jamieproctor.ca

Although the concept of a ‘high-way to hell’ is centuries old, when stripped of obfuscational metaphor these ancient roads more resembled footpaths than anything and were seldom-trodden by any but the most brave and foolhardy – and even those often preferred to risk transport on the more-common-but-perilous bat.  The first seeds of the modern hellish superhighway system are many, but its most obvious starting point can arguably be pinned at the eternal damnation of Henry Ford to the asphalt boilers.  If it’s arguable, then argue it, do not simply state it and leave it at that. 
Ford was as quick to speak of his own value as many of the powerful in life are, but unusually enough his claims found a receptive audience in the local baron, who found herself tired by the troubles of managing nightmares for her daily tours of her lamentable demesne (a diet of sweet dreams sufficient to keep an adult nightmare in rideworthy health was as complex and expensive to procure then as it was now, and their tempers were no kinder).  More fortuitously still, said baron proved to be absent-minded enough that following her shackling of Ford to a drawing-table she became distracted by assassination attempts and familial bothers and let him be to provide not only properly-itemized blueprints for an automobile but of the factory floor that might produce them.  The prototype vehicle proved an ostentatiously noisy and therefore desirable ride, and the idea of the profit to be gained through them led to first one, then two, then three production lines.  The booming of business and combustion engines resonated far and wide throughout the asphalt ridges in but a few scant years, and soon word of this strange fad reached beyond its boiling backwaters and into deeper and more august ears.  Such drama does not become a history essay; this is NOT a creative writing course, and if it were you would be receiving harsh marks for excess.

Interest in automobiles was hot, with demand not far behind, but there remained a key obstacle: traversable roads.  Travel and hell had never been given reason for ease before; what was the point in a journey that wasn’t harsh and cruel, and what obstacle to your enemies was a well-trodden path?  But cars, even cars forged with hellish steal and shod with wheels rubberized with the sobs of the damned, required some evenness of surface to ensure a ride that was merely ‘rough’ as opposed to ‘self-destructive.’  Quotation marks identify quotations which demand citations; they are not to be sprinkled for idle decoration.  In the backwater asphalt ridges long stretches of barren and blackened ground were readily come by, but more glamorous rings such as the scorched sea or the murder spires possessed no such monotony in their terrain.  Adequate driving surfaces would have to be constructed in some of the most demanding environments known to any departed being. 

Prior hellish efforts in this vein were constructed from good intentions, which on exposure to harsh enough reality would curdle readily into a sort of molten brick that would seize most readily to the nearest solid object and congeal into an immovable stain upon the world.  The principal objection raised to this was scarcity; private footpaths might be made by them, or perhaps a single great road, but for general use one might as well suggest that the streets of London or Shanghai or Timbuktu be paved in gold and platinum.  No matter how great the demand, the supply simply wasn’t there.  Much effort was expended on locating a suitable substitute, an endeavor that was lent a serious setback when Ford’s demands for an increased share of the profits led to him being sewn face–first into a cupholder by his then-employer.  Evidence?  Argument?  Anything that isn’t an assertion?  Innovation came from a surprising source: a chance mugging of a visiting and inattentive cherubim in an alleyway of the central inferno led to the procurement of a small handful of stray partially-crooked prayers, several of which were subsequently purchased by an overworked alchemist who fell asleep at his workstation and accidentally set himself on fire.  As his remains were being scraped free from his chair, it was noticed by the janitor that the prayers in the unfortunate alchemist’s pocket had been fused by the heat with a few absent-minded thoughts that had been left lying around his workstation, producing a vast amount of a nigh-ephemeral substance.  The janitor quickly stole all of it, was mugged on her way home, and once the mugger made it to the nearest patent office and was discreetly murdered by the on-duty clerk who was then usurped by her supervisor the rest, as hell knows it, was history.  This construes libel and I would advise you remove it unless you are fond of extremely physical practical legal education. 

Thoughts and prayers were the ideal construction material for roads: they were cheap, plentiful, and came apart with minimal wear and tear, leading to yearly maintenance work that would ensure a constant stream of treasure and favours to anyone providing them.  Six competing companies all sprang up within weeks, each of which battled each other in gruesome ‘road wars’ that devastated infrastructure for miles around until it was revealed that all six were in actuality engaged in a conspiratorial monopoly whose illusory feud provided them all with plenty of construction work.  All levels of staff deemed important enough to be responsible were subsequently flayed, liquefied, drained, and repurposed as road paint before being replaced with mortified toadies as per standard, and with that squabbling beyond them hell’s road system boomed from the Styx to the Abyss with a speed hitherto undreamt of.  Highways and byways evolved and unspooled; goods began to speed from dock to destination; Would you care to expand on this or are you just slipping it in for the sake of hearing yourself talk? and the distance between the hinterlands and the heartland began to erode, which immediately led to the next great displacement event caused by the infernal automobile: the urbanization of hell. 

The infernopolises had always been the prime grounds for making money, and with transit rendered so much faster and easier more than ever flocked to them, leaving hell’s backwaters settling deeper and deeper into stifling deoxygenated swamps (often literally – e.g., the case of the burnwater boglands).  With the corresponding rise in the cities of both the newly-flush automobile elite of corporate CEOs, CFOs, directors, vice-presidents, vicer-presidents, and department heads and the vast tangled underclass of road workers, furnace tenders, prayer miners, thought melters, and assembly labourers, both in close proximity, a new goal was given to those who had already attained everything they wanted: getting as far away from their serfs as physically possible.  The ultrawealthy immediately bought out the prettiest of the backwater reaches for estates; the merely rich contented themselves with sprawling cottages and off-season homes in the uglier but equally secluded corners of the pits; and the more numerous but pitifully desperate ‘upper-middle-class’ QUOTATION MARKS contented themselves with simply exiting the infernopolises proper and separating the land into an endless web of nigh-identical homes, each with a single lawn that was not quite the right size or shape and a garage big enough for two and a half cars. 

Thus was created the final and most dangerous side-effect of the infernal automobile: the suburbanization of hell.   

The patterns begun then continue at work even now: over 90% of hell’s recorded inhabitants live in dense urban communities, each aspiring not to become a baron but a petty lord of their own individuated dwelling-space – and each year, more homes are constructed for the consumption of the landed elite, who are quite enjoying the opportunity to once more play at landlord and watch their new serfs slave for the chance of a petty prize.  By now the newest suburban homes are located so far from the central infernopolises that they are beginning to come perilously close to penetrating the earth’s crust, and reverse earthquakes are a common price to pay for taking one’s place among the nouveau-rich.  Other side effects, such as the raining of chunks of cratonic debris and tectonic plate splinters into the hearts of the cities proper, are deemed irrelevant and inevitable.  Despite this, all scholarly evidence from the lowest imp-sage to the most ancient puzzle-demon is agreed: hell must cease to sprawl, must contract itself, must make amends for the reckless love of the car that has transformed it into a land of crumbling thoughts-and-prayers and panicked would-be-wealthy, or the surface itself may cave in upon our heads. 

A downright alarmist conclusion, poorly-written and filled with hysterical exaggeration if not outright lies – what consensus can there be, when the Xxxon-Noble corporation’s own science department has just this week published yet another paper proving that all notions of so-called ‘infernogenic cavern crumbling’ are nothing more than the lies and exaggerations of desperate academics hankering for funding?

Also no, you can’t have time off to mourn your grandmother.  ‘Crushed to death by mysterious rocks falling from the sky,’ do you all think I’m an idiot?  That’s the third one this semester IN THIS CLASS.  F-.  Get out of my course. 

“Come with me.”
I looked up and she was already leaving.  Sure steps, steady pace, no hesitation, bag already slung over her shoulder and the classroom door slapped open with one hand.  And I mean, she was absolutely right – I wasn’t going to ignore Janet when she asked – but she could’ve been less rude about it. 

Then again, it was more than I’d gotten out of her all summer.  I’d take what I could get. 

***

The ice underfoot was so sheer and slick.  One boot slipped – and they had good sharp cleats, she’d been very careful when buying, she’d done her research – and the other stuttered and sent her forwards with a jerk and a snap of rope and then hands reached for her as she tilted and tipped and fell over and over and over, so dizzy and numb with adrenaline and fear that she didn’t even feel the water until the light was fading out of sight above her. 

***

Janet drove more recklessly than I remembered from…spring?  Just spring, that was all, not too long ago when she never did a rolling stop; never went more than eight above the limit, never took an intersection without turning her head every which way..  She didn’t speed, but that was about it: traffic lights, changing lanes, taking corners, none of it seemed to register as even a suggestion.  We were through downtown in record time and I was sure that the only reason we hadn’t been arrested was that we’d moved so smoothly and surely that nobody had managed to notice us. 

The windows were wide open and the wind off the ocean made me shiver; winter was a long way off, but summer was no closer.  “Where are we going?”

Janet’s expression hadn’t changed, but if you looked at it right she could’ve been smiling.  “Swimming.”

***

She’d tried to swim up, but it was gone: the direction, the somatic sensation of her limbs, the energy to move, all of it. 

Instead she sank, like a rock, like her heartbeat, down and down and down until her eyes were as good as shut open wide and the cold was almost warming and the world was just so tiring, so heavy, so draining that it slipped away overhead without a sliver of regret. 

Then she touched something, and it touched her. 

***

“This is crazy,” I said to my best friend that had spoken to almost nobody since she’d gotten out of the hospital two months ago following a ‘miracle’ recovery from nearly drowning in hypothermic waters, only to then suffer the death of one of her parents. 

I still MEANT it, but I really regretted saying it. 

“That’s okay,” Janet said with that same easy calm she’d kept on her face ever since she’d come back.  I’d gotten in a few fights (not all verbal) with people who’d called it ‘creepy’ or ‘psycho’ but I was forced to admit that at this particular moment it was – at the very least – kind of frustrating.  I should try to get her into poker again, put it to good use. 

“Why don’t we go do something else instead?” I suggested subtly.

“Like what?”  Oh god her shoes were already off, when had she taken off her shoes.  One toe entered the water, then both feet. 

“Like…I don’t know, play poker?”  Maybe not that subtly. 

“No.”
“Janet, this water has to be almost freezing.”
“Yes,” she said happily.  “It’s okay, come on in.”

“But-”
“Kamala?  I almost froze to death.  I won’t let that happen to you.”

She was only lying half her ass off: yes, it was almost freezing; no, it was NOT okay.

We really should’ve done poker. 

***

“Hello,” she said with the last of her air, and even though she couldn’t see them the shimmering sensation of the little bubbles rushing out of her lips and up her face was the only hint she had of which direction everything else in the world was. 

Hello, said the shape.  It was thick and heavy and impossibly rough, scraping away her skin where it brushed against her in an unhurried amble, investigating her with idle thoroughness. 

“Am I dead?  I’m out of air.”
No and yes, said the shape.  Or yes and no.  Pick one each.  What are you doing down here?  I have never known a thing like you.

“I fell.  I slipped.  I think.”  It was really hard to remember, the incident was at once too fresh and too faded in her mind.  “I’ve never met you either, whoever you are, whatever you are.  I can’t see and I can’t hear and I can barely feel anything and I’m going to die now.”
Maybe, said the shape.  Or you could not.

“How?”

You could be my daughter.  It has been a long time since I had children.  My children live here and they do not freeze and they do not breathe and they do not die, only sleep and swim and grow older and older.  Be my daughter and you will do those things.

“But I need to breathe.”
Not to live.

“But I don’t want to live here.”
Then I will give you a piece of it, and it will travel with you.

“But I don’t know what you are.”
Every child is born this way. 

“But… I don’t want to.”
Choose.

She couldn’t be sure if she’d shut her eyes or not.  It was all the same here.  “Yes.”

***

“I’m crazy,” I said.  Or tried to say; my teeth were shaking violently and my lips were too numb to move. 

“You aren’t,” said Janet.  She was practically holding me up in the water at this point, even though she was swimming in what probably felt like fifty pounds of soaked clothes and I’d self-consciously stripped down to my underwear.   Right now I was feeling naked in more ways than one and if hypothermia wasn’t my main concern I’d be embarrassed as all hell. 

“I’m freezing to death.”
“It’s okay, I won’t let you.  Just relax.”
I groaned.  “I can’t.  I’m sorry.  I think I’m cramping.”
“That’s okay, just don’t kick too hard.  My mother’s here.”
That woke me up, even through the cold.  “Janet,” I said with as little chattering as possible, as gently as clenched jaw muscles would let me, “your mother is dead.”

“Yes.  This is my sleeping mother.  Look.”
I opened my mouth to say something about how maybe metaphorically Janet’s mother was always with her but she looked at me and reached out one hand to brush my cheek and then turned my entire head down until I was almost eating the seawater.

I looked.  Then I looked harder, and harder, and harder, and finally when I gave up and just looked again, I saw it. 

There was a shark there.  Right beside us, just beneath us.  It wasn’t coming closer, it hadn’t appeared as if from nowhere, it was just… there.  It was always there.  How had I missed it, it was the size of a fucking pickup truck. 

“Janet-”

“Yes,” she said calmly.  And she let go of me.

***

She rose. 

Not quickly, like she’d fallen.  Not tumbling, like she’d sunken.  She swam up from below inevitably, unflinchingly.  Her mother’s body beat the water with long, slow sweeps, and she moved without effort, without apparent cause, just rose and rose and rose until horrible bright glare shattered her gaze and the glistening fangs of ten thousand dangling ice spires reflected from above her into her eyes. 

There was a hole.  And she was thrust through it, crying and spitting and reeking of something that made piss smell like roses, thrown upon the cold ice amidst shocked exclamations and strange lanky things with hands and feet and warm blankets and heat packs and emergency radios. 

It was a miracle. 

Not that she got better; her mother had promised her that.  That she could stare all of this in the eye and remind herself to breathe. 

For appearances. 

***

I immediately thrashed and sank and gasped and swore and kicked and floundered.  I couldn’t have looked more like an injured seal if I’d taken mime classes, and I wondered if all the stories I’d heard were true and you couldn’t feel your legs being bitten off until you looked at them. 

Then, just like someone who’d been told not to think about pink elephants, I had to look at them.  And just past my flailing limbs, still not moving, the shark.  God, it was even bigger underwater; huge and round and blunted like the world’s biggest cigar; it lacked the pale belly of the white sharks that fed on the seals off the point.  It also lacked their grace, their speed, their big black eyes – it loitered there in midwater, a special kind of inelegant motionlessness.  Trails of something unpleasant and chitinous dangled in the current from the corners of its blind eyes, and inside its mouth glimmered no beautiful teeth, just a blank round hole, gaping. 

I was being very poetic for someone who was sure she was about to die.  My bladder, who was faster on the uptake than my brain, had already abandoned ship. 

The mouth was closer now, which was impressive because the shark wasn’t moving.  It was sliding closer without moving, like a rogue piece of scenery, and even as it slid past and around me and brushed me with its rough knuckle-busted snout hard enough to scratch and scrape it was hard to keep my eyes on its grey gnarled skin. 

It circled twice more, and then it closed its jaws around my middle, bit down enough for me to feel the squeeze, then turned on its tail and went down, down, down until the water was as empty as it had seemed to be all along. 

Janet was holding me again, which was good because at some point I’d stopped swimming. 

“She likes you,” she told me. 

***

After the airlift, after the hospital, after the long trip home, she finally slept, really slept, truly slept. 

And in her dreams, she swam without effort, underneath the world, awake and dreaming, moving without notice, sliding beneath notice and without stopping and without end, on and on and on and on. 

Hello, said her sleeping mother. 

Hello, she said. 

They moved through the waters and in the night they rose up and covered all the streets and all the lights and flooded through the windows and placed every dreaming head on every pillow on every corner deep, deep under the waves, where she and her sleeping mother felt them and they quaked under their shape, like sleeping dogs cringing from an imagined predator. 

When she woke up, she’d forgotten to breathe again.  And there was a faint whiff of something that smelled like rotten urine.   

***

The towel in the trunk of Janet’s car was thick and soft and had been wrapped around what seemed to be a hot water bottle.  She’d always been good at planning ahead, and I was so grateful for it that I couldn’t think or speak until I was nearly dry again and she was rubbing down my hair. 

There was a neat semicircle of tiny puncture wounds all around the perimeter of my torso, armpit to hips. They were just shallow enough to only hurt when the towel brushed them the wrong way; just deep enough to bleed a little.  The beautiful fluffy towel was probably irrecoverable. 

“Who knows?” I asked. 
“Just you.  And my parents.”
“Oh.”  I felt flattered, and then I noticed an important inflection.  “Wait, both of them?”
“Yes,” said Janet.  She squeezed my hand. 

“Janet,” I said, with all the care and delicacy of someone who’d been completely sure she was going to die ten minutes ago, “did that shark eat your mother?”

“Yes.  For revenge.”

“For-”

“My cleats were sharp the day before we went for our walk on the ice,” said Janet.  “She checked for me.  And my rope came loose when I fell.  She tied it for me.  And when I was falling, she reached out.  And didn’t catch me.  We saw it in her sleep.”

I should argue that those could have been accidents, but that felt like a cruelty that would’ve made all the whispers of ‘crazy’ and ‘psycho’ and ‘freak’ seem like head-pats.  So instead I squirmed around in my seat and hugged her.

She hugged back without hesitation, and that was the very first thing she’d done since spring that felt completely like the old days, like the same Janet I’d known since grade nine.  She always squeezed exactly almost too hard. 

“So why me?” I mumbled into her shoulderblades.  They smelled a bit like rotten piss, but after what I’d gone through I’d cherish anything that wasn’t saltwater.  “Why tell me now?”
Janet pulled back, just enough to look at me nose to nose.  Nothing dangled from her eyes, and I hoped that habit of her mother’s wasn’t hereditary.  They were very pretty eyes. 

“I really love you a lot and don’t want to hide things from you.  Any things.”
“Oh.”

“Mother told me that the best way to find something I want is to go up to it and take it.”
“Your mother is a very wise fish.” 

“She is,” said Janet, and I could definitely read the smile in that expression now, so I kissed it. 

***

After thirty seconds I caught on that she didn’t need to breathe. This seemed like an unfair advantage.    

The grad-cultist’s scarred hide was as pale and wan as his rigid smile, but his blood was hot and bright as it spilled forth from his ritual punctures, gliding in hot streaks over the surface of the grey slate blade he chopped with. 

“Phyla!” he sang, the notes turning to gurgles as Dr. Rodney Burke ducked under his swing and his pistol uttered a sharp retort through the madman’s robes and into his heart.  “Phyla!”  called the grad’s fellow doorman, still engaged in a deadly dance of death with Dr. Burke’s assistant, the plucky and game Head Nurse Nancy Wittling.  “It comes, the hour is done.  Phyla!  Urk!”
“I must go!” shouted the professor at his comrade, who had her hands full of scrawny neck.  “Be strong!”

“Hnnh,” grunted Nancy, slowly bearing down on the vertebrae of her whimpering foe.  Dr. Burke felt shame at abandoning a woman to such frightful violence alone, but as his aching legs propelled him up the great stone steps of the Cyclop’s Staircase, slick underfoot with the rain and damp, a greater horror began to dwell in his heart.  The hour WAS done; his Swiss watch told him so.  At midnight precise/the sacrifice that ABOMINABLE translation they had found in Doolaughter’s half-burnt notes had claimed, and now ‘twas nine past twelve.  Perhaps the ritual had run late?  Perhaps a stray blow suffered during the car chase had set his watch ahead?  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, but if wishes were fishes the world would smell foul.  Fear lent wings to his feet, and those wings set him at last upon the final height of the Staircase, a blackened basalt-black plateau overlooking the sea and topped with a tasteful pagoda for the shelter of gentle tourist families during the holiday season. 

It was not empty, but no innocent babes nor bawling infants nor sullen teens occupied it.  No, atop a seagull-scarred picnic table, all the more ominous for its modest surroundings, lay that maddening tapestry of the perverse, the biologist’s-bane, the thing that had driven many a PhD to their demise, the Bermuus Shale.  A flash of distant lightning illuminated the nightmarish forms and features whose fossilized remains lay chained within its icy grip, every shape a sight undreamt of by saner minds.  Huddled underneath its hideous grotesqueries, prone upon the ground, lay the motionless form of a human body. 

“No!” gasped Burke, and his weapon dropped from fingers now numb with dread.  “Too late!”

“Yeh,” mumbled a voice. 

Burke started so badly he would’ve dropped his gun again were he still holding it.  That voice, those thick and mumbling syllables, that thick and phlegmy inflection clotted richly with the syrup of academic resentment… “Doolaughter?” exclaimed Burke. 

“Down here.”

Burke looked down there. 

“No.  Here.  Over HERE,” said the mad archivist in annoyance, and it was only when he started waving his arm in exasperation that Burke realized that the forlorn frame of what he’d assumed to be a human sacrifice was in fact Doolaughter. 

“What the devil have you done?” demanded Burke. 

“About half the bottle,” said Doolaughter morosely.  “Want some?  It’s Darcc-Ichor, from the buried vault of the Sealed Abbey.  Bottled by the cannibal abbot himself, old Petrichlorias – the last of its kind.  Tastes a bit like piss.”

Burke took the bottle, sniffed it, and immediately put it down on the picnic table next to the Shale.  “Why give up now?” he demanded.  “After the obsession, the thefts, the MURDERS, for god’s sake – you know that Chief Librarian Phillipson was like a father to us both!  And now here, at the very time and place you obsessed over, equipped with every tool your madness demanded you seize, you gave up at the final hurdle.”
“Did not,” sulked Doolaughter.  “Look.”
“I did, I just don’t want any of it.”

“No, LOOK.”
Burke looked and followed the long gnarled length of Doolaughter’s ink-blotted finger out to the sea, which was flat and black and strangely motionless for such a storm and oh. 

“My god,” he said faintly. 

“No,” said Doolaughter, bitterness in every word.  “Mine.”
The carapace very nearly filled the horizon.  Far down the coastline a pair of gently-wavering tendrils eddied through the gloomy clouds, sprouting from depths unknown and reaching into the blackened sky.  Antenna great and terrible beyond all reckoning, gathering information and delivering them to a mind all out of scope and of an antiquity whose vastness was fit to crumble a human’s soul.  The great and scuted back flexed and turned with the impossible speed of the very large, and the tides danced at its motions. 

“What have you done?” gasped Burke. 

“I have done as I wished.  I have brought the secret phylum from the depths of the lost journals of Erasmus Darwin unto the light of the skies; I have called it with dark strong liquid and bright young flesh and offered it the earth and the seas and the sky; I have thrown into the wind the names and deeds of every secret name of every man of science and natural philosophy that had ever wished it to sleep forever, and I have bestirred the eldest deity of this world to waking life once more.”
They stood there – Burke stood there; Doolaughter remained content to slump under the picnic table. 

“What is it doing?” asked Burke at last. 

Doolaughter finished another gulp of Darcc-Ichor.  “Eating seaweed.”
“What?”
“It’s eating seaweed!” exploded the mad archivist.  “I have bestirred the eldest deity of this world to waking life once more AND IT’S EATING SEAWEED.”
“Where?”
“Down there.  Look.  No, LOOK.  Do you need glasses?”
“It’s very dark right now.”
“And you’re not looking the right way.  Down there, – no, there, next to the antennae.  See?”

Burke saw at last.  A myriad of tree-sized but relatively-tiny little limbs, each bedecked with soft-looking fringes, were combing through the waves like a mother her daughter’s hair before bed-time.  After several passes of this, the appendage would be brought up to the rim of a seemingly small and dainty mouth adorned with several sets of nested jaws, which would shovel the rich dripping-green harvest down the god’s gullet. 

“My goodness,” said Burke. 

“No,” said Doolaughter, suddenly fierce as Burke had expected him to be.  “My GODLINESS.  I spent decades suspecting this, years preparing this – do you know how hard it is Burke, to be the only man to look the unthinkable in the eye and dare not blink from its implications?  I saw what thousands of generations dared not imagine, and I acted upon it, and I gave the world what it wanted – what it needed, what was RIGHT – and now it’s out there eating seaweed.”

They watched the god eat some more seaweed.  Burke watched; Doolaughter finished the bottle and then threw it onto the ground, where it shattered. 

“I take it back; piss is better.  Why are you still here?  Go away.”
“You must be brought to justice,” muttered Burke.  He was still trying to grasp the scale at work here; the horizon from this altitude should be at least –

“For what?  Depleting local algae supplies?”
“You killed our mentor and six esteemed and venerable scholars!”
“And I’m pretty sure you didn’t get up here without punching the cards of a few of my guards so I’d say we’ve both got each other sewn up.”
“They were only grad students,” said Burke, defensively. 

“Grad students with rich families; it’s a lot harder to convince young people to get involved with this sort of thing when they aren’t bored stiff, and NOBODY’S more bored than the wealthy.”  Doolaughter rubbed his face.  “Hell, maybe you’re right: you probably did them a favour more than anything.  The disappointment would’ve killed them.  Do you know, I really expected a new age?  Old truths made manifest.  All the mysteries unfurled and revealed, whatever the costs.  A time when we would become free and wild and beyond good and evil, when laws and morals would be thrown aside and all men would shout and kill and revel in joy.”

“It still might happen,” said Burke.  He eyed the broken glass with distaste and picked his pistol back up.  “When it’s done eating the seaweed.”

“I think it’ll have a nap next,” said Doolaughter nastily.  “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That.  That noise.  I think it’s an airplane.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This is exactly what drove me mad about all the rest of you – nobody pays any attention.  There, see those lights?  A plane!”

“A bomber,” said Burke, whose nephew was in the navy. 

“An American bomber,” said Doolaughter.  “And that’s a bomb.”
“What?” said Burke, and then the explosion happened.  It was shockingly bright even at their great distance from it, and in its false dawn the full extinct of the being below them was – if not made clear – made more evident.  Like an iceberg, much more of it was still underwater than they’d thought. 

“Atomics!” shouted Burke. 
“Yes,” said Doolaughter.

“Truly, the ingenuity of humanity may yet earn us a reprieve from this awful doom you have – in the name of Christ, the fiend yet lives!”

“Yep.”
“And yet how it – what is it doing?”

“Flinching.”
Indeed, the whole horizon was now a lot less chitinous than had previously been the case; much of the shell that had filled the bay was hunched in a great swelling ripple of distaste and surprise. 

“Oh,” said Burke.  The water was beginning to swirl against the pillar in heavy waves as the god began to beat a retreat into open water.  “Wait, where’s it going?”
“Oh who fucking cares, back wherever it came from I expect,” said Doolaughter.  “We’ve scared it so it’s hiding.”  He rubbed his skeletal palms against his face, shoulders shaking with emotions wholly unsuppressed but too complex to express.  “We’ve called it out of its nap and fed it and we’ve scared it so now it’s going back to bed I SPENT MY LIFE’S WORK ON THIS BURKE.”

Burke didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t. 

“I need another drink.  Do you have a drink?”
“No.  But Ms. Wittling has a medicinal flask in her left boot for emergencies, and I expect she’ll be waiting at the car by now.”
“You’re just trying to get me to go to prison quietly.”
“On my honour, I am n-”

“Do you think they’ll have a drink there?”
“Well-”

“I like those odds.  Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“What about the Shale?”
“What ABOUT it?  Besides, the thing weighs a ton.”

***

The storm passed, the night waned, the car made several stops and turned off.

And far beneath the continental crust, in a recently-reoccupied house, a presence slept like the dead once more, dreaming of soft tasty green and startlingly bright little lights.

Waiting is more than half the fun anyways. 

Molly almost stepped on it, buried in the snow like that.  But she glanced down and the broken cap caught her eye and so the shattered husk of the cheap little disposable pen ended up next to her boot instead of under it.  Then she leaned in to look closer because it’s not every day you see that sort of thing – a pen in the street, broken to still-clinging bits so clinically by a car tire or someone’s foot or who-knows-what – and she thought that she saw something very tiny clinging to the frigid edge of where the seeping ink glued itself against the broken walls of its haft. 

That interested her.  So she picked the broken pen up and wiped it clean of slush and brought it home from school with her and after she was done eating dinner she took it up to her room, stole her brother’s microscope, and put the pen under it. 

The tiny object was a little bubble of scraped plastic, held together with thickened ink clots.  And as she watched, a tiny, tiny little body toddled out its front door, stretched, plucked up a slender and colourful pole, and walked down to the edge of the ink gulf. 

The trip took it twenty minutes, and by the time Molly was ordered to go to bed because Tomorrow Is A School Day Damnit six oily, inky little squirmy blobs had been plucked from the inksea and stowed in some kind of microscopic bottle for later use. 

She couldn’t sleep for a long, long time after that. 

***

Molly’s schoolwork suffered for the next week, and not just for the lack of sleep (which her mother insisted on battling with earlier and earlier bedtimes).  She was distracted.

At home she spent hours over the microscope, pouring over the tiny life on the shores of the inky gulf.  The inhabitants were a family of varied size and shapes that didn’t quite make sense, subsisting on bottled game taken from the blue sea and building tiny structures of shaved plastic.  Their fishing tools were crafted from splintered tufts of pen-cap, and were exceedingly rare.  In fact, this shard of main-haft pen was a long way from the cap.  How had they found it?
The answer came on day three, when a miniscule caravan came to town.  It was towed by a single giant crawling thing of legs, and atop its long, long back squirmed a healthy stock of its children, which disembarked and offered up many slivers of fresh cap-material.  They were traded for vats and tubs of the ink-sea’s bounty, and the caravan stayed for some days before departing capwards again. 

Molly took some photographs to mark the position of her original village and followed the caravan’s progress across the pen-haft with careful eye.  It travelled through long serrated plastic forests of startling transparency and sharpness; it travelled through deep grooves once home to rushing rivers of ink; it walked along the perilous thread of the spring that dangled over the dry abyss that had run blue before the shattering; it travelled in long slow helixs across the short-horizon of the pen’s walls and always, always onward towards the long horizon of the cap.  On this trip it halted innumerable times – it stopped amidst tiny roughened badlands where bubbles of air were mined from within the pen’s walls; it stopped on tough and hardy clot-masses that had glued themselves to the underside of the spring’s spiral silver shaft; it stopped in floating crumbs that bobbed in ink—waves and floated from one side of a great shallow sea to another; it stopped at deep crevices where strange dried clots squirmed in darkness and sought in consternation for a safe path around, or over, or through. 

The last were more and more common.  It seemed that the shattering of the pen was a recent affair, and not one that its inhabitants were comfortable with. 

Molly followed her caravan to its home at the great round basin-peak of the pen’s-cap, where it disgorged its cargo of food and exotic materials to be distributed among the poor and small of its many-legged kind (the smallest were balls of so many legs that they appeared to not have any legs at all).  Then she went to bed and slept, and her dreams were troubling and many.  Hunger and fear were there, but not her own.  They remained just out of sight, just out of reach, growing and spiralling unchecked and out of control. 

On her way home from school the next day, she stopped by a hardware store and bought six different kinds of glue and a selection of unspeakably tiny brushes. 

***

The cracks were Molly’s first target.  Each was examined and monitored for at least three full sessions of four hours before she dared bring her brush into play; she had to make sure they were clear of life, that they were structurally damaging, that their sealing would cause no further disruption.  Many of her smallest brushes were too large and clumsy, and the tip of one of her grandmother’s needles was brought into play.  Vast gaping crevices in the horizon-walls were sealed shut and left smooth and shining in a stead march from base to cap. 

After that, she refilled the ink-seas.  Slowly, gradually, drip by drip.  Unlike the cracks, here disruption was inevitable, so she settled for an undeniable-but-slow approach, swelling the blue waves higher and higher so that all would see them rise and seek safer ground.  Twice she had to pause for stragglers, but only twice, and the unsealed cracks she’d left proved their value as refugia for the slow and the stubborn and the species too sessile to move. 

The pen-tip was the greatest challenge; the cone had been lost in some snowdrift, along with any residents it might have once possessed.  After much agonizing, online shopping, and careful examination of several of her mother’s ball-points under the microscope, Molly determined that for whatever reason life was not universal to all pens, and so sacrificed an uninhabited one under the knife, screwdriver, and tweezers to re-establish the structure of her own. 

The surgical transplant took hours, even with a minuscule vise she’d been able to buy second-hand from a defunct jewellery store.  Every thirty seconds she stopped, wiped away the sweat, had a big drink of water, and breathed in and out.  It was shockingly noisy. 

***

Molly had thought she’d known pens.  Not before she’d found her pen in that snowdrift, but before she sat down to repair it.  It turned out she hadn’t known jack because good lord you learned a pen inside out and outside in if you were being really diligent about fixing it.  She knew the bay and oceans and depths of its inksea; she knew the contours and gulleys and hills of its walls; she knew the secrets of its inner walls (sealed and unsealed); she knew the thriving life of its cap-end (burgeoning with activity and hope now that the land was once more whole); she knew the ancient hidden secrets of the spring-dwellers, now oncemore sheathed safely in the blue; she even knew the few curious and hardy adventurers that had made their way down into the shining depths of the freshly-attached nose cone, witnessing the adherence of a new form of matter they’d thought would nevermore exist within their grasp. 

Molly knew them all, and she loved them, and she put the pen in her pen holder where it stood in place of pride until three days later her mom went looking for a pen and took it without asking, whereupon she never saw it again for the rest of her life. 

***

This is the actual answer to the Problem of Evil.