by Brian Hodge
That’s the way it unfolded for me, and once she woke up too, Ashleigh looked to be on the same track.
“Is it an earthquake?” she sat up in bed and asked.
While it sounded like one, the chilly November night filling with the sounds of splintering and collapse, it didn’t feel like one. Nothing was shaking, not for us.
I left the lights off while I went to the window, because something out there was making people scream, and I didn’t want to draw attention. I twisted the blinds open over the nearest bedroom window, but this only overlooked the backyard, and nothing was going on there.
So I crept toward the living room, where the windows overlooked the street, but before I even got there, I knew that bad had gone to worse, whatever it was, because now all the dogs in the neighborhood were baying, terrible throat-shredding howls that sounded as if nothing they could do would give full voice to the frenzy of their fear. Dogs have a keen sense of what’s natural and what isn’t, and for these, something had crossed that barrier.
I had no doubt what it was.
Or would you have to call her who?
Just the same, I still couldn’t process what was going on outside my window. Even something as low as a neighborhood like ours has its own skyline, familiar roofs and stable trees. Live there long enough and you could sketch it from memory.
But ours was changed. No…
Changing.
Roofs were gone, houses gone, piles of rubble where there had been form and structure and charm. Even as I watched, the far side of the house next door seemed to spew smoke, only unlike any smoke I’d ever seen. Because it wasn’t smoke. Instead, it was as if the side of the house was breaking up into clouds of particles that swirled and dissipated like dust. Lights began to jitter and spark in our neighbor’s windows—
Then I ducked away from my own and scrambled for the bedroom, for Ashleigh, and she was screaming to know what was happening. I was desperate and deluded enough to think we could escape, mind processing a billion synaptic connections a second as I plotted a course down the outside stairs and across the darkened backyard, or maybe we should bail from the bathroom window onto the sloping roof and launch our flight from there, and we’d have to find clothes somewhere else.
Then the house gave a shudder and a lurch, filled with a sound I’d never heard before, somewhere between a clawing and a whir. We could hear Lara screaming down below, then she stopped and everything seemed to vibrate around us with an energy that was more felt than heard, like the deep plummeting groan of some immense thing’s satisfaction.
And we were trying, we really were, trying to get somewhere, but now no route seemed viable, and destruction to come from everywhere at once.
The floor began to blossom from below, in the spot where the old staircase had once been, in the days when the house was one. Floorboards and beams rippled like a wave of clay, then flurried into puffs of ash and grains no bigger than sand. The floor tilted and we dropped, buffeted by everything that wasn’t nailed down.
An arm came through from below, longer than long, then another, fingers that could wrap around a telephone pole splaying wide and digging in, heaving to haul the rest of the body through in a motion that seemed effortless.
But of course we saw the head before the rest, and this alone would’ve been enough to do in most people’s minds right there. The glimpse I’d had in that window in Portland hadn’t been enough to do justice to the wrongness of it all. And because there wasn’t nearly room enough for it to stand, it crouched, watching as Ashleigh and I struggled to crawl away through the wreckage.
I could still see my mother in this new being, traces of her, overlapping echoes of what she’d been stirred in with the unfathomable ambitions of what she’d allowed to take her over. You could call it a god, I suppose, if you didn’t know better. And for all I knew, this had happened before, in antiquity, some skewed truth to the outlandish old legends after all—the sons of God finding the daughters of Earth beautiful, and coming down to take them and breed monstrosities.
It wanted to appeal, I could see that now. It had borrowed notions of beauty and made them its own. It had stolen ideas that were too subtle for this remote intelligence to comprehend, then in an attempt to improve on them had misinterpreted them all.
Tall was good, so it had made her taller. Thin was good, so it had made her thinner. Prominent cheekbones and a defined jaw, contoured waist and smiling mouth, straight white teeth and wide-spaced eyes—it had begun with what had been deemed good, and exaggerated them until they became nightmarish. It was apparently unable to decide whether alabaster skin or dark skin was better, so it had marbled her with both. Then augmented her with aesthetics that could only have come with it from elsewhere, because nothing in this world could’ve found them appealing.
Ashleigh clung harder and turned her head into me as we were whipped by a cold, wet wind that gusted through the hole in the house and up through the floor.
It saw me, truly saw me—I could see this reflected in the vast pale orbs of its eyes. There was no way to tell what, if anything, of Helen Lytner remained in this entity, if the circuitry of her memories had been obliterated by everything that had overlaid it. Yet she saw me…and recognized who I was.
As if a long, long search had come to an end.
There’s something wrong with it, my brother had said, but he’d seemed clueless, too close to grasp what was obvious to me, coming in a nauseating dawn of insight and intuition.
This thing that thought itself beautiful, magnificent? To some it may have been a god, but it understood nothing. It was a child. It may have been powerful, but it was still a child, needy and impulsive and prone to a child’s tantrums.
It reached—she reached—to pull us both closer, no matter how Ashleigh and I tried to fight it, because strength, too, is good, and it had made her stronger.
She reached, gathering us up, and I wondered why, after all this time, after such a strict policy of rejection and neglect, why the fuck had she finally decided that she wanted me after all?
* * *
When you’re in college, you’re privy to a lot of stories about waking up in strange places. As an undergrad, I even had a professor who told our class that he started going to Alcoholics Anonymous because he could never find his car on Sunday mornings.
That was never me. I didn’t even much like the stories. No, for me it was always the blistering excitement of moderation. It was important to stay in control. Growing up, I’d learned from the worst, a weak father and an unhinged mother, and the thing that drove me hardest was the goal of being nothing like them.
So I worked hard and studied hard, tempering my playtime with discipline, because blackouts were for losers.
In the end, though, I had them all beat, with a story no one could top.
And how would it sound in a bar, after two too many…?
Dude, you won’t believe what happened to me this weekend. My scary-ass mom decided to drop by right after Ashleigh and I had had sex. And I don’t have to tell you how awkward that is. They’ve got their own kind of radar for that shit. And then my whole house caved in. I can’t believe we even made it out alive. I think we were carried, but I was already starting to lose consciousness by then.
How we got where we ended up…I don’t have a clue. We started at Point A and woke up at Point B, and whatever came in between, I can’t put it together. Every time I try, I come up with a big fat zero. It was like an alien abduction, man, we were so wrecked. I just know I lost a day. Yeah, a whole day. Didn’t wake up until the next night.
And you won’t believe where I was. Seriously. Who ends up way out in the middle of nowhere, no clothes still, in the middle of November, tied to a tree?
That’s the gist of it, anyway.
For a few minutes, I came stirring back to awareness under the misperception that I was alone. I was cognizant only of what felt to be the vastness of open woods, and knew that it was far from anything much in the wa
y of civilization—light pollution, that old enemy, did not impinge on the sky. This was the deep night sky our remotest ancestors saw, that filled them with wonder and awe.
Whether it filled them with fear, I don’t know. But if it didn’t, it should have.
The bonds lashing me to the tree were rope, as near as I could tell, except for a thick woody vine wound around the middle. I shivered, and the last things I could remember began to come back. I called Ashleigh’s name, a shout that sounded nothing like calling for someone indoors. No matter how loudly I yelled her name, the sound of it reverberating softly through the woods was small and lost and lonely.
In time I got an answer, Ashleigh calling back, a sound even more dispiriting than mine, so much smaller, thinner, so far away I might never find her again. I yelled myself hoarse telling her that I loved her, that I was sorry, that when we got out of this place, I would be hers for as long as she would have me.
But even then, I knew whose I really was.
Worse, I didn’t know if she could make out what I was telling her. Because what came back from her was so filtered by trees and distance, it was almost entirely syllables with all meaning stripped away.
In time, too, it became obvious that, even apart from Ashleigh, I was far from alone, other voices echoing through the trees as, one by one, strangers roused and began screaming out their confusion and terror. They came from all around me, some near, some far, and I couldn’t see a single one of them.
How many? Ten, at least. A dozen? Fifteen? Twenty? It was so hard to tell. We called to each other, desperate strangers clawing for the last shreds of companionship we might ever know, until one by one the rest seemed to fall silent with exhaustion and despair.
Maybe everyone picked up on the same idea: that we weren’t there for each other, but rather because of what was going on overhead.
The Leonids.
I watched them zip through the night sky, streaks of white and green and blue fire, tinged sometimes with red, more and more as the hours passed—a stunning display out here where the sky could be itself, without hindrance. This had always been the greatest light show I’d ever known, and it brought back such memories.
No, no that. Nothing to do with her.
Something else.
Some dreams never leave you, because they’re more than just dreams. They’re truth, distilled to purest potency. I’ve always known that, but am willing to concede now that I may have been attributing their significance to the wrong phenomenon.
I’ve been dreaming this same scenario for as long as I can remember: standing under a vast night sky that has come alive with a swarm of distant moving lights. It spans the horizon to fill the sky in front of me. Unlike meteorites, I can actually track these. There’s nothing natural about them. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, they move with purpose and intent. They start and stop, they change course. They have jobs to do, and do them without hesitation. They’ve crossed oceans of space, eons of time, from world to world, to be here.
Sometimes I’m alone in these dreams. Other times I’m with friends, with people I love that I don’t even know in the waking world. Sometimes I’m with strangers I just happened to end up with.
But all of us, always, implicitly understand the same thing: that while this may not be the end of the world, it’s most assuredly the end of the world as we know it.
And as the sky burned above me now with the truth of it all, with branches and bark digging into my skin, it seemed as if I’d known all along this was coming, that an end of days was in transit, and I was going to be privileged to witness the fall.
In time, yet again, I felt even less alone than before. I could sense it, or imagined that I did: a vast armada sifting down through the layers of atmosphere, drifting on the subtlest currents of air, like a swarm of fireflies on the scale of microbes. It was a presence, and while it may not have conformed to our understanding of a mind, it still carried the burden of intelligence.
Or maybe I was giving myself way too much credit, fancying I could feel what I shouldn’t have been able to feel.
I screamed myself hoarse again, calling to Ashleigh, and then just screaming for the release it brought after the weight of knowing grew too heavy. The others—my mother’s captives, her experimental subjects—seemed to feel it too, that something was wrong, even more wrong than before, and because panic was contagious, we all wailed into the night.
Hours passed. The stars spun slowly overhead. Meteors came and meteors went, until they mostly just went, down to the last lonely stragglers, and the show was over.
The woods were silent now, in that blackest time of night when nothing moves and even the owls have stopped hunting. Exhaustion and sleep, in and out, feeling half-frozen, in and out, immobilized and numb, in and out.
Until dawn, and the first gray ghost of light in the sky.
It was still dark here in the woods, and finally I heard something moving again, a sound of footsteps that wanted to weave itself into my dreams, until everything merged and I was no longer sure what was encroaching on what. Did I only dream that towering, emaciated figure roaming amid the trees, pausing here and there, then moving on? Did it really visit me, too, its thicket of sticklike fingers poking and probing, pulling open one eye that I tried to hold shut…and if it did, was it only my imagination that it seemed to linger with me longest of all?
Did it really touch my face with something like a caress?
Dawn came on and birds began to sing, and the people joined them, everyone but me, it seemed, as the first tentative light in the sky was challenged from below. More screaming, all over again, all around me, but worse than before, because now they were screams of mortality.
As such, they didn’t last as long.
Then it was just me again, alone in a garden of bright orange fires blazing in the soft blue haze, their smoke carrying away the stink of failure.
* * *
One last redux of missing time.
Not long, nothing like before, a few hours at most. Maybe it was my own doing. Sometimes we sleep because we want to, sometimes because we need it, and sometimes we sleep in self-defense.
I awoke on the ground beneath the tree to which I’d been lashed, the bonds cut and lying in tangles around me. Still naked, still cold, but not as bad as the night before now that it was daytime, bright and blue-skied.
And then there were the fires to warm things up.
They were down to smoldering ash, columns of lazy smoke that rose without urgency now that their work was finished. I followed these markers, one to another to the next, at each spot spending time with the withered remains that hung contorted and fused against their trees. With seared torsos and charred skulls and blackened arms bound aloft, they looked as if they were still clawing at the sky.
Fire had always been the answer, hadn’t it? The preferred way to expunge and purify. Witches and heretics and now this.
The fires hadn’t spread, though. The trees themselves were largely untouched. Was this normal? Was I an idiot for questioning what normal even meant at this point?
I visited sixteen in all. I wanted to know their names. I wanted to apologize. I wanted to know their stories, where they were from and how they were chosen—if there had been some method to it, or if they’d simply been swept up in random chaos.
At some point I admitted to myself that I didn’t know for certain which of them was Ashleigh. I knew which direction she was in, and that she’d sounded far away. While I’d narrowed it down to two, both hairless and sexless now, really, I couldn’t be sure. There seemed nothing more important than spending time at her pyre…but I just didn’t know.
I picked one anyway. You have to create a hypothesis, even if you might be wrong. So I chose, as the tears cut streaks in the ash blown and dusted across my face, to make a crust like a ragged gray mask, and I traced a finger along one carbonized foot, then higher, to her knee.
I loved this. I loved you. And now I’ve destroyed you.
Pick one anyway. You’ve been wrong about worse.
Like being out here all alone, for starters.
The last thing I expected to find now was another survivor.
The gods are funny that way.
* * *
Why hadn’t I known I still had living company on this worst of all mornings? Simple. In wandering from tree to tree, following a path of destruction and aftermath, I’d been following smoke the whole time. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But because she hadn’t burned, I was late in catching on.
Lara hadn’t burned.
It seemed a small miracle that I found her at all. Or, more accurately, that she found me. I was the one making noise. I was the one giving the other a reason to hide, to crouch and flatten behind the tree she had awakened next to, until she saw that this pale, naked thing crunching disconsolate through the autumn leaves was human, wholly human.
Although even this early I was afraid that appearances might be deceiving.
Lara, at least, still had the dignity of clothing. She was wearing flannel pajama bottoms with a big green plaid pattern and a faded T-shirt that swallowed her whole, and the look on her face suggested that her clothes were going to be the most regular thing about her for a long time.
For a few moments she was only a voice calling to me through the trees. A female voice calling my name. Ashleigh…? I thought. Anybody would. Then I saw who it was, and felt the ember of hope snuff out, like losing her all over again. Would I have traded Lara for Ashleigh? In a withered heartbeat. Am I proud of that?
