Monster - A. Lee Martinez [86]
It was overwhelming. And the storm was only beginning. Lightning crackled in its dark interior. Thunder rumbled, and every distant boom carried hints of knowledge that would drive Monster mad. He scanned the landscape for some form of shelter.
A yawning black cave appeared behind him. He wasn’t surprised by it. He was too eager to get out of the rain. He stepped into the edge of it. A rocky overhang sheltered him from the increasing downpour.
“I wouldn’t go in there, if I were you,” said Lotus as she stepped into view. She stood in the middle of the downpour but remained dry.
“How did you get here?”
“I’ve been here from the beginning.”
He edged away from her.
“I’m not your enemy here, Monster. The only thing you have to fear here is… fear itself. A bit corny, I know, but very true. And that’s all you’ll find in there.”
He looked into the cave’s inky darkness, an impenetrable void. A cold wind blasted out, but instead of pushing him away, it yanked him into it. He fell shrieking into the abyss.
Lotus seized him, pulling from the edge. She set him down on solid ground and offered him an umbrella.
“Use this. The symbolism is rather blunt, but that will probably work in your favor, given your rather limited imagination.”
He opened the umbrella. He glanced over his shoulder, back at the cave. Something was breathing in there.
“Ignore it,” she said. “It’s only the assembled fears of the collective unconscious. No one has the power to conquer them, so unless you want to be devoured by them, you’re better off pretending they’re not there. Of course, that feeds them too, but there’s no way around that.”
“Where are we?” Monster asked. “It’s difficult to explain. You are not exactly in the stone, not exactly in your own mind, not exactly in the collective unconscious. You’re in a temporary astral landscape cobbled together from bits of all three.”
The wind picked up. The rain fell harder.
“I suppose we’ll have to find some cover if we’re to keep you from going mad until the storm passes.”
The clouds formed shapes older than Monster’s universe. He glimpsed secrets of other places that made no sense in the reality he understood. Realms where gravity worked in reverse, where life-forms reproduced by traveling through time to have sex with their future selves. Realities composed of lonely, singular intelligences who passed eternity humming and wishing they had thumbs to twiddle. All manner of possibilities, most of them colossal failures as universes went, falling into various forms of terminal entropy within a few billion years.
“You should stop looking up there,” said Lotus. “You can’t handle it.”
He lowered his eyes to the ground.
“We’ll have to find shelter.” She pointed to a house in the distance. “That should work. A mind can only take so much, and that umbrella won’t protect you when the heart of the storm hits.”
A burning ball of hail landed at Monster’s feet.
“I’d hurry if I were you,” said Lotus, disappearing like a ghost.
He ran for the house as lightning bolts and miniature meteorites exploded around him. A shard sliced him across the cheek, and Monster learned that Elvis’s downfall was engineered by vampires, that a dairy farm in Iowa had several superintelligent cows plotting the overthrow of the human race, and the mathematical equation for cold fusion, which he forgot almost immediately.
The storm grew worse the next few steps. His umbrella burst into flame. He was drenched in knowledge, flooded in bits and pieces of information. It passed through his mind without taking hold, eroding his own knowledge like a rushing flood against crumbling soil.
He was getting stupider, and if he didn’t get inside, he’d probably forget his own name.
The sky opened up and revealed the Big Secret. Not the meaning of life, something not even the ancient and all-knowing stone knew, but something almost as important and twice as unknowable. Something that, had Monster glimpsed it for even a moment, would’ve reduced him to a quivering, gibbering mass. Fortunately, he kept his head down and his eyes shut. He didn’t open