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Against incomprehensible odds, he opens his eyes.
The sunlight cuts through the smallest crack of the curtain. Specks float illuminated from behind, glittering gold and fuzzy until his pupils adjust. In the not-quite-consciousness there is silence, and peace.
He breathes in and the world filters through his nostrils with it. A hypnogogic jerk to wakefulness.
His chest expands unibhibited, his heart pumps rhythmically and strong. He has energy. He feels rested. He does not understand that this is an oddity until he does. The memory of the night before trickles listless, rain filling up a gutter. Consciousness comes to him in drips, diseased and colourless flashes in his minds eye helps him to picture the unthinkable.
An unclean getaway. His nose curls rankled.
A truck taken, a haphazard mistake of gunfire out of the window, the air displacing the hair on his arm. A pole unseen leading to the sickening crunch of metal and the squeal of rubber. Spinning ceacelessly through space and time and simultaneously nothing at all. A tournaquette applied liberally in the shadows after pulling himself away from the wreckage. The maintenance of counsciousness an equal struggle to offsetting bodily shock as he watched the police pick up his arm from the elbow down clean off the asphalt. In his half alive state he would have sworn he saw a finger twitch.
Taking himself off to have his soul plucked from his useless body through the night.
The back of his neck is damp. His eyes lurch as much as his stomach as he turns his head to be greeted with the impossible.
His peripheral vision swims, the pinprick of stars joining until he blinks. He flexes tendons that were not there mere hours before and a hand that cannot exist curls unabated. The displacement is so subtle that it takes uncountable seconds to seep through his optic nerve as something to observe.
His hand looks different. There is an odd flash of black under his nails that were he anyone else he could convince himself was there prior. He looks at it for minutes more that he won’t get back until he sees that a scar he’s had nigh on twenty years is no longer there, unmarred and unremarkable skin in its place. Even and tan as the rest of the cells surrounding it.
His eyes travel down to the flesh that it was sawn through; whatever franksteinien stitching he expected does not exist. There is no mark to be seen with the naked eye.
Inconceivable reality surrounds him. The next breath he takes he wonders if the air inhaled garners the same percentage of nitrogen as the night before.
And if it does?
He swallows spit needlessly. A dry bobbing of his throat, clammy and cottony. His eyes drift instinctually to the nightstand to see no water glass – but why would there be.
Perhaps something else would be equally likely to materialize. There is someone else on the exact opposite side of the globe as him who has awoken amputated to the forearm. The idea is abstract as it is ludicrous. His hand throbs. There is no glass of water. His hand is clean.
His hand is clean.
He raises his other hand to his eyes, the weight of sleep and the honeyed processes of shock keeping his movements slow and heavy. There is no blood there. He raises his new hand to match. His shirt fabric is still torn off his forearm and the tournaquette is still above his elbow; clean where it should be dirty and loose where it was attempting to keep his lifeblood from deserting him as he deserted an amputated hand.
He searches blindly, scrounging with the hand bereft of gunk under its nails for the scrap of black fabric he held to the stump to stop the bleeding from tracking to his room. He brings it to himself and sees that it, too, is cleared of blood. His mind is a viscous thing, a globulous drip of spinal fluid down his chin. A thin line he struggles to hold on to.
He allows himself a few hollow moments to stare at the ceiling fan before he moves. He’s careful, ginger in the way he pull himself off the edge of the bed to standing. The rush of lightheadedness associated with blood loss does not come. He does not stumble.
There is an ill-placed mirror in the corner of the room, full-bodied and imposing. His gaze glances off of it before it returns and stays steady. His form greets him. He peruses it. From as far as he is, he is given no evidence of further harm.
The steady hum of an air-conditioning unit slows and yet the room chills. A feeling he knows well burrows its way into his skin, unfamiliar in its current state. His hand moves of its own accord to reach behind his back as if to touch another living soul. It displaces nothing but air.
He drops it. It hits against his thigh slightly too harshly.
After some time he looks away from the mirror.
His breath is in the middle of his chest, careful but not quick. He looks back. It is too dark.
He opens the curtains and approaches the mirror to lean forward and inspect himself to the best of his capabilities. It would feel as though he had just finished shaving if it were not for the fact that he is unsure whether there is an odd swirling pattern of black to the left of one of his corneas or if his vision is finally failing from blood loss.
If he truly has any. He blinks as the thought sparks another. His eyelashes feel heavy. They dust his cheek.
He follows the thought the same way he follows his literal tracks. He opens the door to see no smearing of oxydized blood. There is nothing in the open hallway nor the short stairwell. Not so much as a drop on the door from where he shouldered it open from the alley where he-
There.
His mind knows better than to play tricks on him. He remembers the way he stumbled, the white hot of brick making contact and smearing with flesh that should never have been exposed while he still lived. He remembers panting and guarding, the sick of a dog in pain, before stumbling forth to the emergency exit of the hotel he picked.
He approaches the opposite wall, his jaw ticking and an odd feelign curling cold and empty in his stomach.
A smear of his flesh remains. It is blackened oddly, resembling a grotesque thing years old and burned to ash. The pattern of apparent flame makes it look as though it spontaneously combusted – there is a ring of soot around the char. He peers closer, bending at the waist, and keenly eyes the droplets of smeared blood that are now black as night tinged red still and like nothing he’s ever seen before. It almost looks like the darkest garnet itself is embedded in the ochre brick. His eyelids drop as if half-asleep. His mind sharpened, his gaze follows the dribble to the concrete below to find more singed liquid. An unmistakable small puddle. He must have stood there longer than he believed he had.
He squats down, knees creaking in their sockets and head tilting. He deliberates. He puts the pad of a finger into the tacky remains.
He pulls it out and it releases vapour like bromine. The skin bubbles and ripples beneath it, an itching burn deep into renewed tissue. He hums, an unconscious thing. It, too, bubbles.
It finishes burning off, vapour singing his nose caustic before it leaves entirely. The liquid on the ground is undisturbed at large. The pad of his finger is near unrecognisable as human flesh, though it does not ache more than the deep thrum of the rest of his hand. He can see white at the edges of his vision. He should be in agony.
He pulls himself to full height, noting again the lack of dizziness. He returns his focus to the remains on the wall. He looks at it.
An odd garbled shout is heard to his left. It is more animal than man. Something startling to wakefullness that it cannot conceive.
He uncharacteristically turns his head to survey the sound and sees a homeless man propped against a dumpster pointing at him and holding a cross he made out of two sticks and plastic twine; the kind of which one would see having fallen from the newspaper boy.
He turns his body to align with his head. The man cries out and begins slithering backward from him, all elbows and writhing limbs, so frothed at the mouth that he does not notice when his skin gives and he leaves grazings of blood in his slow getaway. He is silent as he does so. His chest is heaving. Chigurh can see the cave and carving of it through the layers of clothing on his person. The whites of his eyes shine reflective as a bubble.
Chigurh stares.
The silence does not last. He is no faster than he was, a snail trailing entrails for its slime, but he echoes from a whisper after his shout of fear. As though he had his mouth to God’s ear.
God must pull away uncaring. Perhaps he takes the tower with him. The volume lifts to anger torrenting from tongues incomprehensible. The homeless man is in a cave stumbling down to the dark, his own creation, the walls writhing around him.
Chigurh watches on.
The man turns tail, attempting to crawl out of the alley and screaming hell incarnate. A voice behind his own. Chigurh notices there is something wrong with his legs. It is unclear how long they have been mangled and how long his eyes have been crazed. He doesn’t get far beyond the alley before his wails turn to gurgles and cut off altogether. He is not dead. There is the labour of breathing and scraping still.
The muscles in his forearm twitch like a horse. The Dullahan’s, maybe. He looks back at the redblack mucused tile. There is a fleck of flesh looking for all intents as if it were charred on a grill. Shrivelled and dark, umber red peaking through in a colour impossible. He uses a different finger to pick at it. It crumbles to a coalish substance though vile and bloodied across the pads of his fingers. A substance yet to be rectified with the world of man.
He does not have the time he once did. He turns around to face the door and begins his ascent. Sweeping across again and knowing what to look for he sees blackened discoloured carpet and wood anew. The doorknob to his room is covered in it. He wipes the fabric of his shirt over it, blinking when the areas newly cleaned shine over the rest of the brass as if it had been cleansed in his absence from his own flesh. He frowns, and holds up his finger. It is whole and unmarred. His fingerprint remains though pink and fresh. He swallows.
He considers going back for the homeless man. He opens the door to look upon the clock on his nightstand and pauses to read the output. A rare hesitation befalls him. He thinks about the likelihood of not being able to track down the man come nightfall to whatever hospital or morgue he will be taken to. He weighs the facts against the scales. The hand gripping the doorknob tightens and buzzes.
He opens the door proper and re-enters the room surveying it in new midday light. He clicks his tongue against his teeth. He locks the door.
He pulls the bed away from the wall and when he stands he is not lightheaded nor exerted. He examines the wall to find nothing but dust. He pulls the bed farther afeild and finds the same state of affairs on the floor. He begins upon stripping the bed naked as if the sheets themselves would contain evidence of a ritual he has no memory of completing but there is none. Just bits of char having put holes in the fabric. If he did not know better he may have thought them cigarette burns. The mattress unlevied is yellowed in spots he knows better than to contemplate but shows no sign.
He places everything back including the sheets. He pushes the bed back against the wall and looks upon the weathered room. He approaches the window which is clear and with glass and pane both unsullied. He shifts the curtains to find nothing on the wall there either. Frustration and chagrin exit his nostrils at a loss on what to look for and the evidence of anything at all.
He abandons the room in favour of exiting from the front entrance and scouring his current car. He looks at the receptionist who does not glance in his direction. In the parking lot everything is in its place. The silencer on his shotgun shines. He stares at it uncanny for longer than he should before he recalls losing it.
His palm throbs again as if the muscle tissue itself is telling him something. Morse code to the beat of his heart. He breathes carefully to ease the headache beginning behind his eyes. He straightens and shuts the car door. The first familiar feeling in hours cajoles him gently. His fingertips tingle with fate. He listens to himself and makes his final way back to the motel room.
The journey is arduous. Every step is tar. A desert sandstorm whips against his cheeks and threatens to bowl him over to kneeling. By the time he closes the door behind him and looks upon the room aglow oddly with the afternoon light there is a dark spot to the left of his vision which acts as if his eyes were closed. His optic nerve pressurized and about to puncture in twain, his head split cleanly in two. An aura, he intimates, even as it twitches and writhes with weight to it, a migraine – something he’s only experienced once before.
The visual shifts. No. His head is tilting as he loses his balance.
His limbs lock up and he careens to the floor. Atlas who lost his grip. An ankle twists and he cannot feel the pain, paralaysis infernal.
The failure of his optic nerve is gone. He stares unblinking at the popcorn ceiling.
There is a moment of breathing and an inability to think past a rotten buzzing before it returns. It slides oddly from his peripheral vision slowly, a horror of hot air balloon in gentle wind. It is small, still. The light hits it and splits apart as though it has mass. Bigger than a speck as if it was high to the ceiling or perhaps having gone through it entirely, as impossible as it sounds. It is spinning, a top that will soon fall.
He focuses his vision on it and it does not move with his vision. Peripheral to central, an impossibility. The background behind it warps, a black hole that is still turning to face him.
It is not an aura.
He is unsure how long his heart has been racing. His palms are clammy. He cannot move. He doesn’t know if it is fear or something else that stops him. That unknowing does not occlude him from understanding that looking elsewhere would be a mistake. He knows that, at least, as assuredly as he knows anything.
Was he drugged, somehow. The substance he assumed to be from a limb he still has attached-
The thought is cleaved in two. It moves, drifting unmistakeably closer to him. There is a line of sheen around it that reminds him of an auraura, though so slim as to seem like a line.
At its crawling approach his limbs tingle, a jaw clenching ear buzzing skittering across his skin. The centipede to end all centipedes befalling him, a march from the bottom of his itching foot up his leg to rest disgustingly in line with his spinal cord, every gnarled twisted vertibrae.
Another impossibility staring him in the face – as it approaches it looks to have the depth and size of a planet.
A trecherous part of his reeling mind whispers a God.
The thought has static that hurts his teeth.
It inches closer still. His pupils pinprick where they should blow in the face of such darkness. There is shattering colour and swirling nothingness in Its mass and in that he sees the shape of a face long dead. The lack of eyes are rolled unseeing. The chin is hanging as if gravity still pervade a room of sacrilidge the wrong way round. Flesh that could be a tongue or could be the fat of a cheek hangs swinging and pustulent from a mouth gaping and unending in its cavern.
His own tongue is a muscle turned useless, fat and squashed near his teeth. He has stopped breathing. His jaw aches where it is clenched. He is foaming at the mouth. He would assume he was having a seizure if he were less lucid.
There is ozone and stench when he inhales and nothing at all when he breathes out, not even the natural feeling of his own chest caving to neutrality.
If every bone was jutting out of his body he would not be surprised. If he opened his maw and a golf ball fell out of the hovering thing above him only to crack the yolk of an egg on his teeth he would not be surprised.
He has nothing left with which to think. To rectify, to justify, to consider, to feel. There is only one option left, and it is intake it or die.
So he Knows.
Without blinking, a crystaline tear smears to his temple.
This thing bore him his hand. Birthed him anew many times.
He does not want this thing. He does not want what he does not know.
The decapitated, delapitated head borne of nothingness does not move; and so Chigurh has no way of identifying what has changed to smugness.
The mouth widens. The jaw unhinges as a snake. Tendrils of skin that are not there snap, a sick twisting. The throat pulses, vochal chords in name only clanging together, though the sound that befalls him is arriving from the very atoms that encroach his skull.
The buzzing surrounding him is that of flies, of buzzards, of mountainous rock caving and the sand it becomes and it increases still. It becomes insectoid, lecherous heaved and pliable. The sound moves as though to engulf him entirely. His eardrums burst and it feels a great relief from the pain of them. His blood trickles, viscous and blackened, globulous and magmatic through his side burns. The hiss of flesh burning is unheard, unfelt and careening itself into the cacoughony and with the divine marring of his flesh he hears Its language.
How did You get Here?
A question rhetoric and maniacal. Chains that bind.
Chigurh tries to blink and finds that he cannot. Something clogs his nose and leaks from his eyes. His knowing answers. A test passed, a bill to rights. He does not inhale and yet he smells the embers of his burning. There is smoke in his lungs and he wonders if he will remember how he will die after this or if this is simply it.
Oh, No, It saysnot, Be not afraid.
It laughs. A joke has been made at Chigurhs expense and beyond what he is capable of considering. The chuckle sounds like his own only that it twists his third rib to crack and peel from the rest. Jutting out the white flag of his marrow, an offering he did not willingly give. The breath that accompanies is rot that spears into his throat.
I am you, his knowing says, I have understood you all my life. His skin is pallid and leaking. His lips move as though to form words. They crack with the effort, spittle and blood mixing pink on his chin. The flesh of his cheeks bubble.
Not really, It saysnot, not unkindly. But you will.
If It can feel anything then It is feeling for him as his skin peels away to reveal vestibules of viscera. A mothers tender care sluicing him.
Reason has no place here. And yet such a simple truth, that this should ache; why doesn’t It hurt-
His pinprick pupils blow with pain so great it stops his heart before they revert again. He coughs tar-like blood, it drips off his chin and from his neck to the floor. Steam rises behind it. A peek, a promise. Validation impervious to his own derision.
The rest of his lifeblood leaks congealed and jelly-like from unblinking eyes. A feeling unknown before him, but It knows. It has seen it many times.
Is this all It is, the last dredges of his humanic consciousness wails. He did not know that he had it until it hurled itself at the brick wall of all there is.
It coos at him. It is the chiming of bells and the new cry of a babe, the crackling of eggs burst out of, and bioluminescence in the sea. Now he knows where he gets his mannerisms from.
I know this must be so hard for you, here, It saysnot, a thing without pity, Here…
There is not a blink to his transportation but a blank spot where there is simply nothing until he is somewhere else.
He is kneeled in dry dirt. The sun is high on the horizon, scorching outside of the mouth of the alley that he has found himself in, though it does nothing to brighten his vision. He has been here before, long ago, though the details of the image are hazy and changing. He looks out to the township past the alley and a mailman he knows greets him with a smile he never gave before entering a bar that doesn’t exist instead of kicking him in the side.
He is six again, though he isn’t, and this is a memory of disecting the stray cat that he killed. His hands are that which he is now accustomed, big and strong – but so is the cat. Impossibly large with bloat, and more. The teeth are that of a big cat, the maw and eyes of a panther, not the tabby that he knows it should be. With the dark where there should be daylight it is pantheon. The teeth glint at him, tongue lolled out of its mouth as if displaced by a rebreather at some zoo vet.
He is dreaming, he thinks. He has not dreamed once since he was a child about this old.
This very day, in fact, something laughs. It stings across his skin like sand on a windy beach. It distracts him from his task.
He is dreaming, he thinks again, he is dreaming. Everything is liminal; reorienting towards his not-quite memory. He looks upon It. His chest aches. His nose stings.
He missed this cat.
He searches for his tools that he had put aside from memory in the acrid dirt and find none. His hands are already dirty and dust ridden when he brings them to the thing. He caresses the fur to feel the soft cool of it. He splits the stomach from throat to groin with the nail of his pinky finger. The glide is smooth, the nail retracting to the quick and beyond, a sickening snick of a sound following, but he continues. He opens the skin to reveal innards. His nose dips to his collar bone and he smells what remains of the intestines. His gaze flickers to the half-closed eye of a jaguar, the pupil blown so much as to nearly melt the remaining green. It is dead, the eyes unmoving and looking to the horizon away from him. He brings his hands to its face, pries open the eye further with a thumb and finger to present his hand covered in gore to it. The pupil moves to see him, impossibly wide and shimmering blackness. He can see his own reflection in it still. The green looks almost like an auraura.
His orifices are dripping.
He feels contentment as he returns to his exploratory work. He childishly splits its leg from its shoulder to hear the pop. He removes a tooth with some difficulty before peering down to see the discoloured gums. He pulls the stomach from the cavity. He tries to tear into it only to find that he cannot – there is something hard jutting out. To placate himself he pulls some ribs. He extracts the claws with the grip of the tips of his fingers. He degloves the separated arm. He receives his commandments.
He is pulled chest first from his dream to reality.
My Tool, It serenades, oblivious or uncaring to Chigurh’s shattering.
I cannot do what you ask, he resists into nothingness.
It flickers. It is closer than before, transmuted through space, infintesimal to his skin. His nose tingles as his hands. Its eyes morph to a vissage of his own and back to the face.
It leaves, caving in on Itself until reality takes back the space that was gone. Any notion that he was ever in control leaves with it.
He takes a heaving breath in and finds his eyes watering and wide, unseeing, his ribcage uncrushed. He forgot the watery sensation of his lungs expanding. He did not realise it was gone until it was back. He would open his mouth for more of it, greedy and terror-stricken, but he can not gaurantee he would maintain his muteness.
His sinuses are stripped of mucus. The air is hot but dry and it cracks his membranes. His stomach heaves and he gags. His muscles twitch and suddenly he is on his side. He does not remember the feeling of motion.
He refuses to engage. Bile makes its way up his throat but no more. The taste is still acrid on the back of his tongue. A shaking hand, now certain in its newness, raises to touch the skin of his face. It is intact and without gore.
He swallows, the motion painless.
He braces himself on stained black carpet in a perfect ring around his face, a bomb that went off, and heaves himself to his hands and knees. His elbows to his shoulders wobble, pillars that threaten collapse. More ancient now than they’ve ever felt.
He will not fall. He will not crumble.
Atlas stands. The weight of the world unknown on his shoulders, threatening to stoop his spine.
It takes longer than it should to recognise the world is dark from nightfall and not the betrayal of his eyes.
He had the map of the room memorised and still he stumbles and grasps for the light.
The carpet is not dirt. His head still pounds, tongue fuzzy and large in his mouth. But there is no dancing colour of dark in his vision. The room is unremarkable.
He does not look in the mirror.
He sits on the bed and thinks.
He could go after the homeless man. He could. But the craze in his eye suggests nothing useful, assuming he had lived. What would he know that Chigurh doesn’t now.
His eyes move to the red glow of the bedside. 3:13.
His limbs are reluctant to move and oddly sore. The contents of his guts seem too eagre to smash together in his insides when he walks but he does not lose his balance again.
He sheds his clothes as if they were his skin and showers blankly. Sticky fingers reaching for mundanity he has not wanted to grasp for decades. There is a small part of him that wishes to scrub himself raw. He does not allow more than the single pass-over of soap. When he is done he exits the shower and bends, drinking water from the tap of the sink like a dog. He does not look at the drain hole. He does not close his eyes. He does not stop drinking for a long time.
The urge to urinate is not there but he does anyway, a steadying hand on the wall. The feeling of relief is a short lived one, made of biological impulse, but he grasps for it anyway.
He exits the bathrooms, and dons fresh boxer briefs.
With nothing left to contend himself with he lays down. The underside of his eyes are heavy turgid things.
Sleep is as close by as he feared and it wraps itself around him, a familiar blanket.
He dreams unending. He is sitting at a table in a dimly lit restaurant. He has ordered an expensive bottle of wine and a porter-cut steak, medium rare. It is served without fancy. The waiter has no face and no hair. He holds his cutlery unlike himself and it bleeds when he cuts into it. He raises it to his lips and wraps his teeth around the tines, chewing slowly. The metal crunches.
He thinks about his life.
Epilogue:
It looks on. It’s not often that It places a ripple in the still water of time. But things must be rectified and everything has their due. Already the scales shift back to balanced.