by Joel Varty
For a moment, everything seems okay again. The horses are calm, and the smell of the barn is as normal as it could ever be. When something is wrong, the barn smells different, and you can tell that everything isn’t as it should be – this isn’t like that. A soft voice behind me disturbs that noisy quietude of the place.
“Aeron? Is that you?” It is Courteney, behind me. I turn to see her, and she smiles, as if she knows… everything. How can a girl do that?
“Hey.”
“You okay?” she asks. How does she know to ask that? “You seem a little spooked.”
“Horses get spooked.” I say, a little sharper than I intend.
“People aren’t so different from horses.”
We stand there then, looking at each, and thinking about that for a while.
And then we hear the screams from far off, almost like a memory, and the day turns to night, and we lose all sense of ourselves. And just them, the whole world seems to fall apart and Courtenay and I stand in deep night so dark that even the walls of the barn disappear and we are divided by unseen miles from everything and everyone.
And I think for a moment that I am dead, but the thought of standing here with her makes it seem a little better than that, and we don’t join in with the others screaming.
…
Jonah
I remember the dream.
It is dream filled with darkness that I have had several times over my life. A recurring nightmare, where I see my life systematically taken apart and the pieces scattered over oblivion. It is a strange dream, as they tend to be, with as much of it being impressions and feelings as opposed to visions and voices.
But there is a voice, sometimes. A hard, cruel voice, warning me that whatever I do will not be enough. That I will die trying, that I will go blind with the pain of trying to thwart this destiny that has been laid out for me. This doom that has gripped me.
I first had the dream as a small child, and I can remember wanting to cry, but also wanting to quickly forget the visions. Crying would only serve to prolong their pain, so I cast them aside, setting them apart from my waking self. It left behind a whole other layer of consciousness to deal with the problem set before me by the warning.
You will not have enough time to save them. You will die trying to decide who must suffer the most, and so you will be the one who suffers.
…
I awaken stiff and groggy. The sky is bright and clear overhead, but far off in the west, the clouds are gathering in a deep grey mass of mist and ugliness that I recognise from my waking nightmares of the past days and weeks.
I, who have raced all this way east, nearly killing my horse and losing my friends along the way, have left behind a bigger tragedy than the one I sought to avoid.
And I know that the dream has come true.
And I am filled with despair.
And I lie back down on the cold ground and cry out with the pain in my soul, grinding my wounded hands into the dirt.
And in the dream I remain.
And in the dream I burn.
Part Three
There is no answer more potent than the one that nature gives us to our problems. We have only to look for a few moments into the depth of nature’s balance to understand that our own presence in this place, this earth, is tenuous, and our dominion over it becoming more and more a questionable assertion.
The darkness meets the dawn of this day with an imperceptible division between light and darkness. It is almost like any other day, with the quiet sound of air passing through the new leaves and the slow creak of wood and bark scraping back and forth as branches swing to and fro in a minute dance between stillness and motion. Birds flit onto and off of their various perches; one fat woodpecker climbs straight up the length of an old pine and poises itself, ready to fire its machine-gun beak into its bark.
How are we to tell where the darkness ends and the light begins? It is a transition that we are not prepared to explore too deeply, lest we stray too far from ourselves. Did we not notice how we lost our touch with this world, and let it slip so far out of our control? Did we ever have a chance to control it?
The feel of the prickly-soft grass against a cheek in the morning chillness is enough to rouse the group of people in the roadside glade from their slumber, and as a group they stand and watch the dawn and the night collide overhead.
This is how the dream ends.
This is the whimper of the world’s ending, and the only thing that makes it real is the emptiness that we allow to bring us to this place.
Chapter One – How the Dream Ends
Jonah
The soil is what saves me – it speaks to me directly through my fingertips.
Never give in to your fears. Use them to find hope.
I open my eyes and look up at the sky. Directly above me and back to the east is the promise of a bright blue sky. To the west and all the way to the horizon, is blackness. I rise up from the ground, to stand upon the precipice of this darkness, and to take one step is to thrust myself all the way into it, yet I don’t fall forward idly.
No. It is not the force of gravity that I take with me, not some feeble, physical phenomena, but rather it is the force of all nature and all that I believe is good and right: the very Word is behind my back, pressing me onward. It is using my perception as the hardened tip of a spear. The darkness that has spread outward from the faraway distance to the space right before me recedes in a long narrow pathway, into the west, onward to where I rode from a few days ago.
I take another step, and the brightness of the day follows me in a wedge of hope. The people camped with me stand in silence as well, a little ways behind me. No one speaks, aside from a few murmurs between those that happen to be standing close to each other.
The sky looks like the nightmarish shadow of nuclear fallout in a giant dust cloud, only I know that it isn’t full of dust at all, but rather a deadly mist. My imagination provides the excerpts of reality sufficient to process the data that lies beyond my vision, and I believe that I see the land being eaten up all the way down to the bedrock of the earth. Everything that holds any appearance of life: animals, trees, small plants, moss, even the very soil itself is wasting away under the impossible yet unstoppable power of this infection.
This is not what Ruben invented. It can’t be. This is an abomination, a living hell that is spreading with increasing speed and ferociousness throughout the land, taking down all in its path. My mind wavers for a few moments, trying unconsciously to think up an escape mechanism to disappear into, but there is none.
The people behind me panic, and start running in the other direction, to the east, and I am jolted from my deep trance. I turn back to them and shout as loud as I can, “Stop! Don’t run! I can deal with this! We have to stay together!” I surprise myself with how confident I sound.
My mind races onto our next problem as I turn back to face the impending storm: how are we to fight this wicked mist? Is this the wrath of God? Are we meant to succumb to it, to surrender? Or is this hell itself, come before us to inhabit the earth at last? Why? Why why why?
On the other side of the darkness, as if drawn in a line of light by my increasingly wounded imagination, is none other than Sergeant Thomas, only he is just Bill now, as he ought to be, followed closely by two others, as if he is walking point in some sort of ground patrol through the underworld. Hades is his warzone, and he is slipping between its boundaries on a glimmer of light that lies in a long ribbon from him to the spot where I now stand.
I am distracted by a stray thought, an irony that slips between the broken boards which have been nailed over my battered mind. I think to myself that the city we escaped from not long ago, with its newly grown forest of indomitable trees, is probably now the safest place on earth. I think to myself that Ruben could not have created such an atrocity, at least not on purpose. He certainly wouldn’t have admitted it to me if he did. Which in turn could only mean that if he did create this thing... He s
imply never chose to tell me of it, he only told me of its opposite, at least a part of its opposite, but one that requires my blood as a catalyst to be invoked.
And without stopping to think, because it makes no sense to do so just now, I take a sharp stone from the ground at my feet and draw it across the palm of my hand. Turning, letting the blood run freely along the ground, and watching as I hungrily restore the passion of nature in the land, I reach out and shake hands with those around me. At first they cower away from this mad-man that has possessed them, but the effect of the blood on the ground and the unmistakable health that it restores there, plus the memories of what they have seen earlier, lead them all to come to me in a long line. They take my hand in theirs for a short moment, each looking me warily in the eyes, some with wonder, most others with fear.
I try not to faint.
At last everyone is finished, and the day seems to be a little brighter around us, but we are now well and truly surrounded by a gloom deeper and more potent than can be imagined. Thus I take it to be a real phenomenon, and not just some imagined thought. We are the only beacons in this unnatural night. We are the only somethings in this empty nothing.
We march westward through it – through the closest thing to hell as I can imagine. I climb onto Ernest and he carries me at the front of our parade of life. We will survive, we say to ourselves, but only in our minds, since our mouths don’t seem to be capable of speech anymore, they are frozen shut with so much fear.
The landscape responds to us as we walk through it, the grass and rocks popping up through the black sludge and disappearing back into nothingness as we pass over and across it. Small animals, little more than tiny ghosts, take shape at the edge of our vision, but they do not materialize. Ernest does not falter, but I don’t try to go faster than a walk.
We all tire quickly, but we don’t slow down. I rely on the imaginary ribbon of light connecting me to Bill Thomas as my guiding direction, which seems crazy on one hand, but in this unreality it is the only way I can navigate in a straight line. At any rate, I try to hold more to the left instead of the right. At least this way we will eventually come to the lakeshore instead of becoming lost in the vast wilderness to the north.
We walk on and on, like an extension of yesterday’s trails, but only in that we are moving. There is no food, and hunger leaks our energy and even our fear that was driving us begins to run dry of all ardour. I begin to find my mind wandering, as it will inevitably do, to strange things.
I wonder whether any of this would have happened had we not run out of gasoline. Was our civilization so fragile that a simple thing like being able to drive around in cars, trucks and planes was enough to bring us back to our roots as savages and forsaken, piteous fools?
I think of Rachel, and wish her to be here. I would let her ride if she was, but she wouldn’t let me get off the horse. She would know that I am too weak to walk very far, since I am draining my lifeblood in a long thin trail behind me, mile after mile, drip by drip falling from my dangling hand.
My mind goes somewhat dim then, and eventually to a deep, echoing quietness before I tumble from Ernest’s tall back and dash my head against the hard ground. And then there is only black darkness with no light.
Chapter Two – The Love of Friends and Children
Susan
I watch him fall, as if in some sort of dream, and in that same dream I run to his side and take his hand in mine, and I bind his torn flesh in a strip of cloth torn from my own shirt. A few of the others help me raise him to the back of the horse, who stands patiently while we arrange him so that he won’t easily slide off. I wonder for a moment if I should let his hand continue to bleed, but it seems that the narrow pathway we travel upon is no longer relying solely on that blood to sustain its existence.
We are now powering the life that ekes back into the earth with the faint sparks of hope taken seed by Jonah’s example. I find myself hoping, not for the first time, that he isn’t dead. How much more can he take? Is this his final act, to die with his blood drained out on our behalf? I wish I could have met his family – he probably has a nice family.
But for now there is just the act of putting one foot in front of the other. That is all there is to do, besides straining our eyes in the bare non-light of the day that has dawned for us, and I hope we aren’t going to meet our own deaths. The landmarks that I expect to see don’t materialize. It is as if the whole world has turned to a void of darkness, as if all of creation is being unmade before us, and we are the only threads of reality holding it together.
I think back to times when people have described their near-death situations to me, and this seems so far from that. It’s a complete reversal of all that I have come to think of as what makes up the world. Good, evil: these are things that I am capable of comprehending, of dealing with as circumstances arise, but this dead darkness is completely beyond that frame of reference. It baffles my head with its impossibility. I can’t figure it out, so I just try to walk through it, and to ignore the screams of my mind as I imagine what will happen when the little bit of magic that holds this world together disappears completely.
I try not to think of anything except to keep moving and I hope that those around me do the same. Several hands reach out intermittently to touch each other: the horse, an elbow, a shoulder, just some piece of the living to connect ourselves to. I can’t help but think that the dream of life has ended and the nightmare of not-living has begun, and that by escaping it we are only delaying the inevitable. I try not to let that thought stray too far in front of me, though, and keep it sealed off as far away as I can.
…
Bill
We race through the landscape. It may once have been a road, maybe a field, maybe a forest, but to our feet it is just a vacant expression of nothingness. The strip of light from me to Jonah has faded over the course of several hours into nothing more than a faint memory, something that I struggle to recall as being real. I try to think of something that will bring it back, but such notions of a light in this darkness have bled out from me long ago.
Has it been hours, minutes, days? Am I dead yet? Can these two with me die, or are they beyond that inevitability? Do they have to endure this place forever? Do I? The questions burn.
The very air begins to burn with acrid smoke, something that seems out of place – fire seems to be a thing that is more alive than this world will allow for – and so we walk towards the smoke wafting and blending within the misty vapours of this land. It gives us a sense of direction in the vastness of this open vista of nothingness.
And so we trudge through the lunar blackness, but now we are in search of the burning. The fires of redemption maybe? The end of something? I might just welcome that, but there is a thought deep within me which keeps me from falling to my knees and allowing it to end here: Steven, Lewis, Chapin – all those kids. They’re still out there, somewhere. Are they still alive? How could they possibly not be dead? And then I remember the blood – my blood, mixed with that of Truth some days back and then made into something different.
That’s not a thing that makes sense to me, and so I cling to it as a distraction. I turn to my two companions, who have been largely silent up until now. I ask them, “What’s with my blood, is it different than it was before? Did it get infected with something?”
There isn’t much of a reaction. One of them stares straight past me at something far off, and the other gives only a little smile, and says “what do you think? Do you feel any different?”
“No,” I answer, shaking my head, moving on. “And yes,” I whisper to myself after a few steps.
“That’s something then,” says another voice, all of a sudden, and then there is a sudden cheery crackling of a fire, with a face behind it, outlined by the light of the flames. “You can’t be the same if you’ve ever been different.”
It is an old black man, and he is sitting on a rock beside a massive oak tree, with a smoky little fire in front of him, heating
up a scorched kettle. It has just started to steam a bit, and is making a whistling sound.
“Michael!” calls out one of the angels from behind me, and they both rush forward, only to stop just in front this strange magician. “What are you doing? Where have you been?”
The old man pokes at the fire a bit with his stick, and stares into the glowing embers for a moment, before raising his obviously wasted and blinded eyes somewhat in our direction. “How do I know where in tarnation I am? I’ve been sitting here for about as long as I can stand it, waiting for you all to come find me so we can get on with things. What’s been happening, it’s been awful quiet.”
I look around, and it’s like we are in an island of blackness, with only this small fire keeping us afloat on a vast ocean in the middle of the night. “It is quiet,” I reply.
“You must be Bill Thomas,” says the old black man. “I’m Michael - the real angel of this bunch of misfits. Which just goes to show you that you can’t judge a book by its cover, sometimes you just need to go by feel, and that’s the best way.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask.
“It means,” he says to me, and the others, I think, “that sometimes, being blind is the best way to learn about faith, because you never know where your next step is going to fall.”
“I don’t believe you’re making any sense,” I say.
“Exactly! That’s just the point!” He gestures to the other two with his long index finger. “You see, this is why I won that bet for twenty dollars. Sometimes you just need to have a little faith in humankind. They can do things that you wouldn’t believe.”
And all of a sudden, the other two so-called angels aren’t so grown-up anymore. One of them turns back into a boy, though perhaps a bit older this time, maybe ten years old, and the other a pouty teenager.