Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (59 page)

Meteorologists have attributed the tragic event to “positive” lightning, a relatively rare phenomenon. Unlike far more commonly occurring “negative” lightning, positive lightning takes place when a positive charge is carried by the uppermost regions of clouds – most often anvil clouds – rather than by the ground. This causes the leader arc to form within the anvil of the cumulonimbus cloud and travel horizontally for several miles before suddenly veering down to meet the negatively charged streamer rising up from the ground. The bolt can strike anywhere within several miles of the anvil of the thunderstorm, often in areas experiencing clear or only slightly cloudy skies, hence they may also be referred to as “bolts from the blue.” Positive lightning is estimated to account for less than 5% of all lightning strikes.

The meteorologist in question is not named, nor is his or her affiliation given. I do find it odd that far more space is devoted to an attempt to explain the event than to any other aspect of it. Also, it appears to have been cribbed from a textbook or other reference source, and deviates significantly from the voice of the rest of the article. There is, reading over it again and again, the sense that explaining the nature of lightning was far more important to whoever wrote the piece than was reporting the deaths of the family or even the general facts of the case. A single anonymous source is quoted, a resident of High Street (in The Village) as a witness to the lightning strike. There is also mentioned a “terrific booming from the sky” that occurred an hour
after
the strike, and I can’t help but wonder why the paper went to so much trouble to make plain that there was nothing especially peculiar about the lightning, but records another strange incident in passing which it makes no attempt to explain.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” the librarian asks, peering into the small room. I notice for the first time that the room smells musty. Or maybe it’s the librarian who smells musty.

“I did,” I reply. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

“I do my job. I do what the town council pays me to do.”

“Then you do it well,” I say, determined to inflict upon her a compliment.

She grumbles, and I leave while she’s busy removing the spool and returning it to its yellow Kodak box. I step out onto the tiny courtyard in front of the library, and it’s just begun raining. Cold drops pepper my face. I stand, staring up into the rain, and consider calling the editor, apologizing, and asking for a second chance. Telling him there really is no mystery here, so it could be a great little piece debunking a rural myth, a triumph of science over the supposedly miraculous. I could return to The City, to my apartment, and wait for other jobs. I would find a way to forget about whatever lives at the top of the hill. I would tell myself I’d imagined the whole affair, mark it up to weariness, depression, something of the sort.

The rain almost feels like needles.

6.

I awake from a nightmare. I awake breathless to sweaty sheets. I think I may have cried out in my sleep, but I don’t know for sure. Almost at once, I forget most of the particulars of the dream. But it centered on the charred tree. There was something coiled in the branches of the tree, or perched there. It was gazing down at me. A shapeless thing, or very nearly so, clinging somehow to those charcoal branches. I wanted to turn away, to look away, but was unable. I felt the purest spite spilling from it, flowing down the gnarled trunk and washing over me. I have never believed in evil, but the thing in the tree was, I knew, evil. It was evil, and it was ancient beyond any human comprehension. Some of the eldest stars were younger and the earth an infant by comparison. Mercifully, it didn’t speak or make any other sound whatsoever.

I awake to a voice, and I recognize it straightaway. It’s the voice from the hill. Near the door, there’s the faintest of silhouettes, an outline that is only almost human. It’s tall and begins moving gracefully across the room towards me. I reach to turn on the lamp, but, thankfully, my hand never touches the cord.

“Have you seen enough?” she asks. “What you found at the library, was that enough?”

She’s very near the foot of the bed now. I would never have guessed she was so tall and so extraordinarily slender. My eyes struggle with the darkness to make sense of something I cannot actually see.

“Not you,” I whisper. “It hasn’t explained you.”

“Do I require an explanation?”

“Most people would say so.”

If this is being read, I would say most
readers
would certainly say so. There, I
have
said it.

“But not you?”

“I don’t know what I need,” I say, and I’m being completely honest.

Here there is a long silence, and I realize it’s still raining. That it’s raining much harder than when I went to bed. I can hear thunder far away.

“This is the problem with explanations,” she says. “You ask for one, and it triggers an infinite regression. There is never a final question. Unless inquiry is halted by an arbitrary act. And it’s true, many inquiries are, if only by necessity.”

“If I knew what you are, why you are, how you are, if there is any connection between you and the death of those three people…” I trail off, knowing she’ll finish my thought.

She says, “…you’d only have another question, and another after that.
Ad infinitum
.”

“I think I want to go home,” I whisper.

“Then you should go home, don’t you think?”

“What was that I dreamt of, the thing in the tree?”

Now she is leaning over me, on the bed
with
me, and it only frightens me that I am not afraid. “Only a bad dream,” she sighs, and her breath smells like the summer forest, and autumn leaves, and snow, and swollen mountain rivers in the spring. It doesn’t smell even remotely of fire.

“Before The Village, you were here,” I say. “You’ve almost always been here.” It isn’t a question, and she doesn’t mistake it for one. She doesn’t say anything else, and I understand I will never again hear her speak.

She wraps her arms and legs about me – and, as I guessed, they were delicate and nothing like the arms and legs of women, and she takes me into her. We do not make love. We fuck. No, she fucks me. She fucks me, and it seems to go on forever. Repeatedly, I almost reach climax, and, repeatedly, it slips away. She mutters in a language I know, instinctively, has never been studied by any linguist, and one I’ll not recall a syllable of later on, no matter how hard I struggle to do so. It seems filled with clicks and glottal stops. Outside, there is rain and thunder and lightning. The storm is pounding at the windows, wanting in. The storm, I think, is jealous. I wonder how long it will hold a grudge. Is that what happened on top of the hill? Did she take the man or the woman (or both) as a lover? Did the sky get even?

I do finally come, and the smells of her melt away. She is gone, and I lay on those sweaty sheets, trying to catch my breath.

So
, I do not say aloud,
the dream didn’t end with the tree. I dreamt her here, in the room with me. I dreamt her questions, and I dreamt her fucking me
.

I do my best to fool myself this is the truth.

It doesn’t matter anymore.

By dawn, the rain has stopped.

7.

I have breakfast, pack, fill up the Nissan’s tank, and pay my motel bill.

By the time I pull out of the parking lot, it’s almost nine o’clock.

I drive away from The Village, and the steep slopes pressing in on all sides as if to smother it, and I drive away from the old cemetery beside Lake Witalema. I drive south, taking the long way back to the interstate, rather than passing the turnoff leading up the hill and the house and the lightning-struck tree. I know that I will spend the rest of my life avoiding the White Mountains. Maybe I’ll even go so far as to never step foot in New Hampshire again. That wouldn’t be so hard to do.

I keep my eyes on the road in front of me, and am relieved as the forests and lakes give way to farmland and then the outskirts of The City. I am leaving behind a mystery that was never mine to answer. I leave behind shadows for light. Wondrous and terrifying glimpses of the extraordinary for the mundane.

I will do my damnedest to convince the editor to whom I owe a story – he took my call this morning and was only mildly annoyed I’d missed the deadline – that there is nothing the least bit bizarre about that hill or the woods surrounding it. Nothing to it but tall tales told by ignorant and gullible Swamp Yankees, people who likely haven’t heard the Revolutionary War has ended. I’ll lie and make them sound that absurd, and we’ll all have a good laugh.

I will bury, deep as I can, all my memories of her.

It doesn’t matter anymore.

ONE TREE HILL (THE WORLD AS CATACLYSM)

This story is one of those very rare times when I feel like I got it just right. A whisper, instead of a scream. If I were wise, I’d never write another weird tale set in New England, because I’ll never do a better job of it than this story. Anyone familiar with T. E. D. Klein’s classic
The Ceremonies
(1984) will note my very conscious nod to that novel.

One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.
 

~ Charles Fort

Sometime the questions are complicated and the answers
are simple
. 

~ Dr. Seuss

For Sixty Six

1.

Radio Friendly Unit Shifter

(Dublin, 12/10/2012)

Here’s the scene: Ptolema sits alone in the booth at Bewley’s Oriental, sipping bitter black coffee. The October morning sun makes hard candy of Harry Clarke’s stained-glass windows, and she checks her watch, and she stares into her coffee cup, and she looks at the stained glass, in that order, over and over again. The two agents are late, and late could mean anything. Or it could mean nothing at all. She’s surrounded by the clamor of Trinity students and faculty, locals, tourists, latter-day bohemians. Ptolema hasn’t been in Dublin in almost twenty years now, and it made her angry and sick to her stomach to see the fucking Starbucks that’s opened almost directly across the street from Bewley’s. This thoroughfare is no longer the Dublin of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, not the Dublin of Mícheál Ó Coileáin and the Easter Rising. Grafton Street, she thinks, might as well be a Disney World reconstruction of the city. It was not so far along, this cancer, the last time she was here. But, again, that was almost twenty years ago. This is Dublin
attempting
to remake and sanitize itself for the World At Large, the travelers who want history as exhibit, local color free of anything that would make them uneasy. Plastic Paddy souvenirs. Leprechaun and shamrock tchotchkes. But, Starbucks or no Starbucks, the McDonalds at the intersection with Wicklow Street or no, Burger fucking King or no, a block or two in almost any direction, and that, that is still Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town.”

And even here on Sráid Grafton, there’s still the buskers, the street preachers, the children sent out by their parents to beg for spare change. Stand on Ha’penny Bridge, and the Liffey still brings to her mind Murdoch and how “No man who has faced the Liffey can be appalled by the dirt of another river.” The tourist-friendly cancer is kept hemmed in by the disagreeable, living city that will never have its face scrubbed up presentable for company. So, good for you, Dirty Old Town.

I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.

Ptolema checks her watch again: 10:38, which puts the X agents almost a half hour tardy. She’s already called her handler in London once, and if she calls again Ptolema knows she’ll be pulled. Because it could be a set up. Because it might be. She turns off her phone, just in case Barbican Estate decides to ring her. There’s too much riding on this meeting, and she’s not about to see three month’s work swirl down the shitter because someone can’t tell time. Or can’t be bothered. This is, of course, to be expected from the X motherfuckers, and she knew that going in. She leans back in the booth, wanting a cigarette, and the air smells like frying eggs and dry little disks of black and white pudding.

Watch face. Coffee. Stained glass.

She bought the watch from a Munich pawnshop in 1963. The steaming coffee reminds her of the mist rising from that bay in Maine that’s disgorged Hell’s own derelicts. The windows hint at an unfamiliar world.

Ptolema notices four students at a nearby table staring. Laughing amongst themselves. Sniggering boy-men. Muttering German. One jabs a thumb her way. To those pasty, pale bastards, she must cut a strange sight, sure: bald head smooth enough it glistens in the sun through the windows, her brown Egyptian skin, the ugly scar over her left ear, and, to them, she probably appears no older than thirty, thirty-five. She smiles and shows them her middle finger, and they shut the fuck up and mind their breakfasts. Perhaps it was the impatience in her eyes. Maybe they caught sight of all the secrets there, all the necessary evils of her station, all the men and woman she’s sent to Charon – by her own hand or the obedient hands of her subordinates.

Ptolema stares at the door, as though she can will the Xers to show up.

The coffee steams, and she tries not to think of Deer Isle. She hasn’t entered the quarantine zone herself, and she won’t if she can help it. Thank you very much, but there’s plenty enough ugliness this side of the pond without going abroad in search of more and better. Let the CDC handle it, the NSA, that Other American Group that has no official or unofficial title, but is ever on standby when this sort of shit goes down – which seems to be happening more and more often, and fuck all if she even wants to know why. It’s not even her
job
to know why. It’s only her job to monitor the comings and goings of the X. To fathom the unfathomable, as it were, because how do you understand the goals of an organization so secretive 99.9% of its operatives have only the faintest idea of the big picture and are let loose to make up the do’s and don’ts of a mission or experiment as they go along. Anarchy leaves almost as bad a taste in Ptolema’s mouth as would the crap they sell at that McDonalds across the way.

The four German kids depart, surly and still muttering amongst themselves. She checks her watch again; 10:45. And she’s just about two centimeters away from
Screw these idiots, and screw Barbican
when she catches sight of two faces that match the photos tucked into the dossier in her satchel beneath the table. These expats, supposedly cast out by their own designs. Fallen from their brethren quasi-Buddhist, mongrel Hindu, cyber-Shinto, Gnostic Thelemite worshippers at the shrines of Castaneda, Crowley, Camus, Blavatsky, Robert Anton Wilson, Velikovsky, Berlitz, Charles Fort,
ad infinitum,
a congregation based, possibly, in Saigon, or Calcutta, or Kyoto or, more likely, nowhere at all. Anyway, this pair of ladies, they look like the rough end of flattened shit. Even more tattered than in their photographs. A wonder someone didn’t turn them away at the door, because they sure as fuck look more like panhandlers than anyone who could afford a meal or a pint. Between them, probably not even the two pounds twenty for a side of potato farl. Oh, but how looks can be deceiving, and for all she knows, these two might be goddamn stockbrokers or solicitors on the bum. Still, no one’s going to touch an X. Not anyone who isn’t deep in the know. Won’t have the foggiest
why,
so call it instinct. In their rags, genuine or carefully cultivated, these two weave their way between the tables, untouchable because
that’s the way it is.
Fucking ghosts, the whole lot of them. Even rogue agents like these two – assuming they actually
are
rogues, and that’s not just another layer of some other ghost’s one-dimensional logistic map or what have you. Ptolema sits up straighter and straightens the lapels of her leather blazer – force of habit from years when the Y didn’t send her out to do business with sketchy cocksuckers, when the Bureau’s resources were not stretched so bloody thin, and Ptolema was held back for shadow dignitaries and face-to-face sitdowns with those occupying
unquestionable
power, for whom appearances actually mattered.

They reach her booth, there below Harry Clarke’s windows. One of the women is a tall redhead with a buzz cut and a ring in her nose. The other’s not so tall, and her black hair’s pulled back in two long braids. Right off, it’s obvious neither of them are Irish. Ptolema doesn’t even have to hear them speak to know that much. Americans, the both of them, and she’d bet half her Swiss bank account on that. They slide into the seat across from her.

“You P?” the redhead asks.

“When the need arises,” Ptolema replies, “but not in my fucking trousers.”

The girl with the braids laughs. “Cute,” she says. “Real cute.”

“Told you,” says the redhead, “that she’d be like this. Every one of them, they’re all cheeky, smart-mouthed cunts.”

Ptolema checks her watch again. “I assume tardiness is a point of pride with you.”

“Close enough,” says the redhead. Beneath her biker jacket, she’s wearing an oatmeal-and-mud-colored sweater that might once have been white. The array of buttons festooning the jacket is just a little too deliberate. But only subtly so, not the sort of affectation one would notice unless one were trying to spot affectations, which Ptolema can’t help but do. It keeps her on her toes. It’s kept her alive more than once. Even the selection of buttons – a red anarchy symbol on a black field, the Sex Pistols, a skull and crossbones, the Dead Kennedys, the Clash – and the array of spikes and studs set into the shoulders and collar and sleeves. It all comes off prefab. Their accents are a Manchester put-on.

“Didn’t whoever holds your leash bother to inform you of the current decade?” Ptolema asks and points at the jacket. “The X must be even more desperate than usual.”

The one in braids (who isn’t wearing a biker jacket, just a ripped-up Bauhaus t-shirt and a ratty faux fur leopard-print coat) leans over and whispers in the redhead’s ear. The redhead laughs.

“I’m not going to ask your names, because I neither need nor want to know them,” says Ptolema.

“Good, because we weren’t planning on tellin’ you,” the redhead replies.

“Always convenient to be on the same page.”

“If you fuckin’ say so,” shrugs the redhead.

Ptolema removes an early model iPod from the inner pocket of her blazer, complete with earbuds. She sets it on the table between them.

“You’ve both assured me you’re turncoats,” she says, “but policy is to treat all defectors and moles as re-doubled agents. Ergo, I am proceeding on the assumption that this will, sooner or later, get back to Julia Set.”

“We don’t parlay with JS no more,” says the redhead. “Bridges burned good and fuckin’ proper.”

“Bureau policy. Not my call. Also, we know the X routinely factors traitors into its equations. Free variables, as it were. But, as I’ve said, that’s our working assumption, and we’ve taken it into account. Nonetheless, I am instructed to proceed on good faith.”

“Which means
you
lot are desperate,” smirks the woman with braids, and she reaches for the iPod. “What’s this then?”

Ptolema lets her have it, though she’d intended the redhead to hear the recording first. There’s the second deviation from Barbican’s itinerary.

“That’s reason Number One that we’re having this conversation,” she says. “Our people in Manhattan and Boston are picking it up all over the place. A twenty-four second transmission broadcasting on pirate stations. On FM, it’s popping up at ninety to ninety-one megahertz, and on mediumwave exclusively at 1710. We’ve spotted it on single sideband modulation, as well, and shortwave. And we have five instances thus far of it having been embedded in pop and country songs on several Top 40 FM stations.”

The redhead glances suspiciously at Ptolema. “Thought this was about – ”

“We’ll get to that. But first, we’re getting to this. Consider it prologue, okay?” And Ptolema taps the iPod.

“Whatever you say, sister.”

The redhead takes the iPod from her companion, so, hey, a smidge of realignment, one less red mark. She puts the buds in her ears and presses her thumb against the click wheel. Immediately, she frowns and shakes her head.

“Just fuckin’ static,” she mutters.

“That passes. Shut up and listen.”

The redhead shuts up, and Ptolema watches her closely. The first tell could come right here, the very first hint the X might be lying. Long, long ago, Ptolema learned to read body language like it was words on a printed page. But the redhead’s reactions are genuine. Thirty seconds pass, and she yanks out the earbuds and silently stares at the iPod a moment before she says anything. The woman with black braids watches her closely.

“Yeah, well, that is the dog’s bollocks of mental, I’ll give you that.”

Ptolema takes a sip of her coffee, gone cold now, then asks the redhead, “Where’d they find you two, anyway? Nebraska? Oklahoma?”

The woman with black braids snickers and elbows her companion.

“So, tell me what you heard,” Ptolema says, setting down her cup.

“Nothin’ much. The static, yeah. Then a little girl, kid’s voice, creepy, innit?”

“What’d she say?” asks black braids.

“Six words. Just six words. ‘Black Queen white. White Queen black.’”

“What the feck does
that
mean?”

The redhead stares at Ptolema, as if waiting for an answer to black braids’ question. Instead, she has questions all her own.

“First time you’ve heard it? Either of you?”

“Sounds like chess shite to me,” the redhead mutters.

“Okay, fine, so I’ll take that as a no.”

“Take it however you want. That’s all you got?”

Ptolema reaches underneath the table for her satchel. The worn leather is camel hide, and there are cracks here and there. She unfastens the strap and removes a manila folder. She lays it on the table next to the iPod.

“The phrase you heard is also turning up as graffiti, but the taggers we’ve questioned don’t know shit about it. Or if they do, they won’t say. A week ago, Xeroxed fliers started appearing in both cities, Boston and New York, just those six words, always on canary-yellow paper.”

“Canary,” says black braids. “Like the bird?”

Ptolema ignores the question, but does note that the woman no longer seems to have an interest in hearing the recording for herself. Which might mean several things or might mean nothing at all. But worth noting, regardless.

“It’s nothing from our cell,” the redhead says, then glances over her shoulder towards the doors and the big windows fronting Bewley’s. “Can’t speak for the others, but you know that.”

“Of course,” Ptolema tells her. Then she opens the folder, and on top there’s a glossy color photo of a woman standing on a street corner. There’s nothing especially remarkable about her appearance, and if that’s deliberate she’s mastered the art of blending in. A little frowzy, maybe. She’s wearing a windbreaker the color of an artichoke.

“This was taken here in Dublin three days ago, up on Burgh Quay. I’m not going to ask if you know her, because all three of us already know the answer. She goes by Twisby.”

“Yeah,” says the redhead, and she doesn’t say anything else about the photo. She takes out a cigarette, but doesn’t light it. She just holds it between her fingers. Ptolema can see she’s getting nervous, but anyone could see that.