[Continued from Meeting of the Dead]
If he had eyes to cry, he would. But he doesn't. Nor does he have breath to catch in his throat, skin to break out in goosebumps, or a spine for any chills that might want to play like mice on a clock that's getting ready to strike "one".
His Eden wraps around him lovingly. Mists and frogs. Stars twinkling in the clear spring sky. He would hate to lose all of it already; it was too soon. Too soon after his return for him to have to leave it again.
But not yet. Not now. _Now_ he had to go deeper into the Eden. Had to find its heart. Its beginning. Only there would he learn the truth of what he had seen at the meeting of the dead. Only there would he find out if his suspicions were true. And what to do about it if they were.
"No time like the present." He mutters to the chirping frogs.
A quick adjustment of his ballcap and he starts off toward the infinite horizon line that would never come closer. And though he could ordinarily just _be_ where he wanted to be, this was a journey of walking. A journey more into his own soul and his own mind and his own past. A journey to the beginning of the eternal midnight. A journey to 11:59.
His was the shortest of the journey, it having not existed for all that long. The fresh spring midnight soon gave way to the stale and stagnant midnight of a summer that had gone on too long. Summer midnight in a rotting swamp of tall reeds and grasses, dead claws of trees reaching from thick black sludge, bloated bullfrogs lowing a bass harmony to the ululating melody provided by unseen cicadas. Mosquitoes buzzed annoyingly around his head, the doppler effect of compressing and expanding sound making them sound like miniature fighter jets as they blew by his ears.
Essuncius continued walking. This was the old Eden. The infinite midnight paradise to which his new Eden had been heir. The Eden he had hoped never to have to replace.
A building appeared on the horizon, directly in the ghost's path. Essuncius kept walking until the outlines of the structure revealed themselves through proximity.
It was a small building. What had once been a restaurant. Or a diner. It had been badly burned, charred by some long ago fire that had been interrupted -- doused by fireman's hose or heavy downpour. A neon sign dangled broken and dark from a pole just outside the door. It illuminated abruptly as Essuncius approached. Flickering and spitting and buzzing in the annoying-yet-funny way that only neon signs could manage. Where once it had read "The Hidden 'Ess", the only tubes now managing to shed their holy light spelled out a cryptic message or nothing at all, depending on the perceptions of the reader: "...he Hi...d...... E...s".
Essuncius mouthed the words like some magical phrase necessary to gain entry to some secret cave and pushed inside to an interior just as fire ravaged as the exterior. Red vinyl hung like congealed rubber blood from blackened-chrome bar stools. A melted Wurlitzer juke box hulked menacingly against the far wall, looking like some bio-organic menace from the worst of the "B" horror movies. Essuncius caught his reflection in the smoke-darkened mirror that took up the entire wall behind the bar. He turned to face it fully and smiled sadly. A thirteen-year-old boy in a ballcap and a three-sizes-too-big blue lab-coat decorated with clouds and rainbows smiled back at him.
The wurlitzer sputtered to life and began trying to play music from melted records. The sound wavered up and down. Foreign. Alien. Slowing and speeding alternately as the needle scratched its way up one warped hill and down the other side.
"EEEEAAAArrrth angel, earRRRRTH AAANNNGEEELLLL..."
He turned and took a step toward it. It stopped as abruptly as it started, lapsing back into molten, black silence.
And then he was standing outside the diner -- behind it -- blinking in the instant change of locale. And he knew that he had seen what he was supposed to see in this Eden. He nodded once and began walking in the direction the undead Wurlitzer had turned him towards. The direction of 11:59.
Behind him, as the burned-out shell of the diner vanished in the distance, the jukebox began to sing. The tune, perfectly played, reached the ghost's ears and he wished again that he did not lack the physical capability for tears.
"...And when I die,
And when I'm dead and gone,
There'll be one child born
in this world to carry on, carry on..."
Essuncius was tired. He was tired to the bone. To the heart. He smiled as the metaphors broke down. He was exhausted beyond a mere physical level -- he was tired to the soul. Which, being a ghost, was all that there was of him.
He had walked the midnight swamp for what? Hours? Days? Weeks? since leaving the ruined diner. And time never changed. The landscape never changed. Nothing _ever_ changed. There was no way to tell the passing of time, if time passed at all.
And then, with a single step, it changed.
The stagnant summer air was replaced with the salty, misty breezes of the shore and the sweet scent of blooming heather. The voices of frogs and crickets and owls faded beneath the roar and crash of a powerful ocean breaking against rocky cliffs somewhere unseen in the distance. The squishy, wet ground was instantly firm and dry, blanketed in a thin cover of short grass. And overlooking everything, that full moon peeking down from its midnight sky.
Essuncius climbed up over hill and down into valley. Always going in the same direction. Never wavering or turning aside. To be distracted, to go the wrong way, would be to become forever lost in the Midnight Eden. Would mean eventual dissolution. Annihilation. Wandering through reflections of the past -- never going forward and never being able to go back.
The mournful howl of a hound crying in some fog-shrouded moor forever beyond the horizon echoed through the highlands. Essuncius paused mid-step. Waited. And then continued on in the direction indicated by the jukebox in the previous incarnation of the dark paradise of the dead. In the attempt to find 11:59, one's ability to navigate was based solely on one's ability to detect the significance of subtle signs and symbols. And Essuncius was fairly certain that the hound in _this_ Eden was merely background noise, much like the frogs in the newest version.
The crashing of waves grew louder as he climbed a steep slope. The air more heavily laden with salty spray. Atop the crest, his progress was halted at the crumbling walls of a crudely-built barrow.
Low and long, it appeared to have been quickly constructed of local stones scavenged from the rocky hillsides. Now, the passing of long years showed the results of such hurried craftsmanship. Fallen blocks littered the ground around the grave. Grass and weeds poked through gaps. The hilt of an ancient sword protruded from the stones.
Essuncius reached out a tentative hand, uncertain. Could the blade be his sign in this Eden? Like Arthur, was he to remove the sword from the stone and claim his kingship?
A bony hand shot from the rocks and grabbed his wrist. A quick tug against his arm and he was sent flying over the barrow. Stony ground rushed up to meet him and he skidded to a prone stop with his face peering over the cliff's edge at the crashing ocean far below. Behind him, the heavy slide and grate of stones told him that the barrow's occupant was rising to meet him.
He turned and climbed slowly to his feet, noting with dismay the grass stains on his rainbow-clad lab coat. He was as real as anything else in the Midnight Eden. His coat was stained, his elbows and knees scraped, and his chest about to be punctured by a particularly large sword being held in a fairly aggressive position by a particularly large skeleton clad in rusting armor.
He took a tiny step back. Another. Until his heels found the edge of the cliff.
The ocean below sounded almost hungry.
The skeleton matched him step for step.
The sword just kept pointing at his chest.
The first thing to run through Essuncius' mind was whether he could be killed here in the past of the Midnight Eden. Not killed exactly, but destroyed. Dissolved.
The second thing was just who the hell was this armored skeleton pointing a rusty sword at him?
Not having any immediate answers to these ponderings, he fell back on typical Essuncius tradition.
"Careful with that thing. I haven't had a tetanus shot for quite some time."
The skeleton grinned, but then, that was what skeletons always did.
"Who are you?"
The skeleton didn't answer. It stood, motionless. The sword point never wavering from its position a fraction of an inch from where Essuncius' heart would have been had he still had a real body. The wind whistled through its bones and the howled eerily through the gaps in its armor.
Essuncius' mind whirled. This _couldn't_ be a trick of this Eden, could it? Or could it? And if it wasn't, what was it? _Who_ was...?
And then it hit him.
They called her "The Wanderer" -- the last entity to try and find the beginning of the Eternal Midnight. The last to try and find 11:59. She never came back. She had lost her way in the funhouse mirrors of Midnight's past and stood as a warning to anyone who would attempt the same foolish quest. Anyone like Essuncius.
"Wanderer," Essuncius whispered. "My God. We thought you were just a myth..."
At his words, the skeleton pulled the sword up and away in a sharp arc.
The movement startled Essuncius and he jerked backwards. He stood for a moment, sneakered feet clinging precariously to the edge of the cliff. Arms pinwheeling at his sides as he tried to regain his balance.
The skeleton reached out a bony hand and grabbed him by the shirt.
Essuncius rolled his eyes and breathed a heavy sigh of relief. If he'd had a heart, he was certain it would have stopped right then and there.
"Oh God, Wanderer" he breathed. "Thank you. Th..."
And then the skeleton pushed.
Essuncius grabbed at the skeletal hand, his fingers closing around bare radius and ulnar. For a moment he hung there as his feet scrabbled for purchase, kicking loose stones to the hungry, crashing ocean far below. Both hands clinging desperately to the skeleton's arm. The skull swiveled down at him, fixing him with the black stare of empty eye-sockets. Arm bones broke with a sickening crack and Essuncius tumbled into the void, that hollow gaze following him all the way down.
If he'd had a bladder, Essuncius probably would have wet himself as he fell. As it was, he didn't even scream. Unbelieving, he only stared up as that horrible, grinning skull shrank with distance. Wind and spray blew past him, plastering his rainbow-overshirt and his t-shirt to his skin. The ravenous roar of the waves grew louder. Closer. He couldn't even see the skeleton that had thrown him to his doom, though he still clutched its hand. He didn't even realize he had kept hold of it.
His mind whirled. How far had he fallen? Why hadn't he hit yet? Would he hit? Or was this what it was like to get lost in the Midnight Eden in the search for 11:59? Would he fall until the end of time, the ocean always roaring below him? Always getting closer but never arriving? And what if the Eden was somehow _beyond_ time? When the rest of the multiverse failed, would he still be here, in the timeless, eternal midnight, perpetually tumbling toward an ocean that would never swallow him?
It came as quite a shock when he finally hit.
His world became an explosion of white and cold.
And pain.
He had hit hard. _Too_ hard. Landing on his back on a soft, semi-solid surface that wasn't water but wasn't rock or ground.
He lay there, still holding the skeletal hand, as he waited for the pain to fade. And then he opened his eyes.
His first thought was that he had actually been finally destroyed -- that he had finally been allowed into the afterlife that he had been denied so many years ago. All around him was bright. White. But it was a cold light. Harsh and severe. Was it the light of God? Was this heaven?
But he'd always imagined that the light of the Presence would be warm. Comforting. Yellow and orange and soft and fuzzy. While this light was pale and white. Icy and sterile. A blue fluorescent in a black cell. And so overwhelmingly cold.
He sat up slowly, nonexistent muscles protesting against a pain he shouldn't feel and a frostiness that chilled him to his nonexistent bones. He realized as he did so that he was sitting in snow. _Deep_ snow. Snow that had cushioned his fall. Gone was the howling, angry sea. Gone the cliff from which he had fell. Gone everything except an endless expanse of pale snow glimmering and shimmering under the light of a pale, blue-white moon hanging full and bloated in a black, midnight sky.
He climbed laboriously to his feet and surveyed the landscape, confirming that there was nothing from horizon to horizon except for snow and moonlight. No hills. No valleys. No trees or scrub or iced-over streams. Nothing but Essuncius standing and shivering in wet clothes that were slowly freezing in the sub-zero night.
How long he stood in the cold as his wet clothing froze around him, Essuncius couldn't say. He only stood there, knee deep in the impression his body had left in the snow, still holding that skeletal hand by the wrist. He was uncertain. Confused. Terrified.
Somehow, he had made it to the next Eden. His memory was hazy, but this Eden was recognizable -- it was the only one of its kind. The only Eden with snow. The only winter Eden. The only Eden that was _this_ dead. This lifeless. This...
...quiet.
But he didn't know where to go. Didn't know which direction to turn. To choose the wrong way would be to vanish eternally into the Edens.
So he stood, paralyzed in indecision. Frozen in fear.
And cold.
His wet clothing had become totally solid. His hair hung in sharp, icicle jags, tinkling musically when he turned his head.
He scanned the horizons for hours... days... weeks... years... searching for a clue. A sign. Anything. And when he could stand it no longer, he screamed.
"Help!"
The sound faded quickly, soaked up by the hushing properties of snow, and that oppressing silence returned.
He was ready to shout again when he heard the noise. Soft at first. Distant. Then louder and closer. The strange, squeaking-crunch of footsteps in the snow.
Essuncius turned his head this way and that, his frozen hair singing like wind chimes.
And then they were there, to his right: footprints appearing in the snow as if by their own will and whim. One after the other in a steady line toward him. Closer and closer.
Essuncius gripped the bone wrist like a club.
The footsteps passed him by without pausing. Without stopping to look at the frozen white specter with musical hair and sepulchral weapon.
Essuncius turned and shuffled clumsily after them. Kicking up large puffs of snow as he wobbled stiff-leggedly across the frozen tundra.
He laughed at his own wooden movements beneath his solid clothing and the footprints paused momentarily. For just an instant, Essuncius thought he heard an answering chuckle, and then the footprints continued on into the frozen Eden.
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