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You reach out to the statue, press your palm against it, spread all six fingers and brush your thumb against the corner of the eye. Beneath your skin the stone is rough and gritty, cool and dense. You feel every bump, every ridge. You feel nothing.
Bill's remains are very solid, and very empty.
You do not touch his hand.
**
He's waiting expectantly, this muse, this miracle, this answer to all of Ford's unuttered prayers, and Ford takes his hand without hesitation.
How fascinating, how odd: Ford knows that this being exists on a higher plane than his, that they intersect only in the realm of minds and dreams. That physically none of this is happening at all and Ford's body is lying still and quiet somewhere underneath a tree. And yet, he imagines he can feel, not a hand in his, precisely, but something. The shape and the idea of a hand. A force around which his own fingers curl and bend. And the glowing blue flames around it, they feel almost hot. Almost cold? Fizzy, electric, alive? Or still, implacable, an unwavering metaphysical fact? How will he ever find the words to write about this? How could he possibly describe it?
None of it is physical. None of it is real. He isn't touching flesh or fire or anything at all. And yet, it may be the single realest thing that he has ever experienced.
**
Bill fills the room, overwhelmingly present. A real object in real space, at least to the extent that reality as you knew it even exists anymore. He's in pyramidal form again, flaunting his three-dimensionality.
Why a square-based pyramid, you wonder? Why not a tetrahedron? Didn't he once tell you he hated squares? But the questions don't successfully distract you from the pain, and, anyway, you don't care anymore, do you? Not about his body, or his opinions, not about anything he wants, except in as much as it's your duty to keep him from having it.
"Not ready to talk yet?" he says. "Fine! How about we UP THE VOLTAGE?" His voice, too, is a physical thing, indescribably different from the voice you heard in your mind, when your mind was somewhere you thought he belonged. It's shrill and booming, echoey and hollow.
The pain is a real and physical thing, too. But then, it always was.
**
The music has made him loose, and the alcohol — or whatever Bill is doing to his brain chemistry to simulate the alcohol — has made him bold. Emotions bubble up inside him and spill out across the sticky, boozy, blissfully chaotic landscape Bill has built for them in his mind. Feelings he can name: happiness, gratitude, worship. And one he can't, some strange, bright thing like an afterimage of loneliness, like the shape it leaves behind when it's gone.
Fanciful, unscientific language. He'd normally never indulge in it. But never mind. Tonight is for indulgence.
He's not even aware of moving his hand. Perhaps he never did so; he is dreaming, after all, and there is far less distance in dreams between thought and action. But he's touching Bill, however it happened, fingers gently brushing a spot that, if Bill were human, might be his cheek. He isn't human, of course. He is something wonderful and strange. And he feels... He feels like something. Not quite solid, not quite graspable, but something. Like an idea half-formed.
Ford leans forward, leans in. His lips brush an eyelid. Eyelids brush his lips. There is the flickering idea of a tongue. It's like kissing a hallucination, or a promise. He can almost-not-quite feel it: warmth, cold, wetness, fingers in his hair. He thinks it's enough. How would he know any better?
He is thirty-two, and it's his first kiss.
Later, of course, he'll deny that it counted, that it was anything approaching real. After all, it was only in his mind.
**
Bill seizes you, laughing, his slyly grinning eye seeming to promise that this is some fun you'll have together. He tugs you by the shackles, pulls you from the penthouse, strings you up in front of his henchmen like a trophy on display. He's making a show of it. Making a meal of it. Maybe he thinks the delay, the build-up will make the torture more effective. Maybe he simply can't resist being overdramatic.
He's close to you now, shrieking gleeful threats and exhortations in your ear, fingering the metal band around your neck as if he's proud of the job he did creating it from nothing, or admiring the way it fits.
You can feel him. His hands are physical hands, velvety and strong. Flexible and jointless, they move like like tentacles or the body of a snake. Your shackled hands brush against him once, where his cheek would be if he were human. It feels like bone, and beneath it there is something thrumming and alive.
If you leaned forward and kissed him now, you think you would feel wetness and warmth, the delicate brush of eyelashes. You think his tongue would squirm and vibrate against yours, and you'd feel every motion as if it were your own. Perhaps he would taste like sulfuric acid, or licorice, or blood.
You don't lean forward, of course. Instead, to your relief, the first jolt of electricity hits, and you begin to scream.
**
He lets Ford stay, once. Lets him curl up in a tiny nook inside his own brain and watch as Bill explores his body.
His Muse's touches are exhaustive, explicit, but conducted with far too much scornful alien detachment to fairly be called intimate.
It's a fascinating experience, being a passenger in his own skin, feeling his muscles obeying commands he never gave them. Fascinating, scientifically. He tells himself that's good enough, that that's all he really wanted from the exercise. That it's not about a base animal desire to touch another being flesh to flesh, even if he has to supply all the flesh himself. That it's an honor to be a vessel for this transcendent being, a gift to his friend, to offer up his body as an experiment and a diversion.
He won't count this later, either, even though it's intensely physical (and he has the scars to prove it). He would sooner release the equation that lets Bill rule his world than admit that when he lay down on his bed and opened his mind he did it quivering with the thought of offering Bill his virginity, his stomach full of molten anticipation and his heart of shameless, hopeful need.
**
The blast goes through Bill's hat. It goes through his goddamn hat. It was meant to go through his nonexistent heart, through the core and the center of him. An irrecoverable metaphysical wound. Instead, it's merely a physical one, a temporary inconvenience. A hole punched through muscle, bone, and gristle, knitting itself closed almost as fast as it was made.
You'd wonder about the speck he once showed you he kept under that hat, whether it's still there, if it's embedded in his flesh, if you've destroyed it. If it was ever what he said it was at all. But currently there's no room in your mind — yes, even in your capacious and ever-working brain — for anything more than fear and anger and oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck. This was meant to be your destiny and you've fumbled it, and you and your world and your family will all pay for your mistakes.
You have to keep trying, stay defiant, and you will, because that's who you are, but for a moment all you can see is muscle and gristle and bone and a useless closing hole. Bill, repulsing you again.
**
Ford's knuckles are raw, swollen, bleeding. He isn't at all certain that none of them are broken. The wounds in his palms have opened up again, oozing blood. Dull, tender pain lurks in the small of his back, where Bill has marked him. None of it compares to the trembling, quaking fatigue or the awful, itchy twitch from overdose levels of adrenaline and caffeine. Ford curses his body, feeble and vulnerable and human. He curses his mind for losing control of that body, for letting Bill in. Curses himself for trusting, believing, for making deals he can't take back.
Curses Bill, of course. For every violation, every ache. For the black dots gathering in his vision and the black vortex gathering in his chest.
His eyelids begin to slide shut again, again, and he forces them open, fixes his gaze on a point ahead of him, imagines Bill there, Bill physical, vulnerable, punchable. Touchable. Ford always wanted him to be touchable. Oh god, oh god. He can never be any of those things, can never be physically here, or it's all over, the whole world will find out just how badly Ford Pines can screw up, but as his eyes inevitably begin to close again, he can't help imagining an eye yielding beneath his fist, vitreous humor oozing between his fingers, eyelashes brushing gently against his lips, and a tongue...
No. No! He can't sleep, must not sleep, or Bill will have his body. Bill will have his body.
**
Bill is a pyramid against the sky, distant, immense, overwhelming. The center of everything.
"PHYSICAL FORM," he cries, his voice bloated with triumph, "DON'T MIND IF I DO!"
And he does. He clothes himself in matter, making himself into your reality, your reality into him. Flesh and gristle, covered in metal, covered in crystal, covered in bricks that aren't bricks, covered in madness.
He's here and he's real, and there is nothing vulnerable about his body, nothing human. Of course there isn't. He never wanted anything human.
Involuntarily, your hand slides into your coat and clutches at your journal as if it were a talisman. As if it had answers. But there is nothing but the familiar ache of old scars and the memory of the invisible words you wrote before you fell out of your world and into a nightmare: If he gains physical form, then all is lost.
Well, at least you've learned that you're capable of being wrong.