The Rhevireon Chronicle: The Ascent of the West Read online

  That evening at the cliff, by a lighthouse.

  Dusk got back into the truck, he drove off the cliff, until next tomorrow.

  Next morning.

  ‘You’re the girl from yesterday, Erin, right!’ the studio photographer offered, while having his espresso from a dispenser machine.

  ‘Nesrin,’ she corrected him,‘but that’s fine, at least you’d my face stuck in mind, so—’ waiting for his answer.

  ‘The thing is, it sort of caught me on the hop you came back!’ his initial response already had the best of her, ruined it for her.

  ‘I don’t understand!’

  ‘We thought it was obvious, you were too good for us,’ returned he with regret, ‘oohps!’

  ‘I see!’ she picked up her profile, and shook hands with him,‘so pardon me for not getting the drift arsehole.’ She left him the verbal remark.

  ‘Oh yeah, no future for you babe!’

  Nesrin hit the street, out there for a cig, she needed one, her first step in the pursuit of a life of purpose went astray, and passionately she drew on that last cigarette, as she gazed high, at a billboard.

  ‘It’s time, isn’t?’ Madam Arenithe enquired.

  ‘Time for what, huh?’ he asked, having tea with her,‘back to your twisted ways hag!’

  ‘Alas,’ she exclaimed, ‘yesterday, the day before, and even probably prior to that, you left my place, this house, same hour, same destination, coincidence? Maybe, I don’t care where you headed for, but it gives me the creeps when above this and that, every time you did it, you took my vintage ride behind my back, seriously, after all I raised you learning, the do’s and don’ts, not to ever cozen me, but you deceived me!’ imploded with choler, Arenithe thrust the fork onto the table.

  ‘The gaz gauge! How did I neglect that?’ he said,‘now bring me the keys Arenithe, I really need that clunker, or I’ll hot wire it otherwise.’

  ‘Right, give me a minute.’

  Arcturus emerged from the ashes; day 2, of the metamorphosis.

  At the villa, his mental state had worsened, his body disfigured even more, but the painting, his morphing masterpiece had gotten charmer, something of perfection, in spite of his sight loss, the day and night, the animating images in his subconsciousness dictated the deeds of his gangrenous hand; and on the spur of the moment, streaks of light began to stimulate his eyes gently.

  That evening at the cliff, by the lighthouse.

  Dusk observed the come and go of the surfs, as they collapsed against bottom of the crags, no boat would survive that! He started the engine, and depressed the clutch.

  The day after.

  11:05 a.m., the Aletheia Institute; the hallways burst at the seams with disciplined students changing classes; her next course, theoretical physics.

  Ninety degrees around the city.

  ‘Arggh! we strictly don’t accept to work on decrepit vehicles,’ said owner of the repair shop, while on a creeper sliding under the truck;‘we don’t, but I can make an exception.’ He added.

  ‘No! How disrespectful of you to blatantly tell someone my age such thing,’ Madame Arenithe expressed with a spit about her mouth, with her pumps she kicked him.‘I proffer no bribes.’

  ‘The heck! what the violence’s for woman?’ said the mechanic, sliding out,‘I just was being nice to you my lady, for what you’ve done to me at that drug store, I’d this midnight migraine that no doc could spare my head from, but you, pfff, one tablet, and it was gone, damn!’

  ‘Really! Good to here that, we’d like you visit us asap then!’

  ‘No offence, bur’ I’d rather stay healthy than see your face ever again,’ replied the mechanic decisively, he went on spouting,‘so, we’ve a can of worms here, most of the damage was done to the mufflers area, and yeah, the pistons ‘re just in a terrible state of affairs.’

  At the Aletheia.

  ‘It is of our interest how the discovery of the Higgs boson, thereby…’ as she was about to expound on the subject, Nesrin, reached to the classroom’s door.

  ‘Tardy!’ commented her professor,‘if not for your outstanding performance recently! Come in.’ Nesrin got to her seat, unruffled, she took notes in.

  ‘As I was saying, thereby the Higgs fields, that had made conquest of particle physics on behalf of the Standard Model, in parallel, was the turning point toward rising above it, thus, disestablishment of the older system, the once modern physics, or as I prefer to call them, polar physics! Indeed, from a subjective point of view, it was the first instant in a legitimate paradigm shift in science in general, and physics particularly, a shift from the theoretical incompatibility of the quantum field framework with that of the differential geometry of gravitation, up to the unfolding reformation of all laws describing observable phenomena, a theory of everything that must unify the three non-gravitational fundamental interactions with the fourth, gravity; the answer to the unsolved problem of cosmogony, or, perhaps there only is a dead end, a consistent set of axioms which is logically incomplete, impossibility of the incomplete to solve the «everything». That is why, we experiment.’

  Fomalhault emerged from the ashes of Redoubt; day 3, of the metamorphosis.

  At the villa, as the painting got almost accomplished, his senses were slowly returning to him, but not his body. Gilbert, emaciated, arid, malformed, was becoming what he painted down, the great work on the canvas substantialized into a hideous creation in reality, and he dropped the brush, his masterpiece remained unfinished, when his hands no longer were of use to him, his feet mutated into cloven hooves, tusks jutted out his jaw, slavering, his skin developed a condition of leukoderma, a layer of depigmentated pelage formed out of his skin, his skull, he got head of the beast, the bestial entity he hosted inside of him.

  19:11, the Aletheia Institute.

  Nesrin by the stairs at the gates, none of her colleagues was there other than herself, the entrance sealed already; doing what she was bound to, to wait for this person, who would fetch her home.

  Then at last, the SUV hauled up by the curb, in front of her; that person had arrived.

  At the store.

  ‘What is this?’ just as she settled at her pharmacy, Arenithe queried when she’d notice of them on the counter, flowers.

  ‘A bouquet of blue borage!’ Returned Spencer, stating the obvious.

  ‘Well, yeah, I mean from who?’ she couldn’t believe herself, it must be that auto mechanic, she knew he’d some issues.

  ‘The boy Dusk.’ Disclosed Spencer, sorting out packets of medicine.‘Told me they were for you, then said something which I flat didn’t understand, “We’re all guilty until proven innocent”, and so he asked me to kiss you for him, and left just like that!’

  ‘For me! I wonder what’s that motive he got.’

  ‘What about the kiss!’

  At the villa by the hillside.

  Gilbert spat on his great work, the incomplete portrait painting of his other self triggered the inborn slave in him, the abeyant in his human psyche to act; a man trapped between the hybrid he made out of himself, the seed he implanted into his flesh, and the double of this being manifested on the canvas, a self-portrait of a doppelganger, and through the man the two entities coalesced into one; wild, Gilbert did attain the physical strength he so desperately wanted to possess, but as the natural law went, he’d to offer something under a pact of reciprocity, of equal or greater value, so he did; his humanity.

  At outskirts of the megalopolis.

  20:15, the bus stopped off side of the highway, by the remote station on the lakeside, the plug door slid open, and the only person to board that bus got off, he proceeded to advance on foot along the cliff, for a while he turned by, and watched the bus setting forth, as its tail lamps shone farther into the distance before merging with gloom of the evenfall.

  Driving down the Plaza Delta.

  ‘Where are we heading?’

  ‘Till we get there.’ Deborah said resolutely, as she drove them across downtown Junea
uton.

  ‘Sure.’ Her voice told of the aversion she had for Deborah, her mother, that person; the woman who left Monty to the advantage of her career, Nesrin was repeatedly told. Monty, since the day got he right to their child custody, made it his duty to bring their daughter up on a doctrine of pragmatism, drilled into that child nothing but abomination, spite, and denigration of her own mother. Nesrin loathed every moment she had to pass with Deborah.

  The gate grunted, gate of the Phronesis, that it got the aged man alerted, and with a second thud, it had his heart pounding out of his chest, and then, it was all calm; what most concerned him, he knew the library like the back of his hand, and for the past five decades of scrupulous, consigned service, his intuition never failed him.

  ‘Monty told me of that audition!’ she placed the SUV at a parking lot.

  ‘So what?’ muttered she while unbuckled her seat belt, Nesrin got off the car with the slightest interest in the mother-daughter confab of sorts.

  ‘Won’t share that with me Nesy?’ Deborah prayed her, having a walk in the lot, ‘what was their feedback? did they like you? Did they not? Reckoned with any other opts or, maybe, better I shut up?’

  ‘Screwed it once, I’ll move on and see how’s it gonna bring it to me next!’ she finally said, passing by a pitch, Nesrin dropped a tip to the buskers.

  ‘Though I bet, them, got what it takes!’ replied Deborah hinting at the building at the other side of the street.

  ‘The Emporiums!’ exclaimed Nesrin, last time she’d been to there was the day of her graduation.

  ‘Let’s get you some threads.’ Deborah inveigled her daughter into that place, the Emporiums; the high end department store of Juneauton at the Plaza Delta intersection, out of its numerous boutiques with their displaying windows dressed in mannequins, the eye-catcher Emporiums premises was the most sumptuous of them all, as the flagship store of the Emporiums retail chain, incorporated in the Weltzentrumpoleis before finding its way into metropolitan areas of the Occidental Regnum, this building, was the paragon of conspicuous consumerism in the Weltzentrumpoleis, stressed in the bas-relief maxim on its frontispiece saying,

  CONSUMPTION IS THE MOTOR OF CIVILIZATION.

  23:44, the aged security officer inspected section after section of the library, moved from aisle to aisle, no sign of the intruder, no sign but that of dementia steamrolling his bodacious intuition, until, he was at the main study room.

  ‘Belhavenard the Harbinger!’ he whined.

  At the cliff by the lighthouse.

  The lighthouse jutting over the lake, was the only form of a link between him and anything else human, processed by the touch of man; in spite of the fact that Dusk had gotten hardened to the organic attributes of the area, the dew-plated bushes, recessing sands, and the precipitous tor shore, he was sickened by them, it didn’t matter to him if they were something of magic, for the supernal most place on earth, was the abyss, when a human being had to experience it in absolute solitude.

  Far away, at the store.

  ‘Whoah, sounds like the tempo’s peaking in the zone!’ Spencer gushed at the sight of a fire engines’ procession making its way by.

  ‘May He be with them,’ without getting a load of the situation outside, she retorted, involved in what she was best at doing, handling the crank-operated till,‘none but him above in the know!’ Arenithe absently mumbled.

  By the lighthouse.

  All changed with a flicker of light in the distant vistas of the Eyak lake, interrupted by the inclemency, Dusk gave a signal back, it was a yacht, the yacht guided by the rotating lens of the lighthouse into the haven was hacking its way, Dusk scrabbled himself down the rocks rugged towards foot of the crag.

  At the Ulmus Montana county.

  She placed her memoirs in the chest of drawers, then she sat to her piano, a grand piano, Nesrin played a piece, she once had composed.

  At foot of the cliff.

  A man and young woman from aboard the boat, throw Dusk the shroud, it was swept away in the waves churning, submerged in the roiling spume, enmeshed on the rocks, Dusk plunged into the lake that moiled, overflowed in the current he swam hard for the rope, and he tugged at the rope, strove to have it tied on the rocks; and with the knot strong enough, the young woman plunged off the boat clinging to the shroud, Dusk toed her into the strand, then it was the man’s turn, but before he pitched himself into water, he hewed hull of the yacht, scuttling the yacht.

  Hardly they made it to the lakeside,‘here we come for you, I’m captain Sebastian Curtis,’ the man told Dusk, who gave him a blanket to cover his drenching body, only then the man continued, ‘I am the one to give you the phone call, after she had the audacity to seek out a deal with me back in the harbour, a week before we set out cruising the Eyak, without Senior Geovany Guvelharts harbouring suspicions about it; here I brought her back for you, that’s my half of the bargain, the one I had with this young woman. That I will do the best I could to get us where’s safer.’

  ‘Do you trust this man?’ Dusk asked her.

  ‘He’d proven himself to me.’ She enfolded Dusk skintight in her arms, Hoyden retained close to him, she finally returned to him; since the end of spring.

  Sebastian the skipper, unloosened the rope.

  XV

  EXCLUSIVE

  July the 11.

  Models catwalked the runway, against her will Natalya kept tabs on the real-life poster boys doing their thing; the paltry, postiche, flawless male models, luminaries of this Potemkin village, the Juneauton Fashion Week.

  ‘Yinz, it’s call of the onus.’ Matt expressed with a sigh telling of his growing ennui, when the two way pager beeped,‘I just started to like the vibes these freaks of nature give out!’

  ‘You can stay then, no pressure,’ Natalya riposted, as she threaded her way across the event’s attendance of socialites and fashion critics, ‘I’ll see what’s up with the guys, and make you the beep if I ever missed you dear friend.’ She went on loudly, raising the tone over the hullabaloo of the exhibition.

  ‘I’d a change of heart!’

  Noon, at the villa.

  Gilbert woke up in the lounge room, into the midst of the detriment brought upon the place, the yesterday-high-art holding the room together, that of less worth than ditched crockery now it came to be, alone the painting unfinished still, in front of nude Gilbert, in his former shape, of a frail mortal, and he touched the painting, which no idea of what it meant he had over the trail of his mind, not even how did it happen into being he conjured up; my magnum opus! he marveled, as he laid his hand onto the box.

  At the Zentrum Gonzo’s building.

  11:41 a.m., Matthias and Natalya ran up the staircase leading up to the storey holding the office, the secretary who scrupulously was on the await for their occurrence, she rushed to the door at their sight, ‘everybody’s inside!’ tipped them off as she let them in.

  ‘It is no skeleton in the cupboard!’ Sean Yang was saying, standing with his legs crossed, with one hand inclined against the desk, while facing a view of the smog and jam of that day, provided by the soundproof panoramic window intercepting commotion of the outside from saturating his stronghold, and which in the meanwhile would punctuate a coherent alteration of feedback between him and the rest of his staffers’ reps, who currently occupied each sparse inch around his study; Yang sort of blasé with the not so prompt comers he kept the preaching on, ‘that the people to found what today is by far the biggest game changer in the market, the Zentrum Gonzo, are the same to founder with it the standards defining whole of an age of news delivery to the public sphere, ethics; without too many ethics comes very much controversy, thence to publicity, capital hurled in thereof, and that’s commerce; in spite of the fact that it takes some guts to stymy the appeal of the yellow press from infiltrating our cover pages, yea just as I do it in golf, our self-imposed position should remain one of a pliable leverage, that is, we might be not ethical but we got a moral, which is to fathom that w
hen to buy into the politician’s and how to broker for the musician, is what to sell the populi, this is my recipe for us to con, the recipe of symbiosis in practical journalism spiced up with elusiveness and all is to simmer on exclusivity, so go exclusive fellas! And to start with, here’s the latest news, the Phronesis on fire.’ Thundered Yang out of flaming exhilaration.

  ‘Ahem!’ Matt called for their attention, ‘too tard!’ he remarked, and having their eyes settled upon him he went on, ‘my apt’s got the view flat over the library, so you can imagine!’

  ‘Gimme what you got!’ Yang fired back with a good deal of exasperation.

  ‘The five cents?’

  ‘The picts Matt, pictures of the Phronesis on fire!’ she cued him in, without losing tensure over his obtuseness,‘since you live by the library, duh.’ She even saw to clear it up for him in simpler terms.

  ‘Of course I didn’t snap any, wasn’t our assignment, or what?!’

  ‘Remind me why I’d have taken on a drop-out in the first place?’ Yang exclaimed with a terrible scowl.

  ‘I believe it all started with a tongue twister,’ Matt claimed, getting all emotional though, ‘you bet me to say the twister, I gave it a shot, and somehow the job was mine.’