I was numb to the hellish suffering beyond caring that I was numb, maybe due to general exhaustion, maybe due to permanent moral impairment after the incident with Mr. Snuff Brown. In either case, my one recurring concern was hardly steeped in compassion. After tonight, I wondered, how long would it take for the Gorman County Reservoir to refill?
To lessen the ear-splitting volume of catastrophe, I resorted to the cellar, with minimally worthwhile results. I gravitated right away to the plastic ficus in my former OGAM Chronicles studio. Regarded it fondly from my shabby wicker chair. It was no less cheap, dusty, bogus than on the day I’d borrowed it from Pabodie Cable, but here was greenery that wouldn’t iridesce, fade to gray, or collapse into powder.
My thoughts began to slip their moorings of the present, to meander among loose ends, unfinished business bobbing to the mental surface, even as my drowsy eyes roved among the chintzy foliage. Aha! I bounced up, grabbed some paper from the eMac’s printer tray, and hunkered down again to jot thank-you notes to Gerard Heroux and the others who’d humored OGAM’s appeal for folklore about the reservoir. And why not? Time lay before me like an empty prairie out to the horizon. No clocks to punch for the foreseeable future, and no pressure to earn income. The house was paid for, and nobody would be around to collect property taxes any time soon. Even if the state disallowed me Unemployment, my savings could support my frugal lifestyle for months, and my account was in a bank with branches all over the northeast, in no danger of joining the updraft to the Piscids. I let the sheaf of papers, and the top sheet reading “Dear Mr. Heroux,” drop between my outspread knees to the floor. Since time was henceforth a boundless plain, what was my rush?
I braved the insane decibels upstairs to settle a mostly academic point. Clamped the phone to my ears and found a dial tone, like a lifeline from otherwise estranged normality. Just to see what would come of it, I went through Wil’s and every other cell number off the top of my head, and was shunted without fail, and without a single preliminary ring, to voicemail. Moreover, after the sixth ring at City Hall, Wil’s place, the Metcalfe residence, and every other landline I could think of, a recorded message explained that the number I had dialed was “temporarily out of service.” Vetoed trying calls to a different area code. Conversation in this din would be ridiculous.
Plus, it was getting worse outside. Was that even possible? I gaped out the living room window. Tried kidding myself that some non-Euclidian kind of optical illusion was taunting me. The “color” wasn’t really burning with blinding new ferocity, and didn’t really loom like a skyrocketing Niagara a mile down the road. But it did, and I had just enough presence of mind to reason why. In the 1990s, the city water system had expanded to help sell townhouse sprawl, irksomely close to “my” wilderness. And whether by oversight or design, the “color” had taken longer to claim its own out here. Reducing me to the hollow consolation that I’d never met any of those neighbors, had no faces to connect with their delayed holocaust. No, the “color” had no further excuse to carve its swath any closer to home. Or so I tried persuading myself.
Then something streaked across the front yard, just outside the crescent of light from my window, and something lower to the ground followed seconds after. Petrifying me, till my underachieving wits grasped that the streaks weren’t luminous. An impulse, or possibly an instinct, propelled me out the front door, and if it was an instinct, it was much less sinister and not as age-old dormant as my phobic cringing at the starry void. In the fringe of dark sky around the platter of cloud, meteors raced into and out of sight like shiners breaking the waves. I flinched earthward and had a second to brace myself as five substantial dogs charged past my legs and into relative security. They were dirty, matted, trembling, and wild-eyed, and one of them was Elsie. They caromed in sloppy, irregular ellipses around the living room before curling up in neutral corners behind the sofa, under the table, nesting in armchairs, whining miserably.
Enough of the housepet lingered in them to seek any port indoors in this monstrous storm, but I abstained from testing anyone’s personal space with friendly overtures till calm prevailed. None of them looked too malnourished, so some of my neighbors must have been feeding rather than poisoning them. At the thought that some of the suburbanites had been humane, I felt my first pangs of sadness for them. Of course the dogs were mine now, or at any rate my house had become theirs, and more might show up. Would dogs eat tofu franks? That was it for protein in my fridge this week, like it or not.
Did Elsie even recognize me from months ago on Ellery Avenue? Had she led the others here on the trail of my scent? Yes or no, I could stop regretting that I’d rescued no one from the scourging of Occam. But of all the Rice household, who’d have believed last July that Elsie would come out the sole survivor in October? That her collars and tags, like those of her pack, would end up the only artifacts of their owners, of their town?
The halogen glare, meanwhile, had dulled to a translucency in which I could read how the black torrent of slurry had thinned to a high-velocity fountain of speckles, like a pixilated roll of player piano music. The noise had yet to subside below saturation level.
I was going to be all right, in the primal sense of escaping with my hide, with a life to reassemble, and that trumped all more refined considerations. I almost gave in to jubilation, but I couldn’t. One small thing wouldn’t let me, but what the hell was it? Concentrating was an uphill battle amidst canine whimpers and panting.
My thumb itched as if calling attention to itself. Yes, that was it. A little scar persisted as my souvenir of that excursion to the Blasted Heath, when barbed wire had drawn blood and perhaps injected something as well. I felt the psychic flooring drop out from under me. Had to back away from the window, into a wooden chair at the dining-room table, one of the few furnishings without a post-traumatic squatter underneath. Maybe I’d be fine, or maybe my ordeal was far from through with me.
What had A. P. scribbled in his journal? About something tinier than a mustard seed left to gestate at the bottom of a well in 1882, blossoming into something a millionfold more powerful? If a grain of Blasted Heath were in my circulation, it was inert, denatured, I reminded myself, and had it been there at all, the “color” would have scooped me out of existence when it siphoned all trace of itself to the stars. But why then had the ravening, hateful “color” spared me in the sewers, during its hour of sharpest hunger, when it could have harvested me along with those two men at my heels? What did the “color” know about the gray dust that I didn’t?
The whining dogs were already getting on my nerves as I watched my thumb prickle, psychosomatically or not, and I pondered how long I’d be able to stay sane. Or whether sanity even offered the best approach for dealing with this. Decided for the time being I’d qualify as sane until the urge won out to go inspect the vast open grave of Occam. Nothing down there but unacceptable reality, a fatal plunge into assimilation with the soulless universe. Behooved me at long last to learn the knack of living day to day, or maybe hour to hour. At the moment, I asked of the future only that the dogs not beg to be let out before I could tolerate opening the door again. And perversely or not, I had to muse that, come what may, at least the “Gorman taste” was history. I must have been imagining that hint of its presence whenever I swallowed.
The Color Over Occam Page 26