Signalz

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Hey, Red Riding Hood,” said boozy male voice. “I dig the cape.”

  An unshaven man in a short jacket and a fedora set at a rakish angle stepped out of the shadows and approached us.

  I tugged on Ellie’s sleeve. “Let’s go.”

  But Ellie stood firm, muttering something that sounded like, Right on schedule.

  “Good evening, sir,” she said. “Could you direct us to the boardwalk?”

  “Sure can.” He stopped two feet before us. “Gimme your fancy red cape and I’ll guide you there myself.”

  It occurred to me that he was seeing the red cape I’d seen in flashes throughout our trip.

  “I’m afraid I can’t give up Blanky.”

  “We ain’t hagglin’, little girl.” A knife with a nasty-looking blade appeared in his hand. “Hand it over.”

  I wanted to run but I couldn’t leave Ellie.

  “I’ve had Blanky all my life.”

  He waved the blade toward me. “This looks like your mother. You’ve had her all your life too, right? How’s about I cut her and we see if you still wanna keep your cape?”

  Ellie tsked. “Well, since you put it that way.”

  She untied the blanket from around her neck and handed it over. I noticed that her back was clear of the creatures. I glanced at Blanky and saw its entire underside massed with kiddlies.

  “Ellie…”

  “Mother…” A warning tone.

  I zipped my lips.

  The man had slipped the knife into his belt and was swinging Blanky over his shoulders, then knotting it around his neck.

  “You know, I used to be quite the fashion plate. I had a stable of the finest girls on the street. Then everything went south for me. But I can still look sharp, right? I can—”

  His expression suddenly changed—to puzzled, then concerned.

  “What the—?”

  He started twisting and clawing at his back. He staggered in a circle as he tried to untie Blanky but his fingers fumbled futilely at the knot.

  When he turned back to us his eyes were black with crawling things and wriggling legs. He opened his mouth but it was filled with the same. His hands fell to his sides as he dropped to his knees; he swayed back and forth once or twice, then he toppled face-first onto the sidewalk where he lay still. Not a twitch, not a groan. He looked shrunken inside his clothes. His right eye socket—empty now—was visible.

  I stared in open-mouthed shock. No doubt he was dead.

  “Ellie?” I said when I found my voice, a voice that sounded like someone else’s. “What happened?”

  “The kiddlies defended us. It just so happened they were hungry as well. They have no taste for skin and bone, but they like everything else.”

  I closed my eyes and swallowed a surge of bile. She was telling me that he was—quite literally—little more than a bag of bones now.

  A couple of commuters hurried by, barely looking at him. Ellie removed Blanky from his corpse—I couldn’t help but notice the black, writhing mass clinging to its underside—and retied it around her neck. I shuddered at the thought of those things against my own back.

  “Come,” she said. “The sunrise awaits.”

  3

  I barely remember the trek up Stillwell Avenue to the boardwalk. Vague images of Nathan’s signs and that grinning Steeplechase Face everywhere, a rollercoaster to my left, the bright orange height of the defunct Parachute Jump looming to my right, and finally a locked-up pavilion overlooking the beach and the sparkling water.

  “Excellent!” she said, spreading her arms toward the limitless expanse of pristine sky. “A beautiful morning for the show.”

  I was too numb with shock and, I confess, sick fear to appreciate the weather. A man had died back there. A scum-of-the-earth man, a former pimp from what he’d said, but a human being nonetheless, and he’d been devoured from the inside by Ellie’s kiddlies.

  And Ellie herself…in the pre-dawn light I could see how her face had filled out and her cheeks now showed a rosy glow.

  I realized to my horror that the kiddlies had shared their bounty. Ellie had fed too.

  She pointed west, past the Parachute Jump. “See that purplish sky just above the horizon? That’s called ‘Earth shadow,’ which is exactly what it is—a shadow cast by the curve of the eastern horizon before the sun rises above it. And see that pink band above that? That’s the sun lighting up the higher levels of the atmosphere. It’s called the Belt of Venus.”

  “Did you learn this in your coma too?”

  “No, Mother,” she said, her tone arid. “In Mister Benson’s astronomy class. What time on your phone?”

  I checked. “Five twenty.”

  She pointed east. “The sun is supposed to appear in one minute.”

  We waited. A minute passed, then two, then three…and no sun.

  “Well, Ellie, either my phone’s wrong or your information is wrong.”

  “Before I woke you, I checked with the U.S. Naval Observatory. Using Eastern Standard Time, it lists today’s sunrise at this latitude and longitude at four twenty-one. Since we’re in Daylight Saving, I had to add an hour.”

  Five twenty-five and still no sun.

  “This is impossible, Ellie. The sun’s never late, and the days are supposed to be getting longer, not shorter.”

  My phone was reading five twenty-six when a crimson crescent began to peek over the horizon.

  “There!” she cried, pointing. “There it is! A wonderful five minutes late! It’s begun, Mother! It’s truly begun!”

  For a few seconds her spider legs appeared—not hazy and ghostly, but sharp and solid enough to click when they touched. They materialized and moved around, then disappeared, all without disturbing Blanky’s fabric. But they weren’t responsible for the wave of deep unease coursing through me—the sun’s tardiness triggered that.

  “You knew the sun was going to be late? How?” But I knew the answer.

  “I believe I spoke it aloud many times in my coma: It will begin in the Heavens…”

  “‘And end in the Earth.’ Spoke? You’d shout it. But what—?”

  She gestured again toward the rising sun. “As predicted, it has begun in the Heavens. This morning the sun rose late. Tonight it will set early. Tomorrow morning it will rise even later. Night is falling, Mother. The Change has begun. His time is at hand.”

  “Who’s time?”

  “Why, the One’s, of course.”

  “The One what?”

  She looked at the rising sun. “A long story, Mother. Come, you and I will walk the boards, as they say, and I will tell you all about it before I have to return to Manhattan.”

  “‘Have to’?”

  She seemed to have all sorts of frames of reference to which I had no clue—more coma learning, I assumed.

  “A fraternal order will have need of my services later this morning, but we have plenty of time before I’m due there.”

  HARI

  Hari screamed. She’d sworn to herself that she wouldn’t, but when the shiny black tendril extruded through the windshield, the scream burst free unbidden.

  They’d tried everything they could think of, even going so far as to start the engine and drive blindly, accelerating, then jerking to a halt in an effort to dislodge the tarry clumps. But no use. They’d somehow glued themselves to the doors and windows and weren’t leaving.

  She’d watched with growing horror as the acid they secreted ate away at the window glass—not just the dozen or so spots on the windshield, but the side and rear windows as well. On the upside, it proved an agonizingly slow process that took hours upon hours; on the downside, the clumps seemed to have infinite patience.

  Adding to the terror was the frustration of watching the clock creep toward 5:30. If, as they predicted and hoped, the passage reopened around that time, they’d have no way of knowing. And even if by some chance they did know, they wouldn’t be able to reach it driving blind.

  So they sat and watched the
deepening pocks on the glass. Only a matter of time before—

  And then it happened. The glass thinned to the point where the outside pressure of the clumps penetrated in one…two…three places, allowing tendrils to writhe through. They undulated wildly, angling this way and that as if sniffing the air in search of prey.

  Hari pressed herself back as far as the seat cushion would allow. For a rapid heartbeat or two she thought she might have confused the thing, but then, after freezing for an instant, it darted toward her face.

  That was when she screamed. She raised her hands in defense and the tendril tip fastened onto her forearm like cold dry lips in an obscene kiss.

  “Donny!”

  But he was tangled with two of them. And then a fourth and a fifth broke through, searching for nourishment or whatever it was they wanted. A second tendril fastened onto her other arm and Hari screamed again in plain, flat-out horror and despair because she saw their doom snaking all around them and no way to fight back and—

  What?

  The tendrils stopped their writhing and sucking and froze in position. Then they abruptly retracted through the holes in the glass. As they slid off the windshield, the plateau became visible again. The aurora was gone. The sky had lightened while they were under attack, but they hadn’t had a clue. And now the huge red sun was cresting the mountaintops. Despite the alienness of the whole scene, Hari thought she’d never seen anything so beautiful.

  “Sunrise…” Donny said, breathless. “You think that’s it? Those things only come out at night?”

  Hari was checking her forearms. The sucking tips of the tendrils hadn’t had a chance to break the skin, but…

  “I’ve got hickies!”

  Donny pointed through the Swiss-cheesed windshield. “Hey, look at the oil slick thingies.”

  The black clumps were flattening themselves, then seeping into the ground like liquid, leaving no trace.

  “That’s why we had no idea they were here,” Hari said. A glance in the rearview mirror made her jerk upright in her seat. “The passage! It’s opening!”

  She started the engine, rammed into drive, and started a tire-screeching 180 turn.

  “Easy, easy,” Donny said. “Let’s make sure it’s completely open before we bowl into it.”

  Hari could appreciate his concern. The area of the cliff wall that was opening had a misty look that darkened as the red sunlight brightened.

  “That’s it!” Donny cried. “The star’s light triggers the passage.”

  Hari checked the rearview again. The big red ball was halfway risen. She slowed the Tahoe.

  “Let’s hope so. I’ll keep us at a crawl until it fully clears the horizon. If you’re right, we should be good then.”

  The opening darkened and deepened as more and more of the sun came into view. When it finally looked again like it had when they’d arrived, Hari eased forward and into the passage. A few minutes later they emerged onto a wooded mountainside with their own sun, smaller and gloriously yellow, sitting above a forested horizon.

  Hari paused for a moment to drink in the delicious familiarity, then turned downhill and drove as fast as she dared to get off this mountain before the sheriff and the convoy arrived to drop off another load. She kept a death grip on the steering wheel and didn’t relax until they turned onto Taconic Trail.

  “What happened to us back there?” she said, slumping in her seat. “Were we really on another planet being attacked by living oil slicks? Or did someone slip some LSD into our morning coffee?”

  Donny stuck an index finger through one of the holes in the windshield.

  “We didn’t hallucinate these. And—oh, Christ. Look at the hood!”

  Hari had been concentrating so much on the twisty mountain road she hadn’t noticed how large patches of the car’s paint job had been corroded away.

  “Those things must have been secreting all sorts of acids. How do we explain this to the rental folks?”

  “Vandals,” Donny said. “Antifa vandals thought we were Republicans and attacked us with acid. Works for me.”

  As they neared the New York-Massachusetts border, they came upon a convoy of a dozen or so trucks hauling freight and tanker trailers toward Norum Hill.

  “We never got a chance to talk about what they might be up to,” Donny said.

  Hari had barely had time to think, what with all that had happened, but now…

  “Tons of freeze-dried food and water to reconstitute it. Pretty obvious they’re planning on feeding people—either a select group for a long time, or a fair-sized population for a short time. Either way, it’s pretty clear they’re expecting an apocalypse.”

  “But what kind? Environmental? Economic? Viral? Zombies? What?”

  “Check the radio,” she said. “See if anything happened while we were out of touch. Try AM.”

  “AM?” Donny made a face. “I didn’t think anyone still listened to AM.”

  “It’s your best chance of finding an all-news station.”

  After a few tries with the scan button it stopped on 810 where they suffered through traffic and weather and sports until Donny reached for the tuner. But Hari grabbed his hand when she heard…

  “Did the sun rise late today? Most people don’t pay that close attention, but the folks at the National Weather Service do. That’s their job. And Doctor Claire Berkley, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, says that the sun did indeed rise late over Washington, DC this morning—five minutes and eight-point-two-two seconds late, to be precise. Doctor Berkley says it rose late by exactly the same interval at the Greenwich Observatory in England as well, and that it has been rising late all over the world. When pressed for an answer she stated:

  “‘The only imaginable cause would be a shift in the Earth’s axis, which would, conversely, cause an earlier sunrise in the southern hemisphere. But sunrise was late all over the globe, and Earth’s axis is unchanged.’

  “Doctor Berkley said she had no explanation yet. We will be following this incredible story. Meanwhile, in other news…”

  “Holy shit!” Donny said. “The sun rose late? Late?”

  Hari felt a chill, which graduated to tremors as she saw all the dominoes falling. Fearing she’d lose control of the car, she pulled onto the shoulder and skidded to a stop.

  “What’s the matter? You okay?”

  She could only shake her head. Not okay. Not okay at all.

  “Hari, are you gonna be sick?”

  She found her voice. “What was that mantra you mentioned yesterday, the one in the Septimus Foundation emails?”

  Now, Donny looked a little sick himself. “‘It will begin in the Heavens…’”

  “I think that’s just what happened while we were trapped in Wherever: It began in the Heavens. This is what the Septimus folks have been preparing for.”

  “The sun rising late?”

  “I can’t see it being a one-time thing. Think about it: the sun rises progressively later every day when it’s supposed to be rising earlier. What’s the fallout from that?”

  “Well, less daylight, for sure.”

  “Which means crop failures, Donny. Not just local—worldwide. And worldwide crop failures lead to worldwide famine. And how do you prepare for worldwide famine?”

  Donny’s voice was very small. “Stockpile food.”

  “Right. For your own people and for others you want to control. When the world goes hungry, the guy serving lunch calls the shots. They’ve seen this coming and they’ve been preparing.”

  “We’ve got to tell Art.”

  “Tell Art?” She heard her voice rising but couldn’t stop it. “Sure. Tell Art so he can sell off his stocks and collect all that nice cash—for what? If this is going to go like they think, it’s the end of the fucking world, Donny, or at least the end of life as we know it! We’ve got signals from outer space or beyond outer space shooting into the Earth and maybe causing all this. We’ve got a hole through a mountain back the
re that leads to another planet! What if that passage doesn’t close one time and all those tar-clump things decide to migrate to this side? They like the dark and now daylight is shrinking! We are fucked, Donny! Royally fucked!”

  She realized she was screaming and shut up.

  “Don’t lose it, Hari,” Donny said with a wide-eyed stare. “Please don’t lose it. You’re the most together woman I’ve ever known—make that person I’ve ever known. If you can’t hold it together—”

  “I’m okay. Just had to vent a little. I’m okay now.”

  Not true. She wasn’t sure she’d ever be okay again—not with what the future promised. But she felt better. The venting had helped some, but only a little. The apocalypse loomed. She had to find her own way to deal with it.

  She put the Tahoe in gear and got rolling again.

  “You have a plan?” Donny said.

  “I’m working on one.”

  The signals…somehow the signals were key. Or at least a starting point.

  “I can’t stop thinking about those Septimus sonsabitches,” Donny said. “They knew this was coming but they kept it to themselves. Coulda warned the world but instead they’re angling to take advantage of the shit storm. Someone needs to take them down.”

  An uncomfortable thought struck Hari. “You don’t happen to own a gun, do you?”

  A short harsh laugh. “No. I’m a lover, not a fighter. I couldn’t pull a trigger on man nor beast. But someone oughta do something.”

  “Well, if you’ll pardon the cliché, what goes around tends to come around.”

  He shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t come around unless someone makes it come around.”

  Hari decided then she liked him. Liked him a lot.

  They spent the rest of the trip in relative silence. Hari didn’t know what Donny was thinking, but her own thoughts kept returning to those signals. She remembered the email address that sent the reports because it included an iconic Central Park West apartment building—almost as iconic as the Dakota: Burbank@theallard.com. She’d pay a visit to the Allard as soon as she made it back to the city. She hoped “Burbank” referred to a person and not the Los Angeles suburb, because she had a ton of questions about the signals, and was pretty sure this Burbank had the answers.