Joseph Sale - Return to the Black Gate

( THE BUTTERFLY MAN )

He sees the image of a grave.

Souls flitter around him like thoughts. Though he has no eyes, he sees more than he has ever seen . The sockets in his face seethe like voids, but his inner eye roves, like a searchlight scouring marshland for hidden prey.

He is sat cross-legged upon the heath. Cold, British air lashes features which, if they were any more rugged, would be deformed. He does not look like a prophet: torn jeans, snakeskin boots, a leather jacket. Tall grass stirs with the ever-changing impulses of the wind, making a hissing sound, like a hidden serpent approaching. Around him, a morphing exuberance of butterflies, a thousand different colours, each wingbeat showing a blinking eye. These are the souls he freed from the pit of Nekyia. As he thinks, searches, sees, they respond, forming shapes that descry his meaning like letters.

His eye pierces the material to the beyond, showing reality for the insubstantial thing it is. The spirit is all that endures, all that has substance. The Prince knows this because he has been unmade three times. His body has been utterly destroyed, but his spirit, his soul, always survives.

With that thought, his eye is dragged to the past, like an anchor to the oceans sedimented bottom. He tries to resist for a moment, but knows he cannot. Besides, he learns as much from scrying the past as he does the future.

The butterflies form towers around him. The skyline of New York is glimpsed only for a moment before it disintegrates into chaos, the butterflies endlessly, obsessively, form circles that turn like the gears of the universe.

The world The Prince was born in is now dead. He destroyed it, reduced it to irradiated ash. He remembers the cold blizzard sweeping the city, his nemesis: Brian Mor, The Man In The Black Hat, the man who drove his fingers into The Princes throat and squeezed until every throb of life was excreted.

He was reborn into a new world, a new reality. That of Nekyia, the City of Lost Souls. There, he became king for a while, the Fourth Horsemen of Death reigning over a city formed from soul-stuff, built on the coagulated substance of the dead.

His fists clench. The butterflies swirl faster, as though willing him to wind time forward, gloss over the scenes which come next

His foolish voyage to the edges of Nekyia, to escape the city. He commanded a ship upon a black sea, and was dashed by the gods. Drowning. His second death.

The third scene rises, and he openly bares teeth, shakes as though with sudden exertion to hold the vision in place. The butterflies form a moon-sickle, a dark smile.

Betrayal!

Dr Monaghan, the sorcerer Yin, the Taking Man his lieutenants turned upon him and ripped him apart. They castrated and blinded him, left him dead in the arms of Fay.

Fay! He remembers the woman, the prophetess, the one person he could bring himself to He stops the thought. His heart races in his chest. He is not worthy of her, the Fifth Horseman, the woman of magic and light and prophecy. Yet she wrought a change in him so deep it was like she had transmogrified the atoms of his being, performed alchemy upon his living flesh.

After his death, he became part of the souls of the city, and the souls of the city became part of him. He gained a kind of new consciousness, floating not in a space between worlds, but in a space between being and unbeing, between self and other. He began to lose his distinctions, his past, his anger. In his last moments he had cried out for forgiveness from Fay, and she had kissed him, such a kiss as to leave blemish upon the immortal soul forever and how he would cherish that blemish!

At some point, he found himself once again acquiring being. It was agony. He hated it, wanted to remain part of the butterflies, the spirits, the beauty, drifting between between everything. All his life he had known pain, an ache in his limbs, a pressure in his mind, as though his brain were slowly expanding like a tumour, pressing against the inside of his skull. As a butterfly, he was freed from that pain.

But it seemed he had no choice.

He came to, at points. In a hospital bed, next to a dying woman, he found form again, hovering over her like a fairy about to swap a tooth for silver .

In a dark forest, racing alongside a speeding vehicle.

Dancing upon a black ocean.

At points he was a cloud of butterflies. At points he seemed more human, though still bits of him felt like insect parts. His fingers like little antennae , his torso like a fuzzed thorax, his shoulder-blades the ghosts of wings.

Then, startlingly, there had been cold. A slap of feeling. Plummeted, dumped. He had arisen on this scratch of English heathland at the centre of a circle of old stones . Naked. Cockless and eyeless. Horribly human in shape. But he knew, now, he had never been and would never be truly human.

Hed wandered, drawn by the true-sight of his minds eye, eventually coming to a little market town. People didnt scream when they saw him, just muttered and walked away. He heard their accents: British. Strange people, these limeys , he thought. If he had walked into an American town looking as he did , there would be screams and cops.

He d felt cobblestones beneath his feet. Was this the past? No, he d heard cars. His disorientation was tremendous. Hadnt he burned this world to the ground? Or was it another world just like his own? W as this the future, where everything had been rebuilt? Or the past, before the dreadful thing was to be done?