As the helicopter flew over the city, Thursday saw the city below with all its twinkling lights as a cavern illuminated by millions of candles. The city was the yawning mouth of the earth and inside were the tiny, desperate lives of civilization grasping for comfort, for light in the darkness, before the great maw snapped shut.
The helicopter flew for a while and Thursday couldn’t be sure how he felt about everything, though he appreciated the change of clothes that was provided for him and he felt very spiffy in the sharp suit and tie. He felt anticipation more than anything. What would Sunday look like now? Was he Kurt Graham, or had he somehow resurrected the body of Marlo Charles?
When the helicopter finally began its descent, Thursday felt a pang of worry that he was being lowered into the belly of the Earth; they were still over the lights of Manhattan. They landed on a rooftop and as the propeller settled, Thursday was told that they had reached their destination and that someone would take him to the dinner planned in his honor. He walked to the only other person on the rooftop who stood next to the high guard rails that surrounded the roof.
“Nice night,” Thursday said to the figure of a person who was either dressed in all black or in dark clothing, they truly were just a figure apparently gazing out into the darkness with their back to him. He heard mechanical sounds, like gears turning and metal scraping, and he turned to see the helicopter descending into the rooftop, and then a metal covering sliding into place to return the roof to normal.
“That is impressive,” he remarked, hoping to strike up conversation with the figure that was unmoved, uninterested. For a moment, he was overcome by the notion that either he was hallucinating the presence of the figure, or that it wasn’t a person at all, but some fixture in the shape of a person perched on the edge of the building like a gargoyle.
“I’m the new Thursday,” he said, hoping this might bring the figure to life, and sure enough, the person turned revealing a pale face in the hood of a cloak that seemed to flare dramatically as they turned. The face was long, almost in the shape of a diamond with the bottom point elongated, like the chin had been stretched down. The eyes were a pale blue and like the lips that were thin under the long pointy nose, they sat unaffected like the features of a portrait set down long ago. There was no real expression on the face until he repeated himself.
“I am Thursday, also known as Azalaan, the Idiot God. I’m here for… whatever happens next I guess.”
A portrait is made to fix a moment in time, its function is to remain still, so when the mouth on the face of the figure moved into a half smirk, Thursday was taken aback. Of course he’d hoped for a response seeing as there was no one else around to take him to whatever happened next for the newly elected Thursday, but seeing this figure react had frustrated the quickly formed expectation that the appearance of the figure elicited. And there was something off about the smile, something strange. It was crooked, only one corner of the mouth moved upward toward the pale eyes and nothing else on the face was disturbed an inch, as though the original slit of a mouth had been erased and then redrawn by the giant hand of the real creator of the whole farce who must be telling such a compelling story that listeners overlook obvious leaps in perception, or even the well worn tropes of the genre that bring our protagonist to a familiarly cloaked figure at the onset of an odyssey — but I do digress.
“This way,” the figure said evenly, no affectation, no emotion to suss out the feelings or intentions behind the crooked smile.
Thursday followed the figure to a large, rectangular structure on the rooftop where the figure pressed a button on the surface. Soon an elevator door opened and they both stood inside.
“Are we going to another secret meeting place?” He asked as they rode the elevator down for about five minutes.
“We’ve no need for secret meetings anymore,” the figure said. In the light, she was much more human, and obviously a woman though her suit was cut like a man’s. She had long black hair that rested on both her shoulders, and the hood on her head was perfectly tailored like the rest of the cloak, and the grey suit she wore underneath it.
“By decree of the man himself, Sunday, our council has no need of secret rendezvous. The plan to end life as we know it has been underway, and it’s been met with more enthusiasm from the public than we anticipated. Apparently, a lot of people are bored enough to actually court upheaval and anarchy, in theory anyway. No one likes to deal with the fallout of these things, but if conditions of every day are truly horrid, then man will endure any suffering to end those conditions. Most don’t want real revolution, most are actually comfortable with the lives they’ve managed, but they’re told to express outrage or risk corruption. When they hear us talking about our revolution, our intent and our plans, they, everyone really, thinks it’s a joke, that we are merely performing our political views in order to make an impression, to be seen and heard, because of that question of a tree falling alone and whether it matters without an audience. That question haunts the masses, and we harness that expectation to hide in plain sight now.”
Just as she was done, the elevator stopped, and the doors opened onto a large space filled with dining tables. It was a very fancy restaurant and all in attendance were formally dressed. The floor of the restaurant was tiered with four distinct levels including the bottom and the top, and there were tables on what looked like two giant stairs. The top level was surrounded by glass windows and looked out onto the street. It was clear that the most impressive people occupied the tables at the top; there was a flurry of waiters going to and from the tables either bringing elaborate dishes on plates and bottles of alcohol, or taking empty things to clear the table. As Thursday followed the woman around the top level along the street, he noticed that every table had an elaborate feast laid out before them.
He spotted the table that the woman was no doubt leading him to while it was still in the distance. It was a table of five men, all dressed nicely and somehow from a different time, maybe a half century earlier than everyone else. And there was a massive man with his back to Thursday sitting next to the window. He was so big that he made the other men look small at a distance, and Thursday imagined that there must be a crowd on the sidewalk gawking at the behemoth of a man.
It was Sunday, Thursday knew it, and he did not pilot the body of anyone that he knew. Sunday sat at the head of the table and the man had a cartoonishly evil look to him. His head was large, though believably human, and his face contorted, shifted like clay into the various expressions that he adopted. His mouth snarled, and his brows arched and dove as appropriate, and his imposing figure made him the undeniable focal point of the entire space of the restaurant, and outside no doubt in a substantial radius.
The woman who had guided him from the roof, introduced herself as Monday, and then she proceeded to name everyone at the table around Sunday as she and Thursday sat next to each other at the elaborate spread of food that crowded the middle of the table. There was already a conversation occupying the table, and dominated by the booming voice of Sunday that Thursday was surprised he was only hearing as he sat.
Sunday was talking to, mostly about, Tuesday, who was a standard looking white businessman, but though very, strikingly handsome. His eyes were light brown and his hair dark. He had a neatly trimmed and lined beard and had the look of a lumberjack in black business attire. The look on his face as Sunday spoke was sinister, as though he was capable of the most egregious plots against mankind.
“Tuesday gets it,” Sunday was saying and gesticulating with his massive hands. “The rebrand definitely worked for him and his beloved faction of his Supremacists. They have been hiding in plain sight, amassing their silent majority fueled by jealousy and a feeling of abandonment by the country of their forefathers. Once you all ditched the hoods, it was much easier to spread the word silently on the wind. This Council of True Idiocy convenes with one purpose, to end the world through our cooperation under my leadership, and we have achieved great things together by using the masses’ incredulity of conspiracies against them. We are the secret hand that some of us use as the Boogeyman for recruitment, we are the secret organization with the destiny of the free world at our fingertips, and we do it all very conspicuously because there is so much bluster in the zeitgeist that people have come to expect inaction. We should acknowledge the Technologists, our comrade Friday, for their role in that. We strike however we like, stoking fear and suspicion, because people are afraid of the truth that they claim to know, that of course there is a secret group trying to end the world and they are powerless to stop it.”
Thursday half listened to Sunday as he inspected everyone else at the table. Monday sat next to him, and Wednesday was next to her. Wednesday was a woman with long brown hair and her fancy suit that was cut for a man seemed ill placed on her. She wore a colorful bandana tied around her forehead, presumably to tame her hair that was curly despite its length, and shades that were small lenses sitting on her cheeks and exposing her eyes, corralled by wiry metal that made the frames. She had light brown skin and though she was old, she also seemed eternally youthful. There was an anger on her brow that contributed to the notion that her suit was not becoming of her character, as though she resented the suit and all of the fancy trappings of the restaurant. Wednesday seemed to be seething with anger, like she vibrated under the strain of containing her rage. She was the leader of Nature’s Wrath, Monday had explained in her introduction, and they were committed to protecting the earth, even if that meant ridding it of humanity. The organization was small compared to the others represented at the table of days, but their inclusion was a respectful gesture to revolutionaries of the past.
Saturday, who sat across from Thursday, was also the leader of a small organization with historical relevance, the Anarchists. He was an old man with white hair on his head and face that was perfectly combed and cut. He had an elaborate mustache that sat atop his mouth and it wiggled when he laughed or contributed something to the conversation, which was not often as Sunday was still praising the triumphs of Tuesday, the leader of the Supremacists. Saturday wore a hat with a rounded top and the brim curled up. His face seemed to be dominated by hair, even his eyebrows were bushy white, his eyes were mostly slits in his face. The expressiveness of his mustache was slightly unnerving to Thursday who came to see it as a large furry caterpillar that was the true Saturday, a sapient and evil caterpillar that piloted the body of the well dressed and stout old man about on his Anarchist duties.
Friday sat between Saturday and Tuesday, and he was a squirrely man with large glasses that reduced his eyes to black dots in the middle. He had a pale complexion, as though he hadn’t faced daylight in a very long time, and he seemed weak from sitting up straight and supporting the weight of his fancy clothing. Friday led the Technologists who wanted to hasten humanity’s integration with machines by ruining civilization.
Most everyone at the table, Thursday realized, had an ideology in opposition to at least one other person who sat with them. But Sunday, the cartoonishly large supervillain at the helm, had brought them all together. He’d united them in the same way that he had instructed Tuesday to unite the Supremacists, by promising them that their cooperation could help them achieve their common goal.
“We are gathered here to welcome the new Thursday,” Sunday was saying and Thursday was startled from his careful survey of his dinner companions. He looked into the eyes of Sunday and he knew that he had seen them before.
“Welcome Azalaan,” Sunday said joyfully as the animation of his face progressed from snarl, to smile, and then back again. “The Pretender has finally joined us. I was beginning to think that you’d never make it.”
PRL Serials 