Frightened Boy

Chapter Nine, part two - Devils

The police stopped as something caught their eye.  I turned and looked down the street where a lone figure stood, his feet on either side of the double yellow lines of the pavement.

It was Him in a burgundy jacket, big aviator glasses, and a short-cropped beard.  He held a cigarette between his fingers like a conductor’s wand.  Escher stood perfectly still, blocking the policemen’s path.

The two cops looked like rabbits in his headlights.  They ducked slowly back into their cruiser.  Apparently afraid, they turned off their warning lights and pulled a U-turn to leave in the direction from which they came.

As soon as the vehicle turned, time snapped back into motion.  My attacker lunged at me again, and I was barely ahead of him. I ran for the bus, which was empty save a lone driver.  I shouted to Guts to stop trying to fight and follow me, as I flew past him into the buses’ waiting door.

I climbed on.  My pursuers did not enter the bus.  Never been happier to see the camera mounted at its rear, recording the passengers getting on and off. These signs of civilization were gateways to the Voice’s power, and the Strangers must fear them.  

Out the window, Guts punched and kicked a large flowing figure.  It was impossible to tell where the cloak ended and the body inside it began, so all of his frantic blows seemed to hit only empty air. Another Stranger approached from behind him. 

I banged on the glass of the bus.  Guts twirled his head, dreadlocks spinning.  This seemed to break his bloodlust, and he turned to charge into the bus.  The Stranger launched himself at Guts’s waist, and even as he latched on, it was clear the large delivery driver wasn’t stopping.  He dragged the Stranger a few feet before at last his attacker let go, and Guts was on the bus. The moment he stepped inside, the vehicle accelerated, sending him stumbling down the aisle.

Escher blew a ring of smoke at the bus as it spun past him. 

 “I… I saw Escher,” I managed to breathe heavily into the phone after I had ducked safely down into a rear seat.  “He was there.” 

“I know,” said the Voice.

“How did you get the police to come so quickly?”

“Because I run Banlo Bay. This bus will take you downtown in good time.”

“Why did the police just leave like that?”

“They were afraid of Escher.”

“Well, why didn’t the Strangers follow me onto the bus? It's not like them to back off.”

“They were afraid of me.”

“Afraid of you?  Who the hell are you?” I asked.

“I will tell you this—it is extremely rare that I take a personal interest in something.  You don’t know how lucky you are,” the Voice said, somewhere between a smirk and a sneer.

“Trust me, I appreciate it.  So… what’s the next step?”

“Right now, hundreds of policemen are attacking the camp of Strangers from which you escaped,” he said. 

“Wait,” I said.  “Are you Illuminati?”

“Ah, so you’ve found me out,” the Voice said.  “I am Illuminati, I am Bilderberg, I am NWO, I am Skull and Bones, I am the Freemasons. All and one.”

“How is that possible?  I thought the Illuminati hated the Bilderbergers for causing the Great Collapse?” My personal theories on the Collapse I’d survived.

“You’ve only scratched the surface, Clark.  There is an entire world operating underneath and above your own.  Previous to now, you were only a resource to be controlled. You’ve been given a glimpse at how it operates.” 

“So why are we running from Escher then?” I asked.

There was silence on the other end.  I turned to Guts, who was panting and clutching his side in the seat across from me.

“Who is Escher really?” I asked.

“I don’t know who he really is. I hope to capture that footage, use our facial recognition software to answer that question. He thinks he is a reincarnation of the famous twentieth-century graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher, somehow alive in our time due to his painting of Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. As a result, the man calling himself Escher thinks this is all a dream he’s having as the artist. He believes reality is only a figment of his imagination.”

“So if he’s insane, why’s he so hard to catch?”

“Because reality actually seems to do what he wants it to do.”

“That’s impossible.”

            “Yes, it is. But I’ve seen bullets stop in front of him, seen doorways appear out of nowhere. I’ve seen him escaped locked vaults without opening the doors. He knows things he couldn’t know, and events always seem to unfold perfectly in his favor. I have no other explanation. My only hope is to convince him he’s not Escher, and to do that I have to find where he really came from.”

“What if he’s really Escher and we’re all in his head?”

“Then when I kill him, we’ll all cease to exist,” the Voice said. “Now, the bus is going to circle the city until morning, when we’ll enter downtown and take advantage of rush hour to confuse the Strangers. I’ll call again when the sun comes up.”

*

The bus bounced on the road, and I realized I’d been asleep.  The early morning sun was rising, and I’d be reaching downtown at the same time I would if I’d been going to work like a regular human being—like the kind of human being I’d hoped to be, at least before I met Erika. 

Dawn rose on a pack of wild dogs roaming the fields of rubble and overgrown grass just outside of the feeder road of the highway, migrating toward an old warehouse that’d been swallowed by ivy. 

The highways were the tracks in a house of haunted horrors; you were fine as long as you didn't get off the ride. 

As the bus pulled into the outskirts of downtown Banlo Bay, I watched the throngs of people walking into the metropolitan center.  Some were homeless—just waking up, beginning their daylong search for food.  Many were marked with the effects of rubella or small pox, polio contorting their bodies like melting wax museum figurines.

The phone buzzed in my lap.  I fumbled with it for a moment and answered.

“There will be Strangers waiting for you at every bus stop in the city,” the Voice said.

“So you're saying I’m fucked?”