by Mike Ashley
“Ah, here you are. Your Relief was killed so we sent back for you. You’d only left a few seconds.” A ragged hole in the bunker wall testified to the incident. The relief’s cadaver, stripped, was being carted off to the disposal machine.
“XN 2. Things are livelier than ever. They certainly are hot stuff. Every new offensive from here is pitched back at us in the same style within minutes, I notice. That new cannon had only just started up when back came the same shells – I never knew They had them. Tit for tat.”
Into H’s brain, seemingly clarified by hunger and exhaustion and much emotion, flashed an unspeakable suspicion, one that he could never prove or disprove, having too little knowledge and experience, too little overall view. No one had ever seen the Enemy. No one knew how or when the War had begun. Information and communication were paralysingly difficult up here. No one knew what really happened to Time as one came close to the Frontier, or beyond it. Could it be that the conceleration there became infinite and that there was nothing beyond the Frontier? Could all the supposed missiles of the Enemy be their own, somehow returning? Perhaps the war had started with a peasant explorer lightheartedly flinging a stone northwards, which returned and struck him. Perhaps there was, then, no Enemy.
“XN 3. Couldn’t that gun’s own shells be reflected back from the Frontier, then?”
“XN 2. Impossible. Now you are to try to reach that forward missile post by the surface – our tunnel is destroyed – at 15° 40’ East – you can just see the hump near the edge of the I/R viewer’s limit – with this message; and tell him verbally to treble output.”
The ragged hole was too small. H left by the forward port. He ran, on his “walker”, into a ribbon of landscape which became a thicket of fire, a porcupine of fire, a Nessus-shirt to the Earth, as in a dream. Into an unbelievable supercrescendo of sound, light, heat, pressure and impacts he ran, on and on up the now almost invisible slope . . .
TWEMBER
Steve Rasnic Tem
Continuing the theme of the previous story we have another example of the disruption of time, this time trying to depict some kind of force that has corrupted time like the weather and caused disturbances across the Earth.
Steve Rasnic Tem has been writing novels and short stories since 1979, mostly in the fields of supernatural and horror fiction but sometimes straying into science fiction. Some of his stories can be found in the collections The Far Side of the Lake (2001) and In Concert (2010), the latter in collaboration with his wife, Melanie.
Will observed through the kitchen window of his parent’s farmhouse as the towering escarpment, its many strata glittering relative to their contents, moved inescapably through the fields several hundred yards away. He held his breath as it passed over and through fences, barns, tractors, and an abandoned house long shed of paint. Its trespass was apparently without effect, although some of the objects in its wake had appeared to tremble ever so slightly, shining as if washed in a recent, cleansing rain.
“It might be beautiful,” his mother said beside him, her palsy magnified by the exertion of standing, “if it weren’t so frightening.”
“You’re pushing yourself.” He helped her into one of the old ladder-back kitchen chairs. “You’re going to make yourself sick.”
“A body needs to see what she’s up against.” She closed her eyes.
He got back to the window in time to see a single tree in the escarpment’s wake sway, shake, and fall over. Between the long spells of disabling interference he had heard television commentators relate how, other than the symptomatic “cosmetic” impact on climate, sometimes nearby objects were affected, possibly even destroyed, when touched by the escarpments, or the walls, or the roaming cliffs – whatever you cared to call the phenomena. These effects were still poorly understood, and “under investigation” and there had been “no official conclusions”. Will wondered if there ever would be, but no one would ever again be able to convince him that the consequences of these massive, beautiful, and strange escarpments as they journeyed across the world were merely cosmetic.
His mother insisted that the television be kept on, even late at night, and even though it was no better than a white noise machine most of the time. “We can’t afford to miss anything important,” she’d said. “It’s like when there’s a tornado coming – you keep your TV on.”
“These aren’t like tornadoes, Mom. They can’t predict them.”
“Well, maybe they’ll at least figure out what they are, why they’re here.”
“They’ve talked about a hundred theories, two hundred. Time disruption, alien invasion, dimensional shifts at the earth’s core. Why are tsunamis here? Does it matter? You still can’t stop them.” At least the constant static on the TV had helped him sleep better.
“They’re getting closer.” Tracy had come up behind him. There was a time when she would have put her arms around him at this point, but that affectionate gesture didn’t appear to be in his wife’s repertoire anymore.
“Maybe. But it’s not like they have intelligence,” he said, not really wanting to continue their old argument, but unable to simply let it go.
“See how it changes course, just slightly?” she said. “And there’s enough tilt from vertical, I’m sure that can’t just be an optical illusion. It leans toward occupied areas. I’ve been watching this one off and on all day, whenever it’s visible, almost from the time it came out of the ground.”
“They don’t really come out of the ground.” He tried to sound neutral, patient, but he doubted he was succeeding. “They’ve said it just looks that way. They’re forming from the ground up, that’s all.”
“We don’t know that much about them. No one does,” she snapped.
“It’s not like it’s some predator surfacing, like a shark or a snake, prowling for victims.” He was unable to soften the tone of his voice.
“You don’t know that for sure.”
Will watched as the escarpment either flowed out of visual range or dematerialized; it was hard to tell. “No. I guess I don’t.”
“Some of the people around here are saying that those things sense where there are people living, that they’re drawn there, like sharks to bait. They say they learn.”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “I hope not.” Of course she was entitled to her opinion, and it wasn’t that he knew any more than she did. But they used to know how to disagree.
He could hear his father stirring in the bedroom. The old man shuffled out, his eyes wet, unfocused. The way he moved past, Will wasn’t sure if he even knew they were there. His father gazed out the window, and not for the first time Will wondered what exactly he was seeing. In the hazy distance another escarpment seemed to be making its appearance, but it might simply be the dust blown up from the ground, meeting the low-lying, streaked clouds. Then his father said “chugchugchugchugchug”, and made a whooh whoohing sound, like a train. Then he made his way on out to the porch.
In his bedroom, Jeff began to whimper. Tracy went in to check on him. Will knew he should join her there – he’d barely looked at his son in days, except to say goodnight after the boy was already asleep – but considering how awkward it would be with the three of them he instead grabbed the keys to his dad’s pickup and went out looking for the place where the escarpment had passed through and touched that tree.
Will had grown up here in eastern Colorado, gone to school, helped his parents out on the farm. It really hadn’t changed that much over the decades, until recently, with that confusion of seasons that frequently followed the passage of escarpments through a region. The actual temperatures might vary only a few degrees from the norm, but the accompanying visual clues were often deceptive and disorienting. Stretches of this past summer had felt almost wintery, what with reduced sunlight, a deadening of plant color, and even the ghostly manifestation of a kind of faux snow which disintegrated into a shower of minute light-reflecting particles when touched.
Those suffering from seasonal affective disorder had had no summer reprieve this year. He’d heard stories that a few of the more sensitive victims had taken to their beds for most of the entire year. Colorado had a reputation for unpredictable weather, but these outbreaks, these “invasions” as some people called them, had taken this tendency toward meteorological unreliability to a new extreme.
Now it was, or at least should have been, September, with autumn on the way but still a few pretty hot days, but there were – or at least there appeared to be – almost no leaves on the trees, and no indications that there ever had been, and a gray-white sky had developed over the past few weeks, an immense amorphous shroud hanging just above the tops of the trees, as if the entire world had gone into storage. Dead of winter, or so he would have thought, if he’d actually lost track of the weeks, which he dare not do. He studied the calendar at least once a day and tried to make what he saw outside conform with memories of seasons past, as if he might will a return to normalcy.
Thankfully there had been few signs as yet of that fake snow. The official word was that the snow-like manifestation was harmless for incidental contact, and safe for children. Will wasn’t yet convinced – the very existence of it gave him the creeps, thinking that some sort of metaphysical infection might have infiltrated the very atomic structure of the world, and haunted it.
“Twember,” was what his mother called this new mixing of the seasons. “It’s all betwixt and between. Pretty soon we’re going to have just this one season. It won’t matter when you plant, or what; it’s all going to look like it died.”
He thought he was probably in the correct vicinity now. Parts of the ground had this vaguely rubbed, not quite polished appearance, as if the path had been heated and ever-so-slightly glazed by the friction of the escarpment’s passing. The air was charged – it seemed to push back, making his skin tingle and his hair stir. A small tree slightly to one side of the path had been bent the opposite way, several of its branches fresh and shiny as spring, as if they had been gently renewed, lovingly washed, but the rest with that flat, dead look he’d come to hate.
Spotting a patch of glitter on the ground, Will pulled off onto the shoulder and got out of the truck. As he walked closer he could see how here and there sprays of the shiny stuff must have spewed out of the passing escarpment, suggesting contents escaping under pressure, like plumes of steam. He dropped to one knee and examined the spot: a mix of old coins, buttons, bits of glass, small metal figures, toys, vacation mementos, souvenirs, suggesting the random debris left in the bottom of the miscellanea drawer after the good stuff has been packed away for some major household move – the stuff you threw in the trash or left behind for the next tenants.
The strong scent of persimmons permeated the air. The funny thing was, he had no idea how he knew this. Will didn’t think he’d ever seen one, much less smelled it. Was it a flower, or a fruit?
For a few minutes he thought there were no other signs of the escarpment’s passing, but then he began to notice things. A reflection a few yards away turned out to be an antique oil lamp. He supposed it was remotely possible such a thing could have been lost or discarded and still remain relatively intact, but this lamp was pristine, with at least an inch of oil still in its reservoir. And a few feet beyond were a pair of women’s shoes, covered in white satin, delicate and expensive-looking, set upright on the pale dust as if the owner had stepped out of them but moments before, racing for the party she could not afford to miss.
The old house had been abandoned sometime in the seventies, the structure variously adapted since then to store equipment, hay, even as a makeshift shelter for a small herd of goats. From the outside it looked very much the same, and Will might have passed it by, but then he saw the ornate bedpost through one of the broken windows, and the look of fresh blue paint over part of one exterior wall, and knew that something had occurred here out of the ordinary.
The house hadn’t had a door in a decade or more, and still did not, but the framing around the door opening appeared almost new, and was of metal – which it had never been – attached to a ragged border of brick which had incongruously blended in to the edges of the original wood-framed wall. Two enormous, shiny brass hinges stood out from this frame like the flags of some new, insurgent government. The effect was as if a door were about to materialize, or else had almost completed its disappearance.
Once he was past the door frame, the small abandoned house appeared as he might normally expect. Islands of dirt, drifted in through the opening or blown through the missing windows, looked to have eaten through the floorboards, some sprouting prairie grass and gray aster. There were also the scat of some wild animal or other, probably fox or coyote, small pieces of old hay from back when the building had been used for feed storage, and a variety of vulgar graffiti on the ruined walls, none of it appearing to be of recent vintage.
A short hallway led from this front room into the back of the house, and as he passed through Will began to notice a more remarkable sort of misalignment, a clear discrepancy between what was and what should have been.
A broken piece of shelf hung on the wall approximately midway through the brief hallway. It had a couple of small objects on it. On closer inspection he saw that it wasn’t broken at all – the edges of the wood actually appeared finely frayed, the threads of what was alternating with the threads of what was not. Along the frayed edge lay approximately one-third of an old daguerreotype – although not at all old, it seemed. Shiny-new, glass sealed around the intact edges with rolled copper, laid inside a wood and leather case. A large portion of the entire package bitten off, missing, not torn exactly, or broken, for the missing bite of it too was delicately, wispily frayed, glass fibers floating into empty air as if pulled away. The image under the glass was of a newly married couple in Victorian-style clothing, their expressions like those under duress: the bride straining out a thin smile, the groom stiffly erect, as if his neck were braced.
A piece of pale gauze covered the opening at the end of the short hall. Now lifting on a cool breeze, the gauze slapped the walls on both sides, the ceiling. Will stepped forward and gently pulled it aside, feeling like an intruder.
A four-poster bed sat diagonally in the ruined room, the incongruous scent of the perfumed linen still strong despite faint traces of an abandoned staleness and animal decay. The bed looked recently slept in, the covers just pulled back, the missing woman – he figured it was probably a woman – having stepped out for a moment. Peering closer, he found a long, copper-colored hair on the pillow. He picked it up gently, holding it like something precious against the fading afternoon light drifting lazily in through the broken window. He wanted to take it with him, but he didn’t know exactly why, or how he could, or if he should. So he laid it carefully back down on the pillow, in its approximate original location.
Half a mirror torn lengthwise was propped against a wide gap in the outer wall. Beyond was simply more of the eastern Colorado plains, scrub grass and scattered stone, but somewhat smoother than normal, shinier, and Will surmised that the escarpment had exited the farm house at this point.
He found himself creeping up to the mirror, nervous to look inside. Will never looked at mirrors much, even under normal conditions. He wasn’t that old – in his fifties still and, as far as he knew, the same person inside, thinking the same thoughts he’d had at seventeen, eighteen, twenty. But what he saw in the mirror had stopped matching the self-image in his brain some time long ago.
He stopped a couple of feet away, focusing on the ragged edge where the escarpment had cut through and obliterated the present, or the past. More of that floating raggedness, suggesting a kind of yearning for completion, for what was missing. His reluctance to find his reflection made him reel a bit. What if he looked down and it was himself as a teenager looking up, with obvious signs of disappointment on his face?
But it was himself, although perhaps a bit older, paler, as if the color were being leached out and e
ventually he would disappear. The problem with avoiding your image in the mirror was that when you finally did see it, it was a bit of a shock, really, because of how much you had changed. Who was this old man with his thoughts?
He left the abandoned house and strolled slowly toward the pickup, watching the ground, looking for additional leavings but finding nothing. The empty ground looked like it always did out here, as it probably did in any open, unsettled place, as if it were ageless, unfixed, and yet fundamentally unchangeable. Whatever might be done to it, it would always return to this.
He wanted to describe to Tracy what he’d seen here, but what, exactly, had he seen? Time had passed this way, and left some things behind, then gone on its way. And the world was fundamentally unchanged. His mother might understand better, but Tracy was the one he wanted to tell, even though she might not hear him.
He felt the pressure change inside his ears, and he turned part of the way around, looking, but not seeing. Suddenly the world roared up behind him, passed him, and he shook.
He bent slightly backwards, looking up, terrified he might lose his balance, and having no idea of what the possible consequences might be. The moving escarpment towered high above him, shaking in and out of focus as it passed, and shaking him, seemingly shaking the ground, but clearly this wasn’t a physical shaking, clearly this was no earthquake, but a violent vibration of the senses, and the consciousness behind them. Closing his eyes minimized the sensation, but he didn’t want to miss anything, so other than a few involuntary blinks he kept them open. He turned his body around as best he could, as quickly, to get a better view.
