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PART ONE
Wherever they are now, this someplace else, it’s dark.
They hold onto each other in this unassuming expanse and hear only each other’s damp, laboured breaths: Jon’s gasps are thick with blood, Martin’s are viscous with tears.
Then their bodies are no more and it’s silent.
Their mouths are no more. It’s silent.
The fears dash past them like mercury on glass and it’s as silent as a graveyard on a weekday morning.
There is no sign of tapes, or Annabelle or Jonah, or blood or flame or the crumbling exhaustion of a world once Watched.
Martin is less sure of his own being than he is of Jon wrapped in his – something -, and Jon says Martin’s name in awe and relief before he realises he can’t make any noise. It doesn’t matter, because somehow they hear each other. Non-corporeal, Martin thinks. He’s reminded of a joke about a ghost, what seems like eons ago in another lifetime, and misses the feeling of his feet on the ground.
Where is this place, one of them is saying, and
I can’t tell, it’s too dark.
Light flickers on like blooming heat from a supernova, an illuminated image taken straight from a glossy Hubble Telescope picture. Martin’s mum used to have National Geographics on the coffee table. The sight in front of them is closer to a star reborn but it looks like ink in water.
Jon says, Martin, look, and he turns his – something – and oh,
There’s worlds stretched out in front of them like fractals in a kaleidoscope and it almost hurts to look at. Something slots into place and Martin touches a sheet of matter. They’ve gone wherever the fears have gone, which is everywhere, apparently, and there’s a million electron-worlds just spinning around this atom of them. There’s so much. This is so much – to be alive for now, together, in some capacity.
They hold each other for a moment. Or a year or so. Relish in the absence of slick, wet knife wounds.
Can we save them? whispers Jon, and Martin thinks, radiating above him, that they can try.
I think it will cost us something.
A string lets out a twang and somewhere, reality shifts.
Forms envelop forms, and then Martin realises.
I think we have to – have to split a bit. Like they did. I think we have to give some of this up.
Mm, Jon hums without lips or breath or air, and Martin is so in love he doesn’t know what to do with himself.
Jon, I think we’re… whatever the fears were. Before. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t …
I think we’re gods.
Jon’s lack of a face turns up and gazes at Martin with an intensity like a hummingbird’s heartbeat.
Martin, he says and unravels a bit of his own celestial power.
I don’t want to be a god. I just want to be with you.
Something glows in what has been made of Martin Blackwood, and they place themselves both in the antithesis of fear. Their extrahuman sentience is surrendered and fractures, following the paths of tapes into those kaleidoscopic worlds. Jon hopes that it helps the people there if they ever need it.
Jonathan Sims and Martin Blackwood yield their own rightful apotheosis to the void, and pour something back into the rivulets carved by the Mother of Puppets. In a million worlds, fear spills into the cracks, woven into the fabric of the universe with deft arachnid limbs, and two things follow.
Some balm of faith in each other does its best to chase away the mistrust. People say it feels like scars healed over, and choosing humanity, and following each other into the fog. Refusing to give up, and that even if you do, knowing that there is someone behind you. That what you do matters.
The second thing is love, to smother over the manipulation. Occasionally on a lonely winter’s night there is a feeling of a warm drink, companionship when you thought you were long past saving, and a kind of defiant belief in your own goodness that only comes with loving those around you.
The kaleidoscope implodes and they are left in the dark once again. Finally, at long last, the statements end. They find themselves utterly human in a dimension never meant to be seen. Martin Blackwood is ripped away from Jonathan Sims is ripped away from the Eye, and they’ll find each other. One way or another. That’s the deal.
The descent from godhood is quiet. Martin thinks it is kind of nice, though: If they are about to die here, like this, at least they have arms again. At least they can hold each other.
PART TWO
Martin Blackwood wakes up, feeling like there should be a knife in his hand.
This thought shakes him out of his half-conscious stupor. Of course there’s not a knife, he’s in bed, he’s asleep. Was asleep.
Rolling over, the covers fall off his feet, and suddenly he’s awake and lucid and the day is just beginning in a London that he settles into like the chords of a familiar song. He can’t help feeling that it’s a bit out of tune today – something’s missing – and his eyes catch on a teacup in the sink for some reason. Huh.
That must be it. He’ll grab a coffee on the way to work. Martin makes himself porridge before heading off, hoping he has time to go to a Costa or something. He even puts a few canned peaches on top of the steaming bowl. As a treat.
The metropolitan street feels mundane. Martin trusts it will be as expected. He trusts in the people in the cars not to crash, and in the people on the street to wait until the lights turn green, and in the everyday tiny goodness of those around him. Ask him, though, and he wouldn’t notice.
Jonathan Sims jolts awake, heart racing, feeling like there’s meant to be a wound piercing his ribcage.
There’s not, that’s ridiculous. He’s slumped at a desk marking students’ papers. God, and the clock has ticked over to lunchtime, and he doesn’t even need to be here. That’s a relief, he thinks for a minute, and it’s a warm feeling he relishes in.
There’s – someone’s meant to be here with him.
He checks his diary and it’s empty. Phantom appointments?
The light in the humanities department staffroom is weak and flickering but welcome, and he’s reminded of another dusty room and another pile of documents and another stab to his torso.
He blinks himself back. Stretches an arm over his shoulder. Why does he feel like he should be hurting? There’s not a hint of blood on the desk chair. Jon takes in a long, deep breath. It feels like he’s been wearing a hat for days, and someone’s taken it off, and he’s noticing the absence of pressure like a – like a knife to the chest. Jon puts on his jumper to comfort whatever this strange feeling is, and it seems to work. He goes easy on the grading, then. Maybe a few students can get a few extra marks – look, it’s not like they don’t need a bit of forgiveness, right?
Someone plots, someone lies. This is how the world has been going for a long, long time. Someone makes their sibling laugh, and someone else in the city of London falls in love a little bit, and there’s a pound left in the parking meter Martin Blackwood pulls into at the supermarket on his way home. He needs more of those peaches.
There’s a podcast quietly speaking on the car stereo, must have autoplayed on his phone, and the voice seems a bit uncannily familiar.
“You’re listening to What The Ghost, today with special guest from the London Police missing persons unit, Basira Hussain, and we are still looking for any leads on the real-life unsolved disappearance of-“
The audio cuts out with a snap as Martin turns the engine off. The floodlights in the carpark look like eyes on sticks, and he snaps a picture.
They remind him of a praying mantis, maybe. He laughs out loud in the driver’s seat before getting out.
Someone betrays a friend, and a politician breaks a promise, but across town Jonathan Sims’ faculty colleague (a history teacher) has just had his first child. Jon thinks he’ll maybe buy a card at the Aldi on the way back to his flat, after he finishes this parent-teacher interview.
You know, it’d be hard to have that sort of responsibility. He can barely imagine it – a real human, under your care! You definitely deserve a card for that alone, and he makes his mind up. Jon’s in a better mood than just good, and he’s not quite sure why, but he’s going to use it and go buy that card. He says goodbye to the young girl’s father, locks the school door and starts in the direction of the metro.
PART THREE
There are so many varieties of canned peaches in an Aldi, do you know that?
Lights are fluorescent and glinting off the labelled aluminium on the shelf as Martin examines another can. In juice and syrup and sliced and diced and cored – can you even core peaches, he wonders, hovering in front of the Preserved Fruit aisle, or are they just pulling my leg?
Jon comes up behind this stranger staring at canned food and clears his throat. He’s feeling braver than usual today. People mill around him, but this man doesn’t seem to be in a hurry, and there’s not many leisurely people in supermarkets in the middle of London.
“Excuse me, do you happen to know where the birthday cards are in here?”
Hands freeze around the rim of a tin of peaches. They’re freckled, Jon notices, and familiar somehow. He waits for a reply but this guy’s spine just straightens under his woollen jumper, like he’s touched an electric fence very slowly. Jon is just about to ask him if everything’s alright, when the most incredulous voice he’s ever heard speaks up, the stranger turning their head away from the shelf of tinned fruit in disbelief, turning towards-
“J- Jon?”
Oh. Of course, it’s. It’s …
It’s years of stolen glances and friends lost in tunnels. Dusty documents and wrongness in workplace hallways, of mysteries and bloody pipes and bomb pipes and hospital beds. God, disasters and windswept beaches and horrors beyond description, of Watching Seeing Knowing and then a knife in the chest and an apotheosis, and above all this fear, all this trembling throbbing and tumultuous fear, there is love.
He loves this man, he loves-
“Martin?”
“Fuck,” says Martin, Martin Blackwood, and this is. This is good. This is right.
“Martin,” because Jon can’t get it into his own head that they did it, they did something and god, he’s right here in Jon’s arms,
“We did it, Jon, fucking hell, we-”
“I found you, I promised I would, I’m here and you’re here and it’s gone-”
Martin pulls back from his grip a bit then. Looks at Jon with a look of hope that’s so endearing, he’s going to have to kiss it off his face in a minute.
“We – it’s gone?”
“There’s always going to be fear, I think. But mediated. There are other things to, whatever we – put out there. I think, I think we did something good.”
“But you don’t know?”
“I,”, and Jon laughs, clear and bright and far too loud for any corner store on a weekday night, “Martin, I have no more idea than you do.”
Martin kisses him on the mouth, with tongue, in the middle of aisle seven.
They’re in love and alive and in tears.
Jon thinks people might be staring, and that’s okay. He’s watched before. He’s been watched.
It’s nice to just be looked at, and then forgotten about, moved on from. Noticed momentarily just for being in love, sobbing, in the middle of a supermarket, and because Martin just dropped a can of peaches on the floor. They should bashfully apologise to the employee in a minute.
There’s two people, eyes red from crying, who can’t seem to keep their hands apart in the middle of an Aldi in London, and around them, the worlds go on.