Wonderful World

by Javier Calvo

  Lucas recognizes something of his own vaguely namby-pamby seriousness in the way his father talks. That sort of namby-pamby seriousness that often causes people to get easily distracted and stop listening. Lucas changes position on the sofa with a pensive face and his feet splash in an enormous puddle that he could swear wasn't there a moment ago. He examines the floor planks near their table. Obviously there must be a pipe broken somewhere in the bar, because water is coming from somewhere and flooding the room. Koldo Cruz has taken a bag of marijuana out of one of the inside pockets of his denim jacket and is rolling another joint with the same lethargic face. Bocanegra leans in toward Lucas to whisper in his ear.

  “Don't even ask.” He points with his pint of beer to the figure covered in bloody bandages. “We don't talk about that at this table.”

  “Is that why everyone's so quiet?” Lucas Giraut looks at Bocanegra, who has abruptly moved away and now seems to be acting like he hadn't said anything, his eyes fixed on the legs of some terrified-looking girls at the next table. “Is that why it looks like everyone is afraid? Because of this…? Because of the one with the bandages?”

  “Listen.” Lorenzo Giraut stops kissing the bloody cheek of the bandaged figure and looks at his son with a namby-pamby serious expression. “You're here for a reason. This is the night it all began. And not only for obvious reasons. This is the real beginning of the story. If you want to understand it, pay attention. What happens between us three tonight is the real beginning of everything.”

  “It's like that story about the butterfly that flutters its wings in China,” says Koldo Cruz. With a lethargic expression. His long hair is curly while Bocanegra's is wavy and Giraut's is straight and blond.

  Lucas Giraut can't help noticing that his father and the bandaged figure of inhuman proportions are seated at an interpersonal distance normally reserved for people who are physically intimate. The bandaged figure's hand, Lucas notices with a slightly disgusted expression, is quite close to his father's crotch. Koldo Cruz finishes lighting his joint and begins to perform some sort of undulating, vaguely snakelike dance with his arms and neck to the beat of the song playing on the wooden speakers by the bar. Bocanegra and Giraut move their heads rhythmically in acknowledgment of the song. The guy singing through the wooden speakers sings that when the moon eclipses the sun one can't technically speak of a dark side of the moon since, technically speaking, both sides are dark.

  “That doesn't make sense,” says Lucas Giraut finally. Looking at his father and the other figures around the table. “That's not how dreams work. Dreams are made of memories. But I was never here. I wasn't even born. I've never seen this man.” He points to Koldo Cruz. “And no one's ever told me any of this. So how could I remember it?”

  Bocanegra stares at Lorenzo Giraut with a theatrical expression of shock. The cruel smile that Lucas knows so well in the real-life Bocanegra is already there in the face of the Bocanegra in the dream. In an embryonic stage, if you will.

  “Oh, shit,” says Bocanegra. “Who has the Temporal Paradox Survival Manual? Because I forgot mine.” He pats down his pockets mockingly.

  Everyone at the table starts to laugh, except for Lucas Giraut. The figure wrapped in bloody bandages doesn't laugh, either. It just looks at Lucas out of the corner of his eye. With those points of yellow light.

  “Listen.” Lorenzo Giraut once again takes on his namby-pamby serious tone. “We don't have much time. Not to mention the water level.” He points to the floor. Where the level of the water waterlogging the floorboards has now risen an inch or so and forces the pub regulars to walk on tiptoe and lift up the hems of their long skirts. “Your mission is to discover what happened between us. You have until eleven approximately.” He quickly checks his wristwatch and then looks at his son with a kind expression. “IDT, of course.”

  “IDT?” Lucas furrows his brow.

  “Internal Dream Time,” says Bocanegra. He empties his pint in one gulp and bangs noisily against the table's wooden surface with the base of the empty glass. “Anyway, around here everything closes at eleven.”

  The pub's back room has been clearing out and now the only other people left are a little man with a corduroy suit reading a British newspaper and two sinister-looking guys with leather jackets and bowl cuts. They all have their pants rolled up. Lucas takes a sip of his beer and tries to determine what it is about this scene of the Down With The Sun Dream that seems so powerfully familiar. Bocanegra lifts a leather bag off the flooded floor and places it on the table. It is a bottle green Puma sports bag. He unzips the bag and gestures to Lucas, inviting him to look inside.

  “This is our new business project,” says Bocanegra.

  Lucas extends his neck to see what's inside the bag. Inside the bag there's a pile of female body parts. An arm filled with bracelets and a perfectly manicured hand. A torso with small, slightly wrinkled breasts. A foot here and knee there. Bocanegra rummages around inside the bag until he finds what he's looking for and holds it up for Lucas to see: it's the face of Estefanía “Fanny” Giraut, with lips bruised by silicone injections and skin pulled horribly taut from behind the ears. With a nose so surgically reconstructed that it no longer looks like a nose. Just a strange cartilaginous protuberance. Something that makes one think of vestigial tails and appendages with teeth. Fanny Giraut's face looks irritated as Bocanegra, grabbing it by the ears without the slightest consideration, sticks it back in the bag.

  “We think we can get almost a million for this. It was Lorenzo's idea. Getting into the antiques business. He thought of it after visiting that museum with the mummies here in London. We set up a bogus company. To send out fake invoices. On a little British island with a special tax regimen.”

  “The island is a center of telluric energies.” Koldo Cruz brings his joint to his glitter-covered face. His long curly hair falls onto his sparkly face and red eyes. “The druids have always known it. That's why our plans can't fail.”

  Lucas Giraut pulls his feet up out of the water and puts them on the sofa. The water that keeps coming must be about eight inches above floor level by now, forcing everyone to get up on chairs. The waiters have their pants rolled up to the knees and are having trouble moving through the water, holding their trays filled with pints of beer precariously and sometimes dropping them when a wave hits them from the side or from behind. Of course, thinks Giraut. That is exactly what's familiar to him about the scene. When he was a boy, in his childhood bedroom in the North Wing of the Giraut family house in the Ampurdan, he had a recurring dream in which the Mediterranean rose, flooding the beach and reaching the house in a question of minutes. Covering the first floor and then the second, where the Fishing Trophy Room is. In his dream, Lucas would watch the water level rise until the furniture and the lamps and the paintings on the walls started floating. Finally the house flooded completely, the water reaching the ceiling. The fish overran the hallways and the rooms. The only thing that little Lucas could do in the face of the rising water was go farther up the house's marble staircase. First he got trapped in the attic and then, when the water flooded that part, too, he pushed open the trap door and went out onto the roof. Where the same landscape always awaited him. The Ampurdan coast had disappeared. The sea covered everything. The rocky hills of the northern coast had become little dwindling islands. There was no trace of terra firma. Minutes later, Lucas was floating in the water, grabbing a plank of wood or some other remains of the flood.

  Someone shouts in the front of the pub. The two guys with bowl cuts in the back room have gotten up on one of the tables and are trying to climb the curtains. The little man with the corduroy suit clicks his tongue and tries to move between the tables, but he's dragged by a wave. On the table occupied by the Down With The Sun Society, Lorenzo Giraut, Koldo Cruz and Bocanegra are consulting a messy pile of maps and blueprints. With a conspiratorial air. The way they are consulting the maps and whispering to each other is not so much genuinely conspiratorial. It's more like the way someon
e whispers theatrically, giggling and rubbing their hands together, when they want to make abundantly clear to any spectator that they're conspiring. Giraut looks at his Lino Rossi suit with a devastated expression as the water rises above the level of the sofa and the tables. He finally decides to dive in and head to the stairs that lead to the upper floor. Toward which the rest of the pub's regulars are already swimming.

  As Giraut swims under the murky water, he passes fish and aimlessly floating pieces of furniture. The figure wrapped in bloody bandages is the only figure that remains in its chair as if nothing was going on. Now it seems to be reading a Stephen King novel. With some sort of dark mist of blood oozing from its bandaged wounds beneath the water. Lucas Giraut looks around him, searching for his father. Lucas Giraut's cheeks are puffed out like the cheeks of people swimming underwater in movies and cartoons. With a small trail of tiny bubbles rising from his mouth. After a minute he appears on the surface.

  “Hey!” he shouts to Bocanegra, who is connecting cables to a T-shaped detonator. “Has anyone seen my father?”

  The detonator Bocanegra is connecting the cables to is one of those T-shaped detonators that have to be pushed down with both hands. Like those detonators that Wile E. Coyote always uses to try to finish off the Road Runner. The cables Bocanegra is connecting to the detonator are different colors. There is no trace of Lorenzo Giraut anywhere.

  “I haven't seen Sir Intellectualoid.” Bocanegra speaks in a nasty tone. While still working on the detonator. “What makes you think I've seen Mister Tightass Bookworm? Mister I'm More Important Than Everybody Else Because I've Read A Lot Of Books And My Ass Is Shaped Like A Library Chair?”

  Lucas Giraut's gaze follows the different-colored cables that come out of the detonator and go up one wall and continue along the ceiling to the far end of the room. And which then go down the opposite side until they reach the spot where Koldo Cruz is standing on top of the bar. Clinging to a large bottle rack to keep from being dragged down by the waves. The cables connected to the detonator end in a string of dynamite sticks that someone has tied around Cruz's waist with strips of black adhesive tape. The sticks of dynamite have the peace sign drawn on them.

  “Mr. Cruz!” shouts Giraut, splashing around in the water. “Be careful…!” he starts to say.

  But a tremendous explosion blows Koldo Cruz to bits. The entire wall collapses onto the spot where Koldo Cruz was just a second before. Creating a cloud of smoke. Creating a tsunami that instantly sweeps away Giraut and everything around Giraut.

  WONDERFUL WORLD

  By Stephen King

  CHAPTER 42

  Chuck Kimball woke up on his third day in Boston beneath a layer of cardboard boxes and lice-infested blankets in an alley without streetlights or lights of any kind. It was obvious that the cardboard boxes and blankets had belonged to someone else at some point, to one of the many bums and drunks that used to fill the streets of the historic Beacon Hill neighborhood. They had disappeared, too. A couple of bottles of cheap wine in brown paper bags marked that corner of the alley as the former property of one of those modern nomads. Chuck stretched and looked around him, slightly alarmed. The street at the end of the alley seemed calm. Since he had taken apart his wristwatch, his notion of time had almost completely disappeared. He slept for intervals of several minutes at a time, always waking up with a start and drifting back into nervous lethargy. His cravings for Dexedrine seemed to have completely disappeared.

  After peeing in a corner, Chuck studied himself in a piece of broken mirror. There was no doubt his appearance would give him away if he dared to go out onto a busy street. Judging by the light, the sun should be coming up in less than an hour. His stomach sent him one of its irritated messages. A hungry grumbling mixed with a warning that diarrhea, and the danger of dehydration, could arrive at any moment.

  First crawling and then dragging himself along the ground, Chuck got to the end of the alley and peeked out. He was about fifty yards from the corner, between Beacon and Dartmouth. The landscape was strangely familiar and at the same time ineffably disturbing. With its old gas streetlights and cobble-stoned streets and the rolling rows of elegant redbrick houses. There wasn't a soul out at that hour. Not a car. Not a bird. The desolation that had been following him for the last few weeks seemed to have taken on a decidedly different component.

  Where were the groups of people chatting in front of the stores? The happy-looking pedestrians walking to their workplaces or exiting the T stations in an orderly fashion? In that moment he understood what was newly disturbing. It was the silence. First the animals had disappeared and now the people. When they began their transmissions, little more than a month ago, the populated areas had kept up the semblance of normality. Everyone had maintained that irritating farce of routines and jobs and family life. Something in the atmosphere of that deserted corner told him that things had changed. That they were entering a new phase of the colonization.

  Chuck started walking along Beacon Street. At first he walked with hurried steps, plastered to the gates of buildings and to the redbrick walls. Looking over his shoulder for signs of Captors in the sky. They seemed to be hiding, too. There was no smoke coming from the chimneys of the houses, in spite of the cold. No movement could be seen at the window curtains. Chuck shivered and slowed his pace. There was a supermarket cart abandoned in the middle of the street. With bags inside. Something that They would undoubtedly never do.

  He approached the cart, still studying the sky, and examined the bags' contents. He was so hungry that, for a few moments, he forgot to keep his guard up and monitor his surroundings. He found several bags of snacks, which he tore open and devoured like an animal. Bringing fistfuls of potato chips to his mouth and swallowing them without chewing. He drank sips of soda until he could feel the stimulating rush of sugar in his veins. He ate a piece of ham and took several bites of a still bleeding steak. And then he saw it. While he was still pulling on the piece of meat with his teeth, streams of blood sliding down his chin.

  There They were. They were all there. He didn't need to see anything more than the black cloud to understand that. The black cloud that floated over the giant golden dome of the State House, at the peak of Beacon Hill, above the trees and avenues of Boston Common. It was blacker and denser than any cloud Chuck had seen before. There must have been dozens of Them flying in circles over the dome, maybe hundreds. Up until then Chuck had seen some of the Captors flying low above rooftops or floating in groups of three or four above their centers of control. It was their way of communicating, that he was sure of. Of creating focal points of transmission with whatever it was that They were transmitting. Places where their waves were concentrated and therefore dangerous places that not even someone immune like him could go near without running certain risks.

  Chuck dropped the piece of raw meat and spit out the pieces he still had in his mouth. He set off running down the deserted street without taking his eyes off the black cloud of Captors. Like every time he saw Them, there was something that attracted his gaze fatefully. Something impossible to define, which was surely the explanation of why some cultures in the past had confused them with angels. That's if the Captors weren't the basis of human belief in angels to begin with. Now, due to the concentration of all those dozens of specimens, Chuck felt that mesmerizing effect stronger than ever. Each Captor must have been between ten and fifteen feet long from the top of their snakelike heads to the tip of their tails, although with their wings completely unfolded They could sometimes double that figure. They flew in circles over their control centers like some sort of established dance, with concentric turn after concentric turn that Chuck suspected must have something to do with those vortexes that Saunders had told him about. Creating vaguely conical black clouds, like tornado funnels.

  Judging by the concentration of Captors over the gold dome, Boston's State House must be the main control center in the city, if not the state. Chuck advanced slowly. Now it seemed that he could hear the
m, too. Some sort of deep, constant buzzing that either came from the beating of their wings or from some kind of frequency that They used to communicate among themselves.

  The fact that he had never heard them before didn't surprise him in the slightest. As the colonization grew day by day, the signs had been multiplying. The night he saw them for the first time soaring over the highway he had had that powerful sensation that he had noticed their presence before. Of course, that had to do with the mechanisms They used in order to not be seen. Chuck suspected that their previous invisibility must have been due to something like collective hypnosis. Something that made people not notice them in spite of the fact that They were right in front of them and could be easily seen.

  He was now about three blocks from Beacon Hill and the wrought-iron gates that separated the street from the park's landscaped grounds. He decided to stop there. He got behind a tree trunk and extended his neck as far as he could to see what was on the other side of the fence.

  His heart skipped a beat.

  There were people there. A lot of people. At first glance, Chuck calculated that there must have been at least a thousand. Beneath the elevated redbrick portico and the Corinthian columns of the State House. Most of the people there were lined up to get into the building. It was the way they were lined up that terrified Chuck. Even though he'd seen similar things dozens of times in recent weeks he still hadn't gotten used to them. They were in a perfectly orderly line. In total silence. No arguments, no nervous leg movements and no impatient glances at their watches. Just standing motionless in the line, each one staring at the nape of the neck in front of them. The line snaked from the State House entrance, going down through the garden to the wrought-iron gates.

  Another several dozen people seemed to be keeping watch around the line and the entrance doors. Observing the surroundings, some of them with binoculars.

  Now Chuck was paralyzed. His legs wanted to run far away from there without waiting to see any more, but his brain told him he shouldn't move. That he had miraculously managed to get that close without being seen, but now any movement could give him away. He was right out in the open, in the middle of the street, three blocks from where those things were scoping out the surroundings with binoculars and maybe a third of a mile from the dome darkened by the shadow of that black cloud of Captors.