Hate ran the world.
Misanthropy was a discursive, sublimated hell. Even at a subatomic level, which The Entity had heard about in the last moments of the film Ant-Man. Paul Rudd’s face had been the first thing it saw when it came into consciousness in a dark movie theatre. There were other people there, and their varying levels of satisfaction and disappointment left it feeling ill.
So, The Entity, quite rightly, swiftly left the cinema and walked the busy city streets in search of something to settle its stomach and saw it all—felt it all. The currents of abhorrence swelled in looming waves as eyes from passing people landed upon it.
Their emotions thickened the air, clotting it as muck does. The excretion of humanity tasted horrid upon The Entity’s tongue. Familiar. Ashy.
The Entity was helpless as the mirror within turned upon the people; their shoulders sagged, their chins wrinkled into fists, or their faces blotched puce under the weight of their own hateful feelings reflected back upon them.
The legs turned onto the main square, carrying The Entity into the crowding of shops and restaurants and people with their tinkling sweeps of self-replicating desire and the sucking hiss of self-deprecation and the chewing crunch of vengeful stomps and the ringing squall of children and the compounding thunder of rage and hate hate hate, that was so solid they became an abstract overlay of colour. The undulating shapes that made up these feelings flooded The Entity’s vision.
Shutting its eyes, it rubbed its fists right into the sockets, sending warping sparks across the black sky within. The Entity was becoming porous at the edges, each feeling seeped through its skin, and something whacked into its shoulder painfully.
‘Oi! Watch it, you!’ said a young woman with platinum hair and Bluetooth headset grafted to her ear. She was the colour of slate which was prismatic around her and solid like concrete. There was a flash of bright pink at her ankle—love, curled around a silver anklet. A gift.
Confusion. A thumb came in contact with The Entity’s chest. ‘You?’ came the questioning reply. It could not figure this word out. The letters skittered about its skull, chewing at the edges in a semiotic tangle. But no answer came as the woman had already disappeared, muttering of nutters and mid-monthly meetings of lattes.
Across the square, it felt it—a spice—a cayenne on his tongue kind of emotion. It was fear that joined the roiling pot of the square. Far more flavourful than the rest, and far more powerful too.
This new fear had teeth. Gnashing, nasty things. It began to ripple and tear through the crowd towards The Entity. And fear, it turned out, was purple. The most horrible kind.
It gleamed right next to the sandwich shop that was run by a young person with lime green hair and according to their smugness, they had just received a near-mythic twenty-dollar tip.
The Entity latched onto this joyous feeling like a sailor does to its ship in a storm. Its fingertips shook a great chattering. It was close to bolting in fear itself as the emotion burst into its body and turned within it like a coiling snake. Each emotion licked the other, unfurling and embroidering themselves into The Entity, who was a conductor—heightening and brightening and frightening. Unable to hold the terror that moved like water held in hands, The Entity refracted it outwards. The unholy terror latched with amoeba-like tendrils to the closest people who dissolved with the swiftness of a rain-sodden river. The sandwich shop server came into the fold; shifting from person to node, and fear eroded all of their joy. Fear-limbs multiplied with mitosis-like speed, jumping from body to body. Faces crumpled from shock to wide-eyed deerishness. Some screamed; others were too frightened to speak. Some retched. They all became connected along the buzzing synaptic freeways, amplifying and spreading their own horror through the streets.
The Entity swept through them in a dreadful panic, attempting to find the source that called the loudest in terror.
‘Heath!’ Something yelled with a voice like a gong. ‘Come on, your legs are too bloody long for me to keep up!’
What is a Heath? A place for grasses?
The Entity turned to the heavy footfalls that chased it. The tendrils, brilliant in their plum plumage, turned in synchronicity with it. All the while, the new presence moved like a short and stocky stone among them. It waddled towards The Entity with purpose. Fear continued to chew at the corners of the man and the tendrils batted at him, but the confusion and hurt he exuded was a smidge too strong to be subdued.
The Entity cocked its head slightly, confused.
‘I was so worried!’ the man said as if The Entity did not know this. The man’s eyes skated suspiciously about the nodes that watched on, but still he came closer and wrapped his sausagy arms around the body, squeezing. ‘You fell asleep during the movie, in the best bit and all, then you just vanished.’
The Entity pointed to its chest once more. ‘You?’
‘What?’
The Entity pointed to the man. ‘I? I is I?’ It asked.
The fear began to find purchase upon the man’s sweaty skin with every word. The Entity frowned as the glaze crawled across the man’s face—it wasn’t mourning exactly but it could feel the loss of this stranger as their muscles relaxed in some places but tightened around his eyes. The Entity could not read minds, but the man’s face and grief screamed to it—Oh God!—and garbled out prickly, horrible, inhuman noises that The Entity shied from.
‘What’s happening, Heath?’
Hands scrabbled for The Entity, who stepped back. ‘Don’t know what Heath is. You will protect I,’ it said, as the purple current grew more potent with a great undertow around the man. The Entity took the man’s hands off its arms, holding them to the man’s side, who struggled under its grip. His eyes were excreting. Comforting the man was difficult, but The Entity was by no means cruel. ‘Wait and You will—you will do something.’
The Entity turned from the man who finally seized in fear and joined its brethren-limbs, subsumed by the body of feeling that frisked between The Entity and the mysterious source. The Entity moved, parting its lavender node-sea, gave it access to the fear’s epicentre that pulsed before it. The feeling grew as it moved across the square; the tendrils leapt further down the streets with the refractive energy that gushed from The Entity’s pores as it strode towards the source of the fear, and then it saw the blob huddled upon the pavement.
‘What are I?’ The Entity asked it, in a strained voice as it struggled against the waves of terror that swashed about them. The blob revealed itself with a lifting of its head. She was a child with wide, frightened eyes and blotchy, tear-stained cheeks. There was a glimmer to the girl’s skin that was not emotion but wholly physical. It was a glimmer, as if she was a prism caught in the sunlight; each colour was caught in her veins, moving beneath her skin with the rapid thump of her heart. One of its nodes twitched near it, her face flushing beyond the fear—recognition? The Entity sipped at the emotion and found both rage and hate, sown beneath it in a slop. All for the child—and though The Entity could not pinpoint why, this was … unsurprising, in a sick way.
The girl shook, eyeing the node warily.
‘I fear this?’ The Entity questioned, turning to the node who dared not look at it or the girl.
‘P-pocket, her pocket!’ The girl hissed, pointing towards the node. The Entity knew that the girl was telling the truth according to the node’s gelatinous guilt behind its peelings of fear and hate.
Crouched upon the ground, the child’s eyes widened as The Entity pulled a sliver of a knife from the node’s pocket. It did not fight The Entity, but its emotions spiked and shattered in a vortex of shape and colour. The Entity’s perception grew thin under the bombardment; each pulsing wisp slipped from view in streams to the pavement. Under the concrete, the tiny consciouses of the worms reached out with purple tendrils, taking to the beetles and the bacteria that did not understand what swept through them. Each consciousness sluiced upon The Entity, nearly drowning it.
The interlocking nodes moved as one in a surging swell, many senses flooded at once, spreading tendrils further through the city to a florid man eating an unpleasant bagel and to a dog, Tinky, who was enamoured with its owner and along to a woman who was nervous for her SWOT presentation and on and on and on. Their concerns fled and were replaced by The Entity’s own over-stimulated consciousness. The buildings themselves were swamped in purple-teal tentacles that tacked themselves to the glass, waving gently to the sun above.
And there was a knife in The Entity’s hand. Cool and waiting.
The child, as if without control, looked to her pursuer. She was odd, eyes shimmering as if coated with a summer mirage. ‘She—she was going to kill me.’
YES. The Entity spoke, but the voice came from no mouths; it drummed from the shifting tapestry of colour and emotion.
‘Are—are you?’ she asked.
DO NOT THINK SO BUT—the fear. Horror. The tentacles seemed to have transcended their original purpose, crawling closer to her feet. While her own shimmer seemed to deter them some, although they were making headway.
‘Can’t you control it?’ she asked, now in a panic, and she kicked out, hissing at the purpling colour that grew deeper in shade. The Entity tingled at the sight, without shame. It was all so loud inside its head, full of voices, and the purity of her fear was anchoring—beautiful.
YOU?
It could hear the helicopters swarm in above; many ears twitched to the chop of the incoming blades. The girl’s eyes widened into shining marbles. The Entity struggled, but the chaos within it, all the synaptic connections firing and misfiring, was consuming. Fear arched, cat-like, with claws that gleamed with intent.
She moved back; her own shimmer expanded outside the confines of her skin and cocooned her in a diaphanous slick. But the tendrils solidified around her in a messy mass of viscous feeling. She screamed.
A breach was made. Tearing through the protective sack of her own powers. With no agency on either side with only that pure animal instinct for survival left, they reached out to one another: Thousands and One.
Far away, the pilot in the helicopter yelped as fingers touched, and a bright-burn light consumed the streets, and The Entity was turned inwards, dragging the girl with it.
She was a depthless ammolite stone within them, in the dark that was surrounded by a city made of coral that shimmered the many colours of nodes within The Entity.
W-who are you?
YOU IS ALL. YOU IS FEAR.
The surface of her rock undulated. I am not.
I IS STRANGE. NOT LIKE THE OTHERS.
The rock scoffed. You mean the people you had under your control?
NOT UNDER CONTROL. A PART OF YOU. CAN’T CONTROL ONLY … MAKE PEOPLE FEEL. FEAR IS POWERFUL. WHAT I WAS FEELING WAS TOO MUCH FOR YOU. EVERYTHING GOT—TOO MUCH.
They … the rock shivered. I escaped from the centre in town, and they came after me. I was scared. You can’t blame me for that.
There was silence in the sway of the coral nodes as The Entity did not know what to say.
Although it knew vaguely of what the rock spoke of, these centres for rehabilitation popped up after the Quincy scandal and subsequent shambling fall of the Labour party. It had not bothered it before … The Entity just existed. Its skull throbbed at the thought.
Where are we?
SOMEPLACE BETWEEN. DON’T KNOW.
So, you know we? You keep mixing up words … it’s weird.
CAN FIGURE IT OUT. CONTEXT CLUES.
The Entity got the impression the rock was giggling. But there was no natural sound here, just the full slush of the water-like atmosphere.
It was awkward.
The rock sighed. I’m Rosy. There was a pause. Thanks for saving me from … you … er … eating me. And from that lady who was chasing me.
The Entity wasn’t sure how to respond. So, it didn’t. Time passed slow and strange. The Entity felt restless, stretched far too thin. Holding this place like Atlas had, but without the muscles.
The rock—Rosy—was rocking from side to side along with coral around them that had slowly crawled closer.
‘Heath?’ said a sourceless voice.
Rosy and The Entity recoiled in surprise after what could have been years of silence. Something was niggling at The Entity. A pink granule of the thing that had calcified over time and it was slowly pushing its way up through the sand at its feet.
HEATH?
Who’s Heath?
DON’T KNOW.
‘Heath!’
The Entity was slammed back into its bodies. There were empty spots in its perception now. Some nodes had been shot and had made a bloody hill of bodies. Helicopters were clouds that blotted out the sun.
Rosy was covered in tentacles, her tiny body nearly entirely obscured by them. The Entity could feel her, still full of fear and vindication. Holding on only just barely.
‘Heath!’
There, popping up, was that grain of pink that it had seen upon that woman’s ankle. It burned. The Entity turned. Smeared with blood and quivering amoeba fronds that burst from his skin was the man, grimacing—hand out.
‘I—’ The Entity said, stepping back. It was crumbling under the abhorrent acid rain that pelted from above, culling its edges with efficiency, exposing the heady drone of many minds still filled with fear. Although now it came from everywhere at the sights and sounds of guns, tasers and police batons.
The man threw himself at The Entity, wrapping and burning. Each touch was scalding as if doused in boiling water. The Entity hissed.
Buildings wobbled. Their abstractions, coloured bacteria on a macro-scale, shivered at the touch.
‘Stop this, Heath!’
‘Who is … who is Heath?’
‘Heath is—Heath is I.’
The bottom fell out of the city for a moment, and only the worms and beetles beneath it remained suspended in space. The buildings were lit up by the tapestries of a city’s feeling, a membrane that receded as the fronds grasped for the glass and scaffolding without purchase.
The Entity could feel distant joys as its forced grip gave way, and with the release, knees cracked upon the ground, adding pain into the soup. With glacial slowness, the palette returned. Each untethering of his nodes left him feeling lighter. The earth returned to its place beneath his feet, and all the colour subsided, drawing back in tidal currents towards him.
Heath buckled into Adam’s arms—stocky, sure-footed, smiling Adam—and held him tight.
Just looking at him stained Heath’s vision pink.
‘I just wanted to know how you felt about me,’ Heath whispered into Adam’s neck.
Adam pulled away, smiling, and looked down to Rosy, who was blinking up at them owlishly.
‘We need to get you both out of here,’ Adam said, looking down the street. Police and Rippled Control Personnel were combing the streets with gleaming metal lassoes that they passed from hand to hand. Heath nodded. He could still feel the currents of fear rippling through the crowd.
Adam squeezed his knuckles. Heath gave him a tight smile and turned to Rosy.
‘Come on,’ he said, taking her hand. ‘Let’s hit the frog and toad, hey?’
His hand engulfed hers. It was so small, and his palm tingled where the shimmer of her skin connected with his.
‘It’s going to be okay,’ Rosy promised, giving him a gappy smile. Her voice was high in the real world, like tinkling bells. All hopeful and bright.
But Adam and Heath blocked her view of the streets behind them.
Emma-Grace Clarke is a Melbourne based creative writer and winner of the Women’s Voices 2020 competition. She’s lived up and down the east coast of Australia but dreams of moving into a hut hidden in the wilderness someday. If you ever came across her, you’d find her writing (obviously) and probably staring out a window at some birds.