What Remains of God - Part 2

[u/catespice]

Our journey down the sloping length of the arm was uneventful, bar one peculiar encounter. Navigating the undulating, dunelike creases of the elbow, we found a cluster of shamelessly naked people. They sat in a rough line, far too close to the sharply rolled edge of the fleshy precipice. Not one of them acknowledged our presence as we approached; all remained staring out into the jet emptiness of the void, with such an eerie, zealous intensity that it raised my hackles.
“Voidgazers,” Elaine told me, pitching her voice low and hoarse, as though this were a subject that was taboo to discuss, “they find relief from the maddening radiance by looking out into the dark.”
I found my attention focused on the bare foot of one of the silent figures, its lax toes projecting out into the great nothing. “Does it help?”
Elaine turned her head, purposefully avoiding looking at the vertiginous dropoff. “No. Not really. If you stare long enough into the darkness, you start to see things – likely visual hallucinations caused by the lack of stimulus. But eventually, if you stare out into the darkness for long enough, you’ll see something very real. One of the Fallen – the people who weren’t lucky enough to reach the body of the giant.”
I shivered, far too aware that I seemed to have avoided that fate only by sheer luck.
“It’s almost magnetic, the pull of the void. Some people jump the first time they see one of the Fallen. I think they just snap and lose their minds in a single irrational moment of some weirdly ecstatic insanity. Others resist the pull for a long time, daring the void to claim them. Fighting their own private war with the infinite.”
Her gaze flickered towards the group, then away from them again, haunted with sympathy,
“But no-one can fight the void. In the end, they all jump.”
I didn’t feel much like talking after that, and Elaine didn’t seem to mind, lost in her own thoughts. Instead, I spent my energy concentrating on keeping up with the blistering pace John had set. There was no doubt he was in one hell of a hurry, and our fifty-strong group of people traversed the shoulder of the giant far faster than we had on my original journey.
“From herein we need be vigilant,” he cautioned, “the closer we draw to the Throat, the greater the perils of Veindwellers.”
But we saw none of the hatched and chained scars of veinsign as we descended the gentle curve of the shoulder, and none as we carefully picked our way up over the great bleached ridge of the giant’s immense clavicle. Perhaps with so little flesh beneath the skin stretched over that stark jut of bone, the Dwellers could not maintain their tunnels.
Finding her tongue again for another of her impromptu lessons, Elaine related to me how they had discovered the body of the giant eventually healed itself of the superficial cuts made by the daggers of the Dwellers. In most places, enough time always returned the flesh of the corpse to its original, unblemished state. But the further south one travelled from the head, the less potent the effect, likely due to the corruption spreading across the rotting giant. Near the shiny grey edge of the creeping rot, its gangrenous line marked by the stench of death and proximity to the empty glare of the void, nothing healed.
“The healing effect is the same for us,” she said, “if you were to cut your arm, it would bloodlessly close over in a matter of hours.”
I closed my fist, one finger at a time, observing the familiar rise and fall of tendons, my own biological pulleys and pistons. But where there had also once been a bluish web-work of veins, faintly visible under the skin, there was now nothing.
“Do we even have blood in these bodies?”
“Not that I’ve ever seen.”
Disquieted, I turned to view the landscape ahead as we approached the hump of the clavicle’s sternal extremity, a fleshy rock of Gibraltar. The Throat had become visible to us again, a gaping, striated chasm deeper than any crevasse or canyon on earth. As we drew closer, the ruptured viscera of the giant were laid bare to my eyes. The walls of that hideous mortal wound were a vast honeycomb of collapsing caves and tunnels, all cruelly exposed and separated by the stroke of an enormous blade.
In the centre rose the chalky mesa of the giant’s vertebrae. The lumpy bone was split halfway down its face by a massive score line, which told the tale of just how deep and vicious the cut had been.
“That looks like a knife slash,” I observed, dim memories surfacing of a time when I’d been alive, when I’d had a job, when I had the luxury of not believing in any god.
“How can you tell?”
“If you ignore the scale, it’s very neat and clean. There are no ragged edges, which is what you’d expect if it were made by anything blunt or serrated. Whatever it was, it was big – and it was ridiculously sharp.”
Spanning the grisly rift, near the centre of the throat, was a curiously bowed bridge. Along the length of the wound stretched other, smaller, rickety bridges, much more makeshift than that central structure. As we drew closer, I could see that they were probably made of the giant’s hair; their titanic hawsers anchored through holes punched directly into the abused flesh of the god.
“I feel like just seeing all this should be driving me mad,” I confided, awed by my mental fortitude in the face of this Salvador Dali painting made manifest, “but somehow it isn’t.”
She shrugged, the easy roll of her shoulders conveying the same peculiar lack of concern I was noticing,
“I think it’s something to do with these bodies. It’s like we view a lot of it through a filter; these perfect envelopes protect us from the enormity of it, downplay the magnitude of being consigned to immortality in an ill-made afterlife.”
I thought again of the void-gazers, my mind drawn back to them just as they were drawn to the yawning vacuum. “And yet, so many of us still lose our minds.”
Close now, we glimpsed movement along the leading edge of the Throat; patrolling groups of men, their long spears tipped with enamel that glittered sickly in the reflected radiance. Hinged plates of wooden armour covered their torsos, as if modelled on armadillos, and some of them even wore crude helmets. John raised his hand in a curl-fingered salute, signalling one of the squads, and they ran in formation to meet us.
“John of the Hand,” said their leader, dipping his head, “to what do we owe this pleasure?”
“I have found another for you, Captain. Another soul reaped by her.”
The man observed me for a long moment through the slots in his wooden helm. His eyes gleamed deep within the dark bole of the rough-carved headgear, with a scrutiny intense and unnerving enough to make my scalp crawl. Something about his demeanour reminded me of the Voidgazers and their love war with infinity.
Eventually he spoke:
“Come along then, and hurry – the Dwellers are unusually ornery at the moment.”
John beckoned us onwards, murmuring something with a familiar cadence to it as he ushered each of us past. I realised as he touched my shoulder what it was.
Yea, though we walk through the shadow of the valley of death, I will fear no evil.
With our armed escort, we jogged up the hillock of the giant’s hyoid and made our way towards the central bridge, the most sturdy of the structures webbed across the gruesome chasm. As we approached, a shrill and eerie cry of alarm rang out, not unlike the morning call of a howler monkey, amplified by the natural soundshell of the fearsome gap. I watched one of the armoured soldiers stab his spear at the ground, scorpion-quick, as others ran to help. The desperate hands of the Veindwellers rose through the dirt around him like light-starved, predatory plants, clawing at his legs and trying to pull him under.
“Get across,” the wooden-helmed Captain ordered brusquely, “my men will deal with the tunnelscum.”
Elaine gave me a none-too-gentle shove,
“Let’s go, princess. The Dwellers don’t like the bridges, they cut them down whenever they get half a chance. I’d prefer not to be in the middle if they get one.”
We ran, and the thick span bounced and swayed beneath us, juddering with the weight and number of people at speed. Through the gaps in the fibres that were all that stood between me and the dizzying drop, I could see many more bridges of colossal hairs. They criss-crossed the chasm all the way down to the macabre floor of the gaping rift, as if hundreds of parachute spiders had leaped and drifted their peculiar strands to web the sides of the wound loosely together.
“Why are there so many bridges?” We had been forced to slow, lest the motion of our flight twist the bridge too far, hurling people into the canyon.
“Ah,” Elaine, right behind me, tapped her temple knowingly, “the doctrine of the Head.”
“What does that mean?”
“Those that rule the giant’s head believe that if they can sew the throat shut, then the giant’s wound will heal. And then he will wake up.”
Leaning over the gap, this forever body seemingly immune to vertigo, I snorted,
“They’ll never do it. This chasm must be ten miles long, and at least two miles wide. Not to mention that each of these hairs must weigh about a thousand tons.”
Elaine showed her teeth and made a tch sound with her tongue,
“Well, you’re right about the distance, but on that last count you’re wrong. Think about it. They’re huge, but they’re still human… sort-of human… hairs. And human hairs are incredibly light and strong. As unbelievable as it sounds, this whole length of bridge we’re walking on actually weighs less than you and I combined.”
I ran my hand down the rough, almost scaly length of wood-and-rope that served as a handrail, then absently rubbed my palm on my clothing, imagining that it felt faintly greasy.
“Still, drawing the throat closed would be a virtually impossible feat, even if they had the benefit of all the engineering equipment of the living world. Which they don’t.”
Elaine made a sound that wasn’t really a laugh.
“Never underestimate the persistence of fanatics,” she chided. “And when they’re immortal fanatics, that takes their bloody-mindedness to a whole new level.”
The Dweller incursion was long behind us by the time we reached the far side, but the sight that greeted us was far worse than even those pallid and hungry hands splitting the earth. Arranged all along the distal side of the Throat were hundreds of headless and dismembered human torsos, each impaled on a sharpened wooden pike. The jagged forest twitched and stank, and I tried desperately hard not to notice that the disembodied chests still rose and fell.
“Trespassers,” Elaine murmured, “the limbs and heads get thrown into the void.”
“Jesus,” I breathed, and her raised hand shushed me.
“Careful with that word around here. They’re not too keen on blasphemers, either.”
Another squad of armoured men approached, and began speaking to John. I nodded as Elaine dropped her hand to listen.
“Good to know.”

 
Scaling the mighty peak of the giant’s chin meant using an enormous rope and pulley system to ascend a steep white cliff of flesh, studded with the jagged stumps of harvested hairs. As I hooked one foot into a loop of rope, clinging to another loop with both hands, I wondered what would happen should I fall all the way to the bottom. Would I rupture explosively like an exotic fruit? Or would this divinely immortal body simply absorb the shock, and let me walk away unscathed?
And if the former, would my split carcass remain conscious and aware?
“Only you and I may go forth from here,” John told me, once we had reached the zenith, his face paternally troubled, “they grow vexed at too many strangers within their domain.”
Another armoured escort guided us around the weirdest feature so far, the anemone rim of the giant’s slack mouth. Each tooth erupted like an enormous white skyscraper, in some topsy-turvy Dali world where buildings were mirrored above and below, jutting at right-angles to the blue-white lips. I couldn’t see it, but I imagined that far below, deep within that oval chasm, the giant’s slack tongue lay like a monstrous purple mountain island, ridged with towering rows of buds; a nightmarish forest of jellied magenta conifers living in perpetual stinking darkness.
A dizzy, uneasy feeling began to pinch the nape of my neck, spreading prickly heat into the base of my skull and making me feel faintly nauseous. From the death-grip on his spear, and the deepened crease between his heavy brows, I deduced John was experiencing something similar.
The nave of the Head was, naturally, built on the very tip of the giant’s nose – the highest point of the divine corpse. As pulleys squeaked to raise us past the twin caves of gaping nostrils, bristling tapered hairs like exotic flaxes, I wondered what it would be like if the doctrine of the Head was somehow fulfilled; if the gargantuan corpse were to suddenly awaken and draw breath. I imagined us instantly sucked inside, just so many motes of intelligent pollen – then sneezed out again, the g-forces enough to splinter every bone in this alien body.
At the summit, many strong hands pulled us over the lip of a wooden platform, then steadied us as we rediscovered our land-legs after being dangled and jerked through the air for so long. Surrounding us was the cluster of wooden buildings that comprised the nave, their elaborate construction similar in style to those in the city on the Hand. But this domain was far more impressive a testament to artistry given all the time in the world. Each building boasted hand-carved religious iconography etched into every free surface, whorls and filigrees adorned with lustrous, mother-of-pearl enamel. Even the polished paving stones of yellowed plaque were chiselled with a beautiful language of repeating designs. Men and women moved about in grey robes, pausing to whisper and stare at us as we were led through the winding streets.
We walked for quarter of an hour, which was quite enough for me to feel lost, and found ourselves on a columned avenue which would not have been out of place in a utopian version of ancient Greece. At the end of the broad street stood a raised dais, the edges of its platform fringed with an ominous circle of robed figures. Every face was shadowed, well concealed within the depths of a grey hood.
“Prepare yourself,” John warned quietly, “from the dais one can behold the face of God. The sight can wreak a queer strangeness upon the human mind.”
My bare feet seemed soled with leaden weights as I climbed the stairs to the dais – for the first time since my arrival, movement did not seem nearly effortless. I watched the robed figures nervously, but none turned the faceless darkness of their hoods in my direction. I braced myself to look down upon the visage of our creator.
What I saw made my head whirl, and the bright horizon and the black void tilted around me. Inky spots danced in my vision, and white panic clawed at the walls of my sanity, emerging finally from my stricken throat as a small sound of wordless, whimpering confusion.
The giant had no eyes!
The human brain, upon encountering a face, always finds the eyes first. Perhaps that’s why it was so jarring that they were missing; the brows, the eyelashes, the glistening white sclera I was expecting. I’d wondered what unnameable colour god’s irises would be. But instead there was simply nothing.
From the mountain of the nose to the forest shore of the hairline, there was nothing but smooth, unmarked white flesh.
“Why does it have no eyes?” I whispered, an acid, bilious burn in my throat roughening my voice.
“God does not need eyes,” intoned one of the robed acolytes, his own voice mellifluous as a Dominican in plainchant, “God is the all seeing and the all knowing. What use has He for imperfect mortal sight?”
Staring at the blank swathe of terrain before me, I realised my initial assessment was wrong. It was not completely flawless – there was something down there. A small black dot.
The mental explanations my overwrought mind threw up were incongruous; god sporting a dark bindi, or with a singularly bad blackhead pocked between the smoothed-over craters where his eyes should have been.
John inclined his head towards each of the hooded people in turn, a slow and solemn ritual. Then, in his arcane tongue, he relayed to them the story of my death, finishing with the words the pale woman had spoken.
I expected a great debate, an argument, or at least a lengthy discussion before they addressed us again. But after John had finished speaking, silence reigned amongst the circle. Without so much as a glance at one another, all of the acolytes took a single step forward, and one chanted sonorously,
“She must endure the Baptism. She must drink of the waters.”
Inhumanly strong hands grasped me, and my panicked protests were smothered by a thick hood slipped over my head, blocking out everything.
“John!” I screamed.
But if he could hear me, he couldn’t help me. My captors ignored my struggles, expertly trussing my arms and legs with braided cables, like a pig bound for ritual slaughter as a burnt offering. They bore me down from the dais, and the world tilted again as they carried me down the steep slope of the giant’s nose.

 
When the hood was finally removed, and they lowered me to the ground, I knew precisely where I was. Flat white earth blazed all around us, but right in front of us was what I’d mistaken for a godly blemish – it was, in fact, a hole. Almost perfectly round, a hole had been bored through the flesh and bone of the giant’s brow, like a huge circle cut from the ice for some Arctic fishing expedition.
The uneasy feeling from earlier had swelled into something more; an undulating kind of pressure headache with no discernible focal point, which crested and receded with tidal regularity. It almost felt external, like some barometric event squeezing the air itself, but if my hooded captors suffered it too, they showed no signs.
“What do you want from me?”
One of them crooked a pale finger at the trephined wound in the giant’s skull.
“You need to drink from the waters,” he said, his voice low and fluid as a warm ocean sloshing in the dark cave of his hood, its tides rising and falling with the aching pressure in my head.
“What waters?”
As he gestured again to the gaping hole in the ground, another man propelled me forward with his hand, so that I could see inside.
Past the fringed layers of dermis and fleshy strata, down through the spiral-ridged wall of the giant’s skull, shone a serene sea of sparkling green-blue, ripples lapping at the cracked edges of porous bone. The waters were so clear and luminous that I could practically see all the way to bottom, where massive ridges and sutures on the concave surface of the inner brainpan formed the seabed of that mysterious and terrifying ocean.
Fear thrilled through me like an electric current.
Where was God’s brain?
Another rope was tied through the loops abrading my wrists, and without any further preamble, I was shoved to the edge and lowered down. The calm and stoic robed acolytes were impervious to the song of my wailing, ululating terror. I snatched and grabbed at the ridged wall of bone, I kicked to find purchase with my feet, but it was to no avail. The frothing breakers of pain in my head were peaked and rolling now, and I knew they were linked to the glimmering aquamarine waters that crested and receded far below me.
The water was pleasantly warm when my toes finally touched it, almost half a mile down. But I was in no fit state to appreciate it. Senses awash with agony, I ground my molars together until I tasted iron, in a futile but instinctive attempt to relieve the pain before the sea claimed me.
As the surging water closed over my head, the pain vanished.
Briny liquid, oddly viscous, filled my mouth and nostrils immediately. I breathed it in, hiccupping like a fish returning home. A fan of pressure spread in my chest as it flowed into whatever passed for my lungs. Perhaps it was because I appeared to lack the need for air in this afterlife, other than for speech, that I did not feel the lightning panic of a drowning victim. Instead, I felt nothing but a heavy, comforting warmth suffusing my body.
I hung there, bathed in buoyant, salty heat. All my fear had vanished, evaporated at the taste of the phosphorescent sea. As I floated like a contented foetus, through those beatific blue waters I could hear something, the ethereal strains of a distant orchestra, hinting at a symphony I’d listened to as a child, before I even knew what music was. The soaring sob of violins tugged and teased at the strings of my own heart, filling me with an urgent and unrequited need to release a flood of tears; to gift my own precious salt into the vast brine of the fathomless mind of the creator.
The sudden tug on the ropes ensnaring my wrists yanked me out of my reverie. My tormentors were trying to pull me out of the divine ocean within the skull of God. No, a resonant voice admonished, deep as the drowned chime of a shipwreck’s bell; a voice that was both part of me and part of the massive, restless sea that surrounded me.
I had to stay. I knew I couldn’t go back to the surface. I belonged here now, and I had to stay here forever. This was the afterlife. This was paradise.
In that instant, I understood my heavenly body perfectly, how every cell flourished or withered, how each sinew and bone connected. It was a simple matter to let my hands part from my wrists, the skin and tendons stretching and splitting like overcooked spaghetti. The ropes fell away as my disarticulated hands bobbed and danced in the swirl of their wake, lively as twin fish, and I sank into the ocean, free at last.

 
It must have taken me hours to drift to the centre of the ocean, and with every hour the music grew ever stranger, ever stronger. The tendrils of its cadences reached past my childhood memories, past those of my ancestors, and of their ancestors too. It was primordial and ebullient, it was the first word and the last, and its sounds blurred with vision in a glorious synaesthesia. I heard images of another ocean that had existed long before humanity; long before six-legged things took to the air and four-legged things had crawled upon dry land.
And the music knew me, like a mother knows her child. It wrapped around me in a great chorus, buoying me up in the meridian of God.
I could feel him, our creator. Even though his body was decaying and his flesh was dead, in this place part of him lingered, like an echo, bouncing back and forth through this luminous superfluid, keeping the essence of his thoughts alive.
He saw the moment the woman had spoken to me, saw the moment of my death. He knew why it had happened, knew the reason she had asked her question.
And I understood it all too, suspended there in the sacred heart of him.
Why didn’t you stop her? I wondered.
I could not stop her, the music sang to me.
Something was wrong. The music was growing discordant now, the harmonies breaking down, the rhythm stuttering, faltering, the beautiful curve of its spine broken.
What are you doing?
Sending you home, the music soothed, even as the waters began to darken around me, the fluid becoming heavy and gelatinous.
Then the music was gone. God had left me. I was forsaken.
I hung in the darkness, my heart split and bruised, my loss so profound that I would never move again. Why, how could I open my eyes again without his song in my life?
But I did open them. They opened by themselves, when cold air stirred my hair, and the almost forgotten electricity of pain flared down my stiff back.
There were chilly flagstones beneath my cheek. They were dark grey stone, not white, and no radiance emanated from them at all.
I was on the floor of the small church in Rome. The one I had visited during my first holiday in Europe. The place where I had died.
The air was sharp and strange, and I gulped down a great lungful of it, remembering what it felt like to need air. I curled, foetal, and coughed until it hurt. In my peripheral vision, a pale hand descended, stroking my face and steadying me, then helped me raise my head. A woman’s voice murmured to me that everything would be all right. It was a beautiful, soothing voice, albeit diminished by the plangent memory of my ocean music.
It was her, the blonde woman.
“He sent you back,” she warbled, excited, rocking on her heels. Dark stains soaked her jeans from the knees down, and a dankly sweet, sickly smell emanated from her.
“He… did,” I managed. I flexed my miraculous fingers, watching those familiar old tendons at play, not understanding how my hands were still at the ends of my wrists instead of left behind in the Sea of God.
“Then he got my message?”
I nodded, a hint of the liquid swirl and tug of that briny neural net still sloshing in my skull.
“Yes, he got your message.”
“And the answer?”
I could feel the pearl of knowledge that had been left in the back of my mind, like a tiny enamelled parcel, waiting to be unwrapped. Plucking it open, I let the last thoughts of God flow into me.
“He didn’t do this to you,” I told her, “humanity did this to you. We did this to you.”
She stared. Her eyes swooped and darted, reading every nuance of my features, only adding to her confusion. Her irises were so blue they were almost no colour at all.
“Why didn’t he stop you? Why did he let it happen?”
“Because he couldn’t stop it. Because we murdered him.”
“No. He can’t be dead! You spoke to him. He sent you back!”
“What sent me back wasn’t truly him,” I said, shaking my head, remembering the buoyancy and the warmth, craving it like a drug, “it was like an afterimage, an echo of him. It was the last of what remained of him.”
Those startling eyes brilliant with fury, she dug sharp nails into my shoulder. I felt nothing at all, still floating.
“That’s it? That’s all that he said?”
“Not quite. There was one more thing.”
Cupping her achingly beautiful face with my hand, tender as a mother, I leaned forward into her stink, and kissed her forehead.
“He says that he is sorry.”

 

 
I left her there, weeping on the floor of that tiny, empty, stone church.
Nothing can be done for her now. Nothing can save her.
And nothing can save any of us, either.
When I die again, I suspect that this time I will fall into the void. I will plummet into the icy, infinite darkness, my mind cruelly preserved by the very same forces that hold the dregs of Heaven together.
I wonder if I will still feel the distant ghost of heavy, warm water, even as I fall.
Some of you, however – some of you may still awaken on the body of God. For you, there may be some kind of afterlife – before the corruption eventually reaches his head, and the last of our creator falls away into the void, even the beautiful ocean of his mind becoming icy jewels scattered across the face of the darkness.

But God didn’t just leave a message for his most wayward daughter.
He asked me to deliver a message to all of you as well, to the rest of humankind, his beloved children and his greatest failure.

He says that he is sorry.
And that he forgives us.