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Rain pounded on the fabric of the giant and unnatural altar to the uncanny, a gift to rouse the Stranger from its prison and bring it forth into the world. Droplets hit the curtain with rapid fingertip taps, like nails playing drum beats on countertops, and ran in rivulets down its gently sloping sides, coated in that artificial sweetness of peppermint and strawberry paint. Those stripes of bone white and blood red spilled from the very top of the mast to the nails driven deep into the sodden earth. The dyes didn't seep, didn't mingle into one, ugly, mud-mixed pink, but still the rain kept pouring, making futile attempts to foil the perfect repitition of red, white, red, white that formed the profile of the enormous big-top tent.
That tent was filled with bodies. Glistening as though plastic and wax could sweat, they covered so much of the ground that navigating it, aside from a few paths kept strictly clear for the movement and practise of the Dancer, Nikola Orsinov, seemed impossible. Some of them were barren, but others had faces; weird ones, the kind that made anyone want to creep just a little bit closer, if only to find out that surely, surely, there was some deep and horrifying recognition. The resemblance of each of them to a friend, a parent, a sibling, was so enticing, but the lure was a lie, and the jaws were inescapable. Some of the waxworks had fallen, but others stood, their limbs raised to the swaying ceiling; they had, at first, looked to be almost joyous — a celebration of disfigurement to the point of anonymity — but, as nights turned into weeks and their numbers tripled, more and more it became obvious that they were stretching to a point, to a target, to a prisoner. A tangling mess of stiff cadavers, unidentifiable in all factors but the one that they were humanoid, stood still, clearly aiming to grasp the Circus's only inmate.
The bodies weren't the only oddity in the big-top tent; behind the prisoner, far behind the wall of living wax, even further behind the drenched curtains, revealed only in the sense that its quiet, mournful, song, brought about by the rain, decorated the already murky atmosphere, was a coffin. A coffin, with no end, a limitless capacity for unfortunate souls, and deep scratches of lettering engraved into its lid: DO NOT OPEN. It was bound tightly with chains, and the chains were joined by a thick, steel padlock, the key to which was held by just one of the Dancer's two acolytes.
Another instrument of painful music, this one without a voice or any kind of sentience, was the calliope. The small, red pipe organ stood silently, waiting for plastic fingers to hold down its delicate keys and play it, faster and faster, until the world was spun anew and uniqueness and identity drew their last breaths. It had on it inscribed 'be still, for there is strange music', and the prisoner knew this to be true, for he had heard one of the Dancer's underlings many a time practice upon the dust-laden machine, and loose its eery songs to the air.
Taxidermized skins of various animal species in various conditions of care were hung from wooden racks around the circumference of the tent. Some were rich, wild pelts with intricate and beautiful patterns, nascent patinas of coloured quills and thick fur, but others were stark and frighteningly hairless. To believe them to be human was to encourage and feed the strange god of concealment; human beings are alive, and these thin, flat stretches of flesh were very dead, and so could not be and yet were.
And, through that arduous cacophony of melancholy melody, in the centre of all those figures and all those atrocities, Jonathan Sims sat, strapped to a chair, his head bowed so low and for so long that his neck had adjusted to the ache, with a strip of cloth bound tight over his mouth, the knot of which had become tangled with his hair. A torn vest and shorts hung loose over his body, and, every minute or so, he'd shiver, almost silently, at the bitter cold. He'd been dressed in this so that access to his own skin was free and easy — the Dancer had described moisturising him as 'taking care' of it; she'd been adamant that his physical condition should be better before he was peeled. Daily, Jonathan had stirred from thick and dreamless sleep to find that oils and lotions had been massaged into him during the night, and the imagery was not comforting.
During his imprisonment, a gradual weight, one of loss, dejection, and ambiguity, had been built up in that dreadful place. It had feasted on the endless servings of fear delivered by the Archivist, course after course of terror: a fear for his life, a fear for his mind — as the only certainty there was that he was bound to be deceived and confused — and a fear for the state of the world once this ritual was brought to its climax. The Unknowing — for that was its name, he had learned — was to change the world, to send it into a constant state of anxiety, a surreal world filled with indecision, shambling marionettes with matching makeup, where trust was shared so thin that the hope of gathering enough was futile. It was to be a world of masks, a world of changing, a world where no name lasted long enough to mean a thing, and no face stayed constant: a circus-world, where none won prizes but the Stranger. The Dread Power of everything beyond the mind, everything unlearned, everything in periphery, lurked at the boundary of human perception, feeding on that weak but plentiful and universal fear of what was that?, and who are they?, and do I know you?
No, you don't.
He couldn't see the rain, but he knew it for the damp air pooling around his body, the smell of fed plants and wet soil, and the mist blowing from his nostrils at every starving breath alerted him to the cold night outside. He couldn't see the crowd of unmoving bodies, or the calliope, or the skins, but he knew that all the inanimate horrors lurked in the darkness regardless. He couldn't see the Stranger, but he knew its two faces well enough by now to be waiting for the next spike of uncontrollable panic.
What the Archivist could see, through the gradual adjustment of his gaze to the black night air, was a single tape recorder at his feet.
It had appeared when the bag had first been pulled from his head, and Jonathan had assumed that it had fallen from his pocket and just happened to turn on for the first time when Nikola introduced her captive to her crew. Her plastic lips had hung open in eager awe after she'd noticed it, and she had included it keenly in her conversations with the Archivist, snatching back the role of interrogator from Jonathan as she asked questions to the little object over his muffled calls and retorts. With great enthusiasm she had described her surroundings to whoever listened on the other side of the thing, her excited rant occasionally broken by a command she'd direct to a subordinate or two. She'd loved the thing enough to take it with her, numerous times, but, after spending another night alone, Jonathan would always wake up to it by his side.
Despite the preference it clearly showed to staying by the Archivist, it never once turned on again. Weeks went by. Jonathan became more and more exhausted and was drained of every ounce of hope, before, click, it was running.
The gentle whirring sound woke Jonathan properly, and he gasped as much as he could while his mouth was plugged with fabric. Breathing heavily, his eyes sealed on the tape recorder, the Archivist listened to the new sound like an old friend.
The buzz of the recorder, the drumming of the rain, and sharp, familiar laughter.
The echo of the noise predated itself: broken by shuddering gasps and wretched howling, it bounced through the big-top tent and churned the atmosphere into a frothing mess, shifting from utter mystique and hidden terror to a mix of that and the abject but beautiful insanity of Michael.
A beam of light cut the place in two, forged by the split between reality — which pulled at the seams and contorted like hot air around the aperture that had burst through it — and the door, and shot across the floor and onto the back wall, falling perpendicular over Jon's right eye. Jonathan squinted, briefly, and sighed as much as he could through the gag, before the door swung open with a painful squeal and the sickly, yellow light filled the place like rising water.
A static followed the laughing song, rising in intensity with the heaving, bursting agony; Michael's laughter swelled and retracted like a headache, and Jonathan's eyes froze, wide open, upon the Distortion as it bowed its awful head, coils of golden thread thrashing like a furious sea falling forth in tangles about its feet. It laughed and laughed, effort forced into its sickness, as it closed the door behind it, and stalked toward the seat that Jonathan was bound to, exuding its own, unnatural luminescence and leaving it trailing behind.
Masks after masks peeled from its face, starting by curling from the scalp until they folded, paper thin, and shed themselves like skin after successive skin. An identical smile lay beneath each one, a grotesque host to thin, flat teeth, arranged neatly in two rows, and a corpse's tongue, white as bone. Eyes appeared hollow and empty: a single, dead colour, but its cheeks still were flush and rosy: the same colour as its ears and the end of its nose, though the rest of it had turned a haunted, chalky grey.
The same red scarf made Jonathan scowl in frustration; it hung, like it always had, in two slow arches around its awkwardly crooked neck, a deep and rotten ribbon of cuts and bruising. It sat nestled warmly atop the curly wool that poked from within the collar of its coat, cinched at the waist and billowing out in no breeze at all around the knees. It continued to laugh as it strode foward, placing one boot in front of the other. They had thick soles and high heels, and were gently damp around their seams, as though the melt had crept in.
It was as though the cold entered with it, a deeper cold.
Creeping closer toward the Archivist, it continued to cackle from split throats. Jonathan watched tongues and teeth spill over the crimson lip of the scarf as echoes of laughter creaked from each mouth and hit Jon square in the face.
"Oh..." the Distortion whispered, glared, and smiled.
Michael tutted, gravely, "oh...", its familiar lilt pulling its voice into song, "ohh, Archivist. What have you done now? It's almost sad to see you like this."
Rolling his exhausted eyes, Jonathan groaned, low and irritated, as Michael approached him, until it swung forward, its face morphing through the air and solidifying just inches before Jon's. Palms at the ends of long, twisted arms hit the floor as the spine of the Distortion contorted in loops as it grew in height, until it towered over the shivering Archivist, its neck still wrought downward to bring the head adjacent to Jon's; the false eyes met true ones.
It continued to chide with a mock sympathy, and its lips swerved on its face, its chin to the sky and its hair tumbling over Jonathan's knees and onto the floor.
"Almost."
For a second, it stared, shallow and wavering, into Jon's eyes, before it writhed through the air in a flicker of light and colour, a reflection on startled water, aurora artificialis, squirming into that tall and unpleasantly humanoid form. It strode on brittle legs to be beside him, and Jonathan wrought his poor, strained neck to glare upward at its gleaming, crooked smile, a smile that faced the back wall of the tent, allowing only the porcelain crowd to bask in its radioactive glow.
Curling its hands into each other behind its back, "I've come to a decision Archivist," it said to the wall, before pulling away, and darting in a flash of spitting sparks into shadow, only to convulse in a blink of movement behind Jon's chair. Trailing its suddenly warped and whetted fingers over Jonathan's throat, threatening to reopen the rabid wound, left there by the beast with the pocket knife, and let it fester, Michael whispered, "I'm going to kill you."
Its gentle exhalation was a biting cold, but the leather of its cheek must have been hot enough to brand the impression of its face into Jonathan's neck. He groaned, fear masking as frustration, and Michael sighed into his sorry skin.
"It's earlier than I had hoped, but that's life... I suppose." As if realising an opportunity to emotionally elbow Jon between his ribs, it gasped, and peered over his shoulder with a grin, muttering, "your life!"
It giggled as it clasped both its steel hands around Jon's throat and gently tightened its grip, all the while growing in height and winding through the air to meet Jon upside-down. "Before I do, however, I want you to understand," it assured him, and softly spoke, "even if it does go against my nature, so..."
A single index finger was flicked upward. It caught the low, yellow gleam that radiated from Michael's figure like metal catches candlelight, and Michael swiftly pulled it up against Jonathan's face, beneath the cloth, grinning at the brief spike of terror Jon must have revealed at the sudden sting; it really did feel like a blade was pushed into his cheek.
After the single slick slice, Michael withdrew its hand, and Jonathan gasped loudly as the gag fell from his mouth and landed on the floor.
As it crept around the Archivist, and settled a few feet before him, Michael spoke slowly, enunciating each word as though carefully counting each breath, making sure it had enough spare for the story it wished to tell. Pronouncing softly every syllable, the Distortion aimed to make its intention as easy to follow as possible for the poor, dumb Archivist.
"Ask... your questions."
But, Jonathan couldn't help but heave a confused response. "What?"
In less than a second, the monster lunged forward, drifting into a blur of motion as it tore back through time.
Bones must have crunched and cracked as Michael crushed its towering body into human form. Skin just a shade too stained with blue covered up smoking holes, those which let through the heat: the heat that caused the air around them to contort and ripple. Long, golden hair sprung into tight coils and then fell, loose and heavy, into shorter strings, the colour of sand and lost photographs, curling gently across newly formed shoulders. Losing its ability to gracefully float through the air with it, the bloody scarf fell too, laying dead over its chest. The edge of each infinitely shrinking chasm of a laugh-line, which had torn its cheeks in cycles and folded the corners of its lips upwards, were melded and wrought in rosy colour, until they left the frozen face entirely and swam into rings around each eye.
Jonathan had only a moment to recognise it as the too human, too weak, too mousy version of Michael that had led him through the corridors the month before, before it fell to its knees — silent — grabbed Jonathan's shoulders with soft and harmless fingers, and whispered, a cool mist swirling from its violet lips.
"Ask me."
Jonathan stammered briefly as he decided upon a question while the frail, blond fawn searched his eye. "H-how did you find me?"
The man giggled behind an upturned palm, a noise that wavered in the air as though released from many mouths, and rose to its feet, swerving backward slightly as its body was stretched and warped back into the looming nightmare, technicolour, and its limbs and various entrails grew in length. Sighing before speaking, the Distortion glanced over to the constrained Archivist from its disjointed tower of makeshift flesh with many eyes. Its expression morphed into one of sadistic pleasure, and it grinned as it answered.
"The Eye watches," it lilted, "and the Stranger conceals... but me... I lie, Archivist. I am the throat of Delusion incarnate..." it finished licking an unused pair of lips as it spoke, and returned to kneel beside Jon, batting long, curled lashes as it reached to twirl a blunted finger through Jonathan's hair.
"They can't hide you from me."
The cold spark that followed the briefest of touches forced Jonathan to flinch, while Michael drank in excess air as he recovered.
He made a second attempt. "What do you have to do with the Unknowing!?"
It retreated from Jon's hair with a giggle, covering its main mouth with both hands and squinting; alive suddenly with malice and mischief, Michael chuckled slightly.
"Nothing!" When Michael's giggle became an uproar, Jonathan knew he'd wasted the question. "Nothing whatsoever! Except," it teased him through careless spasms of starving joy, "perhaps, that I would like it to fail!"
"So... wh-why are you here?" Jonathan bit his lip as he asked the massive, twirling, sensory overload, and it ceased.
Rolling its eyes, as though it were obvious, Michael responded, mockingly, "I already said: to kill you."
"But- but why!?"
"Because I don't want the Circus to win," it snapped, "and I don't want the Archives to, either! Killing you myself..." once more, it lowered itself to what could have been its knees, legs lost in vines and wires of scintillating colour, "it's the best of both..." Michael gestured vaguely with one hand, swiping its impossibly sharp fingers dangerously close to Jonathan's neck. It smiled. "And," its eyes fastened themselves upon the sealed wound as it froze in place, "of course, there's revenge."
"Revenge?!" Outraged, Jonathan jolted forward, as far as he could with his arms still tied, ignoring the sting as delicate skin cut itself on Michael's fingers, shards of glass. "I still don't even know who you are!"
A single pause drunk in all the noise of the surroundings: the hammering of the rain, the awful droning of the coffin, the occasional crack of a waxwork too eager to wake. The Distortion didn't inhale oxygen as much as it did take in every other possible sensation, chew it up, and swallow it in order to continue it's reign of overstimulation. It narrowed its eyes as it drunk in every other sound and scent, forcing the Archivist to truly focus on it alone.
"I am Michael."
The Distortion rose again, and began to pace around the single chair: one hand, each arrowhead finger bent and buried in Jon's hair, on Jonathan's head, the other thrown to the world, as though it were performing to the plastic crowd.
"I was not always Michael." It strolled in circles, gently spinning Jon's head as it continued its awful orbit, a slow but persistent hurricane. "I do not want to be Michael." As though it couldn't bite back the fury, it bent its crooked body at the waist, jolted Jon's head to the side, pulling him up by knotted hair until it met him parallel, eye to eye. "Being Michael stole the only purpose I have ever known!"
Croaking against the agony, Jonathan whispered, "you were Gertrude's assistant, weren't you?"
There was a sudden pause, in which Michael's skin lost its sickly tinge of off-white and grew gently rosy. Its brow raised and its glare softened as it parted its thin and lilac lips. It shrunk slightly in height, all the while maintaining that painful grasp through Jonathan's hair. The awkward silence filled the tent, stopping both their roaring hearts, before Michael, in under a second, retracted into its original state: state of being, state of matter. Perplexed, and mildly annoyed, the Distortion pursed the bursting arteries that then stood in place of lips, let its grip slacken on Jonathan's hair, and narrowed its glass eyes as the chair, burdened with Jonathan's body, clattered onto its four feet again.
"No."
A creeping sense of alarm filled Jonathan's body. "But- but the tape! I heard you."
"No," slowly, with an edge, a warning, Michael stated, "you heard Michael."
Fear briefly left Jonathan to be replaced by an intense frustration. "I..." he groaned, before snapping, "what the Hell are you talking about?!"
The frustration seemed mutual — "quiet, Archivist!" Michael unbent its body and cracked each vertebrae back into place as it pulled itself back to normal, staggering height. "The Cramped Casket sings loud but not loud enough to drown out screaming. The Michael on that tape was not me." It began to explain, but the explanation curdled on its tongue and bloomed in wild, fruitless vines. "When that person was Michael, I was something else... and now I am Michael, and that person is gone."
"So, what... you..." Jonathan inhaled slowly, before tilting his head in question, "you became him?"
"No more than he became me." The Distortion lifted its two sharp and bulbous hands and carved arcs through the air with them as it recoiled from Jon's question and pressed them both to its chest. It gazed into him, its head turned, and a single, confused eye met Jon's. "It is rare that someone I take finds their way into being me, but it does happen... and Michael had help."
In a heartbeat, the Archivist's sense of innate purpose returned; shifting upright in his seat, his hands still tied behind his back, Jonathan focused the miniscule sum of energy and effort he'd gleaned through a restless night's sleep into that single, sickening eye.
"What happened?" He did ask, but what left his mouth was less so an ask and more so a goad.
Michael scoffed, briefly intrigued by the prospect of entertaining what would be — Jon realised with a sigh — a meal.
Its sneer softened into a smile, which curled at the edges until it folded blushing cheeks. A warmth crossed over its nose like a bandage, and every eye, even those that had evaporated into the atmosphere, or blinked loose from its golden hair, half closed in a look so satisfied that Jonathan couldn't pull his astonishment away. In his periphery, he might even have seen it lick its lips.
"Ahhh," something finally brought it to a decision, and it whispered, "a statement, of course." Smirking, it whispered, "is your recorder running?"
There was a momentary pause in which Jonathan knew that the look on his face had already betrayed him.
Michael cocked its head. "Yes?" Then its brow raised, and the very corners of the scarlet slice across its face tilted upward in a smile. "Say it," it ordered, and the attention of every stitched button eye in every plastic socket in the room was upon it in an instant, as it sauntered back toward Jon and leant over him, "Archivist."
"Statement of... Michael." Jonathan hesitated in the introduction, but forced himself onward, sealing shut the clock that would count down backwards to his doom. "Taken from subject, date..." it wouldn't let him finish.
"The last day of the Archivist's life!" It said it with such joy, such pleasure, such malice, relishing the pang of hungry terror gnawing at Jonathan's stomach, and the defeat that he revealed through the movement of his weary flesh.
With all the ache of tens of lifetimes, all trapped in the endless loop of watch and be watched, the Archivist allowed its sacred line to roll from its tongue for the last time, as it had done at so every opportunity before.
"Statement begins."
The Distortion retracted, falling back into itself a thousand times like a vortex that would inevitably waste its energy consuming its own tail until it ceased to be. Its strobing, pulsing ecstacy swirled like a cocoon around a fragile core, and burst in vivid splendour. The Archivist had never seen something so eagerly discard its own nature in order to conform to something else's, but that was what it did. Quickly, having spun itself into a frenzy, it landed back into its human skin and tumbled deeply into the proximity of the the Archivist, finding purchase for its knotted fingers as its contorted hands were pressed into familiar ones, pale, slender, and sharp.
Its head landed on its shoulder, weeping that same cascading golden hair that Jonathan now doubted it owned at all, and a genuinely puzzled expression was kneaded into the soft clay of its face as it questioned. "How far back should it go?" Its eyes flickered to the apex of the tent, "to the beginning of me?" To the wax bodies. "Centuries?" To the floor. "Millennia? How do you define the start for your being when, in some ways, you have always been?"
Jonathan didn't respond; it was not his job to answer Michael's questions, and the allure of a fresh statement had caught him like worm on a hook, or an anglerfish. With nothing left in his body able to fear, he could only listen, with the deepest intent to understand, while his meal poured itself into his ear and fed his body and soul.
Michael didn't stop to realise. "Time... is difficult to form."
An understanding flickered over its face, before it succumbed to a brief expression of loss and hesitancy, and it quickly became passive again.
"Michael Shelley, though—" Jonathan stiffened, his chin high and his eyes wide, as Michael revealed the missing string in the dark and murky mystery that Jon had been wading in with no torch for months and months— "he is easier to keep track of. He was born, he was pointless," a sliver of spite snuck into his speech, and Michael continued to hiss, "and he should have died."
Wilting, slightly, it lowered itself onto the floor again, onto its knees, and then its hip, its chin in one hand and the fingers of which slicing through the amorphous stew of hair. As it settled against Jon's knee, a small grin broke through the ivory of its face.
"But, before that could happen, he went to work for the Magnus Institute." It smirked," that... ivory tower, keeping its prisoners ignorant in pursuit of...knowledge." It giggled at the irony, and exhaled deeply through it. "A dungeon full of idiot watchers... and Michael Shelley was no exception."
Relaxing his grip on the instinct of self-preservation and slowly, cautiously, taking in the meal that Michael was betraying itself to willingly provide, Jonathan drank the poisoned story and felt every emotion leave him as his body grew cold. In just a moment, he knew everything; he knew the young man — "when he was in school," Michael continued, "he lost a friend to something like me," — like he'd heard the tale a hundred times, like he'd worked with him. Jonathan could see his fright, his horror: he could feel it filling his bones and waking his heart, saturating his veins and arteries in the history of it all. He could taste it.
"His friend was named Ryan, but those in power simply called him schizophrenic."
The taste of the tale was bitter and unloved, and Jonathan found difficulty in swallowing it.
"I don't know if he was," the dull and uncoloured iris painted onto the marble that sat in Michael's eye socket swerved to gaze far upward at the ceiling of the tent, and his voice gave away no evidence that he truly cared for the story at all, "but it doesn't matter."
A sour expression, one of a hollow victory, settled onto the Distortion's paper mask. "He was so dreadfully afraid his world wasn't real, that to make it so was almost nothing! Michael was there when he was taken; he never got over what he saw," the Distortion's borrowed features — the Archivist could see it now, so clearly, as though the lie had always been visible but Jonathan had never before had the ability to see it — crawled into an expression so laced with salt that Jonathan almost winced, "or didn't see."
The final eye that Jonathan had kept forcefully shut for too, too long, opened with a creak. The gaping, mental hole that opened to suck in every blood-soaked sensation blossomed like a rose carrying a crown of thorns: an all-seeing, all-feeling, all-consuming diadem of knowledge. Jonathan saw.
He no longer listened, but saw.
He saw much searching and despair; it trailed as dust behind Michael Shelley's every stumbling footstep and was released from his lungs much the same. Jonathan watched with an empty stomach and a stinging tongue as Michael Shelley continued to taint his every thought, until his story overcame all and — for what must have been the first, and only, time — he occupied every inch of the Archivist's mind; the spotlight was his exact shape.
Soon enough, the Archivist felt little admission of itself and, after a point, none at all.
Michael Shelley, a tall, thin, and blond, young man, was, due to the circumstances of his pointless birth and meaningless childhood, driven into the waiting arms of the Institute. There, he met Gertrude Robinson.
The Distortion called her "the Archivist," but the man to whom she'd passed down that title was no longer keen to share; it continued to salivate over the lost cause of a human being, and Michael the Distortion continued to speak.
"Even being what I am..." the Distortion had rarely seen anyone so adept at distorting the truth as Gertrude Robinson. It might have sneered her name.
Michael Shelley was, the Archivist saw, protective of the frail, old woman he believed her to be: her frame so delicate, her image so forgetful. Michael Shelley would offer his services to her in any way he thought he could, all the while believing her to be gently wise. The Archivist watched him care for her, trust her, and it continued watching as the great and ugly jaws of madness clamped around his body and dragged him to his doom.
"And she fed him to me," the Distortion's stolen voice continued to narrate the scene that the Archivist was witnessing unfold. "She made him me to destroy our transcendence, and she did not... hesitate."
Poor Michael. The Archivist felt tears pool where they could not have done so before. It saw a thousand trips, conferences, and investigations for the Institute: Gertrude Robinson had made sure that all her assistants would be ready, and that they would not be suspicious if they were told they were going abroad for work. There wasn't a single doubt, or concern, in Michael Shelley's mind when he was told that they were travelling to Russia, to a place named Земля Санникова.
The Archivist knew that Земля Санникова did not exist and, perhaps, if Michael Shelley had stopped to look up their destination then he would too. But, the Archivist watched Gertrude Robinson leave the mouth of the Institute with Michael Shelley in tow, trusting her with every expendable step that he took. Trusting her deeply, and honestly, and naively, Michael Shelley stumbled behind her, his arms around his middle, and a viscerally sanguine scarf wound tight around his brittle throat.
At some point, the Archivist watched them arrive in Dikson, Диксон, at the very edge of the Kara Sea — Ка́рское мо́ре, it knew, the ocean of punishment — where the two gloomy figures were picked up by a quiet, so quiet, almost silent, sea captain. The Archivist recognised him from the backlogs and the roots of its chronically expanding mind as Peter Lukas.
Even then, it seemed that Michael Shelley trusted Gertrude Robinson with all his life: a life that went undervalued and unloved.
The three of them travelled north upon the Tundra, for the Archivist recognised it from the sea of statements and named it in a heartbeat, and it continued to study the youngest and most innocent of the three with its large eyes, as he shivered through a cold more bitter than he'd ever conceived possible.
But, the sweet and credulous creature was wracked with a terrible nervousness; the Archivist could hear the flurry of questions within his internal monologue. He was worried... worried about the poor, old woman, anxious about how she may cope with the chill. The Distortion giggled with ire and poison on its tongue as Michael Shelley tentatively offered Gertrude Robinson his scarf.
Turned to iron, stiff as stone, she refused it, and continued to spin him that same, dreadful lie: you'll need it more than I will. A purpose within her carried her forward, she left it in the footprints she created as she paved through the snow that was beginning to blanket the Tundra, a purpose Michael Shelley had never seen in her, in anyone at all, and would never know, himself.
The water turned to ice as the Arctic approached, and Gertrude Robinson's eyes turned cold.
Then, at last, he began to be afraid: so, so deathly afraid, afraid enough to whisper with a trembling voice.
"Miss Robinson," condensation blowing from his blue, blue lips had frozen on his lashes — a constellation of tears, "where are we going?"
Already aware of the answer he'd receive, he nodded slowly before the sound hit his ears. "Zemlya Sannikova," he heard; Sannikov Land.
Michael Shelley had been made aware of a great evil, and was going to help her fight it: fight it, and destroy it. How, he knew not. He'd never been much of a warrior, and he'd never had enough weight to throw; figuratively, or literally. But — and, an expression of peace fell over his face and contentment closed his eyes — Gertrude Robinson, his Miss Robinson, had deemed him worthy, and anyone who doubted the workings of the intricate mind of Miss Robinson was a fool. At least, he had always believed it so.
There was a moment of silence, in the memory, an aching gash of a hole in the Archive, before the Distortion pulled the Archivist out of its trance and brought the two of them, beasts, face to face to eye to eye to lips to lips.
A passing shock rolled through the Distortion's mess of twitching nerves and died, prohibited by the insulation of the Archivist's dull and silent flesh. The intensity of the heat Jon had once felt rise from the kiss, as though the bone of his jaw were melting into oil and his skin was broiling in bubbles, burst with a snap, until the deep and earthy cold settled in; it was the kind of cold that brought you to your knees and pushed you to grow roots in the ground, the kind that ripped concrete to shreds, and forced the modern world to bow in fear and wonder. That shift from burning heat, a million degrees hotter than Jon should have been able to withstand, to minus two-hundred and seventy-four degrees celcius, took place in a fraction of a second, but, by Michael's next turn speaking, aeons had passed, and time no longer had rhyme or reason. Two celestial bodies no longer held themselves to a degree of separation from each other, but became in fact or fiction one manic entity of knowledge, deceit, and schadenfreude.
"Am I evil, Archivist?" Michael's second throat surrendered the question, and Jonathan's single one couldn't break free to answer.
This close to delusion incarnate, its scattered reflections and jarring imagery but millimetres from his face, Jonathan had to force his eyes tightly closed. See no evil.
"Is a thing evil when it simply obeys its own nature?" It continued to coax unfortunately suppressed answers from the shuddering Archivist with a set of different and unhindered lips. "When it embodies its nature? When that nature is created by those which revile it?"
Fleetingly searching for something to tangle in its steel fingers, the Distortion's hands once again cupped the face of the terrified Archivist, and pressed warm, leathery meat onto its ears. Hear no evil.
"Perhaps Gertrude believed so." The songbird just kept teasing, it just kept singing.
Jonathan hummed, distress bleeding onto the floor and leaving its imprint on the earth as it evaporated away and left behind ire. Cold moisture crystallised around their lips and throats and sealed them shut; the lies that Michael could breathe as easily and consistently as any other could air were forbade passage as the instrument of falsehood found its valves blocked by unrestrained truth. Speak no evil.
The kiss continued for far too long and, subsequently, was ended far too soon.
Jonathan gasped, but no air entered his lungs and neither did sound leave them. The Distortion pulled away swiftly, leaving traces of its many, many faces in small strands that melted from its own onto Jon's. As it receded, the blurry outlines and dripping features solidified; several empty eyes, tear stained bloody, blinked into just two; its mouth, which before had split in sections across the multitudes of reflections, shrank until it was a gentle frown, the teeth within twisting into sweet and natural places; its lips, coated with dark and agitated skin, as cold as ice, folded and conformed to the curves of its cool and pliant rind, and the tongue that licked them stayed that same diseased and swollen white. The hands lodged in the matted mess of hair on Jonathan head softened until their serrated edge existed only within the grip that it held upon him, and Michael's hair, once more, brimmed with genuine curls and covered its quivering throat.
A perfect sculpture of Michael Shelley stood before him; it spoke.
"Michael certainly did." The Archivist was seated firmly back into view of the unfolding nightmare; Michael Shelley had landed one delicate boot into the deep snow.
"He believed everything she told him," but the Archivist heard something else. I believed everything she told me.
It was the Distortion that Gertrude Robinson had coerced Michael Shelley into wanting to stop. The Distortion, and the others of It-Is-Not-What-It-Is: those wrenched and crumpled figures, the lies that echoes of your loved ones tell you from behind your very own mind, the split-second of delay beneath the movement of your eyes, the memories you're sure you built yourself out of senses and stimuli that form corrupted and inexplicable worlds. A party of unsaid words and grinning mimicries of human lives had congregated to celebrate the birth of something truly maddening, of something beyond the world that was visible to those of us that saw within the confines of the electromagnetic spectrum. The Great Twisting.
The-Worker-of-Clay's decades of labour had taken a toll on its bent and buckled body. Muscle had been built upon bleeding muscle, formed with thick fingers alive with expertise and artistic enlightenment. Embellishing his swollen limbs were rivers of wine-coloured silt, decorating his flesh like veins of ruby ore. All those years had been spent crafting and creating the most contorted and impossible edifice; one of doors, and stairs, and falsehoods, and smiles. The essence of the Spiral danced with it, and with the thousand staring morsels, each of them skin and bone, without a single suggestion of sanity in their minds. The impression that the spectacle left upon them was not, and could never have been, one of clarity, but it was one of perfection: sweet apotheosis.
The alter warped and wailed and melted and mixed and still it stood and sometimes drooped and came to life and fell down dead and never even existed and the Archivist watched and watched and blinked and the cycle had restarted. Apotheosis was the only word to come to mind. Worship; an exaltation, a glorification, a veneration of the idolised madness of the Spiral.
No, the Archivist held its train of thought; it had only seen its truth when it had darted, panic-stricken and bewildered into the passages themselves. The apotheosis, the new age of Es Mentiras, was contained within that yellow door — the one that would open to all the places that were never there: the Distortion. And the Distortion was marvellous.
Even when Michael had attempted on shedding it's skins and breaking free from the restraints of sacrificial flesh, its depiction of the Distortion, of the memory of its beauty, had never quite come through.
Here they were, the Archivist saw, dancing and twisting and reaching sky-high, a huge and untapped well of power and energy undulating and convulsing through space and time and leaving no shadow at all. They, at this point, had been the door and the interior that sat like patient, open jaws behind it. Instead of the grotesque amalgam of sea green fog and rippling, rolling limbs that Jonathan Sims had been forced to waltz with back before the Archivist had any intentions at all, they were invisible, convulsing chaos.
Laughter has no colour other than the emotion propelling it forward; when there is no feeling, no reason, only laughter, then there is no colour at all.
And, upon this invisible gateway into Twisting Deceit, a multitude of smiles were modelled.
And this is what Michael Shelley and Gertrude Robinson had seen after they'd set foot onto Земля Санникова, a land that does not exist, and never has. The Archivist could not see the future — only the past — and so could not be certain of its continued nonexistence. Times change, of course, it reminded itself. Times change and people change and faces change.
The Archivist could feel warmth, comfort, and the poor, doomed man beside it could feel it too. He shuddered at the jarring change, the split-second shift from biting cold to an embrace of warmth. Still shivering, though either Archivist could tell that it was due mostly to primal fear, Michael Shelley inhaled quietly and shrugged free from his shoulders his lambskin, carrying it on his elbows and allowing it to hang limp. Long and slender hands wrung themselves into knots against his stomach, while Michael Shelley steadied his breathing and searched for eye contact from Gertrude Robinson; she gave it not to him, and instead met, in a gaze so saturated in plot and corruption and hatred, the eyes of Peter Lukas.
The sea captain stiffened at the sight, as though no amount of force would cause him to disobey her silent command. He would be waiting for her when she returned alone.
Perhaps, once again, if Michael Shelley had ever managed to look into her eyes directly, he would be well aware of the danger that Gertrude Robinson possessed, of the ruthless cunning in her mind and the vengeful nature of her heart. As the matter stood, however, Michael Shelley was blissfully, and perfectly, ignorant.
While the Archivist followed them both through the green jungle of the forever-elusive polar island, and up the gentle mountains without names, Michael Shelley remained so. He was fragile; he was glassware in a delivery truck with a label marking him for a second-class journey overseas. His final destination was nearing and, in the case that he would get lost on route, stumble too close to the truth and forfeit his arranged destiny, he had no return address tied around his throat: only that knitted, crimson trail, second hand, the only object in his possession that was his alone.
At the top of the canine peaks, bursting through thick, white clouds that hung in frozen stills of hurricane winds, Gertrude Robinson introduced Michael Shelley to their adversary. It was an intense but glorious sight, when the trembling, breathing obstacle came face to face with the spiralling laughter.
Michael Shelley — poor, sweet thing, the Archivist felt the Ceaseless Watcher swell in size as his torment was relived — was convinced that, at the sight of the Distortion's rapture, he had gone mad. No, the madness was yet to come, but no words could have broken him from the spell that had taken hold of him.
The Distortion continued to subtly narrate the scene, but the Archivist predicted every word before swallowing it whole.
Michael Shelley's sanity was, for the time being, totally sound and, disregarding years of chipping, shaving, cutting, skimming, and manipulating, where his person was molded to fit that of the perfect lamb, his mind was unblemished. For, the mind does not shatter; it is soft and malleable. It bends and it twists, but it returns to what it was, though whatever beasts a child bears witness to will undoubtedly leave their mark upon it.
Regardless, in a split second, Michael Shelley had become determined that he had already lost it — that he had never seen a marble, let alone owned any. After all, what he saw — with, the Archivist knew, crystal clarity — was not simply something that could be real.
But Gertrude Robinson, Michael Shelley's anchor, his weight, dragging him just far enough down under the water so as to force shut his eyes, make them sting, salty, while his mouth and nose were free to cry for help and breathe, did not waver. She did not hesitate. The Archivist watched her, enticed and eager, a mentor, a predecessor, an example, as she gave no indication that the spectacle before her was anything more or less than what she had expected. There was no room left in her mind, no corner unsullied by theory and conspiracy and stratagem, for doubt. Wretched, naive Michael Shelley clung onto her wordlessness and waited patiently for a response, as she stared, carefully, into the Distortion's parade, looking for something that was its heart; its door. She found it.
"Perhaps..." Michael's interruption of the scene before them opened Jonathan's mortal eyes back to the ring they shared, "I should have realised what was happening: seeing those two lonely figures approaching me. But," pools of colour, each indented with a single, black droplet of oil: eyes, rolled over and backward in the skull it had inherited, delighted. Many others leaked from pores and holes that appeared to bleed before being covered again by stray stretches of fabric skin. "I cannot tell you the existential joys of truly... becoming." Giggling, in natural, echoing fashion, Michael hummed as it fell onto its knees and lay against the Archivist. "Of an entireness finally crossing the threshold into your self." It found a roost over Jonathan's thigh, and began to melt into the pitiful existence of the Archivist. "So ecstatic—" Michael flourished an awkward hand that was somewhere along the transition from long, slender fingers, to stained, black, screws— "was my completeness, I did not even hear my own door creak open."
That awkward hand crawled forward on elastic limbs until it cupped Jon's chin and tilted it in a limp arc up and over to gaze blankly at the Distortion's made-up face. There was no glare because Jonathan had lost the will to fight. Instead, he blinked, meekly, and allowed the sticky trickle of sweet, warm blood to drip into his mouth as the Distortion carelessly grazed the very gentle linen of his skin with its claws.
Swaying, slowly, like a corpse would as though it were carried by the wind, he allowed his eyes the pleasure of closing, though the story was painted onto the underside of his eyelids, regardless. A door screamed as it creaked open, bleating pitifully a song of intruder, trespasser, an aria of heart disease, while its master danced itself into new shapes and forms as it anticipated the baptism of its purpose. And, the Archivist was returned to the ivory peaks without a name, and the lush and verdant jungle that did not exist.
Because, it knew, Gertrude Robinson had told Michael Shelley how to stop them; she told him to walk through a door. The door was yellow and peeling into spirals at its foot. It was warm, like living flesh, to the touch, but the metal of its black hinges, ones that connected to nothing at all but screamed when opened nonetheless, was ice cold as though the vitality of its surroundings, of the jungle, of the festivities, had not yet reached them.
Michael Shelley's breath pooled in waves and downward cycles, weighted by the panic and terror that had shut down his mind, so enclosed and so molded was it by Gertrude Robinson. Pursing his shivering lips, he forced himself to nod as though he understood.
After all, he trusted her.
The calf might once have trusted the priest, the ore might once have trusted the smith, the dog might once have trusted the bomb.
He went inside, his scarf looking more and more like an untimely and bloody wound by the moment. A second? A minute? What was time, in that place? The door closed behind him and the Archivist hadn't seen whose hand had held the knob.
But, Michael Shelley wasn't helpless. He was disposable, but not useless, and Gertrude Robinson had given one more thing along with an early grave: a map.
The Distortion couldn't say how she would have got such a map, or if she somehow made it, but nor could it remain speechless; "and yet it was a map: a map to me."
The Archivist was swallowed by the map that made no sense. Its lines overlapped and inverted as it meandered deep into the parchment paper, and some of them could be confused with wrinkles on the page, a web-like map of veins and tunnels that, once he was within, Michael Shelley knew how to navigate. He knew which doors to open, and he threw them with wild and terrified abandon. He knew which mirrors to shatter: those that, Gertrude Robinson had told him, revealed to him his own reflection, as they were certainly lies and tricks and deceit and Michael Shelley couldn't allow himself to be fooled by them.
And he continued to wreak havoc through the intestines of the Distortion, suffocate it and provoke it, for a while, right until the moment where the Distortion ceased to be able to stand the teasing pinpricks of his footsteps in the villi of its carpet.
It opened wide, to its own detriment, and became Michael.
Blood vessels and thumping ventricles choked and spluttered into crumbling brick, and dust filled Michael Shelley's lungs as flesh became solid wood, the hair standing upright on his neck became splinters, and his veins were wrought and dragged and split and engorged until they became the hallways. His mind fractured and caved into itself a thousand times, bending into shapes unimaginable and unnamed by human tongue. Growing into roots, his hands burned with living fire, sharp and gnarled and twitching as they were, and where shattered glass had broken free from the poisoned mirrors and scraped his knuckles beyond healing, where bone had become exposed after hit after hit of manic obedience, new fingers sprung, even wilder and more agonising than before. Strings and fibres were wound, tight and restrictive, into plaits and then threaded into Michael Shelley's nerve endings; the Distortion felt pain.
"Even sharper than the joy of becoming..." the Distortion lulled, mournfully, "is the agony of being opened—" the Archivist opened a tongueless mouth to cry as an incandescent terror levered out its flesh to shred its insides— "and remade."
In a split-second, the Archivist's ribs became gnashing teeth and its spine a row of firecrackers. The Archivist felt, with horrifying precision, the strain of soul and muscle as its who feigned tearing bloody from its what, and another was forcefully and gracelessly shunted into place.
"To become Michael." The Distortion seethed and spat and grew and growled but every spread of its eternal, rolling, amorphous, atrocious being was trapped, stuck, in the frail and crooked body of Michael Shelley, and there was no surpassing such a prison. Intimidation worked no longer: the Archivist saw right through the mask and into the terrified eyes of the man beneath the mania.
"And to do so at such a crucial point in our Twisting!" Many throats hissed as one, within this long and incomprehensible complaint. The Distortion continued to make attempts to rise through the blank canvas of Michael Shelley. "In our becoming!" It failed every time, spluttering choking plumes of colour and spark, until it gave in and collapsed back into the fragile shell. Collapsed, like a falling building, like a network of tunnels and caves and crevices, down into themselves and filled every pore and cavity with rubble and leftover brick. Collapsed, like a starving lung, filled with liquid, bubbled, and silenced. Collapsed, like an atom, or a universe, like a maelstrom, like a singularity, like something owned by one of two extremes, expansive or pitiful, pressing deeper and deeper into its core until it filled every space with all the matter it could, hardened into iron beneath the pressure, and froze, taking time with it.
Michael Shelley was a haunted house. Hollow, filled with wandering individuals, his veins had become the corridors, his mouth the entrance, and the atria within his heart the very twisted evil he had ventured to destroy.
"Well," Michael Shelley clasped his hands around himself and fell forward until he was hunched on his knees, as he shuddered through trembling lips and steaming words, "of course it destroyed it." There was something triumphant in his voice, however weak and faltering it was. Though the Archivist could not bear to look too deep into his round, wet eyes, it could see them still as though its every lifetime were joined as one. Michael Shelley's eyes were alight with a defiant, dwindling fire.
I was needed!
I was useful!
I helped!
Instead, it leant further back into its chair as its being was absorbed right back into feasting on his memories: a parasite, a virus, a worm.
The impossible altar, crafted so delicately and with such intent on perfection so that every twist of the knife and every scratch of the scalpel indented within it a purposeful and unique shape, collapsed too: the Archivist saw within it the bones of Michael Shelley shattered and crushed into mangled and reanimated paste. An expression of horror on his face, The-Worker-of-Clay tore out his veins with a cry of bittersweet revenge on what he perceived to be his own lack of skill, and was dissolved in crimson mud, skin broiling and mind melting long before he could realise how very dead his friend already was. The others, the apparitions, the hallucinations, the several and the many in the one, were cast to all the places that aren't. The Archivist did not need to hear the Distortion weep to know that many never found their way out again.
"And, somehow," Michael Shelley collected his panicked breaths into one and slumped visibly before the Archivist, his shoulders in a half-hearted shrug, his brow creased, his lips parted in disbelief, and his eyes raw and sickly, "Gertrude Robinson," the postmodern Prometheus, "was back on that boat before Sannikov Land once again never existed."
A moment of hesitancy and silence predated the explosive finale of the statement. Michael Shelley knelt, in grief as dead as he had always been in life, with sallow skin and knotted hands. Red and glistening, the scarf bled woven trails into wool, and knitted itself around his throat, as it was cut and pierced and bruised by the needles that crafted it. Inches from the Archivist's knee, he glanced toward its face but stayed begging on all fours. He panted, and tried to hold every other scattered breath in, but couldn't quiet manage it. The cloth of the creature shuffled as it rose to its feet, and it shifted a pair of soft, round glasses over its nose until the eyes beneath began leaking oil. Exhausted, he opened his mouth to let out mist and snow, but no words. His chest burst open in an instant, so quickly that sound could not follow and was dragged into the gaping maw of his ribcage-mouth, a terrifying cocoon that let forward a flurry of sickeningly sweet wing beats and honey.
The Distortion sprung forth, again, pulling the essence of Michael Shelley from the corpse and wearing it as a mask. The Archivist hesitated, unsettled by its perception of it; paradolia is only half a face, of course, the physical half.
Once dressed in stolen clothes, once the mane of wild hair had ceased to expand and begun to drift and float, it approached the Archivist again. Growing in height with every step, the Distortion rolled each new eye that had opened in its hair, iris blurring with flesh and rolling curl, and shrugged itself clear of human terror as it found itself back in the now familiar straitjacket of Michael's skin.
"And all that was left was me," it giggled, grinning with only its mouth, and each of the Archivist's breaths hastened to flee its dutifully drinking lungs as the laughter softened. After only a second, it sounded less like rusted hinges and throbbing headaches, and more like running water. "Michael." The Archivist recalled Michael Shelley from those beautifully spinning tapes and whirring motors and ticking gears; the Distortion continued to whisper with a sardonic glee, using the helpless victim's vocal chords against itself, "my very existence tied to my pointlessness: wearing my failure as the very fabric of my being: reduced, once again, to feeding on the unsuspecting and confused."
The Archivist could find kinship, in that regard.
In the hapless and unsteady consumption of whatever roamed too close, the Archivist and the Distortion could find overlap: they could have found friendship, had Michael waited just a little longer, and chosen for Jonathan Sims an escape not founded upon death. Both creatures had become themselves through awful and ceaseless feeding, through the delirium of dreams, of what sleeps beneath the subconscious, and through the gratification of cold, hard fact. While the Archivist inhaled cobwebs and letters and points of view, the Distortion had unhinged its jaw and swallowed whole a myriad of people and a menagerie of storytellers. While the two of them had fed on wildly different fears, one, in a sense, complimented the other.
The fear of being known, noticed, read, sucked dry of privacy and stolen from where safety is found in solitude, seemed to drive more people into the unknowable sanctuary of the Distortion, into the corridors that just kept expanding.
"That," it stated, gesturing to itself — or not itself, "is who I am."
And Jonathan was thrust from the imaginings of the event, pulled from the innately appetising nature of the statement, and dropped into the real world with a gasp and a groan as the winding web of chords and nerves that had wrapped itself around his lungs and prohibited him from breathing tore into a thousand, shimmering shards of glass.
Pushed forward, the ropes binding his long-burnt wrists snapping as Michael slid a finger against them, Jonathan heaved as his palms hit his knees and his torso swung drunkenly forward. Michael met him, exhausted, swaying like a reflection on rippling water until it had knelt in submission and hauled itself to be as close to the Archivist as possible. Two pale eyes — the two situated in the socket of Michael Shelley's skull — blinked slowly in Jonathan's direction, and Jon could hear the pleading, the begging: ask me another.
"But you…" Jon inhaled, again, "you never tried to take revenge on Gertrude?"
Elated at the next question, Michael's figure strobed and stuttered in vivid colour.
"She knew how to protect herself." Stretching as it rose, its limbs rolling into impossible shapes as though they'd passed a funhouse mirror, it warped into the Distortion, impossibly tall, stick thin, a deer in headlights. "She knew what she was creating." Michael the Distortion gestured to the image of itself. "And, killing her was not as important," it smiled, almost halfway to being pleasant, as it bent its spine in a million fragile places in order to bend down and kiss Jonathan's forehead, etched with worry and wrinkled as it was, "she wasn't as good an Archivist as you are."
Michael couldn't help itself. It sighed, and Jonathan could hear the unspoken words: again, again!
With nothing else to do, he obliged, "so, why not kill me before?"
An agitated whine undercut the sentence as Michael theatrically jut out its lower lip and batted playful lashes in Jon's direction.
"I had hoped that you would stop the Unknowing first, destroy the workings of I-Do-Not-Know-You... but," both eyes flitted to another target, "instead you are here, and may bring it about faster. So better your death happens now."
Another. Another!
Jonathan, his heart roaring in his ears and his skin crawling, couldn't stop himself from crying out, "i-is there anything I can do to stop you from killing me!?"
Laughter was the response: mocking and consuming laughter, as if it fed even then on the fear that was evaporating from Jon's body in plumes, and burned it as fuel for the golden fire. "If you scream loud enough the Circus may take notice of me, but..." Michael's eyes bled into each other and pooled in horrid, ashen streaks; the liquid pearl trailed behind it as it bent forward, hunching its stretched and twisted skeleton into a crunching mess of marrow, before they were blinked solid, "I promise—" it dragged a swift cutting motion over the pulsing ripples on its chest— "that you will die far more pleasantly with me than with them."
More laughter swallowed Michael, wrapping warped jaws stacked with crooked teeth around its throat and over its face, before teeth became eyes and lips became skin and gum became bone and Michael was made anew. This happened a number of times — a number between three and a thousand, but Jon quickly lost count — where layers of skin washed over layers of skin washed over layers of skin... each in their own twisted mouths, heaving and gasping and laughing through the agony of being Michael.
"Ah..." it finally allowed itself to catch its breath, and its lungs no longer wracked its flimsy torso and creased its paper skin. At the sight of the Archivist's disparity it crooned, gently, but falsely. While the sound it made was one of pity, the movement of its mouth still bit back giggles.
Jonathan simply slumped. A cold and sickening despair crawled into his stomach like a disease, and spread through his blood to every melancholy part of his stiff and frozen body. Folded over in such a painful way that his own organs felt suffocated, he exhaled. Still, at least, the feeling of his own heart shattered, his own stomach pressed, his own lungs burned, his own liver battered, his own intestines tangled, his own kidneys squashed, his own pancreas bruised, was something other than the crushing loneliness, fear, guilt, and hatred that he had pickled in for what felt like eternity.
Michael saw his misery and cocked its head in wonder. Sliding through solid air and leaving traces of its many features behind, it reached Jon's chair, cupped his head with human hands, tilted it upward, and met his lips with a pair so gentle, but still so fierce. The kiss — again — seared an infernal burn, as though it would cauterise the question-asking, quite-compelling wound of the Archivist's mouth, and seal it permanently shut.
Kiss goodbye?
It pulled away too quickly, keen to kill, feast, and bask in the certainty of its own safety, and left stinging claw marks behind Jon's ears, in the tangle of his hair. Jonathan exhaled, weakly. He understood that there was no stalling his fate anymore; he knew the uncaring jaws, the lips of liars and the teeth of traitors, better than he knew himself.
"Okay," he whimpered, in utter defeat and total submission, and Michael breached its own invisible boundary and burst into a genuine smile: no carnivore fangs, no bleeding eyes, just a smile.
"Good." The Archivist all to yourself, right, Michael? "Right this way!"
A door creaked into existence, appearing within the split second of space between the last heartbeat Jonathan ever attempted to notice as he closed his eyes and the moment that he opened them again. It shifted, as boards carrying immense weight often did, and stood there, physical and material, hiding behind it a warren of intense colour and labyrinthine paths though it met no walls. It just sat there, at the edge of a clearing that had previously contained nothing.
"Open it..." Michael began to goad, but, realising the Archivist's forlorn expression, and matching it, it quickly performed a sympathy that was so close to reality that Jonathan almost sobbed. "Open it," it repeated, more softly, "and all this will be over."
A sudden frustration set alight his blood, and his eyes pressed shut and sealed themselves with hot tears. In an instant, like a tiny supernova, a heat lit up every corner of his body; his skin prickled, his jaw clenched, and every square millimetre along flesh and scar tissue alike burned with a short-lived flame. As a rage more potent than any he'd felt before, a fury unmatched even by the shell of the man beside him, overwhelmed him for the briefest of moments, Jonathan Sims lunged for the handle of the doorknob and wrenched it aside as the memory of Michael Shelley had done so before.
He was going to die.
The handle turned with a click and the Archivist found the lock engaged.
With hatred replaced by terror, Jonathan tried the handle twice more, mumbling half a faint but sincerely confused sentence.
"What?" Michael crept forward to be beside him, am image of mockery still plastered onto his face.
"It's locked."
Giggling briefly, either unaware at first of his honesty or in blatant denial of it, Michael whispered, "it's not," and Jonathan's frustration returned in an instant.
"Why is it locked!?" What he had meant to say had been why had I prepared myself for death? Why did you frighten me for nothing?
But Michael only glowered, heavy with a vitriolic eagerness one could only describe as bloodlust. "It can't be!"
"Well, you try it!"
Shoving Jon aside as it scampered forward and grasped the handle, turning it twice to find no response at all, Michael became frantic as the lock continued to click.
"Th-Tha-That-That's... not-" worry replaced anticipation, and a realisation joined the haunted expression its last ever mask wore. "Oh." As it peeled away, no face followed to replace it.
"Oh no."
And the awful noise released straight after sent Jonathan's hands flying to the sides of his head; the distorted scream, throat-burning and ear-splitting, suggested to Jonathan the impression that, before him, the immolation of a being as old as time itself was occurring.
As Michael shrieked, a course and jagged cry for nothing in particular, Jonathan witnessed an arduous and agonising reduction of its flesh. The lethal cavern that carved into its chest, blazing away clothes and skin until the ribs were exposed, opened the Distortion to its very soul. Brittle bones cracked as they peeled themselves away in a painful and terminal disaster and crawled around its torso to swallow it. Limbs were wrought past their elastic limit, and the Distortion continued to wail in shock and alarm and understanding as the 'who' it had grown so used to, so attached to, was burnt to a crisp, leaving its 'what' without a host, exposed to a thousand emotional elements. A new mouth was torn over the image of the old, and technicolour blood spurted from the gash. New fingers burst from the palms of its hands and broke the old in places never before conceived of: they continued to stretch and grow. Destroying itself, orouborous screeched as its body contorted and pulled itself into knots it couldn't shake, bonds that it could not escape, that made it choke and heave. The scarf, snake-like, curled itself around its body and suffocated it, and, in a terrifying disintegration of matter and meat — having let every feeling of fury, love, terror, disbelief, resentment, and spite, overwhelm it — the Distortion burst into sparks.
And while he died again, while his body, used for years and years as a puppet of torture, was shredded and burnt into ashes and dust, Michael Shelley screamed. Not with fear — no, he had learnt not to fear — but with outrage. He had, with all intent to trust and every instinct in his body alight with terror, slid his fingers, stained black as though he'd been working with charcoal, over that same handle — that exact same handle — and he had been let in like it had been waiting for him.
The Archivist, a being that, by all means, should have been despised by the Distortion, had met a locked door. Michael Shelley, in all his innocence and all his harmlessness, had been crushed up, swallowed, and destroyed.
Jonathan heard him scream for justice, fairness, the neutrality that the Distortion had so often clung to as a defence, and mumbled a single, soft apology.
He'd been readier to die, and the door had refused him the honour.
He promised, quietly, to the collapsing bedlam before him, that he wouldn't forget Michael Shelley: that he'd remember him, think of him, talk about him.
But Michael Shelley was far too dead to hear that; golden strands of hair fell from the vortex as the final slivers of Michael were stretched and torn and pulled to their poles, and they curled as they burst into flame when they hit the floor. Its suffering was over in an instant.
A deep and sickening dread washed over Jonathan as he stared at the charred scarring before him, and the nervousness set in as — using the last of the light he had been given — he glanced around at the ceramic horde beneath him. Just before he was about to succumb to his primal, human urges and make a break for anywhere that wasn't occupied by the Stranger, the canary-coloured door, two steps to his right, that had, just seconds before, been so conveniently locked and so oddly still, opened with a whine, a creak, and a softer, more uneasy voice asked him a question he'd really hoped never to hear again.
"Do you want to come in?"