Dividing Earth: A Novel of Dark Fantasy (24 page)

“I would definitely say,” he said with a weary sigh,. “that we
did
sex.”

“Good,” said Mary, then she rose, threw on a robe, and went into the bathroom.

Robert fell back into his pillows, still not quite believing what had just happened.

* * * * *

Dan had left many things up in the air—chiefly, what had happened to his mother, and to Montague Greer. After a number of weeks, he finally decided to head to the local library.

Once there, he got on the Internet and found the site of the local Simola Straight paper. Over the next hour, he filtered through the mundane, prosaic life of a town, only stopping to rub his eyes, or to get some water from the fountain by the restrooms. He found nothing until the second hour, as he shuffled back two years into the town’s past. He came upon this headline: P
rominent
C
assadaga
C
itizens
V
anish
.

Robert blinked, rubbed his eyes, staring at the glimmering screen. He thought about the door. Had Greer truly opened it, or had the old man channeled some latent gift within Robert? A combination of the two? After all, the second time he had touched that mysterious ocean, he had been able to control the current. Had the door been there, invisible, all along? A door to a new perception, a new way of seeing, a way to journey inward, toward the dominant part of his genetic code? Had Greer merely placed his hand on the knob?

He thought further back, to the dreams he and Mary had shared. His mother had reached them from that still sea: when the letter arrived it had been blank at first, but then she’d pushed through, and the message hadn’t been
I’m out there
, but
I’m inside
. If she had been able to somehow cross over, to communicate from some far off yet close place, then what might his abilities entail? He thought of the scales, and the evening after Veronica’s death, how the porch had been ripped apart; what if his subconscious, so upset, had caused these things? He’d seen his mother rip apart a town while a preacher threatened her parents, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Robert smiled. It was all out of that realm, but it didn’t really matter now, did it? It was all in the realm of
is
.

Again, he stared at the screen, wondering if it was a door. He stared at each letter in turn, concentrating on the story they told, and the town it all had taken place in, the man the story was about, and then he reached out, touched the screen.

Nothing. Just a warm, hard monitor screen. He looked down, thought of his mother again, how she’d controlled the fire somehow, touched a flame and commanded it to envelope her hand, and how she’d used what Durham had meant to be the instrument of her death to cause his own. From the inside out. The power, the connectedness of it . . . .

So he slowed down, took each word separately, slowly, concentrating violently, and his skin began to prickle, his gut to burn, and when he reached up to touch the screen it finally happened and he nearly screamed.

His fingers weren’t touching the screen at all, but when they reached the spot where it should have been, the world shimmered like the surface of a pond shaking and reflecting a plane passing overhead. He reared back, blinking madly, watching everything before his eyes roll with tiny waves of disturbance.

And then he was standing in the dark.

A reading light sat on a wooden floor, casting its brilliance up and out, revealing the thick leg of a man seated in a folding chair: Montague Greer.

Robert tried to take a step, but found his feet weren’t on the floor. He raised his arm, could feel his arm, but could not see it. His arm did not exist here. His body did not exist here. Only his eyes were here.

The huge leg lifted and descended, tapping the floor in heavy strokes. The sound was drum-like, and the old man hummed a melody above it.

Then the black changed somehow, grew lighter without altering its color. The black seemed to bend, to shift, to part, and suddenly Robert noticed another figure standing there in the dark.

Greer stopped tapping, humming. “Hello, Sarah,” he said.

Robert opened his mouth, but no sound came forth; he noticed he wasn’t even moving the air around him.

First, he saw his mother’s foot as she stepped toward the light; next, her leg and her hip, and her skin was youthful, flush, vibrant; finally, the floor-lamp threw light on her face. As she had been while rising from the sea, Sarah Lieber was nude. She was resplendent.

“I can’t say I expected to see you,” said Greer.

She stepped to within a foot of the old man, looked down, her hands clenched by her sides, fixing her eyes on his slack but strangely powerful form. She seemed to be not staring so much as appraising. She said nothing.

“You kept an eye on your boy all those years. Impressive.” Greer’s voice was changing, rising. He seemed, if only a little, startled. Perhaps even afraid.

“He’s my son,” said Sarah. Her voice was small; it was as if she hadn’t used it for years. And maybe she hadn’t.

Montague Greer leaned forward. He stood. His face was inches from Sarah’s. Her eyes gleamed in the upcast light.

Again, the darkness seemed to change, to lighten somehow. At first, Greer kept his eyes on Sarah’s, but then as the darkness slowly gathered he looked around, backed up a step, watching as the blackness began to slowly move within itself, like water. It began to spin, slowly at first, then quick as a cyclone it swirled around them, beating back against the walls of the room, splashing onto them like paint.

And the room was bright.

Sarah bent over, retrieved the lamp from the floor, removed the shade. The bulb was blinding, but then she blew on it. It snuffed out, went dark. She set the lamp back, and now Monty was backing up, heading toward the staircase. She stepped toward him.

“Don’t, Sarah. Don’t do this.”

“Don’t do what? Aren’t you tired of waking up every day? Don’t you dream of release?”

“What I dream—”

Sarah stopped, bowed her head, closed her eyes, her hands clenched by her thighs. She made a popping sound with her lips.

Montague Greer grimaced. Cords stood out on his neck. His eyes bulged.

Slowly, Sarah raised her hands.

Greer threw his head back, moaning, and clenched his fists, punched one into the center of his forehead. A trickle of blood ran from his nose.

Sarah opened her mouth. An impossibly high-pitched sound came from it, and the walls and floorboards shook.

Greer’s mouth snapped open, and blood poured from it. It was dark, the blood, and it spewed like oil from the ground. Sarah’s wail continued and Greer collapsed to his knees, then forward, onto his palms. On all fours now, blood running from his mouth, he slapped around in a pool of it.

Slowly, Montague Greer pitched forward.

Sarah stood over him, panting. “Rest, Monty,” she whispered. “Rest.”

Suddenly, she straightened, stiffening. Her eyes shot to the ceiling, then over. If he’d had a corporeal form, she would have been staring right at him. “Robert?”

He tried to speak. He couldn’t. He existed only in the vacuum of souls.

But still she stared, her eyes clear and focused, her lips trembling. “You’re there,” she said. A tear rolled down her cheek. “I’ve watched you, son. For so . . . long.” She wiped the tear away, shook her head as if she was angry at her display of emotion. “I’m sorry, so sorry, I couldn’t be next to you as you grew.” Her tear flowed freely now, but he didn’t think she noticed. “There’s a girl,” she continued. “I’ve watched her, son, watched her all along. She’s right,” Sarah said, smiling now, a tender, soft smile. “Mary’s the one.”

The room brightened, and she stepped back, looked down.

In the center of Greer’s chest was a circle of light. It pulsated, it grew. Sarah calmly watched as the light engulfed his form, and he slowly disappeared within it.

She turned back to him, raised her hand, waving, and for a moment she stood there, perfect and white as the light surrounding her, but then her skin shaded over and her eyes darkened. Her hair began to fade, blending into the gray, and her form blurred and wavered. Soon the light overtook her, and Sarah Lieber, for the second time before her son, began to vanish. Her skin whitened until all he could make out was the outline of her body; it was as if he was seeing her through a veil.

Suddenly, Robert moved, rising, breaking through the house, sifting into the air above it, feeling the heat of the midday sun, the quickening of a breeze.

He overlooked the town. Below, citizens were peeking from windows, they were parting drapes, they were stepping outside and looking around. As if they sensed it.

In minutes, the citizens of Cassadaga had left their offices and homes. They were chatting on the streets. Their movements had a purpose.

They formed a line and were marching toward the house. Entranced, they were silent now, their faces expressionless, and, as they turned down the driveway bracketed by two white fences, the white fire in the attic of Greer’s home grew.

Montague Greer and Sarah Lieber had passed on, and their passage had left a doorway.

* * * * *

When Robert arrived home, he felt blank. Thankfully, only Mary was home. She was in the kitchen, dicing onions.

He stood in the doorway. In the doorway, he thought.
Life was about doors. Which ones you entered, which ones you passed by.

“You okay?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

She scanned his face, dropped the knife, and crossed the kitchen to embrace him. She held him for a time, then asked again, “Sure you’re okay?”

“Okay,” he said, holding her tight, then pulling back.

A worried look came over Mary.

“How long’s it been since you talked to your folks?”

She stammered something.

He waited.

“A long time,” she finally said.

“Want to go home?”

Mary backed up, placed the knife on the counter, breathing deeply. Finally, with the faintest of smiles coming over her, she said, “Yes.”

A Future Time, A Future Memory

Robert and Mary Lieber were taking their first vacation in years, a cross country drive across the states that would end in Sacramento, home of one of Robert’s long-lost uncles. Jenn had just started her last year of college, while they had not quite finished paying for it. They had been working like mad for years now, and they decided on a whim one day to just take off, visit Uncle Henry, who was something of a black sheep, which excited Robert to no end. Perhaps Uncle Henry belonged to his mother’s side of the family.

On the third day of their drive, they crossed into Arizona, where the world changed. Dust hung in clouds on the horizon; the sun burned down on the bowl of the earth. The road was two-lanes, surrounded by desert and the clay ridges of mountains and canyons. As the landscape became more desolate, Robert began looking at the line of mountains and thought of bones, the slight crescent of a back. Mary awoke from a nap, cradled her pregnant belly, rubbing it, and said, “I can’t believe she’s almost done with school. She’s almost gone.”

“Hey, we’ve got her successor coming,” said Robert. They’d been looking forward for the past few years to Jenn starting college, of beginning that long road toward adulthood, but once she actually left, they’d both felt a strange vacancy at the center of their life. So they began trying.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” he said, grabbing her hand. “I do.”

Mary flipped on the radio. It took her a while to find a station playing something other than old-time country, but finally she happened onto classic rock, an old Led Zeppelin tune about a stairway to heaven.

Passing what appeared to be a deserted filling station, Robert checked his gauge—three quarters of a tank—and when he looked up he thought he saw a town on the horizon. This seemed odd because he hadn’t expected anything for nearly a hundred miles. He sped up, keeping his eyes on what appeared to be some kind of small settlement. Nearing it, he could make out a few large buildings on opposite sides of a central street that led to one more structure at the far edge of the town. Above it, a wooden cross proclaimed Christ.

“Wow,” said Robert, pointing. “Either that’s a movie set or a ghost town.” Mary sat up, rubbed her eyes.

As they approached, a strange feeling came over Robert. At first he thought he was hungry—his hands were beginning to shake, as if he hadn’t had enough sugar. But then sweat broke out on his forehead. His tongue seemed to stick to the roof of his mouth.

Something about this reminded him of his college years, when he’d visited New Mexico with a friend he’d met at school. They’d gone hiking a few times on the mountains bracketing a desert that stretched to meet the sun somewhere in the distance. Some journeyed to visit the sea, thought they felt answers pulsing within her vast circulation, thought they felt the water connect them to the continents and islands beyond their immediate reach. But Robert felt this in the desert. Perhaps it had been some kind of buried memory, some connection to his mother’s past in the embryonic America of this past century, an America dreaming of Edison but for whom Einstein was an impossible idea. He’d always felt at home surrounded by silence and space. For some reason, during those summers he’d felt he could solve any dilemma while surrounded by the death of dust. Young men, there was no denying it, were fools.

Now the town was far to their right. They were passing it when Robert looked down the long central street, a path of chewed dirt and encroaching clay. Suddenly, he pulled off the road and hammered over a path of uneven land.

“Robert!” cried Mary.

“Hold on,” said Robert, barely noticing her.
He didn’t realize where he was yet, but it was close as a wolf.
The Navigator kicked up a cloud of dust, obscuring the town. Then he stopped. The dust lifted, swirling into the sienna sky, and Robert stepped out of the SUV, made his way quickly down Main Street while Mary yelled at him to slow down. He stopped in the middle of town. The bat wing doors of a saloon were to his left. Mary drew next to him, panting, asking what the hell had gotten into him.

“Tempest,” he said, craning back, looking at the top floor of the hotel. Where his grandparents had stayed the night before they died. He glanced down, to the steps of the inn, where his mother had lost them and something else, something less definable than life, than the blood of innocents. He looked at Mary. Tears lined her eyes. She nodded.

“Here,” she said.

They stood in the middle of the street for some time, then started for the church at the end of town. The sun shone off the cross.
Nathaniel Durham
, thought Robert. For so long, he’d done his best not to think of his past, his blood. He’d needed time, time to heal, time to distance himself. The past was nothing if not a ghost.

He and Jenn had taken long walks during her last year of high school, and she had asked her thousand questions, some about his mother, some about this very town, some about the blood they shared. He’d done his best to answer each of them honestly. But his answers, like his knowledge, were wildly incomplete. He knew little of the world he had entered. He didn’t know whether it was a state of mind or truly another world, hiding in another solar system, another universe, another dimension. He’d told her what he’d been fortunate to learn, but even what he believed he knew had eroded under the constant tide of time. He’d begun to think that had he not lived with people who had experienced these things with him, even in their limited way, he would have questioned it all.

Until today. He was, after all, here.

If nothing else, his experience had amputated him from the collective. Popular culture and fashionable thought were altogether alien paths. Science had killed the mystical and the mythical, and had placed religion in an ever shrinking box. Especially religion as proscribed by people like Nathaniel Durham. For Robert, the things that men believed they knew, the systems they created to order their largely mysterious lives and their untameable world, were nothing more than a series of fires built to beat back the darkness of the mystery, of the magic.

But the magic was real. The magic was here.

It was a part of everything, it was in the tiny gaps of information Man didn’t realize existed, in the things they thought they knew. As it always had been, and always would be.

Yes
, thought Robert.
It’s in my blood, and it was in the blood spilled on the steps of that inn.

He took Mary’s hand, squeezed it.

“You okay?” she asked, her voice small in the open space.

Robert looked away from the church. “Beautiful,” he said, glancing down the center of the dead town. Above, the sun hovered like a god. “So beautiful.”

Dividing Earth

May 1, 2002–February 23, 2006

Orlando, Florida

74,500 words