Dividing Earth: A Novel of Dark Fantasy (14 page)

Veronica couldn’t help but smile. She nodded. “Nice to meet you all,” she said, feeling silly for her formality. The bartender pushed a pair of scrupulously clean beer steins to Sal, who handed her one.

Lump, still grinning, added, “Where you off to, Ronnie?”

“Sorry?”

“People don’t stop in G-Town, honey. Unless they’re lost. Are you lost?”

The question seemed portentous, the question of an oracle. She shook her head.

“She’s not lost, boys and girls, this is a planned stop!” cried Lump, rearing back, eyeing his friends, who laughed hesitantly, unsurely. He turned back to her. “Ronnie, this is Gibtown. All year long, in every one of your cities, we lie. But here we tell the truth.”

She paused, ran her eyes over them, said, “I’m leaving.”

“You just came.”

“No, not here. I’m leaving. Everything.”

“Ah,” said Lump, his finger raised, and he turned, pacing around. “Now we’re getting somewhere!” He faced her. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” she said helplessly, and all of them exploded into laughter, their eyes meeting. She looked around—at Sal, at the bartender, who’d pulled sunglasses off, revealing a pearl eye, then at Martha, who was sucking her beer down from her helmet and into her unimaginable recesses. She felt her sanity, like a transmission struggling for purchase, slip. Her eyes were wide. The beer slipped from her hand, exploded on the floor, and the freaks laughed and laughed.

Lump took her hand, led her to his stool. Martha lifted her enormous arm, pulled her close, and she was surprised by the huge woman’s sweet smell.

“It’s alright, darling,” said Martha. “We’ve all got a problem or two,” she finished, and everyone laughed. In a moment, everyone but Veronica had raised their drink of choice and touched it to their lips.

* * * * *

The people at The Hilltop that day possessed souls far more alien than their physical strangeness. They spoke not of consumerism, but of a journey. Born different, unaccepted by even their families, the carnies had traveled from the Pacific to the Atlantic by tent peg, entertaining those who would sneer at them in daylight but who traveled to see them by the light of the moon. They had journeyed through this land’s soul by caravan. They loved more than they hated, drank too much, worked hard, lived disfigured, and died young. They had traveled by a kind of psychic Route 66, and had arrived at the heart of the American Dream almost by default.

Back in her room that night she paced, remembering Lump’s every gesticulation, the lines on his face, his gold-tinged smile, and her memory awakened, thousands of snapshots sparking. They dizzied her with illumination, so she undid her door’s chain, flipped back the lock, and walked outside.

A murmur of rolling steel rose from the distant highway. Streetlights bordered the entrance to Sal’s motel; pools of yellow light merged. She held onto a column of wood. The awning distanced her from the light, made her feel invisible, and for some reason, she craved a cigarette. She felt utterly alone, inconspicuous, as if on an island.

Behind her, a door creaked open. She jumped, placed a hand over her heart. A man shuffled out. He wore a Confederate flag bandana around his head, and his beard was long and unkempt. He nodded, smiled, and she caught a whiff of putrid breath. “Hello,” she said. Beside her, he breathed deeply of the night air. “It’s lovely out,” she said. The man nodded, and then she saw the knife dangling from his right hand. Moonlight spangled on its blade.

2

Robert stared at himself in the mirror. He’d lost another ten pounds. His ribs were visible; shadows, like ink, curved into them. He glanced over. Jenn was asleep on his bed. She’d joined him these last two nights; he’d been sweating through the sheets, and had awakened twice to her dowsing his forehead with a damp cloth. She was catching up on sleep now. He guessed they’d both miss another day of school.

He went downstairs to his office, rifled through his CDs, but saw nothing worthy until he came upon an old disc that he’d burned from a friend’s original. He popped it in, turned up the volume, and it began softly, built slowly, a plaintive voice ringing out, and then the music exploded through. He stood alone, hands by his side, head back, eyes closed, felt the beats and rhythms time his heart, the vocals sear into him like pain, and he swayed like that, waiting for tears, a long time.

The pause was so brief he never should have noticed: after a downbeat there was a fraction of a second before the drummer continued, and within that moment Robert heard a strange sound coming from the living room, a sound he was immediately certain he shouldn’t have heard at all. He shut off the music and cocked his head: it sounded like fingernails tapping, quietly, on a windowpane. He slowly made his way toward the sound, but when he got to the living room, he saw no shadows, no branches brushing against the window. Frowning, he looked around, edging forward. He stopped, finally, cold all over, when he saw the source of the sound.

It was the vase Veronica had hand-painted some years ago, but it wasn’t clicking against the window. It was moving. She’d kept the thing at the far end of a coffee table, but it had somehow traveled all the way to the edge, and it didn’t look to be stopping there. The vase was twisting, moving with an almost human purpose, and was now teetering on the edge. For a moment longer Robert only stared, not believing it and knowing no one else would either. Then he broke into a run. (Although when he thought about it later in the day, he didn’t realize why he’d done this: it wasn’t as if he cared about the damn thing.) It began to fall, and he nearly dove to catch it; but the thing plunged to the floor. It shattered. Larger pieces skittered along the wood, while some of it was actually reduced to a powdery ash.

Robert stood over it, staring at the mess. When the tear dropped down his face, he didn’t immediately understand. But he had the strangest feeling that something was wrong.
Veronica,
he thought, staring at the shattered clay.

3

In The House of Socrates, Dan awoke with a start. For a moment his eyes and mind insisted he was back in the cabin he’d lived in a very long time ago. He shook his head, sitting up now, and looked around. He’d closed the shop late, and had fallen asleep on the couch. At night the bookshelves looked like ancient monoliths, the books like doors. Perhaps both were true. He stood, circled the couch, feeling muddled and cloudy, and then something—déjà vu, perhaps—passed over him. He thought of Robert, couldn’t help but think of him really, but then the thought began to shift, to change into something less thought than image; an object, a glass, no, that wasn’t it, it had, when cast against the blurry light of a window, the outline of a woman, an object falling, twirling in the air, sure to shatter.

He sat back on the couch, abruptly certain he was seeing through someone else’s eyes.
Robert,
he thought. But Robert wasn’t merely staring at this falling thing; no, he was making some sort of connection. And Dan froze.

Veronica.

Chapter Twenty-One: Fire (II.)

1

Daniel’s place consisted of a single room, most of it filled with books, stacked from the floor to the ceiling. A wooden chair sat before the fireplace, and next to the outer wall a table housed more books. Sarah stood in the midst of it, looking around, and he was watching her eyes. Although she was obviously exhausted and grieving, they were like huge crystals, a dark anger brewing within them. He wasn’t sure she knew it yet, but it was there.

He picked up a leather-bound volume from the table, flipped it open and said, “I knew your father, many years ago. Any woman he took must have been special.” As he said this, he thought of the Greers. Fifteen years ago last week, Susan and Joseph had made there way here. Susan had done the talking while Joseph stood behind her, silent just outside the door, hands in the pockets of his worn jacket, his eyes filled with reflections of the distant plain. Daniel had found himself wondering why men did things they so obviously didn’t wish to. “We’ve tried for so long, but nothing’s ever been alive in there,” Susan told him, her hands on the front of her dress, worrying it, fraying it. “Even when we’d thought there might be hope.” Touched, but knowing what was coming, Daniel allowed her to ask anyway. Then he took Joseph by the arm, strolling away from his cabin and Susan, speaking in a low voice, asking him if this was what he wanted. “Will it be ours? Really ours?” asked Joseph. Daniel had only smiled, let go of Joseph’s arm and made his way back. He’d led Susan inside, and shut the door on her staring husband.

Daniel had never met the boy. But sometimes, if he closed his eyes and focused he could nearly make out his face, could almost see him. Almost, but not quite.
Sometimes,
he thought,
life is nothing but shadows.

2

Daniel looked up, seemed to calculate something, then carefully set the volume down on the table, pointing to the open page. Sarah came forward. The picture stretched from the first to the second page. The medium was hazy, the pages ancient—she had an idea that if she blew on them the paper would come apart like a dandelion, the image lost to the dust that all was eventually lost to. The picture depicted a tribe marching through the snow. Oxen trailed before and behind them, heavy loads roped to their backs.

“Our ancestors,” said Daniel. “Forced to relocate because of fear.”

Sarah looked up, remembered her father telling her of the land bridge between one world and the next. A bridge that no longer existed.

“Are you talented, Sarah?”

She stared at him, unsure.

“You’re not like other people. Am I correct?”

She nodded.

“I saw your father when you came to town.”

“You saw him? I didn’t know he saw you—“

“He didn’t. I saw him, Sarah. As I saw you. He thought you were more than the rest of us. Much more.”

“They were scared of me,” said Sarah. Once she’d said it, for some reason she felt a great weight roll off.

Daniel nodded. “In the fifteenth century, a German named Gregory Schledt wrote that no one knew where our kind came from, or how to differentiate us from them. He believed we were God’s first clay, beings He made before He created man. He was executed three days after he wrote this, accused of being a witch.”

Sarah worked her mouth, but no sound came. Her father had told her that their bloodline had been thinned over the years, the tribes fractured.

“Found in The Gospel of Thomas—a book not accepted by the church, by the way—is a passage that supposedly came from Christ’s own mouth. ‘I am the All, and the All came forth from me. Cleave a piece of wood and you will find me; lift up a stone and I am there.’ But these exact words were written by one of us, before we became frightened of a written record, and over three thousand years ago. The author was attempting to explain our nasty habit of opening doors to other worlds, to other times, to places that exist only on nonphysical planes.”

“I don’t understand,” she whispered.

“Time, space and mortality affect our ability to see,” he said, turning his back to her. “But there are planes beyond these, Sarah, and the limiting principals of mortality are different for us. Humans can only accept the testimony of their senses as to what reality is made of, and they have only fifty, sixty, or perhaps seventy years of possible research. But if you learn yourself, you can enable your senses to lift the veil on the purely physical world, to open doors humans don’t know exist. But you must be careful. Asylums are filled with us.”

3

They spoke of their race until someone knocked on the door. Ordinarily, Daniel could sense someone coming long before they arrived. Disturbed, he went to the door and pulled it open.

And met his son.

Daniel did his best not to react. The boy was tall, his shoulders broad, his eyes clear, glittering with intelligence, and his smile, although he was noticeably nervous, was beautiful. Daniel leaned his bulk against the door frame, looking down at the boy, and asked, “Can you guess my two questions?” The boy, whom he knew was called Montague, shook his head. He looked suddenly terrified, and it was all Daniel could do not to put his arms around him.

The boy, in a boyish soprano that was soon to change, said, “My name is Montague Greer, sir.”

“Montague, why are you here?”

The boy peeked inside; once he spied Sarah, he stepped back. “I came for her.”

Daniel looked over his son, and his heart broke: Montague loved the girl. Or thought he did. “Do your folks know you’re here?”

Looking up with frightened eyes, Montague shook his head.

That’s when Daniel saw the lights. He looked up, thought for a moment they weren’t there, but then he saw them deep in the woods, moving. “Who knew you were coming?” he asked, his heart racing.

Montague turned. “No one, sir.”

Sarah stood up behind Daniel. “Do you smell that?”

“Come in, boy,” said Daniel. He watched the lights draw closer, divide and multiply, become torches, and the shadows men. Along with the fire, the men carried muskets. Nathaniel led them. The brothers made brief eye contact, and the reverend grinned. Daniel stepped back, closed the door, and sighed. “They mean to kill us,” he said, scarcely believing it even as he said it. “They mean to kill all of us.”

Sarah had been standing near the back of the room, but now she stepped forward. She took a deep breath and Daniel glanced back at her. “What they mean to do,” she began, speaking through clenched teeth, “and what they will accomplish are two different things.” Her eyes were afire.

Daniel turned back, went to the window. His brother was surrounded by townsmen. They were all pointing at his cabin, listening intently to Nathaniel, their torches raised high. Then the preacher yelled it. “Light it!” His face was illuminated like a Jack O’Lantern by the fire. “Light it!” And the men moved.

There was a second when everyone inside the cabin looked each other in the eye and had the identical thought, Perhaps they won’t follow his order. But then Daniel looked out the window and the men were closing in, their torches raised, the fire consuming them destined to be transferred.

4

The fire spread quickly, and Montague rushed to the door, pushed on it. He backed away, staring at his hands. “It’s hot,” he said, a wild look of horror coming over him. Crying, he began to scream for it to stop.

The flames ate up the sides, then reached for the roof. The eating sounds grew louder, burning smells sharper, and fiery ash began to drift down. He began to cough as the smoke poured in. He screamed for Sarah and she yelled back so he reached out and grabbed a hand, but it was Daniel’s hand, the witch’s hand, and for a moment he didn’t know what to be more frightened of. He let go, breathing in shallow gasps now. The tears were soot on his cheeks. His eyes were glassy with terror. Then he thought,
Heat, it goes up.
He went to his knees.

When he looked back up he saw a strange thing. Daniel and Sarah were standing in the middle of the smoky cabin, seemingly conversing, oblivious to the smoke and the fire that reached through the open windows with yellow and blue fingers. Then his eyes began to sting and he closed them, sinking closer and closer to the floor.

After a time he heard a voice, and it seemed far off. “Hold on, son,” the voice said, and then arms fell over him—thick, weighty arms winding around his torso. For a moment, he thought his ear drums had burst, because it grew quiet, the screams and shouts outside the cabin fading. Then he thought that perhaps he was dying because he could no longer smell the smoke. He held on to the arms, tried to open his eyes, which were wet with ashy tears and sweat. The idea that he was dying was confirmed by the appearance of a cloudy sky, violet and tinged with red. He thought he cried out but he couldn’t hear his own voice. The sky blackened, vanishing, and time seemed to pause.
Or perhaps,
he thought,
I am now dead.
There was nothing beneath his feet, and dark all around him. Still, he felt Daniel’s arms; the witch was breathing into his ear.
Maybe we’re all dead
.

Slowly, things began to reappear. As if a great and giant hand were painting it around him, objects came into being. He heard a gasp, a voice. Or it might have been the sound of the world being born. Then he felt wet grass under his feet and closed his eyes a second, thinking, He’s moving me. Somehow he’s moving me.

When he opened his eyes again he was surrounded by a forest. The witch’s hand was on his shoulder. “Lovely, isn’t it?” said Daniel.

5

To her astonishment, the fire and smoke were not affecting her: She calmly watched the blaze at work, marveling at its power.

The ceiling was bubbling, caving in spots, and she knew the whole thing would soon come spilling in. By the back window the fire licked inside, setting the books aflame, and she went there, touched a blue-white flame, bringing it before her eyes. The fire danced on the tips of her fingers. She felt it, understood her skin would register a burn tomorrow, but knew it wouldn’t be as bad as one on a normal man. She tilted her head and closed her eyes, thought of her father and mother, and of how they were gone now, lying on a table somewhere back in Tempest, perhaps in a common, shallow and unhallowed grave outside of townm and how the man who’d caused this was standing just outside this cabin’s walls, the fierce light of a fire he’d created flickering in his eyes as the blaze reached for the vault of heaven. The heat enveloped her hand and she started for the door, her eyes still closed. She opened them and kicked at the door, which fell off its hinges, then strolled from the burning house, leapt off the stoop, landed solidly in the dirt and stood there, a ball of white flame circulating around her fist. The men stared at her with wide eyes. A few lifted their muskets. Sarah shrieked and punched her burning hand into the air as the fire behind her ate, crackling with hunger, its wooden nourishment crumbling in its jaws. She tumbled to one knee, smashing her fist into the earth at her feet.

In pieces, the house came crashing down.

Still on one knee, Sarah looked up. The preacher stood before his mob, watching her. Although a pale flame still swirled around her hand, she no longer felt it; she felt only a white-hot fire within. Her mouth snapped open and shut, her hands began to tremble. Suddenly, her back arched. She closed her eyes to the night sky and heard a scream. It was hers. There was a clatter of dropped rifles as the men fought, too late, to retreat. Then one man moaned. Another screamed. Sarah cried out; foam began to creep from her mouth. With another howl, she lurched forward. One by one, weapons began to drop into the dust. The preacher shouted for them to pick them up, to attack, but then he fell silent, his eyes growing large. A smile that felt somehow wicked spread over Sarah’s face. It was good, watching it.

Nathaniel Durham stood before his men, the beginnings of a seizure playing over him: his hands fisted and opened, his face contorted, his body twisted violently. Then he fell still, and when he opened his mouth, Sarah thought it was to scream. But for a moment she saw only blackness. Then a blue light at the back of his throat. Then a flame burst from his mouth along with the most final, horrible scream Sarah had ever heard, and she thought,
The scream they deserve.
A holy fire burned through his cheeks, his chest, his thighs, and then Nathaniel Durham was on fire, a conflagration taking him from the inside out. The mob joined him. It was as if their insides had been coated in kerosene and set inside a furnace.

They were all burning.

Sarah stood, the flames dancing in her eyes, and her smile vanished. She stepped back. They were running and rolling on the ground, and their voices, before only a mass of sorrow, broke apart into a series of raw, lonely cries, as if their lament was an afterthought. She looked for the preacher, but couldn’t distinguish one from the other, and she continued to back away. With every step the thought beat like a heart, It was wrong. There were reasons, she supposed there were always reasons, but she hadn’t fixed a thing.

Her parents were still dead.

Sarah turned, picking up her pace, suddenly wanting to be free. She broke into a run, feet slamming into the dirt that wound away into this expanse of land they now called America, and something inside her, she would later think, had changed.

Part Three: The Door

“The dead have highways.”

—The Books of Blood,
Clive Barker