Revelation

This story is a story.
I enjoy the refrain but I think the piece either needs fleshing out or condensing or shooting maybe.

Too fucking right the earth will shake.

Cold day shaded into warm night. Weird how it sometimes does that, or at least it strikes Mike as weird but also lucky since he’s brought Emma up to the reservoir for well you can guess for what and the temperature factors into his chances, as it were. So it’s with not so much a sense as a kind of twinge of relief somewhere above the libido that he notices the night air’s warm but the breeze swooping down onto the water is cool enough to make it something better than just comfortable. Get in. Takes a rug from the boot and – because the details matter – a bottle of something a driver really shouldn’t be drinking as well and the two of them walk a little distance down the slope, get closer to the water.

Twenty minutes on and Mike has drunk, well, a little more than Emma but she’s a lightweight so it’s okay and they are both having a fucking fantastic time of it, she’s laughing at everything he says and he’s feeling all sort of content (yeah he’s not all flickers of want) and they haven’t even mentioned clothes yet. Not bad.

Too fucking right the earth will shake.

Skid over to the other side and in a little hut Nick who tends the area as much as realistically possible is well aware that with his nerves and his back and his general sort of vague sense of horror every time he sees his old skin in a mirror that it’s probably not the best idea to drop acid but, well, when it was good it was good and it’s his birthday anyway and Jim and Harry and Vic all chipped in and seriously, this place is more home than home these days so if he’s going to get good vibes anywhere it’s here. He’s maybe a little worried about forgetting how to swim or thinking the reservoir’s like clear glass with a city of mermaids at the bottom or something – don’t laugh, he’s seen it happen – but life is, well, what is life without a little risk? And it’s not like he’d be missing much anyway. So – bottoms up, as it were.

Too fucking right the earth will shake.

Further down on Nick’s side Peter is, as ever, pretty unclear on the specific, you know, point of exactly why he’s still taking pictures. They’re shit, they always are and as soon as he gets back to his studio he’s going to have to accept this but still try and get something decent from the screen to the canvas. Good luck. What is actually going to happen, as he knows, is that he’s going to mix painkillers with red wine and knock himself out for the night, twisted up in self-loathing and a little satisfaction down somewhere he’s not entirely willing to admit exists that he is, in fact, a tortured romantic soul killing himself to achieve art. What a hero. At this point, however, he’s still adjusting shutter speed, shifting position slightly, trying to synch the ripples up with the tree or the road or something, looking for a line of some sort. Boy’s got to have a hobby.

And – of all the fucking luck. Of all the possible times to come up here (and for none of them is it the first time) they had to pick the one time that, it just so happens, to the minute two thousand years ago, at this very spot, a murderer who carried a second sun in his eyes was chained down in the natural basin, covered in the soil he came from, the waters of the surrounding rivers sent crashing down on his head to keep him forever silenced even, this is the thing, even as he was screaming at the top of his lungs – in fact more like laughing – that when the sons of the sons of the sons of his killers were forgotten, their dust mingled with chalk and mould, when their names were cast onto winds that carried them far beyond graves and when, finally when the stars had swung onto their fatal line with the second sun dimmed but still burning in his eyes – he, archfiend, prophet, he would return. Carve his path out through whatever tombs they had built upon him and return. And yes; the names are forgotten, the bodies have long crumbled, the stars have lined up and he is making his way – out.

The water ripples in the centre and the stars shivering on the surface are swallowed by a brighter light from below and as it happens Peter has his eyes on the moon and Mike has his eyes on Emma and Nick has his eyes on some very pretty colours and none of them are looking at the middle of the reservoir where shedding his chains he rises and stands. The years have barely changed a thing; the names are still there just under his skin rippling as he moves, his eyes are still white and thin where he has seen and taken the burning light, his teeth are still cracked and grinding he is still a knife of a man. One thing different: the horns, his goring bone corona, he’s not the only one who can see them now. Trembles in the air and growls something and if anybody in the vicinity spoke conversational Latin of the kind used exactly 2000 years ago then they would hear him say: too fucking right the earth will shake.