Pixie
Isaiah shifted to try to find a more comfortable position in the chair, but nothing helped. It was already a long day. Professor after professor had droned on as he sat through class after class. The balmy dusk of summer was beckoning outside the window, and he wished for nothing more than the chair on his porch and a cigarette to toast the twilight. But he was here in this stuffy office listening to his professor’s whining, German accent.
“Mr. Fleet.” As the professor spoke, he did not look at Isaiah. He studied a stack of papers on his desk. “Thank you for meeting me again,” he continued as he picked up one of the papers. “I know it was short notice.”
Isaiah nodded. “You’re welcome,” he answered, but he could not muster a hint of enthusiasm in the words.
“We Germans are not a people who believe in ambiguity,” the professor continued. “Ours was a history of hardship, and life has little time for niceties.”
Isaiah nodded again. He tried to smile, but that smile left his face as his eyes wandered back to the small window at the back of the office. He hoped the meeting would be quick, so he could enjoy at least some of the evening.
The man did not answer at first. He looked at a final paper that sat in front of him. He grunted and then shifted the paper to the side. His eyes continued to stare at the paper, and when Isaiah looked down at it, he saw that it was a schematic filled with equations. The man continued to stare at that schematic as his hand moved. He muttered to himself in German as he pulled one of his desk drawers open. Isaiah suspected the muttering had been a curse, but he could not be sure because he knew no German. The professor sighed, his hand reached into that drawer, and he pulled out a small bottle. The tablets on the inside rattled as he clunked it onto the desk. Then he looked up at Isaiah. “Mr. Fleet,” he said. His eyes were tired, intense, hopeful. “I want you to take it again.”
Isaiah looked at the bottle. He looked at the tablets inside. The last time he had seen them had been more than a week ago, and the last time he had seen them, some sort of Satan had visited him in the bathroom. The stain of that meeting flared up like an old wound. The professor had mentioned them one or two times since that classroom experiment, but the man never hinted that they would ever make another appearance in his students lives. Sure, the man had promised knowledge beyond what humans could know. Sure, he had told Isaiah that despite the fear he felt, he had experienced something special. But Isaiah shook his head as he looked at those tablets, and he shook his head without thinking. Fear (or something he could not understand) moved his muscles.
The professor frowned at the response. As he leaned back, his chair groaned as if to speak what the man felt. “I understand the fear you may have. As I’ve told you before, I’ve met what you met. I understand what it is. I understand the dark power of that thing.” The man’s voice was stern as he spoke. Isaiah even thought he heard anger.
“Son,” the professor continued before Isaiah could respond. “Isaiah,” he tried to soften his voice and he nodded in mimicry of a father, but Isaiah still had the impression that slow anger bubbled under the surface, “good things come through pain. You must go through the valley of death to get to the city of gold.”
Isaiah nodded back to him with tightly pursed lips. The young man had made up his mind. Place one of those pills before him, and he would not take it. He looked to the window again. It seemed the sunlight had faded, and he wondered if it was only a trick of his eyes. How could the sun go down so quickly? “Sir,” Isaiah answered. “It’s . . .” he searched his mind for an explanation of why he would not take that pill, but he found no other answer than fear. Fear and only fear. And as that fear settled on him, he began to feel ashamed of himself. He knew what he had seen had been a creation of his mind. The drug had entered him, and the drug had placed that monster in his world. But that monster was not real. It was a projection. Light and air and nothing else, and since it was no more real than the images in a cinema, he had nothing to fear of it. It could not harm him. It could not harm anyone, and yet, he feared it. It was this irrational fear that made him feel ashamed.
The professor did not answer him at first, and he did not look at him. No. The man looked at the table. He brought a slow hand up and tapped the lid of the pill bottle three times. Only after he had done this did he speak, and when he spoke, his voice was not forceful, nor was it honeyed. He did not speak as a man trying to persuade. His voice was simple and raw. His voice was clear. It was quiet.
“I promise that if you decide to take this again, it’ll change your life forever. It opens a door. And if you seize it . . .” The man did not continue. His voice shrank to silence, and he remained silent. He only stared over at Isaiah and awaited a reply, a decision.
Isaiah pursed his lips. He considered getting up and leaving, but his shame did not let him. The time to leave had already passed. Though his fear shouted at his to leave, his rational mind overpowered his misgivings and kept him in that chair and kept him in that room.
Isaiah nodded back to the man. “I will take it.” His words were almost a whisper.
The professor smiled. He grabbed the pill bottle. He popped it open and held it ready for Isaiah. Isaiah brought out a hand. The professor tilted the bottle, and a single tablet fell into his palm.
“I met the man who discovered this little gateway.” Isaiah looked down at that little tablet as the man spoke, and he saw the professor’s finger come into his vision and tap it.
“We’ll call him Moses,” the professor continued.
Isaiah looked at the man. His cold face had softened somehow. Even that scar running down his jawline had softened as well. The man held a glass of water. Isaiah took the water. He brought his hand up to his mouth. The pill fell onto his tongue. He tasted its bitterness. He brought the glass of water up to his mouth and washed the bitterness away.
“Good, good,” the professor muttered. “Now, let Moses lead you from the desert to that promised land.”
Isaiah heard the man say something else, but his mind was cloudy. It felt like his ears were stuffed with cotton balls, and everything the man was saying was thick and muffled. Isaiah looked over to the professor. He saw that old man as if through super-heated air, as if through shimmering water. His face rippled with that water. His forehead billowed out. His nose grew to the size of an orange. His mouth opened. Isaiah heard the man’s muffled voice again. The man’s mouth broke into a smile, and that smile began to fold in on itself. The man’s mouth folded in upon itself a dozen times and then Isaiah saw blackness. It was not darkness. It was as if a hood had been pulled over his eyes. He was still seeing something, but that thing had no depth or color or light. Everything around him was blackness. He looked up: blackness. He looked down: blackness. Every way, blackness, without a hint of light.
Then, with the same quickness, his vision was filled with white light. But this light did not last as long. This light faded in the eyes like a flashbulb. And when that light faded, he was able to see the office again, but slowly. Little detail by little detail came back to his vision. It was the office. But it was all different. He looked to the professor, and as he looked to the professor, he realized how the world was different. It looked like an animal that had been skinned. The husk of the world had been flayed off to reveal its true nature underneath.
At first he saw the office as it had been, but with this flaying, the place faded, little by little it faded and evaporated until it was blackness all around him. Though the space was only blackness, he understood it to be more the office than the office had ever been. Isaiah somehow understood this blackness was the real office. What Isaiah had seen before had been something else.
After glancing around the darkness of the room, Isaiah looked back to where the professor had been standing, and he was surprised to find he was still there, but the man was different as well. He was younger by at least a decade. His hair had not a hint of gray. His facial features were sharper, tighter jowls, a more pronounced chin, and he wore a dark, military uniform. He had a bright red armband wrapped around his bicep. The cap on his head had a silver skull that sat at the center of his forehead.
Isaiah took a step back from the man in surprise. He knew the uniform of a Nazi when he saw one, but that was not what startled him. Something gleamed across every inch of that man’s body, from the top of his hat, across the little metal skull, to the bottom of his tightly laced boots: a thick layer of blood. Isaiah regained his composure and continued to study the man and noticed something else: something floated in the air around the man’s body. Isaiah’s eyes squinted in confusion for a moment and then understanding dawned. Ash, flakes of ash, billowing like an aura. The man said something, but Isaiah did not hear the man’s voice as words. But no, it was not that simple. The man was speaking words. What he was saying did not sound anything like words, but Isaiah knew they were words. But those words sounded something like crunching glass. The sound was hard to place. It was like a gurgle, but it was a gurgle as if coming from a robot. The man nodded toward him, but Isaiah shook his head to tell him he did not understand.
Then Isaiah heard an electric pop. He saw a small, lightning-like flash out of the corner of his eye, and his eyes darted toward that light. The air where he had seen the light was empty, almost empty. There was an odd energy floating where the light had been. The first thought that came to his mind was a ghost. But it did not fit what he would expect of a ghost. The second thought he had (and this made more sense to him) was that he was seeing something akin to Moses’ burning bush.
Whatever was floating in the air was beyond this reality. A divine presence was making itself known.
A spark, something like a spark, lit up the thing. Darkness centered itself in that divine space, and a being grew from a pinprick into something the size of a toddler. But it was not a toddler. It had a childlike face, but it was not the face of a child. It was an old face, especially in the eyes. It made Isaiah think of an old woman, but there was none of the exhaustion that is often seen in the twilight years of a person’s life. “A pixie,” Isaiah thought. “A fairy of some sort.” His eyes wandered across this thing. He wondered if it were real. Or was it just a projection, all light and nothing else. He became more certain of the evanescence of this being as he saw its appearance stutter into something else. As it shifted, it still had the appearance of a pixie, but it turned into a thousand fractals of color. Everything else in this dark room remained the same, but it was as if he were looking through a kaleidoscope at this thing.
Then the colors and fractals disappeared and the normal (as much as this thing was normal) human appearance returned.
The professor said something else, but Isaiah ignored him. No matter how hard he tried, he would never be able to pull meaning from that crunching, chunky voice.
“We like to dream too,” this pixie thing said. It had a voice he did not expect. The thing had a voice like a wrench falling into a long, twisted pipe that ended in a cavernous empty metal tank. He did not know how he could understand it, but he did.
“We’ve seen many futures,” the things clanked out. “The best futures are the ones that were once dreams. We’re always awed by dreams incarnate.” The thing chuckled, or maybe a better way to describe what he heard was a giggle. But that giggle was nothing like a giggle. “Do you like us better now?” the pixie continued.
“Um,” Isaiah answered, but he otherwise stood still and dumb.
“We have many feathers, skins, clothes, fashions, folds.” It giggled again (or whatever that noise was). “But you don’t like us dark. You like us bright, full of light. If only you knew the imaginary nature of such things. One no better than the other? Two strands twisting together to the same end. But dust prefers light? Dust prefers when it really never matters.” The thing’s giggle was the punctuation ending its sentence.
“You are. . .” Isaiah paused. He swallowed. He was not afraid of this thing, but that entity in the bathroom still made cold shivers of fear fill him.
“We are the darkness,” the thing smiled, something like a smile. The creature’s mouth shattered in a large arc across its lower face. “Sometimes in the dark. Sometimes in the light.” The shattered smile glimmered. “Dust prefers, you know,” it said, and the smile slipped from its face like the light of a passing car.
Isaiah did not answer. He tried to look at the details of this thing, but he found he could not focus on it fully.
It smiled as he studied it. “You have a favorite color?” it asked.
“I, um,” Isaiah barely attended to the question as he squinted his eyes as he tried to focus on the thing. “I like blue,” he said. His voice was lazy as he spoke. His eyes narrowed until they were almost closed, but he found that the more he tried to focus on the thing, the more difficult it became.
The thing nodded knowingly toward him. “You all have a favorite color,” is said, as if to itself, and Isaiah heard those words as if from a great distance. His own eyes relaxed, and when the strain left his face, this thing stuttered into a thousand tiny colors and facets as it continued to speak. “Isaiah Fleet.” When it spoke his name, Isaiah’s eyes jerked back to look at this thing’s face. The shattered smile filled the face of that thing again. “Isaiah Fleet,” it said again. It spoke like a little child who had elicited uproarious laughter from a group of adults and was trying to make that group laugh again. Isaiah heard his name fill that thing’s mouth again. It sounded like a devious little imp, and Isaiah had to remind himself that this thing was not a child. This thing was the darkness he had seen before. It only happened to look like a child.
A sharp sigh filled him when he heard his name a third time, but he did not say anything.
“We have a plan for you, Isaiah,” it said.
Isaiah squinted again, but this time he furrowed his brow as to try to gain a clearer understanding of what the thing just said. But no understanding came to Isaiah, and he shook his head. The professor said he would receive clarity, but he was only filled with more confusion. “What is going on?” he asked.
The thing took a step toward Isaiah. As it took that step, it doubled in size. It now stood as tall as himself. “Our ways are not your ways. You have vision as small as a pinprick. Perhaps you’ll understand some day on some level, like you understand the dark world with a sudden flash of lightning. All we can tell you is that you’ll never hunger, never thirst. You’ll find yourself somehow saved from certain death. You’ll suddenly find that others are giving you respect.”
The thing giggled. “The plans we have for you, Isaiah.” More giggling filled the creature’s throat.
“Isaiah!” Isaiah heard a shout. He glanced toward the blood-covered professor, but the man did not look back at him. The professor looked past him, and as Isaiah followed the man’s eyes, he saw his brother Ezekiel. Though his older brother was surrounded by darkness, it appeared as if his body emanated some sort of warm light. Unlike the professor, his brother’s appearance was only altered in this way.
“Isaiah!” Isaiah winced at this second shout. He wondered if Ezekiel was only in his imagination, but the presence of his brother was confirmed when he felt a strong hand clamping down on his shoulder and when he looked up to see his brother’s face filling his vision.
“What?” Isaiah answered sleepily.
Ezekiel said Isaiah’s name, but the rest of what he said was muddled. Isaiah tried to piece together the meaning, but he would have had better luck trying to understand the art of a toddler. But Ezekiel continued to talk, and Isaiah could not understand a single word.
Ezekiel’s other hand came up and clamped on Isaiah’s other shoulder. This hand was stronger than the first, and Ezekiel gave him a strong shake. His voice filled Isaiah’s ears, and from that muddled sound, Isaiah only found he understood one word: emergency. And that word paired with Ezekiel’s face filled Isaiah with worry. Something was wrong. Had their father died? Their mother? What could make Ezekiel so worried? Something was happening, something serious. But he could not understand it. His mind could not reach through the haze of the drug trip. Ezekiel was here. Isaiah assumed his brother needed help. Why would he have come here otherwise? But what help would he be in this addled state?
Isaiah shook his head. He felt his face shrink into a look of confusion. He continued to shake his head as he tried to look Ezekiel in the eyes.
Ezekiel only shook him again and shouted more incomprehensibles.
“It is the real world,” a voice chittered from the corner of the room. When Isaiah found he was not able to look in his brother’s eyes, he glanced toward the voice. The pixie still stood where he had left it. It smiled over at him, and opened its mouth to speak again. “Does he ever say anything meaningful?” the thing asked.
Ezekiel shook him again. His voice filled Isaiah’s ears a third time. “You idiot, damnit, listen to me,” Ezekiel’s voice was filled with anger.
Isaiah looked back to his brother. He found he could focus on the other’s eyes this time. Before, when he saw his brother speaking, he had seen the urgency of fear, but he had been wrong. His eyes were angry, annoyed, and urgent. “Now,” those eyes shouted. “Listen, and listen now.”
“What? What? What?” the words tumbled out of Isaiah’s mouth.
“No, no, no,” the voice from the corner mumbled under his breath. Through that cavernous metallic voice, Isaiah heard an emotion as if from a small child who had not gotten his way. “You,” its voice was sharp. “You know he doesn’t like you. And you know he doesn’t have anything to add to anything.” Then the thing sighed, something like a sigh. If there was a vocalization that was the opposite of this thing’s giggle, it was this sigh.
Ezekiel did not turn to look at the thing in the corner. He glanced to the professor, and then answered Isaiah as if no other person had spoken at all.
“We’ve got an emergency,” Ezekiel continued. His voice was even louder and harsher in Isaiah’s ears.
“What’s happened to Dad?” Isaiah tried to bring some forcefulness to his words, but whatever was in the drug the professor had given him was making it difficult.
Ezekiel waved away his comment with one hand. “Not Dad. Daniel. Daniel’s in trouble, Isaiah.”
Ezekiel’s face warped in front of Isaiah. Isaiah pulled back, and he felt humor fill his chest. He threw back his head and let out a loud cackle. He was going to tell Ezekiel that Daniel could shove it, but Ezekiel’s hand had already clamped around his arm and Isaiah, under the effects of that drug, did not know how to control his body to be able to pry himself away.
Ezekiel did not explain any further. He dragged Isaiah toward the darkness of the room. He pulled him away from the professor and the professor’s desk. Darkness surrounded him. The professor disappeared as if they had gone through a black curtain. All the light disappeared in the same way as the professor. The world around Isaiah stuttered, and then he emerged in the hallway of the college. Though he recognized this as his college’s hallway, it was in decay, but it was not merely in decay. The college around him appeared as if someone had purposefully destroyed it. Isaiah was sure it was not merely abandoned. Clear destruction had cut through this place.
The hallway was full of people. Isaiah assumed these were students, but they did not look like students. Each of them had the appearance of a person, but each had a different look. Some emanated a faint and golden glow. Others seemed to turn the world green around them. Or was it gray? Isaiah was not sure. A few he passed were beautiful, and his eyes followed after so as to catch a few more seconds of that beauty. Some appeared deformed, some stunted. Some had moss and other plants growing from their skin. One was covered in writhing bugs, and Isaiah quickly looked away from this one.
“What’s happening?” Isaiah mumbled. His eyes continued to scan the people and the destroyed college around him.
“I was told to come to Daniel’s office,” Ezekiel answered, but Isaiah was talking about the college.
“You see everything,” the pixie’s voice did not seem to come from a specific place. He turned to try to find where the pixie was, but he saw it nowhere in that darkness. The voice seemed to be coming from inside his head.
“What does that mean?” Isaiah did not know where to turn as he answered the pixie.
Ezekiel shook his head. “I don’t know,” he answered. “But Daniel told me to bring guns.”
Isaiah nodded, but he did not answer. As he waited for the pixie to answer, he tried to pull himself away from Ezekiel. He found Ezekiel too strong and himself too weak, and they moved from the hallway into a cool summer evening. It was not until Ezekiel shoved him into the passenger seat of a car that that thing answered. Isaiah saw it after the car began moving. It did not sit in the seat. It was inside of the space of the car, but it floated above the seat. When it swung an arm out, that arm passed through the body of the vehicle as if that vehicle was a ghost itself. Then it smiled at Isaiah, and after smiling for a few, long blocks, it spoke to him again.
“See with your eyes,” that tin can voice answered. “Look. Understand. Seeing is knowing. Knowing is understanding.”
Isaiah brought his hands up to rub his eyes. He looked to the back seat. The thing still hovered in the center of the car. Isaiah groaned and then muttered to himself. The pixie spoke again, but its words filling his ears were just odd noise. “What was that?” he asked the clattering thing in the back seat.
“Daniel told me to bring weapons, guns,” Ezekiel repeated.
“Oh, God,” Isaiah answered his brother. “Guns, really?” his voice lilted up with the question. “Goddamnit.” The curse was loud in his mouth. He did not see the pixie in the back seat as he looked at his brother. As he turned to Ezekiel, the car around him seemed to turn into flames. Outside the car and beyond those flames, the world appeared to him as transcendent beauty. It was as beautiful as a purple desert sunset from the top of a tall cliff, but that beautiful world was filled with terrors as well. He saw enormous, sentient trees. Each of the buildings was made of a thin, frail, bone-like frame. They had no walls, and he could see right through the walls to those many different people who looked as varied as the students he had seen walking through the halls of his university.
Isaiah shook his head and blinked his eyes hard. He looked back to Ezekiel again. He thought of what Ezekiel had said. He thought about the guns that Daniel had asked for.
“He’s in some serious shit, isn’t he?” Isaiah asked.
“What?” Ezekiel asked without looking over.
“Daniel,” Isaiah continued. “In some serious shit.”
Ezekiel grimaced and nodded, but he did not say anything.
Isaiah’s eyes went to the outside world. His hand gripped his leg as he stared out at that terrifying world. Houses full of skeletons went by. A tree the size of a mountain loomed outside the window. A dog ran past. He knew it was a dog, but it looked more like giant, chomping teeth. Next came a boy on a bicycle. Isaiah was surprised to see this boy because he appeared normal. The only thing that was different was that this boy’s skin gave out a faint, golden glow like Ezekiel. His eyes followed this boy until he went out of his vision. His eyes continued to see wonders and strangeness and oddities until Ezekiel stomped on the brake and stopped the car in front of a shop. Isaiah’s eyes continued to wander, and when Ezekiel came back after a few minutes, he shoved a saw-off shotgun into Isaiah’s hands, and a moment later, Ezekiel dug into his pocket and dropped two boxes of shells into Isaiah’s lap. A third box followed, from where, Isaiah did not know. Then Ezekiel pulled the back door open, dropped something inside, and slammed the door.
“Load it,” Ezekiel commanded, though Isaiah heard nervousness lace his brother’s voice. Isaiah felt the weapon in his lap. He looked down. The metal warped in front of him. He looked at the box of ammo, but he did not know how he would begin to load this melting shotgun.
“You see the world, don’t you?” It was the voice of the creature.
Isaiah did not look back, but he saw it out of the corner of his eye. It was floating in the back seat once again. “More nonsense,” he thought. He ignored the creature. He picked up one of the boxes of ammo and began to open it.
“Where are we going?” he asked Ezekiel.
Ezekiel did not so much as glance over when he answered. “We’re going to Daniel’s office,” he said. “I already told you this.”
Isaiah nodded. “Guns,” he answered. He motioned to the weapon that sat on his lap.
“Guns,” the creature echoed from the back.
“Load it,” Ezekiel commanded again. The worry seemed to be completely gone from his voice this time, and he was half-attending to the words.
“Beautiful creations,” the creature from the back seat continued. “Mankind, bringing order from chaos and creating those things which allow for such a quick return to the void.” Isaiah heard a smile in the thing’s voice. Though he continued to ignore that thing, he found it more difficult. He knew it was something conjured up by his own mind, but if he were to guess which of the individuals in the car besides himself was the real one, he would have had to agree that more reality seemed to emanate from this thing. He did not know how to explain it. Ezekiel was real. Ezekiel was as real as he had ever been, but Ezekiel was a wan light of reality next to a spotlight.
“He asked you to bring guns?” Isaiah focused his eyes on Ezekiel. He reminded himself of the small tablet he had ingested. “Ezekiel,” Isaiah continued, but Ezekiel did not answer. He kept his eyes firmly on the road.
“Guns, goons, loons, sons of thunder, sinners, saints, and angels. God himself. Everything returns to the void, and that is a beautiful thought,” the thing chittered from the back seat. “Plans, plans,” the thing continued. “Left as good as right. Up as good as down. All the same. All dimensionless. All the void.” The thing giggled.
“Ezekiel,” Isaiah pushed the words of the creature out of his head. “You of all people should have hesitated when he said guns.”
Ezekiel grimaced, a slight pout of the lips, but he did not answer again. And when Isaiah followed Ezekiel’s eyes out the windshield, he knew why. They were pulling to the side of the road across from Daniel’s office.
“Okay, Isaiah,” Ezekiel answered. “Load your damn gun. We’ll go in the front. If you see something, shoot it.” Ezekiel’s voice quivered as he said those words, and then he took in a deep breath and continued. “Shoot first,” and Ezekiel shook his head as he said the words. “Point, shoot. It is a shotgun. No need to aim.” Then Ezekiel popped open his door, retrieved his own weapon from the back seat, and started walking across the street.
Isaiah looked down at the gun again. The barrel still morphed in front of him. The words of Ezekiel ran away from his mind. “Shotgun,” the thing said from the back seat, as if trying out a new word. Isaiah glanced back at it, and he cursed under his breath when it caught his eye.
“Ignore a fish?” it said as it stared at him with what Isaiah could only describe as annoyance.
“What?” he asked.
“Am I an unthinking animal?” it continued. “Think you can let me so easily slip from your consciousness?”
Isaiah shook his head. He looked up at Daniel’s office. As Ezekiel approached the door, he pushed shells into the bottom of his gun. The stalwart figure of Ezekiel was juxtaposed with what was behind him: the maze of windows and doors that made up Daniel’s offices. Isaiah shut his eyes. He shut out the light. He shut out the flaming car, the morphing metal in his hands, the creature in the back seat. He blinked to try to bring himself to reality, but when he opened his eyes, the confusion before them remained the same. The car was still in flames. The weapon had twisted itself into a knot. That pixie creature floated in the back seat.
“I am here,” the thing said, a proclamation of its existence.
“I don’t care,” Isaiah answered. The drug trip pixie was the least of his worries. Daniel had asked for guns. That meant something serious. Guns meant someone else already had guns, and Ezekiel was walking into an unknown danger alone. Isaiah knew he was not supposed to care about his brothers. From his perspective, they were responsible for sorting through their own problems, but he felt a fraternal tug. Ezekiel needed him. He did not know what for. He did not know why, but if he did nothing, he knew he would regret it.
Isaiah looked down at the weapon. He sighed. He tried to find the different parts by feel alone. He hoped the drug trip would wear off soon. It had already gone on too long, but he had to find a way. Somehow, he would load this gun. Somehow, he would shoot it. And somehow, those he shot would not be one of his brothers.
Isaiah shook his head as he continued to stare at that morphing gun. He swore a final time. “I’m going to end up shooting myself, aren’t I?” he said.
The pixie laughed.