What does it mean, you want to know, what does it mean what does it mean even though there is meaning and there is the aching feeling that means your fate is linked to the salamander’s.
You thought you would be the one to help the creature, but you think the creature has to help you. Or you’ll be lost. Among the demons. Among all the doors. For a moment you despair. Of all of it. The world. The world beyond. Your place in it. But that line in the water draws you back, the glide and the roll and dive of the thing you call salamander.
You still don’t know what it calls itself.
* * *
Later, you feel an urge to see the salamander again. Leave your hiding place. Wander by obscure paths down to the riverbank. Moonlight makes shadows on the water, enough to see how smooth the water is, so devoid of ripples. Should you write another sentence in the mud? Maybe the salamander has left, gone far from here, followed the river down to the estuaries near the sea. Living a life you would love to live.
But no: A glimmer beneath the water, like submerged flame. The smell of dead leaves smoldering. The glimmer deepens, widens.
You leave another message in the mud. Subvert the intent, how your mother would write these things in greeting cards but mean the opposite.
Be safe. Be well. Be blessed.
* * *
<
Demons lived in the abandoned factory now, as well as the City. Was it a punishment for the City? It wasn’t clear.
In church, just the once, the girl’s mother gave the sermon. No one knew except the girl, but the sermon was about her mother being mad at her stepfather for leaving. Or maybe some of the townsfolk guessed and didn’t care.
The demons buzzed around her mother’s head, disgorged themselves from the words coming out of her mouth, as if her mother’s mouth were full of flies. Except it would have been better if they were just flies. And the not-flies burst into tiny flames and the flames became a shimmering face that roared out the words her mother merely said. Even though no one else noticed but sat in the pews frozen-smiling because although they saw no demons, they saw her mother and did not like what they saw.
The girl didn’t tell her mother later, afraid of pills ground up into runny shepherd’s pie or just another night of an argument she hadn’t started.
The day she came home from school to find everything in her bathroom smashed or torn apart, in a mess her mother said she had to clean up. “The demons came,” her mother said. “To punish you.”
What was the difference between her family and demons? In truth, some demons were once people who did bad things even though they knew better. In truth, people were demons when they didn’t know any better. The girl had learned that it hardly mattered in the end.
Sometimes, the girl thought it was really her mother’s name she should write in blood.>>
- 4 -
In the forest, at night, where the moonlight fades, you glimpse the darkness moving. Emerging from the factory, the factory opening up like a maw in your head that devours all.
Coming closer to the bridge, to the tunnel. Everything around it is so still you know it’s not your imagination. Drift and glide, the way the motion feels like the brush of a dark wing then like a monstrous head eclipsing the shadows of branches. Faint sound of a deliberate pace, on two legs not four.
How as you hide in the rags and ruin of an old sleeping bag. How as you pretend to be dead, to be nothing human. As you stare through a veil of dirty white cloth at the pale dark of the underside of the bridge.
That is when it comes close, disguised by stealth. Veiled, it is a shape made of parts that don’t fit. Lithe and ponderous. Thin yet thick. Reptilian yet birdlike. But an eye so sharp, letting so much light in, you can feel its gaze pulling at the edges of you. Pulling at you like it means to unravel you. Tugging. Teasing.
Don’t you want to be revealed? Don’t you?
There comes a smell that’s antiseptic yet fresh with blood. There comes a smell like a questing all its own, like senses for this thing mean something different than they mean for you. That it might never see you, and yet know you entire. Devour you. Entire. The tunnel bricked-up.
You feel buried. Suffocating.
Never see the light, be forever staring up into nothing and nowhere.
Many creatures in the forest have become nocturnal. You tell yourself as the monster comes close. Faded into night because day is too dangerous. As you shut down. A homeless man told you. A biologist. Laid off. Discredited. By a pipeline company. The man rambled like he’d rambled on hikes, across wilderness he loved that only existed now in his mind. Then he’d disappeared. But from him you knew porcupines loved fruit. That maybe a fox, even a blue fox, could creep through the day as well as the dark.
Pulsating, kinetic, imbued with something twinned to the life you have now—how something inside you knows more than you do. It knows the future. It can see a few moves ahead, even if you can’t do anything about what happens. Like, you’d only seen the one pale man in your dreams, and he’d been falling into a bed of roses that became snow globes that became a myriad of worlds. And in every one of those worlds there was a burning shed and a pale man on the opposite shore and you can’t remember if you had the dream before or after you saw the pale men.
Parts of the journal, when you take it out again at dawn, in that curious gray light that wants to leave you guessing as to whether the world is beginning or ending … why those parts are familiar. For the demon creature takes many forms in the journal. Sometimes he is cadaverous and seems trapped in an agony of self-doubt. In one sketch, he lives inside an alchemical bubble of air and water protected by a swirling wall of dust and sand. A kind of soft outer shell. Like something waiting to be born. In some, he reflects the somber mask of a bat. Trying out roles.
To calm yourself from the onslaught, you tell the ferns and the dirt what you know to be true, the children’s story your mother told you once, and then ever after only with bile, with sarcasm, so you’ve had to change it. She always said you were still a child to believe in it.
This was the story: Over all the forest beyond their home and the little shed, over all of it. Over all. Ruled the forest mind. Which seemed to slumber and not remember and be simple. To be made of earth and trees and clouds and birds. But was actually awake in a way no person could be awake. Slumber that was not sleep. Mind that was not mind. A person could never imprison that mind, only destroy parts of it, bit by bit. But as long as even a small piece remained, it could never die. Would never die.
Might save you to save itself or, in the end, might not even notice you small and huddled against the wall of a tunnel.
When it’s gone. Crept past the tunnel mouth. Receded into the forest. When you cannot feel that awful weight. When, hours later, the tickle and itch of sun at the edges brings a different kind of heat and you’re sweating. The eye of the monster that will grow in dreams, red and swollen and dark.
Then you remove the veil. Sit up on your elbows. Release your breath. Scream and scream until you’re hoarse at what it left behind.
The pale man’s head staring sightless up at you from the ground.
The tunnel feels like the maw of a giant fish. Devoured. Digested. Broken down for parts. Nothing human. Nothing real, flesh-and-blood. Just a witness to atrocity. Your mind on fire, and nothing to put it out. You cannot move, cannot speak. Don’t know where to look for something that might calm your raging pulse, the ringing in your ears. The way the world tilts and shifts.
Smell the clean rasp of water alive with so many things.
On the tunnel wall, the salamander appears like magic. Lik
e mimicry and camouflage. Skin hue turning from dirty white and wall-textured to a humming orange tinged with green. Strobing gentle.
Was it always there? Watching?
Becomes horizontal, walking up to you. Still you can’t move. Broad bullet of that head, now almost larger than you, the muscular body behind it, the curling question of the thick tail.
The salamander’s eyes gulp, spin, recover in the wet drawl of pupil split vertically and come back together. Staring at you, and you, finally, unable to look away. The hue changes in the moment. From violet to aquamarine to pink and then into the most spectacular shade of light blue. Shifts again.
Rough, soft pad of toes against your arm a good sign. Trust, too, in how you do not flinch, pull away. Read once that salamanders can be poisoned by touch. How any oil or soap, any unnatural thing can hurt them. That you can hurt by touch. That you can hurt another living being just by existing in the world. Just by passing through the world. That is all. That is all. Panic, wanting to pull away, to preserve, to avoid causing distress.
But the touch is steady, warm, insistent. Reassures though you do not want to be reassured, know that keeping the horror of what happened in your mind is survival. Don’t want to hurt to feel. Don’t want to remember. Can’t get past it. Into the future. There’s nothing that cannot be reconciled, the salamander’s gaze tells you. Caught in that gaze, in the touch. A wall of globes that causes pain.
Then the salamander is gone, taking the pale man’s eyeless head with it. Still feel the touch. The touch exists all around you. Makes the world better. Takes part of your past with him.
Back in the forest, you see from afar two pale men searching for their third. Hear the distant cry of their distress, the call inhuman that is the flare sent up for their brother. It sounds like the caw of a crow hiss-mumbled so it tumbles out into the world ungainly and new.
In the journal, the pale men and the dark bird are on the same page. But here, in this forest, they are enemies.
* * *
<
Demons could speak to the dark. But demons became contaminated by it, and that’s why they couldn’t be trusted. A demon that couldn’t be trusted was a terrible thing. Then she couldn’t predict what it might do. Which is why when she grew up, she gave up alcohol unless it was the only thing she had to drink. Alcohol made it hard to tell a demon from a monster.
But in truth … the truth about demons was primal, awful, chaotic darkness with a will and an evil smile and eyes that were everywhere, torn holes not pinpricks, that saw through her or saw into her and crushed her marrow and froze her brain and collapsed her spine and made her piss in her pants. Nothing kind or gentle or wise. Why should demons have to be, when they were used to having their way?
These thoughts came back to her as an adult, as she watched, hidden, as demons poured out of the abandoned factory, eager to infect the world. To conquer it. If they looked like people, who would know the difference? If they weren’t the same demons as before, did it matter?>>
– 3 –
They are taken too far out of you. They’re too distant now. All the things you could have done. There’s only where you are now. With the world closing in. Hunting you, and you become wraith, phantom, a mere notion and a smudge of night.
The next week, you visit the soup kitchen in town. But now it feels odd, like you don’t belong. Vision green-tinged for a time. A film you blame on the rain, and what might live in the rain. But you can’t be sure. Too many strangers. Too many factory workers who stare around them as if looking for something. You distrusted them already, for what they did. But now you distrust them for who they might be.
No one lives in the tunnel now except you. Where did they go? Where could they go? But you couldn’t follow, despite the danger. You couldn’t because of the salamander. Even with the pale men and the dark bird searching. The pale men have grown in number and then receded, as the dark bird kills them. Does it kill them because they failed or because they are sick?
You found the drone crumpled, spilling blood from a jagged gash, antennae still twitching. Nothing you could do for it, not even to risk killing it to kill its pain. Splayed out in a forest clearing like bait. No more drones will come, and that frightens you as once the drone frightened you. It means whatever the invasion is … it’s winning.
You hide the journal in a different place every day. Every night. Sneak glances at its pages as if it might give up its mysteries. But more that it might help you know what to do.
A dark, reptilian bird smudged like ash on one page. Dark and twisted. Hard to read. Sketches and a smattering of words you understand. A fable. Of a cruel father. Of a boy whose sanctuary had been turned into a hell.
A word you think is English, Nocturnalia, sketches that look like a reverie become dangerous. Creatures losing their minds. Swiggles and arrows like particles carried through the air. Nerve gas? Pollutant? But intentional. Some miasma in the air that makes creatures behave odd. Invisible. Or maybe you’re wrong and it describes something else.
No help at all.
You spend more time in a hidden hollow in the forest. Surrounded by the moss and lichen and pine straw. The soft cool spring of loam beneath your body. The forest mind running through the forest floor. Suppressing your cough. Staring up at the canopy, the woodpeckers and jays and warblers that stitch their way between. Waiting for the sound of the pale men. Waiting for the sound of the dark bird. Death seems like a dream, a puzzle you cannot solve. What will death be like in this maze?
Then the salamander creeps close and looks down into your hollow. Makes a low burbling sound. Turns to look back over its shoulder. Burbles again, facing you.
You don’t understand.
The salamander throws up all over you. Shock. Then, calm.
A light pink liquid, in that light, which seeps everywhere, holds you in place from surprise and some hidden quality you can’t describe. The liquid cools you. Feels like nothing. Feels like air throbbing against you, thickening and thinning to form-fit you. Smooth comfort. Spreading across your arms and your legs, and any reason to move fades from you.
You laugh, delighted. It smells of bubble gum. The smell of watermelon bubble gum! Which you used to buy when you could afford it. Chew it like food for hours. Fool the stomach.
Again, the salamander vomits, this time over itself, and you see the pink surround it, coursing like an organism. Traveling with purpose. Through the glaze across your eyes. The breathing through your skin that is not your skin. The salamander slides in beside you. A solid, a hefty weight. Its belly is distended as if full of young. Tight fit, and you now looking into its eyes as you both wait for the next thing.
Down in the pit of the hollow, so close to something so alien.
A shadow rises across the lip of the hollow. A familiar shape. The dark bird, the reptilian smirk of beak, the bloodshot eye you can imagine despite the dark. But you cannot even tense up against your second skin. Which breathes for you now as if you are covered in lungs or gills, feeding your body through the skin.
The dark bird stares down into the hollow. The dark bird stares for a long time. You and the salamander are so very still, so very close. Your mind roams, passing through the eye of the salamander and into a world of ripple and wave of endless floating and quick darting motion. Weaving through weeds and bulrushes and over cool stones at the bottom of the river. The thrill of liquid against the body, the constraint of that. The way it reminds you the world matters in a way that breathing air cannot.
The dark
bird cannot see you. You’re under the river, scouring the bottom. So very far away from the hollow.
Comes the snarl, an expression of frustration or bloodlust. The dark bird falls away from the edge of the hollow. The shadow relaxes into normal night.
After, you and the salamander wash off in the river, watch as a thin scrim in the shape of you, of the salamander, floats downstream. Faintly luminous. Dissolving.
The salamander writes something in the water. It disappears, then widens. Just exists in your memory, as if you are at the center of the ripples. As if you’re diving through the calm of the center into deep water. As if you are monstrous.
“I don’t understand,” you whisper.
But you do.
Your blood is different now. The salamander has done something to it. You feel rejuvenated somehow, even with smell of gasoline lingering in the wind.
The salamander burbles at you once, twice, then, ponderous and huge, plunges into the river and is gone.
When you write the word demon in the journal, it means something different. It’s like the blood snuffs out what the word means. But, also, there is something peering out from the page that wasn’t there before.
Some part of the salamander lives in the journal now.
* * *
You’ve never begrudged your maker the daily pain, the lack of comfort. Lack of care. The cold. The heat. The things you have to do. It isn’t easy, but it isn’t hard, either. Because you have to. The way you live. You can’t remember another way. You can’t forget.
Does it matter to the forests or the smokestacks or the sky? Does it matter to the salamander or the strange pale men or the mice in their meadow, the deer in their field? Does it matter to the course of the river or the street or how the town expands or contracts or fills up with drones? Does it matter?
Dead Astronauts Page 12