https://helenaheissner.substack.com/s/ordinary-worlds

 

This Chapter's song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxJbUr-YI4E

 

Ice and starlight and blood and death exploded inside her mind, forcing her back into the waking world, into the light she’d struggled so long to hide from. 

Lacy’s eyes tore open. She’d had that dream again, and once again her sheets reeked of dry sweat, and her face contorted as the odor assaulted her. She groaned- she didn’t have enough quarters for laundry this week, so she’d have to either scrub these by hand or live with the stench for another seven days. She tossed them off her body and regretted it immediately as the glacial morning cold of early March in Michigan collided with her. The rhythm of rain outside threatened to lull her back to sleep, so she threw herself out of bed. She landed on the floor and pushed off the ground, stumbled forward around the garden of gears and cogs and springs and sprockets that bloomed on her bedroom floor. 

Danny’s door was open and his room was empty: he’d already left for work. Lacy went into the bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror: diminutive, emaciated, and pallid. She hadn’t shaved in weeks, and her beard covered the entire bottom half of her face before merging with the growth on her neck and chest and everywhere else. Her brown eyes were heavy with exhaustion, weighed down by massive bags, while her brown hair was a cacophony of bedhead. She stripped, turned on the shower, and climbed in before the water had grown hot. She scrubbed herself until her skin stung, then climbed out and stared into the mirror with renewed loathing.

Danny had slid the day’s call-list under her door before he left for work. Lacy looked at it, flipped it over and groaned when she saw it was double-sided. She sat down at her desk, at her massive pile of half-assembled radios and the single rolo-dial telephone that sat atop it all, beneath the cross nailed to her wall- a gift from her old CCD teacher Drew, God rest his soul- and a Detroit Red Wings championship pennant, a gift from her best friend Danny. She loved ‘em, but she couldn’t bring herself to watch a game yet this whole season- the fuckin’ GM had no idea what he was doing. He was all about skill players, which meant the whole team was made of punk-ass bitches. Hadn’t been a brawl this whole season! Unbelievable.  

On the floor of her room, Lacy had five fully-intact radios that she’d built herself from spare parts. She turned on all five of them, fiddled with them until she settled on a rock station, a pop station, a country station, a hip hop station, and a jazz station respectively. She sat down at her desk, closed her eyes, and let the spark in her heart warm. She reached a distinct mental finger towards each respective radio, listening until she heard the different soundwaves at the most basic, distinctive level. She twitched her fingers, one at a time, and the radios changed volumes without the dials even having to be turned. She overlaid the different radio waves on top of each other, and when she was finished, she’d crafted a layered tapestry of music, each level distinct but flowing into its neighbors, five discordant songs weaved into a single symphony. She’d only been able to stack two layers atop each other when she’d first started this, but she’d managed five a few months back and was now able to do so consistently. The denser the sound-cocoon got, the more comfortable it was. Lacy liked sound. You couldn’t see it. She didn’t have to see herself when dealing with it.

She picked up the phone, dialed the first number. “Hi, my name’s Liam O’Sullivan, calling from Woodrow Knives- would you like to purchase some knives?”

They did not. They never did. Danny usually had more luck with door-to-door sales. He’d gotten her this job when they’d first moved in together, and she was grateful for it, but it did mean having to talk to… People. Ugh. But hey, at least she got to play with the knives. That was certainly a plus. And so, she dialed the next number and asked the questions, twirling a carving knife between her fingers like a pen. 

“I, uh,” the woman’s voice on the other end said. Lacy envied the woman’s sweet voice; it was the opposite of her own gruff snarl. “Sorry, do you hear something in the background?”

Lacy twitched her fingers, and the musical tapestry decreased its density. “No.”

“Oh, well, never mind. Who did you say you were?”

“Liam O’Sullivan, calling from Woodrow Knives.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did.”

“No, no, you said your name was Lacy.”

Lacy’s already-pale face blanched paper-white. “That’s not true.”

“No, I’m sure you said your name was Lacy. And I thought that was an unusual name for a young man-”

Lacy slammed the phone into the receiver. She spent the next twenty minutes staring at a blank spot on the wall directly ahead of her, listening to her music, until finally she picked back up her phone and dialed the next number. She made sure she said her name was Liam that time, the words ashes in her mouth.

The day went by, and she ran down the list until she was done. Once she was finished, she cleaned the house from top to bottom, same as she always did while Danny was at work. As long as everything else was spotless it didn’t matter if her room was a mess. 

After that, she resumed what she’d been doing before passing out the previous night: fixing the old radio she’d picked up at the shop two months ago. An old man named Harry had sold it to her from the back of his mobile home and had said it was broken beyond repair, at which point Lacy accepted the challenge. She picked up her screwdriver and opened it up and, fanning her spark again, channeled the tiniest bit of lighting and gave it a burst of power. She put it back together and then reached inside again with her magic, attempting to coax noise out of it. She felt radio waves around her and bound them to the box, and a new layer was added to her tapestry. It was reggae music- not her personal favorite, but she could see the appeal. She cupped the radio on both sides, but then a spark shot out of her hands and the music turned to static. “No nonono-FUCK!” she said, slapping the box with her left hand. 

The static shot up and down in its pitch, and then it ceased altogether and left a cavity of silence in its place. Then, after another moment, a familiar voice came through and said, “Why did God topple the Tower of Babel?”
“... D-Drew?” she said in a tiny whisper. 

“Why did it have to fall?” Drew said.

Lacy’s eyes bulged and her fingers spread wide and stiffened. She wrapped her hands around the radio and gripped tight.

The reggae music returned. 

Lacy slammed her head onto her desk and groaned. 

She spent the next three hours repeatedly disassembling and reassembling the radio, attempting to retrieve the voice. She shut off all her other music so that she could give it her entire focus, so that her ears would only have one thing to decipher for once. She hated having to concentrate, hated having to dwell within and utilize her conscious mind for this long, but sometimes life asked you to do deeply unpleasant things.

After a while, she heard a knocking on her door. “Hm?” Lacy grunted. 

“Lacy, your food is outside your door,” Danny said. He’d made dinner for her again- that was nice of him. 

“Thanks,” Lacy said. 

“You gonna actually eat it this time?”

“Yeah.”

“You said that last time.”

“Yeah.”

“When was the last time you ate?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Danny said. “Lacy, you said you’d start eating at least once a day consistently. I’m leaving this outside. You better goddamn eat it.”

Lacy went back to work. A couple of hours later, her stomach growled, and she got up and retrieved the chicken salad sandwich Danny had left for her. She stood up, ate half of it, then put it down on the plate in the hallway and closed the door again. She could finish it later. 

She sat down at her radio and began disassembling it for the twentieth time that day when her ears twitched. She heard something. Something outside. Something approaching the bungalow at an alarming rate from the swath of woods behind it. 

She grabbed a knife she’d hidden under her bed a few months back, after the attacks had started getting more regular. It was a kitchen knife, meant for chopping meat. Hopefully that wouldn’t be necessary. Cold, fresh air forced itself down her lungs for the first time all day as she stepped outside. All the worlds’ noise came flooding in at once, and she stopped short and closed her eyes and winced as she adjusted. After a few moments breathing, listening, she opened her eyes and went around to the backyard. It was fenced in, a square lot of about twenty yards of grass. The forest began behind it, an ocean of beech trees standing tall and verdant. Heavy gray clouds clung to the sky and blocked out the moon and the stars, and a cold moisture was thick and palpable in the air. Their one-story house, made of brick and cement, sat on the outskirts of Grand Rapids, a half-hour north of town by car. The next nearest house was a half-mile up the dirt road through the forest, while further north simply revealed further and further wilderness.

Out from the forest, descending from the north, came a man with slate-gray skin and blood-red eyes, fangs spilling out a bloody maw, claws hacking wildly at the air as he ran forward. 

A ghoul.

Lacy’s eyes went wide. That was why she hadn’t heard a heartbeat- only footsteps. Her own heartbeat’s thunder filled her ears, her mind, her soul. She desperately groped for breath, reaching for strength. Ten years of self-taught training: this was the point of it all. She fanned the ember in her heart, let the energy gather within her, then released it.

Sound diminished in the surrounding area, descending into a claustrophobic silence. Heat and pressure built up in her arm, surging and pulsating with an exhilarating strength. Lightning hurdled from her palm towards the ghoul and struck it, the rancid aroma of dead flesh aflame congesting the cold, damp night. 

Lacy watched the monster burn. They were getting more frequent in their attacks. It used to be once every month or two, but ever since she’d turned twenty-one back in December they’d been coming at least once a week. 

Lacy stood over the fire, her right arm limp as it often was after she’d wielded a full-on lightning bolt. With her left hand, she snapped her fingers, and the sound came crashing back into the world. 

She grabbed a shovel from the garage and dug a grave. It probably wasn’t necessary- the ghoul’s flesh burned like paper, and all that remained at the end were silver ashes accented with violet flecks. Still, better safe than sorry. She buried the kill deep in the ground, and then she went back inside and crawled into bed, offering a prayer thanking God for helping her survive yet another ordinary day. 

***

Danny woke up on the floor with his head throbbing, his blankets strewn about after another night tossing and turning. That was certainly irritating- he was pretty sure he’d drunk enough before bed to not have any nightmares. Have to try harder tonight, then. An extra shot or two couldn’t hurt.

He fumbled for his cellphone on his nightstand, hitting the alarm button on the screen to silence the horrible shrill sound. He scrolled through his phone, the light from the screen illuminating his overstuffed bookshelf filled with door stopper fantasy novels. 

Five new text messages from Mom, all nagging him about his contributions to the company that he’d promised would be handled by the end of the fiscal quarter. She was expecting a call that night. Lovely. 

He dragged himself into the bathroom, leaving a trail of water around the sink as he washed his face and trimmed his beard, and another puddle on the floor after he showered. 

Ten new messages from his older sister, all about how she was gonna come and see him soon, but how it was going to be a surprise. He clenched his jaw. He’d have to arrange something to keep busy with, avoid dealing with her- put in a few minutes facetime and then get to ignore her most of the next year. 

He dressed himself in a red button-down and khakis, then went into the kitchen and made himself steak and eggs and a cup of black coffee. He poured a whisky shot into the black, then downed a gulp, and suddenly the world seemed much more manageable. 

One new message from Dad. It was about the idea they’d discussed for the business moving forward, something that had first crawled out of the recesses of Danny’s mind when he was seventeen. Danny stared at it for twenty minutes, and when he’d finished his Irish Coffee, he texted a ‘y’ in response. An abyss in his stomach bellowed that was a terrible idea, but what was done was done. 

He had another Irish Coffee, then he knocked on Lacy’s door. “You alive in there, Lace?”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she called. “Just getting to work on today’s calls.”

“You ate yesterday?”

“Yes, Danny, I ate yesterday.”

“You’ll eat again today?”

“Yes, Danny, I’ll eat again today.”

“Just making sure. I’m heading out. See you later.”

“Bye.”

He left behind his best friend, whom he rarely ever got to hang out with anymore, whom he rarely ever saw leave her bedroom anymore. She’d just retreated further and further into herself since they’d moved here. Maybe it’d been a mistake, but they’d both needed to get far away from their hometown, and Grand Rapids was all they could afford on the money they earned from Woodrow Knives. 

House to house. Door to door. Business to business. Selling knives. The day rolled by, as it always did, one action after another propelling him closer and closer to his next serving of liquid relief. He drove his truck through the rain and made his sales quotas, and as the day faded into evening he passed a church named for Saint Matthias. 

He went inside and climbed into the confessional booth. He heard the priest sit down on the other side. 

And Danny said nothing. 

He sat there for thirty minutes before the priest simply left. 

Danny crawled out of the church, the rain drenching him as he skulked to his car. When he got home, Lacy was still in her room, five different genres of music pouring out from the gaps in her closed door. 

His phone buzzed. It was Mom. 

He’d already dealt with Dad today. Just this once, he let himself ignore Mom’s call. He went into the liquor cabinet and brought a bottle with him into his room.

It was all a pleasurably miserable slush of sounds and sights and sensations after that.  

***

“Hi. Gwen. Alcoholic,” Gwen said, the circle of chairs expanding on both sides around her. They sat in the basement of Saint Mattias’ church, lamps placed in the four corners brightening the cramped space above the navy blue carpet. Paintings of scenes from the Old Testament decorated the walls: The Parting of the Red Sea, Jonah and the Whale, the Tower of Babel. 

“Hi Gwen,” the group said collectively. 

Like every meeting she’d been to, they were a varied bunch. All ages, ethnicities, genders. They were united by their eyes, their shared looks of frustration and bitterness and hope. They were all here together, and they were all here to listen. 

“It’s been five years, three months, one week, and two days since I last drank,” Gwen continued, repeatedly wringing her hands together as she spoke. “It’s been a month since I’ve last been to a meeting. Figured I shouldn’t stretch that any longer- I was already starting to get the urge again. I guess I’ve been feeling lately like I don’t deserve anything, because even after all these years I still feel the urge. And things have been… Going better lately. My boyfriend, we’ve been long distance for a bit now, but… I think things are getting serious. Really serious. ‘I think he’s looking at rings’ level-serious. And I’m… I’m thrilled that’s what he’s doing. Thrilled he wants to spend his life with me. But I’m still wondering if I remotely deserve it. Deserve him. We dated for years while I got worse and worse, until finally it… Finally I torpedoed our relationship. My drinking was always a sticking point… He’s a good Mormon boy, never touched a drop in his life. What he saw in me I’ve never been clear on. But I got clean… I wanted to get clean. And I went to apologize to him, and he pointed me towards a rehab facility. And when I got out, we started working together again, started getting close again… And it just happened. I didn’t think I deserved to have him as a friend, let alone a partner. I’ve screwed up so many things in my life, so many relationships, romantic and otherwise. And I’m still just left wondering when I’m gonna wake up from this beautiful dream where I have an amazing man who loves me and I’ll find myself back in the nightmare I inevitably make for myself wherever I go. That’s it… I’m done.”

The meeting went by too quickly. She put a few dollars in the donation box, then stepped outside. Back in the real world again, in the cold night air of the Michigan spring. She went into the parking lot outside the church and stood in front of her silver Prius, leaning against the car and tying her shoulder-length golden blonde hair into a ponytail and lighting a filtered cigarette. The smoke mixed with the smell of petrichor, swirling around her beneath the canopy of stars. She checked her phone. New message from Quentin- that brave, beautiful man was working a job in North Dakota with Joshua and Isabella. They were a hell of a team. Gwen had ridden with them the past few months, but life had guided her elsewhere, towards unfinished business. 

Step Nine, as it were. No, not ‘as it were.’ Step Nine, plain and simple. Making amends to the people she’d let down because of her drinking. 

When the final car cleared out of the church parking lot, and the streets were clear, Gwen stubbed out her cigarette and tapped a hand to her chest. A storm of cosmic power brewed in her chest, and a glowing white sphere of burning light, no bigger than a basketball, emerged from her heart. Her Star. Her Destiny.

Her body resonated with its heavenly song, her joints aching less, her hunger diminishing, her exhaustion dissipating. The Star shot off towards the north, and Gwen hopped into her car and followed it.

***

Two nights in a row. That was not normal. And definitely not good. 

Lacy stuck out her palm and tried to hurl lightning, but produced only sparks. For the third time in the last month. “Shit!”

She tried something else she’d been working on- channeling the lightning through the knife itself, holding the charge. She focused, fanned the spark in her heart, channeled. The blade crackled with blue lightning… Only for it to immediately peter out. 

“SHIT!”

The ghoul jumped over the fence and continued its charge. She stood her ground and brandished her knife, and to her surprise the wind around her began to shift and rise in cold, sharp turns. It flowed around her skin, in between her hairs and over the sensitive flesh. The ghoul leapt at her, and became trapped in the swirling tempest. Lacy stared as the ghoul’s claw stopped less than an inch from her face, as the ghoul struggled against the bonds.
The ghoul snarled. There was a cadence to the snarling, a rhythm, an annunciation- he was probably saying something, or trying to but couldn’t. His mouth was overstuffed with sharp fangs, his face elongated and his slate-like skin chipped and flaky. His face almost looked like it was falling off even as the creature tried to clamp its jaws around her throat. Above her, there was a humming, a throbbing from the sky itself. As if the stars themselves, reaching for the earth with their memories of light, bled their souls upon the world. 

Except one was not a memory. One floated directly above the world, and when it saw Lacy and sensed her doing magic, it descended from the sky to find her. Blue starlight, fresh and new, reaching for her. The small sphere, barely bigger than her head, settled five feet above her, and offered her its light.

Dread and anxiety festered deep inside Lacy’s stomach, a fundamental rejection of the starlight that occurred each and every time it was offered to her, and the wind slackened. The ghoul broke free and pounced onto her, pinning her to the ground, and Lacy plunged her knife into his shoulder. 

The ghoul cried in pain and fell back… But then yanked the knife from his shoulder. The stainless-steel blade gleamed with black blood, and he wiped the flat on his tongue.

“SHIT!” Lacy screamed.

The ghoul brandished a feral smile. He was definitely saying something, but it was lost in his hideous rage and hunger.

Lacy threw wild punches at the ghoul, flailing her arms in a desperate attempt to create distance between the two of them as she scrambled off the ground. She needed distance, and she needed to find a weak spot to focus her attack on. The ghoul swatted her hands away with his claws, scratching her arms and drawing blood. Finally, he grabbed hold of both her hands and loomed over Lacy, fangs closing in on her face. Lacy’s fear-induced paralysis reached a totality, saturating every fiber of her being as if liquid nitrogen flowed through her veins.  

A rustling shook the beech trees as footsteps carried a new heartbeat into the fray. New, and yet familiar. Lacy heard the words and the voice for the second time in her life: “Toter engel.”

The forest darkened a half-shade. Lacy’s small blue star hesitated, as if no longer sure of where to go, as if its map had been stolen mid-journey. It stopped, confused, before returning to the night sky. 

An angel of white light seared the black night, charging forth from the forest and slamming into the ghoul. The ghoul dropped dead on top of Lacy, and she howled in confusion and fear. She rolled out from under the ghoul and pawed at herself, desperately trying to remove the stain of the monster’s fingerprints. The cuts on her hands and forearms stung, and crimson droplets fell from her skin and onto the ground. Finally, when she laid flat on her back, she opened her eyes and looked up to find a familiar face.

It was the woman from ten years ago, the night Drew died. Her hair, now golden blonde rather than white, had grown out to shoulder length, and her face bore the weight of a decade gone by. She wore a black leather jacket over a white top and blue jeans and brown boots, and she had a thin horizontal scar underneath her right eye. “Hello again,” Gwen said, breathing heavily. “Do you remember me?”

“Yeah,” Lacy spat. “I do.”

“It’s Liam, right? Liam O’Sullivan?”

“Yes,” Lacy lied, clawing at her terrible mass of facial wool.

“It’s been a while.”

“It has. Why are you here?” Lacy asked.

Gwen offered her a hand up, and Lacy ignored it and pushed herself off of the ground.  

Gwen blinked, and her outstretched hand retreated. “I was tracking this ghoul and it wound up here.”

“Seems… Likely,” Lacy said. What are you doing here? There’s no way this is a coincidence, not with the attacks getting more and more frequent, she thought.

“Well, it might be more complicated than that.”

Clearly. “In what regard?”

“How much time do you have?”

Lacy’s gaze tore away from Gwen as she folded her arms over her chest. “Not enough.”

Gwen cocked an eyebrow. “Well, if you’d like, I can explain on the way.”

“On the way to what?”

“Training. You still wanna be a monster hunter?”

For a second, a nostalgic sense of escape echoed through her brain, long-neglected synapses firing in the process. Once, this looked like the only way out of the dark. But now…  “No,” Lacy said. “No, I don’t think so.”

Gwen blinked again. “Are you sure? You seemed pretty eager last time.”

What the fuck is wrong with this woman? She shows up after a decade and acts like I’m still in the exact same spot. Lacy thought. “Yeah. I’m sure. Are there gonna be more of these things around here?”

Gwen put her hands in her pocket. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“I’m gonna stick around here for a bit, make sure they don’t.”

“Okay,” Lacy said. “Now please leave.”

Gwen squinted. “Hell of a thanks for saving your life.”

“Well, I didn’t ask you to.”

“Yeah, you seemed like you had it under control there.”

“Doesn’t matter!” Lacy said. “You’ll get rid of this thing’s body?”

“Yeah, I can handle it,” Gwen said flatly. “Guess that’s my job around here.”

“Guess so,” Lacy said as she turned around and went back inside. The door collapsed behind her, shutting Gwen out as Lacy tried not to think about her, tried not to picture what she did next. Tried not to listen to the sound of Gwen hauling the body away into the forest, of it burning in a pyre contained only by the bounds of Gwen’s magic. Tried not to listen to the world outside as it raged on without her; tried not to listen to the hideous screeching of all the things that wanted to kill her. She crawled into the shower and let herself soak until the hot water ran down, and then she dragged herself into bed, said her ‘Our Father’ and her ‘Hail Mary’, and fell asleep.