Apocalypse

by Nancy Springer

“Jesus,” I says.

  “I tried to tell her a few times what was happening to me, but she called me a liar. Slapped me so hard she knocked me over, then prayed at me. I got pregnant three times. There’s a woman back Railroad Street I went to for abortions. The first time I was only thirteen, I almost died.”

  It was all finally sinking in, and I was on my feet with my hands all balled into fists, and I says, “Why didn’t you tell me? I would’ve killed him. I’ll kill him now. I’ll go do it right now.”

  She says in a funny, soft voice, “That’s why.”

  “You don’t want me to kill him? You want me to, I’ll kill him all right!” I was so mad my chest was pumping. “I’ll do him any way you want. You just tell me what you want.”

  “That’s the problem,” she says, real soft, real calm. “I thought I wanted him dead. I thought I wanted them all dead except the misfits. This whole reeking Hoadley town. Screwed me just like my father screwed me. That’s why I did what I did. I thought I wanted my mother dead, too.”

  Then I began to get it, what her problem was, and cooled down some, and set down on the floor beside her again.

  “It worked on me too,” I got to admit, “what you done to your mother.”

  She nodded at the floor between her knees. “Now I’m not sure what I want anymore.”

  Wasn’t sure she wanted her father dead, she meant. “Well,” I says, “let me go beat him up, anyways. I can tell him why from you.”

  “Barry,” she says, sort of desperate, and I got cool all the way and looked at her and listened hard for whatever it was she had to say.

  “I’m not sure I want anybody dead anymore,” she says.

  “Well, that’s all right,” I says, not really getting the point. I just knowed whatever Joanie wanted was all right with me. But she jerks her poor bashed face up and yells at me.

  “It’s not all right! Don’t you understand what I’ve done? I’ve called up the Devil. The hell god. The fire lord. Satan himself.”

  Then I finally understood. It took all the brains I had, but I understood, and I knowed she was in deep trouble. We all was.

  She says, “I offered him souls. Lots of souls. A world’s worth. I don’t think just a town’s worth would have convinced him. He’s greedy. But I invited him to begin the end days right here in good old Hoadley, and he sort of sniffed the air and tasted it with his tongue, like a hunting dog.” I heard the shiver in her voice. She was finally telling me the truth about that day, and she was talking like it was a bad dream she had to get out. “His tongue was a lick of fire. And he smiled like a dog showing its teeth, and said it was as good a place as any. ‘Much evil has been done here,’ he said. And that’s when he made this place the hub, and he pulled my mask off and made me look in the mirror and gave me this face.” The way she said it, you would’ve thought he’d made her into a toad. But there wasn’t nothing I could do about that.

  She says, “I promised him every son-of-a-bitch normal in Hoadley to take and burn.”

  “He ain’t going to stop with Hoadley,” I says, because that’s what the real problem is.

  “No. He doesn’t like to quit.”

  Oh, God. My ma, my pa, my brothers—but that wasn’t what worried me the most, not right away, anyways.

  “Joanie,” I says, “Joanie,” joggling at her leg with my hand, I was so scared. “Joanie, he got your soul?”

  She didn’t answer me. She wouldn’t look at me. She just pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms tight around them and laid down her head on them with her face turned away from me, and she sort of rocked, back and forth, back and forth. And she sort of moaned to herself, like a baby does sometimes. Only there was words in what she was moaning. She’s crooning to herself:

  “… the invisible worm

  Has found out my bed

  Of crimson joy

  And his dark secret love

  Does my life destroy

  My life destroy

  My life destroy.…”

  It did not take much for Mark to guess where Cally might be. He knew what was important to her; in fact, he had often thought that the damn horse was more important to her than he was. Certainly it was more important to her than his priorities: his death calls, his deep carpets on which she pertinaciously tracked manure, the dusting she was supposed to do in the parlors between viewings. He supported her, so certainly she ought to give him some cooperation and assistance with the business. She could never support herself, not in Hoadley, not at women’s wages. Let alone support a horse.

  Let alone the kids.

  The kids; what could be wrong with the kids? Mark sent his vehicle—the Going Home To Perfect Rest Van, the one in which he brought the bodies to the discreedy-screened-off-from-prying-eyes back basement door by the embalming room—sent it swaying around a single-lane dogleg turn under a railroad bridge, one of those damn old redstone bridges built low and narrow, like a tunnel, with a redstone wall and a streambed tucked under it for good measure, just to make it more dangerous. He should have blared his horn going into it in case someone was coming the other way. But he hadn’t. And he didn’t at the next one, either, and going around the hairpin up the hill he pushed the accelerator to the floor, rocketing into the wrong lane.

  At the stable he found Cally’s car but not Cally. Not anyone else, either. Mark hammered angry-fisted at the farmhouse door, glaring at the plastic junkyard horses on their posts—these horse-crazy women, what overgrown children they were. Mark had heard something about this place, some sort of leer, some scandal, not paying much attention, as he had not been able to pay much attention to anything in the two days since Cally had left him. All he remembered was that the speaker had been frightened of these women and their horses. Ridiculous.

  Not finding anyone at the farmhouse, he went and knocked at the door of the remodeled silo—a make-believe castle, might as well be a child’s playhouse. Fine bunch of nuts Cally had taken up with. He blamed her recent stubborn rebelliousness on them; he blamed her thin, thin, reproachful death’s head of a face on them, he blamed his failing marriage on them. Best to blame everything on them.

  No one answered his pounding, though various vehicles stood parked nearby. Mark shouted into the barn and found no humans there. He scanned the pastures; not knowing one horse from another, he saw little to help him, but it seemed to him conceivable that Cally and the others had gone riding. How could she go riding at a time like this? Yet of course she would. It was just what she would do.

  Too full of resentful energy to sit down and wait, or even to pace and wait, he set off with a long, hard stride down the trail that ran past the pasture toward the steep downslopes and valley bottoms of the woods.

  A deep-throated vibration filled the woods to the treetops, seeming to catch on the myriad small branches as did the ever-present cicadas scoring the tender bark with their orange claws. The twigs minutely trembled. A massive organ, a huge rasping tomcat, a monstrous basso continuo beneath the treble chorus of the hungerbugs, the mine was roaring in the valley.

  Even before he plunged into the woods Mark had almost forgotten where he was going and why. In fact it made no sense for him to be searching for Cally along this particular trail. She was just as likely to be riding somewhere else, across the road perhaps. And even if she had gone this way—Mark saw hoofprints everywhere, maybe recent, maybe not—even if she was somewhere ahead he was not likely to catch up to her. It would have been far more sensible to wait at the stable. But Mark strode on, veering off the trail, tearing his way through poison-green bramble patches, snapping branches, lunging down the steep side of the ridge between trees. The woods were lovely, dark and deep.… Crashing along in that wild place, Mark was able to forget who he was, what he cared about, or nearly forget; his relief was physical and immense. He reveled in the rush of air through his pink spongy lungs, the feel of his own elastic muscles, the hot pulse of his blood, the thud of his feet. His beeper sounded; he tore it off his belt an
d flung it against a rock. Black plastic smashed, tiny metal parts scattered, the insistent noise stopped; Mark felt as satisfied as if he had shattered a black hungerbug and silenced its babyish wail.

  Pausing at the bottom of the ridge for breath, he pulled the letter from his pocket, tore it open and read it.

  The chesty tremolo of the mine was in his ears, his mind; the words meant nothing to him. Tammy, displaying deviant behavior? A prepubescent girl approaching strange men like a streetwalker? Hospitalized for observation? Owen, showing stainlike, reddish patches of insensitive skin and loss of feeling in his fingers, the classical symptoms of—leprosy? Leprosy. Absurd. Who were these people? What were they to him? He could not remember their faces; he could not remember his own name. Who was this hysterical woman writing in such a heightened tone? Another one demanding his help, his heart, his soul. Well, they had taken his soul, Cally and all the Hoadley poor souls between them, and they could keep it for their very own. He felt much better without it.

  And speak of the devil, there was Cally on that damn black horse of hers, along with those other damn women she liked to pal around with, on their own ridiculous animals.

  Mark laughed—or thought he laughed—and started forward.

  Elspeth jerked her head up at the first stutter of that sound, looking for a charging bear. She knew a bear when she heard one, and she knew there was nothing more dangerous to a rider on horseback than a bear; any horse would go crazy at the mere smell of one. The horsewomen, riding along the black brickle mine road, reined in their mounts sharply when they heard that coughing roar, but had no time to do more before Mark burst out of the woods. Clinging atop their rearing horses, the women gaped; the man lunging toward them was running berserk, his name-brand polo shirt nearly ripped off his torso by snags and briars, his skin torn, his eyes as wild as his knotted hair, but—those things were the least of what made them stare.

  Mark flung the letter at Cally as he had flung the beeper at the boulder, but the letter did not satisfy him by hitting with a smash; it swayed in air and fluttered wimpishly to the ground. With a snarl Mark turned away and loped off down the mine road. He was so bizarrely changed that not until he was out of sight did Cally realize who he was.

  “Mark!” She started after him.

  “Wait,” said Shirley in a voice so stunned it entirely lacked its usual volume and resonance. “You sure that was Mark?” Shaken, distressed by the events of the past few days, she felt sure of nothing, but she thought she had seen claws, a stirring of horns in the wild man’s hair.

  Cally wasn’t waiting, though Devil fought her at every pace. With hard black boots she kicked him into a run. With her own peculiar grim glee, eager for trouble as always, old Gigi sent Snake Oil after her. Shirley cursed and trailed after. Elspeth, last of all, slipped down from her plunging Warrior and picked up the torn envelope lying on the ground before mounting again and following.

  She galloped, then, to catch up with Shirley, who had galloped and caught up with Gigi. Cally, on runaway Devil, was still somewhere ahead. Incredibly, Mark—or whatever it was they had seen—seemed somehow to have run faster than them all. And trees lay strewn on the black gravel mine road as they neared the tipple, half-grown trees broken off above the ground, their trunks splintered or dangling. The place looked as if a twister had savaged it. Yet no storm had struck, and the trees had been trembling skyward an hour before.

  No one could hear hoofbeats, splintering trees, the thunder of her own heart; the clamor of the mine superseded all other sound. As if some chauvinist man had dared them on, the horsewomen galloped through the devastated woods, jumping treetrunks when they could, dodging others, impatiently circumventing the rest, fighting their way through the bewilderment of downed timber like ants through a pile of jumbled pick-up-sticks—

  The mighty cat-purring nose of the mine abruptly ceased, leaving the woods in deathly silence. Even the cicadas had fallen silent, listening for the scream—the first scream of that apocalypse day.

  It came.

  Mark had known in an instinctive way where he was going. A beast needs a lair.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Gigi had arrived at the stable on that day wanting to go horseback riding, and the force of Gigi’s presence generally impacted on those around her. The thick corpse-white callus of her scarred skin seemed to define her, let her walk hard, talk like dropped stones and take her own way. She found Cally and Shirley and Elspeth in the farmhouse still dazed in early afternoon by the events of the night before, and with the tug of dry words and cold fingers she pulled them out to go riding with her.

  Once Gigi had gotten them moving they were glad enough to oblige. Each deadlocked, wrestling with her own devils, they welcomed the riding as a talisman of control, of mastery; once they had ridden a while, they would feel a sense, however illusory, that all was well, and they would be able to talk with one another again. Though that was not their aim, to intercommunicate, to act as a phalanx of four. They went, each one, as a personal venture, in search of a personal answer.

  Saddling Devil in his stall (since he would not stand in the stable aisle) Cally could look at the others without her scrutiny’s being noticed. Gigi, so wonderfully self-possessed that the mood of the others could not squelch her, chirping baby talk to Snake Oil; if there was any tenderness left in her, it was all for the horse. Elspeth, darkly shaken, saddling Warrior in silence. Like Cally, Elspeth and Shirley had not eaten that day. Cally had cooked bacon and hash browns and raspberry-jam omelette, urging the heavy brunch on the others in order to vicariously feed herself, but no one had eaten. And Shirley, also silent, pale even in the honeyed afternoon light: big-boned, hearty Shirley who had always laughed loud, whose flushed face had always resembled the round, peach-hued, nodding bloom of a manure-grown German rose …

  “Shirley,” said Cally, the name surprised out of her by her own shock at what she had seen on the pale skin in the sunlight.

  Shirley came wordlessly to the stall, looking over the dusty partition at her, and even though she knew everyone could hear her, could see what she had seen, Cally spoke softly.

  “You’ve got spots.”

  Shirley glanced down at the hard, elderberry-blue lumps on her arms and nodded.

  “They’re not just bug bites or something.”

  Statement, more than question; Shirley did not bother to shake her head. As well as Cally did, she knew that the small meek-looking bumps were not spider bites or pinpricks or zits.

  “I heard you coughing in the night. Sounded like smoker’s cough. But you don’t smoke.”

  “Never did,” said Shirley.

  They looked at each other. Cally felt the small muscles twitching and blinking around her eyes.

  “Go ahead and say it,” Shirley told her. “It’s starting already.”

  “What’s starting?” Gigi sang out with cheerful insensitivity from the end of the stable, where she was standing, waiting, with Snake Oil. Elspeth and Cally looked down at the horse muck on their boots, but Shirley answered.

  “AIDS.” Curtly. Elspeth’s dark eyes flashed up, outraged and pleading.

  “Don’t say it any more!”

  Shirley retorted, “Don’t make no difference now, does it?”

  They rode. They mounted their horses: the black, the gray, the blood bay and Gigi’s mount the color of parchment. Four women far too old for juvenile pastimes, they rode: Gigi half eaten away by her own impending death, Cally starved nearly to a skeleton, Shirley with the raven of AIDS skulking sharp-clawed on her shoulder, and Elspeth with a weapon as yet unbloodied. They rode down the ridge and along the valley amid the shaking shadows and the nattering of the mine. They talked about men and mobs, telling Gigi some of what had happened in the night, skirting the subject of what Shirley had been; odd, their feelings toward a woman who had been a man. Even the weird carousel-circling fence seemed easier to deal with than Shirley now that they knew what she was. They felt unsure of how to treat her, no longer
willing to trust her with their thoughts, their confidences, though she was the same person she had always been.… And the Lord God of Misfits only knew what would become of her might-as-well-be-marriage with Elspeth.

  And on the way back from their ride they encountered a man, perhaps mad, perhaps merely a representative specimen of his gender, wild with a primal rage that grew visible on his body in claws and bristling fur and horns.

  And a few moments later they heard Mr. Zankowski scream.

  In the middle distance they heard him, his voice echoing, clarion, through the woods. “Armageddon!” he trumpeted, in the reverberating word as much triumph as fear. “Arr-mageddon! Arr—” The victory call ended in a cry, cut off.

  Cally reached him first, fell off over Devil’s shoulder—the horse spooked from the limp-rag thing strewn on the brickle, from the smell of coughed-up blood, of deaths—Cally landed on her thin back beneath Devil’s wild-eyed, wide-nostriled head grotesquely snaking down at her, beneath his lifted forehooves, but kept hold of the reins. Falling over the shoulder was almost routine to her. By the time the others rode up, she was kneeling by Mr. Zankowski’s body (as flat and untidy as if it had been dropped from a tall building), holding Devil’s reins in one hand and feeling for the prone man’s carotid artery with the other, but finding no pulse, no sign of life. Mr. Zankowski’s dead face stared up at the stained and murky Hoadley sky with a look of rapt repose, as if he had seen the glory of the coming of his Lord.

  Shirley and Elspeth kept to their horses and hung back; they considered Cally their death-professional-by-marriage, and wanted no share of her expertise. But Gigi rode close, glanced down and said bluntly, as if out of sure, almost casual knowledge, “He’s ferrecht.” Broken, wrecked, irreparably ruined, the old German word meant. Dead. Once, generations before, use of the term had been someone’s idea of a euphemism or a joke, to say that a dead person was out-of-order beyond fixing, like a smashed watch, burned-out wiring, a dropped telephone, a vending machine permanently on the fritz. Ferrecht. “Let him lay.”