by Rich Horton
Perhaps our tragedy was the result of similar mistakes.
But if a government agency isn’t to blame, then who?
A cult, perhaps. Although that perches close to the terrorist assumptions, with the added problem that no known cult carries any interest in pushing thousands into the arms of imaginary lovers.
Perhaps a major corporation was testing a new product, and its calculations were a thousandfold wrong.
Unlikely, but not impossible.
Even less likely explanations include aliens operating our midst, time travelers from some far human/machine future, and the utterly random hand of some capricious or incompetent god.
And waiting beyond the impossible:
The unthinkable.
Case study:
Tenured professors are allowed to purchase season tickets, though they are relegated to some famously poor locations. BB and his wife had seats high in the southwestern portion of the stadium. These were fit people but far from young. They left for the restrooms before the first half ended, and they were slowly climbing the steps when the stadium fell into darkness. Probably neither noticed the helmet and golf cart stopping in the middle of the field. BB does recall his wife hesitating in the gloom above him. He speaks affectionately about touching her back, trying to reassure her with his presence, and then came the flash that transported him to another world where he lived and loved for three alien days—long days which would translate to perhaps two weeks by the human count, he estimates.
To an accomplished physicist, that alternate world appeared perfectly credible.
Twenty-three minutes after the blast, BB woke to find himself lying on top of his wife. To his horror, he realized that she had fallen hard, driven in part by his own body. Her forehead sharp struck the edge of a concrete step. BB tended to the bloody wound as best he could, and then this man in his late seventies tried to lift his wife, and failed, before screaming as loudly as he could, begging for anyone’s help.
Sitting nearby were a brother and sister, alert and conversing with one campus police officer. All three came to the rescue, and despite his own head wound, the brother carried the dying woman across other bodies and out into the nearest parking lot. But the medical personnel were elsewhere, lucid or otherwise, and this spouse of fifty-eight years died in the back of a useless ambulance.
BB’s subsequent depression was prolonged and useful.
Two months after the funeral, he began working on an explanation for his wife’s murder and the transformation of so many innocent lives. Those efforts led to a series of dense, harshly reasoned papers that have mostly gone unpublished. But the professional indifference hasn’t kept his conclusions from being shared by others, both within his field and far beyond.
BB claims that what happened isn’t possible. Not according to natural laws, and not according to any compilation of wild hypotheses.
Impossibility is itself a clue, says BB.
He has written nothing about his fictional love affair, but the alien world is a different subject. Thoroughly rendered, complete with estimates of size and mass, apparent history and harsh climate, he argues that the world was too intricate and perfect for even an expert to dream up. That means that his vision had to be the work of another mind, a much more competent and relentless mind. According to the old professor, each of us exists inside the dreams of someone greater, and what happened on that October evening was an accident, a sorry mistake.
The universe is a cosmic fiction.
That fiction is run by mathematics and vast, unseen machines.
Some tiny piece of the machinery failed. Which must happen from time to time, as every device has its limits.
BB argues that there was no bomb or other device inside that football helmet. The golf cart failed because of the initial surge of uninvited energies, and like a fuse popping inside a circuit box, the event came and went quickly enough. But there was leakage from the higher mind, and the professor has both equations and options for experiments that might someday prove him right.
As mentioned, BB has not published these results in any responsible journal.
Some of his peers want him to retire finally.
But the old man refuses. He likes to teach and do research. Those are the only blessings left for him, now that his wife is dead. But he remains confident that the woman lives on, probably somewhere in the higher mind, and death will come soon enough, freeing him for a long, joyous chase.
What constitutes reasonable answers?
We can’t say. Months of study and endless discussion has left us with no clear options. But we have cobbled together a variety of stories that capture the elements of what we consider workable, sane explanations.
Remember the reported scent of perfume.
Maybe that’s a key.
And the fifty-yard line too.
The incident was devised as a study, and the football field supplied a workable transect. Again, think of Castle Bravo. Consider the possibility that the effects far outweighed every projection. The EMP blast wasn’t the first stage. The incident began when someone released a powerful chemical into the atmosphere. The chemical came from the giant helmet or from the hose being towed along, and it migrated inside everyone, brought to the lungs and blood where it had powerful hallucinogenic effects. Perhaps the electrical jolt was meant to height the drug’s effects, or it was a substantial malfunction in an untested system.
The culprit here would be a major pharmaceutical corporation or a bioengineering start-up.
What was being tested was a genuine love potion.
Again, think of the nuclear blast that worked too well.
The event was meant to be both an experiment and a social event, and only the people on the field should have been infected.
Horrified by the aftermath, the guilty parties have destroyed their work and gone into hiding.
And no, we won’t suggest that this is the genuine answer.
There is zero evidence backing up this story or any other. What we are proposing—indeed, what we insist is true—is that no answers will be forthcoming. Something large did happen. Nothing like it has happened before or since. And so it’s reasonable, even responsible, to claim that we won’t ever learn the truth, and that’s the conundrum we need to deal with today.
Case study:
RL is a twenty-year-old woman. A cheerleader before the event, she woke only last week. After more than fifteen months of lying in various beds, in hospitals and then at home, she reports having spent fifty-eight years elsewhere.
Her fiance was her only visitor when she woke.
When told of the circumstances, RL appeared calm, even amused by what had to be unexpected news. This wasn’t the shallow young woman who tumbled and waved pom-poms on the sidelines. She was composed, eerily so. The man whom she was supposed to marry was weeping, telling her about that awful night and the wild theories explaining what had happened. Tech wizards; evil governments; high minds; satanic spells. Then he grabbed one of her skeletal hands, describing how he had watched over her as much as anyone, that he always had been devoted and faithful, and he didn’t care what she did inside that silly dream world. Dreams didn’t matter. What mattered was that God had placed him into her life, here and now, giving him the strength to greet her return to what was real.
That rush of words and pent-up emotion finally ended.
A brief, wary silence followed.
And then the young/old woman laughed. It was a bittersweet sound—profound and hopeless, revealing the enormous gap between the two of them. Her fiance felt the hope draining out of him. His grip weakened. She retrieved her hand and then pointed at him, saying a few words in a language that he didn’t know.
He eased away.
And then quietly, in the language she had barely used in half a century, she said, “The last thing I remember . . . ”
“What is that?” he asked.
“His hand,” she said.
“Whose hand?”
The laughter returned, even sadder.
Then she grabbed hold of herself, arms crossed on her starved chest, and she said, “My husband was behind me on the steps, in the dark. And he put his hand on my back, and just for a moment, just that last moment . . . I felt young again . . . ”
Witch, Beast, Saint:
An Erotic Fairy Tale
C.S.E. Cooney
Once upon a time I found a monster in the woods.
In the manner of most witches, I had a knack for discovering lost things. He was crawling with vermin, so wasted he barely flinched when I tested his nose and tongue, checking texture, temperature, moisture.
He was half an inch and kissing close to dying.
“Beast,” said I, in the language all beasts knew. “Look at me. Do you wish to die like this?”
He understood. Opening his eyes, he looked at me. I felt his answer thrum in my bones, barely vocalized, a rattling sigh that was a clearer cry for help than if he had spoken the words in a human tongue.
“Come with me then,” I said, laying a compulsion on him to rise, since he could not do it for himself. “I suppose you can be my familiar.”
I put him in the cellar and fed him up until he was able to move about on his own. Then I began the arduous task of coaxing him outside to the wishing well and washing him, which took many days and a great deal of patience. Already the potatoes and last year’s apples and the onions greening in their barrels had begun to take on his dank and desolate stench. And really, he was so grateful for the attention.
Like many beasts, he found the sound of my voice soothing. So I told him the story of how he came to be.
“This cottage passes from witch to witch,” I said. “My predecessor was ancient by the time she mistook an oak tree for an open passage and drove her mortar and pestle right into it. They say mortar and pestles are safer than brooms. I don’t know about that. I prefer to walk everywhere, or maybe hitch a ride on a wagon. You have nice broad shoulders. Perhaps I’ll teach you to piggyback me, by and by. There’s a bit of a pig in you. Well, boar. It’s the tusks. Your nose is more stag. Soft and broad from bridge to tip. Those gently flaring nostrils. But your horns are definitely bull. Anyway. What was I saying?”
The monster made a gesture like a pestle grinding something in a mortar.
“Right!” I cried. “My predecessor. Apparently in the last few decades before her terminal flying accident, she’d developed this habit of turning local boys to beasts every time they slighted her—or she imagined they did. The most famous case was that of our sovereign prince himself. He lives in a castle, in a stretch of forest not far from here. Don’t worry though. He found a local hedge-witch—much like myself—to break the spell. They say she was so beautiful she could shatter strong sorceries with a kiss.”
I shrugged. My hands were wrist-deep in his sudsy fur, the soap black with his murk.
“Could be. Or she might have been a scholar—much like myself—who knew the right incantations, under which phase of moon to utter them, how to transfer all that moonlight and magic words from her lips to his. It looks much like a kiss. All very standard, unless you slip in some tongue. Fact is she was probably tired of trading chicken eggs and goat milk for her minor miracles. Thought to have a go at the princessing business instead. Never have to pick nettles in a midnight graveyard ever again—unless she wanted to. And once a witch, we like to say, always a witch. Princess or no.”
Pausing, I regarded the monster, wondering what it would be to kiss him. The juncture at my thighs prickled, swelled, pulsed, grew moist. Then he exhaled and I stepped back.
His fangs needed brushing. Badly. Too, I wasn’t sure he was used to me yet. That he wouldn’t startle back in panic, catching my lip on one of his pointy bits and taking half my face with him.
His eyelashes were very long, coarse and curly. He would not yet meet my gaze. But when I stopped scrubbing, he knocked his large skull against the palm of my hand, urging me on.
“Beast, be still!” I commanded, and he was. Except for his tail, which swept around to brush my hip in shy apology. I ran my hand along it, muttering as I scrubbed, “Why I didn’t just shave you bare-ass naked so we could start afresh, I don’t know. Probably because my garden shears aren’t big enough.”
I could’ve changed him back. The transformation spell would take research, focus, a not inconsiderable outpouring of stored magic, but in the end, it was entirely doable.
Thing was, I rather liked my monster as a monster. Doubtless he’d been less impressive as a man. A rough and unlettered peasant with a rude habit of overlooking the courtesies owed his elder, maybe. Or a rowdy, ruddy-cheeked boy who bit his thumb at the wrong old woman on the wrong day.
But he was a strong, silent companion with rather more intelligence, having once been human, than your average woodland critter. He hunted for me, and the wolves ran with him, which was something to see. (There was something of the wolf in his tail, his teeth.) He brought me back deer and rabbit the way my sister-witches’ cats brought them mice and crickets, and he positively purred—or rumbled, anyway—once I deemed him clean enough to pet.
Washing day by the wishing well became a weekly ritual. Between hunting in the woods and sleeping on the dirt floor of the cellar, chained (for no witch leaves a monster to wander unprotected through her house at night) he was never pristine for long.
Unlike cats, he enjoyed being washed. Once he learned I would not tolerate otherwise, he always held very still for me. I trimmed his black talons and brushed his curving fangs and polished those great ivory tusks that jutted up from his mandibles until they gleamed. His ears were the prettiest part of him, russet velvet triangles with black streaks, and white tufts sprouting from the delicate hollows. The first time I stroked them, his sex organ rose up from the shag of his thighs, thick and purple-veined, with a glistening pink tip.
“Oh, do you want this washed too?” I laughed. “You nasty thing.”
I would’ve left it there, but he took my soapy hand in his paw and pulled me closer. Otherwise he did not touch me, but waited, rubbing the residue off my hand. The pad of his foreclaw made slow circles on my calloused palm. He watched me mutely, eyes wide on my face. Moss green eyes, with flecks of yellow glowing in them, like little lamps. I had never seen their like before. My breath quickened. I stepped in and took him in hand. His eyes rolled back in his head. His tongue lolled out between his fangs. His breath was hot, but smelled now of sharp green mint and old apples.
I admit I was lonely. I sometimes traded my neighboring foresters and husbandmen little magic tricks for a quick fuck. Not a lot of options in this part of the woods. They were always wildly excited and ashamed; they all had wives at home, and often grunted or screamed their women’s names as they buried themselves inside me, or sprayed their unfaithful seed over my belly.
But my monster had no human vocabulary to speak of, thank the Dark Queen of the Crossroads.
As I pulled and kneaded him, the backs of my knees softened like warm wax. The afternoon slant of light took on a wine-red cast. The soap slicked him right out of my hands.
He made no sound at this, but sank to a crouch before me, tail curled around his ankles, balancing on one fist, like an ape. The other slid beneath my skirt and clutched my hip, urging me toward his mouth. He nudged my thighs apart, pressing me back against the wishing well. Ducking his head beneath my skirt, he began to lave me. His tongue was long, with a nap to it like wet velvet stretched over the finest sandpaper. It made my bud stand hard as a pearl. And then his tongue slipped deeper. Wrapping my fists around his tusks, I rode his massive, twisted face until my knees gave out and I collapsed upon him.
Whereupon he withdrew his terrible tongue and turned me to face the wishing well, bending me over the stones. I widened my stance and braced against the rough stones of the well. He entered me from behind, so slowly it was like being bludgeoned by a bolt of silk through the medium of molasses.
“Harder, you monste
r!” I grunted. “Or I’ll put you in a spiked choke chain. I’ll beat you with nettles. I’ll let the forest children come and throw stones. I’ll invite the goodwives to smear your feet with pitch and set fire to them with torches. I’ll—yes. Yes! Like that! Yes!”
I must have blacked out from the incredible crush and pull of those tides, startling awake only when his hot seed sprayed my back.
“Beast,” I murmured, turning in his arms, “My monstrous one. My pet fiend.”
He made small noises at these endearments, his breath a fever on my neck. His sinewy arms wrapped around me, lifting me, carrying me into my cottage. His heated body did not stink, but gave off an odor like lightning-struck glass, like peat smoke, like wet stone.
His pants and sighs I could interpret with ease, for I had the language of beasts from my mother, who had known all the birdsong of the wood—though my specialty was with mammals, and predators in particular.
He was telling me, “My love, my mistress, my lonely queen. Only you. Always you. You forever. I will devour those who part us.”
However.
Later that year, when autumn began to bleed the leaves of the forest to russet gold and vixen red, a day came when neither my monster nor I could prevent our sundering.
He had probably started out as a wandering warlock, or sorcerer. Whatever he’d been doing on his journeys had catapulted him willy-nilly to sainthood. A blue-white nimbus sprouted out the top of his head, the very place a baby’s soft spot would be. The residual radiance trailed after him like the tail of a comet.
I wished, later, that he had been soft too, infantile with holiness, damaged from do-gooding. But he was sharp as any conman or two-trick magician, with a kindness in his eyes that cut like a knife’s edge. I liked him instantly, and also was afraid.
“Greetings, sister-witch,” said the saint, from behind the gates of my garden.
He knew better than to enter a witch’s garden uninvited, and for that I respected him.
“Good even, brother-warlock,” I said. “You’ve got a bit of something rising from your head.”
