Containment: The Death of Earth
Page 21
Adam had found the wheelchair in the attic after they bought the house. It was old, the back an intricate wicker weave. There were swan heads at the armrest ends, like an antique rocking chair. She loved it.
How would she go on? How would she make it home? Laura doubted she’d get more than a mile, even if she suddenly developed superhuman strength. The chair lacked a motor. Could she roll it by hand? Her arms, shoulders, neck, and back ached from having to wrangle the heavy chair from the ruined lift. As her desperation mounted, she felt silly thinking of her cat.
“Oh, Marianna, you looked so disappointed when I left you home. But this accident would’ve scared you to death.”
She’d only come about 3 miles, knew exactly where she was. There was a pet shop nearby where she bought everything for her BFF.
Laura grasped the wheels of the chair and maneuvered around the dead and dying, not because she was callous but because she was powerless to help. She tried not to hear their moans. She glimpsed something else: the shadow.
“Why do I rate a guardian, and not all these others? Can you explain it to me?” Laura demanded, unable to be insensitive to the suffering around her.
A man tapping a cane asked, “’Scuse me.”
He sniffed the air, caught a whiff of Laura’s Chanel.
“’Scuse me, m’am. I can’t see but I feel him comin’ up behind me. Could you tell me, please, what disease he’s got, providin’ it’s obvious? I wanna know ’fore he goes through me.”
Laura saw the ghost of a little girl in colonial dress, covered in so many pustules, even her eyes had them. She was also blind.
“It’s smallpox,” Laura told him gently.
“Oh, thank the Lord!” cried the blind man. “It shouldn’t take so long as some of them plagues. Even though these superbugs are speeded up, ones like H.I.V. And tuberculosis…”
The child walked through him. Laura couldn’t bear to watch.
Windows were smashed and doors kicked in where looters had tried to profit. Their bodies laid mixed with National Guardsmen—among the rest. Fires must have started in parts of Atlanta, hardly anyone left to put them out. She watched the smoke, gathering with viral tendrils.
I remember when some joker mixed peyote buttons in the food, she’d typed into From Behind the Wall a few days ago. Tracers. Paranoia. Death rattles and flutes from long-ago rituals given goat faces and sequined skeletons—very Day of the Dead, El dia de Los Muertos.
Depressed, Laura found herself speaking the 23rd Psalm. A young guard, Esequiel, taught her this in the camp when she was 18. It was on the day after the guard who killed the two men for attacking her was put to death.
“Jehova’ es mi pastor; nada me faltada’.
En lugares de delicados pastos me hara’ descansar; junto a aguas de reposo me pastoreara’.
Confortara’ me alma; me guiara’ por sendas de justicia por amor de su nombre.
Aunque ande en valle de somber de muerte, no temere’ mal aguno, porque tu estara’s conmigo, tu vara y tu cayado me infundiran aliento.
Aderezas mesa delante de mi en presencia de mis angustiadores; unges mi cabezo con aceite; mi copa esta’ rebosando.
Ciertamente el bien y la misericordia me seguiran todas la dias de mi vida y en la casa de Jehova’ morare’ por largos dias.”
(The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures,
He leadeth me beside the still waters,
He restoreth my soul,
He guideth me in paths of righteousness
for His Name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley
of the shadow of death,
I shall fear no evil, for Thou art with me;
Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me
in the presence of mine enemies.
You annointeth my head with oil; my cup overfloweth.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house
of the Lord forever.)
“Young lady?”
Laura looked up in surprise. An old woman had opened the door to a shop which appeared dark and as closed as the other businesses in this area. But its windows—blackened with a sun-reflective screening—were intact.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to startle you! It’s just that I came downstairs and saw you… I live on the third-floor loft. It isn’t safe and you don’t look at all well. Here, let me help you.”
The woman looked anxiously up and down the sidewalk as she scurried outside, then hurried to push the wheelchair in. She locked the deadbolt.
The woman sighed. “That was poor Mr. McNee out there, gone to a ghost. He’s always come here for his books in Braille.”
“This is a bookstore?” Laura asked. “I’ve never seen it before.”
She could’ve sworn this was an antique mini mall or the Russian Tea Room. Maybe an antique mini mall with the Tea Room.
“Well, I’ve been here since the others along the block opened,” the woman replied, taking the wheelchair over near a comfy sofa where patrons…used to…relax with a book. “Would you like some sweet iced tea? Don’t imagine there’ll be ice much longer. I think the electricity will be going out soon.”
Laura sighed then too, grateful for this woman. “Thank you. I do need to take some medicine.”
The woman went over to a table where there was a coffee maker and several sweating pitchers. She brought back two glasses of tea, ice cubes tinkling like wind chimes. She took a seat next to Laura, and set the tea on a coffee table in front of the sofa. On it were several large old books: Story of the Saturday Evening Post; Jungle Cats; The Complete Marx Brothers’.
“Yes, I’m a used bookstore,” the woman said, catching Laura’s glimpse at the books. “I’ve always hated to see works from years ago get wasted. Some author’s dreams or soul getting lost to the ages. Sometimes people take those things for granted, not realizing how much the writers put of their hearts into their words.”
Laura took the bottle of pain meds out of her purse. But her hands shook to where she couldn’t open it. The woman took it from her, pushed down on the cap, and opened it. “How many?”
“Two, please. I really hate those child protector things.” Her mouth went dry at the thought. Don’t need them when you don’t have children.
“My name is Lily, by the way,” said her hostess.
“I’m Laura.”
They shook hands.
“I’m a widow,” Lily went on. “Oh, not recently. Not this. Eric had a heart attack a couple years back. You?”
“I have a husband,” the younger replied. “He’s…away.”
“Any children?”
Laura prickled at the question, but… she answered Lily. Honestly.
“No, I can’t have children.”
“Me either,” the other woman replied. “I had nothing inside.”
“Same here—now.”
Laura could barely believe her candor, but it came naturally. She contemplated Lily and sipped her tea. And the bookstore. “Um, how come the ghosts don’t come through your walls?”
Lily laughed. “I let my customers smoke, because I do. Terrible habit, considering how absorbent paper is…”
Laura wasn’t sure where Lily was going with this, but let her go on.
“Well, I began burning incense,” the elder woman continued, “to cover the tar and nicotine smell. One of the regular ladies to the shop was a witch. She brought me candles. I always use them now because they don’t make me sneeze! They are mugwort and amanita. Anyway, I don’t think the spirits like them.”
Laura’s eyebrows went up. “Really. I suppose you must have some very interesting books then. She appreciated the subject change.
“Sure do.”
“Tell me, do a great many authors write about the End Times?”
Lily set down her glass. “Would you li
ke to see?”
“Yes,” Laura replied, feeling both apprehension and excitement.
Lily wheeled her to the back of the first floor, past an old-fashioned spiral staircase to an equally quaint elevator, one of the wrought iron-cage things. This was what slowly, creakingly, delivered them to the second floor, and what must have been fifty aisles of books of every size and age. They entered a separate room that almost seemed larger than the entire downstairs.
Lily gestured expansively. “Fiction. Prophecy. Magic, and yes, magic concerning the End Times…back thousands of years… Well, copies, naturally. Never has a subject…” She smiled. “…other than sex, of course…interested humanity more. The library at Alexandria, Egypt, for example—at least, what survived its many burnings. Samaria, the Assyrians, Minoans, China, Tibet before the Communists, Israel before King David, the Aristotelian Greeks, the Gnostics, the early Scandinavians and Ragnarok, Templars, Arabia before Mohammed, the Maya, the Aboriginals of Australia and New Zealand.
“There are books purported to have been translated from Atlantis, Ur, and Mu. Black Elk, the lost writings of Pope Joan, the Revelation of John of Patmos—unexpurgated by the early church. The Dead Sea Scrolls, parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls that were never officially released. Texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, plus those supposedly burned for warmth by the mother of the man who found them. Although that excuse was patently absurd. There wouldn’t have been enough to get any warmth from, plus they would have burned so fast.” Tired though she was, Laura got Lily’s bookish humor. The elder woman continued.
“Carl Jung, Edgar Cayce, Cotton Mather, Adam Smith, William Miller, Charles Russell, Mother Ann Lee, Mary Shelley, L. Ron Hubbard, Walter and Jeshua Saclas. The Left Behind series, tons of science fiction, horror fiction, poetry. The ‘end of’ material about The End is practically endless.”
The tomes lined shelves three and four deep. They were stacked upon the floor with little room to pass between. They filled boxes and cloth bags. There were nits and tiny pinwheeling worms—visible—even the subtle, awful noise of paper being chewed. A haze in the room came from books turning to the fog of insect offal and the overbearing reek of mold.
Then Laura saw it, a very large book tucked between two towering floor stacks. Her palms sweat and her feet went numb. The fine hair on the back of her neck itched as if infected by the small life eating the books.
The Enantiodromia.
She looked about for Lily but the old woman was gone. Should I call for her? ...
Laura’s eyes fell back on the volume… She picked it up.
So. Heavy. She set the volume in her lap with a groan.
It was not a book that had been printed by a press. It was written by hand, in ink. Like Adam’s journals…
Oh, God…
It was Adam’s handwriting.
Laura leafed through it, seeing what she’d read only 48 hours ago. Wait… what? There were two more entries beyond what she’d seen in her husband’s final journal, only…that same day.
To calculate angular momentum (net spin around a fixed axis), multiplying the mass of every part of the mass in the world by its perpendicular distance from the rotational axis and speed of the part’s circular motion around the axis. This planet’s total angular momentum is the sum of the mass of all the parts.
Newtonian rule of thumb says the net spin can’t change for an isolated system.
How isolated we are, pieces without conscious interconnection. The potential energy of a falling body is proportional to its size, decreasing as it falls. The speed of the fall, combined with kinetic energy, increases by a precise counterbalancing aggregate. (Do you (Dream) all falling?) We are the mysterious intermediaries of Time and Space, forever alone in the dominions of deception we call self-determination. We erroneously believe that our chances proceed equally in all directions, but it is Time that is not an arrow—we are finite.
The Angels are not apathetic. They simply know that they will still exist long after we are gone, no longer elements in the sum of all parts. They are as different from us as the man in the moon. As opposed to the man on the moon, who took that giant leap for their kind, even as that kind then rolled over in its sleep to dream of the crumbling of our expanded boundaries…natural retaliation against a species in sudden decline. (How do you (Dream) yourself to be?)
We were just an accident of nature or did we briefly matter in the constant motion that is the mind and motives of the Greatest Intellect? The genuine semantics of Armageddon, a quiet Apocalypse.
– from The Enantiodromia
Laura paused before the last few lines. Had she just heard somebody chuckle? She turned, the book heavy in her lap. No one. Not even Lily.
How had the old woman come by this?
We are dead, Jerusalem, dead.
Our savior comes stained in blood and chemicals,
as time and space is made crooked out of curved
to make stairs for the descent to earth
from third Heaven.
But there is no salvation for us, Jerusalem,
for we have made our bed
where the savior bled,
and we are dead, Jerusalem, dead.
– from The Enantiodromia
A low, male laugh rippled through fragile pages being digested. One by one the books grew silent, the hungry creatures devouring them struck dead by a fetidness in the air the laugh expelled.
Laura grasped the wheels of her chair, pushing out of the room of collected End Times, down past all those aisles of authors’ spleens and nightmares. She heard the sound of footsteps behind her, only walking, not chasing, as if he knew it would be easy to catch up to her.
She reached the elevator and hit the button for it to open. How strange the lift looked now, not quaint but rusted, cobwebbed. This CAN’T be the same one… Yet she saw the first set of tracks from the wheelchair, left in the dust.
It didn’t open. Again, Laura hit the button.
Nothing. Again. Nothing. Again. Nothing.
“Lily?” Laura cried out.
She heard a movement.
Lily…?
It was a book dropping to the floor. In that direction, all the way to the end of that aisle, she stood. Lily. Her old woman smile was so wide and rigid with teeth that it might have been a rictus. Finger bones plucked another book from the shelf and let it fall.
Something ghastly swirled in Lily’s features. Was this the shape of her plague?
No. The gray hair went dark, the pale skin tanned, the wrinkles smoothed young. And the sudden bones re-fleshed. Muscles popped. She was changing. Into…what?
Laura could see Lily’s transformation into the male stranger.
Laura pulled herself up out of the chair, slung the purse over her head and shoulder, clutched The Enantiodromia to her chest, and ran toward the spiral staircase. The stitches inside her strained to the snapping point as she struggled down the coiling steps. She was dizzy, both from the pain and her medicine. Also from the tea she’d been given…? She’d wondered why there was so much sugar in it. To cover up the taste of a mind-bender, she snorted.
The book she carried weighed as much as a door—or so it seemed. She stopped, set The Enantiodromia on the step above her, opened it to the end, and tore out the last two pages. These she put in her purse and continued to the first floor.
The handsome dark-haired man—she was sure he was the one Adam warned her about—sat on the comfy sofa, sipping that sickeningly sweet Southern tea, ice resembling white tubercles and sloughed scabs. The candles were no longer candles, but several hands, fingers burning.
“Do you intend to pay for that merchandise you just vandalized, Mrs. Grigori?” he asked, grinning.
Laura ran to the door, hit the deadbolt, and near leaped onto the sidewalk beyond.
“Where are you?” she called. “I thought you were my guardian!”
Shadowy swirl. A voice. “I am here. He’s not coming after you.”
“Miss?”
Laura felt a burning wetness. The stitches had ripped out. Blood ran down her legs.
The next thing she knew she woke up at home, on the sofa on top of one blanket and underneath another.
“…your address from your driver’s license. Hardly any new traffic anymore, just a lot of wrecks. I guess you know all the hospitals are closed. Nobody alive to treat…”
The kid was maybe 18, skinny, blonde, his face a hormonal train wreck. “My name’s Ben. Yeah, you’re Laura. Saw it on your license, too.”
He looked so worried, she thought. Poor thing. Probably an orphan now. It surprised her that he hadn’t mistaken her for a revenant and driven off. But specters don’t faint… do they? Still, a brave boy, to help her. She could’ve been contagious, ridden with an epidemic.
“Do you think we’re the only two folks left in the world?” Ben asked, squirming as he put a cool, damp cloth on Laura’s forehead.
She thought about Adam and couldn’t speak for the tears.
Ben got up from where he’d been kneeling beside the couch. He walked over to look at a wedding portrait on a wall over the fireplace.
Laura saw Marianna…no!…her small neck broken, lying in a chair.
Ben turned around, yet no longer a kid. He’d become Lily, then the dark-haired stranger. The back of his shirt hung in ribbons, the skin beneath likewise ripped and bleeding. “She was quite the watch cat. So, what was she in a previous life, the Ghost or the Darkness? You won’t be that much of a wildcat, will you?” Finally, he was a man who looked a lot like Adam.
Laura looked around wildly. “Guardian?” she whispered, calling for the shadow.