Saturday, the Twelfth of October

by Norma Fox Mazer

  She didn’t answer. He was calling only because their mother had forced him. Even if it had been his own idea, she wouldn’t have answered. She hated him now. She pressed herself against the boulder, longing to dissolve into the earth, into the stone. She pressed harder and harder against the stone, her face and body burning, her head, her arms, her whole self melting and burning. A humming grew in her ears, a distant humming like the humming of a hundred wires. It grew gradually louder, more insistent and became a furious, shattering buzzing, as if the sky were black with a million insects. She didn’t hear Ivan call her again. Her self was dissolving, coming apart melting into the earth and the stone. “WHAT?” she cried. She wanted to stop this thing that was happening, but was swept up, her head filling and threatening to burst like an overripe fruit “WHAT IS THIS?” she cried in terror. Then a storm of darkness descended on her, wings of darkness spinning and tossing her in a blur of silver and black. WHAT? HELP! HELP ME! HELP! Her mouth was filled with darkness. Her blinded eyes streamed silver. Silver poured through her arms and silver streams jetted from her nostrils. Silver flew from her body, streamers of black silver, black as the earth, black and silver as the depths of the earth.

  Chapter 3

  She lay on the ground, crumpled, shaking, bones scraped raw. Behind her closed eyelids, stunning, needle-like flashes of black and silver pierced her skull. For a long time she lay there, shuddering, shaking. Gradually she became quieter; her body knit itself together; her flesh softened; her bones again became an uncounted, unfelt part of herself.

  “What was it?” Her voice was a whisper. Her lips were swollen, sore. She groped for an explanation, a way of understanding the silver and darkness, a name for the merciless force that had flung and flayed her. Beneath her body she felt the earth still trembling from the—storm? Hurricane? Tornado? Yes, tornado. Greedily, she fastened on the familiar word, the possible explanation. A tornado was terrifying, but comprehensible. A raging wind whirling through the sky like a giant egg whisk, sucking her up into its black center. She had had no warning of its coming, no signal, no premonition, but that was understandable. Tangled in misery, she had been oblivious to everything but her need to get away from Ivan. A tornado, yes. A force of nature, a disaster, and she in the heart of the disaster. In her mind she saw rubble of toppled buildings, dust and smoke rising silently in a devastated city beneath a sullen sky. She pushed her clenched hands against her jaw, trying with the little ache of bone rubbing against bone to keep away terror. Her family. Her home. What had happened to them? She became aware of silence, sound unburdened by the rumble of vehicles, the rasp of machinery, the muted city roar.

  Open your eyes. Don’t be a rabbit. Face it. But the ominous silence, thick, almost palpable, seemed as threatening as the storm had been; silence poured over her like a deadly gas.

  A loud buzzing filled her ears. She recalled the onset of the storm, and her eyes flew open. A swarm of stout metallic green insects with bulging black eyes beat around her face. They hovered vertically in space like tiny evil helicopters. She leaped to her feet, covering her head with her arms. “Go away! Go away, go away!” Instinctively she ducked lower and threw herself against the boulder. Behind her, the buzzing diminished, then disappeared. She raised her head cautiously and looked around. She was in the middle of a vast overgrown field. Above her the sky was shockingly blue, the sun blazed with a fierce purity, and everywhere grass, bushes, and flowers grew in lush, dazing, brilliant profusion. The wire park fence, the pigeon-spattered statue of James P. Mechanix, the scarred maples, the paint-flecked teeter-totters—all had disappeared. The buildings outside the park were gone. The streets, the cars, the people, the city itself—all had vanished. She put her hands to her eyes. Her mind felt as hot as the yellow sun, thick and boiling, uncomprehending.

  In the distance, the sharp peaks of mountains shimmered like water. All around her was the silence—a silence unlike anything she’d ever known, deep and thick, yet not silence; for the air was rippled with the high, shrill calls of invisible insects, with wind soughing through the trees in the distance, and with strange hoarse bird cries.

  She tried to remember her geography, to relate stray facts to the physical landscape around her. The storm had snatched her and set her down—where? Could she have been flung so fast and so far that she was now in a distant part of the country? Or even another country? At the thought her heart thumped painfully. Unbidden, then, her hands wandered over her face, touching eyes, cheekbones, lips, as if in this confusion and terror her physical self might, somehow, have been altered. She looked down the length of her body, stretched out her arms, flexed her fingers, rose on her toes. Her relief was silly and real. She was all there, intact, unchanged, still Zan. Her clothing, too, was unchanged—sneakers, jeans, shirt, all limp and familiar. She felt a sudden fondness for her clothes—they had come through this with her!—and with the same feeling of gratified fondness she took out and fingered each object in her pockets. Her jackknife, a white button, a crumpled tissue, a safety pin, two linty Lifesavers, her school locker key. She stared at them as if they contained answers, then put them carefully back into her pocket

  She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hello. Anybody here? Hello. Anybody around?” Only birdcalls, insects, and wind answered her. She pushed up the sleeves of her shirt. No reason to panic. There were explanations for everything. She had only to find a house and people. Then everything would not seem so strange and ominous. She turned to the boulder, touching it quickly, for luck. Her own ugly beast of a boulder! A wave of emotion swept her, but at once chilling reason struck it down. How could this rock be her rock when Mechanix Park was gone, the city was gone, and she was somewhere else? Besides, she had never seen anything bloom on her boulder’s tough hide except smashed soda bottles. This boulder blazed with red and blue lichens, clumps of green moss, and clusters of vivid, tiny blue flowers growing in every crevice. Then, too, there was no perfect round dynamite hole, no long secret shaft down its middle. She had only thought it was her boulder because she wanted so desperately to touch something known and familiar.

  She stepped into the field, waving her arms to drive away the swarming insects, and pushed her way clumsily through the shoulder-high growths of grass and flowers. Astonished, she saw bright emerald butterflies as big as birds skeining the air, and others, jet black, as small as bees. She pushed aside the grass with swimming motions of her hands, fixing her eyes on the distant trees. Thick tangles of bushes choked her steps. The sun beat down on her head, and the high grasses swayed in front of her eyes. The field seemed to go on and on. The trees looked as far away as ever. Her arms were welting from the coarse grass, and she began kicking it aside with her feet. Her tongue clicked dryly against the roof of her mouth. She longed for a cold, moist can of soda. Bees and flies, attracted by her sweat, buzzed maddeningly around her.

  She sank to the ground for a rest; it was cooler there, the stalks of the plants forming a dim, cave-like place. She brightened, enjoying the feeling of a hideaway, the shadowed little clearing close to the earth, just the sort of place she’d loved when she was small. But soon she got up and moved briskly forward again. Turning, she saw her path behind her, narrow, twisting, bent through the field. She continued on. As she neared the trees, her steps slowed, faltered, then stopped. Before her she saw a massive forest stretching impenetrably in every direction.

  The trees were enormous, a race of giants of incredible height and girth. Vines, creepers, and thorns grew thick and tangled over blackened scabby trunks; wind creaked through massive, grotesquely twisted limbs; and long rays of greenish-black light filtered from the forest roof like murky water. Zan had to tilt her head until her neck ached to see the tops of the trees.

  Several times in the past years her parents had taken her and her brothers to the state park forest, a two-hour bus ride from the city. The air in the park had smelled piney sweet, and her mother, relaxed for a few hours, had recalled the times in her childhood when he
r parents had taken her and Cici to the country. Each time they had brought a picnic lunch and, after eating at one of the wooden tables, they had gone walking in the forest, along trails marked with little red plastic circles stuck on trees. The trees had been trim and straight, growing in neat pleasant rows. But that forest had about as much relationship to the forest before Zan as did a glass of water to a raging ocean.

  A thick, sweetish odor assailed Zan’s nostrils. The wind carried unidentifiable clattering and barks and screams from the dark trees, making the hairs on her arms stand up. She could never go in there. Never! But the field was bounded on every side by forest, and there was no other way out. Blindly she veered in another direction, then in another, propelled by despair.

  Suddenly the sky darkened. Overhead, thousands upon thousands of huge birds blotted out sun and sky, light and warmth. Curved necks extended like snakes, long blue legs dangling strangely, wings beating the air, they shrieked like a convocation of demons and devils. Ai-uuuhhh! Ai-uuuhhh!

  Zan’s own cry was drowned in the birds’ sound as she plunged back through the field, pushing aside the whipping grasses and ending up, finally, against a rock. Only when the last, demonic call had faded did she see that the boulder she had been so furiously hugging was the same one she had left behind her. She had made a complete circle.

  She slumped to the coolness of the ground, putting her head against the stone, remembering how Ivan had called down the street after her. If she’d answered him, if she’d gotten up and gone home, would she be here now? For a little while she went over again all the events of the morning, almost forgetting for a few moments where she was. After a while, she got to her feet again, and made a megaphone of her hands. “HEL-LO? HEL-LO! HEL-LO!” She turned, yelling in every direction. “IS ANYONE AROUND? DO YOU HEAR ME? HELLO! HELLO! ANSWER IF YOU HEAR ME. ANSWER ME!”

  Her voice disappeared into the field like a pebble on a beach. It was stupid to stand there and yell. She struck out again into the field, in another direction. She sweated through the field, temples throbbing, thrusting down the grass and flowers, sidestepping the thorny little bushes, making another path.

  Unexpectedly she came upon a small sandy clearing with scrubby grass and a shallow pool. Nearby, the forest again. Throwing herself down on her belly, she stuck her face gratefully into the pool, gulping down the warm water, splashing it over her steaming head. Dripping, she rolled away and lay on her back, arms flung across her face. She was exhausted, her mind blurry. Colors and swarming shafts of light played behind her eyelids.

  She jerked suddenly to alertness with the conviction that she was being watched. Her scalp prickled. She sat up, looking uneasily into the watery gloom of the forest. The sense of being watched heightened. She turned slowly round and saw two bright, bulging black eyes with yellow centers staring directly at her. An animal as big as she, furry, tawny, with long splayed-out, dangerous-looking feet stood on its hind legs on the limb of a tree, gripping another branch above it with one hand. Its tail, thick and striped like a raccoon’s, curled over its upraised arm. It had an almost human look, calm and appraising. Zan’s belly jerked spasmodically. She tried to make herself small. Then, with a squawk that seemed like a derisive laugh, the animal leaped to another tree and disappeared into the forest.

  There was a metallic taste in Zan’s throat. An idea gnawed at her; an idea that had been burrowing secretly into her mind from the moment she opened her eyes to that mad yellow sun. Something awesomely out of the ordinary had happened to her, something so bizarre, so incredible . . . She sprang to her feet, pushing away, denying, her thoughts. Her head swam dizzily, but in her stomach there was a leaden weight. She bent over, sweating, and vomited bitter bile into the grass.

  She rinsed her mouth in the waterhole, rinsing and spitting till she felt clean again, then sank back on her haunches, feeling hollow and fragile as a reed. She hugged herself, shivering despite the sun. Over her head three vulture-like black birds circled in the brillant sky, circling lower and lower till Zan could clearly see their long hooded hangman’s heads, their cold white-ringed eyes. They circled in slow, smooth, sinking circles, and Zan’s heart seemed to circle and sink with them. She had wished violently to be somewhere else. Anywhere. And she had been given her wish. But it was awful, terrifying. She shaded her eyes against the shocking light of the sun and once again searched the landscape for something familiar. Anything. Anything at all.

  Sweating and chilled, she cried out. “Hello! Hello, oh, hello, won’t somebody answer me? Hello! Is anyone here? Anyone? Anyone?”

  Chapter 4

  Zan was sleeping on the ground, dreaming of a vomit-colored bug walking on the kitchen ceiling. The bug’s large eyes swiveled and stared straight down at her. Sickened, she backed away, bumping into the kitchen table, then into her cot. The bug scuttled along the ceiling, following her, staring at her. She couldn’t escape. She woke with a start, sitting up and rubbing her cheek where it had pressed into the ground. Her eyes were hot and dry; there was dirt in her mouth, gritting between her teeth. She was stunned afresh by the jarring brilliance of the meadow, by the immense, empty sky, and most of all by her aloneness.

  She went to the waterhole and, sucking up a mouthful of water, sloshed it around between her teeth, then spit it out. She splashed her hands and her face and swallowed enough water to temporarily fool her stomach into believing it had been fed. She remembered the Lifesavers and popped one into her mouth, sucking it slowly. Finally, feeling better, she squatted on her heels, considering her situation. She needed to make a plan, to do something sensible, not go on wandering back and forth in this field, yelling pointlessly and swinging crazily between tears and laughter. She could go back to the boulder, but what would it gain her? To find people, she had to leave the field. She had no choice. There was the field, there were the mountains, an incalculable distance away, forbidding and foreign. And there was the forest. She had to go into it, through it, and out.

  Do it. Don’t think.

  She moved briskly to the edge of the trees. Branches creaked, an animal squawked harshly. She took a step forward, another, and another, passing from sun into shadow. The forest rustled with the scurrying and scuttling of unseen creatures. She peered into the dimness, her skin damp with apprehension. Wind creaked through massive limbs hung with thick tangled vines. She scuffed forward uncertainly. She snapped a branch to mark her trail and told herself to move forward in a straight line. Behind her, something thudded to the earth. Her heart pushed heavily against her ribs. “Oh, Mom,” she whispered.

  Staring into a dense tangle of limbs and leaves and vines, Zan wondered what creatures lived there and if they were watching her. She picked up a stout branch and held it in front of her like a spear. With each step she took, her nostrils flared uneasily and she looked in every direction, tense, poised for flight. Every creak and rustle alerted her senses in an ancient fear response: antennae quivered from every inch of her skin; the back of her neck prickled; up and down her arms the fine hairs stood erect. Warning! Danger! Her tongue was dry in her mouth. All at once she knew she was being watched: eyes were peering at her from a hidden place. “Who’s there?” she shouted. The back of her head was icy. The conviction that she was being secretly observed became stronger, impossible to ignore. She whirled, clutching her stick, and forgetting everything she had planned, she veered wildly off to one side, stumbling and tripping over roots and fallen trees. She almost fell, caught herself, and banged into a tree.

  Now mosquitoes appeared in clouds, whining around her ears and biting her arms and legs and face. This, finally, drove her back to the meadow. But even there, out in the open, the sense of being observed refused to fade. Hot and sweating, irritated because she would have to work up the nerve all over again to venture into the forest, she chewed furiously on a blade of grass.

  She spoke aloud for courage. “Okay, you’re going into the forest now.” This time it was going to be straight on, do or die, no tears, no running
away, no fear about being watched, just GO. If she moved fast and straight and resolutely, she was sure to find something—people, a house, some sign of life. As she thought this, a troop of tiny, deer-like animals appeared in the grass, heading toward her, their hooves beating like raindrops on the ground. She stared at them in wonder. Small as cats, with golden coats, they had two curved horns springing from between their ears and a third hom, like a tiny polished knife, jutting from above the nose. The lead animal, scenting her, froze. A moment later, the entire herd turned in a blur of gold and was swallowed up by the high grass.

  Zan ran after them for a few yards, then stopped, her mind quivering with questions to which she had no answers. Miniature deer with three horns . . . the crushing immensity of the forest . . . butterflies as big as birds, and birds flying in such incredible numbers . . . And no airplanes, or telephone wires, or distant sounds of traffic. No people anywhere. Nothing but strange, buzzing, shrilling silence and the fresh smell of grass and the blazing sun in that fierce blue sky. From the corner of her eyes she saw movement at the edge of the forest. Her shoulders tensed for flight or fight. Then, in a stunning moment of disbelief, she caught a glimpse of long tangled hair and bare brown shoulders. A girl, her face in shadow, was peeking around the side of a tree. For an instant Zan was so startled she simply stood and stared back. Then an exhilarating wave of relief sent her running, yelling and laughing, toward the girl.

  “Hey, hello, hello, hi, hello!” She waved her arms exuberantly, leaping high in her joy. “You’re beautiful!” she cried. And the girl disappeared.

  Dumbfounded, Zan crashed around, peering behind trees, calling, “Come back. Why did you ran away? Please come back.” Leaves clapped like leather, branches swayed and creaked, and in the deep shadows there were fleeting movements. “Are you there?” Zan called hopefully, straining to see into the watery gloom. Had she imagined the girl? Wanted so desperately to see another human that she had hallucinated her into being? Was she going crazy?