by Steven Welch
Another flash. They were getting closer, and the flash was brighter now, more distinct.
There were no clouds but there was something black that towered in the distance.
The flash was coming from the tall blackness.
Minutes passed and as they did Elise and Taariq could see more detail. There was something tall and black moving along the horizon and it carried the flashes of light with it. The light was a blinding white and green and looked for all the world like lightning.
Elise couldn’t hear the thunder if there was any over the throaty rumble of the truck’s engine.
“Damn. That’s a tornado,” she said.
“What’s a tornado?”
“A bad storm.”
Elise stopped the truck and reached into her backpack. A pair of binoculars.
Through the lens she could see a twisting, gyrating tower of blackness that was slowly ripping across the desert to the west. There were no clouds above the ebony column, only stars, and the blackness rippled with light. Every few moments the light burst and revealed the massive dust storm that trailed along behind the tornado.
“Doesn’t make sense,” she said, “no other clouds, not a single cloud in the sky. It’s like a dust devil but huge.”
“It’s getting bigger,” said Taariq.
“No. I think it’s getting closer.”
THE BLACK PILLAR
The Egyptian desert floor rattled the truck. The windows vibrated and the barrels of fuel made drumming sounds against the metal of the truck bed.
There was a noise now, a low tone like a deep moan, and it was getting louder by the second.
The black tornado came along the highway and it moved toward them, expanding as it came.
Elise gambled that the sand here was hard to either side of the road and she knew the truck’s tires were fat. Her hands worked the clutch and her feet feathered the pedals as they dropped off of the asphalt.
“Let’s go around that,” she said.
“Probably a good idea.”
“It’s moving really fast.”
They took the desert slowly at first to make sure that the tires would grip and that the engine had the torque to do the job. Elise’s eyes shifted between the path ahead and the towering column of darkness that was getting closer by the second.
The roar of the black tornado was louder than the truck. The thing was a hundred meters tall and all the desert around its base was a storm of dust and debris as it moved. The flashes of light rippled along and through and inside the ebony column and revealed the fast rotating winds. Elise wanted no part of it, whatever it was, and she steered wide into the desert.
“There’s another one,” Taariq said, and he had to shout to be heard.
A smaller black column appeared to the east, not in their direct path but close enough. Blue green light rippled along its winds. And then there was another of the storms, this time off to the north.
“Black dust devils. They’re all over the place.”
There were at least five of the things in sight now, the largest, the first they had seen, a hundred meters high, the smallest looked to be no bigger than the truck.
“I’ve seen something like them,” Elise said, “in Paris, in sandstorms there. Static electricity makes it look like lightning. I think that’s what’s happening.”
She jammed the pedal to the floor and the engine roared. They were in a metal cabin on wheels on an endless plain of sand and rock and there was no running from the line of tornadoes.
“We’re going through. Hold on.”
The columns of black debris and lightning loomed larger and larger as they came and now they were close enough to see them, to see them really well.
The blackness of the nearest tornado was alive with energy, the tendrils of electricity writhed in the twisting winds. The desert at the root of the tornado was rippling with flashes of blinding light. Elise could feel the static charge even in the air inside the truck and she was afraid to touch metal for fear of being shocked. The desert was being consumed at the base of the tower of blackness and it looked as if the ground was being shredded into something more than dirt and rock. The ground looked like a fabric that was being torn and in each thread of the earth there was a blinding, coruscating tendril of energy.
A great black hand was shredding the fabric of the world.
She tried to speak, but the sound was deafening now. Their ears popped with the change in pressure around them. The truck raced closer and to the west of the largest of the storms but there was another closer to their right that grew taller as it went. Elise steered their vehicle close enough to the wall of destruction that she could see into the winds.
There was a pattern of shapes and images in the tornado’s wall and it looked to Elise as if she could see beyond the blackness into other worlds.
She wanted to say “what the hell” but the air in the truck cabin was thin and the sound of the tornado was deafening.
An object slammed into the passenger side glass and left a sticky streak where it went. Taariq’s face was pale and his mouth was wide.
Something thumped hard on the truck roof and a small hand appeared, grasping, clutching, trying to find hold along the windshield and then failing.
A face. A face with many eyes and skin as dark as coal. The hand’s fingers were long, and the nails were knives.
Elise cursed. The thing that slammed down onto the roof was now on the hood of the truck. It was thin and naked and clung to the edge of the hood with desperate strength, a demon child with many eyes and teeth like knitting needles.
She had seen its kind before when she was a child. This one was young and small but no less horrifying.
This was a Child of Many Eyes and it would rip her if it could reach her with those long fingers and those shining teeth.
Elise slammed on the brakes as she twisted the wheel and the thing went flying off into the night.
The tornado closest to them was only yards away. The sound was deafening. Elise hit the peddle again and the truck jolted forward.
She could see into the wall of the storm. There was wind, yes, and debris, but there were other things in that column of black. Threads of energy knotting and unknotting, weaving and coming undone, rips in the blackness that revealed light and in that light Elise thought she could see so many things. In the flashes of light, in the rips that spawned and then disappeared within the wall of the tornado, Elise saw other worlds. There was a daylight field, then a frozen pond against a green sky, then a brick wall along which were torches and chains, then a woman holding a child as she walked a wooded path into some distant night.
There were other worlds, other realities, a shifting blur of things that should not be there but somehow were.
She focused on breathing. The air was so thin that she could barely catch her breath and Elise knew if she didn’t drive and drive fast she would die. She thought she heard Taariq screaming, but she stared straight ahead and slammed the accelerator.
A wall of black storm, then a distant shore on a sunny day, then the blackness again, then an office full of women who wore nothing but green, then blackness. So many worlds revealed in the heart of the storm.
She looked forward and there was a family in the high beams.
Elise jerked the wheel again. Three figures ran along the desert floor and they were silhouettes in the truck’s head lamps in the instant before the vehicle shuddered to the left.
Elise looked for them again. Another hallucination?
No. A tall figure in the darkness, one slightly smaller, and another that must have been a child.
They ran, holding hands as they went.
Taariq struck her hard on the shoulder. She couldn’t hear him but he was pointing forward as if to say “let’s get out of here now.”
The family. They must need help. There had been a child.
Elise scanned the storm-swept night. The nearest tornado was getting closer. She couldn’t see the family i
n the maelstrom.
She was out of the truck and running before she could think. Elise nearly fell as she stepped onto the desert floor but kept her balance in the storm and spun in circles.
Where were they? The wind slapped her like a living thing. The sand was painful, and the pressure made her ears hurt.
Where?
Three small figures in the darkness. Perhaps a mother, a father, and a child. Elise tried to scream to them but she couldn’t even hear herself in the storm. The figures looked human but were their heads too large? There was something strange about them, something that didn’t look natural. Another tornado appeared in front of the three figures, rippling with lightning, and it sucked the three strange figures up into its blackness like an animal eating its prey.
Elise ran back to the truck and was accelerating almost before her back was in the seat. The door was open but she didn’t care.
The wall of the storm was next to them and she could see so many worlds in the endless strings that made up its winds.
She slammed the driver’s side door hard just as the storm enveloped them and the truck was shrouded in the darkness and violence of the wind.
The tires found their grip and the deafening sound of the tornado disappeared in an instant.
What? They were no longer in the desert at night. There was no tornado. Everything around them changed, and they were somewhere else entirely.
They drove through a cornfield under a bright blue sky. The cornstalks whipped and thrashed the truck and birds, frightened out of their hiding spots, burst into the surrounding sky.
It was not night; it was day, and it was not the desert, it was a cornfield under a blue sky that stretched as far as the eye could see.
And then, blackness, the uneven rubble of the desert under their tires, and the horrible thunder of the storm once again swept over them.
They were in the tornado and the truck lifted. Elise felt the tires lose their grip on the desert floor and the cab of the truck tilted back. She pulled her hands from the wheel and clutched the hot plastic of the dashboard with all of her strength.
The truck slammed down hard. The tornado passed over them and the tires found their grip again.
Taariq screamed, the Octo-Thing rang his little warning bell, and Elise drove hard until they were beyond the line of tornadoes and the night sky opened beyond.
THE REST STOP
Elise woke when a hot ray of sunlight touched her face.
She stretched and empty candy bar wrappers made rustling sounds on the dusty tile floor. It took a moment for her eyes to focus. She was tired, and the sleep had been hard.
Yes. There was the truck in the parking lot. She could see it through the broken glass of the large window by the vending machine. Her backpack had been her pillow. The Octo-Thing snored softly in the darkness under the chair to her side.
The gadget on her wrist functioned as a GPS but Elise knew someday a satellite would burn up in the atmosphere and Jules would go blind. Anyway, a GPS was nice at that moment but not essential. The big green sign by the side of the road as they had pulled into the border rest stop had told her what she’d need to know in English and in Arabic.
Cairo was only two hundred kilometers away.
The terrible morning taste in her mouth was a gritty residue of desert dust and old candy bars she’d found in the machine. What if I kiss him again? My breath must be rank, she thought, then made a face because this was not something she’d ever considered before but now it was top of mind and that was really strange. Idiot, she said lightly. Still, it’s a terrible taste. She swished from a bottle of water and stood. Her legs were still shaking from the adrenalin rush of the night storm.
“Hellnado Plain,” she said with a smile, “the terrors of Hellnado Plain. A new adventure.”
Elise walked outside. The morning was young, so the air was still cool. She looked around at the old rest stop. It stretched across both sides of the highway and there was a cafe on a second level connected by a walkway. One side had welcomed visitors to Egypt, the other to Jordan. Beyond there were faded old gas pumps under a fallen metal roof and a cinder block series of guard shacks.
“Hey,” said Taariq. She jumped a little. She hadn’t heard him approach.
“Yeah, hey,” said Elise. He looked tired and his face was filthy from the dust of their journey through the Jordanian desert. Elise offered him her water bottle. He waved her off.
“I found some bottles inside. Thanks though.”
“This place will work for a few hours. Can’t drive during the day. Too hot. I’m going back to sleep.”
Taariq sat down in the dirt where there had once been a parking space for tourists.
“What the hell was that? What did we see last night?” he asked.
Elise dropped down next to him.
“I made up a name for it. Hellnado Plain. Those weren’t just tornadoes. They were hellnados. Get it?”
Taariq didn’t laugh.
“Sorry. Yeah. Scary. And I really don’t know. I don’t know how you can have tornadoes on a clear night and I don’t know, I mean, I don’t understand what they really were.”
“But it was real.”
“It was real.” Elise pulled a cornstalk from her blue vest.
“This was stuck in the truck’s grill,” she said.
“It was like the tornadoes took us someplace else. I saw other places inside,” Taariq said and then his voice drifted away and he shook his head.
“We saw the same thing,” said Elise.
“When I looked at them it was like they were curtains, ripped curtains, and through the rips there were other places.”
“Awesome, right?”
Taariq looked at Elise and his eyes were wide with fear.
“No. Not at all.” He stood quickly and walked off toward the rest stop cafeteria.
Elise watched him go.
“Well, I think it was fantastic,” she said.
Elise rested and sketched until the sun set and then they loaded up the truck and again hit the road. There was beauty there, beauty in the low rumble of the engine as it fired, the tires on the sand and gravel, the night wind as it blew past. Elise drove while Taariq slept, her arm out the window and waving in the breeze. They passed a few signs of the old world along the way but mostly the desert was its endless expanse of sand and shrub under an indigo sky pulsing with stars. Debris on the road and the truck’s life blood of garage brewed fuel kept the speed low and by Elise’s calculations they would reach the outskirts of Cairo as the sun rose.
The Octo-Thing played a soft song on his tiny violin. The strange little cephalopod was curled under Elise’s seat and the music made her smile as she drove. She did not know. She had never known where he found his tunes. Were they songs of his own creation? Were they songs common on his world? They were beautiful. Elise stared out at the stars and wondered where the planet of the Octo-Thing might have been in that vest web, in that eternal and endless fabric of suns. She had been there and back but she had not traveled through space and time so perhaps that world wasn’t even beyond. Perhaps it was under, or within, or perhaps she had never been? No. There was a land-dwelling octopus that played the violin at her feet. Elise was fairly confident that proved the existence of the place called Orcanum, a world of water she had visited, where she saw friends die, and where she met a God the size of a mountain. He was living proof.
Elise looked at Taariq. There was a glow from dashboard lights in the truck cabin on his face as he slept. She liked how his hair framed his face, the softness of his skin, even the juniper bush smoke smell of his clothes.
“I know you’re lying,” she said so low that even if he had been awake, he might not have heard.
Her left hand made swimming motions in the wind outside of the truck cabin, her right was tight and high on the wheel.
Taariq stirred in his sleep and Elise fell quiet and continued to wave her hand into the wind.
THE SEWERS OF PARIS
Yes, Zuzu was bleeding out but there was no better place to do so than Paris.
Paris was born as a tiny village two thousand years ago on the Isle de La Cite. This spit of land in the middle of The Seine wasn’t much to speak of at first but the location was good for fishing and for trade. As the population grew Paris became a town, a village, a city. The city had needs as did her people and so Paris developed their famous system of sewers that would eventually run the length and breadth of the great City of Light. Before The Turn there had been tours of the sewers and they were well attended and popular.
But Paris was an ancient city and there were so many things hidden below her. The lost world below Paris was almost without limit.
These were the oldest sewers of Paris and they were known to only a few. They were extensive tunnels of stone and mud and centuries of filth and their fingers reached out below the city for kilometers in every direction. The sewers of Paris were famous, but these were not those, they were older by far. These catacombs were forgotten and their only maps had been in the possession of Les Scaphandriers.
The Astonishing Aquanauts had many secrets and some of those were hidden beneath cities, in tunnels, in chambers older than one would expect.
Zuzu came to Les Scaphandriers as a teenager and she took to her studies with the same enthusiasm she brought to everything else in her life. Education was a passion, so she was skilled in meteorology, she could catalogue the creatures of the deep, she was a crack sommelier, and she knew her way around the deck of a boat better than most.
Nobody knew the hidden sewers of ancient Paris better than Zuzu except old Jules Valiance but he was dead so now it was on her.
She heard the footsteps coming, and she finished the nasty job of wrapping a length of thin nylon rope around her thigh. Les Scaphandriers always carried nylon rope. And rubber ducks filled with anesthetic gas, but that would have been of little value in this situation.
Her fingers were strong but slick with her own blood so tying the rope tight enough to stop the blood flow had been difficult. The wound on her side was also a problem, but less so, and she ignored it despite the blood and the pain.