by Joe Hill
“What is it?” asks the nanny.
“Physics,” I say, going around the car and opening my trunk. “You should go home immediately.”
I pull out a pair of old jumper cables and stride across the driveway. Marie is standing just inside the house, her face a pale flash behind the glass storm door. Inside, I lift my daughter off the ground. She wraps her legs around my hip and now I am running again, toys crunching under my feet, my daughter’s long hair tickling my forearm. The nanny has put it into a braid. I never learned how to do that. Depending on the trajectory of the incoming mass, I may not ever have the chance.
“What did you do today?” I ask Marie.
“Played,” she says.
Trying not to pant, I crack open a few windows in the house. Air pressure fluctuations are a certainty. I hope that we only have to worry about broken glass. There is no basement to hide in here, just a cookie-cutter house built on a flat slab of concrete. But the sewer main is embedded deep into the foundation. In the worst case, it will be the last thing to go.
I head to the bathroom.
“Wait here for just a second,” I say, setting Marie down in the hallway. Stepping into the small bathroom, I wind up and violently kick the wall behind the toilet until the drywall collapses. Dropping to my knees, I claw out chunks of the drywall until I have exposed the main sewer line that runs behind the toilet. It is a solid steel pipe maybe six inches in diameter. With shaking hands, I shove the jumper cable around it. Then I wedge myself between the toilet and the outside wall and I sit down on the cold tile floor, the jumper cables under my armpits anchoring me to the ground. This is the safest place that I can find.
If the black hole falling toward us misses the planet, even by a few thousand miles, we may survive. If it’s a direct hit, we’ll share the fate of Mars. At the sonic horizon, sound won’t be able to escape from it. At the event horizon, neither will light. Before that can happen we will reach a Lagrange point as the anomaly cancels out Earth’s gravity. We will fall into the sky and be swallowed by that dark star.
The anomaly was never detected, so it must have come from intergalactic space. The Oort cloud is around a light-year out, mostly made of comets. The Kuiper-Edgeworth belt is on the edge of the solar system. Neither region had enough density to make the black hole visible. I wonder what we were doing when it entered our solar system. Was I teaching Marie the names of dead planets?
“Daddy?” asks Marie.
She is standing in the bathroom doorway, eyes wide. Outside, a car engine revs as someone speeds past our house. A distant, untended door slams idiotically in the breeze. Marie’s flowery dress shivers and flutters over her scratched knees in the restless calm.
“Come here, honey,” I say in my most reassuring voice. “Come sit on my lap.”
Hesitantly, she walks over to me. The half-open window above us is a glowing red rectangle. It whistles quietly as air is pulled through the house. I tie the greasy jumper cable cord in a painfully tight knot around my chest. I can’t risk crushing her lungs, so I wrap my arms around Marie. Her arms fall naturally around my neck, hugging tight. Her breath is warm against my neck.
“Hold on to your daddy very tight,” I say. “Do you understand?”
“But why?” she asks.
“Because I don’t want to lose you, baby,” I say, and my sudden swallowed tears are salty in the back of my throat.
Whips are cracking in the distance now. I hear a scream. Screams.
A gust of wind shatters the bathroom window. I cradle Marie closer as the shards of glass are sucked out of the window frame. A last straggler rattles in place like a loose tooth. The whip cracks are emanating from loose objects that have accelerated upward past the speed of sound. The crack-crack-crack sound is thousands of sonic booms. They almost drown out the frightened cries of people who are falling into the sky. Millions must be dying this way. Billions.
“What is that?” asks Marie, voice wavering.
“It’s nothing, honey. It’s all right,” I say, holding her to me. Her arms are rubber bands tight around my neck. The roof shingles are rustling gently, leaping into the sky like a flock of pigeons. I can’t see them, but it occurs to me that the direction they travel will be along the thing’s incoming trajectory. I watch that rattling piece of glass that’s been left behind in the window frame, my lips pressed together. It jitters and finally takes flight straight up.
A fatal trajectory. A through-and-through.
“What’s happening?” Marie asks, through tears.
“It’s the stars, honey,” I say. “The stars are falling.”
It’s the most accurate explanation I can offer.
“Why?” she asks.
“Look at Daddy,” I say. I feel a sudden lightness, a gentle tug pulling us upward. I lean against the cables to make sure they are still tight. “Please look at your daddy. It will be O.K. Hold on tight.”
Nails screech as a part of the roof frame curls away and disappears. Marie is biting her lips to keep her mouth closed and nodding as tears course over her cheeks. I have not consulted the child development books, but I think she is very brave for three years old. Only three trips around the sun and now the sun is going to end. Sol will be teased apart in hundred-thousand-mile licks of flame.
“My darling,” I say. “Can you tell me the name of the planet that we live on?”
“Earth.”
“And what is the planet with a ring around it?”
“S-Saturn.”
“What are the rings made of?”
“Mountains of ice.”
Maybe a sense of wonder is also a heritable trait.
“Are the stars—”
Something big crashes outside. The wind is shrieking now in a new way. The upper atmosphere has formed into a vortex of supersonic air molecules.
“Daddy?” screams Marie. Her lips are bright and bitten, tear ducts polishing those familiar brown eyes with saline. A quivering frown is dimpling her chin, and all I can think of is how small she is compared to all this.
“Honey, it’s O.K. I’ve got you. Are the stars very big or very small?”
“Very big,” she says, crying outright now. I rock her as we speak, holding her to my chest. The cables are tightening and the sewer main is a hard knuckle against my spine. Marie’s static-charged hair is lifting in the fitful wind.
“You’re right again. They look small, but they’re very big. The stars are so very, very big.”
A subsonic groan rumbles through the frame of the house. Through the missing roof I can see that trees and telephone poles and cars are tumbling silently into the red eye overhead. Their sound isn’t fast enough to escape. The air in here is chilling as it thins, but I can feel heat radiating down from that hungry orb.
Minutes now. Maybe seconds.
“Daddy?” Marie asks.
Her lips and eyes are tinged blue as her light passes me. I’m trying to smile for her, but my lips have gone spastic. Tears are leaking out of my eyes, crawling over my temples, and dripping up into the sky. The broken walls of the house are dancing. A strange light is flowing in the quiet.
The world is made of change. People arrive and people leave. But my love for her is constant. It is a feeling that cannot be quantified because it is not a number. Love is a pattern in the chaos.
“It is very late, my darling,” I say. “And the stars are in the sky.”
They are so very big.
“And that means it’s time for me to give you a kiss. And an Eskimo kiss.”
She leans up for the kiss by habit. Her tiny nose mushing into mine.
“And now . . .”
I can’t do this.
“And now I will lay you down . . .”
Swallow your fear. You are a good father. Have courage.
“And tuck you in, nice and tight, so you stay warm all night.”
The house has gone away from us and I did not notice. The sun is a sapphire eye on the horizon. It lays gentle blue sh
adows over a scoured wasteland.
And a red star still falls.
“Goodnight, my darling.”
I hold her tight as we rise together into the blackness. The view around us expands impossibly and the world outside speeds up in a trick of relativity. A chaotic mass of dust hurtles past and disappears. In our last moment together, we face a silent black curtain of space studded with infinite unwavering pinpricks of light.
We will always have the stars.
NATHAN BALLINGRUD
Skullpocket
FROM Nightmare Carnival
JONATHAN WORMCAKE, THE Gentleman Corpse of Hob’s Landing, greets me at the door himself. Normally one of his several servants would perform this minor duty, and I can only assume it’s my role as a priest in the Church of the Maggot that affords me this special attention. I certainly don’t believe it has anything to do with our first encounter, fifty years ago this very day. I’d be surprised if he remembers that at all.
He greets me with a cordial nod of the head and leads me down a long hallway to the vast study, lined with thousands of books and boasting broad windows overlooking the Chesapeake Bay, where the waters are painted gold by an autumn sun. I remember this walk, and this study, with a painful twinge in my heart. I was just a boy when I came here last. Now, like Mr. Wormcake, I am an old man, and facing an end to things.
I’m shocked by how old he looks. I know I shouldn’t be; Mr. Wormcake’s presence in this mansion by the bay extends back one hundred years, and his history with the town is well documented. But since the death of the Orchid Girl last year, he has withdrawn from public life, and in that time his aspect has changed considerably. Though his bearing remains regal and his grooming is as immaculate as ever, age hangs from him like a too-large coat. The flesh around his head is entirely gone, and his hair—once his proudest feature—is no more. The bare bones of his skull gleam brightly in the late-afternoon sunlight, and the eyes which once transfixed an entire town have fallen to dust, leaving dark sockets. He looks frail, and he looks tired.
To be fair, the fourteen children crowding the room, all between the ages of six and twelve, only underscore this impression. They’ve been selected for the honor of attending the opening ceremonies of the Seventieth Annual Skullpocket Fair by the Maggot, which summoned them here through their dreams. The children are too young, for the most part, to understand the significance of the honor, and so they mill about the great study in nervous anticipation, chattering to each other and touching things they shouldn’t.
Mr. Wormcake’s longtime manservant—formally known as Brain in a Jar 17, of the Frozen Parliament, but who is more affectionately recognized as the kindly “Uncle Digby”—glides into the room, his body a polished, gold-inlaid box on rolling treads, topped with a clear dome under which the floating severed head of an old man is suspended in a bubbling green solution, white hair drifting like ghostly kelp. He is received with a joyful chorus of shouts from the children, who immediately crowd around him. He embraces the closest of them with his metal arms.
“Oh my, look at all these wonderful children,” he says. “What animated little beasts!”
To anyone new to Hob’s Landing, Uncle Digby can be unnerving. His face and eyes are dead, and his head appears to be nothing more than a preserved portion of a cadaver; but the brain inside is both alive and lively, and it speaks through a small voice box situated beneath the glass dome.
While the children are distracted, Mr. Wormcake removes a small wooden box from where it sits discreetly on a bookshelf. He opens it and withdraws the lower, fleshy portion of a human face—from below the nose to the first curve of the chin, kept moist in a thin pool of blood. A tongue is suspended from it by a system of leather twine and gears. Mr. Wormcake affixes the half face to his skull by means of an elastic band and pushes the tongue into his mouth. Blood trickles down the jawline of the skull and dapples the white collar of his starched shirt. The effect is disconcerting, even to me, who has grown up in Hob’s Landing and am accustomed to stranger sights than this.
Jonathan Wormcake has not ventured into public view for twenty years, since the denuding of his skull, and it occurs to me that I am the first person not a part of this household to witness this procedure.
I am here because Mr. Wormcake is dying. We don’t know how a ghoul dies. Not even he is sure, as he left the warrens as a boy and was never indoctrinated into the mysteries. The dreams given to us by the Maggot, replete with images of sloughing flesh and great black kites riding silently along the night’s air currents, suggest that it’s not an ending but a transformation. But we have no experience to measure these dreams against. What waits for him on the far side of this death remains an open question.
He stretches open his mouth and moves his tongue like a man testing the fit of a new article of clothing. Apparently satisfied, he looks at me at last. “It’s good of you to come, especially on this night,” he says.
“I have to admit I was surprised you chose the opening night of Skullpocket Fair for this. It seems there might have been a more discreet time.”
He looks at the children gathered around Uncle Digby, who is guiding them gently toward the great bay window facing east, where the flat waters of the Chesapeake are painted gold by the late-afternoon sun. They are animated by excitement and fear, a tangle of emotions I remember from when I was in their place. “I have no intention of stealing their moment,” he says. “This night is about them. Not me.”
I’m not convinced this is entirely true. Though the children have been selected to participate in the opening ceremonies of Skullpocket Fair and will be the focus of the opening act, the pomp and circumstance is no more about them than it is about the Maggot, or the role of the church in this town. Really, it’s all about Jonathan Wormcake. Never mind the failed mayoral campaign of the midseventies, never mind the fallout from the Sleepover Wars or the damning secrets made public by the infamous betrayal of his best friend, Wenceslas Slipwicket—Wormcake is the true patriarch of Hob’s Landing; the Skullpocket Fair is held each year to celebrate that fact, and to fortify it.
That this one marks the one hundredth anniversary of his dramatic arrival in town, and his ritual surrendering of this particular life, makes his false modesty a little hard to take.
“Sit down,” he says, and extends a hand toward the most comfortable chair in the room: a high-backed, deeply cushioned piece of furniture of the sort one might expect to find in the drawing room of an English lord. It faces the large windows, through which we are afforded a view of the sun-flecked waters of the Chesapeake Bay. Mr. Wormcake maneuvers another, smaller chair away from the chess table in the corner and closer to me, so we can speak more easily. He eases himself slowly into it and sighs with a weary satisfaction as his body settles, at last, into stillness. If he had eyes, I believe he would close them now.
Meanwhile, Uncle Digby has corralled the children into double rows of folding chairs, also facing the bay windows. He is distributing soda and little containers of popcorn, which do not calm the children but do at least draw their focus.
“Did you speak to any of the children after they received the dream?” Wormcake asks me.
“No. Some of them were brought to the church by their parents, but I didn’t speak to any of them personally. We have others who specialize in that kind of thing.”
“I understand it can be a traumatic experience for some of them.”
“Well, it’s an honor to be selected by the Maggot, but it can also be pretty terrifying. The dream is very intense. Some people don’t respond well.”
“That makes me sad.”
I glance over at the kids, seated now, the popcorn spilling from their hands, shoveled into their mouths. They bristle with a wild energy: a crackling, kinetic radiation that could spill into chaos and tears if not expertly handled. Uncle Digby, though, is nothing if not an expert. The kindliest member of the Frozen Parliament, he has long been the spokesman for the family, as well as a confidant to M
r. Wormcake himself. There are many who believe that without his steady influence, the relationship between the Wormcakes and the townspeople of Hob’s Landing would have devolved into brutal violence long ago.
“The truth is, I don’t want anyone to know why you’re here. I don’t want my death to be a spectacle. If you came up here any other night, someone would notice, and it wouldn’t be hard for them to figure out why. This way, the town’s attention is on the fair. And anyway, I like the symmetry of it.”
“Forgive me for asking, Mr. Wormcake, but my duty here demands it: are you doing this because of the Orchid Girl’s death?”
He casts a dark little glance at me. It’s not possible to read emotion in a naked skull, of course, and the prosthetic mouth does not permit him any range of expression; but the force of the look leaves me no doubt of his irritation. “The Orchid Girl was her name for the people in town. Her real name was Gretchen. Call her by that.”
“My apologies. But the question remains, I’m afraid. To leave the world purely, you must do it unstained by grief.”
“Don’t presume to teach me about the faith I introduced to you.”
I accept his chastisement quietly.
He is silent for a long moment, and I allow myself to be distracted by the sound of the children gabbling excitedly to each other, and of Uncle Digby relating some well-worn anecdote about the time the Leviathan returned to the bay. Old news to me, but wonderful stuff to the kids. When Mr. Wormcake speaks again, it is to change course.
“You mentioned the dream which summons the children as being intense. This is not your first time to the house, is it?”
“No. I had the dream myself, when I was a kid. I was summoned to Skullpocket Fair. Seventy years ago. The very first one.”
“My, my. Now that is something. Interesting that it’s you who will perform my death ritual. So that puts you in your eighties? You look young for your age.”
I smile at him. “Thanks, but I don’t feel young.”
“Who does, anymore? I suppose I should say ‘welcome back.’”
