Divine_Scream

by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  The banshee snatched his right hand and shook her head. Her gaze traveled from his palm back up to his eyes. “Nice work. You opened your fist. The scout has smelled you now, dummy.”

  “I don’t—”

  With incredible strength, she locked her hand around Jared’s. “I’m going to need to do the scream here and hope for the best. Don’t let go of me. Whatever you do. Understand?”

  He nodded and she turned her head in sideways appraisal. “You sure? Because so far you suck at following directions.”

  “I understa—”

  She broke into a sprint, nearly pulling Jared’s arm out of joint.

  Sniffing sounds followed them. Jared turned back and watched in horror as the scout loped toward them, its legs rising and falling rapidly like a deer’s. Rich, corded black veins pulsed all through the brain-head. The scout waved its crossbow. It had been too far to see before, but as the creature closed in on them, Jared got a much better view. A long net wiggled from the end of the bolt.

  “Remember,” said the banshee through deep breaths. “Don’t. Let. Go.”

  Her blue eyes had become so real, so intense and commanding, Jared almost didn’t believe this was a psychotic dream anymore. He gripped her hand tighter. A thin vibration hummed in the air, indistinguishable at first, and then it thickened with other layers of the same sound, a series of universe-moving machines revived from eons of silence. A pulse went through the banshee and through Jared’s hand to shock his elbow. The source of the strange sound came from an angelic braid of silver and gold that lighted under the skin of the banshee’s neck—it looked like a peculiar musical instrument, a sophisticated, harp-shaped set of vocal cords. Her mouth parted and miniature sunbursts and eclipses spread through the air on every note.

  The scout let out a growl of frustration and shot its net gun. Jared followed the tangle of black webbing as it sailed overhead… and then… the air pulled back, away, the net hewed into minute, dim fragments. Everything surrounding Jared and the woman suddenly did the same. Buildings stretched out on strings of pebbles that raced into the sky, where they threaded in an immense tapestry of grays, greens, and browns. Lacing. Bending. Joining. And slowly, that tapestry pulled down east and west of them in long luxurious trails that could have been earthen taffy. Dark steam lifted from the sidewalks and streets and buildings alike. Plumes roiled around Jared and the banshee before little stars blinked in the space around them. It was as though he and the banshee had become galactic giants thrashing their way through space; they were juggernauts that moved around a micro-sized universe that had been shrunken exclusively for them. Comets the size of houseflies zipped past, asteroid fields scattered like suspended pools of pebbles and dust, and planets slipped around their bodies, frozen eggs moving briefly before returning to orbital position.

  Jared looked over his shoulder. The scout struggled out in the darkness. It clawed and shifted violently but could not gain control. Its nostrils collapsed and the exposed brain hemorrhaged in torrents. After one more flail of its body, the scout drifted away, useless and frozen in the nothingness.

  Jared’s ears buzzed as the banshee’s bizarre scream ended. The tunnel of open space that forged through the city buckled and shook, almost angrily.

  “Oh, damn it!” yelled the banshee. “Shit!”

  “What?” He could hardly hear himself.

  “A Disturbance Paradigm. Keep holding on to me, Jared!”

  Gravity pulled from several directions. His grip on the banshee’s hand started to give. She swung around and grabbed his wrist with her other hand. They were floating now. Pebbles, rocks, bricks, and stones rained down, some bundling together before falling apart and then rebuilding again. The banshee pivoted, turned him away from the dangerous debris. A cluster of something that looked like a halved portion of a dentist’s office twisted down from nowhere. The banshee threw her arms around Jared and rocked him away, just dodging the office as it fell past.

  The sensation of being sucked through a straw overwhelmed him then and bile rose in his throat with a horrible wave of claustrophobia. A force pushed him and his protector forward into shards of hot white light and in the next moment—

  Jared sat on the curb of Eighth Street, just across from his favorite pho restaurant, which had to be at least five miles from the doctor’s office. He glanced back and saw the dentist’s office, unaffected, people waiting in chairs by a fake plant. Hadn’t that whole building just blown past them, as though weighing nothing? And yet it was here again. Nothing was fragmented or weightless. Everything was grounded and whole again. All of the madness of moving through space had ended like a dream.

  The banshee sighed and held her forehead. “Not what I counted on… damn it. We were supposed to make it to the beach. That Disturbance Paradigm really screwed things up. Oh… this so sucks. So sucks. So sucks.”

  Jared gaped at her a moment. Her agitation faded and she drew back and clapped him on the shoulder, successfully scaring the shit out of him. “Well, enough bitching I guess. We’ll get to the beach still. But that was a good job, Jared. I’m proud! You didn’t let go of my hand.”

  She helped him up and he searched his surroundings, dizzily. “What else would have happened had I let go?”

  She shrugged one shoulder, her metallic purple and brown tresses swaying with the motion. “Reality probably would have bent into a pretzel that ate it itself and then vomited… Best way I can describe it. Anyhow, we have much to discuss and little time to do it.”

  “By all means.” Jared brushed off his pants. “Start where I’m connected in all this.”

  “Great,” she replied. “So you’re ready to talk about your death?”

  Jared absently nodded.

  And then fainted on the sidewalk.

  Chapter 2

  The Banshee

  The banshee studied Jared as he sat there, searching the sidewalk in a daze. How many times had she watched him this way? Lost. Out to sea. Scared of what the future might hold for him. He’d spent most of his life that way, and she’d been there for it all. Still, she could never be inside his head, so there would always be more to learn.

  An old lady driving a brand new Cadillac slowed down and peered suspiciously over her sleeping husband in the passenger seat. The window slid down. The banshee smiled and the woman smiled back, a little embarrassed. “Is he okay?”

  “Tequila shooters for breakfast,” said the banshee.

  The woman shot them both a disapproving glare and pulled the car away. Neither of the older people in the Cadillac were her assignments, but she could still read their lives. They’d both be gone from this world by this time next year. The woman would break her hip next Saturday and die during surgery a month later. The man would give up on life, drink scotch and eat nothing but Del Taco for the year thereafter. In the end, relatives would say he died of a broken heart. And this would technically be the case, due to organ failure.

  Jared blinked up into the sun. Dark blonde hair, hazel eyes, just a slight shade of stubble on his jaw. He was incredibly handsome. She’d always thought so, even as a little boy. His shyness and lack of confidence, however, ultimately masked his good looks. Women who got to know him interpreted his reluctance as weakness, rather than taking it as a good sign and accepting it as a challenge. The banshee didn’t understand females in this world. They mostly chose strength and protection in men when modern society had rendered such qualities superfluous. With so many good hearts out there going to waste, women should have been cultivating these flowers and watching them bloom to fullness. Instead, they chose the man with more confidence than he deserved and spent most of their lives chipping away at that confidence to reshape them into someone closer to Jared. That was working in reverse. Jared was a hunk of stone that hadn’t been worked into a statue yet. She loved all the possibilities lying within him.

  “I’ve never fainted before,” he said.

  “I won’t hold it against you,” she replied. “I thought you
had a stronger stomach. My apologies, Jared. We won’t talk death right now.”

  He pinched between his eyes. “Who are you? Do you have a name?”

  “No. None of us do. Our own lives don’t matter. We aren’t people.”

  “You look like a person to me.”

  “We are mechanisms. We perform a required job. I’m like a spiritual air traffic controller. When I give the go-ahead, someone takes flight into the great unknown, and never before.”

  “I thought we weren’t talking about that right now.” Jared closed his eyes and took a quivering breath through his nose.

  “Oops. Yeah. Sorry about that.”

  His eyes flew open, vitally renewed. “I need to understand what’s happening. I mean, what was that back there? What the hell—what in the hell was all of that? And that thing you did, that sound that came out of your throat—”

  “That was a Cosmos Scream,” the banshee explained. “It severs all realities at once to form a short-cut of sorts through time and space. It usually works more smoothly than that, and we could have covered a lot more miles, reached our ultimate destination, but unfortunately one reality rejected our presence and the conflict formed a Disturbance Paradigm.”

  “Come again?”

  She offered her hand and Jared carefully took it. She pulled him to his feet and grasped his shoulders for a moment to make sure he had balance. For a few seconds she massaged his muscles and stared deep into his eyes. This made him squirmy and she drew her hands away.

  “As I said before, it’s like a reality pretzel, but that paradigm back there was teeny-tiny. I’ve seen far greater DPs than that, so count us lucky. Anyway, let’s get moving, huh? We can talk as we walk.”

  Jared flinched. “You’re not going to do that cosmic thingy again, are you?”

  “Cosmos Scream? Not likely.”

  “What does that mean? ‘Not likely?’ That you are going to do it again? I—I can’t go through that another time.”

  “Oh, poor baby. Want me to hold you?” She put her arm around his waist as she guided him down the street. “I could sing you a soothing song. I know many.”

  “You’re making fun of me?”

  “Hell yes I am. Look, breathe in and breathe out. I won’t be doing another Cosmos Scream. No more bending reality. From here on in, reality stays rooted. I’ll use every other scream I have to help you. Everything within my limits, anyway.”

  “What are you actually helping me with, though?”

  “You ready to talk about that? Maybe sit down first,” she said, regarding him with a maternal concern.

  “I’m not there yet.”

  “Didn’t think so.”

  He sighed and blinked rapidly, trying to form another thought. “You have other screams then?”

  “Of course I do, dummy.” The banshee spotted a small eating establishment near a Korean bank. Her heart leapt. “Hey is that a pretzel place? Oh man, what a coincidence! I was just talking about those. Oh buy me one, Jared. I’ve never had food here before. And a soda. I want one of those, too. There’s no line. It won’t take us long, will it?”

  “I guess— not.” Jared stumbled forward at her insistence.

  Mr. Softy’s Pretzels had only one patron, a tattooed woman with a pompadour, who had finished her food and was busy thumbing the screen of her phone. As they made their way over to the counter, the banshee studied the woman. This human wasn’t her assignment either but the mark of death was clear: three years from now, head-on collision while texting and driving, coming home from a Tool concert. She will leave behind a six year old daughter and a boyfriend who is “the one.”

  The banshee shook the thoughts from her head and drew closer to the counter. A middle-aged man with a salt and pepper mustache smiled warmly at them. “I like your hair,” he said to the banshee. “Interesting colors.”

  “Thank you,” said the banshee. “I like your mustache. Very manly. Jared, you need to grow one.”

  “Yeah, Jared,” the man chuckled. “Grow one. It would suit you.”

  Jared blushed. After a moment of silence he said to the banshee, “Aren’t you going to order?”

  “I want a pretzel with that cheese sauce, and one of those soda things.”

  “Which kind?” asked the man.

  “The best kind.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Give her your favorite,” Jared clarified.

  The mustached man half-smiled. “Don’t drink soda really.”

  “Give her a 7-Up then.”

  “Got it. Anything for you?”

  Jared shook his head. They waited there while the man got everything. She took a drink of the soda first. This world had such focus on the senses—not like in her reality, where the senses were fabricated; no, in this world they were on display, like delicacies to be sampled but not feasted upon, delightfully pronounced and adorable compared to what they really could be. She brushed the waxy cup’s surface with her thumb. The perspiration up and down its sides. The carbonation fizzling within like microscopic fireworks. The plastic straw inside her mouth. The soda glurping as it traveled up. Ice rattling below. The beverage burning her nose, sweetly. It was a very interesting experience when considered simultaneously. Life was good in this moment. Yes, this made her content.

  The man rang them up, and with all the grace of a robot, Jared took out his wallet and paid.

  “Thanks you two,” the man said.

  The banshee shared another smile with him. In twenty-two years pancreatic cancer would claim his life. The heartening thing, however, was he’d be more than ready to go by that time. That’s a luxury not many human beings enjoyed.

  She turned her thoughts back to the matter at hand. If she was going to do anything else interesting on this trip, she’d have to get him close to the beach before anyone in the Deeper Unseen found out what she’d done. Especially if they found out.

  Which way was south?

  She didn’t have a firm grasp on direction yet; things moved differently now that she had a foothold in this place. She could faintly smell the stench of sea salt on the air. The ocean wasn’t far, luckily for them both. It was both reassuring and devastating. If they succeeded, for Jared it would mean his soul escaping eternal pain, and for the banshee, it would mean... being rid of her accursed job for good.

  Jared didn’t need to know how that would ultimately happen, and she had no plans on letting him know. He already looked thoroughly disturbed as he watched her munch on the pretzel, another refined sensory experience to be sure.

  “Hey, remember what I said earlier?” she asked, and playfully gnawed the end of the pretzel. “Watch, Jared, I’m eating reality. Mmmm! It’s salty!”

  He smoothed his hands over his face and shook his head. She shrugged and dunked the remaining part of the pretzel into the tangy cheese sauce. Good while it lasted.

  “Where are we going, banshee?” he asked. “I should—I should go back to the doctor’s. Really. He had to tell me something important.”

  “It wouldn’t help. The doctor’s still confused by what I did to him anyway.”

  Jared stopped. “What you did to him?”

  The banshee pushed him along. “Keep walking. I used a Bewildering Scream—made all his memories of your results like smeared Aramaic writing inside his mind. It’ll be days before he can recall what he needed to tell you.”

  “Why—”

  “I had to get him out of the exam room. I figured he’d go for help and that’d give me my chance.”

  “Did you see the results?”

  She hesitated, and then said, “Yep. Sure did.”

  “And?”

  “Ready to talk about this, are we?”

  Jared steeled himself and nodded. “Yeah, please. What’s on the report?”

  “Can’t tell you that. It’s forbidden to disclose how you actually die.”

  “So I am?”

  “What?”

  “Going to die?”

  “Oh, what a complet
ely unforeseen shock, all you humans die.”

  “It’s the when I’m worried about,” he said and swallowed.

  “It’s not for me to divulge precise details. Technically, I can’t say exactly when either. I can only be vague. If I allowed everything to slip, I could no longer be your banshee and then I’d be of no assistance to you.”

  “So what are you actually assisting me in? Cheating death?”

  The banshee laughed. “Oh no. That’s above my pay grade.”

  “Then—”

  “How about cheating eternal agony? Sound better?”

  “Honestly? They both sound shitty.”

  “You creatures think all death is bad, even when you despise living. Funny, that. But there are good deaths and bad deaths, believe me.”

  Jared’s face went green and he broke away from her hold of his waist. “So the doctor’s concern was real?”

  “All I can say is that you’re scheduled to die this summer. Nothing is fixed though. It could happen a lot sooner if you don’t follow my every direction.”

  This did nothing to improve Jared’s color.

  “Nobody ever wants to hear about their mortality… but there are worse things than dying. After that Cosmos Scream going wrong, there is a good chance that The Assembly approaches. Every hundred years, a new gift is made of a person about to die. You are that gift, Jared. After patiently waiting, the Assembly intends to collect you.”

  “They take me before or after… it, I mean, death… happens?”

  “Under normal circumstances, the Assembly kidnaps you at the moment of death, before your spirit can release. Spiritual interruptus. That’s funny, right?”

  “Hysterical.”

  “As a gift, nothing will be the same again. You’ll be taken to my reality, the Deeper Unseen, and you’ll be made immortal and become their toy, their property.”

  “What do they do with gifts?”

  “I really shouldn’t scare you…”

  “What does it mean?” he asked.

  “Remember the scout?”