Apocalypse

by Nancy Springer

  On the rosebushes the cicadas sighed, Doom, doom.

  Oona did what she had been wanting for twenty-one years to do: “Shut up,” she said, and without effort or rehearsal her hand found a flowerpot, a heavy ceramic one in the shape of a potbellied lion, and hurled it over the porch barrier, violating Sojourner’s air space and Sojourner’s skull. The old woman fell and lay still. Knowing how frail these lank old ladies with no padding were inclined to be, Oona felt satisfied she would not get up again.

  Going into her house, Oona felt the hair on her breasts itching against the inside of her blouse and made a sour face. Just because she wore slacks. Good Lord. Probably it would get bristly if she tried to shave it. No matter. Her husband would never notice it.

  Oona grudgingly thanked her luck that Sojourner had not said men who masturbated themselves would go blind. Even though there didn’t seem to be much time left for Hoadley, she wouldn’t have wanted to spend it leading her husband around by the hand.

  In passing on her snorting black horse, Cally noted Sojourner’s body lying on the porch. The sight did not affect her other than with uneasy second thoughts. She had always respected Sojourner, because Sojourner was the only person in Hoadley who seemed to think and live in lean, terse, uncompromising lines, who did not smother her lawn and house with cuddly-cute icons of sugar-coated life, who did not messily overeat of life. It occurred to her, glancing at the body (lying like a wintertime corn husk the wind would soon take away) that she was the only person in Hoadley who had thought much of Sojourner. Yet seeing Sojourner dead, she felt nothing for her. And she wondered if she had been right to admire her, or if she had admired her for the wrong reasons. As she had admired Gigi maybe for all the wrong reasons.

  She had asked Shirley (who may have been a man once, but was a nice, obliging person just the same) to exit Hoadley via the funeral home, and as was expected of her Shirley had agreed. Arriving at the Perfect Rest, Cally looped Devil’s reins over the top spire of the three-tiered fountain on the front lawn and ran inside while the others waited for her. She was not at all sure what she was looking for—Mark? But she knew where Mark was. Nevertheless, she trotted from Blue Room to Peach Parlor to Rose Room, peeking in. In Rose the body of Mr. Mundis, a former coal miner, awaited the ministrations of Barry Beal, who would arrange over it a blanket of a texture and hue that would have appalled the man in life. Barry Beal was not there, had not been there, Cally noted, the everyday portion of her mind automatically wondering where he was. Meanwhile, the world, like the rest of her, was going insane, and the corpse was slowly sitting up in the coffin—casket, rather; never say coffin—the dead man was sitting up, but still unmistakably dead, the eyes blank, the face flat and pork-pink with makeup and embalming fluid. Mr. Mundis did not push himself up with his hands and complain of his poor wind and his arthritis, as he would have in life. He sat up woodenly, as if the hand of God had pulled a string attached to his head. Cally fled.

  With frenetic energy hers once again she ran up the steps to the apartment. No Mark there, either. But once in the cluttered and familiar living room, already forgetting the dead man downstairs (too much was happening for one overactive corpse to matter very much; the late Mrs. Zepka’s leer, evidently, had been the merest hint of things to come) Cally knew why she had come home. Comfortably, as if someone had put a cup of tea in her hand, she sat down on the sofa and read her letter.

  Tammy, acting strangely, hospitalized for evaluation? Owen, showing symptoms of—leprosy?

  Her children. Getting them out of Hoadley had not been enough. Like a pestilence, Hoadley had afflicted them before they had gone; Hoadley was in them, a poison in their blood. Hoadley would kill them.

  Her children; all the children … In the bushes outside, the hungerbabies keened.

  Cally got up with eyes as fixed and lifeless as that of the corpse; with a stride that had lost all impulsion she went downstairs and outside to join the Elspeth and Shirley and Gigi. What else was there for her to do but to be the horsewoman who rode the black steed?

  “My house next,” Gigi demanded, not bothering to look at Shirley for acquiescence; Shirley would not argue. “I want to see if Homer’s got himself dead of a heart attack yet. And if he hasn’t, I want to kill him.”

  No one smiled or so much as blinked. Gigi had always matter-of-factly talked about murdering Homer.

  “What better time?” she added. “What’s one more body in a mess like this?”

  They had to backtrack. Shirley trailed in the rear, stoical but pale. The sinkhole taking the town into the bowels of the old mines had grown; they had to skirt it. They discovered that on their mounts they could move around what remained of the town as no one else could; they could cut through the narrow spaces between houses where cars could not go, they could canter across back yards and jump the fences that separated them. On the streets, they could traverse the broken pavements between the abandoned cars, and the panicked crowds fleeing the catastrophe on foot made way for them, frightened of the lathered, wild-eyed horses. There was an undeniable thrill in their unaccustomed freedom, their power on horseback in that stricken town. Gigi, trampling flowerbeds under the hooves of her pale appaloosa, gave a high-pitched bark of laughter. Never, Cally thought, looking at her with repugnance and fascination, never had she seen the evil old ever-dying woman so alive, so youthful with excitement, as she was on that day of doom. The strong, sweaty smell of terror in the air must have suited her.

  The old Wilmore house had gone down into the abyss, Cally noticed. Mark’s birthplace and childhood home was gone, cactus named Fred and all. She saw Ma Wilmore in her customary crocheted hat (the cactus had worn its own headgear down to its demise) standing in the crowd at the edge of the chasm, looking after it. Those Hoadley people who remained by the great pit looked and screamed and looked and shrieked but seemed unable to move away, these old-timers, as they had always felt unable to move away from Hoadley, as if held by some hypnotic black-snake gaze of God.

  Cally looked, from the vantage of Devil’s high-horse back, and saw something dark moving in deep earth—a shadow, a coal-colored stirring, nothing more distinct—and murmured without feeling, “Mark.”

  “God damn! There goes my house.” Gigi sounded outraged. Cally knew the old woman felt no affection for the house; her dudgeon must have been because she had wanted to send Homer with it.

  “Mark,” Cally whispered again, her taut, thin gaze fixed downward, into the smoky black emptiness under Hoadley, hollow as her belly, hollow as Gigi’s heart, and she did not look up until she heard an odd sort of dry, coughing scream from the woman next to her—Shirley. Then she looked.

  Gigi’s house and high dog-proof fence and incredible flourishing flower gardens all sagged at the edge of the abyss, breaking apart. And out of those thick, thriving gardens, boiling out of the dense roots and falling into the void—came babies, long-dead babies, falling without a cry, by the dozen, the hundred. Tiny, frail, some skeletal, some curled and tan, like so many dead birds and insect husks they drifted on the heat of infernal fire, on the updrafts of smoke yellow as chicken fat. Babies—or what had once been babies—or what could have been babies.…

  The children, Cally thought, all the children … And loud on the wind sounded the wailing, dying cries of those other babies who had boiled out from underground, the children who wore coal-black faces and translucent, orange-trimmed wings. The hunger-babies. And Cally remembered Gigi declaring, to hell with them.…

  “Abortionist,” said Elspeth in a flat, dispassionate voice, studying Gigi with an artist’s narrow eyes.

  “Murderess,” Cally said, or tried to say, her voice sounding tenuous, strangled, as if a snake had her by the throat. But Gigi only grinned, showing her teeth like a skull.

  “I am what I am,” Gigi said, “and so are you. You are Famine. And you, Shirley Peterless Danyo, can’t-have-a-child-or-make-one-either, you are Pestilence. And you are War, Elspeth, whether you like it or not. Poor Elspeth, ne
ver wants to get involved.” Gigi stared until Elspeth looked down at her sword, then turned on Cally, her grin gone between thin lips. “Don’t get sniffy with me, Ms. Famine Apocalypse Wilmore. You’re no better than me. You’re nearly the same as me.”

  “I hate you,” Cally whispered.

  “Do you? Seems to me—”

  “Gigi—what are you?” interrupted Shirley, to quell the quarrel.

  “Damn it!” Elspeth exploded at her lover—or former lover. “Must you always have everything spelled out? Now—”

  “Now,” Gigi said, “it is my turn. And I am Death.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I guess Mr. Wilmore didn’t mind none that I didn’t show up for work that day. He had other stuff on his mind. Course at the time I didn’t know what all was going on down in Hoadley and I figured I was in trouble, but I couldn’t help that. I couldn’t leave Joanie the way she was, and I couldn’t get her to go with me neither. So we both just set in the merry-go-round and tried to figure out what to do.

  I says, “Did the Devil say how he was going to …”

  “He said he wouldn’t have to do much of anything. Once he got things started, people would do all the work themselves.”

  Like Garrett’s dominoes.

  “Destroy themselves,” Joanie says, “just like they always did, with half a chance.”

  “Joan,” I says, “you got to talk to him again and tell him to make it stop.”

  She gave a hard sort of snort, like she would have laughed at me if she wasn’t so discouraged and tired. “Sure,” she says, sarcastic.

  I says, “You got to at least try. What’s going to happen to my Ma and my Pa and my brothers?” I heard my voice go up high, like a kid’s, and I tried to calm down. Joan had set up straight and was looking at me. Ahira, I mean. She had that Ahira look in her eyes.

  “Barry Beal,” she says, real slow and soft, “I will never understand you. You’ve asked about what will happen to me, and your family, and everyone in Hoadley, and never once have you asked what will happen to you.”

  That didn’t seem so hard to understand. “I’ll be with you,” I says.

  “If I’m going to try to summon Satan again,” she says, “you’ve got to get out of here.”

  “No,” I says.

  “Bar, you’ll get killed!”

  “I’m staying with you,” I says.

  “I don’t have Snakie to make the circle any more!”

  “It don’t matter. I’m staying.”

  “Bar, what the hun do you think is going to protect us?”

  We could’ve argued about it a while longer, but then into the merry-go-round come footsteps, and we both looked, and it was that weird guy, the one that looked like me but too damn perfect and would have had sex with a dead person if they asked him. He came in cocky naked and set down with us and smiled at me like a cat.

  I says, grumpy, “What the hell is he doing here?”

  “I called him.” Joanie used her Queen-of-Sheba Ahira voice on me. “I can do that, you know.”

  “I guess you could send him away, too.”

  “He might be able to help us. Bar, stop being so jealous.” She sounded grumpy as me but more like Joanie again. “It’s silly to be jealous of yourself.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m you,” the big dick says.

  “In a pig’s eye!”

  “He is!” Joanie says. “Mostly. Whenever you left part of yourself around my place, I saved it. He’s your hair and nail trimmings and—and nose tissues and stuff.” Joanie’s voice went a little pale. “And a piece of wood. And some junk food. Vanilla Tastycakes and things.”

  “Jesus,” I says.

  “It took a lot of doing,” Joan says, stronger. “So have some respect.”

  I made a snotty sound in my nose and says, “I don’t care what you say, he ain’t me. I’m right here.”

  But the hunk’s looking at Joanie, and he says, “What have you done?”

  Her face, he means. She says, “Never mind that.”

  “But why? You were beautiful.”

  “Never mind! I want you to just—just mind your own business and help me.”

  Them’s two things impossible to do both at once. But Joanie’s naked friend don’t say so. He just says, “Help you with what?”

  So she explains it to him. And after she’s done, he sets real quiet. Then he says, soft, “Why should I help you?”

  “I made you.”

  “Your mother and father made you. Would you do such a thing for them? No, because they did not love you. And you do not love me. I disgust you, and you are afraid of me. You know how I have ached for you, but you will not so much as kiss me or touch my hand.”

  This here was good news, sort of. I perked up, listening.

  “Now you have made yourself no longer beautiful,” he says. “Why should I stay and put myself in danger for you?”

  And Joanie don’t have no answer. And I think, Well, that’s it, and I guess he will get up and go. I sort of hope he will, and I sort of hope he won’t. But then he turns them deep brown eyes, like a ten-point buck’s eyes, on me.

  “But for this one I must stay,” he says, soft as his eyes.

  I feel my chest get tight, I don’t know why, and I says, “How come?”

  “I have told you, you are my second self. I cannot do otherwise. I will stand between you and Satan.”

  I can’t argue with him none. It’s our only chance. I look at Joanie, and she looks at me and nods, and we get up.

  We should’ve went outside, maybe, but we didn’t. We just done it right where we was, in between the horses. That nude dude drawed a circle on the floor around Joanie and me with his finger—it showed on them planks, red, like blood—and then I seen it was blood. His finger was dripping when he stood up. He looks at Joanie.

  “I have a name now,” he says, hard. And then he looks at me.

  “I want you to know my name,” he says, soft. “It is Eros.”

  “All right,” I says. “Thanks.” For what he was doing, I meant.

  He takes a stand on the rim of the circle with his back to us, and Joanie started the spell. She stood by one of them wooden horses and said words didn’t make no sense to me, and she made her voice sound fierce but the rest of her was shaking. But Eros didn’t shake none. He was cool. He was like some movie star facing the firing squad without a mask or a cigarette. Rock solid beautiful.

  Me, I just stood there like a dummy.

  First thing I noticed was the smell, like Trout Creek, all sulphur. But I didn’t hardly have time to smell it before the devil come busting out in front of us like a blast furnace, so hot and fierce I just about couldn’t stand it. I put my hands over my eyes and looked right through them, red, and I could still see him. He didn’t look like no Sunday-School devil with red tights or a pitchfork or nothing. I wouldn’t of been so scared of him if he did. He was big, maybe twice as tall as me, he was a big swaying snake of fire with the face of a person, except the next minute he wasn’t no more. Next he was a person all the way, grinding his hips like a peep show dancer, except his face was a politician or a mine owner or a television preacher, I ain’t sure which, and his hands was burning bones. And he had a big hard-on and big breasts both. But then he was one of them nosy old ladies from Hoadley. All at once, sort of. Trying to see him was like watching shapes in fire flames, and trying to touch him would have been like grabbing a bonfire, and I knowed why he was like that. He was the devil. You couldn’t get hold of him.

  And before he even said nothing, that hot dog Eros, the one who was supposed to be protecting us, just melted away. Not like when he disappeared before. This time he made a puddle on the floor. Little bits of fingernail and hair and dandruff and cookie crumbs, melted icing and stuff floating in something like hot motor oil. And a big old chunk of wood. It flared up and burned like a firecracker. He was gone.

  And the devil says to us, “How dare you.” His voice was like the whooshing soun
d a welding torch makes, but I understood him okay, right down to my bones, and I was shaking worse than Joanie. Old Satan, he was plenty mad. Or she was. Sounded like a she, just then.

  Joanie may have been shook but she had guts. She didn’t give him time to say no more. She says, “Call it off.” She tries to say it like she’s got a right to order the devil around, but I guess she don’t fool nobody. Her voice ain’t behaving, and it keeps getting worse. “Make it stop,” she says. “Call it a day. I’ve had it. I don’t want any more of this Ahira business. I don’t want the world to end. I don’t even want Hoadley to end. I just want.…” Her voice shook so bad she couldn’t finish. Or maybe she didn’t know what she wanted.

  Anyways, when the devil heard what she was saying he let out a blast-furnace roar scared me so bad I about peed my pants, until I figured out he was laughing. Laughing!

  Yukking it up so hard he could barely talk. “You ridiculous humans!” he hollered. “You poor, wide-eyed, wishful, muddleheaded, muck-footed, absurd fools! You call on me!”

  “Yes,” says Alita. “You gave me the power. You gave me this face. Take them away.”

  Old Satan is still laughing, jiggling and shooting off sparks; I can’t look at him. “You simpleminded twit,” he says to Joanie, “don’t you know what that is lying in a puddle in front of you? Like dog pee?”

  “It’s just the doppelganger.”

  “Ninny. Pudding-faced, hyperventilating coitophobe. It’s your dream lover.”

  I still had my hands over my eyes, trying to look at the devil, but now I wanted to look at Joanie. I squeezed a peek at her between my fingers. I couldn’t see her real good—it was like she was a black person standing there. But I could tell she had stopped shaking. She was standing real still with her hands stretched out a little like she was dizzy or floating.