by Paul Monette
Iris wouldn’t have it. She clenched her teeth, whirled around, and addressed a whole circle of stooped and blank-eyed folk. “You don’t have to do what he tells you,” she said, trying to control her anger. “It’s just an eclipse. It doesn’t mean a thing. Do you understand?”
Oh, yes, they understood. They rose as one, about fifteen of them, and clasped hands and straggled across to stand at the rim of the cliff, strung out in a perfect line. The space between them and the other two, say twenty feet, cried out for more to come and look.
Iris turned in a rage to see if this was Michael’s work. He sat on a rock beneath the trees, glum and completely distracted. It may have been just cunning, yet she could feel it in her bones: he had nothing whatever to do with it. Perhaps it was all in her mind. She knew that if she raised her voice and told the crowd to flee, they would all go take their place in line. Admit it, she thought, this is your idea now.
Had it always been, from the very first?
She went to him under the rustling fir. She knelt in front of him, took his hands, and stared in his eyes with a burning urge, as if she finally meant to say she loved him. He came back from a long, long way. He smiled with a sweet expectancy. Perhaps it wasn’t too late at all: he was still a true believer.
“Please,” she said. “What have you done to me?”
His face clouded over. He spoke with cool dignity: “Look, you leave mine alone, I’ll leave yours alone.”
“It’s all for me, isn’t it, Michael? Isn’t it?” He made no move to answer. Yes was what he meant. “If you love me, help me save them.”
“And what will you give me, Iris?” he asked with a rueful smile.
“Whatever you want.”
He gave a short laugh, like somebody bored. He said: “But I don’t want anything.”
Then, as if the sky had its own ideas, as if to give him a hint perhaps, the shade of a crescent touched the sun. They knew it the instant it happened. They gazed up to see the edge of the moon eat into the pool of fire like a winter kill. She shut her eyes at the sear of it. Subliminally, she must have heard the faintest shower of gravel, too—or was it the merest whoosh of air? Whatever it was, she did not need the prophet’s smile to turn her toward the cliff edge.
There wasn’t a soul. Where the line of villagers had been standing, only the matted grass prickled to gain its shape again. Iris muffled a cry, leaped to her feet, and ran across to see—though so much started to happen now that she never got a proper look at the pitiless sea below. For some had begun to mumble prayers and score their flesh with fingernails. Those who were already half gone stood up to volunteer. Others simply wept, as they stared at the dimming sky. A sickly shadow seemed to cling to the corner of every object. Every moment, it claimed a little more.
Iris was at the rim when the first ones came toward her. She opened her arms and stood like a shield. “Go back!” she cried. “It’s just a few minutes. You don’t know what you’re doing!”
Perhaps. They were certainly an odd lot, this group of the first minute. They exhibited a curious insolence, with a funny tinge of irony. Eight or ten came directly up and stood about her. They could have pushed her over in a second. At first she thought they were going to answer her, and thus she looked to the oldest, a man in his middle fifties. He leered like a drunk, pressing his face up close till his nose touched hers. Then he pulled back and dived over with a queer scream.
The others laughed coarsely, pointing at Iris as if the joke were all on her. And then, in roughly descending order according to age, they stepped out into the air, each with a lovely scream—like they were riding on a roller coaster. Iris shouted “No!” at every fall, but no one listened. One was thirty. One was twenty. One was about sixteen—
“Harriet!” Iris shrieked, half a second late, and stood there all alone with nothing in her hands. She could hear the excited cries break off, one by one as the bodies hit the water. The sun wasn’t even a quarter closed. “Do something!” Iris called across to Michael.
He still sat perched on his rock, gazing dully at the broken sky. “Me?” he shouted back. The contempt was clear from fifty feet away. “No—you, Iris. You listen.”
Listen to what? That shouting? She knew what it was, better than he did. Her people were clamoring in the light, banging on the trapdoor, begging to be released. Of course she owed them a moment’s comfort. She’d get to them as soon as she was finished here. But if she didn’t save the others now, soon it would be too late. She checked the sky: about a third. Waves of flame were lapping round the disk of the intruding moon, rather as if they were fighting back. Or no: as if they were trying to embrace it. The light was growing spectral on the cliff, turning them all to ghosts. If only they could see there was nothing final in it. The tricks of light were fleeting as a dream.
The victims of the second minute were easily sixty strong. They were a little more frightened than those who’d gone before, but they were also the best behaved. They gathered themselves in clusters of three or four, clearly matched by body type and coloring. Families, without a doubt. They seemed to take a certain pride in simply having come this far together. Tears were in their eyes, but they held their heads up high. They didn’t seem fanatic in the least. As the first of the clans reached the rim, the light turned silver-gold. They exchanged a final melancholy look, shut their eyes, and went. There wasn’t the breath of a scream.
Iris ran up to put herself in the way. The families were queuing up at a spot where the ledge was cantilevered out. They could have gone over anywhere, but the order seemed to calm them. The fathers winked at the teenage sons. The women pointed up at the morning fireworks, losing themselves in simpering banalities. When Iris tried to rail at them, they walked right by her as if she weren’t there. They stepped off the edge like people getting into lifeboats.
Iris lurched away and ran toward the lighthouse. She hated all this pointless courage. If only they would kick and scream like children, maybe they’d have a chance. The moon was almost midpoint on the sun. Go with the living, she told herself. It wasn’t till she reached the light and turned her mind to the gnashing of the saved that she realized none of the children had come to the park at all.
Maybe they’d escaped. As she gripped the latch on the lighthouse door, she thought how well it would all turn out if the children at least had made it to the woods. Soon they would be free. Then she could be their teacher. She dared not imagine any more, for fear of how the powers of the air would turn it all against her.
She stepped inside and stared at the quaking trapdoor under the stairs, as if she had X-ray eyes and could see which ones were pounding hardest. Suddenly there was a hush. The beating stopped. Then a lot of scurry and whispering, like rats. It was Roy who spoke, his mouth right up against a crack between the boards.
“Iris? You there?” She nodded soberly. Made no sound. He was doing all he could to come off generous and giving. “Hey, listen,” he said, “we’ve waited all our lives for this. Free us, will you? That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?”
God, she was sick of morals. She could hardly remember anymore just what she was saving these people for. If everyone would only wait four minutes, they could do whatever they liked. In her head she started to count the seconds.
“Iris, please,” whispered Roy, “don’t make us live in the wilderness. We hate it here.”
Don’t stay then, Iris thought. Go home.
“We don’t fit in anymore,” he said, as if he read her mind as easily as Michael did. “Not anywhere. Just let us go.”
She couldn’t think of a single answer. All that he said seemed perfectly sound. If she’d thought about it at all, she’d have let them go in a second, so she didn’t think. She just kept counting, knowing she had the strength for these few minutes and nothing more. Once the sun was clear again, she swore she would never have another moral notion. Not if all the murderers were kings.
“Iris, Iris,” he crooned through the floor. “Please�
�do it for love.”
She glanced outside to see how far the matter of the light had gone. The sun was two-thirds covered. Geysers of lava raged around the moon. The earthlight turned quicksilver, and the shadows on the cliff were beaten gold. The families waiting to jump now sang a hymn, Christian of course, in several parts like a tidy choir. For those in peril on the sea, as if they were going down on a ship. There was nothing they could do about it except be noble. Noble became the way of the second wave.
She looked at the others still clustered on the lawn. Many were full of terror and shrinking back. The leaders of the third group were having to pull their people up and shrill at them. It seemed the pace of things was falling behind. Those on the edges crept under the bushes and up the trees. By the time they got to the fifth minute, thought Iris, Michael would have to push. Nothing was perfect, even now. She laughed to think how crazed he would be before the fall of light was done.
Two things happened then. The prisoners heard her laughter, and they lunged, beating the lid like a battering ram. And when she shrank away against the wall, Michael came around the outer door and stepped inside. Her eyes went wide with fear. Frantically, she patted her pockets and combed the stairs. She bent down and felt in the dust on the floor. No luck. Then she looked back at Michael, who dangled the key between two fingers, shaking it like a bell. He grinned from ear to ear.
“Don’t,” she pleaded, putting out a supplicating hand.
“You free them, Iris,” said Michael gently. “They’re yours.”
“No,” she whimpered, rising frightened to her feet. “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
“Who does?”
The hammering was so loud she couldn’t think. She snatched the key from his hand, which only made him laugh. She stowed it in a pocket. As her fury grew, the fear left her. Things would hold if she could stay angry. “What about yours?” she defied him. “They don’t look so happy.”
“But they don’t count,” he replied with a shrug. “They were dead the day they were born. How are you feeling now?”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’ll survive.”
Everything she said only seemed to delight him more. “Well, of course you will,” he purred at her. “That’s the whole point.” He gestured vaguely at the park outside. “The next one comes in about six hundred years,” he said. “We’ll watch it together, shall we?”
Because she couldn’t follow him, she stepped to the door to check the sun. They had reached the full corona. The villagers had ceased to jump. The willing ones were gone; now the others dug in. The whole idea had ground to a halt, even as the chromosphere ringed the moon with a million conflagrations. She thought of the children, free somewhere. Then she squinted her eyes and stared directly at it, for after all she would never see another. Just a few more minutes now.
And yet she would have thought there would be something, now that they’d reached the eye of it. Some certainty. Some victory. Something more than a ring of light and zero in the heart.
“Iris?”
He sounded so happy, she couldn’t help but turn. For a moment her eyes were dazed. She saw the ring like a vision, superimposed on everything—like a halo round the prophet’s head. Then her focus cleared: he was holding a revolver. Smiling, he shot a single shot point-blank, directly at her heart.
The force of it nearly knocked her over. The wind went out of her lungs. She gripped her heart as Michael howled with laughter. It only took a moment, and she knew she wasn’t dead. She stared at her hands: no blood. She didn’t feel a thing.
She looked over at him strangely. Now he held a knife. The very same she had used on Emery Oz, she thought with the oddest sense of calm. He danced up close as she flattened herself against the curving wall. He raised it above his head and slashed down and plunged it in her stomach. She saw it go in and come out, but as if from a point outside herself. She hardly winced. The sweater was torn to the waist, rather as if she were ripping off her clothes, but that was all. Her belly was white and smooth.
The clamoring had stopped, meanwhile, in the well below the floor—as if the prisoners thought better of coming out to a sudden change of rules. Even now she kept on counting. She would not have to face it at all, if she could just get through the next three minutes. Shyly she stared at the floor. She never would have met his eyes if he hadn’t slipped a cord around her neck. Her head snapped back as he pulled it taut. His face was an inch away.
“See?” said Michael with flashing eyes.
She couldn’t speak, but not because she was choking. She breathed in and out the same as ever. Though the cord bit deep and seemed about to sever the windpipe, Iris found she wasn’t even startled. Only speechless. She had a sudden horror that the victory was here.
“Think of it, Iris,” he murmured at her, pulling the rope so tight that it turned his fingers blue. “We can do anything now.”
The only thing in her favor was how much he needed to talk about it, as if he had to get her approval before the eclipse was done. Now he let up on the pressure, to give her a little room to say. What would she like to do first?
She slipped from the noose and bolted. She ran outside and slammed the door. Still ticking off the seconds in her head, she stalked through the last of the villagers. They crouched and lay about, some of them almost fetal. As for the sun, she was used to the trick by now. The shock was over. When she glanced up to see how far the moon had waned from dead center, nothing induced her to stop and stare. She only meant to check the time.
Of course, she knew he’d follow her, but really, shouldn’t he be getting the rest of his people over? A kind of torpor had overtaken them, even those who up till now had been his brave lieutenants. She knew the way it was written—after all, she’d been here before. Michael could not claim her till he carried out the rest. It was still a world of laws, even as it fell apart.
So why was he throwing it all away? There must have been fifty people left. Why, when she turned, did she find him lumbering toward her, not even glancing left or right? It was as if he’d given up. She was pricked by a sharp dissatisfaction, to think she’d won so easily.
As he drifted toward her smiling, his myriad weapons cast aside, she could not help but smile herself. Almost as if she would dance for joy, she opened her arms to gather him in. Why not? It was only for the next three minutes. He might as well have a taste. He’d lost, he’d lost—she knew it deep down. There wasn’t any danger anymore. The ruins of his plan lay all about them.
Then came the sound of thunder, down the moonstruck hill. She turned to look, her arms still open, and saw the ravening herd in its final headlong run, racing toward the cliffs. She froze in horror—tricked again—as Michael rushed into her stunned embrace. Out in front of the vast stampede, she saw the village children riding bareback. Each had picked the beast of his wildest nightmare. A ten-year-old, the spit of a boy she’d left behind, straddled a trumpeting elk. Then a girl on a spotted gazelle, babbling the names of God. The zebra carried twins. The timid girl from Emery’s sat proud on a long-toothed tiger.
These four, out in the lead, came prancing into the park like a scouting party. The pitiful villagers scrambled, trying to mass together in a wedge, but it wasn’t any use. The tide of animals, thousands strong, sailed over the brook and crashed through the grove of firs. There was no place left to hide. As the children trotted over and formed a ring around Michael and Iris, the forsaken began to keen and back away to the edge. Some were trampled. Some were gored. The beasts went over the cliff like a river, bearing the frail away.
Iris, half mad, looked up at the sky. The sun had only a minute to go. She tugged and pulled away from Michael, trying to work her way between the tiger and the elk. The animals pouring over rumbled like an avalanche.
“Where are you going?” Michael called. He gripped her arms so tightly it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“With them,” she bellowed, and strained toward the cliff. She kicked at his ankle
s and tried to bite his hands.
He genuinely seemed bewildered. He glanced up at the watching children, as if to get a clue. He had to twist her around and make her wince to put her in a bear hug. Still she fought, till he cried in her ear: “But you can’t. I’ve freed you from all of that.”
“Free?” she screamed. “You call this free?”
His face had fallen, but she couldn’t see because he was behind her. All she could see was the beasts of the earth, leaping out into the air. Michael didn’t know what to say. He only knew to hold on tight because suddenly he was afraid.
As they came to the end of the herd, the flow of creatures abated. They were loping off the cliff in ones and twos. The moon had meanwhile slid half off the sun, drying up like a patch of snow.
“Iris,” he pleaded, “I need you. I can’t do it all alone.” He held her in a panic, trying both to pin her and embrace her. He’d done the drug, he’d done the spell. He’d tried out all the killings. What did she want? “Just give it time,” he whispered gently.
The shadows had lost their purple. The park was nearly empty. He heard her yelling over and over: “I hate you, I hate you.” More than the sound in his ears, he could feel the helpless rage that racked her body. It seemed to him he was holding something dying.
And now they were down to forty seconds.
“Iris, Iris,” moaned the prophet. “Forget about me—I’ll leave. We’ll try it again next time.”
“Change me,” she seethed, in a frenzy in his arms. “Take it back!”
The children edged their beasts away. The dazzled lovers before them, locked in a strange embrace, didn’t need protecting anymore. Besides, the moon had only a bite left of the sun. The babbling children trotted to the edge, where the herd had dwindled to the barest trickle. They jumped all four together, somersaulting off their mounts as soon as they’d cleared the cliff. For a moment in the pearly air they seemed to float.