Chapter Three: Mantra Scramble
1
I wondered if something like this might happen, Quint thought as he clicked his tongue. “Putnam, get Pip. They are in the waterfall room bathing.”
“Yes, Master Quint,” Putnam said with a slight bow, then hurried from the room. Quint walked to the opposite side of the table. Yes, this was a strong vibration; there would be traces left where it had warped the air. With any luck, Pip would get here before those traces were gone.
2
Phildrious Putnam phase-shifted into his original form as he exited the dining room, becoming an oily black humanoid shape.
He reached for a phase warp, collapsed into a puddle, and went underneath the kitchen door into the hallway on the other side. He could feel the pull of the other potential he had accessed by touching the phase-warp—the pull to be the puddle completely and stay that way. He naturally resisted this tug as he did any time he phase-shifted.
Assuming his original black and oily form—which did not tug at him—Putnam walked down the hallway, an endless sprawl lined by doors. Above each door was a golden sign with engraved writing: ‘Theatre,’ ‘Sly Grass Den,’ ‘Spider Milk Bar,’ ‘Peep Show,’ and oddly enough ‘19’, were just a few. Putnam stopped in front of one marked ‘Waterfall Room.’ He reached for a phase warp in front of the door handle, shifting himself back into the expected manservant form he usually wore with his friends, then twisted the handle.
The door opened to a roaring waterfall that fell over a rocky ledge into a plunge pool below. The water sparkled with the reflection of sunlight, flowing toward the doorway then veering to the right. Putnam stepped into a wooded area that clung to the water’s edge like facial hair. The trees were very tall and slightly red in color, and the door Putnam came through stood open in the trunk of one of these behemoths.
“Master PIP!” Putnam yelled, trying to get through the blast of the waterfall. He stepped forward onto a rock the size of a human head.
“MASTER PIP!” Putnam yelled again, louder this time, and then the sesnickie jumped out of the water near the edge, causing water to come crashing down on Putnam’s head.
“Master Pip, something has happened, and—”
Pip shook the water out of their fur, ensuring that Putnam’s livery was entirely soaked.
“Leslie has vanished with the Eraser,” Putnam went on, wiping water from his eyes. “Master Quint said he needs you now.” At this, the sesnickie Moved, teleporting. Putnam turned around and became oily black again, the wet livery disappearing. He went through the door and made his way back.
3
Leslie drifted. The vibrations sang and strummed his nerves with chaos fingers. He could hear—everything LOW.
EMPTY YOURSELF.
BE A VESSEL.
YOU CAN ONLY BE TRUE IF YOU ARE TRULY EMPTY.
I.
SEE.
YOU.
White light ate away at Leslie’s mind. He screamed. Blank—everything blank, stretching forever. A flash of red.
I CAN MAKE IT STOP.
White, acid light.
Now red—a red cloak, a tall form. Horns peaking from beneath a hood—brown, twisting horns. The face was obscured but for the bottom where it swirled in a black and white Void. Static fuzz.
I CAN MAKE YOU HAPPY.
Images flashed in Leslie’s mind. But was it his mind? Was he here? He seemed more ‘it’ now. He appeared to … be ASURA and himself at the same time—which was all time, every time, both selves, all selves.
ASURA.
He saw himself suspended above a pool of static fuzz like what had swirled inside the hood. Then was dipped in.
He was …
A virus, eating holes through a heart.
A breath blowing phase dust, separating the atoms of its victims.
A woman breaking wooden spoons across a child’s back, leaving thick splinters in the skin..
The Hate, drugging the water supply of farmers who refused the One Dream.
Rakshasas coming to Dandelion from their previous planet and enslaving the Drake people.
Leslie, with the mantra scramble bug, walking toward his brother Alfred and then putting it into his ear. The bug smooshed its way through Alfred’s brain and extended its hundred legs across pink meat, biting its pincers into the prefrontal cortex—
Mantra scramble.
Alfred babbled.
“I didn’t do it! I would never do that to Alfred” Leslie screamed.
YOU ARE THESE THINGS.
YOU ARE BUT A SMALL PIECE OF THE ALL.
YOU DENY THEM, BUT THEY ARE YOU.
ALL THAT YOU SAW IS SO.
I CAN MAKE IT STOP.
White light threatened to consume him.
EMPTY.
A vision of a doctor taking a spike to a woman’s tear duct, hammering it home. One red tear falling down the cheek.
EMPTY.
“STOP!” Leslie cried.
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I CAN MAKE IT STOP
“NO!”
I CANNOT MAKE YOU, THIS IS TRUE. I CAN TAKE THAT WHICH IS AND SHAPE IT.
Leslie felt a hole tearing. He felt it in his stomach, though he knew it was in his mind. The hole was there before, but now it was gaping. It was like the mind grooves that Quint talked about sesnickies traveling when they did a Fishing. It felt like ASURA was riding back and forth in these grooves in a rocking chair, turning divots into chasms.
Fiona.
The old wound.
4
Pip vomited. The sesnickie was sickened by the scent of this place. The phlegmy bile drifted in a sinuous line from Pip’s mouth, denying gravity, and Pip pushed away, floating toward Leslie.
Leslie hung suspended in air, stomach to the sky, his arms, legs, and head hanging down.
WHAT IS THIS?
ANOTHER HAS COME?
IS THIS …? YES … I CAN USE THIS.
There was a very strange vibrational pulse that came over Pip and they couldn’t quite place it. No time, they thought. Pip jumped for Leslie, coiled their body around him and sent a very invasive set of feelings and thoughts to him.
5
The meditaz.
Escaping the Hate.
Alfred babbling next to Fiona.
Fiona …
The scents and colors swirling translated to something like, “We need to Move, you fuck. The mantrum! Let’s get back. This place makes me sick!”
Fiona. Back to Fiona.
Leslie chanted the mantrum for Moving.
6
Fiona spooned potato soup into Alfred’s mouth. She noticed she was chewing a nail on her free hand to the point of pulling skin and stopped.
Quint paced the long side of the table. A grandfather clock ticked quietly behind him.
Fiona looked to her left, where Putnam stood by the door to the kitchens, staring unblinkingly ahead. Fiona had grown fond of Putnam in the five and a half years since she stumbled into the front yard of Quint’s Manor House, but she still had the remote sense of unease when he was near.
It was a group of phase-shifters who chased her through the Forest of Midnight, surrounding her, feeding on her vibrations. At the time, she had no idea what they were eating, just that she was being sucked on—like nothing good ever was or ever would be. She had felt the fire of hives ringing her eyes before she blacked out.
That was her first memory; anything before the Shadow Wood did not exist, and no matter how hard she tried, she could not piece together her life before it. When she awoke from the phase-shifter attack, she was in the Forest of Midnight, black, quiet, alone. Standing up, she’d felt for the nearest shadow tree, using the branches as anchors in the dark until one step brought sudden light all around—light, and a manor house in the middle of a field of knee-high pinkish-purple lilies. Later, Quint had told her some people called them stargazers.
Fiona noticed a lone shadow tree standing on a hill behind the house. She felt drawn to the black mass of leaves dancing like flames in the wind.
She walked warily toward the house, and when she was halfway there the front door opened and out stepped an aged man with circle-rimmed glasses, long, fuzzy gray hair, and a beard that came to several matted points around his jaw.
Two blonde young men followed.
Then a black, oily shape stepped from behind the trio, and Fiona had fainted.
“Shit,” Fiona said as she tore skin from her nail. She sucked on the finger to soothe the pain. Quint stopped his pacing to look over at her, but she shook her head and he went on, muttering about some woman, and the Hate, and all the bother, and he should have known better, and it was Valucias all over again, and on and on.
She thumbed her book, turning to a picture of the red-cloaked Leere.
Where had Leslie gone? Why had he looked so insane when he’d grabbed the Eraser? Why couldn’t Alfred just get over the goddamn mantra scramble?
A tear landed on the page, darkening a ring of Leere’s cloak the rust color of dried blood.
She caught Quint looking at her again and wiped her eyes, turning away, scowling and hoping the hives that betrayed those true emotions she rarely shared hadn’t formed.
Alfred had pushed Fiona away, throwing himself entirely into his research until she gave up on their marriage entirely. But then he’d become … broken, right when she was finished, for fuck’s sake, right on the day when she’d finally decided to tell him she was done, and she was leaving the manor house, and she hoped he found what he was looking for in his research. She clenched a fist under the table. It wasn’t fair. How could she leave him now—how could she even want to until he was well again? And why did Pip Fish that card if it led to this? she thought. Pip had been so sure the Eraser was the only way to fix the mantra scramble in Alfred’s brain.
Fiona was impatient, not only to heal her husband so he could get back to his life, but also so she could get on with hers.
7
Leslie took full control of the connection between himself and the sesnickie. Pip arched their back in protest. Suddenly, in the middle of the Move, the image of the austere dining room disappeared and the cold marble pillars and tile of the meditaz replaced it, only—it was wrong somehow.
8
There wasn’t much to Leslie now but a kind of divine urgency for—Fiona.
It was an ache the had once pained him daily, but he’d moved on, understanding that Alfred had won her, as Alfred was brilliant, was incredible, was some kind of a fucking genius, wasn’t he?
Leslie had accepted it, yes, but every flicker of eye contact still sent a jolt through him. And now those eyes wouldn’t leave his mind, wouldn’t stop their boring into him, their wanting him. There was no acceptance now, oh no, why would there be? Now there was only that painful desire, and the surety that she, too, felt this way.
Doesn’t she? She does—yes, of course she does. She always has. You were just too craven to try. She’s been waiting the whole fucking time!
To have her he knew what he had to do. He saw his brother sitting cross-legged on a square pillow against one of the pillars of the meditaz, eyes closed. Leslie felt the tickling in the back of his head that signaled the beginning of a sending from Pip. He wasn’t sure how he did it, but he thrummed into the Eraser. Waves of cold rippled through him as Pip’s sending was cut off. Leslie felt the sesnickie stiffen beneath him. Frozen like disco freeze, he thought. Low Vibrations. Leslie dismounted and took a step behind the pillar to his left. There was a reason Leslie had used the Eraser’s strange powers to Move back to this time and day. This was the Day Of Contemplation six months ago and Alfred would be in a deep trance.
ASURA, the being inside the Eraser, had also shown Leslie the way—where to go, what to do. All would be provided. Leslie peaked from behind the pillar at his brother. He turned and began to walk toward Alfred. A very muffled piece of him urged him away—Away, don’t you remember? Go back and tell the others you know what happened to Alfred. If you don’t do it, maybe that’s what’ll fix him. If you never did it to him, then it never happened!
Alfred hadn’t exactly been present around this time, and he barely even spoke with his wife, Fiona. He didn’t deserve her! He did, however, deserve the bug. Yes, the bug, which would be provided soon, and Leslie would put in his brother’s ear because it was the only way Fiona could let go of Alfred for good.
But where was the bug? He continued to walk, then paused as he saw the red-cloaked figure towering over him to his right. Brown, twisting horns peaked out from a hood that concealed the head. He’d seen this creature, or a statue of it, on Lavender. It was Him! The story-taker! The Necrolore! r
LEERE!
HELLO LESLIE
Leslie’s face twisted as he dropped the Eraser. Leere pointed a transmogrifier at him. The world grew around him, the pillars were giant towers now, the ceiling pushing miles away.
Leere bent and picked Leslie up.
He was the bug, a fucking mantra scramble bug! But it wasn’t supposed to be like this! The thing inside the Eraser, ASURA, it—He—had assured Leslie that a bug would be provided, and that Leslie would carry the bug to … to what? It was all fading, and fast. He felt the need to feed, to reach little legs into slits of pink meat and poke and prod and feed and feed and feed on vibrations. Powerful vibrations.
Leere carried Leslie toward his brother and placed him on Alfred’s neck.
Leslie crawled into a screaming Alfred’s ear canal and smooshed his way through the brain. He extended his hundred legs into what holes needed filling, those cracks that leaked food, so much food into Leslie, then stabbed his pincers into pink meat and squeezed.
Alfred went rigid, his screams fading in a kind of hissing whine until a grotesque twist of nonsense and babbling palsied on his lips.
9
Pip watched from the shadows, helpless, frozen from Leslie’s strange control over the vibrations—Pip assumed it had something to do with the Eraser that Leslie still held as he walked toward the oblivious, meditating Alfred. Pip watched as Leslie turned, stiffened and shrank. A very tall, red-cloaked figure walked from behind a pillar, and, with a gloved hand, picked Leslie’s tiny, flailing bug body up off the floor.
Alfred screamed before the babbling began. The cloaked figure turned to Pip. The sesnickie, now free from Leslie’s vibrations, jumped for the Eraser. There was a powerful scent attached to it, thrumming with the vibration of forward, and future, and here, but not now.
Pip materialized in the dining room of their original time, dropping the Eraser and scrambling to the corner of the room.