I could have withdrawn entirely into myself, pulled away from Jane, but I did not. I tried to fight these visions or manifestations or whatever they were, but I did not push Jane away from me as I probably would have done in the past. Instead, I kept her close, told her everything I saw, everything I felt, and it seemed that when I was with her, when we were together, that other world faded a little and I was more fully in Thompson.
I saw the creature on Sunday.
Until now, my glimpses into this alternate universe had been limited to landscapes, to plant life and rocks. I had seen nothing animate, nothing alive. But on Sunday morning I awoke, opened the bedroom drapes, looked outside, and saw the creature. It was staring at me from across an orange meadow. I watched it move sideways across the tall grass. It was like a spider, only it was as big as a horse, and there was in its face, visible even from this distance, a look of sly knowledge that chilled me to the bone. I saw its hairy mouth open, heard a loud sibilant whisper, and I quickly let the drapes drop, stepping back and away from them. I did not know what the creature had said and I did not want to know, but something told me that if I continued staring at it, watching it, I would be able to make out what it was saying.
I crawled back into bed, pulled the covers over my head.
Later that day, I went again to see Philipe. Jane wanted to come, but I told her she couldn’t. I said Philipe would be spooked, that he would not want her with us, and though she didn’t like that at all, she believed it. It wasn’t true—I’m sure Philipe would have loved to meet her—but for some reason I did not want her to meet Philipe, and I did not feel bad lying to her about it.
He opened the door to his apartment before I was halfway up the walk, and I was shocked by the change in him. It had been less than two weeks since I’d seen him last, but in that time he had deteriorated badly. It was nothing specific, nothing I could put my finger on. He wasn’t thinner than he had been, he hadn’t lost all his hair, he had just… faded. Whatever had set Philipe apart from everyone else, whatever had made him unique, an individual, seemed to have gone, and the person standing before me was as bland and unremarkable as a department store mannequin.
Had the same thing happened to me?
Then he spoke, called my name, and some of his old self was back. I recognized the voice, heard in it the intelligence and drive that had once drawn me to him, and I followed him into his apartment. The floor was covered with dirt and beer bottles and uprooted alien plants, and I looked at him. “You can… touch those things?” I asked.
He nodded.
I reached for a blue branch lying on his coffee table, and my hand passed through it. I was filled with an overwhelming sense of relief.
“You’ll be there soon,” he said sadly.
You’re almost there.
I nodded. I looked around at the damage, at the destroyed plants and shrubs. I cleared my throat. “Do you still have those, uh… ?” I trailed off.
He knew what I was getting at. “Not since that last time. Not since the terrorists broke up.”
“You haven’t… killed anyone?”
He smiled slightly. “Not that I’m aware of.”
There was a question that had been bugging me since that night of the sandstorm, since I’d followed him into that house, and I figured that now was the time to ask it. “You were talking to someone,” I said. “That night. Answering questions. Who were you talking to?”
“God, I thought.”
“You thought?”
“It was the same voice that had named me Philipe. I’d heard it a long time ago. In my dreams. Even before I knew I was Ignored. It told me to call myself Philipe, told me to put together the terrorists. It told me… other things, too.”
“Your hunches?”
He nodded. “I thought I saw it once, in one of those dreams, hiding in the shadows in a forest, and even though it scared me, it impressed me.” He paused, looked far away. “No, that’s not exactly true. It didn’t just impress me. It filled me with awe. I know it sounds crazy, but I thought it was God.”
“And now?”
“Now? Now I think it was someone—something—from the other side.”
The other side.
I looked through the window at the purple forest across the street, and a chill passed through me.
His voice grew quiet. “I thought I saw it the other day. Outside.”
I didn’t want to hear what he’d seen or what he thought he’d seen, but I knew he was going to tell me anyway.
“It was hiding in the background, in the trees, and there were a lot of spider things in front of it, spider things the size of camels. But I could see its eyes, its eyebrows, its teeth. I saw hair, fur, and hooves. And it knew me. It recognized me.”
The goose bumps were all over my body. I was afraid to even look in the direction of the window.
“I used to think we were God’s chosen,” Philipe said. “I thought we were closer to God than everyone else because we were so obviously average. I believed in the Golden Mean, and I thought that mediocrity was perfection. This was what God meant man to be. Man had the potential to go farther or fall shorter, but it was this perfection of the median that would bring us into God’s graces.
“Now—” he looked out the window. “Now I just think we’re more receptive to the vibrations, the messages, the… whatever it is that’s coming from that place.” He turned toward me. “Have you ever read a story called ‘The Great God Pan’?”
I shook my head.
“It talks about ‘lifting the veil’, about contacting a world that sounds like the one we’ve been seeing.” He walked across the room to an end table piled with library books and picked one out, handing it to me. “Here. Read it.”
I looked at the cover. Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural. One of the pages was marked, and I opened it to that spot. “‘The Great God Pan’ by Arthur Machen.”
“Read it,” he said again.
I looked at him. “Now?”
“You have something better to do? It’ll only take you a half hour or so. I’ll watch TV while you read.”
“I can’t—”
“Why did you come here today?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Why did you come here?”
“To… talk to you.”
“About what?”
“About—”
“About what you’ve seen. You’ve seen the thing I’ve described, haven’t you?”
I shook my head.
“Then you’ve seen the spider things.”
I looked at him, nodded slowly.
“Read.”
I sat down on his couch. I didn’t know what bearing he thought a fictional horror story could have on the situation we faced, but I found out almost immediately. Indeed, the situation in the work was eerily similar to what I had experienced with the murderer, uncomfortably close to what Philipe had described. A mad scientist finds a way to breach the gap between this world and “the other world.” He sends a woman through, and she returns completely and utterly mad. She has seen the awesome, godlike power of a creature the ancients inadequately referred to as the great god Pan. She has also been impregnated there, and when her daughter grows up, the daughter possesses the ability to pass between the two worlds at will. In this world, our world, the daughter is a murderer, courting men, then letting them see her true face and driving them to suicide. She is finally discovered and killed.
Throughout the story, Philipe had underlined several passages. One in which the daughter is walking through a meadow and suddenly disappears. One noting the strange, heavy feeling left in the air after she passes between the two worlds. One describing the “secret forces,” the unspeakable, unnamable, unimaginable forces that lay at the heart of existence and are far too powerful for human comprehension. And the final line of the story, stating that the daughter, the creature, was now permanently in that other world and with her true companions.
It was this last
that sent a chill through me. I thought of the murderer, mortally wounded, running toward the safety of the purple trees.
Philipe was looking at me as I closed the book. “Sound familiar?”
“It’s a story,” I said.
“But it’s truer than people think. Truer, maybe, than the author knew. We’ve seen that world, you and I.” He paused. “I have heard the voice of the great god Pan.”
I looked at him. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t disbelieve him, either.
“What we are,” he said, “are transmitters to that world. We can see it; we can hear it; we can carry messages from it. That’s our purpose. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we were put on this earth. It even explains the gradations of Ignored. You and I can communicate with the powers there. We can tell it to the other Ignored. They can tell it to the half-and-halfs like Joe. Joe and his kind can tell the rest of the world.”
“But the other Ignored don’t hear us anymore,” I pointed out. “And I thought you said Joe was no longer Ignored.”
He waved away my objection.
“Besides, that can’t be all we are, transmitters. That wouldn’t make us average; that has nothing to do with being ordinary—”
“No one is only one thing. A black man is not just black. He’s also a man. A son. Maybe a brother, a husband, a father. He might like rap or rock or classical music. He might be an athlete or a scholar. There are different facets to everyone. No one is so one-dimensional that they can be described by a single word.” He paused. “Not even us.”
I did not know whether I believed him. I did not know whether I wanted to believe him. It would be nice to think that being Ignored was not the sole attribute of my existence, that it was not the defining feature of my being. But for my purpose in life to be entirely unrelated to that, to have nothing whatsoever to do with my individual talents or collective identity… I couldn’t buy that. I didn’t want to buy it.
Philipe leaned forward. “Maybe this is where the human race is going; maybe this is where it’s all been heading. Maybe we’re the goal, the ultimate byproducts of this Ignored evolution. Maybe one day everyone will be able to pass back and forth between worlds. Maybe we are Helen’s companions,” he said, pointing to the book.
I thought of the murderer, of his obvious insanity, and though it did remind me of the daughter in the story, I shook my head. “No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“We’re not evolving into higher beings who can move at will between worlds or dimensions or whatever the hell this is. We’re fading out of this world and into that other one. We’re being sucked into it. And then we’ll be gone. That’s the purpose of evolution? For people to be dragged away from their loved ones to live with monster spiders? I don’t think so.”
“You’re looking at it from a short-sighted—”
“No, I’m not.” I shook my head. “Besides, I don’t care. I don’t want to go there. I don’t even want to be able to see it. I want to stay right here with Jane. If you spent as much time thinking about how we can stop this process as you’ve spent thinking about what it is, we could probably survive.”
“No, we couldn’t,” he said.
No, we couldn’t.
I stared at Philipe. I had not realized until that moment how much I had been counting on him to get me out of this mess, to save me, and his flat negation of hope was like a stake through my heart. All of a sudden, I saw that his elaborate theories, his weaving of our facts into Machen’s fiction, were merely attempts to deal with the certain knowledge that we were not going to be able to come back, that we were doomed. Philipe, I saw, was just as frightened of the unknown as I was.
“What are we going to do about it? I asked.
“Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.”
“Bullshit!” I slammed my hand down on the coffee table. “We can’t just fade away without a fight.”
Philipe looked at me. No, David looked at me. Philipe was gone, and in his place was a tired, resigned, and defeated man. “We can,” he said. “And we will.”
I stood up angrily and walked without speaking out of his apartment. He said something behind me, but I could not hear what it was and I did not care. Tears of anger burned my eyes, and I strode through the purple trees to my car. Philipe could not help me, I knew now. No one could help me. I wanted to believe that a miracle would occur, that something would stop this inevitable progression before it claimed me entirely, but I could not.
I drove away, through Thompson and through that other world.
I did not look back.
FOURTEEN
Magic.
I clung to James’ idea, wanting desperately to believe that what afflicted me was not irreversible, was not the inevitable result of a logical progression but could disappear overnight with the wave of a wand or the application of some as yet undiscovered power.
Hadn’t Philipe been hinting about that? Magic?
I tried to sustain my belief in the days that followed. But even if it had been the vagaries of magic that had made me this way and not the deliberate building blocks of genetics, the fact remained that I was getting worse. In the mirror, when I looked at myself, I saw someone older-looking than me, someone duller. Around the house, Thompson was disappearing, being taken over by orange grass and silver streams and pink rocks and purple trees and hissing spiders the size of horses.
I began praying to God to make that other world disappear, to make me normal, but He—or She—ignored my pleas.
Were we ignored by God?
The only time I felt all right was when I was with Jane. Even the imposition of that other world faded somewhat in her presence, the inside of the house, at least, remaining free from its influence, and I kept Jane with me as much as possible. I did not know if it was my imagination or if Jane really did protect me from those alien views, but I believed in her, believed that she was my talisman, my amulet, and I took advantage of what she could give me.
We tried to figure out why she might have this power—if it was a power—and what we could do to harness it, amplify it, but neither of us could think of anything, and the only thing we knew to do was stay with each other and hope that would stave everything off.
It didn’t, though.
She quit her job to stay home with me. It didn’t really matter—everything in Thompson was free, anyway, and she could just go to the store and pick up what we needed when we needed it.
I don’t want to make it sound like we just sat around waiting for the end, feeling sorry for ourselves. We didn’t. But neither did we pretend that nothing was wrong. We faced the truth—and tried to make the best of things under the circumstances.
We talked a lot.
We made love several times a day.
We’d been living for the most part off our usual junk food staples—hot dogs, hamburgers, tacos, macaroni and cheese—but Jane decided that we might as well take advantage of the time we had left together in an epicurean way as well, and she went to the store to get steaks and lobsters, crabs and caviar. None of these things were to our taste, or at least to my taste, but the idea of living it up at the end definitely appealed to Jane, and I didn’t want to rain on her parade.
Time was too short to waste it arguing.
I was sitting in the living room watching a rerun of Gilligan’s Island when she returned from the store, carrying two huge sacks of food in her arms. I stood to help her. She looked around the room. “Bob?” she said.
My heart lurched in my chest.
She didn’t see me.
“I’m here!” I screamed.
She jumped at the sound of my voice, dropping one of the sacks, and I ran over to her. I took the other sack from her arms, put it down on the floor, and threw my arms around her, hugging her tightly, squeezing her. I pressed my face into her hair and let the tears come. “I thought it was over,” I said. “I thought you couldn’t see me anymore.”
“I see you. I can see you.” She held on to m
e as hard as I held on to her, as though I were perched at the edge of a crumbling cliff and she was trying to keep me from slipping away. There was fear in her voice, and I knew that for those first few seconds before I’d screamed, when she was scanning the living room, she hadn’t been able to see me.
I was going to lose her.
Milk was draining onto the carpet from a split and overturned carton, but we didn’t care. We held on to each other, not letting go, not saying anything, not needing to, as the afternoon shadows lengthened on the orange grass outside.
I was awakened in the middle of the night by a voice calling my name. It was not a low voice, a hushed voice, a whispered voice, as those sorts of voices always are in movies. Rather it was shouted but muffled by distance, like someone yelling to me from across a field.
“Bob!”
I sat up in bed. Next to me, Jane was still asleep, oblivious.
“Bob!”
I pushed off the covers and got out of bed. I pulled open the drapes and looked outside.
Thompson was gone.
I was staring out at an orange field. At the opposite end grew a forest of purple trees. Beyond that, in the haze of distance, were pink mountains. A dark black sun hung lightlessly in an illuminated gold sky.
“Bob!”
The voice seemed to be coming from within the trees. I looked in that direction and saw, moving within the forest, hints of blackness that looked like the spider things. Beyond that, darker and more indistinct, was a larger unmoving object that I somehow knew was alive. This was where the voice was coming from.
How did it know my name?
“Bob!”
“What?” I called back.
“Join us!”
The Ignored Page 36