The butterflies came by the thousands, surrounding us in a cloud of muted colors, all tinted red by the impossibly bright Moon.
Sarah was still searching for something. I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t find any words at all. The whole thing was a puzzle, an extra few hours granted as inscrutably as it was miraculously, a meaning to be worked out for the rest of my life and maybe beyond. Nothing more. There were no secret words, no final, special goodbyes, none of the significant things you’d be sure you’d have to cram into the last hour of a loved one’s presence.
Nothing more. No words at all.
In the end she staggered and fell and the butterflies covered her entirely, a writhing, dark blanket, but I brushed them away and took her in my arms. She wasn’t even a skeleton, but a thing of tatters, an old, cardboard Halloween decoration you might see trampled on the street in the middle of November.
She spoke a little then. I couldn’t make out the words. I listened for a long time before I realized she was reciting the words to an old song we both knew.
“Go fetch me water from the desert,
And blood from out of a stone.
Go fetch me milk from a fair maid’s breast
That never a young man hath known.”
I sang softly in reply, “When shall we meet again, Sweetheart? When shall we meet again?” but my voice broke and I couldn’t continue.
The butterflies were like a wave, a flickering tide. I saw the beasts in the cartoon jungle then, great-maned lions with eyes of fire, and a zebra striped red and black, and a serpent with a human face, coiled around the base of a hill, regarding us. There were two moons in the sky now, one red, the other white, hardly shining at all, the color of white paper.
I held onto Sarah tightly, all the while afraid that I would break her, that she would crumble to bits in my arms. I felt her crumbling anyway, diminishing. It was like trying to carry a sand sculpture.
I wore a cloak of butterflies then, the sound of their wings against my ears a constant sighing like a tide, and more, rising almost into coherence, almost into words.
We walked up the hill past the blank-eyed face of the serpent. I knew this place. We stood before Cleopatra’s Needle, that ancient obelisk the Khedive of Egypt had sent to the people of New York in the 19th century as a token of his esteem. It stood gleaming in the double moonlight, surrounded by benches and little placards explaining what the hieroglyphics meant. We’d been here before, many times in fact. It had been a running joke between us, when we were younger, to make up our own translations, something more interesting than just “Ra, son of Ra, Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt.”
Now I shook the butterflies off Sarah’s face so she could see. I turned her head with my hand, gently.
“Look. Up at the top. It says EAT AT THUTMOE’S. There, further down, the sacred moustache cups of ’Im’otep and ’Er’otep, the only Cockney Pharaohs. And those figures, the Middle Kingdom Kickers, ancient predecessors of the Rockettes, and—”
I tried to laugh, but was sobbing instead. She made no response at all. I felt her getting lighter every instant, going away, as the butterflies somehow drew away her substance.
There was no revelation, no portentous wisdom from beyond. We two had come together by accident, been separated by accident, reunited by accident, however briefly. We merely lingered as long as we could, savoring, creating memories, filling each pitiless moment one by one, until I held only her bare skull in my hands. White bone flashed beneath the butterfly wings.
“There has to be more,” I said. “No. This isn’t right. There has to be more than this.”
The skull wheezed. It ground its teeth. It spoke syllables, not words, in a voice that was wholly alien.
That was the one true moment of terror I felt, the helpless horror of holding something else in my arms, which was not Sarah nor ever had been—some devil come from Hell in this particular shape to torment me. Sarah was already gone, and I had done nothing, said nothing, made a fool of myself in this very last, crucial time, wasted, wasted, wasted—
The hundred million butterflies covered me, the benches, the obelisk, everything. And then, for an instant the shifting patterns of the wings formed some semblance of her face. I saw her again, and I heard her voice one last time.
“This was enough. You were with me. Thank you.”
“No,” I said. “More—”
I shook the skull. Dust and scraps of clothing fell from my arms. The butterflies swarmed, filling the air, settling again.
The skull moved. The jaw clicked up and down. Its voice was like a crow, shrieking.
“Alas, poor Yorick,” it said, and the jaw fell off and the rest crumbled like paper-thin wax.
* * * *
I must have slept. I awoke to the sounds of children’s voices. For an instant I was terrified that I would be discovered holding Sarah’s skull, but my hands were empty, blue-black from the iridescent dust of butterfly scales.
Later, I went to see Frank Rodgers, who has helped our mutual friend Sam Gilmore through his own time of difficulty and strangeness. Those of us who have experienced such things have a way of finding one another. We form a network, sharing, remembering.
So I told him the whole story as if I were in a confessional, and he said, “That was still her at the end, with the Yorick joke. It was her way of signing off. It was the sort of thing she would do, don’t you think?”
I had maintained my composure with Frank until then, but I just broke down, and he held me as a parent might a sobbing child.
“Just a joke? Just a fucking joke? Was that all it was?”
“Oh it was a lot more than that, but don’t you think it was a nice touch to go out on a happy note, with a joke?”
“But we had so little time.”
“And it was very well spent.”
It was very hard for me to understand that, but I tried, and he helped me, and eventually, perhaps, I could.
THE OUTSIDE MAN
“When you walk with the Outside Man,” I said, “you walk forever. You may choose to do so. Indeed, you must choose, for he will never compel you, but when you walk with him, when he has given you whatever it is you most desperately desire, you cannot stop walking, and you are always alone.”
I paused in my circular pacing, listening to the sounds of the night: the wind in the leaves, crickets, birds. And as I listened, they grew still, one by one.
“What the Hell do you mean, Quilt?” he said. “Cut the amateur theatrics.”
I started again, one step, another, another, encircling him where he sat. He turned to follow me with his gaze, the rusty chair creaking. Footsteps and ancient metal; the only sounds now.
“My grandmother told me about the Outside Man for the first time when I was six or seven,” I said. “She was really neat, I thought then, like the Gypsy woman in The Wolf Man, the one who intones so solemnly about wolfbane and the full moon and your prayers not being much good under the circumstances; only she lived at my house and her secrets were just for me.
“She spoke of Der Waldganger, the Walker-in-the-Forest who meets hapless—but never innocent—travelers in the darkness and extracts from them, not their souls, but the truth, the sort of truth you’re afraid to admit even to yourself. Which is pretty much the same thing as losing your soul, I guess. Whatever you tell the Outside Man is true, she used to say with a kind of terrifying finality that thrilled me, back then.”
“I don’t get it, Quilt,” he said, rapping his knuckles on the metal chair-arm, for the comfort of the sound.
I continued pacing, around and around. He sat facing forward, turning only slightly as I passed.
“Der Waldganger. Grandma was full of stories of the Old Country—haunted castles along the Rhine, headless knights, maidens back from the grave—but she wasn’t really German German, just Pennsylvania German, though through her our family went back a long, long ways, and was, at times suitably witchy.
“My grandmother was the sort of pers
on who never left the house without her copy of John George Hohman’s ‘Pow-wow’ magic book, Long Lost Friend. Hohman gives a charm against Der Waldganger, or the Outside Man, to use the New World name—”
“Quilt, what has this crap got to do with…? Why have you brought me here?” He stopped rapping his knuckles. I stood still. He seemed to hold his breath, and the woods were utterly, utterly silent, and somehow I could hear the plaintive, pained note in his mind. I fancied that his eyes gleamed like those of a frightened animal, but of course they did not.
“I brought you here because it is a suitable setting for a little story I have to tell. Just sit and listen. I must have mentioned my little brother, Stevie—”
“The one who…died?”
“The very one. But how did he die? How, really? Only the Outside Man truly knows, and I do, and very soon, you will too.”
“Quilt, please—”
“Listen.” I was pacing again, around and around, three times and more; three times three times. “Now Stevie and I were what you’d call rival siblings. In most cases it is the older child who has gotten used to being the center of the familial universe and can never forgive the younger for usurping Mamma’s affections. But Stevie had it backwards. He wanted everything, and I was in his way; so he existed solely to make my life miserable, spilling milk on my drawings, ‘accidentally’ knocking ink into my aquarium and poisoning the fish. His answer to anything I did back was ‘I’ll tell. You wait. I’ll tell.’
“Once, when I was fourteen or so—that would have made him nine and a half—I’d had enough, and we were alone in the house for several hours, so I locked him in a closet. I heard him pounding and threatening to tell, then sobbing, then pleading, and finally there was silence, which suited me just fine. But shortly before our parents got home, I had to let him out. He stank. He’d had an accident in his pants. He was red-faced but, for once, very, very quiet.
“`I’ll get you,’ was all he said.
“His revenge was capably delivered. I’ll grant him that. A day or two later he stole the Polaroid I’d just gotten for my birthday and took some very unusual pictures of himself, naked in all of them, tied up, dangling from a rafter, bound to a support-post in the basement so he looked like St. Sebastian waiting for the arrows; even crucified on some boards. He’d certainly put his religious education to good use. More than once, I wondered how he’d managed to operate the camera in such a position.
“Not that I had much time to ponder the matter.
“He placed those photos in the pocket of a pair of my jeans in the dirty-clothes hamper. Mother found them when she was doing the wash. She came into my room so ashen-faced I was afraid someone was dead or she was having a heart-attack, and then she laid out the pictures on my bed one by one, as if she were dealing a game of cards, and I just stood there, uncomprehending.
“I started to say something, and Mother made a sound almost like an animal howl as she scooped up the pictures, pressed them in my hand, grabbed me by the hair—it was shoulder-length in those days—and hauled me off to my father’s study. She made me show him the pictures.
“Of course no one believed me when I said it was all a lie. Dad screamed at me, calling me a pervert and a monster and—unusual language for a man of his generation—a fucking faggot. Stevie was there, lapping it all up, but outwardly putting on his finest show of tears and terrified squeals as he described how I’d held a steak-knife to his throat and forced him to do so many terrible things.
“My father’s first response, believe it or not, was to get a pair of scissors out of his desk and cut off most of my hair, yanking and slashing until I had gashes on my forehead and looked like one of those World War Two collaborators being publicly humiliated. Then he slammed me full in the face with his fist, his ring and the scissors ripping my cheek open; and I went crashing through the front of the display case where he kept his mineral specimens. Everybody seemed to be screaming, bawling, and clinging to each other; except I was the one who was lying there bleeding, with rocks bouncing off my head, but nobody seemed to pay any attention to me.
“Later, when Mother was bandaging me up, she went on and on about how I’d have to go to psychiatrists and maybe be institutionalized, and how I could never, never be left alone. She was rehearsing her own parental martyrdom, which she would perform again and again for the benefit of her friends.
“That was when I decided to kill my brother.”
* * * *
Once more I paused beneath the vaulted cathedral arches of the midnight forest, listening to the silence, a silence broken only once by an owl, hooting. Be still I commanded with a thought, and the owl was still.
The metal chair creaked. The listener leaned forward intensely. I had his interest now.
“It was about four A.M. that same night, when I climbed out of my bedroom window, scurried across the lawn, and made my way into the woods behind our house.
“`But how would you find the Outside Man, supposing you wanted to?’ I’d asked Grandma once.
“`Oh, child, that is a terrible thing to ask, a terrible thing to think about. Only if there is a great sin in your heart can you find him. If you must, he is always there, just beyond the shutters, behind the nearest tree, waiting in some special place only you and he can know.’
“The woods were strange that night, not just because I was afraid, but truly ‘strange,’ filled with unfamiliar sounds; then there were no sounds at all but the ones I made sloshing through heaps of fallen leaves; and distances were all wrong. I should have come out on Lancaster Pike. I should have seen lights from the neighbors’ houses. But no, it was like being at the bottom of a dark ocean and groping from stone to stone, from tree to tree in actuality, until I came to my special place, which only I and the Outside Man could know: a little clearing in front of a huge oak. By daylight, it was a friendly tree. I had climbed it many times. By night, its branches embraced numberless mysteries.
“But I did not climb. I sat and waited in the old metal chair someone had abandoned at the base of the oak.
“And the Outside Man came to me, after a time, out of the deeper woods. I rose to greet him. I knew I could not hide. I didn’t want to. It was like that old song: I met a man with eyes of glass, and fingers long like the wriggling worm— He looked as I had expected, gaunt and stooped in his swirling cape, his face a mere suggestion beneath his broad hat, skin the color of bone, but skin nevertheless, drawn tight over his skull so it crinkled when he smiled, revealing dark, sharp teeth. His eyes were indeed like glass, black and round, huge, gleaming. They have been with me, ever since, staring into me, never turning away even for an instant.”
* * * *
“Quilt, you’re making this up, aren’t you? I’ve seen your paintings. Damned scary, I don’t deny. All those skeletal figures with big, black eyes. Now you’re going to tell me you do them from life…”
“I’m not sure you could call it life.”
* * * *
“`I want my brother to die,’ I said, holding back tears. I was terribly afraid just then, not of the Outside Man, but as if I were tottering on the edge of a cliff and I knew that I had to jump. There was no going back. It was irrevocable. ‘I want Stevie to die,’ I said again.
“The Outside Man took me by the hand. His touch was cold and hard and dry. He led me through the forest, through the darkness, and the woods were filled with monsters, some of them almost human, some twisted and deformed and filled with pain, some just utterly strange; but they flickered away like minnows before an oncoming shark.
“`Steven must die,’ I said for the third and final time. Three is the number. Hohman makes that clear in Long Lost Friend where he says, ‘For good or for ill, what is spoken thrice is spoken truly.’
“The Outside Man paused then. He let go of my hand. He reached up into the sky and seemed to take something down from it. For an instant I thought he held the Moon in his long, bony claw. But it was something smaller, like a glowing egg of purest w
hite, weightless when he placed it in my cupped hands.
“Out of the object came voices, Mom’s, Dad’s, Stevie’s, and traffic noises, as if I were eavesdropping when they were all in the car together.
“`Goddamned brat,” my Father said.
“`Oh God,’ Mother said. ‘You don’t think he’d…hurt himself?’
“Stevie was crying—Bravo! Masterful performance! What an actor that kid would have made!—and he was begging them not to hurt me. He said he knew I was sick but I could be cured, couldn’t I? Mother wept then, and was comforting him. Their sobs formed a tearful harmony.
“`Shit,’ was all I said as I crushed the thing I held in my hands. For an instant it darkened, became a bright, blood red; for an instant I heard brakes squealing; then it broke like a light bulb trampled underfoot, and my hands were covered with dust. I wiped them on my pants, and looked up, and saw that the Outside Man was gone.
“I stood still, hugging my sides, suddenly cold, listening to the night birds, the crickets, and the autumn leaves rattling in the wind. Slowly I realized that I was in the clearing by the oak tree. We had walked in a great circle, if we had walked anywhere at all.
“I sat down in the chair and for a few minutes almost convinced myself the entire experience had been a dream.
“But I had to go home eventually, and as the woods began to grow light, I went. It was a very short walk, just a few minutes. There were swarms of police cars outside our house.
“When I announced who I was, a whole team of experts took me aside and gently broke the news that my parents and my brother Steven had all been out in the car last night—past four A.M.; possibly I could tell them why—and out on Route 202 a drunken trucker had shoved his sixteen-wheeler right up their collective ass…though, of course, the policewoman didn’t phrase it that way. The bodies were burned almost beyond recognition.
The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack: 25 Weird Tales of Fantasy and Horror Page 16