Midnight Diner 3

by Edoardo Albert

  He fidgeted, eyes darting this way and that, hands opening and closing on the ground. He sat up, despite the excruciation of the shattered slivers of glass touching one another beneath his skin. His back was perfectly straight, the indentation of his prone body on his faded blue sleeping bag still visible. His hair and the grass around him waved in random patterns as the wind continued to run through it. I saw a barn behind the trees under which we had slept.

  "I’m going to go to that barn and try to get supplies," I said. He still would not look at me.

  I turned to go and stopped, an apology wanting to come out of my mouth. But I said nothing. Sooner apologize to a dog.

  The grass bent under my boots as I took long strides up and then down the hillock against which we had slept towards the sagging barn, red paint flaked on its sides.

  Sometimes they tried to eat animals and left messes even more monstrous than themselves. This looked like a place cows would have pastured before...before...nothing but clichés came to mind. Before everything.... Before The Thing. Before The Disaster. Before the TV stopped blaring and no more tanks rolled on the streets or planes roared overhead to disappear in an instant. Eventually even the radios went dead, the crackpots and talk show hosts and preachers who finally had a real problem to rant about. Before the passing of an age.

  I had seen a cow once, one they had got to. I’d been driving for some days by that point, lost within the endless repetition of gorgeous sunrise and sunset. Many times I wished I had kept track of exactly what day it was, to render time less massive and indistinct. Knowing exactly where I was—I knew it was somewhere in the Midwest, somewhere on the prairies, but nothing more—would also have eased the distance, as vast as it was vague. I collected maps with a greed I could not control, but they tore down and destroyed almost every sign they came across (how did they know what was a sign and what wasn’t? I have no idea), so the maps were almost useless.

  I had thought that the cow was dead at first. Its guts had exploded, messy red below black and white skin. Flies jumped around it in greedy circles. Then I noticed that each time one alighted on the carnage (I had unwisely slowed to look at it out of my window), it would not take off again, sinking instead into the deep red.

  It started to move—not its legs or head, but its belly started to try to walk. That was the best way I can describe what I remembered. I can’t say more, because I was already picking up speed.

  I was gone.

  But no cows, dead or alive, were in the yellow fields swarming around the barn like sharks surrounding the last survivor from a ship. I heard a grunt from behind me. Turning, I saw my companion walking off-kilter, as if willing legs to move that had already despaired. I must have showed some sign of concern, since he spoke to me through unmoving jaw and lip, "Yes. Yes, I uss do iss." He then raised his hand and his fist went straight into the zombie’s mouth. I spun and saw them all around, coming out of the barn, staggering towards us in a shrinking circle.

  You will think that they looked like the zombies in the horror movies you’ve seen: a bunch of ragged, moaning, bloody bodies staggering toward us. But the zombies you’ve seen on your screen had far more humanity than what staggered towards me then.

  "Yes," he said, his face still broken. "Yes, you go now. Iss is right." Then he pulled his arm away, the stump already writhing with things uglier than maggots.

  I turned and ran.

  ~

  Many days I walked, eating where I could. I had left my gun behind.

  I met another of those things—those Starfish heads which he had called Flowers. Right by me it went, called on a course I was blind to. As soon as it was past me, my legs started to shake; one never feels the fear of them until they are past. When under their eyes, something far greater than fear swallows even the farthest horizon.

  I followed it.

  ~

  Of their meeting place (if that was what it was) and what they did there (if they were doing anything), I can say no more than I understand, and so must say little. The thing I followed traveled for one day and one night and then moved toward a tangled mass of red on the horizon, bloody dots weaving among each other on an endless plane of yellow grass under flat gray clouds. I, unable any more to stagger behind it, fell into a sitting position with my back against a broken road sign. Exhausted as I was, my surprise turned my neck upwards to look at the first road sign I had seen in months. The name of the town that used to exist here I cannot remember, but I do remember reading on the sign (craning my neck to look as I sat) and seeing that it proclaimed the place as the geographical center of North America.

  You will ask why I followed the monster and why I bothered to look at the sign. I cannot answer. I had killed my one friend: what reason could I have for doing or not doing anything?

  During the months spent there, none ever attacked me, as they had tried before; but the serpentine curling of the starfish arms never left me. It printed the sky, making the sun into a flower

  which I cowered and trembled beneath. I wandered, alone, around the outskirts of dead, empty

  buildings while they walked in patterns just beyond the range of my understanding. They would circle each other in greater and smaller revolutions, with starfish-arms extended, revealing dead gray eyes and a black pit of a mouth, lined with sharp triangles of bone; and, while they circled, some inkling of a pattern would steal over me. But then they would stop, turn to the sky open- faced, start in new convolutions, and I would again be lost.

  That was their appearance: when their faces were open, bruise-red starfish arms would wave as if in underwater currents around a crater of a face with two dead gray eyes and a circular hole beneath. This mouth was a perfect, inhuman circle. And then sometimes the starfish arms would fold inward, contract like fingers forming a fist; they were long enough to curl around the inside of the hollow mouth. When they closed this way, their faces became long and slanted, with just enough room for their eyes to peer between the collapsed tentacles. You could see the outline of each separate starfish-arm like the imprint of a hand with sinuous fingers reaching upwards to the crown of the skull. Human faces speak of their heart and voice, but what shone on their faces was only the sun, lashing down on the prairie grass, heedless of the wind that never stopped, burning onto my retina a brightness which seemed to crash against me like huge waves against a weak wooden dock. No matter how long I gazed on them, what made me different from them never seemed to give way; I could never forget what they had lost.

  Sometimes sounds would pass between them, all slinking sibilants, the plurality of tongues in their mouths making it sound as if three or four enemies were whispering to each other. Sometimes one would turn to another and the star-fish-sun arms would fold, as would the arms by his side, shoulders and face collapsing into that perfect circle of a mouth. Then they would flare open again.

  Sometimes they all stood still and silent for days, eyes upwards.

  They hated water. Once, when the skies finally opened and blessed the earth with rain, I saw them all huddled and writhing under the sprinkling drops.

  One time I was sitting on a countertop next to a larger window in a decrepit store, stuffing cold corn from a can into my mouth like an animal. I saw a single zombie shambling toward them through endless fields of dead yellow stalks under a yellow sun. I could see that its head had been split open, and the blue sky in between its dead right eye and nose. It shuffled past the window without looking at me.

  I did not try to hide; I was past fear. The starfish came, unbidden, and circled it. Then it walked away with them. Perhaps it meant something. I stared at the sky, the sun, then a single daisy; the afterimage of the sun blurring with the yellow center of the flower.

  Eventually, I followed them.

  ~

  She had two long and seemingly fresh scars on either side of her neck, running just below her jaw on both sides. No lines where tentacles were pressed together were visible on her face, as on the Starfish when they closed t
heir faces. She looked almost human. But she was also somehow more than the monsters standing around: something unearthly lit up her jaw and forehead and played along her fingers like electricity. I cannot say why I thought of her as female, for nothing could have been further beyond the harmony of man and woman than what I saw; something sharp or angular in her features, or dexterous about her fingers, perhaps. She had darkish gray lines streaking from the cavities where her eyes should have been.

  She was standing in the midst of one of their endless spiraling circles. An old telephone pole stood just behind her, and a small hill just beside that, higher than any of the Flowers circling her. They kept looking directly at her as they circled her, faces trained on their center even when the hill obstructed their view. (How were they able still to look directly at her when they could not see her?)

  But something black opened in the back of my mind when the scars on her throat peeled open in the wind and began to wave in serpentine perfection around her head, silencing any echo of humanity. The same gray streaks trailing down from her eyes were still visible on the ruined crater of her face when she opened like a flower inside the sun. A single gray tear dripped down one side of her face at one point after her tentacles had opened. It came to me then how their dead gray eyes looked as if they were decomposing, about to burst.

  Then her tentacles closed again, forming that cunning parody of a human face with long scars below the jawline. The same slithering whispers which sometimes passed between them were growing louder in her mouth, and more complex: "Yess...yesss...it returns. I see now. Now I can see. It returns to myself." (The things circling her sped up for a few paces, opening their tentacles, then slowed, weaving in and out of their circles.) "It knew that this was the way of it. It knew I would remember." She turned caverns empty even of dead eyes upward, starfish-arms flaring open again. "Now, now I finally see. Now it has been freed."

  One of those furthest away from her suddenly stopped, dropped to its knees, and fell face first in the grass. Those around it stopped, sun-arms flaming open. Then the hands connected to that torso pushed down into the grass, setting it upright. Two smudges of streaky gray fluid were left on the ground where it had fallen. Turning its face upward, sounds came out of its mouth: "Thllasssee...ethlassee...I see...I thlass...I see the arms...the sun ..." I saw a fly buzz and then settle in the cavity which had once held a gray egg of an eye; I then saw it, motionless, slide down the thing’s face in a stream of gray.

  Another fell, just as the first had. And another.

  I started to stumble away, but something caught the corner of my eye as I staggered past their circle: a huddled mass, chained to the telephone pole.

  I fell over, choked, watched.

  The thing was sitting down, bent over, less than animal; if gangrene could have lived on itself in the shape of a human body, it would have looked like that. (The memory of their kind swarming slowly over my friend pierced me.) As it lolled in circles, I saw that it was the zombie whose head had been split. Flies swooped around the canyon of that crevasse. Fluid dripped onto its lap as the head moved.

  Then it looked up towards the sun. Red lacerations started to trace themselves from its neck up to its skull. As I watched, waving arms began to peel back from the thing’s swollen neck, floating in currents I could never feel: another sun born into death. With an audile rustling, the crevasse in the thing’s head healed so that its tentacles formed a perfect circle around its skull.

  "It begins," the thing in the center said, her sun having again retreated into her mockery of a human face. "It ends and begins. It becomes one of us, and then will return to itself."

  My eyes closed and I faded from the world.

  ~

  Darkness, now. Moonlight cast bright whispers onto the floor through the window next to the mattress I was lying on. How I had gotten here, who had laid me here, didn’t matter. At least I was alone.

  A garter snake curled its body on the window next to me...and then lifted itself up off the window sill. Half a dozen waving snakes followed, all connected to the dark sun at their center, silhouetted against the moonlight. It climbed through the window and sat next to me.

  "I remember," she said. "I remember the name of the one I used to be.

  "He came to me," she said, "a small man who never smiled. I worked in a building in the center of the city, where the rulers of that place kept the poor who lived there alive through food and medicine. They streamed in every day, empty in eye and empty of hand. I never saw any of them, never spoke with them when we exchanged words. I signed papers and typed messages. He came to me once, carrying a small case. He said he offered me life without end and power over others, and knowledge that would otherwise ever be lost to me. Were I to refuse him, he said, I would die. "We were alone, after the others had gone home. He threw me to the floor and was lying on top of me. I could not move. He opened his case and stabbed the arm of the body I once was. I remember now that I died. The muscle beneath my chest stopped but my eyes stayed open. I remember now that the body I used to be ate anything that was alive, along with the rest of them. No thought was within me. Then I changed. I returned to myself. I opened to the sun."

  She closed, then, and although I should have been far past fear by that point, she was somehow more terrifying as a human figure sitting in utter darkness than anything she had been before. I heard her say: "Even in victory, we are generous. I do not know where my true father is, he who brought me life without end and power. But he will find me. You may join us. Let me have you."

  I staggered upwards and away, out the window she had come through. From behind me as if from a tomb, I heard: If you refuse, we will keep all food from you.

  ~

  Falling, now, in a deep pool. They hate water. But I am lost in it now, just as I have been lost in time, in space, in my own skin. The sun wavers in ripples above the surface of the water. I do not try to breathe.

  The most beautiful woman I had ever seen had met me. This is the passing of an age, she said, and if the wind and sunlight could have laughed with joy, it would not have been more joyful than the tones with which she addressed me. You have passed through the age, from the old to what will become new.

  Those wandering still remember what it was to move toward a goal. I had not even been wandering anymore. I had run from the monster who had been alive, who had been a zombie, and then a starfish, and had returned to herself; who had embraced death and power, and offered me the same. I had wandered, more aimless than the birds or rabbits I occasionally saw, more lost than I had ever been. She met me beside one of the hundreds of pools I had walked by as I moved from nothing toward nothing. Even though I was standing, I had to lift my neck up to look into her eyes. Kindness lined every fold of her face, every curl of her hair. The light seemed to pool on her skin.

  She lowered me backwards into the pool, smiling as she did so. I fell through an infinity of water, endless, without boundary. No pool could be this deep, but still I fell. And then I was breaking the surface again, she helping me up. I held my head down as the water streamed off me under the warm sun, the wind like perfume in my nose. She put my hand on the arm of another and gently wrapped my fingers around warm skin. I looked down and saw I was holding an arm which ended before the wrist.

  "I’m so sorry I did that to you," I said, looking at him, and it seemed that something of her music had caught my voice.

  His once-shattered cheek was still scarred, and something passed over my heart as I saw the two scars below each jaw. Looking full upon him (finally able to look, as I had never done during all our days driving together), I could still see the faint red outlines of the tentacles which had once lined his face but did so no more.

  "Do not let your heart be troubled," the music on the air said, and it was as if my ribs were opening like wings. "Your friend has been through fire and death, but I have healed him, and he will be healed yet again. They are only scars now, and he will be free even of them on the day that is coming
."

  "I’m so sorry I was a coward," he said to me. I put my arms around him and squeezed him. "I’m so sorry about your wife and your daughters," I said.

  "Why didn’t you ever ask me about them? About what happened? They turned right in front of me and I had to run. Right in front of me!" Tears came down his face, real tears from blue eyes, not foul gray water from blindness.

  "I didn’t think you were worth it," I whispered, and the sky was mirrored in the truth of what

  I said. "And I didn’t think you had the words to admit what you had lost." "Perhaps you’re right," he said.

  I turned to the one standing in front of us. "They did it to themselves," I said. "We did it to ourselves. We traded what dim life we had for death, and for a semblance of power. We stared into the sun until we were blind." I felt the weeks and years slipping away from me as I made our confession. She nodded to me in proportions of beauty which no human face can match; I dropped my gaze.

  Turning to my friend, I embraced him again, and wept.

  "They are starting to build a city," the woman said. "They are coming back to themselves, in a way. There will be no end to its height, and if they finish it, nothing they put their hand to will be too hard for them." Then she was gone, a fading point of light beside the sun. Although smaller, she seemed to dwarf our sun in intensity. The grass and trees seemed to watch as she departed, a thousand faces all turned in the same direction.

  Turning with my friend, I saw the city she spoke of. Nothing of this sort could have come about before: a towering black mess of concrete and wood, rising amidst the smoke of so many fires. Many of the starfish milled around it, some leading zombies into it. I noticed a few normal humans walking toward the city as well, and things with feverish tentacles around their heads meeting them and leading them inside.

  "I have no idea how to do this," I said to him, my heart large with the joy of being with him again, knowing he would never turn away again from fear.

  "And yet we must," he said, and the truth of it pierced me.