Fear the Abyss: 22 Terrifying Tales of Cosmic Horror (19 page)

He'd gone on to explain further, using such cheerful phrases as
the ultimate heat death of the universe
, but you'd only been half-listening. You were too busy trying to wrap your mind around the second law. If entropy always increased, you reasoned, then anything anyone did, no matter how constructive it seemed, only helped to hasten the process of breaking the universe down into nothing. And there wasn't anything anyone could do about it.

In the years afterward, you'd come to a deeper understanding of the three laws, and you know that they're far more complex than you'd first thought on that afternoon in Mr. Gillespie's class, but the basic core of your initial insight still holds up.

But Mr. Gillespie's class wasn't all existential angst. He'd hung a number of inspirational posters around his classroom featuring great scientists throughout history. Your favorite had been the poster of Isaac Newton, not because of the man himself, but rather the quote beneath his image:
Whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
You loved the poetry and mystery of the line, and that, perhaps more than anything else, spurred you to seek a career in science.

Of course, running tests on river water wasn't exactly exploring the "ocean of truth," was it? And as you grew older and became more aware of the ticking clock that was your heart--a poor defective organ that would eventually need tuning up as badly as your pick-up's engine--you had to do something to give entropy the finger. You knew it was going to win in the end, but you had to at least make the attempt to leave something more behind when you were gone than file after file of test results stored on some office computer. Building houses--building
homes
--where families could raise children, who in turn would grow up to have their own children, had seemed like a perfect legacy. Too bad it didn't pay the goddamned bills, not enough of them, anyway.

You decide not to worry about what you saw at the coffee shop. You've got a check-up with your cardiologist in a few days, and you'll ask her about the hallucinations--if they were even serious enough to be called that--then. Thinking about Ghostlight reminds you of your coffee, and you reach for it, only to withdraw your hand. You're still not sure if you want to risk the caffeine. You turn on the radio instead and crank the volume despite your headache. You always turn the volume high; it helps to mask the distressing sounds coming from the pick-up's engine.

An old Bob Segar tune's finishing up, and you catch a bit of lyric about autumn closing in. Nice. Just what you want to hear right now. You leave the radio tuned to this station, though. The song's almost finished, and they play a wide variety of music here. You like not knowing what sort of artist is going to come on next. It could be anyone from the Big Bopper to the Beatles to AC/DC.
Predictability is its own form of entropy,
you think.

You're driving down Jefferson Avenue. It's the most direct route to Lizzie's school from Ghostlight Coffee, but it takes you through one of the skuzzier parts of town. The buildings here are so old they're on the verge of collapse, and for every business that's open, three have been closed and abandoned. Flaking paint and weathered brick, unintelligible graffiti spray-painted on walls, broken glass and discarded fast-food wrappers scattered on the sidewalks. The people here walk with slow shuffling steps, heads bowed, faces expressionless. Whenever you come this way, you can't help thinking about all the work there is to be done here--buildings to refurbish, businesses to reopen, people to save...But it's work you know will never be done.

The song ends and the DJ comes on the air. The prerecorded voice is usually that of an old sitcom actor you recognize but whose name you can never remember. But this time someone else speaks.

"Everything winds down, like an uncoiling spring."

This voice you
can
put a name to: it's Mr. Gillespie.

"So before it's too late, listen to these messages from our fine sponsors."

A commercial for a bartending school comes on, one you've heard many times before. You pay no more attention to it now than you did the other times you've heard it. You tell yourself that the DJ can't be Mr. Gillespie. You were in his class thirty-four years ago, and he hadn't been a young man then. He's bound to be retired now, if not dead. And even if he
is
still alive, why would he be spending what remains of his golden years providing prerecorded patter between songs on a small Southwestern Ohio radio station? It didn't make sense.

But the uncoiling spring was exactly the kind of image Mr. Gillespie would've used when talking about the Second Law. Weirder yet, the line seemed to come in response to what you were thinking.
Coincidence,
you tell yourself.
That's all.
But you don't believe it, not deep down where it really matters.

The commercials, all of them comfortingly mundane, continue for the next couple blocks. As you approach an intersection, you see the lights of emergency vehicles, and you slow down. The traffic light is blinking yellow, and there's a police officer standing in the middle of the intersection waving cars through. As you draw closer, you see there's been an accident, a bad one. Three vehicles--an SUV, a Ford Taurus, and a minivan--all appeared to have attempted to pass through the intersection at the same time, from three different directions, all traveling at surprisingly high speed, the drivers heedless of another well-known law of physics: two objects (let alone three) cannot occupy the same space at the same time. You first reaction is relief. It looks like the accident, bad as it is, isn't slowing traffic down, and you won't be late to pick up Lizzie. Guilt comes next. You should be thinking of the poor bastards who got hurt in this crash--and given the state of the vehicles, let alone the two EMS vans on the scene, you're sure no one's walking away from this clusterfuck unscathed--but your first thought was a selfish one. It's not that you're uncaring. You have a responsibility to Lizzie, that's all. This may be true, but it doesn't make you feel any better about yourself.

It's your turn to pass through the intersection, and the cop waves you forward, his motions sharp, an edge of impatience to them. You don't want to be one of those people who slow as they pass an accident, eager to sate their morbid curiosity. You'd like to think you're better than that. But you can't help sneaking a quick glance.

You see four emergency medical personnel, all dressed in blue uniforms, struggling to pull a mass of bloody flesh and cloth from the wreckage. Several police officers and firefighters stand by, watching, none of them making the slightest move to help. They seem alert, though, their bodies filled with coiled energy, and you catch what appears to be a look of hunger in their eyes.
They're just itching for some action,
you tell yourself. But that's not the kind of hunger you see. As you draw closer, you realize that the collision must have been far worse than you initially thought, for the twisted, crumpled metal of the three vehicles is so intertwined, it seems as if they've merged into a single solid mass. Last weekend, you watched a nature documentary on cable with Lizzie detailing what happened to the body of an adult elephant after it died. Lizzie was fascinated by the parade of predators and scavengers that worked to devour the dead beast over the course of several days, but it was the maggots that really captured her imagination. She'd seen flies before, of course, but not maggots, and after only a few short days under the heat of the African sun, there were thousands of the wriggling white things, so many that they began to reduce the elephant's flesh to a disgusting liquefied mess. And although the program's narrator pointed out how the energy the elephant had stored in its body over the course of a lifetime would be recycled into the environment, you couldn't help thinking this was a perfect illustration of the Second Law in action. The mass of vehicles reminds you of that elephant, while the EMTs, cops, and firefighters remind you of the lions, leopards, hyenas, and jackals who arrived to feed on the corpse. And the maggots? You suppose they're the looky-loo's driving by, of which you're forced to admit you're one.
Just call me Mr. Maggot,
you think.

You're almost through the intersection when your gaze centers on the bodies the EMT's are working to extricate from the wreckage. No...
Body
. Singular.

You tell yourself it's a trick of your eyes (no way you want to consider the possibility you're having another hallucination.) The bloody, broken thing the men and women pull from the crumpled metal can't be one large form with multiple heads, arms, and legs. It only looks that way because of the angle from which you're seeing the bodies, the quality of the afternoon light hitting them, the unreal nature of any horrific accident scene. Or most likely, a combination of the three.

Oh, it's a combination all right,
you think. It seems like three objects
can
occupy the same space at the same time--after a fashion, at least.

The iron bands around your chest return, bringing with them ice-cold knives of panic.  Fresh pain erupts inside your skull, so intense it's nearly blinding. You fumble for the pill fob on the end of your keys, but it's difficult to get the lid off with the keys in the ignition. As you struggle, the bands tighten, the panic intensifies, and you feel your airway begin to seal shut...

Pull over!
you tell yourself, Wave down the cop, get him to bring one of the EMTs over here. Maybe they'll throw you in the back of one of their vans and haul your ass to the nearest ER.

The car behind you honks, startling you, and you realize that you've slowed to a crawl. The cop is waving you forward, his motions sharper now, more insistent, an angry scowl on his face, and other drivers start honking.
Pull over, pull over, pull over!
But you ignore the voice in your head and force yourself to press down on the accelerator, and move through the intersection. Your head still pounds, but the bands around your chest begin to loosen, your throat opens up, and you're able to breathe again. Not easily, but at least you can get some air. You think you're going to be okay.

You're tempted to look in your rearview to check if you really saw what you think you saw, if there truly was one body with multiple heads and limbs, but you keep your gaze fixed firmly on the road in front of you and continue driving. The pain in your chest eases, but this time it doesn't go away, not entirely.

*****

"Daddy, is that what's going to happen to me when I die?"

H
er question catches you off-guard, and you try to make a joke out of it. "You mean getting eaten by jungle animals?"

Lizzie gives you a look that says, Don't be stupid. "I mean being turned into nothing but bones. And those will be gone too someday, won't they? So they'll be nothing left of me." She pauses for a moment to think before adding, "It'll be like I was never here at all."

You've never lied to her before. When she was much younger, she asked you if Santa Claus was real. You wanted to tell her yes, to give her imagination the push it needed to believe that there was magic in the world, at least for a little while. But when you saw the unquestioning trust on her face, you could do nothing but tell her the truth. You quickly followed up by telling her the usual bullshit, that Santa was the spirit of Christmas that lives in everyone, but you could tell she wasn't buying it. Worse, you could tell she was disappointed.

So now, sitting on the couch, both of you looking at a picked-clean elephant carcass on TV, you think of how you'd wished you'd lied about Santa years ago, and you want to tell her that it'll be okay, that God is in his heaven and all's right with the world. But you can't, so you just keep your damned mouth shut and pray she doesn't press you for answers you don't want to give, and you wish like hell that there was someone around to lie for you.

*****

Mr. Gillespie's voice comes on the radio once more. You listen as you rub your chest with your free hand, as if you might be able to massage your now-mild--but still present--chest pain away.

"Here's something to ponder, boys and girls. When the universe begins to break down, space and time will, too. It only makes sense, right? After all, that's what the universe is made of. So if time no longer functions--if, for lack of a better word, time
dies
--then how is it possible for the universe to truly end? In order to have beginnings, middles, and ends, you need the passage of time. No time, no end. So imagine that the universe is on the verge of giving its last gasp, and in that instant time stops. That means the universe would continue to exist in a kind of a frozen eternity, forever on the edge of death but unable to ever reach it. And since time is no longer a factor, there's nothing to separate one moment from the next. Everything that ever happened will basically continue happening forever, but all at once, in one great big jumbled mess. And not just events, either. Thoughts, emotions, dreams, nightmares . . .they'll all be in the mix, too, kids. And we'll be there, every single one of us, in that last forever non-moment of existence. We might even be conscious of what's happened to us, at least partially. Can you imagine what that would be like? I can't, but it sounds a lot like Hell, doesn't it?"
A pause.
"That's enough for you to chew on for now. Let's have some more music. I was going to play Blue Oyster Cult's 'Don't Fear the Reaper,' but I decided it would be too cliché at this point. Instead, how about some Steely Dan?"