Gellie noticed how his coat bulged with wallets and jewelry he’d stolen off the watchers.
“Don’t frown at me like that,” Tom said defensively.
“Frown at you how? Like I could kill you?” she asked, suppressing her rage.
He squinted at her with a mean smile. “You gonna kill me like you did them people at the church?”
Gellie stepped back.
“Don’t go makin’ yourself out to be better than me. I ain’t been sent up for murder. I ain’t all burned. That’s got to be some divine retribution on your skin, lady,” Tom continued. “Boy wanted to know who took his soul, but what’s your soul about?”
“Anon is my soul,” Gellie replied.
««—»»
Tom loped down the street, cursing his ex-wife. A block away he found Burt Scholz doing the mannequin routine. Burt was Tom’s connection but didn’t look as if he’d be putting his hand out for his palm to be crossed tonight. Tom hustled up to the local drug merchant and began rifling through his jacket. It didn’t take long to find what he wanted, more than he could ever have afforded at one time.
Elated, he ran back home, hooked himself up, and got his free high, setting the rest aside for later adventures. He let the rush carry him as if he was suspended in the air, earth rushing away with the stars turned toward him. But then he had a disquieting sense that he was on an equal relativity with whatever the watchers watched. An artifact of some outré frame of reference, Tom turned in the air without conscious will, arms windmilling for an impossible balance. Soon he would face the inevitable direction. He’d see IT.
I don’t want to see IT!
Not Burt’s best. What had this stuff been cut with?
Tom sweated, coming back to himself. He stood up, swaying, and stumbled to the door, going outside. He hoped a walk would help shake this nasty trip out of him.
Not too far away were the ruins of the church. There was the boy banging on the burned door.
Nonnie was making a peculiar noise. Tom listened and thought the kid was maybe calling, “Momma!” But the sounds weren’t quite right, halfway between a bleat and a howl. And every time his fists hit the charcoaled wood, it looked—from Tom’s vantage point anyway—as if a black scorpion skittered off. Just ashes flaking, really.
Nonnie hurried away and Tom followed, heading to the banks of Lake Garza. The dirty water lapped at the shore, too foul to be reflective of the night sky.
Nonnie crept to the water’s edge and bent down, touching a forefinger to the surface. There was a boom as when jets broke the sound barrier—yet under the water instead of overhead. There was next a crackling noise as the lake turned white and hard.
Tom blinked. Was he hallucinating this or had his son just frozen the water? It shimmered in crystal. Like a big frosted window. Now it reflected all sorts of things.
Tom didn’t let himself ponder what might be mirrored there. But he did go to it after the boy wandered away. He got to his knees on the shore and touched the surface, not unlike the way Nonnie had. Yes, it was thick and solid, glacial to the touch. Something that never happened to Lake Garza even when it was the dead of winter—and it wasn’t winter right now.
Tom walked onto the ice, amazed. Thinking, maybe it was the drugs I gave him…maybe the boy’s got super powers ’cause of me… that ain’t so bad, is it?
The frozen surface cracked under him. Tom swayed as a piece of ice tilted up, shot forward a few feet like a surfboard in a good swell, and then dumped him.
Yeah. Yeah. Those stars again only now he was rushing… DOWN, wasn’t it? And it was dark and he thought he was going to puke, and he was being pulled toward the IT out there that he so badly didn’t want to come face to face with. Oh, sweet God and Jesus and the Holy Ghost, don’t make him have to look at that and know IT was looking back.
Except this wasn’t space. This wasn’t some negative relativity’s revelation.
He was just stoned. Hey, it was only water!
All Tom did was drown.
««—»»
The big screen caught Gellie’s attention as she neared the former boot repair shop. The images flowing across it were bizarre in the mostly dark street. Who was it on for? Not for those inert in the street, staring up in horror.
California Dr. Rutherford Prophet was discovered at Mount Palomar Observatory, paralyzed at his telescope. A very short note was found beside him, scribbled in his handwriting.
Religion will not save you;
Atheism will not save you.
Pythagorus doesn’t matter;
Promethius might.
Objects in (window) are larger than they appear.
Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
Emergency Broadcast System Everyone who has not already done so was advised to seek shelter as the cloud was expected to enter the earth’s atmosphere at 0500 EST. If there were no official shelters designated in their area, they were to enter a basement or an old fallout bunker or just get inside their bathroom if it was at a central point in the house and had no windows, just as they would in the event of a tornado or hurricane. Winds accompanying the cloud might be dangerous. They were also to keep this station tuned to the EBS for further reports.
“Ma’m, aren’t you going to the school? I believe that’s the official shelter around here, isn’t it?”
Gellie turned to the man in the 3-D glasses and wide-brimmed hat.
“I know I look strange but I figure with this get-up I’ll have a constant reminder not to look up,” he explained. He extended his hand. “My name is Damiano Mercado. Some of the locals call me the TV Man because I put the set here. But I’m really just a writer.”
Gellie didn’t shake the hand.
He shrugged. “Actually I’ve looked up. Wearing these, of course,” he said, tapping the red and green glasses. “I may be one of those who can’t see whatever it is but I think it’s because IT doesn’t translate well into the basic three dimensions. It’s a fourth dimensional being—or maybe a fifth. Anyway, some see it and others don’t. I’m just not taking any chances.”
He lowered the shades briefly to let her see his eyes. She tried not to chuckle. He had one green pupil and one brown.
“How come they can see it if it’s not of our dimension?” Gellie asked, pointing out the watchers.
He answered her question with another. “How do some people see ghosts, or know when tragedy is about to strike, or have psychic visions of crimes committed miles away and years ago? They say we all have psychic powers but surely some are more sensitive than others. A matter of perception.”
Gellie cocked her head. “But why hasn’t it paralyzed the ones who’ve looked and haven’t seen?”
He shoved the hat forward, still keeping the brim shading his eyes. He scratched at a balding patch on the back of his head. “Semantically, the paralysis is the brain’s attempt to explain the terror which has shut down the spirit.”
“But if you look at watchers closely, they’re not quite paralyzed. Their eyes move a little, as if trackin’ somethin’ far away.” She didn’t add that she’d actually poked one in the eye.
He smiled nervously. “Well, they say the eyes are the windows to the soul. Sounds trite, doesn’t it? Given the possible monumental grief behind this.”
“Which is what exactly?”
“That by the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. That’s Shakespeare.”
Gellie nodded. “For God’s sake steer clear of verse which wants to heal the universe. That’s Anon.”
She went away and the TV Man began to stare at the big screen again. Suddenly the screen went blank.
“Oh, no. They can’t have just gone completely off the air.”
He lowered his 3-D glasses, not noticing that a little boy, crawling with vermin, had just walked around the corner.
Nonnie pointed at the television and the screen abruptly filled with a vision of haunted sky. The writer gasped at an enigma above and below the nerve receptors, real
ized in a leap of pattern recognition.
««—»»
The tornado sirens were blaring. Not that there was a cyclone but it was Garza’s last attempt to get folks to take cover. A car stopped at a weedy lot and a woman leading a little girl got out. She’d come to wrap a blanket around her watcher husband. There had been a company baseball game being held there two nights ago. The two companies had long since shut down but the teams still played sometimes, out of habit. Out of the eighteen men, two coaches, and about twenty who’d come to observe the game, about seventeen had become trapped in the watcher mode.
A cigarette dangled from the woman’s mouth. She took a bottle of saline solution from her purse and lovingly put drops into his bulging eyes.
“Luis, me and Canela got to go to the shelter now. They say on the news the big cloud will be hear very soon. Be all right, mi corazón. Please be all right,” she whispered, then kissed him on a twisted cheek.
She hadn’t seen Nonnie as he came up behind her. He asked, “Are you the one who stole my soul?”
Startled, she yelped. The cigarette dropped into the high, dry grass as she and her child ran back for their car. Nonnie scampered away as a wind rose to ignite the grass, engulfing the watchers.
Gellie saw the smoke. She smelled burning flesh several blocks away. She hurried that direction, hoping she wouldn’t find Nonnie there. But she had to make sure. Fires scared her very much. And he could as easily be there as anywhere else.
She found the watchers burning like torches, unable to fall, a field of roasting scarecrows.
How fast they burned! The wind was still blowing. Was it because the Prophet Cloud was so close to earth now? Her thin hair tossed around her scarred face. She stared as people incinerated, flaps of blackening flesh like oily rags simply going too quickly. Normally it took a human body many hours to burn down that much. There was one which she couldn’t tear her eyes from. The flesh and tendons were mostly gone already. What she could see was a rib cage bent as if tentacles closed—squeezing—around the heart. The deviated pelvic bone was a Mobius strip whose purpose was three-fold:
mocking desire which was on a loop to show that its purpose began and ended with itself,
proving zero’s destiny as absolute nothing, fossils of atoms motionless, mouth open in that round, silent scream,
illustrating in the circle of clarity (and ultimate, irrevocable despair) that escape was impossible.
Ashes were hanging in upright pillars…
Through them Gellie saw her son dashing across the street and into an old apartment building. No one was there, of course. Many were probably watchers, standing in streets or maybe even burning (to death?) in that weedy lot. The others had all fled to find better shelter, perhaps to the school.
“Nonnie!” Gellie cried only to have her voice thrown back to her in the wind. Looking up, she saw the cosmic cloud almost filling half the sky. It seemed to be a vapor on glass, as if breathed there in a fog by an enormous mouth close behind, creating a mysterious shape that held a secret which only disclosed disorder. She could become distracted trying to guess that shape if she let herself.
But she mustn’t let herself.
Gellie dodged flames which whipped out of the weeds. She ran into the building after him. Hearing the soft thuds of tennis shoes on cheap carpeting, she entered an apartment with its door hanging open.
“Nonnie? Please, sweetheart. It’s just me,” she called out, thinking, is it because I look like this now and he’s afraid?
He didn’t believe she’d killed those people, did he?
There was a shadow of a monstrously-deformed baby on a wall but glancing around, she saw no actual body which might have cast it. Something scratched at the upper angles in a room’s corners as wind blew out of an empty closet. A refrigerator door hung open, eggs exploding to hatch out featherless yellow-white blobs. A package of red meat had fallen on the linoleum and was inching toward the sink.
She heard footsteps going upstairs and quickly pursued, legs aching as she took steps two at a time. To a hallway and then to a bedroom where a single black scorpion hopped across a pillow, then flew up, hitting a ceiling fan which turned in the wind. The blades struck and divided it into a dozen more of itself which buzzed about the ceiling. Then some of these were shattered by fan blades, the pieces forming whole scorpions.
There was a patio door in the far bedroom wall, leading out to a balcony. Gellie found Nonnie looking at the sky, his hands on the balcony bannister, his body rocking back and forth. There was some dark night still visible aside from the haze of the approaching cloud. He was focused intently on this blackness, moaning a word over and over which sound like “Mamma” but wasn’t.
“Nonnie?”
He turned to face her. The emptiness in his eyes was a shock to her. His sockets looked black and scoured out.
“Are you the one who stole my soul?” he asked, his voice like static.
His clothes squirmed. Winged black scorpions came out of the cuffs of his jeans and the sleeves of his coat. They flew toward her, lighting on her face and arms, stinging her until she thought she was on fire all over again.
Gellie ignored the pain as much as she could. She remembered something she’d read once in one of those fancy books. That representations of reality were easier to grasp than reality itself. People tended to confuse the two and to take their concepts and symbols for reality. These creatures stinging her couldn’t be anything but a symbol for some other reality, one not here yet—pending. She thought about that stained glass window in the old church. The Christ figure hadn’t been standing with hands up to hold back the wind. His arms had been open.
She stepped forward, her arms wide. “I have your soul right here, baby.”
Prophet Cloud hit the atmosphere and immediately spread through it in linear fashion. The darkness disappeared. It looked as if a god had dumped glitter onto the world.
Nonnie looked briefly confused. He murmured, “Momma, I feel burned inside.”
He collapsed and Gellie caught him. The scorpions hissed like water droplets on a fire, then winked out on her skin. Gellie lifted him in her arms and carried him back into the apartment, down the stairs, outside. The dust fell, very fine. In the weedy lot the fire had extinguished, ashes sifting away, absorbed into the dust. Watchers on other streets collapsed from their sentinel positions, shook themselves, got up and stumbled into any doorway, rubbing their eyes, sobbing softly.
The dust cloud would probably fill the atmosphere for some time before it all settled to the earth. There would be grit in the sky for months, maybe for years to come. It had broken the hypnotic hold over them, coming between the earth and the distant heaven.
Gellie ran into Damiano Mercado at the shelter provided at the school. The writer’s face still hadn’t gone back to normal. His eyes bulged and his mouth was twisted. All the former watchers appeared as if they had suffered a massive stroke.
“I hear talk that we’re goin’ to have to build places underground. Will we have to be in them for long?” she asked him.
His smile was faint and haunted. “Forever, I think. Considering what’s on its way. The dust doesn’t keep it from getting here. It just keeps us from seeing what’s out there for a while.”
Someone had brought in a television set for whenever the broadcasting resumed. But everyone was still off the air. Some kid turned it on anyway and the children gathered around the dark screen.
“Canela, get away from there. Come here, querida,” said the woman who had come to the lot to drape the blanket around her husband. No cigarette hung from her lips now. She’d given up smoking.
The little girl walked up to her mother and asked, “Are you the one who stole my soul?”
The woman had only now awakened from a dream in which her husband was still alive and had just returned home. But instead of coming in through the front door, he simply stood at the window.
Maybe it hadn’t been Luis. But something was at the wind
ow.
| — | — |
GUISES
The morning alarm went off. In her dream it was an explosion inside her skull. Complete with shards of bone and puzzles of brain and flesh, all going outward with finite fire.
Tombi came awake, trembling under the blanket, one hand sneaking out from under to shut off the clock on the bedside table. She stayed still a few moments, counting a procession of breaths, then she slowly sat up, covers slipping away.
She was always tempted at first just to touch her face, fingertips exploring skin, tracing the geography of plain and cartilage. But she never did because this was only a postponement of the inevitable. She had much to do today so she might as well get it over with and go to the mirror.
She swung her legs out from the mattress, set her feet on the floor, and stood up. Tombi closed her eyes, as they had been in sleep only minutes before. It relieved her that she could close them now. It was soothing to wake up with them closed.
She began to move forward, banging her knee on the corner of a cedar chest, carved with an elaborate Medusa on its lid. She stumbled, eyes opening with the sting but gazing down. It was a journey she could easily have made correctly, with her eyes closed from bed to mirror for didn’t she do this every morning? Hadn’t she been doing it every day for the last twenty years?
Yes, she could traverse that limited space in a trance if necessary. But if Tombi leaned slightly toward the right, allowing herself to bump into the chest, she might be assured that the sudden pain would bring her focus downward. She would have a reason not to yet peer into the mirror. It also slowed down her approach to this troubling rendezvous with the looking glass.
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