Has The World Ended Yet?

by Peter Darbyshire

  And then I went out into the melting city in search of Providence.

  * * *

  YOU KNOW how this story ends.

  I stalked the streets of the city. I turned day into night, and night into nightmare. The mayor declared a state of emergency and people fled, but no one came to help. No one would come while I was loose.

  The government revealed the secret of the Frozen City and you exchanged your theories about what had happened.

  I was a host for some horrible disease that I’d brought back from the Frozen City. Scientists said I should be called Vector, or maybe Carrier, not Ghost.

  I was a superweapon, released from a lab of the Frozen City, or maybe even developed by our own government using technology from the Frozen City.

  I was an inhabitant of the Frozen City who had switched places with the real me. I’d escaped into the world to wreak havoc and set the stage for an invasion of the rest of my kind.

  None of these things were true.

  After Smyth’s visit, I knew what was true.

  I was still me, the same me who’d gone to the Frozen City with Providence. But I was turning into something else. I was turning into a real ghost, the kind I carried around inside me.

  I wondered about them. I wondered if maybe they, too, had once been people like me. I wondered if they’d been changed by the Frozen City.

  I wondered if Providence was a ghost like the others now.

  And I wondered if I no longer carried her inside me at all, if I’d already released her into the world but hadn’t realized it.

  I kept visiting her empty grave every day. Maybe I was waiting for a sign. Maybe I was waiting for you to finally do something. Which you did when Providence’s grave opened beneath my feet and I fell through the trap door you had built and into this waiting tomb, and then the ceiling slammed shut again.

  But by then it was too late, wasn’t it?

  * * *

  THE WATER rises up around me in the coffin now, lapping at my face.

  I wonder how many other Frozen Cities are out there, buried in the ice.

  The ghosts inside me cry out. They want to escape their tomb. They want to escape me.

  I wonder who will find me in the future. Who will break open my grave and release me?

  Now the water is at my mouth. The ghosts scream.

  Providence, I am so sorry.

  I open my mouth and the ghosts rush out of me in a flood that cannot be stopped.

  The Deity Salesmen

  ALWAYS RING TWICE

  The smell of smoke from a distant fire was in the air when the deity salesmen rang the doorbell.

  Albee answered the door the first time. He wasn’t sure why he bothered to leave his miniatures in the garage and walk all the way to the front door, but he did anyway. The only people who ever rang the doorbell were salesmen. Usually they were trying to sell lawn-care treatments or window cleaning or even new roofs. Like Albee would be around long enough at his age to enjoy a new roof.

  When Albee and Church had first moved into the neighbourhood, the bell had rang almost every day with kids coming to the door to sell them cookies or chocolate bars or just to ask for their recycling for bottle drives. The kids had stopped ringing the bell after the accident. Now it was just the salesmen.

  This was the first time they’d had deity salesmen come to the door, though. Albee knew about them, of course. He’d seen them sitting at bus stops and, one time, wandering around the abandoned Avalon housing development a half-dozen blocks over. Albee sometimes drove through there at night, when he was supposed to be at the grocery store. He liked to park and look at the half-built neighbourhood, where some of the homes were actually complete but empty. He’d try to imagine all the different lives he could have lived. Church was in some of them but not others.

  The one night, he’d seen the deity salesmen coming down the street toward him when he was stopped in front of a lot that held only the wooden frame of a house. Someone had left naked store mannequins inside the unfinished home, with red plastic cups crushed in their hands, as if they were holding a party. The deity salesmen wore their black pants and black glasses and white shirts, with ties and shoes the same colour as the cups the mannequins held. They walked the deity between them, holding its hands like it was a small child. It was the size of a child, but that was where the resemblance stopped. The deity had been all horns and wings, and Albee had started the car and driven away from there before he got a closer look at it.

  The travelling deity salesmen who came to Albee’s door this afternoon could have been the same ones he’d seen in the Avalon development, but he wasn’t sure. They all looked the same to him in their uniforms. The deity was different, though. This one was small and hunched over, as if it were curled around some deep pain inside itself. It was as black as – night? No, something even blacker than night, whatever that could be. It had tiny wings that looked stuck to its back, as if they’d never been used for flight, and pointed ears and a snout. It looked a little like a bat, if a bat were made of stone darker than night. At least it was more or less humanoid, Albee thought. He’d seen others that weren’t and figured they had to be tough sells.

  “Do you have a deity in your life?” the salesman on the left asked, skipping any sort of greeting and going straight to the sales pitch. “Because if you don’t, we’d like to talk to you.”

  “I’ve got a deity,” Albee said, because he’d seen a video once where a man with tattoos of an elephant creature wielding flaming swords had said you could get rid of deity salesmen by telling them you already had a deity. The man had been standing in a Starbucks for some reason, and people kept looking at him and the camera. The man said most deities didn’t really get along and tended to fight if they found themselves in the same house. It was like politics, the man said, or pets. Albee didn’t know if what the man said was true or not, and the Starbucks setting didn’t help make up his mind. But he figured he could trust him because someone who was willing to tattoo elephant creatures on himself was obviously someone of great conviction.

  “Lying is a sin to many deities,” the salesman on the right said. He looked at Albee through his glasses as if he could see straight into his soul, if Albee had such a thing.

  “Maybe you can leave me a card and I’ll call you later,” Albee said. He wanted to close the door and get back to his miniatures. He wanted the deity salesmen to move along before Church came to the door and talked to them. There was no telling what she might do these days.

  “We’re talking about a deity here,” the first salesman said.

  “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” the other salesman said.

  The deity didn’t say anything. It just stood there, hunched over, staring up at Albee with those black eyes.

  “I’ll think about it,” Albee said and closed the door in their faces.

  He made sure to lock the door and then he went back to the garage. The miniatures were the same as he’d left them. They were always the same as he’d left them.

  They covered a sheet of plywood he’d set up on sawhorses in the centre of the garage. Model houses the same as the street outside. Even the trees and sidewalks and cars were the same. Albee had gone to a 3-D-printing service and had them print off models from an online street view. He’d spent the last few years painting the houses to look like the houses outside. He’d put little squares of fake grass around the houses to resemble the green lawns of his neighbours. He’d bought fake plastic trees and placed them in yards. He’d bought little plastic figurines of people that he’d dressed in outfits he’d ordered online to look like his neighbours. Whenever anything changed in his neighbourhood, he changed the miniatures to match. When the Wyatts next door had painted their house red, he’d taken a picture of the side of their house and matched the same shade of red for his model. When the Tannens up the street had split up, he’d taken the Rich Tannen miniature out of the house and put it back in his tool box of miniatures. He kept the
Tannen children miniatures in a zip-lock bag in the tool box and he put them back in the house every second week. The only thing that wasn’t true to life was the Wyatts’ tree, which in the tabletop neighbourhood didn’t shed leaves that blew all over everyone else’s yards. Albee didn’t really know how he’d replicate that and didn’t want to think about it, because it was enough work just raking up those leaves every day. They never seemed to stop.

  Albee looked down at his neighbourhood, at his own house. The figurine of Church was in the backyard, working in the garden where she spent most of her days. He was in the garage, where he spent most of his days. His figurine looked down at a sheet of balsa wood painted to look like the table he looked down at now. The figurine of the boy, their son, was in his bedroom, where he hadn’t been since the accident. All was as it was supposed to be.

  Except for the travelling deity salesmen. Their figures stood in front of the door of the model house where Albee and Church lived. The little figure of the deity stood between them. Albee stared down at the miniatures. He had never seen these figures before. He didn’t move or look away, even as the doorbell rang again and again for several minutes before finally stopping.

  Albee went to the tool box on one of the shelves in the garage. The real tool box, not the one he kept the spare miniatures in. He took out a pair of barbecue tongs he’d put in there for some reason he could no longer remember. Maybe he’d foreseen this day. He went back to the miniature neighbourhood and picked up the salesman on the left with the tongs. He took it over to the recycling bin in the corner of the garage and dropped it in. Then he went back and did the same thing with the salesman on the right. When he went back for the deity miniature, it was gone. He stared down at the front doorstep of the miniature home for a moment, but it was like the deity had never been there. He looked around the little house, peering into the bushes and even under the car in the front driveway to see if he had knocked it aside somewhere. But he couldn’t see any sign of it. He looked on the garage floor under the neighbourhood, but there was only a couple of fallen screws and some paint stains. He kept looking all over the neighbourhood for the missing deity, until Church called him into the house for dinner.

  When he went into the kitchen, he found the deity, the real deity, sitting at the table with Church. It was perched on the back of one of the chairs, like some sort of bird. He stopped and stared at it and it stared back at him with those black eyes.

  “I heated up some soup,” Church said. “The roasted tomato. And I made grilled cheese sandwiches.” She was already sitting at the table. There was a streak of dirt across her brow, just under where the grey started. Like an accent. She looked out the window, at the street, as if what was out there was somehow more interesting than what was in their kitchen.

  “What is that thing doing in here?” Albee asked. He looked around for an open window, thinking maybe it had flown into the house and didn’t know how to get back out.

  “A couple of nice young men came to the door,” Church said. “They said it was a deity of love. Imagine that.” She looked at the deity and smiled. The deity looked at her and then back at Albee. It didn’t smile.

  “I already told them no,” Albee said. “We don’t need a deity.”

  “What’s the harm in a deity?” Church asked.

  “Tell that to the Middle East.”

  “This isn’t the Middle East yet.”

  “What sort of love?”

  “What do you mean?” Church looked at him.

  “What sort of love is it a deity of?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But we could use any sort of love at all now, don’t you think?”

  Albee went to the front door again and looked up and down the street. He didn’t see the deity salesmen anywhere. They were gone, but the smell of smoke was still in the air. And the lawn was covered in leaves from the Wyatts’ tree again. Those strange leaves that curled up on themselves and turned red almost the instant they fell from the tree. Not for the first time, he wished the tree would fall like its leaves. Preferably on the Wyatts’ side of the fence.

  Albee thought about getting in his car and looking for the salesmen but he knew he’d never find them. They probably had a car hidden around the corner. They were probably driving back to their deity warehouse right now, laughing at Albee and Church.

  “They said they’d come back tomorrow to see how we liked our deity,” Church said from the kitchen. “They said we could return it if its love didn’t work for us.”

  “How much did it cost?” Albee asked, still scanning the street. He thought he saw the blinds move in the front window of the house across from them. There was no car in the driveway, but the Wellingtons were retired and Linda Wellington often stayed home while Richard golfed. Albee suspected Richard golfed because Linda stayed home, but that was none of his business.

  “That’s the best part,” Church said. “It didn’t cost anything. It was free.”

  Albee stared at the Wellingtons’ house for a moment longer. If Linda Wellington had seen Church take the deity, the whole neighbourhood would know soon. Linda had once worked in PR and she still thought it was her job to get the message out, whatever message might find its way to this sleepy street.

  Albee thought about leaving the door open to see if the deity would leave on its own, but who knew what else might wander in? He closed the door and locked it, then went back to the kitchen.

  “No good will come out of this,” he said as he sat down at the table, across from the deity.

  “What good ever comes out of anything?” Church asked.

  They ate in silence, Albee and the deity looking at each other and Church looking out the window. Albee didn’t really like roasted tomato soup, but he couldn’t be bothered to complain. He thought Church needed something to do. Both of them had needed something to do since the accident and the leave from work and then early retirement that had followed.

  After a time, the window began to rattle. Albee looked outside and saw a stream of those red leaves from the Wyatts’ tree whip past, carried by the wind. The clouds were dark now and churning in the sky. Not moving, just churning.

  “Was it supposed to rain today?” he asked.

  “Is anything ever supposed to happen?” Church asked.

  There was a loud bang, like someone had shot at them from the next room. Albee actually ducked in his chair, thinking maybe it was a random shooter, before his mind registered the rolling vibration of the thunder passing through their house.

  “That was lightning,” Church said, rather unnecessarily, Albee thought.

  “I think it hit our house,” Albee said. He shook his head at the deity. “I told you no good would come of that thing.” The deity just shifted a bit on the chair, adjusting the grip of its claws. It kept on watching him. Albee saw its claws were gouging the wood frame of the chair, but he decided not to say anything about that. The table and chairs had been Church’s choice and he’d never cared that much for them, anyway.

  When Albee went back out to the front step, he saw that the lightning hadn’t hit their house. Instead, it had hit the Wyatts’ tree. The lightning had blown the tree apart, and it had fallen into the Wyatts’ roof, caving in a section of it. A jagged shred of trunk still poked up over the fence, like a knife pointing at the sky.

  Albee stared at the fallen tree and his neighbours’ house, then looked up. The dark clouds had stopped churning and were drifting apart. Patches of sun shone through here and there. He didn’t see any sign of rain. When he looked back down at the street, the pavement was dry.

  The Wyatts came out of their house, then, to look at the damage. Albee waved at them, the reflexive greeting of neighbours. They waved back and then stared up at the tree stuck in their house.

  “Everyone’s all right then?” Albee called over to them, and they both nodded in response. They folded their arms at the same time, in that way couples have of mirroring each other, and shook their heads at the tree together.


  Albee turned to go back into the house before they could ask any questions. He didn’t feel right about this. Just a short while ago he’d been thinking about their tree falling over and now it had. He didn’t know if it had anything to do with the deity or not, but he didn’t want to answer any questions in case they’d seen the deity. It was this sort of thing that led to higher fences and anonymous complaints to the city about people parking in the street.

  He bumped into Church, who was standing right behind him, also staring at the tree.

  “Will you look at that,” she said. She looked up at the sky. “What do you suppose caused it?”

  Albee went past her without answering. He looked for the deity in the kitchen, but it was gone.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “Where is what?” Church said from outside, still staring next door.

  Albee gazed around the kitchen but didn’t see the deity anywhere. Maybe it had disappeared just like the miniature deity had vanished. He shook his head and sighed, then went to the cupboard that held the Scotch. He poured himself a glass and went back into the garage. That was where he found the deity.

  It was perched on top of one of the storage units, looking down at the model neighbourhood. He didn’t know how it had got up there, let alone opened the door to the garage. Maybe it had flown, but its wings still looked stuck to its back. Maybe it had climbed up there. He stopped thinking about that when he looked at the neighbourhood.

  It looked mostly the same as when he’d left it. The difference was the Wyatts’ tree. It was stuck in the roof of the Wyatts’ house now. The roof was caved in, revealing the hollow space inside the Wyatts’ house. Albee had never bothered to fill in the interiors of the model houses, mainly because he didn’t know what most of them looked like inside. The remains of the model tree were scorched, as if it had been hit by lightning as well.

  Albee stared at the model tree and house, then up at the deity. It stared down at him without blinking. He thought it stared down at him without blinking, anyway. He couldn’t really see its face in the shadows.