Chapter 34.1

 

If John of Patmos is sitting on a mountain as he has his visions of the Apocalypse through the help of the Angel of Revelation, he probably had the second-best view of the end of the world ever. Only the second, though, because the very best view is granted to the person who makes it happen and sees it all unravel in real-time.

In the time it takes Roisin to inhale and exhale, the Sixth Seal has cracked, split, and been torn apart like the skin of a balloon filmed at two thousand frames per second as it is pricked by the tip of a dirty heroin needle. The skin of the seal peels away and the inner core expands faster than a nuclear fusion bomb detonating over Central England and the world breaks open.

Around her, and spreading outwards too fast for human eyes, but slow enough for those of angels, the flat peels away from perception. The walls don’t fall away so much as unravel, as the loose thread on your favourite jumper from your nan catches a nail from a salvaged stretcher frame and unravels the whole sleeve before you’ve even walked to the end of the street, and you can’t ask your nan to knit another one because she died last year so you’re left with a decision to use the jumper in a piece of art or take off the other sleeve and wear it as a seriously uncool tank top.

The plaster becomes threads of intention. The floor becomes a grid of choices. The ceiling becomes a membrane stretched over a void. She can still see the room, but it feels like a colour slide projected onto the ruins of Dresden after the last war; it exists only because it once existed, and she has the memory of it. Through the planes of reality (whatever that might be to an outside observer) she can see the room as it was two breaths ago, as it was when Steve bought the house, as it was when the house was first build, and finally, as it was before there was even the concept of a house, and this was a wooded hill covered with a dense, wild forest.

But superimposed on the bark of an oak – or an elm or a birch, Roisin was never really interested in botany other than its use as symbolism – is the idea of a wall; the concept of a door; the function of a taut canopy of branches and leaves as the outlines of a ceiling

Everything is an artist’s sketch of scaffolded possibilities. Everything is placeholder. Everything is the concept of an architect’s model, not reality, and the architect has drawn his design on the palimpsest of previous artist’s pictorial representation of a tree, and before that, a hillside, ragged with the detritus from a crumbled mountain.

Next to her, inside her thoughts, Astaroth whispers, almost reverent as he follows her gaze: “There it is. The world stripped of its skin.”

She turns in place and sees the people around her. Paul is no longer just Paul. There is a shape over which his image is overlaid, but it is a shape made of guilt and fear, threaded through with filaments of gold for his love and compassion for others, and silver for his passion for art. He is also wound like a cocoon with shadowy black tendrils of pestilence that Linnea has gifted him with.

Steve is a knot of loyalty and panic and the neighbours are silhouettes of loneliness, resentment, tenderness, exhaustion; with tendrils of sickness spreading out not only across Wolverhampton, but across the world from a hundred different sources; nay, a thousand. They are no longer people, but patterns; They are short lines of code in a data stream; fallen leaves on the floor of an autumnal forest; fractal bursts of binary that make up a whole operating system, and the system they are helping run is the universe of creation, and the purpose of creation is the manufacture, distribution and collection of soul fractals.

A further half-turn, and there is the solidity of Pestilence, watching her with clinical delight. “Revelation,” he murmurs. “Isn’t it exquisite?”

Namaan is scintillating purity, shot through with a thread of longing: no longer a creature but a scar in the fabric of the blueprint. He is a wound in the architecture. A place where Heaven tore something out and stitched something else clumsily in its place. He is an obedience that was broken, a purpose that was denied and a hunger for that which was forbidden. He is also scintillating purity, shot through with a thread of longing. He sees her seeing through him and his voice ripples through the planes: “You see us for what we are.”

Roisin nods, her first breath almost exhaled. “I do.”