He looked down at Jill. The bite on her arm was almost colorless, but radiating out from it were black lines that ran like tattoos of vines up her arm. More of the black lines were etched on her throat and along the sides of her face. Black goo oozed from two or three smaller bites that Jack hadn’t seen before. Were they from what happened at the school, or from just now? No way to tell; the rain had washed away all of the red, leaving wounds that opened obscenely and in which white grubs wriggled in the black wetness.
Her heart beat like the wings of a hummingbird. Too fast, too light.
Outside, Mom and the others moaned for them.
“Jack . . . ” she said, and her voice was even smaller, farther away.
“Yeah?”
“Remember when you were in the hospital in January?”
“Yeah.”
“You . . . you told me about your dream?” She still spoke in the dazed voice of a dreamer.
“Which dream?” he asked, though he thought he already knew.
“The one about . . . the big wave. The black wave.”
“The black nothing,” he corrected. “Yeah, I remember.”
She sniffed but it didn’t stop the tears from falling. “Is . . . is that what this is?”
Jack kissed her cheek. As they sat there, her skin had begun to change, the intense heat gradually giving way to a clammy coldness. Outside, the pounding, the moans, the rain, the wind, the thunder—it was all continuous.
“Yeah,” he said quietly, “I think so.”
They listened to the noise and Jack felt himself getting smaller inside his own body.
“Will it hurt?” she asked.
Jack had to think about that. He didn’t want to lie but he wasn’t sure of the truth.
The roar of noise was fading. Not getting smaller but each separate sound was being consumed by a wordless moan that was greater than the sum of its parts.
“No,” he said, “it won’t hurt.”
Jill’s eyes drifted shut and there was just the faintest trace of a smile on her lips. There was no reason for it to be there, but it was there.
He held her until all the warmth was gone from her. He listened for the hummingbird flutter of her heart and heard nothing.
He touched his face. His tears had stopped with her heart. That was okay, he thought. That’s how it should be.
Then Jack laid Jill down on the floor and stood up.
The moan of the darkness outside was so big now. Massive. Huge.
He bent close and peered out through the peephole.
The pounding on the door stopped. Mom and the others outside began to turn, one after the other, looking away from the house. Looking out into the yard.
Jack took a breath.
He opened the door.
12
The lightning and the outspill of light from the lantern showed him the porch and the yard, the car and the road. There were at least fifty of the white-faced people there. None of them looked at him. Mom was right there, but she had her back to him. He saw Roger crawling through the water so he could see past the truck. He saw Dad rise awkwardly to his feet, his face gone but the pistol still dangling from his finger.
All of them were turned away, looking past the abandoned truck, facing the farm road.
Jack stood over Jill’s body and watched as the wall of water from the shattered levee came surging up the road toward the house. It was so beautiful.
A big, black wall of nothing.
Jack looked at his mother, his father, his uncle, and then down at Jill.
He would not be going into the dark without them.
The dark was going to take them all.
Jack smiled.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
“Wake up,” she whispers, as ever she is always whispering with those demanding, ashen lips, but I do not open my eyes. I do not wake up, as she has bidden me to do, but, instead, lie drifting in this amniotic moment, unwilling to move one instant forward and incapable of retreating by even the scant breadth of a single second. For now, there is
only
now; yet, even so, an infinity stretches all around, haunted by dim shapes and half-glimpsed phantasmagoria, and if I named this time and place, I might name it Pluto or Orcus or Dis Pater. But never would I name it purgatorial, for here there are no purging flames nor trials of final purification from venial transgressions. I have not arrived here by any shade of damnation and await no deliverance, but scud gently through Pre-Adamite seas, and so might I name this wide pacific realm
Womb,
the uterus common to all that which has ever risen squirming from mere insensate earth. I might name it
Mother.
I might best call it nothing at all, for a name may only lessen and constrain this inconceivable vastness.
“Wake up now,” she whispers, but I shall rather seek these deeper currents.
No longer can I distinguish that which is
without
from that which is
within.
In ocher and loden green and malachite dusks do I dissolve and somehow still retain this flesh and this unbeating heart and this blood grown cold and stagnant in my veins. Even as I slip free, I am constrained, and in the eel-grass shadows do I descry her desperate, damned form bending low above this warm and salty sea where she has laid me down. She is Heaven, her milky skin is star pierced through a thousand, thousand times to spill forth droplets of the dazzling light which is but one half of her unspeakable art. She would have me think it the totality, as though a dead woman is blind merely because her eyes remain shut. Long did I suspect the whole of her. When I breathed and had occasion to walk beneath the sun and moon, even then did I harbor my suspicions and guess at the blackness fastidiously concealed within that blinding glare. And here, at this moment, she is to me as naked as in the hour of her birth, and no guise nor glamour would ever hide from me that perpetual evening of her soul. At this moment, all and everything is laid bare. I am gutted like a gasping fish, and she is flayed by revelation.
She whispers to me, and I float across endless plains of primordial silt and gaping hadopelgaic chasms where sometimes I sense the awful minds of other sleepers, ancient before the coming of time, waiting alone in sunken temples and drowned sepulchers. Below me lies the gray and glairy mass of Professor Huxley’s
Bathybius haeckelii,
the boundless, wriggling sheet of
Urschleim
that encircles all the globe. Here and there do I catch sight of the bleached skeletons of mighty whales and ichthyosauria, their bones gnawed raw by centuries and millennia and aeons, by the busy proboscides of nameless invertebrata. The struts of a Leviathan’s ribcage rise from the gloom like a cathedral’s vaulted roof, and a startled retinue of spiny crabs wave threatful pincers that I might not forget I am the intruder. For this I
would
forget, and forswear that tattered life she stole and now so labors to restore, were that choice only mine to make.
I know this is no ocean, and I know there is no firmament set out over me. But I am sinking, all the same, spiraling down with infinite slowness towards some unimaginable beginning or conclusion (as though there is a difference between the two). And you watch on worriedly, and yet always that devouring curiosity to defuse any fear or regret. Your hands wander impatiently across copper coils and spark tungsten filaments, tap upon sluggish dials and tug so slightly at the rubber tubes that enter and exit me as though I have sprouted a bouquet of umbilici. You mind the gate and the road back, and so I turn away and would not see your pale, exhausted face.
With a glass dropper, you taint my pool with poisonous tinctures of quicksilver and iodine, meaning to shock me back into a discarded shell.
And I misstep, then, some fraction of a footfall this way or that, and now somehow I have not yet felt the snip that divided
me
from
me.
I sit naked on a wooden stool near
Der Ocean auf dem Tische,
the great vivarium tank you have fashioned from iron and plate glass and marble.
You will be my goldfish,
you laugh.
You will be my newt. What better part could you ever play, my dear?
You kiss my bare shoulders and my lips, and I taste brandy on your tongue. You hold my breasts cupped in your hands and tease my nipples with your teeth. And I know none of this is misdirection to put my mind at ease, but rather your delight in changes to come. The experiment is your bacchanal, and the mad glint in your eyes would shame any maenad or rutting satyr. I have no delusions regarding what is soon to come. I am the sacrifice, and it matters little or none at all whether the altar you have raised is to Science or Dionysus.
“Oh, if I could stand in your place,” you sigh, and again your lips brush mine. “If I could
see
what you will see and
feel
what you will feel!”
“I will be your eyes,” I say, echoing myself. “I will be your curious, probing hands.” These might be wedding vows that we exchange. These might be the last words of the condemned on the morning of her execution.
“Yes, you shall, but I would make this journey myself and have need of no surrogate.” Then and now, I wonder in secret if you mean everything you say. It is easy to declare envy when there is no likelihood of exchanging places. “Where you go, my love, all go in due time, but you may be the first ever to return and report to the living what she has witnessed there.”
You kneel before me, as if in awe or gratitude, and your head settles upon my lap. I touch your golden hair with fingers that have scarcely begun to feel the tingling and chill, the numbness that will consume me soon enough. You kindly offered to place the lethal preparation in a cup of something sweet that I would not taste its bitterness, but I told you how I preferred to know my executioner and would not have his grim face so pleasantly hooded. I took it in a single acrid spoonful, and now we wait, and I touch your golden hair.
“When I was a girl,” I begin, then must pause to lick my dry lips.
“You have told me this story already.”
“I would have you hear it once more. Am I not accorded some last indulgence before the stroll to the gallows?”
“It will not be a gallows,” you reply, but there is a sharp edge around your words, a brittle frame and all the gilt flaking free. “Indeed, it will be little more than a quick glance stolen through a window before the drapes are drawn shut against you. So, dear, you do not stand to
earn
some final coddling, not this day, and so I would not hear that tale repeated, when I know it as well as I know the four syllables of my own beloved’s name.”
“You
will
hear me,” I say, and my fingers twine and knot themselves tightly in your hair. A few flaxen strands pull free, and I hope I can carry them down into the dark with me. You tense, but do not pull away or make any further protest. “When I was a girl, my own brother died beneath the wheels of an ox cart. It was an accident, of course. But still his skull was broken and his chest all staved in, though, in the end, no one was judged at fault.”
I sit on my stool, and you kneel there on the stone floor, waiting for me to be done, restlessly awaiting my passage and the moment when I have been rendered incapable of repeating familiar tales you do not wish to hear retold.
“I held him, what remained of him. I felt the shudder when his child’s soul pulled loose from its prison. His blue eyes were as bright in that instant as the glare of sunlight off freshly fallen snow. As for the man who drove the cart, he committed suicide some weeks later, though I did not learn this until I was almost grown.”
“There is no ox cart here,” you whisper. “There are no careless hooves and no innocent drover.”
“I did not say he was a drover. I have never said that. He was merely a farmer, I think, on his way to market with a load of potatoes and cabbages. My brother’s entire unlived life traded for only a few bushels of potatoes and cabbages. That must be esteemed a bargain, by any measure.”
“We should begin now,” you say, and I don’t disagree, for my legs are growing stiff and an indefinable weight has begun to press in upon me. I was warned of these symptoms, and so there is not surprise, only the fear that I have prayed I would be strong enough to bear. You stand and help me to my feet, then lead me the short distance to the vivarium tank. Suddenly, I cannot escape the fanciful and disagreeable impression that your mechanical apparatuses and contraptions are watching on. Maybe, I think, they have been watching all along. Perhaps, they were my jurors, an impassionate, unbiased tribunal of brass and steel and porcelain, and now they gaze out with automaton eyes and exhale steam and oily vapors to see their sentence served. You told me there would be madness, that the toxin would act upon my mind as well as my body, but in my madness I have forgotten the warning.
“Please, I would not have them see me, not like this,” I tell you, but already we have reached the great tank that will only serve as my carriage for these brief and extraordinary travels—if your calculations and theories are proved correct—or that will become my deathbed, if, perchance, you have made some critical error. There is a stepladder, and you guide me, and so I endeavor not to feel their enthusiastic, damp-palmed scrutiny. I sit down on the platform at the top of the ladder and let my feet dangle into the warm liquid, both my feet and then my legs up to the knees. It is not an objectionable sensation, and promises that I will not be cold for much longer. Streams of bubbles rise slowly from vents set into the rear wall of the tank, stirring and oxygenating this translucent primal soup of viscous humors, your painstaking brew of protéine and hæmatoglobin, carbamide resin and cellulose, water and phlegm and bile. All those substances believed fundamental to life, a recipe gleaned from dusty volumes of Medieval alchemy and metaphysics, but also from your own researches and the work of more modern scientific practitioners and professors of chemistry and anatomy. Previously, I have found the odor all but unbearable, though now there seems to be no detectable scent at all.
“Believe me,” you say, “I will have you back with me in less than an hour.” And I try hard then to remember how long an hour is, but the poison leeches away even the memory of time. With hands as gentle as a midwife’s, you help me from the platform and into my strange bath, and you keep my head above the surface until the last convulsions have come and gone and I am made no more than any cadaver.