And why did my footprints vanish after I left them? Not instantly, to be sure, yet each time I left the disk to go to the lake, the prints I’d made in the ashes the time before were gone. Like markings in snow after a fresh fall. Were there ashfalls in this world, like snowfalls on the surface? Or did the ashes somehow ooze their way up from below? These were mysteries beyond my comprehension, unless the book should happen to explain them. So far it hadn’t.
In the meantime I found good use for the oily, heavy ashes. I took one of my shoes and packed it full with them. It was a short, makeshift club, and not a bad one. I liked to stand amid the vegetation, the weighted shoe in my hand, and swing it low through the bushes. The leaves and branches flew into fragments at the impact. I knew the dero, or whatever else might come for me, wouldn’t crumble quite so easily. But they wouldn’t get me without a fight.
I knelt by the lake, prodding myself to drink. I couldn’t. The water was disgusting. Vile. Putrid.
Drink.
It was the voice of the woman, speaking inside my head, as it had the first time I was there. I didn’t know who she was.
“I don’t like this water. I won’t drink it.”
Follow the moon. Drink from the moon.
“The moon? I can’t reach the moon.”
Her voice repeated back, in its echolike manner: the moon, the moon.
I realized then: the moon was in the sky. But it was also in the water, a few yards out from where I knelt. Its image rippled slightly and seemed somehow bigger than the original.
“I still can’t reach it. I’m afraid to go out that far.”
Go, she echoed back.
I knew the path from disk to water’s edge. So far I’d had no stomach to explore further. In a place like this, fear trumped curiosity. But I’d begun to trust this woman, to think of her as a friend. I did as she said.
The water deepened as I walked. The ashes at the bottom sucked my feet into them, smoothly, past my ankles. The satiny touch soothed my swollen foot. When the water got to my thighs, I leaned forward into it and began half to swim, half to walk. I tried my best to keep the ash-filled shoe, which I carried everywhere I went, above the surface. The image of the moon withdrew from before me. Then it stopped, held still. Waited for me to catch up.
When I stood, the water came to above my waist. The moon shimmered beneath my face. I bent my face into it. I drank from it. And yes, it tasted cleaner, less foul, than in the shallows.
I gulped water, then more water. I stared into the silvery disk that quivered just below me, mirroring the moon in the sky above. And the shadow that passed across it—
IS THAT MY FACE?
What I saw had to be my reflection in the water. But it couldn’t be. It had appeared suddenly, a darkness upon the moon’s blinding silver. A triangular face, black or perhaps gray, with two eyes and two nostrils and a mouth. The face dwindled to a point at its bottom; the mouth was a short, lipless line. And those eyes—those blank dark ovals, slanting up from the center of the face—
Eyes couldn’t possibly be that big.
I jerked my hand up and felt for my own eyes, realizing a second too late that I’d let go of my shoe. I felt my glasses and behind them the soft balls in their sockets. They were still my eyes. They hadn’t been transformed into the black monstrosities staring up from the water. I clenched my fist; I smashed down hard into the dark face in the moon’s image.
Waves rippled away. The face disappeared.
Surely I’d been seeing things. Still, it felt like time to start getting out of there. Then I remembered I’d lost my shoe. Without it I’d be defenseless. I closed my eyes, held my breath, and pushed myself down into the water. I began feeling with my hand along the bottom.
Felt the multiple legs twine around my body.
Felt the pointed nails dig themselves into my back.
I came up screaming, spitting out water. The thing that had got hold of me came up with me. Claws like ants’ pincers crisscrossed my back. They made ribbons of my undershirt, my skin. The dark arrowhead of a face, hard and wet as a lobster’s claw, pressed into mine. Its eyes tried to push their way into my eyes, through the cracked glass lenses that separated us. Deep inside each eye was a vertical slit, a crevasse, opening into an abyss. The legs felt numberless.
“Let me go!”
The face backed away. The uppermost legs—skinny, angled, brittlelooking—waved around my head, dripping their water into the lake. They gave off a loamy smell, like fresh-dug earth. Before I knew what I was doing, I had my hands around the thing’s neck.
The lipless mouth barely moved. It droned a strange guttural language that seemed mostly to be the syllable kha, kha, kha in different combinations. I couldn’t understand any of the words. Yet the meaning inside them hummed like a tuning fork in my head.
Until the seeding.
“What? What are you saying?”
I squeezed the throat, hard. I saw the leg cutting downward and felt a streak of burning pain across my forehead, down past my eyes. If it hadn’t been for my glasses, I would have been blinded. I gave out a yell. I let go of the neck; I swung my hand and grabbed again. This time it was a leg I held.
“Talk to me, goddamn you!”
With its free legs the thing scrabbled at the surface of the water. My arm, as if on its own, gave a vicious twist; the leg came off in my hand. Like a water strider, wriggling its remaining limbs, the creature skittered off over the lake.
I stood, my feet planted on the bottom, gasping for breath. I thought my heart would burst and I would drown, choking blood. I forgot about my shoe. I imagined the water infested with these creatures. I waited to feel the jabs of their pincers. Half swimming, half running, I heaved myself shoreward, moving with the panicked slowness of my worst dreams.
At last the water fell to my knees, then my ankles. I marched forward. I lifted the creature’s hard, slippery leg and waved it over my head. “Hyaaaaa!” I yelled at the top of my voice. I wouldn’t use the leg as a club; it was too light for that. I wanted to say, to whatever might be watching me: this is what I did to your friend. I can do it to you.
The silent shoreline came alive. It hummed; it buzzed. Narrow shapes of gray and black slipped shivering into the ashes, as if sucked downward by a vacuum. Prairie dogs into their holes; trap-door spiders into their lairs. The bushes rustled from the movement. Then they were still once more. I dug my nails into my palms to keep from vomiting up the water I’d drunk. Slowly, very carefully, I began to walk.
Back in the disk, I examined my trophy. A severed leg, nearly two feet long—the leg of a monster-size insect or arachnid. External skeleton, which had looked almost black at the lake but in the disk’s light was gray. One sharp joint where an elbow would be; from the spot where I’d torn the leg away, a thick black stuff oozed. But at the end, where the hand would be—not the arthropod pincer I’d imagined—
A real hand, with six fingers.
At the end of each finger a claw, mostly withdrawn into the crustlike skin.
I placed that hand against the print on my shirt. It fit perfectly.
My bare back leaked blood onto the altar’s side as I sat thinking, wondering, staring. At the creature’s arm, which lay on the floor next to my foot. At my own arm, the skin of which had begun to turn ... gray, I thought at first. Looking more closely, I decided the color was a light brown.
From immersion in the lake’s water, no doubt. The way your teeth turn brown when you drink too much tea. I remembered the stain-brown skin of the three men at the airport that had so baffled me. Had they been drinking, bathing, maybe even living in a lake like this? How? And where? And why?
Riddles chased mysteries, were chased by enigmas, around and around my brain. I must sleep; I could not possibly sleep. After a long time I got to my feet. I crawled out through the disk’s opening, carrying my other shoe. I began to fill it with ashes.
CHAPTER 20
NO SUN EVER ROSE. NO DAWN EVER CAME. THE MOON HUN
G above me, always full, never changing.
I grew thirsty; I drank. Then I was thirsty again. I never felt the need to eat, though, and guessed that the water by the lake’s shore, foul as it was, had something in it that kept me alive.
Gray shrubbery and in one direction the lake: these bounded my world, unvarying as the monster moon in the star-barren sky. Every so often, in a fit of energy and rage, I’d slam with my shoe at the bushes on the opposite side of the disk from the lake, striking as hard, moving as fast and far through them as I could. I thought: They can’t be endless. Sooner or later I’ve got to come to something beyond. I never did.
Yet they didn’t grow back where I’d shattered them, and that gave me the sense of some accomplishment. So did the feeling that my limbs had grown longer, my stride wider. The fragments of the bushes flew farther at impact than they once did; in the moonlight, my shadow stretched out beyond where it once had. If my father could be here, I sometimes thought, how would his and mine compare?
I never encountered anything alive, six- or eight- or many-legged. Only at the lake.
From where I drank I had a clear view of several hundred yards of shoreline, on either side of me. None of it looked any different from the spot I’d begun to think of as mine. Frequently now I saw the lake creatures, standing in groups along the edge, and although they kept their distance, I could tell they were the same as the thing that had attacked me in the water. Or maybe not attacked, but just laid hold on me, with some desperate yearning that left me bloodied and scarred and the creature mutilated, missing a leg, which I now carried with me and waved above my head whenever the others showed a sign of approaching. So they kept away. They stayed in their part of the lake, I in mine, each of us bending to drink from the same filth.
I never understood why they didn’t come for me inside the disk, while I was sleeping and helpless.
I thought: They’re waiting for something.
I took to sleeping with my ash-filled shoe under my fingers.
The lake’s water soaked into my clothes, my underwear. They stiffened as they dried. They cracked, fell away from my body in ribbons, useful at last only to be piled into a pillow. Bare, curled into myself, careful out of habit not to lie on my glass-riddled neck, I slept on them. I would have taken one of the stones of the place to put under my head, but down here there weren’t any stones. Just ashes.
I dreamed of other places, which were the same as this one even though they looked different.
When I lie down, I say: “When shall I arise?”
But the night is long, and I am full of tossings to and fro until the
dawning of the day.
This is from the Bible, the Book of Job. Yet only a line or two later: “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, / And are spent without hope.”
Time crawls snail slow, spins with blinding speed. Months and years whirl by, too quick to grasp or even feel their passage. Yet the nights are endless. I know what Job meant; I’ve lain where he lay. The scraps of clothing on which I’ve rested stank like his dungheap.
There the woman came to me, rising from the shards of my dreams.
She was the woman who spoke by the lake: drink; or go out to the moon. Inside the disk, in the confusion of my sleep, she was no longer a voice inside me. She’d begun to take form.
Mostly human. Not entirely so. Her eyes were cat’s eyes, vertical slits for pupils; her hair was white. She came shining in the darkness, naked like me, and I tried to make out her shape, but all was filmy and vague. Skin rubbed against skin; she was on top of me. Before I could stop myself, it was over.
She put her hand to her belly and smiled, maybe friendly, maybe mocking. “Is this the seeding?” I asked. She shook her head no.
Not yet the seeding.
Then she was gone.
Each time I returned from the lake, I dipped my finger in the ashes and made a mark on the disk’s inner wall. When she first appeared inside the disk, there were twenty ash markings. Now . . .
Still twenty.
Sometimes a few more, or a few less. But always about twenty. Because after a while the ashen smears dry out, crumble to powder, drop from the wall without leaving a trace, and there’s nothing at all I can do about it. So it’s futile for me to make these marks. Yet I keep on.
Thirst is my only measure of time.
Ninth grade’s gone by. Tenth. More than half of eleventh.
Pimples erupt on my face, burst in blood, with or without my father’s assistance. There’s stubble on my face, my upper lip. I shave and cut myself; more blood. “All young boys,” my father smirks, “cut themselves trying to shave. . . .”
My journal, like me, is marooned outside time. The New Year’s globe falls, explodes into 1964 . . . 1965 ... 1966. It changes nothing. Spring comes to the calendar, not to the wind. Or to the chill inside.
Swifter than a shuttle. Without hope.
Beyond my bedroom wall she tosses to and fro. She breathes like an exhausted dog. She’s going to die; I can tell from looking at my father; he’s already got the funeral planned. I’m the only one who refuses to believe it.
Except, of course, her . . .
But in that timelessness mind grows, and its capacities. Like the hair on my forearms. Between my legs.
Slowly I mastered the handwritings in the Gypsies’ book. I teased out the secret of their drawings. Abstract from them their details—grotesque, inessential. Patterns remain. These correspond to the buttons and switches and lights of the disk’s control panel. Move the controls in accord with these patterns. Things will happen.
The disk might begin to hum, to tremble. Once, experimenting, I felt it lift a few feet above the ground. I looked at my hand and was amazed to see it turn transparent, the panel’s lights visible through it. Lifting it toward the disk’s dome, I watched moonlight sift through bone and muscle and skin.
This was flight. Invisibility too. If I’d dared, I would have kept on. I’d have raised the disk high, shot up into the black sky, and swooped out over the lake until I’d found the water’s limit. I would have tested the edges of this world, no longer shackled by my swollen foot, by dread of the hands or tentacles or pincers reaching out for me. When I’d gotten beyond it—to a place out from under this awful moon, where there were colors again—I’d make the disk descend as UFOs do. Wobbling and trembling, like a falling leaf.
But I didn’t.
The sight of myself disappearing filled me with dread. I hadn’t forgotten the sailors on a navy ship, turned unreal in the experiment called Hell Incorporated. What happened to them was happening to me.
I fled the control panel. I huddled on the floor by the altar, trembling, my eyes squeezed shut. When I opened them, the disk was back on the ground, my body solid once more. Mostly I was relieved. Yet I was pained also, as if there’d been an opportunity and it had been missed, and I didn’t know when or whether it would return.
I sat swaying over the book, poring over its words. I could make out nearly all that the Gypsies had written if I stuck with it long enough. The meaning was something else again. But that’s the way of a scripture: it’s often not meant to be understood.
But what shall That Man do, when the Infant born of his Seeding is borne to him at Night, through the Neighborhoods of the Most Distant? How shall he Nourish her? How shall he keep Her from her death? And Woe to him if she should Perish! The Ashes shall be the Burning of His Own dear flesh.
The Seeding . . . the Ashes ... There were clues here, if only I could decipher them, to what was happening around me. Perhaps a prophecy of my own future? And that “Most Distant,” whatever it was: hadn’t I been told of something like that, the night I first heard about the navy ship? I racked my brain to recall. In vain; and context didn’t help. When I turned the page, the writer had lost interest in the subject and gone on to something else:
Such fools the Gaiyars are! They call us Alien, envision us as dwarves or monsters, search to the bottom of the sea or to t
he Edges Of The Galaxy for our home. Hah! as if we could ever be Alien to them! All the time we are within them, Bone of their Bone and Flesh of their Flesh. But they will not Understand, none of the Gaiyars will ever understand.
I knew “gaiyars”—a Gypsy word for outsiders, the way I’d sometimes hear my mother and grandmother talk about the goyim, the shiksas. The rest of the paragraph made no sense at all. I read on, hoping for explanation. At the bottom of the page I found a few lines in another handwriting, a different ink color, apparently in response.
But Jemi my Brother:
There is a truth in what the gaiyars say. True, we are part of them,
embedded in them, Spirit and Flesh, from the Day Of Their Birth.
AND YET—
From the depth of the sea to the End of the Stars,
Amid all the galaxies scattered upon the Great Disk,
From one edge of the universe to the other, and upon all its infinite
Planets and innumerable Moons—
There is none more alien than We.
CHAPTER 21
I DOZED, IN THE MIDST OF A DREAM I KNEW EVEN THEN WAS more than a dream, when I felt the touch on my foot.
I’m in my mother’s arms, and they’re plump and strong like a healthy woman’s. Her face is full and round, not peaky and withered, as I’ve always known it. She smiles down at me, without a trace of fear, the way she did before the sickness began and she and my father still had joy in each other.
She’s teaching me the alphabet:
“Ay-bee-cee-dee-ee-eff-gee”
Suddenly she stops singing. Her face like the sky turns clouded and blank.... And the fingers touched me, light and gentle, and I awoke, crying aloud.
Journal of a UFO Investigator Page 14
