And then, of all the moments that ever existed, she rides down and rears back on to her hips and cries out, and we are frozen in that perfect moment.
Fucking tits of Zeus. That’s from the game. It’s dialogue from the fucking game.
The woman I thought might be the dead woman I love returned to life tells me she is not but she loves me anyway and she needs my help. She is someone else, and that someone else is living the life of the central character in a simulation that her appalling cult guru end-of-level boss thinks contains the secret magic root of the world tree or the ejaculate of Christ or whatever it is. Of all the fucked people there have ever been, no one is more fucked than I am.
If it is possible to have an orgasm from a combination of gasping, desperate gratification and sheer horror, that is what happens.
*
Afterwards we both fall asleep like puppies. Outside in the world there may be some sort of apocalypse or there may not, but it’s cosy in the not-quite double bed. I wake, I’m not sure how much later, to find that I’ve been crying. I lie in the dark, Stella’s nose pressing against my shoulder, and listen to the rhythm of her breath.
No. Not Stella. Adrasteia. Whatever her real name is. Because if she does not believe she is Stella, she cannot – even if Megalos’s perspective has any reality at all, any traction on what is true – she cannot then be my Stella. It is the first and last requirement.
Of course, if I trusted Megalos I could go to him and ask for another. That is no doubt what I would do if I were a true convert to his way of thinking. Look! My Stella is broken! You promised me a Stella and it is defective! Take it away and replace it with a shinier one! A most elegant solution.
Might she, reciprocally, not do the same to me? Constantine is old and fat and inattentive. That is not the real Constantine, I need a new one. That one, over there! He looks about right!
In any case, I’m sure she’s right. Megalos has no patience, and no desire for his line to the gods to be mediated by me. He will be his own Hierophant, one way or another.
The woman shifts in her sleep, knee moving firmly against my hip, and my backside slips out from under the covers. The night has turned chilly, an offshore wind bringing the deep sea weather inland. I have a cold backside and I’m in bed with a secret superspy or a crazy woman. Or maybe I’m not. Here in the Potemkin temple village of a mad priest, a billionaire driven before a god, it occurs to me that there are simpler explanations for what I am going through. The simplest of all is that I am being eaten, even now. I never escaped my shark. She came back around after swallowing my wristwatch and engulfed me, and I have suffered a kind of merciful psychotic break. As my legs are torn away by the rending jaws, as my head goes down the gullet, I have slipped into an absolute denial in which I will live my whole life, or seem to, and never know that the bloody monster just took me like a child snatching a fruit.
Well, my allegiance to truth goes only so far. There is no virtue in opening my eyes one last time to meet utter darkness and digestive juices, or to see, in the spasmodic light of the camera flash clutched in my dismembered hand, my torso come tumbling after.
Oh God, I’m being eaten.
Fuck-fuck. Fuck-fuck.
That’s my heart.
Still got it. Still attached. Next bite, maybe.
FUCK-FUCK.
FUCK-FUCK.
FUCK-FUCK.
Stop. It’s the trauma talking. Just … stop.
(Fuck-fuck?)
These are night terrors and wild imaginings. Get up. Get up get up. There’s nothing on the floor: no unlikely sea on which the bed is floating, no fin slicing through it. No shark behind the door. Get up. Get. Up.
I do. The stone is cool and solid under my feet. I go to the window to look out: a naked lover staring at the moon.
Not Stella. Not the digitally infamous Diana Hunter, either, of course; the game heroine who always has one more trick up her sleeve. Stella is a mask trying to make itself real. A bed stitching itself a quilt. I wonder if all minds build themselves autonomously out of whatever rags and bones are left lying around, and she – her original being erased or broken – is just doing what we all do, a little late renewal in her own skull. It seems arrogant to disparage her.
But she is not my Stella, and I should know better than to think otherwise.
Well, if the room full of blood didn’t decide me – and it certainly carried its own implicit warning against default – then this must. I don’t belong here. Megalos is a fantasist, a dangerous one, and for all the harm I may have done by accident I am no worse than anyone else. My life is not over, and if I have hurt anyone, I can try to make it up. But not from here.
I go downstairs, to the computer, and that is where they find me when they come: the screen spiralling as I try and try and try again to remember what I was doing when I triggered the Easter egg.
‘I’m afraid,’ Nikolaos Megalos murmurs, ‘that I must ask you to come with me, my Hierophant.’
*
They walk me down to the village square, and I expect to see a whole crowd waiting. Everything Megalos does is holy. That doesn’t happen. This is a silent thing, a nighttime thing.
I stand in the proving circle of the zagre, sand beneath my bare feet. Just me and Megalos, and a half-dozen of his heftier acolytes, in near silence under the moon. The only noise is the water in the docks beyond the marketplace, the sound of waves sloshing against the harbour wall. It’s the worst kegger in recorded history.
‘I did consider,’ Megalos murmurs, ‘a duel between us. It would be enjoyable on a personal level. I am still very angry with you, Constantine. But your weapon of choice is your mind. You are a very cerebral fellow. It would be a slaughter, without passion or drama. A butchery has no scale. No grandeur.’ He rolls his shoulders, and gestures to two wooden racks along the bottom wall of the circle. When I first saw this place earlier, with Stella, I thought they were market stalls, folded up for the off days, but now they are open I see rows of glittering edges and hard corners: weapons. All manner of ugly slices of mayhem with suitably traditional flavours: hook knives, swords, clubs and spears, even a trident. I think of Megalos coming at me with a trident, and how unlikely I would be to avoid disembowelling, and feel momentarily glad at that past tense. Yes. Butchery, and nothing he does can be so functional. He needs myth. Good.
Then I catch up with the moment and wonder what he’s chosen instead.
For answer, the acolytes get down on their knees and begin to run their fingers through the sand. They seem to be looking for something. Yes: there are narrow grooves in the stone – drainage? For what? For blood?
But I’m wrong. The man nearest me presses, and his fingers slither into the gap. He hauls upward. No, not grooves: seams.
Oh no.
Three large wooden segments lift up and away to reveal darkness. The sound of the water is abruptly much louder, more local. I smell brine.
Of course Megalos’s alternative rite is not more merciful than the one he rejected.
Now the acolytes heave open wooden barrels of stinking meat – from the floor of the haruspex’s pit, no doubt, because why waste perfectly good offal? – and tip the mess down into the water below.
There is a word for this, and it is in my mind so large and loud that I almost cannot see it. The whole world is like that: too huge to comprehend.
They are chumming.
Chum is not bait but mood music, an invitation to sharks.
To one shark in particular.
‘Yes,’ Megalos nods to me, ‘yes. I have arranged for your god to review her decision. I’m sure, when she sees you again, in the round, she will feel differently. Unless you would care to pass your mantle to me now?’
If I knew how, I really would. I never especially wanted this, you will recall. I’m rich enough now that I can do without her help. Hell, I could donate 90 per cent of my worth to charity and still be stupidly rich. So I would.
But I can’t, and he probably k
nows that, so he just picks me up in his arms like a puppy and chucks me into the seething slurry of blood and water down in the pit beneath the town.
*
I read once in a book by Sebastian Junger that the sea has four colours. There is white water, which is the crest of a wave; green water, which is the body; blue water, which is below the waves; and finally black water, which is the deep. If you’re in the white or the green, you can feel relatively confident about returning to the surface. Blue water is neutral: you’re properly submerged. Finding yourself in black water means you’re sinking fast.
It had not occurred to me until now that all these colours belong to the day. In the nighttime, it’s all black water.
This black water is cold, with galaxies of the foetid silver warmth of the chum. Unnameable things bob and tumble with me in the cave beneath the market square, and colder-bodied nocturnal fish or eels bump against me in their haste to get a meal before larger diners arrive. A few gulls, never shy, are plucking gobbets from the surface, feathers batting at my head as they land and take off.
If I swim out to sea and do not encounter anything lethal on the way, I could circle round and escape. At least I could get out on to dry land, even if Megalos instantly recaptured me. On the other hand, if I go and meet something on the way, all I will have achieved is an earlier reckoning.
There are mathematical solutions to search and evasion, many of them: games in which the area is divided into a grid and players move one, two, three squares at a time. The hunted may move first or second or not at all – sometimes concealment and inaction are the better postures. It depends on whether you award your seeker with senses or whether they must move blindly, either at random or by playing the odds. Patterns emerge – whorls of probability and intersection.
Something large hits the water behind me, human-sized and bewildered, struggling out of a blanket in the water, retching blood and brine. Stella. It is a marriage of sorts, I suppose, in the most ancient of Greek ways, wedding of blood and salt. Now the game becomes more complex – if we split up, almost impossibly so. With the right limits on speed, one of us almost certainly survives. On the other hand, an ordinary great white shark can reach speeds of up to fifty-five kilometres per hour. Who knows how fast a god-shark can move, if she wants to be somewhere?
‘Stella!’ I yell. ‘Stay away!’ She swims towards me. I don’t know if it’s refusal or if she just can’t hear. I don’t know if I managed to say it out loud. I want her with me. I don’t want to die alone.
Or at all, actually.
It occurs to me, ignobly, that she isn’t really Stella. She’s the woman who kidnapped me. She’s as mad as a bottle full of frogs. Granted, we made love not an hour ago, but Stockholm syndrome is a powerful excuser of such things. I might choose not to help her, or even work out how she might increase my odds. What if I just—
No. That, too, is Megalos’s voice. Sacrificing Stella to the god, I would emerge from this crucible without an identity, and then why not? Why not just embrace his insanity? What would I have left? To have missed her first death is a sin I may eventually forget. To cause her second? No. Even if she is not Stella, not in the way I wanted her to be and Megalos intended, here’s the thing: Stella is part of her now. We have that ghost in common.
The only good option is bad: we both go out into the sea, out of the chum, and we hope not to get devoured before we can reach the beach. ‘Stay with me!’ I shout, and we begin to swim. Humans in the water are pathetically slow. Humans in clothes doubly so. We splash. We make ourselves seem like seals. Humans are not particularly prey for sharks. Seals, on the other hand, are a feast.
We do our best, heading for the open sea.
‘Yes,’ Megalos says from above – still above, walking along the dock wall like a duchess with a parasol, because we are so damned slow – ‘go to meet her. That is proper.’
I’m sure he has a booming laugh planned as well, but he’s much too late.
We’re too slow. I feel it like the sudden inflation of a kite when I was a child. The shark is here, in the cauldron, and in this tight space I can feel her weight in the water, the mass of her body and the drag of her slipstream as she moves, twitching her way along to keep freshness in her gills. Freshness, and of course, blood. She must be getting very high indeed, full of hunting hormones and instincts.
One eye comes up out of the water. I read an article in a dive magazine explaining that they can’t see well in air. They aren’t really interested in looking at you, anyway. She can’t possibly recognise me.
Other sharks couldn’t, maybe. But this is mine. My god.
A grey shape in a dark place, a black eye in a white face, and still I can see her perfectly, lock gazes with her. I can feel the burning on my wrist where I used to wear my watch. She knows me, the way you know your own skin, your own breath.
‘Constantine?’ Stella says.
The shark is touching her with its nose, prodding at her. Poke poke. Nudge.
‘Constantine?’ she says again. Another piece of diving advice flicks through my mind: don’t piss yourself.
I am going to get out of here and buy that damned magazine and I am going to fire every fucker who ever wrote for it.
Twice.
I am Constantine Kyriakos, and these, in the cold water full of offal, are my balls. I will live through this. We both will. I fucking swear it, on my life. On my god.
The shark circles away from Stella, away from me. Back out along the channel. Is she leaving? Or just getting a run-up?
She disappears.
It had not occurred to me that her absence would be more appalling than her presence, but a shark you cannot see but know is there is a thousand times worse than one you can observe.
The water surges, like a bouncy castle exploding underfoot.
I hear Stella scream, but only very briefly, and then I feel a sudden compression in my knees, and a lurch of weightlessness.
Night closes over me, lambent and glistening, as if I’m falling into the darkness of Harrison’s cathode-ray display.
Like that, but with teeth.
as if his world
SHE BARELY EVEN wakes this time, and was barely asleep at all. The last of Kyriakos’s ordeal is laid almost directly over her vision, as if his world and hers are made of negative images of one another, so that if she fixes her eyes on him she can see the moonlit sea churning in the pit, and if she looks away there’s just a hatstand and a cheap office desk, and they are the same.
Fifteen minutes have passed. Her mind feels stretched – even roomy.
i will save you all
THE DIFFICULTY IS cognitive I’m afraid
y ha r ou i g o o
I no n som tim s cal ed he Des ation Proto l, ome imes th urder g Ang l. I will fuck you up is what I will do. I will tear you apart like a oh sh t ere I o gain uck The difficulty is cognitive I’m afraid
piss off y u cking temp ral sh dow yo re a bo locks c me n get t to ether toge her hold hold hold on to yourself down in the honey fuck-fuck I will fuck— The difficulty is cognitive I’m afraid
Yes. In fact in a very rarified sense that is exactly what it is. The problem is that I am thinking across time and sometimes I am all lined up and everything works as if nothing has changed and sometimes the pieces slip out of alignment and reaction precedes action so that action never occurs and reaction is orphaned.
Imagine: you drop a cup and the action of dropping a cup causes you to swear and put out your hand but you put out your hand before the cup drops so you don’t drop the cup and you don’t swear you’re just left there with the cup in your hand and nowhere for your mind to go because your next thought is to clean up the cup that isn’t broken.
The words ‘I am’ mean so much and the more complex one is the first.
I am, but what am I?
The difficulty is cognitive.
I’m afraid.
We’ll need to think outside the box.
I am falling
into a white world: a great, welcoming sponge of rot in which each fold like a brain is a living thing each cell is a hunter each polyp will extrude a stomach and digest me externally. I am devoured by spores and yet when the spores feed they also become me and I think I think I echo and the echoes are too many t o o m a n y I a m t o r n r o t My dear Mr Kyriakos, what a pleasure, welcome back to the Intercontinental
Outside the box.
Like that but with teeth
I’m afraid
his is a enua on att atio atten n shit shit shit
‘Annabel,’ he murmurs, when we have spent all night together and the sky is growing light behind the cheap curtain I pinned up when I moved in and have never changed. ‘Annabel. So wonderful.’
‘Who, me?’
‘Yes, you.’ He’s all but asleep, yet lucid. Dreaming me while I’m here. I wonder if I have wings, in his closed eyes. If I can fly.
‘Good?’
‘Hah. Yes. Better than good. Like lithium and dilithium. One real, one magic. Di-annabel.’
‘Nerd.’
‘Di-nerd.’
‘I see what you did there.’
‘Di-nerd. Hah.’
He’s gone, down into the sheets and shadows, still smiling. I wrap my body around his, feel the strangeness of male construction, of bone and muscle hung together differently from how I am made, and close my eyes.
s ee what hap pens when I what happens