[Original Novella] Upon the Shadow of Nothing, Part 2 (the finale!)

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I'd have kept walking except that he held an arm out in front of my chest. Before us was a pair of great circular doors, made from something I initially assumed was porcelain, but stained brown with age. The decoration was bizarre. Fine little carvings inset in the frame depicted withered little people in scenes of daily life, the frame itself carved to resemble a chain of bones joined at the ends. The doors were made of the same material and bore similar incredibly detailed carvings. This really was remarkable artwork. Zach must've found it in storage down here and realized he could use it as a prop for the performance he was subjecting me to now.

Only, as I peered around it, I found it was stranger still than it initially appeared. The frame of the door was perhaps five feet deep, but with nothing behind it. Like it was not a passage to some new room but a container for something.

"The fuck's in there?" I queried. He flashed a deranged grin. "What's North of the North Pole? What's negative one inches on a ruler? Where's the three hundred and sixty first degree in a circle?" I elbowed him. "Give me a straight answer you god damned weirdo." He wouldn't stop grinning and now began to laugh. "Nothing. But not true nothing. There can never be. Can you show me a nothing? No, even nothing is something. The substrate. Strangelife. They're feeble as projections but can still reorder projected matter. Well enough to build a bridge for more convenient travel."

I became nauseous. It started sometime earlier as that feeling between nausea and hunger that you can't resolve as either until it becomes intense enough. Now it was. The room began to sway perceptibly beneath me. "Don't open that."

That's exactly what he meant to do and I felt too weak to fight him. "Zach, I want to go home. Stop this, lead me out of here." He searched for something to pry with. "What's the matter? I'm a liar, remember? Nothing I told you was true. Focus on that and try not to pass out, you're about to see some serious shit."

The door finally cracked open with a tremendous sound of rushing air. It whipped the hair about my face, like standing in front of a jet engine intake. "CLOSE IT!" I shouted, but couldn't make myself heard over the din. Like a man possessed he wedged himself into the doorway and pushed it further and further open.

The wind slowed, then finally died down. Whatever pressure difference there'd been was now evidently equalized. I wondered how that could be possible until remembering Zach had made a point of shutting and sealing the blast door to the mine. Otherwise, I imagined, our atmosphere would just continue to vent into the pitch black abyss I could now see through the open door.

As I gaped, Zach opened the other door for a better view. There was an object in the distance. Like nothing I'd ever seen before. It is even now difficult to describe coherently. There was nothing in my experience to compare it to.

The object was obviously huge but distant. We could still make it out in some detail. It was very ornate and intricate, excruciatingly detailed, the same color and texture everywhere like polished ivory or bone but a dull brown color. Many of the structures were themselves flowing, exquisitely carved forms consisting of blended together skeletal sections. Long serpentine columns of ribcages, zigzagging trim consisting of femurs which fused at the ends. Not made from bones but carved to resemble it, surely?

Part of it was some kind of stage, or platform. A flat, decorated pavilion where things could take place. Three skulls embedded in the back wall looked down on it from different angles. On the platform tiny people went about their lives. Pushing baby carriages. Building homes. Getting married. Attending funerals. All of them emaciated and skeletal, the same color and material as the rest of it. Like a living, sculpted or carved diorama, a floating island or structure which hung on and among nothing.

All of the decorative patterns converged on a central seat of power. A podium or throne encircled by skeletal levers. A little man, pale, emaciated and hairless rhythmically swayed from side to side, occasionally pushing or pulling the levers, which I intuited was animating the tiny figures on the stage below. It struck me as infinitely meaningful and simultaneously morbid. Apex morbidity.

Zach was taking pictures with his fucking phone like none of this surprised him. I couldn't avert my gaze for any length of time. My head kept snapping back into position. My focus locked against my will on the intricate suspended structure. The little figures, living their lives, and the naked man dancing about, pulling levers, making all of it happen.

"He'll always be there, you know." Zach whispered in my ear. "He'll always be there, doing that thing. What you see him doing now. That's what he's always done. And he'll still be there, doing that thing when the stars die."

I rejected it. Whatever Zach might've slipped me was responsible. Fatigue, maybe. Natural gas seeping from the cave? This conviction coincided, to a fraction of a second, with a violent quake that shook the floating diorama. Little figures were thrown over the edge by it. Delicate faux bone formations shattered and crumbled.

The little man stopped pulling the levers in a panic, and looked around for the cause. His eyes came to rest on us. It was as if I'd been struck by lightening. His direct awareness of me, the unbroken eye contact had a physical impact that flattened my lungs.

"Shut the doors, Zach" I muttered. He continued filming. "Not until you do what I brought you here for." I flew into a rage. "SHUT THE DOORS! SHUT THE DOORS YOU FUCKER! SHUT THE DOORS! SHUT THE DOORS! IT CAN'T BE! IT CAN'T BE, CAN IT? NO! IT CAN'T BE REAL. IT CAN'T BE. SHUT THE DOORS!"

The structure began to grow larger. It was accelerating towards us. I felt on the verge of vomiting, but locked into a powerful duality with it. Like that thing and myself were all that existed in the universe. I felt certain I was sensing it's intention to reach me.

The little man underwent bizarre contortions, flipping end over end, distorting his proportions as he descended from his control station to the platform below. I can only describe the aesthetic of his movement as 'spidery'. More parts than he should have, than he did have while standing still, manifesting then vanishing as needed while in motion.

"SHUT THE DOORS! Shut them Zach, I'm sorry for everything. Please shut the doors. Please Zach shut the doors." His grin began to falter. "You're not supposed to believe. Remember? I need you to do what I can't. This isn't the time to start believing all of a sudden. That isn't you. Don't fail me. Don't fail both of us, for fuck's sake. Not now. I could close the doors and it wouldn't save us. One of 'em already made it through."

I turned to look at the approaching island. The little man was nowhere to be seen. I fought off the paralysis of terror to lurch forward and shut the first door. Then shoving Zach out of the way, I heaved the second one shut. Everything went silent. I stared at him, breathing erratically and covered in sweat. "I told you, it's here already. You know what to do."

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed something wedged into the corner of the ceiling. A small, frail tangle of limbs. Like a child or frail woman, compressed into that tiny hiding space like a frightened insect. It was their nature, wasn't it? To hide, instinctively. To escape the purges. So slowly, so gingerly, it began to stir. My body went tense and my mouth hung open but I could not vocalize however hard I tried to. Nor could I break my fixation on it.

It had no fixed form. Of course not. It was a projection, moreso than either of us. It would briefly resolve as something like the little man, but blurry, whiter than the Moon and spiderlike. The limbs were long and thin, fading in and out of different positions around it.

The eyes were just large dark blotches of shadow on the face. The mouth lipless, with tiny skeletal teeth showing through. It began to move down the wall. A combination of crawling, drifting and sliding. I couldn't fully process thought. The purest, most absolute moral terror disrupted every attempt. Even Zach had begun to lose his composure.

"Stop panicking. Do what you're supposed to. There's precious little time. Look at it. Can that exist? How does it move? What's it made of? If it's not material, how does light interact with it's eyes so it can see? How could sound vibrate it's eardrums so it can hear? If it doesn't eat, why is there a mouth? Think about it. All of those. Force yourself. Please. Please, do it now. Do it now."

I did my best to zero in on the sound of his voice and dismiss what was in front of me. It was a herculean effort. I directed all of my mind still under control to contemplating the impossibility of what we were seeing. If it could identify and move towards us, it could think.

But how? Without the physical structure of a brain to organize energy into thought, it was impossible. I repeated this to myself. I scrutinized it for errors. It seemed airtight. The moment I believed it, the thing stopped moving. It quivered, twitched and struggled to coordinate it's shifty, bony limbs.

"Keep it up, it's working. Don't let anything distract you. How could it be real? How does its body work? If nothing material interacts with it how can light bounce off of it so we can see it? How do the eyes work? How? It's absurd, isn't it?"

It was. It was! The more I thought about it the more resolute I became. What I was seeing could not be real. I thought about how eyes work and how an immaterial eye could not receive photons. The thing before us changed again. The shadowy blotches it used to see faded, then vanished.

A hallucination, like I'd suspected all along. It had to be. My mind created it, so my mind could destroy it. Certainly. The stronger I felt about this the more it writhed, parts of it fading into and out of being. Finally just a torso and a head, which shrunk and melded together, splitting apart, becoming a fluid, then a wispy smoke-like essence, which then evaporated.

My heart still raced. I was now soaked with sweat and stunk like a zoo. The cave was as cold as ever but I felt lethally feverish. I focused on breathing exercises to bring down my heart rate. Zach beamed at me. I could've strangled him. We rested there for as long as it took me to regain my strength, then trekked up through the mine to the industrial building, then to the car waiting outside. I was still powerfully rattled, so I let Zach drive.

The road home was long and featureless, with vast fields of wheat to either side. My mind raced uncontrollably trying to integrate what I'd seen into what I knew could, and couldn't, be true. Like a puzzle piece that wouldn't fit no matter how I pressed on it. "What the fuck was that back there?"

He didn't answer initially. I was feeling more vulnerable than I ever had before or since and wished for once he'd just stop being cryptic and show me his cards. "You know as much as you need to. If I tell you more, you might start to believe, and that’s no good. I need you to be able to do what you did back there a shitload more times. If you can’t, you’re as defenseless against them as me. You want some advice? Don't dwell on this. Dismiss it as a psychotic episode. You know how I told you never to change? I meant that. Don't ever change. Keeping looking at the world the way you do now, or we're lost. Because now that we've killed one, the rest will come for us."

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