LII
It was hard to tell if The Whale wave even moving or not. Everything was black; but not black as a colour mind you, black as in nothingness, or falling away. Just as a penny might vanish after being thrown down some dark and murky well, so too did The Young Cripple’s hands as she held them right in front of her eyes. Such was the consuming division of the darkness abounding that it literally swallowed everything whole. But there was, so very far away, a small red speck whose Light must have been incalculable and indivisible because even in this vacuum, it shone.
It was when they were some distance away from danger that The Young Cripple - egged by her friend T - turned, and saw the most incredible or maybe stupendously disappointing sight.
“Is that Heaven?” asked The Young Cripple.
What they were looking at was the backside of a rather enormous spacecraft.
“That’s where we’ve just come from. Call it Heaven, or call it what you will. That’s not a planet. And it’s not any kind of world,” said T, as they both eyed the craft’s structure, size, and dimension.
It looked like a giant sea container that was outlined with red and green flashing lights. They, for some reason, were not swallowed by the darkness. They were visible no matter how far The Whale travelled, and they perfectly detailed the shape of the craft. It in itself didn’t look extraordinary. Under the gleam of flashing lights, it looked like a large rusted rectangle. Its hinges were covered in barnacles and it was dented on all sides as if, whoever flew this craft, had poor perception of depth and distance, and had made an art form out of confusing encounters for collisions.
There were large exhausts on each corner. It was as if there was no right side to this structure. It could, by the looks of it, propel itself from any position so as to work itself through even the most contorted fractures of time and space. And stamped on each side of the craft, were two numbers: one being, the coordinates of a correctional facility, and the other, a phone number for an ice-cream shop.
It was not, though, as the girl had believed - a planet.
“Who is he?” asked T, referring to the man lying unconscious.
“He’s someone we have to help.”
Out in the distance, the red speck was getting larger, and behind them, the outline of Heaven, gradually getting smaller. Soon they were between the two points where both seemed like an eternity away. Seeing the red speck get large, though, her desperation accelerated as if she were nearing the water’s edge after having risen from the murky depths below, and the brighter was the sun, the more out of breath she actually felt.
The girl rested the fear detector on the top of the platform where she stood and aimed it towards the red speck. She asked T to be silent so she could hear the vibrations of fear. And for a great while, there was nothing but eerie static. This alone, though, with the feeling that permeated from listening to it, had the girl direct The Whale towards the host of that sound; that being, the tiny red speck. The desire to turn away was enough for the girl to know that they were heading in the right direction.
As she aimed her device out in the distance, she could hear, through the radio, the sound of digging, and weeping. It was The Young Boy. There was no doubt in that whatsoever. The weeping, though, was not his.
“We have to go faster,” she urged to The Whale.
“Why the hurry?” asked The Whale.
“I have to save someone,” said The Young Cripple, pacing back and forth on the spot.
“But you have just saved someone,” replied The Whale.
“And now we have to hurry, to save his son, and my friend.”
“Who says he is yours to save?”
“I do,” said The Young Cripple, stamping her foot down hard.
“But why the hurry?”
“Because you’re going to slow.”
“I only go one way. It is neither fast nor slow. It is, as it is. Here in open space, things are much larger. The hands of time extend much farther, and each second travels a far greater distance. For bigger things like planets, stars and myself, it is not very much, but for very small things like atoms, grains of sand, and you, it is quite a thing indeed. You, dear child, should learn to go slow, so as not to confuse a streak for a smear.”
“What does that mean?”
“Are you saving this boy? Or are you taking us all to our deaths?”
As the tiny, red speck grew into a misty and fiery ball, the sound coming from the radio started to screech and squeal. The Whale shut its eyes, so too did the girl. Had T a pair himself, so too would he.
The sound was piercing. It struck at every nerve in their beings. The Whale bucked and almost threw its passengers off into the vast emptiness of space. It managed to barely control its spasms, though; enough so that The Young Cripple could grip onto The Father, the detector, and T.
The sound pillaged The Whales thoughts. It sensed - as if it were real - the presence of a fishing boat; its choking, black smoke pouring out into space, and its bow, readied with long perforating spears, aimed at The Whale’s back and sides.
“We should turn around and go back,” shouted The Whale.
With the way he spoke, his shouting still sounded pleasant and at ease.
“No,” shouted The Young Cripple, “keep going. Don’t stop.”
The louder the screaming from the radio, the more escalated was the fear that ravaged The Whale’s thoughts and senses. He could hear now, the sound of fishermen passing around orders and coordinates. And he could hear too, the sound of thousands of whales, bigger and smaller then he, being slaughtered inside the belly of the ship, with their innards, spilling into space. It sounded to The Whale, like a symphony of distress and dire warning. Out here in space, The Whale was the last of his kind, and now, hearing as loud as his own breath, the innocent murder of his brothers and sisters, he felt alive - for this alone bore the dreaded curse of awareness which meant that soon, he too would be extinct.
The Whale cried as it outran the hunting vessel in its mind.
On its back, and huddled together on a wooden platform, The Young Cripple, T, and even The Father, were being marauded by the fear that was rudimentary to the core of their thoughts and beliefs. The closer they came to the red speck - which now looked like an asphyxiating cloud of red dust – the louder was the frequency from the radio, and with it, the more intense and perverse were, their disquieted and macabre feelings and hallucinations.
The Young Cripple felt as if everywhere around her, there were monsters and ghouls that were set upon devouring her and eating her - like a spider - over a prolonged and terribly painful period of time. And it wasn’t the digestion that bothered her, or the size of the spider’s teeth, it was time – for her whole life, it had always been time. That alone has been the beast which had courted her coat tail; escaping her when she needed it most, and stalking her endlessly when she wished that it would pick up its pace and either kill her once and for all or allow her the effort to scrape together a victory. The Young Cripple felt the murderous anchor of time, like some tentacled sea monster, pulling her further from the surface of the ocean and back down into the seedy depths of her self-depreciating existence.
The Father, on the other hand, dreamt about his son. Inside his coma, he saw his boy standing in a flower bed with a shovel in his hands; and while a demon stood beside him weeping, his boy dug his own grave. And the louder was the sound from the radio, the louder then was weeping of The Demon in The Father’s thoughts. And as The Young Boy dug the last mound of red dirt and threw away his shovel, The Father burst out of his coma, screaming frantically.
He screamed, as did The Young Cripple; as did T; and as did The Whale. They all screamed - as if it were a fashion; as if it were the thing to do. The screamed in differing pitches and frequencies. And they screamed in wavering patterns, rhythms, and tonalities.
One and all, they screamed.
But there was no whaling vessel on their tail, and there was no tentacled monster pulling the girl beneath the ocean
. The Father, on the other hand, was fairly certain that what played out in his thoughts was indeed occurring right now, somewhere inside that misty swirl of red.
The closer they came, though, the louder were the echoes of chaos in their minds - and because of it, their constant screaming which had left their voices hoarse and grainy, like an old vinyl record.
The girl remembered, though, just as her thoughts had her tipping over the edge of the platform and nearly falling into space, the words of The Collector.
“The volume,” she thought, ignoring the persuasive thoughts in her head which felt like a weight that was attached to one side of her body, and though she didn’t want to die, she felt as if it were pulling over to her death, which, to anyone else, might have looked just like a suicide.
The Young Cripple snapped at the dial and turned it all the way to the left, until the screeching waned, and with it, the energy that was in the air so to speak, that they had all shared, it too eased, and then died off entirely, until The Young Cripple, T, The Father, and The Whale, all slackened their muscles and relaxed once more, as if being alive or dead were no different, and hardly worth all the commotion.
Now that they were close enough to the red planet to taste its atmosphere, the sound of fear was intolerable. But the nature of the device, which used their fear to guide them to what mattered most, was designed with a simple knob so that fear, as a beacon, would direct them, as opposed to fear, as a siren, which would overwhelm them.
The Young Cripple hung the detector once more over platform, and guided The Whale into the red mist and swirling dust, as they continued on their journey to find the boy, and with it, the girl knew, the billions of stories that she had her troupe had collected on Earth – those that belonged with every soul imprisoned in Heaven.
“Go slow,” said The Young Cripple.
The Whale smiled.
“Now you understand,” it said.
The Whale, along with its passengers, slowly sailed into The Demon’s planet, disappearing into the choking red atmosphere, navigating by fear alone.