The Dead Ones

By: Jordan Seifert

Mikaela Gross looked deep into the echo. From her bedroom window, where moments prior she had knocked down the small netted screen to reach outside and water one of her hanging plants, she saw a thing. It was a ripple mixed with a tide on the corner of the precipice of infinity. Or something like that. Her green eyes disappeared as her hollowed black pupils stretched wider in a useless attempt to take in her situation. To see what was really there. Not a colour or a shade or a degree of light, but a place of new angles and new movements, where the third dimension exists as a concept as the fourth dimension or the second dimension does in ours. Mikaela Gross saw a new thing. Her brain thudded in her head, her heart beat increasing steadily, and all she could think was “Why? Why am I seeing this?” Her thumb was still resting against the seal of the window, and instinctively she shoved the frame to her window back up, planting it within the sill. And as she did, the silence of infinity broke and the new place disappeared. It didn’t fall into a hole, or fade, but rather it slipped past Mikaela in a direction she could not comprehend, and then the place was gone.

For a moment she stood there. There was, for a second, a fragment of comprehension. She had seen creatures and a place, similar to our world, but they followed different laws and logic. What she had seen had been so complicated, she wasn’t sure if wherever it was, if it was anywhere, they even made use of the concept of “different.” Not a different word, but an entirely separate concept. Nothing was different there, but there was no word for what they did have. It was an impossible to decipher mess of anti-logic. Mikaela rubbed the small space in between her eyebrows, wrinkling the flesh above the bridge of her nose. Although her heart was still beating too fast, and it felt like somebody had pressed against her brain, she was physically alright. She had to test it. She had to reach outside and hope that nothing burned her hand off, or grabbed it and pulled it into the unknown. Reaching again to open the window, she let down the netted screen and, as it had come and gone before, the place was back. The place which could barely be called a place. It was a screaming point or angle. And then she noticed something. A connection. A firm bridge between the present and the past. She had opened the window. Less than a single second into the future, Mikaela crossed that bridge and slammed the window shut again. “There! Fuck that!” She took a deep heaving breath, phlegm rising in her throat. She had not been physically hurt, but she was, emotionally, deeply scarred. Her pupils refused to narrow. They had been locked into their transcendent state.

Mikaela heard a tap on her window. “Let me in,” she heard a thick voice murmur. It was like an animal’s shrieks intermingled with coughs and wheezes. “Let me the fuck in.” Outside the window was a dead hand, raw flesh sewn together in bundles, fingers splayed out like a handful of broken roses. Mikaela didn’t want to touch the window. Even if the hand weren’t there, she had learned. “Associative Learning,” the voice said. “It’s a simple concept. Learn it, love it, let me the fuck in.”

“I- I can’t,” Mikaela murmured, her whispers barely audible under rushing floods of panic. Her body trembled.

“You learned that touching the window does a bad thing. A terrible thing. That’s why I am here. You have done a bad thing. A fucking terrible thing. Don’t you know anything about shapes and angles? They’re like keys. You move your window and it’s like putting a perfectly shaped key into a tumbler lock. Click and the door is open. But this isn’t like any normal door, so let me the fuck in.”

“I’d have to open the window,” Mikaela cried. “I don’t want it to come back.”

The man, or creature, or whatever it was, broke her window open and crawled through. It moved like an injured spider, shaking and sputtering as it heaved itself into the room. “I am not God,” the beast said. “But I know of him. And I know of what he does for you.”

“What?” Mikaela felt tears streaming down her cheeks. She was inconsolable. Her nerve endings had practically shorted out, and she couldn’t think so far as down to her feet, frozen in place.

“God is not a man or a woman, but a place. A place that you have seen, and now you stand breathless to behold.” The creature stood plain as day in front of her, bent over. His shiny black limbs were broken into pieces, and at the head of it all was an egg shape skull covered in frazzled hair. Two dots for eyes sat expressionless in the center of it, and a stitched wound that it used for a mouth snapped and elicited gurgles as it spoke.

“I saw… God?”

“What the fuck do you think I said? I am not a thing you can mimic. I’m a broken, filthy thing. You can see that. But you can also hear my words. This is observational learning. You observe what I am saying and you take it to heart you strange bitch.” Its voice was nauseating. Like a cloud of drowning bees. It leapt up and down, its thrusting bones splattering gore which landed like thick globules of paint against Mikaela’s walls and clothes and flesh. “Classical conditioning, weird bitch. A neutral stimulus for you has become associated with a meaningful one. That is to say, it’s the angle you made that matters, not the window. You think because I broke the window we can’t patch it?”

“I didn’t say that. I didn’t-”

“WATCH!” the thing roared, leaping forward, the sharp bone jutting from its elbow slicing a leaf of flesh off Mikaela’s face. She screamed in agony.

“MY SKIN! MY SKIN!” Mikaela shouted.

“You have more. I do not,” the thing gurgled. “Watch.” It pulled out a long thin cord of hair and used it like a staple to stretch her flesh across the window sill and form a tight seal. “Now the pane has been replaced, as well as the net, and we can continue.” It opened the window, and the face of God appeared again. All knowing, all seeing, if it saw or knew anything in the same sense as a human did. “THIS IS GOD. Behaviours and consequences, you strange bitch. I cut your flesh and I open a port hole to God. Now I know that when I do this my behaviour reaps a consequence. This is operant conditioning.”

“What does this mean?” Mikaela said.

“It’s as plain as day, but in essence it means that you are well and truly fucked. Your predecessors had it right. I know because I was there. Back when the rocks were smooth, before the old ones broke them apart so that the angle could no longer be seen. Back when all the rocks on Earth looked the same and not like chipped shards and gravel. An exact condition that used to be everywhere and which hasn’t been seen for over 12,000,000 years. Back when the angle which opens the world to God was in all places, and God‘s impossible image filled the skies. Back when God was everywhere. Back when weird bearded fucks sacrificed everything to God in order to keep God from showing us his blank and endless eyes. And you, my weird bitch, have seen his eyes. Don‘t you know what comes next?”

Mikaela thought this through. Her brain shrugged and her eyes opened wide, dark circles forming beneath them. Her knees shook and her mouth had stood agape. She had seen God, and now, the skin of her face missing, blooms of blood spattered across her chest, she fell to her shaking knees. “Don’t kill me!” she screamed.

“Too fucking late.”