The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

Cisneros didn’t move; cobwebs bridged between his shoulders and the bunker wall, and more cobwebs formed a linkage between his ankles, his knees. No spiders in sight…not on his body, anyway. And not as many as there had been on the fouled walls and ceiling.

  “Come on, Bert,” he said, a real wealth of anxiety and pleading in his voice. “Get the fuck up!”

  Maybe he was dead, Tyrell thought. And what did that say about Astrid? He’d half-talked himself into believing that she hadn’t been real, but if what she had told was true…Christ, it was all craziness! He doubted he would ever be able to sort it out. He shouted again, and again Cisneros made no response. He drew a breath, held it, leaned in over the lip and poked the sleeping man with a forefinger.

  The finger sank knuckle-deep into Cisneros’s shoulder, and Tyrell felt ticklish movement along its length.

  He cried out in shock, fell back. Cisneros’s body rippled and shifted, and as Tyrell watched it began to break apart, the realistic-looking slicker, the jeans, the seam of swarthy skin visible between the ragged black hair and the slicker’s collar, all dissolving into a myriad separate white shapes, thousands and thousands of spiders spilling, crawling over one another, proving that the body had been composed of nothing but tiny arachnid forms, a boiling nest of little horrors, a tide of them that scuttled across the floor and fumed toward him over the edge of the lip.

  Tyrell screamed and screamed, scrambling away from the bunker, falling, wriggling on his back, then crawling toward the sea, right to the verge, into cold water. He sat up, staring at the bunker. The spiders had not followed him; they were poised on the lip, all in a row, riding one another, a fringe of them several inches thick, and he had the idea that they were watching him, amused by his panic. He got to his feet, gasping, choking on fear, and there was an explosion at his back. He turned just in time to be knocked flat by an enormous breaker that dragged him over the coarse sand of the slope. He scrambled up, coughing up saltwater. The mass of spiders was still perched on the lip, still watching. He started to his right. Stopped. Went to his left. Stopped. A sob loosened in his chest, and his eyes filled.

  “Oh, Jesus God,” he said, singing it out above the pitch of the wind. “Please don’t do this!”

  A lesser wave broke at his back, sending a flow of chill water rushing about his knees.

  “Please,” he said. “I don’t want this anymore.”

  He wished there was someone who could answer, someone to whom he could appeal this thoroughly unfair circumstance. That, he thought, would be his best hope, because it was for certain there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. But at last, having no other option, he began to run, giving the bunker a wide berth, pumping his knees, mounting the dune and cresting it, picking his way nimbly among the overgrown craters and through the pines. He came to feel light in running, as if each step might lift him high above the island, even above the storm, and seizing upon this comforting irrationality among all the terrifying irrationalities that ruled over Nomans Land, he thought he might be able to run forever, or until he dropped, or until something even more irrational happened, something that through terror or pain would set him free once and for all from the fear that had ruled him for so long.

  Night, a toiling darkness illuminated by strokes of red lightning that spread down the darkness like cracks in a black and fragile shell, and a flickering orange light was shining beneath the ill-fitting door of Astrid’s shack. Tyrell stood in the pines, hugging himself for warmth, his teeth chattering, chilled to the bone. Hallucinations, she’d said. Maybe that had been responsible for all that had happened. Hallucinations brought on by the spiders’ venom. If her version of things was accurate—hallucinations, Bert dead—then he had nothing to fear inside the shack. He wanted badly to believe her, because then he could get warm. Warmth seemed the most important quality in all the world, and he realized he was going to have to give it priority very soon or else he was not going to survive. He kept edging nearer to the shack, stopping, listening, hoping to pick up some sign of occupancy and from that sign to gauge the nature of the occupant. But the only sounds were the pissing of the rain in the pine boughs, the moaning of the wind, and the occasional concussion from the sky.

  Tyrell crept to the side of the door, peered in through a gap in the boards, but could make out nothing apart from blurred orange light. He could feel the warmth inside, steaming out at him, and its allure drew him to pull the door open. The shack was empty. After a moment’s hesitation he ducked inside and closed the door behind him. He stripped off his clothing, wrapped himself in one of the blankets, and stood by the hot plate, warming his hands over the coils, standing there until his shaking had stopped. Then he sat down on the sleeping bag, covered himself with a second blanket, and stared blankly at the ceiling, where dozens of white spiders patrolled the intricate strands of their webs. He felt weak in every joint, every extremity, too weak to consider doing anything about the spiders, and he became mesmerized by their delicate movements. There seemed to be patterns involved in their shifting, at the heart of which was the maintenance of a structure, a constant process of adjustment, of equalization. He laughed at himself. Christ, you’re really losing it, you are! He settled back against the wall, let his eyes close; the light of the hurricane lamp acquired a dim yellowish orange value through his lids, like the color of a summer sunset, a clean, sweet color, and it seemed he was falling into it, drifting away on a calm breeze that carried him beyond this storm, beyond all storms.

  He came awake to find Astrid looking down at him, shrugging out of her slicker. He sat up, tension cabling the muscles in his neck and shoulders, waiting for her to change back into a corpse. But no change occurred. She ran her hands along the sides of her head, pulling the damp heft of her hair into a sleek ponytail.

  “I was worried about you,” she said. “I didn’t know where you’d gone.”

  He had trouble mustering speech. “I…uh…” He swallowed. “It was those hallucinations you talked about. I woke up and saw something that frightened me.”

  “What did you see?” She kneeled beside him, and he had to restrain himself from scrambling away.

  He told her what he’d seen in the shack, in the bunker; once he had finished he laughed nervously and said, “When you said there might be hallucinations, I didn’t think you had anything like that in mind.”

  She plucked at a wisp of grass, her features cast in a somber expression. “I have to tell you the truth,” she said. “I don’t suppose it’s very important whether or not you believe me. Or maybe it is…maybe it’s important in some way I don’t understand. But I do have to tell you.”

  He felt something bad coming; a sour cold heaviness was collecting in his gut, and the weakness in his limbs grew more profound.

  “I came here in the summer of 1964,” she said. “I…” She broke off, reacting to his horrified stare. “I’m not a ghost…not in the way you think. Not any more than you are.”

  “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “Just listen,” she said. “It’s going to be very hard for you to believe this, and you won’t have a chance of understanding unless you listen carefully and hear me out. All right?”

  He nodded, too frightened to move, to do other than listen.

  “I came here in ’64,” she continued. “To study the spiders. I’d heard about them from a botanist who’d spent time on the island, and I’d seen a specimen. That was enough to convince me that we were dealing with an entirely new subspecies and not just a variant. Their poison, in particular, fascinated me. It incorporated an incredibly complex DNA. Do you know what that is? DNA?”

  “I’ve a fair idea,” he said, thinking of ’64, right, you crazy bitch!

  “Okay.” She put her hand to her brow, pinched the bridge of her nose, a gesture—it seemed to Tyrell—of weariness. “God, there’s so much to tell!”

  This sign of weakness on her part boosted his confidence. “Go ahead. We’ve got all night.”

  “At least that
,” she said; she drew a breath, let it sigh out. “Aside from the DNA, I found what appeared to be fragments of human RNA in the poison.” She looked at him questioningly.

  “Something to do with memory, storing memory or something…is that right?”

  “Near enough.”

  Wind curled in beneath the door to rustle the dry grasses carpeting the floor; the flame of the hurricane lamp flickered, brightened, and a tide of orange light momentarily eroded the edge of the shadows on the walls. The rain had let up to a drizzle, and the thunder had quit altogether. The storm, Tyrell realized, was nearing its end. For some reason this made him anxious. He was not feeling very well. He kept wishing for something solid, some edifice of thought to hang on to; but there was nothing within reach, and this caused him even more anxiety. He tried to focus on Astrid’s words.

  “Anyway,” she went on, “after a week or so I ran up against some pretty frightening questions. The poison, I’d discovered, was unbelievably potent. I figured that death would follow within seconds of a bite. Yet I’d been bitten many times and I was still alive. And I couldn’t understand how the spiders had been isolated on the island. Surely, I thought, they must have been carried off on the boats that had landed here over the years ever since the Indians occupied the land. And if that had been the case, given their hardiness, their breeding capacity, there wouldn’t be too many people left alive. Without a sophisticated technology, there was no way an antidote could have been produced. The poison was extremely complex.” Another sigh. “Then I began having dreams.”

  Tyrell remembered Cisneros, his ravings. “What kind of dreams?”

  “They weren’t dreams, they were experiences of other lives. Men, women, children. All from different eras, some of them Indian lives from precolonial times. None earlier than that. It wasn’t that I was watching them. I was inside their heads, living their days and nights. And it was from these dreams that I began to understand the truth, that the spiders had been transported off-island…a long, long time ago. They’d been carried to the mainland, back to Europe on the colonial vessels, and then gradually had spread to Asia, Africa. Everywhere. By my estimate their population had come to span the world by the mid-nineteenth century. I very much doubt that humanity survived into the twentieth. Of course what I know of human history belies that…that’s part of their fabrication. But in reality the last hundred years or so of mankind must have been awful. People dying and dying. The population shrinking to a mere handful of souls who hadn’t been bitten.”

  It took him a long moment to absorb what she had said. “Now wait a minute! We’re living proof of…”

  “No, we’re not,” she said. “We’re not alive. We never were.” He tried to interrupt, but she talked over him. “I don’t understand it completely. Or perhaps I do. I can’t be sure. It’s difficult to explain things in human terms, because though the spiders with their poison have managed to ensure a kind of human survival, I have no idea of their motivations…or if they even have motivations. This may be all reflex on their part. Or maybe it’s that they’ve become a unity, intelligent in some way due to a symbiotic use of our genetic material. A group mind or something of the sort. Maybe the best analogy would be to say…Have you heard about the concept of people’s personalities being translated into computer software? That’s similar to what the spiders have done. Transformed our genetic material into a biological analogue of software.” She blew out a sharp breath between her pursed lips. “I think sometimes it’s all a game to them, a pageant, this continuation of the history of a dead race. The way they appear to attach special significance to this island, for instance. Once in a while they act out a scene or two on the island, and the human creations involved. Like you and me. It’s as if they develop a fondness for them. They bring them back over and over, and occasionally they’ll let them live”—she laughed—“happily. As if they were celebrating us, thanking us for what we’ve done for them by dying, by affording them a new level of consciousness.” She took his hand. “Do you remember asking me why it was that one moment I’d be looking at you with longing, and the next I’d be frightened? It’s because I think they mean for us to live happily for a while. I want that so much! I don’t want to lose the chance. Maybe it’s only a dream, an illusion. But it feels so good, so strong, to be even this much alive compared to what I’ve been…almost nothing, a flicker of consciousness subsumed into a hive of dreams.”

  He pulled his hand away from her. “You’re fucking crazy!”

  “I know that’s how it sounds…”

  “No, it doesn’t sound crazy. It is crazy!” He drew up his knees, shifted deeper into the corner; the lamplight fell across his toes, and when he pulled them back into shadow he felt much more secure. “You sit here and tell me that we’re the figments of the imagination of a bunch of goddamn spiders, and that they’ve been carrying out the evolution of human history in this fantasy world they’ve created…”

  “Yes, I…”

  “And you expect me to swallow that? Jesus Christ, woman!”

  “I’d think,” she said stiffly, “that of all people you’d be able to comprehend it…what with your living in a fantasy of your own all these years.”

  “When it comes to fantasy, lady, I can’t hold a candle to you.”

  “It’s not so alien as it seems,” she said. “Philosophers have been…”

  He snorted in contempt.

  “…saying more or less the same thing for centuries. Think about it. Didn’t your friend say what I have? Didn’t he?”

  His shock at her knowing what Cisneros had said must have showed on his face, because she laughed.

  “How could I have known that?” she said. “I couldn’t have…not unless his truth had been communicated to me through dreams.” Again she took his hand. “You’ll understand sooner or later. It’s always hard for those of us who’re brought to the island to accept. It’s like waking up to find you’re dreaming. But eventually you become sensitized to what they intend, what their patterns are, their tendencies.”

  Tyrell shook free of her, his mind whirling. Had everything he’d seen and felt since his arrival been a hallucination? That couldn’t be right. The hallucination theory, that was hers, and so it had to be wrong. No, wait. She’d denied that one when she’d tried to convince him about the spiders. So maybe it was right after all. Maybe this whole thing had been a fever dream, maybe he was lying passed out in the bunker, or maybe even back in his berth aboard the Preciosilla. His thoughts went skittering away into the corners of his brain, hiding like spiders in the convolutions, and he sat empty and unknowing, bewildered by the infinity of confusions accessible to him. Astrid said something, but he refused to listen, certain that whatever she would tell him would only offer more confusion. He could hear his thoughts ticking in secret, little bombs waiting to explode. His heart was ticking, too. The entire world was running on the same pulse, building and building to an explosive moment. He closed his eyes, and the light seemed to be growing brighter, more solid, to pry beneath his lids with thin glowing orange talons.

  “Jack! Look at me!”

  Oh, no! He remembered what had happened the last time he’d had a look at her after a long interval.

  “Are you all right, Jack?”

  Let me be, damn you!

  She was very near, her breath warm on his cheek, and he couldn’t resist taking a peek. That close to him, her face was a touch distorted; but it was her face. Strong Scandinavian features framed by hair like white gold. She looked beautiful in her concern, and he didn’t trust that. Not one bit.

  “Don’t leave me, Jack,” she said. “You have to understand…they’ve given us a chance to live, for more of a life than anyone else can have. But you have to accept things, you can’t go against them. They’ll simply…stop you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes…yes, I understand.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes off her, waiting for the smooth skin and icy eyes and white teeth to give way to corruption
and pocked bone.

  “Do you remember earlier?” she asked. “Making love?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Make love to me now. I want to feel that way again.”

  Her face drew closer yet, and he knew what the plan was now. They would wait until he was kissing her to make the change, and he would find himself kissing death, his tongue probing into a joyless void of rotted gums and broken teeth. Revolted, he shoved her hard, sending her back against the table. Her head struck the corner, cutting short her scream, and she fell on her side. He sat there, breathing rapidly, expecting her to get up. Then he noticed the blood miring the back of her pale blond head.

  “Astrid!”

  He threw off the blanket, crawled over to her, searched for a pulse.

  She was dead.

  Well, he thought, that proved she was wrong. You had to be alive in order to die.

  Didn’t you?

  He was repelled by his insensitivity, by how casually he could accept the death of this woman with whom he had made love only hours before.

  But maybe they hadn’t made love, maybe…

  He scrambled to his feet. Time to stop this shit, stop this ridiculous metaphysical merry-go-round. He’d killed a woman. She’d been a lunatic, but he was liable for the act, and he’d damn well better cover his tracks. He struggled into his wet clothes, trying to think, but his thoughts were muddy, circulating with sluggish inefficiency. Then in pulling on his trousers, he lurched into the table and nearly overturned the lamp. He grabbed it by the handle, held it above the table a moment. A mad little idea crackled in his head. Kill two birds with one stone, he would. He wedged his feet into his shoes, avoiding looking at the body. But as he shrugged on his slicker, his eyes fell upon it and emotion tightened his chest. A tear leaked down onto his cheek.

  “Aw, Jesus!” he said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  As if Jesus were listening.

  He made promises to God. Lord, he said to himself, get me out of this. I swear I’ll live a clean life. I’ll go back to Ireland, I’ll take a stand for God and country.