The little girl was the host’s sister. She died in childhood, hit by a car while running across the road as part of a dare devised by her brother.
By the time David and I ran out of the house, two of the other guests had already started being able to see for themselves, and the number of people at the party had risen to fifteen.
After four beers my mind was a little fuzzy, and for a while I was almost able to forget. Then I heard a soft splashing sound from below and looked to see a young boy climbing out of the stagnant water in the pool. He didn’t look up but just walked over the flagstones to the gate and then padded out through the entrance to the motel. I could still hear the soft sound of his wet feet long after he’d disappeared into the darkness. The brother who’d held his head under a moment too long; the father who’d been too busy watching someone else’s wife putting lotion on her thighs; or the mother who’d fallen asleep. Someone would be having a visitor tonight.
When we got back to the house after the party, and tried to get back into the lab, we found that we couldn’t open the door. The lock had fused. Something had attacked the metal of the tumblers, turning the mechanism into a solid lump of metal. We stared at each other, by now feeling very sober, and then turned to look through the glass upper portion of the door. Everything inside looked the way it always had, but I now believe that even early, before we knew what was happening, everything had already been set in motion. The beckies work in strange and invisible ways.
David got the axe from the garage, and we broke through the door to the laboratory. We found the vat of MindWorks empty. A small hole had appeared in the bottom of the glass, and there was a faint trail where the contents had flowed across the floor, making small holes at several points. It had doubled back on itself, and in a couple of places it had also flowed against gravity. It ended in a larger hole which, it transpired, dripped through into a pipe. A pipe which went out back into the municipal water system.
The first reports were on CNN at seven o’clock the next morning. Eight murders in downtown Jacksonville, and three on the University campus. David’s cold. Reports of people suddenly going crazy, screaming at people who weren’t there, running in terror from voices in their head and acting on impulses that they claimed weren’t theirs. By lunchtime the problem wasn’t just confined to people we might have come into contact with: it had started to spread on its own.
I don’t know why it happened like this. Maybe we just made a mistake somewhere. Perhaps it was something as small and simple as a chiral isomer, some chemical which the beckies created in a mirror image of the way it should be. That’s what happened with Thalidomide, and that’s what we created. A Thalidomide of the soul.
Or maybe there was no mistake. Perhaps that’s just the way it is. Maybe the only spirits who stick around are the ones you don’t want to see. The ones who can turn people into psychotics who riot, murder, or end their lives, through the hatred or guilt they bring with them. These people have always been here, all the time, staying close to the people who remember them. Only now they are no longer invisible. Or silent.
A day later there were reports in European cities, at first just the ones where I’d sent my letters, then spreading rapidly across the entire land mass. By the time my letters reached their recipients, the beckies I’d breathed over them had multiplied a thousandfold, breaking the paper down and reconstituting the molecules to create more of themselves. They were so clever, our children, and they shared the ambitions of their creators. If they’d needed to, they could probably have formed themselves into new letters, and lay around until someone posted them all over the world. But they didn’t, because coughing, or sneezing, or just breathing is enough to spread the infection. By the following week a state of emergency was in force in every country in the world.
A mob killed David before the police got to him. He never got to see Rebecca. I don’t know why. She just didn’t come. I was placed under house arrest and then taken to the facility to help with the feverish attempts to come up with a cure. There is none, and there never will be. The beckies are too smart, too aggressive, and too powerful. They just take any antidote, break it down, and use it to make more of themselves.
They don’t need the vote. They’re already in control.
The moon is out over the ocean, casting glints over the tides as they rustle back and forth with a sound like someone slowly running their finger across a piece of paper. A little while ago I heard a siren in the far distance. Apart from that all is quiet.
I think it’s unlikely I shall riot, or go on a killing spree. In the end, I will simply go.
The times when Karen comes to see me are bad. She didn’t stop writing to me because she lost interest, it turns out. She stopped writing because she had been pregnant by me and didn’t want me involved and died through some nightmare of childbirth without ever telling her mother my name. I hadn’t brought any contraception. I think we both figured life would let you get away with things like that. When David and I talked about Karen over that game of pool she was already dead. She will come again tonight, as she always does, and maybe tonight will be the night when I decide I cannot bear it any longer. Perhaps seeing her here, at the motel where David and I stayed that summer, will be enough to make me do what I have to do.
If it isn’t her who gives me the strength, then someone else will, because I’ve started seeing other people now too. It’s quite surprising how many—or maybe it isn’t, when you consider that all of this is partly my fault. So many people have died, and will die, all of them with something to say to me. Every night there are more, as the world slowly winds down. There are two of them here now, standing in the court and looking up at me. Perhaps in the end I shall be the last one alive, surrounded by silent figures in ranks that reach out to the horizon.
Or maybe, as I hope, some night David and Rebecca will come for me, and I will go with them.
FIGURES IN RAIN
By Chet Williamson
There were only two other people waiting in the reception area of the King’s Arms Tavern when we arrived. It was 9:30, the last seating time, and when Caitlin and I entered the dimly lit room we spent several seconds folding the umbrella and shaking the droplets from our coats. It was raining furiously, drenching the stones of Williamsburg, plunging the already dark streets into even greater darkness.
The weather did little to improve either our mood or the looks of the town. Colonial Williamsburg was far less picturesque in late February than in the seasons in which we had previously visited it. Caitlin and I had both come here as children, dutifully brought by our parents, and we had done the same with Robert, making the Williamsburg/Jamestown/Monticello circuit the summer when he was between sixth and seventh grades. Too old to wear a tricorn and carry a wooden gun, and too young to appreciate the painstaking care with which the colonial community had been recreated, he found little enjoyment in the two days we spent there. Caitlin and I, however, had been taken with the totality of the experience—the crafts, the buildings, the food, and the people who recreated so vividly what it must have been like to live in English America.
We had found ourselves guiltily wishing that we had been there alone, and had returned to the place one long Easter weekend when Robert was in college. We found that Williamsburg in spring was even more exquisite than in summer. The gardens were a brilliantly hued profusion of lilies, daffodils, and tulips, and the trees were either blossoming or newly greening. It was a glorious time to be there, and there was the further benefit that Caitlin and I were rediscovering, after eighteen years of parenthood, what it was like to be lovers once more. With no duties to Robert beyond the financial and distantly (in space, at least) supportive, we had more time for each other. The empty nest proved, at first, to be as great a blessing for us as independence proved to be for Robert.
Then other concerns replaced those we had had for our son. A series of financial setbacks in my business required my spending more time at my office, and a restructu
ring of the staff which Caitlin oversaw meant that she brought home far more work than before. We were both at least a decade away from retirement and every day were being made more aware of the necessity of storing up nuts against the long winter. A series of annoying if non-life threatening health problems did little to ease our commercial burdens, and the deaths of my mother and father further increased my depression. Dad went only a few months after my mother died of cancer. They loved each other deeply, and each had depended on the other. I think he willed himself into death when she died, and when it came he welcomed it.
I honestly believe that we went to Williamsburg in late February in desperation. We had grown apart, but not from choice. Both Caitlin and I knew that at this time in our lives more than any other we needed the other’s strength and love to help buttress ourselves against the unpredictability of the world and of our own flesh.
Let's get away, we said to each other. We would leave everything behind, go somewhere we loved, and just be together. Our batteries were dead, and maybe several days alone together would give us a jump start. Maybe the world could become remarkable again.
Even before we arrived, it felt wrong. We had overslept and had to pack in haste, not even taking the time to remove from the trunk several boxes of my parents’ personal things that I had finally been clearing out of their house. The sky was overcast, and it started raining by mid-afternoon when we crossed the Virginia border.
We arrived at the Williamsburg Visitors’ Center just before it closed, and bought multi-day passes, then made reservations at Christiana Campbell’s Tavern the following evening and King’s Arms Tavern the next. We had seafood that evening at a restaurant in Merchants’ Square, a collection of shops outside the colonial area, and then walked down Duke of Gloucester Street in a light, cold rain that grew heavier as we went. We gave it up, turned around, and went back to the car and drove to our motel. Although we were both tired from the drive, we felt duty-bound to make love. It was done without much passion, as are most deeds inspired by duty.
There followed two more days of intermittent cold rain, during which we spent most of our time indoors. Exteriors offered little: the gardens were brown and yellow, and the trees glistened only with the rainwater on their bark. The streets were dotted with puddles, and the vast, grassy areas were sodden.
The rain and the gray season brought out few tourists, and those who braved the elements seemed more sternly determined to see what they had to see than enchanted with the near-perfect recreation of the past. The costumed re-enactors at each occupied site maintained their good spirits, and energetically tried to brighten the fatally dull day by their interaction with the sparse crowds, but succeeded only fitfully.
Caitlin and I found none of the magic we had sought and so needed. The days were flat and gray. We took little joy in them or in each other’s company. The sole pleasure of the first day was the meal at Campbell’s Tavern. Though there were a few empty tables, there was still a sense of warmth and conviviality in the candlelit rooms. We were seated away from any windows, so the weather was of no concern, and the food was hearty and abundant.
Still, as soon as we stepped outside into the rain, the gray mood returned. Back at the motel, Caitlin soaked in the tub with a novel, while I, in spite of my promise to myself to do no work, cheated slightly. I brought up a small box of my parents’ photo albums and scrapbooks from the trunk of the car, planning to see if there was anything my surviving aunts and uncles might want as a keepsake.
Caitlin gave me a you promised look when she came out of the bathroom and saw what I was doing. I closed the books and took a shower. She was sleeping when I climbed into bed.
The second and last full day held more of the same. We spent several hours in the well-lit Rockefeller Folk Art Center, but the proliferation of flat, two-dimensional primitive work did little to assuage our hunger for the deep and rich and unexpected. The shock that our systems required was not to be found there.
It was highly unlikely that we would experience it that night either. The King’s Arms Tavern was slightly more formal—and more expensive—than Christiana Campbell’s. We checked our wet coats, gave our name to the hostess in colonial dress, and sat down to wait on a bench against the wall. Fiddle and fife music sounded from somewhere within.
I smiled at the young man sitting next to me, and he smiled back. Unlike most tourists, he was wearing a suit, dress shirt and necktie, and his black wingtips were polished to a high gloss. His hair was meticulously combed in the retro style that so many his age are adopting. He was one of those people who look instantly familiar, like someone you might have seen on television in a supporting role for years but to whom you had never attached a name.
“Lousy night,” he said without a trace of true complaint. He might rather have been observing that the evening was beautifully clear and balmy.
I agreed, and Caitlin smiled empathetically. “Warm and dry in here, though,” I added.
“Yeah. You ever eat here?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “It’s very good.”
“Try the peanut soup,” Caitlin advised.
Both the man and his wife gave little laughs of discomfort. The wife was wearing a flowered print dress and low white shoes unseasonable both in terms of weather and style. She was slim everywhere but her abdomen, a rounded mass that told eloquently of her pregnancy.
“How long now?” asked Caitlin with a warm concern that expressed her motherly (or grandmotherly) instincts. They were, I reminded myself sourly, young enough to be our children.
“Two more months,” the girl said, her voice as vaguely familiar as her husband’s face. I was trying to figure out where I might have seen them before, and was about to ask where they were from, when the hostess came into the room and said that our table was ready.
“Enjoy your meal,” I told them as we followed the woman, who led us to the second floor and seated us at one of the two windows in the room that faced the street. Rain still pattered against the glass, and Caitlin and I could just make out the occasional passersby hurrying through the downpour, dimly seen in the tavern’s pale, evocative front porch lights, and the residual beams of candlelight that fell onto the street from the windows where we diners sat.
We had ordered our meals, and when I looked up from the Sally Lunn bread I was buttering, I saw that the young couple from downstairs had been seated at the other window table, so that the man and I were facing each other. I smiled and nodded, and he raised his hand in a shy wave.
Throughout the meal, I found myself looking out the windows, focusing not on the kaleidoscopic surface of the glass, where raindrops struck, exploded, and made uneven rivulets as they ran toward the bottom sill, but past and through and around them, out onto the dark street, made darker by the extinguishing of the front lights. No one moved on the street below. The tourists who on previous visits had wandered the ancient streets until quite late, soaking in the ambience that darkness sealed upon the town, had been discouraged by the rain and cold. No one would walk the lanes of Williamsburg tonight out of pleasure.
Still I looked, as did Caitlin. Our attention meandered from the plates before us to the darkness on the other side of the panes, and was claimed at times by the coming and going of our server and the fiddler who drifted through the rooms, playing, I assumed, colonial airs.
Though I hadn’t noticed the young couple being served, my attention fixed as it was on the windows, my plate, and the silence that lay between Caitlin and me, their courses kept pace with ours, despite our earlier seating. I occasionally glanced over, and a smile passed between the young man and me signaling a shared appreciation of the food. When I continued to watch, I observed his solicitousness toward his wife, whose back was to me. He spoke quietly to her, frequently took her hand, and on occasion fed her from his own fork when he thought himself unobserved.
As Caitlin and I sat together over our coffee, her expression was sadder than I had ever seen it. Her hand was resting on the ta
blecloth inches from mine, and I moved until our fingers were just touching. She smiled, just a small flower in the grim winter landscape of her face, and took my fingers in her own, then shook her head and said quietly, “What’s wrong with us?”
What indeed? I still loved Caitlin and had no doubt that she loved me. I had no answer and only turned and looked out the window once more.
At first I thought that what I saw was a trick of the light, a car’s beams whispering across the dark street, or a soft reflection in the glass from inside the room. I then realized that I was seeing a person walking across Duke of Gloucester Street, a person who was gleaming in the rain and the night as though lit from within. I pressed my face against the glass, cupping my eyes with my hands like blinders to close out the light from within the room.
The tension of my movement alarmed Caitlin, and she leaned toward me, but when I whispered, “Look,” she turned her gaze to the pane. From her hissed intake of breath I was sure that she too saw it.
The Raleigh Tavern, open only during the day as an historical site, was across the street, and the figure was moving past it, toward a wooden gate to the right of the building. It was a man, as far as I could tell, wearing a three-cornered hat, a shirt, a vest, and knee breeches. I could make out no colors other than various shades of gray. The figure moved slowly, but with a sense of purpose. It was as though he were walking briskly, but in slow-motion, as though time had slowed for him. We could not see his face, but he carried himself as though he felt no rain. His head was high, his arms swung loosely at his sides.
The monochromatic glow from him illuminated the descending curtain of rain, the wet surface of the street, and, as he drew near to it, the gate, which he did not pause to open but instead passed through. In another few heartbeats he was out of sight.
Mister October Page 8
