I’LL NEVER FORGET the look on that kid’s face when the raging masses of the crowd crushed his body into the steel barrier in front of the stage, right before it disappeared beneath the trampling feet of the kids pushing in from behind. And his was just the first body to go down. I got glimpses of other teenagers being swallowed up by the rolling wave of dark clothes and sweaty meat. By that time, security was already herding us off the stage, and minutes later we were spread across two SUVs and on our way back to the airport.
Climbing up the stairs to board the chartered Gulfstream, I’m still reeling from what happened. Once inside the luxurious cabin, I remain standing in the aisle, while Adam and Ruby immediately crash onto a double seat on one side of the plane, both emitting deep sighs as they visibly deflate, as if it’s been another long day at the office.
‘That was… insane,’ I say, feeling idiotic stating the obvious. But since we were rushed off the stage, there’s been a silent vacuum surrounding all of us that I feel a deep urge to fill. ‘What the hell’s gotten into this crowd?’
Ruby and Adam stare up at me with oddly cow-like expressions. It is Ryan, our tour manager, who answers as he squeezes past me. ‘Pack thousands of randy teenagers into an enclosed space and allow them to go absolutely nuts for two hours—you ask me, it was just a matter of time before something like this happened to a band like you guys.’ He flops down onto a seat on the other side of the aisle from Ruby and Adam, looking ridiculous as always with a frat bro’s outfit and haircut on his fifty-plus-year-old body.
‘I don’t know.’ Christine’s voice comes from behind me, filled with a subtle tremor. She’s been the last to board.
I sit down opposite from Ruby and Adam to make room for her. Christine’s our publicist and looks all of her forty years, which means fine as hell. Ever since being worshipped by hordes of teenagers, I’ve been feeling an increasing attraction to women who are in the process of aging gracefully—extra pounds and all.
She takes her seat behind Ryan. ‘I think it’s these new songs you’ve been playing. They are positively riling people up.’
‘I know, right?’ Ryan says and cackles.
Sprawling on the seats opposite me, Adam and Ruby—my bandmates—look at each other with uncertain half-smiles.
Christine eyes the two of them, that perpetual frown of hers deepening. ‘What’s been up with you two lately?’ she says, but neither of them seems to hear.
The noise from the twin engines grows as the jet begins taxiing toward the runway. Everybody straps in.
I know exactly what Christine is talking about, of course. I’ve known Adam and Ruby for more than half my life. After my parents died—and when we ourselves were all still teenagers and I was technically in the custody of my grandmother—I practically lived at Adam’s and Ruby’s places. It was during that time that the three of us founded The Cutthroat Puppies in the basement of Adam’s parents’ house. Despite all of that, though, I’ve never been as close with either of them as the two of them are to each other—even before they started their disgusting on-again, off-again affair. Still, there’s been a bond between the three of us, a connection that is inevitable when a small group of people are being creative together, make music together, and together achieve something that is almost impossible. We are the band.
But lately, ever since we came back from the last European tour the previous year, Adam and Ruby have been drifting further away from me. After that tour, they even started to write and record songs without me. Weird songs. Similar in style to what we’d done before, but also not, and with lyrics attached that were bordering on the insane, not making much sense half the time and at other times not recognisable as any kind of English at all. But with The Cutthroat Puppies being a straight-up democracy, these songs were quickly unleashed on the world without much fanfare, dumped onto the streamers for the undemanding youth to lap up. And apparently drive them up the fucking wall.
I turn to Ryan to ask him if he’s got any information regarding injuries (or worse) among the crowd they’ve just left behind, when Ruby’s torn denim hot pants make a beeping sound. She pulls her phone out of her ass pocket and brings up whatever application triggered the noise. Her eyes widen.
Having reached starting position, the jet’s engines calm down for a brief moment. Some garbled announcement from one of the pilots crackles from hidden speakers.
Without taking her eyes off her phone, Ruby repeatedly slaps Adam’s naked shoulder, which sticks out from his black wife-beater like the gnarled white root of a tree.
He pushes her hand away. ‘Stop it!’
‘It’s happening,’ she says, breathless. ‘It’s really happening.’
The engines roar and I’m gently but firmly pressed into my seat as the jet accelerates to push back against Earth’s gravity, the increasing g-force like a giant hand on my torso.
Adam and Ruby lock eyes, before Adam’s hand races for his own phone.
‘What—’ I begin, but then the jet’s nose rises and my stomach drops as we lift off.
It never fails to amaze me how quickly the ground falls away beyond the small cabin window. With the plane immediately banking to the right—or east, or starboard, or whatever you want to call it—I can already see, framed by the window, the skyline of Vancouver shrivelling to a shapeless aggregation of lights in the fading evening glow.
I turn back to my bandmates. ‘What’s going on?’
The transformation I see on Adam’s face is even more shocking than the world shrinking below us in time lapse. Adam’s never been one to hold much of a tan—in fact, he probably needs sunblock when the moon is full—but the pallor that has crept on his face now is nothing short of deathly. What makes it shocking, though, is the smile curling his blood-drained lips at the same time.
If there’s anything happening to Ruby’s face it’s harder to discern, because she has a hand firmly clasped over a large part of it.
‘Guys?’
Finally, Adam looks up at me as if I just woke him up. He blinks twice, then throws his phone over to me and sits back and covers his face with both of his hands.
Turns out, the screen of Adam’s phone is the entrance to a rabbit hole, and on its other side lies a world of horrors so unthinkable as to be outright fantastical. The tabs of the phone’s browser show breaking news stories from around the world about what appear to be serial incidences of violence involving large groups of people, mostly teenagers. The incidences range from break-ins and arson to mass beatings and open-street murders. The most widespread incidences, however, are mass suicides. I scan through cell phone videos of kids setting themselves on fire, drinking chemicals, cutting themselves, or jumping from bridges and tall buildings while holding hands. And there is only one common thread weaving through all the mayhem: The perpetrators are uniformly clothed in Cutthroat Puppies merchandise, often playing Puppies songs while doing their deeds, the music—some of it written by my own hands—making for an eerily fitting soundtrack to the death and bloodshed.
I let the phone slip out of my cold hand. Ruby and I open our seatbelts at the same time, albeit for vastly different reasons. Ruby climbs on top of Adam, holds his face in her hands and sticks her tongue in his mouth, while I try to climb out of my seat as the jet banks to make another turn, still rising higher and higher.
‘You all right, Tom?’ Christine raises a precautionary hand in my direction as I half-step, half-fall into the aisle. As an answer, I stumble to the bathroom at the back of the jet and, without bothering to close the door behind me, puke my guts into the high-tech super-suction toilet. After my former stomach contents were successfully rerouted into the bowels of the aeroplane instead of my own, I stagger back to my seat. Christine kneels down next to me as soon as I’m sitting down again. ‘Jeez, Tom, do you need anything?’ Her hand on my arm is oddly arousing, and the sensation makes we want to get back up and go puke some more. I don’t know how to respond.
Ruby eyes me from her position on Adam’s lap. With a smile, she moves her butt from Adam’s knees onto the table between us, swings her legs around and lets herself fall into the seat next to me. A finger with a black nail at its tip rises to start playing with a lock of my long hair hanging next to my face.
‘Do you remember our show in Prague last year?’ she says.
As a rule, I don’t answer rhetorical questions, and I’m still sane enough not to do so now.
‘We took a couple of days to travel around the country,’ she continues. ‘Remember telling us about that place Sedlec that you read about in that weird-ass book of yours, with its chapel of bones? Well, Adam and I… we went there one night, when we were staying in… I can’t remember the name of the fucking city.’
The plane makes a couple of minor jumps, like a car going over speed bumps. Or maybe it’s just my stomach.
‘Anyway, we went there, just before dawn, and this thing, Tom… it was just incredible! There was this altar, it looked like it was completely made of skulls and bones. And then—I don’t know, something just came over us! Next thing I know I’m lying on that altar, and we are fucking, and fucking so hard. Right under this huge chandelier of more skulls and bones, and there were more skulls all around us—and it was insane, Tom, like fucking with a whole army of the dead staring at you!’
Teardrops are rolling from her eyes as she strokes my hair.
Adam leans forward, the look on his face feverish. ‘Lots of boners there that night, believe me!’ He cackles like I imagine a hyena would.
The jet is still slightly tilted in an upward trajectory. The ever-present vibration of the jet’s cabin seems to be slowly building in intensity, turning into a gentle shaking from time to time.
Ruby giggles back at Adam, the madness now standing tall and proud on her face. ‘When we came back to Prague,’ she says to me, ‘it was like there were new memories of that night forming in our minds, of things we were sure didn’t actually happen. Like, suddenly I had these images in my head that there’d been—get this—a huge black leopard with us in the chapel, circling us as we were doing it. And Adam seemed to remember out of the blue that there had been… something behind or on top of him as he was on top of me.’
Adam shrinks back from that last part, his sudden discomfort practically written on his forehead, which only elicits more giggles from Ruby.
‘And then there were the voices. It was like hundreds of them, like the voices of all the dead in that chapel, but all of them crystal clear as day, and they were telling us things, like…’
‘Like a blueprint,’ Adam says.
There comes a dull thump from where Christine is kneeling next to me in the aisle. I turn to her, and she looks back at me like she’s surprised to see me. I see the trickle of blood running down her temple—so eerily similar to Ruby’s tears of ecstasy—and only then the hilt of a dagger sticking out of the top of her head like some weird traditional hair ornament. When her body collapses to the side, I stare up at Ryan, who stands over her, an expression of wonder on his face.
That’s when Adam reaches over the table and grabs me by my shirt to pull my face close to his. ‘They told us how to be gods, Tom.’
‘Look!’ Ruby shrieks.
I turn to look in her direction, my head swivelling like a robot’s on my frozen body. Past her head, beyond the window, I see waves of colour in the sky. Aurora Borealis, I think. Then the Gulfstream is gripped by some kind of turbulence that feels like the jet is a toy in some angry toddler’s hand. My own hands work reflexively to close my seatbelt again. As the cabin is tossed in what feels like all directions, Ryan tumbles down the aisle. Adam and Ruby, though, instead of strapping in again too, get up from their seats—Ruby climbing over me—and, once standing in the aisle, start shedding all of their clothes, moving like drunken puppets amid the turbulence. At one point, Adam points down the aisle and laughs. ‘I think Ryan broke his fucking neck.’ He howls like it’s the most hilarious thing he’s ever seen. ‘Oh poor, sad fucking guy! So close to Val-fucking-halla, bro.’
When both of them are naked, the jet seems to calm down a bit. Ruby bends down and pulls the dagger—a dagger that I recognised right away—from Christine’s head with the wet and creaking noise of metal grating on bone. She points the bloodied blade in my direction. ‘Remember this? One hell of a birthday present, Tom. I don’t know where you keep finding these things!’
With the turbulence abating, Adam and Ruby are now on stable enough footing that Ruby can take Adam’s hand and slash across his palm with the dagger I discovered two years ago somewhere in the south of Spain. She does the same to her own hand, then drops the dagger and takes his bleeding hand in hers. They embrace each other with their other arms and kiss and moan and hiss with pain. Then they open their bloody hands and try to pull them apart, but cannot, because their palms are fused together where the skin was broken.
They look at me. ‘Come join us,’ Ruby breathes.
‘I’ll be right there,’ I manage to say, somewhat cheerfully, as if I’ve just been invited to go for ice cream. I bite my tongue to suppress my own fit of hysterical laughter that’s looming at the back of my throat.
Joined at the hand, the two of them walk down the aisle like a bride and groom from hell, heading for the sofa that is lining one side of the cabin further toward the back.
The jet is all calm now. Even the engines have stopped. The only sound comes from Adam and Ruby having sex somewhere behind me.
I close my eyes. Try to relax the rock-hard muscles in my body. Of course you want to be gods, I think. Being half-gods already means you’re still only halfway there, right?
A sudden lightness grabs hold of me. At first, I’m certain that this is me finally passing out. But then the lightness becomes… physical. I become weightless and start to hover over my seat, only held in place by the seatbelt. Christine’s dead body floats off the ground to my left, a halo of zero-gravity blood forming around her head. I turn away and look out the window, and see a sky full of stars like I’ve never seen it before. Like the tiniest of diamonds lost on an expanse of black velvet. If I could only reach through the cabin window, I’m almost certain that I could pick them from the sky one by one.
Then, as I watch, the stars disappear as if behind a curtain of more black, and the weight returns to my body as it drops back into the seat. There a thump thump sounds coming from different parts of the cabin as other bodies drop back to the ground.
All is quiet then. I open my seatbelt and step into the aisle. Toward the back, Adam and Ruby are a lump of meat that is still rocking on the sofa to some silent rhythm. I turn and walk to the front of the jet. The door to the cockpit is open. I duck inside. The pilots are gone. Jagged holes are gaping in the cockpit windows on both sides. I’m surprised how easily my brain accepts the fact that both pilots were violently torn or sucked out of the plane through the front windows at some point. Beyond the windows, there is nothing but utter blackness. Only the slightest breeze is drifting through the broken glass, despite the movement that I’m still feeling beneath my feet.
I return to the cabin and walk all the way back to Adam and Ruby. The skin of their bodies has melted together at various places, forming a kind of cocoon around them. I kneel down and put both of my hands on their horrid form.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper, and it’s the truth, and there are tears on my cheeks now. ‘There was no other way.’
To open the pathway, it needed to be them. Two lovers with a strong bond, with good hearts but corruptible minds. With the hooks of greed and lust for power already buried deeply. That’s how it is written in the book I found in my father’s safe deposit box after my parents died all these years ago. It could never have been me. Instead of greed, I feel only rage. Instead of power, I hunger only for revenge. And in that, I am all alone.
I complete the ritual by uttering the words that are written. When I’m done, I dip the fingers of one hand into a puddle of blood on the cabin floor and paint the symbols of the Unnamed Warrior on my face. Then I look around for the dagger, with its blade forged from metal not of my world. When I find it, I slip it into the waistband of my pants and move again to the front of the plane, where I open the outside door, which swings back without much resistance and only the slightest groan.
I stare into the vast blackness outside. Again, there is hardly any movement of air. I step closer to the edge and look down. Below, where Earth should have been, there is nothing but a speck of light in the darkness, some immeasurable distance away. Involuntarily I close my eyes. For a quick moment, a violent rush of vertigo is almost enough to break my mind.
But I hold on.
When I can open my eyes again, I realise that my hand is tightly wrapped around the amulet that I keep around my neck, usually beneath my shirt. The amulet my father always suspected to be with a shady collector in Croatia. As it turned out, he’d been right.
My father, the archaeologist; and my mother, the museum curator—who both studied the past to understand the present and look into the future. What they found, though, was a truth too terrible to know. But also the courage not to look away. The price they paid was a most horrible death, by the hand—for lack of a better term—of an entity that desperately needs to remain hidden. Because it’s been feeding off our world, and it can only do so from the depths of the unknown.
But I—I know. And I’m coming for it.
I step forward, into the void.
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