Beneath the Rising

by Premee Mohamed

  She was trembling so hard she was almost flickering, like a poorly-tracked VHS tape. But fear alone wasn’t proof. “All right,” I said dubiously. “If They’re so powerful, why aren’t we one of Their colonies right now?”

  “No one’s really sure. But sometime in the past, we did figure out a few things when They appeared. How They travel, where They can come in. The thin places, gates and veils, were mapped. Someone learned how to use Their magic to fight Them, push Them out, even knock Them out. It’s not sleep. It’s something else; it takes work. Almost like anaesthesia. But it’s so light, anything can wake Them. They are infuriated by having Their paths barred, especially by things that, to Them, are barely better than, or different from, insects.”

  “Us.”

  “Us. It’s not just entitlement, it’s revenge. There’s so much more I could tell you, but just take away that They are gods, but not like the gods we write about with love in the Bible and the Bhagavad Gītā and the Silmarillion. I only say ‘god’ because I don’t know another word for that much power.”

  “And these gods, They’re... here now? Awake, back? Or just one of Them is back?”

  “No. They still can’t come here; the doors are still locked to them. But magic always seeps through, and lesser things, like… like flies coming through a window screen. This thing, it’s a servant, an ambassador. A former apprentice. But now that it’s come, evil things will happen. They generate magic like poison, powdered cyanide, like a fungus shedding its spores, invisible, everywhere, a crawling ugliness and wrongness that... that... that dusts down and catches and grows and creeps. Anything that is Theirs can scoop it up, use it. And now that it’s here, more may be able to come.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “No.”

  We stared at each other for a minute, tense. Eventually her breath slowed, and she reached for her coffee with steady hands.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “I have work tomorrow, I can’t stay. What are we gonna do?”

  “Stay over. Don’t take the bus in the morning. I’ll get Rutger to give you a ride.”

  “What if it follows me to work when we leave?”

  “I’m hoping it’ll stay here and watch me instead. Maybe I can... I don’t know. Distract it by running the reactor. I think that’s what it’s interested in. What drew it here.”

  “You’re hoping that... oh God. Is Thou Shalt Greatly Ru This Day in on this? Does he know about the... Ancient Ones?”

  “No, and stop making fun of his name.”

  “Does anyone else know?”

  “Yeah. That’s who I was calling.”

  “Can they help? Can they... can they do... God, it sounds stupid to even say it. I’m sorry, I’m freaking out but I’m working on it. I need a minute. This isn’t The X-Files, you know.”

  “I think I’d look cute with red hair.”

  “Who says you’re the scientist in this scenario? You’re clearly Mulder. Look what you’re asking me to believe.”

  “Don’t, then,” she said, draining her cup; her face was gray and glistening, all the blood hiding. “If it makes you feel better about all this.”

  “It does not. Can They get in the house?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, it’s set up to be hard for humans to get into, not... other things.”

  “Great news. Not.”

  We dug up an oversized t-shirt for me to sleep in, and I made Johnny promise to stay in the hallway while I showered, repeatedly dropping and chasing one of her mother’s spa soaps around the huge glass box. My hands were shaking so badly I cut my thumb opening the toothbrush package, a bloodless gash on the sharp plastic edge.

  I kept telling myself it wasn’t fear, not really, it was something else—exhaustion, dehydration, like yesterday. And that was easy enough, because what had I had to fear so far? In my whole life? Just the little things that were scary but survivable: getting grounded, being bullied at school, one of the kids going missing in the mall. This felt more like something from outside of me, like secondhand smoke, greasily invisible, sinking into my pores, blown from someone unseen. Not something I could scope out and assess, feel the shape and edges of, decide for myself whether I should be scared of it. The dark thing. Harbinger of the Them. Only her word for it, and this placeless, nameless adrenaline.

  We took the Indigo Line, a seldom-used route that never meets the main staircase, descending until I convinced myself that the air was growing warmer from the earth’s core, and our thighs were stinging and trembling. Finally we reached a long hallway with a couple of doors on each side, and Johnny let us into one with a thumbprint scanner. It was much cooler than the hallway—and, of course, down here, windowless.

  “What is this place?” I said, looking at the two couches kitty-corner to each other, the piles of magazines and blankets, the single phone and lamp.

  “Reading room,” she said. I lay on one couch and looked at the ceiling—matte metal, dark gray, studded regularly with screws or rivets, trying to figure out if it spelled anything. A beetle bumbled past on the ceiling, iridescent green and blue.

  She said, “I don’t even know if we’re safer down here, but if we’re being watched, maybe we’re harder to see now.”

  “Thanks. I’m gonna sleep great now. Wait, we? Are you staying—?”

  “Yeah.”

  “After all that coffee?”

  “Honestly, it just goes through my system like lemonade now. I’ll get you up at six,” she said, snapping the light off without ceremony.

  I wrapped myself in the blanket and closed my eyes, unnecessarily; it was pitch black either way. Jesus. A reading room buried in the dead centre of her fortress, protected from anything and everything we might have worried about as children. Nuclear blasts, anthrax-hurling madmen, civil war, serial killers. Bullies. Mean girls. The fashion police. It wasn’t the billions of people she’d helped who hated her; it was the ones whose lives had been essentially unaffected, and who lived in jealousy and suspicion of what she was. She’d almost burned herself out when she was ten or eleven, working hundred-hour weeks, never sleeping, publishing paper after paper and combining them with press conferences and lecture tours, till Rutger and her parents had put their collective foot down. Don’t, they’d said. You’ll die.

  I don’t care, she’d told them—I remembered that, how I’d jumped when she said it—I need to get as much done as I can. How had we convinced a ten year-old kid that she had lots of time left and didn’t need to die trying? I couldn’t remember. Maybe we hadn’t. And then at the Muttart Conservatory a few months later for their holiday concert, her white arm emerging from a puff of burgundy velvet, pointing at the skinny stalk similarly poking from an unremarkable pile of grey spikes. “That’s a century plant,” she’d whispered as the orchestra set up. “They save up and save up and save up for years, decades, and then they suddenly send up one flower shoot and then they die.”

  “That’s stupid,” I said. “Most plants do it every year. We talked about it in school.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t make anything like that,” she said. It was true; the spike had grown so tall and so fast that they’d had to clip it at the top, lest it try to break the glass of the pyramid and shoot out into the icy prairie air. “Look at that. How nothing could miss that it’s flowering; that that’s the biggest and best thing it’ll do in its whole life.”

  “And the last thing.”

  “Sure. But look.”

  “I am looking.” Looking but not seeing. It was years before I knew what she’d been trying to tell me about herself—not a confession but a warning.

  Before she’d left, this would have been my dream night—there would have been hope, excitement, anticipation. Maybe this night, this one sleepover, would be the night I’d admit that I was in love with her, and she’d say it back, and we’d agree that we’d grown up, that we were ready for grown-up love very different from the fierce, childhood devotion we’d always had, and then we’d kiss, and then...


  In the silence, I heard my stomach gurgle, Johnny’s soft breathing, the scrape as she turned over on her couch. Far from becoming accustomed to each other’s noises, I thought, in a few moments our ears would sprout new hairs, new bones; we would be able to hear each other’s heartbeat against the blankets, thrown out and resonating like a drum, we would be able to hear the scrape of eyelid against eyeball. I swallowed nervous spit, sounding like a firehose.

  As many times as we’d played together, stayed up late talking, driven around, eaten side by side, boosted each other over fences, removed splinters, tried to hypnotize each other, this was by far—I thought—the most intimate we’d ever been. It was as if we were trying to fall asleep inside one another’s mouths. It was far from romantic; it was disgusting. But we’d always been like this, hadn’t we? That unhealthy, stifling closeness, just like this, like conjoined twins who could have been separated and always refused the operation, face to face breathing each other’s breath, too close to be normal friends. Too close to love. That was it, wasn’t it? We’d never say it. It couldn’t be said—that we were not ageing, precisely, but maturing at two completely different rates, that both were outpacing the friendship, which was a third rate, a third line on a graph we never thought about. Independent of her, independent of me. And yet we couldn’t leave each other.

  I lay awake while Johnny’s breathing grew long and slow—asleep, or faking sleep. Not kidding about the coffee, apparently. I was thirsty and also had to piss, but there was no way I was getting up to fumble around till I found the door and let myself out into the dark hallway to grope along till I found a bathroom (not likely) or the stairs (definitely not).

  In the morning, I thought, in the morning I’ll ask her questions and she’ll answer them, she’ll stop talking about things that happened thousands of years ago and just tell me what we can do right now. No. Not what we can do. What she can do. She’s the one They’re watching. She said so. I’m just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  I finally began to doze off, my heartbeat growing muffled, a faint impression of Johnny whimpering and even speaking a few feet away, the sound of her voice no less familiar than that of my fading heart, though in a language I didn’t know.

  Wait. Don’t fall asleep yet. How does she know any of th—

  the sky is

  not a sky

  the sky is torn, ragged at the edges

  a spill of struggling bodies

  light by which one cannot see

  a march in the dimness

  cover eyes and ears against the

  against

  the light which can be heard

  I woke up on the floor, grit in my mouth, spitting and gagging even before I had come fully awake, and I couldn’t take it any more, I banged around till my hand hit the slim metal pole of the lamp and I switched it on, already apologizing to Johnny—who, I saw with a shock as my eyes adjusted, had slept through the commotion.

  But it didn’t look like real sleep—in fact, I realized with a jolt, it reminded me of the twins and their night terrors. The first time it happened I thought they were having a seizure, they were so stiff, trembling, unwakeable. Just as I had run for the phone to call 911, they had woken simultaneously and burst into tears, and the rest of the night was spent comforting them. They either didn’t remember what they had dreamt, or couldn’t express it in their childish language. Just like me, a few minutes ago. Except that I had woken myself up and she hadn’t.

  In the clear light her skin was green-grey, beaded with sweat that shook down her face with the trembling, her hair glassy, bleached of colour, hands fists. I reached for her instinctively, then forced my hand back. No. She’d hurt me if she woke up—not on purpose, but that wouldn’t make any difference. As I looked up, a corner of the room seemed to recede, sprinting as if down a long corridor—and then it was perfectly normal, just like the other one, a mirror image. The lamp creaked under my grip. All the shadows looked too black, not sharp enough. There had been depth in that corner. Hadn’t there? Just for a second?

  “Johnny, wake up. Wake up!”

  Her eyes flickered open, gazing straight past me to the ceiling. She screamed.

  I backed away, hitting my thighs on the couch and toppling over it, and struggled up. “John! Snap out of it!”

  “Nicky?”

  “It’s me, it’s—Jesus. Are you okay?”

  I finally flipped myself off the couch’s sucking grip and crawled over to her, stopping at a prudent distance. “You’re, uh, bleeding a little bit.”

  “Bit my tongue.” She ran her forearm over her lips, producing a long streak of pink-tinted saliva, like lipgloss. I looked away. “What... happened?”

  “You were having a bad dream.”

  “Was I? How do you know?”

  “You just looked like you were.” I sagged onto the floor, rested my wrists on my knees. I wanted to sleep for another eight hours. Real sleep, not this nightmare garbage that left me even more tired. “You looked like the boys did when they were having night terrors. Don’t you remember what you were dreaming about?”

  She shook her head, wiped her mouth again. “I dreamt I was... somewhere else... and I couldn’t see. I mean, I could see, but not...”

  “The light was wrong,” I murmured. “You could hear the light but you couldn’t see in it.”

  She stared at me.

  “John,” I said. “Did They get into the house?”

  Silence. After what felt like a punishing length of time, she lifted her wrist and said “Well, it’s 5:45. We’d better get you to work.”

  She threw off the blanket and stepped past me. The hallway was as dark as our room had been, lit by the lonely triangle of white light interrupted by our silhouettes. Shadows seemed to squirm at either end. I watched them till I was sure they weren’t moving.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I TURNED AROUND so many times as Rutger drove me to work that I wricked my neck, but no shadow followed us, no black streak floated or loped behind the car.

  “Joanna seemed upset this morning,” he said abruptly when we stopped at the lights on Hebert; I nearly jumped out of my skin. I hadn’t expected him to say anything to me, let alone something I couldn’t really reply to.

  Well, I’m not fucking surprised, I almost said. Instead I shrugged. If he didn’t know about this… this new stalker, this new situation, then it wasn’t up to me to tell him. I stared at his profile, hoping to get some clues from it, but his expression was fixed.

  “She’s tired,” I said carefully, unable to bear the silence much longer. “She’s working on something big.”

  “Renewable energy, yes. She described to me the design of the reactor.”

  “…Oh. Good. That’s good.”

  “It does not seem to me,” he said quietly, the end of his words a little clipped, as we turned into the parking lot, “that it should work, however.”

  I glanced at him. That was the closest to real anxiety I’d ever seen him express. For a moment I debated spilling everything, telling him what she’d told me, begging for help; she couldn’t deal with this alone, not if They were everything she said They were, and who knew how she’d come to that conclusion anyway. I mean she was smart, yes, absolutely, but she was still just a kid, we were just kids, I couldn’t help her, we needed… but I knew I couldn’t. “I guess that’s why she’s tired. You know. Testing it or whatever.”

  “Perhaps.”

  We had taken, at her request, a twisty route; I ran from the Lexus and managed to clock in just in a minute before my shift started.

  “You all right, Nicky?” asked the bakery manager, Barb. “You sound stuffy. Coming down with something?”

  “Hm? No, I don’t think so. Allergies,” I said.

  “You look sketchy, baby. I got some Benadryl in my purse, come see me after you check the bread numbers, okay?”

  Everybody wanted to be my mom. I sighed and headed into the bakery storeroom, then stopped, confused. Something
stank, something that would have been just as out of place but more comprehensible coming from the meat locker: a rotten stench, green-black in colour, not the fuzzy apologetic blue of bread mould. I hesitated near the tall shelves, sniffing—and then the door swung shut behind me and the lights went out.

  For a second I stood in complete darkness, and then I spun and scrabbled at the wall for the switches, feeling them under my fingertips as up, thumbs-up, yes sir, we’re still on. I flicked them anyway, up and down a dozen times. Nothing. A darkness, strangers, the sound of gunfire. I reached for the handle, and cried out as a hand closed around my wrist.

  “Uhh!” I yanked back, but the grip was like a handcuff—scaly, hot, carrying a wave of stomach-churning smell so that I had to spit quickly onto the floor to empty my mouth. The hand didn’t budge. I wrenched at it, this can’t be happening, I was just too tired, that was all, hallucinating, or some fucking prank you guys, some fucking prank, but the hand wasn’t human, and I was only, I knew, using the word ‘hand’ because ‘appendage’ would have made me scream. Even now I wondered if I should be screaming; my affronted grunt wouldn’t have attracted any help.

  It wasn’t completely dark; there was a little light, ordinary fluorescent light filtering under the half-inch gap under the door. As my eyes adjusted, the thing holding me came into focus—yes, of course it was the thing from the creek, a limb extending from the raggedy blackness and clamped tight around my wrist.

  I was sure that if I kept squirming it would simply take the skin off, and a dim embarrassment soaked through the terror: that it was not the pain I feared exactly or the injury itself, but how I would explain it when I got out of the storeroom, if I ever got out. Because everyone would ask how it happened and if I couldn’t explain I would be in trouble. I became aware of my panting breath and willed it to slow. Okay. All right. Found me. I believe.