Dividing Earth: A Novel of Dark Fantasy (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four: Where Sarah Was

1

Sarah thought:
Years have passed and the world has changed, but I have not.

But that wasn’t exactly right, was it? She had changed, her sense of the world and of the people that populated it had deepened, and her sense of herself had grown, but physically she looked a perpetual thirty, even though more than a century had ticked away. To the people she shared her days with, she had changed very little. And the only way she had been able to evade the obvious question was to keep on moving, just as she had as a child.

The more things change . . . .

She’d worked as a seamstress, a moonshine runner, a nanny, and now as a bartender, but she could only work in one place for so long before people started wondering if this strange and quiet employee had found in Florida what Ponce de Leon had not. If it would have made a difference, she would have been happy to explain that she hadn’t found the Fountain of Youth any more than the old Conquistador had. (In his search for the magical elixir, the short bastard had only found, ironically enough, a sunny place for the old to relax until they died.) No, she’d just been born different. Among them, but not of them.

And really, when you got right down to it, the world hadn’t changed much either. Oh, eras had come and gone, technology had been redefined and redefined, social mores had been erected and then eroded, but people had by and large remained the same. Although many seemed to feel that the human race was continually moving into the light of science and reason, they had really only buried their superstitions beneath layers of jargon and rhetoric, beneath the sands of physics and the delight of escaping the planet to set foot on the moon. Sure, their knowledge had grown, but their sense of themselves had not.

Yesterday, in a place called Dealey Plaza, a man who had dreamed of the moon had been killed. Murdered.

A coup.

And so it was in all countries, in all cities, during all times. Humanity wanted what no one could ever really gain, the power to control the hearts and minds of the masses, but power, in a very real way, even among her own kind, didn’t really exist, or if it did it was so fleeting as to be a vapor one struggled to find in the air as if floated away.

Caesar was dead.

She’d kept the bar open normal hours, and although many patrons had imbibed excessively, the place had cleared well before closing. She’d cleaned up, then gone upstairs to sleep.

But this morning she felt somehow different. No doubt the world would mourn for a time—although many would secretly throw parties, of that she was certain—but it would soon revert to its habit of slow erosion. The change, as was the case in all true changes, lay within her.

Sarah had lived in North Florida for the better part of two decades, and sooner or later she would be forced to outrun those old cries (the words had changed over the years, but not the fears behind them.) She’d caught wind of a small community of Spiritualists farther south, and she’d been thinking about it for awhile. So she tossed her clothes into a bag, locked the bar’s door behind her, and walked to the bus station, hoping she wouldn’t run into anyone she knew before stepping on, and while she walked she thought,
The king is dead. Long live the king.

* * * * *

Sarah disembarked and made it to a café before deciding to turn back.

The café had six tables, which were arranged in a circle. An old man stood behind a counter, popping his dentures out of his mouth, then re-swallowing them in some sort of time-passing game. Behind him was a handwritten sign that announced that he made the best burger in Central Florida. A long cooler sat to the right of the counter; in it were tubs of homemade ice cream. She smiled at the old man, who proceeded to swallow his teeth and bid her a good morning. “Hello,” she answered, strolling closer to the counter. “I’ve just moved to town, and I was wondering—”

“Moved?” asked the old man, licking his gums.

Sarah nodded. “Yes.”

The old man looked down and around, then said, “Moved, huh.”

She stared at him, then understood. This was a closed community, threatened by a vastly different outside world. “Actually,” she said, “I’d like to have my palm read.”

He nodded, seemed to relax a bit, popped his dentures out, then swallowed them again, pointing down the road outside. “Go to Earth Cathedral. Palmists in there.”

“Who should I ask for?”

“Monty Greer.”

Sarah stiffened. “Monty . . .”

“Yeah, Doctor Montague Greer.”

* * * * *

At first, Sarah had no idea why she’d fled. Perhaps she was frightened of thinking back to the last time she’d seen Montague. It had been a long time since she’d thought that far back. She wasn’t sure she was ready.

The cabbie drove her to downtown Simola Straight and dropped her off. She saw a pub named the Tin Lizzy and strolled in, ordered a glass of water and just sat there, almost too stunned to think. But in moments, all thoughts of Cassadega and Montague Greer would go away.

In moments, Jimmy Lieber would walk in.

* * * * *

When Sarah married Jimmy, a sense of foreboding came over her. She might live another ten years, or sixty, for what it was worth, but she certainly didn’t feel like it. Even as they basked in their happiness, she couldn’t shake the portentous thought that things were winding down, that the book of her life was soon to end. And she hadn’t been able to tell Jimmy, good old six-pack Jimmy, the stories that populated that book, which was certainly sad, because it was, on the whole, a good book. But she knew that Jimmy couldn’t accept the narrative that had joined her years, so she had invented a past she was certain her husband could digest. Beyond this invention, Jimmy hadn’t pried. He’d only loved her.

Sarah had been alone so long that married life did not come easily to her. Jimmy hadn’t wanted her to work, so she’d stayed home and taken care of their modest place, waiting for her husband to return each day. Which he did, unfailingly, at half past five every afternoon. Although the morning and afternoon were lonely hours, once five thirty rolled around, she couldn’t keep the smile off her face. Jimmy wasn’t perfect, but he was a good man, a kind man, an attentive man. They shared a bottle of wine and dinner every evening, and made love every night. Life, for the only time Sarah could remember, was whole and complete.

Then came the month she didn’t bleed.

* * * * *

It was during her pregnancy that Sarah began to think of the past. Here she was, about to have a child, and it was frightening to believe that the boy might be plagued with her race’s separation from humanity.

For the first time in decades she thought back to that night, the night of the fire. Daniel had shown her a picture of her people’s migration, then had begun to paint—in maddeningly broad strokes—their history, but that evening had been cut short.

Doctor Greer
, the old man had said.
Doctor Montague Greer
.

It couldn’t be the same person. Couldn’t be.

* * * * *

She drove to Cassadaga during her second trimester, and found Earth Cathedral. She parked exactly where she would that fateful day years later, and made her way to the front doors. She stood there for some time, her heart beating madly, her hands shaking. She stared at the door, thinking of what Dan had told her about her people’s habits of opening doors to other worlds, to other times. Finally, she knocked.

After a second knock, she heard shuffling feet echoing inside, then a large bolt being drawn. The door opened, its bottom scraping along the cement floor.

Sarah’s mouth dropped open. Her eyes darted from the man’s face to his feet, then back again. His skin was the color of marble in moonlight; it was at once wrinkled and tight, his body stiff but somehow supple beneath it all. He looked to be covered in a kind of bark. But he was, beneath all the years, unmistakably the boy she had once known. “Montague?” she whispered.

The man’s dry lips cracked open, formed a strange smile. His eyes, still young and alert, were bright. “Sarah,” he said.

* * * * *

“Dear God, I never thought I’d see you again,” the old man said.

They sat in Montague’s—
Monty,
she thought,
he calls himself Monty now
—office, which consisted of two benches sitting against opposite walls. Sarah’s head was spinning. “How . . .” she began, her hands up in a kind of protest.

Monty only smiled. “Dan broke his cardinal rule. I learned quickly, and I found I had a gift he didn’t have.”

As it had been since she’d arrived, her mouth was wide-open. She just didn’t have any words to fill it.

“This world, this universe, and all you see around you is only one plane of existence. I’ve heard people talk about parallel universes, but most of them speak as if there were only a couple.”

“And there are—”

“Infinite, Sarah,” said Monty, leaning forward. “All you need to do is find the doors. But as in most gifts, there’s a catch.”

“Which is?”

The old man leaned against the wall, pointed at the cracked and sagging flesh of his face. “It’s dangerous. If you open a door, things can get out as well as in.”

Sarah didn’t answer.

“And what about you?” he asked, suddenly changing the subject. “As I expected, you’ve become a beautiful woman. And not alone, I see.”

Sarah glanced down, smiling.

“Your first?”

She nodded.

“You must be scared. You’ve been disconnected from your people for so long.”

“I’m terrified.”

Monty stared at her. At first, she thought he was only thinking of what to say, but then it became clear he wasn’t. He looked her over, not speaking, for a long time. Finally, he got up, left the room and returned with a box, which he set at her feet. “A few years ago, an old woman gave me a set of blank diaries she’d made herself. She told me she’d always wanted to set the story of her life down, but had never gotten around to it. Am I right in thinking you won’t be introducing your child to his relatives?”

Again, she nodded.

“At least share a piece of yourself, Sarah. This child won’t be quite like everyone else, and he’s bound to have questions. And at some point, my dear, we all die, and when you do, you won’t be able to answer his questions, will you?”

* * * * *

Sarah remembered Monty’s remark the day she gave birth. She was laying in the hospital bed, waiting to meet her son, when her hand grazed her neck. And she felt it.

Just under her chin was a rock-hard lymph node.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Beyond the Door

1

Robert had been walking for what felt like years. His lips were chapped, his throat parched, his legs aching.

There were no paths. He knocked away branches, kept an eye out for whatever wildlife might inhabit this place, and drove on, telling himself that he’d find water sooner or later, or a branch heavy with fruit. Beyond this he did his best not to think, at least for now. Here, under a sky that should not exist, walking on land that should not hold him, watching out for beasts that should not have been, thoughts were only a special kind of madness. Above all, he did not think of his mother. He did not think about her standing nude before him when he was only a boy; he did not think about the vaporous light that had swirled around her, taking her; he did not think about what she’d told him—
oh, son, follow me, you won’t believe it
—and he did not close his eyes now and again to see her disappearing, her arms outstretched, her eyes glassy with tears and visions.

After a time, he came to the edge of the forest. Beyond it was an uneven land of stone. They appeared to have been shoved into the ground by huge hands: some stood perfectly vertical, reminiscent of Stonehenge, other were flat, and still others skewed or broken, as if they’d fallen from the sky and crashed here. He cursed, couldn’t imagine climbing over and around them. He was so tired. So he collapsed on the ground, leaned back and stared at the sky. It was dense with clouds, which were no longer gray but tinged with a red as dark as brick. Behind this brick, a yellowish ribbon of light swirled through the heavens. All was backlit and split by lightning. Tilting his head back, he opened his mouth and tasted rain. It fell slowly at first, in fat drops, then the sky burst open and Robert flattened himself against the dirt, finally satisfied that this was no dream, that he could think about where he lay.

The rain tasted good—it tasted clean.

As he lay there, he thought back to some time ago. (You could not measure time here—nothing set or rose, so it got neither brighter nor darker. It was a world of eternal twilight.) Shortly after Monty had shoved him through the door, ha had seen the beach to the east of the forest and had burst through the foliage and over a dune, only to stop before the motionless and eerily silent sea. He sat in the sand, scooping it over his legs, watching the ocean almost imperceptibly whisper before him. Then he searched the sky, but found no sun, no moon. Only beasts roamed the clouds. The sky was gunmetal highlighted with pastels, the sand a soft tan, the forest behind him a washed-out green that spiraled around lemon-shaded bark.

He stood, licked his lips, wondering if the water was heavy with salt. He almost didn’t care. Approaching the water, which stretched flat as a pond, he watched for signs of life beneath. There was only his face, and it stopped him. He cocked his head, staring—he was no longer bony, no longer gaunt, and he could find no traces of the disease. Was he dreaming? Had he failed to awaken from the hypnosis? He shook his head, dropped to his knees, and reached out his hand over the water, dangling it over the mirror, and finally touched it down.

And screamed.

Something like a seizure ran through him. He reared back, his hand stuck in water that no longer looked like water at all, but like an endless floor of silver, solid enough to walk across or to be buried under. But Robert couldn’t see it. He was seeing past the world, through to the river of time, of space, of All:

In the center of a vast jungle a pyramid touches the sky. Painted men encircle it, shouting, jabbing the bloody tips of spears into the air.

The surface of a lake is broken by skin, a blue-gray head. A massive tail propels it toward a rain forest. Above, the sky is ice and fire. The animal is dying. The world is dying.

At the bottom of a sea across a universe, a broken vessel lies forever still. Beasts no eye has witnessed move in and out of a grand room, their great mouths snapping in the darkness.

In the center of the cosmos lies a dark planet, a dead planet. Buried in its surface are the remains of several civilizations, each unknown to the next. It is only a single world, but it is every world.

Still screaming, Robert escaped the sea, toppled back into the sand. These images had not come in a sequence, but all at once. It was madness.

After a time, he realized he was lying on a beach. He stared at the sky. It was darker now. Like a boy, he tried to make shapes out of the clouds.

“What is it?” he whispered. “What was it?”

The memory of what he’d seen rushed toward him again and he shut his eyes but it didn’t help, and days passed, years passed, a century passed, or perhaps it was only a moment, but then, under the pale light of an alien sky, Robert Lieber fell asleep.

He thought of that day often. Perhaps it was a day ago, perhaps a week, or a year. It had taken him some time to clear his head of what he’d seen, but then again, although the sheer weight of the images had nearly crushed him, he did not want to merely forget. He did not know what that silvery surface beyond the sand was; rather, he only knew what it was not: It was not an ocean. Beyond that, who knew? All he had was conjecture, or perhaps an untenable hypothesis, which was this: This place was not a place at all. It didn’t make sense in a material way. But if it were some sort of physical manifestation of a spiritual way station, if the water, the lake, the ocean, the whatever, was some sort of continuum, if it was some kind of current of . . . what? Of what? Robert sat up, stood, started for the stones. Of life? No, that wasn’t it, but he was close. He’d seen things that only made sense if you thought in terms of the cosmos’s history, if you thought about all of humanity. But even that wasn’t enough.

And then he knew. He didn’t think of it. It didn’t come to him in a flash of excitement. Robert exhaled, stopping atop a jagged stone, a peace spreading through him. He stared into the sky. He hadn’t quite figured out what this place was, or where, but he understood the water.

It was everything.

Creation, all that had been, or was to come. It was the story of matter, the story of anti-matter, the tale of a paradox, the narrative of All. Somehow, he’d touched the water of God’s mind, and had seen everything there was to see. That ocean was a mountain atop all of creation, and looking over it had been terrifying, the view impossible.

* * * * *

Robert had been exploring for what had to be days when he found the cave. It was at the bottom of a ravine. Leaves and foliage partially concealed its mouth. He tried to scale the slope, but ended up sliding down most of it. Glancing back, he surmised it was a hundred or more feet back up, and there was nothing to grab hold of. While it had been relatively easy ending up down here, it would be the devil’s work returning to the top.

When he took a step, he nearly fell. Wincing, he saw that some sort of vine had wrapped itself around his ankle. He yanked his foot, but was answered only by a needle of pain. He touched the dry, green surface of the vine, and immediately withdrew his hand with a hiss. Something had cut his finger. He squinted and looked closer. Sure enough, almost translucent silver needles shot out all over the vine. One had entered the top of his foot, running just over a prominent vein. He held his breath, bent over, touched his foot. The needle moved beneath his skin, but didn’t offer to slip out. Sitting down, he gently pushed on the vine. Any movement at all hurt.

He exhaled a curse, stopped messing with it a moment to look at the opposite end of the pit. Four thin trees stood taller than the ravine behind them. All over the valley, the land sloped upwards. The only thing down here was the cave. Again, he looked at the vine and its needles, trying to figure out a painless solution. But he wasn’t thinking clearly: He hadn’t eaten a thing since being shoved through the door, and he could feel the machine of his body slowing. He couldn’t move quickly, couldn’t think with any speed.

“Okay,” he said, leaning over. “You’re gonna have to come out, one way or another.”

But saying it didn’t make it any better. How was he going to get that thing out? He couldn’t grab hold of the vine without depositing a clan of those silver things in his hands—so what was the plan, Stan?

He stared at it for a while, cocking his head in one direction and then the other, and it finally came to him.

“Call the village, I’ve found the idiot,” he said, reaching down, pressing his thumb and forefinger to the needle. He took a breath, and snapped it off the vine. Slowly, with the thing still worming around over a vein, he uncoiled the vine, stepped out of it, and hopped back a pace or two. With his hands behind him, he lowered himself onto the ground and situated his legs into an Indian-style position. With his feet not more than a hand’s distance from his eyes, he took stock of how deeply it was lodged, and approximately how much pressure this little operation would take. He pressed on it and it hurt, but he was too exhausted to scream, so he cursed silently, pressured it again, shoving it back toward the original hole. It was excruciating—he had an idea that the needle had microscopic barbs on its sides, and was scraping along the vein and the underside of his skin. But at last, its nearly translucent head showed, and he took it between his fingers. With a symphony of pain accompanying it, the splinter ripped out.

Robert sat there for a time with the thing between his fingers, staring at it. Finally, he tossed it aside, took to his feet, and started for the cave.

* * * * *

To his astonishment, he found something to eat not more than a hundred feet inside. Long cylindrical objects glistened in the half-light, and for a moment he thought they were some sort of hibernating animal. But as he approached, he made out their green color. Then he touched them. To be careful, he plucked one from its stem and took a bite. A small bite. He waited for a few minutes. He didn’t keel over, and that was good enough for him.

When he’d finished, he counted twenty-one rinds on the cave’s stone floor.

He sat down, leaned his head against a rock and blanked out, stupidly digesting.

Robert awoke feeling better than he had in a long, long time. He took a look around, saw that an entire wall was ripe with fruit, and smiled. He shook his head, trying not to think about this place, but of course that was impossible. There was a light at the mouth of the cave, a pale, uncertain luminescence created by a star he could not see. The faint scent of water, mildew almost, permeated the air. The heavy wash of wings descended on the clearing, but he could hear it all over the island, those nameless beasts swimming through the sky. So all he could do, really, was think about this place: it was all around him.
Fine,
he thought.
Aside from the water, what do I know?

He knew that his mother had been sent here. Well, that wasn’t exactly right. He didn’t know if she’d come here, or some other dimension, but he did have a hunch. That wasn’t the same as knowing, was it?

She had disappeared in front of him, he did know that. And he supposed he’d always known it, even if his conscious mind hadn’t allowed the memory to surface via normal channels. So if his mother had vanished, and the same man had opened the door, was it foolish to believe he’d sent them both here? Wasn’t Monty the Wizard trying to give him answers? Maybe his hunch was a reasonable assumption, after all.

Of course, the more he knew, the greater the questions. If he understood the sea, and he knew that Monty had sent both he and his mother here, he still had no clear understanding of what
here
was. And that was really the question, wasn’t it?

The more he turned it over, the more he considered it, the more he attempted to answer this question, the more Robert Lieber understood that some questions could not be answered by human minds. He was beginning to see that mankind’s assumption that the physical world was all-important was only the Dark Ages flat-world theory taken to its inverse, exponential extreme. He wasn’t even sure the material plane made sense.

All the unanswerable questions, then, came down to one: He was here—but what, exactly, was he doing here?

Robert looked toward the mouth of the cave, at the light spilling inside. “Finding her,” he whispered.

But where?

Just as when he’d realized what the water was, the connection didn’t blast into him, it didn’t jolt him out of his reverie. It was a sudden peace, an inner calm. He sat up, wrapped his arms around his knees, remembering when he’d first thought he might be sick, and how he’d immediately checked on his daughter. He’d watched her sleep for a while, and then anger had come over him. Not anger over the possibility of sickness—that would come later—but anger over the possibility that he would miss her journey from childhood to adulthood. Wouldn’t his mother have had a similar reaction? If she couldn’t physically stand next to her son as he made his own journey, she had been determined to watch. And she’d found a way, trapped in that silvery portal, to place her hand in the material world: The letter, the destruction of the porch. She understood that her presence in this strange purgatory had upset the balance of things, so she’d guided him to Monty, who had reopened the door.

He might never know what or where this place was, but he certainly knew what here was: Here was a place a mother could find, could see, her son.

The ocean.

A tear slid down Robert’s cheek. She had been with him all along.

After a long and arduous climb out of the valley, he started for the sea.

* * * * *

He got lost many times on his way back. More than once he had to stop, listening for creeping animals or for the cries of beasts overhead, but heard nothing. Saw nothing. Still, he felt watched.

After a time, he came to the land of stone, smiled and thought,
Okay, I’m on the right path.
But his good mood faded once he set to climbing over, around and in between the sentinel-like rocks. More than once he slipped, lost his footing or just plain fell, and by the time he reached the other side, he had to take a break. Almost immediately, it began to storm.