“The corn dolly? Local colour, for my film.”
She shook her head, pointed at the air canisters. “You’re not diving.”
“If I’m caught in a nuée ardente, then I don’t want to die with a lungful of scalding ash. That is, if I’m not totally crisped first.”
She stared at me, the steel-capped boots, the photographer’s multi-pocketed vest and my backpack over thermo-safety overalls, with a hard hat dangling on its string from my neck, like an old-fashioned bonnet. Nobody else on the field trip was dressed so protectively.
From the other side of the jeep, Joe Boy distinctly said: “Old woman.”
Without looking at him, I replied: “The networks won’t insure me otherwise.”
Our driver arrived. We piled in and set out through the sprawling city, passing through slums, then outlying farms, and, as we ascended the foothills, thick fog.
Chillipepper consists of two parts, like a layered pudding. One, the bulk of the volcano, is an ancient caldera, broken in parts like battlements; the second is within it, a much smaller and recent cone. We drove up pitted and winding roads, stopping at a small building just below the rim of the caldera, no more than a hut for mobile phone transmitters and geological instruments.
The driver got out a comic and a packed lunch, settling in for a long stay. There was no way to go but down, into the crater via a guideline of posts, connected with rope. Nothing could be seen except mist. I gazed into it, trying to locate the cone and its own personal fog. The caldera looked like San Francisco on a bad day, hardly something to get the adrenaline flowing. While I brooded, Larissa bummed a cigarette from me. And as I watched her head in its beanie bend over the flame, something really strange happened: I felt the chemical surge I should have got from Chillipepper. When I stared into the volcano again, it dissipated. Shit! What was wrong?
Barely able to see beyond an arm’s length, we formed a descending crocodile down into the crater. At the bottom, the combination of the rising sun and a stiff breeze wrought a miracle: The fog cleared, blown through the battlements, and we could see. The caldera looked, as usual this close to a volcano, like the surface of the moon, but smelly. The cone rose in the centre, the colour of an ash heap, and to my jaded eyes not much bigger. An unimpressive dribble of steam rose from it.
That mattered not; we had work to do. I got out my best camera, now I had something to film. All around the scientists scattered, the equipment of their various arcane specialities in hand: geochemistry, seismology, petrology. But for the babble in various languages, the soft phonemes of Russian, Joe Boy’s Texan drawl, it was completely silent. My boots crunched new-laid-down rock, kicked up soft ash. I still hadn’t got the expected surge—well, not from the volcano—and that bothered me. It was messing with my head, as were the remnants of the vodka, and I knew my personal edge was missing. I was like a lens that couldn’t focus: nothing seemed clear, or right.
Shots of the caldera soon palled, and that left only the cone. It got bigger as I neared and started to climb, not as steep as the ancient walls around us, but still not for the unfit. Halfway up I passed a grad student, examining rocks through a lens, and a little later the co-authors, collecting gas from a steaming fissure. One yelled as I passed: “A hundred ninety-five degrees C!” At the top I paused, not at the sight from the summit, of the surrounding landscape, Chillipepper’s domain, but into the crater. It was slightly domed in the centre, a clot of cooled, sealed lava, with who knew what beneath. Nonetheless Joe Boy and Larissa were racing across its surface, like a pair of science-crazed kids.
My mobile beeped. “Oh shut up, Spider!” I muttered. On the other side of the crater, the twins glared at me. I reached into the pack, switched the mobile off, and as I did touched vegetable matter: the doll. Without thinking consciously, I pulled it out and tossed it into the crater. The doll came to rest against a rock, bizarrely upright in its skirts, as if stopped for a rest. Larissa looked up, laughed, then went back to what she was doing. Now I felt the surge, and I filmed the doll, filmed her and Joe Boy’s antics.
What happened next? There are gaps in my mental records, where the film is my only witness. The earth shook, I knew that, and I froze as beneath me, with a deafening roar, the floor of the crater split up and open in a cascade of fire. The view skews up, catching a glimpse of the twins, now cowering. Then a handheld blur, of rocks beneath my running feet, some grey, some eggs new-laid, red-hot, and shot from the volcano. The angle careers as I dodge more rocks, boulder-size and spat out with incredible force. I must be off the cone now, and running across the caldera floor, the most dangerous place to meet a nuée ardente. Then I fall, and the camera view tilts upwards wildly, recording Chillipepper’s latest Plinian column as it reaches for the skies. The film goes blank.
I woke up in an air ambulance chartered by CNN that was flying me to the best medical treatment network money could buy. I had a broken ankle, burns from sulphuric acid and red-hot rock, also a compound fracture of the skull, from a projectile that would have mashed me without the hard hat. As I lay looking up at the nurse, a seasoned emergency evacuations professional, she cooed: “Your camera’s okay, you were protecting it beneath your body.”
And thus the footage was saved, much more valuable than any photographer.
I opened my mouth, found it dry and cracked. “And everybody else?”
“They’re all fine.”
“Liar,” I said, a good line on which to pass out. I knew nobody could have escaped from the crater, and the rock barrage would have felled an army. Later I learned the rescue workers found most of the others in pieces, burned and bloodied traces. Joe Boy’s Texas belt buckle somehow got spat out recognizable, if twisted and half melted. Of Larissa there was no sign, as if she had been vapourized.
When I next woke, I wept: survivor guilt, the worst loneliness.
I spent a long time in hospital, which I largely remember in short film clips. Cody Veitch, walking in with a big grin and a humongous basket of hothouse orchids. Cut to a trayful of blackened objects in front of me, all of which I had carried up the mountain. The backpack and vest had smouldered; only the thermal overalls stayed largely intact. I picked up my mobile, its case singed, but miraculously still working. Then I turned it so that the network team, the bland interviewer and her cameras, could read an SMS on the screen, from Spider:
BET! GET OFF CHILLIPEPPER! NOW! The date was two minutes before the eruption, when nobody standing on the cone had any indication, from gas emissions or perceptible tremors, of the fiery force about to surface. But Spider knew, the formula or whatever it was deadly accurate. His Nobel was assured.
Cut again, to an Orthodox priest, bearded, yet with a strong resemblance to Larissa. I asked him for a prayer, in Russian, for his sake as much as mine. He obliged, the unknown words flowing over me like an aural balm.
Cut, to more family, this time my parents, prepared to take me home and nurse me. As they said: “We’ve been expecting far worse…”
Cut one last time, to the network team again, filming me as I watched my Chillipepper footage on a wide-screen console. This was their climax, a pound of flesh or vicarious emotion. The only way I could view it was at a technical remove, ignoring the hype: “The ultimate volcano footage, from someone totally on the spot!” Thus detached, I watched, thinking I’d filmed bigger and better volcanic explosions, though at a greater distance. The eruption of Chillipepper wouldn’t have killed anyone, if people hadn’t been fool enough to be actually standing on the damn thing as it blew.
I dabbed my eyes discreetly for the team, the expected network emoticon. When they were safely gone, I cried rivulets, for the deaths I had just seen, even Joe Boy’s. I’d wished him harm, but not that much—he was simply an aging insecure man, protecting his scientific glory. At least he went the way he wanted to, pure Powdermonkey. I guessed all of them had. But I didn’t want to, not anymore. My Powdermonkey days were gone, the surge, the thrill lost with Larissa on the volcano. So was my
career, I guessed. Could I ever look through a lens again, after filming the fiery death of someone I had only just begun to realise I loved?
The only thing to do was…do things. First was an e-mail to Spider. I sent him two words, terse as our relationship had always been: I RESIGN. No reply was needed, but I got it anyway: I UNDERSTAND.
Next I summoned Cody Veitch and resigned in person.
“Call me when you need a book agent,” he said.
Cody might be a network asshole, but he reads people well. Words weren’t entirely a new tool for me: I’d always written to the family, even if it was all about volcanoes. I’d also loved posting to Volcano-Lovers. Could I make something of a new medium, get it to say what I wanted?
One day, months later, I was sitting in the family backyard, the new spring filling the trees with blossom. I had the laptop on my knee, playing Scrabble, that’s how boring and invalid I’d become. Suddenly I closed the game and started typing frantically.
There are ways to tell a story. Something had happened on Chillipepper to make me the only survivor, but there was no easy way to express it.
A dream? Too pat.
Magical realism? Don Nestor and the volcano god arguing my fate? Too arty.
Crime? There was more to it than that. Horror? Beyond the wildest imaginings. A ghost story? Maybe.
What was the best form for my truth?
I let my fingers do the typing or talking, and left it at that. If my film and my writing are at variance, then consider Don Nestor and the volcano, the tales told inside and outside the church. Both have equal validity.
I’m back at the volcano, amid the roar and the fury, running down the slope for my life, and I hear someone coming behind me, a girl’s voice, swearing in Russian, of which I understand two vital words:
“Piroklastichesky potok!”
I know the recommended procedure, find a hollow, don gas mask, and cover myself. A hideous wait would follow as the nuée ardente passed over me on its fiery journey down the mountain. Should I be really lucky, it might not be hot enough to char the flesh off my bones. I eyeball the craterscape frantically, seeking sanctuary. Next moment I trip, go sprawling into…just the ticket. I place the camera underneath me, heap ash over my steel-capped but possibly not fireproof boots, lie down with the backpack over my head.
“Larissa! I’ve only got the one gas mask, you’d better have it.”
“Nichevo. I’ll lie on top, protect you.”
And although she is so small, she stretches my body length and more over me, her skirts and shawl like a thick, rustling blanket. She wraps both arms around me, clasping them beneath my chest. The lappets of her long headscarf trail down into the ash, sealing me off from what is coming.
“Here it is!” she says. Hot darkness flows over us, and all I can hear is the crackle of the corn husks all around, as they burst into flame.
Gather
Christopher Rowe
Christopher Rowe lives in Lexington, Kentucky. He attended both the Clarion West and the Sycamore Hill writing workshops. With his wife, writer Gwenda Bond, he runs a small press, The Fortress of Words, which produces the critically acclaimed magazine Say…
His story “The Voluntary State” was a Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon award finalist. The best of his early short fiction was collected in a chapbook, Bittersweet Creek.
Rowe has been writing a series of stories that portray a very weird, reconfigured Kentucky. “Gather” is one of them.
At the very end of autumn, Gather had thirty-four coins to spend. Commerce—that’s the kind of buying things that used coins instead of goods—was not an opportunity that arose in the north town very often. He planned to spend all thirty-four.
There was a lot to regret about that. All of Gather’s coins were beautiful. They had curling, unknowable writing on one side and little pictures of God on the other. Gather loved to study the coins. He was intimately aware of all their differences and similarities, and aware, too, that with winter coming he’d have few chances to get more.
Besides his work assignments, his sisters would usually each give him a coin for good-bye and remembrance when it was their turn to go down the river to wife for the bad batch men. He’d found one copper coin in a wagon track, where the ground had split from thawing and refreezing in the inconstant autumn temperatures. It showed God’s eyes, all steaming. He’d won a rough gray coin at a fair, when he’d rowed a skiff faster than a sweepsman off a southern barge.
Another obstacle to transactions was the way the act of spending could complicate itself so hypnotically. Offer the merchant a coin for those pepper seeds spilling out of twists of dead, unflickering paper, then put the coin to heart, to lips. Do it again and rock forward and backward and then forward and then backward and put the coin to forehead, to heart, to lips, and on like that, and on until the merchant loses patience and raps one hand against the table and shakes the seeds with the other, arrhythmic. All wrong.
“Liveborn fool,” the merchant said. “A grown man, getting lost in counting games! Buy if you’re buying; we’re closing this fair down.”
Gather snapped to, because these barges were the last before winter, and it would be long years to huddle with just the cold comfort of money before spring.
The merchant spoke again. “Ice chokes the river, boy, and if it freezes over it’ll be you pushing our barges, skate-like, you and all these holy men down from their chapterhouse.” The southerners were bad batch men, mostly, with useless legs bundled up under them if they were merchants or captains, legs self-amputated if they were hard men who needed speed, like the sweeps handlers.
Gather had liked rowing the skiff so quickly, and would have asked about a job on the barge, but he had to stay up the river with the preachers and his sisters. Only bad batch men can be southerners. That was from a bible. So he worked on the docks or on the fishing boats for now, and would work chopping holes in the ice when the river was frozen. Gather was stout and steady.
He considered whether to buy the twists, which would yield long red wreaths of hothouse peppers, if he was careful. He considered his thirty-four coins.
“You can plant a coin,” one of his sisters had said when he’d accumulated two dozen of the coins. “You can plant them, but they won’t grow into anything useful out here.”
But that wasn’t quite true, it wasn’t exactly the truth, and Gather required things to be very exact indeed. Precision was his watchword and his sacrament.
In the end, he bought four twists of seeds from the southern merchant. He bought an old blanket that the seller claimed had been woven by a machine. He bought forty candles, forty pounds of sugar, and forty minutes’ worth of a storyteller’s time.
Forty minutes was long enough for the national anthem, the long night in the garden at Gethsemane, and the history of the first people to come down onto Virginia, who were called Pilgrims and who had starved to death before they were born again for God.
Counting coins again.
The twists and the blanket and the candles and the sugar and the time and that’s down to eleven left for imperishable food. Eleven coins on smoked fish like muskie, or eleven coins on ground grains like spelt, or eleven coins on dried pulses like beans.
Peas and lentils all winter, then.
Weeks later, when the river was frozen hard enough for foot traffic, some of the children came to Gather and asked him to pull their sledge across to the far side. This was forbidden, but their leader, a little girl with green eyes, was PK—a preacher’s kid—which warranted a lot of deference. But more than that she said, “One, two, three, four, Gather walks across the floor…” and on like that—a very clever little girl, very good at rhymes and rhythms. So Gather bundled up in his heaviest coat and his machine blanket and trudged out onto the ice with a towrope slung over his shoulder.
The PK girl had him skirt north of the island where the watchtower stood. (“Thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, further up so we are not seen.”) There
were no preachers manning the tower top that Gather could see, which was a curiosity. Then he heard hammering and work-chanting farther down the river and remembered that today was the first day the preachers would be pushing the big wagons across to the far side to cut up big blocks of frozen soil—the good kind of soil that things would grow in. Many work points, but only for preachers, who had special dispensation from God and specific instructions on where to gather the soil from their bibles.
The PK snapped her fingers in time with her counting to get Gather moving again, and he pulled them on up and across. Her voice faltered with her courage, a dozen yards shy of the eastern shore. The bank was choked with evergreens right down to the ice, towering pines that cut off any view of what lay farther back. Which was just as well, because God lived on the far bank and to go to the house of God was forbidden. That was from a bible, too.
“S’ko back, y’all.” One of the other children finally spoke. Earlier, the PK had hushed the girls whenever they started to speak, which Gather had appreciated because it was rare for a pair and nearly impossible for a group to keep the rhythm.
Gather was pretty sure the speaker was a niece of his, or possibly a very young aunt, some kin anyhow from the tangled net of cousins and sisters who stayed up the river for the preachers. She said, “S’kome.”
The option of returning to town lay out there on the ice, but the PK was clearly not convinced. She stood, considering, and nobody moved to turn the sledge around.
A thick shelf of snow slid off the lowest hanging branch of a nearby tree. It made a noise like shhhh-choom. None of the children jumped or screamed or carried on, but Gather said, “Oh, Lord,” because he thought that maybe God was coming down the bank.
The PK girl said, “Home home home home.”
For Gather, home was his apartment in the carriage house behind the post office. Once he and the children were back on the side of the river where people lived, Gather walked down Dock Street with the river to his left.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 8