Blind Heroics
Nearing Zathura
"Only in dreams am I to find my place. Were that I could sleep eternally."
The Analysis had to continue.
It had to go on no matter how he shied from the doors.
He'd come out of the meditative state only to perform his daily and nightly ritual of keeping the Maritime in fit order and to write a letter to one who will never lay eyes on it. He'd stopped to think about that for a moment and almost laughed.
Letters to a dead man.
A man he let down.
A man he loved beyond knowing.
He didn't let the thought linger while out of the Analysis position. That thought carried too much emotion with it and enough emotion had already leaked into the Analyses. There didn't need to be more.
So he completed his faithful ritual in silence and prepared to return to the state of Analysis. However this time, he didn't go sit on the bar. This time, he crawled into the kitchen, put some coffee on and went into the back room.
He still had that feeling of 'forbidden territory'.
He pushed it aside in favour of the Analysis' commands.
While not going too far into the room, he somehow finds the appropriate spot for tonight's Analysis. Just beyond the doorway to the left.
Yes.
Here.
He lowered into the reverse-cross-legged position.
His eyes closed as both hands brought out his journal and spyglass. Lifelines.
Now all he could do was go.
-The expanse of darkness closed off again. The corridors twisted and turned as they did before and he stood at the end of the longest one with his treasures held in his arms. There was no turning back now.
He couldn't turn back and go to the very beginning.
He began walking down the path before him. Knowing how it twists and his destination, he follows the same path he took when he fled from the doors. The path was the same; cold and littered with things Dante could dream up.
The voices in here no longer remained silent. They began to call. They began to taunt, encourage and terrify.
"Turn back. Turn back. She awaits. He will walk away."
"Go on. Can you let him down again?"
"Save yourself. You stand alone...alone...alone..."
The past began to haunt him then as he followed the winding path into nowhere. Skeletons rose up from the icy ground and wraiths screamed from above. The ground became slick and wet, but with what he couldn't tell.
Blood. Rain.
He turned left and went uphill.
A shade flew down grinning like Alice's Cheshire feline. It aimed and he ducked to just barely miss the shot of excruciating cold.
He started running then.
The unseen ceiling/sky above broke open as he ran, spilling at first a steady drizzle of cold moisture. The ghosts dove at him like kamikazes from hell. The ground conspired to make him trip and fall.
Something not far behind waited for him.
And followed.
He didn't know of this thing that followed him. All he knew was the rainblood. The faster he ran, the harder it fell. The farther he ran, the harder it fell. Slipping numerous times, he kept going -- sometimes crawling when the need called for it.
He didn't notice until a long time later that he'd slowed down to a walk again. The ghosts stopped following. They stopped dive-bombing him but they cried and screamed in the distance.
The rainblood fell in a raging deluge across the twisted wasteland. In the distance, the ghosts seemed to gather like sickening clouds of miasmic fog.
It was a microcosm of the dark.
He walked steadily now as the path leveled off. He lost track of how many turns he took until the turns ceased to exist. There was no warning. There was no gradual decrease. The turns just stopped.
He knew what was ahead though. The path blazed ahead straight as any arrow.
He was close.
He followed the stubborn creature from a distance. He smelled of brine, salt and centuries of things left unsaid. He walked with a stiff, measured gait but never felt the sensation of bones cracking or muscles screaming in protest.
He wouldn't have cared anyway.
He knew the creature's name but didn't deign to think of it. He just smiled as he followed, stalking his determined prey.
And a rotted hand with more bone than flesh went into the pocket of his coat. The thing couldn't be called a coat anymore for it missed a sleeve and bore clinging remains of seaweed and salt. The pocket was still there and that's what mattered.
His hand crunched as it found its quarry inside the pocket.
Time was close.
And he smiled.
Renne never spoke. He felt the rainblood come down on him in sheets but he didn't care. He knew his goal and he pressed on until he met it.
The doors.
It was then that he smelled the one following him. He was afraid even if he knew what it was. What it represented. It wasn't real.
Was it?
He didn't let himself ask that question more than once. He stood before the same doors he had run away from and held his treasures.
Behind him, the hunter closed in.
And he still didn't care. He put his journal and spyglass away in his endless pocket now to protect them. Then he turned to face his hunter. In here, this twisted wasteland, he could remember how to speak like he used to.
His English was accented but it was clear.
"You are here."
The hunter that smelled of brine, salt and things untold strode robotically forward and stopped beside Renne at the doors. His voice was cold and inflectionless, just as it had been for the last few months.
"I am here. You let me down."
"I could not help. You turned from me."
"I could not trust you."
"I let you down."
"What are you going to do about it?"
"Understand."
"Understand what?"
"Why you are the way you are."
Renne turned then to face the doors he so feared. They were still locked and the carvings were still there, sinister as ever. He pulled out his spyglass and held it close to himself.
The hunter spoke again.
"You came back."
Renne didn't turn around.
"I did. I underestimated much."
"You learned."
"I did. You are a confusing entity."
"No more than you."
He put his spyglass away and reached for the doors. It was already too long in waiting. The hunter put a rotted, skeletal hand up against the left door as if to symbolically stop him.
"I came for you. I could have had you."
"You could not."
The hunter backed away, turned and began to walk. Renne knew he still would be there and knew what he was. Who he was. He didn't turn back.
"I named you."
"I loved you."
The doors came open as they were pulled. It was slow at first as if waiting for the hunter to vanish into the distance and join the howling shades. It was only then that the bone doors flew as if ripping from their hinges.
The voice came again. He knew her and he hated her.
The Catalyst spoke but he did not listen. He stood with the doors open and listened to something else. Honed in on something else.
"...my family..."
Home. Family.
He was terrified. He knew this event and its familiarity had the maddening edge. The kamikaze shades came now and danced around him to re-enact this thing he was hearing and reliving.
Renne hesitated a moment longer.
Then he walked through the bone doors.
"My home...family...."
He wouldn't say her name. Or theirs. All he did was listen. He dissected every word spoken, every emotion that flared up at the edge of a cold ocean.
Danio. Hi?.
Flames burned from words that bore ashes.
Ice crept up and froze salted tears.
-And the sea could do nothing.-
The Catalyst laughed in his ears as he examined every facet of that hellish gem. She smiled the smile of a traitor in fragile damsel's garb. She was a wolf in the fold.
She was the Catalyst.
What could he have done? What could he have said?
He still could think of nothing.
In his helplessness, he let them down.
-Concluded.
Move forward.-
He moved forward into the darker, hazy world beyond the bone doors.
He moved forward until he came to a place of nothingness. It was blank in front of him. Fog surrounded him and consumed the screaming wraiths. They were his spectres and he accepted that.
From somewhere in the fog, a gun sounded.
He went forward.
He held his spyglass, bent down and kissed it.
He knew what resided here and he examined it for a while. Not long.
The contradiction was clear. The hunter drifted in and out of everywhere as a flickering presence. A wolf harrying a grizzly.
He made his observation. He spoke four words.
"I must trust you."
And the doors slammed shut.-
-----------------------------
The Analysis was as harrowing as he had expected. He had expected the doors. He had expected the Catalyst. Even the hunter.
He knew the hunter.
Still, it was enough.
He was in many ways closer to conclusions than before but in other ways, further back than what he'd come. The rainblood in his mind was identified now as he felt it run down his face.
He had acted out in the midst of Analysis.
He felt the marks run down his face and burn with the sting of tears. His arms tingled with the same but without the sting.
This was Home.
They were family, no matter how confusing.
And still, much of him shut it out in favour of complete autonomy.
It was the complete autonomy that sent up the warning. He couldn't do it indefinitely no matter how hard he tried. And he had tried for eight years now.
Silver had cast him out in anger. That was understood and accepted.
Pendrell had been killed from inside. That still hurt but it was understood and accepted.
The Dirk had been nearly destroyed and Osprey had left. That too was understood and accepted.
Now, something else was understood and accepted.
The Maritime had drawn him in. The Maritime let him in.
Many times, he thought it had left him behind. Many times he had thought it left him. Expendable. Worth but an occasional laugh.
But he always came back.
Always.
He remembered what was said to him all those years ago but that had been Analysed alongside the Catalyst beyond the bone doors. It wasn't conclusive but he had at least theories to go on.
He had learned since his naive, foolish days. He had grown and the Maritime had seen that growth. Archie sparked it.
Harold fanned it.
Both had kept it going.
Both had confused him. Angered him. Hurt him beyond measure. Built him higher than he'd dreamed, stronger than he'd hoped.
He still explored and drank in everything he could learn from the world. It was wonderful though, to be able to come back home.
So he always came back.
Eventually, he learned about each man.
Archie was the capricious, sometimes gentle, sometimes cold wind.
Harold was the tempering, raging, warming fire.
And he was on the horizon between sea and sky.
He remembered them and the confusing emotions they brought. He had begun to love them long ago but had underestimated -- still in that time too afraid to get close to anyone.
He hadn't begun to realise then that they had found their way into his walls. So he had come back to understand what it all was.
He remembered what he heard. What he felt from them.
He misunderstood so much still, but with each Analysis he came closer to understanding and accepting it in all of its frightening glory.
Home was here.
Family was them.
They were confusing but now he had theories.
Which was enough for now.
The hunter still prowled within and played tricks with him. He knew what the hunter was and why it manifested in the form it did. He also knew what the hunter carried.
For the thousandth time, he wondered how the hunter would have his way.
He didn't have to wonder for long.
The last thing Renne remembered was holding his treasures close against himself and by now lying upon the floor of that sturdy building called Home.
