by Brian Hodge
How she shined. How she shined.
Sweat flowed and muscles began to scream, but no magick this time, no folding of the land upon itself. He would carry her the entire distance back, to reunite her with the pieces that had been plundered.
He would carry her every mile. Every yard. Every foot.
*
“All we desire is to coax you toward everything you are meant to be. But because your lives are short, it’s hard for you to comprehend all that exists and ever has and ever will. So we fan the flames of your wonder.
“There are Kyyth who have grown the bodies of pleisiosaurs around themselves and live in deep lakes, to remind you of a past your kind never knew. There are Kyyth who take on bodies that are neither human nor ape but somewhere between, and wander mountains and dense forests, to remind you of your own origins and how far you’ve come. The Kyyth have worn the flesh of things you yourselves have made up in your minds, because if you desired to believe in them that much, then that was all the justification they needed to be real.
“And in these ways we hope to bring you to belief in yourself, and the exalted position you hold…”
*
And the air smelled of ash.
Austin stood in smoke wafting from her pyre and watched the smudge it made against the sky. As it ebbed into a haze he ducked into the shack long enough to grab a simple stick.
He sat on the ground and drew a few spirals in the dirt, from center outward with a clockwise twist. The air at the center of each would shimmer like heat-haze on a horizon before coalescing into a tiny whirlwind. He let them spin, fattening on their own momentum.
But whereas before he would bring his palm down to squash them, now he only snapped the stick and walked away.
*
“It is all out of love for you…”
*
Around noon on the day that Miracle was wiped from the face of the earth, they later stated for the record, the surviving crew of the southbound Union Pacific freight train that passed through the town witnessed a bizarre chaos in its streets. There was both violence and jubilation, as if a street fair had turned on itself. A few minutes and a few miles later they were still puzzling this over when the engines rounded a bend that cut between a pair of craggy red mesas and, on emerging, put them on their collision course with the cyclones.
Four, they saw — then three, then two, and finally one, the largest of this nest of whirlwinds sucking up each of the others and growing mightier with each meal. Their combined furies swelled into a towering colossus of dark umber that dwarfed the sandstone spires and blotted out the sky. It flexed in place for several moments, then as if with deliberate intent roared across the desert floor toward the tracks.
There was no time to react, no place else to steer, nothing to do except pray. But God, they said later, must’ve had His heart set on a cataclysm that day. The engines had already passed by, but the caboose was still to come and the long snaking body of the train most vulnerable in between.
The column of wind hit, lifting the nearest freight cars from the tracks like links in the middle of a chain. The rest derailed and, from the center out toward both ends, began a slow, grinding corkscrew as they were pulled back toward the middle.
But maybe there was some small nod of mercy in the turbulent air that day. Hydraulic lines blew and couplings wrenched apart like soft lead as the whirlwind took its due and left the rest. While a pair of boxcars were plucked along with them, the cyclone seemed as selective as any arbitrary act of God, as a string of five tanker cars filled with liquid propane was sucked aloft, white capsules clenched inside a giant brown fist.
The cyclone retreated from the tracks then, to steer a new course. Toward Miracle, on its day of days.
There the whirlwind faltered and died and dropped its burden. The crew in the caboose felt the heat and blast wave from three miles away. The clouds of flame they described boiled high enough to challenge Heaven, and then fell back.
*
“But our love for you is not that of a parent for its children. We would never be so presumptuous. Because we know our place. Instead, our love is the love of older brothers and sisters for their younger siblings, even though we know that you will grow to be greater than we could ever hope to be.
“And while I cannot tell you why … that’s as it was always meant to be.”
*
He may have awakened that morning as Austin McCoy, but now he wasn’t convinced it was as simple as that. Dragons stirring inside his mind, wings unfurling inside his soul, and a body that felt ready to collapse.
Would Austin McCoy have scrubbed an entire town out of existence? Not the Austin who’d awakened a few hours ago. Never him. But this one would, and had. In forward motion, every minute since spent outrunning those discoveries on his porch and in Gabrielle’s tub. He could never get far enough away.
From the desolate high stage of a mesa he watched it burn, and from the first moments when those fiery blooms rolled across the landscape, obliterating the town and scalding streets into tar, he realized something that he’d never suspected before. His cells tingled with the knowledge and the kinship, made of stuff that had been around since the beginning of time … and remembered, even if he hadn’t. Now he understood his species’ fascination with explosions. They weren’t acts of destruction so much as instants of creation, echoes of the bang that had set everything in motion, giving birth to mountains, men, and mites.
Not bad for a day’s work.
He came down from the mesa when the firestorm retreated back to the town proper, so he could watch from ground level — at least as long as it would take until the sky filled with helicopters and planes, and the road brought an army of rescuers with nothing to do but wait to rake the ashes.
Dry as it was, the ground steamed beneath his boots. A fat green fly lit upon his shoulder. He almost swatted it, but let it crawl there instead. You never knew. You just never knew.
And, unlikely as this seemed to him, he realized that he and the fly weren’t the only things here left alive.
It came walking out of the fields of fire, moving toward him on two good legs, and when it came close enough to touch he could feel the scorching radiance from its body.
“Well done,” it said. Voice still that of a woman who could captivate with nuance and a glance. “Sodom and Gomorrah couldn’t have gone any better. They’ll wonder about this for ages.”
She’d come to him as a casualty of his grief and rage, but even at that she had allowed herself a bizarre beauty. Ever vain. She was naked as could be, a burn victim with all the crust and crisp scraped away, leaving the tight shiny pinkness underneath. Her hair was gone, her lips were gone, her nose was a bump and a pair of slits; her ears had shriveled against her skull; even her breasts were tiny now. Every spare ounce had been seared away. She looked like a snake on two legs.
“I know you’re too proud to ask why,” she said.
Scarlett. He still thought of her as Scarlett. But Scarlett was nothing but illusion. A means to a cruel end.
“So let’s talk of Gabrielle. Do you want me to tell you she didn’t suffer? Fine. She didn’t suffer. There — is that what you want?”
He said nothing.
“What — it wasn’t supposed to be this way? Of course it was. If you insisted on clinging to her, this was exactly what it was supposed to be like. Gabrielle wasn’t here to be taught by you. She wasn’t here to forgive you. And especially she wasn’t here to take you home. You are home … or as close as you’ve ever been.”
“But I love her,” he whispered.
“And I love you,” she said.
With the toe of his boot he drew a spiral in the blackened dirt. She erased it with a gleaming raw foot and reptilian smile, and looked back over her shoulder toward the heart of the inferno.
“Memuneh?” she said. “It’s not even his name. Did you know that?”
“I’d suspected.”
“He robbed it from your ow
n folklore. ‘Dispenser of dreams. Defender in Heaven of his earthly wards.’ Sound familiar?”
Austin shut his eyes. Yes. Yes, it did. Sentimental treacle, lactated to suckle babies in the darkest nights of their souls.
“But he’s right about one thing. We are here for you. We save you from your own inertia.”
Illusion. She wasn’t really there.
“If it wasn’t for the Kyyth, you’d all still be in trees. Pats on the head and full plates don’t move you very far. If they did, dogs would be building cities and reaching for the stars. No, the only thing that really moves you forward is your own agony. Trying to outrun it. So. Who are you going to believe — me or him?”
Behind her the inferno roared, tightening his skin and drying out his eyes, yet he stared into its seething core, at the shapes hinted at beyond its flaming veil. The shells of buildings, the slag of ambition.
“Did he tell you what our name means?” she asked.
A nod. “Bridge. He told Gabrielle it meant bridge.”
Her lipless mouth compressed into a slitted line. “That’s his own folklore. But if you want to know? Once upon a time there lived a civilization that nobody’s found yet. I won’t tell you where, but you’d recognize the name of the river. They owed much of their existence to their beasts of burden. But the only way to drive those simple animals forward was by using a whip. Or if you prefer their word for it, a kyyth. And if that was the name they gave us, what of it? Nothing since has been more accurate. Nothing since has described us better.”
If he couldn’t take Memuneh at his word, why take Scarlett at hers? She seemed to smell his doubt through the smoke, while he looked past her into the fiery aftermath of the great blast and wondered what had been created here today.
“You’re close, you’re so close,” she said, then stepped up to kiss him with that lipless mouth and a feathery hot tickle of her tongue. “Remember…”
And in that moment’s intimacy, like so many other times when their membranes touched, it was as though something seeped from her and her world into him, another spark of recognition
—he felt the claws of a leopard crack open the bony little cage of his chest—
and she stepped away and let him buckle to the ground with the full bloody flavor of it, telling him that’s right, embrace it all over again, and all of the others since. Savor the pain of each and every death and feel their lashes up and down his back, and now Gabrielle’s too, his love for her the last thing holding him to a world that he no longer had to bother with. Go ahead. Let it hurt. Let it cut. Let it burn.
She leaned over him and stared down.
“You were the first ugly, hairy little thing that ever stood on two legs and shook your fist and refused to die,” she said. “So you didn’t. Body after body — you never gave up, did you?”
He rubbed a fistful of dirt and ashes into his hair because they were the only things that seemed real now. The only things that he wanted to feel, solid and worthless, but genuine.
“Say cursum perficio, Austin. You did it. But I can’t whip you along any further. These last steps? You’ll have to take them on your own.”
She helped him up and he stood, dust sifting from his skull, and with watering eyes he looked at what lay ahead. Flames washed over it like rapids over rocks worn smooth, but it did not burn. He could see it now — mansion and castle and forest and field. All one. All waiting. Elizium, empty and his.
“It’s time to go take your place, and wait,” she said. “That was the plan.”
“Wait for…?”
“The rest.” She caressed his cheek and nodded. Tapped him on the forehead. “Where do you think God went, anyway?”
From the distant sky, the deep beat of a helicopter’s rotors; from the far road, whirling blue lights and sirens in mourning.
Cursum perficio.
I win the race.
With dirt for a crown and smoke for a laurel, I win the race.
She squeezed his hand. “There isn’t much time now. I can walk with you. But I can’t force you.”
No. He was falling from the train. He was bleeding in the tunnel. He was murdering a coyote to give a voice to demons. He was anywhere but here.
“You’re lying,” he said. “All of you. You’ve lied all along.”
“One way to find out.” She raised her free arm to show him the way, through flame and wreckage and molten tar. “It’s only flesh, Austin. Turn loose. You don’t need it anymore.”
The first step was tentative; the next, a little less so. And so on. And so on. His hair caught fire in a rush like warm breath, then his clothing. The flames feasted deeper, but it only hurt for a moment, until he remembered how to make the sensation stop.
He began to remember everything then, all over again, from quasars to quarks. He knew the instincts of atoms and the majestic loneliness of stars. They were strewn above and below, and how they shined. He would start with the nearest, and if she wasn’t there, he would move along to the next, and the next, and the next until he found her, because still, it would never be Paradise without her.
Let me tell you about eternity.
He remembered everything.
He laughed.
Endnotes: Paradise Burned
“If God did not exist,” Voltaire said, “it would be necessary to invent Him.”
Except it isn’t so much that we invent Him as that we just can’t seem to stop re-inventing Him. Or Her. Or It. Or Them. See? Off we go already.
We’ve always done it, from long before Voltaire’s voice dropped, and we keep on doing it, and always will. Usually it’s the most obnoxious believers who do it most, cranking out about as many riffs on God as there are agendas for Him (or him) to endorse and petitions for him to sign.
Even the Old and New Testaments don’t much agree. The God of the New seems a mellow enough sort. But the God of the Old doesn’t even himself seem quite sure who he is, patting his tykes on the head one chapter, and the next thundering about, slamming doors and cabinets like someone in urgent need of a regulation of his dosage of medication, compounded by the nasty habit of smiting huge numbers of people for some awfully inconsistent reasons. Really. See the movie. With Charlton Heston. It’ll scare the bejeebers out of you.
Like a lot of people who hate straitjackets, I was born and raised in a faith that I no longer hold to. Which isn’t to imply that I have none, only that what works for me now isn’t nearly so confining about the arms, and is considerably looser about the crotch.
I like to think God grins down with a certain favor on that — for the wordplay, if nothing else — but then so did the lads who stacked kindling around problematic women and toasted them by the thousands, and so do those who now rig up bombs for this or that jihad, but there you go. It’s a bitch, this trying to figure out the unknowable. But I try. And try. And sometimes it ends up in print.
For one reason and another, over the years I’ve periodically been informed that I’m going to Hell. Those prone to proclaiming a thing like this in earnest usually mean well, but you know, beneath their touching concern for another’s immortal well-being you can’t help but notice a perverse glee. This is their sport. They’re the German Shorthaired Pointers of the Apocalypse, tails stiff and noses high as they point out, not pheasants, but those of us voted Most Likely To Spend Eternity With Hot Pokers Up Our Bums. They’re often very good at it, because they get a lot of practice.
So there it is, out in the open: “Hey! You! You’re going to Hell.” Really, now, how do you respond to that one? “Been there already, thanks, it sends its regards, and by the way, these are some of the souvenirs I brought back…”?
Which brings us to these stories.
Over the past few years I’ve spent some time in some perfectly dreadful places, psychologically and maybe even metaphysically speaking. (Las Vegas is another matter.) Sometimes I went deliberately. Too much Rimbaud, maybe, and not always enough perspective. Other times there was outside help, in which ca
se, well, it’d be a shame to waste the experience. Otherwise, what’s the point? The very same question that most of us, at one time or another, ask in a broader sense, about the lives that we’ve been given. And why should it stop with us?
I recall a parable — nonbiblical, nondenominational, non-dogmatic — whose upshot is that we were given language because God loves the stories, and he loves the stories because they help him to know himself better.
Well, I’ve tried to do my part, and if those stories have sometimes taken on the inflammatory tone of “J’accuse!, impudent little prick that I am, then I invite all those self-appointed experts on flaming torments to recall that, in a faithful translation of the book that forms the scoliotic backbone of their lives, Satan wasn’t the enemy of all that was holy. He was, literally, “the Accuser,” around to serve as critic and generally keep the Big Guy honest. And just look at the thanks he gets. Horns. Silly tail. Cheesy-looking Van Dyke. Hooves. The blame for everything. In short, the worst public relations nightmare since Michael Jackson.
Makes you want to stop and pause next time you hear the Rolling Stones do “Sympathy for the Devil,” doesn’t it?
So it was a journey, this book, and each of its stories represents a step or two or several along the way. (Okay, a half-step backward for the Lovecraft desecration.) There are other steps that aren’t seen here but would belong if they weren’t for the time being committed elsewhere. It was a journey I didn’t really recognize was being taken until this phase of it was nearly over. It was a journey toward that state of being that Kahlil Gibran describes in The Prophet as being able “to bless the darkness as we have blessed the light.”
It was a journey, and the natives were strange and wonderful and terrible, and I took a lot of pictures, and here are the notes penned on the back of them:
Stick Around, It Gets Worse. Shortly before a long autumn weekend with friends in Chicago, I read a Mike Royko column about a stretch of expressway there, where wastes of ova were amusing themselves by the methods described in the story. I didn’t drive along the same route, but it was on my mind just the same, and that Sunday dusk departure along the Eisenhower Expressway was what got this story rolling as my mind wandered. A week or two after the story was written, a young mother was killed much closer to home, by a cinder block dropped through her windshield. And not long after that, when John Pelan accepted the story for his Darkside anthology, it was with a letter saying that a friend’s father had died the same way. Proving nothing, I guess, but reinforcing that odd event-clustering I’ll often notice when writing something. When writing the shamanic scene with the divination by rock, I really did go out and find one first. The resulting images in the story were exactly the things I saw in it, when putting myself in the character’s mindset. And yeah, then I put the rock back.