There are things so ancient and awful that they have been excluded from the scope of morality.
HE BOXING RING IS DOUSED in spotlight. Casanova English stands battered, but victorious over Johnny Hitmaker, who lays motionless on the canvas. Ravenous cheers are an insistent roar from the heard but unseen ticket holders who are hidden under a pall of darkness that suffocates the unlit stands.
Detached confusion is written across Casanova’s face. His eyes dart around the ring from confusion, unaware of where he is or what’s happening. The ring feels real to him, and familiar. His gaze drops to the bloody, unconscious face of his opponent, then down to the contract and lighter in his hands.
“What…” he starts to say, but trails off before the thought fully realizes. His head raises. His eyes search for a point of reference past the ropes and the security of the spotlight, perhaps trying to find the hard camera that should be center focused to document the perplexity of his twitching eyebrows and rat-like facial twitches.
A shift of weight pulls his attention back to his hands, and a reformation. When his eyes move to investigate, he sees the contract is gone, and the lighter is now a microphone. Hesitantly, he brings it to his lips.
“I, umm,” the words stumble, “no, you… people need me.” Sweat blooms across his forehead. “You need CU:LT. Yes, that’s it. You need CU:LT. Society needs CU:LT. It’s a sanctuary… for me to provide a—”
The noise of the crowd suddenly folds into a collapsing vacuum, leaving a barren, focusless soundscape. His ears turn inward to the drumming beat of his heart, the woosh of air sucking in and out of his chest, the muffled pulse of blood moving through his circulatory system—a furor of distractions that lead him off script, off memory.
“That’s why… in March… you’re going to get bi-weekly shows for the first time in CU:LT history.”
The intonation of his words flattens into a monotonic procession of syllables, each one more detached than the previous. His mind is aimless and his speech uncertain about what comes next.
He raises the microphone closer to his mouth. “No more… corporate hands,” he says, followed by a sharp squeal of feedback from the public address system. “No more… supernatural entities tugging the strings…”
LIGHTS OUT.
Darkness envelopes him. His breathing is fuel for panic, faster, more shallower, like a knife stabbing him in the chest over, and over, and over again. “Help!” he screams into nothingness. Senses flee, awareness abandons, and in this infinite perdition he is one thought, a phrase that repeats over and over.
Help me! Help me! Help me! Help—
Plink.
A water drop free falls from a spout to the metal basin of a sink. Plink… Plink… Plink… Then the smell hits him, a wave of stale piss, mildew and cheap disinfectant—and something else. Something coppery, and foul. Something half-remembered.
Suddenly oblivion cracks with light, then explodes into a diffuse illumination. Sight returns to him with nauseating revelation, a jarring return to another place from his past, another presentation from his memory warehouse.
The glisten of damp cinder blocks, the grime hardened in between tiles, the rusted spouts arcing from the walls—it’s a prison shower room creeping with mold and sorrow, a claustrophobic reality bathed in the sterile white shine of LED tube lights that buzz against their rusted metal housings.
“Hello, boy,” we say from the unlit janitor closet, in a voice he does not recognize as ours. It’s a man’s voice—deep, wet and gurgly.
“Dad?” he asks. Anxiety has made him rigid and pencil-thin, contoured by the harsh fluorescence in stiff geometry.
He jumps when our hand shoots from the darkness to seize the left frame. A second meaty, vein-riddled hand of an aged man grabs the other side, and then with one pull, we rise into the light.
He shouts, “What the fuck?!”
His father’s skin suit encases our beauty but imperfectly, sagging loosely from the angles of our face like melting wax. Across the throat, a yawning gash oozes with old blood and ripples with every breath.
We place a hand over the wound and apply pressure, not to choke but to seal the severed trachea, forcing our air through the vocal folds to sibilate a grinding tone of disappointment.
“Look what you did, boy,” we say as our legs carry us forward, one crooked step at a time.
“You’re dead,” he says.
“Look at what you did to me.”
“You deserved it,” he says, gaining confidence as he remembers the moment when the inmate slashed his father’s throat. Being allowed entry into the prison, to witness his father’s murder, cost him a handsome bribe, but it was worth every tainted penny.
“You’re a murdering piece of shit!” He’s shouting now, emboldened by the recollection of the emotions he felt that night seeing the assassin descend upon his father.
“At least… I had… the guts… to do my… own work,” we say, another step forward, another step closer. “You didn’t even have… the sack to kill us… yourself. Had to hire some… piece of shit… child molestor to do… the cuttin’ for ya.”
We grab him by the black t-shirt, the same one he wore that night. He jolts, his hands immediately gripping ours in an effort to free himself as we drive him backward across the rotting floor, until his back slams into the wall with a blunt thud that forces the air out of his lungs.
This close, he can’t avoid our eyes, yellowed with flecks of glowing sulfur surrounded in endless black.
“You aren’t my father,” he chokes out on the back of a painful exhalation.
“Sounds like… someone needs… their mouth… washed out…” Our hand reaches to the metal gear jutting out of the tile. “Wanna take a shower with dear ol’ dad?” With a hissing sputter, filthy water begins shooting out of the overhead faucet, dousing us both in a brown, putrid shower.
We drag him further under the rancid water, letting it fill his gullet, causing him to wretch. When he’s had his fill, we turn and with great strength fling him across the room. He lands with a grunt, then slides another meter before coming to a halt inside the threshold of the closet. At once, the lights inside flicker on, revealing his old office at the New Mexico State Penitentiary.
“Your entire life,” we say after reclosing the hole in our throat, “shaped by this… moment… daddy’s messy little exit… You thought… killing me… would cut the strings… but you just found… others to do the pulling…”
He skitters onto his backside, coughing up mouthfuls of diseased water, then crab-crawls into the desk under the dingy light.
Between hacks he hisses, “Shut… the fuck… up!”
“First, it was the Board,” we say, but the voice is shifting, modulating into a new register, but also twisting into something inhuman. Something demonic. More feminine but encased in whispers and growls. “That you had Johnny Bracchus wipe it out.”
He watches in horror as our hands grab at the flesh of his father’s skin suit and in one, fell motion, we rip it from us, degloving our head from his epidermis, then the torso and arms, and further down, until his sack of meat lands with a messy squelch around our feet.
His eyes suddenly narrow, then peel apart like rotten eggs from realization.
“Yelena?”
Our bare feet step out of his boots and settle on the floor as the last vile pieces of skin and sinew smack on the floor. Our clattering voice chuckles and our lips curl upward, but the smile doesn’t stop. It tears open from the corners into a gaping crescent stretching nearly from ear to ear.
“Then when you couldn’t pay the bills, Your Pal Detective came to you with another idea. A promise of old money to solve your problems.”
“How?” he asks, but he doesn’t even understand the scope of that question. How is this happening?… How does she know about her?…
Across the shower room we walk, our naked skin slimy with the bloody remnants of his father, shining like snake skin as the light crawls over us.
“You got a problem, Cass,” we say as knees bend, back arcs, and our hands reach down to flatten on the tile. Then, like an animal, we prowl toward him on all fours. His head twists around, his eyes searching for something, anything to use against us, until our face pushes toward his, our noses centimeters apart.
“We can save you, Cass,” we say, quieter now, and less ragged. “From yourself. All you have to do is say yes.”
He stares into our dread gaze, perhaps searching for some human element to which he can connect, some bridge of sympathy he can traverse, but he finds nothing but the cold desolation of an unwelcoming dark space.
His face, pale from fear, quivers as he licks the dryness from his lips, giving himself time to work up to ask the only question that matters.
“What are you?”
Our lips come apart, booming with a phlegm-strangled eruption of laughter batters the walls of the small closet with raw derision and chilling glee.
“Something worse,” we say after the hacking chuckles die out. “Much, much worse. Then again, our goals and hers aren’t that much different. Maybe we should be having this conversation with the Veil? Maybe we offer her what she wants more than anything. Life. Immortality. Do you really think she’s satisfied buried in those woods? What if she regrets letting you leave… intact.”
Words come up his throat but we snatch them away with a hand around his neck, squeezing hard enough to turn his face purple.
“If you don’t want to end up like Lucas, consider our offer. Until then… Time to wakey wakey.”
Our other hand lifts into his view. With built-up tension, the middle finger slides rapidly off the thumb to strike the palm, cracking with a sharp, piercing…
SNAP!
You gather under banners of transient power. You call yourselves Champions… a designation etched onto fleeting moments. New World, SNUFF, Classic—markers of a supposed hierarchy within this fragile construct you call CU:LT. Since the first cave paintings were scrawled by hominid hands dipped in red ochre, the human mind has dreamed of ascension beyond simple mortality, to become an enduring legend to be passed down for thousands of years.
Corey Black, embodying decades of accumulated scars and ritualized violence. Max Daemon, fueled by the volatile energy of the crowd’s desperate hope. They are merely points of friction. Obstacles against a current far vaster than their comprehension. Even in this form we currently inhabit, these distinctions are meaningless noise against the backdrop of our truth.
We are not here to win in your ephemeral terms. This is an opportunity. A confluence. A focus point where the inherent weaknesses of this structure, this company, are flayed apart like a hanged man. CU:LT festers, stressed and compromised by lesser forces scrambling for purchase, mistaking survival for permanence. Such struggles are… inefficient.
Our purpose is not conquest but assimilation. CU:LT, like all organized systems, possess pathways, currents of influence, reservoirs of belief and despair. We have merely introduced a more fundamental frequency. An ontological symphony, the same melody that strung the chords which formed the first stars.
CU:LT will be consumed in our song. Its narratives, its struggles, its very essence will be metabolized and repurposed as another melody of our lamentation. Its performers, its followers, their devotions realigned to a resonance far more profound than fleeting applause or allegiances to brittle symbols.
But dominance is not the only prize to be won tonight. For some, this will be the beginning of the end. For others, the end of the beginning of their transformation. Corey, Max, Casanova… The Black Rainbow rises and we are coming… for everything.