The Meridians

by Michaelbrent Collings

  But even as she contemplated these questions, the gray man cursed again, and began to...change. She could see him, standing there as bright and loud as a circus tent at midday.

  Then, she couldn't. Or rather, she could, but what she saw was dramatically different. Instead of a gray man, he seemed for a moment to become a creature of color. He shifted through all the hues of the rainbow, and even beyond, shifting into colors that Lynette had never seen before, and suspected that no one had ever seen before. Colors that were so vivid and unreal that she tasted as much as saw them, so bright that they tinkled in her ears as much as they tickled her optic nerves. It was strange, because it was the most beautiful thing that Lynette had ever seen - probably the most beautiful thing that anyone had ever seen - but because it dealt with colors and hues that she knew were outside the ken of normal human experience, there was no way that she would ever be able to describe them beyond this: when she saw the gray man begin his strange shift into colors beyond those of anything she had ever before experienced, Lynette suddenly suspected that she knew what angels looked like.

  That in itself surprised her. She had thought after Robbie was taken that she no longer believed in God; that she no longer believed in a being that was so great and wonderful that it had created her family as though out of a dream; but at the same time so small and horrible that it had then ripped that same family to pieces as though in a nightmare. But here she was entertaining thoughts of angels. And not only that, she realized suddenly that in her greatest fear - in the moment when she thought she had lost her own angel, her Kevin - she had turned not to screaming obscenities, or to yelling for her mother as she had heard even the bravest people did in times of extreme stress, but to a simpler, calmer expression. She had begun repeating the Lord's Prayer.

  Our Father, who art in Heaven...

  The words rang through her and she realized with a start that she did still believe in the greatness of something beyond humanity, something that had been responsible for the birth of her species in all its misery and imperfection, yet was at its heart good and understanding and hopeful. Her faith, it seemed, had not been lost, but only misplaced for a time.

  Then the thing that stood before her - surely no angel, or if he was an angel, then a dark angel, one that brought fear and hatred in lieu of good news and love - cursed vehemently. He gave voice to a slew of swear words so vile that she immediately covered Kevin's ears, as though they were somehow no longer in mortal peril, but were in danger of nothing no worse than picking up a bad habit or two.

  "This isn't fair," said the old gray man who was no longer gray, and his voice was as strange and musical as his coloration, vibrations that belonged on a scale that was audible to her, but at the same time did not belong in her world. She did not know what she was witnessing, but did know intuitively that it was something mystical and otherworldly, something that no one else in all of history might have seen before. No angel, certainly, but perhaps something just as mysterious, just as strange and incomprehensible.

  The gray/not-gray man cursed again.

  Then the colors grew more intense, and suddenly began washing out. In a moment, Lynette found herself looking at what appeared to be a color negative of the gray man: a gray man in reverse, with the color wheel turned on its back and flipped around insanely.

  The old man looked at her. And as though he had not just tried to kill her, as though they were trusted friends and confidants, he pleaded with her. "Help me," he said. "Please, help me. I can't go through another sixty years like this."

  In spite of the man's cruel temperament and obviously evil nature, she suddenly could not help but feel a pang of pity for his plight. Whether this was a product of her newly reborn faith or merely a human response to another being in pain - and perhaps they were one and the same - she could not tell for certain. She only knew that she had the insane urge to comfort him in that moment.

  The urge passed as he unleashed another spate of curse words that made the previous stream of invectives seem positively tame in comparison. He was insane, she knew. He had to be. And his next words confirmed it, and as well as confirming the diagnosis they drained whatever warmth she had from her heart, replacing it with a steely strength that she knew would lend her the vigor needed to stand against this otherworldly being in whatever form he might appear, be it an angel of death and who dealt in shining razor blades, or an angel of brightness and light who begged for her son's death.

  "Please," he said, reaching out a rainbow-colored hand to her. "Please. I just need to kill him. I just need to kill your boy." The man began to cry, golden tears coursing down his cheeks and dripping from his chin.

  The tears disappeared before they touched the ground, and again Lynette was reminded of biblical stories about angels whose feet did not rest upon the earth, as though their incorruption could not tolerate the corruption of a fallen planet.

  But this was no angel, she reminded herself. This was a devil incarnate. A being that for some reason had chosen to fixate its destructive powers on her family in general and her son in particular.

  "Just kill him," whispered the gray man. "Just kill him, please."

  Then the gale that had appeared in Lynette's apartment reappeared in the confines of the elevator and the corridor outside it. Wind whipped through the space, tousling her and Kevin's hair and intertwining them into a single hydra-like mass. The brightness of the being before her continued to grow, then grew still further until it was almost impossible to look at.

  Lynette looked down at Kevin, and saw to her startlement that he no longer had his head buried in her chest. In fact, he was staring single-mindedly at the gray man, at the golden pillar of light and death that stood before them. Small Kevin, who could not even look a stranger in the eye at the supermarket, was staring directly at the nightmare that had tried to kill him. He was whispering something, though Lynette had to strain to hear it in the sound of the wind that pervaded the atmosphere all around them. And when she did, her heart again grew cold as she was reminded of a night some five years and more before. The words threw her back to the days immediately after Robbie's death, to those dark stretches of day and night that seemed as though they would never end. To a night when she found her baby boy sitting in bed, and speaking a breathy fragment of a sentence, a strange cipher of thought.

  "Witten was white," breathed Kevin. "Witten was white, witten was white, witten was white."

  Only this time, he was saying it in a different tone of voice. Whereas when he had spoken the words in his sleep he had seemed almost drugged, or perhaps even possessed by some otherworldly force that had come in and inhabited his body for a time but had barely the strength to speak through him, the voice that was now coming from her son was stronger than any she had ever heard. He was doing something more than merely speaking; he was making a declaration. As though he were the town herald in medieval times, he was speaking words that were meant to reveal and amaze, to awe and inspire.

  "Witten was white, witten was white...."

  But in spite of the tone of her son's voice, Lynette once more felt herself clench from the inside out, reacting to the words as she might expect to react to an eviction notice or to bad news. She did not understand what her son was saying, anymore than she had understood it on the first night that he spoke it, but she knew instinctively that it signaled some great change, and that not all of the change would be good.

  "Witten was white, witten was -"

  "Stop saying that!" screamed the gray man. And now his voice, too, was different. No longer the contained tones of a tightly-wound madman, nor the dulcimer tones of one of Satan's minions, sweetly calling people to their doom. The voice was fragmented as the color scheme he now inhabited, now sounding like the voice of a man, now like that of a woman, now like that of a child, now like that of a death-bed geriatric. "Stop saying that! Stop saying that and die!"

  He reached forward with the blade he still held, and as he did the storm around them peaked in
force, feeling as though it must at any moment pick them up bodily and slam then against the side of the elevator. But somehow Lynette stayed rooted to the spot, managed to hold her ground in the face of the onrushing tempest.

  The blade passed through them with no more effect than it had previously.

  The gray man screamed, and then became so bright that Lynette did shield her eyes, prying one hand away from her death-grip on Kevin long enough to cover her eyes. The scream of the gray man elongated, stretching out into eternity, becoming not a human voice but a bell-like tone that slowly, slowly lowered in volume until it was impossible to tell where the sound left off and the silence that followed it began.

  Lynette opened her eyes.

  The gray man was gone.

  The storm was over.

  For now.

  ***

  19.

  ***

  Scott hated first period.

  Every teacher at Meridian High School had at least one down period - an hour when they were supposed to prepare lesson plans, go over grades, and do the sundry other tasks necessary to prepare for their days. First period was Scott's down period, but he never used it to prepare lesson plans, or for much of anything else. For some reason, he usually spent it in his "office" - not much more than a cubby in the room that housed all the physical education supplies - staring at a wall.

  Surprisingly, Scott had managed to survive the eight years since the deaths of Chad and Amy. Had even, to some eyes, managed to thrive. He had come to Meridian and proved himself to be a surprisingly effective P.E. teacher, the kind of teacher that the students all hoped they got. Considering that the other P.E. teacher was an elderly man who seemed determined to shout the students in his classes to death, this may not have been much of a compliment, but even Scott knew that he was more than a comparatively good teacher. He was an excellent educator, viewed on his own and not merely when standing next to the crotchety old Mr. Randall.

  Part of the reason for his excellence was that he was simply available. Where other teachers invariably tried to finish up their school days so that they could get home to families or friends or whatever else "normal" people did, Scott had no such aspirations. Indeed, he dreaded going home, since it meant he would be going to an empty house full of nothing but the sounds of silence and hopelessness that clung to him like phantoms wherever he went. The only thing that he had found that could exorcise those demons was to be helping his students. And even then, the exorcism was only temporary - the demons of despair came back to plague him at every opportunity.

  Which was why Scott hated first period. His free period was the only time he was really and truly alone at the school. The other periods were full of the students and the successes and failures that they - like all teenagers - wore on their sleeves for all to see. They were full of games and sweat and work and all manner of things that could keep his mind off the one thing it inevitably strayed to whenever given half a chance: the past.

  But not first period. No, in that period the students were all in school, all busy with their regular classes, so he was usually alone. Even Mr. Randall was off limits, since the other P.E. teacher did use the time to prepare for the day ahead, and had made it clear very early on that he sorely resented any intrusions into the precious time he had each morning from seven thirty to eight twenty-five a.m.

  So Scott sat in his office, and sat alone, and though he usually tried to busy himself with something - some new text on PhysEd training, or reading up on the newest teaching methodologies, or simply working on inputting students' grades into the school's computer records - he almost always ended up sitting motionless, silent, staring at the wall ahead of him without actually seeing it. He would sit, and stare, and think.

  He would think of his son, so happy and free.

  He would think of his wife, so bright and beautiful.

  He would think of the family he had had, and the family he had lost.

  Often, sitting there in the dim half-light of the poorly lit office, he would hear sounds. The pleasant tinkling of his son's laughter, as though even in death he were still enjoying his last birthday presents. The throaty whisper of his wife as she lay beside him, curled up in his arms after they made love. The loud, brassy sound of the family together at the dinner table.

  They were phantom sounds, existing only in his mind, and though Scott knew that after eight years to still be hearing the memories of his family so vividly was not a good sign, still he reveled in them. He could not help but wish that the memories were real, and so when they came he allowed them to consume him entirely.

  On rare occasions a student would come to visit him during that first hour, clutching a hall pass and with special permission from the principal to come and see Scott on some emergency or other. When that happened, Scott was invariably cranky and snappish, as though he resented the students' intrusions into his time of remembering, his sanctuary of memory. He knew it was happening, knew he was angry and acting out against the student, but was helpless to stop it. After all, who else could he act out against? God? God, he had decided, was either a myth or a petty creature so small that he was determined to make the world an uglier place by stealing people of beauty and life like his family. So all that was left was to take solace in his memories, and that meant that when his memories were interrupted, he could only respond angrily at the person who had interrupted them, even if the person was otherwise innocent.

  It was unfair, Scott knew, but he was also powerless to stop it from happening. The students learned within a year or two of his arrival that bothering Mr. Cowley during his free period was not a good idea, so now, eight years after his arrival at the school, Scott had one full hour each day where he was able to think of his family, was able to revel in their memory, was able to bathe himself in the purity of his past.

  Only he knew it was a lie.

  Because each year the memories grew more ephemeral, less grounded in reality. Each year, his son's smile widened in his mind, his wife's laugh became ever brighter and happier. Soon, he knew he was no longer even remembering his family, but was instead remembering crude caricatures of them, "perfect" versions of the flawed, imperfect beings he had lived with in happiness for so long. And the perfect versions were not nearly as satisfying. Part of what had made his marriage great, he came to realize, was not the absence of fights with Amy, but rather the fact that each fight ended in making up. It was not that his son listened to him and did everything right the first time out of the gate, but rather the fact that Scott had to work to help him to learn and grow. His life with Amy and Chad had consisted not merely of "good" moments, but of harder times that served to illuminate the good times by giving them a point of comparison.

  But more and more in his memory, he was remembering the good and forgetting the bad. In his mind he never fought with his wife, never had a disagreement with his son. In his mind dinner was always ready on time, and rooms were always clean, and teeth were brushed at bedtime and no one fussed when the time came to put away toys. In his mind, the languid disease of perfection stole from him the reality of the hard-earned victories and the lovingly won triumphs. He was no longer living in a past that was real, but only a flawed version of it, only a version where everything was perfect, and so nothing had any real value at all.

  But in spite of this, in spite of the fact that he knew his memories resembled the realities they were modeled on a little less each day, Scott could not help but spend time staring blankly at the wall during that terrible first period, sinking deeper and deeper into remembrances of a past that never really happened, because the past that had occurred - the real past, the flawed, imperfect, difficult, wonderful past - was far too complex and wondrous to be encompassed by anything as frail as human memory.

  So he hated first period. Because he both felt himself passing into a falsehood of perfection...and still couldn't help drinking it in, like a thirsty man drinking seawater, all the while knowing that it would just make him thirstier and s
ick, but unable to stop nonetheless.

  Today was no exception to that rule, either. He came in early, passing through the main office as he always did, gathering the day's announcements and various other items from his mail cubby. He did this as quickly as possible, hoping against hope to get in and out of the office undetected, but as usual he failed in this mission.

  "Hi, stranger!" said a high, chirping voice.

  Scott pasted a smile on his face as he turned to face the source of the voice, but inwardly he cringed. Cheryl Armstrong, the school's new secretary, was standing behind him, her perfume wafting about her in an almost visible cloud. She had started work at Meridian High School a few months before, when the school's previous secretary left to have a baby and had decided not to return to her job in favor of remaining a full-time mother, and had immediately decided that she was either in love with Scott or that he would make a great fixer-upper project. Scott wasn't sure which it was, and wasn't sure if there was even a difference in Cheryl's eyes.

  Either way, she seemed to be at his elbow at every turn, as though she were some kind of a strangely smiling spirit determined to haunt him out of his misery.

  "Hi, Cheryl," he answered, then fell silent. Part of the problem with Cheryl was that she was clearly interested in him, and he didn't know how to react to that. He knew that Amy was gone, had no illusions about that, and also knew that most of his friends in Meridian were of the opinion that he had "suffered enough" and should "move on." Whatever that meant. As though there was some quota of suffering that, once filled, entitled a person to live their lives worry free from that point on.

  But Scott knew that was not the case. The one constant in life was suffering. And no amount of it could ever satisfy the cruelties of a universe that demanded happiness like a tribute; that demanded blood like a tyrannical ruler determined to prove his worth by sacrificing any who dared to find joy under his reign.

  Cheryl, in fact, proved that fact, because almost nothing made Scott suffer more than having to brave the morning ritual that had come to define his relationship with Cheryl.