Chapter 14
MINE EYES HAVE SEEN THE
GLORY
Time stood still.
She needed to know the location of the bombs he’d set in Chicago. He was standing right there. Not even a mind shield in place.
He was talking. He was always talking. Meaningless verbiage. You could drown in it, and that, she thought, was the plan. Play my game. Waste your time. Watch the city burn.
So many lives on the line. There always were when dealing with him
She could flit inside his mind, so quickly, so easily; he wouldn’t even notice it.
She made contact. She...
Time stood still.
The nightmare rewound.
She needed to know the location of the bombs he’d set in Chicago. He was standing right there. Not even a mind shield in place.
**********
Mentalon fell forever.
He could not see, or more accurately, there was nothing to see. There was just the endless feeling of ceaseless flight straight down. Or perhaps he was perfectly still and it was just the world hurtling past.
It didn’t matter. He still felt sick.
Mentalon had never been in a place like this before. No mind had ever felt like this, no melding had ever felt so total.
So real.
In the inky blackness that he fell through, Mentalon thought he could occasionally make out the faint outline of structures--a building, a tree, a mountain--but it was hard to tell. It was too dark. Still, Mentalon became increasingly sure that the darkness was filled with things he couldn’t see. Nothing threatening--it wasn’t like that. No, it was just filled with.... furniture. The props of memories hidden in shadow. Annette Rosenberg’s mind was like the floor of a closed showroom, the shades drawn.
The lights out.
Down, far, far below, Mentalon began to make out a faint, gray luminescence--like the moon seen through sultry summer’s night clouds. As he looked at it, he slowed and started to drift towards it.
As he got closer, he could make out more details. It was a flat desolate plane of what looked like gray sand that seemed to stretch forever, but only a small part of it--a circle several miles in diameter--was illuminated, as if from a giant, harsh spotlight hung somewhere above. Except that there was no spotlight, or any other source for the fluorescent white glare that baked the sand: The light simply existed.
As he watched, the entire plane of gray sand seemed to shift and flow. Ravines were suddenly cut in its surface, hills bulged, and it began to take on a familiar shape.
A mask--Comedy--smiled at him with infinite malice as he descended.
There was a glint of silver below the right nostril and Mentalon directed himself toward it. Mentalon cast no shadow as he approached and when he landed, a large, wispy gray cloud of dust was sent into the air. The ground was soft--too soft for sand. He reached down and felt the flaky material he stood on sift through his hand. He looked down at the gray residue left on his fingers. Not sand.
Ash.
Mentalon felt the temperature drop and looked over at the silver metal structure. It was a cage, six feet wide, four feet tall, with thick, rusted bars. No lock. No door. Something huddled within, shivering. Despite the light, there were still no shadows, anywhere. Mentalon looked up wondering if he would be able to see the light source now. There still wasn’t any.
Mentalon started walking toward the cage, his feet sinking deep into the ash with every step. Behind the cage loomed the nose of the mask 50 meters distant, its nostril the opening to a vast, dark, impenetrable cave. Mentalon didn’t like looking at it. Things moved in there, just out of the corner of his eye. Somehow he knew the cave was where the shadows were kept.
All of them.
Mentalon stood outside the cage. The woman inside was in a fetal position, shivering. Her arms were drawn up over her bald head, completely covering her face. The dress she was wearing may have once been a blue floral print, but it was hard to tell. It was now faded and wore to rags. Her white pumps were spit down the center, revealing pale, emaciated feet, toenails jagged and broken.
“Miss Annette?” Mentalon asked, a whisper all he could manage.
She didn’t stir.
Mentalon looked at her. He wasn’t used to seeing her like this, looking so much worse than she had even in the clinic, back outside. Here, she looked so alone, so broken, so....
“....undignified?” a polite, but otherwise completely affectless voice offered from behind Mentalon.
Mentalon spun around.
“She was quite the fashion plate, back in the day, compared to the others,” the Patchwork Man said, standing casually a few feet away, reclining casually on his cane, his mask smiling. “Never wanted any part of the garish costumes. Always stuck with something sensible, normal and respectable. She never bothered with a secret identity. I always respected her for that. I think it was her inborn sense of dignity that was responsible. Pity how she turned out.”
Mentalon’s eyes went wide. The images he’d seen in Archie’s head were just too vivid, too searing. Mentalon didn’t think; he just acted.
The Patchwork Man inclined his head quizzically and then chuckled. It was a deep, guttural sound, completely devoid of real mirth. He started strolling toward Mentalon. “Interesting. By now you should be realizing that your attempt to de-ionize the neurons in my brain isn’t working. Feel free to keep trying, though.”
Mentalon flew a few feet straight up into the air. He needed some distance. When he looked back down, the Patchwork Man’s mask was now Tragedy.
The Patchwork Man shook his head sadly. “Come now, little man. Haven’t you figured this out yet? Why, I’m not even here. I’m just a symptom of her psychosis,” he said, pointing his cane toward the cage with a flourish. “Just a delusion, albeit a dangerous one. But then aren’t they all?”
The Patchwork Man snapped a finger and Mentalon instantly turned back into Warden. Shocked, Warden desperately tried to change, to fly, anything. But he couldn’t. He screamed and plummeted into the ground. A thick cloud of ash exploded around him and he lay heaving, trying to catch his breath.
“You picked the wrong place to try and win Archibald’s respect,” the Patchwork Man said. As the cloud of dust cleared, Warden could see that the visage of Comedy had returned. The Patchwork Man stood above him and leaned against the cage. “But I know all about how that feels, too. Remember, talk to me and you’re just talking to her,” he pounded on the top of the cage with his fist, and the woman’s leg twitched within. “Seen through a mirror darkly, of course, but then, that’s all I ever am. I’m her, I’m you, I’m dear Archibald, I’m your parents--dead as doornails; I’m a patchwork of you all.”
Tears came involuntarily to Warden’s eyes at the mention of his parents. The Patchwork Man knelt beside him. “You willingly joined minds with someone who liked to think of herself as the preeminent psi on the planet,” he whispered. “No secrets here. None.” The Patchwork Man stood up and walked a few paces away. “All right, maybe one, but only one,” he said and turned around, his mask Tragedy.
“Hers. Would you like to know what it is?” he asked eagerly.
Warden pulled himself up and wrapped his fingered around the bars to Annette’s cage and shook. “Annette!” he yelled, voice cracking. “You’ve got to come on! I’m here to help you! Archie Goodwin sent me! Wake up!”
“She can’t hear you,” the Patchwork Man said, as if addressing a feebleminded child. “She can’t hear anyone anymore. She hears only me now.”
Warden leaned his forehead against a bar. It was ice cold.
What happened to you, Miss Annette?
“I merely showed her some things,” the Patchwork Man responded to the unspoken question. “Nothing more. Nothing less. I showed her some things about the world, about the people she loved, about the people she had sworn to protect, and I showed her some things about herself. She didn’t care for the lesson. But really now, is the teacher to be blamed for the intellectual rigidity of the pupil?” the Patchwork Man, still pacing around the cage, asked with a melodramatic shrug.
I’m being dumb. I’m still Mentalon. If I wasn’t, I couldn’t be here. Have to stop acting like this is the real world. Warden squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated on the woman lying in the cage. That was where Annette was hiding. He’d found her, now he had to get her to listen to him.
The Patchwork Man, his mask still Tragedy, walked alongside the cage, running his cane along the bars as he went. “I gave her the option of bending, instead she decided to break. A shame, but you can’t make an omelet, you know? Omelets…. eggs…. Archibald used to bore her to tears with that drivel, just as he does with you. It’s almost a relief not to have to put up with it anymore. Once, she let on to Archibald how she really felt about his pathetic little obsession and he finally realized how deadly dull she found it. Annette could feel the embarrassment and disappointment radiating off him and she knew she’d caused it. That fact was like a small dagger, right through her heart. It was silly, utterly meaningless, but she felt it so keenly. Touching, really.”
Warden ignored him. His eyes were clenched shut, his fists squeezing the icy bars. It was like reaching through molasses, but he could sense Annette’s mind beyond. Just a little bit more. All he had to do was reach a little further with his mind.
The Patchwork Man stood over Warden again. He put his hands on his hips impatiently. “Are you really foolish enough to think you can put Humpty-Dumpty back together again? I’ve opened her eyes. Are you going to close them again?”
Warden didn’t move. Closer.
“Archibald really needs to be brought up on charges for what he’s done to you,” the Patchwork Man said brightly. “When will you learn? Like I said, talk to me and you’re really just talking to her....”
The black molasses parted a little. Warden could feel a shape struggling in it. Annette! He reached out with his mind, made contact. Got you! I won’t let go! Warden pulled but suddenly felt sharp claws digging into his mind, dragging him forward, instead. Forward into the inky void, eagerly, hungrily.
“....talk to her and you’re talking to me,” the Patchwork Man said.
Warden was falling again. A guttural chuckle coming from both above and below.
**********
“Convulsion!” NoMan yelled and held down Mentalon’s arms and legs.
Archie pried the unconscious dwarf’s mouth open and wedged a teeth guard inside. “We have to break their contact!”
“I don’t think we can,” NoMan said, still steadying Mentalon’s spasming limbs. “Their minds are too deeply entwined, their EEGs too unstable.”
“Just whatever you do, don’t say, ‘I told you so,’” Archie said.
Annette, also unconscious since Mentalon gently touch her face and went catatonic, started banging the back of her head against the padded wall.
“Jesus!” Archie yelled and restrained her. “What the hell is going on in there?”
Archie and NoMan finished putting both Annette and Mentalon in soft restraints. Their convulsions stopped just as a red light over the door started flashing urgently and a low buzz sounded through the building.
Archie and NoMan exchanged quick glances.
“Perimeter alert,” NoMan said evenly.
“Shit,” Archie muttered.
Mentalon started to convulse again.
**********
Just a
memory.
Mentalon kept repeating that, like a mantra, as he fell right through the blazing center of it. This meager touchstone of rationality threatened to give way, but never did. It was all he had, but it was resilient.
He was lucky it just a memory.
Annette Rosenberg had encountered what lay in the Patchwork Man’s mind completely unfiltered. The version Warden experienced was diluted by distance and time; denial and fantasy; repression and the acidic inelegance of the human mind itself. It was just a memory. Merely an echo.
It was hell.
Inside the collective unconscious, Gabriel Warner had found what he was looking for all those years ago, across the street from the theatrical supply company. Gabriel Warner had found his answers and only through his own limitless hate was his intellect able to remain intact in the face of it.
He had seen the elemental group mind and more importantly he had *felt* it. Millions of thoughts, desires, perceptions, instincts and ideas; all distinct, all individual, all pulling in a different direction. And yet, as disparate as they all were, each of them was still apart of a unified whole; tied together in one gigantic mosaic of experience stretching forward and backward through time. It was both utter chaos and utter order.
And while each piece of it screamed in a different voice, all were united in the same tone of hopeless rage, fear and paranoia.
For Warner had been correct: The "foolish," "naive," "mundane" elements he was so contemptuous of were indeed absent from the surface of the American collective unconscious and busy elsewhere inside the heart of Uncle Sam. Thus, he was pitched headfirst through what was left: A shifting cacophony of brutal madness. A tapestry of hatred and loathing.
A ragged patchwork of darkness.
This is what Annette Rosenberg had touched. This is what still lived inside the mind of the Patchwork Man: Pure, raw, primal evil--humanity’s blackest heart completely unrestrained. Nothing redeeming, just madness, vileness and death, extending in an unbroken line from the first human being to the last.
Through the uncharted agony, Warden could see a web of other memories peeking thorough, mixed in. These memories were not Annette’s.
They were Gabriel Warner’s.
Warden saw Gabriel Warner awakening two days after merging with the collective unconscious. What had already been an irredeemably broken psyche had now undergone a profound change for the worse. Warner was convinced that his mind was intact, indeed clearer than it had ever been before, but the depths of his new madness simply melted the fragile boundaries between insanity and pure evil. Warden could taste Warner’s missionary zeal to remake the world.
Warner now considered himself neither human, nor metahuman, but connected to something that was greater than them both. No longer Gabriel Warner, but The Patchwork Man: A guide who would educate man and god, dragging the latter out of childhood and preparing both for their new roles in a new world.
The Patchwork Man would have to go to the metahumans, of course. They were still stuck in their adolescent paradigm of dime-store heroics, but he would use the appropriate tools and relate to them in a manner that they were comfortable with. They would call him a "super villain" and he would use these conventions to test them, push them, weed out the weak, foster the strong, show them the flaws in their reasoning, the fallacies of their obsolete world-view. Demonstrate that human morality was nothing more than a thin tissue of lies that even humans ignored when convenient, and that the only reason for its existence was because human beings were such fragile, weak, ephemeral creatures to begin with.
But metahumans were not fragile, weak or ephemeral. They didn't need pretty lies to protect them. Their magnificent physiologies and abilities already mocked pitiful human standards--now their minds just needed to be freed from the shackles of nostalgia. They were the Over Men and Women. They weren’t meant to obey laws, but to make them.
The Patchwork Man would shock them out of their complacency, always vividly illustrating by contrast just how petty and weak the creatures the metahumans thought they were protecting really were, and how futile all such efforts would always be. He would kill normals by the hundreds, by the thousands, until the metahumans became properly desensitized to their deaths.
But most of all, the Patchwork Man would show the metahumans fear and teach them the only way to banish it forever; in doing so, giving them the will to do it. He would toy with them and despite all their powers, all their beliefs and quaint convictions in human justice, he would slice their precious feelings of control away. They would be cast adrift, feeling manipulated and weak, and they would learn to hate it; eventually--inevitably--becoming willing to do anything in their power to prevent it from ever happening again.
Their power would allow them to do many things. Under the new Gods' rule, everything would change.
And the mind of man would be an anarchic patchwork no longer.
**********
Warden landed in another cloud of billowing ash. He checked a sob as it tried to escape his throat.
“Enjoy your trip?” the Patchwork Man asked, still leaning against the cage and looking at his gold pocket watch. Inside the cage, the woman had not moved since Warden had last seen her.
“I don’t see how you could,” the Patchwork Man continued, still looking at his watch, “the experience being so second-hand and all. None of the thrills and vibrancy of the real thing, which is much more illuminating that someone else’s mere memory of it. Although, to be perfectly honest, I think she’s developed a bit of an unhealthy fixation on it.”
Warden stood up and dusted himself off. He faced the Patchwork Man.
“Surely, you must understand now,” the Patchwork Man said, looking at Warden with his withering, smiling gaze, “you can never get her back. ‘She’s gone where the goblins go, below, below, below....’” he sang sprightly. “And she isn’t coming back.”
“I know about you,” Warden said, his voice wavering.
“Yes, I suppose you do. I noticed that she shared my secrets with you, instead of her own.” He paused and glanced back at his watch before looking up again, his face Tragedy now. “Isn’t that just like a woman?”
Warden was silent.
“Archibald used to say that to her, you know. ‘Isn’t that just like a woman?’” the Patchwork Man said. “Do you think he really didn’t know how much that bothered her? Or was it that he just didn’t care? I think Annette learned the answer when she experienced the fullest flower of the pale shadow you just enjoyed. It’s just as well she stayed here with me. I’m sure she’s found me a much more conscientious companion than Archibald ever was.”
“You can’t keep her here forever. She won’t let you. She can beat you”
The Patchwork Man’s stance changed. No longer relaxed, now perfectly erect, utterly still, implicitly threatening. “You really think so, little man?” His voice was low and harsh. “Your mother used to call you that, didn’t she? ‘Little man.’ Yes, let’s have us a look at you. So brave, so certain. Not even caring that your five hours are almost up,” he said as he snapped his pocket watch closed.
Warden squinted at him, uncertain.
“Oh, yes. Time’s almost up. Wouldn’t it be tragic if your consciousness was severed from you body and couldn’t find its way back? Now where could you go that would be so far away, so chaotic, that you’d become so hopelessly lost?” The Patchwork Man turned his head toward the black cave that loomed behind him. When he looked back, the mask of Comedy now leered at Warden. “Don’t worry; I remember the way.”
Warden lifted off the ground and started floating toward the Patchwork Man. Warden struggled in the air, but there was nothing to fight. Again, it wasn’t as much that he was moving as the rest of the world was. The Patchwork Man started to walk toward the cave, Warden hovering beside him. The shadows in the black mouth of the cave started to writhe and swirl.
“You really must experience it for yourself,” the Patchwork Man said. “And unlike Annette you won’t have to relay on a single second’s memory to savor. You’ll be able to stay there. Forever.”
Warden looked at the cage receding away from him. He closed his eyes and concentrated. He reached out with his mind and felt that tiny, neglected aspect of Annette’s self again. Caged, trapped; a prisoner to a single, eternally replaying memory. She’d lived it for so long, she had convinced herself that this was all that was left of her. Warden was almost swept up in the endless tide of the memory again, but recognized it this time and dodged aside, avoiding it. He was learning.
He hoped not too late.
“You came here as a liberator,” the Patchwork Man said, as they continued toward the cave, “but she doesn’t want to be liberated. She’s chosen to stay here.”
Warden probed deeper, working to save her as another part of her mind was trying to destroy him. Lurking deep below the line of consciousness, beyond the storm of memory, beyond the defense mechanisms, beyond the shade of the Patchwork Man she had created to be her jailer, beyond all that, was Annette, just as she appeared in the cage: Unreached, but not unreachable.
But there was something else here, too. Even now—with time so very important--it forced Warden to pause and regard it warily. Formless, silent, it was all around; Warden could feel its invisible weight pressing down on him. It was something just as elemental as the collective consciousness of man, but different and distinct.
Something vastly powerful.
This had not come from the poisoned flood that had been released into Annette Rosenberg’s mind. No, whatever this was, it had always been here. Waiting.
“You’ve never asked me what Annette’s secret is,” the Patchwork Man said from above, almost at the lip of the cave, yawning open like an eager mouth. “The thing so awful that, once she learned it, she could never allow herself to leave this place. Let me share it with you.” The Patchwork Man leaned in right over Warden’s ear. “When I presented the glorious essence of mankind to Annette, she saw the blackest part of her own soul....” he paused, his voice dropping to a whisper.
“....and she liked it.”
The shadows in the cave boiled and churned like black fire, screaming like bedlam “Good bye, my friend,” the Patchwork Man said. “If you ever see me, the real me, inside that wondrous unity, don’t hesitate to say hello.”
Warden tensed his body and yelled right at the heart of Annette Rosenberg’s consciousness.
**********
Time stood still.
An eternity encompassed in a second. Everything she had seen inside his mind. Everything she had felt. Everything she had learned. All of it fresh and new.
She did the only thing she could: She kept her eyes closed shut, her head buried in her arms and her ears covered. Nothing mattered. Nothing changed.
The nightmare rewound.
She needed to know the location of the bombs he’d set in Chicago. He was standing right there. Not even a mind shield in place.
He was talking. He was always talking. Meaningless verbiage. You could drown in it, and that, she thought, was the plan. Play my game. Waste your time. Watch the city burn.
So many lives on the line. There always were when dealing with him
She could flit inside his mind, so quickly, so easily; he wouldn’t even notice it.
She made contact. She...
Time stood still.
An eternity encompassed in a second. Everything she had seen inside his mind. Everything she had felt. Everything she had learned. All of it fresh and new.
She did the only thing she could: She kept her eyes closed shut, her head buried in her arms and her ears covered. Nothing mattered. Nothing changed.
Or did it?
Over the din of a hundred million remembered screams, Annette thought she heard something different. Not a scream, but a yell. Someone nearby. She couldn’t make out what the person was saying, but understood the urgency. Someone was telling her she could be free, if only she tried.
And someone was calling for help.
She really shouldn’t look. It hurt to open her eyes; it just allowed more pain to flow in. In a moment, the yelling would be gone. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. She knew that.
She did it anyway.
**********
The Patchwork Man picked Warden up with one arm. Warden was too completely drained from his last effort to rouse Annette to even struggle. As the Patchwork Man prepared to hurl Warden down into the cave, it collapsed inward instantly and completely, like a child’s sandcastle. The angry yells of the millions within faded and were gone.
The Patchwork Man dropped Warden to ground and spun around angrily. Annette Rosenberg stood in front of him. Behind her, the cage was in pieces. She looked awful, but her eyes were open, determined, and she was standing confidently, her hands clenched into fists at her sides. A faint fuzz of hair was visible on her otherwise smooth pate.
The Patchwork Man leaned insolently on his cane. “Well, look who has returned from the dead,” he said. “You know you can’t beat me.”
Annette stared through him. “I already have,” she said. “You’re just a dream. I’ve woken up.” Her eyes flashed crimson.
The Patchwork Man exploded. A fragment of his plastic mask landed, smoldering, next to Warden.
The ground was shaking and the harsh light was dimming. Annette was standing over Warden, looking down at him with a combination of relief, confusion and utter exhaustion. Warden looked up, completely drained.
I’m almost out of time. I don’t know what
will happen to me if I’m still here when my time runs out.
She smiled a familiar smile. Take my hand.
He did and they both lifted off the ground just as the gray plane of ash began to collapse. They soared into the darkness above. Warden looked back down and, in the fading light, he saw the last gray ashes crumble and implode into the shadows, leaving total complete blackness.
Exactly one second later, the light of a re-igniting star erupted from where the plane used to be.
Warden thought he saw the pure, white luminescence flutter strangely for a moment, almost like the beating of enormous wings, as the wave front of radiance swept past him; a hot wind that illuminated the entire mindscape of Annette Rosenberg as it spread. Darkness was replaced by a sky as bright and blue as any found in Kentucky during summer. Crystal spires of intellect reached to the heavens above. An ocean of compassion crashed down upon on the shores of self below.
Warden looked up. Annette was no longer there holding his hand, but she had not left him. She was all around.
Enormous wings? Warden heard her voice echo from all over, sounding almost as tired as he was. Tired, but happy. Why not? Hope is the thing with feathers.
There was another surge of brilliance, surrounding him, propelling him on his way home.
And as he left, Warden felt a soft, gentle kiss on his forehead.
Chapter 15: “Manifest Destiny”
Red Knight was
instantly in the air. He cracked the sound barrier a second later.