Chapter 40: The Spirit

It was not long before Violet became distantly aware of a presence shimmering at the far edges of her mind. She was reminded in some vague way of a glass shooter marble she’d left at home, smooth and shot through with fractures from some long ago impact. At times she liked to sit and stare through it, along the myriad semi-geometric pathways within, the sharp edges of each crack hidden by the glossiness of a still perfect exterior.

This new force was not inert like her marble. It moved, and when Violet attempted to reach out she felt a great many pieces held both together and apart, and again an emptiness which seemed oddly familiar.

When she opened her eyes it was to a dull, fizzy ache just behind them, her vision collecting itself only slowly. She’d raised herself onto one elbow and lay crooked beneath her blankets, sore and only half awake.

Amidst the pews, just past the alter, a nearly colorless aberration rippled in space, and though it did not demonstrate movement in the traditional sense, just looking at it made Violet’s eyes want to cross.

It was the spirit.

Violet managed to still a sudden jolting urge to go for her lantern. That wouldn’t work. The last time she’d encountered spirits, in the woods back home, they’d reacted less than favorably to electric lights, to any of the old harbingers of humanity.

So instead she sat fully upright and knew that the cat and the beast were awake as well, silent and tense where they had settled for the night. Violet’s attention drifted from her companions and again she tried to look at the spirit’s sorrowful abstraction, but her eyes still could not maintain purchase.

There was an odd hesitance to the spirit, for though it had left the confines of the hive and drifted out into open space, whatever errand it had set out to accomplish seemed troublesome, or perhaps indefinable.

Violet could not help but recall the cat’s advice on speaking to demons. The spirit was not a demon, but it felt fractured in much the same way. Though where a demon’s fragments spat and sizzled, all Violet could feel of the shivery skein that enfolded the spirit’s center was confusion and fear interlocking, endlessly recursive loops of sensation and experience playing themselves out again and again. From amongst them came flickers of genuine memory, ancient moments gone frayed and gray, worn to atoms by the troubled attentions of recollection.

Behind it all Violet could feel only the very broadest edges of what lay within the spirit’s core, like traces of heat leaking out from the ashes of a dead fire. Impacting the front of her mind were splinters of color. There was grass, and the sky when viewed through eyes of a sort that no longer existed; but an alienation had begun between those shreds of spirit soul and the splinters of memory they had formed themselves around. The spirits knew on some level that there was a great empty world beyond themselves, and from a thousand tiny consciousnesses helpless shivers rolled forth, for something greater had touched upon the edges of their perception, like the ripple of something unseen passing through very dark water.

That something was her, Violet knew, and felt sick. Yet she continued, for the fragments were barely more than isolated reactions, capable of self perpetuation but nothing more. That they had gazed into the night and mewled in horror at what they saw….

Violet put that from her mind and cast her perception stubbornly further, attempting to pierce through the foggy, splintered layers of the spirit’s construction. She’d assumed that it would be similar to how the demon had felt, fragments orbiting a central mass that was larger and more complete than its fellows, but nothing of the sort made itself clear.

The spirit grew denser the further in she pushed, but amidst the discordancies that squalled ever louder Violet could feel no definite solidity emerging, no coherency of format or rising sapience. The spirit before her was but a webwork of disparate parts welded together by proximity and pain and traumas so old as to be completely contextless.

The core of the spirit looked upon her and again there was a shiver both of confusion and fear, sensation and fractured hints of a peculiar logic leaking like sparks from a downed electrical line.

The spirit knew she was supposed to be a human, though it could only remember humans distantly. The memories became ever more distorted the more they were viewed, like ink smudged by endless rubbing fingers. Humans seemed an annihilator, but beyond the instinctive dread that arose Violet could not make sense of the spirit’s thought process, for it collapsed into contradiction, the perspectives it took entirely dissimilar; that of a wolf, a bird, a cat, a fox….

And they marched ever onwards, those experiences, what it felt like to bite and what it felt like to run and limp, the numb horror of being caught in a trap and the sensation of poison burning from the inside out. Lights at night reflected from the clouds, but an empty brightness and a soulless glare, for there were no communications from the ones who laid the traps and shot the guns and swallowed the world whole with eyes so empty as to be mirrors and speech that could not be mimicked by even the greatest attempt—

The spirit jolted back and Violet just barely kept hold of her connection, aware that she was trembling. Distantly, the sticky warmth of a tear rolled down to meet one corner of her mouth. She tasted salt.

It could not be sure of what she was, for though there was humanity writ across her the spirit could not put together those differences that burned bright as the sun. The spirit attempted to speak, or Violet thought that was what it was doing, but the crackling patter of imagery and sound that came held no sense beyond a general fugue of mounting despair.

Violet could feel that despair within herself too, instinctive and troublingly natural. The spirit could not place her and she could not place it. The brokenness within resonated and seemed destined to endlessly reverberate until all the world was splinters and then atoms and then…nothing at all.

The spirit drifted slowly back, its connection faltering and fraying as it did. But before it broke completely Violet could feel something close to a desperate yearning, though a resigned one, for it knew that the unity and purpose it sought were no longer possible.

As Violet listened, no longer trying to press herself forward, she heard the faintly hopeful edges of the noise die and then a lonely, numb coldness settle in. The spirit had become very still, but only those parts of it possessed of outward thought. It continued on towards the hive, for the hive was warm and dark and as familiar as anything could be.

For a time Violet sat quietly trembling, the whole of an interminable night throbbing uneasily about her. Once more she felt weirdly stuck, trapped halfway between the world as ordinarily known, and that fragmented helplessness occupied by the spirit.

It had wanted to simply disappear, with no hope for or appeal to any sort of divine rescue. That the possibility had never occurred to even a single one of the countless fragments scared Violet badly. But though the fear was cold and sharp, it could not truly penetrate, for her mind was elsewhere, trembling like the walls of a freshly struck bell.

She barely noticed when the cat slipped in next to her and pushed its head under her left arm. The touch of her companion’s fur sent staticky crackles tickling along her side and Violet saw a small cascade of pale sparks ripple down the length of the cat’s tail like a string of firecrackers noiselessly detonating.

This was still distant, registering as though to a person freshly stunned, but Violet was present enough to gather the cat fumblingly into her arms. It began to tense, embarrassed, then relaxed and allowed itself to be held like a child’s doll, its whiskers twitching restlessly against Violet’s left ear.

The beast had drifted close as well and conformed itself to the empty space by her right side. A curl of white fabric brushed against Violet’s shoulder.

“You’re soaking the back of my neck.” The cat said after a moment, and this sounded nearly normal, the sickly distance of everything beginning to evaporate.

Violet tried to sniffle back further tears but hiccuped instead.

“I’m sorry.” She mumbled, voice foggy and indistinct.

At this the cat gathered its hind legs under itself and pushed gently up, brushing the wetness from beneath Violet’s eyes with brisk sweeps of its silkily furred head.

“There’s nothing to apologize for,” the cat said, fixing Violet with a very direct gaze. From up close her companion’s eyes looked like a pair of gently glowing moons, coldly lit by some otherworldly source. “You’ve run into something that scares you. That’s all.”

The cat’s pronouncement was smooth and authoritative, sewing the entire situation neatly up, eliminating the more troublesome parts. But….

“I wasn’t scared,” Violet said, knowing even as she spoke that this wasn’t true. “I just didn’t think the spirit would be like that.” But that wasn’t true either, for even now she was thinking back to initial encounter with the spirits in the forest at home. Even then, when she’d been operating at a distance, she’d felt the sorrow. The emptiness.

Her words felt more natural now, even if the message was still muddied. She tried again.

“It was trying to figure out what I was, and what the world was for putting me in its path…and it couldn’t.” Again a shiver of sorrow, as bleak as it was absolute, gripped her in its teeth.

The cat exhaled.

“On occasion the world will produce an annihilator,” it said. “Normally this tragedy carries the benefit of killing its victims outright…but sometimes they linger.”

“Isn’t there something we could do to help?” Violet asked, but the question came quietly, for she’d already guessed the probable answer.

The cat hesitated, seeking out the gentlest possible way to phrase its reply.

“You can only help somebody who knows what help is.” It said at last, and then was silent.

Violet thought about the spirit, curled uneasily into its pocket of blankness at the bottom of the hive, anesthetized against the world. The immediacy of her recollections had already begun to fade and she watched them go with a certain sadness. As soon as she stepped back into the regular world of human perception it seemed that walls sprang up, barring her from those insights she’d gained before, no matter how grand or painful they’d been.

The spirit was becoming an abstraction again.

To her side the beast stirred and then picked itself up, slipping silently into the air. Violet half expected it to say something or drift out into the night, but the beast did neither. Instead it floated over top of the pews and advanced upon the hive, attracting drowsy flights of nocturnal bees as it went.

The bees looped and bumped and made slow, clumsy pirouettes, rendered entirely black against the night’s greater curtain, wings flashing Glow blue like flakes of electrical charge made solid.

Across the furthest edges of the delicately prancing bees came the centralizing influence of the queen, her presence transmitting sternness and caution. But if the beast was paying attention to her, Violet could not tell.

The beast halted above the moldering bulk of the alter and rested there, suspended in space like a spider dangling from silk. After a moment the air before the hive turned to a shimmer, and though Violet had to avert her eyes, she knew that the spirit had somehow been compelled to exit, through curiosity or duty or both.

She was far enough away that only traces of a connection emerged, but Violet knew that the beast was saying something, words crackling to nonsense but the deeper feelings so sharp as to be indelible.

There were numbnesses being exchanged, and again Violet could sense that the spirit was detecting entire swathes of familiarity, though worn and old, only halfway coherent. They stood in the air and slowly turned a circle around each other, like partners agreeing to a dance, but though the spirit had once been a multitude of animals, and though the beast had once been a human, no suspicion or hostilities sprang forth. They were the same in their brokenness now, and even if words could not be exchanged there were great gulfs of existent feeling comprehensible to nobody but themselves.

As Violet watched, the beast and the spirit began to rise, still swirling, one around the other, until the last edges of connection frayed into silence and the pair disappeared into the blackness of the church steeple, gone from sight.

Though there was nothing to see or hear, Violet remained transfixed upon that patch of night and imagined that she could see the elegant dance of ghostly figures swirling free.

It was a long time before the beast reappeared, and when it returned to view it simply sank as though weighted, now unaccompanied. There was no sign of the spirit and the hive vibrated with restless unease before the queen caught hold of herself. Bees still circled the beast, but one by one they peeled away, until the room was silent and the queen seemed possessed of a gentle sadness, as though some unexpected but inevitable tragedy had at last come to pass.

“What happened?” Violet asked as the beast drifted back over. It was lower now, nearly touching the floor.

i -- f i n i s h e d -- i t

Violet knew immediately what that meant and was distantly surprised at herself when no shock or outrage rose in response. Nothing did. Only the same gently curling sadness that she’d felt from the queen.

“Like with the demon, back at the hospital?” She asked.

n o t -- l i k e -- t h at .. -- l i k e .. .. h e l p i n g

The beast seemed to have chosen its words very carefully, but still it puddled down next to Violet as though exhausted. Gently, she stroked the crest of its bony nose.

“Did it ask you to?” She asked.

The beast stirred faintly under her touch.

i t -- l e t -- m e ---- The beast’s words were so quiet they crackled.

“You don’t feel bad, do you?” The cat asked, and though Violet glanced over out of instinct, the cat’s question seemed genuine.

n o ---- Said the beast. ---- b u t -- i -- d i d n ’ t -- l i k e -- i t .

i t -- f e l t -- l i k e -- e n d i n g -- a -- p a r t -- o f -- m y s e l f

Silently, Violet gathered the beast into her arms and hugged its skull to her chest, the cat adding a supportive paw after a moment. She didn’t know if the beast could truly feel her embrace, but that hardly seemed to matter. For a long moment nobody said anything, then the cat slipped out from Violet’s arms and moved to fluff up the bundle of shirts she was using as a pillow.

“Do you think you can sleep?” It asked.

Violet nodded and relinquished her grasp on the beast, which straightened slowly back up, correcting its fabric wherever it had gone crooked.

“I’m glad to have the both of you.” She said, and lay back down. There was still a pit of sadness in the center of her, but she stared up to where the Glow ran in streamers across the lower parts of the ceiling, and that made her feel a little bit better.

When at last she closed her eyes, Violet imagined the spirit’s disparate parts reforming into animals, cats and rabbits, foxes and every other being she’d seen hinted at within those fragmentary depths. They were writ in light, shimmering and multicolored, but once more complete and jubilant in that wholeness. When they moved it was to dance, and they waltzed with each other in loops and reels as they ascended ever further, to reunite with the Glow or play amongst the stars at their leisure.

“Goodnight, Violet.” The cat said, quiet and gentle, but she was already asleep.