Frightened Boy

Chapter Twenty, part two - Drawing Hands

I woke up to the sound of a battering ram crushing the door to the bar. Tear gas attacked my eyes and lungs as I gasped to get a hold of the situation. Police swarmed in. The first one fell where he stood as a bullet from the barkeep’s shotgun, held by Mal, peeled his flesh back. Before I was fully awake, I was cowering behind the bar, using it as cover.

I peeked over the bar and out a window: three trucks, maybe four, and dozens of SWAT officers. They’d found us.

I turned and saw Escher sitting in a yoga position with his eyes closed. Lux had his hands on his headphones, looking like he was ready to take them off any moment.

Mal stood and continued firing shots at those who entered; the tear gas had no effect on him as he brought the invasion to a standstill.

They’d wait us out or bring in heavy artillery.

Escher pulled his pant leg up. Tucked inside of the upper part of his right boot, like pens in a shirt pocket, were two red syringes. Escher pulled one of the two out; it was full of a viscous red liquid that could only be one thing: his blood. He injected it into one of the bulging veins of his inner arm. “I need you all to close your eyes and form a chain,” Escher said, the peaceful look in his eyes undisturbed by the gunfire and bloodshed. He stood up over the counter, directly into the line of fire.

The sound of gunfire continued, but Escher remained standing. Something about him seemed different, comforting. Suddenly, I was okay with this insane plan.

“If you’ve ever trusted him,” Lux said, “now is the time.” We both grabbed one of Escher’s hands.

I’ve never trusted him.

“Keep your eyes closed,” Escher warned.

I felt a hand, calloused and sticky with blood, grab onto mine. Mal.

"You don’t want to try and see this,” Escher said.

I couldn’t bring myself to close my eyes; I needed answers.

I immediately regretted it. I was catapulted out of consciousness and surrounded by a simple pattern of repeating rectangles that formed a cell around me. All sound ceased. I felt as if the room I was in had been transported to the bottom of the ocean.

Everything around me was a simple grid of rectangles. A single rectangular shape in the floor caught my attention, seeming to stand out from the rest in an impossible twist of perception. I noticed it was a parallelogram, slanted on its edges.

The sounds of the violence around me had been drowned down to a muted hum. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t take my eyes off the figure in front of me—the simple shape.

“Now!” Escher said, his voice clear and inescapable.

Suddenly, the shape exploded into a cascade of repeating variants of itself, a shape twisting impossibly into its own cannibalization, gaining color in patterns as it collapsed backwards into infinitely small tessellations, creating a looping tunnel that seemed to continue forever in front of me. To my right I could see outside of shape, where the tunnel snaked onwards for miles, maybe thousands of miles, into the dark space around it. I could see that the loops became a spiral that seemed to swallow itself far in the distance.

“Take a step,” Escher said. “Just one.”

I wasn’t even sure I still had legs. I took a step forward as his drawing hand tugged at mine.

Escher released me. I was back on Earth again, out of the polygonal room. I looked around, confused. We were four blocks away; the police were still raiding the bar where we had stood.