Manifest (The Darkening Trilogy)

by Jonathan R. Stanley

  “No! Stop!” she cried but he wrested the two of them apart and started down the stairs. Veronicara was suddenly dropped on the landing in a heap of blankets. She had tried to hold on, like her mother had said, but couldn’t. Now she was alone in the heat and dark. The warden looked back over his shoulder at the bundle and saw it stir with a cough, but Olesianna’s thrashing form was throwing him off balance. With the woman on his shoulder, the warden rushed down the stairs and out the front door. In her last conscious moments, Olesianna Ganithala struggled to reach her daughter.

  Alexavier smelt the smoke before he saw the house. It was a distinct but rare odor. There was no reason for him to think it was a fire though, for a house fire had not occurred in that providence for fifty years… yet that smell, recalled from fire places or barbeques was unmistakable. From down the street, Alexavier looked at his smoldering house, a black skeleton, charred and warped amongst the tranquility and muted color of the trees and other houses. Several emergency hover cars were parked near the building and people had gathered. He saw the emergency team exiting the house with a stretcher.

  For the rest of his life, the image would haunt him.

  He couldn’t manage to speak. His mother was being restrained by two men in blue uniforms and forced into the backseat of a car, her lungs wailing with completely unrestrained hysteria. Alex’s face was contorted in sadness and terrified confusion. There had been no warning, no preparation. Life just suddenly up and moved on. He tried to slow things down, to demand that everything stop. He needed a moment to rationalize what had happened, to reassure himself that it wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening.

  Alex rushed up to the emergency vehicle in which his mother was being driven away but she didn’t notice him, so he went to the gurney. Alex knew the figure under the sheet must be his sister’s, but why was her face covered? It had to be her – no one else would have been so small. Yet even for his sister, the figure was tiny. Alex wanted to see his Veronicara to tell her she would be alright. She must have been terrified. Before anyone could stop him, Alex gripped the sheet and prepared to throw it off. But when he grabbed a hold of it, he stopped. In his hands, what would have been his sister’s arm was instead, what felt like charred kindling at the bottom of a fire, dry and coal-like. An emergency technician grabbed his wrist and Alex released the sheet in horror. He began to scream and scream and scream and scream.

  Softly then, Alex opened his eyes and looked across the cabin of the hover car at Olesianna. It was evening time and he thought they had agreed to stop just before sunset, yet his mother was now driving with the headlights illuminating the barren landscape ahead. Alex sat up in the passenger seat and looked around.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “It’s okay. I’d rather be awake.” Alex wiped his eyes with his wrists.

  “Me too.”

  Alex looked ahead of them as he elevated his seat upright. “What happened to the grass?”

  “I don’t know. It just kind of ended a few minutes back.”

  “Another desert?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Wow, I never realized how creepy it is driving at night.”

  “I just need to be moving,” Olesianna said, mostly to herself.

  Alex squinted ahead of them and looked down harder at the ground. “Slow down for a second.”

  Olesianna rolled to a stop, kicking up some dust in the headlights. Silence. Alex had become used to the darkness in the wild, but for some reason it was different now. Probably, most notably because there was no moon out that night. But even more than that, the darkness seemed complete – pure even.

  “What is it?”

  “The ground looks… burned.”

  Suddenly a purple flash of light left a long crooked streak in the distant sky and then with a rush of wind, a tremendous thunder rolled across the flat scorched land. Both Alex and his mother jumped in their seats, and immediately broke into nervous laughter. Just a thunder storm.

  “Should I keep going?” Olesianna asked.

  “To be honest I’d rather not be just sitting here. This place is kind of freaking me out.”

  “Okay.” Olesianna began driving forward again. After twenty minutes without any thunder, they both assumed that the storm had been brief. But then, quite suddenly, a gradual hiss began to creep across the plane until finally a torrential downpour attacked the hover car like a thousand tiny pebbles beating on the metal exterior. Alex took out an empty can of food he had just had for dinner and rolled down the window. Filling it up and swishing it around to clean it out, he waited until it filled up a second time then tasted the water. Olesianna looked at him curiously for several seconds as he swished the water around in his mouth.

  “It tastes… dirty,” he finally said. Not a second after, the hover car plowed through an embankment and went skidding down a street surrounded on all sides by massive brick buildings.

  Olesianna’s jaw dropped as she looked up at the massive structures. They had spun several times and she had no idea which way was out, but it immediately dawned on her that they needed to leave. Quickly she turned off the headlights.

  “What are you doing?” Alex whispered in the darkness. The rain had stopped as abruptly as it came and everything was quiet.

  “Where are we?” Olesianna hissed back.

  “This is it!”

  “This is what?”

  “Ope-shed told me about this place.”

  “What place!”

  “He said there was rumor of a civilization on the eastern coast,” Alex explained. “I think this is it.”

  “Doesn’t look like anyone is here anymore.”

  “Well it is night time, and these look like factories anyway. See the smoke stacks? Let’s wait till morning,” Alex offered.

  “What? No!” She whispered. “I’m not gonna sit in this dark car in the middle of some strange place till morning. Which way is the desert?”

  “I don’t know – I wasn’t driving!”

  “Well it can’t be far; let’s just turn on the headlights and look around.” Olesianna reached down to the side of the steering column and placed her fingers over the light switch. With a quick flick, she rotated the end and illuminated the area in front of them with a bright, white light.

  Both of them froze solid in their seats, as the scene before them became lit. As if in unison with the headlights, an electrical hum like a generator followed by a sharp sparking sound brought nearly a thousand strung lights to life in a faded brown haze. All the lines of bulbs led to a central wooden banner, yellowed, with the paint chipping around the edges. On it was written: Welcome to the Circus, and just below it was a neon sign that read: The Bitch.

  Next to this was an ebony man in a black suit and top hat playing a piano, the keys of which were made of human fingers. From his heinous instrument, warped carnival music filled the air. A spot-light suddenly illuminated a slightly raised wooden stage just below the sign. On it sat an enormous woman nearly unrecognizable as human – weighing perhaps a thousand pounds. She was naked, wearing curlers in her thin blonde hair and eating from a bucket nearby that had tiny amputated limbs in it, smothered in red sauce. Around her absurdly fat face and down her neck was a smearing of red and orange juices and on the bent floorboards of the stage was a large puddle of excrement.

  Olesianna threw the car in reverse and stepped on the gas as hard as she could, but the sudden vertigo made Alex lean forward and vomit in the foot-room of the front seat. At that moment, the black piano player’s head lifted off his neck as if cut by an unseen blade and rolled onto the ground. The body slumped forward but the hands kept playing.

  In another second, the carnival stage was gone from their view but was quickly replaced by a man in an orange jump suit running across the street. The top of his skull was missing is if cleanly cut around his crown and on his brain was a swarm of mice eating at the exposed tissue while he violently swatted at them. He quickly ran out of view as Oles
ianna cut the wheel hard and the hover car whirled around, facing the other way.

  There in the middle of the street before them, at a four way intersection, surrounded on all sides by power plants were four surgeons standing around a woman. The surgeons wore giant telescopic lenses over their eyes and masks covering their sunken, chalk white skin. Underneath their gowns, their bodies slowly lost substance until there was nothing at their feet to hold them up. Floating in the air, the doctors focused intently on a woman in a hospital gown squatting over a bucket. On her bare and spine-ribbed back was a rusty water spigot, sewn into her skin between the shoulder blades. One of the surgeons, who moved his head sharply, like a rooster, reached down and turned the nozzle on the faucet. The woman screamed an ungodly howl and from her underside, blood began to rush out of her body and into the bucket.

  Olesianna pulled the wheel hard to one side and stepped on the gas again but quickly drove straight through a brick wall, skidding to a sudden halt against a cement pillar inside.

  Everything was silent for a long time before a gloved hand reached down and picked up a book off the street, lying in the trail of the car’s debris.

  Alex stumbled back out through the hole in the wall a short time later. His head was bleeding and he was dazed. Before falling dizzily to the ground, he caught sight of one last figure standing in the street. This person was close to seven feet tall with massively broad shoulders. He wore a long, brown, duster trench coat, boots, gloves, and a very wide brimmed, brown leather hat. The figure had Alex’s book on politics open, unbeknownst to Alex, to one of Plato’s works. The figure read the title of the work and chuckled, then closed the hard bound text book, gripped it with both hands, and ripped it effortlessly in half. He tossed the remains aside and walked over to Alex.

  The figure lifted him by the ankle so he was upside down but eye to eye. Glowing purple irises examined Alex for a moment. He just barely remembered the figure inspecting the necklace from around his neck, the one from the time capsule, before he passed out.

  †Alexavier†

  I woke up to a sound I knew. It was Beethoven, track 1… Moonlight Sonata. It was the sound of me trying to fall asleep. I opened my eyes to tried and get rid of the nightmares. Sometimes they were so real I kept feeling them for a long time after I got up. I couldn’t really even remember what they were about most of the time, but I felt shaky and empty. It was like sucking the bottom bit of soda from a cup with a straw – that’s how I felt.

  And why weren’t my eyes open yet?

  I bolted upright and looked around. My eyes were open, it was just really dark. Terrible things started to flood back in front of me. They were playing on top of my eyes and even if I closed them tight, they stayed there. I was completely overrun with doubt, and for probably a couple minutes I was unable to move.

  Then I realized that the piano wasn’t playing through my headphones. Someone close enough for me to hear was actually playing Moonlight Sonata on a piano. I just prayed it wasn’t that headless man… I felt like I was going to shake apart. I was going to die, I knew it. I’d never been so terrified before. Nothing else mattered. Nothing I had seen in the wild was anything compared to this.

  A really deep voice spoke to me then, but it was so deep that even though I was startled, I didn’t jump. “I don’t need much light. And I’m not used to visitors.” It sounded like his throat had been burned.

  I didn’t know how to respond, so I just opened my eyes as wide as I could and tried to find him in the darkness.

  “Behind you,” he said and I turned around quickly.

  I found him, but I don’t remember any light being there. He was playing a giant piano. I seemed to remember him from my nightmare. He wore a very wide brimmed hat and most of the rest of him was too dark to see.

  “Where am I?” I asked.

  “Deep underground.”

  “Are you going to kill me?” My throat was dry so I had to force my question out in a rasp.

  “One day you might look on it like that.” He hadn’t stopped playing yet.

  I got up off the cold hardwood floor and walked a little closer to him.

  “Where’s my mother?”

  “She’s lying right next to you.”

  I looked back but couldn’t see anything – not even walls or a ceiling.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “You wrote in my book.”

  “What?”

  “The book. You wrote in the margins.”

  My head was spinning. “I thought there was a city here.”

  “Who told you that?”

  I suddenly felt incredibly gullible. “What kind of place is this? Were those things I saw… a dream?”

  “Yes.”

  I am reassured for a second but then begin to ask myself: how can his answer be yes if they were from my dream?

  The figure laughed.

  “Look, I’m really scared,” and was I trying not to cry. “Can you please just tell me what’s going on?”

  “Such a waste. I never meant for you to come here.”

  The time capsule! “Are you…” The name on the necklace… “James Aulico?”

  He stopped playing and turned his head towards me. His eyes glowed purple under his hat. After a moment he resumed playing.

  “You’re not insane, whoever you are. They will tell you otherwise, but just remember that you are probably saner than anyone else you’ll ever meet. If you want to keep up appearances, never talk about anything that has happened to you before tomorrow. If you want to get things over with quickly, shout your story from the tallest building. You are now a citizen of Gothica.” The song ended.

  My throat was choked up and I was about to start crying. “Please…”

  Water was dripping on my face. I was lying on my back on something hard, and that feeling of dreaming awake and wondering where I was going to wake up took a hold of me again. For the second time, I sat up quickly and looked around. I was lying on the hood of the hover car which looked damaged and dented. I was on a street corner and it was raining.

  “Mom? Mom! Get up!” I rushed over to her as she sat, propped up against the side bumper. She snapped awake and jumped to her feet, her eyes were all crazy looking, ready to kill something if she had to. “What happened? Where are we?”

  I looked around at the tall buildings, the stormy sky, and the creepy looking people who were coming at us. I took a deep breath and repeated the last thing I remembered hearing. “Gothica.”