The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “A trick of the eyes,” said Cobb.

  THREE

  This must be an illusion, I thought, an infinite recursion of identical trees. They were spaced every fifty feet or so, and we followed the path they made, but it was difficult to follow the line of trees, a struggle to stay on the path. Soon the forest changed around us, the surrounding pines denser, brushing us with needles. I feared we would be lost among those repeating trees, but Cobb shouldered through a tangle of boughs and we came into the clearing near the river. My body grew cold with revelation.

  This was the Red Run, this was the Vardogger—the pines, the clearing, the river—but unlike the last time I’d been here, when I recognized the features but not the place, I knew that this was where I had been crucified. Unsure of how to comprehend what had happened here so many years ago, so many years from now, an experience I still struggled to understand, a sea-swept discomfort remembering ice and the frozen husks of burnt trees, the blizzard snows. I remembered my skin like a chemical fire and unfastening my space suit and stepping naked into winter winds. Deep numbness, ice, a river as black as ink. I had been crucified in the air, I had been hung from a cross I couldn’t see. One of the Vardogger trees had been felled and lay across the rushing black water like a footbridge, its branches hewn away.

  Close to a dozen men had gathered near the felled tree, wearing winter coats or draped in heavy blankets. Only one of the men approached me, however, as Cobb and his companion forced me to my knees in the grass. A taller man, lean, he swept toward me with a bouncy step. His hair was reddish gold, catching the sunlight like a fiery halo. Unlike the others, whose beards grew natty and unkempt, this man was clean-shaven, with sharp bones and sculpted cheeks and eyes that rested in pools of shadow. What was it Marian had said? The Devil. Patrick Mursult had told Marian that the Devil could devour people with his eyes. I felt sure Hyldekrugger could be the devil in flesh. He moved with a serpentine grace, his mouth hung slightly open, the tip of his tongue touching his lips, like he could taste me in the air.

  “Shannon Moss,” he said. “I don’t recognize you from your photograph. Who did this to you?”

  What do I look like? Sick at the thought of my injured face. I felt smooth gaps in my gums with my tongue, sliding it into the bleeding spaces between my teeth. I could feel my nose hanging. Pain, pulsing. “Cobb,” I said.

  “He ruined you,” said Hyldekrugger.

  My senses were heightened. Wherever we were was a different forest from the forest Nestor had brought me through, different from the place where I’d been with Njoku and O’Connor. There were no birds here, no sound here at all beyond the sounds we made, a peculiar silence. I could see the boughs of the surrounding trees moving but couldn’t hear their movement. Hyldekrugger unsheathed a hunter’s knife, a serrated black blade. He came around behind me. No, no, no, I thought. He’ll kill me.

  “You can’t,” I said. “You can’t do this—I’m the traveler.”

  Cobb still held me, gripped me tighter, his hands like iron rings bracing me. Hyldekrugger grabbed my hair, wrapped it once around his wrist, and pulled my head back, exposing my neck. A premonition of the cut across my neck, of my neck opening like a second mouth.

  “Don’t kill me,” I said. “You can’t, I’m the traveler. If you kill me, your whole world dies, your universe dies. I’m the traveler, I’m—”

  “You think we’ll turn to nothing?” said Hyldekrugger. “I’m not so sure about that. We’re within the Vardogger here, this strange place. You think we’ll turn to nothing if I kill you.”

  “I’m NCIS, you know that,” I said. “You know who I am. Shannon Moss. March 1997. That’s the date. March 1997 is terra firma. You’ll die if you kill me.”

  Cobb said, “Fuck,” but I felt Hyldekrugger’s grip on my hair tighten. I was pulled upward, my head yanked back—My neck, he’ll slash my neck—but I felt the blade tug at my hair, cutting it. When he let me go, I saw Hyldekrugger holding a handful of my hair like it was the pelt of a skinned rabbit.

  “I know you,” I said. “I know who you are. Karl Hyldekrugger. You took out the CJIS building with sarin gas—the FBI building in Clarksburg. You killed a thousand people. You killed Patrick Mursult, his family. You killed children.”

  “So you came to this time looking for me?” he asked. “That wasn’t me, that was just some premonition of me.”

  “That was a different you,” I said. “I was investigating all your killing and learned about the murder of a lawyer named Carla Durr. Led me to Nestor.”

  Hyldekrugger sheathed his knife. “Driscoll,” he said. “So you’re following that thread.” He strung my hair through one of his belt loops. I’d just pronounced a death sentence on all of them by telling them they were all part of my IFT. I knew that Hyldekrugger was figuring out what to do with me, deciding if he would kill me and throw away his own life with mine—but he had already rejected suicide once before, I knew. They had all mutinied to stay alive.

  “We’re shadows to her,” Hyldekrugger said to the surviving Libra crew. “Get out of here, leave me alone with her.”

  The others dispersed, following the line of Vardogger trees to the riverbank. They climbed the roots of the fallen tree onto the trunk and made their way across the Red Run. There were ropes alongside the tree they held for balance, the tree made into a footbridge. Each one of them seemed to disappear before he’d made it fully across the river, like they’d all slipped behind an invisible curtain that hung halfway across.

  “You’re from 1997?” said Hyldekrugger. “You must have access to your own ship. A Cormorant maybe. Think of all the possibilities you have seen, think of all the futures. Do you report back to your government about what you have seen?”

  “I do. We all do. We’re trying to prevent—”

  “Your government knows what will happen in the coming years,” he said. “They’re watching world events like they’re watching reruns, but the same tragedies occur. Why is that?”

  “Why did you kill those children?” I asked. “Mursult’s children. And you sent someone to murder that scientist, Dr. Driscoll. Why? Why the chemical weapons, why all the killing?”

  “Driscoll would have brought the universe crashing down around us,” said Hyldekrugger. “Mursult, too. Wake up, Shannon Moss. My visions of the future are the same as yours. You’ve seen everything that I’ve seen. You’ve seen the Terminus. You aren’t opposed to us, not really. You’re not opposed to us, you’re just blind. We’re the only ones to stanch the coming tide.”

  “You brought the Terminus here—you did,” I said. “It followed Libra, burned through every future—”

  “Not us,” said Hyldekrugger. “The Terminus doesn’t spread, it doesn’t cut through timelines like they say. NSC will bring it here, they’re the ones. The Naval Space Command will someday send ships to that planet we chanced upon. They’ll someday find out our secret and go there, whether next year or a hundred years from now or a thousand, it will happen. They’re too greedy just to let it lie. The Terminus will follow the ships of the Navy fleet back to Earth. It will follow them. The possibility of this happening is so very high that every future ends in Terminus. We’re trying to weaken their resolve to find that horror. We’ll kill anyone who wants to find that death planet, but the Terminus is closer, so they must be getting close.”

  Bodies in the fields of CJIS, bodies in the Ryder truck, sailors of the Naval Space Command, scientists at the Naval Research Lab, at Phasal Systems: Hyldekrugger would kill anyone who might rediscover Esperance.

  “Every future I’ve seen, you’ve killed so many people, so many innocent people,” I said. “Driscoll would have gone to study that planet, so you had to kill him. Is that right? You’d have to kill so many people . . .”

  “Break the chain. Cut all lines to the Terminus, kill to cover the mistake in all our thinking. Everyone’s critical flaw is that we believe in our own existence, until we’re sho
wn otherwise. Everything we see and feel tells us we’re alive, that what surrounds us is real, but it’s all a damn mistake, all an illusion we can’t see through. I’ve killed so many people here, but what has it been worth? If you’re a traveler, what has it been worth? Nothing. But you. You can still help us. You can return to the True, you can kill the machine that will bring the Terminus, make it feel less like fate, more like possibility. That’s all I ask you, to bring back our freedom of will, our other futures, our chance at futures. Kill until every future doesn’t end in death.”

  “No,” I said. “I protect the innocent.”

  For a brutal moment, I feared that Hyldekrugger would kill me after all, that his mind had changed as suddenly as a summer storm, but he extended his hand to me, helped me stand.

  “Come,” he said, unlocking my handcuffs, throwing them aside. “We have a ways to walk, and our journey is difficult.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “I need to preserve you,” he said.

  I followed Hyldekrugger across the clearing, along the line of trees, pushing against the desire to leave the path, to turn around. “This is where the echoes come through, isn’t it?” I said.

  “The Vardogger is the doorway to a mansion with many rooms,” said Hyldekrugger. “Some of the doppelgängers come through here. They’re confused. They think they’re walking through a mirror. What did you call them? The echoes? The echoes cross the river here. They remember they’d been lost in the woods, that they’d somehow gotten turned around, as if in a child’s nightmare of being lost. They’ll come through the forest here, come to a clearing. They’ll return to the river they were sure they’d left behind.”

  “What about the others?” I asked. “You said that only some of the echoes come through here, crossing the river.”

  “The others flash into being up ahead,” said Hyldekrugger. “We kill them when we see them. They want to take our place here. Sometimes they’ve succeeded.”

  “Who?”

  “Us,” he said. “We see us. We fight an endless mutiny against ourselves. You see it happen. You see your twin and you know you’ll have to kill him. Otherwise he’ll kill you. He’ll become you.”

  The Vardogger trees stretched ahead of us. I glanced behind and saw the same impossible line of trees stretching away from us. Marian lost in the confusion of this place, crossing the river, seeing herself. Echoes of worlds, echoes of lives.

  “You killed Mursult’s family,” I said.

  “Yes, with an ax,” said Hyldekrugger. “Patrick Mursult was willing to destroy us, so I destroyed him. He wanted to betray us in exchange for a governmental pardon. His thirty pieces of silver. He would have brought the Terminus to our doorstep. He was a fool.”

  When we made it to the riverbank, Hyldekrugger pulled one of the coats hanging from the exposed roots and gave it to me. He wrapped himself with a military blanket.

  “The end times are cold,” he said. “You’ll see things. But you must keep walking, stay on the path. We’re crossing into somewhere else. There are dangers where we’re going. I don’t know what will happen when the Terminus comes, if it comes, but I assume this boundary will break like the yolk of an egg and hell will pass through.”

  I climbed the roots, stepped up onto the tree trunk, holding on to the rope railing with both hands. A surface like this was difficult for me, the rounded, smooth trunk of the felled Vardogger tree feeling more like petrified wood than rough char. I couldn’t sense the slickness here, where the river spray made the wood wet, whether or not my fake foot had found grip. Hyldekrugger climbed up after me, following closely. I stepped, baby steps, sideways, inching along, holding the rope line. The river roared by beneath us, the black water, crashing rapids.

  You’ll see things, Hyldekrugger had said. Halfway across, the temperature plummeted like we had stepped from spring into midwinter. The sky became leaden, and the air filled with swirling snowflakes and flecks of ice. The landscape changed ahead of me, no longer the green of spring but a scene of winter, the Vardogger trees obscured by blasts of snow. I kept inching my way across the footbridge, the tree trunk even slicker with a skim of ice, and all around us, appearing in the air as if the stars had just revealed themselves, were the bodies of the hanged men, bodies crucified upside down, floating above the river and far into the distance, among the trees. They were moaning, their noises a choir of undying anguish.

  I dropped to my knee, gripping the rope, clutching it to keep from being blown into the river by the winds. Hyldekrugger huddled in his blanket, his wild red hair rimed with hoarfrost. Behind us the clearing we had just left was now a deep arctic blue. I saw a speck of orange in the immense steel green of the tree line. I screamed in horror.

  “I was crucified here,” I cried, searching the bodies in the air for my own body. “I was one of them.”

  Hyldekrugger took me in his arms, helped me to stand. “How did you survive?” he asked.

  Snow clung to his eyelashes, and his eyes watered in the frigid wind. His hands were on my arms, steadying me.

  “I was saved,” I said, even now wondering if I would see the lights of the descending Quad-lander. “I was pulled down, I was rescued. They saved the wrong person—look there, in the distance, that’s where she is. That other woman is me. That’s who I am.”

  Hyldekrugger looked behind us. “That woman is dead,” he said. “You’re here now.”

  I didn’t know what QTNs were. I had come from a time when there was no Terminus—I was only a possibility, one of many possibilities. A point of pain centered my eyes, felt like it grew wider, expanding into an abyss. Everything about me was an abyss.

  He half carried me to cover the remaining distance of the footbridge and when we stepped from the felled tree into drifts of snow, he huddled with me, draping his blanket over me. Hyldekrugger carried me forward, onward. Infinite reflections opened around us, as if my eyes were kaleidoscopes and everywhere I looked were mirrors. I saw us walking toward us through the sky, away from us above the river, upward through the earth, toward us from across the bridge. In the distance of every reflection, I saw a point of orange. Hyldekrugger forced me forward. The path of the Vardogger trees began to curve, and despite the shredding ice-wind the air filled with smoke like we were walking toward a great fire, lung-burning blackness that shaded the sky to charcoal. Sparks of fire curled upward, were whipped about in the sky. “Hurry,” said Hyldekrugger, leading me along the curving path of trees, the air a midnight of smoke. Soon the Vardogger trees themselves were ablaze, no longer ashen husks of trees but trees in the full bloom of fire, one fiery tree after another like a line of scintillant torches, orange conflagrations battered by the wind and carried upward as if every tree were a tornado of flame stretching to heaven.

  “Where are you taking me?” I said above the scream of wind.

  “This is the ship made of nails,” he said, and ahead of us I saw the black hulk of Libra towering above the eternal forest, a wrecked ship mounded with blowing snow. The monolithic bow was rent apart while the stern, housing the engine room—the propulsion system and the B-L drive—was afire with spurting spheres of vivid blue light that flashed and were gone, a blinding strobe.

  We hurried along the path of burning trees, the ship growing larger in our view, and I saw one of the NSC inflatable concrete domes, a bulwark against the driving snow, a soot-black dome with windows dimly lit. I wanted to go there, to huddle inside for warmth, but Hyldekrugger pulled me back along our path.

  “They’d kill you there,” he said. “No matter what I say, they’d kill you. They’re trained to kill, without question. The men in that dome are sentinels here. They keep watch for our approaching forms and shoot them down before they can escape into the woods. I’ve killed myself here, many times.”

  And I saw there were corpses in the snowy fields surrounding the ship, countless corpses frozen in all postures of death, echoes of the Libra crew. They had been stripped of their clothing and whatev
er gear they might have carried. I saw Hyldekrugger’s body, and another of his bodies, and another.

  The burning path of Vardogger trees terminated at Libra. We walked alongside the hull until we came to gangway stairs leading to one of the airlocks. The cold had seeped through my coat, made it hard to move. “You’ll have to climb,” Hyldekrugger said once we were at the stairs. Anything to escape this cold, but my hands burned against the iron railings. As we climbed, another blue spherical flare burst from the ship, enveloping us. A static jolt passed through me, a deep shock that stunned me, and for an instant I saw myself crucified, I saw myself in the orange space suit, I saw myself crossing the black river, I saw myself as a teenager with Courtney Gimm, blowing cigarette smoke from her bedroom window. Have you ever seen a flower called the falling star as it blooms?

  “Keep climbing,” said Hyldekrugger. “Now’s our chance, right now. Climb!”

  I looked out over the forest from the height of the gangway stairs—the ship was encircled by a great fire, an inferno of trees, waves of firelight that flapped in the wind like the flags of hell. I imagined Libra falling from the sky, damaged during the mutiny, its hull enrobed in fire and plummeting to the Earth like a burning mountain, crashing here. Other lines of Vardogger trees radiated away from the ship, countless lines of trees like burning spokes surrounding a hub, seemingly infinite paths leading to other sections of the eternal forest. So many pathways, a mansion with many rooms. I could see past the forest fires to where the fires died, to where the Vardogger lines became charred trees, a burnt forest of ashen white, the snow mixed with so much soot that the horizon was grayed, the sky dark. The landscape was like a burning God’s eye, and I stood in the black pupil, Libra. The fires and the Vardogger lines churned around us, as if I stood at the center of a world-enveloping hurricane. I was screaming.

  Hyldekrugger dragged me up the remaining stairs, to the airlock in the hull, but the hull was caked with rust, or something colored like rust, and flecked with white and brown. No, it wasn’t rust—the rust color had been painted on. It covered the airlock and the surrounding hull like a thick reddish skin. Hyldekrugger spun the lock, and the portal door swung inward.