degreelessnesss: chapter three

[jute]

NOTE: i've posted this already, but it seems to have disappeared. so i'm trying again. if everyone else can see it and i've just gone insane, i apologize, and feel free to delete this post, mod people. also, the special characters don't seem to work correctly on this forum, so that first line is all fucked. oh well.

degreelessness:chapterone
degreelessness:chaptertwo

degreelessness:chapterthree

KEÖAËH KÃ

SKIDOO

is how psalm 23 of The Book of Lies began. chester liked that one a lot. which was good, because he needed something to like, and he sure wasn’t getting it from the fucking desert he was traversing to get to the tower. (getting an automobile of some sort never occurred to him, because there weren’t any in the game.)

the desert wasn’t a very exciting place to be. chester could have sworn that even the sky never changed. there was nothing to see, nothing to kill, nothing to do except walk. and think. he had all sorts of fucking time for that, which was okay because it gave him a chance to ponder some things. like, for instance, that cacodemon he killed a while ago. where the hell did he get the name ‘cacodemon’? did he make it up? and what the fuck is a cacodemon? a cycloptic floating red ball with teeth and a bizarrely sexual orifice or two on its back? and when did he learn german? more than that, how did he travel through time and space to end up in a nazi dungeon? how the hell did he kill jesus christ? and why couldn’t he die? this is what he was thinking when he heard a voice say ‘no.’

chester spun around wildly, looking all over the place because holy shit he just heard a voice and he wasn’t even being shot at by people from Europe.

‘there is no way out.’

he couldn’t see anyone anywhere. there was nothing to block his view, nowhere for anyone to hide. it’s a fucking desert, after all. it seemed like the voice was coming from everywhere all at once, but not like the music always did. this was different. if the music was a kind of audio wallpaper, then this voice was a sculpture. for a long time, chester just stood there, but no more sound came. nothing but dead silence except a moody D minor harpsichord riff. fuck it, chester thought. more goddamn questions. and he started walking again.

when chester was young, he had a recurring nightmare: he was in an empty courtyard, completely still. there were a few clumps of snow, but most of it had melted, revealing dark brown earth, and the sky was a cold endless gray. leafless trees reached for the sun and failed, and he was always somehow sure that if a gust of wind were to come up, they would shatter instantly. there were tables and benches, all concrete, cracked, worn. the walls around the courtyard were a uniform maroon brick. there was no graffiti, no vandalism, no sign of previous habitation at all, except for a single word written in thick, even black letters on one of the walls. despite its obvious legibility, he found it incredibly difficult to read, and as he strained to make it out, he realized that even though he was in the courtyard, it was still empty. he looked down, forgetting about the word written on the wall, though it seemed like he was missing something, and he saw that he was made of glass, and the reflection he was making was of somewhere else, not this place, not this empty courtyard. he thought he saw something in this false reflection, but as he tried to study it, he sensed a movement out of the corner of his eye and looked up and

as chester got closer to the tower, he began to make out some details, all of them unpleasant. the immense structure appeared to be constructed from bodies. not all corpses, either. some of them appeared to be writhing around, in agony or ecstasy. maybe both. blood ran down in thick lines and pooled at the base of the hellish edifice along with piles of meat and more carcasses. the more chester looked at it, the more he started to see faces that he recognized, celebrities, friends, people he had seen walking down the street, in an endless supply, much more than the zombies he had faced before. he saw the suicide girl from back in the city; he saw david bowie even though he was dead and also in the city (though he looked very alive here, and even appeared to be gnawing on his own intestines); he saw the three stooges; he saw his friend matt, who he had been in a band with before the demons came; and (this is the one that did his head in the most) he even saw one of those nazi bastards that he had killed after he took that hidden teleport. it made him wonder: if there were any other people left alive, and they looked at this monstrous tower, would they see the same faces, or would they perceive entirely different people? not that it really mattered.

near the tower, trees dotted the landscape. there appeared to be two kinds, both dead: one was a short, stumpy affair, gray and brown, looking like it had been blasted by lightning. the other was bigger and insanely distorted, more like a stylized ‘s’ made out of wood than a real tree at all. it was covered with knots and bumps and its roots seemed to be trying to escape the soil that bound them. both of these tree varieties (along with two very spiky types of stump) pervaded the scenery, duplicated constantly, like the mountains and clouds that endlessly loop in the background when the coyote is chasing the roadrunner through the desert on looney tunes. or maybe the eternal hallway that scooby and shaggy run through as they’re pursued by whatever ghouls happen to hound them in that particular episode. the infinite reiterations of a fractal as expressed through sad, lifeless trees. jackson pollock saying “i am nature.”

speaking of pollock. chester was also wondering about the books he had taken from the library. he had chosen them totally at random, but they seemed to hold similar meanings and philosophies, at least on a superficial level. maybe it was just because he had read so little in such a long time, and now he was reading these books back to back, but Valis and The Book of Lies had super-positioned in his mind like the two images of a haiku to form a single idea. anyway, he had just finished Crowley’s book, so he reached into his pack and pulled out another. maybe a third book would help to tie everything together. chester remembered the old saying that, just like a ménage-a-trois, everything came in threes.

[DaJuice]

I already commented before it disappeared, not sure if you read it. I don't feel like typing it out again. To summarize, I like this one a lot better than #2. Great work, when's the next one coming?

[jute]

thanks. i appreciate that a lot. no, i didn't see your comments. the damn thing just disappeared on me. i thought i was having a 'nam flashback.

[Guardian]

Having never heard of the books chester had read, I think that got me a bit confused about whatever underlying ideas there may be here. Despite that, this was great, and I agree, better than the previous, though I heartily enjoyed that one too.

Definitely can't wait to see more.

[jute]

Guardian said:

Having never heard of the books chester had read, I think that got me a bit confused about whatever underlying ideas there may be here. Despite that, this was great, and I agree, better than the previous, though I heartily enjoyed that one too.

Definitely can't wait to see more.

don't worry if you haven't read any of the books that are mentioned. you'll (hopefully) understand the story perfectly well by the time it's over, regardless of your knowledge of them. they're extras, not requirements. and thank you for your kind words. i'm glad you're enjoying the story.

[Guardian]

Ah, I love it when stories just wrap themselves up in neat little bows at the end --- or in this case, bloddy, tattered knots. ;) But the gist is still the same.

I'm glad I'm able to boost your ego so, heh. I had no clue that, for a game with practically no backstory, people can just come up with ideas and go off on a tangent that can go in any direction -- and it's well written, too! I'd expect pretty-pretty pictures and such like that (which I have also seen), but not stories. It's been quite a pleasant surprise.