The Conformity

by John Hornor Jacobs

  “Do not blaspheme!” For a moment her face is contorted with fury. “You are abominations. There’ll be no blaspheming in my presence.”

  This woman seriously needs to get punted with a size-twelve steel-toe boot.

  “We’re sorry,” Jack says. “We’re just trying to understand.”

  “These are the end days. And the Godhead moves above us, collecting the Saved into His embrace. The Rapture.”

  Jack’s getting desperate. “But why the ‘Panopticon’?”

  Gulch draws her hand to her mouth and stills, almost as if she’s seen something terrifying. For a moment she’s vulnerable. Almost sympathetic. She says in a quiet voice, “It watches me when I sleep. I have dreams.” She looks at Jack, and her eyes widen until the pupils are totally visible, ringed in white. “It watches me and watches me. I can feel it.” Her voice drops even lower. “Behind my eyes. It sees all.”

  “And you want it to come here?”

  Her expression becomes neutral once more. “When the faithful are joined with the Godhead, all will be revealed.”

  “I’ll tell you what you want to know,” Jack says. “None of this is what you think.”

  Her expression remains neutral as she steps forward, drawing back her fist. She’s economical in her movements. Drawing back the small fist, pausing just a second, and then lashing out, crushing Jack’s nose against his face, rocking his head back. “There’ll be no blasphemy here.”

  It’s a while before Jack can speak, the blood flows too heavy from his nose, down over his lips. His head lolls to the side, his eyes go unfocused, bleary. After a moment, he rights his head and says, “I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

  “That’s interesting. But you could still be lying. I’ll need to check.”

  “Look at my hands! Look at them!”

  For a long while, Gulch sits there, chewing her lip as if evaluating the possibility of some treachery. Then she carefully walks behind Jack’s chair and looks at his hands.

  When she returns, her face is immobile as a mask. “You have the Devil’s mark on you.”

  Jack begins to give a weak, burbling laugh through the blood. “We make a nice pair, then.”

  This time, when she draws back her fist, it’s less composed. Less mechanical. She’s getting into it. Her fist connects right below Jack’s eye and rocks his head back.

  I feel helpless, watching her tenderize the guy like that. He’s not my favorite person in the world but … goddamn, this bitch has got some issues.

  “So, who chopped off your extra bits, lady?” I ask.

  Her head swivels around to look at me as if it was on some oiled turret. The intensity of her stare makes my stomach loosen in my belly. There’s intelligence behind those eyes, along with some ugly promises.

  “Shut your mouth.”

  “Hey, I can do some mind-reading too. Let me guess. Your daddy didn’t like your extra fingers, right? Didn’t like you poking around in his head?” Strange how someone’s face can remain so still while getting so red. “So maybe he took you out to the woodshed where he kept the hatchet? Maybe he put your hand on the chopping block?”

  The fury on her face is more frightening because her face itself is so placid. But the emotion pours off her like radio waves fanning out from a tower. She stands, knuckles bloody, watching me.

  “This conversation is over.” Her voice is cold. “May the Panopticon guide me. And by guiding me, lead me toward salvation.”

  She puts her index fingers to her temple and her eyes grow large, like diving into pools, and suddenly I’ve joined Jack in a bloody, burbling nose and it feels like I’m being swallowed whole. All I see are her eyes and then there’s the pressure, like that time when I leaped from the top stair all the way to the bottom and my ankle twisted and then grew fat and tight with blood, but now it’s just in my mind, like it’s swelling. Distending. A wrenched ankle filling with someone else’s blood. There’s nothing I can do to stop it.

  She’s in me and I’m paralyzed; I can only observe what she’s doing in my head. It’s like lying on an operating table and trying to figure out what the surgeons are doing in your body cavity with scalpels, bloody and searching. Images of fire. Of Jack, huddled over the trash can, surprised. Of wind and flying. Snow and cold. The feel of Jack’s voice speaking in my mind. The elation and pure joy of flight, whooping and sweeping in the frigid currents of air. The musty scent of the lodge. Shreve lying on his pallet, unconscious. She focuses on Shreve for a long while, chasing memories of the Li’l Devil far back. The feel of him. His sheer mental power. His flight. The unity of our minds in answer to the Conformity. Falling and a great wrenching. Backward through our memory until the physical glommed-together mass of the Conformity swells like a star growing in our joined minds and she gives a psychic yawp of greed, of victory. She’s got what she wants.

  Now she digs deeper. Back and back to the campus and all the extranaturals there, the dorms, the faces of the bugfucks and jocks and the Red Team. Everything.

  In the end, she has everything. And then the pressure stops. Gulch looks up, alarmed. Her mouth open in surprise.

  Massey and Billings walk into the office, followed by the woman from the medical clinic. She’s holding the rifle on them.

  “Don’t make a move. I will shoot you,” she says.

  twenty-three

  –a simple game, that’s all it is, just a game. We run into the woods, a gang of us, the black kids, the white kids, the mix-up kids that live in that racial world of halves and degrees of color, each of us with a ribbon or scrap of bright fabric hanging from our belts. We run screaming into the woods behind Holly Pines, into the trees, into the woods, separating into teams, shirts and skins, and for hours hunt each other, racing, juking, dodging, doing whatever it takes to keep the others from snatching our flags. And I am fast! I am fearless and move so like thought. Jay-Jay and Willis, I nab their flags and send them to the skins’ prison, a circle drawn in dirt, with an Arkansas Razorback flag as the ultimate prize. But after a moment, I realize I’ve lost sight of Vig who’d last been screaming near the hobo camp by the train tracks, and abandoning all pretense of game, I tear through the woods, racing toward the shirts’ territory, calling his name, drawing the shirts to me. Something about my demeanor is wild and the boys coming near me stop, maybe sensing my rising panic, and I catch flashes of their faces as I barrel past them, yelling, “Vig, VIG! Goddamn it, Vig,” terrified that something’s happened, something terrible–

  CASEY

  The sunlight’s only a brief respite. Slate-gray storm clouds spill across the sky, and the wind picks up so that it moans and groans in the eaves of the old lodge as the day progresses while Ember and Negata put together a bundle of rice and flour hard biscuits they baked in the oven and an old plastic water container fished from the trash bin. It becomes obvious she’s going nowhere today, and she settles down for a long sulk, intermittently glaring at me, Negata, and Shreve’s unconscious form.

  Eventually, she shakes a smoke from a wrinkled pack, I give her a coal to light it, and she puffs away, furious that she can’t leave as the snow begins dumping on top of us and the lodge shudders with wind.

  Later, we slurp salty chicken noodle soup from coffee cups and stare at the windows. The light outside dims, and Negata places the last of the firewood in the hearth. From here out, it’s furniture-burning time. In the silence, I think about all the items in the lodge—the dressers, the chairs, the credenzas—that we can break apart and burn to keep us unfrozen.

  I find a spot near Shreve and lie down, pressing my body close to keep him warm. I can see my breath in the low light of the room. At some point, I fall asleep hoping I don’t dream of towering masses of people or ghosts of the dead.

  In the middle of the night I wake, heart racing. Certain that the war has come home to us.

  People are dying out there, in the cold and dark. People are becoming one with … it. And we’re stuck here. After a long while, I sit up
and go and look at Shreve, staring at his face. Thinking about our invisible war.

  Eventually, I can keep my eyes open no longer, and I lean back against the wall and sleep.

  I wake to bitter cold and the sound of splintering wood. The fire is growing, and in the dark I can make out the lean figure of Negata as he tosses what looks like the component parts of a wooden chair onto the fire.

  “How did it get so cold so fast?” I ask.

  Negata gives his smile-not-smile and says, “I imagine it was when Ember opened the door and left.”

  It takes only a moment to sit up and begin to understand what’s happened. Of course she left without telling us. She’s not going to go search for the Liar until she’s found out what’s going on with Jack.

  Ember! What are you doing?

  Nothing. Radio silence.

  Everything’s going to shit, and I can’t do anything about it.

  I look at Shreve—I’m always looking at Shreve, it seems like, I know his angular face better than I know my own—and realize his eyes are open.

  It’s a long while before he speaks, but I guess that’s because I’ve kissed him, his mouth, his eyes, his forehead and cheeks. I press myself against him; I want his closeness, and I want him to know I’m close.

  “Hey, you,” he says. He must be tired and still hurt, because the I-know-something-you-don’t-know grin he usually wears isn’t plastered across his face. It’s not there at all. He looks at me and simply smiles, happy to see me. And that’s when I lose it.

  No tears. No sobbing. But I’m lost. I love him. And the way he grips my ghosthand, I know he loves me too. Our secret bond. It’s that simple. I can just look at him and know it. I don’t need a song or poem or some sappy pronouncement. That smile—the one he gives me without hurt or self-mockery or loathing. And the pressure of his hand on an arm that isn’t there anymore. That is all I need.

  “Shreve. We’ve been so worried.”

  He shuts his eyes for a moment, and as they close I can see how ineffably tired he must be, dark circles around his sunken eyes, his cracked lips, the harsh lines of hunger and fatigue. He hasn’t eaten in days, and by now his body is cannibalizing itself. He has good color and seems to be breathing fine, but he’s dehydrated and wasted. He didn’t have enough meat on his bones before the fall. Now it’s like he’s almost half cranium. I can see the vein at his temple pulsing. The throb of life in the hollow of his throat.

  Negata is already moving, bringing Shreve a cup of water. He hands it to me and lets me place it at Shreve’s lips. Shreve takes a sip, coughs, and then takes another.

  “Do you want food? Are you hungry?”

  He smiles at me again, a real smile, and shakes his head. “Let me sit up.” It’s then that he notices Negata kneeling nearby. “Hello, Mr. Negata,” Shreve says. “Hello.”

  Negata bows his head.

  “I see you,” Shreve says, tapping the throbbing vein at his temple. “I see you now.” There’s a sense of wonder there, in the way he says it.

  “I always knew you would eventually,” Negata replies. “Though I hoped you wouldn’t.”

  “Wait, what’s going on?” I ask.

  Shreve glances at me and shakes his head, just slightly.

  “I understand a lot of things now that I didn’t before,” he says. And in his voice, there’s this alarming calmness I’ve never heard there. He’s changed.

  “Ember said you were awake. Like dreaming, or something,” I say, and then a thought occurs to me. “And the ghosts! You sent Danielle and Bernard back.”

  Shreve pushes off the pallet into a hunched-over sitting position and takes another painful sip of water and hands me the cup.

  “I had some housekeeping to do,” he says. “I had too many guests and needed …”

  “Yes?” I realize I’m kind of pawing at him, my flesh hand on his chest and my ghosthand on his back.

  “I had grown too large,” he says, and looks from me to Negata. “Inside. At all times there was … a congress in my head. And I needed to lock it all away. So that the Conformity can’t see me.”

  For an instant, there’s a flash—one of those disjointed images we get from sharing minds, being one with each other—I see a hall, an infinite hall stretching away into the distance, but it’s not a hall, it’s a cellblock with many doors, each one with bars, and Shreve leading thousands of people into individual cells and locking them away. It’s just a single moment and then it’s gone and I’m not even sure I experienced it in the first place.

  Shreve pats my knee. “It’s hard to explain. But now I’m just me for the first time in a long time. And I have to stay that way. Otherwise …”

  Negata, his voice soft, says, “The entity will come for you. It’s drawn to power. But it’s more drawn to the collective, isn’t it? The joining of minds is a challenge, yes?”

  Shreve looks at him. His eyes are as clear as I’ve ever seen them. “Yes. I have to stay just me and nothing else. If I do, it won’t be able to see me.” He grins. “As long as I’m incarcerado here—” He taps his chest with an index finger. “It won’t know where I am.”

  He’s too quiet. He looks to the dark window and then to the ceiling and then into the fire, smoldering.

  “Until it’s too late,” he adds finally. Then: “It’s time to go.”

  twenty-four

  JACK

  “Don’t move. I will shoot you,” the voice says.

  The woman from the clinic—we never even got her name—

  I feel a hand nesting in my hair, jerking my head up and back and wrenching my neck horribly. The Gulch woman’s straddling me, with some sort of long knife—or a letter opener?—in her already bloodied fist.

  “I don’t think so, Madelyn. Unless you want me to poke some holes in this abomination.” Her voice, fruity and rapturous, blows in my face. Her breath smells like mint tea. I can feel the hard tip of the knife at my throat. My throbbing face, my eye, my broken nose, the agony of ropes cutting into my flesh, the ache in my muscles from the wheeling fall—all of those sensations dim and disappear, and all I can focus on is the sensation of that metal point on my throat and her minty, wholesome breath.

  Madelyn clucks a little, like she’s seen a kid fall and scrape his knee on her front walk. It’s a sympathetic sound.

  I wish I could see her. But Gulch fills my senses.

  “Let these boys go. You have your church. You have your god now. Let them go.”

  Gulch blinks and says, “No. They have a use. We shall call the All-Seeing here, to us.” It takes a moment for what she’s saying to sink in. “And then—”

  She got in, Jack, Tap says. There’s no attitude in his voice. No snark. Just pain and shame. She got in and took what she wanted.

  “And then we shall ascend.”

  “Well, I’ve always known you were a loon, Miss Emily Ruth Gulch. You hid in your grandmother’s house and had your prayer meetings with whoever’d listen to your nonsense, and that was just fine. But I’m taking those boys with me.”

  I can feel the knife dig into my flesh. It’s outrageous, the feeling of metal entering the body. Like the pain isn’t enough. There has to be a violation too. For a moment I think about the Witch, Ilsa Moteff. Her in my mind. I’ll choose the knife any day. But still, I cringe away from it. It makes me want. Want my mother I never knew. Want warmth and to be back at the campus. It makes me want Shreve.

  God, I’m scared. And this woman will kill me. I can feel it in the strength of her fingers, the way she bludgeoned me. Her grip is like death.

  I’m scared.

  “No, Madelyn.” A smile crosses Gulch’s features. It expands slowly until it stretches across her face like a pool of oil spreading. “We allowed you your clinic because I could find no use in killing you or dealing with the animals you harbor there. The All-Seeing God cares nothing about the dull beasts of the earth. But now—”

  “Bullshit. You left me alone because I shot Simon through his torch-carrying
hand when you all came to rout me out. You left me alone,” she says, fury in her voice, “because I fought back against your collective madness.”

  “Madness?” Gulch actually sounds tickled. “The Godhead is proof that this is no madness! You saw it, did you not, before the electricity went away. It was on every station! The Godhead is real! The All-Seeing is real!”

  “That is no god, woman. It’s just something … something unexplainable.”

  “Blasphemy.” Gulch shifts her weight, getting ready to plunge the metal into my neck. “I believe we’re in a stalemate, then,” Gulch says. “Because I will kill this boy. And if you allow me one moment …” She closes her eyes, and I can see her eyeballs scanning in their sockets like someone deep in REM sleep.

  Jack, I can hear her! Tap sends. She’s calling her …

  What? You can hear her? I send back.

  She’s calling her “faithful”!

  Gulch, whose face is so close to mine, snaps open her eyes once more.

  “My Saved. Those who shall be gathered into the flesh of the Panopticon.” She chuckles. The smell of the woman on top of me is overpowering. “They are on their way.”

  twenty-five

  EMBER

  Ghosts or no ghosts, they’ve got to be out of their goddamned minds to think that I’m going to go flying off to find that little liar who fucked with my head in the testing before I discover what’s happened to Jack. Casey can whine about it all she wants, but I’m the super-duper in the sky and she’s just the sap with the invisible arm.

  Should have nabbed more blankets before taking off because it’s cold here and it only takes moments before all of my body is numb. The only warm part of me is my mouth, chuffing moist air into the stale fabric of my improvised mask only to have it freeze moments later.

  Eyes water and tear with the force of the wind and my speed. The land passes below me in dark, green-black waves like a sea, undulating.