“You didn’t check the television programming schedule before we met up with you?”
“No, of course not.”
Andrew doesn’t know what Sabrina is doing, why she’s now grilling Leonard about the show and the timing, why she has seemingly flipped to arguing Andrew’s side.
She says, “Redmond said he knew the time, too. Did he tell you first?”
“No, I knew the time before he and I—or any of us—talked about it.”
“Are you sure?”
Leonard sighs. “Yes. I’m sure.”
“So he only knew the time because you told him?”
“I have no idea what he knew or was shown. Why all these questions now? You can’t doubt what’s happening—”
Andrew says, “I really don’t care anymore. You guys will have plenty of time to figure it out once we’re out of here. Take that chair and sit, Sabrina, or I’m going to have to hurt you both. Know that I won’t hesitate to hurt you.”
Sabrina says, “I’m going to help you and Eric leave here if you’ll let me.”
Sabrina
I tell you, Andrew and Eric, the four of us hid the keys to Redmond’s truck, buried them a few paces away from the dirt road. Or maybe I should say O’Bannon instead of Redmond because even if Andrew is mistaken, I believe that’s who he is now. Redmond was awful even when I first encountered him on the online message board. He made jokes about posting dick pics and asked what Adriane and I were wearing while we shared the dreams, nightmares, messages, and visions we were all experiencing, and what it was doing to our lives. Despite Redmond, I was relieved there were others living through the same thing. Yes, obviously our shared visions were terrifying, but as frightened as I was, finding the others meant I wasn’t alone, and it meant I wasn’t having some sort of psychotic break and I could stop the obsessive self-analysis and self-diagnosis. The first night on the message board together, we didn’t know yet what the visions meant or that we had any part to play. I hoped we were going to be like prophets, or something. Warn people, you know? Warn them about what might happen if we didn’t stop doing all the shitty things we’re all doing to one another and to the environment. I told the others how it started with me hearing whispers a few nights before while I was in line at In-N-Out Burger. The burger was my reward for a long day of entrance exam prep; I was planning to apply to nurse practitioner master’s programs in the California State University system. So at first I thought some creep behind me was whispering in my ear. And it wasn’t just hearing the whisper; I felt breathed-out air pushing through my hair and brushing the rim of my ear. I turned but there was no one in line behind me. I must’ve looked like a lunatic spinning around like I did. I tried to pass it off as my own yammering brain unable to come down from study mode and I pawed at my ears like there was a fly or mosquito dive-bombing me. I nearly shouted my order at the confused kid behind the counter. The whispering continued and I thought maybe it was the clunky air-conditioning operating at some weird frequency, so instead of eating at the restaurant like I’d planned, I scooped everything off the tray and ran out to my car. I was exhausted and now totally freaked out and the voice was still there with me. It wasn’t in my head. It sounded like someone talking through the tiny speakers of a cell phone but when the phone wasn’t against my ear and was instead crammed inside my jeans pocket, or lost inside my bag, or it had fallen down underneath the driver’s seat. Believe me, I’ve thought long and hard about this and I know it’s what a crazy person who doesn’t know she’s going crazy would say, but it wasn’t in my head. That small voice existed independent of me and it was coming from somewhere inside the car. I drove home with the radio tuned to KRock and blasting at full volume. I shouted and I sang along with songs I didn’t know the words to. I parked and ran up to my little second-floor studio apartment, fumbling with the keys at the front door like some slasher movie victim moments before the knife blade flashes, and then I was inside and I dropped my food on the kitchen table, which was covered in papers and the exam practice booklet. The apartment was quiet but for the ticking of the central air and muffled steps coming from the floor above. No voice or whispers, but my apartment seemed off, like it had been staged to look like the way I would’ve left it, but there were imperceptible inauthenticities. Something was wrong, or would be wrong, and all I could do was wait for the wrong to happen. The more I listened, percolating up from below those everyday background noises I usually ignored, there was a high-pitched ringing, the kind you get in your ears after a really loud concert, but it wasn’t coming from inside my head or my ears. A spanned distance was communicated in how it sounded. A great, impossible distance. The ringing pitched lower, like the hum of slowing fan blades, and focused into words that were in my own voice but not a voice I’ve ever used. I sat and I listened. I never ate that stupid burger and I fell asleep at the table and I dreamed. Those dreams from that first night are a deck of used playing cards, the colors faded, corners bent and peeling, and some of the cards are missing and I don’t know which ones are gone but they are the important ones, the most important. I do remember everything the voice said to me, though. And I remember the physical part of listening. I remember what those words felt like.
I tell you, Andrew and Eric, the morning after finding the message board (I’d stayed up into the early morning hours typing, reading, and rereading everyone’s posts), I woke with a compulsion to drive to Valencia, a town twenty miles north of Los Angeles. I hadn’t been there since I was a kid and I had no idea why I was supposed to go or what I would find. I was still buzzing after connecting with the others online so I indulged this compulsion instead of denying it. This might sound strange, but the idea of dropping everything to drive to who-knows-where was both terrifying and thrilling, and it was a relief, too. It was relief to give in, even knowing this act of belief would irreparably change my life. I didn’t want or crave that change, at least not consciously. Until the night at In-N-Out, I was 100 percent focused on my job and getting into a master’s program, to the detriment of my already meager social life, but that didn’t really matter to me. I was happy, or if I wasn’t happy, I was all right, and that was plenty good enough. But that morning I called in sick to the hospital, although I knew the written recommendation I needed from my supervisor for my school applications was becoming less glowing with each passing sick day, now the third in a week. She was royally pissed but I had no choice. Or I convinced myself I had no choice. Either way, for this once proud and lifelong agnostic, the possibilities and implications of the fucked-up adventure were intoxicating. For some reason I’d been chosen. I was being given proof there was something out there greater than me or greater than us, something beyond our everyday, and it was communicating with me, and telling me what to do. Do you have any idea how delicious it is to give yourself over to something else so completely? So I did.
I say to you, Andrew and Eric, trust the process, right? Dad’s favorite saying, applied to everything from sports to career to politics to relationships to dealing with grief after Mom died a few years ago. God, I hated that saying and how often he’d say it. It made this big strong guy seem so mealymouthed, passive, weak, resigned to failure. Trust the process and a shrug. Might as well wear a shirt that reads fine, i give up. I yelled at him in front of the oncologist, after hearing the details of proposed and (I knew) desperate treatment, he said, “Trust the process,” like it was a goddamned hallelujah. I should tell him I’m sorry, now, because I can’t count how many times I’ve said trust the process to myself over the last seven days. My holy mantra. I said it when I was home and ignoring the pleading where are you? texts and voice messages from work, friends, and Dad, too. I said it when I took mesh from orthopedics and made our four white masks as a vision instructed me to, no reason yet to be given for their existence and usage. Never a reason. I said it when I bought the plane ticket. I said it when I met Leonard, Adriane, and Redmond for the first time at a Burger King rest stop on the highway, and I said it when
I saw they were all wearing jeans and button-down shirts like me and Redmond joked that we looked like a lame indie rock band, and I said it when the shirts’ different colors made sense and told me all I needed to know about who each of us was or was supposed to be. I said it when we first verbalized what it was we were actually going to do out here at the cabin, and I said it when I looked into Redmond’s pickup truck bed and saw he made the staffs for us with their spiked metal tops and the one with the bonus hammer-block tacked on, each of them right out of a dream I had on the plane ride out here, like he’d plucked them out of my head and dropped them in the truck, and I said it when he told us about how he’d made them without remembering or knowing exactly how he’d made them, and I said it when I climbed into Redmond’s truck cab, and I said it as those awful things rattled around the truck bed with each bump and turn, and I said it when we parked on the dirt road and I said it when I picked up the weapon built for me to use and I said it when we knew we could use the rope but not the rolls of duct tape, and I said it when I tried to text Dad, “Trust the process. I love you,” and then we left our phones in the truck and we started walking here, and I said it before we forced our way into the cabin. And I keep saying it. I even fucking said it before I walked up the basement stairs like ten minutes ago. Trust the process. Dumbly believe things are how they’re supposed to be and that they will work out simply because of that belief, even if you know better.
I tell you, Andrew and Eric, about my impromptu trip to Valencia, how I drove north on the I-5 without any maps or GPS and I got off at a random exit. I didn’t know what I was looking for and I navigated through suburban sprawl and then to San Francisquito Canyon Road, which goes rural in an eyeblink and carves through rolling hills and forest like a winding river. At a severe bend in the road, I pulled over and parked in a small gravel lot buffeted by a cement divider. Beyond the divider was the former San Francisquito Road. It’d been closed and rerouted after numerous washouts. The closed road follows alongside the ruins of the St. Francis Dam, which collapsed in the middle of one night in March 1928, sending giant chunks of cement and billions of gallons of water rushing through the valley, wiping out houses and ranches, killing more than four hundred people, washing bodies all the way to the Pacific Ocean. I didn’t know anything about the dam until after I got home and looked it up online. While I was there walking the path of the ruins, I walked alone, dutifully following the closed road, which was being overrun and swallowed up by the surrounding vegetation and clay and dirt. I walked through the valley, dry and bleached and as empty of people as the surface of the moon. There was a cloudless blue sky above the craggy, shadowed faces of the surrounding hills and the only sounds came from bugs and it felt like I was walking through a postapocalyptic landscape. My earlier excitement quickly faded. Whatever I was going to be shown, I was sure I wouldn’t be able to stop it and my only purpose was to be a witness.
I tell you, Andrew and Eric, I now wish my only role was to be a passive witness of the end. I took my time and I was careful not to walk too fast so I could see and mark everything, and maybe thirty minutes in, there was a fifteen-foot-tall, cube-shaped boulder of dam just off the road and squatting in the brush like a sunning tortoise. Its sand-colored, crumbly concrete was striated, and from the road it looked like a section of a staircase for a giant. Like I said, I didn’t know it was a piece of the St. Francis Dam until I got home, so I didn’t know what it was other than a man-made ruin, a leftover, a gravestone for a doomed past. I kept walking and following the road, and maybe another thirty minutes later I stopped. I was made to stop. I now think I was in the spot where the dam had been built and spanned across the valley. I left the road and hiked over to an area covered with rubble, a mix of stones and small bits of porous cement. I stood in the lowest point of the valley and it was as quiet as the bottom of the sea. I expected, I don’t know, to see someone or something (I still can’t bring myself to say God, or a god) come over the hilltops and—this sounds crazy, I know—grab me, pick me up because I felt doll-sized, and I didn’t think I was alone anymore, and it wasn’t a good feeling. Then everything went black.
I tell you, Andrew and Eric, I know Adriane said she saw The Goonies rock and the tsunami before we saw it all on TV. I never saw that. I won’t lie to you. That’s a promise I can keep. I’d marched the path of a great flood without knowing it and I didn’t see anything other than darkness. It wasn’t like I’d lost time or something and it had become night in the valley. It wasn’t night-dark; I couldn’t see anything. There was nothing. I was nothing. But then I heard groans and high-pitched sounds of stress and I could only imagine one of the hills was going to burst or break above me. There was a thunderous crack and a low vibrato whoosh sounding like the earth itself giving a defeated sigh, and then an ocean of water cascading and rushing over me, past me, and into the landscape I could no longer see. There was the percussive snapping of trees and crunch of collapsing houses and buildings. There were people, so many people, screaming and screaming, and the worst part was the screams went unfinished; the screams cut out and left me to fill in how they were supposed to continue. In the valley I listened to an apocalypse that already happened and I was listening to the end of everything else, and that end would never cease. The callous rush of water didn’t stop and continued long past the final echoes of destruction and death. It went on forever. I went along with it, neither cold nor warm, or anything really, another piece of detritus floating away. Part of me is still there now. At some point I was extracted out of that endless time, and I wasn’t in the dark, and I was back at my car and it was almost noon. I don’t remember walking back to the car. Trust the process, right?
I tell you, Andrew and Eric, there are other gaps in my memory. Gaps I don’t care to fill in. I already told you how I tried not to come to New Hampshire and how I just sort of came back to myself, from wherever I was, and I was sitting in a cab on the way to LAX.
Just let me tell you this, Andrew and Eric: I wasn’t me, or I wasn’t all there when the three of us killed Redmond. It was like a trance, I guess, though I’ve never been in a trance so how would I know? I think a part of me, the best part, the important part, got sent back to the nothingness, floating along in the never-ending end in the valley, but enough of me was left behind here to see Redmond grinning through his masked face and to feel the wooden handle vibrate in my hands as I smashed his head and to hear the sound it made. I wasn’t there for all of it. I can’t tell you how many times I swung and hit him. I can’t tell you which one of us landed the final, killing blow. I tell you, Andrew, I already cannot recall specifics about our struggle at your SUV. It’s like trying to remember something from early childhood. There’s only the barest and broadest traces of this happened and I was there.
Eric asks me if I’ve seen anyone else here or there (he doesn’t specify where there is) and he mumbles something about a figure and light. Andrew talks over him, nearly shouting, telling Eric to stop talking to me and he asks Eric if he’s ready to go yet. Eric doesn’t look at Andrew. He only looks at me. I try not to stare at his daughter, wrapped in a sheet and on his lap. It only occurs to me now that I’m being a terrible nurse for not insisting I look under the sheet at Wen, to make sure she’s beyond saving.
I tell you, Eric, I’ve never seen a figure like you described, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one here.
Eric says that right before Redmond was killed, he sensed a presence in the room with us. It was sort of like when you drop an egg into a pot of water and the water rises, is displaced. He says it was like that.
I don’t like what he is saying and I like how he looks even less. He has a lights-are-on-but-no-one’s-home glaze. I wonder if I looked like that when I was talking about my experiences and I already can’t remember how much or how little I actually said out loud to them or just thought.
Eric says he could feel the space in the room being displaced. He says he saw something appear, join the circle around Redmond befor
e we started pummeling him. He says he tried to pass it off as a flash of light from the deck or a concussion- and stress-induced hallucination or migraine, one that looked at him, one that regarded him. Eric enunciates “regarded.” He says he hasn’t seen the figure again, but he’s felt it hanging around. It was here somewhere after Adriane and Wen died, and Eric says he shut the cabin’s front door to keep it outside.
I ask you, Eric, is it here now?
He tells me no, but he thinks it will be soon.
Andrew charges across the room at me. He is crying and yelling, telling me to stop talking to Eric, to stop filling his head with nonsense and lies. To Eric he says you’re hurt and whatever you saw was a hallucination and you’re not thinking clearly.
I tell you, Andrew, I’m sorry and I’m not trying to convince Eric of anything and I want to help you both leave the cabin. That’s all I want to do now. That’s my only mission left in life, to help you both leave here and leave here alive.
Leonard says they have to choose again, and soon. His voice is a reveille, and the new part of me that isn’t an actual part of me stirs and I say yes without being able to stop the affirmation.
Andrew ignores Leonard and he tells me to sit in a chair and if I say another word he’ll kill me.
I hold my ground. If Andrew is going to swing that block hammer at my head, so be it. I tell you, Andrew, listen, Redmond’s truck is exactly three miles away from the cabin. On the side of the dirt road, about halfway between here and the truck, we hid the keys under a flat rock the size of a Frisbee. It’s slate colored, and half of it has a light-green beard of lichen and it’s maybe four steps off the road and into the brush. The rock is in front of a tree with a goiter-sized knot on its trunk. I don’t know what kind of tree, and I tell you, Andrew and Eric, I’m sorry. You can go now and try to find it yourselves, but it’ll be difficult to pick out the tree if you haven’t seen it before. So I am going to go with you.
The Cabin at the End of the World_A Novel Page 21