The Crossing: Waiting for the bus

She watched him approach the fiery girl from the safety of a nearby roof.

He said on the bench next to the fiery girl:

"Cooler today," he said.

The temperature was the same as it had always been.  Older people made no sense.  Must be that once you hit thirteen or fourteen your brain warped.

"Yeah," the fiery girl said.

"Still pretty warm though," he said.

When she realized what they must be talking about she felt stupid.  She tried to shift, but it was harder without the threat of someone dying spurring her on.  She mentally repeated what he had told her, "Clear your mind and then focus on them.  Try not to think about them, just give your attention over to them and let them wash over you."  She focused on the fiery girl.

It took a moment, she missed what the fiery girl said as a result, but the world shifted.  No longer a partly cloudy unremarkable day, the sky was a mix of flame and smoke, the the buildings smoldered, but did not burn, all was charred.  The roof she was perched on was very, very hot, and she had to exert her own will, against this different world, to convince her hands not to burn and blister.

It was cooler though.  She shifted back.  The world was the same again.

"You gonna be ok?" he asked the fiery girl.

"I don't know," she said to him.  "I'm hopeful though.

He nodded, then asked, "Where will you go?"

"Therapy, I think," was her response.

"That's good.  I approve of therapy," he said.  "I've never been there myself, but I'm told it can work wonders."

"Will I really make it out?" the fiery girl asked.

"This bus route has been running since buses first transported people between towns," he said. "No bus on this route has ever had so much as a flat tire.  It'll get you where you need to go safely."

"That's good," the fiery girl said.

"If the crossing meant to keep you, it wouldn't let you be sitting here waiting for the bus, since it doesn't that means it approves of you going and will ensure your safe passage," he said.  "But, don't think you're charmed.  Once you get where you're going you'll be on your own.  So look both ways when crossing streets."

The fiery girl almost laughed, in the end she only smiled.

"Do you see everyone off?" the fiery girl asked.

"No, I actually came to thank you," he said.

The fiery girl asked, "Thank me?" with a tone that indicated near complete confusion.

"For saving my life."

"All I did was bring some of my heat," the fiery girl said; "you should thank your sidekick."

"Oh, I did, but without your help she wouldn't have been able to save me, so you saved me too," He said.  "I was dying enough that there's thanks to go around."

"Where is she now?" the fiery girl asked.

"On the roof over there," he said, pointing right at her.

How the Hell did he know?

"She wanted to see you safely off too, I think, but wasn't up for actual conversation," he said.  "Or something like that."

She was fuming --though, she mentally amended, not literally-- at what she saw as an attempt to psychoanalyze her motivations.  That's when the bus showed up.

The fiery girl got on, three people got off.

She looked into their worlds.

Frigid wastes, one of shadows, and one that seemed immaculately clean, high tech, and was complete with a population of hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine people all on their phones, tablets, and PDAs.  This would be interesting.

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[The Crossing Metapost]

[The Crossing Backstory]

[Original Work Index]

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For the record, "he" is the one who describes the backstory in the backstory post, "she" (the observer, not the fiery girl) is the one he describes it to, and I have not come up with names yet.

The Crossing: Backstory

[Some explanation of where this idea came from here.]
[As told by one person who has settled in the town within the crossing to someone else who has recently decided to live there.]

A long time ago the town was resettled. A cult had been drawn here by the darkness. The darkness wasn't as strong back then, but then neither was the light. The darkness of the town called out, just as it does today, but even fewer could hear it than do these days. The darkness in the souls of the cultists, though, that was enough to make a connection.

So they came. They came and found an abandoned town waiting for them to take possession. They repaired the buildings, tilled the land, and began to live here as if it were any other place. Hard to believe now, I know. For decades they lived here. It had to be decades because the ritual they wanted to preform required the death of innocents, and none of them were innocent.

They raised new children, keeping the truth of who and what they were hidden from those they planned to use. Raised from birth in this place, in the crossing, those children had within them the power to enact the townsfolk's ritual.

The ritual called for the death of twenty-three innocents over seventeen months. Lunar months, if that matters to you. For the first year of sacrifices they killed one thirteen year old each month. Thirteen deaths; thirteen months. Each child sacrificed in the month of their birth – though, again, lunar months. You would think them each thirteen years and six months old, each sacrificed six months from their birthday.

The final four sacrifices followed an escalating pattern. One twenty-three year old was sacrificed in the fourteenth month. Two nineteen year olds in the fifteenth month. Three seventeen year olds in the sixteenth month. There were to be four thirteen year olds in the seventeenth month.

The cult failed to account for a basic thing. Even as their actions sank the crossing further into darkness, a light began to glimmer. The ones they scarified were pure. Not saints or angels, but people. Human beings that were purposely kept separate from the taint of their parents and their town. Even as the cult's rituals cemented the unthinking darkness that defines this place, the ghosts of those that had died formed the first willful force of light to dwell in the crossing.

That we know of, of course. The crossing is older than sin itself, so they say, but the history we can learn goes back only so far. What went on here before cult has been lost like whispers in the wind. They came after a period of prolonged silence, and proceeded to drown out whatever secrets might have lingered with their own cacophony.

Regardless, if the cult had bothered to pay attention, they'd have noticed the push-back beginning as they carried out those last sacrifices. They didn't see it coming until it was far too late, of course. The twenty-third sacrifice at the close of the seventeenth month was when the ghosts finally had the power to really accomplish something. Twenty-two lost souls, not some divine beings but things like you or me, humans --confused, angry, hurt, muddled, but none the less compassionate human beings-- prevented the final sacrifice of the final batch from going as planned.

Twenty-two lost souls trying to save a twenty-third before it became one of their number. They didn't, quite, succeed, but neither did they fail.

The ritual utterly failed to bring the cultists dread god through the crossing. It failed because the twenty third soul was torn asunder. Neither freed nor used. The others tried to save its life, they tried to save the soul itself, they tried to make anything happen … anything but what was supposed to happen.

They succeeded in most of what they tried to do, everything but the main point. They saved the life of the last sacrifice, but it mattered little because all that remained was a soulless body. They prevented the soul from becoming trapped, like them, within the crossing, but it didn't much matter at the time because the soul was broken in the process. As the ritual held the soul in place, they tried to wrench it free, and the soul simply shattered.

Part of it lingered here, not because it was trapped but because it had some innate understanding that here was where it had the chance to become whole again. The two largest parts were thrown miles away, where they eventually became newborn twins. The other pieces were tiny by comparison to the first three. Some found their way into animals, a squirrel here, a field-mouse there. One became attached to a stick.

The twenty two lost souls remained in the crossing. The cultist's god remained beyond this world, but it wasn't pushed back to where it had been before the rituals commenced. It was instead stuck being almost free.

And so darkness and light infused the crossing for the next thirteen years. As for the state of the crossing itself, it was as if someone had stuck their foot in the door between worlds. It wasn't quite open, but it definitely wasn't shut.

Those thirteen years are why we don't know what happened before the cultists moved here. Things were calm, we know that much. They interrupted a time of subtlety and silence, that's clear. But their influence during those thirteen years erased whatever history there was.

They explored the instances and shadows, they built up the town in all its variations, they did so much to solidify the in-between that it's hard to imagine the crossing going quiet again. Hard to imagine, but it's happened before and I doubt those cultists were special enough to do something for the very first time in history, so it must be possible that it will happen again.

Still, try to find history from before they arrived and you won't. It simply isn't possible to see beyond the footprint they've left with any kind of clarity.

The reason they stayed was that they had nearly succeeded, their awakening of the crossing from its period of slumber and whispers was all the proof they needed of that. Also, I think, they somehow sensed that their time would come again.

They may not have, precisely, realized that the majority of the soul had been reincarnated, but somehow they knew that if they waited opportunity would knock. They may not have known that in thirteen years time their chance would come again, but they had a feeling that it would come at some point. So they stayed, and they waited, and they built, and their darkness grew.

Some people I've told the story to have difficulty understanding why they'd all stay. It's harder for me to imagine why they'd consider leaving. These are people who had sold their souls. Not by signing some silly contract written in blood, by doing unforgivable things without so much as a twinge of guilt or a moment's desire for forgiveness.

They'd burnt away everything good about themselves. The original project, it must be remembered, lasted a quarter of a century. They resettled the town, refurbished it, began to live here, and brought into this world the first sacrificial decades before their ritual would end. Decades before the ritual would start. Remember that the oldest was 23 at the time of sacrifice.

I don't know how you can live with someone that long and still be willing to kill them for the sake of some ritual or some god, but I have an even harder time believing that the kind of person who would do that, the kind of person who would go that far, would simply up and walk away if things didn't go precisely according to plan.

Once someone has gone that far, what could they possibly go back to?

Anyway, by the time the thirteen years were up, the cult had figured out what they needed to do. They eventually realized that parts of the soul had been reincarnated. They also gained some awareness that a large shard of it was already here. They hunted down and sacrificed the animals that housed bits of the soul in smaller rituals, ones that helped them call out to the largest missing pieces: the twins.

How magic translates to logistics is something I'll never understand, but the process worked, and soon the two pieces of the shattered soul that had escaped this place were on their way back here, in a car with their father.

The shard that remained here had spent its time learning, organizing the twenty-two who had gone before, and regaining what parts of itself it could manage. When the animals were sacrificed it readily accepted the broken bits back into itself. It didn't, and I find this impressive for a thirteen year old--however dead it might be--seem concerned with freeing itself from its broken afterlife. In fact, it tried to prevent the twins from arriving, which would have prevented it from ever being whole again.

It failed; the result was a car crash. The father lost consciousness, the boy was injured, the girl could have escaped but she wouldn't leave her twin brother. Cultists abducted the twins, but by the force of the shard that had remained here and the twenty-two lost souls that were helping it, the cultists were tricked into thinking that the father was already dead and so left him alive.

The shard led the others in trying to prevent the ritual. With twenty-three points of light against them, twenty-two of them full souls, and the crossing partially open, the cultists found themselves unable to proceed.

It must be remembered, as I said, none of the sacrificed were saints. They may have spent the thirteen years gently guiding outsiders away from the crossing, they may have been trying to prevent darkness from overrunning this world, but they were still quite capable of being pissed off. They could still find it in themselves to hold a grudge against the people who had mercilessly killed them.

There are monsters in the crossing, you've seen them. They don't just come out when people need to work out their inner demons by fighting outer demons. Ring the dinner bell and they'll be more than happy to come out in force.

It didn't take the cult long to go from thinking that leaving the father alive had been a hideous mistake to thinking that it was an incredible gain. They understood that if the shard had kept them from killing him, the shard must see some value in him, and so they attempted to trick him into working against the shard, correctly guessing that the shard would not harm him.

The good news is that they ended up failing anyway.

They nearly completed their ritual, but it served only to empower the shard, making it a whole soul once again. They may have thought that didn't matter as there were twenty-two other souls already aligned against them. They may simply not have given it much thought.

Either way the twenty-two lost souls, for all their effort and all that they had done to oppose the cult, were bound by the ritual. It was why they had lacked the power to protect the sacrifices before the twenty-third and why they had not even been able to save the twenty third. The shard, on the other hand, had never seen its ritual completed. It wasn't bound in action or location. It had spent some thirteen years as a free entity within the crossing--and not the crossing as you or I know it. The incomplete ritual had neither succeeded nor failed, it had simply been put on hold. There was a rift in those days.

I know that it probably seems like I'm hammering this too hard, but trust me, this is important.

For thirteen years the crossing was jammed, neither open nor closed, the moments of flux we see today were expanded until flux was more common than a stable state. In that environment the shard had grown, half its life as a human born in the crossing, ignorant of matters beyond the physical, half its life as a shard in the crossing in flux.

It had understanding we cannot hope to comprehend and was limited, primarily, by the fact that it was just a portion of a being. A shard of a soul rather than a whole one.

When the ritual resumed, in the moments between when it became a whole soul and when it would have been bound like the others, it rebelled. With the help of the father of the twins the ritual was ended in failure. The twenty-two lost souls were freed, the cult's god was pushed as far from this world as it had been before the first sacrifice, the cult was swept from this world into one of the echoes within the crossing, and after thirteen years of flux, the crossing was able to stabilize.

The three bodies that had belonged to the soul --the original sacrifice, the boy, and the girl-- were incinerated. I honestly don't know why the cult had bothered to keep the original body alive anyway. The soul had already been expelled from it, it was nothing but a highly damaged empty vessel.

A new body was created, in the image of the twins, which left the crossing with the father. Somehow, damned if I know how, it was able to change official records to say that there had only ever been one twin anyway. While records are just ink on paper or code on computers, memory is something that persists, thus we can know that the one who left was originally the two who came.

I won't say that the father and child lived happily ever after, no one lives a life that's quite that dull, but my understanding is that they lived well and continue to do so. Old age looks to be more likely to kill the father at this point than old gods. The child did return here once, as an adult of the younger variety, to tie up some loose ends.

The twenty-two souls are free to do whatever it is that souls do, but sometimes they come here again. You can feel them linger, and sometimes even see their light as they help the wayward out of the darkness.

I hesitate to say the cult is gone. I've thought that before and been wrong. They have certainly been kept from the human plane. They exist in the shadows, echos, reflections, semblances, parallels, counterparts, and effigies, if they exist at all. They cannot reach outside of this town, and as far as I know they've never been found unless someone went looking for them first.

The crossing became as we know it: home. No longer stuck open, transitions and reverberations became momentary shifts, not states of being. The darkness was pretty well cemented into it, but so was the possibility of redemption. The darkness calls out to its own, some who are brought here by the call wallow in it, but others shed it and leave here brighter than they would have been without the journey.

Most people who come here can't wait to get back out, but I wouldn't want to live outside the crossing. Don't get me wrong, if I were outside I'd want to live, it's not like I can't live without it or anything, but it would never be my preference to live somewhere else. I shudder to think what it would be like to be trapped in a single world. Everything … static. Nothing but what your eyes see and your ears hear.

Most people who come don't understand that any better than I understand them. I see why they want to leave --their darkness drew them here and so darkness is what they find here-- but I don't see why they want to be in a world that's what they call normal. I'm guessing you can understand me on that, since you've decided to stay.

I'm glad of that, I like the company.

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[Original Work Index]

The Crossing: The Inspiration and The General Idea.

I was considering doing a note before the story fiction fragment,  but then it was just becoming too big.  Especially since it wasn't a, "You have to read this to understand," sort of note, but instead in a, "Where the fuck did this come from?" sort of note.  If you don't care about that, or even if you do, here's a link to the fragment of The Crossing I wrote.

Either way, since I decided to split this off, it has evolved into a long winded article.

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So I've been looking at Resident Evil a bit because it inspires, well, this sort of thing.  In the course of that I ended up reading a bit about a game that started to be developed for the series but never came about due to technical limitations and the project lead being more ambitious than he was skilled.  That included reference to Silent Hill, which led to me getting around to reading up on the Silent Hill series, something I've not really done previously because horror is not what draws me to Resident Evil (convoluted plot that sort of makes sense simply because the people with power in that universe are weird enough you can hand-wave most anything is what draws me to Resident Evil.)

The first Silent Hill game (which fans of the game and fans of the movie are both quick to point out wasn't like the movie) was driven by an evil cult that wanted to complete a human sacrifice ritual that was interrupted by plot and soul splitting.  The second Silent Hill game was a deeply psychological game about a place where inner demons became outer demons.  From what I've read the series seemed to alternate between those two things:

1. A place where bad shit is going down and that bad shit is totally external to yourself
2. A place where your psychological issues are given life to the extent you might have to shoot said issues to stay alive.

That, in itself, is kind of an intriguing split.

Also interesting to me is that one the big visible parts of what makes Silent Hill what it is is that it tends to involve multiple versions of the same town.  Go to their wiki and you'll see separate entries for the real world, the fog world, and the "other" world.

Why is this of interest to me?  Because I have ideas that also involve switching worlds.  That's no big deal, a lot of ideas involve that sort of thing, but some of them sort of cry out for a setting that justifies, "Here are three to twelve different versions of the same town just because."

So in the things that involve (1) Silent Hill is the site of seriously bad shit that is objectively real (even if it might not be able to be scientifically proven because Silent Hill probably has a "No scientific instruments allowed in the auxiliary dimensions" policy) and has little to nothing to do with the observer.

There is bad shit in the world and the character has to deal with it.  Installments of the series that follow that line include but are not limited to the first, third, and fourth games.  Plus the prequel game.

In the things that involve (2) Silent Hill seems to call out to people who have inner bad shit and then pits them against said bad shit such that one of the following occurs:
a) They deal with their inner turmoil and are able to leave as psychologically balanced people
b) They learn nothing and loop right back around.
c) They embrace the darkness and are damned.

What happens is not objective, it depends on the observer.  What you face in Silent Hill depends on what you bring with you.  Someone who lacks serious emotional baggage will be completely immune from the monsters that might kill the person standing next to them because, to them, the monsters don't exist.  The monsters are just a manifestation of what's inside said person standing next to them.  Baggage lacking person will not see or hear the the monsters, certainly can't be harmed by them.

Installments that follow this route include but are not limited to game two, Homecoming, and Downpour.  (Only games 2, 3, and 4 had numbers.)

It's been argued that part of the success of the games is that they don't try to explain shit and so there's always mystery and mystery opens the door to fear.  I have no idea if that's true or not.  It is extremely likely that I never will know if that's true.  I'm not a fan of horror.  Neither am I a fan of the psychological horror or body horror sub-genres.  Which is to say: I'm not going to be playing the Silent Hill games.  (Or watching the movie.)

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So, back to what does interest me: reconciling the two parts of Silent Hill.

At this point I should probably go ahead and point out that darkness as a shorthand for bad is an idea to be found in Silent Hill.  The most gruesome of the alternative dimensions in Silent Hill (the "other" world) is very dark, with the darkness limiting visibility even more than the oppressive fog does in the fog world.

Anyway, using that shorthand the two different things that drive Silent Hill games can be seen as external darkness (the evil cult and its god) and internal darkness (mostly guilt for having done very bad things.)  The town gives a foothold to external darkness, and it gives external life to people's internal darkness.  It also seems to call people with internal darkness to it.

Also: multiple worlds.

Just making that observation (the one before "multiple worlds") goes a long way toward reconciling the two divergent things.  Silent Hill is a place where darkness can be given physical form which means different but related things depending on whether the darkness is carried in your soul or called here by a cult.

The things that involve the cult are about transcending the boundaries between worlds (specifically, they're trying really hard to get their god into this world) with the monsters presumably coming from another world and the other dimensions presumably representing in between states.

The things that involve inner darkness almost resemble a two way purgatory.  (Traditional Purgatory only has one direction: heavenward.  You can't fail Purgatory and go to Hell.)  Either you are purified (as you would be in traditional purgatory), you have to retake the purgatory, or you go straight to Hell.

That last one implies that Silent Hill somehow lies between Hell and Earth.  (Note that those who are purified do not go straight to heaven, they're released back out into the world.)

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This brings us to the idea for The Crossing.

Silent Hill (again, not the movie) is set in Maine for some reason that I have no desire to look up at this time.  That's nice, I know Maine, so I see no reason for any idea that I base on it not to be set in Maine too.

The idea behind the name would be that the place is the crossing between worlds.  For whatever reason, the border between worlds is thinner there and it's possible to cross from one to another.  Most of the time, however, this is limited to things that aren't fully developed worlds in their own right but instead things that have formed between worlds.

Hell (or some such) may be on the other side, but you can't actually get through to it, or bring something through from it, without an involved ritual fulfilling process.  To do otherwise would be like trying to fly a plane by punching buttons and flipping switches without knowing what you're doing.

People who want to let what's on the other side through have come and done horrible things, which has left the crossing tainted by darkness.

The darkness, in turn, calls out to the darkness in the souls of others.

Sometimes that brings more people who want to unleash what is on the other side, but sometimes it just brings people whose souls have somehow become tainted.  In the second case the metaphysical nature of the crossing lets them face their internal demons (as, you know, external demons) and, if they do it well, to shed their personal darkness and leave the better for it.

(Though the person who as taken up residence there, we'll get to that in a bit, feels this is no substitute for therapy.)

Of course, with people coming, shedding their darkness, and leaving, it can be (will be, by previously mentioned character) argued that the crossing itself is weighed down by the baggage these people leave behind, thus increasing the net darkness of the place and the way that it calls out to dark people.

A counter argument can be made that there's a positive force at work since there are people leaving better than they came (those who face their inner darkness and are able to leave it behind.)

In general people do not live at the crossing.  Those who find it (and not everyone does, satellite photos indicate that there is no town there) tend to be there either to preform a ritual (Cthulhu hasn't eaten us yet, guess they all failed) or to face their inner demons.

That doesn't lead to terribly long stays (the major exception, a decades long ritual, is described in the backstory) as those who end up damned by the process cross beyond the world(s) of the crossing and those who end up redeemed go back out into the normal world.

Some people, however, come by other means.  Some of them, in turn, choose to stay.  The character who narrates the backstory linked to above, and the person he's telling it to, both have made their homes in the crossing even though neither ritual nor introspection requires that they do.

One of the people who faced inner demons at the crossing considered the human resident to be an angel (after the events transpired and time to reflect was had.)

Regardless, the voluntary (non-evil cult member) residents of the crossing are not tied to it, and so can come and go as they please.  The longer they stay, the better the understand it, and the better they are able to utilize it's oddities.

Since the town at the crossing hasn't been inhabited by an actual town full of people since long running evil ritual of evil finally failed, the residents (at the time of fiction fragment: all two of them) tend to have no lasting human contact and can be hermitish and also impolite.  (Narrator of the backstory tends to speak to everyone except for the one the backstory is being narrated to as if they're absurdly slow for not knowing things they really have had no way to pick up on.  "You don't get it!" is a mainstay of said character's vocabulary.)

On a good day at the crossing the only thing there is what outsiders have brought with them, mind you since outsiders tend to be drawn in based on having darkness that troubles their souls, that's not necessarily a good thing.

On a bad day at the crossing someone has realized that this is the best possible place for them to set up their, "I want to summon the evil god of evil," operation, and thus monsters from unpleasant planes of existence may very well run amok.

Mind you, depending on the monsters it might be the case that the long time resident has won them over with donations beef jerky and games of fetch, so it's kind of hit or miss when you're trying to initiate doomsday.

(On a random note, I haven't been following news about "Jurassic World" very closely, nor am I about to start, but one of the trailers they've been sticking everywhere looked like it had the main character riding with raptors as an ally.  The rest of the film may well suck, but that concept alone is awesome.)

Anyway, that's the general overview.

Now, I just have to learn how to make a game engine from the ground up so that I can screw with things on a level so fundamental most people would never consider going there, make a proof of concept, figure out how you'd go about saving someone who has been shot when your primary resource is Hell itself (hell-fire to cauterize the wound, river/lake/pool/whatever of blood harvested to replace lost blood via transfusion, moldy bread to penicillin is not a good idea--even though mold, as a sign of decay, would totally fit into a hell-world--as it takes too long and is too unreliable, and then what?), write a script, get funding, assemble a voice cast and programmers to do the work of expanding initial engine deign proof of concept into an actual game, market, and then watch the money come in.

Or not.  I'm guessing not.