“Maybe it's the refrigerator.”
“No, goddamnit. It's not the fridge.”
Dave was exhausted. He hadn't been sleeping well lately. Pressures at the office, he supposed, were getting to him. He sure as hell didn't need to be playing “Guess That Sound” at 2 AM.
“Just put the pillow over your head and go back to sleep. I'll check it out in the morning.”
“I can't sleep with my head under the pillow,” Beth grumbled, but she turned away from him and put her head under the pillow just the same. He patted her hip one more time, feeling a little wistful.
“Isn't that better?”
“What? I can't hear you.”
Ignoring her sarcasm, Dave leaned over and kissed her shoulder as he whispered, “Goodnight, honey.”
Dave awoke early the next morning feeling like every nerve in his body was on edge. His eyes were itchy, and he could feel a headache coming on.
This is really weird, he thought. I was in bed by 10 last night. That's nine freakin’ hours of sleep. I shouldn't feel like this.
He went downstairs to the kitchen. Beth was seated at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee clasped in both hands. Her face was pale, and she looked at him bleary-eyed.
“How'd you sleep?” she asked, and he caught the edge in her voice.
“Before you woke me up or after?” He forced a grin.
“Very funny. That goddamn hum kept me awake most of the night.” She took a sip of coffee and opened the newspaper, making a point of ignoring him.
“Beth …”
“Yeah?”
Dave stood still in the middle of the kitchen. Without even thinking about it, he suddenly realized that he could hear something. There was a low, steady vibration just at the edge of awareness. He could almost feel it in his feet.
“Wait a sec.” He held up a finger to silence her. “You know … I think I can hear it.”
“Really?” Beth looked at him like she didn't quite believe him, but then she relented and said, “Oh, thank God. I thought I might be going insane.”
Over the next hour or so, they searched throughout the house from attic to basement, looking for a possible source of the sound. It wasn't in the wires or the pipes or the circuit breaker box or the TV, of that Dave was sure. The odd thing was, no matter what floor they were on or what room they were in, the sound always seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. When Dave went outside to check the shed and garage, he found Beth in the middle of the yard, crying.
“What's the matter, honey?” He put his arms around her, feeling the tension in her body.
“I can hear it just as loud out here as I can inside the house,” she said, sobbing into his shoulder.
“So?”
“So … That means it's not coming from inside the house. It's out here somewhere. It's like it's coming from the ground or the sky or something.”
“Now you're being ridiculous,” he said. He took a breath and, leaning close, stared into her eyes. “I'll call the electric company and maybe the phone company. It's gotta be a problem with the wires.”
“Sure,” Beth said, not sounding convinced. She wiped her nose on her bathrobe sleeve, then turned and walked back into the house. Dave watched her leave, knowing she didn't believe it was a wire problem.
He wasn't sure he believed it, either.
Over the next few days, things got worse. A lot worse. Like a sore in your mouth you can't help probing with your tongue, Dave found himself poised and listening for the sound all the time, trying to detect its source. Once he was aware of it, he couldn't help but hear it. He was growing desperate to locate it and analyze it. His work at the office suffered. Jeff Stewart, his boss, noticed how distracted he was. At first he commented on it with amusement, but that changed to concern and, finally, exasperation. But Dave noticed that everyone in the office seemed a little distracted and, as the day went by, more and more irritable. This would make sense, he thought, if everyone were sleeping as poorly as he was. It had taken him hours to fall asleep last night, and once he was out, the noise still permeated his dreams. He woke up a dozen or more times and just lay there staring at the ceiling as he listened to the low, steady hum just at the edge of hearing. He knew Beth was lying awake next to him, but they didn't talk. Every attempt at conversation ended with one of them snapping at the other.
Over the next few days, sales of white-noise machines, soundproofing materials, and environmental sound CDs went through the roof. People turned their TVs and radios up loud in a futile effort to block out the hum, further irritating their neighbors who were already on edge.
Dave's commute to work quickly became a crash course in Type-A driving techniques. One morning, he was trapped for more than an hour behind a sixty-five-car pileup on the Schuylkill Expressway that had turned into a demolition derby. It took nearly the entire city police force and an army of tow trucks to break up the melee. After that, Dave kept to back streets going to and from work.
Schools began canceling soccer and football games as soccer-mom brawls and riots in the stands became increasingly frequent and intense. Shoving matches broke out in ticket lines and grocery checkout lanes. Neighborhood feuds and other violent incidents escalated, filling the newspaper and TV news with lurid reports. As the week wore on, road rage morphed into drive-by shootings. Gang warfare was waged openly, and police brutality was applauded instead of prosecuted. The slightest provocation caused near-riots in public. The media reported that the hum—and the rise in aggressive behavior—was a global phenomenon.
“It's only a matter of time before some third-world countries start tossing nukes at each other,” Dave muttered one morning at the office staff meeting.
Mike from Purchasing glared at him.
“Who died and made you Mr-Know-It-All?” he snarled.
“Jesus, Mike, quit being such an asshole,” Dave snapped back.
“All right. That's enough,” said Jeff. “This isn't kindergarten. Let's try to be professional here, okay?”
“Professional, schmessional,” Mike grumbled. “Who gives a rat's ass anymore, anyway?”
“I said that's enough.” Jeff thumped the conference table with his clenched fist.
Sherry from Operations burst into tears. “Stop it, stop it now! Jesus stop it! I can't take it any more! I can't eat. I can't sleep, and I sure as hell can't stand listening to the two of you morons!”
Dave noticed with a shock the fist-sized bruise on her cheek. She caught him staring at her face and shouted at him, “It's none of your goddamned business!”
“What'd I say?” asked Dave with a shrug.
“That's it!” roared Jeff. “You're fired! All of you! Every damned one of you!”
The entire staff turned and looked at him, seated at the head of the table. His face was flushed, and his eyes were bulging. In the moment of silence that followed, everyone in the room became aware of the hum, but Dave was the first to mention that it had changed subtly. Now there was a discordant clanking sound, still just at the edge of hearing, but the sound was penetrating.
“The music of the spheres,” Sherry whispered in a tight, wavering voice. “It's the music of the spheres.” Her voice scaled up toward hysteria. “The harmony is gone. The center cannot hold. Something's gone terribly, terribly wrong!” With a loud, animal wail, she got up and ran from the room with tears streaming down her face.
Mike swallowed hard, trying to control his frustration. “What the hell's she talking about?”
“Go home. All of you. I'm closing the office until they figure out what this sound is.” Jeff's fists were clenched, and his body was trembling as though he were in the grips of a fever. “If I don't, I'm going to have to kill every single one of you … unless you kill me first.” He grinned wolfishly, then slumped down in his chair, pressing the heels of his hands against his ears as he sobbed quietly.
Mike and Dave left the conference room without speaking.
That afternoon, Dave drove hom
e, mindful not to do anything that would irritate anyone on the road. Sitting on the sofa in the living room as he waited for Beth to get home, he couldn't help but listen to the hum. He thought about what could possibly be happening but couldn't come up with an answer.
When Beth finally came home, Dave said, “Sit down. We have to talk.” She looked at him warily, and the mistrust he saw in her eyes hurt him.
“What's her name?”
“What?” He realized what she meant and shook his head. “No. It's nothing like that. Look, Beth, I'm trying to save us, not break us apart. Listen to me, okay?”
Beth nodded as she took a breath and held it. He could see she was trying to pull the last shreds of her patience together, and he felt a powerful rush of gratitude and love for her. It was so good to feel something pleasant that for a brief moment he forgot all about the noise.
“Jeff closed the office. This sound is getting on everyone's nerves, and he's afraid we're all going to end up killing each other. He's probably right. I was thinking—we get out of here. Let's go up to your folks’ place in Maine or anywhere, as long as it's far away from here and from all these people.”
“But the news says this hum is everywhere. There's no escaping it, Dave,” Beth said. Her face contorted, but she clenched her fists and regained her self-control. “What's the point of going anywhere?”
“Maybe there isn't a point, but I … I feel like we have to do something. We have to try. I don't want us to end up another murder-suicide statistic.” He took her into his arms and held her close. “I love you, Beth.”
She clung to him and whispered, “I love you, too.”
They sat silently in the living room as the twilight deepened, and the world all around them hummed.
What would normally have been a nine-hour ride to Little Sebago Lake took almost twenty-four hours because Dave wanted to stay off the interstates. The latest news reports indicated that truckers were chasing down and crushing unlucky drivers who pissed them off. Dave had seen the film Duel once, and that was enough for him.
As they headed north, the sound became more discordant. Dave noticed a mechanical chunking quality that was getting more pronounced. The endless, irregular rhythm ground away at his nerves like fine sandpaper, but they finally made it to the cabin by the lake without incident.
The camp was on the east side of the lake, small and shabby, but a welcome sight. The lake stretched out before them, a flat, blue expanse of water with the New Hampshire mountains off in the distance to the west. The sun was just setting, tipping the lake's surface with sparkles of gold light and streaking the sky with slashes of red and purple.
It was beautiful, and when Dave and Beth looked at each other, the good feelings drowned out the hum, if only for a moment. They embraced and kissed with passion.
Then the day was over. The sun dropped behind the mountains, and the humming noise pressed back in on them. After unpacking the car, they ate a cold supper of baked beans out of the can. Beth set about making the bed upstairs and straightening up while Dave walked down to the lake's edge.
The night was still except for the hum. All the usual sounds—the birds and crickets and frogs—were silent. The lake looked like a large pane of smoky glass. Stars twinkled in the velvety sky above. Dave sat down on a weather-stripped tree trunk that had washed up onto shore and looked up at the sky. The noise seemed to be changing again. It now was a faint, squeaky sound that reminded him of fingernails raking down a chalkboard. At least it was the only sound. No blaring TVs, no pounding stereos.
How long can this go on? he wondered. How long can anyone handle this before we all go mad and exterminate ourselves?
He heaved a sigh as he looked up at the sky. At first, he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing when he noticed a few black flakes drifting down onto the lake's surface. They looked like soot from a bonfire. Like a child in a snowstorm, Dave reached up and tried to catch one of the falling flakes.
Funny, he thought, I don't smell smoke.
He looked at his hand. The flake lay in the cup of his palm, but it wasn't soft and crumbly like ash. It was hard and thin, with a dark, brittle surface. It crunched like fragile glass when he poked it with his index finger.
Jesus Christ, he thought. It looks like paint.
Curious, he looked up again. By now the flakes were sifting down rapidly from the sky. As he watched, Dave became aware of a low, steady vibration beneath his feet. It felt like a mild electrical current. As he watched the sky, irregular yellow splotches appeared overhead as more and more black paint fell away, exposing a dull, cracked surface behind. After a time, silver and yellow flakes began to fall. Dave watched in amazement, his mouth dry, his mind numb.
A crescent moon was rising in the east behind him. He turned to see if it, too, was peeling away from the sky like an old sticker on a refrigerator. The noise rose to a sudden, piercing squeal, and then the vibration rumbled the ground like a distant earthquake.
“Beth!” he called out, watching as fragments of the moon broke off and drifted down from the sky. They fluttered and hissed as they rushed through the trees behind him, and then he saw something overhead that was impossible to believe. The peeling paint had exposed a vast complex of spinning gears and cogs with a network of circuits and switches that glowed as they overheated. The humming sound rose even higher until it was almost unbearable as more pieces of the night sky fell away, revealing the machinery behind it. At last, Dave knew—as impossible as it was—what was happening.
“Beth!” he called out so his wife could hear him above the steadily rising rumble. “Come out here! You've got to see this! The sky is falling!”
SALVADOR
Lucius Shepard
THREE WEEKS BEFORE they wasted Tecolutla, Dantzler had his baptism of fire. The platoon was crossing a meadow at the foot of an emerald green volcano, and being a dreamy sort, he was idling along, swatting tall grasses with his rifle barrel and thinking how it might have been a first-grader with crayons who had devised this elementary landscape of a perfect cone rising into a cloudless sky, when cap-pistol noises sounded on the slope. Someone screamed for the medic, and Dantzler dove into the grass, fumbling for his ampules. He slipped one from the dispenser and popped it under his nose, inhaling frantically; then, to be on the safe side, he popped another—“a double helpin’ of martial arts,” as DT would say—and lay with his head down until the drugs had worked their magic. There was dirt in his mouth, and he was afraid.
Gradually his arms and legs lost their heaviness, and his heart rate slowed. His vision sharpened to the point that he could see not only the pinpricks of fire blooming on the slope, but also the figures behind them, half-obscured by brush. A bubble of grim anger welled up in his brain, hardened by a fierce resolve, and he started moving toward the volcano. By the time he reached the base of the cone, he was all rage and reflexes. He spent the next forty minutes spinning acrobatically through the thickets, spraying shadows with bursts of his M-18; yet part of his mind remained distant from the action, marveling at his efficiency, at the comic-strip enthusiasm he felt for the task of killing. He shouted at the men he shot, and he shot them many more times than was necessary, like a child playing soldier.
“Playin’ my ass!” DT would say. “You just actin’ natural.”
DT was a firm believer in the ampules; though the official line was that they contained tailored RNA compounds and pseudo-endorphins modified to an inhalant form, he held the opinion that they opened a man up to his inner nature. He was big, black, with heavily muscled arms and crudely stamped features, and he had come to the Special Forces direct from prison, where he had done a stretch for attempted murder; the palms of his hands were covered by jail tattoos—a pentagram and a horned monster. The words DIE HIGH were painted on his helmet. This was his second tour in Salvador, and Moody, who was Dantzler's buddy, said the drugs had addled DT's brains, that he was crazy and gone to hell.
“He collects trophies,” Moody had said. “An
d not just ears like they done in ’Nam.”
When Dantzler had finally gotten a glimpse of the trophies, he had been appalled. They were kept in a tin box in DT's pack and were nearly unrecognizable; they looked like withered brown or chids. But despite his revulsion, despite the fact that he was afraid of DT, he admired the man's capacity for survival and had taken to heart his advice to rely on the drugs.
On the way back down the slope, they discovered a live casualty, an Indian kid about Dantzler's age, nineteen or twenty. Black hair, adobe skin, and heavy-lidded brown eyes. Dantzler, whose father was an anthropologist and had done field work in Salvador, figured him for a Santa Ana tribesman; before leaving the States, Dantzler had pored over his father's notes, hoping this would give him an edge, and had learned to identify the various regional types. The kid had a minor leg wound and was wearing fatigue pants and a faded COKE ADDS LIFE T-shirt. This T-shirt irritated DT no end. “What the hell you know ’bout coke?” he asked the kid as they headed for the chopper that was to carry them deeper into Morazan Province. “You think it's funny or somethin’?” He whacked the kid in the back with his rifle butt, and when they reached the chopper, he slung him inside and had him sit by the door. He sat beside him, tapped out a joint from a pack of Kools, and asked, “Where's Infante?”
“Dead,” said the medic.
“Shit!” DT licked the joint so it would burn evenly. “Goddamn beaner ain't no use ’cept somebody else know Spanish.”
“I know a little,” Dantzler volunteered.
Staring at Dantzler, DT's eyes went empty and unfocused. “Naw,” he said. “You don't know no Spanish.”
Dantzler ducked his head to avoid DT's stare and said nothing; he thought he understood what DT meant, but he ducked away from the understanding as well. The chopper bore them aloft, and DT lit the joint. He let the smoke out through his nostrils and passed the joint to the kid, who accepted gratefully.
The End Of The World Page 2
