Jakob Simmons, if he could still be called as such, does not now remember the damp stone walls of his childhood home, nor where it could be found on a map of the Earth’s surface, but he remembers the little gap in the wall that fascinated him so, and the darkness just beyond. He remembers staring into it for hours. His parents left him alone, busy trying to put bread on the table, but he was not lonely, nor did he feel neglected. How could he feel neglected when the shadow of that thing felt always just beyond his peripheral, eager to embrace him?
He does not now remember what he brought to it, the sacrifices he made, the way he hunted down the powdery gray moths who infested the wardrobe which held the family’s clothes and slowly succumbed to mold in the bleak background of their lives. But he does remember the rush of feeding it their smashed little corpses. How its satisfaction, the cold manifestation of its dark outer hunger, reverberated through the house and into his bones. For one brilliant moment he would share that cruel awareness, in total sync with the darkness that fascinated him and which was fascinated by him. Then he would share the hunger. And the hunger was less nice, less enlightening. He would cower and cry like any normal child, though already the darkness had started to overwrite his brain into something less familiar, quietly steamrolling the altruism and decency out of the ancient human paradigm imprinted there. It would sit with him for a moment, that bile and that hate, until it was time to look for the moths again. He began to eat them too, just to share in the communion.
He does not now remember the exact two fingers he lost when he finally reached into that gap, nor which hand they’d been taken from, but he does remember the painlessness of their loss, the way they had been cleanly cauterized. He remembers the sour liquid the stumps had been coated in, how it tasted when he brought it to his mouth and let it into him. That perhaps had been the precise moment the world had doomed itself.
His exact age when he noticed that the gap had been filled in, not with more stone but with clean and decent worldly air, is lost to him, but he remembers not being particularly surprised. He remembers the feeling of knowing that his friend was not lost to him.
From that moment forward, he would make it his goal to find it – to find Her – again. He never doubted it would happen. He just needed to follow the path set before him, to pick up the clues to seek Her out. When a wealthy man whose land he tilled offered him access to a good school, a moment of kindness from a man who had ordered many of his poor charges to be whipped, Jakob took it. He does not remember the names of the books he spent endless nights wrapped in, looking for any detail that might lead to Her. But he remembers the moment he found mention of the motifs that underlined Her existence. That roving darkness, the hunger and the hatred.
In the old days, back when witches were sought and burned before the age of reason, She had many acolytes. They would cut themselves open and let bedbugs siphon off their fluids, their humors beneath the blood and flesh. Then they would feed those bloated parasites to the cracks in the firmament, the little gaps in reality like the one that had taken up residence in Jakob’s childhood home. Her acolytes were few, but they were still around. They called Her the Vinegar Queen. It took him many years but eventually he found them.
As they knew Her, they knew Jakob as their brother. But even then with stars in his eyes Jakob knew he was special. He was not like them, blind followers that they were. He was Her jewel. She would build him into her crown when She came to take dominion over the world, and he would be Her king and her fool. Perhaps all of them thought the same of themselves.
Her brief manifestations followed a cycle – not the cycle of the Moon or the stars, which were all meaningless to Her, but a deeper, stranger cycle that had to be divined using other methods. The Vinegar Mysterium tracked Her appearances zealously and followed Her across Europe, and the near East, and eventually all the way to the New World. It was there that they learned to make the flowers, the little gateways, so they could stop their roaming and feed Her right there in their makeshift monastery whenever the time of the cycle came.
Jakob, now an Abbot of the Mysterium, made his flower to resemble a marigold. He remembers this association, the crowns he wore to emphasize his affiliation. It is one of the few things he does remember. He also remembers his first true communion with Her, when She came to him in the form of a slender young man and made love to him on the dirt outside, and how he woke up naked and alone only hours later, still under the Moon, drenched in that same sour liquid. He still is not sure what exactly happened that night. Perhaps the whole thing was merely a strange dream. But he remembers the feeling of finally being as close to Her as he could ever be, and the idea She planted in his head while it happened.
He remembers picking up the flower after, the strange little intricate device of sharp bronze scraps and shaved wood. He remembers the darkness at the center, how it looked at him, how he trusted it completely.
He remembers shoving his hand inside, and the pain that erupted into and through and then up out of his arm as he became part of the sky.
There is little left of that original world now, the one that first felt Her violation. Where the blood tide tore craters into the structure of the Earth itself. Where men and women and children and animals all tasted themselves and each other and broke against the rocks under the surface of the paper-thin logic of their physical reality, merging into a new logic, hating what they used to be, hating what they were. Jakob remembers carpets and windows and clouds laughing at him, taunting him for ever being a person, for ever thinking he could be a person, because what was a person really? What was any of this but the precursor to the inevitability of Her hatred and Her victory? He remembers the dirty calcium spikes of his teeth and the screaming acid of his bowels and that simple truth, Biledark, Biledark, becoming his ears and his eyes and working him like dough into a new causal chain. He remembers the Other, Her collaborator, the cold diamond eye keeping track of his becoming.
He remembers how badly the Animal wanted him, but how She would not let him go.
Something else, something there, he remembers it screaming through the skin of the many worlds, begging them to defend what it could not. No one could defend against Her. She pulsed out from that first world and kept going. Why would she slow? She was in now. What She had waited for, sitting on the top of the hill, knowing she would start to roll sooner or later, it was reality. It always had been reality.
Nothing was broken. Everything was beautiful.
As I am, I am As.
Jakob remembers smiling.
He was going to live forever.