Waiting for God

Waiting for God

By Christopher Paul Halliday

Chicago, November, 1997

"Explain it to me again," said the bartender.

The caped figure on the other side of the bar stared at him hard, and every piece of glass in the place sang in harmony for a long moment. Then the Cloaked Man sighed resignedly, and the singing stopped.

"It's like this," he said, his leather armour creaking as he shifted on his stool. "I'm a fictional character, or at least I was. The guy I'm looking for created me as part of a round robin story, which involved lots of other different fictional characters ending up a long way from here..."

"On Babylon 5, right?" interrupted the bartender, determined to prove to this deeply strange person that he had been paying attention. The glasses sang again briefly.

"On Babylon 5," muttered the Cloaked Man, in much the same tone of voice that other people would use to describe the sensation of severe incontinence. "The authors decided to write a tale in which the barriers of reality break down, you see. And then they rather rashly wrote themselves into the story."

The bartender frowned. "What's wrong with that?"

The Cloaked Man sipped his Southern Comfort and smiled. "They rather underestimated the power of the human imagination. You see, they set their story on a place that has a very real presence in the minds of a lot of people. What they didn't know was that, because of the creative energy put into the place, it is real in many ways. When they wrote
themselves into the story, they established a link between the fictional reality they had created, and their own world."

"So you're one of these writers then?"

The Cloaked Man rolled his eyes. "Do I look like a writer?"

The bartender considered him for a moment, taking in the bizarre outfit and the ponytail, and decided might be best if he kept his real opinion to himself. "Uh, not really. Not unless you're one of those slash authors I've been hearing about." A bottle of Blue Bols froze solid behind the bar, and the Juke Box squawked loudly.

"I'm not a bloody slash author either," growled the stranger through gritted teeth. "You wouldn't believe what they've done to the station. There's bloody recreational ductwork everywhere now."

"Oh," said the bartender, suddenly wishing he'd told his boyfriend how much he loved him this morning.

"Anyway, my author wrote me in as his... avatar within the story. Humans honestly shouldn't go mucking about with meta-textural stuff. It's far too dangerous really. Someone could get hurt." At this, the cloaked man gave a feral grin. "He lost control of me when several other authors decided that I was the bad guy, and when they weren't looking, I took control of myself. I had rather a lot of fun for a while, being thoroughly villainous and despicable. After a while though, the plot lost cohesion, and people stopped being willing to suspend their disbelief. As a result, the universe began to fall apart, and I escaped."

"How did you get out?"

"Plot hole."

"And so now you're looking for the guy that wrote you," the bartender put in, sure that he'd just missed something.

"That's right. He knows how dangerous I am, see? He created me to be a god of chaos, and that's exactly what I am. The problem is that he keeps writing stories for me, creating short-lived bubble universes in order to give me something to do. It'd be interesting, only fictional universes are constantly in a state of flux anyway, as the minds that create them add new things, retcon others and generally get creative. They're no fun for someone like me. No status quo to upset. So I decided to get into the real world."

The bartender topped up the Southern Comfort glass. "Not a problem for you, being a god." The Cloaked Man studied him carefully for signs of mockery, but the bartender's deadpan expression gave little away.

The Cloaked Man turned to look at the door. "More of a problem than I thought. You see, there's a fundamental difference between fiction and reality. They're not meant to cross over, and normally there's a..." The Cloaked Man waved a gloved hand aimlessly.

"Barrier?" suggested the bartender.

"Barrier, exactly. There's a barrier between the two types of reality. It's only at certain times that it becomes weak enough to cross over. Times like now."

"Thanksgiving?"

"Conventions. Especially sci-fi conventions. All that willing suspension of disbelief in one place. It's a powerful force."

"And that's why you're here. To meet your maker. That's kind of sweet." The bartender was grinning, relieved that the oddly dressed psychopath would soon be gone. He thought about holding his lover once more, and his smile grew wider.

"Meet him, bollocks," spat the Cloaked Man. "I'm going to vaporize his scrawny arse."

The bartender's smile vanished. "Er...won't killing him kill you?"

The Cloaked Man shook his head. "Why should it? If I'm in the real world, I'm real. He can only affect me while I'm fictional. I just want to pay the bastard back for putting me through his dreadful hackwork for the last few years. Every bloody time I thought I'd made it out I found myself in a sodding fan-fic, or a roleplaying game or something. Last time I got this close the little shit dropped me in an spoof episode of the Magic School Bus."

"Nasty," sympathized the bartender.

"You're not kidding. I..." The cloaked man paused, his head turned towards the entrance. "Excuse me a moment."

Over the Cloaked Man's shoulder, the bartender could see a small group of people entering the bar. He recognized most of them immediately; along with the mad British woman who'd hammered the entire bar at darts and was currently thumping the jukebox, they'd spent a good deal of the convention so far drinking. Several of the men had bits of pink stuff either in their hair or attached to their clothes... The bartender's eyes narrowed. One of the men bore a disturbing resemblance to the cloaked man.

"God, I'm glad I took control before his hair fell out," muttered the Cloaked Man. "I could have looked like that."

"Is that him? He looks like you, sort of. Like an older brother."

The Cloaked Man nodded. "Not for much longer." Grinning, he closed his eyes for a moment. There was a muffled popping sound, several screams, and the slapping of several large chunks of flesh hitting the walls.

"There," said the Cloaked Man in a pleased tone. "That's that."

The bartender swallowed heavily to control his stomach. "Not... not very... sporting."

The Cloaked Man grinned. "No, it wasn't, was it?"

"I thought you were going to vapourise him."

"I'm a chaos god. I'm allowed to change my mind." The Cloaked Man got to his feet. "Now," he said, flexing his fingers and grinning madly as lightning crackled between them. Suddenly he seemed taller, his voice deeper. "Now this planet is in some serious fucking trou... who's that?" he said, pointing at the mad British woman.

"Think they call her... Shaz. Don't blow her up. She's a good customer."

The Cloaked Man stared. Hard. The glasses began to sing again. "What's she been drinking?"

"Rum and coke. Won't touch anything else."

"Is that her handbag she's dancing around?" The Cloaked Man's voice was beginning to crack.

"If it's the white one, yeah. Matches her shoes."

"Son of a bitch!" spat the Cloaked Man. "The git's done it to me again!"

"Done...what?" asked the bartender, with a curiously cold sinking feeling.

The Cloaked Man looked up at him, and odd mix of pity and anger in his eyes. "Trust me, you don't want to know." Rummaging in a pouch at his waist, the Cloaked Man produced a fifty and dropped it on the bar. "Keep the change," he said sadly.

And then he was gone.

The bartender stared at the empty seat for a long time, then poured himself a very large drink and downed it in one. After the police had finished interviewing everybody about the mysterious spontaneous explosion of a hotel guest, the bartender drove home, thinking about the cloaked man, and his strange tale. And then he stopped his car in the middle of the road and stared. As the city ahead of him faded away, tears filled his eyes, and he understood the sad look the stranger had given him.

The story over, the world began to shut down.

Author's note:

I have no real idea where this came from, or why. It just leapt out of my head and onto the keyboard. There are quite a few of you to whom this will mean absolutely nothing. Consider yourselves lucky :-)

The Cloaked Man is Adversary, a character that I invented for a round robin Babylon 5 fan fic ( the notorious "Convergence" story, which may still be archived on the web somewhere). Adversary was actually created in protest at the other authors writing themselves in, and grew from there. "Shaz" is Shaz Ney, who most certainly doesn't drink Rum and Coke and isn't the dancing around her handbag type - at least not in any real universe :-)