The Ends of the Earth

by Lucius Shepard

  And then he chastised himself for his weakness. He’d done the deed, and he’d have to face up to the consequences.

  Damn! Did every fucking thing you decided about your life, your morality, sound as feckless and unattached to reality as the things he was trying to decide?

  He backed to the door, pushed it open, and held the lamp high. Astrid’s body receded into shadow; only her feet were in the light. He said a prayer for her, for himself. Then he dashed down the lamp, and as the grass upon the floor burst into flames, he sprinted out into the darkness.

  Within seconds the entire shack was ablaze, flames snapping, shooting into the starless sky, high and bright enough that they would surely be seen by the keeper at Gay Head. Tyrell had become so accustomed to the violence of the storm that the relative calmness of the night felt unnatural, inimical. He glanced behind him, expecting some threat to show itself; but there were only the pines, the faintly stirring dark. When he turned back to the shack, however, he saw that the threat he most feared had materialized.

  It was a spectacular sight, with the flames leaping, wisping into thin smoke and sparks that shot out into eloquent curves over the pine tops, and the shack itself a skeleton with molten knots of fire peeping between the boards…so spectacular, in fact, that at first Tyrell didn’t notice movement inside the building. And when he did notice it, something dark and spindly twisting and rippling behind a wall of flame, he thought it merely some internal structure being eaten by the fire. But then that something came toward the door, paused in the doorway, a black streaming figure with fiery hair and stick-thin limbs, reminding him of the captain in the burning wheel-house of the Preciosilla. But he knew this was not the captain. The figure stood for a few seconds without moving; then, with the slow precision of a signalman, it began to wave its arm back and forth, back and forth, each repetition of the gesture charging Tyrell with the voltage of fear. He would have liked to bellow, to scream, to roar, anything to release the tension inside him; but he was enervated, on the verge of collapse, and he managed only a muted squawk. The muscles of his jaw trembled, and his heart seemed to have tripled its rhythm, less beating than quivering in the hollow of his chest.

  He was too frightened to turn his back on the burning figure, and he retreated slowly, carefully, feeling behind him, brushing aside clumps of wet needles, dragging his feet so he wouldn’t stumble and pitch over into one of the craters. Only after he had put a hundred feet between himself and the shack, its fierce reddish orange glow like that of a miniature sun fallen from the heavens, casting the pine trunks in stark silhouette…only then did he run, breaking free of the pines, climbing to the crest of the dune overlooking the bunker, and there sinking to his knees. Neither exhausted nor out of breath, of strength, but rather totally confused, seeing no point in further flight. He sat cross-legged, watching the amber sweep of the Gay Head light across the bottom of pale scudding clouds, feeling empty, hollow, barely registering the gentle touch of the wind on his face, watching the pitch and roil of the sea, which was still heavy and running high.

  “Hello, Jack,” said a man’s voice to his right.

  Nothing could shock Tyrell anymore. He felt a prickle of cold traipse along his neck like the tiptoeing of a spider, but nothing more. He turned his head a quarter of an arc and saw a man standing some ten or twelve feet away. A most unusual man, a man who in outline displayed the short, bandy-legged form of Bert Cisneros, complete to the shape of the wool hat atop his head, but whose substance was the blue darkness of the night sky beset with a sprinkling of white many-pointed stars.

  “That you, Bert?” asked Tyrell.

  “More or less,” said Cisneros. “You know how it is.”

  “No, I don’t, Bert. Maybe that’s my problem. I don’t have a fucking clue about how it is.”

  “I tried to tell you.” Cisneros flung out a starry arm, gesturing inland. “And so did she.”

  The stars in his body were moving, shifting into strange alignments, like living constellations. It was troubling to see, and Tyrell lowered his eyes to the sand.

  “Was that the truth, then?” he asked.

  “The truth.” Cisneros laughed. “No matter how illusory a species we are, every man’s still his own truth. I’ve heard you say much the same thing, Jack.”

  “Did I, now? I wonder what I meant by it.”

  “You’ll understand soon enough.”

  An immense slow wave lifted from the dark, towering over the beach, and came crashing down, its vast tonnage exploding into splinters of white spray. The smell of brine was strong.

  “So what’s to happen now?” asked Tyrell.

  “For you?”

  “Yeah, for me.”

  “I’m afraid you’re just not cut out for the next part, Jack,” said Cisneros. “It sometimes happens that the created prove unsuitable. Not even the creators are infallible.”

  Tyrell sniffed. “I was ever a disappointment to my mother, too.” He was silent a moment, tracing a line in the sand with his forefinger. “I’d like to believe that Astrid’s alive somehow…that either what you’re saying’s true, or else that I’m round my fucking twist and none of this is happening.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Cisneros. “Nothing I tell you is going to be a solid assurance one way or the other. It’s not in your nature to accept that from me. But you haven’t done anything to be ashamed of…not really.”

  “From all you’re telling me, Bert, can I assume that given your version of reality is accurate, we still have a bit of free will left to us?”

  “If you want to call it that. Things are actually little different from how you always thought they were. The only salient difference is that instead of an unknown mystical creator, there’s a knowable, explicable one. Of course in the beginning”—Cisneros shrugged—“who can say?”

  Tyrell glanced at him, then away. “Even if you are a hallucination, you’re still an asshole. I never could figure how an ignorant git like yourself could think he knew anything. But maybe you do know something now. Whatever, you are a changed man, Bert. And I’m not talking about the suit of special effects. Quite erudite, you are. They must have something important in mind for you.”

  “It’s as I told you,” said Cisneros. “As I’ve shown you. I am to instruct with words and miracles. To invest the play with a new spirit. Who knows what the result may be?”

  “You sound pretty much in control, Bert. You sure about that? You sure the fucking spiders haven’t got something nasty in mind for you? I mean, how come an asshole like you, a real punk…how come you get to win the world?”

  “God works in mysterious ways.”

  A broken laugh guttered out between Tyrell’s teeth. “I wish I could buy all this crap.”

  “So do I, Jack. So do I.” Cisneros sidled off a couple of feet. “I’m going to leave you now. Things are at an end here, and I can’t help you. Perhaps someday we’ll meet again. You never know.”

  “I suppose I should be hoping for that eventuality,” said Tyrell without taking his eyes from the patch of sand before him. “But tell you the truth, I don’t hope for it a hell of a lot.”

  When he looked up after a minute or so, Cisneros was gone. But he was not alone. Horribly burned, her face melted and blackened, her eyes like shattered opaque crystals, breasts smeared into shapeless masses, bone showing through the crispy meat of her right leg, Astrid was standing where Cisneros had been. Tyrell’s gorge rose, his fear returned. But nonetheless he remained sitting on the dune top. “Go away, damn you,” he said.

  He heard a horrid wheezing and recognized it for the sound of air passing in and out of charred lungs; the breeze rustled frays of burned skin on her arms. He buried his face in his hands. “Oh, God!” he said. “Just let me be for a little while, all right? Just let me be.”

  A throaty husk of a noise, speech trying to issue from her throat.

  “Ahh!” He pushed himself erect, tripped, rolled down the face of the dune. He got to one kn
ee, gazed back up to the crest. For a moment he thought she had vanished, but then the Gay Head light flashed across her, etching an image into Tyrell’s mind: a female thing with black crusted thighs, her flesh displaying shiny fracture lines like overlapping slabs of anthracite. Blind eyes. Bits of papery skin fluttering like hanks of hair from her skull in the fitful wind. The image wouldn’t fit inside his head. It kept expanding, forcing out thoughts, until there was no room for anything else, and still it continued to expand, driving a hoarse cry out of his chest, sending him staggering toward the edge of the shore.

  He couldn’t see Astrid, but he felt the push of her vision, and to escape that he waded out into the water, going waist-deep, breasting into a crawl that took him flush into a breaking wave. He dived underwater into the heart of the wave, felt it billow above him, and surfaced in a trough so deep that he could not locate the shore. The water was terribly cold, but after a few seconds his flesh grew numb, and this lack of sensation inspired him. He stroked away from the island, realizing that this way led to death, but no longer caring, no longer willing to suffer the obscenities that sprouted from the darkness of Nomans Land. Another wave lifted above him, and again he dived into its heart, surfacing far beyond it. All around, the sea was peaking into enormous waves whose flowing slopes carried him high, then sent him hurtling into pitch-black valleys. He tried to swim, but it was futile. The weight of his soaked clothing was dragging him under, and his feeble strokes were merely exertion, serving no purpose. Fear overwhelmed him. A cry formed in his throat. But as he went slipping into yet another valley, the momentum of that rushing decline dissipated the cry and he felt exhilarated, like a child on a carnival ride. He went under, came up choking, flailing, spitting saltwater. The tilting side of a swell bore him under a second time. He beat his way to the surface, thrusting his head into the air, knowing that he was drowning, that the cold had robbed him of strength, regretting now his decision to flee the island, regretting everything, his lost opportunities, his failures, the loss of fleeting moments of happiness, so few by comparison to the long periods of doldrums that had dominated his life. But as he sank for a last time, a white nail driving itself into the black flesh of the sea, at the core of his panic and regret was a profound satisfaction, the knowledge that he was dying, really dying, that madness had afflicted him and nothing of what he had undergone on the island had the least reality. That he was a man and not a pale imagined thing. He had a moment of bitterness amid his fear. What had he done to deserve this? He was no worse than most, no more a coward or charlatan. He didn’t think these things as much as he experienced them in a bleak current of emotion, and once that current had exhausted itself, he accepted—along with the unfairness of life—the cold embrace of the sea and sank twisting into the depths, his arms floating up with the grace of a slow dancer, his lungs filling, his mind growing as black and serene as the water surrounding him, dwindling to a point of ebony stillness that seemed to hang in a suspension, a peaceful place between dread and the object of dread in which he perceived the pure thing of his soul, his essential things, touched them, found them strong and unafraid, and then, this necessary business done, he went without reservation about the small and final business of dying.

  IX

  Two nights after being rescued by the Coast Guard from Nomans Land, Bert Cisneros sat drinking beer at a table in the Atlantic Café on Nantucket, where just that afternoon he had been interviewed by members of a review board assembled by the Maritime Union and by the owners of the Preciosilla. Marvelous detail, he’d thought, and he had treated the board with the ironic respect that he considered it deserved. He was accompanied by two friends from New Bedford, Portuguese sailors who were in aspect and temperament much like his former self and hailed from the fishing vessel Cariño, which had put into port during the storm and was currently undergoing engine repairs. One of the men, José Nascimento, after listening to the relation of Cisneros’s adventures with spiders and dreams, asked if this was the same story he had told the investigative board.

  “No,” said Cisneros. “The time wasn’t right then to begin the process of illumination.”

  His companions exchanged looks of concern; they had never heard their friend speak in such a manner.

  “But now,” Cisneros went on, “now the time has come.” His gaze swept over the dark monkeylike faces of his companions. “You don’t believe anything I’ve said, do you?”

  “Hey, Bert,” said Nascimento. “You been through some rough shit, man. You a little fucked up right now. Don’t worry ’bout it.”

  “That’s right,” said the second man, Arcoles Gil. “You be fine pretty soon. Just take it easy, have another beer.”

  “Don’t you notice a difference in me?” Cisneros asked.

  “Well,” said Gil, “you talkin’ funny, that’s for sure.”

  “It’s not only my way of speaking that’s changed,” said Cisneros. “I’ve changed utterly. When I think back to the man I was, the things I did, particularly the things I did to women…”

  “You gotta hit a woman sometimes, man,” said Nascimento. “Shit, Bert. You know that. Sometimes they put you in a position where you ain’t got no choice, where if you don’t hit ’em, they cut off your balls.”

  Cisneros felt sad for Nascimento. Looking at his friend was like looking into a mirror that reflected his own past foulness and brutal stupidity. It would be easy now, given his new perspective, to try and put his old life behind him, to hide the past away and neglect his friends in the interest of complacency and contentment. But Bert Cisneros was a man of honor. It was his duty, his trust, to bring enlightenment to men like Nascimento. To all men.

  “When I think back on what I’ve done,” he said, “despite the fact I realize that my entire life is a beautifully articulated fantasy, I’m sick to my stomach.” He paused, thoughtfully rubbing the little eight-pointed star he had brought from the island with the tips of his fingers. “I often wonder if this violent dream the spiders have made of the twentieth century is an accurate reflection of what would have occurred had humanity survived…if through some biochemical genius they’ve managed to predict the exact twists and turns that would have resulted from human greed and lust. I don’t suppose the answer’s important any longer. Now that I’ve been called to inform the world of its insubstantial nature, perhaps things will be returned to a kind of normalcy. Perhaps we’ll be able to regain control of our destiny…no matter how illusory it is. After all, who can judge the potentials of an illusion? But I really believe they want something good for us.”

  The men’s faces displayed both pity and alarm, and Cisneros laughed. “Come, my friends,” he said, getting to his feet. “I’ll prove it to you.” They remained seated. “Come on! I’ll prove it in a way you won’t be able to deny. I’ll show you what the world really looks like. Come on!”

  Grudgingly, they followed him through the crowd at the bar to the door of the café, and then along the sidewalk until they came to the main street of the town. Buildings of brick and wood frame, cobblestones, a few cars moving, pedestrians looking into hotly lit shop windows. Graceful old trees leaning in over the rooftops.

  “What do you see?” Cisneros asked.

  Gil and Nascimento once again exchanged concerned glances.

  “The street,” said Gil with a puzzled expression.

  “No,” said Cisneros. “You only see a dream. I’ll show you the street.”

  He concentrated his will, and within seconds the scene before him rippled, wavered, like something melting in the rain, and in its place, lit by a bone-white full moon, was a ruin. Sad fragments of another time, another dream. The broken shells of weathered gray houses fettered in ivy, their windows shattered, half-hidden by brush and oak and hawthorn. The cobblestones were thick with moss. Mice scampered in the complex skeins of shadow beneath the boughs. Something long and yellowish brown protruded from a pile of leaves—a human bone. They were probably all around, he realized, the bones of the spiders’
last victims. And spanning between limbs of trees, the cross-pieces of windows, everywhere, were veils of cobwebs tenanted by white spiders. After the bustle of the street of dreams, the emptiness of reality was harrowing. The emptiness and solitude of the place made Cisneros feel old, as if the weight of the years was a kind of contagion.

  “There…you see,” said Cisneros, turning to his friends.

  But they, along with the shops and the cars and the pedestrians, had vanished.

  Cisneros was startled but not afraid. Perhaps, he thought, he had misunderstood the discretion of his control, perhaps it was impossible to reveal the totality of the actual without eliminating all observers. Of course, he told himself. That must be it. He tried to reinhabit the world of the dream, but—and this did frighten him—he could not remember how it was done. The knowledge of how to manipulate the materials of the unreal had seemed innate, as uncomplicated and natural a process as breathing, and yet now…He ran a little ways forward into the center of the deserted street, panicked, slipping on the damp mossy stones. He tried again, focusing his will on the act of return, clenching his fists, squeezing his eyes shut. But when he opened them he discovered that nothing had changed. He could sense the forms and tensions of the dream just beyond his range, just out of reach, tantalizing, unattainable. Could the spiders have tricked him? Could all their promises merely have been a terrible deceit? Had they been playing with him, weaving another duplicitous web of his needs and desires? He whirled around, expecting to see some vast trap closing shut on him. But there were only the shattered buildings, the trees, the desolate moon, and he realized that the trap had already been sprung. They had raised him high and left him in a place where wit and knowledge had no audience, no use, no meaning, and thus were nothing but a torment.

  The ruins appeared to have inched nearer, the network of shadows was shrinking to encage him. The bone-knob moon with its scatter of ashy markings looked to have lowered and been caught in the fork of two oak limbs, pinning him in place with its strong light. Rustles and skitterings from within the abandoned houses. Something tickled his cheek; he brushed at it, and a spider came away on his hand, perched like an ornate ring on the middle joint of his forefinger. With a shout, he knocked it off. The sound of his fear was swallowed by the silence.