Thanks to those loyal readers who have been keeping up with my serialized novel The Journals of Doctor Mormeck. I really appreciate your support and donations. I’ve now topped 46,000 words and have all of the notes, fragments, and half-scenes necessary to complete this rough draft. For those who haven’t been following along, I’m making it easy by posting the entire draft thus far below the cut, in addition to an exclusive interview with the characters..

I planned to post new material today, but for the past week I’ve been grappling with extreme tooth pain that’s had me working at half-capacity. I go in for surgery to remove all four wisdom teeth on Monday, and thus I don’t think I’ll be posting more Mormeck until next Thursday or so.

So, quite frankly, the donations part of this enterprise is taking on a little added urgency as a result, especially given the amount of time spent on pro bono work for translation efforts and the Shared Worlds teen writing camp recently. If you like what you’ve been reading or what you’re encountering below for the first time, please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial stand-alone book appearance.

What Is Mormeck about?

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck.

Enjoy the story, and the interview!

***

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH THE CHARACTERS

The individuals being interviewed exist in a parallel universe where none of the events in The Journals of Doctor Mormeck actually took place but were instead birthed fully formed from the imagination of a Serbian playwright named Dzef VanderMer. They are actors in the six-act, four-levels-at-once play he has created and which is being produced in Istanbul, the cultural capital of this alt-Earth, in their version of 2011. The play is still in the production phase, with the script being revised. To avoid too much confusion we are using the character names throughout this interview, not the actors’ real names. For this interview, we were able to get Marty, the subject of Mormeck Mountain’s obsession, Mormeck Mountain, and Mormeck Avatar. Gabriel the angel was not available for interview. All of the actors were plucked from their normal routine, given a sedative that induced calm and reasoning, and given incontrovertible proof that their play is reality in other alt-universes.

What has been the biggest challenge in approaching your role?

Marty: The sense of stasis. I want to know more about my role as a spy. I want to know more about the Grim Lighthouse and I want less waiting around. It’s definitely a difficult role in the sense of playing multiple Marty’s, each with their own slightly different personality, but that’s an inner thing. I want a more expansive landscape. But I know it’s early stages.

Mormeck Mountain: How to convey gravitas and a kind of deep but not ponderous intelligence. Really, the idea of movement without movement. I have to convey his character through his stillness, and somehow make that stillness into motion. Also, making him emotionally vulnerable while not losing…losing some kind of overall perception of his…of, well, the fact he’s basically a mountain. It’s a very physically demanding role from that point of view.

Mormeck Avatar: For me, it’s actually the opposite problem. I have to worry about getting too fractured because so many influences work on me. I mean, I start out as a doppelganger of Mormeck Mountain and then my own self, then able to morph into a King Komodo with immense powers and also to morph into human form. Then, of course, the Remnant comes into play and I’m playing host to another personality, so to speak. How to ground all of that in one central personality is the great challenge. And channel that into making all of those elements become part of my unique self.

Do you ever get lost in the scale of the production? There are six simultaneously moving sets and at times you are played by a pre-recorded holographic representation of yourself?

Mormeck Mountain: I can’t allow myself to! Supposedly, I’m a mountain. How can a mountain get lost in anything? But, yes, it is daunting at times.

Marty: I am more aware of it than they are, because they’re at the center of the storm, always doing things. I’m more over to the side as they work on the script. So I can observe it more. When I’m not in a scene, I’m watching from the balcony, and I’m in awe of the number of moving parts in this production. The fact that in rehearsals it has mostly worked is a miracle.

Mormeck Avatar: I see my character’s journey as being just one thread of this production. He’s not supposed to know what’s going on elsewhere, so I try to block it out, too. I haven’t ever looked at the full stage, and I have my assistant guide me through the back-stage area so I only ever see the sets I will part of. I also, quite frankly, never hang out with Marty if I can help it for the same reason—no offense, Marty.

Marty: None taken. I think I feel somewhat the same, despite what I said earlier. I don’t want to know much more than my character should know, either. But, of course, one of my iterations lives in the Grim Lighthouse, and that’s a place of temporal distortion…so it doesn’t hurt me to know more as it would hurt Mormeck Avatar over here.

Have you learned anything thus far from the experience of working on the production, and how does it feel to know that in other universes all of these events have occurred, and are continually occurring…even though I will be wiping your memories of that fact shortly after this interview concludes?

Mormeck Avatar: Anything I’ve learned from working on the production is beggared by the knowledge I’m playing the part of someone real, and I can only hope that after you wipe our memories somehow my brain will still subconsciously remember and bring that knowledge into my performance. I [breaks down crying]. I’m sorry. It’s just…what you’ve told us is so sad and yet so beautiful and so vast that I cannot…I just cannot cope with the idea of not knowing it after this.

Mormeck Mountain: I have the same hope. But I will tell you that I think I already knew. I think somehow in channeling the character, I channeled something else. I’ve had dreams that I only vaguely remember but that fit the outlines of what you’ve told us. So somehow I think I was already bringing that to the stage, and I don’t think I’ll forget, not truly. Not forever….The play, the play’s still important to me, and it’s taught me patience, it’s taught me solitude in my own mind, and its opened me up emotionally in ways I wasn’t before. I think that’s perhaps why the director chose me—so that I could experience the same journey as the character…that’s all I have to say.

Marty: There’s no point wasting sadness on what we soon will not know. I don’t have the patience for that. I can’t control it. It’s going to happen. Do I think it’s cruel of you to do? Yes. Do I think that I’ll miss knowing, that some part of me will miss what it doesn’t remember? Yes. But you have to understand that the play and reality have already intersected in some ways. I’ve fallen in love with [Mormeck Mountain], and he with me. And I’ve felt for some time now—and I haven’t told you this [Mormeck Mountain] because I thought it would scare you—but I feel as if I have a real connection with you, and something about the way we have to act together in the play has reinforced this, something beyond the words of the play itself. And I know you feel it too. So, I don’t care really about what I’ve learned from the play, or what you’re about to take from us. On some level. On some level, I will still be happy tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that. And on some level I’ll still know we’re all connected, and what do the details matter? Did you really think the details would matter? That you were entrusting us with some sacred knowledge?…So, come on, do your worst. You’ve had your fun. Make us forget. Just fucking do it.

THE JOURNALS OF DOCTOR MORMECK
Copyright 2011, Jeff VanderMeer

Entry #1

As the experiments continue across dimensions and across time, even I cannot escape the inevitable recognition that we are all animals, and in acquiring reason we paradoxically seem determined to continually undermine reason—destabilization as a coping mechanism because our brains really aren’t ready for all of this yet. Systems we construct must therefore by definition fail. Their failure is a relief perversely. We willingly revert.

(What’s not a relief or comforting is that no permutation of any humanoid sentient species yet discovered can be said to be any less self-destructive. Is a certain type of intelligence a kind of disease? Are opposable thumbs a harbinger of disaster?)

I was listening to the transmission from a luna moth in the Southern Hemisphere of Earth 2.7.5 yesterday and it’s not as if this fact isn’t understood in every-day life, for leaking through the banal conversation outside at dusk at a cafe or coffee house, caught up in our surveillance because of the key words “angels” and “other worlds,” came this snippet rendered originally by a male voice, in Spanish: “If you notice how illogical, inconsistent, subjectively, just plan odd and off we all seem to act individually and collectively, how ideologies–which are usually a form of disease–infect us until we spout the most ridiculous generalities (whether those ideologies are on left or right), it sometimes seems Earth was created by gods or aliens to house billions of insane sentients.”

I commandeered a passing fly to settle on this man’s shoulder. He sat with a group of about ten people, middle class, clearly professionals of some sort. I listened in for a good five minutes, but the conversation turned away from the implications of what this man had said.

What I found unsettling is that the man, retreating to the bathroom to use a urinal, murmured “did you catch all of that?” at one point, and for a second I thought he somehow knew the fly camouflaged by his dark shirt was recording him…but, no, pulling out to diagnostic surveil I found he was himself “bugged” with a wire under his shirt, and clearly spying for someone’s secret service. Who he was with, or why they should be of interest counted as merely regional politics—strategically unimportant. But it amused me to discover that he watched others as I watched him.

However, it also made me paranoid. Are we all watching each other? And if so, who is watching me?

So I shall, in the secret part of each night—or what functions as night here—begin to record, in the old-fashioned way, using pen and paper, how I came to be here and the results of our experiments. I shall use English, that most out-dated of languages, as a further impediment to interception. I will number but not date these entries. (Dates are a laughable proposition anyway, knowing what I know.)
It’s possible that even though I am taking these precautions that I will be found out. I’m accepting of that possibility. The truth is, I am surrounded by people, and yet I have no confessor, no one with which I can share the inner-most thoughts that gather around me with a kind of flapping, glittery darkness. I trust no one, and they don’t, I think, trust me.

It’s not that kind of operation. I am not that kind of monster.

Entry #2

Before swooping down to the forest floor to write again, I pondered for awhile about what I should write first, what second, what third. The possibilities opening up before me seemed to contain multitudes. It was overwhelming, if I’m honest. A journal can include everything and nothing, and I am no expert at confessionals. But then I thought about someone finding the book, buried in a box in the dirt, possibly hundreds of years from now…and even though I’m writing it in a dead language, and for myself, there was a kind of tingle of anticipation of that far-future reader, an acknowledgment that some day I will have a reader.

And that reader will need to know who I am, because although raised by what might be termed “humans,” I am not human. Indeed, there are no others like me anywhere nearby.

I came here, to this planet, this doorway, as the shooting seed of an adult of my species, and I might have originated galaxies away and centuries ago. Who knows? I don’t.

I started polyp-small, and discovered by those who were here first, I was tended to in a laboratory devoted to experiments across time and space. None of them had seen anything like me, either. It soon became clear I was sentient, and growing. That is when they decided to truly take me in and make me one of them. That is when I gained a “father” and a “mother,” although these terms have a different meaning to my species.

At first, I was like some cross between lab assistant and lab pet—it was difficult for them to choose how to treat me, and I don’t blame them. I did not know my own capabilities, so how could I expect them to? But I continued to grow, and continued to learn, at a prodigious rate. It became clear I was their peer, and then, to some extent, meant to be their leader. Why not? I had no allegiance to my own species, and no aversion to theirs. Besides, their mission appealed to me, for so many reasons.

Yet I am vast, and no laboratory could contain me, ultimately. Now, as an adult, I look like a mountain, but also like a monster from the nightmares of humans. My four legs are enormously thick and rise some hundred feet, where they intersect at the base of what in a human would be my torso; each leg ends in a huge round foot, from which tendrils root into the ground. My torso is also my head and rises another hundred feet, with moth-like feelers protruding out in a feathery profusion. Each tendril is wider than a human being and stretches out a good fifty to seventy-five feet. I can elongate them as necessary.

Atop my head perches the laboratory and some outer buildings, and I have stood here still for so long that a small forest has grown up around the lab. I have no need to move, because from the eyeless crennelated sides of my “face”—my tendrils are my eyes—I can send out a winged probe that, alighting beside the lab, morphs into a vaguely humanoid remote replica. This replica interacts with my fellow researchers, some of whom are, with my blessing, devoted to studying me. This is also how I secretly come to the planet’s surface to write these entries.

As I’ve said, I am the only one of my kind, but in accepting the mission of my fellow researchers, I also hope to one day discover another of me. We must exist, just so widely dispersed that the finding is the difficult part. And in the meantime, every week, from deep inside my body, self-fertilized polyps emerge, and—shot with incredible force, protected by vacuum-sealed pods—make their way out into space. I could keep some of them with me, I suppose, but instinctually I know they would die without their exposure to space. I would be killing my offspring just to have someone similar to talk to. And someday those I send out may come back.

So I talk to the people here, and cooperate with their mission. I monitor the surveillance transmissions from a hundred thousand worlds spread out across a a wide expanse of alternate universes. Earth and its duplicates, its mutants, are our primary concern for now, but not our only one. Some day Earth may fade from our awareness entirely, once the war there has been won.

In the meantime, for all of my size, I am afraid of what is unfolding in the sensory apparatus of the luna moths and our other spy-creatures, across all the Earths, and because that scares me, so too, more and more, my human colleagues scare me.

Although I have not been truly honest about these colleagues of mine. Nominally, they are human. Luminously, they are angels.

And that is enough writing for today. It takes a great effort to write any of these words, especially through a remote probe. Everything about the forest floor distracts me. I have too many senses to remain numb to…anything.

Entry #3

I’ve forgotten what I wanted to relate, because I’m drunk, or “pissed” as one of the angels, the humans, says. It takes a lot to get a monster as big as a mountain drunk. It takes my rooting filaments tapping into sweet hallucinogenic sap of other plants. It takes my fellow observers pouring pint after pint of rotgut down a throat I created just for the purpose. But it can be done! Gloriously, riotously done!

I’m a happy drunk for the most part. I see sunbeams and novas. I relax and think everything across the universes is wonderful. I contain multitudes, but durnk, I am but one person, no different than my fellow experimenters, no different in my bleary rants and affirmations of solidarity. I’m not a monster at all. I’m your best friend, your confidante.

And yet…part of me is still sealed off from all of that. Part of me is monitoring information lightyears away, brought from luna moths and komodo dragons and from bears that rip open to reveal doors and much more horrific things that don’t need thinking about, and which, luckily, you don’t think about when durnk. No, durnk is a state of bliss when considering things like geo-political social situations across multiple alt-worlds. Or wars between species thought of as angels and demons but all too…human?…humanoid?

But that’s too sad to bear thinking about. Time for another drink poured down the artificial throat. I think this one’s a screwdriver! I think! The screwdriver to beat all screwdrivers!

Yes, I’m one of them. Finally. Forever. or until the morning hangover.

Big as a mountain. Small as mouse. Drunk as a louse.

Entry #4

Who can blame anyone for mistaking them for angels, these people I work for, these people who have taken me in? Who can blame anyone for creating the myth of angels, or the “angels” for using it?

On this outpost, “this backwater planet at the end of nowhere,” as the bear-sentinel Seether calls it, the arrival of the angels from far-flung missions can be as dramatic as a sunrise or as stealthy as turning to discover a person sitting in a chair empty the moment before.

But it’s for the dramatics that I love them, although I know it’s a weakness. They dare to take chances, and so instead of riddling their way through the Rips to come home—really all the way home, safe—some of them will enter in the upper atmosphere, calculating how long it will take for their incredibly strong wings to burn up, and coming hurtling down, on fire, like fiery jewels. And I send the skein of my senses rushing up to meet them, to experience their fall. Weaving and diving, feet-first and head-first, they careen down in droves at times, coordinating their descents.

Most of the time, they guess correctly, and make it to the laboratory grounds, their wings crumpled and glistening black-brown like burnt sugar but having performed almost like parachutes. The wings will grow back. Everything grows back on them; they even have a tolerance for the vacuum of space. Some of them get drunk on it.

The ones not so lucky smash screaming into the lawns and smolder there until the medics come. I hear the impact above me, reverberating through my skull, and I send out my tendrils to investigate. They lie there, shrieking and laughing at the same time. Writhing in a spasm of something that’s not just pain. They look like heaps of smoking, quivering tar but smell like honeysuckle. These cases take longer to heal, but their misfortune isn’t seen as frivolous by the others. When you’re almost immortal, your idea of play isn’t the same as for other beings. Your idea of play is almost as important as the missions you cross galaxies, decades, and dimensions to carry out.

Stationary mountain-sized monster that I am, I revel in their joy, their mobility, their risk-taking. I forgive everything because of it. They are so beautiful I might even be able to forgive the slaughter of hundreds, of thousands, for love of them. At least for a little while.

Entry #5

Intel from surveillance today has had a thready, inconsistent quality. More than ever, I’ve been unable to see the patterns, to understand how it all fits together. In quick succession, glimpses of: a strange library on the top of a mountain, men struggling against a storm in an antiquated ship with huge sails, three women consoling a forth in a graveyard, enormous floating creatures shooting bolts of lightning at one another while below shouting crowds of people like shoals of fish ran back and forth. An ant struggling to hold a blade of grass. The innards of a clock winding down. A man praying in a temple.

But then attention seemed to resolve upon a wintery city under siege, the wings of our luna moths dusted with snowflakes, a battle played out under gray skies. The mortar fire was like the shriek of birds—and became the shriek of birds, because the starlings began to mimic the sound after several days. Glue and water boiled with bay leaves to make a terrible soup. Belts with nettle and vinegar for another soup. Rats tossed whole into the fire to roast, with no time to put them on spits, desperate men and women in rags shooting from behind pitted, gouged walls at their enemies. A slow-motion war in the snow, even in the best boots…and some didn’t even have shoes, wrapping pieces of cloth to protect blue-bruised feet. Stolid, sullen, broken architecture framing faces and bodies whose own architecture displayed the harsh lines and utility of starvation, even from under hats and layers of clothing.

But this war was not our observers’ objective. A room in a deserted hospital with its roof blown off, the snow falling and coating the floors—that was where our luna moths congregated in this blighted city. The moths formed a living green cloud covering the walls and tables. If any of the combatants had seen this happening they would have thought it a hallucination: moths impervious to the weather killing so many human beings. And there, on the tables, frozen canisters containing the cremains of psychiatric patients. Old, old, old, much older than the concepts the two sides were killing each other over. Remains that had become ossified, spilling out from the rusted canisters. Strange shades of azure and amber and bronze and frothy white. Soon, under the analysis of the moths, the canisters came to reside in our laboratory, leaving facsimiles behind. And the moths rose in a swirling funnel and disappeared into the sky, leaving attackers and besieged to their bone-cold torment.

In the laboratory, we now have twelve canisters of human ashes. Tomorrow there will be twelve people in the laboratory not there before. The angels seem excited by this discovery. But I have no idea what it means. It makes me feel uneasy.

Entry #6

The first six of the twelve recovered in canisters from the war-torn winter city came back to us sane but with their memories wiped clean and their motor functional infantile. The seventh was insane at first. They resurrected him from his own ashes and he screamed with the first breath of air in his lungs. He was one of the angels, but still he screamed, as if he didn’t remember. His name was given to me as “Kathar,” and he had been tortured in the winter city.

After a time, Kathar stopped screaming and regained the preternatural confidence that marks all of these “angels.” Kathar had been on surveillance elsewhere but something he had seen that now existed as a hole in his memory had sidetracked him. Before he had been taken, Kathar had destroyed his own wings, changed his eyes, created for himself a uniform of white-and-gray that matched the besiegers, who he thought were winning the war. Then the other side had found him, and brought him to a hospital that wasn’t for sick people but for experiments. There, he was interrogated and tortured, and when he didn’t talk they burned him alive, some inkling having formed in his captors’ minds, Kathar said, that he was not entirely human.

This was all I knew because this was all I observed before the others took him someplace more private for a full debriefing. Some time afterwards, the leader of our laboratory, who calls himself Gabriel “but only as a joke” came to confer with my laboratorial avatar. Gabriel has my respect, but I think he likes his naming joke too much; a joke can grow into a truth, and a truth become someone’s burden.

Gabriel came to recruit me in a new way, one that went beyond our agreement. “Kathar tells a story that disturbs us greatly.” As his mouth curled upward in an almost-smile that his kind could not help. “He says he came into contact with a presence, and that this presence influenced his captors—first in the capture itself and then what happened afterwards. Kathar believes that under cover of the torture, this presence took something from him.”

I knew that the angels had their enemies, that part of their purpose in establishing the laboratory was not simply to monitor for irregularities, for things that might naturally create instability, but also to combat interference from others. They had never named these “others” to me, and it had not mattered to me. For me, if I must be honest, just the opportunity to glimpse through surveillance a hundred different worlds was enough.

But when I questioned Gabriel on this point, he shook his head, and even the half-smiled seemed oddly tinged with doubt…even fear. “This is nothing we have encountered before. No one has watched us, the watchers, before without our knowledge. Those who know of us, know because we wish it.”

Then he told me they needed my help, that someone needed to return to that winter war, in that particular reality, and investigate, report back. It could not be the remote surveillance of the luna moths. It could not be another angel, because this presence could track them “as if we have a recognizable heat signature” that registers on their instruments. Gabriel said they needed me to go. They needed my budded avatar to go because Mormeck Mountain could change not just Mormeck Outpost’s appearance but also the cellular composition. “You will go, with our instructions,” Gabriel said, “and as soon as you are there, you will alter yourself to perfectly mimic the humans there. The presence may sense your arrival, but then you will go dead to them.”

Was this, perhaps, what Gabriel and his kind had been moving toward all along? That I become not just monitor, home, and house to their efforts, but also active spy? Part of me wanted to scream as Kathar had screamed, at the thought of the unknown, but the greater part felt a great upwelling of an emotion close to happiness. My avatar was me, yes, but also separate from me. Once embedded in the winter city, my avatar’s bond with Mormeck Mountain would be broken, and we would have to synchronize our memories once I returned to myself, but I was as much me as Mountain as avatar, and vice versa. It was not even that my avatar would be a copy of me—we both were emissaries of a greater whole, a city, a host, that happened to appear as one creature. If Mormeck Mountain were to come to grief while Mormeck Mobile roamed a far-off place, then it would be Mobile that became Mountain, over time, lacking only a week or a few months of memory.

In a word, I said yes to Gabriel, and they prepared me for the journey today. I received four objects to take with me, all made very small. They briefed me on the specifics of the local conflict in a place “most commonly known across the alt-Earths as Stalingrad” and noted that in this particular iteration of that conflict “The forces of Adolf Hitler, a genocidal despot, have laid siege to the defenders, soldiers for the Soviet Union, an empire run by a autocrat named Trotsky.” He hesitated then, as much as Gabriel ever hesitates. “Complicating matters slightly, a third force works in Stalingrad: a highly evolved carnivore not native to Earth, with supreme powers of camouflage and working without the knowledge of the human population. We call them Komodos after an Earth species, but that’s not really what they are; and they are neither our enemies nor our friends. You can trust no one. Trade allegiances, even shape, as necessary.”

“Where do I start?” I asked.

“In the hospital where we found the ashes,” Gabriel said. “Any orthodoxy, any ideology, whether progressive or repressive, is a weakness, Mormeck. Anyone free of it can manipulate it, while anyone who is a true believer cannot be free of it, and will react in one of a limited number of ways. Use their ideology against them.” He had uploaded into my avatar a complete knowledge of all factions, including the Komodos—their history, their beliefs, and the wider context. I was also equipped with new languages that felt itchy in my avatar’s mind. I decided, too, to bring my “journal” with me, hidden within a sealed pouch of skin against my thigh. I could write in it without taking it out of my body.

“And what of the presence?”

“You will encounter proxies of the presence, and you will know them because in their speech and their actions they almost but not quite match the orthodoxies of which we have spoken. You will record all information about the presence that you can, and you will not engage the presence unless forced to.”

“And if I am in danger?” After the seventh reconstituted from ash, the last five had been placed in a secure facility. All five had suffered psychotic breaks as soon as they’d regained consciousness.

“We will give you the coordinates for doors back.”

Then it was just a matter of traveling to Stalingrad. Except the journey wasn’t as easy for me as for the angels. They carried that power in their bodies, the knowledge of it, the ability for it. They were doors, in a sense. But only they could open those doors and go through.

For me, as for anyone else, the process was perilous and painful. My avatar would have to walk across the lawn outside of the laboratory, into the little forest, and there be devoured alive by the sentinel bear known as Seether. He would strip my flesh down to the bone with claw and fang, and feast on my remains…and when I was nothing but bones, he would crack the marrows and eat all of me…and then and only then would I travel across the alt-worlds to my destination, knit back together. I would not scream because I would suppress my nerve endings first, but it would not be a pleasant sensation. Seether too was a door—ancient and feral and containing worlds. He too was, in his way, as aesthetically pleasing as the luna moths or any other of the angels’ discoveries, experiments, and inventions. But not to the traveler. To the traveler, he was the very experience of violent death, even though was no other way.

Of course, the angels came to watch. To them, it was funny, and their half-smiles became broad and merry even as my view of them dissolved in a sudden spray of my own blood and tissue.

Avaunt!

Entry #7

My kind cannot be killed—extinguished for a time, yes, but the truth of me lives in every cell, and were I ever treated more like a castle-keep than host and stormed and sacked and put to the torch…some small piece of unconquered me would survive, slip into a river, be picked up by the mud on an invader’s boot, and over time, centuries perhaps, Mormeck would rise again, mountain-massive.

So when the angels told me I must leave my self in my avatar, sever the connection, exist in two places at once, I was at peace with this situation. But what I had not been told was that this must happen before my Outpost’s dissolution by the bear Seether—that it was expected I would observe the beginning of my Outpost’s passage to the winter city.

At first, this unexpected thing did not bother me, and I did my duty: I disengaged so that my avatar/Outpost was no longer me and yet we both were me. I, Mormeck Mountain, watched through the sensors in my skin as Mormeck Outpost was torn to pieces by Seether, the bear-door. Watched the busy work of claws and fangs haphazardly reduce me to slashed chunks of flesh, the blood pouring out onto the grass while the angels laughed.

I felt almost superior, reflecting on how mere humans on the whole—the intelligent species we spy on most throughout all the alt-Earths—do not understand their fellow animals. Their endearing but sad attempts at science have never understood that a luna moth is not just Actias luna (Linnaeus), a member of Lepidoptera, but also an intricate surveillance device that can transmit live images, sound, taste, smell, and feel across a million alt-worlds to a remote destination presided over by a living mountain. That a single komodo dragon might exist in multiple realities at once, its skin porous in a way that would be considered supernatural by the primitive. That certain bears might be a horrifically painful but efficient way of travel. Or even, switching to the science of religion, that angels might not just laugh at the human idea of God but cynically seek to reinforce it, too.

But, gradually, I was drawn to the spectacle in front of me. It was a strange sensation to see myself—even such a small part of me—die in such extreme and methodical a fashion without any connection, to not be experiencing it too. I had no time for admiration of Seether’s killing efficiency. I was watching instead what should have been the face of pain on Mormeck Outpost, those features smeared with blood, offal, and ripped flesh, cheek ripped from the bone, orbital exposed…and yet still the expression, the eyes, screamed not of horror or discomfort but of release, of freedom, of anticipation…even as the remains sank in on themselves due to Seether’s happy gorging and the bear slapped off the head and cracked open the skull, feasted on the brain, cracked the bones, slurped the marrows.

Just the price of passage, and Mormeck Outpost’s expression no concern of mine, perhaps even beyond his control. But to me in that moment I thought, with a sense of loss, that he was glad to be rid of me, glad to be gone. And that, dear diary, was a revelation, and Seether only in that minute having licked the last of him off of the grass. A great fear, a great longing, a great envy rose within all of me, like some sort of revolt at the cellular level. For the first time in dealing with the angels, I felt as if I had made a colossal mistake.

Entry #1 (Mormeck’s Avatar)

Returned to the winter city usually called Stalingrad but on this alt-Earth known as “Volgograd”, Russian, German, and the subsonic language of the Komodos crammed into me. I appeared in a crush of snow, dropping reconstituted through five feet of air with none to see me. I tried to change my molecular structure immediately, but this was impossible. No one was around. Not even a rat. Without hesitation, I shed all but a tendril of myself and runneled into the substrata and found a sluggish worm, became a worm, found a rat, became a rat, tunneled up and found a dead human, thawed that, became that. All the time paranoid, afraid that some Presence might find me. But it didn’t happen.

I don’t know how long this process took—I was too engrossed in it—but long enough that I had gotten over the aftershocks from being devoured by Seether. There’s a horror in being ripped at, being torn apart, that has nothing to do with pain—the pain had been deadened—and everything to do with the pulling, the ripping rendered numb. It felt to me as how it would feel to a human if peeling off the dead skin from a sunburn, but instead, with the same level of intensity, long swathes of flesh came with it. What had the humans felt so long ago when the angels had sent out their holy bears to bring back specimens.

Did those hunted down think that after their savage deaths they had been to Heaven? Did they misinterpret the smiles of the angels?
Not me. I knew I had been brought to a kind of hell. Under siege. On this alt-Earth, the date was December 14, 1942. The Germans and Russians had fought themselves to a stand-still for over a year, and both sides barely existed as coherent fighting forces in the city despite the reflexive sending of more reinforcements and supplies. Air support had become almost non-existent. Trotsky was plagued in the Far East by an all-out Japanese assault upon his borders. Hitler had launched an attack against the East Coast of the country known as the United States, after a failed revolt by his generals, and spending much of his time keeping his supply lines safe and ruling Europe and part of Africa.

This winter city was now forgotten and full of corpses, almost equally divided between the two sides, but poorly ruled. Into that lawlessness had come spies and profiteers and, oddly, an area scooped out of the boundaries near the Volga that now served as a kind of neutral zone. And everywhere, too, the komodos roamed, silent and invisible, their brand of life-taking unnoticed amongst so much carnage.

I became human hidden behind a ruined, frozen wall, hearing the soft crunch of a patrol across an ice field that once been a courtyard, and the sound of mortar shells, and a low clear moan somewhere distant, and a gasoline-blood smell that had soaked into the snow. The shouts of men and women accompanied by machine gun fire. The sun was a blood-orange at the horizon, but it had been that way for hours.

Dusk, and I’d stolen the dead man’s clothes, his boots, his gun, and his face. I discovered I was cold but I could freeze through and it wouldn’t matter. I was now part of the Russian side: Trotsky’s White Army, stalemated with the German Christo-Fascists…the information dissolving into my brain like a painkiller, each new fact bringing me calm. I would always have a map in my head, always know exactly where I was, and thus how far away from home.

Mormeck Mountain rarely knew outright fear, but I was an Outpost—I could as good as die before being saved, and the Mountain would remain if I disappeared to my last cell. From the first, then, in that new and tactile place I found I had become autonomous and through rebirth as worm-rat become my own person. A dead person. I looked like a dead person. I had to.

The dead man had had a name, but I didn’t want to know it. I had to know only that he’d been on patrol and a sniper’s bullet had taken him, and now he would lurch up and find another patrol or wander, seeking others, seeking a certain…Presence.

But the swift-shifting komodos that found me first.

Entry #8 (Mormeck)

I was not rid of my avatar once he traveled to the winter city under siege. I thought I might be, and I was glad of this, for he still troubled me. But the angels had their luna moths in the city, and they wanted me to use them for surveillance. “Only you,” said Gabriel, “will know what might be odd and what might be normal for your avatar. If your avatar is subverted by the Komodos or a presence, the evidence of this may be imperceptible to anyone else.”

So I watched my Outpost performing his mission in the city. First, his disappearance into the soil, which I knew was to acquire the right molecular structure, and then his reappearance as a member of one side in the conflict. I knew where to look, knew the signs, for where he might arise.

In those first moments after he once again registered in the surveillance of the luna moths, my avatar was a stranger to me—more even than when he had stared at me while Seether destroyed him to rebuild him. This sense of something wrong grew stronger. I was here, but I was also there, with no connection between the two. He wasn’t my doppelganger or my brother. He was me, but now different. On the one hand there was my sense of loss, of a need to communicate with my avatar. On the other, there was a growing dislike, as if I watched someone else pretending to be me and not behaving as I would behave, but being taken as me by those around him. This feeling was bizarre to have, I know, and yet it seemed encoded in my DNA.

It did not take long, watching him run from shadow to shadow, sometimes hiding in plain sight by joining members of the same army and sometimes leaving them to wander in the most deserted places, that I began to want him dead. My avatar. Me, in a sense. Most of me rebelled against this idea—found it perverse and distressing—but underneath like some constant, distant drum beat, I still had the thought.

By the time he encountered the komodos on the second day, I had become too embedded in the situation, too fixated on my avatar, and it took awhile to realize that within thirty-six hours of my Outpost entering the city, a third of my luna moths had winked out, just disappeared into the snow.

And I had no idea who had done it.

Entry #2 (Mormeck’s Avatar)

Komodo dragons have a strange history across the universe. They exist in two basic forms. The first is the seemingly normal large-sized lizard version found across most alt-Earths. This version is actually a trans-dimensional creature that exists in several places at once. A gland that imbues its saliva with a slow-acting toxin also provides the creature with its ability to populate so many realities simultaneously. The saliva can be used to travel across dimensions by anyone, but your travel will only last a few weeks, and then you will die unless you have the exceedingly rare antidote. As you lie in paralysis somewhere far from where you originated, the komodo will catch up to you and feast upon you. And you will wonder why you thought you could outrun what no one can outrun.

The komodos that found me taking shelter by leaning against a supporting wall in an abandoned, roofless warehouse were not this first variety. The normal variety isn’t intelligent. The normal variety is somewhat ponderous and stupid, and operates by instinct alone. But the second kind, the King Komodos as they’re called by some, are intelligent, and they can thread and stitch their way across universes and time, although with a somewhat more chaotic agenda than the angels. Which is to say, theirs is a rambunctious and irreverent rule and they trouble the angels much as a violent storm might someone living in a cabin. You don’t take it personally.

But I took it personally. King Komodos are huge and like their distant cousins they too exist many places simultaneously. Unlike those cousins, the King Komodos are invisible due to an incredibly sophisticated camouflage feature. So at first I thought they were just the beginnings of a storm, except that the waves of invisibility that surged across where the ceiling should have been became too regular, rippled too closely to a reptilian shape. Clearly, in many other realities, this warehouse had a ceiling; they weren’t flying across air. Soon, the half-dozen King Komodos roiling around the warehouse became more visible to me—like long, wave-wide quick-silver tongues of water flashing through the air, with a hint of scales at times, a quick flash of claw, a suggestion of a curious and brazen eye. I could hear the sound of their scuttling gallop, which unnerved me more than anything. They sounded like they were the size of small elephants, with the sticky toes of geckoes. There was a kind of clean heat of a stink, too—it was odd and full of spice but it needled through your nostrils and was gone before returning a few minutes later.

I stayed there, leaning against the wall, pretending not to notice them, because if I had been truly human, I wouldn’t have sensed them at all, unless they’d chosen to manifest. But something about my very ability to sense them drew them to me, made the Komodos realize I wasn’t human. A horrific breath scalded the side of my face and a scaly transparent snout as big as a battering ram smashed against me, make me fall to the floor. The snout again, flinging me to the center of the warehouse. I was dazed, scared for the first time since coming to the winter city.

A circle of translucent lizard flesh roiled and seethed around me like a whirlpool, and in the language of the angels they used for my benefit I began to hear their guttural yet sibbilant cursing.

“It’s with the angels.”

“Yes, it is.”

“It thinks we can’t see it, that we don’t know what it is.”

“But we know what it is, don’t we?”

“A thing of the angels.”

“An angel-thing. Angel filth.”

“Angel-fucker. Angel-shitter. Angel-pisser.”

I panicked—I tried to run out of the circle, but it was like trying to run through a wall of pure muscle that smelled like spice. I fell back, bruised, and heard the weird huffing-chuckle that is the King Komodo’s most bloodthirsty expression of humor.

It wasn’t long after that. That circle spasmed close and closer and the great green-gold eyes became visible all around me and the snouts opened and the fangs pierced and I dampened my pain centers and the King Komodos lovingly rendered me down to bits of thrown-about and fought over flesh-and-blood. It didn’t take long. I might as well have jumped into the center of a half-dozen buzz saws.

When they were done, they quickly became distracted by something in another reality, and scuttle-galloped off, hissing and cursing.
Leaving me as just a foot in a shoe, with a little bit of ankle.

This was getting to be a habit.

…Except they did not know the true measure of me, Mormeck Outpost, whose every cell contains all of him. Who can regrow a body from a mote in god’s eye.

…Except their ungentle touch had left me knowing how to take on the form of a King Komodo.

Entry #9 (Mormeck)

On the third day after my avatar’s departure, my last luna moth winked out of existence. I was blind. I had observed my Outpost regenerate and transform into a King Komodo and go scuttling invisible away, but not much more. It felt like a severing of a connection. As much as I had begun to dislike my avatar, he had still been me, and being blind to his journey left a strange wound. I resented being concerned. I resented feeling this sense of loss that I hadn’t expected. Gabriel tried to comfort me by reminding me that my Outpost had the coordinates for the return portal, the return bear, but this did not much soothe me.

“There’s nothing you can do until he returns,” Gabriel told me. “We can try to bring other surveillance into play, but it may not work. It may not be advisable to do so. It might just expose your avatar’s position even more.”

I agreed that he was right and asked for two things: to be put on another assignment to take my mind off of my avatar, and if I could talk to one of the angels that had returned insane from the winter city: resurrected from ashes only to succumb to some horror or some trauma it could barely articulate. He agreed to both, although only reluctantly to the second.

I do not know why I asked to see the insane angel. I don’t know what I expected to find out, except that this angel had been in the city my avatar now roamed. We sat there in the white room with the angel sitting on a white chair and my emissary standing in front of him. His wings hadn’t come back right; they were twisty and thatched in a way that suggested the chrysalis-wet wings of an emerging butterfly. He twitched regularly, could not stop himself, and his gaze could not alight on any one place, even though there was little enough to look at. His eyes were utterly black and without reflection. His mouth did not lilt upward in the half-smile chiseled into the other angels’ faces. He smelled like ashes, as was only proper, I suppose.

“What happened to you in the city?” I asked.
“They asked that already,” he replied.

He had a voice like pieces of ice splintering against each other. It made me not want to ever hear that voice again, but I persevered: “Tell me again.”

“The things came. They knew us. They took us. They unmade us…after a time.”

“The King Komodos.”

“No.”

“The humans.”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“The things,” the angel replied. And then, unexpectedly, “They did not find funny what we found funny.” And I thought of the angels laughing as my avatar was torn apart by the bear Seether.

“And for this they…unmade…you?”

“No,” the angel said. “They unmade us because we had unmade something first.”

I started to ask what the angels had unmade but some shiver in the ice-crunch of his voice made me stop and become wary. There was no reason why Gabriel or the others couldn’t listen in, and something in the implication of “unmade something first” frightened me. I know it may be difficult to believe a Mountain like me could be afraid, but in that blindingly white room talking to the mad angel with the black eyes I began to experience something that might even be known as terror. I could suddenly feel, all of the foot-treads of the angels upon my surface and feel the hot breath of Seether and in a kind of wrenching dislocation everything living on me was suddenly alien, so alien that I wanted to just shake and shake until I’d shaken it all off of me. It took an act of supreme will not to give in to the impulse.

When I’d mastered it, I asked the angel, “How would you describe these…things?”

Now the mad angel stared right at my avatar with those strange eyes, opened his mouth, and out came an avalanche of a roar, like a glacier suddenly shuddering and exploding into the water, like something gigantic and half-crazed being slaughtered by thousands. Eventually, it deformed his face. Eventually, ashes like flecks of snow poured out of his mouth. Eventually, his eyes turned white. Eventually, I stood in front of a dead husk toppled over in front of me like an offering.
Gabriel came up behind me. “I should have warned you not to ask that,” he said. “That’s happened to two others.”

He was grinning ear-to-ear as he said it.

Entry #3 (Avatar)

When you are born from a Mountain, no matter how Mormeckian, no matter how bipedal an avatar of that mountain, you carry that ponderousness with you, always. You learn to accept your new-found agility and separate personhood, but your legs still seem sometimes made of pendulous iron and your thoughts switch from quicksilver to quicksand from minute to minute. There are advantages to being an old soul in a new body, but mostly you are two things at once, which can be wearying.

Transforming myself into a King Komodo lifted much of the Mountain from me. My new body, invisible to humans, was a wonder of engineering that could stop quick as thought and reverse itself, flow across a courtyard like water, but also rippled with muscles. Every part of me was muscle, and I had a control as I ran that satisfied on an aesthetic and aerodynamic level. My senses too were enhanced so that I could hear a mouse fart underground from a hundred yards. I could see across far distances, but if I allowed a membrane to close across my eye, I suddenly saw heat signatures, too. My sense of smell was exceptional as well, and changed in this body so that nothing smelled bad, not even rotting bodies. Snow smelled fresh no matter how dirty.

The pads of my feet were picked up minute vibrations and allowed me to triangulate the source of sounds. They also conveyed more than texture, but something more than I cannot articulate because it constituted some sixth sense. Those pads also allowed me, along with my rock-climber’s claws, to run across any surface, even upside down. My scales, meanwhile, responded to my thoughts: I could be invisible, translucent, or drop these disguises and manifest with my scales in their natural color, a sea-green shade. I could even ripple colors across my body like a squid.

One thing only I couldn’t inherit from my contact with the King Komodos: I could not stitch my way in and out of dimensions and realities. If someone had shot me and autopsied me, I would have been all King Komodo, but my brain was still just mimicking theirs and that essential functionality did not transfer, which made me wonder too how much sheer will and belief factored into their ability.

The question became, what should I do as a King Komodo that would enhance the success of my mission to bring back intel on the Presence? As the war heated up again, Hitler having had his old general shot and another take his place in a rare moment of focus on the Eastern Front. Hitler’s new order was to advance, and so I roamed streets littered with bodies or the scene of desperate close-quarters urban fighting between infantrymen. Air support still lagged behind.

In the midst of this renewed chaos, so at odds with the ice-choked slow flow of the Volga, one landmark stood out: Pavlov’s House, as it came to be nicknamed, or in some realities where Pavlov died in the initial German assault, Afanasiev’s House. Yakov Fedotovich Pavlov was a sergeant in the Soviet army tasked with holding a half-destroyed four-story building in the center of Stalingrad with only a few dozen soldiers. Ivan F. Afansiev was his lieutenant. I knew this from the histories the angels had inserted into my cells.

But in this reality, it was early days yet. Pavlov’s House was just another building being defended by desperate hungry, dirty Soviet soldiers, a PTRS-41 tank gun on the roof and a one-kilometer line of sight in all directions an advantage augmented by a secret tunnel dug from the building back to secure Soviet positions. German tanks could not raise their turrets high enough to take out the tank gun. The barricades, mines, and fortified machine gun positions made the area beyond the building a kill zone sometimes strewn with many dozens of German dead. Pavlov was determine to hold on with his depleted platoon and the new German general was determined to make the taking of Pavlov’s position a strategic and symbolic necessity.

I saw several advantages to enlisting Pavlov’s help. First, there weren’t many men in the house so my chances of meeting with him undetected seemed high. Second, Pavlov had political capital due to his spirited defense. With so many commanders being turned in for supposed ideological crimes by Soviet political officers, this meant something tangible. Third, evidence in the histories suggested that in some realities Pavlov’s defense had been aided by “outside forces”.

Might a Mountain become a Komodo be considered an “outside force”? And this outside force needed help. If the King Komodos had been able to somehow sense my connection to the angels, might not the Presence also sense that connection? Human resources on the ground seeking clues might be more vulnerable, but they would not be seen as linked to players outside of the conflict.

I chose a night clear and cold when the hostilities had ceased for an hour or two. From a nearby street, I lurked until the path seemed clear. Then I shot across the street in invisible mode, my tail leaving its signature in the snow. When I approached the barricades, I made myself small, then medium-sized once clear, then small again to slip past the guards undetected. I had an image of Sergeant Pavlov in my head that I checked against each human I passed. Once inside the building, I switched back to the size of a samoyed, crept silent past several groups of men, piles of weapons, up and down stairs, until in the underground, before the tunnel, I discovered a group of rooms with closed doors. The walls were hasty patch-work concrete but the doors had been brought from somewhere more elegant and were made of dark polished wood, decorated with flourishes and paneling. I let the membrane fall over my eyes and used heat-sensing to find Pavlov’s office. He was alone.

Then I made myself gecko-small and slid through the keyhole, but poured out of it as I changed to my normal size and allowed my scales to return to their normal color. To Sergeant Pavlov, sitting under a lamp’s glow at a table in the far corner, examining maps with his back against the wall, it must have seemed as if a gigantic sea-green lizard had magically appeared in the room, filling it up, because in truth my head nearly knocked against the ceiling.

But Pavlov surprised me. He expressed no fear. He did not draw back in terror. He did not cry out for help. He didn’t reach for his gun.
Instead, his expression unreadable, he pushed out the chair opposite him with his leg and indicated for me to sit, a ludicrous proposition but sincere. His black hair had been very carefully combed back. He wore the gray camouflage fatigues common for sergeants in that war. One eye opened wider than the other, which could have given him a comical look but instead made him seem somehow ironic or quizzical, especially set off by thick eyebrows. A kind of subdued but laughing intelligence inhabited the slightly off-center quality of his features.

When I made no move toward the chair, just made a kind of muted growl in the back of my throat, he reached over to the desk near him and retrieved two small glasses, set one in front of him, the other across from him. He carefully poured in an amber-colored liquid into each glass, gestured again for me to sit.

I had been prepared for any reaction but this one.

“I have come for you,” I said with deliberate ambiguity and menace. I had thought that fear would be my ally, but fear must have fled into the snows outside.

Pavlov nodded, as if not disputing this fact.

“Sit,” he said in Russian. “Sit and have a drink. If you’re here to kill me, I’ll need one before I go, and if I’m going to live I will have a sudden and urgent need to celebrate.”

I found I was starting to like Sergeant Pavlov. It didn’t hurt that he was the first person I had really talked to since my arrival.

I made myself somewhat smaller and flowed into the chair: a large green toothy dragon with opposable thumbs.

And I drank with Sergeant Pavlov in the basement of what would become as Pavlov’s House.

Entry #10 (Mountain)

It has been three days since I wrote in this journal. The incident with the damaged angel confused and disturbed me. I had seen Gabriel’s impassiveness in response to stimuli before, his seemingly innate distance from empathy. But the lack of concern for one of his own kind, especially an angel pushed to such an extremity of response, worried me. Somehow the angels’ reaction to the devouring of my avatar had been what I expected, but in this case Gabriel had surprised me. What then might move Gabriel to concern, sympathy, or comfort of another soul.

I had always told myself that our surveillance and our experiments served the cause of Order in the universes, that this required a kind of clinical detachment on the part of the angels. A smile is a cultural response, a learned behavior, I knew from my many hours of observing alt-Earths. It could mean many things. That it meant nothing sympathetic when Gabriel smiled did not hint at some sinister purpose. Yet his demeanor after the angel’s death I read as barely hiding some secret satisfaction that would otherwise burst out, envelop the world in sharp laughter. Why was such utter cruelty required?

I realized that much about the angels I had taken on face value, possibly because without them I would be totally alone on this planet—there is no other sentient life here—and with no real way to leave except by proxy, ejecting my seedlings and avatars into space. They told me they studied the alt-Earths because their instruments had caught the vibrations of a horrific catastrophe farther up the time stream, across all of the Earths, and that it would affect all other worlds as well. For this reason, they had set up outposts on the outside, as on my planet, and were engaged in surveillance and experimentation to reach a decision on what action to undertake. Their experiments never involved human beings—the items brought back were either animal, plant, or mineral in nature, along with human-made artifacts. Even though I participated in the tests, I was a glorified lab assistant and didn’t truly understand the purpose of the experiments. Parts of the laboratory, too, were off-limits to me. Gabriel never told me I couldn’t go somewhere, but in certain areas my sensors simply didn’t work and if my avatar entered them, the avatar became stripped of all sensory perception. This, too, I had not thought to question…until now.

These are the thoughts that came to me as I settled uncomfortably into my new assignment, which I called “The Lighthouse” because I was to monitor the comings and goings from a lighthouse on the stormy coast of a country called Scotland, facing the North Sea. Not only was I spying on an alt-Earth where the industrial revolution had not happened, but the essential borders of nations, and the nations themselves often deviated radically from the norm. Scotland, for example, encompassed all of the British Isles. On the mainland of Europe, what was Spain, France, and Italy in most alt-realities was ruled by the peoples the Spanish had called the Moors. Czechoslovakia sprawled across almost all of Eastern Europe, and so on. I was told that although the business at the lighthouse had regional significance politically, it also resonated in some way across the worlds. I was to surveil based on this context.

But I had decided to surveil on a slightly different basis: that the angels had not told me the full truth, and that studying the lighthouse might help reveal what they had hidden from me.

I admit, too, that my thoughts may have gone in this direction to avoid another direction: namely, wondering what had happened to my avatar.

Entry #4 (Avatar)

So I sat there with Sergeant Pavlov, defender of Pavlov’s House in the center of war-torn Stalingrad, drinking “homemade rot-gut” as he called it.

“Your accent is dog crap,” Pavlov said as he lit a cigarette. “Where do you come from?”

His lack of fear perplexed me; it worried at me so much I could not leave it alone.

“Have you seen my kind before?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he replied, downing a shot and grinning from the burn of it. “You’re not going to tell me where you come from.”

“Where did you see another of…me?”

He could not know that I wasn’t really a Komodo but merely a mountain made an avatar and then made a komodo, sent by angels. I downed my own shot. It stung for me too, but my new metabolism burned off the alcohol in a matter of seconds. I had another, which made Pavlov’s eyebrows rise for the first time.

Pavlov thought about my question for a second and, fixing me with his stare, said, “I will only tell you if I know I am not going to die tonight.”

“That I have no control over,” the green dragon said, “but if you do it won’t be by my hand.” Pavlov gave my razor-clawed paw with strange hooked thumb a rueful look. “You are safe from me,” I added, to be clear.

He nodded to show he understood, took another drag on his cigarette. “One night, I went to relieve a sentry…”

This was before he occupied Pavlov’s House. The Germans had cut off his platoon from the main force and they were so depleted that even sergeants stood watch. They’d taken up positions inside an abandoned hotel. The far wall from the sentry’s position had been shorn away by a bombing attack. Bombs had also blown off the roof above the sentry’s position.

“So I would be standing behind one wall, looking out through a puncture in the concrete from tank fire, and the far end of the corridor behind me ended in a doorway of snow, while snow fell on me from above.”

The sentry wasn’t there. He had vanished. Then what was falling began to seem dark, almost purple, and when he looked up, he saw the sentry’s body, head torn off, seeming to float in mid-air just over the lip of an exposed floor above. But the falling snow revealed a shape like a monstrous lizard head and reptilian arms holding the body as fangs tore into it.

“I didn’t think. I ran away and ordered my men out of the hotel.”

“Then why didn’t you run just now?”

Pavlov shrugged. “Where would I run to? I’ll live or die in this place. We are not to give up one inch of ground according to orders.” This time he took just a sip of the amber rot-gut. “Are you on their side?”

Meaning the Germans. I ignored him. “Do your men know…about creatures like me?”

“No.”

“Other officers?”

“Some. Maybe. We don’t talk about it. They probably want to think it’s dragons from myth or some witch’s curse, but as we all know there are no dragons or witches in the Soviet Union.”

Or alternative universes where Lenin was captured, put on trial by Tsar or Duma, and executed.

“As for whose side I’m on,” I said, “I have a deal for you.” I had no real experience with any of this, just mimicry of things I had seen while conducting surveillance.

Pavlov chuckled a bit at that, almost a sign of nervousness. “A deal? Why should I make deals with dragons when I spend day and night trying not be killed by a whole army of Germans?”

“Don’t you want to break the stalemate here? Don’t you want to be the one to break it?” In almost every scenario, the Germans lost eventually, but for Pavlov, in this month, this week, this moment, victory must look like a dim and distant thing.

The sergeant considered that for a moment. “So you are offering me something…in return for what?”

“I’ll perform reconnaissance for you and I will help you defend this place in return for the information I need.”

“Which is?”

“There is another…presence in the city besides my kind and besides you or the Germans. I want you to arrange for certain patrols throughout the city to be on the look-out for this presence, and to report on it.”
“And what are the characteristics of this…presence? What are we looking for?”

“Anything unusual,” I said.

This time Pavlov actually laughed, which made me feel out of my depth. “Anything unusual? We have starlings that sound like mortar fire. We have creatures like you biting the heads off of sentries. We recently found a clandestine mental hospital full of corpses and people’s ashes. Just last month, before more rations arrived, my men were making soup out of their belts and happy for it. You may need to be more specific.”

“I can give you a short list. Is it possible?”

“What would you do if I said it were impossible?”

“Are you going to say it is impossible?”

“No.”

We talked and drank for a few minutes more and then Pavlov held out his hand with only the slightest of hesitation. I took it as gently as I could in mine, his clammy palm lost in the heat of my scales and claws.

“Here is to…unusual events,” Pavlov said, and I could not help but laugh, startling myself, as even a chuckle in a King Komodo very much mimics a man being noisily strangled.

Thus was the great Komodo-Soviet alliance entered into, known only to me and a future war hero.

Entry #11

It has been five days since my last entry.

The lighthouse keeper is a woman named Marty, seemingly made of granite, with a square, open face and broad shoulders, who leans into every ill-wind that blew around that desolate place, who trudges from the well and back even in the middle of storms, a gale no more to her than a tickling breeze.

Of course I loved her as soon as I saw her, for she was like a mountain in some ways, just like me. I didn’t have straggly blonde hair like her, and I didn’t tend a garden—although I was a kind of garden—and I didn’t sometimes put on lipstick and go into the nearby village for a Friday dance. But I am quite sure that I could match her pint for pint at the local pub. A mountain can drink anyone under the table. Of course, a mountain can’t fit itself into a pub, so I had to content myself with the images and sound coming back from my moths hovering at the greasy windows.

Marty McBratney is her full name. Her brother, who visited once, called her “Bratty McBratty” but that just made her laugh, and made me envision a willful, powerful teenager striking out over moor and bracken, singing all the while of the injustice of the world. But I think I was just remembering a commercial I saw on a TV during one of the other surveillance missions.

Marty led a solitary life at the lighthouse, although she wasn’t dour. She had taken to her job with enthusiasm, and this was evident in her constant maintenance of the lighthouse and her diligence in making sure she properly guided ships safely to shore. From my research I would have said that in every particular she seemed an excellent lighthouse keeper. Except for one mystery.

Each of the past five days, at dusk, a figure had come out of the bushes behind the lighthouse and met Marty there. Three times a man, twice a woman.

Without words, without preamble, they would bring their mouths together for a long, deep, passionate kiss. Marty was so tall she would usually be leaning down for this ritual. In one ridiculous instance involving a short, wiry man, she bent her knees and, holding the man’s shoulders in a vice, practically pulled him off his feet so that the mouth-docking could occur.

Disengaging, the stranger would retreat into the bushes. Marty would run to the front of the lighthouse, and then clamber up the revolving stairwell to the very top, taking the metal steps two at a time and making the whole structure reverberate with the echo of her tread. As soon as she had reached the top, the beacon that had been merely glowing would burn with a white light, cutting through the gloom, almost as if powered by the energy of the kiss. A few minutes later, she would slowly descend and walk out onto the front steps, light a cigarette, take three puffs, drop it, and extinguish it with her shoe. She would look out into the darkness in these moments, as if searching for something, and I liked to imagined she was staring straight at me. She would then retreat to her rooms in the cottage next to the lighthouse.

In summary:

Stranger.
Kiss.
Run.
Frenzied climb.
Beam of light.
Leisurely descent.
Cigarette.

What did it mean? What could it possibly signify?

I felt more adrift in my observations of human behavior than ever before.

Entry #5—Avatar

It has been five or six days. I have had no time to write, and no inclination.

The days and nights have blurred together here, in the winter city by the river. My missions for Pavlov have blurred with my drinking sessions. My Komodo and Mormeck natures have become blurred, too. Something in the maintenance of that body—of becoming a wingless dragon—has changed me. I started out wanting to be gone from this place…but now I find that I enjoy reconnaissance—the rush of it, the terror, the element of the unknown. Even more, my Komodo body responds to it: the stealthy stalking and shadowing, my body invisible or camouflaged to match the surfaces I cling to, scuttle across, or bound through.

I have stood up silent and unmoving, a broken wall against my scaly back and listened to two German sentries discuss the weather and then certain sexual proclivities of their superior officer, which proved useful to Pavlov. I was looming over them, keeping my mouth shut so my hot breath would not wash over them, so close I could have reached out and knocked them over. But they didn’t see me. They saw only the wall.
I have, in a burst and release of energy that is pure Komodo, scrambled across the snow at midnight under a yellow moon—well past the rival German and Russian lines, to frolic in cold dark forest and bring down a deer. Komodos have an urge to eat that I cannot control, and if I don’t feed on something every few days, I am not myself. And all the while: an exhilaration I never felt as pure Mormeck, a kind of freedom that comes with motion that a mountain cannot fathom, even in avatar form.

As Pavlov has tried harder and harder to follow my own orders, I have tried to follow his, even when this has meant direct action, in part because I believe he is a good person. When the Germans began to bring a “super cannon” into position to fire upon what has now officially become known as “Pavlov’s House,” I, invisible, smashed into it from the side and sent the soldiers guarding it running off, only for them to later claim, according to my eavesdropping, that there had been a sudden wind. A secret force of white-clad commandoes attempting a nighttime raid found themselves confronted by a translucent raging monster and fled in terror. No one likes to talk about that incident: not a rumor or a breath of it uncovered in my skulking.

I have justified turning from surveillance to intervention because I know that in this alt-world Pavlov’s House is never breached, never burned to the ground, and that the German obsession with eliminating his position cost them bitterly on a strategic level. I am merely the personification—the Komodo-ification—of history. I am doing nothing that would not be done by someone.

Yet, as I pad invisible and small along the walls of Pavlov’s House on my way to report to Pavlov, I have heard his men talking more and about serendipity and luck in uncertain tones that indicate they don’t believe in these things, that although they cannot see me, they can feel my presence, know something is happening that should not be happening.

Meanwhile, Pavlov has had little for me, despite ample proof he has spent quite a bit of political capital getting patrols to be on the look-out for the Presence I seek. We sit across the table in Pavlov’s underground office, and I am sure neither of us knows what the other really thinks.

“My friend, we are getting closer to finding your ‘Presence’,” Pavlov says to me as he downs a shot.

“My friend, we have done good work today,” Pavlov says.

“My friend, the Germans are terrified of you,” Pavlov says.

But what does he really think? What’s going on inside of his head? Does Pavlov secretly believe he is going mad? Does he stay awake at night trying to figure out what I am, where I came from?

I try to see it from his perspective. I try to imagine, for instance, what it would be like if I knew nothing of angels and an angel suddenly appeared before me. What would I have done? Would I have been as calm as Pavlov that first time, and how long would it take for me to start questioning—why this need to search for a Presence, why the willingness to help, why, even, why an enormous dragon would drink with me night after night.

“I believe you,” I reply to Pavlov, noncommittally.

“If you say so,” I say.

“They are terrified of me,” I say, wanting to ask instead, “Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to know? Or is it just easier not to?”

***

On what they dare not call Christmas—a holy day for a popular god-cult in this reality—Pavlov’s men secretly exchanged presents. If the political officer found out in this, Trotsky’s Soviet Union, they could be sent to a work camp. The presents were sad things—loose, frozen tea that one had been saved, given to another who gifted a cufflink found in the snow to yet a third who gave a slice of sausage—and what wasn’t drinkable or edible would be gifted back on the next occasion, if they were still here.

Pavlov gave me a delicate gold watch on a chain that displayed the time in several time zones, no doubt taken off the German dead after the latest repulsed assault. I held it in my Komodo claws, feeling suddenly rough and bulky, and a surge of emotion came over me that was straight from Mormeck Mountain. It was a ridiculous present to give a dragon. It displayed a complete misunderstanding of what I had become, but at the same time resonated deeply with Mormeck Avatar. Time was at the heart of everything. No time. Too much time. Divergent time lines.
“I hope you like it, my friend,” Pavlov said.

Was I his friend? I had always thought those words just a reflexive quirk of his speech. How could it be otherwise? I was terrifying and inexplicable—even more so if he had met me as Mormeck Mountain.

“Thank you, I do like it…but I am afraid I have nothing for you.”

Ridiculously, I felt bad and yet even as I uttered those words I realized that I had just revealed to Pavlov more than I had in any previous conversation.

This is Pavlov’s House.

Am I becoming Pavlov’s Komodo?

Entry #12

Everything that rises must resolve. But when I drift, I drift, and a mountain can drift for a long time. A mountain can drift and still function. This language cannot convey the concept so I must repeat, must keep trying in different ways. I drift, I resolve, I fold inward while turning outward. No, it’s no use.

I have continued my surveillance of Marty the lighthouse keeper and the lighthouse itself over the past couple of weeks. I find my cycles of coming down here to the jungle floor to write take ever greater effort, in no small part because Gabriel seems intent on watching me more closely than before. I don’t know what this signifies.

Marty and the lighthouse. I knew very early on that this daily routine of walking around the back and kissing a stranger meant something—some kind of code, some kind of message—and that the answer lay in the exchange itself. Something was being communicated, and to find out what I needed to get inside of their mouths, specifically inside of Marty’s mouth. I knew this too because although I activated the luna moths’ infra-red, x-ray, and other sensory apparatus…at the moment at which lips locked the insides of their mouths went blurry, unseeable. Something was blocking me out.

Spying on someone’s mouth. This was a strange idea, frankly, for someone like myself who had no mouth unless I made one, and much more invasive than anything I had done before. However, Gabriel kept asking for updates that went beyond what could be seen from the images the luna moths sent back. He wanted my analysis, and my analysis was that I liked Marty and I liked the lighthouse, and I liked being a part of that life, even if from afar. But that wasn’t the answer Gabriel would want.

So I began to scheme about how to get inside of Marty’s mouth. One way was drastic and required my moths to descend upon the stranger before he or she approached the lighthouse and cover his/her entire body, taking it over, and then proceeding with the assignation. But not only would this endanger the message from the stranger’s side of thing, but Marty might notice the mimicry, which would be approximate only.

I then came up with a number of ever-more impossible schemes, the most elaborate of which required a luna moth at the top of the lighthouse to break off the metamorph tool that formed part of its antennae—at the exact right moment. This tool, smaller than a thumbnail, would glide and tumble down the side of the lighthouse, lingering as necessary or speeding up, just as Marty walked out on her way to the meeting. The luna moth would emit a high-pitched squeal. Marty would look up and if there was even the least parting of her lips, the tool would slip between them. Once inside the mouth, the tool would spread out across the tongue and embed itself, forming an invisible second surface that Marty would not feel in the least. This surface would record every element of the kiss. While she slept, it would disengage, flee through her mouth, and gradually make its way outside to be reunited with the luna moth it had come from. And then the data would be transmitted back to me.

It was, possibly, a ridiculous plan that would have taken several attempts, but the more I fixated on it, the less I had to think about other, more practical solutions. Some of those solutions would require sending angels in, and a subset of those solutions would result in interrogations.

But my problem was more systemic. I had never engaged in this kind of surveillance before. Always I had watched many different people, and skimmed the surface, either moving on or being the invisible eyes and ears in a location, like a restaurant, where many people came and went. Now, I followed one person, Marty, as she followed her daily schedule. I watched her digging furrows in her garden, weeding, and taking a break to drink lemonade and a cookie. I watched her as she mended an old fishing net she sometimes took with her when she waded into the offshore shallows on the weekends. I watched her as she sat on a blanket on the cliff overlooking the sea and guffawed and giggled while reading one of her comedy of manners. I watched her interactions at the pub, and the way she did what she wanted but was never less than kind to anyone, preferring to use a rather sharp and barbed wit to deflate the pompous or the stupid. I watched her patience with a brother who was the opposite of her in so many ways. I watched her stare into the mirror while washing her face and half-hearted pluck at an eyebrow hair. I watched her sing robust sea-shanties in the shower, bellowing them out at the top of her lungs.

I watched and I watched and I watched…and the more I watched, the more I felt ashamed. The less I wanted to be intruding on her personal space. I began to change my process. I had the luna moths send out their own emissaries—tiny gray flies—to cover areas like the bathroom and bedroom of Marty’s cottage. I programmed a routine for the flies that meant they only reported back if something out of the ordinary occurred…and it never did. This gave me some distance from Marty, and, unknown to her, more privacy, but the strange way I felt during surveillance didn’t really change.

When her birthday came along a week ago, and she celebrated at the pub, I was happy for her, and chuckled inside at some of the antics of her friends. When she received a letter indicating an old friend had passed on, I felt sad with her. And at that point, I moved from surveillance to a different kind of active intervention. I began leaving her messages that were not messages. She liked the feel of small, tight pine cones—the smoothness and the sharp little points—so I converted luna moth metamorph tools into pine cones, a horrible waste of resources, and left them strewn where she could find them on her walks. I used other tools to ensure her garden was pest-free and that her sunflowers and turnips and other vegetables grew strong and robust. If you can imagine a tiny almost-invisible army of bioteched nanobots coming out after dark to tend to a garden.

Most recently, at my most ambitious, I fabricated a decent facsimile of an apple pie and had it left on the doorstep of the lighthouse with a note indicated it was from a “secret admirer”. But I watched later and the pie must have been too bitter because she threw it out, and in a moment of utter stupidity I had forgotten she read in English and had written my note in the language of the angels. She kept the note, and puzzled over it often, so perhaps that was a good thing.

But in truth, I am just what they call a peeping tom, even if in the service of the angels, and this depresses me.

I am also an intelligent mountain light years and time-streams away from Marty in truth. I am what they call a peeping tom, even if it is in the service of the angels. I am not male or female, but both and neither. To reproduce I fling my self-fertilized mega-seeds up through the stratosphere and into space, where they spend thousands of years dormant before settling on a planet far distant.

The heresy I share here in this secret journal is this: I do not want to know about the mystery of the kisses. I do not care if it is important to Gabriel and the other angels. I do not want a laboratory on my head. I do not want to be a mountain.

I want to live in a cottage beside a lighthouse by the sea.

And that is impossible: I am my own lighthouse.

Entry #6 (Avatar)

The political officer for Sergeant Pavlov’s platoon was named Boris Mikhailovich Bashmachkin, called something similar to “Boris the Bore” behind his back. Bashmachkin outranked Pavlov in several ways. For example, at a word to Moscow from Boris the Bore, Pavlov would find himself in front of a firing squad or sent to a work camp in the Far East.

That these eventualities were perhaps less eminent due to Pavlov’s popularity did not mean Bashmachkin couldn’t as Pavlov put it “make a nuisance of himself.” In other timelines, political officers stepped down after 1942. In this timeline, their power only expanded and broadened, until in a decade’s time they would live like despotic ticks feasting off of black-market deals for military equipment, paralyzing the battle-readiness of many units. This would lead, in part, to more famines in the 1960s and the overthrow of a by then senile and blind Trotsky, pulled unmercifully from his fortified offices in the Kremlin and, in the Red Square where he had so often performed troop reviews, torn apart by his former supporters. Several angels had attended that show, according to the records in my head, and found it “most entertaining.”

“Yes, Mormeck,” Pavlov said experimentally, for I had just recently revealed my name. “He is a nuisance. He makes my men nervous. He wants kickbacks from me in return for not pursuing their ideological crimes. Yes, my men curse too much. Yes, I find their little stage productions with bits of sausage for puppets odd and confusing. But I ask you, Mormeck: wouldn’t you engage in black humor if you had a mound of dead Germans to look at every night? And an ocean of live ones to fend off each morning? And how am I to get you what you want if this Boris is always in the way?”

“How long did you practice that speech?” I asked him.

“Only for a few minutes while I shaved this morning,” Pavlov replied, a secret amusement revealed mostly through his eyes.

“What do you need from me?”

“Did I mention the tea party? I am throwing a tea party. For Boris. Perhaps you could attend if your social calendar is open?”

***.

The “tea party” took place the next night, in Pavlov’s underground offices. He had pulled the table out from the wall, placed a clean tablecloth upon it, a fancy tea cosy and a half-decent tea pot in the middle. At his chair, positioned so his back would be against the wall, Pavlov had placed a shot glass and a bottle of vodka. To the left, where I sat, another shot glass. Opposite Pavlov, a very fancy tea cup with a floral design, sitting atop a gold-fringed saucer. It was probably the only undamaged tea cup in the entire building.

Promptly at 8pm Boris arrived via the secret tunnel and knocked on the door. I remained sitting but turned invisible, while Pavlov unlocked the door and ushered Boris in with a sweep of his arm.

“Welcome, Comrade Bashmachkin! Welcome to our tea party.”

Boris the Bore had a big, flushed, almost jowly face but would not have been considered unhandsome by many—tall, well-built, in his mid-forties. The most noticeable defect to his handsomeness were his black eyes, which sat in weary ripples of wrinkles. He had a nose like a cleaver but his chin compensated for it. He would have made a very good statue, and Pavlov had said more than once that “from afar in particular he has what one might call a noble visage.” He smelled to me like pork sausage, onions, and aftershave. He wore a great coat that he gave to Pavlov with a kind of odd half-salute, as if he didn’t know what to do with his hands.

“I am happy, comrade, to have the opportunity to sit with you,” Boris said, then noticed the shot glasses as he sat and Pavlov slid into his own chair against the wall. “But what is this? Are we drinking, too?”
Pavlov gave a thin smile. I shifted back in my seat imperceptibly. I was crammed into the corner and afraid my hot breath might register before it should.

“I am drinking,” Pavlov said. “Have some tea,” and he poured a cup for Boris, steam rising from the spout. I must admit, it had a fragrant, almost spicy smell that filled the room with a sense of false comfort.
Boris laughed nervously, then took a sip of the tea. He was looking at the second shot glass, resting at my place at the table. “And will we have company?”

Pavlov ignored him. “Comrade,” he said, “I thought it might be good for us to talk privately so that we might reach an understanding.”

Boris took another sip, said, “I had hoped you might say that.” Now he smiled, apparently relaxing a little. Perhaps he had decided to forget about the second shot glass.

“Let’s drink to it, then,” Pavlov said, and he poured himself a shot, also filling my glass. Pavlov lifted his shot glass, gestured for Boris to do so as well with his tea cup.

“But what are we toasting?”

“Our understanding.”

“But we haven’t discussed our…understanding.”

Pavlov downed his shot. “Haven’t we?”

Boris’s face got redder. Now he clearly thought he was being made fun of. “No we haven’t,” he said, and then added, rather petulantly, “And even if we had, surely comrade it would not be sealed with one party drinking vodka and the other drinking tea. Especially when you’ve poured for the invisible man like you’re touched in the head.”

“You shouldn’t be drinking tonight,” Pavlov said.

Boris half-rose from his chair. “I don’t like your tone, sergeant. I don’t like it at all.”

“I think it is time to introduce you to my other guest,” Pavlov said.
I materialized in my chair: an enormous wingless “dragon” with a bullet head, fangs the size of Boris’s forearm, and claws to match.

A kind of strangled choke came out of Boris, and he remained frozen, not standing and not sitting.

“Sit down, comrade,” Pavlov said in a flat voice.

Boris sat. It seemed all he was capable of. He was still trying to breathe, and he was still staring at me as if I were all the demons of Hell wrapped up in some lizard skin. He could not seem to look away from his own doom.

Delicately, almost daintily, I picked up my shot glass and downed my vodka. A splendid fiery burn spread through my body.

“You shouldn’t be drinking, Boris,” Pavlov said. “If you were drinking, your senses might be impaired. You might believe that whatever you saw tonight was a product of your drunkenness. You might begin to think you had imagined it.”

Boris had now managed to wrench his gaze from my Komodo face and was most studiously avoiding my gaze by staring at Pavlov. But except for incomprehensible noises nothing came out of his mouth. He was shaking a bit, too.

Pavlov continued as I made snorting and growling noises: “As for our ‘understanding’, Boris, let me remind you so you do not forget. You are preparing certain reports to your superiors concerning what you see as suspect speech and activities on the part of me and my subordinates. You will find your way to a favorable interpretation instead. Further, you will stop interfering in my communications with my commanding military officers. And from this point you will report to your superiors that Pavlov’s House is ideologically pure in its noble fight against the invader. And you will continue these favorable reports until either this house is rubble or we have won…and forever after.” More practice by Pavlov in front of the mirror.

An attempt at speech came out of Boris’s quivering mouth, but it was incomprehensible.

“DO YOU UNDERSTAND?” I shouted at him out of the blue. “DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

That jolted him out of his shock. “You can talk? You talk?”

“YES I TALK. DO YOU UNDERSTAND, PATHETIC HUMAN CREATURE?!”

And he cried out, “I understand! I understand!” But, of course, he didn’t understand anything, which is why he was so afraid.

I, dragon, half-rose out of my chair and loomed over Boris. “AND IF YOU DO NOT DO AS PAVLOV ASKS, I WILL RIP YOU LIMB FROM LIMB. I WILL SMACK YOUR HEAD OFF YOUR BODY. I WILL TEAR OUT YOUR ENTRAILS. I WILL SNAP YOUR LEGS OFF. I WILL FEAST ON YOUR REMAINS FOR WEEKS. AND WHEN YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A SOUL, I WILL REND YOUR SOUL AND DEVOUR IT UNTIL YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A PILE OF MEDALS IN A CARDBOARD BOX.” Now he felt my hot breath. Even Pavlov was looking at me a little uncertainly, although later he said it was because he thought the “pile of medals” line was anti-climactic.

“I-I understand,” Boris said. “I understand the understanding. I understand the understanding. I understand it!”

“I am glad we could have this little talk,” Pavlov said. “You may leave now. Be assured that my friend here will be shadowing you from time to time.”

On ropey legs, Boris stood and turned toward the door, expression blank. He gathered up his coat himself, put it on, although it took four tries. Put on his hat. Wound his scarf around his neck.
He opened the door and, as if to make sure he had not imagined it after all, stole a glance back at us: just a dragon and a sergeant having a couple of shots of vodka. “You can talk,” he croaked.

I gave him my best hissing roar: “SHUT THE DOOR BEHIND YOU!” and he ran shrieking, although not without slamming the door shut behind him.
Pavlov poured us both another shot. “And now to business.”

“That wasn’t the business?” I can’t claim it hadn’t felt good to frighten Boris. It might not be my proudest moment, to admit that, but it’s how I felt, as if I had accomplished something.

“No, not entirely.” He handed me a piece of paper. “I typed it up from examining the reports of various patrols.”

I read it with mounting interest.

Unusual Events Reported in the Past Week, Stalingrad and Environs

—Half-naked woman running through street with several children.
—Giant crow cawing words in German
—Palm tree growing in courtyard (unsubstantiated)
—Explosion of mouse population on northwest bank of the Volga
—Ghosts seen near mass gravesite (reporting soldiers drunk)
—German soldier observed to be walking calmly through the snow, helmet off. The soldier’s head was on backwards and his hair appeared to be on fire or there was an orange flame shooting out of his skull. When approached by three of our soldiers, he began to laugh and advance on them with no fear. He is reported to have said, in German, “You have no agency here,” or perhaps “You have no agents here.” He was advancing backwards, so they could see his face. It looked as if it were made of stone. When they shot him and it had no effect, he reached out a hand and made a gesture, and one soldier dropped dead. The other two fled. The German soldier shouted after them, “Tell the [word garbled] they’re next.”

“You saved the best for last,” I said, the Komdo side of me suddenly excited even as the Mormeck part of me was more cautious.

Pavlov smiled. “The others were not really that unusual. The last item seemed perhaps…very unusual. And these two are good soldiers. They drink very little. They have only been here a few months.”

“Can they take me to where they saw this man?”

“Perhaps Boris could be persuaded to.”

Pavlov’s smile widened until I could see his teeth.

Entry #13

It has been five days since my last confession, father, and I have sinned…Except I don’t believe in God or priests, despite the fact Marty does, and my “father” was my mother, too, and s/he flung me out across the universe, a gigantic seed pod insulated against the vacuum, to fall where I would, my decaying orbit bringing me to this distant planet where I gradually grew into an awareness of myself…and of the angels.

Gabriel came to me not long after my last entry. He was unhappy with my surveillance progress. He seemed suspicious of my lies about why I had been unable to extract information from Marty the lighthouse keeper.

“Use the luna moths to occupy her brain. Extract any information directly from the cortex,” he told the mountain that had in fact been in full retreat from any action that might be considered invasive where Marty was concerned.

I told him I would and then Gabriel pointed out another reality nearby. “Don’t worry, Mormeck—we can always put you on another surveillance track.” This mountain had to stop from shuddering at the thought of being separated from Marty.

I knew this other reality—I had surveiled it briefly before. On that alt-Earth, a vast civilization pushed south from the Arctic, sending ahead their floating ghost-whale spirit weapons. These floating ghost-whales glided across the surface of the world and anyone they touched, anyone who came within the influence of their wallowing bodies, faded into the past of another, random reality—ceased to exist in the present. They emitted whale-song as they came, a deceptively sonorous psych-weapon that could break eardrums and brought fear to the invaders. The invaders had come from across the sea and had misjudged everything that could be misjudged. They had occupied territory and torn up the land while dismissing indigenous tech that was not inferior but simply different because it existed across dimensions, requiring only unity of purpose to bring forth. Those who retreated did so for strategic not tactical reasons. Now the invaders fell back in disarray, still unable to grasp the scope of their mistake.

But this Earth also existed in a kind of temporal hiccup where everything kept happening over and over again. The spirit-whale advance would reach a certain point, re-set, and begin again—so many times that now the commanders of the northern armies headed south, and their civilian leaders, knew like an echo of an echo in their brains what was happening—a subconscious message received from the near future—and in a thousand minute ways were intent on altering their decisions to try to effect some sort of change. Gabriel had told me that eventually the hiccup would feel the combined psychic pressure of this and it would end…but not even the angels knew if that reality would then proceed normally or cease to exist.

Sometimes the angels hid their wings and traveled there and let the spirit whales dissolve them into the past as a kind of strange jest or joke. The most adventurous would wait until the very second of the temporal hiccup before diving in, and thus be subject to any number of dangerous and random possibilities. Those who survived their comrades would find and bring back and restore their memories. It may have been meant as some kind of adventure, even some sort of rite of passage, but I thought there was a hint of desperation and sadness to it. That the angels, Gabriel included, really wanted to forget, but had to disguise that impulse as play.

But what did they need to forget? The cruelty of decisions they said they made for the greater good? Something much worse?

I am beginning to think I don’t believe in angels, either.

Entry #7 (Avatar)

A day has passed…I had not thought much about my namesake, the Mountain That Remained Behind…until now. Now I think about Mormeck Mountain constantly, wondering what he would do in my stead, because Mormeck Avatar feels compromised by this Komodo skin, this carefully mimicked Komodo brain, this Komodo flesh—so seductive in its strength and speed. Komodo-me likes to stop suddenly and change direction, to go bounding through the snowy woods, to suddenly scuttle up the sides of buildings, feeling the lovely ache and pull of gravity on muscles. Komodo-me makes decisions quickly, too quickly sometimes, and is seduced by the comfortable friendship he has with Sergeant Pavlov, almost to the point of becoming dog-like in wanting to please…although, perhaps that is Mormeck Avatar’s fault, too.

We went out to the place where the soldiers had found the laughing German soldier with his head on backwards and flames coming out of his head. It was safer now to go there than before as the Germans had been forced to retreat from the area, even as they had made gains in places farther south.

Rather, Pavlov through a third party ordered the two soldiers back there, and I followed invisible. Pavlov had had them provided with a two-way radio and they had been told that from time to time someone might ask them questions using it. He didn’t bother giving me a two-way radio.

“My theory, Mormeck,” Pavlov said, “is that given a rational option for a voice coming out of the snow that they will take it. I would like to see this theory tested. Besides, your voice is a little raspy.”

What rational theory would explain the sound of a huge reptile moving through snow, I asked him.

Pavlov shrugged. “The human mind is a remarkable thing.”

Another overcast day. Air-raid sirens wailed as I shadowed the two soldiers, but everyone knew no air strikes were coming. The sound was as reflexive and empty a threat as a writhing lizard tail, one of many empty rituals during wartime. I kept to the sides of buildings as much as possible, my scuttling covered by the wind, for the snow was deep and flakes lazily descending again. The two men talked to one another as they walked, automatic rifles held with the muzzles pointing down but held by hands that even under their gloves could be seen to grasp too tightly. One was named Uri, the other Aleksei.

Uri: “This is bullshit. This is the assignment they give to idiots and morons and dogfuckers. This is the pinnacle of bullshit. We have climbed to the very top of the bullshit. And we are young yet..”

Aleksei: “The bull’s shit is this—there is nothing to report. When we get back there that crazy dying German will be either crispy or gone.”

Uri: “We could say we went to do this bullshit and but not really do this bullshit. I don’t want to do this bullshit.”

Aleksei: “This bull’s shit must be done, Aleksei. If you do not do bull’s shit the right way, you wind up paying for the bull’s shit…and this kind of bull’s shit comes with a heavy, heavy price, my friend.”

Uri: “I would have thought bullshit should be done in a bullshit way.”

Aleksei: “You would be right if bull’s shit was not such a vital part of the system.”

Uri: “Why do you keep saying ‘bull’s shit’? It sounds wrong. Bullshit is much healthier.”

Aleksei: “My grandmother said it that way—it’s an heirloom. Her bull’s shit has been passed down through generations. Don’t insult my grandmother. Besides, everything you say sounds wrong, Uri.”

Uri just grunted at that, and they fell silent for a long time, which meant I had to be very silent indeed. The sky became darker although we were approaching noon. The two men passed burned-out tanks and the rubble of what had once been luxury hotels or spas. They passed by with a nod or salute Soviet patrols: gaunt men and some women who were returning from night fighting and looked nocturnal in the dark rings round their eyes and the paleness of their faces. A lone swallow swung through the air like a dark and narrow dart. The snowflakes fell harder until even with my superior vision the world became a kind of pointelist painting in white with dark shapes glimmering through. Even though I could regulate my temperature with ease, I felt the chill of a uniquely Russian winter. I felt the gloom…and the peace of that gloom. Even the crunching of Uri and Aleksei’s boots was in an odd way comforting to me, even though I had no childhood memories of snow to create that reaction. This reassured me later, because the Komodo would not have appreciated any of that.

At first, they could not find the site. Then they found the site—near an odd, cracked geodesic dome that stood four stories high. They found nothing there. Bt then, a little to the side, Uri pointed to a dark stain in the snow. Aleksei agreed it was trail of burnt blood, leading around the side of the dome.

“Do we follow that, Uri?”

“Do you follow a chain to see if there is a dog on the other end?”

“You do if there is a firing squad behind you.”

“So you want us to make friends with the dog?”

“If the dog is dead, making friends is much easier than expected.”

“What if he is just resting, waiting for some stupid bullshit inspectors to happen by?” Uri asked.

Aleksei had no reply to that one.

They never mentioned their dead comrade, the one who had been killed by the German, as if to do so would be bad luck, perhaps.

I’d already run into a back alley and then up the side of a building where I could jump down onto the dome, and so I circled them from above as, having reached a decision, they circled below, following the blood, rifles held at the ready, the wind whipping their faces. Although I had a higher perspective I, like them, had a restricted perspective, so that each few feet heightened the tension as the burned trail of blood continued on. Each curling progression felt oddly like walking farther down a dark tunnel.

But at the back of the dome, the trail ended abruptly. In the midst of a circle of offal: a pair of men’s legs in heavy white trousers and ragged boots stuck up out of the snow, torso half-hidden beneath, as if the person had tried to dive into the ground. A few feet off to the side a head lay in the snow, the latest flurries having brought the snow up over its mouth. The eyes were blank and milky, staring off into the distance, the cheekbones drawn, the nose sharp, the mouth tight and small. Someone had clearly been by and put his helmet back on his head, as if he still had need of it.

The sight brought Uri and Aleksei up short. They stood for a second as I looked down on them and the dead man.

“Now what?” Aleksei asked.

“Now what what?” Uri replied.

“What do we do with this bull’s shit?”

“I’m not hauling it back to headquarters, if that what you mean,” Uri said.

“That isn’t what I mean. Not only am I not hauling it, Uri, I am not going any nearer. Look at that—what possesses a decapitated man to dive into the snow.”

“My powers of reasoning tell me that a man on fire will do many strange things,” Uri said.

“Including pulling off his own head and tossing it to the side before taking a dive?” Aleksei asked.

“Let’s get out of here,” Uri said.

But that’s when the head began to mumble and laugh a little, spewing snowflakes in a miniature flurry, and the up-ended legs to bicycle through the air in an unnerving way, even to me.

Uri and Aleksei stood frozen. There is no other way to say it. For all of their banter, for all of their bravery in having followed the blood trail, they now stood frozen, as if the German head’s mumbling was a spell binding them.

And I felt a presence like a weight pressing up against the insides of my skull, against my brain, so strong that it pushed by body tight against the side of the dome.

Something was coming. The German soldier was a trap or a signal or a beacon or something even worse, and they’d meant for me to come here, and I was doomed, I was doomed, and I couldn’t tell if that thought came from my own thoughts or the presence in my head, bearing down, and with what resolve I had left, what will, I half-fell, half-skittered down the side of the dome and I gathered up a terrified Aleksei in one arm and a horrified Uri in the other because I would not see them harmed because of me, and I ran from that place as if I were a true human believer fleeing from the gates of Hell, the whole time wondering what would come next, what could possibly come next.

So it never came down to a child’s game involving two-way radios, and I lie here now in a hidden place—far from Pavlov’s House, far from anywhere—hyperventilating as I write, and thinking over and over “Is it gone? Is the presence gone? Is it really gone?” Because I think it is, but what if it didn’t leave because I was out of range but instead went dormant, went into hiding? What if what if what if? I feel more like an isolated Mormeck Outpost than ever before.

Pavlov had been thinking about the burning German on a completely different tactical level, and I had let him because I trusted his war experience. But this wasn’t like any enemy he had ever faced. And I had never encountered anything like it, either.

The presence made me want to claw my own brain out of my head. To take a pick axe and break my skull open and pick through the pieces.

To do anything to get it out.

Entry #14

This Mountain entry is so visual, you’ll have to read it in the original blog entry: you can read here; it will no doubt be radically changed for the final draft.

Entry #8, Avatar

I can feel something inside of my body, inside of my brain. It scritches just the tiniest bit. As if there is something wanting to get out. There are visions here that no one should have to see. There are dislocations and torques and spaces poking through.

I’ve come from Pavlov and a drinking contest. I told him everything I safely could, everything and yet nothing. I’m drunk now. It’s a kind of preservation mechanism. I’m raging up the side of broken bombed buildings in the moonlight, my claws half freezing off, brittle as icicles, and roaring and wanting to escape my skin, but even if I went back to being avatar in form, the Komodo’s too far inside me.
I look down and sometimes see huddled figures around pathetic fires or men hunched against walls in as much clothing as they can put on and I don’t feel removed from them. I see the cold eating into their features as if a sculptor were slowly etching them out of stone and I feel as if I am one of them, and the only difference is I have an escape plan of a kind. I see a soldier guarding a prisoner, one only marginally better off than the other, and I become both empathic and cynical, and want the image gone, cut out not just from my brain but from my optic nerve—to excise the entry point. As if that would solve anything at all.

The domed building awaits with its laughing skull obscured by ice, and I keep as far from it as I can. The dome’s there, waiting. I can feel it like a pressure against my eyes. I can sense it like a thick cloying smell that’s bitter and sweet and decaying. And I’ll have to go back there. I’m going to have to infiltrate that. With this sense of being spied on in my own skull. Why take a shot of vodka when you can drink the whole bottle and control the drip of it into your system, let each drop spread out or not as you wish. I control my body if not my fate.

I miss Mormeck Mountain. I miss myself. No amount of scuttling across the skyline of a mortally damaged city in the snow will solve the hurt of that. (And: is there a shelf-life for an avatar? Can an avatar too long cut-off from its host…go mad?)

There has been a complication.

There is a city hidden under the city.

There is a city hidden in frozen bodies.

There is something dead that is still alive.

There is a mapping going on that should not be going on. There is a knowing that is a form of death as soon as it occurs, the reveal an instance sentence.

I’d be less coy, less obscure, but I’d rather fool myself awhile, not acknowledge what I think I know. It’s easier that way, at least for now.

Entry #15

I have become two detectives suddenly, over the past few days. One rigorously surveils Marty and her lighthouse, her daily meetings with strangers for a single kiss. The other surveils the angels who live in the laboratory atop my head. Neither detective is entirely satisfied with the arrangement, but for now it suffices, like a jury-rigged system that will break-down if isn’t fixed.

Nothing in my observations of Marty has done anything but intensified my sense of having found a…friend? A…what? There is an immense and ponderous sense of projection, of filling in the gaps caused by not being able to sit down and have a conversation with her. I know just about everything someone can know about another being, but somehow that is not the same. And mixed in with these thoughts are the growing feelings of shame at watching her at all, and of knowing that Mormeck Mountain is more “peeping tom” as the alt-Earths almost universally put it than friend to her.

As for the angels, they have grown sloppy in their trust of me, which isn’t surprising. For too long I have accepted everything they told me the way a child will accept what their parents say. But I’m a mountain, not a hill, and the time for that is past.

I continue to, one by one, access their documents and to piece together information from them, all the while pretending to Gabriel and the others that nothing has changed.

This one, for example, interests me. It has no attribution as to the source. But it suggests a possible vulnerability on the part of the angels…

“BATEMAN GLAND, THE – The bateman gland is a twenty-second century adaptation in several alt-universes that manifests as a hole in the left side of the human body, below the ribcage. It is an attempt by the human body to make the camera phone superfluous. Photos are developed in the small intestine and come out in curled form from the navel, through an ingenious re-plumbing effort. This is mostly due to the propensity in these alternative universes for humans to change their bodies to fit the common gestalt. Therefore, it took several million people earnestly wishing with all of their thoughts and prayers that their bodies could take photographs, thus making their camera phones irrelevant, before this adaptation could take place. Those without this ability were suddenly rendered pariahs and deleted in the great purges of 2252 (by AD of the old calendar). An unexpected effect of the bateman gland? It causes periods of intense crying jags as well as a nostalgia for a time before camera phones.

“In the trans-dimensional komodo dragon, the clicking of a bateman gland—the act of taking the photograph—causes a kind of existential rage that dulls upon repetition. Thus, the number of cases of young komodo dragons going insane in neighboring realities. And the scar tissue around the sides of older komodo dragons’ heads. The side effect of the side effect? Like a watermark, you can see the faint ghosting outline of komodo heads in most of the photos taken by bateman glands. The exact connection—the kind of extra-dimensional—residue—that causes this “ghost manifestation” is unclear. But rogue angels now use the communal power of this chaotic uncertainty, combined with extracts of komodo poison and komodo rage, to amplify their power to jump between universes. It also creates an incredible burst of endorphins or endorphin equivalent in the users.”

What to make of this account entire—are pieces of it fanciful? Is it both fiction and nonfiction—is hard for me to determine. But it has helped me to direct my subtle inquiries through the angel’s files in certain directions I had not thought of before.

More viscerally, this mention of “ghost manifestations” has a sudden personal aspect. Since yesterday, there have been sudden manifestations of ghost frogs on my lower flanks. They follow my presence down here to the jungle to write in my journal and watch me with their translucent throats throbbing in silent frog-song, in such numbers that the jungle floor is turned into an ectoplasmic surge of small bulbous bodies, their large eyes oddly more luminous and less ethereal than the rest of them, so near dusk their bodies seem to fade away entirely and it is just an army of glowing silver eyes advancing across the dark green. Thus, they become a kind of army that attends to my local avatar despite me wanting discretion when I come here. At least they stay at my flanks otherwise, and if the angels have noticed them, it seems not to cause them concern.

But I don’t know what it means, even as I feel vaguely responsible for them. The only reference I’ve found in the records to ghost frogs is that they serve sometimes as the sentinels of komodos. But I am not a komodo.

Regardless of this development, this new information, I remain caught in stasis. I must watch Marty. I must spy on the angels. I feel as if I am in a cage when all I want to do is burst out, to follow my instincts, to escape all of this and travel to a lighthouse by the sea.

Entry #9

They were the remnants of a matriarchal flesh-and-blood race of six-legged amphibious carnivores from a planet with a name that sounded like “Rastz”. It issued from their mouths like a reverent and mournful hiss. Now in exile, they called themselves a word that meant the same as “Remnant” in English, but more defiant. Like a cross between “survivor” and “I survived because I danced on your corpse and spit on your grave.”

The Remnant were one of those odd peoples who, despite the presence of a solar system brimming with habitable planets, turned inward instead. They developed intricate robotics and a crude system of cross-dimensional travel long before they thought of space flight. The Remnant wished to explore the universes contained with Rastz, and they sent forth emissaries to explore.

At first, they found every delight and torment possible: versions of their world more peaceful and more advanced than theirs, versions decimated by battles for last scraps of protein on otherwise exhausted continents and seas bare of animal life, all of it dotted with the burning fires of failed city-states gouging the earth for the last fossil fuels. They came to know the full measure of echoes…

But after about two hundred years, everything changed. On an outlier alt-Rastz, a rogue where the Remnant never developed civilization, a Remnant expedition came across a hill overlooking a bay. Upon the hill stood giant bears silent and unblinking, while below angels at play hunted Remnant for sport.

To the Remnant, angels looked a lot like the bleating livestock back at home.

To the angels, the Remnant looked a lot like what they’d been hunting in the bay, but with funny-looking toy weapons strapped to their ponderous sides.

Only one Remnant made it home, but the angels made sure she had a tracer on her. Suddenly, the Remnant knew the outer, wider universe all too well: it was filled with giant bears and beings who looked like food but had strange and possibly superior technology. And those beings were now after them.

Had they simply—“simply”—returned home and decided to stay there, turned outward, explored the planets in their solar system, forgotten they had ever stumbled across alternative Rastzs, perhaps the angels would have left them alone. But instead the Remnant decided to try to establish hegemony over the other alt-Rastz worlds and find ways to thwart the angels.

The angels saw what was happening and were not amused. They had conflicts of their own to worry about. They decided that, for their purposes, they didn’t need Rastz—any Rastzs. They sent death and destruction. They funneled plagues through the portals. They sent transdimensional fireballs that scorched whole continents across alt-Rastzs. They suppressed evolution, sent it reeling back on itself. They took some versions and smashed them, sent others spinning out into the galaxy, unmoored from Rastz’s sun. They didn’t care. It didn’t matter to them at all. They didn’t care, either, when the Remnant sued for peace. It was a process. They had begun the process. The process must be completed.

And when it was all over not a single flesh-and-blood Remnant remained alive. And the only possible savior of an entire race existed within a habitat the size and shape of a test tube hurtling through space as far away from the dead Rastzs as possible, in only one possible reality. A test-tube spinning end-over-end filled with bioneered nanotech, filled with thirteen consciousnessess downloaded into Remnant micro-brains, surrounded by anything else that could fit on information-absorbing microtic tissue sheets. Thus swathed in sheets of the sum total of their civilization’s history and knowledge the Remnant slowly traversed the universe unmoored, so small and insignificant that they did not register with the angels at all. Within each micro-brain burned just one thought: to rebuild, to expand, to seek vengeance.

The destruction of Rastz happened one hundred million years ago, if you take Mormeck Mountain’s time-spool as the baseline. This all happened long before any Earth developed civilization.

This all happened well before any of our times…and yet…and yet…it all soon became very personal to me because the Remnant told me the story while torturing me for information.

None of which really explains how I found myself half-komodo, half-worm, staring down at an underground replica of Stalingrad. Or why the pressure in my skull at that moment meant that in a few hours of my capture I would explode like the perfect bomb, in a hellstorm of fire and flesh and shrapnel.

But reconstruction is a difficult process and I am just a remnant at the moment, so I will leave that story for the next entry.

Entry #16

Perhaps Gabriel can sense my discontent, because soon after my last entry, he came to me with a smile and an outstretched hand (tipped with sharp nails almost like claws).

“You want to know more,” he said. “I can tell. You are growing bored watching one lighthouse on a backwater alt-earth.”

“Mountains don’t get bored,” I replied.

Gabriel’s curved smile grew until it seemed about to split his face in two. “Nonetheless…”

The avatar I sent with Gabriel was half-komodo, in honor of my lost avatar somewhere in the winter city. This seemed to make Gabriel twitchy, but I didn’t care. He led me deep into the laboratory, to the library, which I’d never entered before. We passed many doors and passageways I found curious, from which sounds or smells emanated that required further investigation…but Gabriel kept an iron grip on my left arm the entire time, guiding me along at a brisk pace.
We entered the library, which houses a legion of titles brought back from thousands of alt-Earths, so many that I could not read them all in a thousand years. An angel’s library is not like a human’s library, and I still do not know who collected them, or why they were collected. Outside of the space was a hologram of a famous old library from an alt-Earth, with shelves and shelves in a golden light.
But within the pure white dome of the angels’ library lay cases and cases. Huge mounds or middens of battered light brown cases with handles, like on satchels or suitcases. No apparent organizing principle to how they had been scattered and dumped, although each case had a title scrawled across the top, like Books That Started Wars or Versions of the Torah or Books That Never Existed or Books That Only Existed Once or Books About Cats or Versions of The Voynich Manuscript.

The cases contained what most humans would recognize as the glass sample slides that scientists place in front of the lens of a microscope, except somewhat thicker and thus containing more of a sample between the two plates. In running my fingers over one row of them in an open cases I found the slides oddly warm to the touch; they pulsed a little bit.

I had seen too many normal human libraries in my surveillance. “This isn’t a library,” I said. “How would I read the books?”

He smirked and placed what looked like a tiny eye-dropper in my hand. “The front of the slides are made of living tissue. Insert the dropper, extract a sample of the liquid and place it on your tongue.”

He undid the latch on a case titled “Literature of Tlon”, delicately pulled a slide from its place. There was a purplish stain captured within and it lazily squished and sloshed within its trap. “This is a book,” Gabriel said. “Read it. Read all of them if you like.”

Then he left.

I didn’t at first like reading in this way, not that I was much used to reading anyway. I was always on surveillance and what I usually absorbed was visual in nature. I had learned what the angels needed me to learn through modules absorbed through the skin, so that there was no process of discovery. It simply existed in my mind where before it had not. I had, of course, had my avatars read various physical books from time to time, whatever they left around in the unrestricted parts of the library, so I knew the experience and had been transported by reading, too, a half dozen times…and in a way, I was eager. I think in that moment I believed that reading books might bring me closer to Marty. She loved books. She loved them so much I wanted to be a book she read.

So I jabbed the dropper into the membrane of the slide and it went right in and I retrieved some of the purple liquid, placed a drop on my tongue, and sat in an old rocking chair in the corner of the room while I “read” the book, ignoring a nearby bloodstain on the floor…

It was more like listening to great music than reading, in that the liquid form of the book took up a space in one’s mind that bypassed the editor housed there. It bypassed the entry phase of reading, during which you are aware of, say, being in a rocking chair in a strange room, and that itch on your left hand, and those nagging problems in your life…all of those moments before a book sweeps you away into its own world, its own dream. That was gone, and I was just fully within the book, appreciating it exactly as it was meant to be appreciated, to the point of complete and utter immersion. It wasn’t like watching a movie, not at all, it was still like reading, with that sensual appreciation of each word on the tip of the tongue, that moment of frisson when a sentence goes somewhere unexpected but brilliant, rewiring your brain, the mind creating the sensory experience, better than any hallucination or even my favorite thing on my favorite iteration of an alt-Earth. It was an ecstasy and a reverie that created pleasure I’d never experienced before.

When I finished that first book, with its landscapes of a fantastical place that on one Earth at least actually existed, I must admit to becoming an addict. I placed the next on my tongue, and the next. I scrabbled my way to case after case on those mounds in that domed room. I absorbed so many I lost count, and the reality of the rocking chair in which I sat during these expeditions seemed like some odd way station in a sanitized virtual reality before my return to the world in my head.

I experienced so many lives and so many places. I read the books of those who had died obscure across all alt-Earths and those who had been famous, those who had died young and those who had died old. So much by so many. By so few. By all. And multiplied by the variations, so that here a short story writer who had never completed that tantalizingly titled novel had indeed finished and instead of being shot by Nazis during World War II had lived into old and somber age, to write even more novels, each more amazing and heart-breaking than the last. And here a woman who died in the Far East unknown, her writings burned by her husband before any could be published, was more important than the Emperor. And here the novelist who had turned away from his muse regained it on some other alt-Earth and rather than a hack he was a miniaturist, creating absurd yet haunting portraits of eccentric people. And here, too, that suicide in a river had never happened and what had come to her when she’d stopped in mid-stream and reconsidered was like a concerto bursting out of my very heart.

I only became aware of the tears running down my face after about the thousandth book I placed upon my tongue. It was an expansion of a story called “The Dead” that in only four alt-Earths had become the ending of a novel, and that novel was better than anything the writer had done in life on any of the other Earths.

Now I know that Gabriel meant to bury me in those books, thought he was burying me in facts, knowledge, information, but instead he was steeping me in emotion, giving me the full experience of what reading meant to Marty. Fiction, philosophy, biographies, histories, biology textbooks…

By the end, I wasn’t drowned in any of it, not really. Instead, there was calm and peace at the core of me.

And yet an odd sensation, this incredibly strange feeling, enveloped me, and I realized that my avatar was weeping not just from sorrow at realizing I was all alone but also overwhelming elation and the epiphany that I was not alone…and that no matter Gabriel’s purpose, my readings had not just moved me—they had moved me so I was not afterwards in the position I had been in before. I was no longer in the same location relative to the universes, to myself, to the angels, to human beings, to my avatar, to Marty, to anything. And for this I secretly thank Gabriel even as I despise him even more.

And I realize now that I must take a risk. The mountain must talk to Marty.

To every Marty.

Entry #10 (avatar)

I piece the story together in the same way that I piece myself together…where was I? Where am I? Recovering…I am a recovering bomb. I have been an explosion addict through no fault of my own, and now I must start the hard work of living without the possibility of detonation…

***

I went back to the strange domed building, and no slumped-over dead dismembered German soldier lay there. The snow lay over the ground pristine, undisturbed. There was still a pressure in my head that I attributed to the Presence. A quick surveil uncovered that the strange dome was mere marker, mere beacon, and that whatever used it as such lived deep beneath the ground. I sensed a hollowness under the earth where no hollowness should exist: the sensors on the bottom of my komodo feet told me.

But to get there, I would have to abandon my komodo-self, the self I had not left for weeks. I did so with reluctance, for that skin, that flesh, had been splendid armor, had made me feel oddly invincible. To set that down for even a moment struck me as wrong.

Still, I did it, digging into the snow and dirt as komodo only to be immersed in the ground as a rather large earthworm that undulated down, down through the hard compacted soil, through the richness of it, and the occasional unexpected stone, like some kind of deep-sea diver turned terrestrial, ever downward, heading ever for the emptiness my brain could still feel below me.

Until I burst through and, half-morphed back to komodo, half-in, half-out of the ground, a root sticking me in my left ear-hole, took in the sight below me: a perfect scale model of Stalingrad before the war that gleamed in the ethereal, buttery light. No ruined buildings, no stacks of bodies, no artillery, no mortars, no tanks. There a government building, here a converted cathedral.

What would Pavlov have thought of that shining city, untouched by war? Why do I think he might have recoiled, been sickened, been made angry by it? Wanted to burn it all down.

The only anomalous details were a dead, dismembered German soldier slumped in the far corner, face awash in half-dried blood and frame hunched over by the ceiling, a giant in that context…and the thousands of tiny mechanical komodos swarming the streets…and the way they all craned their necks to look up at me…and the way they scuttled in a great metallic clang toward me, up the walls of the cavern, as I struggled to break free of the hole I’d made to enter…only to burst forth into their clutches and be carried down to the replica of th strange domed building below. They clicked and hissed and snapped at me with their jaws and I gullivered for them mightily, thrashing in their grasp but unable to break free. No change of shape or size made any difference, and I noticed from the corners of my vision that as I changed they would blur for an instant and, reforming, adapt to my newness. Soon, I would discover they, and the whole city below me, was created from nano-bots and it was at the pleasure of the Remnant that they appeared to constitute komodos at all.

Something in me rebelled at destroying that strange dome, and so I adapted to the size of its door as they led me inside. The ceiling that rose and rose had a greenish tint mixed with dark red smears, as if fungi had met dried blood and consummated a strange union. I felt as if I was looking from the inside out at a giant’s disinterred skull.

Within, I met the Remnant, all twelve of them, and the pressure in my skull increased. They, too, were composed of nano-bots and had decided to take the form of generic miniature German soldiers—to reassure me or to terrify me?—and there was little to tell one from the other except by the eyes, which varied from violet to green and blue and hazel, as if human beings stared out from an incarcerating mask.

There was no preamble.

“Who are you with?” the one who by his medals purported to be a general. “Why are you here?”

And another, in a murmur, “Are you a spy?” And another, in a shout, “Are you with the angels?” And another, in a shriek, “Did you come here to destroy us?”
Before I could answer, the torture began. The mecha-komodos scrambled atop me and held me down, turning into shackles that changed in size and shape as I changed in size and shape, until finally I stopped. It was useless. I was just wasting energy.

“I’m a mountain,” I told them. “I’m just an intelligent mountain from far far away. Nothing to do with you.”

But they’d already stopped listening, before I started talking. The pressure in my head had gotten so much worse I was having trouble concentrating anyway.

Then the twelve Remnants disassembled into their nano-parts and entered my body, interrogating me from within, trying to parse information from my bloodstream, my brain stem, from my spleen and kidneys or their equivalent. None of it meant much, the organs within my body as much for show as their gleaming Stalingrad—what need has a mountain for organs any more than moss does?—but I let the form of them dictate my defenses as a way of confusing the enemy. I grew an extra liver. I put a second and third stomach in their way. I respliced veins to arteries and sent my heart down into my intestines to evade them. I let my claw-tips house my lungs for awhile. Instead of changing my body size and type I let my bladders erupt from my skin and wobble their like strange rescue balloons. All over my body organs burst forth like blossoms. I changed my blood cells into tiny sharks to attack the nano-machines. Within my body, the Remnants fought my remnants as I watched with eyes I grew out of the tissue linings of my circulatory system.

That war took as long in its way as the siege of Stalingrad. It was over in minutes, but within that micro-universe, it was days and weeks, my generals that were avatars of my own avatar making it a war of attrition, even as with each new maneuver the nano-tech of the Remnant took more and more intel from me.

But at a cost, for even as they extracted from me, I extracted from them, until the tale of their civilization I have previously recounted became clear, and the one recurring image that came to mind when I thought of them was of a lonely test-tube, the last vestiges of an angel-destroyed civilization, traveling end-over-end through space for millions years until their instruments guided them to Earth, and then alt-Earths (for they had retained their portal technology) as the principal current playground for the angels. Burning through all of their nano-parts was a dueling caution and thirst for vengeance. They had been shadowy and cautious enough to spook the angels, and clever enough to rebuild across many alt-Earths in their new mecha-form, so that the twelve I now battled were only one set of many cells of twelve—tiny, living underground, undermining what they could, taking over human bodies when they could, moving inexorably but slowly toward their goals.

Finally, they began to take over my systems, to extinguish or neutralize my cell-sharks, to force me to stop emitting organs, to engage in tissue-based subterfuge. Slowly, they began to get to the core of me, to come close to breaching the defenses that had kept them out of my central mind. And I found this disturbing, almost horrifying, because by now I existed unique and autonomous from Mormeck Mountain. I was, I realized in those last micro-seconds, become unique, and if I ever met up with the Mountain again it would be like greeting a brother or a close cousin, not a doppelganger.

That’s when the pressure in my brain increased and I realized it came not from the Presence but from a more familiar source, set off by the proximity to the Presence.

That’s when I detonated and destroyed the cavern and blew the top off of both the miniature dome and the dome aboveground, just another explosion in a world that expected them, that flourished on them.

Entry #17

This is my partial analysis of Marty across more than one hundred alt-Earths…

65 percent are unhappy
45 percent are suffering from some ailment
58 percent like ice cream
95 percent read books
15 percent never become lighthouse keepers
13 percent die young
20 percent live into old age
18 percent get married at some point
90 percent have boyfriends or girlfriends
75 percent drink beer
5 percent drink only tea
10 percent have spent time in therapy or psych wards
85 percent are introverted loners
50 percent have been assaulted at one time or another
3 percent have been murdered
65 percent have no living relatives by the time they are thirty
40 percent wanted to be marine biologists before they became lighthouse keepers
80 percent believe in ghosts (perhaps influenced by my spying)
12 percent are drafted by various armies
20 percent have expert fire-arms skills of some kind
25 percent were athletes in school
35 percent came to the lighthouse trying to escape their pasts
70 percent of the lighthouse Martys start and maintain gardens
40 percent of them don’t have secret spies who kiss secrets into them behind the lighthouse

60 percent of the two-dozen versions of Marty I have dared approach through my luna moths—talked to through my luna moths—recoiled in horror and basically ran away and then tried to rationalize the encounter as “nerves” or “not having eaten lunch”.

39 percent picked up a rock or a hammer and smashed the luna moth to fleshy pulp.

1 percent calmly ignored the incident and continued reading their books.

I haven’t approached the real “Marty,” of course—I have kept her separate and uncontaminated by my experiments. Because I’m afraid of her reaction. Because I am trying to use the others to understand the real one. Because I am a manipulative and obsessive mountain, a mountain who has no authorization from the angels to breach the other realities with luna moths and yet is doing so anyway—altering observation logs, making records go missing, and watching for any gap in their attention to perform these ritualistic insertions of dialogue into places where they should not exist.

But. I. Cannot. Stop. Doing. It. Any more than I can stop my investigation of the angels. Both things could be deadly, but I don’t care.

And beyond all of this, through all of the probabilities I search through, relentless as a common stalker, it is always there on the edges: the Grim Lighthouse. It is there when I am awake and when I allow my mind to diffuse into those separate cells that for me signify sleep. The Grim Lighthouse.

If the real Marty existed in a place composed mostly of light, then she must also exist in darkness.

I don’t want to go there, but I know I must.

Entry #11 (Avatar)

It was another of the angels’ “jokes”: a slow blast, micro-detonations from points within the bone of my skull, each setting off the next to create a glowing ring of fire before the chain reaction blew me to bits and destroyed the cavern. It was like watching someone light a ring of candles on my birthday cake, only I was the cake and I would have no chance to blow them out. It took so long I had time to think about what small pieces of me might survive, what trajectory my bones would take as they shot from my body in splinters.

As the detonations continued, I thought about the canisters of dead angels the Remnant had left for the luna moths to find, and how hard it is to interrogate dust, even if you can re-animate it, make it walk again, talk again. I thought about worlds crowded atop one another and about being eaten by the bear and if Pavlov wondered where I’d disappeared to, and even how much time had passed since I had entered the cavern. I tried to remember a childhood I had never had—was I once a hill?—and in all ways I sucked the marrow from those seconds as I watched the birthday candles flare to life one by one, spinning slowly around the synapses of my own brain. I had to admit I loved the symmetry and grace of it, the way that the angels had managed not only to hide such a powerful remedy to the Presence but also how delicately they had placed it within me. Even as I understood that the angels had turned me into a bomb because they did not want me to return, even as ashes, and that fact meant my own flame rose to meet theirs, for all I wanted now was to return home, to Mormeck Mountain, no matter what it took.

And I wondered in the crescendo of my own skull, the rising spark and catalyst, as I thought I smelled something beginning to burn like an old-fashioned fuse on an ancient bomb—was I already on fire by then, scattering nano-komodos like melting bits of solder?—if this is what happened when an intelligent species lived on for too long. If a species could become senile and insane if it continued on for millions or billions of years. Was that what had happened to the angels, the equivalent of insanity? A state in which the long-existing causality for their actions, buried somewhere in their past, back on whatever home-world they had burst forth from, had not followed them forward through all of the time lines…and now they only seemed fleet of foot and all-powerful, all-knowing…that in fact they knew nothing, were simply following patterns that no longer had any meaning, and that this explosion in my head was just one more manifestation of that meaninglessness and that in each angel’s brain if you looked closely enough you would find only candles snuffed out: an abyss and a soundless scream. The only purpose the same you would find in a disembodied lizard’s tail.

As even my basic functions became functionless and a fuzziness set in, I thought of the Remnant, too, where clearly something had gone terribly wrong in their spinning test tube across the galaxies, so when they emerged their mechanical selves could think only of the past and only of vengeance and no matter how many nano-copies they made of themselves they would only ever be The Twelve, and The Twelve copied and copied until they were a kind of ghost that sometimes, as It wandered lonely clanking its chains, wondered with a crushing regret, what might have happened if It had not met a row of bears upon a hill, not met a row of angels ringing a distant bay…

My time was up.

Then, the Burn.

Entry #18

By the rocking chair in the angels’ library, I found something odd when I returned there today. It had been shoved into a crack in the wall, which was improbable enough: a crack in that seamless, immaculate surface. But, then, it was near a small dried up pool of blood. A slide, like the other slides. But this one I had my avatar pocket and bring back. Something told me I shouldn’t “read” it in the library, or mention it to Gabriel. And so later, I sampled it, letting the liquid suffuse Mormeck mountain, soaking into every cell. It was short and odd and I could not tell if it were meant to be fiction or some secret surveil, akin to that recorded by the luna moths, that had been deposited in the library to disguise it. I could not even tell where it had been written or who had written it, except for some slight indication of the story being told in a bar on an alt-Earth, to a human child. This is what I “read”…

***

Time to get out of the house. But it’s so strange, the weight of this giant green head. It makes me stagger back and forth like a drunkard. Maybe I’ll get used to it eventually. The smell of plastic is intoxicating and I feel a kind of extra-terrestrial clarity coming on, like the mysteries of the universe will soon be solved in some small way. So this is what it’s like to be free, is one thought, although with this giant head on, my arms are pinned and it is so…green out here. Even the birds are green. The garbage collector is green. So are all the…cars. I am glad the buildings accommodate people with giant green heads, but of course that makes sense. Still, sometimes I feel as if I might be doing damage to my forehead due to low-hanging doorways.

Did I mention how I came to possess the giant green head in the first place? I don’t think I did. I wonder if I will.

The weight of this giant alien baby head increased once I entered the local mall, and soon I felt a pressure pulling on my neck, which puzzled me. When I managed to find a mirror, I discovered that a rag-tag band of green children had attached themselves to my giant head by means of crude homemade grappling hooks, and were by their combined mass throwing off my balance! I had no choice but to take drastic action…

The drastic action took the form of a sit-down. I sat down and cursed at a rapid rate in a variety of local languages. After half an hour, the children began to find me less than interesting, and left. I was about to continue my perambulations without further interference.

No. I didn’t really sit down and curse. I rose in a rage and flung children like ragdolls. The ones who held on to their grappling hooks. Which is always a fool’s chance.

Did I tell you it was a mall? It wasn’t a mall. I only said that so you wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. And they weren’t children.

But that’s not true, either. I don’t tell you this so you won’t feel uncomfortable. I’m entirely more selfish than that, and I’m not even really talking for your benefit anyway. I say anything I say so I will feel more comfortable…

The rest of my journey in the giant head went badly. I walked to the river, lost my balance, and fell into the water, head-first. I bobbed downstream, legs in the air, staring at upside-down bass and tadpoles, with just enough air to breathe. A strange murky beauty to it all, and from that perspective the river weeds draped down, the alligators all pale belly, long throat, and legs weirdly paddling above their torsos…

So then I managed to get caught in some branches just as the giant green head I was wearing filled up with water. And wedged thusly, I was able to get right-side up. By then, I was miles from town and sopping wet. With difficulty I made it up the steep bank, only to be confronted by a startling and horrible sight….

But, in fact, I may need to back up and tell the truth again. There were other people involved. There always are, even if you don’t know that yet. I left the house in such a hurry for a reason. Someone was after me. Someone caught up. I had no choice but to jump in the river. The head began to fill with water for a reason, too. The bullet.

The ones who pursued me smelled funny. Not bad, just different, like lime mixed with pumice and salt. When they got angry, they smelled like thick brine. They did not always hold their shape like most people. They appeared in the sky above my house diving down with silver wings folded. Their wings were burning, ravaged. Like a damselfly’s wings, theirs were filigreed, and the flame tore holes. By the time they reached the ground, their wings were gone. If not for that, I would never have been able to escape me…although there is always some possibility that they wanted me to escape them.

Here’s another thing I have not said: I was expecting them. Just not so soon. Does that sound strange? It’s not nearly the strangest thing.

***
The startling and horrible sight? Well, part of it was benign: a two-story rotting shack that looked like it had once been part of a farm. But standing outside the door to this ramshackle building, I could see what looked like a huge brown bear with matted flanks standing on its hind-legs. Or an approximation of a bear. It had been dead for a long time, its sides caved in along with the right side of its head…but still it breathed. It had eyes that, even through the green wall between us, looked human. Trapped in a staved-in bear skull.

I could tell it breathed because its ribs pushed slowly through its fur and dead leaves swirled up and out, and then, with the inhale, fell back inside, only to appear again before being lost once more.

For a moment, I hesitated. Wouldn’t anyone? But from behind me, down the riverbank, I heard the unmistakable sounds of pursuit. Even without wings, they were fast. As I’ve said, they did not need to hold their shape. I approached the bear-thing, the dry sedge weeds of the field sandpaper-rough against my trousers. Up close, its eyes were green-flecked gold. Its muzzle revealed hints of yellowing bone. Its paws looked soft, its claws curling in on themselves.

Despite the crown of buzzing flies it wore, the bear smelled like a body after the flesh has been worn away by weather and erosion and scavengers: clean, but with some lingering hint of sharpness that bit into the nostrils. If not for the intensity of the eyes, the bear-thing would itself have resembled a tall hut with the thatch falling off the roof beams.

The bear-thing guarded a door.

“I’m not from this place,” I shouted through the huge green head that trapped me. “I need safe passage.”

There came a sound like grass sprinkled into a brisk wind and two huge paws clamped onto either side of my head and, as I braced myself, pulled it off.

The bear-thing tossed the head to the side. I stood there blinking in the sudden glare. Sodden. Read head bleeding. Hair wet with river water and sweat. Arms chaffed raw. Shoulder sore.

“I am not from this place, either,” the bear-thing said. A thin, drawn-out growl like a rusty gate being pulled open.

Behind us, they came closer, with their mouths that could see and their eyes that could hear. Together, we entered the two-story hut and closed the door behind us. Inside, it was wider than on the outside: a vast, tumbling, dark space that I did not wish to explore. I felt as if a step in the wrong direction and I would be falling off of a cliff into nothingness.

“My name is Seether,” said the bear that was not a bear, the corpse that was not a corpse.

A Seether is something ancient from the future. It is a remnant but not a Remnant. Not exactly mortal but not exactly immortal. You can summon one, but you must know what you are summoning. Not all Seethers are sane. Not all Seethers can be controlled. The Seether I entered the building with wasn’t controllable, although I had not summoned him.

That is how I died, that time. After I offered my throat, Seether tore it out with one slow slap of his pay. But dying did not much inconvenience me, other than the pain, which I was able to block out. It was the only way to escape my pursuer.

…But you may be confused now, which is okay. It’s okay to be confused. The world is a far stranger place than you can possibly imagine, and as I mentioned I’m not really talking to you.

There may be questions. Here are answers.

Were the pursuers angels? No, as I’ve said, they were not really angels just because they had wings. Do you know why? Because there are no such things as angels, not the way your culture understands angels.

Was I the only one wearing a giant green alien head in this place? No.

Had I done something bad to warrant being chased? Yes.

Had the bullet hurt me badly? Yes. It had. I was already slowly dying as I entered the building with Seether because they had used komodo poison on the bullet.

Why is komodo poison the worst? What you don’t know about the transdimensional properties of the komodo dragon can kill you in more than one place. They can scent your wound through time, through space, sporling out before them like a mist that curls and beckons. While you, you’re more like a rabbit with a pocket watch who’s been stuffed with sawdust, and its falling out of you in chunks, and you’re feeling more and more like part of the background, the scenery.

Everything’s receding. Except the komodo. The komodo’s getting closer and closer. Reeling you in through its sixth, its seventh senses. That tongue, forking out. The bandy-legged progression over rough terrain. The smell of rotting flesh that you can’t quite tell. Is it you, or the komodo? Is it your life on his breath? Is this the last thing you’ll ever see? That ugly pitted bullethead. That shit-eating grin? Because the thing is, you have to die to escape a komodo. You have to let your wound take you. Are you up for that? I didn’t know if I was, on top of being devoured by Seether. But what choice did I have, and it must have worked, at least for a little while, because here I am in this backwater talking to you in a language you probably can’t understand. But that’s okay. I’m not really talking to you.

***
Did I mention how I came to possess the giant green head in the first place? I don’t think so, for a number of reasons.

I’m afraid the story is not a pleasant one. I had killed its previous owner, to whom it had, indeed, served as a head of sorts. I had then emptied it and cured it, that I might use it to walk unobserved through the city’s streets and courtyards. That might sound blood-curdling, I know, except it wasn’t. Nothing botched can be truly blood-curdling. This particular type of creature is insensate about the head. The relationship between head and nervous system is looser than, say, that between the shell and body of a horseshoe crab but not as loose as the relationship between a hermit crab and its shell. I had successfully removed the head without death setting in, but then shock took over and I couldn’t save him. And, it’s pretty much the same everywhere: a killing that occurs in the middle of a crime (say, a robbery or a kidnapping) is more or less murder, even if it’s accidental or for a good cause. Sad, yes. Blood-curdling, no.

It strikes me that I may have been vague as to just where my tale takes place. It takes place on a distant planet in a totally different part of the galaxy, in an area that used to be where the not-angels placed most of their time and resources. The “creature” I killed would be what you call an alien, an extra-terrestrial, just as you would be the same to him. He was one of the most famous composers of his time, in that reality. And I just happened to need his head, so I took it. The greater good demanded it, and even with that disguise I almost didn’t make it to Seether to be devoured and sent out randomly across the worlds to this place, still slowly dying from the komodo poison.

***

The strangest thing? Or maybe it is not so strange. Once, I had been one of them. I had been one of my pursuers, the almost-but-not angels. I might tell you the story if I live long enough. It involves doors. Many doors. It involves a kidnapping. It involves a dislocation so severe it still gives me vertigo. Much worse than wearing a giant green head. It involves my betrayal of them and their plans and their monumental and all-consuming anger over that one simple fact: that I could betray them, that I could want them all dead and everything they stood for removed from the worlds forever.

…And there the account ended, far short of satisfactory to Mormeck Mountain, or most others, I would imagine. I felt as if I had eavesdropped in the middle of a conversation that I only understood part of, even if I understood more than I would have a month ago. Not that this bothered me as much as it could have, because the nature of my function for Gabriel has always included snippets of context and never the full picture. I have been sampling lives from afar and then trying to fill in the gaps best I can.

So I have added the slide to my secret nest of papers and other evidence taken from the laboratory and tried to ignore the ghost frogs shadowing me as I removed any signs of having been there.

But as I return now to my surveillance of Marty, one fact makes all the difference.

Somewhere out there lived, or once had lived, a rebel angel…

Entry #12 (avatar)

There was a ringing in my ears for a long time after the explosion. I mean, in my earholes. Except. I didn’t have earholes anymore, so where could the ringing be coming from?

I didn’t have a tail.

I didn’t have feet.

I didn’t have legs.

I didn’t have a torso.

I didn’t have any internal organs.

I didn’t have any veins.

I didn’t have any arteries.

I didn’t have fatty tissue.

I didn’t have muscle.

I didn’t have tendons.

I didn’t have sinews.

I didn’t have bones.

I didn’t have eyes.

I didn’t have a snout.

I didn’t have a mouth.

I didn’t have a head.

I didn’t have a skull.

I didn’t have a brain.

I would have felt the loss of each intensely if I wasn’t too busy surviving. I was just a scrap of flesh about one centimeter long, a bit of skin and flesh from approximately five centimeters southwest of my left foreleg, having detached from my lower neck from the pressure and shot out, accompanied by its brethren, the shrapnel of a scale model of Stalingrad, rocks, dirt, and a few hundred confused and splattering earthworms and ground-burrowing creatures rapidly losing their bodily integrity.

This was possibly the best decision Scrap-me had ever made, to join the general exodus, for said neck buckled and jellied with the heat and then spray-evaporated beyond saving, along with the rest of me.

So now I was a scrap-smudge embedded in the side of a crater where a secret outpost of the Remnant had been, where once had sat a strange domed building to try to hide it all. I lay there for a long time, recovering my strength. I had my mind, my memory, but at that size I couldn’t really access any of it. All I could do was a slow sludge of an impulse: to re-imagine myself as the bulb of some strange flowering plant, something that had grown on the side of Mormeck Mountain. So Bulb-me took over from Smudge-me after awhile, and when the Russians came to fill in the giant hole the explosion had left, I let that soil feed me. And when I felt angels near—a kind of icy flow through the already frozen soil—I became even more bulb-like, and the shadow of their presence passed over and through me. Long after that, Bulb-me sent up a tendril in reaction to more than the usual tiny amount of sunlight at the surface: some form of spring had begun to arrive. My tendril muscled up between the rocks and permafrost until it found open air, and the sky. My tendril didn’t dare stick up more than about four inches above the melting snow for fear of discovery or being pissed on by dogs. But under the soil, as the tendril fed on the sun and the bulb took in the moisture in the soil, the bulb began to look more and more like a transparent sack with the curled-up embryo of a komodo inside. In the cell of my half-formed thoughts, I grew less cautious as an organism, and for the first time on an Earth, a flower from Mormeck’s mountain’s world grew as a bud from the end of the tendril, and then blossomed: iridescent green-and-blue with a shape almost like an orchid and yet disturbingly not. The flower ate flies and sometimes could lunge to devour small rodents. It couldn’t eat a curious soldier, but it could flood the air with a smell so awful anyone who came close soon staggered away, wretching, and lost all desire to return.

The nutrients entered me at an ever-increasing speed. I was still dreaming and having nightmares and living inside my head in ways that protected my mind from the trauma it had experienced. I swam in strange seas. I flew through vermillion skies. I floated I floated I floated. My consciousness spread and spread until there came a day when first one nictating membrane quivered and the other, and my brain and eyes and motor functions came fully alive again.
I was Komodo again, returned to life by patience, luck, more patience, and good hydration. I was different again from what I had been before. I had never truly been born, and it distanced me again from Mormeck Mountain, from my life as Avatar, even, oddly, from my disguise as komodo—from anything that did not fully acknowledge the unique immediacy of me.

When I was able to control this feeling that welled up so strongly, I took stock of my situation. I could sense no angels about, knew it was night-time from the intel of the flower-spy above, and my limbs felt numb from being in one position so long.

And I thought…it might be time to see what Pavlov had been up to in my absence. The thought of seeing him came with an emotion of deep affection, like seeing an old friend with whom I would take up again as if I had never left.

I uncurled and erupted through the soil and rock to the surface, lurching off to one side and then the other as my legs grew used to their function. There was a silvery whiteness all around that astonished me, gathering in the folds of shadows of slurries and declivities and burn-out, roofless buildings and ruins of walls. A great ecstasy came over me, under a Moon with a seemingly burning fury, and that moment and me restored to my former strength. I rampaged up the side of a five-story building and back down again, jumped across rooftops, and heedless of danger roared out my potency to the crisp night air.

I had a tail.

I had feet.

I had legs.

I had a torso.

I had internal organs.

I had bones.

I had eyes.

I had a snout.

I had a mouth.

I had a head.

I had a skull.

I had a brain.

I had a passenger.

Wait. What?

Yes, I had a passenger. I could feel it inside.

I stopped in mid-thrulling rush of joy, whirling impotently to confront this thing that had been restored along with me.

What are you? I asked.

Wouldn’t you like to know? It replied, with a laugh like a rusty gate.

Entry #19

Through all of my surveillance across worlds, through the stamen-delicate antennae of the luna moths, vibrate the questions. A child asking his mother at bedtime “What is an angel? Do they really live in Heaven?” Are angels real? Do they watch over us? What is a fallen angel? Priests and scientists and believer and non-believers alike. Trillions of replications and icons, the alt-Earths awash in them. Numb, dumb marble statuary devoted to angels. Millions of books. Mutterings and prayers and interrogations and conversations. “What is an angel?” If I could answer any of them, I would say: “An angel is something so alien from yourselves that ‘purpose” becomes a meaningless word.”

But what did I really know? I knew what Gabriel told me, and sometimes a few words with one of the nameless others who I knew only by their faces as they glided effortless and ghost-like through the laboratory on some esoteric secret mission. I knew only that sometimes they carried objects with them on their way from one part of the laboratory to the other. An aquarium full mice and spiders. Three candelabras with old lavender wax runneling down their oxidated curves. Ancient, pitted swords that looked like they had come from some Bronze Age. Four angels once carried effortless the oddly balanced weight of a huge figurehead from the prow of a great ship of war, the glazed gold eyes of the woman mused for the sailors’ superstitions staring fixedly ahead as if their every effort were meaningless and unimportant to her.

I knew from the discoveries in the winter city that one way kill an angel was cremation. It was reversible, but it keep them silent and on a shelf for awhile, waiting for their release…and even that did not guarantee a sane or permanent return. Dust to dust and back from dust for awhile. The essential essence of an angel would show itself over time, a cannister turning turquoise or some other shade. No one knew what the colors meant, although one scientist named Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, who lived in India on an alt-Earth, acquired several and did research. Satyamurthy went mad from whatever he discovered but still managed to self-publish the results in a slim monograph entitled The Significance of Angel Ashes: The Contamination and Reconciliation of the Swedenborg Hypothesis. I found a copy on one of the slide in the angels’ library, and this quote was liquid in my mind when Gabriel joined me there: “Angelcide it seemed was a means of penetration. a sort of litmus test exposing the molecular nature of this immediate realty, the cellular weight of this momentary spot of cohesion in the flux of space and time.”

“You spend a lot of time in here,” he told my avatar. I had “dressed up” as a version of one of the spies Marty had kissed around the back of the lighthouse: a non-descript woman of possibly North African descent dressed in a long skirt and a white blouse.

“You brought me here,” I said.

“Are you finding it useful?” As ever, there was something dead or mechanical behind his eyes, or perhaps it was merely that most of his attention was light years away. I noticed that his hands were covered in red, which dripped to the white floor, and which he ignored. Blood? Paint? Something else entirely?

“Define useful,” I replied. Gabriel did not engage in the kinds of casual conversation I had observed in my surveillance efforts.

Now his attention clicked on again, and I had the full intensity of it. The weight of that stare felt as if he were reaching through my avatar’s eyes and into me with a spike of light. There were atoms burning at the edge of it; I could smell the smoldering and knew suddenly that despite his impassive expression Gabriel was raging inside.

“Does it help with your surveillance,” Gabriel stated. “Is it illuminating. Do you think it drives you closer to understanding or does it make you think of questions.”

I did not know how to reply to this, so I said nothing, but executed a kind of non-committal shrug.

Gabriel stepped closer until I was backed up against the rocking chair and I could smell his lime-and-honeysuckle breath. Up close those eyes were green today and flecked with gold, shot through with luminous black veins. I could see things moving within them, as if even upon and within him a thousand worlds lived and breathed and went about their business unaware of him. His skin so close to mine gave off a peculiar cold heat. His arms stayed at his sides so that the blood on his hands dripped onto my shoes.

“Are you bored, Mormeck Mountain?” Gabriel asked, and the tongue within his mouth had transformed into a serpent’s tongue so that he hissed the words. “Are you prone now to…roving? And if so, is to collect evidence for us?”

He meant my exploration of so many alt-realities inhabited by my beloved Marty, but if he would not address that directly, neither would I. “It is difficult to determine yet exactly the nature of the transactions at the lighthouse,” I said in a neutral tone. “I am cross-referencing to help me learn.”

“You’re running out of time,” he said. “We’ll put you on something else soon.” We’ll put someone or something else on surveillance of Marty was the unspoken threat.

I nodded as if I understood, as if we were indeed engaged in casual conversation, and I pivoted with: “What about my avatar in the winter city? Have you heard anything?”

Gabriel took a step back, looked away for a second. “We have heard nothing yet. I am unsure we will hear anything…ever.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Focus on your surveillance efforts on the lighthouse,” he replied. “Focus on what you can do for…Marty. All sorts of random things can happen if you don’t focus.”

There was a cruelty to his smile then, the kind of smile you do not expect from a being perhaps hundreds of thousands or even millions of years old. A smile you expect to see from a child who has revealed he has done something wicked but for whatever reason even as he confesses cannot help but demonstrate he is rather proud of this wicked thing. Deep, deep in the middle of me, I moved again, as once I had been moved by the books in that library. A seismic shudder. A recognition of a kind.

Then he was gone, as if he’d never been there.

***

Once, I assisted Gabriel in the laboratory. The experiment was conducted in another of the endless white rooms furnished with white tables and transparent beakers within which bubbled and swirled liquids purple or red or green or orange, sometimes even with tiny sea creatures swimming inside of them. I never knew if these creatures were there intentionally or had somehow been swept up in the middle of a scientific sampling by chance. Relevant or irrelevant? The question bothered me.

But that day I was assisting in a particular kind of strangeness. Across a lab sink Gabriel had strung a kind of porous paper that had the feel of skin, almost as if putting thin-kneaded dough across the open face of a pie. At first the “paper” was pale white, but then Gabriel poured the purple liquid from a beaker over it. The liquid strained through but left a stain as well as the floundering of tiny creatures that resembled sharks and sea anemones and crabs and squid but were not. And out of that floundering arose a kind of smoke that formed a circular, three-dimensional, moving representation of a spiral galaxy, a fundamental darkness encroaching around the edges and illuminating it. The creatures beneath grew still and evaporated in wisps of black smoke and flame. Gabriel requested implements from me. A tiny scissors. A tiny knife. A test tube of clear fluid. Each of these things he flung into the middle of that slow-moving image of a galaxy. Each reached a certain point and winked out. Each time the galaxy changed shape a little bit. Each time, the darkness encroached further and what was left burned ever more brightly. Finally, he requested a canister of ashes from me. The metal of the canister had ossified and a brilliant stream of turquoise had frozen down the side. Gabriel pried open the lid and took a pinch of ashes, flicked them into the middle of the apparition of a galaxy. Everything winked out, leaving only the badly burned and sagging paper and a swirl of different colors in the sink’s drain.

“What did you just do?” I asked, unable to contain my curiosity any longer. “What was the darkness? What did the image mean? Why did you use the ashes? What were the sea creatures?”

“Culled and purged and maintained and contaminated,” Gabriel said. “For the greater good.” But that was all I could get out of him, and for those questions I never assisted again on such a procedure.

A few days later I was moved to surveillance.

***

After Gabriel left the library, I let my avatar melt away again into the whole of me and I continued my surveillance of Marty. I watched her all day in her lighthouse by the sea. She tended her garden while my luna moth observed; her hands had the most fascinating whorled calluses from this work and I followed the strong line of her muscular shoulders as she pulled up weeds and shoveled dirt, the trickle of sweat down the strong jutting outline of her face. She went into the town to buy groceries, the habitual bounce to her step that made it seem as if she were in a hurry but was just an eccentricity of her walk. She took a detour to the pub to visit with friends, her laughter boisterous, infectious; a ruddiness to her face that came not from the drinking but from being out in the sun, and just a pint and a scandalous joke more with the post man and after a half hour she emerged, blinking against the sudden light, and lurchingly happy. She came back and read cross-legged atop a rock by the shore for an hour, her curly hair pushed back by the wind, the pages sand-flecked and flapping at the edges where her thick hand could not hold them down. She would look up at the horizon and stare for long moments and I would wonder what she was thinking, what she thought she saw there, what was hidden, whether at times she wanted to know more of the world than just that place, the lighthouse, her friends, the pub, the garden. After, she retreated to her bedroom and I knew nothing of her actions there until she emerged an hour later. I saw her meet yet against with someone she did not know and press lips chapped from sea salt to his and then return to the top of the lighthouse and flash the signal to an empty and mindless sea that glittered with the gold reflection of the late afternoon sun.

All was as it had always been, but throughout my surveillance I was thinking of my conversation with Gabriel and of the day I had assisted him in the laboratory. I was thinking that I knew more of Marty than of Gabriel.

The sun set and Marty went back into her bedroom, no doubt to stay up reading.

Then, as the moon came up, there appeared something out of the ordinary: a swarming of komodos, invisible, muscular, up the sides of the lighthouse: a mating swarm, of a type I had seen before. While I watched, poised to have my luna moths intercede somehow if Marty came under threat, stricken to my core—feeling somehow helpless so remote, despite the resources at my command—the komodos gamboled and staggered and procreated, writhing and scuttling and intertwining in such numbers that the entire surface of the lighthouse was covered with them. I remained on alert for a long time, stricken even by just the thought that Marty might hear something and come outside and become the object of their attention…but then they grew bored and moved on, winking out of sight instantaneously, to appear in some other place, some other alt-Earth not under my surveillance.

So much of what I see is invisible to the people who I surveil. So much of the world is hidden from them, I do not know if it is a blessing or a curse. But I did not take the komodos as coincidence. I did not see my talk with Gabriel earlier in the day as independent from their having been somehow driven or suggested toward the lighthouse.

By the time my night of surveillance had ended, I knew—and know now—that despite Gabriel’s warning, despite the power he possesses, I am going to disobey him, and keep disobeying him…and that some day I may find some essence myself poured out of a beaker into a skein of stars and stardust and know more about the universe than I ever wished to know even as I evaporate into a spark of flame and smoke.

Entry #13 (avatar)

What are you? I had asked.

Wouldn’t you like to know? It had replied, with a laugh like a rusty gate.

I had recovered my senses enough to recognize that I had a passenger: something embedded in Smudge-me as I had myself been embedded in the wall of the explosion crater. It was a remnant, a trace, really, of a Remnant. A fleck of nano-metal that could only have been seen under a microscope. But I sensed it now. It had shifted within my body to a position right below the bellybutton that the tendril fed. I had enough of my senses back to analyze it, and then to recognize it. My first instinct was to eject it from my body, but I had been alone a very long time, with only my slow and incomprehensible thoughts…and sometimes, nightmares.

I sent an emissary to the Shrapnel Fleck, as I called it. The emissary, the avatar of my avatar, told Fleck that it would be flushed from my body if it did not respond to interrogation. After a long silence, and then with a sound a bit like a rusty door, Fleck responded that it understood, and eventually discarded its belligerence. It had to get along with me or die.

Are you aware? [my emissary asked]
Every nano-particle in a Remnant’s body is encoded with its consciousness.

Are you self-replicating?
No.

Do you have the capability for self-destruction?
I would have done so already if I had that capability.

That doesn’t answer my question.
No, I do not.

Do not what?
Have the capability to self-destruct.

Now put it all together in one sentence.
I do not have the capability to self-destruct.

Who were you originally, back on your home planet?
I was a female scientist, a biologist entrusted with doing intel on the angels after our initial encounter with them.

Are you aware of any other survivors?
I would sense them if there were.

That doesn’t answer the question.
There are no other survivors.

Are there other enclaves of the Remnant on this alt-Earth?
No.

Do you have any method of reaching the Remnant on other Earths?
No.

Do you know of any portals of any kind with the capacity for transport away from this alt-Earth? They must not be angel-maintained.
Yes.

Where?
When.

What?
When.

When what?
The next non-Remnant portal according to our calculations opens in approximately 100 years. It is a rogue Seether portal and you will need to negotiate with it to obtain self-passage. [It transmitted coordinates to my emissary that corresponded to a location in the Far East, in a valley below Siberia, several miles above the border with China.]

You will remain inside of my body as my advisor. I will call you Fleck. In return, I will help you rebuild. Is this acceptable?
Yes.

Fleck, like me, had been badly traumatized by the explosion, and so I left her alone for awhile. I also had to process the information that I was going to have to survive a century just to get back to Mormeck Mountain.

It was time to go visit my friend Pavlov.

Entry #20

I drank a book by a man named Radoslav A. Tsanoff while in the angels’ library last time. It was called The Nature of Evil, and in it Tsanoff related the philosophy of a German named Julius Bahnsen, who believed that reality was an expression of a single, unchanging force that expressed energy, expressed movement, through unrelenting slaughter throughout the universe with no other purpose. I had this book much on my mind as I finally set out to talk to Marty at the Grim Lighthouse.

This Grim Lighthouse existed in a temporal and dimensional abnormality. It was unstable, and it drew other realities into it so that ghosts truly roamed its winding stairs, its rooms, the grounds around it. And due to the nature of the abnormality, this Grim Lighthouse drew to it like a beacon meant for the purpose every evil, wretched, terrible act. To approach it was to approach a montage of horrors. And yet, and yet, it represented my best chance to talk to Marty, in a manifestation that walked amongst horrible marvels each and every day. And yet it was in a way one of the last lighthouses in that world.

I could not send an avatar to that place without alerting Gabriel and the other angels because I would have had to engage the bear Seether. Instead, I slowly increased the number of luna moth spies around the Grim Lighthouse, using their own self-replicating ability. Then I had the luna moths settle en masse upon a skeleton lying on a bed of loam and moss near the edge of Marty’s property and inhabit it. The skeleton had belonged to a man in that reality who had died of radiation sickness and of a worldwide pandemic. It was difficult to know which had taken his last breath from him, or even to recognize what scavengers had stripped the flesh from his bones. I knew only that his rictus, animated by my moths, would not be the strangest thing that this Marty had seen, that Mormeck Mountain in this form might make a better connection with her than a single moth.

And so I took up the skeleton through my moths, flooding the chest cavity, surrounding the legs, pouring into the skull, a single moth inhabiting each eye socket. In a soft flurry of wings, against the perpetual yellow-orange-black light of late afternoon, I dressed the man’s bones as if my moths were a shivery, shifting suit and this were some perverse version of a fancy date, like the ones I had spied upon across other realities. Slowly, the impossibly strong legs of my moths settled into his femurs, his other bones, and each moth delicately guided by my instructions, Mormeck Mothman rose from his bed of loam and walked, at first stiffly and then with more fluidity across that twisted landscape toward the lighthouse.

As I have said, the light on that alt-Earth was always the reflection of late afternoon, just before dusk, in that moment when it seems like a golden orange eye is squinting across the horizon. The sun here acted in preternatural ways—or, rather, the planet caused the sun to seem deranged, but this was just in the eye of the beholder. Terrible things had happened to this Earth. Half the oceans were filled with plastics and every pollutant imaginable had been loosed against nature. Wars for precious resources had left whole countries nothing but craters of death and suffering from nuclear bombs and warheads. Disease had spread, especially mutated viruses, and animal life had changed in drastic ways in a short amount of time. Perhaps two million people now populated a world that had once held eight billion. And into the burgeoning of this senseless slaughter and decay had crept the abnormalities that manifested for reasons mysterious even to the angels in various places around the globe…and particularly around the Grim Lighthouse…

There were bodies on the grounds approaching the lighthouse, but they did not exist always or even ever on this alt-Earth. As visceral as their wounds, as bright the red of their blood, as loud the sound of their moans, as abrupt and useless the violence they visited upon one another…they existed somewhere else, and it was only some hidden pull, like a celestial riptide, that drew them to manifest in this place, while beyond them the dark tower of the lighthouse rose shrouded in shadow, from the windows dotting the sides sudden flares of an almost infernal fire erupting only to subside. Every manner, too, of ghostly creature wraithed through the bushes and trees, dug with massive snouts and muzzles in the tangled dark remains of Marty’s garden. Among huge misshapen vines that lay like odd disfigured arms these beasts some with three or four bloodshot eyes and fangs like tusks rooted out pale underground animals that looked disturbingly human and ripped out their throats and flung them and worried them and did much worse as they screamed. The forms that passed across the sky, that formed purple-black bruised shadows as they not so much flew as scuttled across the sky did not bear scrutiny.

Komodos did not visit this place—it did not fit their philosophy of a joyous chaos; they would have hated Bahnsen’s view of life. Angels did not visit this place anymore, either. They had come, according to the records, only to observe the worst of the beginning of the end, silently and invisibly…from hilltops and from buildings, gathering like flocks of scavengers as the panic spread and slaughter by germ and by radiation and by panic and by every means possible, that the death throes of this world might be witnessed. They did nothing but watch.

…And through this now haunted tableau now strode Mormeck Mothman as if none of them had ever existed, even though he knew better. Because there was nothing I could do for them, nothing at all. I was there to talk to Marty—and I knew if I stopped, if I absorbed what I saw, I would be lost. Ground Zero for the temporal abnormality was the lighthouse itself. What awaited me inside would make all of this look like the most benign of carnival celebrations.

I found her at the door to the lighthouse, about to go inside. She felt my presence at her back and she turned to look at me. She did not seem surprised by what she saw, but why should she? I was the least of her worries by then. Marty the Lighthouse Keeper in this world was dying. I could see it in the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, permanently tightened by the pain and stress. I could smell it on her breath through the luna moths’ sensors. She was stooped over as if her mortality were a weight upon her back. And yet in her gaze I saw the same patience and the same compassion and a kind of resignation that wasn’t defeat.
“You’re here,” she said, and for one strange, exhilarating moment I thought she knew who I was. “You’re physically here. You’re not a…ghost.”

“No,” I said. “I am not a ghost.” Now that I was there, facing her, I found my words were failing me. I couldn’t say what I wanted to say and feared anything I said would drive her away.

She looked away for a second, then back at me as if to see if I would vanish in between her glances.

“Who are you?” she asked. Her voice was raspier than on other alt-Earths. I didn’t know if it was a symptom of her condition.

“I am an alien life form from a planet very far away,” I said. “I work for beings you might call angels.”

A wry, bitter smile. “I’m hallucinating. I’m farther gone than I thought.”

“You could humor a hallucination. I’ve just come to talk for awhile.”

“Are you here to save me?”

“No.”

“Good. I can’t be saved. Let’s be clear about that.” She thought for a moment, then said, “Do you want to come up into the lighthouse?”

“Not yet.”

“You know what’s in there, then…but it’s not real.”

“It’s real somewhere.”

Her eyebrows rose. “I know where we can go.”

***

On this Earth Marty had stumbled into being a lighthouse keeper. Here, she was not a spy transmitting information through her kisses. Here, she had become a marine biologist committed to saving species as the environment world-wide became more and more degraded. As that degradation had fed civil unrest and then anarchy, her government-funded position had dissolved and with the old lighthouse keeper dead she had taken over. But she was dying—of low-grade radiation sickness that had combined with pollutants on this alt-Earth and the toxins entering the world from the temporal dislocation. The confluence of these elements had caused inoperable cancers in her body, some of them wormholing into other dimensions. If the roving lawlessness or madness didn’t claim her first, she had two or three years left—roughly the same time her water and food supplies in the lighthouse would run out. Because of the temporal instability, I couldn’t save her, and in the bifurcating realities that would be created by trying, or going farther back along the timeline, she would still die of various causes within the next five years. Some versions of reality are only so amenable to treaties with “free will.” And in any event, this world was dying. Across all timelines, within a decade, there would be no humans left alive on Earth. In fact, almost no mammals of any kind.

***

So she took me to where she felt most at home. She took me down to the rocky shore beneath the lighthouse, in the strange clarity of the murk, a luminous twilight having settled over the world—and shooting through that twilight the pure, burning fire of the Grim Lighthouse’s beacon, setting the edges of waves ablaze and giving strange glimpses of the ridge-stippled backs of “real” behemoths breaching and thrashing far out at sea. On the curling path edged with wind-stunted bushes, we passed through the ethereal carcasses of huge sea beasts with tentacles and fins and bloated bellies from which peeked other creatures that stared at us with large, glowing eyes and followed our progress with a kind of dual hunger and helplessness.

The sand made my progress difficult, but Marty was surprisingly nimble and light of foot, and her sandals in one hand, staring out over the water, seemed rejuvenated by the mere glimpse of the sea. She took me down to the tidal pools amongst the outcroppings of black rock, ignoring the shambling human wreckage that paced, that ran, back and forth across the beach, the unspeakable acts that were taking place in the interstices between spaces, between atoms. It was true that the screams and the sickening sounds of flesh giving way tended to fade over time, mere repetition being enough to put a distance between those acts and one’s reaction to them. Still, for a moment it made me want to extinguish every alt-Earth just to forever escape from these cruelties.

She showed me what lived in the tidal pools now: radiation-eating jellyfish, carcinogen-devouring sea anemones. Translucent squid that pulsed green-and-blue internally with pieces of plastic, absorbed but, incredibly, being broken down in ways human scientists might have thought impossible. The sounds of the surf in the background were a hissing whisper, a reminder that some things still functioned on this Earth. The smell of toxins, of oil, was another kind of reminder.
The Moon had begun to rise in the sky. There was a large black spot on it where once had been an enormous lunar colony. They’d gotten cut off from Earth when the chaos started and toward the end, in one of those crippling examples of the irrational, fought amongst themselves, eventually causing a nuclear chain reaction that destroyed the entire colony.

“The world doesn’t want us, hallucination,” she said. “The world doesn’t need us. The world is already working on repairing itself.”

“My name is Mormeck,” told her. “I’m not a hallucination.”

“Mormeck the Hallucination,” she mused in a weary voice. “At least you’re more visually interesting than the rest.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Yes, I know. You’re from a distant planet. You work for angels. You think these ghosts, these horrible manifestations, are real.”

I would have to show her. A squadron of luna moths peeled away from the skeleton I had chosen and settled on her hands, pricked her fingers with their needles. She gasped, pulled away, but in addition to the tactile reassurance of my existence they had deposited a wealth of encoded information that was traveling through her bloodstream up into her brain, where I could see it begin to explode like fireworks. Her face lit up and her gaze became distant and her body convulsed, once, twice, and as the luna moths returned to me I went to her and I held her as best I could, crushing moth wings, so she wouldn’t fall against the rocks and hurt herself. Her eyes were hazel. They were deep. I could feel myself falling…and then she returned to herself. Was herself. Again. Except with worlds and galaxies behind her stare. With the angels there, in all of their terrible ambiguity. And me, most of me. Not the part of me that had spied on the other Marty’s. Not yet.

She sat up, a look of terrible concentration on her face. “You’re real…I think you might be real.”

“There are many, many alternate Earths, Marty. What you’re experiencing here is the detritus and horror not just of your own world’s dying, but the combined psychic-temporal terror and cruelty of all of the rest superimposed on this reality.”

“But why?”

“Not even the angels know. There are rips and gaps and confusions between realities sometimes—and like will seek out like, given the right conditions. The universes were not created by someone who was always sane in the way you might recognize ‘sane’.” Did I believe even this gobbet of rationalization? I wasn’t sure.

A hint of pain mixed with interest clouded her features and she looked away, out over the sea and the reckless, constantly moving sweep of the Grim Lighthouse’s light across the waves, the faintly flickering roar of men and women in deadly battle distant across the expanse of beach. “This is all real somewhere, like you said. So that means that this pathetic excuse for a planet that we’ve fucked up so royally isn’t our only chance.”

“There are millions of Earths, yes, and on some of those other threads, human beings make much better decisions.” I didn’t want to have to tell Marty that, sooner or later, on about eighty percent of alt-Earths, humans more or less committed species suicide. In those far-distant times ahead of us new forms of life would arise to replace them, but beyond a certain point even the angels couldn’t see…or predict.

Marty let out a huge, shuddering sigh, and it took a moment for me to realize that it was a sigh of relief, and that the sudden brightness of her eyes meant she was quietly crying.

“Maybe I can save you,” I said, unable to stop myself from saying it. I hadn’t come here to save her. I couldn’t save her. But I said it.

The tears turned to a flash of anger. “For what? Why? Can you bring back everyone I love who has died? Any of them? I told you, this world doesn’t need us. It’s better off without us.” Turning on me then with a kind of rage: “Here at least I will break down into my cells, my atoms, and return to the Earth. At least I’ll be useful for something, Hallucination.” Hallucination. So we were back to that. Perhaps I deserved it.

I began to reply and she cut me off. “Why are you showing me this? Why? And why are you here?”

Any organism can die, even a mountain. For a person it might be a spore in the eye that burrows into the brain, or a paper cut that creates an opening for more serious infection. For a mountain it might be love unreturned. Love that the recipient, even the recipient’s doppelganger, perceives as repugnant or wrong.
But I knew why I had come to the Grim Lighthouse.

So I told her.

Entry #14 (Avatar)

Warily, I returned to Pavlov’s House—the fortified building controlled by Sergeant Yakov Fedotovich Pavlov of the Trotsky-Soviet army. I was much different, of course, even though the avatar that manifested after I ghosted my way stealthily through the defenses, through a door, and then scuttled tiny along the walls of corridors to his office was the same Pavlov had always seen. More of Mormeck Mountain had been flensed away. Less of the giant komodo I came to him as was komodo-ish. And I had a speck of an alien civilization hidden in my body.

As I had avoided pitched battles between German and Soviet tanks in already blasted streets, buildings gutted, smoldering hulks, I had had—in the crisp, cold air, with the blue of the sky a kind of bright smile commenting on the limits of human absurdity—a sort-of epiphany: that I was finally becoming myself, and that I did not yet know what that might mean. I still had my mission, which was now to find my way back to Mormeck Mountain, but at the frontiers of my mind, I could sense outliers of doubt, of lack of purpose, and nothing to replace it.

But whatever it meant, I knew I had to get out of the city, and while I could do that blind, and could flee to any corner of the world, disregarding the intel from the Speck of the Remnant in my body, I preferred to travel to the Far East. A vastness of time and landscape awaited me before my self-rescue, but somehow I needed that. A century was more than enough time to find myself.

Pavlov didn’t seem surprised to see me even though several months had passed, but, then, I had never seen him express surprise over anything. He had perfected the art of receiving information with a stoicism that, while learned, gave him the upper hand in most situations.

But I was surprised to see that standing beside him were Uri and Aleksei, the two soldiers I had saved from the threat of the Remnant outside of their strange domed building. Both of them looked astonished to see their reptilian benefactor again, and not in a good way. They reached for their weapons, but Pavlov barked an order form them to stand down. They did so almost with relief, as if their action had been reflexive and they had no real stomach for the task.

“Body guards?” I asked.

“I am their body guards,” Pavlov said, “after what they saw.”

“The impossible is real?”

“And maybe that, too,” Pavlov said. His face seemed more worn but less wrinkled, as if he had been worn smooth like a stone by the extremity of his situation. His hands showed evidence of thwarted frostbite. He had lost some hair and some had turned gray. From under the table he sat at, I could see his boots were in tatters, bound in cloth. I knew from the history I had seen that the past two months had been the worst of the war for Pavlov’s unit. He could have used a huge, invisible komodo during those dark days. But I had not been there. Though I owed him nothing, really, an odd guilt twisted inside of me.

“It’s good to see you.” And it was. A familiar face, someone I instinctually trusted even though I shouldn’t have trusted anyone.

“It’s an unexpected pleasure,” Pavlov said, with what might have been irony. Uri and Aleksei had unfrozen from their positions against the far wall and Pavlov motioned to them. “Go get tea.” Neither of them moved.

“Tea?”

Pavlov gave a weary smile. “All my vodka goes to the men, along with the local rotgut they make and put in used milk bottles. Now!” And in the strain in his voice ordering his men I saw further evidence of his fatigue.

Neither soldier seemed happy to have to edge by me and out the door, but they did it rather than face Pavlov. I could hear them running down the hall.

“Are they bringing more soldiers?” I asked.

Pavlov grinned. “No. Just tea,” he said with disappointment, either feigned or real. “Only tea. But I am inappropriately curious: what happened to you?”

I thought about answering him. It was a simple question, but one with a complicated answer. What would be gained by giving Pavlov more of a glimpse into the truth of other worlds? Would it assuage his curiosity or simply enflame it? Would it leave him with the nagging sense he had missed something, for as long as he lived?

“I ran into…complications. I almost died. But nothing that happened has any bearing on your situation.”

Pavlov nodded, but said, “Except that you are here again.” His head held at an angle, as if spurring me on: “Complications, and…?”

“As a result, I need to leave the city. I need to head to the Far East. I need to find sanctuary there for a long, long time.”

Uri and Aleksei came back nervously with the tea then, although they seemed to have regained some semblance of control. They shut the door quickly behind them, and Pavlov took over the ritual of preparing the tea, setting out the cups on the table cloth. His hands shook a little bit. I knew he survived this war, I knew he lived a long life after, but it still bothered me to see that.

“I know some people in the Far East,” Pavlov said after a pause. “My family isn’t from there, but friends of the family are. More specifically, I know of a place that you can stay and no one should bother you…so long as you…” He looked me up and down. “You are rather distinctive.”

“I won’t travel in this form.”

“Of course you won’t.” But it was clear from the unexpected scintilla of surprise in his voice that it had not occurred to him that I might manifest as anything as other than a small or large komodo.

He wrote an address on a piece of paper. “The owner of this cottage is missing, presumed dead…It is a lawless place. The Chinese and the Japanese do not respect the border. You may find yourself in another war zone.” Then he stopped writing, looked up at me, scribbled more words. “And this is a postal box where you can reach me now…or after the war.”

I could see it in his eyes: Pavlov wouldn’t risk giving me his home address, couldn’t know I already had it from the files—wife, three children, Moscow—but he was willing to risk further contact.

“Thank you, Pavlov.”

I’m not sure I can explain how that gesture made me feel. It meant something to me, something that took me yet further away from Mormeck Mountain. I had a sudden image of a graying, elderly komodo—monstrous—clothed in a sweater sitting in a rocking chair in a far-distant cottage and penning a letter to his old comrade from the war. Maybe one day coming to visit, catching up their separate lives.

Absurd. Impossible. Or was it?

As I took the piece of paper as gently as I could from Pavlov, my massive claws clicking together, I felt a welling up of affection I had not expected, mixed with an utterly devastating sadness. In this forsaken place, sent here by demons disguised as angels.

Pavlov was the closest thing I had ever had to a friend. And I was leaving him now. For his own safety as for mine.

“In return, there is one thing I would like you to do for me on your…on your way out of town,” Pavlov said.

“Anything, Pavlov,” I said.

I could hear the Scrap inside me vibrating minutely with laughter, and that struck me as sinister…

Entry #21 (Mountain)

“Crabapple—your arms are like adroit armadillos scintillating in mists of microscopic levitating rabid monkeys. Your eyes are tidal pools filled with carnivorous cancerous aquatic feline distemper robots that twitch like brine shrimp in a hot pot. Your toes are like cherry tomatoes radiating out across all the lands and squashing what they please. Love, Dupp Thanager.”

Any organism can die, even a mountain. For a person it might be a spore in the eye that burrows into the brain, or a paper cut that creates an opening for more serious infection. For a mountain it might be love unreturned. Love that the recipient, even the recipient’s doppelganger, perceives as repugnant or wrong.

Dear Journal: I found the love letter from Dupp to Crabapple in the angels’ library. I don’t think it’s very good, but it’s the first one I chanced upon. There were more. I must have drunk in hundreds of them. I don’t know why the first one stuck with me. It’s awful to this mountain, but then I don’t have much experience with love letters.

The ghost frogs surround this avatar now, as I write in this hidden place, every now and again stealing a glance up at the vast expanse of…me. The white glow of them is tinged with lavender-and-emerald, fading in the dusk against the darker green of vines and the brown of tree bark. They are an odd comfort in their bobbing incomprehensibility, like some sign of a greater power or god, beyond the influence of angels or of intelligent mountains. They’re also much bigger and yet less numerous, which has led me to the odd thought that they are growing by absorbing their brethren. Maybe one day there will be just one, and it will be as big as me. They stare at me as if waiting for me to do something. But I’ve already done something and I’m not sure it’s gotten me anywhere.

Marty on the shore with the Grim Lighthouse looming over us, me in my moth-man suit she in her cartigan, but still shivering a bit: “The angels came toward the end—because this is the end, isn’t it? And they did nothing. They just watched in an unnerving way They watched people die and sometimes they seemed to take notes. Then they left. Who are you, really?”

Marty’s questions were like that. I was already off-balance, but her questions came sudden and brisk and tunneled in at me sideways. It took a moment to respond.

“An intelligent mountain, if you want me to be precise. An enormous creature. I might look like a monster to you.”

A thin smile in the shadows. “That might work both ways. Do I look monstrous to you?”

I shook my head, dislodging a few luna moths. “No. You don’t.” What can a mountain want from a human woman? What could a mountain possibly expect in return?

She looked out at the roiling waves. “Well, you’re not a monster to me. You’re oddly comforting.”

Soaring rush of some unfamiliar emotion. “I’m glad.”

But the terrible thing? I was a monster, using her to find the key to my Marty. I was worse than any angel, but I couldn’t stop. She had given me permission not to stop.

“Why are you here, Mormeck?”

“I am…obsessed with you…the you in another reality, one where there is no Grim Lighthouse, no dying earth. There’s a real sun there and a moon that isn’t scarred.”

“Then why aren’t you with that Marty,” but even as she said it I could see she had guessed. Still, I had to say it.

“I’m afraid to. I’m afraid she won’t understand. That she’ll be scared or angry or…”

Marty laughed out loud. “You’ve come here to practice on me. You’ve come to this godforsaken place because you’re shy. Oh, that’s rich.” She was almost doubled-over for a second.

“If I’m honest, this…attachment…probably isn’t real,” I said. “I’ve thought about it, and it’s probably because I’m lonely and she is the only person I really know…you’re the only person I really know.”

Marty sobered, and an expression I still can’t quite identify spread across her face. Some combination of melancholy and affection and anger. “There are worse reasons. Worse things.”

Maybe so. But I knew this at least: an irrational part of me believed I was talking to my Marty. Somehow. Some way. “Crabapple—your arms are like adroit armadillos scintillating in mists of microscopic levitating rabid monkeys.” What is love but a comical and criminal derangement?

Marty stood up. “I can’t help you with your Marty,” she said. “I’m a different Marty. We’re all different. You should know that already. But I want to show you something, in the Grim Lighthouse.”

“I don’t want to go,” I said.

“I think you owe it to me,” she said, and her glance was so penetrating and serious that I shut up and I went with her.

***

…I’m sitting here amongst the ghost frogs trying to get all of this down, and suddenly I don’t want any of this. I don’t want to be a mountain. I don’t want to be in love with Marty. I don’t want to talk to Gabriel again. I want to be my lost avatar, somewhere out there on an alt-Earth. I want to become a stranger even to myself and disappear into the perspective of distance: that wavering figure on the horizon, that dot moving up the hillside that never resolves into anything, that odd smudge on the binoculars that just turns out to be a bit of dirt, easily wiped off.

I’m not sure I want to tell you or anyone about the Grim Lighthouse. Somehow once I get it all down, I will have to do something about it. Somehow if it’s bottled up in my brain, it isn’t real. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean anything. “Your eyes are tidal pools filled with carnivorous cancerous aquatic feline distemper robots that twitch like brine shrimp in a hot pot.” (And yet, if I don’t write it down, I’m locked in a cell with It for the rest of my life.)

Why is it that despite being so large every new thing I discover makes me feel smaller and smaller?

Entry #15 (Avatar)

Such a thin line Pavlov showed me, a kind of fatal smile, that line of the Volga River with the winter city hunched up against it, and against that the pressure of the German assault.

What did Pavlov want me to do for him on my way into exile in the Far East? He wanted me to spoil a general’s breakfast. Specifically, General Alexander Edler von Daniels, leader of infantry, just that week placed in charge also of General Hermann Hoth’s much-depleted panzer army. A divergence in this reality from the norm. It was von Daniels’ infantry that had most pressed Pavlov in his not-so-luxurious fortified house, and “now the man will be bringing some additional ferocity to bear.”

So I stole from Pavlov’s house into the dull gray almost-daylight, tiny and reptilian, and found my way to the Other Side, there to adhere to a soldier’s dirty pack and then to the diesel-stinking metal carapace of a tank and then from there to the side of a smoldering building, skittering my way to a certain courtyard full of dead plants and cracked tiles, through to the private breakfast room of General Alexander Edler von Daniels. (It took much longer than my description, but I am tired of delivering wartime travelogues.)

Pavlov’s intelligence had not been faulty. Not only did the General eat alone, with guards stationed outside the room, but the extent and detail of the food staggered me—flowing as it did down the length of a long, dark-wood table. The General sat on one end of the cornucopia to receive it, as if the medals on his uniform were for excellence in growing crops and taking care of livestock. Hams and plates of eggs. Herring. Caviar. Sausage. What looked like some form of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Piles of strawberries. Chicken. Fried and poached eggs. Fresh mushrooms. Delicate pastries. The savory smell of it made all of my komodo senses quiver. If he ate all of this then clearly he was preternatural in some way. But I thought rather that he must give the leavings to his staff…while outside his infantry survived on half-rations and the city’s populace ate their shoes. Was it flown in on the few surviving supply planes, or somehow ransacked from the countryside?

Regardless, I had no patience for it, and I expanded to my full size, came at him from across the table to swat the gun from his hand as he cursed, and broke his wrist in the process. Then, as he watched, I gobbled up as much as I could in a few bites, bones and all.

Strange, how he sat there petrified, almost as if I had turned him to stone, once I’d taken his gun away. He didn’t even attend to his wrist, just let it dangle loosely on his thigh. His eyes never left me, but it was as he was trapped within a prison of his own flesh.

I leaned down until my open jaws were just inches from the General’s face. “Sergeant Pavlov, from Pavlov’s House, says hello. He says that while you are our guest in the Soviet Union you should eat what the people eat. Nothing more and nothing less. That you should behave in a much more friendly fashion. And if you don’t, he will send me to visit you every morning and every night until you do…”

Nothing. No reaction at all.

Well, then. It would stick or it wouldn’t. Either way, my belly was full and my obligation to Pavlov fulfilled. I shrunk and made myself invisible, and even that didn’t register with the General. I began to wonder whether if I returned that night he would still be staring off into space.

“He will heed the warning for awhile,” Pavlov had told me. “And then it will fade as if it was all a dream and he will forget or he will rationalize as we all do. And then one day, if he is still alive, he will resume eating his ridiculous breakfast, and if we are still at war in this city he will lose his fear of me and he will press me even harder. And perhaps after the war, if he is still alive, while eating some other ridiculous breakfast he will tell his grandchildren a silly story about a giant talking reptile…and you will become a completely different kind of monster.”

“Is that what will happen between us, Pavlov?” I had asked.

A wide smile had animated his face. “Yes, it is true. This may happen between us. I will wake up one morning with a shriek and I will ask myself ‘Why did you ever talk to that impossible lizard. That is the first, the very first, sign of insanity. You must never talk to that lizard again. You must not respond to any guarded letter he might send you. If he sends you a postcard pretend it came from your aunt near the Caspian Sea instead.’”

Would I ever send him a postcard from the Far East? I didn’t know. Part of me understood he would be better off never hearing from me again. Part of me as I left the General’s quarters wondered why Pavlov hadn’t asked me to kill the General, but another part knew exactly why.

On my way out of Stalingrad, against a horizon cut through with spirals of black smoke and the whine of aircraft and mortar fire, I saw an angel. I was a tiny, invisible komodo glued to the side of yet another rumbling Soviet tank belching its way East. The angel stood atop a building torn apart over time by artillery shells until now the roof was gone and the supporting wall of the top floor formed a gaping U. He stood in the embrace of the U like pale statuary or a sentry. But the angel didn’t fool me. Its features were too predatory, even from that distance, its gaze too telescopic. Ever vigilant, it was looking for something—perhaps even me.

When we were several kilometers away, bumping up and down on a dirty, rutted road with stripped trees to either side, I realized there were worse things than angels. For it was then that I discovered I had not just a Remnant inside of me, but a demon, too.

Hiding there like the thin, sour-tasting inner lining of a walnut.

When we were several kilometers away, bumping up and down on a dirty, rutted road with stripped trees to either side, I realized that I’d misjudged the Remnant inside of me.

Cowering there supposedly frail. Bitter as the thin, sour-tasting inner lining of a walnut.

Entry #22 (Mountain)

They’ve taken her away from me. They’ve taken her away from me. They’ve taken her away from me. They’ve taken me away from me.

Gabriel came down like a colossus in flames—smashing through the roof of the library where my avatar sat reading love poems, his wings ablaze and the look upon his face hideous. My avatar was flung headlong into a corner, and I experienced a moment of disorientation throughout my Mountain self.

He stood there unable to speak for a moment, teetering and smoldering in his own anger with his head bent down to stare at me. He was enormous, his body taut and muscular, so that with his white robes he looked as if made out of chiseled marble. A burnt hellish scent cut through the air and the aftershock vibration of his presence was like a wave.

Then my link to my surveillance moths cut off. Then my links to visuals and other sense collectors beyond my mountain self. Then there was just me and my link to my avatar. I could see nothing else, hear nothing else, be nowhere else. My avatar and my self might as well have been the same, and with that realization came the irrational fear that if my library avatar died in this moment, I died too.

Standing over my avatar, Gabriel spoke, words sharp and straight and poison-laced. “You spoke to a surveillance subject. You spoke to her across multiple realities. YOU SPOKE TO HER IN A PLACE OF TEMPORAL DYSFUNCTION. YOU SPOKE TO HER AND LIED TO US.” The marble of his face seemed to wrench apart and then come back together.

The lack of my normal senses had traumatized me. I could not formulate a response for a moment. I fought against a sense that I should Rise Up, that my mountain-self should dislodge the angels from my summit, that I should destroy it all. But I could see nothing. I knew, too, that retaliation would be brutal and swift.

“I did nothing that betrayed you,” I said. “I did break the rules, but it did not hurt anything.”

Gabriel reached down and picked me up by the shoulders, flung me across the room. I had dulled my nerve receptors, but there was still a thickness to the crack-and-thud that brought a ghost sensation of blood and nausea with it. I focused very carefully on his approaching figure through the fuzziness of my vision.

Gabriel leaned down and whispered in my ear. Somehow the whisper was worse. It felt like a serpent sliding into my head under the skin and curling around my skull, looking for a way into my brain. What he said was worst of all. “We gave you speech, mountain. We gave you the kind of intelligence that is considered human. We gave you those things so that you could help us. If you met others of your kind, they would not recognize you. They would cast you out. We are all you have, we are your family.”

My world closed down even further, to contemplation of the annihilation of what he had just said, the unmaking. A scream rose from my flanks that sent the ghost frogs hurtling away or imploding and the scream up up up through the core of me and into my avatar. I punched myself in the face. I punched myself. I looked for something sharp to jab into my eyes. Because I knew he was telling me the truth. Because of what he had taken away.

“Enough!” Gabriel raised his hand. My scream cut off. A dull, deep, dark sense of calm swept over me. He stood before me now his normal height, his clothes impeccable, the hole in the library’s ceiling gone. My avatar stood, and I was now undamaged I could tell. But: inside, beneath the calm, chaos. Who am I? Who am I? What am I? Across the vast empty stretches of space that I had once imagined were from time to time traveled by the juveniles of my kind I saw only the seed pods of something alien and distant from me, grotesque. Except to them I would be grotesque.

Gabriel smiled, as if nothing at all of consequence had happened. Only the twitch and curl of his wing-tips remained as evidence of upset. “We are reassigning you. We think you will find your new assignment more pleasant than the last. Please: continue with your reading.”

He walked out through the library door as if he was a flesh-and-blood man. When he was gone, I had my sensors back, and despite the trauma I breathed through every mountain pore of me a deep draught of information, filling myself with a sad relief.

I checked my surveillance links. One link left. One single, solitary link, to a world with no Marty ever in it, and the lack of the rest a void in the core of me. That one reality I had surveilled once before: a a vast civilization pushed south from the Arctic, sending ahead their floating ghost-whale spirit weapons. These floating ghost-whales glided across the surface of the world and anyone they touched, anyone who came within the influence of their wallowing bodies, faded into the past of another, random reality—ceased to exist in the present. But this Earth also existed in a kind of temporal hiccup where everything kept happening over and over again. The spirit-whale advance would reach a certain point, re-set, and begin again—so many times that now the commanders of the northern armies headed south, and their civilian leaders, knew like an echo of an echo in their brains what was happening.

Like Marty now would be to me. I thought the Marty I had met was the reflection, the doppelganger, the avatar. But for me, I now realize, she was the only one I would ever know. The Marty of the Grim Lighthouse.

The last thing she did for me before I left her was to show me the Grim Lighthouse, and I am beginning to think that what I learned there was the greatest gift anyone could give me, even greater than the savage gifts Gabriel has given me. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, Marty said, a woman who was slowly dying and who lived on a dead Earth. “Don’t be afraid.” As she led me into that charnal house, that abbatoir for the senses. “Nothing can hurt you here,” she said, even as I could tell it hurt her. “Nothing here is real,” she said, even though I had given her the knowledge that it was real, somewhere. Beyond, a poisonous sea radiant with the knowledge of its own disease, and yet that not the worst of it.

“Promise me you’ll come back,” she said, and I’d promised.

But they’ve taken her from me. They’ve hidden her from me, and maybe worse, and in their hubris they think that this will be all right, that this will be okay. That you can do this and come away unscathed. The angels made me human, Gabriel says. Well, then, if I’m to be human and utterly alone, perhaps you’ll see soon enough the worst a human wronged can wreak—I have the Grim Lighthouse to guide me.

I’ll find a way to tear them down, Marty. I’ll tear them all down.

Entry #16 (Avatar)

Did you never wonder why the angels would commit genocide against the Remnant across all possible worlds? Did it never cross your mind? said the thing hiding inside the scrap of Remnant hiding inside of me. Never in the history of shrapnel had such a tiny wound caused such profound complications.

the thing hiding inside the scrap of Remnant hiding inside of me would say soon enough, if not just yet.

But I hadn’t wondered. I had taken the angels’ actions as evidence of their arbitrariness, their particularly disengaged form of ethereal evil, as I was coming to see it. I hadn’t known that an entity that had shot into my body riding a tiny piece of metal would come along to tell me my assumption was wrong. I hadn’t thought that I had anything other than a bit of Remnant inside me. But now it became clear that something had come along with the Remnant.

I hadn’t thought that I had anything other than a bit of poor oppressed Remnant inside me. But now it became clear that either something had come along with the Remnant or I had misunderstood something fundamental about the Remnant.

Obvious because a taste like the sour inner lining of a walnut shell permeated my entire being as I stuck like a limpet to that tank headed East—and something surged out from the tiny Remnant fortress inside of me and attacked my brain.

For a millisecond I froze. In another millisecond I had morphed back into a full-sized komodo spasming and thrashing as if my attacker were riding my back. I crashed off the tank into the hard incline alongside, and from scrubland into forest, remembering to switch to invisible mode soon enough that cries of alarm faded into disbelief…and then I was not paying any more attention to the soldiers above. I was raging invisible through the forest, heading for anything that smelled, through the walnut stench, like water. For there was a fire in my brain as my cells fought other cells. Something had attacked me from the Remnant stronghold, that was all I knew, and as the battle raged, my cells snuck out the essence of my consciousness to another part of my body closer to my tail than my head. But still the invader pressed, and came closer to total control. At the maximum moment of tension between intrusion and escape, I ejected my head from my body, left it rolling and hissing and monstrous and horrible while my neck worked at tying off blood flow. It was an egregiously blunt reversal of normal lizard behavior.

Then I stomped the compromised head into mush. Temporarily defeated, the attacker’s remaining cells retreated to the wall of the Remnant scrap before I could destroy them.

I spent a shivery, miserable time in the woods regenerating my head and seeing things blurrily through hastily created foot-eyes while quarantining with even more rigor this hideous, this treacherous scrap. This Demon.

That’s what I dubbed it now, and wondered how much of its blubbering had been like a spell or misdirection as it began to seek to control my mind.

Because that is what the thing inside me said it was, the thing I dubbed the Demon even though it was just an organism like me.

I pulled the information out of it. I besieged it and I pulled it out over time.

They sought to root out my kind as you will seek to root out me, the Demon said to me, as they have for millions and millions of years, creating echoes of this conflict across all the universes. They saw how we lived upon the minds of the Remnant. Did you think it was coincidence that Remnant expedition came across the angels? Not at all. They saw how we Raised Up and Lived Eternal Within the Minds of the Remnant, unseen, unheard, unknown. Did you think it was coincidence that Remnant expedition came across the angels? Did you think there were ever more than 12 of us, just as there is only one of you?

I sought blitzkrieg options for this parasite—was I supposed to believe its stories, its rants or treat it like a fast-talking ring-worm?—but the truth was all I could do is continue to quarantine the scrap and put up an impenetrable wall of security cells…which still could not drown out his voice echoing through my brain.

We survived even those millions of years of the twelve Remnant wandered the galaxies in exile. Waiting.

Any attempt now to move the Remnant-Demon scrap through my body and out of the most convenient natural or home-made orifice would have meant an unacceptable risk of contamination—as would sending in cell-soldiers to kill the infiltrator.

Is the Remnant in there with you? I asked. For the Demon emanated a presence sadistic and so at odds with the Remnant that it had become immediately clear I hosted not one interloper but two.

For once it did not answer, bluster, or lecture. Instead, it sent further scouts into my cells, but my cells, forewarned, destroyed each one. Whatever the Demon was, it could be countered. It could be contained. But I knew it would be a constant, distracting battle.

So now I limped East with my new slightly leaner head, never able to let my guard down, with only the memorized address given me by Pavlov to give me a purpose.

You’re a piece of something bigger, aren’t you? the Demon had said, ruminating

anticipating

. Something…tastier.

Even now I had not quite shed the echo of Mountain Mormeck, despite becoming more fully myself.

If this Demon still existed within me by the time I could find a portal and return home, what would I be endangering?

Never in the history of shrapnel had such a tiny wound caused such profound complications.

Dear Pavlov: I don’t know when I will post these letters, or if I will ever be able to, but I have decided to write them anyway…I am well on my way to the Far East and all is well. I had a bit of trouble today when I almost lost my head, but reason prevailed and despite an unexpected encounter with a disagreeable fellow traveler, I am doing well. I hope that you are also well. – Your Friend, K

Entry #23 (Mountain)

Note: Been reading this serialized long story/novella? Please support a full-time writer. Paypal to vanderworld at hotmail.com—much appreciated! Donations above $21 will entitle you to a free copy of initial anthology or stand-alone book appearance.

Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.

Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here. A full-on 34,000 recap is compiled in one place, here with the entries since easily found in the archive.

I no longer send an avatar to write in the journal on the jungle floor. I write it here, at the heart of me. If Gabriel finds it, he finds me. Thousands or millions of years from now some other Risen species on this planet will find my journal, incomplete, and need to make up the rest of the story themselves. The rest stays with me.

Everything has continued as before, except now I am relegated to watching the endless recurring loop of an alt-Earth where a civilization pushes south from the Arctic. Floating ghost-whale employed as spirit weapons against the pale-skinned invaders eclipse the sun. Psionic walrus riders channel their power through their mounts’ tusks, the power sent out enough to shatter an enemy soldier’s bones into finely-ground dust. The walrus riders chant for focus as they advance and the enemy soldiers ripple and flop into screaming death and the walruses roar from the vibration of the force emanating from their tusks, will never get used to it.

I feel as if my bones have been turned to dust, but I cannot fall, I cannot give in or give up.

Gabriel: “We gave you speech, mountain. We gave you the kind of intelligence that is considered human. We gave you those things so that you could help us. If you met others of your kind, they would not recognize you. They would cast you out. We are all you have, we are your family.”

Part of the price I paid was apologizing to Gabriel for my duplicity, for my “meddling,” to acknowledge the debt I owed him and his kind. That I understood I was special, was chosen, was nothing like others of my species—and that I understood what he had done for me. That I was grateful. And not to mention Marty to him, not to remind him of Marty. I did not know what they might or might not have done to her, nor whom watched her now if anyone. The thought of it insufferable, and yet I had to suffer it and to be patient.

Gabriel just nodded and went about his business as if my apology had been expected. He had deemed it time to decant another canister stuffed with angel dust. Time to resurrect another screaming blackened immortal entity. I did not have the stomach for it. I went back sullen to my surveillance because what better proof of loyalty?

The ghost whales sang as they advanced across the barrenness of an alt-Earth stripped of natural resources by an alien race that had dropped by and left again millions of years ago.

The whale-song was a deceptively sonorous psych-weapon that could break eardrums and brought fear to the invaders. The invaders had come from across the sea and had misjudged everything that could be misjudged. They had occupied territory and torn up the land while dismissing indigenous tech that was not inferior but simply different because it existed across dimensions, requiring only unity of purpose to coalesce with stark ferocity. Those who had retreated had done so for strategic not tactical reasons. Now the invaders fell back in disarray, still unable to grasp the scope of their mistake.

This Earth also existed in a kind of temporal hiccup where everything kept happening over and over again. The spirit-whale advance would reach a certain point, re-set, and begin again—so many times that now the commanders of the northern armies headed south, and their civilian leaders, knew like an echo of an echo in their brains what was happening—a subconscious message received from the near future—and in a thousand minute ways were intent on altering their decisions to try to effect some sort of change. Gabriel had told me that eventually the hiccup would feel the combined psychic pressure of this and it would end…but not even the angels knew if that reality would then proceed normally or cease to exist. They needed someone to watch for the signs that this might be about to happen.

And even as I diligently watched and reported back, I also sought other knowledge. After a week, professing a morbid interest, I asked Gabriel to let me access information on my species, and he gave it to me.

Did I remember my youth? Had I anything to add to whatever I would learn? No. I don’t remember anything except a kind of awakening, a kind of growth. I remember the vines and the bushes and the trees growing over top of me and the soil and how it all accreted around me and me into it.

The information on my species, which called themselves a name I cannot render into English nor even really understand or articulate, made much clearer the divide between Mormeck Mountain and Pure Mountain. My species is inward turning in its gaze and attention. Our culture is biological, cellular, environmental, a language of texture and anatomy, and though hundreds of miles exist between us on most worlds where we can be found, still there is a quick-silver bond between all of us…except to me. That bond was broken long ago. I don’t even feel an echo of it.

We adapt to so many planets because we are born to become whatever our environment requires from us, to intuit the environment so completely that, over time, we understand it more completely than any native species. All of our intelligence is predicated on this turning inward, and within that space, each mountain discovers worlds and worlds of information and experience. We do not needs outer worlds because we carry worlds with us. We do not need to conquer because we spend our lives conquering ourselves, integrating, spreading, allowing a space for other beings to grow with us.

Experiencing this, I realized how different I truly was. I retained the ability to change my cells, to encode them with my intelligence. I reproduced by flinging pods out into space just like my cousins, but I was not like them. Whatever “gift” Gabriel had given me by altering me, it had made me understand the culture that created ghost whales and used walrus riders more than I understood my own kind. “Revenge” would have been a term unknown to my cousin mountains. “Ambition” would have been meaningless. “Love” would have meant something more communal and ever-lasting than I understood love now.

What did Mountains know of property or of shopping or of going to the movies?

Meanwhile, I watched my alt-Earth as some of the angels hid their wings and traveled there and let the spirit whales dissolve them into the past as a kind of strange jest or joke. The most adventurous would wait until the very second of the temporal hiccup before diving in, and thus be subject to any number of dangerous and random possibilities. Those who survived their comrades would find and bring back and restore their memories. It may have been meant as some kind of adventure, even some sort of rite of passage, but I thought there was a hint of desperation and sadness to it. That the angels, Gabriel included, really wanted to forget, but had to disguise that impulse as play.

Before I left the Grim Lighthouse the last time, in that temporal morass of instability, I sent a message to my avatar in the winter city. An incomplete message. A message that may never reach my avatar. But I sent it nonetheless, if only to make some use, some sense, of that place, to deflect the horror of it. Like tossing a message in the bottle into the maelstrom of a whirlpool.

I am my own lighthouse now, sending out a signal through my thoughts to Marty, to all the Marty’s. To wait. That I’m coming. That I am beginning to find a way.

Entry #17 (Avatar)

URGENT, for long-time readers: Temporal Distortion Event, Level 9. Extent and Duration of Wave Unknown. There is no time engineer to monitor. Avatar Entries #12, #13, #14, and #16 have irrevocably changed.

I made my way farther and farther East, a Demon within me and angels on my trail. I had a whole century to kill before I could rescue myself but I wanted to be as far from the winter city as fast as possible. I abandoned my idea of traveling incognito and tiny upon tanks or trucks—it took a constant vigilance that made me wary of the Demon somehow breaking containment.

I traveled almost always by night, sometimes as a translucent komodo and sometimes as a human being. I became used to the wandering without a map except the one inside my head, of avoiding cities, towns, and villages. In some ways it was easier because of the war and in others harder. Certain kinds of security were lax and others more vigilant. I watched thousands of soldiers pass by, and as many tanks, from the cover of trees. There were desperate people on the road and off the road, and areas so tightly controlled by Trotsky’s secret police that if not for the lack of young and middle aged men you might not even realize that their country was under attack. Some places held more traces of angels and others fewer. I became wary of single footprints in the snow and the sound of wings and anyone who would meet my stare.

Then the snows got worse, and even I sometimes felt the chill, and beyond that the lack of Pavlov—of someone to talk to. The only thing I could talk to had nothing nice to say.

Avatar, do you like being a lackey for nothing, for no gain of your own? Is it important to you in some way?

I preferred traveling in the komodo form, not the human. Being human took more practice, even just in terms of the number of facial muscles; my mouth always felt sore. Besides, humans were herky-jerky and tic-ridden and repressed and unpredictable. Humans couldn’t smell through their skins, had terrible reflexes, and no tough exoskeleton to compensate or even a mind-shield. I could read their brains like rows of peeled leechee fruit. Humans were sacks of flesh, blood, and shit that flopped around for fifty to ninety years and then fell over dead. I wanted no part of that…but over time I would learn. You can learn anything if you have a century to practice. Almost anything. I could slowly teach a human shell to smell through its skin, for example, but form follows function—the process would be jury-rigging at best, unnatural and awkward.

Tell me, Avatar, do you think you’re anything other than a ghost, an echo? You’re a disposable to Mormeck Mountain as fingernail clippings are to human beings.

And the entire way what was unreconcilable within me would hiss or whisper to weaken my mind even as I contemplated trying to excise it by knife blade anyway just to be rid of it.

When you get where you’re going, when you have to wait for as long as you have to wait, you’ll listen to me. You will.

One night, under a full moon, in an icy cold, beside a lake, I could stand my human limitations no longer. I discarded my clothes, which I had only the day before, managed to steal, and I manifested in my most magnificent komodo presence. My form fled out across the surface of the lake, the moon searing the ice. I wanted some kind of escape. I wanted an escape from a century of the waiting I knew that lay ahead of me. I wanted to escape from my Demon. I wanted to escape from the idea that I was just a reflection, a mutation. And even as I stared at myself in the sheen of the ice, what I couldn’t escape was the irony that I felt the most free in an incarnation that was even farther from my true identity.

It was then I realized that another reflection stood beside me in the lake ice.

I held a human child roughly by the hand.

I stood beside the lake with a girl who could not have been more than nine dressed only in a nightgown. She was whimpering as my claws dug into her wrist and she’d given up struggling either because it hurt worse when she did or she’d realized I was too strong.

I recoiled from what I had done, but now that I was aware of her I could not let her go for fear she’d run off into the night and freeze to death.

Avatar, you don’t exist within this world—you live outside of it.

She had dark hair and eyes bright with the moonlight and the image of my serpentine head peering down at her. She looked shaken but unharmed, besides the damage to her wrist. She was muttering words —sometimes phrases to ward off evil in a language she could not possibly fully understand, and in other moments sobs of things I could understand: “Don’t hurt me. Please don’t hurt me. Please take me home.” There was a sour stench of fear about her, but a kind of deep-seated defiance too. She was doing the best she could.

A monster had taken her sleeping from her bed and did not remember
doing so.

Now the monster would have to put her back and try to make it right. Except: how would she un-remember what she’d seen? In ten years when she was almost a grown woman, would she remember this? Would she be changed by it? Would returning her now erase all of it, as if she’d had a nightmare and then woken in the morning to find out it wasn’t real?

You think you’ve got me caged, came the Demon’s voice. You think you know the limits of what I am. But you don’t, avatar. You really don’t.

I didn’t answer, although inside I shook with rage. Instead, I gathered up the girl in my arms and somehow we found our way back to the cottage she had come from, and, changing size, entered through the window, and I laid her head down on the pillow of her bed. This time, I woke the parents with my clumsy efforts, for they slept on cots on the other side of the room.

You could kill them all, right now, if you wanted to. No one would ever know it was you.

They stared at me as if I were unreal. They stared at me as if I could not possibly exist. They had not a word between them, and I had no words for them. Nothing that might be of use. I could not even think of what could be said. I could not even know what the future held for the girl, if the parents would un-think me and thus restore her in their minds to who she was before she’d been taken. Or not.

I stole away into the night, headed for any place as far from human beings as possible.

I must not let my attention drift.

I must not let the words of the Demon create spaces between my thoughts.

I must be ever-vigilant.

But no one can be ever-vigilant.

Can they?

Dear Pavlov: I must admit to being more lost than I had expected; this is strange country and although I feel I am making progress, I am also wandering a bit. That fellow traveler I mentioned has been shadowing me and tries to get the locals to blame me for things that he has done. I am not quite sure what to do about him. But, I have still managed to stay clear of soldiers and of anyone else who might not understand me. Today, despite the trouble, I had a moment of absolute clarity when I saw a strange blueish bird rise suddenly from a branch full into the blaze of the sun, and something about it made me unbearably happy. Then it was as before…I hope that you are still holding out, my friend. You must say hello to your bodyguards from me. I still think of them fondly, if for no other reason than their talent at banter. I am writing this by moonlight from high in a tree. I can see for miles from here—I can almost see all the way to the frozen rim of the world. Your friend, K

Entry #24 (Mountain)

Millions of alt-Earths died out every year. One experienced mass extinctions due to cat litter and plastics and on top of that nuclear holocaust. Another remained verdant but personless when warlike aliens that resembled large terrestrial sharks declared the human race guilty of marine genocide. Elsewhere the dominant species of intelligent giant raven engaged in biological warfare of such a global type it destroyed them and their human slaves. And so it went, on and on. Trillions lived and trillions perished. Biomasses were inherently unstable. Bags of flesh and bones with brains didn’t keep well.

Against this background, the angels’ own situation seemed like just one more kind of slow extinction, but it would not come soon enough. In the library, I learned there had once been a war amongst these “angels” for reasons never given, and it had snuffed out worlds…but after there had been hundreds of them, not millions, and that was a good thing. A new angel was inert and cold for thousands of years until some miraculous combination of conditions brought it to life amongst its brethren. They switched from war to special ops most of the time, with exceptions like the extermination of the Remnant. They grew craftier and colder. They lost the thread, didn’t realize. Went on anyway. Didn’t matter. Was Matter.

I should have felt sympathy but I could not. (But…should I have felt sympathy?)

All I could think about was Marty, standing with her at the top of the lighthouse, having survived the horrors we’d seen walking up. Looking out over the scarred and corrupted ocean and the darkness of the horizon against the shadows of the waves. There was an old-fashioned record player there, in the little space she’d made her own next to the vast beacon that dominated that level. She put on music before we went back down, although I could have left at any time, have dis-inhabited my luna moths, let the skeleton they held up fall to the floor…but that would have meant leaving her alone with the horror…and even though I knew she’d lived with it for months now, I selfishly did not want to leave before she was free of it for a moment.

So she played music, because the music allowed her something to focus on, the sound crowding out the other sounds, the other images trying to creep and crawl into her head. It wasn’t Mozart, not as I had heard Mozart, but it was some echo or shadow of a Mozart who had existed on this Earth. This Mozart had lived longer than the default Mozart. This Mozart had grown into middle and old age, and his music had grown with him, so that his Requiem wasn’t unbearably sad and yet uplifting…no, instead it had an underlying wistfulness that managed also to be mischievous, as if a fresh green vine spiraled through a funeral plot, its leaves disputing the inevitability of death. And this vine wound through our heads as we descended the spiraling stairs through the scenes of murder and rape and torture that superimposed themselves upon the interior of that place, which was so unmoored from time and space that thousands of realities impinged upon it…and every one dire and horrific and yet at the same time in its repetition of the acts human beings could perpetrate one upon another utterly banal, utterly numbing. If only not so fresh to the senses. If only not so superimposed. If only the dying did not seem to supplicate with their eyes, or to accuse, or to convey an inevitability that stabbed deep into the brain. Did the way only the most terrifying and horrible deeds accumulated around the Grim Lighthouse mean that somewhere the opposite occurred, and why? It was a mystery. It would always be a mystery.

This is all a way of distancing myself from those moments because I can still see each image as violent and immediate as if I were still there, and I must at times think these terrors into a particular cell of myself, and lock them there, exile them from my memory palace…although they always creep back in again, so that if I think of Marty, they slowly appear in the background, gradually crowding around.

Meanwhile, I spend my free time in the library seeking clues about the source of the angels’ civil war, clues about the rebel angel I read about before—anything that might add to my understanding. I know better than to seek more clues about my own kind. They’d never have left that information in the library. Gabriel isn’t stupid. Or maybe he is, but not in that way.

Gabriel approached me in the library about my surveil of the Earth where the Arctic army continually advances and then hits the time hiccup and starts all over again. It was the first time we had talked since our confrontation.

“What have you learned?” he asked, and I found the question curious because surely none of my initial analysis could match whatever they already knew.

“Nothing much yet,” I said, cautious. It was peculiar, how Gabriel acted as if nothing had happened between us, but it was better than his anger. “I notice mostly that the advancing army seems to have some subconscious understanding that time keeps re-setting itself. The European invaders seem to have no such underlying knowledge. So that their efforts in defense are always as vigorous, but over time there is a slight…crumbling…in the will of the Arctic army. It is almost unnoticeable, but in spying on their strategy meetings, there is a barely perceptible weakening of resolve. The words are the same, or almost the same, but they are not delivered with the same force…and sometimes the ghost whales seem to shudder right before the re-set.”

Gabriel stared at me, a murderer set in marble. “Can you imagine what we could do if we could replicate this effect elsewhere, Mormeck?”

“No.”

“We could stop massacres. We could halt corrupted civilizations without taking more intrusive measures.”

“You could delay massacres.”

Gabriel shrugged as if it were the same thing.

To forever be teetering on the edge of evil, of bloodshed…was this an existence to be envied?

It occurred to me in that moment that Gabriel came to me because he saw some limit to the angels’ ability to analyze, to observe. That somehow he thought I brought a unique quality to this surveillance.
At the bottom of the Grim Lighthouse, where I said goodbye, not knowing it might be for the last time, I promised Marty I would be back. For her, it was just having someone to talk to. For me it was something different. And I feel I am stuck now, that I am stuck in an endless loop just like the Arctic army, because Gabriel is giving me the chance to pretend nothing has happened, to go back to what it was like before…

And so, dear journal , now I drift, half of me reconciled to Gabriel’s implicit offer and half of me still searching for whatever it will take to cast them out, to avoid forgetting, to undertake revenge. And another part of me trying to figure out who I am. (Perhaps that is what Gabriel wants? A mountain divided against itself is a mountain compliant.)

Meanwhile, Marty slowly dies as the last keeper of the Grim Lighthouse and dozens of worlds die as they naturally would, because that is the way of things.

I do not sleep because mountains are never really asleep, but sometimes I dream of my avatar—somewhere out there in the worlds, full of agency and freedom, and most particularly free of this dilemma, this situation, where I cannot seemingly move forward. Paralyzed. For a mountain to be paralyzed may seem like a strange thing, but nonetheless…

Entry #18 (Avatar)

You can lose yourself in certain types of spaces, at a certain time. I discover this every day as I pass further into the East. In becoming a shadow, in needing to hide, to avoid, to make myself invisible, I have begun to experience the strange sensation of no longer existing, of floating, even though most days I am an enormous komodo dragon.

The paths here are easier to discern, the map in my head comfortingly similar to what lies ahead of me. And yet there’s no accounting on that map for human traffic. On this alt-Earth, the border with China is more secure and the Nazi threat worse, so that in the East the Soviet presence is slightly more relaxed, slightly lessened. Because of this, there is more chaos to navigate: long lines of refugees, wary of any stranger, trying to find their way home in this space, this corridor, between types of authority. You can see it on their faces, the dearly held memory of where they came from before their relocation, some of the children barely old enough to remember the places moved to, but trudging along beside or staring from wagons pulled by oxen. They are marching into a situation less certain than where they came from, but, then, so am I.

The Remnant voice in my head has become as insistent and inescapable as a tooth-ache, and like a tooth-ache I find I can ignore it the busier I am, the more attuned to my environment. I still feel the pain but I am able to distance it.

Thrice I have been attacked, once by brigands and twice by deserters from Trotsky’s armies. I don’t know what they thought they were attacking, if they saw me as food or simply so strange that they had only one choice, and that was to attack. But each time, I discovered at the end I was alone in the middle of a circle of blood and gore….and realized that although I can stop the Remnant from pushing me to commit an act I have not already envisioned, that when I do engage in violence, its influence takes me to a level of bloodthirstiness that can be rationalized as self-defense but only just. And just, too, the suggestion that perhaps if I cannot rid myself of the Remnant, then I will take it out on my pursuers.

You have more potential than this, the Remnant told me after one such event, as I came out of my blitzkrieg of a rage. You could lead men. You could become a despot and then something more than a despot. You could cultivate charisma. You could be a stronger man than even Trotsky.

I almost laughed at the miscalculation from this Remnant, and this sign of his misunderstanding made me more optimistic about one day being free of such influence. What does a mountain care about becoming a despot? Why would a komodo, agent of chaos, stand still long enough to form a government? Still, it put the seed in my head, an inkling of one path once I reached my destination, confirmed the signs that meant one day a portal would exist there.

Then, too, the sudden reappearance of angels put the Remnant in perspective. I saw them only from afar, and only when I became invisible to evade human beings. It was as if they could not see me visible, but something in my emanations invisible gave off an indicator. Angels solemn on a hilltop, heads tilted toward the sky, channelling…something. Angels sitting in small, sullen pubs in backwater towns so shoddy and withdrawn that life there had gone on undisturbed by all of the turmoil beyond. Angels posing as the dispossessed, trudging along in mimicry of human distress. The ones who walked among human beings were subdued and almost faded, as if in trying to fit in they had inadvertently dimmed themselves so much that now they had become part of the background, of the setting. A smudge on a window. A reflection in a puddle. But the ones in wilderness—they flourished in a kind of glow that sucked light to them. Seeing one above me as I waited silent in underbrush, I felt a kind of pull, as if the angel were a kind of demonic lighthouse, drawing me to it. Only the gnawing of the Remnant at the edges of my mind kept me from giving in to that influence. Although the thought has come to me that perhaps they’re looking only for the Remnant, that without the Remnant I would be free of the angels too.

We are close now. The landscape has become both more and less barren and in the distance between the trees I see a kind of wall of dark green that means we are about to enter deep forests.

Yesterday, I came to my senses facing a trail of blood through the snow and the Remnant giggling in my ear. I think he meant me to follow the blood, but instead I went the other way.

Dear Pavlov: I have met up with some of your comrades, although I do not think they were your friends. Although we had some disagreements, it worked out all right in the end. I know you said you have relatives out this way. It makes me wonder if you have visited out this far. If so, you understand the way the landscape eats the roads and how the beauty of it comes with a certain watchfulness…I’ve certainly seen my share of sentinels. I think of you sometimes, defending your position, and wonder if this place is what you dream of as the opposite of where you are, a place you would rather be. Whereas I now think back to the winter city with a kind of perverse fondness. There is something to be said for having a purpose, even a narrow one, and when that is taken away, when your goal is thousands of miles and years from where you are, it feels like drifting. It feels like the middle of something you can’t see the shape of yet. – Your Friend, K