by Joseph Lallo
“Don’t open your eyes,” Major said, as if reading his mind. “That’ll break the connection. Keep going.”
Samuel forced his mind clear again, and this time a pinhole of light appeared. He watched it grow behind his eyelids and dart back and forth like a chaser in his vision. Samuel could see the edges becoming fuzzy and rolling back from the center, like sand pulled out by the tide. He lost sensation in his limbs and could no longer tell if he was standing or lying in the limestone dust on the floor of the cave. Major’s voice cut through, as if the old man were inside his head.
“You got one, boy. You grabbed onto another locality. Now let it open up and make sure it’s not all brimstone, lake of fire, or any of that other biblical bullshit that keeps Christians in the pews every week.”
Samuel blinked within his vision without opening or closing his eyelids. He watched the center spread until the fuzzy border pushed out to his peripheral vision. Samuel had to remind himself to breathe. He stood on the shore of a narrow, long lake. The water sat like a sheet of ice, reflecting the towering mass of earth above it as if another mountain existed inside the lake. Tall pine trees bordered water that cut its way through a high mountain pass. Patches of snow clung to the ground in places hidden by shade. He saw the wind push the pine trees, nudging them into each other with a gentle shake. Samuel couldn’t hear a sound and he was about to tell Major he saw no sign of life when a dark dash pinned to a deep blue sky came across his field of vision and stopped at the top of the tallest pine. He watched the bird spread its wings and take flight in the opposite direction, and Samuel was able to identify it as a hawk.
“Is it alive?” Major asked within his head.
“What?”
“The locality. Is there a cloud? Is a reversion coming?”
Samuel went back to his vision, searching the landscape with all of his senses, even ones he did not realize he had.
“Seems okay.”
Major laughed, and Samuel heard the slapping sound of his hands coming together.
“Perfect. The next thing you need to do is focus on a point inside that locality. Find a rock, a tree, something physical you can latch on to. This is your coordinate for the slip, in a manner of speaking.”
Before Samuel did that, he spun around inside his vision to find the best perspective possible before attempting anything. When he faced the west, Samuel felt it before he saw it. The unmistakable baffle choking the light and life from the sky. He saw tendrils of slate swirling in the blue sky, turning it grey.
“Yeah, this place looks perfect. Let me find us a decent landing pad.”
Major snipped with excitement, and Samuel felt him temporarily exit his mind. He hoped Major would not take it upon himself to serve Mara to the wolves.
“I’m almost ready,” Samuel said. “What’s next?”
“Walk to it. Touch it. Hell, lick it if you have to. Get yourself a physical connection to the object there, which will help target the slip. We won’t land on that fucker, like Plymouth Rock, but we’ll be damn close. Make sure it’s not too close to water. I don’t wanna get my hair wet.”
Samuel realized he could shut Major out, like closing a door or hanging up the phone. He reached out to Mara, still inside the cavern.
“Hey,” he said.
“Samuel?” she asked.
“Listen, and don’t speak. When he gets close, push him in the back.”
“But I don’t know what you mean—”
“Mara. Stop. We don’t have time. When he gets close, push him. Do you understand?”
Samuel felt her head nod. He switched communication from Mara back to Major.
“I will not miss the howling of those wretched beasts. And the goddamn horde can rot in hell. Let’s do this.”
The portal from inside Samuel’s head hovered above the ground inside the cave. The opening rose up ten feet and expanded to a length of twelve. He felt as though he was sitting on top of a cloud, looking out of a bay window on another world below. The ambient sunlight spilled from the portal and illuminated the cave, chasing the wolves even farther away from the entrance and forcing their retreat into the forest. Major and Mara held their hands over their faces to protect their eyes from the blazing light they hadn’t seen for so long.
Mara stepped forward and made eye contact with Samuel. He winked and then turned to face Major.
“Sure is a beauty, eh? I knew once you conjured the portal nothing would stop you from slipping this locality, not even your little Goth princess over there. I’m sure you wouldn’t mind some young pussy, but even that ain’t enough, right?”
“Just do it,” Samuel said. “I want out of this filthy place.”
Major nodded and lifted his chin at Mara.
“Let’s go, hon. You belong to the alpha male now. Sammy and I are going to send you a postcard, don’t you worry.”
Mara dropped her head to her chest. When she raised it, tears streamed down her face.
“Can I just look at it for a minute before you two go?”
“I don’t see no harm in that,” Major said, lifting his shoulders at Samuel.
Samuel shrugged and stepped back from the edge of the portal to allow Mara and Major space to step up to it.
“Take a look at that beautiful, virgin land,” Major said, gazing upon the eastern end of the distant locality.
Mara inched forward. She shook her head, more tears following. Major stepped to the side and put an arm around her. He whispered into her ear.
“Could be dinosaurs with eight heads in there somewhere. But you know what ain’t there? This place. This stinking shithole ain’t.”
Major stepped forward and spread his arms as if to embrace the vista. He tilted his head back and let the natural sunlight ease the tight scar tissue on his face.
“Now,” Samuel yelled.
Mara had taken two steps back from the edge and one to the side, positioning herself directly behind Major while he was basking in the glow of the portal. With her dark, straggly hair covering all but her piercing eyes, Mara lunged forward with both hands. Her palms struck Major’s black overcoat like a slap to the face. She locked her elbows and extended her arms, driving her weight through the push and forward toward the open portal. Major gasped as the shove knocked the air from his lungs. He stumbled forward and almost regained his balance when his left foot slid on the loose limestone and into the portal. His left leg dropped, and his body torqued to the side as whatever force ruling the portal sucked Major in like gravity would from the precipice of a cliff.
Samuel saw the shock and the anger in Major’s eyes as his body slid farther into the portal, alone. His fingers grasped the fuzzy edge of the vortex, and he pulled his chin up to them.
“You fucking liar,” he shouted. “I swear to God I’m coming back for you, you son of a bitch.”
Samuel closed his eyes again. When he reopened them, Mara stood by his side, both of them staring at the cavern wall where an open portal to another locality used to be.
Chapter 14
He will not trick me again.
The hunters from the pack circled their tails, first clockwise, then counterclockwise. Strands of saliva fell from their muzzles, turning the dark soil even darker. Some hunters growled, while others kept their gazes low to avoid signaling a challenge to the alpha male. The wolves’ yellow eyes cut through the darkness with laser precision. The alpha male pulled back from the cave entrance when he no longer felt the elder’s presence, fearful of what it could mean.
He is gone from here. Banished.
The pack kept moving, agitated and weary.
The end arrives soon.
The horde had gathered at a safe distance behind the pack. More creatures emerged from the trees, off the path, and from other hidden places within the locality. They clumped together, swaying back and forth, blotting out the trees and the ground with their swelling numbers. The horde became a living organism comprising thousand
s of unthinking beings. The edges oscillated like a giant cell membrane. The reversion kept advancing from the west, raking the horde to the cave like a pile of leaves.
The alpha male trotted to a rocky outcrop several yards from the cave entrance. He wound his way up the shards of stone until he stood fifteen feet taller than the rest of the pack. The wolf looked out over the field, where the horde replaced the wheat, still teetering back and forth as if pushed by an invisible hand.
So many.
The hunters paced underneath the outcrop while waiting for the alpha male to come back.
We must pursue. We must descend into the womb.
The hunters wailed, gnashing their teeth and snapping at each other’s tails, all the while knowing none among them could challenge for leadership.
***
“What did you do to him?” Mara asked.
Samuel stood still, staring at the dark-grey wall.
“I gave him what he wanted.”
She shook her head. “How did you do it?”
“I’m not sure,” Samuel said.
“Can you do it again?”
“I’m not sure,” he said again.
Mara turned and took a few steps toward the front of the cave. She approached until the yellow eyes of the wolves danced in the darkness beyond.
“Between the wolves and the horde, we’re not getting out of here.”
Samuel nodded. In a recess, he noticed an array of angles foreign to rock. Samuel stood and walked toward them. As the inner glow of the cave cast light on it, Samuel discovered a small pile of broken tree branches and twigs. He gathered them in his arms and walked back toward Mara. He dropped the bundle and began to arrange them into a leaning pile.
“They’re very damp. But it’s worth a try.”
Mara smiled when she realized what he was doing.
She helped arrange the wood as Samuel dug in his pockets for the lighter. He could not remember if it had always been there or not. Samuel felt that sludgy feeling returning to his head, slowing his thoughts and forcing him to think hard about simple tasks. He recognized the feeling as the same when the noose first dropped him into this place, and he wondered if this was how the end would come. If the reversion would rewind everything, even the thoughts and experiences in his head.
“Go ahead and try,” Mara said.
Her words shook Samuel and he wondered how long he had been hovering over the firewood with his thumb on the lighter.
“I don’t even know if the lighter works.”
Mara shrugged her shoulders and sat cross-legged on the ground. Samuel lowered his hand and flicked the lighter. Sparks caught and ignited the fluid in the reservoir. The flame appeared with a green tint, warm instead of hot. He touched the flame to the smallest pieces. The wood cracked and sizzled but failed to catch.
“It was a nice thought,” Mara said, her face betraying her words.
“Not sure how long it would have lasted, anyway. It’s not like there’s a stack of firewood in here.”
She nodded in consolation.
“It was there, too,” Samuel said.
Mara waited, sensing Samuel was speaking to himself as much as he was to her.
“I saw the cloud in the portal, which is why I knew I was slipping him into that one. If it had been paradise, like a picture of the steel-blue waters of the Caribbean you see on office calendars, I’m not sure what I would have done.”
“You saved me.”
Samuel huffed, discomfort wracking his face.
“I really don’t know if I can summon a locality or if it’s all chance. I don’t even know if I can open a locality other than that one. Major could be waiting for us when the next portal opens.”
“Then we won’t be any worse off than we are now, right?”
A howl followed by a series of growls made them both turn to face the entrance.
“I have a feeling they’re coming after us at some point. When the reversion gets right up close, these wolves are going to get over their fear of this cave.”
“I agree,” Samuel said. “And if the horde joins in, we’ll have our hands full.”
Samuel watched Mara tuck a lock of black hair behind her ear, and he thought how sophisticated she would look in middle age. He imagined a shimmer of gray by her ear and a slender hand pushing her hair away from blue eyes that resonated with laughter and experience and life.
“Do you think Kole is dead?”
“Yes,” Samuel said. “Whatever that means here.”
“He was broken,” Mara said. “On the inside.”
“Aren’t we all?” Samuel said.
“His pain was so deep he couldn’t live without it.”
Another howl, this one more intense and louder, echoing through the cave like a gunshot. Mara watched Samuel’s face contort as though she could see the memories floating back to the surface of his mind.
“I was sick. Middle of winter, aches, the flu, the whole thing. We had been married for quite a while at this point, kind of shed the little kisses and light touches of the first few years.”
Mara flinched, and Samuel could see her holding the pain inside the best she could.
“I was in bed and having a hard time falling asleep. We had a big mattress that left a lot of space between us. She reaches over and starts gently rubbing my back with one hand. This was not foreplay. There wasn’t any of that happening that night. She did it because she wanted to, and those couple of minutes of contact felt like a million dollars. It’s that feeling I miss. I ache inside for the intimacy that comes through years of friendship, disagreements, shared experience. It’s more than sex and more than physical contact. It’s a spiritual connection between two people, unspoken, real and powerful.”
Samuel looked at Mara as she wiped tears away with the cuffs of her sleeves. “That’s what’s dead here. That’s what this place is missing. And if it is, maybe the cloud needs to eat it. The reversion needs to do its job and sweep this place from existence.”
“It’s love. I wonder why you can’t say that word? Everything you described is love. Do you think it still exists elsewhere?” Mara asked.
“Why? Why do you think it has to? Maybe love died like the summer breeze and the sound of gulls soaring over open water. Maybe love is lying in its grave with sunlight and goodness and righteousness,” Samuel said.
“It has to exist somewhere else,” Mara said. “If I didn’t believe it did, I’d walk out there right now and offer myself to the wolves.”
“But does it exist for us, Mara?”
“We’re here for a reason,” she said.
He thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know why I’m here,” he said.
“You do, Samuel. We all do. Some of us haven’t remembered it yet.”
Before Samuel could reply, a howl from the alpha male brought them to their feet as the wolf’s silhouette appeared at the threshold of the cave.
***
The cloud continued its death march across the empty sky. The rolling swirls of slate and obsidian pummeled the air. All but a sliver of the eastern horizon remained untainted by the reversion. It dropped toward the surface like a heavy curtain. The cloud pushed down, placing a pillow over the face of the last remaining motion in this world. The silence overpowered everything, and distant vistas disappeared within the coming storm of nothingness.
The trees of the locality leaned inward, exhausted from the continuous pull of the reversion. Some leafless branches touched the ground in homage to the unstoppable force engulfing the land and everything in it. Some could not fight any longer, their trunks snapping and toppling the head of the tree to the forest floor, leaving a ragged trunk sticking up from the ground like a broken tooth.
The horde remained, most fastened to the last piece of solid matter. As the reversion continued to churn from the west, the horde began to revert as well. Clumps of undead flesh fell from their bodies in silent mounds of rotted
bone. Teeth and hair trickled from the creatures’ heads, followed by limbs no longer strong enough to withstand gravity, the lone natural force left virtually untouched. Scraps of clothing long ago turned into dirty, gray remnants floated to the ground in silence. Some of the creatures standing on the edge of the clearing collapsed on themselves, leaving a pumping, empty jaw on the ground spewing nothing but meaningless silence.
The pack suffered along with the horde. The alpha male’s hunters hunkered down in a clearing not far from the cave, but several remained motionless and still for far longer than natural. Two of the hunters lay with their noses nuzzled underneath their tails, the rise and fall of their chests no longer visible. The alpha male strode amongst the wolves and noted the change, one he felt within.
It must be now. Nothing will remain.
Of the six hunters with their muzzles in the dirt, three stood in response to the alpha male.
The horde shall join. There is not much will left in the dead flesh, but it is His command.
The hunters growled and circled their leader. They paced back and forth, staring at the black hole in the mountain. The alpha male trotted forward and circled around. Three dozen members of the horde shuffled, their legs dragging them toward the entrance to the cave. Several more attempted to march until their atrophied bones dropped them to the ground in a pile of dirty fabric and grey flesh. Seeing the movement, the alpha male looked into the sky as it closed in on the tops of the few trees brave enough to reach up.
The alpha male brought his ragged army to the edge of the clearing until he could feel the subtle exhale of the mountain coming through the mouth of the cave. He paced back and forth, growling and snapping at the air.
Come out. We are not done.
***
“We can’t stay here.”
“I know.”
