Taloned branches clawed at her. The ground beneath was shot through with spidery roots and pointed rocks. She nearly tripped several times.
The sound was getting louder. By now she had recognized Thomas’s voice. He was speaking nervously, tensely…but to whom?
She came to a wall of tightly growing tree trunks and peered through a V-shaped opening. There was a clearing down there, situated at the bottom of a small depression. A bluish light, like that of a black-light, swam about. Thomas was there, his Mad Hatter’s voice climbing up the embankment. He was kneeling before something tall and black.
Panic gripped her. What in God’s name is he doing, playing with himself? She suffered a wave of nausea. Finally she was able to locate a space in the trunks. She made her way down.
“Thomas?” she said. “Is everything all right?”
He didn’t answer. As she got closer, she saw he was naked. His clothes were piled beside his bedroll. She’d never known Thomas to go around in the nude. His personality was something to the contrary of that. The sight of his naked body disturbed her.
He’s lost it, he’s finally gone mad, but people go mad all the time, they snap like a branch underfoot and dive headfirst onto a sharp pole. They’re all going mad like that hag woman back in Philadelphia, and that toothless man in Tennessee who wore coke cans for eyeglasses, and the strange preacher in Boston who lined the highway with animal carcasses and set them on fire.
“Thomas?”
She passed before the fire pit and the flames resembled black and blue construction paper cutouts. Instead of logs there were piles of shiny rocks that seemed to keep burning, painting the forest with their weird blue glow.
“What the fuck…” she whispered. “Thomas, where’d you find these?”
She advanced toward him, seeing only his fat, naked back, hearing only his mindless cries. When she recognized what he was kneeling before, her heart stopped, breath caught in her throat, and gooseflesh erupted on her arms.
No. It couldn’t be that.
The giant black door stood attached to nothing. The corners poked into the branches. The bottom disappeared into the dirt. Just like the doors described by all those folks in those different towns. Shiny, metallic, freestanding—only this one was black instead of gold.
Thomas looked over his shoulder. He grinned, face sweaty. His glasses were cracked in three places. His teeth stretched out like an accordion.
Elaine recoiled. He looks absolutely savage.
Suddenly he was on his feet. His fatty naked flesh sagged off the bones, breasts drooping, belly flabbish and swollen, body supported on bony chicken legs. His narrow phallus hung down like a corpse’s tongue.
“I found it,” he said. “A Golden Door. Me—I found it. Not you, not Diana. Not that hippy philosopher, Ron. The door chose me.”
Images of demons danced through Elaine’s head, cut from all the religious books she had read during her life. She recalled sitting through her father’s sermons, hearing him preach hellfire and brimstone. His voice spoke to her. The rapture took place December 21, 2012, when Jesus called His flock home. He judged those who would be saved, and those who would be damned. Those who would be damned were left on the earth to suffer. Now tell me, Elaine, why were you not chosen? Is it because you have sinned against the Lord? Is it because you are a lesbian?
Thomas was approaching the door. “Aren’t you jealous? I’ll be the first to go through, the first to greet whatever is on the other side.”
“Get away from there,” she said. “You’re crazy. It’s not even gold; it’s black. It’s a fraud, Thomas. It’s something else…”
He wagged his finger. “As usual, your religion is a trickster. I won’t be fooled by a forked tongue.” Then his face grew sad. “Nothing makes sense anymore—nothing in this goddamn world makes any sense!”
He was close to tears. His naked body trembled with emotion, and Elaine suddenly had an insight into the psychology of Thomas Miller. She understood how hard this change had been for him. And she actually pitied him.
He had reached the black door. He was standing with his hand on the doorknob. “On the other side, I’ll have all the inhalers I could want,” he said. Because of the fire, his reflection had become visible in the shiny black surface of the door. He stood looking at it, even reached up to trace the outline of his face.
“Thomas, don’t.”
But already he was turning, opening, and he slipped through, closing the door behind him. A heavy silence followed.
Elaine approached the door. But just as her reflection began to take shape in the shadowy, metal surface, it flew open, releasing a strong, forceful wind. It shook the trees, blew out the fire, even pushed Elaine onto her back.
For a brief second she glimpsed infinite space through the opening. Stars burned. Planets rolled. A cosmic dust was mixing with multicolored clouds to create a vast foggy web, out of which sprang Thomas—wild, alien, and savage—coming straight at her through the dark.
She screamed and shot to her feet, but he was already upon her, his soft fleshy limbs and lizard’s tail groping around her neck, legs, waist. He pushed her down. He resembled something that was both human and reptile in nature, yet not completely one or the other.
“Get the fuck off me!” she screeched. She couldn’t stand the way he gripped her, the way his skin felt: slimy, prickly, and rough, like a crocodile.
She kicked at him and drove her knees into his chest. When she got one of her hands free, she brought her elbow down on what might’ve been the back of his head. Strands of drool oozed down on her, but his grip loosened and she managed to scramble out from under him. She tore up the embankment, into the trees.
She could hear him snapping branches behind her. The only illumination came from the gaseous clouds overhead, and their greenish aura filtered down through the canopy, staining the forest floor.
She caught sight of the campsite. With relief she recognized two figures standing to either side of the smoldering fire.
“Help me!” she cried. “He’s coming; he’s after me, help!”
She flung herself into Ron’s arms and buried her face in his chest. She was sobbing. From the corner of her eye, she saw Diana standing with her legs apart, raising a handgun.
“Is it Thomas?” she asked.
“No,” Elaine replied. “Not Thomas. Not anymore.”
Then she closed her eyes, recoiling when the nine loud thunder-bursts echoed through the night. Finally she lifted her head and turned to face her lover. “Where the hell did you get that?”
Diana was about to say something but Ron answered for her. “I gave it to her. To carry, to keep charge over…and to use if it became necessary.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want Thomas knowing about it. At the same time, I didn’t want all of us knowing about it except Thomas. Understand?” She laughed at his explanation and shook her head before getting transferred to Diana’s arms. Ron took the gun and went to investigate the body.
***
When she awoke the next morning, curled in her sleeping bag, the fire was completely out. It looked like someone had been digging in the ashes. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. Ron wasn’t where he should be, but when she looked again she saw him coming out of the trees.
“What happened?” she asked. Diana began to stir.
He tossed something into the fire pit. Instantly, a thick black cloud wafted into the air, and Elaine covered her nose and mouth.
When it cleared, she peered into the ashes. A rubbery hunk of bright green flesh lay on its side in the pit. She knew at once it was part of Thomas—well, part of what he’d become.
“I dragged his body into the trees,” Ron said. “Burned it.” He pointed to the line of smoke twisting up toward the sky.
“Did you see the door?” Elaine asked.
He frowned. “What door?” Then his eyes widened. “A Golden Door?”
“Not a Golden Door. Something e
lse. A Black Door.”
Diana sat up holding her sleeping bag. The nipples on her small breasts poked through the fabric of her shirt. She was looking at Elaine.
“Tell us,” Ron said.
Elaine sighed, then proceeded to tell them everything that had happened since last night. When she finished, she looked to Ron for validation. “Tell me I’m not crazy.”
Ron was in his thinking pose, stroking his chin. He said, “Every action in the universe has an equal and opposite reaction. I’d say that the Black Doors are a negative response to the Golden Doors. It’s reality’s way of balancing the scales. Good and evil, dark and light, life and death, hot and cold—that sort of thing.”
“What does it mean?” Diana asked.
Ron smiled. “It means we stay the hell away from Black Doors.” He bent, started packing up his things.
***
An hour later they were on the highway. Three now instead of four. The wooded hills to either side oscillated between green and gray, sometimes lush and alive, mostly ashen and dead.
Elaine spent a lot of her time looking at the sky. She’d made a habit of it. The greens, the reds, the oranges, clouds like cotton candy sweeping across the heavens. It was not as it once had been: predictable. These days, anything could happen up there.
After a while they stopped and sought refuge in one of the abandoned cars. Sitting in the cab gave their lungs a break from the noxious air. They ate stale bread and a can of baked beans Ron had been saving. Other travelers were moving down the highway. Elaine watched them out the passenger window.
“Now this,” Ron said, fishing out the Advair inhaler. He took a long, deep inhalation, then passed it to Elaine. She clicked back the tiny blue lever, sucked in the crystalline powder, and handed it to Diana. They waited fifteen minutes until the highway was clear, and then continued on their way. They didn’t get very far.
“Intruder, three o’clock,” Ron hissed.
Elaine turned to see a figure running toward them through the grass. A male waving arms above his head, calling out, trying to get their attention.
They stopped. Ron suddenly wheeled toward Diana, thrusting the handgun down the front of her jeans. He yanked her shirt over it. “Here. You seem to have the most luck with this. Watch our backs?”
The thin brunette gave a solemn, militant nod.
“You there, travelers!” the man said, reaching the road, panting and out of breath. “I have secret knowledge to bestow.”
Ron stepped forward. “What makes you think we need secret knowledge?”
The man knit his brows. He was leathery and grotesquely thin. His clothes were oily and they clung to his gaunt frame. He had long, wiry hair and a full beard, and his eyes displayed that haunted look so common in people now. “Everyone needs secret knowledge during the Galactic Alignment,” he said.
“What do you know of the Galactic Alignment?” Elaine asked, surprised. She’d only heard that term among academics.
“Much,” he said, giving her a strange look. He tried taking their hands but they shook him off. Then he wheeled and headed into the grass, signaling them to follow. “Come on, friends, this way. The master is in the trees, by the door!” He turned, continuing into the forest.
“I don’t like it,” Diana said. She was fingering the gun handle through her shirt.
“But he claims there is a door,” Ron said. “It’s worth checking out.” He looked at Elaine. “You up for it?”
She nodded. Together they moved off the highway.
***
A group of humans had gathered in the forest. Almost twenty in all. They, like the impish man who had approached them, were dirty and poorly dressed. Many had curious black war paint smeared under their eyes.
At the front of the assemblage, perching atop a hacked tree stump, was a tiny gnarled man sporting a long gray beard. No more than five feet tall, he wore a billowy white robe and clutched a bamboo staff. His expression was calm, sagely.
At his rear, hovering in the branches, was a Black Door.
Ron took one look at the hovering door and said, “That settles that,” and turned to leave.
“Wait,” Elaine said, stopping him. “Let’s hear what he has to say.”
He sighed, but swung back around. “I already know what he’s going to say. He’s going to ask us if we’ve accepted Jesus Christ into our hearts.”
The old man on the stump quieted the crowd by thumping his staff three times. Each face gazed up at him. “Time is no longer real,” he began, “at least not for us, not anymore. When the Maya Long Count Calendar reached its climax on December 21, 2012, reality as we knew it came to a grinding halt. The universe changed. Planet Earth was fixed into a certain alignment with the sun and the center of the Milky Way. We call this the Galactic Alignment.”
He paused. Those hooded eyes, frayed round the edges with bristling gray hair, seemed to take account of everyone in attendance. He wasn’t just looking at them; he was reading them.
He continued, “When the sun rose on December 21, 2012, the winter solstice, it rose on a new galactic configuration. The sun, our planet’s source of light and energy, had eclipsed us and blocked out the center of the Milky Way, the source of life-giving for our entire species. For the first time in history, we were cut off from that source. So, in essence, we were cut off from God.
“Once this happened, a series of significant changes occurred. First, the planet flipped end over end as the magnetic poles switched. This reversal made it so that all forms of electricity—as we were accustomed to using—became void. This defied the laws of science and there can be no accounting for it.”
“Now comes the Jesus part,” Ron said, elbowing Elaine. He was joking, of course. Pretty much the entire population had been exposed to an explanation in one form or another as to what had happened. Jesus was a popular one. Galactic Alignment was more obscure.
“The second significant change was the cessation of time,” he said. “This also defied rational science. When the Maya Long Count Calendar ended, the door to a new dimension—a timeless dimension—opened, and an incalculable number of persons passed through. For them—rather, for us—reality stood still. For everyone else…reality went on as normal, except that now a percentage of the population had vanished. That would be Dimension A, or the normal dimension of space-time. The dimension we exist in, Dimension B, is outside of space-time.”
Ron grunted, stroking his chin. “That’s an interesting approach, eh?”
“It’s like the Rapture,” Elaine said, prompting Diana to look at her. Diana hated when she mentioned Christian ideology. She had her own reasons for disliking it, namely its condemnation of homosexuality.
But Elaine was on to something. “Think about it,” she said. “If, on December 21, millions of people suddenly disappeared, then it would be just as the Bible predicted—the Rapture, God’s taking away of the saved.”
Ron grunted. “Yes but it remains to be determined who, in fact, are the raptured ones, and who are the damned ones. Both dimensions, arguably, could be considered hell on earth.”
The old man suddenly pointed at Elaine, his eyes burning into her. “You there. Who did you lose that day?”
She swallowed hard. Everyone was looking at her. “I lost my son, Jamie.”
He nodded, then put the same question to Diana. At first she didn’t answer, but at last she consented, saying, “Alonso, my husband.” Elaine noticed tears in her eyes.
The old man went around the crowd asking people to name who they had lost. There were so many. He finished by confessing that he had lost a daughter and a grandson on December 21.
He aimed his staff at the floating Black Door. “Which leads us to the phenomenon that has brought you all here. These Golden Doors we keep hearing about, what are they? Can anyone say for sure? And what about these Black Doors?”
He chuckled, paused as if thinking, then, “I, Bartholomew Radcliffe Elphinstones, stand here today claiming to know the answer.
And I will share it with all of you.”
A gasp swept through the crowd, but he silenced it with a wave of his staff. He said, “The doors—like the door that opened on December 21, 2012—are passageways between dimensions. The Black Doors lead to Hell for the soul, the pain of being, eternal suffering, a futile existence.”
“And the Golden Doors?” shouted someone.
“The Golden Doors lead to the Next Age—the Golden Age—the highest degree of human consciousness. They lead to paradise, the Garden of Eden, Heaven in the most profoundest sense of the word.”
“Which one leads to our old reality,” shouted another, “back to Dimension A?”
2013: The Aftermath Page 17