Poetic Justice.
A leap of Faith
By Pop Schlockmeister
Prologue
Mister Kingdom
He had been scared before, though even fear became a taste that you got used to, given enough time…and enough practice.
Why couldn’t they leave him be.
He almost tripped and went down. ‘Aghhh’ he yelped barking his shin painfully on a rusty post. He ran on, limping a little but not daring to slow, even one iota. His breathing was ragged and tears ran freely down the kid’s dirt streaked face. It was getting dark quickly now; the boy saw the churchyard up ahead. He remembered the lessons of the holy sisters, the power and the nobility of the angels, the salvation that they promised. And in a young child’s imagination he saw for a moment the brightness of that promise, electric yellow in his small mind, for a few seconds so bright as to blind him even to the oppressive terror that his pursuers bought with them. He wheeled left toward the church spire, a tiny black shadow in the quickly darkening evening.
He pushed hard, trying not to hear the thudding of heavy boots as the big men closed in on him. He knew that he had to run harder than he ever had in his life. He knew that if he didn’t get through the churchyard gate they would have him. They would hem him in; he would be trapped between them and the forbidding iron railings of the graveyard. He was only seven years old and despite a seven year old’s imagination he knew that he couldn’t get over those railings; no way, no chance, but if he could just make it to the church…. well then the angels…His thoughts trailed off and tears pushed again at his eyes, pricking and then almost instantly running into the snot hanging from his freckled nose. Between breaths he began to pant the lessons he had learned; those iconic dynasties of the church that he had listened and learned so assiduously from the sisters.
‘Seraphim…. angels of Love’.
He saw the gates to the churchyard wide open, glistening wet still on wood and ironwork from the earlier storm; the one that had caught him out so late.
‘Cher’, he stopped and choked back a scream, a shadow reared up and then fell instantly back immediately in front of him. Just a cloud moving swiftly across the fast rising moon he realised his tiny heart hammering. ‘Cherubim…Angels of Wisdom;’ he continued ‘Thrones. Angels who oversee other angels’. The gate was maybe twenty feet ahead of him now but exhaustion had slowed the boy considerably. Had he been listening he might have noticed that the heavy thudding footfalls both from behind him and to the side had stopped moments earlier. Ears in the darkness were suddenly straining to hear the light lifting tones of a small boy, trembling as he repeated a lesson taught to him three times a week by the sisters of Saint Andrew of the Divine Faith. A retreat, a small church house of healing found in the rural lands just beyond Slobozia city limits in Romania; a place whose doors opened to orphan and indigent children cast out from that city. ‘Dominions…. Angels of mercy’ his recitation continued. He was little more than jogging now, trembling uncontrollably with equal parts cold and fear. ‘Powers…Angels that guide souls.’ The boy thought he might have forgotten one just then, but in the very same instant he passed through the gates and into the churchyard proper. And as he did in his mind he saw a veritable army of angels, thousands upon thousands of them, all so beautiful and white, singing god’s harmony as they drew together. He saw generals issuing instructions to their lieutenants, Angels, and Archangels and of course Virtues (they were his favourites…secretly; unknown of course to the nuns that taught him.) For The Virtues; weren’t each one of those mighty beings an angel of miracle? Giver of God’s gifts to men…. and children. He saw line upon line, rank upon rank of fantastical winged lordlings as far as his young mind could imagine, and as he pushed through the long wet grass, uncut for more than just a single season he felt comfort in the certainty his small heart felt at the coming of that majestic horde.
He took a wide berth around the sparsely scattered gravestones, trying hard not to think about the dead bodies lying just a few feet under the sodden ground. The sisters had spoken of the dead too. Those that had been lifted up to heaven, and others of course, those less fortunate, or deserving. And all that had confused the boy. Lifted up to heaven how? He knew that people didn’t have wings, even dead people; well they hadn’t just grown them had they? In his seven-year-old mind he had convinced himself that those people the good dead, as he thought of them, had been lifted up to heaven by the wings of the angels. He thus felt doubly certain that in his time of asking they would not forsake him.
His mind switched, and suddenly he was sat on a chair, holding tightly to a pale green nylon bedspread, and he was watching his mama dying. It was a vague memory, a series of sepia tone images, and dim next to the more colourful imaginings that now danced around him. But he had felt her hand drop out of his he remembered that, suddenly heavy as the life fell away from her. He had watched as her eyes had gone all glassy and he had known that the life had left her then, as young as he had been. Immediately after the father had come, quickly, still buttoning at the white collar around his neck, and he had said the words that had to be said. He had turned to a boy so small as to be almost invisible in a small dark room lit by only a single guttering candle; and he had said. ‘Sssshhhh young boy, your ma’s gone to heaven now. It’s for the best.’ They always said it was for the best, grown ups. And he supposed that they ought to know. Soon after the preacher had ushered the boy quickly from that room which had seemed quite right to the boy. The preacher had taken the small child away, so it seemed, in order to allow the angels to perform their ministrations, and to remove his mama to heaven, where she certainly belonged.
And so as the kid twisted at the iron ring of the heavy door handle, and with some effort pushed open one of those heavy oak doors. Despite the terror of the pursuers, and the green moss covered grey stone gargoyles that glared down at him from on high; he was reassured by those memories of his mama, who the preacher had told him had gone to heaven a few days after. For a few moments at least those memories let him forget, indeed just long enough not to be thinking about the people that lay a few feet under the wet ground outside. So works the mind of a seven year old scared and alone in the dark, and likely a seventy seven year old also.
He felt with absolute certainty now that an army of white was hurtling down to save him, on wings from heaven. He looked round as the church door glided back toward it’s frame and after a moment longer slipped closed with barely a whisper and the softest of clicks. His feet sounded loud as he padded down a central isle between twin rows of bare hard benches. A simple church, for a poor community, no golden cross nor stained glass crucifixion scene adorned this place of worship. But all of this meant nothing to a seven-year-old child. He padded slowly up that central isle of the church, stepping on flagstones worn smooth with many long years of kneeling and hard worship; and he believed now that he was safe, that here in The House of God he would be protected from the bad men.
Men that stank of tobacco and arrack, that had pawed and pinched and hurt him, that had come in the night once before, not long past and.
His mind shut down for a moment at that image, that assault on a child’s senses, one that he couldn’t and didn’t fully understand, but that made him gasp out loud a few moments later as his senses returned with a jolt. The pain and the shame had been too awful to bear. Indeed it had been why he had stayed out long after the peeling of the day’s last bell; still out when the thunder and summer lightning had come and lit the early evening sky with god’s own power. He had not wanted to return to his cot, not then, not ever.
Not to those hands, scrabbling, grabbing, and forcing, hurting, angry and heavy with stink, and the hot wet on him, and in him too…
’No’ he exclaimed suddenly, his voice sounding very small, barely registering in the hall’s darkness.
And after just a moment a voice answered him from the darkness, deep and strong with lust and evil intent, and there was no forgiveness in that tone, as the disembodied voice replied…’Yes… Oh yes indeed little one. Come and pray with us now child.’
And in his minds eye a small boy saw the white of the angels recede and then disappear, in an instant, and of a sudden he found that he hated them, despised them with all of his heart. They had taunted him, led him here, and then abandoned him. And later as hands held him down and proceeded to tear his soul from him he turned away; and in time he found others. He built himself instead in their image…and through many years he became the master of that Kingdom…
Chapter one
Big wheels
He stood on trembling legs, fated, baited, slated, utterly wasted, alone yet not alone in a room that stank of piss and the rancid odour of rebellion, he knew that there was nobody left who would stand with him now.
No more running, no more school of life, his time had come, and whether you believed in fate or a life more random this indeed was his moment and Jack Silver had known of its coming for some time. His eyes would not focus; he desperately wanted to look into the face of the Matador. However he tried though he was not able to see outward and so instinctively in that moment he looked in upon himself and he laughed at what he saw.
He remembered a sign he’d once seen above the door of a bar, god knew where or when. It had said “Liquor in the front, Poker in the rear.”
God that must have been twenty years back, and yet it had only just dawned on him, right there and then. In fact it had not really said that at all, indeed now he thought of it what it had said was “Lick her in the front, Poke her in the rear”, damned if it hadn’t, he couldn’t see it then, yet here now, well he’d be damned if it wasn’t just the funniest thing, and clear as a bell.
He heard, well more like felt, a rumbling, bass and deep, distant yet somehow threatening, he wanted to look outward but something tugged him back…. Stay; there’s more to see. That bar, that sign, once again he understood that things were rarely as they seemed at first look, rarely indeed.
He thought back to when it began, when it all began………..
There had been nothing, a difficult concept to get your head round absolute nothing, but nothing not having been there, (and this is where it gets clever,) had not been nothing for any time at all, because in the absence of anything there hadn’t been any time by which to measure it.
So after no time whatsoever, nothing became something and when it did for reasons impossible to know it did so violently.
White and loud and of a sudden nothing became everything, and in that very first instant everything was forever, and so was born time. And nothing that had become everything was everywhere, which was an inevitable part of being everything, and in the next instant well that was where the split came. Now these concepts can be difficult to comprehend even for the minds of the great; but right there and then Jack Silver saw it all, clear as a fresh summer morning.
Some believe that in that moment of beginning nothing, which had become everything, chose to allow regard, and thus bore the universes and all that was in them, from gods to electrons and all that might exist ever after in between, both for and with a purpose.
Yet others cannot believe this to be so and think that everything by its new guidelines, in that second instant, fulfilled it’s everything nature by enacting the existence of every random possibility, and thus all realities with all opportunities were created somewhere, some time, and that creation was random throughout and yet complete. Jack Silver saw the truth, as it was, not either or both………
In the instances that followed laws came to exist both to govern and be broken, and were followed closely by structure and elements and motion, and these things roiled and flowed like tides; and in time birthed universes that blossomed throughout everywhere. In these universes came to be galaxies, and stars, and worlds more myriad than numbers could ever hope to count. And so the laws bound them, and the elements built them, and time shaped them; and commonalities began to appear.
Time was key in this entire thing for it allowed change to be measured, and with measure and structure, random became something more, and regard became inevitable and was soon after followed by purpose. But these galaxies of stars and worlds and moons and dust they raced apart, their energies burst asunder and so it was that all things rushed away from one another helter skelter in a fit to fill the space that everything had become in that first instant of being.
In some places and in some times things took shape that were engineered for, and in time found regard, and so everything was seen from within if not from without. These things were various and vicarious lasting an instant or an eternity, but rare was the opportunity for each of them to regard another. Whilst some scrabbled in the mists of some hydrogen gas ball others strode like gods in their corner fastness of that newly birthed everything. Each lasted their instant or eternity but in the scheme of all things their domain seemed a small and piteous thing, but then it was compared to everything, and to all time.
Yet small though those brush strokes seemed against the immense back cloth that was expanding ever greater, still the strokes of the things that began then to inhabit changed how things were and how things would be.
After some time had passed an instance occurred, and though it had been long in coming as we might measure things it was in terms of this everything as inevitable as night following day. Life, like yet not like what we would consider life to be encountered other; and after a period it was seen that there would be a contest for the mastery.
Now this contest was not how we might understand these things to be. One life was a single entity and it was made up of very many parts, a hive would be as close as we might understand that entity to be, spread across light years of space and existing through eons of time, measured how you might measure such a thing. This hive entity allowed each of its many component parts to subdivide all but infinitely and was aware of no reason not to do so in the growing and apparently empty vastness of space, but the mind of this hive emphasised a way of living. It controlled the environments in which it entitled itself to spread, using the elements as well as time and space to provide that control. The hive created two specific component sub units, and required that they bond with one another in order to allow continuity of the species, or what we might understand as life, beyond the energy they were initially imbued with. Alongside this the hive created a higher-level core communication net that linked through time and space and would perhaps appear to someone such as Jack Silver as in the form of a series of emotional pulses, something akin to what might be understood as instinct or more properly intuition. This, along with the elemental controls that existed in the environments the entity chose; gasses, liquids and solids, that were in abundance as the growing omniverse’s key components, allowed a growth unchecked through eons of time across many thousands of star systems.