by Mike Allen
* * *
At last she heard the sound unaccompanied by words.
Sitting vigil in the hospice beside Grandma’s bed with its short, sturdy rails, listening to her labored breathing over the hiss of the oxygen tank. And then something else slid up from underneath, pulsed in time with the rise and fall of her grandmother’s chest.
Panic jelled. The noise grew louder. Tarissa wanted to flee the room, but she forced herself to stay. Plugging her ears did nothing to help. Her grandmother’s eyes moved beneath her eyelids, but they never opened.
She kissed her grandmother’s hand. Her cheek. Her forehead. “Goodbye,” she said. “I love you.”
The sound stopped when her grandmother did.
* * *
She didn’t want to brave the funeral, but for her grandmother’s sake she steeled herself and weathered it. The noise ground at her start to finish.
Her relatives invaded the house, packed away the saltshakers. She had no legal right to stop them. But they weren’t unkind. Days later, as Tarissa huddled in her bedroom, Olivia knocked. She didn’t say anything to Tarissa—for better or for worse, she’d learned her lesson—but her great aunt handed her a piece of flower-printed stationary.
Dearest Tarissa,
I hope this letter finds you well. Don’t be sad for me. I’m in a better place.
I want you to know I love you and always have loved you. You’ve made me proud so many times. You have a strong soul and a smart mind. I think you’ll be able to do anything you set your mind to do.
I’ll miss you, child, until I see you again.
Love,
Tarissa heard no sound within those words, no void behind the universe.
Just her grandmother’s voice.
* * *
Cecilia had heart surgery before she was even a day old. And again at two months. Tarissa was drowning in debt.
Providence took her side in one significant way, for which she was especially grateful. Lamont didn’t run. He stayed with her, stood by her on the deck of the sinking ship. So many men wouldn’t, especially men who hadn’t planned on becoming fathers.
They celebrated Cecilia’s six month birthday with convenience store ice cream. That night, the sound that Tarissa had attuned her entire being to detect began again: her baby gasping, grunting, struggling to breathe.
Lamont was up the moment she was. The alarm clock, the only light source in the room, shone a cruel 1:22 AM.
He drove them white-knuckled to the emergency room. By the time the goddamn doctor actually came to see them, Cecelia’s breathing had calmed, and this quack who came off more like a bureaucrat than a physician told them he could find nothing wrong.
But when he said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through all this trouble,” and Tarissa heard something else in his voice, she wanted to howl.
Lamont, God bless him, said, “Thanks for nothing, Doc.”
By the time they got Cecilia to sleep in her crib and crawled into the too-small double bed, the clock on the nightstand read 4:03 AM.
Tarissa woke exactly twenty minutes later. Lamont snored softly beside her. A hollow thrum lurked beneath the ambient nighttime murmur. She didn’t hear Cecilia. No crying. No breathing.
She vaulted from the bed, almost stumbled headfirst into Cecilia’s crib. Lamont moaned but didn’t wake. She wanted to shout, Don’t you hear that? Can’t you HEAR that SOUND? but she didn’t. She knew he couldn’t.
Cecilia’s face was warm, her breathing a whispery hiss. Her poor heart beat bravely in her chest. Amazing she didn’t wake up bawling, with all the ruckus Tarissa had just made.
The noise. It fluctuated ever so slightly with Cecilia’s inhales and exhales.
She thought about those words, the ones that always held the taint. Sorry for your loss, my condolences.
She never wanted to hear those words again, couldn’t bear the thought. No. Not for Cecilia. Those words weren’t for her. That sound wasn’t for her.
Her ears rang with it, amplifying the crackle of night. She couldn’t pinpoint a single source. Any source. Where was it coming from?
She closed her eyes and concentrated, thought she could glean a hint of a direction. Opened her eyes, immediately lost the focus.
So be it. She would search with her eyes shut.
She took shuffle-steps, arms extended in front of her, the carpet harsh against her bare feet. Her hands found a dresser, a stretch of wall, groped to the door, creaked it open. She kept her eyes closed as she stepped into the hall of the apartment, and yes, that awfulness sounded slightly louder, angled just a fraction to her left.
She had no way to go but straight ahead, down the short passage to the combination living room–kitchen. She pressed herself to the left-hand wall and inched forward, mindful of the long, heavy box Lamont had left on the floor, a cheap plyboard bookshelf still in its packaging. She found it with her feet, managed not to trip or stub her toes.
She didn’t think about what she’d do if she did in fact find a physical source for the noise. She kept listening, the air cold against her legs, the wall colder against her arm.
And the sound grew stronger, closer. She forged on. Soon she heard nothing else. An absence of music, an opposite of laughter, as if a throat sculpted pure mourning, emitted waves that drained away power and life as they washed over whatever they touched. Her body didn’t shiver, but a sensation akin to ice on skin invaded her flesh, chilled her sinuses, her tongue, the spaces in her belly. The wall she leaned against could have been sheered from a glacier.
She connected, then, how long she’d walked, an astonishing distance. She should have stumbled against the love seat in the living room several minutes ago.
Yet the the space leading to the noise kept on going.
She raised her right hand, immediately discovered the opposite wall, equally cold, closer than it should have been, just inches from her body. No carpet roughed the soles of her feet. She walked on ice. She had not noticed the transition until that moment.
Nowhere in her apartment was there a passage this long or this narrow. Gut intuition shouted down the impulse to open her eyes.
She continued forward. The noise should have been shaking her teeth with its volume. But she experienced its intensity in a different way, as a relentless electric current that affected something other than her physical nerves.
An obstruction barred her way. When she placed a palm against it, the barrier shifted away from her a fraction of an inch, and the sound increased. She heard nothing else, not even her own heartbeat.
She groped with featherlight fingertip touches, careful, so painstakingly careful, and gradually determined from its angle, its texture, its edges, that this object she dared not look at was a door, hinged on the right, open on the left, slightly ajar.
The sound came from the other side. She needed it shut.
It had no handle.
The only way to close it, she reasoned, was to grip its edge, jerk it toward her, pull her fingers free before they were caught in the jamb. She imagined herself with her fingertips caught and crushed and the door sealed, trying to free herself in this unearthly place. She wished she hadn’t.
I’m sorry for your loss. My condolences.
She couldn’t leave it open.
She braced herself, slid her fingers along the door with the barest of contacts until they passed through the crack. The corner of the doorframe brushed her knuckles. She curled her fingers through the gap, creeping as slowly as she could manage.
She couldn’t do it as is: she needed more room. She had no choice but to ease the door open wider, give herself clearance.
The noise grew louder.
She didn’t recognize what was happening, not at first. As she secured her grip, the tiny hairs on the back of her right hand pricked as if tweaked by a feeble breeze. The pressure became steady, the settling of a gossamer weight. It felt like long and emaciated fingers touching her as gingerly as she had touched the door.
She opened her mouth in a gasp that made no sound at all.
Fingertips dug down on the back of her hand.
She jerked the door toward her and pulled her fingers free..
The door sealed. The sound stopped.
She didn’t open her eyes until, in her hasty retreat, her heels hooked the back of the bookshelf box and she tumbled hard to the floor.
In the bedroom, Cecilia started to cry. So did she.
* * *
Lamont, between construction jobs, at least could mind the baby while she went to work. Thank goodness. At some level she still had trouble gifting him with her full trust; but this morning, as always, he acted more than willing to do his part, tolerated the early morning feeding, tolerated being up with Cecilia in the hours before dawn.
The noise really was gone.
Tarissa’s shift at the 24-hour big box hell store started at 7 a.m. Despite being even more shortchanged on sleep than usual, she hummed to herself, tuneless, joyous, a noise to cherish. And every movement suggested a smile. Lamont even noticed. He laughed and shook his head. “What’s with you this morning?” After a kiss, “Whatever it is, I like it.”
She just shrugged.
Then she saw herself in the mirror, under the bright bathroom light.
She almost called to Lamont. But they’d just spent an hour together tending to Cecilia and he’d said nothing.
She didn’t know what was wrong, what it meant, but she couldn’t afford to call in sick. They needed every penny.
She finished putting on her uniform, rode the bus to work. Few of the other passengers spared her a second glance, though the one that did, an elderly woman bundled in half a dozen layers despite the heat, stared a moment, eyes almost as wide as Tarissa’s had been in that years-ago photograph. When Tarissa’s eyes met hers she swiftly looked away.
Her boss frowned at her when she reached the time clock to swipe her badge, but that had to do with her timing, right on the dot instead of the preferred ten minutes early.
At the cash register she might have been a ghost, or, more apt, a machine spouting prices and phrases such as “Cash, check or credit?” and “Have a blessed day.” Some shoppers huffed their impatience when the lines grew long, but paid Tarissa the person no mind at all.
She passed the time during the lulls studying the marks on her hand where the being behind the door had touched her. An ignorant person might have mistaken those splotches for vitiligo. There were plenty of ignorant people in the world.
“Oh my God, honey. What happened to you?”
The woman’s name was Hildred, a store regular. She dressed in frumpy blouses, often flecked with paint, or with food, or both, sweet as could be with no sense at all as to when it was appropriate to talk or not talk, especially in a crowded checkout lane during the rush hours, never sparing any details of her diabetes or her bone spurs or her many other ailments. Yet she seemed to genuinely care about the people she repeatedly struck up conversations with, whether they were receptive or not.
Now Hildred stared at her, gape-jawed.
Others in line, even the other cashiers, were starting to look.
“I woke up this morning,” Tarissa stammered. “And it was just…I feel fine, but…” She flailed for something to say to diffuse the situation. “I’m going to see a doctor. Soon as I can. But I feel fine. Really.”
“Oh, honey,” Hildred said, and with just a little hesitation, trepidation, she put a comforting hand on Tarissa’s wrist. “I’m so sorry. My condolences.”
Tarissa’s gaze focused somewhere far away.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s okay.”
drawn shut, torn open
LET THERE BE DARKNESS
The past eludes me—yet I know the future with the clarity of vivid memory. A grand contradiction in my Father’s design, that remains to me a mystery…
* * *
A day will come when the sun’s pale yellow stare starts to fill with the taint of blood.
Among the confused and tremulous hordes of mankind, amidst the endless processions of grand towers forged from metal stolen from the moon, I will walk. One knowing face, one unique being traversing the rivers of humanity that flood this world.
Unknown now: unknown when it begins. But I shall not remain unnoticed. When the time comes, I will not hide what I am.
My life, a long cycle of waiting, to make the offer I must make.
At first my words will be mere rumor, circulating among the residents of the underdepths. My message will find its way among the filthy creatures dwelling in the sewer networks deep beneath our urban blight; creatures whose only light comes from the poisons that make their eyes phosphorescent. Whispers will find the ears of the affluent and mad who seal themselves away in underworld vaults, hording treasures from every age—hiding from some real or imagined cataclysm, yet striving to hold control of the lands above.
I will wait. Through one path or another, bubbling up through the earth, my message will emerge into day’s dimming light.
Those who seek me shall find me. My misshapen face—for by human eyes it is so perceived—printed in two dimensions, projected in three, shall form the center of every conversation: rotating slowly atop the great round tables where corporate councils meet, regarded in puzzlement and awe; placed on private altars and worshiped; precious oil burned, rare beasts slaughtered, even—most horrible of all—children slain to gain my favor.
Against a growing chaos, I will speak the same words, over and over, the network of technology that wraps the world in its web providing my forum. My offer, carried as pulses of light, beamed to the void and back again:
“This world is dying. Very little time remains. Soon all you’ve become, all you have ever dreamed of becoming, will be scoured away.
“But humanity need not perish. He who first brought you into being didn’t intend for you to die with this world. Give me your fealty, ask in humility and I, as His messenger, will strive to grant your kind a second life.”
Beneath the flickering light of my burning effigy, religious despots will thunder ridicule, and their followers will chant murder in the streets. Through communication channels wired straight into the heads of their desperate listeners, the rationalists and analysts will call me mad: an exploiter, a charlatan, a parasite. Yet many more, hearing whispers from shadows of memories too ancient to be understood, will know my creed for Truth.
Knowing this, despite my visions of the imminent future, my heart will fill with hope—a human sentiment, surely, gained from so many eons among them.
Is it possible, with so much of the past behind me, that I will have forgotten the hideous service mankind grants its saviors?
The sensations, so vivid: the terrors, so real. I feel them now as I will then: Rough hands roust me from a dreamless sleep, seize my wrists in crushing grips, tear at the folds of my gown; fingers twine in my tangled locks, drag me out into a moonless night. My scalp screams as the follicles tear out—black fluid covers my eyes, clogs my vision. My assailants fill my ears with angry babble; their fingernails strip my gown away, strip skin from my back, belly, breasts…
Outside this frail vessel that carries my soul, a flurry of sensations: of being bound, held high in the air, bleeding; a crowd’s chorus of jeers; traveling swift in a craft along an ill-made path. Descending: a shower of blows, a rough grope that ends in a cry of disgust. Ascending.
Inside this vessel, a mounting shrill of fear—knowing what I will see when my vision clears.
When my blood-crusted eyes can finally open, a terrifying vista below: the twisting neon spires of the tallest towers of man glow ethereally in the darkness, seen from the rooftop of the tallest tower of all. Painfully harsh grips keep me doubled-over, force me to my knees, dangle me head-first over the edge….
But when I twist my neck, I glimpse the stars. This night, their clusters shine brighter than any stellar panorama I will ever see with these eyes. I gaze heavenward, and know my silent app
eal is useless.
Beneath my terror, a sorrow blooms. Whether mankind itself chooses its final course, or a mad, misguided few, it will not be mine to know. I make no protest at their mishandling: I leave their angry accusations, their hysterical demands, their threats of violation unanswered.
The blade of light pierces me between the breasts—thrusts upward, parting the walls of my belly. My only sound—a gasp—as my body cavities empty into the abyss; a black, viscous flow baptizes the darkness beneath me.