By nightfall they were near the Michigan/Canada border. They had built a fire by the side of the road in a ditch beneath some decaying oaks. Normally it would be impossible to camp outside this time of year without freezing, but since the earth went haywire, the weather was anything but normal.
Thomas had stopped complaining about his breathing. The inhaler had finally kicked in, but it wouldn’t last. Elaine knew this as she sat alone with her back to the fire, gazing up at the sky. Green gaseous clouds, vividly colored like something from a Dr. Seuss book, moved over the countryside. Breathing had become increasingly difficult. People were dying because of it. If you couldn’t get your hands on a gas mask or one of the remaining inhalers, you were shit out of luck.
She was thinking about the Golden Doors. That was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about lately. The towns they passed through with their crumbling buildings, trash pile mountains, and fissure-spilt asphalt, had boasted handfuls of these neurotic, doomsayer types, lecturing to no one in particular about the mystery of the Golden Doors.
Elaine recalled a short and shriveled hag of a woman back in Philadelphia who stood on a park bench, dressed in trash bags, gray hair poking up, eyes feverish and wild. They sprang up all over the globe, she had said. Folks wanna say it ain’t true, that the Golden Doors are a myth, but I’ve seen one. I looked into its shimmering depths and I nearly went mad.
“What’d you see?” asked someone from the crowd.
But the hag had never answered; she only grinned mischievously.
Thousands were moving across the forty-eight states into major cities, spreading word of these Golden Doors, claiming firsthand experience. Many had embarked on pilgrimages in search of them. Elaine’s group, consisting of herself, Diana, Thomas, and Ron, were on this same quest.
She got to her feet, brushing off the seat of her pants. Lights in the sky, green and fiery, churned above her head. Strange, red, silken beings swam through the cumuli as though it were an ocean, paying little attention to the world below.
She went to join the others by the fire. “It’s night and I’m tired,” she said, taking out her bedroll and throwing it over the ground. She put on her facemask and got curled up in the covers, facing the flames.
Diana unrolled her bedding beside Elaine. She got situated and began stroking her hair.
“I don’t know how they can sleep like that,” Tommy said. He sat across from them on the other side of the fire, smoking a cigarette. “Those facemasks are damn annoying. It’s easier if we just take another dose of the inhaler before turning in. Don’t you think?”
“Enough already,” Elaine grumbled. “I can sleep fine.”
“So can I,” Diana added.
“I as well,” said Ron.
Thomas got up, flicked his cigarette, and stalked into the nearby woods. He typically slept by himself, so this wasn’t a big surprise.
“That settles it, then,” Ron said, gazing into the fire. Orange flames clawed the night. He laid down his sleeping bag and within moments all were asleep.
* * *
Elaine awoke to a sound. She’d been having a nightmare about her son. She hadn’t seen Jamie since it happened, since the world locked up like a bad computer screen. He had been attending undergraduate classes at Princeton University, had been living on campus and was even studying law. But now Princeton University was a giant seething sandpit, a liquid desert stretching for miles, with horrifically large dolphin-like insects diving in and out of the sand. She had seen it with her own eyes, but found no sign of Jamie.
The sound was coming from the trees. They could hardly be called trees, looking more like witches being burned at the stake, ashen leaves dangling from skeletal limbs.
Elaine propped herself up. Diana was next to her, snoring into her facemask. Beyond the fire, which had died down to coals, Ron lay in his sleeping bag.
It came again, drifting through the crooked branches, permeating the air. She got up and stretched her back. Sleeping on the ground was always painful. She skirted Ron’s sleeping bag and headed into the woods.
It isn’t safe to travel this far from the highway. I’m asking for trouble. But that sound… it’s got to be Thomas. What the hell is he up to?
The gaseous clouds gave off a light all their own, sickly and green, like the underside of a pond. Nevertheless, night was still night, darkness still darkness, and she had trouble picking her way through the terrain.
Taloned branches clawed at her. The ground beneath was shot through with spidery roots and pointed rocks. She nearly tripped several times.
By now she recognized Thomas’s voice. He was speaking nervously, tensely… But to whom?
She came to a wall of tightly growing tree trunks and peered through a V-shaped opening. There was a clearing down there, situated at the bottom of a small depression. A bluish glow, like the light of a black-light, swam about. Thomas was there, his Mad Hatter’s voice climbing up the embankment. He was kneeling before something tall and black.
Panic gripped her. What in God’s name is he doing, playing with himself? She suffered a wave of nausea. Once it passed, she located a space in the trunks and made her way down.
“Thomas? Is everything all right?”
He didn’t answer. As she got closer, she saw he was naked. His clothes were piled beside his bedroll. She’d never known Thomas to go around in the nude. His personality was something to the contrary of that. The sight of his body disturbed her.
He’s lost it. He’s finally gone mad. People seem to be going mad all the time now. Like that hag back in Philadelphia, and that toothless man we saw in Tennessee who wore coke cans for eyeglasses, and the preacher in Boston who lined the highway with animal carcasses and set them ceremonially on fire.
“Thomas?”
She passed before the fire pit and the flames resembled black and blue construction paper cutouts. Instead of logs there were piles of shiny rocks that seemed to keep burning, painting the forest with their weird blue glow.
“What the fuck…,” she whispered. “Thomas, where’d you find these?”
She advanced toward him, seeing only his fat naked back, hearing only his mindless cries. When she recognized what he was kneeling before, her heart stopped, breath caught in her throat, and gooseflesh erupted on her arms.
No. It couldn’t be that.
The giant black door stood attached to nothing. The corners poked into the branches. The bottom disappeared into the dirt. Just like the doors being described in towns all across America. Shiny, metallic, freestanding—only this one was black instead of gold.
Thomas looked over his shoulder and grinned, face sweaty. His glasses were cracked in three places. His teeth stretched out like an accordion.
Elaine recoiled. He looks savage.
Suddenly he was on his feet, his fatty naked flesh sagging off the bones, breasts drooping, belly flabbish and swollen, body supported on bony chicken legs. His narrow phallus hung down like a corpse’s tongue.
“I found it,” he said. “A Golden Door. Me—I found it. Not you, not Diana. Not that hippy philosopher, Ron. The door chose me.”
Images of demons danced through Elaine’s mind, cut from all the religious books she had read during her life. She recalled sitting through her father’s sermons, hearing him preach hellfire and brimstone. His voice spoke in her head.
The rapture took place December 21, 2012, when Jesus called His flock home. He judged those who would be saved, and those who would be damned. Those who would be damned were left on the earth to suffer. Now tell me, Elaine, why were you not chosen? Is it because you have sinned against the Lord? Is it because you are a lesbian?
Thomas approached the door. “Aren’t you jealous? I’ll be the first to go through, the first to greet whatever’s on the other side.”
“Get away from there,” she said. “You’re crazy. It’s not even gold; it’s black. It’s a fraud, Thomas. It’s something else…”
He wagged his finger. “
As usual, your religion is a trickster. I won’t be fooled by a forked tongue.” Then his face grew sad. “Nothing makes sense anymore—nothing in this goddam world makes sense!”
He was close to tears. His naked body trembled with emotion, and Elaine suddenly had an insight into the psychology of Thomas Miller. She understood how hard this change had been for him. She actually pitied the man.
He had reached the black door. He was standing with his hand on the doorknob. “On the other side, I’ll have all the inhalers I could want,” he said. Because of the fire his reflection had become visible in the shiny black surface of the door. He stood looking at it, even reached up to trace the outline of his face.
“Thomas, don’t.”
But already he was turning, opening, and he slipped through, closing the door behind him. A heavy silence followed.
Elaine approached the door. But just as her reflection began to take shape in the shadowy metal surface, it flew open, releasing a strong, forceful wind. It shook the trees, blew out the fire, pushed Elaine onto her back.
For a brief second she glimpsed infinite space through the opening. Stars burned. Planets rolled. A cosmic dust was mixing with multicolored clouds to create a vast foggy web, out of which sprang Thomas—wild, alien, savage—horrifically mutated, and coming straight at her through the dark…
She screamed and shot to her feet, but he was already upon her, his soft fleshy limbs and lizard’s tail groping around her neck, legs, and waist, pinning her down. He resembled something that was both human and reptile, yet not completely either.
“Get the fuck off me!” she screeched. She couldn’t stand the way he gripped her, the way his skin felt: slimy, prickly, and rough, like a crocodile.
She kicked at him and drove her knees into his chest. When she got one of her hands free, she brought her elbow down on what might’ve been the back of his head. Strands of drool oozed down on her, but his grip loosened and she managed to scramble out from under him. She tore up the embankment, into the trees.
She could hear him snapping branches behind her. The only illumination came from the gaseous clouds overhead, and their greenish aura filtered down through the canopy, staining the forest floor.
She caught sight of the campsite. With relief she recognized two figures standing to either side of the fire.
“Help!” she cried. “He’s coming after me—help!”
She flung herself into Ron’s arms and buried her face in his chest. She was sobbing. From the corner of her eye, she saw Diana standing with legs apart, raising a handgun.
“Is it Thomas?” she asked.
“No,” Elaine replied. “Not anymore.”
Then she closed her eyes, recoiling when the nine loud thunder-bursts echoed through the night. Finally she lifted her head and turned to face her lover. “Where the hell did you get that?”
Diana was about to say something but Ron answered for her. “I gave it to her. To carry, to keep charge over… to use if it became necessary.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want Thomas knowing. At the same time, I didn’t want all of us knowing about it except Thomas. Understand?”
She laughed at his explanation and shook her head. Then she was transferred to Diana’s arms. Ron took the gun and went to investigate the body.
* * *
When she awoke the next morning, curled in her sleeping bag, the fire was out. It looked like someone had been digging in the ashes. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. Ron wasn’t where he usually was, but when she looked again she saw him coming out of the woods.
“What happened?” she asked. Diana stirred beside her.
He tossed something into the fire pit. Instantly, a thick black cloud wafted into the air. Elaine covered her nose and mouth.
When it cleared, she peered into the ashes. A rubbery hunk of bright green flesh lay on its side. She knew it was part of Thomas—well, part of what he’d become.
“I dragged his body into the trees,” Ron said. “Burned it.” He pointed to the line of smoke twisting toward the sky.
“Did you see the door?” Elaine asked.
He frowned. “What door?” Then his eyes widened. “A Golden Door?”
“Not a Golden Door. Something else. A black door.”
Diana sat up holding her sleeping bag. The nipples on her small breasts poked through the fabric of her shirt. She was looking at Elaine.
“Tell us,” Ron said.
Elaine sighed, then proceeded to tell them everything that had happened since last night. When she finished, she looked to Ron for validation. “Tell me I’m not crazy.”
Ron was in his thinking pose, stroking his chin. He said, “Every action in the universe has an equal but opposite reaction. I’d say that the Black Doors are a negative response to the Golden Doors. It’s reality’s way of balancing the scales. Good and evil, dark and light, life and death, hot and cold—that sort of thing.”
“What does it mean?” Diana asked.
Ron smiled. “It means we stay the hell away from Black Doors.” He bent and started packing up his things.
* * *
An hour later they were on the highway. Three now instead of four. The wooded hills to either side oscillated between green and gray, sometimes lush and alive, mostly ashen and dead.
Elaine spent a lot of her time looking at the sky. She’d made a habit of it. The greens, the reds, the oranges, clouds like cotton candy sweeping across the heavens. It wasn’t as it once had been: predictable. These days, anything could be up there.
After a while they stopped and sought refuge in one of the abandoned cars. Sitting in the cab gave their lungs a break from the noxious air. They ate stale bread and a can of baked beans Ron had been saving. Other travelers were moving down the highway. Elaine watched them out the passenger window.
“Now this,” Ron said, fishing out the Advair inhaler. He took a long, deep inhalation, then passed it to Elaine. She clicked back the tiny blue lever, sucked in the crystalline powder, and handed it to Diana. They waited fifteen minutes until the highway was clear, then continued on their way. They didn’t get very far.
“Intruder, three o’clock,” Ron hissed.
Elaine turned to see a figure running toward them through the grass. A male waving arms above his head, calling to get their attention.
They stopped. Ron suddenly wheeled toward Diana, thrusting the handgun down the front of her jeans. He yanked her shirt over it. “You seem to have the most luck with this.”
The thin brunette gave a solemn, militant nod.
“You there, travelers!” the man said, reaching the road, panting
and out of breath. “I have secret knowledge to grant you.”
Ron stepped forward. “What makes you think we want secret knowledge?”
The man knit his brows. He was leathery and grotesquely thin. His clothes were oily and they clung to his gaunt frame. He had long, wiry hair and a full beard, and his eyes displayed that haunted look so common in people now. “Everyone needs secret knowledge during the Galactic Alignment,” he said.
“What do you know of the Galactic Alignment?” Elaine asked, surprised. She’d only heard that term among the pseudoscience academics.
“Much,” he said, giving her a strange look. He tried taking their hands but they shook him off. Then he wheeled and headed into the grass, signaling them to follow. “Come on, friends, this way. The master is in the trees, by the door!” He turned, continuing into the forest.
“I don’t like it,” Diana said. She was fingering the gun handle through her shirt.
“But he claims there is a door,” Ron said. “It’s worth checking out.” He looked at Elaine. “You up for it?”
She nodded, and they moved off the highway.
* * *
A group of humans had gathered in the forest. Almost twenty in all. They, like the impish man, appeared dirty and poorly dressed. Many had curious black war paint smeared under their eyes.
A Black Door hovered in the branches at his rear.
Ron took one look and said, “That settles that,” and turned to leave.
“Wait,” Elaine said, stopping him. “Let’s hear what he has to say.”
He sighed, but swung back around. “I already know what he’s going to say. He’s going to ask if we’ve accepted Jesus Christ into our hearts.”
The old man on the stump quieted the crowd by thumping his staff three times. Each face gazed up at him. “Time is no longer real,” he began. “At least not for us, not anymore. When the Maya Long Count Calendar reached its climax on December 21, 2012, reality as we knew it came to a grinding halt. The universe changed. Planet Earth was fixed into a certain alignment with the sun and the center of the Milky Way. We call this the Galactic Alignment.”
He paused. Those hooded eyes, frayed round the edges with bristling gray hair, seemed to take account of everyone in attendance. He wasn’t just looking at them: he was analyzing them.
He continued, “When the sun rose on December 21, 2012, the winter solstice, it rose on a new galactic configuration. The sun, our planet’s source of light and energy, had eclipsed us and blocked out the center of the Milky Way—the source of life-giving for our entire species. For the first time in history, we were cut off from that source. So, in essence, we were cut off from God.
“Once this happened, a series of significant changes occurred. First, the planet flipped end over end as the magnetic poles switched. This reversal made it so that all forms of electricity—as we were accustomed—became void. This defied the Laws of Science; there can be no accounting for it.”
Aberrations of Reality Page 13