Horror Express Volume Two

by Bentley Little

  It was agreed by everyone that the rock was a miracle. There was no debate on that point. He was the one who had first articulated that position, and the authority bestowed upon him by ownership was such that it forbade argument. The men and women who passed for philosophers these days argued over the meaning of the miracle, church leaders tried to bend its simplicity to their own dogma, but the purpose and nature of the rock remained fundamentally unknowable.

  Owen had no preconceived notions, did not subscribe to one theory or another, and he didn't feel the need to categorise or understand the miracle. He simply accepted it.

  He had gained a knowledge and appreciation of opera since discovering the rock. He'd always been a country music fan, and he'd never had any interest in jazz or classical. He didn't understand that type of music and had automatically assumed that it was beyond his capacity to enjoy.

  But the rock had taught him otherwise.

  It was in its box right now, in the den, and he heard it start up. Philip Glass' Satyagraha. A strong tenor carrying the minimalistic melody.

  That was one of the strangest things about the rock, Owen thought. It had its own voice. It could sing soprano or baritone or tenor, and it could do it all perfectly, but the voice of the rock was always the same, an amazingly pliable instrument with instantly recognisable, inherently unique qualities.

  The rock was an artist.

  Maybe art was the miracle, he thought. Maybe that's what the rock was here to teach them.

  But that didn't seem right, and he reluctantly dismissed the idea.

  She showed up at his doorstep one morning.

  Her name was Nancy and she'd read about him in the paper and seen him on the news, and she'd driven from California to Colorado and looked up his name in the Franklin phonebook and here she was.

  He stood in the doorway barefoot, staring out at the slightly overweight woman on his porch. She didn't look like the kind of person who would do such a thing. Her face was pleasant but ordinary, devoid of that spark of rootless wildness that usually characterised impulsive travellers. She wore no makeup, and her jeans and blouse were so conservative as to neither accentuate nor deemphasise any of her physical attributes. She was the type of woman he never would have looked at twice—would probably not have noticed in the first place—and it was that fact, combined with her single-minded determination to meet him and see the rock, that intrigued him.

  He invited her into the house, apologising for the mess and his own unkempt early morning appearance. She asked politely if she could see the miracle, and he took her to it. The rock was silent, had been silent for most of the night, but she stood reverently before its box in the den and stared at it, saying nothing, only occasionally licking her pale lips.

  It started to sing. One of Mao's arias from John Adams' Nixon in China.

  The rock sang for over forty minutes before finally sinking into silence, and Nancy stood in front of it the entire time, watching and listening with something like awe on her face, a transcendent expression that transformed her features and made Owen realise she wasn't that average-looking after all.

  The last note died flatly, absorbed by the unacoustic wood walls of the den, and Nancy stood there for a few moments longer before Owen cleared his throat and said that was probably it for awhile.

  They walked back out to the living room, took up positions on opposite couches and, after an awkward beginning, started to talk. He asked her why she had come, why she had driven all this way and gone to all the effort to track him down, and at first she claimed that it was because she'd been drawn to the miracle, that she'd been so moved hearing the rock sing on television, so overwhelmed by the fact of its very existence that she'd had no choice but to quit her job, pull up stakes and make a pilgrimage to Owen's ranch.

  ‘You quit your job?’ he asked incredulously

  She nodded, embarrassed but unapologetic.

  He didn't quite buy it. Yes, she'd been nearly overcome by the beauty and majesty of the miracle, but he had the distinct impression that that had come as a surprise to her, that she had not expected to be so moved by the rock, that experiencing its art had not really been the reason for or the focus of her journey.

  He could not figure out why she had come, however. There was nothing in her manner or demeanour to indicate that she wanted to exploit the miracle in any way, and he could not ascribe a motive to her pilgrimage.

  He kept questioning her, pressing her, and eventually she admitted that she did have an ulterior motive for her visit.

  She had her own miracle.

  He stared at her.

  ‘I've never told anyone,’ she said, speaking quickly. She would not look at him but stared down at her hands, clenching and unclenching in her lap. ‘I've never said anything. I've had it for five years now, and I...I guess I always thought of it as a miracle but I didn't really think anyone else would see it that way except me.’

  ‘What is it?’ he asked her.

  ‘It's a canteen that turns water into milk.’

  She reached into her oversized purse and withdrew a green army-issue canteen. Hesitantly, she handed it across the coffee table to Owen. It appeared to be full, and he looked at her questioningly as he placed his hand on the cap. She nodded, and he unscrewed the top.

  Milk.

  Again, she nodded her encouragement, and he lifted the canteen to his lips and drank. The milk was cold, delicious.

  ‘Where did you find it?’ he asked.

  ‘I woke up one morning and it was on the pillow next to me.’

  Owen nodded. ‘I found mine in the morning, too.’

  She started crying, wiping her eyes. ‘I thought I was the only one. And when I heard about you, I was so grateful. I knew it was a miracle when I discovered what it could do, but I wasn't happy that I was chosen to receive it, I was miserable. I thought I was cursed. I lived with it for five years and I kept it quiet and I never told anyone.’ She sniffled. ‘I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what it meant. I didn't understand it.’

  He moved around the coffee table, sitting next to her and putting a comforting arm around her shoulders. ‘No one understands my miracle either,’ he said. ‘That's why everyone's so angry or frustrated or afraid. Miracles are supposed to be...I don't know. Pointers or something. Signposts to the truth. They're supposed to reinforce what it says in The Bible or something.’ He tilted up her chin, looked into her eyes. ‘But ours don't.’

  She smiled through her tears. ‘No, they don't.’

  ‘But it's okay,’ he told her. ‘It's all right.’

  She let him try the miracle later. He drank all of the milk in the canteen at lunch, and then he placed it under the faucet in the kitchen sink. The water poured through the open mouth and turned instantly to milk. He didn't have to twist the cap back on, didn't have to shake it, and didn’t have to do anything. As soon as the water entered the canteen, it was transformed into cold fresh milk.

  He tried it with cold water, warm water, hot water, with water from the sink, from the fish tank, from the toilet, but the result was always the same.

  It was a miracle.

  He told Nancy that she could stay with him, that she could remain as long as she chose, and though she initially declined, saying she didn't want to inconvenience him, she eventually accepted.

  He waited for the inevitable follow up, the hordes of strange people with their own miraculous items who would descend on his doorstep and foist their wonders on him, but they never arrived.

  There was only Nancy.

  His initial impression of her had been wrong, as the rock had made him realise during that first singing session. She was not ordinary in any way. She possessed, in fact, a rare kind of beauty, one not noticeable at first glance but one that grew with increased exposure, just as his appreciation of opera had grown with repeated listening.

  She stayed a day, a week, two weeks. There was no awkwardness in the living arrangement, no sense on either of their parts that she wa
s imposing, and they got along well. It was comfortable having her around, he thought, it seemed natural, it seemed right. Without verbalising it or standardizing it, they fell into roles and patterns of behaviour that complemented each other. During the day, he worked outside as he always had, on his ranch duties, and she fixed up the house, cleaning the rooms and planting a garden, bringing what had once been known as a ‘woman's touch’ to his world. At night, they sat and listened to the rock sing to them while they drank milk.

  In the fall, they moved from two bedrooms into one, and again the progression seemed perfectly natural. There was no discussion of it, no big seismic change in the dynamics of the household. He just said he was tired one evening and ready for bed, and instead of going into her room, she accompanied him into his.

  She decided that she wanted to tell the world about her miracle, but he wasn't sure that was a good idea. It was her decision, and he'd stand by whatever she chose, but after the mixed reaction he'd received from the world, he wasn't sure how people would take to having two miracles in the same household. They'd be jealous, he said, they'd be suspicious. Still, his notoriety had died down, and he told her that if she really wanted to experience fame, he'd support her all the way.

  They went back and forth on the issue—it was an almost nightly topic of conversation—but in the end she decided against it. She'd never wanted to share the canteen with the world before she'd met him, and Nancy concluded that that was probably the way it was supposed to be. If it had wanted to be known, if it had been meant to be known, it would have appeared to someone else besides her, someone more flamboyant, someone more outgoing.

  She snuggled next to him in the bed. ‘I just want to know what it means, though. I just want to know its purpose.’

  ‘I still don't know the purpose of mine,’ he pointed out.

  ‘That's true.’

  ‘We may never know.’

  She did not respond but lay there quietly, and they fell asleep in each other's arms.

  It had been months since the last newspaper article or magazine piece, and though references to the rock cropped up periodically on television, as sitcom fodder or casual mentions in news programs, the collective memory of the American public was short, and it seemed to be more comforting and reassuring for everyone to allow the miracle to lapse into obscurity, to forget that the troubling thing had ever occurred.

  Still, the rock was not totally forgotten, and even as it sang the hiccupping vowels of Meredith Monk's Atlas in the den, Owen sorted through envelopes and opened his latest piece of hate mail.

  This one claimed that the rock was satanic and that God had come to the letter-writer in a dream and instructed him to destroy the rock and silence it forever. Owen did what he had done with all of the other threats: placed it in a special folder that he intended to forward to the police.

  He did not tell Nancy. He did not want to worry her.

  His house burned down the next week while they were in town at the doctor's, and while it could not be proven, the fire chief said they strongly suspected arson.

  ‘Who would do this?’ Nancy asked, and there were tears in her eyes. ‘Who could do such a thing?’

  They had discovered only an hour beforehand that she was pregnant, and the destruction of the house shook both of them, Owen more than he was willing to admit. Their first thoughts were for their miracles, and even as firemen continued to hose down the last stray wisps of smoke, Owen struggled through the outrageously hot rubble, careful not to let his clothes touch any of the blackened beams, feeling the oven-like heat through his boots, until he reached the area of destruction that had been the den.

  The rock was untouched.

  As was the canteen.

  He picked them both up, and they were cool to his touch.

  The rock started to sing.

  This was truly miraculous, and while Owen bound the fire-fighters to secrecy, he allowed one to take pictures and told the others they could visit anytime.

  They talked it over that night, in a hotel room in town, and decided that the time had come to simplify their lives, to disengage themselves from the tangles of modern society. He received insurance money for his destroyed home, but instead of hiring a contractor and rebuilding, he used his own hands and local materials to construct a cabin at the edge of a trout stream at the far end of the property. It had only two rooms and a kitchen, but it took him several months to complete, and by the time he had finished, Nancy was showing.

  Their first night in the new cabin, he grilled on an outside barbecue trout he'd caught and corn she'd grown.

  They were serenaded by the rock.

  He was happier than he'd ever been in his life, and as he ate he looked across the simple table into Nancy's beautiful eyes. Maybe no miracles had meaning, he thought. Maybe people in the past had simply put their own interpretations on miraculous events and ascribed their own motives to occurrences entirely unrelated. Or maybe love was the miracle. Maybe that had been the point of all of this—to bring Nancy and himself together. He didn't know and he didn't care, but as long as they lived near the stream they would have milk, and wherever they went they would have music, and he realised that that was more than enough for him.

  George O’Gorman

  THEY HUNT US

  ‘If you took a group of people and somehow completely erased their knowledge of their own culture...’ Sandy shrugged, paused, rinsed her palate with California Cab. ‘...they would be enculturated once again in no less than three generations. The Homo sapiens brain is hardwired for culture, even if they have to invent it from scratch.’

  ‘With all due deference, Doctor, I do beg to differ. Your hypothetical culture-sterilised group would be animals for a thousand generations. And another thing, this antipasti is exquisite,’ Reg said, chewing.

  ‘Thank you, Reg, but with all due deference to your most high stature, I beg to differ on the other point...’

  The clear thin ring of salad fork against crystal wine glass now interceded in the conversation, sending the combatants back to their hypothetical corners.

  ‘Doctor, Professor, your positions are both infallible, and as far as I can tell, equal one another out perfectly.’ Burleson dropped the salad fork and picked up the wine.

  Sandy patted Burleson's hand, smiling. ‘I'm sorry, Ben. You invited us over and we're just prattling on.’

  ‘Sorry, Ben,’ Reg offered, suddenly feeling like kind of an ass.

  ‘No, no! It's fascinating! I can see the pattern developing for when you actually move in together.’

  This made Reg laugh. He glanced across the table at Sandy-she was blushing. Reg hoped he wasn't as well. Two research-scientist dorks married. Whatever is going to happen? Only one way to find out, jack.

  ‘In fact,’ Ben continued thoughtfully, ‘your culture-wiping thought experiment is my true clandestine purpose in bringing you two over to my house tonight. There may be a way to work up some experimental data on this.’

  ‘What?’ Reg said, annoyed. ‘Don't play games, Ben.’

  ‘The fact is we've been doing trials at my lab on some of the new drugs for treating post-traumatic stress disorder. We've accidentally discovered a combination that induces complete temporary retrograde amnesia, even to the point of erasing learned language skills. When the cocktail wears off, the subject recovers full memories of everything.’

  ‘Oh, please!’ Reg laughed. He glanced at Sandy. She wasn't laughing.

  Sandy said, seriously, ‘Are you proposing a joint experiment, Ben?’

  Ben sipped his wine, then answered, ‘Naturally at this stage, none of the drugs are anywhere near FDA approval.’

  ‘How long does the amnesia last?’

  ‘As long as we want. It can be very precisely calibrated.’

  ‘I want to do it.’

  Listening to this, something hot and nasty was rising in Reg's gorge. ‘Sandy, for Christ's sake! And you!’ He turned to Burleson. ‘This was an ambush! She will not be an
experimental animal for your drugs!’

  ‘You've already got your full professorship! You're only thirty-five!’ Sandy said to Reg. ‘You can afford to sit back and be conservative for the rest of your career. And what is this anyway, you laying down the law to me? Like it's the nineteen-fifties? What's next, you're gonna command me to quit my job and have two-point-five babies?’

  Oh God. It was their worst argument yet. And right there in Ben Burleson's dining room. ‘Sandy, have you any idea what they do to the animals in that lab?’ Reg said quietly, massaging his eyes.

  ‘I need to do this, Reg.’

  ‘You're going to have to be completely naked,’ Burleson said softly, leaning over Sandy.

  ‘Of course. All traces of culture to be removed.’

  ‘Even that.’ Burleson pointed at her diamond engagement ring.

  ‘Yeah.’ She pulled it off and handed it to him. ‘Of course, I can't take off my tattoo, but that's okay because I won't see it. It's on my butt.’

  ‘I'll see it,’ Reg said, lying there next to her in the grass, also completely naked.

  Sandy chuckled nervously. ‘Maybe it will become our cultural icon.’

  Burleson turned to Reg, carefully looking only at his face. ‘Thank you for doing this, Reg.’

  ‘You think I'd let Sandy go through this alone?’

  In the soft, long grass next to him, Sandy sighed.

  Burleson opened a small case and began removing syringes. ‘You will experience total memory loss for a period of precisely forty-eight hours. You will then regain your memory while also retaining the memories of your amnesiac adventure. This is an old citrus grove, so you'll have some munchies. There's a creek over there with semi-potable water. I don't think there's anything poisonous around or any wild animals. We'll be monitoring you from up on the ridge, anyway, in case you have a problem or start to wander towards the highway or anything. You should be completely isolated here for the duration.’

  ‘I'm scared, Reg.’ Sandy took his hand. ‘But also very excited.’