do this. She can see it in the blood on my palm. In my lifelines.

I want to ask about the WOMAN in WHITE.

She presses one razor sharp finger to her lips and shushes me. The WOMAN in WHITE can wait. The ORACLE can protect me.

She has seen my future, which means I have a future.

go, she writes in my palm and then pulls away. My head feels full of information, pregnant with possibilities.

I look at my hand and then back up, but she is gone.

I head out the door and don't look back.

Back on Track

Okay, I haven't received any visitors at work or had any calls about the manuscript. So I guess I was correct and this 'Alliterator' guy was lying about writing it. In any case, I'm going to continue posting the chapters when I have the time.

I do have to warn you though, that this is where it gets good. Those previous chapters were a warm up -- the chapters that come after have some full blown insanity.

 - Pete (Properly Paranoid)