by J. Thorn
She waved as she passed through and came right to his table.
“I love this place,” she said without a greeting.
“Same,” Samuel said. “Presti’s is the best joint in Little Italy. I had some favorite hangs when I lived in Detroit and Pittsburgh, but there weren’t any places that had Italian pastries like these.”
Lindsay nodded and headed to the girl waiting for her behind the counter. They exchanged a few words, and Lindsay came to the table with a tray holding two small espresso mugs, a raspberry-chocolate mousse and a cannolo.
“I told her I’d just bring it since it was all ready. She looked disappointed.”
Samuel’s face flushed. “Because you wouldn’t let her do her job?”
“No. Because she saw me coming to your table.”
Samuel raised a cup of espresso and put it to his lips. The dark, rich liquid brought a warmth to his chest, and he savored the aftertaste of the deep-roasted beans. Lindsay did the same and then set hers down. She looked at him, even leaning over to see what he wore on his feet. Samuel had forgotten about dream attire and immediately returned the gaze. Lindsay wore tight, khaki shorts that hugged her shapely thighs. Several tattoos spiraled around each ankle before diving underneath a set of trendy sandals. A crucifix sat poised above her cleavage. She wore her hair down, and her makeup appeared tasteful and elegant. Lindsay set her mug down, and Samuel commented on the color of her nails.
“It felt like I was dropped in the middle of the sidewalk. When I looked down, I was pleasantly surprised. It would have been really embarrassing to walk into Presti’s in my dominatrix outfit.”
“Agreed,” he said. “Seems like these visions come with the ideal self, how we hope others see us.”
“How does—”
“We have plenty of time,” Samuel said, cutting her off. “But I have few answers to your questions. I think it’s best if we decide what to do about the cabin and the cloud.”
She nodded and sat back, cradling the espresso with both hands. “This is lovely anyways.”
“It is,” Samuel said. “No reason we can’t enjoy it while we’re here.”
As if on cue, his favorite Presti’s girl appeared with two more cups of espresso. “Thought you could use another.” She turned and sauntered back toward the counter, making sure her hips led the way.
“She’s hot for you,” Lindsay said.
“I wish,” he said.
“She might not be the only one.”
Samuel bit his lip and placed both hands on the table. He could not let his personal desires cloud the objective at hand, even if Lindsay had them, too. Samuel picked up a spoon and tried his mousse. The sweet, dark chocolate melted on his tongue, and he thought an eternity in Presti’s would be more like heaven than heaven itself.
“We can’t stay,” he said.
Lindsay shrugged, understanding the frivolity had to give way to the gravity of the situation. She hoped there would be a time when it could return, but it would not be in this dream. “But we can’t leave. Those creatures look like they could rip us in half.”
“I’ve tried that, and it barely worked last time. Seems like the reversion wised up and sent a guard that couldn’t be so easily outrun.”
“That doesn’t leave us with many options,” Lindsay said.
“We could try another local slip,” he said. “It felt tough with three, but I think I can get us closer to the mountain with two. Once we get there, the challenge becomes a different one.”
Lindsay sipped her espresso, thinking what neither wanted to say.
“He’s intentionally holding us back. He wants to stay in the cabin. We can just let him stay.”
“Is that how you rationalize it?” Lindsay asked.
“He nearly raped you, and he tried to kill me.”
Lindsay nodded, a cold shiver running down her back. “I know. But leaving him seems like murder, too.”
“Something corrupted Jack’s head. He lost direction in that cabin, and he is not the same guy he was when he came here. I think I know what happened, but it’s irrelevant. If we want the opportunity to control our fate, we need to get to the peak. To get to the peak, we need to slip, and odds are better slipping two rather than three.”
“You’re right,” she said. “Doesn’t seem like there’s much to discuss after all, eh?”
Samuel felt the sting of her question but knew there was no other way. “Would you like another espresso?” he asked.
“No, it would make me pee a lot.”
They both laughed, considering the absurdity of bladder control within the dream bundled inside a reversion.
Bells rang as throngs of people spilled from the front doors of the church and angled for the crosswalk that would take them to Presti’s.
“Looks like we’re out of time, anyways. Sounds seem to bring me out of sleep.”
Lindsay took a last look at her unfinished treat and wished she could save the pastry for later. Knowing it would not happen, she shoved it into her mouth.
“That’s attractive,” Samuel said.
Lindsay used her tongue to lick cream from the edges of her mouth while tucking some in with the tip of her index finger.
“And that’s beyond hot,” he said as she giggled and raised her shoulders up while winking at him.
The people who had pushed through the doors dissipated, and even Samuel’s favorite Presti’s girl abandoned her post. When the photographs of Cleveland’s Little Italy faded from the walls, Samuel knew the time for talking and dreaming was over.
***
Deva thought the end had arrived. He did not believe he could lift his leg another time, yet he did. His staff continued the countdown to ascension with each strike on the stone steps. He would miss this world, and longed for what came next, if anything. Deva laughed at himself and the thousands he had kept in the cycle. Now he questioned that role and his place in it. He thought it might be best to lie down and let the reversion swallow everything. Let it ooze across the land, leaving nothing but a dark void behind.
And yet he continued climbing upward as his mind worked to hold him in place.
“It is self-preservation,” he said to nobody in particular. “It is the locality trying to prevent the inevitable.”
He pushed on. The light at the top of the spiral staircase remained fixed, much like Polaris in the sky of old. It did not appear closer, nor did it disappear. But it kept him moving onward and upward to the place where his destiny would be decided. Deva let his mind drift back to the first days here, and the old feelings cut through eons of hardened duty until they felt as fresh as yesterday’s whispers. He remembered the entry to this world and all of the confusion it brought.
Deva could almost feel that stinging wind on his face while he dragged the children along through the masses that pushed into the forest, running from something unseen. He remembered the feeling of loss, the emptiness that took over when he realized his wife had not arrived with them. At the time, Deva had to push that fear aside, as he was now the sole protector of Samuel and Mara. They would be his responsibility from now on.
He took another step and the memories came to him in stages after so many years.
Those first weeks were the most painful. Deva remembered the looks on their faces, the ones dying and those resigned to their fate. The nooses hung from the trees while the wind pushed through them like saddened songbirds. The bodies remained, some still warm, not like the forest and its inhospitable welcome in this locality. They wore grimaces and looks of deadly certainty while loved ones scrambled beneath them in hordes of wailing sorrow. Once the pain sunk deep, those who could rise above it gathered together, and the exodus began. The people of the Earth left their old lives behind. Instinct took over in order to survive.
Deva thought about the countless generations that began to fulfill their dharmic responsibility in this way. He tried counting the years as his legs pushed him farther up the spiral staircase, but he quickly lost cou
nt of both. Instead, he let his mind drift back to his exodus in hopes his muscles would be distracted long enough to deliver him to the peak.
He had spoken to Samuel and Mara with words that children should not hear. He tried to explain the hanging corpses to them, the disappearance of their mother. While some in the group cried out, demanding the location of their loved ones, others accepted the fate and the actions they could not change. He hid Samuel and Mara’s eyes from the horror, knowing they could look if they so chose. As they approached the edge of the forest where the plain rose up to kiss the horizon, Deva turned to look over his shoulder. He recalled how the humans had taken on insectile qualities, crawling from the forest like ants sent scurrying from a crushed colony. Through the years, he often wondered whether he could have found his wife had he gone through the suicide forest with the intention of finding her.
Deva paused his climb and closed his eyes. The memories came back with a visceral quality that convinced him it would be the last time they returned. He licked dry lips and wished for a refreshing cool taste of water. Deva laughed, amused he still retained the urgings for the biological needs that had long left his ragged bones. Even if it would be of no benefit, he would welcome the feel of water on his tongue once again. Deva sat, hoping Shallna would hold. He had not told the underling of the impending challenge, fearful the knowledge might wear away at his confidence. Samuel would make it to the peak. Deva convinced himself this was the case as a means for motivation. He would be at the peak, waiting. He would fulfill his duty.
The stone stairs beckoned once again, and Deva knew he had to keep momentum. He felt a renewed sense of energy in his legs, feeling but not seeing the peak in the near distance. Deva held the staff but no longer used it to help propel his body upward. Now it became strictly a timekeeper, an eternal measurement of progress as it struck stone. His mind floated back to the uncertain hours and days after leaving the forest. Deva felt the pain of the conversations he had with his children, their desperation from lost ages returning and lodging inside his chest. Mara and Samuel longed for their mother, pled for the sanctity of their house and the knowing comfort it brought through stability and regularity. He tried explaining why that was lost forever, yet he wasn’t sure himself.
Deva woke on countless dark mornings, convinced his wife’s smooth legs would be wrapped around his, listening for the soft thumping of the children running through the house. With each morning came reality, smashing through his wishful desires. Like the ascension itself, acceptance crept closer with each passing moment, each foot moving forward. The memories of his world had almost convinced him it would happen, and that his children would be spared the pain of the reversion. Almost. By the time Deva was separated from Samuel and Mara while being chased by the horde, many of the souls that belonged to the reversion had acquiesced. They felt the hopelessness in their bones and asked for release from it. Deva cursed them not because of their mental fortitude, but because of their ability to opt out. His soul would not let him drift like an unanchored craft on the open sea.
His determination, his drive, his motivation, they all became shackles. They bound him to the reversion and it to him until he would be left with nothing more than an empty world and a trickle of life moving through final cycles. He tried abandoning his responsibility, tried forfeiting any hope, waiting to be released. But it never happened, and here he was, making the ascension again, although he knew this would be the last time. Through the hurt, the anger, the pain and all of those endless years, he would finally come to a rest. He welcomed the end, and could not imagine being forced through the cycle once more. Deva stopped again, his thoughts disguising the fact that his lungs burned and he needed an opportunity to rest. He sat and waited, confident he would know when it would be time to rise and continue the trek to the peak.
***
“We’re leaving him, aren’t we?” Lindsay asked.
“It’s what we talked about.”
Lindsay looked at Jack, asleep on the floor, and then back to Samuel. She could not differentiate between their experience in the dream and the memories from her life. Samuel told her the time would pass here while they talked, but had not explained the vitality of it. Calling it a dream somehow devalued the experience.
“I know,” she said. “How long were we there?”
“An hour, maybe two. More like ten minutes here. It doesn’t completely stop inside the reversion, but it moves exponentially slower.”
Lindsay believed the explanation was a way for Samuel to prolong what he knew had to be done. She felt it too, although Jack argued for waiting it out in the cabin and calling for a reset. Somehow it did not feel right, as if she knew better than Jack what he wanted. “When?”
“I’m not sure it matters,” he said. “We’re going to want to move soon, based on the location of the cloud.”
He pointed at the window, and Lindsay walked over to take a look. The mass of charcoal slithered through the sky, streams of grey licking the horizon above the spider-crabs. She imagined white splitting the void much like lightning would a thunderstorm, but the cloud maneuvered and roiled overhead, clearly closer to the cabin than the last time she looked.
“Will it be like last time?” Lindsay asked.
“I guess so. With one less rider.”
Lindsay glanced down at Jack, still asleep. A line of drool hung from the corner of his mouth, and she heard low grumblings coming from his throat. The young man’s eyes bulged beneath his eyelids.
“Should we wake him up first?”
“I don’t see the need for that. Something tells me this conversation is our way of prolonging the inevitable. We have to go, Lindsay. And we have to go soon.”
Before she could reply, a wretched sound pierced the cabin. Samuel jumped, his ears accustomed to the spartan air of the reversion. He had adapted to the dead stillness, and the sound shook him to the core. Lindsay’s eyes opened wide, and she ran to stand next to him. The sound continued, joined by others of a similar nature. It pierced their ears like rusty gears turning for the first time in ages. Samuel imagined metal spikes being dragged down a sheet of discarded tin roofing. The noises seemed to escalate and reverberate throughout the cabin until Jack was awake and sitting upright, scuttling toward the middle of the cabin and away from the walls.
“They know,” Samuel said.
Lindsay and Jack looked at each other, understanding exactly what Samuel meant.
“They want to hold us in, let the cloud come. You pissed them off. We could have sat here and waited and got another chance, but you had to go and fuck with it all, didn’t you?”
Samuel looked at Jack and saw the maniacal look in his eyes had returned. “Shut up,” he said.
“Fuck you, Samuel. I am not getting ripped apart by the spider-crabs, and you can’t leave me here tied up. That is fucked up, Samuel, and you know it.”
Samuel saw the hesitation in Lindsay’s eyes as she struggled with the moral implications of what she knew had to be done. He turned, and Jack began tearing at his bindings while yelling incoherently at the walls.
“They’re coming for us, Samuel,” Lindsay said. “They know what we’re about to do and they’re coming now to make sure we’re here when the cloud arrives.”
As soon as Lindsay spoke, the first pincer broke through the ancient walls of the cabin. When Samuel saw the creature’s spindly limb, he gasped. The appendage wiggled and squirmed as it exploited a knothole in the plank. Within seconds, the pincer tore it away and the creature pushed another leg through the opening. Samuel grabbed Lindsay and moved to the other side of the cabin. Jack remained on the floor, sitting in a puddle of his own piss.
“Oh my God,” Lindsay whispered.
All over the cabin, boards burst into shreds of sawdust and bone-white shards.
The pincers came through first and wiggled in the air, as if commanded by a snake charmer. They coiled and bounced, searching for their prey trapped inside. Jack lay flat on his back. He had g
iven up hope of escaping his bonds and decided to watch the spectacle with abject horror. Lindsay hid her face in Samuel’s shoulder. Samuel’s chin rested on his chest as he looked around the cabin. The lone window shattered into a thousand, filthy crystals as one of the spider-crabs thrust its head through.
Several bulbous eyes sat like a crown on the top of its skull. A greasy film covered each, black as polished obsidian. Two fangs curled out from underneath its eyes, covered in fine hairs that seemed to pulse on their own. Thin lines of saliva fell from the corners, yellow and viscous like diseased pus. It opened and closed as if trying to taste its prey before the kill. Samuel believed he was staring into the eternal abyss.
I will not die in its clutches, he thought.
Lindsay began kicking and thrashing about as if trying to dispel invisible invaders. “Get them off, get them off,” she said, anticipating a fate far worse than her imagination could conjure.
“Don’t let them eat me, Samuel. Please, don’t let them eat me. Kill me first,” Jack said.
The lucid plea snapped Samuel from the spectacle. He turned to see the first spider-crab forcing its bloated body through the empty window frame and realized the cabin would not hold for much longer. The planks moaned and whined before cracking along the wood grain and falling to the floor. Samuel smelled the pine scent trapped lifetimes ago inside the weathered wood, but the aroma was quickly replaced by the stench of decomposing organic matter coming from the gaping maws of the spider-crabs. Three heads were inside the cabin now, and pincers floated in the air like live electrical lines.
Samuel stood and lunged for Jack. He ripped Scout from its sheath, where he had concealed it on his right leg. The blade slashed through the bonds around Jack’s ankles, and Samuel maneuvered to make the same cut on his wrists.
“Thanks, man,” Jack said without moving. “Thank you.”
Samuel looked into his eyes and saw resignation. His words spoke of gratitude and a sliver of hope, but his body said otherwise.
