by J. S. Volpe
Roger struggled harder. Calvin and Violet redoubled their efforts to hold him down.
“You’re fucked, fucker!” Violet shouted into his face.
Roger headbutted her, his forehead smacking into her right eye socket with a sound like a pair of coconuts knocking together. Violet slumped sideways, groaning. Her grip on his arm slackened enough for him to wrench it free. She groggily grabbed for the gun he held in that hand, but she was too slow, too disoriented, and her hands closed on empty air.
Since Violet was currently too dazed to be a threat, Roger pointed the gun at Calvin’s face. Calvin jerked his head to the side just as Roger pulled the trigger. There was a bang that made Roger’s ears hurt, and Calvin tumbled away across the grass, screaming and trailing droplets of blood.
Roger sprang to his feet and looked around just in time to see Donovan, Cynthia, and the two kids disappearing into the brush at the east edge of the clearing.
“No!” Roger bellowed. He started to raise the guns, but then out of the corner of his eye he caught a blur of movement in the woods at the north edge of the clearing. He spun around and raised his guns at the exact moment Agent Schmidt burst from the foliage, his own pistol raised.
Both men fired simultaneously. Schmidt’s shot traced a thin red line across Roger’s left cheek then vanished into a tree trunk on the south side of the clearing. One of Roger’s two shots likewise wound up in a tree, but the other one left a neat round hole in the center of Schmidt’s forehead and a much larger hole in the back of his head. Gore splattered the bushes behind him, as well as the face of Agent Rowan, who had emerged from the woods a second after Schmidt. Rowan staggered backward, trying to wipe his partner’s brains from his eyes, while Schmidt’s corpse toppled forward onto the grass.
With a feral grin, Roger started to take aim at Agent Rowan, eager to finish off the FBI geek so he could turn his attention to recapturing the kids. But then he froze.
Silvery-white light was filling the air around him. Before Roger’s amazed gaze, it grew brighter and brighter, reducing the rest of the world to a pallid phantom.
9
Calvin felt himself screaming, but all he could hear was a muffled ringing. Every atom in his head seemed to be vibrating from the gunshot. His left temple throbbed with pain. It felt as if someone had clobbered him with a hammer. He touched a hand to his temple, and his palm came away streaked with blood.
When he saw the silvery light growing brighter around him, his first thought was that there was something wrong with his vision. Which didn’t really surprise him, given that he believed Grey’s bullet was lodged deep in his brain.
But then he saw Grey himself standing a few feet away and looking around with his mouth agape, his pistols hanging forgotten at his sides. Grey saw the light too.
So did Violet, who sat on the grass nearby, likewise gaping. She saw Calvin looking at her and said something. He couldn’t hear anything except that incessant ringing, but he could clearly lip-read the words, “What the fuck?”
10
When Agent Max Rowan cleared his partner’s blood and brains from his eyes, he was stunned to see a silver-white light filling most of the clearing.
Max looked up, thinking it might be a searchlight from a helicopter.
But no. The light wasn’t a beam. It wasn’t streaming down from above. It was a discrete dome that stopped a few feet short of the clearing’s edge. It engulfed Agent Schmidt’s corpse all the way down to the calves. Max himself was just outside it.
Max trained his gun on Roger. Weird light or not, he had a job to do and a partner to avenge.
“Drop—” He meant to say “drop your weapons” but that was when he noticed hazy shapes in the light.
11
“This is it,” Cynthia said. She and Donovan had barely gotten John and Anna to the edge of the clearing when the gunfire erupted behind them. They had all dove into the bushes, then peered out through the foliage. Cynthia had half expected to see Calvin and Violet dead and Grey charging after them. Instead she saw a familiar silver-white radiance. “This is the light.”
“The what?” Donovan said.
“The light I saw when Aunt Wendy died. This is it. Only stronger. Brighter.”
She glanced at Grey, who stood gawping at the light, then at Violet and Calvin, both of whom sat on the grass, likewise gawping. Calvin’s head was bleeding, but only a little; it looked like Grey’s bullet had only grazed him, thank God. Still, he might have a concussion. And Grey might regain his wits at any moment.
She was about to order Donovan to lead the kids away while she dashed back into the clearing to help get Calvin and Violet to safety, but then she noticed the shapes in the light.
As she watched in fear and wonder, the light brightened and the shapes grew clearer.
12
Anna averted her eyes from the light. She didn’t want to see it. It was wrong. She didn’t know how she knew it was wrong, but she did, and it was.
“John…” She laid a hand on his arm. “Come on. We should get to where it’s safe.”
He didn’t move. He didn’t speak. He didn’t even seem to hear her. He just kept staring at the light and its increasingly clear contents as if he suspected they were something important, something he needed to see.
13
Roger turned in a circle. The light had stopped growing brighter, and the shapes within it were clearer now. Clear enough to see. Mostly. They overlapped and interpenetrated, occupying the same space like double exposures. Except they weren’t double or triple or quadruple. They were infinite. They were everything.
Roger was standing in a graveyard and on a mountaintop and in a factory and at the bottom of the ocean and in a thousand other places all at the same time. A neon-green spider as big as a softball scuttled through Roger’s left foot as if it were Roger who was the immaterial thing. A young woman ran past with a baby clutched to her chest. A team of bearded dwarves tended a blazing furnace, their faces grim and intent in the red glow. A pair of velociraptors mated in a fernbrake. A boxy silver robot whizzed overhead. A two-headed dog-like creature with dark gray fur and glowing red eyes tore at the carcass of a large animal, its twin muzzles dripping blood. A cavalry charged past, banners fluttering, dust billowing up from the horses’ hooves. It was like a million movies all playing on the same screen at the same time. Roger could even hear some of the sounds these things made, though the sounds were faint and muffled and barely audible over the ringing in his ears.
14
Max watched the weird flickering images for a few seconds, then shook his head. Whatever this was, it wasn’t why he was here.
He took a step forward, which brought him to the very edge of the shimmering, image-laden light. For all his determination and sense of duty, some primitive part of him balked at entering that light.
In his initial amazement at the spectacle, Max had lowered his gun. Now he raised it at Roger again, who was barely visible at the heart of the bizarre display.
“Drop your weapons!” Max shouted. “Now!”
15
Roger didn’t move. Roger barely even heard him. The FBI agent was merely one more detail in the endless flux.
Roger flinched as a gigantic jellyfish swam through him.
“This isn’t real,” he said through gritted teeth. He looked around. Where were those damn kids? He still had to kill the kids. He couldn’t see them amid all the dolls and obelisks and sandstorms.
For that matter where was Emily? He hadn’t seen her since she vanished. Had she abandoned him? Had she—
The images began to fade. The creatures and places and things grew fainter and hazier and blended back into the light, which likewise began to ebb. But while everything else faded, one thing grew crisper and clearer: Special Agent Max Rowan standing a few paces away and pointing a gun at Roger.
“No!” Roger cried. He started to duck down and raise his own guns at Max, but he was too slow. He saw the muzzle-flash of Max’s gun, hear
d the bang, felt a brief pressure at the center of his forehead as if someone had tapped him with their fingertip, and then—
16
And then he was in a mill of some kind, a structure so vast its walls and ceiling were lost in distant shadow. A complex network of enormous wooden shafts and cogwheels filled most of the space overhead. The machinery’s intricate, creaking movements drove a pair of millstones in the center of the floor. The stones were as big around as houses, and as the runner stone rotated slowly and inexorably atop the bedstone, it produced a low, deep rumble that Roger felt in the very marrow of his bones.
Emily stood between him and the millstones.
“There you are!” Roger cried, relieved. He had been afraid she had abandoned him. “What do we do now? What, uh…”
He frowned, trying to recall what had to be done. How had he gotten here exactly? He couldn’t quite remember. But there were definitely things that needed to be done. There always were.
Emily didn’t respond. She just stared at him, her face blank.
Her blankness made Roger stiffen, suddenly afraid. He sensed the presence of someone off to his right. He turned and saw a Native American man leaning against a pillar with his arms folded across his chest. The man wore a black suit and tie, and had hair as long and black as Emily’s. He was regarding Roger with a small, sly smile.
Then Roger glimpsed another figure in his peripheral vision. He turned to the right again, which left him facing away from Emily, and saw a strange figure on a walkway a dozen feet above the floor. The figure wore a hooded, faded, dirty-yellow cloak that completely shrouded its body. Beneath the hood, the entity wore a pale yellow mask made of a hard, smooth substance that for some reason Roger felt sure was bone. The mask was blank and featureless, with no holes or designs of any kind. The entity was so still that Roger thought for a second it might be a dummy or scarecrow. But no: It was alive. He could feel it.
And then he caught a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. Turning once more, he spied a figure barely visible in the shadows—a tall, burly man with a beard and what appeared to be a fur vest like a barbarian would wear.
And Roger sensed other entities that were watching unseen from the murky depths of the mill. What the hell was going on?
He turned to the right one last time, which brought him full circle back to Emily and the rumbling millstones.
Except Emily wasn’t there anymore. In her place was a small, willowy female entity, about four-and-a-half feet tall, with long, pointed ears, jet-black eyes, a pair of fleshy antennae sprouting from her forehead, and multicolored butterfly wings on her back. She was naked, and her pale skin glowed with a moony light.
“What’s happening?” Roger said. “I don’t understand.”
“It isn’t meant for you to understand,” the entity told him in a voice that buzzed and warped in a manner Roger found almost physically nauseating. “It isn’t possible for you to understand. Not with your pathetically limited human perceptions.”
“What? But—”
“You were just one tiny cog in a vast and ancient machine. And now we’re done with you.” She smiled. It wasn’t a friendly smile. It was the smile of something cold and inhuman. “Goodbye.”
17
Roger’s corpse collapsed to the grass, blood trailing from the small, neat hole in his forehead.
Max lowered his gun and looked around. “Is everyone—”
And then the light, which had nearly faded completely, flared back to life with redoubled intensity. It grew so bright that everyone present had to squint, and it ballooned well beyond its original limits until it extended a dozen feet into the woods, engulfing Max and Cynthia and Donovan and John and Anna. The thousand million images in the light took on a life and clarity they hadn’t had before. But just when it appeared that these images would become real and solidify into one intermingled mass, the light and the images vanished with a bang, revealing a small flock of birds in the air above the burned circle of grass. The birds fluttered about the clearing in a panic for a few seconds, long enough for everyone present to identify them as some kind of pigeon, and then they flew up through the hole in the trees overhead and disappeared into the night.
“Okay, I give up,” Violet said. “What the fuck just happened?”
No one answered.
Donovan crawled out of the bushes to join her in the clearing, but when he planted one hand on the grass to push himself to his feet, something small and hard and angular dug into his palm.
“Ow,” he said, yanking his hand back. He looked down. There in the grass was a green plastic army man. A radio operator with a handset held to his face and his mouth open as if he were in mid-report.
Donovan picked up the army man and stared at it. It looked like one of the army men he had given to Emily. Maybe it was. Emily had stuck them in all kinds of weird places. Why not here, too? It could have been sitting here for years. After all, who would notice a green army man amid the green grass?
Unless it had gotten here some other way. Unless…
He suddenly remembered Emily saying, We’re the good guys, and the good guys always win in the end.
Donovan looked around—at the FBI dude checking Calvin’s head wound, at Cynthia and John and Anna emerging from the bushes, at Violet strolling toward him, at the bodies of Grey and the other FBI dude (he didn’t allow his gaze to linger on them for long), at the cops and FBI agents streaming into the clearing from every direction—and then he looked up. Up where the birds had flown. Up at the sky. Up at the stars.
Violet came up beside him.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he muttered. His fingers closed around the army man and he slid it into the pocket of his coat. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
And all the while he kept staring at the stars.
Epilogue:
Two Endings and Three Beginnings
1
Calvin was surprised at the size of the turnout for Mr. May’s funeral. He wasn’t the only one, either: When he entered the McLaughlin Funeral Parlor, the first thing he saw was Mr. McLaughlin and his assistant lugging armfuls of wooden folding chairs through the wide-open double doors that led to the viewing room, from which a loud and steady drone of voices emanated.
When Calvin himself stepped through those double doors and joined the crowd inside, the drone diminished, and he felt countless eyes upon him. No big surprise there, given the line of stitches bristling from the shaved pink patch on the side of his head, which made him feel at one moment like the poster boy for the Make-A-Wish Foundation and at the next like a rugged, battle-scarred man of action. Thankfully Roger Grey’s bullet had only glanced off his skull, but even that had left Calvin concussed and in need of eight stitches.
Many of the funeral’s attendees were residents of May, come to bid farewell to the last member of the town’s eponymous family. But a substantial number of mourners were out-of-towners, strangers, presumably friends and associates of Mr. May’s.
And an odd and diverse lot they were, too. A tall, animated Arab wearing a tailor-made suit with gold cufflinks conversed with a statuesque middle-aged blonde who had an eye-patch over her left eye and splotches of scar tissue on her left cheek and forehead. An obese bald man with skin as white as a cue-ball wept silently beside the open casket, his broad back blocking the contents of the casket from Calvin’s view. A tiny old woman, who Calvin thought must be the oldest person he had ever seen, sat in the front row, her back erect and her hands folded in her lap like a conscientious child at an Easter Sunday church service.
As Calvin navigated the crowd in search of Cynthia, who had said she would be here with the rest of her family, he noticed some of these out-of-towners watching him out of the corners of their eyes, and this time he was sure their scrutiny had nothing to do with his stitches. He guessed they knew that Mr. May had left him the house and the Collection. No doubt they were wondering why. He hoped they didn’t ask him to explain; he didn’
t understand it either.
Cynthia sidled out of the crowd to greet him. For a moment Calvin was struck dumb at the sight of her. She wore a long black dress that, while tasteful, showed off the lines of her body in a way her usual T-shirts and blue jeans never did. Seeing her like this made his heart ache as it never had before. He had hoped he had laid to rest his unrequited—and unrequitable—feelings for her, but he understood now that things like that don’t just roll over and die because you want them to.
“There you are,” she said. She gave him a quick hug, making sure only their arms and shoulders touched, which he was both grateful for and annoyed at. “How’s the, um…” She waved a finger at his stitches. “The war wound?”
“It’s okay. But how are you? How’s your family holding up?”
She shrugged, her eyes misting up and her chin dimpling. Calvin felt bad for even asking.
“We’re dealing with it,” she said. “As much as it can be dealt with, at least.” She cocked her head. “You’re coming to the funeral, right?”
“Of course.”
“In fact, come on.” She stepped back and waved him forward. “Sit with us.”
“Oh, I don’t want to intrude.”
“No, it’s cool. After all, you helped to try to find her and everything. Besides, you’re our neighbor now. I think my folks are keen to get to know you. And think of it this way: It’s like the May and Crow families are finally together again.”
“Huh?” Calvin frowned in puzzlement and glanced at the casket across the room. The obese man had left, but a fresh clutch of mourners hid the body from sight.
“I mean, you’re, like, the scion of the May family now, right?”
“Oh. I never really thought of it like that, but yeah. You’re right.” He glanced at the casket again. “Tell you what, I should, uh, go pay my respects first, you know? Then I’ll join you guys.”