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Chapter 60: Pendulum 0-0

BIG Trigger Warning, here. This chapter is arguably darker than the Coil interlude. There's depressive thoughts, hints of suicidal ideation, and biggest of all, some serious horror movie stuff. Like, if you have some kind of bug phobia? This should probably be a hard pass, for you. I ran this past Higure, and he says he thinks it's okay, but that I ran it by him should tell you something. Because I think this is the Worm-iest chapter in Essence.

Pendulum 0.0

-02:47:03

The moment I had my breath back, I screamed. I banged against the walls of my prison, and when I ran out of breath, I drew in more of the fetid, suffocating air, with all the stench of death and decay and the acidic, pungent odor of my own vomit, and I kept screaming.

"Let me out!"

I voiced it strongly, furiously, with perhaps a tinge of the panic inside my chest, at first. I commanded it. I demanded it. There was no asking or begging. There was no whimpering, and I hadn't started crying, yet.

"LET ME OUT!"

I just shouted it as loudly as I could, banging my fists and my feet against the metal walls more to make noise than in any real attempt at escape.

I didn't really believe they would leave me in there. I thought it was one of their meaner pranks, and it was definitely the worst one they'd ever pulled, but I fully expected my trio of tormentors to open the door after a few minutes of screaming and pounding, giggling and laughing at me for being so pathetic. They'd probably each offer a sneering, condescending remark about how weak I was or how clumsy I must be to have fallen into my locker and get locked inside.

At the very least, in some withered, malnourished hopeful part that I had buried months ago, I thought that someone would surely hear me, someone would come and let me out of my locker. Whether they were an E88 skinhead, one of the ABB's scouts, or even a strung out Merchant, it didn't matter. Someone, I was sure, would come.

Maybe a teacher, and surely there was no way they could ignore this.

But the minutes passed, and the giggles and laughter of Emma and her two sycophants eventually disappeared. It was when the late bell rang and classes started and silence replaced all the noise from outside that it started to sink in: they were going to leave me in here. No one was coming to rescue me. No one was going to hear my screams and come let me out. No one was going to save me.

This was not one of the Trio's thousand injustices. This was not one of their mean-spirited pranks, like stealing my homework or throwing my clothes into the shower with me after Phys Ed. This was cruelty of a scale and magnitude that they had never tried before.

"HEY!"

I banged against the walls of the locker with my fists and my feet until they tingled and throbbed and went almost numb.

"LET ME OUT!"

But the only answer was my echo, bouncing off the inside of my metal prison. From the world beyond, the halls of Winslow High School, there was only empty silence.

I squirmed, trying to turn myself around so that I could at least face the door, rather than looking at the looming darkness of the metal back, but the locker was cramped and small. It was already some kind of miracle — or rather, the worst kind of bad luck — that I fit inside of it at all; it was not, it became apparent to me, big enough that I could turn myself around. I banged my elbow rather hard just trying it.

Eventually, all I could do was settle back as I was and attempt to reach some level of "comfortable." It…never really happened. I was boxed in on all sides, with one arm bent up towards my face and the other hanging down by my waist. My knees were bent, and if I tried to straighten, I hit my head on the top of the locker.

What made it all worse was that I wasn't in there by myself. The stench of rot and vomit was overpowering, even if it got just a little more bearable and a little less offensive after a few minutes. The…shit at the bottom squished beneath my feet, and things that didn't bear thinking about seeped into my shoes and between my toes, and oh god, I'll never be clean again.

I tried to ignore it. I tried to pretend it wasn't happening and that I couldn't feel any of it. That the squish under my feet was mud and the liquid seeping into my shoes was just water. That I wasn't sharing that locker with…with who knew what kind of germs and biohazards and STDs and fuck, don't think about it.

But it wasn't that easy. Long moments passed with nothing else to focus on and only the sound of my own breathing keeping me company. Even the slightest of fidgets banged against the wall and sent echoes reverberating through the tiny space, but those were tiny, short distractions. They lasted only a handful of seconds at best.

I…didn't know how much time passed. It felt like days, but I thought it must have been only a few minutes. It was…the heat of my breath filling the air and the adrenaline shooting through my veins, they must have made it seem like longer, I told myself. I wasn't in there that long. Someone would come and let me out, soon.

Sweat began to trickle down the back of my neck, like a long finger trailing delicately down my spine. The air grew steadily warmer and heavier around me, like a summer day on the beach just before a big storm. My head, with it, grew foggier and my thoughts became sluggish and slow. It was like trying to swim through molasses, like the harder I fought it, the slower I went.

I could almost feel it as it happened, like I was watching the gears in my head grind to a steady halt from outside. The hotter the inside of that locker got, the more I felt my energy and clarity evaporating out of my ears like steam. Already blinded in the dark, my eyelids got heavier and started to droop, even as my breaths got longer and deeper.

The adrenaline must be wearing off.

The thought came to me as though across a great distance, and I blinked against the blackness of the locker. Adrenaline? Oh. That stuff that…gave you energy whenever you were…scared? Or… Or excited? Right. Right… And… What did that have to do with anything, again?

I was locked into a locker. That's what.

Right. Right. And I was here because…

A shrill sound broke through the malaise, a bell. A ringing bell. The bell signaled the end of first period.

The bell that means I've been in here for over an hour, already.

I took a sharp breath in through my nose and shot up as straight as I could on reflex, banging my head off the top of the locker and my knee off the wall. Shoots of pain lanced across my scalp and my kneecap, novas of fire that erupted across my skin and through my bones, and I let out a hiss through my teeth as I reached up with my bent arm to feel the top of me head.

My fingers came away wet and sticky. Blood? Sweat? In the dark, I couldn't tell.

Forget about it, I told myself. Forget about it. That was the bell for first period. That means that…those voices outside are real. You can get out of here.

I tried to speak, but my mouth was dry and my lips were chapped, so I had to wet it. I pounded against the door as hard as I could and against the wall with my fist.

"H-hey!"

There was no answer.

"S-someone let me out of here!"

But no one came. No one appeared to rescue me. I was left alone, to rot, inside that locker. Abandoned. Given no more care or consideration than the garbage at my feet. There wasn't even a pause in any of the voices outside, a single moment where someone asked his friend if he'd heard that.

I tried again.

"H-hey! Someone! Let me out! Let me OUT!"

And still, no one came. The cacophony of voices drifted away and became distant.

"A-anyone?"

I was left alone.

Soon enough, the late bell rang, and all of the voices outside were gone, having made their way to their next class.

That was when it really started to sink in. No one was going to come and rescue me. No one was going to come and let me out. Not Emma, not Sophia, not Madison or any of their other hangers-on. Not some ganger who had a moment of conscience. Not a teacher, whose job it was to help their students.

No one. Not one single person.

Not even Dad.

I was alone.

Unwanted, unloved, and so inconsequential and despised that no one would even acknowledge I was stuck in here.

An awful, gnawing feeling churned in my gut, and a terrible emptiness opened in my chest. It was like I was drowning and suffocating and being strangled, all at once, and the hot, rotten air of the Locker only made it worse.

Why? What had I done to deserve this? What insult could I possibly have committed to have invited something like this upon myself? What god had I spit in the face of? What cruelty had I done to some poor, unfortunate person that this was the punishment? Who had I hurt that this could be considered justice?

Was it because of Mom? Was I not allowed to pull myself back together and find some kind of happiness, with her gone? I'd been getting better. I'd been figuring out how to smile again. I'd been moving on, even if I never forgot. Was I not supposed to?

"Why?" I sobbed. Trails of liquid fire flowed from my eyes and down my cheeks, hot even in the sweltering locker. "Why me? What did I do wrong? What did I do, Emma?"

What had I done, to make her hate me so much? What had I done?

Was I not supposed to go to summer camp? Was that what made her so mad at me? She'd seemed so happy for me, before I left. She'd been smiling, talking about how good it would be for me to get away for a while. Let me recharge, escape from some of the memories. She'd all but pushed me out the front door.

Was I supposed to have stayed home? I would have, if she'd asked me to. I would have stayed. Did she want me to have stayed? I would have. I really would have.

I gasped in a breath, but the air was thick and soupy and only served to make my head feel even foggier and heavier.

How long were they going to leave me in here? How long had I already been in here? I couldn't tell, anymore. Had another bell rung, yet? Had another period passed while I was stuck in this festering pit?

I didn't know. Time was…weird. Like an hour passed between blinks, and a second between eternity. The only light I had filtered through the narrow slats on the front of the door, and it was barely enough for me to make out the vaguest of outlines of my nose. I didn't know whether those moments when it disappeared were people passing in front of my locker or me just forgetting I'd closed my eyes.

Had it been an hour? A day? A week? I didn't know. I didn't know, anymore.

Skrch

I froze, straining my ears.

"H-hello?" I tried. "Is someone there?"

No answer.

Tchtchtchtchtch

"A-anyone?"

Nothing.

I held my breath.

But there were no voices, no footsteps, just me, alone in that locker, blood pounding in my ears.

Maybe I was just hearing things. Yeah, that had to be it. I was just…just imagining it. If it was anything at all, it was just the muck under my feet shifting around. It was just —

Tchtchtchtchtch

Something… Something just touched my leg.

Calm down, I tried to tell myself over the thudding of my heart. It's just…just the water. Th-the muddy water. That's all it was.

I was alone in here, after all. So it was just… It was that stuff under my feet. It was piled high enough to reach my knees, so it had always been a matter of time until it seeped through my jeans and started running down my —

Tchtchtchtchtch

Up my stomach, now — I brushed at the spot, but there was nothing there. Nervously, I felt around under my hoodie and t-shirt, dragging my palm and fingers up and over my ribs, but I found nothing.

You're just imagining it, I thought. There's nothing there. You're just imagining it.

I was alone. There wasn't anything in here with me. I was alone. My mind was just playing tricks on me.

Tchtchtchtchtch

A light touch ghosted along my shoulder, traveling up my arm, and I swatted at it, brushing my hand long my tingling skin, but again, there was nothing. Nothing at all.

It's all in your head.

From above me, something small drifted down, attached to a thin, gossamer strand. It came to a stop in front of my face and turned to look at me.

I froze, peering into the four sets of beady black eyes, as the body slowly, slowly spun around to reveal the vivid red hourglass imprinted upon its abdomen.

I screamed, and the Black Widow jumped, landing on my nose and skittering with eight, hairy legs up my face and into my hair. I bucked backwards on reflex, slamming my spine against the unyielding locker door, and reached frantically up to swat at it — but my hands were pinned, and one scrapped against the ceiling and the other banged against the wall, and I felt it, I felt the Black Widow crawl down my neck and the back of my shirt, felt its tiny legs dance along my spine as it went —

And under my feet, around my legs, the pile of trash came to life and surged upwards, and cockroaches and spiders and fleas and all sorts of things came crawling out, as though the spider was the signal, skittering up my legs and my chest and neck and into my eyes and my mouth and my nose and down my throat and —

And I screamed, I tried to scream around the stream of bugs that clogged my throat and filled my mouth, I tried to swat at the endless sea of them moving all along my body, but there were too many, and I was drowning under a thousand tiny bodies, and I could feel them, biting and chewing and feasting on every inch of skin they could, on my stomach and my lungs and my eyes and my brain, and I jerked, slamming my head against the locker ceiling so hard that stars erupted behind my eyelids.

And the bugs were gone. My head felt like someone had cracked it open, but the bugs were gone, and it felt at once both stuffy and heavy and light and weightless, like it was filled with cotton, but the bugs were gone.

I sobbed, simultaneously relieved and terrified. It wasn't real. The bugs were gone. None of it was real. The bugs were gone.

"Just let me out," I whimpered. "Please? Someone? Let me out of here?"

Emma's face loomed out of the dark, and she smiled at me with a shark-toothed grin through a pale, lipless mouth. Her nose was nothing but a pair of slits carved into the middle of her face. "Look at how pathetic she is! Are you gonna cry, Taylor? Cry for mommy? Oh, but mommy's not here, anymore! Boo-hoo-hoo!"

Sophia's face appeared next to her, leaking wispy black smoke from every orifice, and she leered at me with eyes that glowed a bright, evil red. "I bet she is. Look at her! She's such a weakling that she even got locked inside her own locker! She can't even get herself out!"

"No," I mumbled in her direction, "no, you pushed me in!"

But Sophia just laughed, spewing more smoke from between her teeth.

"It's her own fault," said Madison with a smile that literally split her face in half. "None of this would've happened if she wasn't such a loser!"

"So pathetic!"

"Such a weakling!"

"She should feel right at home in all of that garbage!"

The three of them laughed together, chanting, "Loser! Loser! Loser!"

"…'m not a loser," I denied weakly.

My tormentors just kept laughing, and even as they melted back into the darkness of the locker, it echoed back at me until it was all I could hear. It drowned out the sound of my own breathing and the thudding of my own heart.

"…'m not a loser. 'm not. 'M…"

Except maybe I was. I had no friends. I had no one I talked to at school, if I could help it. No teachers sided with me. None of my classmates sided with me. Everything that happened, I got blamed for, even when I was the victim. My dad couldn't even look at me, most days, let alone string together more than a sentence or two to my face.

"'m not a loser…"

But even I didn't really believe it, anymore. Why else would I be so alone and so uncared for? Maybe I should just give up. Maybe I should just stop fighting it. I was worthless. I didn't mean anything. I'd never amount to anything at all. Maybe I should just…

My head tilted forward to press against the locker wall and I sagged. In my chest, I felt the last ember of hope, the last shred of it I'd been protecting for a year and a half, wither, flicker, and —

I fell, out and through the locker and away from my body, up and up and up, until the Earth was just a little speck beneath me. Some force carried me through the black of space, and I was swept along through a vast canal of stars, passing each by without stopping. In an instant, in an eternity, I stood before vast golden gates, grand and majestic and otherworldly, and with a lurch of fear, an inexplicable certainty told me that the place beyond was a place that only the dead could enter.

I was dying, I realized. The cold jolt of terror tore through the haze that had been suffocating my head, and I took a sharp breath of the Locker's fetid, rotting air. The stench of death and decay tried to smother me, tried to choke me back into that slow, almost peaceful end, consumed by the heat and the rot, but all it did was send another shock of fear directly into my brain.

"N-no," I said hoarsely, my voice barely above a whisper. My throat throbbed and ached and it felt like I was shredding it with knives, but that was so unimportant that I barely even noticed. "I-I don't w-want to d-die…"

No one answered me. The words weren't even loud enough to echo off the walls of the Locker. Even Emma and Sophia made no appearance, not even to mock me again. There was only silence and the thundering of my own heart.

"P-please…"

CLANG. CLANG. The sound of massive locks loosening rang out, rippling through my chest and my ears and vibrating every part of me. A gaping chasm formed inside me, spreading an empty coldness that swallowed up my lungs and my stomach and stretched towards my brain.

No, no, I don't want to die!

But I couldn't move. I was trapped, arms pinned, legs mired in the muck, and I had no strength left to try and break free.

It took everything I had just to speak.

"S-someone… Anyone… I…I don't c-care who…"

ABB, E88, Merchant, teacher, Dad, the Trio themselves, even the Slaughterhouse Nine — at that point, it didn't matter to me who it was, as long as there was someone. Someone who would hear me, someone who wouldn't ignore me, who wouldn't laugh and walk away. Someone. Anyone.

The gates started to creak open, as though to accept my soul into the vastness that lay beyond.

No, no, go away, don't take me, yet! I'm not ready!

I didn't want to die. Even if it meant I could see Mom again, I wasn't ready to give up and let go. I still had a life, I just had to wait out high school. There were still things I wanted to do, a life I wanted to live. Dad was still there, and I couldn't leave him alone. Mom had already left us, and he'd broken down afterwards, so if I died, too, then…

"S-save me."

Please. Please. Don't leave me here to die. Don't leave me here all alone to die in the muck and the grime. Don't let me die in this locker.

"I-I'll…do anything. Anything you want…everything I am… I-it's all yours."

Whatever you want, I'll give it to you. My body, my soul, whatever you want me to give, you can have it. I don't care.

"Just please…save me… Save me…"

And through the gap appeared a golden beetle, shining with an inner light. It fluttered across the distance, soundless, and when it reached me, it landed on my chest, then sank through the cloth and melted into me.

And then the chasm in my chest was filled, suddenly and completely, and the grand and powerful thing that was filling it started to spill over into the rest of me. My body started to twist and morph, bones cracking and creaking as they stretched, muscles rippling as they got stronger and sturdier, bust growing, shoulders broadening, hair lengthening, every part of me taking its shape. Even my clothes were changing around me in the cramped space of the Locker.

Wh-what's happening? I thought frantically. W-what's going on? What are you doing to me!?

And then, it reached my brain, and I felt her. She was like an ocean, vast and powerful, as constant as the tide, as inexorable as a glacier. I was an ant before her, so small and so weak and completely unable to stop her.

Khepri, Hero of the Dawn. Taylor Hebert. A version of myself who had sacrificed everything to save everything. She'd been willing to throw away her own sanity, cutting off pieces of herself one by one, and she was willing to sacrifice whoever and whatever was necessary — friend or foe, comrade or enemy, even innocent bystanders — in order to save the world.

Including me.

My body didn't matter to her. My mind didn't matter to her. I didn't matter to her.

I was just a meat puppet. A tool, just like anything else she used, anyone else. Something to be consumed, then discarded, as long as it brought her closer to her goal. A single, tiny bug, just another part of her swarm.

Already, I could feel her creeping in along the edges, twisting my thoughts and my memories, molding me into her shape and making me think like her, and when she was done…

And when she was done, there'd be nothing left of me. No more Taylor Hebert. Just a husk that called itself Khepri.

True, existential terror, cold and powerful as a hammer to my ribs, shot through my chest and brain, and I banged my fists and my elbows and my feet against the confines of my prison with renewed strength and energy.

But there was no place to run, no way to escape. I was trapped — inside the Locker with the trash, and inside my own head with her. There was only one thing I could do.

I screamed.

Even though my throat was already raw, even though all of my energy had already dwindled away, even though there wasn't anything left for me to scream with, I screamed, long and loud and hard, and the metal walls of the Locker bounced it back at me. Panicked, thrashing, knowing that I was about to be consumed, screaming was the only thing left to me.

NO! The word never made it out of my throat, but in my mind, it resounded. NO! I'M NOT YOU! I'M NOT YOU!

I reached deep down for the strength I didn't have, grabbed at the energy that was already gone, and with everything I had left, I rejected Khepri and everything she was, everything she stood for, everything that she had ever done and every compromise she had ever made for some twisted idea of the greater good.

I wasn't her. I wasn't her. I was Taylor. Taylor. Not Khepri. Never Khepri.

And as I pushed her away, the power that filled up my insides ripped itself out of my chest, and I fell back from those golden gates and through the canal of stars, crossing some vast and unknowable distance at speed, until the stars around me pulled away and shrank, smaller and smaller, into a tiny dot off on the horizon.

All around me, there was only darkness, an empty void, and as it swallowed me up, the last dregs of my energy slipped away, and so did I.

+00:01:17

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