by John Shirley
A double beep came from the mechanism on the dash, and a green light flashed. She pulled off the gas mask and gratefully inhaled clean air.
As she drove, her soft weeping became wracking sobs as Glyneth for the first time had a moment to think about more than survival.
“We failed,” she said aloud. “I failed.”
The circle had wanted her to confirm Winderson’s part in what was being planned, had wanted to confirm their suspicions about Latilla. Who was she, really? They were sure about George Deane; they assumed H. D was part of it. Winderson, a master of public image, had covered his involvement well. He hadn’t been one of the active invokers nine years before. They’d held a group of Saturnian adepts back, in case they failed, a group called the Undercurrent.
Winderson had been closely associated with Deane, and with the network of companies who’d promulgated the invasion . . . the invasion she remembered clearly, unlike so many around her. She’d seen Grindums and Spiders and Dishrags ravaging through a mountain community where she’d been doing work for the Sierra Club. Most of her friends had died that day.
Driven half mad by what she’d seen, Glyneth had looked for an explanation, for understanding. Through a certain Dominican in Snow Mass, Colorado, she was introduced to Yanan and Paymenz, and service to the Conscious Circle. And it was they who told her how the invasion had come about and what big industry’s part in it had been. She began an obsessive canvassing of corporate America—looking for patterns, connections to That Certain One. Then she heard about psychonomics from a disgruntled former trainee, and she began to look closely at West Wind. She used a fictitious academic background to get into the company . . . and Yanan pointed her to Stephen.
When it became clear just how deadly Dirvane 17 was—and equally clear from the e-mails she’d intercepted how many state officials had been paid off about what was happening in Ash Valley—she tried to convince Paymenz to do something sooner, to alert the more sympathetic newspapers, the EPA, the CDC, the U.N., someone, for God’s sake.
Paymenz had begged her to hold back. “The circle says not yet. They say that it’s important for reasons I don’t really understand that Stephen Isquerat turn the tide himself. It’s no accident, his role in this—he possesses a gift, and that’s why the Undercurrent wants to twist it to their own use. But that gift can work against them. If we simply report them, they’ll cover up, make excuses. They have to be stopped permanently. We could lose some people in Ash Valley, but it might save millions later.”
“No, goddamnit.” She sobbed, now. The van fishtailed on the road; she was having difficulty seeing through her own tears. Thick clouds were gathering. A rainstorm, soon.
Up ahead, a group of cars was burning in the center of the highway. She had to drive on the shoulder to get around them.
“No . . .” No, they should have done something—anything—to stop this. That kind of logic—let a town die to save others later? That was like West Wind’s logic.
No!
They had failed. The mass sacrifice in Ash Valley happened too soon. The intervention would come too late.
It was all just plain too fucking late.
“What’s happened?” Latilla’s harsh voice, heard from some distant corner of the sky. “Have we lost him?”
“There was interference.” Harrison Deane’s voice. “They are dogging us, somehow.”
“I feel them; it’s making me sick to my stomach.”
Wasn’t that Jonquil’s voice? Was it possible? Stephen wondered vaguely. Could she be here or with them?
Where was here?
He was walking along one of those floating mountain peaks made of assumptions, another mountain whose base was its peak. If he looked closely at the ground beneath his feet, he could see it shifting within itself, as if constantly reaffirming its stony substance.
He couldn’t bear looking at the nervous streamers of mist between the whirling symmetries in the sky. The faces that formed, when he looked at the mist, seemed so afraid.
Stephen felt wrung out, numb, and deeply afraid. He felt that for the first time he understood the expression hanging by a thread.
If he didn’t hang on to that thread of identity within himself, he would shatter into a thousand Stephens, each to be sucked into one of those whirling symbols in the sky, each to be consumed by one of the living vanities who’d ruled that other world. He’d be annihilated by a thousand outlandish appetites.
The ecstasy he’d felt—he’d do almost anything to get back to it. Maybe . . . anything.
But the last part of the journey . . . had it been a dream, that vision of Ash Valley, of Glyneth? It had to have been. To become a demon, squatting in a great mound of corpses . . . maddened, dying people in a masque of death, dancing and murdering all around him . . .
The Reverend Anthony. Had he really killed him?
“He’s beginning to—”—
“Silence, idiot. You have forgotten our connection to his consciousness, here.”
They had, after all, told him that what he was to experience was real. So that . . . was real? All those dead people—really dead?
“Stephen . . .” Jonquil. She was here! He could see her!
She was lying a few yards away, in a sort of girl-shaped groove cut into the ground, wearing only the nightgown she’d worn at the hospital. He hurried to her, knelt beside her, taking her warm hand in his. He couldn’t see his own hand—but he could feel it touching hers.
She seemed to see him anyway, looking right at where his eyes should be.
“Stephen—it’s getting worse. My sickness. I need the Black Pearl. It’s the only thing that can stop them.”
“Who, Jonquil? Who’re our enemies?”
“An ancient circle of magicians, Stephen. This struggle of magicians has always gone on, but they have lately disguised themselves as good people. They attack us because they know we’re creating a new and better world. They made you see what they wanted you to see—they made it seem that the god form you inhabited was something evil. They made you see dead people where there were living ones. They made you see depravity in Ash Valley, where there was only strength and goodness!”
“So it was them—they made it seem that way?”
She looked at him and drew him close, as if she saw his skepticism and blotted it out by encircling him—what there was of him here—in her arms.
“What can I give you, Stephen?” she breathed into hisears. The entire universe became suffused with the scent of gardenias.
“I . . . want you, Jonquil. And . . . I want . . . I want that feeling I had, that first rush that I felt, that feeling of ecstasy—like I never had to be scared of anything. I was the ruler of a universe of pleasure. . . . Oh God, oh fuck! I want that again. I want to be there with you! I saw you there—and I love you, Jonquil!”
“And I love you, Stephen. But I’m going to die unless you bring the Black Pearl to me. The rest of us don’t have the gift of going like you do. You have an amazing gift for astral travel.”
“But you’re here . . .”
“I can only go so far. But you—why do you think you can travel in these places without going mad? No one else could go so far as you have and keep his sanity—not a human being. It’s part of your gift. And you can go where the Black Pearl is. You have the gift of carrying its substance within you.”
He could no longer hold himself back. He tried to lift her, to gather her in his arms—to mingle himself with her. But his hands plunged into warm mush—which became a syrupy mire, her entire body liquefying and running across the shifting stones under his knees.
“Jonquil!”
He stood up, and watched as her liquid remains, her rippling face, sank into the stone of the mountain, like water into loose sand. Gone.
“Help me . . . go to the Black Pearl. You must go of your own free will, because it is your will that takes you there. Find the Black Pearl. Take it to the god you inhabited before. His strength will become mine and I
will survive! And I promise you, we will find the ecstasy of the dark glory, Stephen!”
With hands he couldn’t see, he reached out to the sky. “Tell me, then! Tell me where to go to save her!”
He found himself moving toward one of the whirling symbols, the symbol of Saturn.
And through it—through an inversion, an inside-out of himself that was becoming almost familiar, feeling he would explode but clinging to that inner thread as he fell through the sea of energy and emerged . . .
. . . in the sunless world of struggling egos, the thrashing groundless trees of energy wrestling with wires of desire. A landscape without land, an infinity of crackling loci, each trying to consume the next.
But one had grown bigger than all the others. It was like the tree Yggdrasil compared to the rest, overshadowing them all like a giant among midgets. Over an eon this tree had grown a single dark fruit, a dark globe that throbbed within the twisting, ever-restless branches of shoots, just above the incandescently pumping central trunk. Was it indeed black, this fruit, this Pearl? It was as silver as it was black, as iridescent as it was silver. It was as absolutely its own spherical shape as the cosmic egg had been before the Big Bang, yet it was quivering within itself with the concentrated electricities of undiluted will.
He knew this with the gnosis of the astral world—with the knowledge of sheer perception: He knew it for a certainty. The Black Pearl was an accretion of pure, selfish will. It was the movement toward the fulfillment of desire from a thousand, thousand egos, swallowed up by this great ego and stored here like a million lightning storms of electricity contained in a single battery.
Stephen saw it now, and he understood. The quantum uncertainty at the root of matter bent itself to will. Normally will was too weak to bend it much, but this will was imponderably concentrated, powerful enough to transmute reality. To give power to those who tapped into it—and that would include the power to cure Jonquil and to give him and Jonquil life in that continuum of ecstasy he’d all too briefly experienced.
“YES!” he shouted without a mouth, and plunged in spiritual flight toward the great Yggdrasil of this world, the Black Pearl at its center.
But this being was all senses—more senses than mind—and it sensed him coming. It thrashed its limbs to stop him, clawing at him with its crackling, sentient tendrils; the murderous, sentient whips snapping all about him. He flew betwixt them—just barely.
“Medusa!” Was that Jonquil’s voice? But he couldn’t let anything distract him.
Never before had he felt so vibrantly present as at that moment when he dove and spun and veered and wove like a swift through a hurricane-lashed forest, using every erg of his mental focus to avoid the trapping lashes of the ego giant’s limbs.
Then he was approaching the Black Pearl.
“Medusa!”
“Jonquil?”
The message from Jonquil came to him compressed into a thousandth of a second:
“Don’t look into the Pearl. Turn your perception away. But open your arms and envision yourself growing big. Imagine swallowing it. Do not look into it—it’s like looking at Medusa.”
He was plunging toward the Black Pearl. It was bigger than his arms could contain.
But he did as she said, envisioned himself growing gigantic, plunging into the ego tree, swallowing the Black Pearl, taking it like a pill.
He felt it enter him—and he shrieked with agony. It burned. It was like swallowing a sun whose fire was pure hatred.
And then he was sinking into the trunk of the ego tree, sucked into it, letting it digest him, and flying to . . . the world of men. Ash Valley, California.
How quickly the rain clouds had gathered, Glyneth thought, as she tossed the cell phone in the back and turned the van around. The rain came tentatively at first, pattering down on the windshield, then lashing it so she had to turn the wipers on high. Her heart felt like a hard, dead lump inside her. She felt cold and very, very lonely. Because she had chosen to die.
She couldn’t turn her back on these people. She knew it was a waste of time to go back to Ash Valley, but she was going anyway. Because it was partly her fault this had all happened. That boy she had smashed with a length of pipe, that woman tearing her hair in the street. Dead people piled like some sick celebration of the Holocaust: She had failed them, and she should die with them. Maybe she could help someone, somehow.
She had been on the van’s cell phone for some minutes. The highway patrol had heard about the disaster in Ash Valley, but no one wanted to hear that it had been orchestrated on purpose.
I just don’t deserve to survive, she thought. I could’ve saved those people somehow.
The rain fell so hard the road was hidden by a sheet of water.
The rain! she thought, with a rush of realization. And the wind!
Together they would wash the D17 from the air. Maybe some who had taken shelter, out of the open air, might survive. She could help a few of them escape the demon, the butchering lunatics who stalked the ruins of Ash Valley. But those sons of bitches in the other vans might well make sure they didn’t make it. The demon hadn’t killed them all.
She looked in the glove compartment, and found what she’d hoped to find. A loaded .45 automatic.
Stephen cackled with joy as he felt the power begin to seethe out from the Black Pearl burning at the core of his being.
He sat up on his wrecked-car throne and raised his fists into the downpour, calling down lightning and dancing with it as it struck to ignite fires in the methane of the rotting corpses piled around him.
The rain hissed into the smoldering remains of the burning houses; it churned the exposed dirt of the Ash Valley park into mud. It cleansed the air of the poison—but the toxin had done its job. It had killed hundreds of the humans, had sacrificed their life energies in order to bring him here, and it would make it possible to bring the others: a second, greater swarm, an invasion of the seven clans that would dwarf the first. But they would turn men into gods, not demons. The sacrifice had laid the groundwork, had opened the gate wide enough . . . and now it was up to him, to it, to her, to the god and goddess he had become, to give birth to a new world.
The rain eased off and Glyneth was a little surprised at the way the vans were racing out of Ash Valley. Were they rushing to get out ahead of the authorities? She glimpsed only one of the driver’s faces. It was etched with naked fear.
What could they’ve seen that was worse than what had already happened?
But then she saw it herself as she got within a few blocks of the park. A giant.
She slowed the van to a crawl, craning to look up at it.
The demon had grown, fed by the sacrifices. It was about six stories high, she guessed. Now seven, now eight.
There was something else. Something almost astronomically repulsive about it.
It was pregnant. Male or female or both, it didn’t matter: It was obviously, gruesomely pregnant. Its glowing middle was swollen, and, through skin stretched to transparency, she could see many thousands of small figures squirming like sperm under a microscope, like maggots in a boil—but she could see their silhouettes, now and then, when they became briefly disentangled from one another: Gnashers, Grindums, Spiders, Dishrags, Bugsys, Sharkadians, Tailpipes. All writhing in the translucent sac of the demon’s belly.
How soon before it gave birth? Did Winderson and his friends know?
Probably not, she guessed. That Certain One deceived its followers.
She could just make out, behind the demon’s features, a faint semblance of Stephen’s. He had helped them bring this about somehow. Something in him had completed the magical circuit.
She drove onto the side street that led into the park. There was a single van there, half blocking the road, and three men stood beside it, arguing. They had their gas masks down around their necks—the air must be safe, now. Two of them were pointing at the giant a block away, standing up to its ankles in corpses, the skyscraping, swag-bellied d
emon shaking a stiff dead man at the sky like an insane queen threatening with its scepter.
She slowed her van, looking for a way around them. The taller man, the one she’d seen talking to Dickinham near the park that day, spotted her and seemed to recognize her. Probably the guy from the trailer, too. He stalked toward her, cocking his .45. She snorted at his overblown confidence. She powered the window down, leaned out, and said, “Peace, asshole.” Then she shot him through the throat.
He fell, clutching his spurting neck. She fired at one of the other men; he fell. The third ran from her and then screamed as the demon took a single step, picked him up, and threw him whirling into the sky.
He never did come down.
