Alex Reynard
The Library
Alex Reynard's Online Books
Part 95
The climb was agonizing, backbreaking work.
Toby was grateful for it. Pain to stoke his fire with.
He was alone on the side of the mountain. Halfway up now. At his back, an unlimited ocean of silence and cold. The stars lit his path with stark clarity. He remembered seeing this kind of light from the photos astronauts took.
Below him was miles of falling. Rocks to bounce off of and break his bones.
Ahead was hours more vertical exertion.
And at the top, a faint glow. An unknown source.
Toby had no idea what he would find up there. Maybe Scaphis had moved into Rebecca's living shell. Maybe she'd be a viscous horror upon a throne of skulls. Maybe she'd built a new tower.
The important thing now was that he had to hate her as much as possible. Like making L'roon's yellow potion overflow.
Hand over hand, Toby climbed. Cognizant at all times of the slithering beige river of flesh that cascaded counter-clockwise down the length of Anasarca's spiral.
She filled the channel where they had ridden the escalator up. It was now a neverending bathtub of rolling plastic vomit. This was not what he'd seen at Gilla-Gilla's shack and the assault on Rhinolith. Scaphis was not a still frame, frozen in her moment of victory. She was active here. Naturally, so close to home. More than that, she was busy with her new collection.
Toby clutched handfuls of chalky rock, grey as the campsite below. Urchin-like blossoms of raw imaginite grew out of the mountainside everywhere. He'd quickly gotten tired of groping for handholds and winding up with a prickly pawful of pain, so he worked out a solution. Imaginite was easier to sculpt than force into an entirely new substance. Whenever Toby touched a spiky lump, it only took a split-second to mold a handle out of it. It was the one easy thing about this experience.
He'd taken his sandals off and stuffed them in his side pockets. His bare feet gripped the rock better, claws acting as miniature grappling hooks. Not to say his pawpads weren't scraped and bleeding by now. They'd bleed a lot more before he reached the top. He desperately hoped she wouldn't be able to smell the red streaks he was leaving.
His palms throbbed. It was nothing compared to the blazing, sizzling, all-over agony from his skin. Head to toe, he burned. The pills had done their best, but hours had passed and they were losing the battle. Pain was dancing up, down, and all around his nerves. Toby imagined tiny imps with razor blades.
Hand over hand. Grip the rocks. Pull himself onward. Up to the top of the cosmos. The galaxies swirled in their eternal dance around him. The work was monotonous. He could not let himself get lost in it. He was glad for the pain. It kept his focus.
He was glad, too, for the constant sight of Scaphis. He needed the reminder of why he was here. Every time he came to a point where he had to jump a gap, he would look down to see her vinyl flesh bubbling below him. Inhale the nauseating stench of burning PVC.
She had taken everything from him. Now was not the time to dredge up old doubts about what he was planning. Now was not the time to think about the plan at all. It was time to think about her.
Because when he got to her door, he would have to put on a mask. Which she would see through if he wasn't convincing.
So this was method acting. He would require calm later, but right now his body needed to feel hatred. He had to ingrain the stress and flush of relentless, burning wrath. It would not be enough to fake it. He would have to project the exact right body language, expression, and exhaustion. He needed to steam himself in anger like a sauna. Steep himself in bitterness like tea.
Scaphis Tarrare. He had known her as another name. She was a junked, dirty toy standing in the middle of a moonlit dirt road. He feared her. She pleaded. She begged for his trust. And in his ignorance, he gave it.
By now, Toby had forgiven himself for this. Showing compassion was the right way, even when it was taken advantage of. Of all the people he had opened his hand to, the vast majority had been worth the risk. Even when he'd been hit in the face with a loathsome, phlegmmy sock. Vienna Tusk was maddened with rage, and she had fooled him, but she was still a soul with an understandable motivation. Misguided, but well-intentioned. Scaphis had consciously faked her entire personality to gain sympathy and a seat on their expedition. She'd helped out just enough to make herself trustworthy. She'd let herself be hugged. All the while, nothing ever mattered to her more than the mountain. Revenge. Aldridge had imprisoned her in plastic, therefore he had to pay. Her companions were expendable.
Toby forced himself to see them all in that fatal, final moment. The moment Doll was no longer Doll. The Neculaunis room, while the silver door itself watched impassively. The crunch of George's bones compressing. Zinc's struggles. Junella's defiance. Piffle's valiant last attempt to reach her captor's heart. Aldridge had tried to use reason, so she took him by the head and tore him in half like paper. Ate him. Ate his wand. Became a goddess of cruelty.
'I only escaped because I went into system failure. Emotional paralysis. Then I shat in her hand and she flicked me off into the void.'
The void. Her face. Outer space at least had starlight and asteroids and, somewhere in it, other life. Within Scaphis' cavernous allmouth was nothing. A blank room. A place where any normal living furson had eyes and lips, expressions, words, emotions, a mind, a soul. Scaphis had a nothingness. When she'd been Doll, Piffle had taken her to the hospital in Coryza, where they'd tried to give her back her face. But Toby understood now. She'd never had one to begin with.
This was a guess, but one he was confident in. She'd had the same void long before Aldridge's spell ensnared her. The same un-face. It summed up her personality in one perfect, striking image.
'I am separate from you. Above you. All of you. I don't even need to show you a reflection of your own life.'
Toby dug his fingers into an outcropping. It crumbled in his grip. He felt himself falling. His eyes flashed below, to the swimming pool of Scaphis he was about to plunge into.
His hammer saved him. The metal fingers extended in a flash, spearing into the rock like climbing pitons.
Toby stayed motionless for several heartbeats, just to be sure he was stable.
He looked down again. Maybe if he fell, nothing would happen. Maybe she already knew he was on his way. Maybe she could sense him. Maybe she would ferry him up to her castle, eager to keep their meeting.
He didn't think so.
Hand over hand, he kept on. The climb was not difficult, but it required his steady attention.
It wasn't just that she'd hurt him and his friends. It was so much more than that. A world more. Toby tried to expand his view to encompass the entirety of Phobiopolis.
Scaphis had made a beeline for Gilla-Gilla. Broke his defenses, rammed her way into his home, and engulfed him like a venus fly trap.
She had bulldozed Dysphoria to do it, shattering the nightmare itself. Unbelievably, her will was stronger.
Bypassing the worthless lost souls in the maze, she'd taken Papilloma first. A settlement already at the edge of madness. What chance had they stood against her? Striking in the night like a blind cobra, she'd scattered their community, snatching up as many fleeing villagers as she could get her flesh around. The others were left to wander to Lalochezia, cast adrift and destitute in a town that would soon begin to bleed dry. Toby remembered the lost, dead eyes of the refugees there. Some paralyzed by hopelessness, others ravenous for any scrap a stranger could give. Toby remembered their staring eyes in vivid, heartbreaking detail.
The market itself. Once thriving, now withering. Madame Tif Tif having to move her goods into a flimsy tent on someone's front lawn. So many shuttered shops. How long until Poubelle and After shut down their kitchen? How long until Jaziezal packed up his potions? How long until there'd be nothing left for Chorizo to scavenge?
Toby remembered hunting through bedrooms in Rhinolith. Feeling the eyes of plastic-drenched prisoners following his movements as he stole their life's earnings. And all the while, there was a goldmine of imaginite right where he was already headed. He didn't know. There was no way he could have known. He'd walked through their town, seeing statues everywhere. Mummified in vinyl. The chief had begged to release him or let him die. Toby remembered having to harden his heart and refuse. Then he looted the royal treasury while the man stood there helpless and watched it being carried away. Scaphis brought misery wherever she went, and had forced Toby to create yet more.
Hand over hand. Toby tensed his legs and leapt, for what felt like the hundredth time, over the escalator channel. The tendons in his hands tensed to bear his weight. The palms felt like they were gripping stove burners. His toes seared with pain as they scrabbled against the ledge.
How many more towns had she swallowed up, that he didn't even know about? Little places. Maybe caravans. Or just wandering travelers in the badlands. Had she caught L'roon yet? Would she bother with him? Maybe she'd want to tear open his cart and shake it out, searching for magical items she could make her own wishes on.
Toby thought of Scarlatina. It was closest to her but she'd left it alone so far. Either she didn't know about it, or it wasn't worth her energy to bother with. The second felt more likely.
She was heading for Ectopia Cordis. Once she had that, the rest of Phobiopolis was in the bag. Toby envisioned her swarming up the sides of the tower-city, the guardsmen firing everything they had, the cranes bashing away at her like swatting hands. What if all that was happening right now while Luxy was away? Correction: Luxy and everyone else powerful enough to defend the city?
If she took the ferris wheels, she would steamroll Coryza. With all those captured Ectopians now serving as her batteries, she could dig her fingers into Coryza's mighty metal panels and pry them open like a Christmas gift. Then mop up everything else at her leisure. Sander's shop. Stoma. The mushroom woman. The caves. And then she would cover the entire world.
Maybe L'roon was right. Maybe, even if she won, she would be left unsatisfied with no one around to oppose her. Maybe she'd get sloppy. Maybe people would go into hiding. An insurgency. Maybe all hope would not die out.
Or maybe it would.
Toby's metal claws punched holes in the cliff face, wishing it were flesh. The way the flanges around the edges of her void twitched and wiggled like a sea anemone's tentacles. He wanted to hold her down and tear them off one by one.
He wanted to shape his hammer into a gleaming silver fist and just punch her until the end of time. Punch her till her head was a flattened smear. Kick her and spit on her and scream at her in disbelief that anyone could be so horrible. Curse at her for what she'd turned him into in opposing her. It hardly mattered that she'd created her own arch-enemy in him. Built her own downfall. What would he be when all this was over? When he'd clustered his friends around for one last hug, didn't he know deep down inside that he was saying goodbye to them? That, even if by some miracle they all survived...
'Whatever happens today, I don't think I'm still going to be Toby at the end of it.'
Hand over hand. Feet pushing against stone and gravity, tail counterbalancing. One hand anchored, the other reaching out for the next rung of the ladder. 'It doesn't matter what she turns me into. It doesn't matter if she kills me or blanks my mind or throws me off the mountain. So long as she goes down too. I am nothing. I am an acceptable casualty.'
Something about that last thought struck him. Not the bit of military jargon he'd overheard on the evening news, the other part.
'I am nothing.'
Hand over hand. Pulling himself forward.
He'd grown up in interminable sickness. Filled himself with books and television and every other distraction from the lie. Anything to avoid facing the reality that he'd started out perfectly healthy and the only real sickness was in his mother's mind. 'Maybe that's why I'm good at dumbfounding,' he mused. 'I had a lot of practice believing the impossible without doubt.'
He took the drugs, he followed commands, he sat and watched comforting fiction.
He absorbed. That was it.
'I took all my personality from books. Heroes. Good guys. What am I really? At my core? A sponge. Soaking up what Mommy told me. Soaking up TV.'
And more. 'Even now. I took ruthlessness from Junella. Tenacity from Zinc. Resilience from Piffle. Lethality from George. Judgment from Luxy. What did I take from Scaphis then?'
He laughed joylessly at the answer. 'A brutal, ugly need to control.'
That's what he was. A collection of parts. A cobbled-together consciousness. A jigsaw puzzle formed from dozens of different images.
'I copied everyone I met along the way. I added their traits onto me, because... what was I to start with?'
He kept his physical self moving, pulling himself up the mountain, hand over hand, while his mental self wandered its own empty halls.
'I am nothing,' he said to himself, and found the thought was not insulting, but strangely empowering. He was a blank sheet of paper that copied down other people's qualities. He glanced at his white fur. Perfectly fitting.
'Nothing. See-through. Clear. Diamonds are clear. They're also the hardest substance in the world.'
"I am nothing," he said aloud. Barely a whisper, just in case she could hear him. But it felt important to speak this, to let his own ears hear it.
"I'm nothing. Nothing. A blank sheet. I am zero. I am dividing by zero." His voice trembled, but felt as resolute as crystal.
"I am the neutralizer. I absorb all wavelengths. I am subtraction. I am a black hole. I am the all-killing absolute cold of outer space.
"I am where she ends."
He looked up to see how far he had left to go. Perhaps a hundred feet straight up.
Easy.
***
Toby had seen the bulges floating along in Scaphis' soupy body. He'd thought at first they were rocks.
Now he could see them clearly. People. Helpless, stricken, cocooned people. All ages, species, genders, types. All with glassy eyes, faces frozen in the last emotion they'd felt before they were collected and conscripted into service. Sucked dry of their will to power a living plague's conquest. Scaphis was pulling them all towards her.
In some areas along the escalator-turned-river, the bodies were so thick Toby could have scampered across them like a lumberjack on a log flow. He made himself meet those tortured gazes, every one of them. Men snarling in hatred as they fought a doomed battle. Women collapsing in anguish as they were ripped away from their lives. Children screaming blindly for someone, anyone, to save them. All were motionless. 'She turned them into mannequins. Dolls, like her.'
The river flowed against gravity, up to the top of the mountain. To their new home.
Toby hooked his arm onto the final plateau and hauled himself over. He had to stop and balance himself. Just a few meager feet of barren space to stand on. He stood and witnessed silently.
This was no longer Aldridge's tidy front yard. No more patio furniture, no more grass. The only good thing left was the awe-inspiring view behind him of Phobiopolis in totality. But he wasn't looking behind him.
The house was gone. The castle was gone. Scaphis had cannibalized them both and built something new in their place. A lighthouse at the end of the world.
Bodies, innumerable bodies, flowed towards it from both sides of the clearing in front. Lifeless trapped citizens, dragged over bumps and rocks. None complaining. Moving as if an infinite army of ants was carrying them along towards the dark structure. Sentient ivy creeping up along its sides.
Toby understood now why Luxy hadn't let Ectopia Cordis stay as she'd designed it.
One might have thought she'd put up scaffolding, then forgot to fill in the rest. But the bare metal was the intention. A trellis. A three-hundred-foot tall burnished metal arrangement reaching up towards the domain of gods.
It was not strictly functional. Artistic flourishes abounded. Ornamental cornices. Twining arches. Gargoyles and angels. Toby could practically feel the chill of the metal, like a railing clutched by bare hands in winter. Scaphis had also repurposed bits of Aldridge and Rebecca's former home for her design. Wooden trim. Brick arches. Stone buttressing. It was like a cathedral. It was like a clock tower. Toby drew an unwelcome parallel to Junella's spiral staircase. 'Did she know? Didn't she say something about having a dream before she built it?'
Scaphis' naked flesh snaked and entwined its way along the universe-scraping citadel's massive length, carrying her prisoners to their final destination. A plume of smoke rose from the highest point, drifting into outer space. Toby hoped it wasn't a crematorium.
He tried to keep his eyes on one furson as they made their long journey up the side of the tower. Scaphis' tendrils pulsated and slid, writhed and ascended, stretched and constricted. Her living, liquid flesh had never horrified him so much. He chose one shape among many and tried to focus on it. Past the base of the tower, up the fancifully sculpted columns, over statuary, around arches and balconies, though a portcullis, around a damaged cement fountain that spewed nothing. Toby followed with his eyes until he began to squint, and then the body was lost among hundreds. One moving shape amongst a multitude. 'Alone among millions.'
He could hear the wailing. Moans of cosmic terror, bleak despair, helpless panic, and unfathomable sorrow. Maybe this close to their denouement, she loosened her grip on their minds. There was no longer any hope of escape, so why not conserve energy? The sound was worse than Phlegmasia. Toby wouldn't have thought it was possible. But in the maze, the trapped souls were simply insane. Babbling, tranquilized lunatics. These people were awake. Aware. Sane. They sounded like they knew exactly where they were and what was being done to them.
He was reminded of a nature documentary. Some kind of wasp. The drones caught other insects and brought them to the hive. Eggs were laid in their still-living flesh. They had to wait, squirming and powerless, as the larvae grew in their innards and slowly ate their way out.
Shivering, Toby reflexively rubbed his right arm, searching for the calming texture of his ribbon. It was gone. For an instant he panicked. Then he calmed himself by remembering he'd taken it off before beginning the climb. Piercings too. If Scaphis knew about Scarlatina, one look at the ribbon might lead to the deduction that he'd re-crossed Dysphoria to reach her. She might be wary of him then, realizing his true endurance.
He checked his body and found that his costume of rage had fully consumed him. He was now a lone scared, angry, pitiful hero. Heedless in his grief. Barely able to make it up the side of the mountain, no strength in reserve to combat the monster he'd come to confront. One tiny mouse in blue shorts against three hundred storeys of malice and power.
Toby idly wished for a mirror, and was surprised when one was granted.
The other Toby gazed back across the width of the plateau. A thin mouse with silver bracers and a metal hand, seeming to sag under the weight of both. Baggy, burning eyes. 'Maybe I'm glad I didn't sleep last night.'
It was his doppelganger. His alter-image that had climbed the other side of the mountain, copying his movements down to the last electron. 'Phobiopolis was omega-shaped,' he remembered. The bottom bars had collapsed together, fusing to become Anasarca. The debris was Dysphoria. And the remaining ring was the two parallel halves of this forlorn afterlife. A cosmic conjoined twin.
Toby thought back to his days spent underneath the mountain. Had they camped close enough to the center that there was only one set of them? No, he would have seen himself and George fly in, and merged with them. This meant another group of lost travelers had made a campfire there, slept under the stars there, tended to three bedridden catatonics there.
Just to see what it looked like from the outside, Toby held up his right hand and flashed it into his hammer. The other Toby did as well. They smiled weakly, comforted mildly by the sight of their small, loyal weapon.
He turned back towards the tower. Perhaps he wouldn't have to climb it after all. There was a door at the base. Aldridge's door. She'd left it intact.
The stupid hero he was portraying would take that bait.
Whatever the case, he was certainly okay with no more climbing. He looked down at his red, callused palms and the blood around his fingernails.
He headed towards the door. His copy did too. Scaphis was everywhere, but so were scattered chunks of her construction project. Doors and slabs of wall. Hunks of metal. Broken-off statuary. It was a lot like playing The Floor Is Lava, which thankfully he'd gotten pretty good at. It was one of the few games a kid could play by themselves while locked up for years in a bedroom. Toby watched his opposite self jump from haven to haven, ungraceful but accurate. He wobbled a few times (especially when that gargoyle's nose suddenly broke off), but he kept up his perfect no-falling streak.
'She has to know I'm here by now. I'm jumping around on top of her. I can't be this lucky to actually surprise her.' Though if he was, heck, he wasn't about to complain.
With a final awkward side hop, he and the mirror-Toby slipped into one another on the doorstep. 'The welcome mat's still here,' he marveled.
Toby, now singular, took a moment to catch his breath and appreciate solid ground. He was here. Again. The monotonous part was over. The pain had dulled to manageable by now, and the workout had left him with an accomplished throb in his muscles. Plus a clear mind. 'Maybe I was so dull back on Earth because I never got out and exercised.'
He looked at the door and doorbell. A wave of deja vu shivered through him. 'I remember standing here before, still rattled from when Logdorbhok had his pet germs nibble me. I looked up and saw Aldridge's big catfish face. Not knowing whether I deserved to be there. Not really believing I was living a moment I'd been waiting on for so long, planning so hard to get to.' That was absolutely an emotional state he could appreciate right now.
He stared down at his feet. Just to gift himself a last moment of cowardly hesitation, he bent down to put his sandals back on. The deer leather was velvety soft. He knew he might never feel comfort again. Might as well savor it.
Then he stood up, facing the door. He checked that his bracers were strapped on tight. He checked that his pouch was full of shurikens and caltrops. He melted his hammer back into his palm. The door was painted just glossy enough that he could see a bleary reflection of his face.
Looking back was a weary, lost, smoldering, shaken trainwreck. A mouse lucky enough to propel himself up the mountain on pure rage, who was now wholly unprepared to reap what he'd sown.
'Perfect.'
Toby took a moment longer to reassure himself. 'If I were a supervillain and one of my old enemies walked through my front door, I'd snatch them up and never let them see the light of day again. Maybe that's what I'm walking into right now. But if so, that's okay. This part is optional. If it works, it's icing on the cake. The cherry on a sundae. A chance to gather information by reading between the lines, and hopefully wreak some psychological warfare.'
He could abandon it all at a moment's notice. Everything else was already in place.
Knowing he could fail this part helped. If he did, they'd just get to the action sooner. If not, then maybe all the pain he'd put into this risk would be worth it.
'I've already won. I cannot let her know that yet, but from here on out it's all just a big magic trick. Her card's been forced. The deck is in my control. The act is already in motion. I just have to play it out.'
He let a small slice of his true confidence show through. That was part of the mask as well.
'Might as well start the show.'
He reached out towards that shiny brass knob. He turned it.
-***-