A Dancer in the Infinite - Chapter 80

Chapter 80 Pursuit Across the Multiverse

This whole day have I followed in the rocks,
And you have changed and flowed from shape to shape,
First as a raven on whose ancient wings
Scarcely a feather lingered, then you seemed
A weasel moving on from stone to stone,
And now at last you wear a human shape – W. B. Yeats

     What was it that this Strassman fellow had said, according to what, Stan, Chandler, and Barry?  “Intention is everything.”

     And so Marie thought about pursuing her sinister dobble-ganger. She held that her image in her mind as the blackness of the Ain engulfed her.  She held it even through the eternal reaches of Ain Soph, and in the light of Ain Soph Aur there burned a desire of giving chase to the evil Marie Brabant.

     When the world around her came into focus, she was in an Egg room, though this one was different.  There was an Egg, but she did not arrive inside it, but next to it.  Immediately she saw that it had been vandalized, if not completely destroyed.  Jenkins body lay off to the corner in a pool of blood, his body riddled with gunshot wounds.  He was dead.  It was silent throughout around her.  The siege here had ended already, the Toxies taking another victory.  Then she heard a single gunshot, and the yelp of a dog and then silence.

     “Virgil” she exclaimed.

     She ran through the Freezer and up the staircase and out to the terrace garden, the dog was still whimpering as the puddle of blood grew around him.  She hurried to his side, but she could clearly see there was nothing she could do to save him.  She petted him gently and placed a kiss on his head.  His eyes closed and he was gone.

     “Fuck you, you bitch!”  She screamed to the heavens.

     She stood up and concentrated on hyperdimensional travel.  She focused her mind on the Ain, and it surrounded her, and she was gone to the chase.

     Again she appeared to find a ruined Egg, and a dead Jenkins, a single gunshot in the garden, and the final yelp of Virgil, and again she pulled the cloak of Ain around herself and she vanished into the Veils of Negative Existence once more.

     Destroyed Egg. Dead Jenkins.  Murdered dog.  She lost count of the times she saw these things.  Occasionally, the sight was changed up slightly with a dead Barry or Wally or Jackie, or even a Marie or two, but the result was just the same.  She was always just behind her foe.  Just there in time to hear the kill shot for poor Virgil.  It was time to form a new plan of action, she realized at last, once she had managed to calm her ever growing rage, and think clearly.  And then it occurred to her.  She needed help, and she knew right where to find it.

copyright 2017 Diana Hignutt