To get at its second attacker, the Changeling had to twist back over its own body awkwardly, hampered by the narrow doorframe. In so doing, the skeleton inside it had its top half twisted backwards while its lower half still faced forwards. Somehow it didn’t shatter inside the metallic-hued flesh.
“Come on, you fuck!” he heard Valerie’s voice shout at the thing. “Come on!”
Its smoke – now billowing, hazing the air – and the heat gusting from its throat had caused a smoke alarm to go off in the hallway...adding to the cacophony.
With the Changeling having turned its back to him, George darted at it with the butcher knife, his heart screaming a kamikaze cry even if his throat was too seized to emit its own, and he slammed the blade into the back of the thing’s neck just below its crown of tendrils.
He leaped backwards and pulled the long screwdriver from his belt like a sword, evading the Changeling as it whipped about. It let out a trilling shriek so high-pitched that George heard glass shattering, maybe in the kitchen window, before his hearing suddenly switched off. His senses were further impeded as the shriek was translated into a gout of hot smoke so thick that he lost all sight of the monster as he crashed back against the kitchen counter...jabbing wildly with the screwdriver...expected that tentacle-surrounded maw to come whooshing at him out of the fog at any second...
But it didn’t come. Instead, he felt a heavy, vibrating thump through his soles. Then, a kind of stillness that spread even as the strange smoke began to dissipate. His eyes streaming, George coughed but could not hear the sound of it. Through the mist, he saw the Changeling where it lay, only several feet from his shoes. The butcher knife’s haft jutted up from its neck. Maybe even jutted up from whatever it had for a cloudy brain inside that rubbery flesh. Besides this, the end of a wooden pole protruded from its mass of tendrils. Tendrils no longer swarming with maggot-like movement. George recognized that pole as the end of the spade, which Valerie had somehow rammed down the creature’s throat while the smoke had obscured his vision.
Valerie stood on the other side of the bulk, waving her arms at the thinning rags of smoke. She looked like she was coughing but George couldn’t hear hers, either. She looked like she was saying something. His name, maybe. He said hers, back. Maybe he heard his own utterance, deeply muffled, or else he simply felt his voice box vibrate.
Her patch of bandage showed, entirely saturated red. Her own eyes streamed; from the smoke, or tears? But she stood over a dead monster, and extended a hand to him, and George found the strength to straighten up and extend his hand to her in turn.
-4-
“We got lucky,” she told him, when he could hear again. He had lost much of his hearing on an earlier occasion, after shooting guns in the woods for hours with a friend of his, without any ear protection. It had taken a while for it to come back then, too. And Valerie had told him that her hearing had been badly muted by the Changeling’s wails, too. In a cotton-swaddled voice, she said, “It was weak in the daytime. Maybe weaker because of the sunlight you let in.”
“It wasn’t Mrs. Parker,” George said, lying back on their mattress while Valerie paced the cellar. And it wasn’t you, either, he added in his mind. “It could have been anyone, staying up there. Any of our neighbors.”
“Maybe even Mrs. Parker’s cat. I didn’t see any sign of it up there.”
“Well...I think it’s more likely it ate the cat.”
“I hope not. Poor little Bootsy.” Valerie had often showed more concern for animals than for human beings – not that George could fault her much.
“I hope the others in the neighborhood didn’t hear all the commotion. And if they did, I hope they don’t know it came from here. For all we know, it was calling to them...telling them what was happening...”
“We’ll have to be on our guard when night falls.”
“Should we even wait for that? Stay here?” George said. “Maybe, if only just for tonight, it might be a good idea to get in the car, find another house a couple blocks away, make sure it’s empty, and hole up there for the night. Maybe someplace with a view of our street. One of the brick tenements downtown. Top floor. We can peek out the windows and watch to see what happens around our house...”
“You know how I feel about being above ground level. If we ever got surrounded or trapped up there, we’d be stuck.”
“No more stuck than we would be in a basement.”
“A tenement has too many apartments. Hence, too many Changelings could be nesting inside. Maybe we could try another house, if we search it carefully first, but I think we’re as safe here as we would be anywhere, George. We’ve already stored up some food, fortified our locks, we have bottled water. I don’t think that thing called out any kind of message. I don’t think they’re anything much more than animals now.”
“We’re animals,” he reminded her.
“They’re not smart like us. They’re not organized,” she persisted. “They’re just...chaos. Chaos in the flesh.”
“Weren’t we always?” George mused, lifting his eyes to the ceiling, which with its pipes and wires and pink insulation looked like something alive with its skin sliced away. “Really...you know...nothing much is changed. Night or day, I guess I’ve always been wary of other people.” He hesitated at going far enough to admit the real word: afraid.
“No time to get philosophical on me. I need you down to earth,” Valerie sighed.
George coughed a few times; his lungs still felt coated in soot. “The thing will rot up there. Even if they don’t smell it, we will.”
“Well what do you propose? That we drag that big thing down the stairs and toss it by the side of the road in case they resume trash pickup?”
“I’m just saying.”
Valerie reflectively touched the fresh bandage she had taped to her own chest, and winced. “Maybe you’re right,” she conceded. “Maybe we should leave. Maybe even for good. Find a place where there’s more people like us. But it’s getting too close to dark, now. By the time we loaded up the car, found a place, checked it out for Changelings, settled in for the night – no, we can’t chance moving tonight. I say we lay low, sit tight and hope for the best.”
“Okay,” George said. “But it’s going to be a long night...”
“It always is.”
-5-
Because it was summer, it didn’t get entirely dark for quite some time; even by nine-thirty there were still ragged blue vestiges of undissolved light in the sky. But around seven o’clock, they had finally lost their electricity. One minute the TV was running with muted sound – showing another of those giant sea anemones soaring above the roofs of some slightly different-looking city – and the next, the cathode light vanished from that box, leaving it essentially a burnt-out shell. The last true sign of the end of the world: no more television. The sun might as well explode altogether.
The lamps they had plugged in went out. They groped for flashlights and found some candles. They had a transistor radio with batteries but didn’t listen to it right now. But when the distant chanting sounds of the Changelings began to mount, until by ten o’clock (by George’s wristwatch) they had reached an unprecedented, earthquaking plateau of a crescendo, both George and Valerie agreed that they had to go upstairs to their apartment and peek out of its unboarded windows to see what was happening out there. George only hoped that they wouldn’t lose their hearing for good, should this horrific barrage of sound increase any much higher. It already had his ribs humming like tuning forks in his chest.
It was Valerie who peeked first around the shade in one of the dark living room’s windows, kneeling on the sofa to get at it. And only one moment after pressing her forehead to the glass, George heard her hiss, “Jesus, oh my God, Jesus Christ...” as if he were operating on her again. It seemed a human instinct to call out to deities and saviors at moments of ecstacy, pain and fear, even if one professed not to have any true spiritual beliefs at saner moments.
George kneeled on
the arm of the sofa and peered out another window beside the one Valerie hunched before.
“Oh my God,” he hissed himself.
The giant was so impossibly huge that its base seemed to fill most of the night sky, at least from this angle, blocking out millions of stars in one tremendous eclipse. At first he thought that the great sea anemone creature must be rooted right in the town center of Eastborough, only several blocks away, but after a minute he estimated that it must be outside the town, perhaps in the middle of Route 9.
Something he hadn’t noticed from the poor TV images of the other two stationary goliaths: a pale but unmistakable greenish glow emanated from the translucent, boneless arms that writhed at its apex. They cast just enough of a dim illumination for George to see that the circular trunk of the massive life form was pulsing darkly with movement. It suggested to George’s mind melting beads of wax running up a candle in reverse. As their eyes adjusted to the gloom of the blacked-out town and the soft bioluminescence of the vast entity, they began to make out and figure out what these movements were upon the monster’s hide.
Changelings. In numbers they could not count or estimate. They were crawling up the gigantic stalk in hordes, inching along like caterpillars, to reach – what? The mouth that no doubt resided at the center of the glowing tendrils? Drawn like bees to pollen? Would they pick up and carry that pollen? Spread it, spread more of these titans, further across the globe? Or did they mean to hurl themselves down the thing’s gullet like sacrifices into a volcano, to pay homage to it...to feed it, make it huger still, make it stronger?
But it was Valerie who voiced another theory, in an awed and terrified whisper, and George felt it was intuitively correct.
“They’re building the thing. They’re all coming together, and blending together, to make one giant Changeling...”
“My God,” George muttered again, as if reluctantly surrendering to the fact that this was his god.
“Then what?” Valerie went on in her whisper. “When they’re finished, what do these big things do?”
“Maybe,” George said, his mind aching as he tried to encompass the scope of these concepts, “maybe then the big ones...migrate to each other. And then...and then they all blend together, too. Into...into one last monster.”
“And then it’s over.” Valerie barely exhaled the words.
The earthshaking chanting sound. Was it coming from all the Changelings adding their forms to the behemoth, building a skyscraper brick by brick, a body cell by cell? Or did that voice originate from the titanic deity-to-be itself?
-6-
Just before midnight it began to rain.
A thunder blast that sounded like a bomb exploding directly above the house woke both George and Valerie, who lay in spoon shapes on their bare mattress. They sat up in the guttering light of a big scented candle in a jar, tensed up almost to the point of throwing up, listening to the tail end of the blast as it rolled away. As it diminished, they became aware of the steady staticy white noise of a downpour.
“It’s raining,” George whispered.
“Duh,” said Valerie. But it hadn’t rained for two weeks. Not since the Fourth of July.
And a thunderstorm. A wave of cooler air must have drifted in from someplace else.
As they got to their feet, locating flashlights, another blast erupted overhead. The Fourth of July all over again, with them at ground zero. Behind the thunder and the downpour, the chanting sound of the giant entity could still be heard, but about an hour ago the sound had dropped its level to something less oppressive, something they had even managed to fall asleep listening to.
Without either of them discussing it with the other, they both went to the stairs. Up into their apartment, their living room, again.
The monster had not moved from where it was rooted. It still gave off that sickly green light with its connotations of both vegetation’s growth and tissue’s decay. But, unless the rain obscured it, there no longer seemed to be any movement bubbling across the thing’s body. Had it finished, then, absorbing into it every one of the Changelings in Eastborough, perhaps even the county?
There was something else. Steam was wisping up from the mouth hidden high above in the midst of the tentacles. As though the rains were extinguishing the fires in the giant’s guts.
They returned downstairs. They snacked from cans, and listened to the rain even after the thunder had moved on, and turned on the transistor for a while. They only detected garbled scraps within the static, disjointed words. “Paralyzed...water...the heat...”
One slept. Then the other. Then both.
When morning came, Valerie was gone.
George bolted to his feet, charged into the little cave-like cellar room which housed the water heater and the electrical circuit breakers. He half expected to find a Changeling in wait for him there, a Changeling with an odd square-shaped scar on the front of its rubbery body. But she was not there...
George found her upstairs, kneeling on the sofa. She turned to him, away from the window, when she heard his approach. He saw that she was smiling.
“Look,” she said in her normal speaking voice, which sounded alien to him now.
George pressed in beside her. The first thing he noticed, of course, was the quality of light. Not silver. Not blazing/blinding. The sky was softly gray; in fact, it was still lightly sprinkling. A small pond of a rain puddle lay in the street in front of the little house whose ground floor they rented. The rain had half-filled the little trash can he had burned Valerie’s tainted flesh in, still standing in the gutter. The grass of their lawn, overgrown from neglect and yellowish from weeks of sun, was matted down and marshy-looking. Birds twittered on telephone lines. The chanting had died out hours ago...
But it was only for a second that George took note of the sky. His attention was too much commanded by the sight of that mountainous animal or being that dwarfed their little New England town.
It was gray like the sky. Even in this subdued daylight they could see the scarred, wrinkled aspect to its trunk. As if, despite the hours of rain, it had been dehydrated, mummified.
The tentacles at its summit were gnarled into unmoving forms, like worms dried by the sun. Like the bare branches of a long dead tree. It was petrified. (Paralyzed, the radio had said.)
They held hands as they emerged into the gray light, the light misty rain. They wore no hoods, no long sleeves. The air was cool. Comfortably, beautifully cool...
They walked. It was several minutes before they met another person walking...but by the time they had all reached the far edge of their town, there were easily a hundred of them. And many of them had linked hands by that point.
The rain had stopped by then, the sky clearing to a crystalline but gentle blue. The petrified giant (Medusa had transfigured herself) was still a good distance away, out on Route 9 for sure, but it seemed to block the blue sky directly ahead of them, its branches spread across the sky like fractures in its cool ceramic surface. It might not be a good idea to get too close, in any event. A while ago, on the far side of the monster, they had heard a great crash, and seen a great puff of dust billow up. A few minutes later, they had understood the cause of the sound, as they saw one of the ossified tentacles break loose and drop to the earth far below, shattering against it, turning to a cloud of ash. The entity, the god, was disintegrating like a pillar of salt...
“The rain,” was all Valerie could say. But she squeezed George’s hand tighter. He saw tears in her eyes. Healing, purging water. “The rain...”
“Look at the sun!” another woman sobbed and laughed at the same time. She raised both her hands up as if that orb were her god. It was a bright, blinding disk to be sure. But it was of a color and aspect all of them had known all of their lives.
Another limb dropped off the monster, smashing and becoming pulverized below. When this cloud of ash rose up, a cool breeze lifted its particles, gusted them high into the air. A cloud of this dust blew across the sun as the breeze
carried it in the direction of Eastborough’s survivors.
The airborne ash began to flutter, snow-like, to earth. George tilted up his face and blinked his lashes against the gray flakes, but held open a palm to collect some of them. Valerie drew closer, against his arm affectionately, to stare into his palm with him – as if to read his fortune there. Foretell his future.
Though three flakes had already settled against his flesh, and the gust of breeze had died away, the flakes continued to move. They each had a tiny rounded kernel at their center, and frayed edges – no, more of a fringe – and as George and Valerie stared at these edges, they saw that they were like the legs of three sluggish centipedes...stirring slowly awake.
With a strangled exclamation, George began to throw the flakes down, but Valerie had already slapped them out of his hand...before they could fully awaken. Before they might burrow beneath his skin...
The flakes were piling all around them. Autumn leaves. Alighting in people’s hair. George and Valerie weren’t the only ones who had noticed their odd appearance and movements. Some had begun swatting at themselves, some were crying out, some were turning to run back toward the town and their homes.
Yet another massive limb tumbled. Crashed. Exploded into a rising storm cloud of gray, drifting pollen...
“Oh my God,” George said. There was no escaping this new deity. No denying it. Though he might not worship it, he had to acknowledge it.
In a dead, fatalistic voice, Valerie said, “They’re seeds.”
The End
Twenty-five Cents
She worked all day with her back to money, as if she worked with the ocean just behind her. But it was an ocean damned up from her sight and smell and touch. She felt only its immense, silvery, crushing presence looming just beyond.
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