Orgonomicon (22 page)

William was strapped into the chair-shaped
cradle of a cluster of electronics interfacing directly with his
nervous system by way of a series of pads and electrodes that
played through his memories at the twist of a dial; wires ran from
the machine and pierced through his skin, and he had a terrible
headache, and every muscle in his body was clenched to its maximum
effort and straining against a harness which gave nowhere. The man
was trying to find out what made him different, what role he played
in something that was happening, how much he knew about anything
interesting. William was being judged, and no matter what the
verdict would come away with a death sentence.

He knew he wasn't going to live through this,
and with that resolution a greater pressure than the electrostatic
field engulfing him began to bear down upon him, starting with an
elasticity of the forehead and relaxation of the muscles in his
scalp. It wasn't anything special to accept that he was about to
die, and the calm feeling that was not numbness began to fill
him.

The machine below him rattled and began to
spark, and an alarm buzzer rang out, and the man became very
unhappy with him. He didn't mean to break anything, and now it was
only getting worse…

He could not allow the despair to take him.
If he was meant to leave this body for another, or for some other,
higher purpose, then it would all be as according to the great
clockwork plan of the universe that was God figuring itself out, or
else it wouldn't, but that still wouldn't matter.

It was all about being the moment in such
immersion that total acceptance was given, including the final
moment.

And he was okay with that. It was part of the
plan.

In the raveling strings of the greater time
vortice, a woven strand pulled apart its neighbor and recombined
with it to become a braid of greater complexity.

His death was part of the bigger picture, and
would happen whether he cooperated or not.

The machine sparked against his back and
caught on fire. More alarms were going off.

The man was in a panic, beating at the flames
with his jacket, and then he saw the fire extinguisher on the wall.
William was released from the electrifying grip of the device and
slumped into it, exhausted; he was immediately engulfed in the
choking spray from the nozzle held in Agent HUT2971's hand.

He raised his head and coughed, and found he
could use his voice, if only there been anything he'd felt the need
to say. He lowered his head again and closed his eyes. The man
reacted to his apparent calm with a fury, and raised the fire
extinguisher high above his head to strike.

"It's okay, you didn't know what you were
doing," William said, and the red bludgeon crashed down and he
ceased to be.

Jaime went into the light.

The great strings exploded from the center of
the new knot outward, untangling and separating, disengaging to
shimmy loose for one fleeting moment of free-floating isolation,
the loose waveforms pulling together and aligning again in
synchrony.

The rivulets of causation and probability
asserted themselves in an adjusted form, and reality wrote itself
accordingly.

William lifted away from the earth and his
broken body, ready to pass back into the soul matrix, to be
recycled and renewed.

He left behind the fire and mayhem, the man
with the bloody metal canister smashing down into the still form
spread out in the ashes of the terrible machine; he saw the man
losing faith in a system that could be broken, knew him to be
disgusted with himself for what he had to do and becoming less and
less able to turn it off, saw the man choose to accept the
self-disgust and dim a feeble light that had grown within him, and
watched the man give himself over to hell.

And then he was the light.

The Queen knew of the unmaking and its
effects upon the continuum, and marked that these periods were
coming with an intensifying frequency, and that with each passing
flare of the anomaly She maintained less and less control over the
realm.

There were cycles beyond, wheels riding upon
wheels within wheels, that were greater than the extent of her
reach—there was a deeper blackness beyond which her manipulations
could not prove, and to which she was forever banned access.

This swallowing darkness came from the
distant behind and beyond the unforeseeable ahead, and would not
let Her pass. It was this darkness that pushed upon Her net, and
would return to push again and again and stronger…

There was so very much to be done; the
unmaking darkness was fast in coming, but if She were to build
something that could withstand its persuasion to disassemble, She
could survive its passage… It was desperate.

The cosmic gears were turning, and she would
not be chewed between their teeth.

It was survival.

Manny was pretty sure that he was dead.

All the color had gone out of the world, and
it lay deep in crawling shadows that reached for him and drew
short, hissed and slunk away. There was a wailing wind coming from
behind him, and he knew instinctively not to look back, that it
would be something worse than death, and forever, and yet something
in his heart knew that he had to go back into it.

He had no explanation for his attraction to
the void; there was simply a reason to not yet let it go.

She'd been shot!

She was lying in her bed asleep, her no good
ex-husband asleep on the couch and the kid in his bed, and someone
came into her room and shot her! In her sleep!

She needed to get up, she needed to check on
her boy, she couldn't just lie there like that… The bullet hole
looked small from the front, right in the middle of her forehead,
but the backside was much messier. It was all over the bed. No one
could have survived a wound like that.

Karen realized that she was examining her
injuries from the outside, that she was observing herself, and
everything ended. The delusion that she was still alive took with
it all her pain, and her strong emotions, and left her
dispassionate and all-knowing. It was time to leave this body
behind and take another.

But there was unfinished business…

Manny had gotten an idea and seized upon it
obsessively, searching the ghostly reproduction of his home for a
mirror, anything reflective, but finding only blackness in their
surfaces. He'd hoped to search the void navigating by reflection,
to be able to look Medusa in the face and find his way through her
lair without being turned to stone; there was no such object in the
afterlife in which to sink his gaze.

In death, he would realize how easy it really
was to let his problems go, and that was when the solutions would
become obvious. He relinquished his hold on the idea, and found his
way.

The only light emanating in this place came
directly from the other souls, and from the soul of the land, and
the way to traverse was to be led by the lights from their eyes.
And there were indeed others around him that he hadn't noticed
before, a teeming multitude of them everywhere he looked, and the
wind that was always behind him slackened, and he knew that the one
set of eyes he needed to see, the one he sought, was elsewhere.

"Manny?"

She could feel that he was near, that she
needed to go to him, that he called to her from across the
gulfs…

And the strands of time wove themselves
together, becoming a thread…

… And Manny extended a blind hand to the
darkness, and felt another take hold and knew that it was the love
of his life and pulled her to him, clasping her to his breast.

"Karen?"

"I'm here, Manny."

"I love you."

"I love you too."

He asked her where their child was, and she
knew the truth of the words as she spoke them, that the boy had
chosen to move on ahead and would see them again in the next
place.

"Can we go together? I want you to be with
me."

"I want that too."

Two stars shone brightly together, their
light becoming one.

The threads of time tautened, and came apart
again.

He pulled her to him, and was surprised by
the cold. He held her tighter, would have warmed and taken the
stiffness from her, but she remained more solid than he, and could
not be moved.

"I've come alone," she said to him, "so
alone."

"I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

"Yes, you are."

There was always the darkness. Everything
came apart.

Everyth—

THE END

Chapter One:
Appendix

(or, My Orgonite Adventure — being an explanation of
just what the hell I was getting up to & why I thought it might
work)

... Be it so,
then I answer'd

I too haughty Shade also sing war, and a longer and
greater one

than any,

Waged in my book with varying fortune, with flight,
advance

and retreat, victory deferr'd and wavering,

(Yet methinks certain, or as good as certain, at the
last,) the

field the world,

For life and death, for the Body and for the eternal
Soul,

Lo, I too am come, chanting the chant of
battles,

I above all promote brave soldiers.

Walt Whitman
, from "
As I Ponder'd in
Silence
"

This is going to be the non-fiction section of the
book.

pareidolia

noun

1. the imagined perception of a pattern or
meaning where it does not actually exist, as in considering the
moon to have human features

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/pareidolia

The trouble with so many of the extraordinary
experiences and encounters I've had has been that they can be so
easily dismissed by conventional explanations.

The following story is not one of those
experiences.

I am going to start this section of the book
with a true tale of tangential relevance; its importance will be
made clear towards the end. This really, truly happened to me, I
swear by whatever you or I hold sacred.

Ahem...

I was fourteen years old and living at the
group home for wayward youth; one midnight hour, my friend tells me
that we're going to try a new way of getting ourselves into
trouble—we're going to play with a Ouija board. I had never used
one before but had some idea of what to expect. After all the staff
had gone to sleep, we snuck out of our rooms and got down to
business. I don't remember if we burned candles or bothered with
any of the usual accoutrements; they would have been extraneous to
the action which was to come.

As he was pulling aside the lid of the box,
he said, "Whatever you do, don't take your hands off the
planchette."

I think I might have said, "Okay..."

We set the board up on the floor between us
and began the usual round of questioning; out of the two of us, my
friend was the only one who'd used the board before, so he
naturally led the proceedings. He began with the standard
interrogation: "Is there anybody here?" and the board's sputtering
response was a slow meandering of the planchette in looping
circles, figure-eights and angular wanderings. It was giving a
response, but an unsatisfying one as far as my friend was
concerned—I had no idea what I should expect, so the action was to
me as good as any, but he apparently knew what was supposed to be
happening and this wasn't it.

I glanced up at him a couple times during
this preliminary period when things were still getting started and
studied his face for any hint of mischief; was he moving the thing
around? Was he playing some kind of trick on me? If so, it wasn't a
very entertaining one.

After a few minutes' worth of hello? hello?
questions and the only response being nonsensical alphanumeric
strings, I myself began to lose patience with it and blurted out of
turn: "Come on already, who is this?" and that was when I got the
response I'd been looking for.

It is difficult to truly do this experience
justice in words; my description will probably fail to impart the
sense of utter freakout that occurred.

Immediately after I asked my question, the
planchette began to whip around so fast that we both had to hang on
with everything we had just to keep from losing our grips on the
thing. It really took off moving; it moved faster than I have ever
seen one go, other than in movies, and we both actually lost
contact with it a couple times. I cannot say for certain that it
did not move around on its own. It was moving that fast, and we
couldn't keep up with it.