Hark! the Herald Angels Scream

by Hark! the Herald Angels Scream (retail) (epub)

  At six, Sherman Duffy is making early breakfast. The whole family sits on bar stools at their marble-island kitchen, mom worrying over teenaged Natalie, nanny Esmerelda holding both baby twins. Sherman knows harm will come knocking. But he doesn’t want to think about it because something in the pit of him, a thought worn so deep from so many repetitions that it becomes a hole, knows the outcome. He cracks eggs inside toast with holes in their middles. Smiling, smiling, he pours mimosas for all, including sixtysomething Esmerelda, whose family still lives in Ecuador. For Sherman is a generous man.

  The sound in the Duffy kitchen is hushed; they’ve heard the sirens and the stories. They know what has befallen so many friends. Soft, dutiful chatter about cinnamon or sugar, whether they ought to still go walking today, given the police.

  The children go missing. The twins, the teen daughter. All gone.

  Sherman has prepared himself so deeply that he’s already mourned their loss. He plates his toast and eggs, begins to eat while his nanny faints and his wife draws a knife across her throat.

  At seven chimes, the National Guard arrive. Sometimes it’s sooner, other times they don’t come at all. This time, it’s at seven chimes. Cars and trucks and yes, tanks, clog the streets.

  Fewer children go missing. Only nine.

  A little before eight in the morning, Detective Clement learns that some parents have planned a mass suicide. They intend to feed their children rat poison. So Clement herds every man, woman, and child before the church’s clock tower. Some are forced, weeping and raging. Most are happy for the company. Fellow witnesses.

  “Keep calm!” Clement orders through his megaphone. All the while, he’s looking at me as if he recognizes what I am. By now, he should. We’ve played our same roles so many times that there is no longer a number, just a circle—a snake biting its own tail.

  “Your children will be found!” he cries. “We have to work together!”

  The clock chimes. Two hundred thirty-six children evaporate from the crowd. First they are there. Then, they are not. It’s a funny thing, witnessing something like that. Those people who have faith, lose it. Those people who have none, find it.

  We’re held in the town square. Surrounded by police. It’s determined that all of the missing are under thirteen years old. It doesn’t matter whether they’re from the town or just visiting for the holiday. The children within the borders, within the woods, are gone. All that are left are 128. Lucky 128. The clock strikes nine.

  None go missing.

  A buoyant joy fills them. Spared! They’ve been spared! It’s over! Parents embrace. The local bakery hands out warm biscuits and bagels. Those who’ve lost begin to feel it more keenly. Those who haven’t begin to trust they might not. Bloody-footed Laurel Frances breaks into spontaneous song: “Ave Maria.”

  The murky cavern’s air so heavy

  Shall breathe of balm if thou hast smiled

  Oh maiden, hear a maiden pleadin’

  Oh mother, hear a suppliant child

  The rest of the people join. The square ignites with elegiac music—a song originally written about the Lady of the Lake, hiding in a Goblin’s cave, and is now a prayer to the Virgin. They come together, these myths of fantasy and these people singing. For a moment I think they might remember that this is not new. That time is going in reverse.

  The clock strikes ten.

  No more go missing. The tenor changes. Now the parents of survivors become smug in their hidden grins, in their pats on backs, and I’m so sorrys. Now, they believe that others have done something wrong and they have not.

  The clock strikes eleven.

  None go missing.

  We stay in the square. More biscuits and now coffee, too. The bereaved begin to blame themselves. What have they done to incur God’s wrath? And on Christmas! The clock strikes noon. “Ave Maria” plays. The rest disappear. All 127 of them. Every child under thirteen.

  All, except me.

  It’s in the news. It doesn’t affect you. You see it in a Facebook stream and wonder if the story’s real. Later, you hear from some vicarious account that a friend’s cousin’s kids went missing in that old waterfront town. But it’s as unreal (or as real) to you as Russian spies and American occupation by foreign governments and starving refugees and oil wars and it bothers you until more bizarre news happens that you also aren’t sure whether to believe or what, if anything, can be done.

  You move on.

  Consider Prometheus. For man, he steals fire. With fire, man might transcend his maker. As punishment for man’s ambition, Zeus sends Pandora’s Box full of plague and strife. He ties Prometheus to a rock, eats his regrown liver every day for eternity. Consider, overwhelmed by his own momentousness, man dreamed God. Why then, does he do this to himself?

  Abnegation.

  As the only child to remain in my town, I’m interviewed by lots of news outlets, then trapped inside a hospital where they lock the doors behind them when they leave. They tell me they’re afraid I’ll be stolen, too. But this isn’t true. They blame me.

  It’s my fault, obviously. Yours, too. And even as I tell you this, I know you’ll forget. It’s your nature. You can’t stand still, and so you take the easiest path you can find, having no idea it’s a circle.

  A new thing happens. I love it when new things happen. The crackpots decide our town is filled with Satanists. They figure the parents struck a deal, sacrificing their own kids. So vigilantes break into the church steeple and smash the bell, hoping to set the children’s captured spirits free.

  We never hear “Ave Maria” again.

  Weeks and then months pass. They let me out of the hospital. The town becomes a graffitied graveyard of flowers and wreaths and empty boxes buried under salty ground. I’m asked to speak at some of the memorials and I do so. I talk about Lucy, whom I earned a karate purple belt with, and I talk about Dan, who licked his ice-cream sandwiches instead of biting them. And I talk about Danica, who in second grade used to spit on me when the teacher wasn’t looking. I don’t mention these things, or the fact that I’ve known the infinite incarnations of these people, and with each occasion, have grown to love them more deeply. Their flaws and efforts and failure and mess. I do not explain that my heart is broken. I only say they’ll be missed.

  My parents believe it is their piousness that saved me. They don’t know that I’m not their child, but a changeling swapped out at birth by hungry Gods. For school, I’m bussed to the next town over. The kids keep their distance, as it’s rumored I’m dangerous—a Typhoid Mary of evaporated children.

  On the first anniversary of our town’s missing children, I’m asked to give a speech, and this is what I say on Christmas Eve, in front of our church:

  Dear friends,

  What? Oh, yeah. I can speak up. Sorry [nervous laugh]. It’s hard. Which I guess is stupid to say. I mean, it’s hard for all of us. We keep having to go through this. It’s like that first time you pick a bathroom stall. You always go to the same one after that. It doesn’t occur to you to do something different.

  Sorry. Okay. Is this loud enough? Okay. Don’t worry. You’re happy you didn’t hear what I just said. You never remember, anyway.

  Well, I guess I should say something. I keep feeling like it’s a test, you know? Like old biblical times. You need to rise up and become better than what’s happening to you. That’s what all those stories are always about, you know? They’re not about sacrifice or blood. They’re about evolving. We used to be apes. But we haven’t changed since then. It’s been too long. I’m sorry. That’s stupid. You don’t want to hear that. I know what I should say. What? Okay. Is this loud enough?…[laugh]. Anyway. I want to say I’m sorry. I know you think I should be with them. So, sorry. Sorry I’m not dead.

  I get booed off the steps. Somebody shoots a BB gun. Hits me in the cheek.

  Detective Clem
ent helps me into a squad car. Takes me to his house, where there are empty bottles everywhere. Gin man. Maps, too, marking the names of every child and where and when they went missing.

  I’m supposed to be nine years old. They all know this can’t possibly be true. But they pretend, because it’s not polite to accuse a child of the uncanny. Pretending makes them forget. “Are your parents hurting you?” he asks as he bandages my cheek.

  Always, it’s him. Different body, different gender, different color, but always the same soul. He asks because he’s trying to understand why I seem like such an alien. I take his chin in my fingers. “I like the feeling of skin,” I answer. “I like being alive. I like breath and I like heat and I like cold.”

  He stares, breath stopped and literally frozen. Abnegation. Abnegation. Abnegation.

  “They don’t hurt me,” I say.

  He nods and takes me home.

  That night I sneak out to the craggy rocks. I scatter salt throughout the inlet. Nineteen bags of it.

  The next morning, we hear the news that it has happened again, in Des Moines, Iowa. These kids didn’t go missing. They just never woke up. Still bodies: warm, breathing, unmoving. Thirty-four thousand and seven sleeping beauties.

  Only one child remains in Des Moines. A changeling, like me.

  I’m asked to help them sort their grieving. This is the speech I make:

  Dear Iowans,

  They told me it’s Iowan. I hope that’s right. A terrible thing has happened. But not just to you. To everyone. I hope you solve it before the world falls apart and you all die so very horribly and painfully and slowly. Oh, okay. Yeah. Can someone help me?

  A fight breaks out. Somebody shoots somebody else. So they put me in a car and send me back east. I stop making speeches.

  And you know? Pretty quickly, people who weren’t directly affected forget. You might wonder how that happens. But then you might open a history book from just this cycle alone. You might consider all the people who’ve died from murder and the wars nobody wanted to fight and the global warming nobody admitted was happening. And it’s not just like, hey, generation to generation, people forget what their parents learned. It’s the same people, forgetting, over and over again. Every five minutes.

  Abnegation. Abnegation. Abnegation.

  So anyway, at my new school I’m attacked by a girl with red hair. The Brillo-y kind, as if she’s descended directly from Norsemen. She’s my locker neighbor and she’s always seemed normal. Even smiles once in a while. So, who knows? Anyway, one day her whole face breaks into crazy rage, like the inside of her is kindling lit on fire and for a moment, she knows. She knows everything. And I fucking love her because it’s a total surprise.

  But then she makes it small. Gives it logic. Tears it into pieces and pushes all the blame on me. Abnegation. “You brought the wrath of Jesus!” she screams. Then she slams my face into the water fountain and breaks my jaw.

  I eat through a straw for nine months and in the end give birth to a new face. Not my first. The teasing is so bad I drop out. It’s not like they can kill me. You could drop an anvil on my head like a Road Runner cartoon. You’ve done it, actually. You, I mean. YOU.

  I stay in that town with my arrogant parents, and like so many humans around me, wish I’d been switched into someone else’s crib. These people I’m trapped at dinner with are ridiculous. We still attend the same church with the broken bell every Sunday. By then, people have stopped looking at the oddity. The survivor. They look away.

  Abnegation. Abnegation. Abnegation.

  Did I mention? This is traditionally the time people stop having babies and this iteration is no different. People stop having babies. The ones in their bellies stop growing. They fossilize and harden into stone. The rest just don’t quicken. The streams blame this on bad diets and original sin. Lesser theories involve mercury levels in seawater and the sea monster Leviathan. Nobody’s sure when it started. Nobody’s sure it’s true. Even the women with eight-month-old rocks in their wombs deny it is happening.

  Can you guess what I’m about to say? Abnegation.

  The next year on Christmas Eve I sneak out again and scatter salt. One of them has risen, tiny bubbles bleeding up. Izzy. The asthma must have made her good at breathing through water. I climb in, swishing through rocks and a watery field of our town’s slumbering children. Izzy struggles to surface, her hair swaying like a mermaid’s. It’s so dark that the water seems bright. I want to ask her why she’s struggling. Why she keeps trying when it always ends the same. So I do it. Even though I’ve never done it before. I pull her up and ask her.

  But she’s three years old. She doesn’t understand. I kiss her before I let her slide back into the wet bed. This is new, too. Then I empty a whole bag of salt over her to keep her from rising back up. We lock eyes as she sinks to rest with the others.

  News is already arriving by the time I get back before dawn that Christmas. Eighteen towns affected, all with just one survivor: the changelings. Disappearing children; sleeping children; catatonic children. More than a million in all.

  They interview the survivors, but soon tire of these. They can’t remember anything we tell them. Next they talk to the parents and the scientists and most especially the preachers shouting fire and brimstone. The streams and the feeds and the checkout counter speakers shriek words of fear and shame and the people worry themselves sick until they get tired of worrying and forget.

  Can you forget something like this? Forget the threat looming over you? Forget your own children? Yes, of course you can. It’s what humans do, and every time they do it, their Gods grow just a little hungrier.

  The fourth year. I bring salt to my sea. More of my town’s children have risen. Their skin has softened to the consistency of tissues and the air bubbles stay small, dreamers flitting through dreams. I salt. They fall back down.

  Clement stops me on my way back. He’s not a detective anymore. Lives like a hermit. It’s not new, seeing him. He follows me everywhere. “That’s where the bodies went?” he asks as he points at the sea, and I have to admit, the hairs along the back of my neck stand right up. He only figures this out 2 percent of the time.

  “Yeah,” I say. “They get restless.”

  “Why do you keep them here?”

  “I tend them. For our cycle.” Then I point at the horizon, which has become a gravity rainbow. Fragmented colors of unequal distribution, pulling us into each other.

  He doesn’t understand any of this, but he hears it. He doesn’t forget it. This is progress. I think next time, he’ll remember more. I always think this. But very incrementally, it is true. He’s so drunk the realization fades. He bends over and vomits. Steaming stuff on a cold winter’s night.

  I finish going home. It’s Christmas Day.

  By noon, all the children in the world are gone. They are lost to sleeping sickness, disappeared under oceans and streams and inside mountains. You’d think the adults who remain would be shocked. But like cattle they’ve warmed themselves with indifference.

  Abnegation. Abnegation. Abnegation.

  The Gods are so hungry they rise up.

  They are spiders and krakens and sloths of many mouths. Martyred women and soldiers and warriors. Every nightmare you can think, all dreamed by their makers. It takes six days and seven nights to slaughter every last adult. They catch those on ships. They catch those in houses. They take those in stores and in woods and under cave walls.

  They take my human parents while I watch. Split them in two, then feed on their insides, snouts rooting like pigs for truffles.

  At last, they surround me and all the other changelings. Like every time before this, I spread my arms wide. They make it slow. They make it hurt. They peel off my fingernails. They chew up my toes. They strip away my skin in seams: arms, legs, cheeks, back. They take turns feeding off my muscles. They peel
back my bones and feed on my organs and heart.

  The Gods, the humans, and the spirit, united in a perfect trinity. Sated, we return as one to the core of the earth to rest another two hundred thousand years.

  I tell you this every time, and you never remember. I am your abnegation. Your mess. Your frailty. Your forgotten memory that haunts you. It is your nature to deny. To refuse. To blame. To create fathers for yourself that do not exist except in your imaginations. You do not understand that it is you humans, in your apprehension and your magic, that are the only God.

  The rainbow inverts. The black hole pulls through to the other side.

  At last, the children wake from hidden lairs and hospital beds. This sleep has washed them ignorant. They do not remember words or their parents or their names. They will start over. Begin again. And again. And again. And again. Cattle for their own creations.

  THE SECOND FLOOR OF THE CHRISTMAS HOTEL

  JOE R. LANSDALE

  I haven’t mentioned this to anyone because I know how it might sound, having to do with what some might call a ghost. I am not a religious man, but I think there may well be some things we don’t understand beyond this life, though I doubt they have anything to do with the common concepts of heaven and hell.

  Some of us may die and merely cease to be, and some of us may remain hung between life and death, caught in a kind of limbo, captured there by intense emotions and events, retaining the dregs of life, but not life as we would want it.

  And sometimes those things reach out.

  This happened ten years ago, when I was seventy. Robert was the same age. He wrote me a letter suggesting we meet for Christmas Eve dinner, which was coming up within the week. It sounded like a glorious idea. There were no wives or children in my life. I had ended up that way by choice, and early on it seemed a great idea to be a playboy with no plans for children, but if I could go back in time I would alter that. It gets lonely without kin.