The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

this back room. But to get there he must cross the iron girder. Pulling his head out of the box, he feels around, leans out into the air of the track. Groping forward with one arm he maneuvers his way until he is stretched out, with one foot and arm on each side of the girder, ready to swing to the opposite end, clinging to it like a fruit bat in the reddish glow. And it is then that a voice speaks to him from inside his skull. But it is not in his own lighter-than-air internal voice but rather the deep and real voice of a man, a stranger, speaking directly to him from a place inside, but slightly left-of-center and above where the me of Kierk is normally spatially located.

The man says—“What you are doing is very stupid.”

A pause in action. The girder digging into his dress shirt. The reddish glow. A laugh out loud. What the fuck was he doing? Withdrawing his limbs he swings back to the side where he had come from. Panting, he withdraws. What is he withdrawing from? He doesn’t know. Maybe it had just been a homeless man whose sleep Kierk had disturbed. And the light had changed the angles, made him seem . . . enormous. His head spinning, he begins retracing his steps.

About ten feet away from the girder and thirty feet from the barely visible lit curve of the platform, he hears it . . . another threatening rumble, but this time from farther down in the tunnel, definitely on his side. Far earlier than he had calculated it out to be, at least two standard deviations too soon, a statistically unlikely event whose likelihood was irrelevant because it is happening, which he verifies by grabbing onto a metal lip with one hand and hanging all the way out, a scarecrow in the dark. There it is, vibrating toward him, a great slug half-tunneled back, a metal worm of the earth coming in a long shriek and with hateful momentum, slowly turning the corner but he knows really it is speeding along, closing even now, in these few seconds of thought. Then he’s off, running toward the platform down the ledge he had just crept carefully on, feet pounding on that thin shelf, eyes on where it drops into oblivion. He spares a brief moment to glance back and there it is, a bright monstrous cyclopean eye pursuing him; it captures him in its light, it roars a greeting, it is upon him . . .

His form comes tumbling out onto the subway platform not five feet before the hurricane of steel rushes past him.

A woman gasps from nearby but Kierk, breathing so hard it hurts, silences her with a look. Beyond some glances and movement away from him he’s left alone to lean against the wall—he can feel every inch of his skin and his head is spinning, ripping from him in this heat where he can’t even catch his breath, so he ends up a staggered figure, just a heavy-breathing delicate chemical balance almost obliterated, a standing negentropy wave that had just escaped from materials harder and faster than it, a standing negentropy wave that is strongly reconsidering this whole investigation, that is reaching certain decisions vis-à-vis the pursuit of this strangeness (like finding that graffiti so far back on precisely the same subway where Atif had been disembodied, dissipated, and then the form itself, the thing towering up in the darkness, it must have been ten feet tall), specifically, he’s leaning toward abandoning the pursuit entirely—for left alone the strangeness might be harmless but in these investigations it is a strangeness that always seems to push back.

The minutes pass and he recovers himself. He’s watchful of the end of the platform where he had seen it but nothing emerges, everything passes normally. It’s Friday night, which he’d forgotten, and the citizens of New York are traversing the underground. Eventually he moves closer to the turnstiles where the art project is installed, sitting down on a nearby bench, his clothes streaked with rust and dirt, completely ruined. In the flow of those entering and exiting there is music. With each passerby a note is sounded, building until the chthonic music is an ambient étude, like listening to a great thought accumulating over decades, a pattern spaced out temporally to such an extent that it was only just recognizable as such. But the nature of the song is not threatening—just big and sad, a melancholy witnessing of the short lives passing through, utterly inhuman but not ominous at all, just a city-size organism unassailable by demands of morality or purpose. And now the patterns of the comings and goings seem finally to have given it a voice to slowly sing out its centennial song. And with that voice a peace has descended over the subway, and Kierk, lulled by this entelechy of city to sound, sits monkishly until quite late, his fear fading, his uncertainty growing.

Later in bed, and with barely a coherent mind left, Kierk recognizes something fundamental about his investigations into consciousness, but it also applies to the mystery of Atif’s death. He has been using the same strategy as Bobby Fischer—complexifying the chessboard to an insane, absurd degree, building forks and pins into gigantic towers of counterfactuals, and then trusting in his innate ability to see a way through when his opponent couldn’t. But Kierk has cluttered the board too much, he knows—everything contradicts everything else . . . which is his last thought before going the way of a shoal breaking into fishes swimming off on their own as he drowses off, not even anxious about the questions that have been haunting him. Rather he has quickly become a sleeping form dissolving into mere ruins. As it happens the pandemonium of demons falls silent and without the tyrant of the self the throne sits empty and Kierk again becomes automata, fully clockwork and