Magnificent Vibration
Page 24
“My God,” she whispers to herself. She isn’t moving, still staring at the point where the creature broke the surface. There is an odd, silver light reflecting in her eyes and I don’t understand the source. But right now I don’t have time to consider it because my heart is still hammering in my breast. I am shivering but not from the cold.
And then it launches.
I turn again to the area where Alice’s eyes are still fixed, and to my absolute rapture, an enormous, ancient, mottled, and mythical creature the size of a frigging city bus, with the same, previously and reverently viewed long snakelike neck and head, breaches out of the coal-black, icy waters of Loch Ness, with the approximate snarl of a tiger. It is the fucking Loch fucking Ness fucking Monster! I scream in surprise, joy, wonder, astonishment, and vindication.
“Skipper, you’re seeing this, yes?” I need confirmation that I’m not just moonstruck. It feels as though I could be. I’m dizzy, faint, and hyperventilating.
“It’s not meant for me,” is the strange reply from the old mariner.
The brute has turned and is now heading toward our waaay-too-small craft. Alice moans, low, rasping. It’s a feline growl of warning or pain from her very soul.
“No.” She utters the one word with so much anguish in her voice that I turn to her. Tears are running from her eyes and she is trembling.
“Don’t worry. I don’t think it means to hurt us,” I tell her, although now I’m not a hundred percent certain of that myself.
“Are we okay?” I ask the Skipper, turning back to this magnificent, frightful, and rapidly advancing water-dragon.
“I don’t believe so,” he answers. Not what I really wanted to hear.
Alice is muttering phrases and I can catch only fragments. “You can’t ask this of me . . . Please, no.”
It makes no sense to me, but there is a childhood fantasy come to bright, shining, and vibrant life towering over me right at this moment and I am starting to believe it means us harm, so I am a little preoccupied.
The beast smells dank and wet as its mouth opens to reveal rows of needle-like tooth cones. But this is not an attack. Instead it dives under our craft, the black water covering it and healing the tear in the surface of the inland sea, leaving it as though a great and fabled creature has not just rent the barrier.
“We should probably get out of here,” I strongly suggest, and I think I’m going into some form of shock as the Skipper guns the engine. I drop into a sitting position on the floor of the vessel and wipe at my nose, which feels wet and is running from all the excitement. What comes away on the back of my hand is blood. I hear Alice weeping and still whispering, “No, no. I will not be a part of this . . .” She is distraught and crying beyond ordinary fear. She is bleeding profusely from her nose as well, and still looking out at the water although the great beast is long gone. I wrap my arm around her as we turn tail and run, but she pushes me away like a petulant child might. We are having two very different experiences out here on the Loch, I think. Blood flows, my mind reels, the small vessel purrs, and the Skipper remains silent. I exist in a dream as I begin to feel light-headed, seated on the floor of the boat amid Alice’s crying and moaning, “No, no this can’t be happening. God help me. God help me. God help me.” She repeats it over and over as though it were a liturgy while I quietly lose consciousness on the decking of the small ark.
God
The OSB thinks about putting one more teeny, tiny call in to the three apostles but this is not the time, and the OSB is really starting to think He/She has overstepped His/Her self-imposed boundaries already regarding omnipotent interference in this whole scenario. It must go how it must go, or there is no reason for any of this. And by “any of this” the OSB means more than one small species on one floating rock could even begin to imagine. The OSB is strengthened in the understanding that life is resilient and will eventually do what it must for its own survival, although the goddamned Vee-Nung certainly disproved that thesis, thank you very effing much!
Bobby
No more is said as the Skipper unloads his shell-shocked cargo back at the Urquhart castle jetty. I have peppered him with questions once I returned to the land of the conscious, but he has answered me only vaguely. It seems he has no more idea what happened out there on the water than I do. I am at a complete loss as to Alice’s reaction and she is refusing or unable to respond. She appears to be in some kind of stupor and is even having trouble maintaining her balance. My urgent questions, “Are you okay? What’s wrong?” remain unanswered.
So I watch as the little boat with the odd name disappears into the dusk, and I guide Alice back to the car. Her face is smeared with her own blood, as I assume my face is with mine. What the hell happened out there?
Merikh
Merikh is back watching 5 Holm Dell Park as the cold night rolls in. He understands much more now. And he is waiting for his role to begin in whatever is to come. But someone is approaching, and he turns to face the advancing figure. Anger and fear color the features of the one who draws near, but he is receptive, too. Merikh begins to explain as much as he can. As much as he comprehends.
Bobby
I carry Alice into the house calling out for Lexington Vargas, but he appears to have gone missing. I lay her on her bed. By now she is in a swoon or asleep or somewhere in between. I carefully sponge the dried blood from her face and then make my way into the bathroom to do the same for myself. In the mirror I see my reflection. My nose, mouth, and chin are smeared with my own dark, desiccated gore; my skin is whiter than I’ve ever known it to be, and my eyes are pinpoints of light. I hardly recognize myself. If it weren’t for the bat-ears I’d wonder who the hell this was looking back at me. To my uncommon reflection I say out loud, “You saw the Loch Ness Monster today, you lucky friggin’ bastard! Your life will never be the same.” I don’t know the truth I speak. I am at this moment thinking that this whole weird trip, the phone calls with Arthur, the three books, Alice and Lexington Vargas and me meeting up, all of it, was just so I could have this day and see the creature of my boyhood dreams, in real and resplendent life. But something in the “back room” tells me that there’s possibly a little more to it than that. It is enough for me right now, though. I’m ready to pack up and get back to America so I can brag to Doug about it. How limited and narrow my thinking is at this point.
I brew strong tea out in the kitchen and take two cups back into Alice’s bedroom.
She is awake. Her eyes look like mine do. Bright. Almost too bright.
“Can you talk yet?” I try.
She nods an assent but says nothing as she takes the steaming cup from me and sips at it tentatively.
“This has been an unbelievable day,” I say after a long moment. Understatement of all understatements.
She pulls the comforter up from the bottom of the bed and looks every bit like a little girl getting ready to have Dad read her a bedtime story as she tucks herself in. But there is no bedtime story. Still trembling, she props herself up on the pillows.
“Are you cold?” I ask. She shakes her head, no.
“I think we should talk about what happened out there today.”
She nods her agreement once more but still does not speak. She looks so vulnerable lying there, her delicate and peaked face peering out from the bedding.
“I love you.” The words leap out of me unexpectedly and catch me by surprise more than I imagine they do her. They are spoken almost breathlessly, so charged with emotion and longing are they. I’ve never said them to another human being before, except to my sweet Josie, and then only as she lay dying. I never spoke them to my ex, even in our most passionate moments. But I mean them now as though my life depended on it.
“I understand,” is all she says.
“What do you understand?”
“That you’re in love with me.”
“What does that mean to you?”
“That God has bound you to me for some reason. And now I think I know wh
at that reason is.”
“God didn’t make me fall in love with you. You made me fall in love with you.”
“Did you not hear what she said out on the lake?”
“What who said? The monster?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about?”
I’m completely lost, and what I thought was an impulsive and romantic statement has now taken a severe left turn.
“The figure standing on the water,” Alice says with a quiver in her voice.
“I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing here. I saw the Loch Ness Monster. What did you see?” And as the words leave my mouth they sound to me like bad dialog from a 1950s horror movie. You just can’t say the words “I saw the Loch Ness Monster” and not sound like you’re a few fries short of a Happy Meal.
“Are you joking? How can you joke like that?”
“I saw it. And so did the Skipper, I think. Are you telling me you didn’t see it?” I am suddenly swimming in a very surrealistic sea.
“I saw a woman standing on the water. And she told me why we were called here. That we were chosen.”
My only reference to someone “standing” on water is Jesus. And maybe Daffy Duck before he realizes it’s actually water and not the deck of a ship he’s on and then sinks like a stone.
“You really didn’t see the creature?” I am desperately trying to clarify what I feel is an undisputable point.
Alice locks eyes with me as though I just fell out of the “stupid tree” and hit every branch on the way down.
“There was a woman, a spirit, standing on the surface of the lake, and she spoke to me and told me I was being given a gift. And she said terrible things.”
“What terrible things?” This has certainly grabbed my attention. I suspected that we were having parallel but markedly different experiences out there on the Loch, and now I am realizing how truly different they were.
“What did she say?”
“She told me the gift is from the Earth and that I am now the carrier,” answers Alice, her voice breaking with emotion.
I am still in the was-it-Jesus? mode, so I think she means she’s supernaturally “with child” . . . or something!!! I’m so lost.
“Are you pregnant?” and it sounds incongruous just saying the words.
“Pregnant?”
“What do you mean you’re the ‘carrier’?” I am struggling.
“I carry the death of half the world,” Alice replies.
Okay, not what I was expecting at all.
“How could God allow this?” She begins to cry and I long to hold her but know I would be rebuffed. I have a feeling we are both in way over our heads.
I need to clarify this point even though the whole “death of half the world” thing is spinning round and round in my mind like a bird in the sky with a broken wing.
“You’re saying you did not see the same Loch Ness Monster I saw?”
“There is no Loch Ness Monster. Other than the spirit who spoke to me,” is her sure reply.
Did I hallucinate? Did she? Did we both?
“I saw this creature. It was right in front of me. But you’re saying you saw some spirit . . . person, standing on the water. Water that’s seven hundred feet deep. And that this person spoke to you?” It all sounds like lunacy to me as I put it into its most basic terms. I think there is more going on here than I can absorb.
“She didn’t speak audibly. It’s as if I was thinking the words—but they weren’t my own thoughts,” she says.
“What did this spirit say?” I’m on shaky ground here, not knowing who is the loony in the rubber room—Alice or me? Or both of us?
She regards me with her big wide eyes and takes a shallow breath. She seems to be debating whether to say what she is about to say. “You are as much a part of this as I am, you know.”
“A part of what?”
“The new beginning. A reboot. The thinning of the herd,” is her answer.
“Thinning of what herd?” An awful idea is forming in the back of my mind. I always was a bit of a slow learner.
“The human race,” is her not completely unexpected reply.
Merikh
Lexington Vargas has finished his conversation with Merikh and now sees his part in this. He unsheathes the weapon from his coat pocket as he walks toward the house. Yin and yang. There can be no shadow without light. No male without female. And no life without death. He has been studying the Chinese concept of yin and yang ever since “Arthur” said he was the yang to Alice’s yin. When he first heard the phrase it was meaningless to him but he is and always has been a diligent student of life (although his father thought otherwise) and he has come to understand the truth in the idea that there is no good or bad, only both. At once. Everything in balance. Yin and yang together form the whole. There are always two paths and he has been chosen. Alice is one and he, Lexington, is the other. For every path there is an alternate way, for every firm, hard choice there is an alternative possibility. And he, himself, is the second choice, the other possible outcome of this event to which they have all been summoned. He understands that God makes no choices for us. Life presents us with options and we are free to choose—good/evil, positive/negative, virtue/depravity—and the resulting outcome, whether we suffer or flourish, is always our choice. As Alice and Bobby have been given two options, so has he, Lexington, been given two options. To act and prevent this or not to act and by non-action allow it. He has chosen. Yin and yang. And these two, once his friends, cannot be allowed to do what they are contemplating. Even if it means the death of everything. If the end of the world is the natural order of things, then so be it. Yang walks toward the small house at 5 Holm Dell Park with a loaded gun in his hand.
Bobby
“How are we supposed to thin the herd? And why?” This has gone so far left that I don’t even know where center is anymore.
Alice has become agitated and has risen from her bed. She’s now pacing in front of the fireplace, her energy contagious. She begins her terrible litany.
“She said she is an Earth spirit, the one on the Loch, and that there are others like her. They are guardians of our world and the Earth is alive—and we are made from and nurtured by her. But our Earth is dying and life can’t grow from a dead thing. We are poisoning her. Killing her. Burying her under our apathy, our garbage, waste, and filth, and our self-righteous entitlement. Even a pregnant mother must abort her baby if it threatens her life. And that is the task she has given to me, to us. To save her. And save ourselves. But how can I do what is being asked of me? It’s murder! Mass murder!”
She finishes her mind-blowing monologue, drops into a chair, and puts her face in her hands. And Atlas is contemplating whether she should shrug or not. At least I think she is.
“How are you supposed to accomplish this? Eliminate four billion people? Nothing on Earth can do that.” This all sounds so nutty I just can’t absorb it.
“It isn’t something on Earth, it comes from within the earth,” Alice answers as I move to sit on the arm of her chair to be closer to her. “I have been given a virus that will kill half the world in six months,” she finishes, and I leap up from my almost-sitting position as though she’s just said she’s radioactive.
“What?” My go-to phrase again.
“It isn’t viable yet,” she says darkly.
“When does it become . . . viable?” I ask.
“That’s where you come in.”
“Me?” I yell a little too loud in the small house. How did I get involved in all this? I just wanted to see the Loch Ness effing Monster.
“I have the female component to the virus. You were given the male element, by whatever Earth spirit appeared to you out on that lake,” is her bizarre answer.
“The Loch Ness Monster is an Earth spirit?” And there is disappointment in my voice.
“If that’s what you saw, then yes,” answers Alice the reluctant assassin.
“As the carrier, I am immune,” she replies. “The symptoms start with a bloody nose. That’s as far as it will go with me. The rest of the infected will die within twenty-four hours of the first sighting of blood.”
“Christ almighty,” I breathe.
“And some will be immune,” she finishes.
“How does it become . . . operational?” I hardly have the words for this, and I think at this point I’m just using phrases again from old movies I’ve seen.
Alice hesitates as though she were deliberating whether to answer or not. Then she opens her mouth and says the best thing I could ever hope to hear and the worst thing I could ever hope to hear. It is the undisputed winner of the “jaw-dropping moment of the century” award.
“All life begins with the sex act. You and I must have sex to make the virus active. Then, as the carrier, it will flow from me with every breath I exhale, and it will grow exponentially through airborne contagion,” she says and starts to cry again.