How far back should it go? To the beginning of me? Centuries? Millennia? How do you define the start of your being when in some ways you have always been? Time is difficult to form. Michael Shelley, though, he is easier to keep track of. He was born. He was pointless. And he should have died. But before that could happen, he went to work for the Magnus Institute – that ivory tower, keeping its prisoners ignorant in pursuit of… knowledge. [Giggles] A dungeon full of idiot watchers. And Michael Shelley was no exception.
When he was in school, he lost a friend to something like me. His friend was named Ryan, but those in power simply called him schizophrenic. I don’t know if he was, but it doesn’t matter. He was so dreadfully afraid his world wasn’t real that to make it so was almost nothing. Michael was there when he was taken; he never got over what he saw. Or didn’t see. After much searching and despair, it drove him into the waiting arms of the Institute, where he met Gertrude Robinson. The Archivist.
Even being what I am, I have rarely seen anyone so adept at distorting the truth as Gertrude Robinson. Michael was protective of the frail old woman he believed her to be. So… so delicate, so forgetful, yet gently wise. He cared for her. He trusted her. And she fed him to me. She made him me to destroy our transcendence. And she did not hesitate.
Poor Michael. He had been on trips for the Institute before. Conferences, investigations, Gertrude had made sure that all her assistants were ready. That none of them would be suspicious if they were told they were going abroad for work. So there was no doubt in his mind, no concern, when she told him that they were travelling to Russia. Perhaps if he’d have stopped to look up their destination, he might have discovered there was no such place as Zemlya Sannikova, but he did not. He trusted her.
Even when they arrived in Dikson, at the edge of the Kara Sea, and they were picked up by a quiet sea captain called Peter Lukas… Even then he trusted her. They travelled north, through cold far more bitter than any Michael had even conceived possible. And do you know what he worried about? [Giggles] He… worried about Gertrude Robinson. About how this poor old woman might cope with the chill. But now she was like iron, and walked with a purpose that Michael had never before seen in her. The water turned to ice as the Arctic approached, and Gertrude’s eyes turned cold.
Then, at last, he began to be afraid. He asked her where they were going and was told again: Zemlya Sannikova. Sannikov Land. There was a great evil, she said, and Michael was going to help her fight it. Am I evil, Archivist? Is a thing evil when it simply obeys its own nature? When it embodies its nature? When that nature is created by those which revile it? Perhaps Gertrude believed so. Michael certainly did. He believed everything she told him.
And it was me they sought to stop. Me and the others of It-Is-Not-What-It-Is. Our Great Twisting. The-Worker-of-Clay had laboured for decades on that contorted, impossible edifice of doors… and stairs… and falsehoods… and smiles. A thousand staring morsels stood, and not one of them believed themselves sane to look upon it. And in the centre, the door that would open to all the places that were never there, was me. I use the word ‘apotheosis’ not because it is correct, but because I can only show you its truth when we are within the passages themselves.
And this is what Michael and Gertrude found when they set foot on Sannikov Land, which does not exist and never has. It was warm, and feeling its reassurance beneath his feet was the last time poor, doomed Michael knew comfort. They walked through the green jungle of that forever-elusive polar island, and up the gentle mountains that can never have a name. And at the top, they found us through our spiralling laughter. And they saw us in all of our glory.
Michael did not go mad, though no words you could have said would have convinced him otherwise. The mind does not shatter, Archivist. It is soft and malleable. It bends and twists and returns to what it was, though what you see and feel may leave their mark upon it. If Michael thought he had lost his mind, it was only because what he saw with crystal clarity was simply not something that could be real.
But Gertrude Robinson did not waver. She did not… hesitate. She gave no indication that she saw anything more or less than was expected. Hers was not a mind that left room for doubt. She stared into us carefully, her eyes scanning for something that was my heart. Looking for my door. And she found it.
Perhaps I should have realised what was happening; seen those two lonely figures approaching me, but I cannot tell you the existential joys of truly… becoming. Of an entireness finally crossing the threshold into your self. So ecstatic was my completeness, I did not even hear my own door creak open. Because Gertrude had told Michael how he could stop us. She told him to walk through a door. And even then, with so much of his mind shut down in panic and terror, he trusted her. And he went inside, closing the door behind him.
But Gertrude Robinson had given poor, disposable Michael one more thing before sending him to me. She had given him a map. I couldn’t say how she would have gotten such a thing, or if she somehow made it. And yet it was a map. A map to me. It made no sense, lines overlapping and inverting, but once within, Michael knew which turns to make, which doors to open, which mirrors to shatter. Until he became me.
Even sharper than the joy of becoming is the agony of being opened and remade. To have your who torn bloody from your what, and another crudely lashed into its place. To become Michael. And to do so at such a crucial point in our Twisting, in our becoming, well of course it destroyed it. The impossible altar collapsed. The-Worker-of-Clay tore out his veins to dissolve himself in crimson mud. The others of us were cast to all the places that aren’t; some have still not found their way out again. And somehow, Gertrude Robinson was back on that boat before Sannikov Land once again never existed.
And all that was left was me. Michael. [Giggles] My very existence tied to my pointlessness. Wearing my failure as the very fabric of my being. Reduced once again to feeding on the unsuspecting and confused. That is who I am.
