Buer.
It
wasted no time in its new vessel. It had lifted the cases with the
money and moved into the car which it drove, at speed from the
bookmakers. It found that Bryce, once accepting its domination and
habitation of his body, was quite amenable and access to Bryce’s
talents and local understanding were paired with its own colossal
wisdom and knowledge without as much as a whimper. Bryce became part
of it, no longer was it parasitical, but symbiotic. Bryce only wished
to experience what it experienced, to share what little of its
burning prodigious power it could grant him without being engulfed by
its terrible brilliance. It granted Bryce his wish and so It and
Bryce became the living manifestation of Buer.
Buer
knew that he, both of them, had chosen well.
Chapter
Fourteen. In
the car, he sped through the slippery, cold, wet streets of the grey
city. He was aiming for the old
brick railway arches
near the King George the Fifth Bridge that
separated
the south from the city centre.
One of those arches
had been leased by
Bryce
long ago. In
it were four large metal cargo containers, one of which was filled
with money, jewellery, and various other illicit proceeds of his long
term career. At Bryce’s last count there was around four million
pounds in cash and several hundred thousand in items. Buer was going
to take it all, take it and leave this vile little human habitation
for the Capital of the Island, London. There he would launder it,
turn it into property, store it in banks and use it in a manner the
humans, in their limited way, considered speculative.
Buer
knew it would take a week at most, before he could establish himself
as a legitimate business concern which was well within the scope of
his accurate projections. All he had to make sure was that he escaped
without attracting the attention of either Alec Morton or the
supposed feminine creatures known as The Sisters.
Buer
was surprised by this knowledge. Of these Sisters, Bryce knew little
more than rumour, the kind of gangland folk tales that were not
uncommon and normally easily dismissed by a rational mind such as
his. Buer dismissed it as little more than criminal mythology,
focussing instead on Alec Morton. To Bryce, Morton seemed like his
own current state, a creature inhabited by one of the denizens of
Ayin. Morton was powerful, not merely as a mob boss, but as a wealthy
individual who had influence in the fields of finance, politics and
intelligence networks. Bryce assumed that Buer had chosen him to be
the same, more than just some little chancer from a crap housing
estate in Glasgow. Buer pondered if Bryce’s opinion may hold some
truth to it. It seemed implausible that Buer would be the only
intelligence stalking this globe, especially since it had met other
aspects in times past; Ashmodei in Loudun back in the early
seventeenth century, where together they had delighted in burning a
priest; Apadeun and Baeleshub during the Ridda Wars where they had
revelled in blood and manipulation. It considered making a detour, to
find this Morton, something that Bryce thought would be beneficial to
all involved. Buer decided he would think on this more when he
arrived at the railway arch.
It
took no more than ten minutes before he was inside. Buer sat down on
the cold concrete, amongst dust, ash and countless old cigarette
ends, crossed his legs and expanded his consciousness past the limits
of mind and body, of space and time. He took Bryce with him as he
flowered out through hyperplanes into boundless ambient space. He was
barely aware of the terrified screaming, insane laughing and
incoherent gibbering of Bryce whose mind was finding the process
unendurable. Buer ignored the noise as he observed the small
glittering gem that was once the universe, the pride of the creator.
Its pale shining brilliance sickened Buer to the core of his
existence, it was an affront to the endless nothingness.
It
seemed no more or no less the same as it always had, nothing, as far
as Buer could perceive, had changed. So he drew it closer, locating
the edge of one small facet, one mote of existence, from beginning to
end. Closer again, picking out one fragment of that mote, the history
of the species of Earth, it appeared as a mold, tapered at one end as
a single cellular organism branching out, multiplying itself,
complexifying until at the other end
it bristles with billions upon billions of intertwined
hyphae, all covered in
leaf and fur and scale and chitin and flesh, all singed black at the
end.
Buer
took some satisfaction from that, knowing that the planet’s end was
by fire and war. It had not always been such, it had taken the minds
of the fallen to cultivate such a fate. Nonetheless the engineering
of such a bleak climax needed maintenance, for there were others, the
servants of the word, if indeed there were a word, who were also
engaged in shaping the creation and they had constant access to the
world. Buer examined a long intertwining strand of the fossilised
organism the path it had been on, focussing on a tiny section of it,
pertaining to the one Bryce knew as Morton and then found something
that surprised it, something so odd and novel that Buer had no idea
such a thing was even possible.
That
made Buer intensely curious about the man, and, coincidentally, his
aggressive relationship with another, the stranger who Buer had
attacked when he appeared at the door of the house.
Both
these men were abnormal, both were worth analysis. Buer conceded that
Bryce had been right, he should get in contact with them. Neither
were being guided by the fallen, but both had more power than the
billions of strands around them.
He
snapped back into the body, on the cold concrete. Bryce was silent,
his mind destroyed by the unlimited perspective that it had
witnessed. That suited Buer fine, he doubted the man had much more to
offer. He had bigger fish to catch.
About
four hundred meters from the railway arches, Daft Pete stood looking
at the grey waters of the Clyde, not far from the wasteland that had
previous been the site of the Garden Festival two years previously. A
derelict patch of ground that he’d spent many summer nights in on
the nod. The river looked like a slab of granite in the gloomy
afternoon. He was tired of the oppressive grey atmosphere of Glasgow
and wondered to himself, just how a homeless junkie from Dunnoch
would go about getting a passport.
Gross Domestic Product will return in November.
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