The Way Things Seem

by Mackey Chandler

  “I’ll be there in about a half hour,” Johnson said.

  * * *

  Johnson was driving a white van. David somehow expected a cheap sedan with government plates. He turned it around to face back down the driveway which put his driver door to them.

  David was tempted to ask if there was anybody with him, but he didn’t sense any life forms in the van, so he didn’t. He didn’t think Johnson could block that. Johnson was carrying a plastic bag and David got that intense uncomfortable feeling, stronger than he had on the phone. The only thing that restrained him from ordering the man to go away is he was holding the bag away from himself with obvious distaste. He wasn’t any happier with it than David was.

  “This is my problem,” Johnson said. He dropped the bag on the grass. He didn’t even want to touch the shape in the bag bare handed. He got a pen from his pocket and snagged the corner of the bag with it to lift it and dump the contents on the lawn.

  It looked like a bathroom tile, with a white edge, but the face was a swirl of motion in false colors that looked like you could dive right through it despite its size.

  “It just radiates evil,” David said.

  “No shit. It’s the creepiest artifact I’ve ever seen. I showed it to a couple other agency people I trust and we all agreed it needs to be destroyed, but we simply can’t do it. If you can it would be a huge favor. I don’t think this is anything anybody wants to allow to exist in our world,” Johnson said.

  Jack just looked at them like he didn’t get it.

  “What does it look like to you Jack?” David asked.

  “It looks like a sort of gray-blue ceramic tile with a spiral groove covering the whole face.”

  “No glow or scintillation?” David asked.

  “Nope. I take it you see something else?” Jack asked.

  “It’s like a stained glass with a very bright light behind it, but with motion,” David said. “It swirls like the spiral you see is turning but it has depth like a whirlpool.”

  Johnson nodded agreement.

  “What sort of a fee do you have in mind for its destruction?” David asked.

  Johnson looked surprised and offended. “I found out how much money you are worth. Do you really need to grub for a few extra dollars to do this? I thought once you saw it you’d want to remove it as a public service. I didn’t take it to my agency. I don’t even want to have it near any of our safe places. So I’d have to pay you out of my pocket. I don’t have anywhere near enough money to be of any interest to you.”

  “I don’t need money,” David agreed, “and yet you are asking me to do something you aren’t able. You’re right, I have plenty of money, but I still have lots of questions you haven’t answered.”

  “I’m still restricted what I can say,” Johnson insisted. “Ask away and I’ll try to help you, but if you ask too much we’ll just take this thing and drop it over an ocean trench.”

  “I’d be more comfortable launching it into the sun,” David said.

  “We don’t have access to a spacecraft,” Johnson said. “We thought about a nuke, but where could we set it off that would not create another huge problem?”

  “So you have access to a nuke,” David surmised. “I think at a minimum I need to know who ‘We’ are I’m doing a favor.”

  “I can only tell you part of that,” Johnson said. “On the US side, we are a small joint service with members from the Department of Energy and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. We have foreign allies who we are constrained from identifying. I’m serious, I can’t even hint at who they are.”

  David looked at him like he was crazy. He knew he wasn’t lying but it seemed bizarre.

  “It would take longer to tell the story than you want to listen,” Johnson said. “Just let me say that if you piss off an old Indian who told you to leave a special place alone, he can lay a world of hurt on you just by refusing to help after you foolishly ignored him. Just like you are threatening to do now.”

  “What did you do to it?” Jack asked. “It looks like a tile that would bust right up.”

  “A diamond saw won’t cut it. A plasma torch or laser won’t melt it and acid doesn’t touch it.”

  “Mind if I try? Jack asked, and pulled out the same big revolver he’d had before.

  “Have at it,” Johnson offered. “If it leaves a mark I’ll be shocked.”

  “Assume it’s going to ricochet,” David warned.

  “Nothing but farm fields for a couple miles that way,” Jack nodded. “If it does bounce off, a ricochet will be flattened and not go all that far anyway. The neighbors around here bang away more than I do, so the noise is no problem.”

  They both stood back. Jack rolled the hammer back and aimed down at the tile at about a forty five degree angle, pointed off towards the back of his lot. David and Johnson both covered their ears. The pistol was still loud and the recoil gave some hint just how powerful. The tile was driven into the dirt slightly and crooked. The flattened slug warbled off end over end. There wasn’t a mark on the tile.

  “Damn. I’m surprised,” Jack admitted.

  “My turn, but I’d like you to move it further away on the grass towards the back of the lot,” David requested.

  Jack made a motion to reach for it, but David stopped him with a quick gesture.

  “I really don’t want you to touch that.”

  Jack nodded and went to the garage, returning with a shovel and moved the tile off a good fifty meters near the edge of the mowed area.

  David sat back in one of the chairs and contemplated it. He gathered as much heat as he could from a huge area of sky. It glowed red hot around the tile and climbed through yellow and white until they couldn’t look at it and David had to observe it in false colors with his eyes closed.

  When he stopped the ground still glowed hot a meter across. They sat there and let it cool before approaching. The tile was still there and Johnson just shuddered.

  David didn’t say anything. He just walked back to the fire pit and took his seat again. This time he called down an electric current from the sky. It glowed like a green funnel of fire in the sky but narrowed down to a natural lightning bolt at the tile with a crack of displaced air and the sharp odor of ozone. Johnson started to get up to go check but David motioned him back to his seat.

  “It’s still there. I can feel it.”

  Jack was goggled eyed at the fireworks. Johnson to his credit didn’t berate David for his failure, he just looked scared.

  “Jack get your shovel would you please?” David asked, and motioned him over. David took the sign he carried in his pocket and laid it face down on the shovel.

  “Lay that right on top of the tile please, and come back,” David requested.

  When Jack deposited it both Johnson and David could see the false lights brighten and shine out of the interface between the two. David looked tired, but he calmly repeated the phrase of power Mrs. Ayers taught him. He didn’t need to look at the sign, he knew where it was. He repeated the phrase elbows on knees to support himself. The false light got brighter beams of light playing from between the opposing objects yet nothing drove them apart. About David’s tenth repetition of the phrase the tile and opposing sign disappeared in a ball of white plasma that drove a fused depression in the dirt and pushed the sod back in a round hump about three meters across. The shock wave slapped them in the face like a living hand, blew Jack’s sliding glass doors into the kitchen in shards, and cracked the bedroom window.

  In sixteen courtrooms and offices of senior politicians across the Eastern states there was a similar flash and explosion over the shoulders of judges and public office holders. There were half again as many in England and France. When it was over six were dead and the survivors were incoherent babbling psychotics or appeared to be in advanced dementia. David and Johnson wouldn’t know about that until much later.

  At Jack’s house, David collapsed in exhaustion. He’d have rolled out of the chair if Jack hadn’t caught him. He
and Johnson carried him in the house and laid him on the sofa. Jack got a blanket and threw across him. He didn’t have to check his vital signs, David was snoring loudly.

  “That may bring the authorities down on us,” Johnson worried.

  “I thought you were the authority in this matter,” Jack said.

  “I never reported what I was doing with the tile. It was too important to chance somebody screwing up and making the wrong call on it,” Johnson said. “That thing was dangerous. Unfortunately, I get the strong impression that some of my superiors who aren’t talented don’t take this seriously.”

  “We didn’t knock over trees or anything that obvious. We’re far enough out in the country that it will be hard to pinpoint just where a loud noise originated. Half the houses are probably empty at this time of day, so if we just keep our mouths shut and don’t do anything to attract attention it should blow over. If anybody comes around door to door let me speak as the homeowner. I’ll stonewall them that we heard nothing and have no idea what they are talking about. I can’t imagine they will search all the properties up and down the road over just a noise and I’m not letting them search the house or back lot without a warrant. I don’t know about you, but I could use a stiff drink,” Jack offered.

  “Please,” Johnson said. When Jack returned with a water glass and bourbon, Johnson had to use both hands to steady it. They sat in silence for several minutes drinking and thinking.

  Outside they hear sirens as a sheriff’s car went down the street looking for the source of the explosion. Not long after a fire truck rumbled by too but without a siren. They went down the road a couple miles and then they returned back the other way together, the police car silent this pass. There wasn’t any indication on the front of the house that anything had happened. With no visible damage, nothing pointed to any one particular home along the rural road, so they went away.

  “Last time he did something like this he slept sixteen hours,” Jack said after awhile. “No point in you hanging around if that concludes your business with him. He’s got your number doesn’t he?”

  “Indeed he does, you should too,” Johnson decided, giving him a card. “Is there anything I can do for you, or anything for him that you’re aware of?”

  “Nah, I’ll have to fix the glass door,” Jack said. He didn’t know about the bedroom window yet. “I’m not poor and if I was, David is made of money and would cover it for me. You go on and tell your friends what happened. When he wakes up he’ll be starved and I’ll have a big meal ready to cook.”

  “Thank you,” Johnson said, thinking they were done and getting up to go.

  “You screwed up you know,” Jack told the agent.

  Johnson wasn’t expecting him to add that.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to visit any trouble upon your home,” Johnson said.

  “Not that,” Jack said, waving the idea away. “You didn’t go straight to your superiors and say you have to recruit this guy when you first met him. Now, it’s obvious he’s way out of your class. I can’t see why he’d want to be recruited now. The nature of government being what it is, I expect eventually you are going to try to tell him what he should or shouldn’t do. You aren’t going to like it at all if the tail starts wagging the dog. He’s doing you favors and what have you done? Seems to me that it’s fortunate he’s a good natured fellow, happy to give you a hand like just now. Not a grouchy old cuss like me.”

  “You may be right,” Johnson admitted, “but I did report it after our first visit and nobody was interested. They seem impressed by other lesser talents. Since you are involved, be aware I didn’t report this artifact he gave me either.” His hand went up and patted his breast pocket. “They’d have it at a secure facility, locked in a safe to study eventually. Neither did I ask permission to bring this problem to him, so I can’t ask the agency to fix the damage we caused to your home.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I could have chased you both off. I probably should have but I have a soft spot for David. I’m thinking it’s a good thing we put paid to that thing if it was that much trouble, but we lucked out you know. That was like a half kilo pack of C4 popping off, but for all any of us knew it could have gone off like a nuke.”

  Johnson nodded agreement. “As you say, we lucked out. Thanks for the drink and your assistance,” he said, and let himself out. Driving off so soon after he had a shot of bourbon, it never even occurred to him that might be a problem after everything else.

  * * *

  The next day David woke up, ate about six thousand calories and surveyed the pit in the back yard. Jack and he filled the depression in, chopped the ring of sod across with the shovel and pulled the resulting wedges back over the bare dirt. After a couple rains it would blend right back in.

  Jack clued David in on just how independent Johnson seemed to be from his organization, and expressed his opinion again that they lucked out not to blow themselves and Atlanta off the map.”

  “Well, they told us when we met that they do what works rather than by the book,” David said. “And you are right, we’re flying blind on a lot of this, but it would be worse to do nothing.”

  It was in the afternoon the day after Johnson called them for help that they started to realize what an unseen depth of action their destruction of that device had precipitated. Some of it could not be kept out of the news and Johnson visited at Jack’s and filled them in on the parts covered up.

  “I’m thinking this was not the entirety of it,” Johnson said. “It’s just one intrusion of the other continuum into our world. I think we will find others. But it’s a start.”

  David was relieved to hear him say that. He was about to try to explain the same idea to the man. Better that Johnson realize it on his own.

  Before Johnson left David tore a sheet off Jack’s grocery list pad on the refrigerator and wrote a number that didn’t appear on his business card.

  “If you every get a text that is just a line of the same number repeated and the call appears to come from an unknown private number, please call that number I just gave you.”

  “I’m supposed to be the secret agent,” Johnson insisted. “Why are you setting up this sort of fancy spy-craft contact?”

  “It’s an agency phone, not your own, isn’t it?” David demanded.

  “Yes,” Johnson said, but left the question hanging between them.

  “I assume they monitor everything you do with it, including location and information searches. You don’t have it on here do you?” David asked, worried for Jack.

  “No, give me a little credit for some skill. It doesn’t have the battery in it and it’s in a metal case.”

  “So, if you see that sort of a message, call me from a safe machine,” David invited.

  “Why did you choose that as a message form?” Johnson asked, still confused.

  “That’s a common type error call when people jam their phone in their pocket and proceed to butt dial it,” David said. “Anybody doing lots of phone surveillance will recognize it and ignore it.”

  “That’s a new one,” Johnson said. “I’ll memorize this and destroy it.”

  * * *

  On the other side, the Queen Mother of her hive called one of her drones before her. He did resemble a shrimp and he had a reflexive movement that would be a sigh in a human. He called his closest friends and transferred his few prized possessions to them. They didn’t ask why he was doing so, they knew. Neither was it appropriate for them to express sympathy or say good-byes. One did not, could not, ever express dissidence. The ability to do so was biologically absent.

  He appeared before the massive form of the queen, her large eyes near as far apart as he could reach to each side. She filled the chamber and would never leave it during her life. No passage out was big enough. Others scurried in and out serving her as he approached her face.

  “Are you the master of the mind net investigating the foul soft beings of the other world which just failed so spectacularly?�
� she demanded of him in a rapid flurry of clicks.

  “I am,” the drone admitted. “We were doing better than the other hives of this sphere trying to pierce the veil of the worlds and then something went terribly wrong. I don’t understand what, but the backlash of the event killed all of them. I am the sole survivor with no workers now.”

  “This is not a problem. We make progress each cycle. We have your records. We shall start over afresh with a new generation group raised to serve this task,” she said. “Approach!”

  He went forward very close although filled with fear to the point of shaking. The desire to live was still an underlying reflex, but one did not refuse the Queen while in her aroma field. It was physically impossible to do so. He leaned forward and could not close his eyes. His kind had no way to do so. He barely felt a twinge of pain as her greater claw severed his head from his body with a crunch. He still served his Queen, but now as a brief snack.

  * * *

  Linda called David from the car and informed him she was waiting at the curb out front. He was dressed casually as instructed. He hadn’t had a new tuxedo made since becoming thinner so it was a good thing they were going casual. He’d started running again before his return to civilization ruined his new physique. He might not gain pounds if he kept stressing himself with his new skills, but he could still get soft and flabby at a new lower weight.

  There was only one vehicle parked in front of his apartments so that had to be her. He hadn’t expected a big pickup truck with dark windows at all. She might be in charge but at least she didn’t get out and hold his door for him. That would have been taking it a bit far and bothered him. It was a double step up to get in the cab. He couldn’t imagine a woman in a skirt doing it. On the plus side it gave him something safe to talk about right away.

  “You come straight from the job site? Got any spare psyches in the bed?” David inquired.

  “I left it open in case we had to haul your ego home,” Linda said.

  David looked out the back window. “Y’all need a bigger truck,” he warned.

  “I love my truck. It’s big enough nobody pushes me around on the road. A single woman in a tiny little car is too much of a target for some unbalanced creeps. I sit up high enough to see what is happening down the road most of the time and it has terrific resale value compared to a sedan. It is sturdier even if you don’t use the extra capacity and it establishes me as culturally Southern.”