Fearful Symmetries (9 page)

When I told my grandmother about it, she said, “You play with her daughter—the girl who is slow but is also so happy when she makes a basket, the way you’ve taught her to make one, laughing like a baby even though she is fourteen and becoming a young woman and doesn’t know she bleeds. That brings you happiness, too—to help her like that. But what is it like for the captain’s wife, who didn’t expect a child like Diane, who thought life would bring something else. Why clean a wonderful fish when your daughter will never grow up the way you want her to, never tell with her own life the story you, her mother, want so much to have told in yours? It would make you scream and shout, wouldn’t it? It would make you catch and let die and then throw the most beautiful creatures away, wouldn’t it? Does this sound familiar, Jimmy? Do you know someone else like this? A mother and a special boy—one who sees what he shouldn’t see, knows what his mother is doing and gets in her way, and she can’t stand it?”

I didn’t understand what she was saying, but I could tell from her eyes—which were blue and bright and crinkled when she smiled—that it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because I would when I was grown up, a man, understand.

When Taps sounded at sunset through the loudspeakers all over the base, I had to stop playing on our front lawn. I had to put my hand over my heart and wait. Standing there as the world got dark, I could smell the odors even worse. When the bugle stopped, I could move again, and I went looking for them. I looked for them every night for a week.

I started in the dumpsters by the machine shops because they were closest. One had the smell, and one didn’t. It wasn’t fish, but it was definitely something dead
because she wanted it to be
. If it was a dog or a cat or a rat, one dumpster or trash can made sense, but it wasn’t just one. I walked on under the electric lights on wires strung over the street and found another dumpster that reeked even worse.

The third one was just a garbage can. It smelled too, and of the same thing. I knew what was in it, but I also didn’t know. I was afraid to think of it—of what it was—even though I knew. It was a
person.
A boy whose hand I held every day. I did not want to remember his name . . . 
because she does not want you to
.

How could it be
someone
? How could a smell in a garbage can or dumpster be
someone
and someone I knew?

The next one—a tiny gray dumpster—smelled the same, and I knew who it was even though I wasn’t supposed to. It burned my nose, but that wasn’t why I was crying. I was very sad, sad as he was, knowing that he was dying and crying because of it.

Something stirred in the eighth dumpster and called my name. I knew the voice—it wanted to help me. It wanted to stop the witch, but how? How does a mother stop a daughter she has to love?

When I stepped up to it, the voice stopped. Only the smell, the rotting, stayed.

I was crying now just like my father, and I was scared that someone would find me like that. MPs patrolled in their cars at night—not many, but sometimes. They would take me back to our quarters and say, “We found him crying by a dumpster. Why would your son be crying on a military base street at night, by a place where people put garbage?”

After they left, my mother would slap me. It wouldn’t matter. I would be waiting for my father to come downstairs, but he wouldn’t be able to. He would be crying and so could not come down, and her slap would be about that as much as how I’d embarrassed her with the military police.

Later, with their door closed, she would tell my father, “They found him crying. Why can’t you both go away?”

She wouldn’t slap him because there would be no need to. He would already be crying.

“They’re all dead!” my mother was shouting. We were in an apartment—a dirty and tiny one—not our quarters on the base. Why were we here? I couldn’t hear anyone else in the apartment.

“How can they all be dead?” I asked, but I knew.
She wanted them to be dead
. She wanted to be alone because only then, she believed, could she be happy. But she wasn’t completely alone yet.

What to do about Jimmy?
she was thinking, and it was like a scream that wouldn’t stop.

I was shivering. I could barely breathe. The air smelled like fried fish, old and burnt. I’d said something to her about my grandmother, and she’d said, “Your grandmother died when you were two! What is wrong with you?” And then, though I hadn’t mentioned him, she said, “You never had a little brother! You couldn’t possibly have held his hand. And the piers—those are on the navy base. You’ve never even been there.”

I hadn’t mentioned the piers.

“And you couldn’t possibly hear him crying.”

“Who?”

“Your father. He’s dead, too. He died three years ago, leaving me like this—with
you—
what was he thinking!

How would my mother do it? I didn’t know, but I could feel her gathering from the air around us, room by room, every shadow, every light, what she needed in order to do it. It would take her a little while, and then it would happen.

Would I just disappear? Would I become something else? Would it hurt?

That night she kept shouting to herself in the living room of the apartment, and I waited. There was nothing to do. Then, as I lay in my bed, in the dark, the Witch Moth appeared at my window. I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it. I got up and let it in and felt its velvet hand against my face. It landed somewhere in the darkness. I knew who it was, and why she’d come.
One witch to stop another
, a voice had whispered—
one who doesn’t know she’s one . . . or doesn’t want to know
.

The others came then, too, their wings whispering in the dark even if my mother had killed them and always would.

I opened my bedroom door because they wanted me to. They flew to her, and in a moment she stopped shouting. She didn’t make a sound. I don’t think she was there anymore.

Later, my grandmother, sitting on a chair in my bedroom under an old floor lamp she’d always liked, said, “Your mother—my only daughter—shouted a lot, and did even more terrible things than that, but you don’t have to worry now. I shouldn’t have waited. In this world—listen to me carefully, Jimmy—she went away three years ago, just ran away, leaving the four of us to enjoy these beautiful quarters. Everything is fine now. . . .” She paused. She took a breath. “I love you. I’ve always loved you more than anything else, Jimmy, but you know that.”

She was smiling. She was looking right at me under the lamp’s light, more real than anything I’d ever known. Her eyes—which were like black velvet, not blue glass—were crinkling. The red spot on her nose was like a tiny flower. “Death is no more frightening than life,” she said with a little laugh. “So why shouldn’t we smile, Jimmy?”

I nodded, and I smiled—and, as I did, everyone who really mattered came back to me on black wings.

Diving deep, something large moves and writhes with the currents, heading into the comforting darkness. The waters become cold, the water pressure increases. A sleek, muscled body drives on, speeding ever downwards, moving fast towards the bottom of everything.

Jeff pulled up at the kerb and stared out of the side window at the remains of his house. The army took down the road blocks a few days ago, the useable highways were being patrolled by the police and the Territorial Army, and things were slowly making their way back towards some kind of normality.

He didn’t want to leave the car. He felt as if it offered him some kind of protective bubble from the world. Not in any literal sense, of course—nobody felt safe now, not after what happened—but inside the car, behind a layer of metal and glass, he could at least compartmentalise his thoughts.

There was no point in staying here, though. He had no choice but to get out. He needed to be sure there were no survivors.

He shifted his gaze to the windscreen and watched a young woman picking her way through the rubble a few yards up ahead. She was dressed in a blue boiler suit, like the kind worn by staff on the factory floor where he used to work, and her hair was pulled back severely from her face. Her pale cheeks were smudged with dirt. Her tiny white hands looked steady enough, but her gait was ungainly as she moved carefully through the broken bricks and shattered timbers that had once formed a home—presumably hers, or that of someone she knew.

Jeff felt like crying. He had lost so much. Everybody had. He didn’t know a single person who remained untouched by the events of the past three weeks. When that thing attacked, it brought with it only destruction. Like a biblical plague, it wiped out everything in its path.

That thing . . . the beast . . . the monster . . . 

Thinking of it now, he felt stupid. It was a child’s word used to describe something he struggled to label in an adult world. Everything changed the day it arrived; even the rules of physics were twisted out of shape, along with the precarious geometry of his own existence.

When he was a boy, he loved reading comics and watching films about monsters. Now he was a man, and he had seen the proof that monsters really existed, he could not even begin to fathom what his younger self had found so fascinating about them.

He opened the door and got out of the car. Night was falling but it was still light enough to see clearly. There was a slight chill in the air. The woman was closer now to his position, and she wasn’t as young as he’d initially thought. Middle aged: possibly in her early forties. The mud on her face clouded her features, at first hiding the wrinkles and the layers of anguish that were now visible.

“Have you seen them?” She approached him as she spoke, stumbling a little as she crossed onto the footpath. He saw that the heel of one of her shoes—the left one—had snapped off during her travels. The woman hadn’t even noticed.

“I’m sorry?”

“We all are . . . we’re all sorry. But have you seen them? My children.”

He clenched his fists. Moments like these, situations in which he could smell and taste and just about touch someone else’s loss, made him nervous. He felt like a little boy again, reading about mythical creatures from a large hardback book.

“No. No, I haven’t.”

“They’re still alive. Somewhere.” She glanced around, at the wreckage of the neighbourhood.” Her eyes were wide. Her lips were slack. “They let me come back here to try and find them. They were in the cellar when it . . . when it hit. The Storm . . .”

That’s what they called it: the Storm. The name seemed fitting. He couldn’t remember who first coined the term, probably some newspaper reporter.

“I . . .” He stopped there, unable to think of anything that might help the woman come to terms with her loss.

“I got out, but they stayed down there. The army truck took me away—they wouldn’t let me go back for them. They were trapped, you see . . . by the rubble. The Storm trapped them inside, underneath. I have to find them.”

She reached out and grabbed his arm. He could barely feel her grip, despite her knuckles whitening as her fingers tightened around his bicep. “Could you help me look for them?” Her smile, when it struggled to the surface, was horrible. Jeff thought he’d never seen an expression so empty.

“I have to . . . I have things to do. This was my house.” He pointed to the pile of bricks and timbers and the scattered glass shards; the piles of earth; the pit formed by a single foot of the Storm.

“We were neighbours?” She peered at him, trying to focus. “Before it happened?”

“I guess so.” He’d never seen her before in his life. This woman was a stranger but they were all supposed to be connected by their shared tragedy. Jeff had never felt that way. He was alone with his ghosts.

They stood there for another moment, as if glued together by some sticky strands of time, and then he pulled away. Her arm remained hanging there, the fingers of her hand curling over empty air.

“My children . . .”

He looked into her eyes and saw nothing, not even an echo of her pain. She was stripped bare, rendered down to nothing but this mindless search for things that were no longer here. He couldn’t tell her, she wouldn’t be told. She needed to discover the truth for herself.

“Good luck,” he said, and he meant it.

Jeff walked away, heading towards the ragged hole in the earth where his house had once stood, the great footprint of the beast that had once passed this way. He wished he’d seen it happen. It must have been an amazing sight, to see the buildings flattened by the gigantic beast as it charged through the neighbourhood and towards the city.

He heard the woman’s scuffling footsteps behind him as she moved away. He wished he had it in him to help her. He hoped she would find her children alive, but doubted she ever would. Not even the bodies would remain. Not even bloodstains.

The Storm came, and that was all. There was no reason for its arrival. It wasn’t like the old movies he’d seen as a kid, where an atomic detonation or the constant experimentation of mankind caused a rift in the earth or a disturbance in the atmosphere, and out stumbled a stop-motion nightmare. No, it was nothing like that. The Storm came, it destroyed whatever it encountered, and it went away again, sated.

They were unable to fight it. The authorities didn’t know what to do; the army and navy and air force were at a loss: none of their weapons had any effect on the Storm. So they waited it out, hoping the thing would either wear itself out and tire of the rampage, or move on, crossing the border into another country. Fingers hovered over the buttons of nuclear launch systems. Members of parliament voted in secret chambers. The nation prepared for a great and terrible sacrifice.

He remembered those first surprisingly clear pieces of footage transmitted on the Internet, and then again on the news channels: HD quality CCTV pictures of some great lizard-like beast emerging from the shadows on the coast, a B Movie come to life. But this was not a man in a suit, or a too-crisp GCI image. It was colossal, the height of two tower blocks, one standing on top of the other. Its arm span was a half a mile across, but it barely needed to stretch them so far to tear down a church, a town hall, a factory warehouse. . . . Bullets and bombs simply bounced off its thick, plated hide to create more damage to the surrounding area. Its call was the trumpet of Armageddon. When it opened its mouth to roar, the sound was unlike anything humanity had heard before.

Nobody knew what the creature was, where it came from, why it appeared. The scientists mumbled in jargon, talked about tectonic plates, seismic events, and then finally, they went quiet. They locked themselves into deep underground laboratories to try and invent something that would kill the thing.

And then . . . then it went away, slinking back into the ocean, the waves covering it like a blanket. The sea bubbled. Ships capsized. The coastal barriers fell. The Storm passed.

But the Storm could return at any time. They all knew this, but it went unspoken. There were celebrations, the blockades came down, people started to rebuild what had been ravaged. But somewhere back in the shadows, or under the dark waters, the Storm waited. Perhaps it even watched.

Jeff walked across the roughly turned earth, his boots hard and solid as he made his way towards the hole in the ground. When he reached it, he went down onto his knees and peered over the rim. It was deep, with standing water gathered at its base, and in each of the toe prints. There was no sign of a body, or of body parts. His family were wiped out, deleted, removed without trace from the face of the earth.

He smiled, gritting his teeth.

As a boy he’d loved monsters. As a man, he wasn’t so sure how he felt.

If it were not for the Storm, he would have been forced to think of some other way to dispose of them, but the monster answered his desperate prayers and came to cleanse him, to remove the evidence of his crimes.

He wondered . . .

If he hoped hard enough, wished for long enough, might it come back? There were other people he wanted to get rid of. It was a nice thought, but he knew it was a fantasy. The situation had nothing to do with him; it was simply a handy coincidence. Even now, it amused him to think something this absurd had saved him from being found out. It was as if one of those childhood comic books had come to life.

Jeff got to his feet and moved slowly away from the ruins. The breeze turned into a light wind, and it whipped up a mass of litter, sending papers and packets and scraps of material scampering into the gutter. Jeff watched them as they tussled. He remembered the way his family struggled: Katherine and the girls, fighting for their sad little lives. It was like watching a movie, only less real. The actors didn’t even look like the people they were trying to portray.

They’d never looked like his family, those actors. The woman he’d married, the daughters he’d fathered, were at some point replaced by strangers. That was why they had to go. It all seemed so clear, and then, without thinking, he’d done it: he had ended them. There was no memory of planning, or running through it all in his mind. There was only the act itself, and the mess left behind.

The wind died down. The litter went still. He smelled old fires and diesel fumes. He tasted bitterness at the back of his throat. Something huge loomed against the horizon, its form unclear, fluttering and unstable.

Jeff walked back to the car, climbed inside, turned on the engine, and waited. He watched the woman as she made her way across the street, towards yet another ruined house. He smiled. Inside his head, he heard the voice of the Storm.

The roaming woman sat down in the rubble, staring at the ground. She clenched and unclenched her hands and then started rooting in the dirt, as if she might find her lost children there, somewhere beneath the disturbed top soil. He imagined her brushing away gravel to see a face staring up at her, eyes closed, lips sealed shut on a silent scream.

Clouds moved behind her, shifting across the low red sky. Something dark shimmered beyond them, like a promise straining to be fulfilled. He thought of giant butterfly wings, and then of the opening mouth of the Storm.

Jeff started the car but waited a few moments—still watching the woman—before driving away. He didn’t turn on the radio. All they ever talked about was the Storm.

As he headed down the road, towards some unidentified place he’d never been before, he thought about this new world and wondered how everyone would cope with the way things were now, the changes happening in the wake of the monster. Jeff had stepped through the veil, but the rest of the world followed behind him.

He drove all night, and then he stopped the car in a lonely place to sit and look up at the sky. Trees stirred like wraiths against the breezy evening. The stars pulsed, the darkness bulged, threatening to burst open like a ripe melon, and he tried to catch a glimpse of the old world, the one they’d all left behind. After a long time, he gave up trying.

And at the bottom of the sea, curled up among the old wrecks in a long, deep, nameless trench, something yawns and blinks its eyes before drifting back into a deep, soundless slumber. It dreams of screams and bloodshed, and finds comfort in the sweet memory of Man’s fear.