The Ignored (47 page)

“Your hunches?”

He nodded. “I thought I saw it once, in one of those dreams, hiding in
the shadows in a forest, and even though it scared me, it impressed me.” He
paused, looked far away. “No, that’s not exactly true. It didn’t just impress
me. It filled me with awe. I know it sounds crazy, but I thought it was God.”

“And now?”

“Now? Now I think it was someone—
something
—from the other
side.”

The other side.

I looked through the window at the purple forest across the street, and
a chill passed through me.

His voice grew quiet. “I thought I saw it the other day. Outside.”

I didn’t want to hear what he’d seen or what he thought he’d seen, but I
knew he was going to tell me anyway.

“It was hiding in the background, in the trees, and there were a lot of
spider things in front of it, spider things the size of camels. But I could see
its eyes, its eyebrows, its teeth. I saw hair, fur, and hooves. And it knew me.
It recognized me.”

The goose bumps were all over my body. I was afraid to even look in the
direction of the window.

“I used to think we were God’s chosen,” Philipe said. “I thought we were
closer to God than everyone else because we were so obviously average. I
believed in the Golden Mean, and I thought that mediocrity was perfection. This
was what God meant man to be. Man had the potential to go farther or fall
shorter, but it was this perfection of the median that would bring us into God’s
graces.

“Now—” he looked out the window. “Now I just think we’re more
receptive to the vibrations, the messages, the… whatever it is that’s
coming from that place.” He turned toward me. “Have you ever read a story called
‘The Great God Pan’?”

I shook my head.

“It talks about ‘lifting the veil’, about contacting a world that sounds
like the one we’ve been seeing.” He walked across the room to an end table piled
with library books and picked one out, handing it to me. “Here. Read it.”

I looked at the cover.
Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural.
One
of the pages was marked, and I opened it to that spot. “‘The Great God
Pan’ by Arthur Machen.”

“Read it,” he said again.

I looked at him. “Now?”

“You have something better to do? It’ll only take you a half hour or so.
I’ll watch TV while you read.”

“I can’t—”

“Why did you come here today?”

I blinked. “What?”

“Why did you come here?”

“To… talk to you.”

“About what?”

“About—”

“About what you’ve seen. You’ve seen the thing I’ve described, haven’t
you?”

I shook my head.

“Then you’ve seen the spider things.”

I looked at him, nodded slowly.

“Read.”

I sat down on his couch. I didn’t know what bearing he thought a
fictional horror story could have on the situation we faced, but I found out
almost immediately. Indeed, the situation in the work was eerily similar to what
I had experienced with the murderer, uncomfortably close to what Philipe had
described. A mad scientist finds a way to breach the gap between this world and
“the other world.” He sends a woman through, and she returns completely and
utterly mad. She has seen the awesome, godlike power of a creature the ancients
inadequately referred to as the great god Pan. She has also been impregnated
there, and when her daughter grows up, the daughter possesses the ability to
pass between the two worlds at will. In this world, our world, the daughter is a
murderer, courting men, then letting them see her true face and driving them to
suicide. She is finally discovered and killed.

Throughout the story, Philipe had underlined several passages. One in
which the daughter is walking through a meadow and suddenly disappears. One
noting the strange, heavy feeling left in the air after she passes between the
two worlds. One describing the “secret forces,” the unspeakable, unnamable,
unimaginable forces that lay at the heart of existence and are far too powerful
for human comprehension. And the final line of the story, stating that the
daughter, the creature, was now permanently in that other world and with her
true companions.

It was this last that sent a chill through me. I thought of the
murderer, mortally wounded, running toward the safety of the purple trees.

Philipe was looking at me as I closed the book. “Sound familiar?”

“It’s a story,” I said.

“But it’s truer than people think. Truer, maybe, than the author knew.
We’ve seen that world, you and I.” He paused. “I have heard the voice of the
great god Pan.”

I looked at him. I didn’t believe him, but I didn’t disbelieve him,
either.

“What we are,” he said, “are transmitters to that world. We can see it;
we can hear it; we can carry messages from it. That’s our purpose. That’s why
we’re here. That’s why we were put on this earth. It even explains the
gradations of Ignored. You and I can communicate with the powers there. We can
tell it to the other Ignored. They can tell it to the half-and-halfs like Joe.
Joe and his kind can tell the rest of the world.”

“But the other Ignored don’t hear us anymore,” I pointed out. “And I
thought you said Joe was no longer Ignored.”

He waved away my objection.

“Besides, that can’t be all we are, transmitters. That wouldn’t make us
average; that has nothing to do with being ordinary—”

“No one is only one thing. A black man is not just black. He’s also a
man. A son. Maybe a brother, a husband, a father. He might like rap or rock or
classical music. He might be an athlete or a scholar. There are different facets
to everyone. No one is so one-dimensional that they can be described by a single
word.” He paused. “Not even us.”

I did not know whether I believed him. I did not know whether I wanted
to believe him. It would be nice to think that being Ignored was not the sole
attribute of my existence, that it was not the defining feature of my being. But
for my purpose in life to be entirely unrelated to that, to have nothing
whatsoever to do with my individual talents or collective identity… I
couldn’t buy that. I didn’t want to buy it.

Philipe leaned forward. “Maybe this is where the human race is going;
maybe this is where it’s all been heading. Maybe we’re the goal, the ultimate
byproducts of this Ignored evolution. Maybe one day everyone will be able to
pass back and forth between worlds. Maybe we are Helen’s companions,” he said,
pointing to the book.

I thought of the murderer, of his obvious insanity, and though it did
remind me of the daughter in the story, I shook my head. “No,” I said.

“Why not?”

“We’re not evolving into higher beings who can move at will between
worlds or dimensions or whatever the hell this is. We’re fading out of this
world and into that other one. We’re being sucked into it. And then we’ll be
gone. That’s the purpose of evolution? For people to be dragged away from their
loved ones to live with monster spiders? I don’t think so.”

“You’re looking at it from a short-sighted—”

“No, I’m not.” I shook my head. “Besides, I don’t care. I don’t want to
go there. I don’t even want to be able to see it. I want to stay right here with
Jane. If you spent as much time thinking about how we can stop this process as
you’ve spent thinking about what it is, we could probably survive.”

“No, we couldn’t,” he said.

No, we couldn’t.

I stared at Philipe. I had not realized until that moment how much I had
been counting on him to get me out of this mess, to save me, and his flat
negation of hope was like a stake through my heart. All of a sudden, I saw that
his elaborate theories, his weaving of our facts into Machen’s fiction, were
merely attempts to deal with the certain knowledge that we were not going to be
able to come back, that we were doomed. Philipe, I saw, was just as frightened
of the unknown as I was.

“What are we going to do about it? I asked.

“Nothing. There’s nothing we can do.”

“Bullshit!” I slammed my hand down on the coffee table. “We can’t just
fade away without a fight.”

Philipe looked at me. No, David looked at me. Philipe was gone, and in
his place was a tired, resigned, and defeated man. “We can,” he said. “And we
will.”

I stood up angrily and walked without speaking out of his apartment. He
said something behind me, but I could not hear what it was and I did not care.
Tears of anger burned my eyes, and I strode through the purple trees to my car.
Philipe could not help me, I knew now. No one could help me. I wanted to believe
that a miracle would occur, that something would stop this inevitable
progression before it claimed me entirely, but I could not.

I drove away, through Thompson and through that other world.

I did not look back.

Magic.

I clung to James’ idea, wanting desperately to believe that what
afflicted me was not irreversible, was not the inevitable result of a logical
progression but could disappear overnight with the wave of a wand or the
application of some as yet undiscovered power.

Hadn’t Philipe been hinting about that? Magic?

I tried to sustain my belief in the days that followed. But even if it
had been the vagaries of magic that had made me this way and not the deliberate
building blocks of genetics, the fact remained that I was getting worse. In the
mirror, when I looked at myself, I saw someone older-looking than me, someone
duller. Around the house, Thompson was disappearing, being taken over by orange
grass and silver streams and pink rocks and purple trees and hissing spiders the
size of horses.

I began praying to God to make that other world disappear, to make me
normal, but He—or She—ignored my pleas.

Were we ignored by God?

The only time I felt all right was when I was with Jane. Even the
imposition of that other world faded somewhat in her presence, the inside of the
house, at least, remaining free from its influence, and I kept Jane with me as
much as possible. I did not know if it was my imagination or if Jane really did
protect me from those alien views, but I believed in her, believed that she was
my talisman, my amulet, and I took advantage of what she could give me.

We tried to figure out why she might have this power—if it was a
power—and what we could do to harness it, amplify it, but neither of us could
think of anything, and the only thing we knew to do was stay with each other and
hope that would stave everything off.

It didn’t, though.

She quit her job to stay home with me. It didn’t really matter—everything in Thompson was free, anyway, and she could just go to the store and
pick up what we needed when we needed it.

I don’t want to make it sound like we just sat around waiting for the
end, feeling sorry for ourselves. We didn’t. But neither did we pretend that
nothing was wrong. We faced the truth—and tried to make the best of things
under the circumstances.

We talked a lot.

We made love several times a day.

We’d been living for the most part off our usual junk food staples—hot dogs, hamburgers, tacos, macaroni and cheese—but Jane decided that we
might as well take advantage of the time we had left together in an epicurean
way as well, and she went to the store to get steaks and lobsters, crabs and
caviar. None of these things were to our taste, or at least to my taste, but the
idea of living it up at the end definitely appealed to Jane, and I didn’t want
to rain on her parade.

Time was too short to waste it arguing.

I was sitting in the living room watching a rerun of
Gilligan’s
Island
when she returned from the store, carrying two huge sacks of food in
her arms. I stood to help her. She looked around the room. “Bob?” she said.

My heart lurched in my chest.

She didn’t see me.

“I’m here!” I screamed.

She jumped at the sound of my voice, dropping one of the sacks, and I
ran over to her. I took the other sack from her arms, put it down on the floor,
and threw my arms around her, hugging her tightly, squeezing her. I pressed my
face into her hair and let the tears come. “I thought it was over,” I said. “I
thought you couldn’t see me anymore.”

“I see you. I can see you.” She held on to me as hard as I held on to
her, as though I were perched at the edge of a crumbling cliff and she was
trying to keep me from slipping away. There was fear in her voice, and I knew
that for those first few seconds before I’d screamed, when she was scanning the
living room, she
hadn’t
been able to see me.

I was going to lose her.

Milk was draining onto the carpet from a split and overturned carton,
but we didn’t care. We held on to each other, not letting go, not saying
anything, not needing to, as the afternoon shadows lengthened on the orange
grass outside.

I was awakened in the middle of the night by a voice calling my name. It
was not a low voice, a hushed voice, a whispered voice, as those sorts of voices
always are in movies. Rather it was shouted but muffled by distance, like
someone yelling to me from across a field.

“Bob!”

I sat up in bed. Next to me, Jane was still asleep, oblivious.

“Bob!”

I pushed off the covers and got out of bed. I pulled open the drapes and
looked outside.

Thompson was gone.

I was staring out at an orange field. At the opposite end grew a forest
of purple trees. Beyond that, in the haze of distance, were pink mountains. A
dark black sun hung lightlessly in an illuminated gold sky.

“Bob!”

The voice seemed to be coming from within the trees. I looked in that
direction and saw, moving within the forest, hints of blackness that looked like
the spider things. Beyond that, darker and more indistinct, was a larger
unmoving object that I somehow knew was alive. This was where the voice was
coming from.