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REQUIEM

An Indigo Prime Story

Written & Illustrated Smith and Weston

falling. the wind in his ears. the whiteness. the long white drop. and Stanley. can't scream any more. can't move any more. can't do anything. except fall.

8TH JULY

Stanley had known something terrible was going to happen for the last three weeks. It started with the birds. He was in the garden trimming the hedge when he heard it - a dry stormy rustling, like leaves blown into a doorway. Stanley looked up and saw the birds sweeping overhead in a shapeless black cloud. They flew straight into the side of the house, exploding against the pebbledashed wall to a gristly wet applause. It went on for minutes, and when it stopped he house was plastered with blood and feathers. Stanley leaned over and was sick on his lawn.
That was a week before his fort-second birthday. There was more to come.

12TH JULY

They called themselves the Adamites and they had been walking since the beginning of the world. There had been a hundred and eighty of them when they had first been cast out, but their numbers had faller through the millennia. During the early years in Judaea, Pilate's men had slaughtered them by the dozen. Two hundred of them had been burned as witches during the Reformation. Even more had died in Belsen. Those who had escaped the Caesars, the Witchfinder Generals, the Gestapo and the Greater Manchester Police could be counted on one hand. Now there were only three left, and they were close to finding what they were looking for. The object of their quest. The grail.

The doorway to the garden of Eden.

16TH JULY

It was his wife. Stanley was sure of it now.
Early on Monday morning he fell into bed from a nightmare. He'd been having the same one for almost a month now - Marjorie sat on the beach while a tall thin man hammered nailss into her body - and it had become clearer, more detailed every night. Stanley climbed out of bed and shuffled into the bathroom for a glass of water. As he turned on the tap he realised dimly that today was his birthday. He glanced up at the mirror and screamed.
The glass slipped from his hand and smashed in the sink.
Stanley stared at his reflection, unable to believe what he was looking at. He was sunburned down the entire right side of his body. It looked like he'd been ruled in half and neatly crayoned in. Stanley sat down on the side of the bath and swallowed.
Sunburned. At night. In bed. Wearing pyjamas. He went and woke up his wife.
'Marjorie, I thought you sent the sunbed back?'
She moaned and told him to go back to sleep.

and still he falls. like an angel. like icarus. everywhere white. everywhere empty. like blindness. or amnesia. only not. he closes his eyes. and falls. conscious all. the way. down.

17TH JULY - 2ND AUGUST


Over the next three weeks things got steadily worse.
He was reading in the garden on Saturday afternoon when it started raining diaries. Stanley ran inside and sat watching at the window, flinching as they splashed into the fish-pond like biack misshapen hail. There was the sound of glass breaking from the greenhouse next door. When the shower had stopped Stanley went out and flipped through one of the diaries. It was the lonely confession of a schoolgirl in love with her history teacher. Most of the others were written in Latin.
During the coffee break on Wednesday morning the face of Marilyn Monroe miraculously appeared on Stanley's handkerchief. The image changed on a daily basis: Liberace, Stalin, Natalie Wood, James Dean. He eventually burned the handkerchief. In the bathroom the next day he was horrified to see the face of Ted Moult impressed on the front of his shirt.
When he got up for work on Friday, he opened the living room curtains with a scream. The window was double-glazed, and in the gap between the panes there were hundreds of bright orange tree-frogs crawling over the glass.
The next morning Stanley discovered that the fish-pond had frozen over. A sculpture of a horse reared up from its surface, chiselled in ice, lilies and coy carp frozen through its length.
Things got worse.
He started getting letters with headlines from the following day's newspapers. The sock for every left foot disappeared, even the ones he left in a safety deposit box at the bank. At work, whenever he used the photocopier it would produce scenes from his childhood. One day he checked the pocket-watch his mother had given him and found a butterfly trapped under the glass.

After a while he convinced himself they were signs of the Force that was slowly taking over his life.
And of course, he was right.

6TH AUGUST

By the time they reached the town, the Adamities knew they had found what they were looking for. The awful siren call of Uriel; the Dweller on the threshold. The Eshkadeth.

They had encountered it before, in different times, but it had never been so strong. It was like gravity, an implacable natural force drawing them in like fish on a line. Kedemah though longingly of Adam, who had first on a line.

Kedemah though longingly of Adam, who had first been cast out from the Garden and had crossed the Threshold on his nine hundred and thirieth birthday. Soon they would sit beside him in the shade of the Tree of Life.

He walked slowly down Ambrose Street, weeping tears of joy.

Stanley falls. the hollowness inside him. spilling out. gravity chewing him up. and there is nothing. and no one. no up. no down. only the fall. the weight of his body, under gravity. only the fall. the falling. the fallen.

7TH AUGUST

On the day he fell into his wife Stanley had gone to work as if everything was normal. But just after two o'clock his nose started bleeding and wouldn't stop and he kept imagining that the drops of blood that splashed onto his blotter were trying to make words. He put with it for twenty minutes then decided he couldn't face it any longer and rang Marjorie to tell her he'd be home early. She started screaming as soon as she picked up the phone. Her voice was deep and slurred, like a record played at the wrong speed: it sounded like a dog trying to speak Hebrew.

"Marjorie?"
"Ilasa dial pereta!"
"It's me, Majorie. I'm calling from-"
"Gird up thy loins and harken!"
Stanley glanced nervously around the office. "who is that?" he said.
"The true worshipper of the highest and ineffable King of Hell!"
There was a flare of pain from his ulcer and Stanley tasted his lunch at the back of his throat. He swallowed hard.
"Look, if you don't lety me speak to my wife right now, I'm going to call-"
The phone went dead.
By the time Stanley got home he'd convinced himself he'd find Marjorie dead, sheets of fat hung over the radiator to dry, arms and legs stacked like firewood. When he opened the front door he expected the smell to come billowing out. Instead he got the smell of bleach. It was strongest at the bottom of the stairs, a heady swimming pool smell, like a warning. Stanley licked his lips, took a deep breath, and went upstairs.
He left the bedroom till last, afraid of what he might find there. When he went in the curtains were still drains, and everything was a dim cool green. It was like being underwater. Majorie was lying on top of the bed, her mouth open, breathing liquidly. She'd always been like something left by the tide - a pale ungainly mermaid coughed from the deeps, beached belly up.
Stanley moved towards her and tapped her shoudler.
It was like touching water. His fingers sank into her flesh up to the knuckles. Stanley snatched his hand back in shock. That was when he saw the ghosts. They came twisting in though the walls, the floor, the ceiling, pouring themselves through the air as if they were water. They came like lenghts of knotted rope, except that each knot was a face, eyes closed, mouths open in an expression on Majorie and disappeared into her, corkscrewing through her body with a sound like wind in the branches.
As he was backing away one of the ghosts brushed past his arm, and Stanley jerked away as if electrocuted. He was already off-balance and for a second he wavered in mid-fall. Then he toppled staight towards his wife. He hit, and it was like hitting static, like the charge that builds on a TV screen. Majorie's body parted under him and he felt himself falling into her, dragged down as if there was an anchor tied to his legs.
He saw the ceiling dancing with light, then the material of his wife's dress in magnified close-up, then he was faling.
And there was only whiteness.
It was 5:16. There was exactly thirty eight minutes to go before the end of the universe.

ACT TWO
Darkness.
Silence.
An alarm chimes and light comes upslowly on the squareon the square. The command centre of INDIGO PRIME. Sat at the console is the TECHNOP, young, in uniform. Standing before him is CLIVE VISTA, the director, forty-one, in a black and green check suit.

VISTA: Reality 12? Isn't that scheduled for closedown?
TECHNOP: Yes, sir. There's just over thirty minutes to go.
VISTA: Oh. [PAUSE] What's the nature of the blockage, exactly?
TECHNOP: The woman's husband.
[Checks the screen.]
Stanley Parish It's causing some pretty spectacular phenomenon.
VISTA: Have you thought about a 6/15? Maybe we can erase the husband before he does the deed?
TECHNOP: I'm afraid not, sir. We need the echoes for a secondary event. We've domino triggers set up in the neighbouring Parallels for the last years.
VISTA: Well, we'll have to send someone in after him. [Pause.] How about Melrose and Gower? They always seem to be desperate for overtime...
TECHNOP: They're in the corezone sir, helping clear up the fallout from the Winwood and Cord operation.

VISTA: That fiasco. It just keeps coming back to haunt me...

[An ochre alert sounds in the background: subdued activity.]

Who would you suggest we use, then?

TECHNOP: I'd suggest a Seamster. Timing's always important with shut-downs.

VISTA: Have you got anyone in mind?

TECHNOP: I was thinking about Leo Sphincter. His partner was deresolved in a Dark Time accident last week. Something challenging like this, it might help ease him back into things..

VISTA [distracted]: Fine, fine.

[ He starts to leave, remembers something, and turns back.]

Oh, and ask him to bring back the new Catherine Cookson book for me. If he remembers. It's been a long time since I've had anything decent to read.

COUNTDOWN - 0:38

The admites had reached the house where the call was coming from when it was drowned out by a sudden spurt df static, like interference. There was a shriek of feedback and the call cut off altogether.

The pilgrims stopped, disorientated, staring around at the neat suburban houses as if searching for help. But there was no one. Kedemah fell to his knees and started tearing at his hair, pulling it out in big ugly handfuls. The other pilgrims did the same, wailing as the children walked past on their way home from school.

In the thousand generations of their wanderings they had never been so near to the Eshkadeth, to the Threshold. This time they had never been on the very verge of redemption and hope had been snatched away within instants.

But somewhere in the hindbrain there was a flicker of sound, the slighest breeze of a call, and the Adamites stopped wailing and turned towards the house across the street. It was there. The Eshkadeth was there. Weak, fading slowly, it urged on one final time.
Kedemah climbed to his feet and lead the pilgrims across the garden and into the house, and the swimming pool smell of chlorine.

EXTRACTA

In Cincinatti, every public telephone started ringing simultaneously. The Sydney Opera House was overgrown with fungi in minutes. A flock of fifteen thousand bowler hats appeared in the air above Jerusalem. Three masons restoring the stonework at Sainte Chapelle cathedral in Paris were trapped in its stained glass window. Children at public schools stopped what they were doing and suddenly started reciting extracts from the Old Testament in its original Hebrew. All the bank dispensers in Leeds started giving out fifty dollar bills.
The world was ending, and it was ending in style. . -

for another second. another age. he falls, snowblind. dazzled by nothing. the wind in his hair. whistling in his

ears. then.


Stanley sees something. a dot. a tiny back dot. in the whiteness. falling with him through the whiteness. it comes nearer. and turns into a man. as it

comes.


It didn't take Leo long to find him. INIDIGO PRIME had given him the coordinates of the quadrant he was in, and then it had been just a matter of ranging up and down until he felt his mind. Stanley was the only person there, and even with such a feeble signal it was easy.
'A chartered accountant,' he muttered to himself. 'Why do I always get the exciting jobs?'
As he approached the tiny figure endlessly falling, turning end over end, Leo decided to change. He tried on hurried assortment of clothes - zoot suit kaftans, burberrys and leather jackets, pullover and moonboots, top hats and tails. His body strobed with fashion. In the end, though, he decided on his usual working clothes: flip flops, psychedelic trousers and a black satin waistcoat. Leo thought he looked pretty cool.
He moved through the whiteness of nullspace until he was freefalling alongside Stanley, matching his endless decent. He was filmed in ice, and stared at Leo as ifhe was looking at sonic kind of monster.
'Hi," he said. "I'm Leo Sphincter. I've come to get you out of here."

Leo reached Out to shake his hand.

Stanley opened his mouth wide an& screamed

COUNTDOWN - 0:31

and suddenly he was standing with the oversize books in the library. He shut
his mouth with a snap. Leo was looking at him with faint amusement.
"We're a couple of streets away, I'm afraid. Sorry. I usually get Rick to handle the tricky stuff."
Stanley glanced round, expecting one of the fat librarians to come thumping round the corner with a reproving glare, but no one came.
"It's okay. They didn't hear you. We're in a suppresion field."
"Who are you? What am I.
Stanley staggered a little, suddenly dizzy. "Have I been in an accident or something?"
Leo grinned. "It's a bitch , isn't it? When I gor recruitcd by INDIGO PRIME. it was just the same. You feel like the world's dropped out from under you.
Stanley remembered the blank white sheet he'd been falling through, the vast arctic emptiness, and shuddered.

"I'm here to see your wife."
"Marjorie?" Stanley said. "Is she all right?"
She's fine. We just need her to help straighten a few things out."
Stanley remembered the wrenching dislocatory jump that had brought them here, and said: "Can we walk? It's only down the road?"

Leo glanced at the clock on the wall above the door "Sure. We've got until 5:54."
"Before what?"
"The end of the universe," Leo said. "I'll explain it all on the way."

EXTRACTA

Pigeons spontaneously combusted throughout Swansea. Mirrors started bleeding. A tree was discovered in Borneo bearing human organs. Tourists watched swear-words in eighteen languages carve themselves into the walls at Lascaux. The canals in Venice were choked with dead swallows. Water leaked from electric sockets in south African hospitals. Phantom armies fought in the sky above Nairobi. The megaliths at Stonehenge cracked open to reveal men and women fossilised inside. Siamese twins were born in Beijing wearing ivory rings on each finger. Tropical orchids sprouted from the gutters in Greenland. Lourdes was racked by showers of raw meat.

COUNTDOWN - 0:26

Stanley struggled to unlock the front door while his mind wrestled with what Leo had just told him.
His wife, Nlarjorie - plain overweight ordinary Marjorie - was one of the three axes on which the universe was based. Or rather, universes, since there were apparently dozens of them, all stacked neatly together like a house of cards. Marjorie could open doors betwecen these realities just by thinking about it, and she'd been doing this - in different incarnations for the last hundred million years, Without even realising it.
"So why are you interested in her all of Sudden?" he asked, as Leo reached a hand in through the door and unlocked it from the inside.
"Because we're in the last times," Leo told him. "reality's being shut down in the next thirty minutes, and we need Marjorie to do it' She's the Eshkadeth...
the Shaoer and Mover of the Ways. Once we're finished here, we'll move her on to another reality and start all over again.
Stanley opened his mouth to say something, and stopped abruptly. There were three strange men standing on his stairs, They looked like tramps, with matted hair and torn dirty raincoats. One of them was carrying a shopping bag filled with old clothes. They were queued up it a line against the wall, waiting single-file.

Stanley turned on Leo. "I suppose thesc are friends of yours?"

"They're the descendants of Ishmael Ahasuerus. The Wandering Jew. The Comte de Saint-Germain." Leo paused dramatically. "The Anonymen," he said with a smirk. "They prefer to call tbeinselves the Adamites, for some reason. They're the forerunners of the human race.

"What are they doing on my stairs?"

"Waiting, " said Leo. "They're the Enochian Keys. We need them to turn off the universe.

Stanley thought he should say something impress1ve, but all he could think of was "oh."


EXTRACTA


Needles leapt to life acrbss the world, sewing curtains closed and people in their beds. The dead started screaming in the earth. Shipwrecks rose up from the bottom of the oceans. The statue of Christ overlooking Rio de Janeiro started clapping its hands. Escalators and lifts ran backwards for thirty seconds. Unicorns ran down Madison Avenue. Every member of the Conservative Party was struck by lightning and instantly killed. in Cameroon, people woke up from comas reciting obscure sixteenth century Italian poetry. Children told their mothers they loved them and offered to do the washing-up. Every scrabble player suddenly realised they could make a seven letter word that went through a triple score square.

COUNTDOWN - 0:14

It was his dream. As stanley watched Leo pull the needles from the inside of his waistcoat, he 'suddenly realised that this was his dream - the tall thin man hammering nails into his wife.

She's in a catatonic trance," Leo said, checking Marjorie's eyes. He glanced over at Stanley. "It's what usually happens, The body shuts down once the Thresholds start to open." He handled the needles like an expert, sliding them deftly into Marjorie's skin.

"It's like acupuncture," Stanley said, cringing as another needle went in.

Leo nodded. "It's the same principle. The body's transversed by a series of lines which carry the life energy. It's similar to the earth's magnetic field. There are seven major points on the body where the physical and psychic shells meet. With people they can be used to cure discomfort or pain. In Marjorie's case they allow us to create doorways between realities." He slid a needle into place an inch above her left hip. "This one's just opened a hole above Hiroshima."

He'd been at it for about ten minutes now and Marjorie's body looked like pincushion, heavy-tipped needles quivering her breathing.

"What do they do?" Stanley asked.
"Exact1y?"

"Well, on this reality they open gateways to different transmigratory levels."

Stanley stared uncomprehending.

"At 5:54, this universe is going to end. That means the deaths of a lot of people. It's a terrible waste of energy. So everyone will be converted to etheric charge and recycled."

"Are you talking about their souls?"

"Something like that." Leo slipped in another needle, and wiped sweat from his eyes. "That one opened the Threshold on Ascarene, in the Alpha Centuri system."

"Well, if the world's going to end, what will happen to me and Marjorie?"

Leo straightened up and stretched, the last of the needles in place.

"I'm going to take marjorie back to INDIGO PRINIE with me. You're going to be reprocessed, along with everyone else."

Stanley felt the blood drain from his face, and his legs weilt suddenly rubbery. He had to sit down on thc edge of the body to stop himself fal1ing.

Leo looked at him sympatheticafly "Is tbere anything special you'd like to be? We can arrange any of several thousand recorporations."

Stanley thought for a moment, then said shyIy. "Well I've always liked dolphins..

Leo moved over to the window where the Adamites were waiting. They stood in a line, motionless faces blank, as if they were waiting for a firing squad. Worse, there was a transparency about their skin and stanley called see things underneath. Things that shouldn't have been there.

Then Leo had taken out another three needles and slipped one into each neck, just below the Adam's apple. It was done with almost surgical precision. He slid them right the way in until only the last weighted inch protruded. A line of spittle ran out from one of the Adamites' mouths. and then they were jerking as if electrocuted, heads tipped back in ecstasy or pain, Stanley couldn't tell which. As he watched, lines of pale purple fire were ruled out along there bodies, starting at their fingers and spreading out. It was as if were being cut open from inside, divided up, anatomy turned to longitude and latitude. Each of them lifted a hand to their throats, impaled it on the protruding inch of needle, and turned. It was like turning keys in locks.

Stanley watched in horror as the Adamites began to collapse, skin and clothes slipping to the floor in wet red strips. It was a s1ow ritualised act. and once it was finished the Adamites stood revealed in their true glory, three revolving columns of light, like lances, like swords, totems of some unknowable force. Images of galaxies and nebulae moved though them like dust in sunlight, the shapes he'd seen in dreams, and the room danced with soft purple light.

"Soul keys," Leo said simply. "The Three Excaliburs."

They waited a moment, respectful, deferential. Then Leo took one of them in his hands and slid in into Marjorie's body. It was like pouring water into a lake, the light spreading through her skin in ripples. He did the same with the other two, inserting them at different points, until Marjorie was crawling with ultra-violet, a bloated pupa strobing on the bed, turning Leo's movements to a jerky robotic ballet.

He sat down on the bed beside Stanley, both of them inches away from the flickering friezework of light, and patted Stanley lightly on the shoulder.

"It's just like 2001, isn't it?" Stanley said, and Leo smiled.

They sat there and waited and thirty-four seconds later, the universe ended.

It was 5:54.

EXTRACTA

A herd of Tyrannosaurus Rex stampeded through a supermarket in Leamington Spa. Hot natural springs exploded from the Filchner Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The 1812 Overture echoed in the skies above Europe. Giant eyes stared in through windows. Nuclear missiles xploded in North American silos like cheap firecrackers. Tap water turned to champagne. And ink. Priests started bleeding from their ears. The deserts of Africa suddenly erupted with spectacular rain forests. The clouds turned into jigsaws and started raining pieces on the cities below. A maths teacher in Brixton suddenly realised the serect of immortality. Babies screamed in the womb, pleading for their first, their last breath of air. The engines of planes stopped. Blind people saw. Cuts and wounds began to miraculously knit themselves together. Children learned they levitate by thinking about Tex Avery cartoons. Zimmer frames rung with orchestral music shoes in shop displays kicked their way out of windows and danced in the streets. In Britain, twelve millon schoolchilren died without seeing the end of Neighbours.

The Universe was switched off
The repeats started the very next day.


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