The aftereffects are trailing fragments of an unknown existence beyond our lives, Charlie had said, and that existence lay close in this sterile place, a prismatic world of insane truth that would drive a man or woman mad if it were so much as glimpsed. The ant-things served those great entities, just as the marching, naked dead served the ant-things.
Perhaps the city wasn't a city at all but a kind of anthill where all the dead of earth were first enslaved and then eaten. And once that happened, did they finally die for good? Perhaps not. I didn't want to remember the couplet Bree had quoted in her email, but was helpless not to: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die.
Somewhere in that marching horde were Patsy Jacobs and Tag-Along-Morrie. Somewhere in it was Claire--who deserved heaven and had gotten this instead: a sterile world below hollow stars, a charnel kingdom where guardian ant-things sometimes crawled and sometimes stood upright, their faces hideously suggestive of the human. This horror was the afterlife, and it was waiting not just for the evil ones among us but for us all.
My mind began to totter. It was a relief, and I almost let go. One idea saved my sanity, and I still cling to it: the possibility that this nightmare landscape was itself a mirage.
"No!" I shouted.
The marching dead turned toward my voice. The ant-things did likewise, their mandibles gnashing, their loathsome eyes (loathsome but intelligent) glaring. Overhead, the sky began to tear open with a titanic ripping sound. An enormous black leg covered with tufts of spiny fur pushed through it. The leg ended in a vast claw made of human faces. Its owner wanted one thing and one thing only: to silence the voice of negation.
It was Mother.
"No!" I shouted again. "No, no, no, no!"
It was our connection to the revived dead woman that was causing this vision; even in the extremity of my horror, I knew it. Jacobs's hand clutched mine like a manacle. If it had been the right hand--the good hand--I could never have freed myself in time. But it was the weakened left. I pulled with all my might as that obscene leg stretched toward me and that claw of screaming faces groped, meaning to yank me upward into the unknowable universe of horror that awaited beyond that black paper sky. Now, through the rip in the firmament, I could see insane light and colors never meant to be looked upon by mortal creatures. The colors were alive. I could feel them crawling over me.
I gave one final yank, freeing myself from Charlie's grip, and went tumbling backward. The empty plain, the vast broken city, the groping claw--they all disappeared. I was in the bedroom of the cottage again, sprawled on the floor. My old fifth business stood beside the bed. Mary Fay--or whatever dark creature Jacobs's secret electricity had summoned into her corpse and dead brain--gripped his hand. Her head had become a pulsing jellyfish with a human face crudely scrawled upon it. Her eyes were a lusterless black. Her grin . . . you would say no one can actually grin ear to ear, it's just a saying, but the dead woman who was no longer dead was doing exactly that. The lower half of her face had become a black pit that trembled and throbbed.
Jacobs stared at her with bulging eyes. His face had gone a cheesy yellow-white. "Patricia? Patsy? Where are you? Where's Morrie?"
The thing spoke for the first and last time.
"Gone to serve the Great Ones, in the Null. No death, no light, no rest."
"No." His chest hitched and he screamed it. "No!"
He tried to pull back. She--it--held him fast.
Now from the dead woman's gaping mouth came a black leg with a flexing claw at the end of it. The claw was alive; it was a face. One I recognized. It was Tag-Along-Morrie, and he was screaming. I heard a tenebrous rustling sound as the leg passed between her lips; in my nightmares I still hear it. It reached, it stretched, it touched the sheet and scrabbled there like skinless fingers, leaving scorch-marks that gave off thin tendrils of smoke. The black eyes of the thing that had been Mary Fay were bulging and spreading. They merged over the bridge of the nose and became a single enormous orb that stared with blank avidity.
Charlie's head snapped back and he began to make a gargling sound. He stood on his toes, seeming to make one final, galvanic effort to free himself from the grasping hand of the thing that was trying to come through from that insane netherworld I now know is so close to our own. Then he collapsed to his knees and fell forward with his forehead against the bed. He looked like he was praying.
The thing let go of him and turned its unspeakable attention to me. It threw back the sheet and struggled to rise, that black insect's leg still extruding from its gaping maw of a mouth. Now Patsy's face had joined Morrie's. They were melted together, writhing.
I got up by pressing my back against the wall and pushing with my legs. Mary Fay's bloated, pulsing face was darkening, as if she were strangling on the thing inside her. That one smooth black eye stared, and reflected in it I fancied I could see the cyclopean city, and the endless column of the marching dead.
I don't remember yanking open the top drawer of the bureau; I only know that all at once the gun was in my hand. I believe if it had been an automatic with the safety on, I would have just stood there, pulling at the frozen trigger, until the thing arose, shambled across the room, and seized me. That claw would have pulled me into its gaping mouth and into that other world, where I would face some unspeakable punishment for daring to say one word: No.
But it wasn't an automatic. It was a revolver. I fired five times, and four of the bullets went into the thing trying to rise from Mary Fay's deathbed. I have reason to know exactly how many shots I fired. I heard the roar of the gun, saw repeated muzzle-flashes in the gloom, felt it jump in my hand, but all of that seemed to be happening to someone else. The thing flailed and fell back. The melted faces screamed with mouths that had merged. I remember thinking, You can't kill Mother with bullets, Jamie. No, not her.
But it was no longer moving. The obscenity that had come out of its mouth lay limp, trailing on the pillow. The faces of Jacobs's wife and son were fading. I covered my eyes and screamed, over and over again. I screamed until I was hoarse. When I lowered my hands, the claw was gone. Mother was gone, too.
If she was ever there in the first place, I hear you say, and I don't blame you; I wouldn't have believed it myself, if I hadn't been there. But I was. They were--the dead ones. And she was.
Now, however, it was only Mary Fay, a woman whose serenity in death had been destroyed by four bullets fired into her corpse. She lay askew with her hair fanned out around her head and her mouth hanging open. I could see two bullet holes in her nightgown and two more below them, in the sheet that was now puddled around her hips. I could also see the scorch-marks left by that terrible claw, although there was no other sign of it now.
Jacobs began very slowly to slide to his left. I reached out, but the movement felt slow and dreamy. I didn't even come close to grabbing him. He thumped to the floor on his side, knees still bent. His eyes were wide open but already glazing. An unutterable expression of horror was stamped on his features.
Charlie, you look like a man who just got a bad electrical shock, I thought, and began to laugh. Oh, how I did laugh. I bent over, grasping my knees to keep from falling. It was almost noiseless, that laughter--the screaming had blown my voice out--but it was genuine. Because it was funny; you see that, don't you? Bad electrical shock! A shocking development! Hilarious!
But all the time I was laughing--convulsed with it, sick with it--I kept my eyes on Mary Fay, waiting for the hair-tufted black leg to slither out of her mouth again, giving birth to those screaming faces.
At last I staggered out of the death chamber, and through the living room. A few broken branches lay on the carpet, blown through the door Jenny Knowlton had left open. They crunched like bones under my feet and I wanted to scream again, but I was too tired. Oh, I was so tired.
The stacked stormclouds were moving away to the east, throwing down random forks of lightning as they went; soon the streets of Brunswick and Freeport would
be flooded, the storm drains temporarily clogged with chips of hail, but between those dark clouds and the place where I stood, a rainbow bent its many-colored arc over the entire breadth of Androscoggin County. Hadn't there been rainbows on the day Astrid and I had come here?
God gave Noah the rainbow sign, we used to sing during our Thursday-night MYF meetings, while Patsy Jacobs swayed on the piano bench and her ponytail swung from side to side. A rainbow was supposed to be a good sign, it meant the storm was over, but looking at this one filled me with fresh horror and revulsion, because it reminded me of Hugh Yates. Hugh and his prismatics. Hugh who had also seen the ant-things.
The world began to darken. I realized I was on the verge of fainting, and that was good. Perhaps when I woke up, my mind would have blotted all this out. That would be even better. Even madness would be better . . . as long as there was no Mother in it.
Death would be best of all. Robert Rivard had known it; Cathy Morse had, too. I remembered the revolver then. Surely there was a bullet left in it for me, but it seemed like no solution. Perhaps it would have, if I hadn't heard what Mother said to Jacobs: No death, no light, no rest.
Only the Great Ones, she had said.
In the Null.
My knees unhinged and I went down, leaning against the side of the doorway, and that was where I blacked out.
XIV
Aftereffects.
Those things happened three years ago. Now I live in Kailua, not far from my brother Conrad. It's a pretty coastal town on the Big Island. My place is on Oneawa Street, a neighborhood quite distant from the beach and an even longer stretch from fashionable, but the apartment is spacious and--for Hawaii, at least--cheap. Also, it's close to Kuulei Road, and that's an important consideration. The Brandon L. Martin Psychiatric Center is on Kuulei Road, and that's where my psychiatrist hangs out his shingle.
Edward Braithwaite says he's forty-one, but to me he looks like he's thirty. I've found that when you're sixty-one--an age I will reach this August--every man and woman between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five appears to be thirty. It's hard to take people seriously when they look as if they're barely past their Terrible Twenties (it is for me, anyway), but I try hard with Braithwaite, because he's done me quite a lot of good . . . although I'd have to say that the antidepressants have done more. I know that some people don't like them. They claim the pills muffle both their thinking and their emotions, and I can testify that they do.
Thank God they do.
I connected with Ed thanks to Con, who gave up the guitar for athletics and gave up athletics for astronomy . . . although he's still a volleyball monster, and not bad on the tennis court, either.
I've told Dr. Braithwaite everything you've read in these pages. I held back nothing. He doesn't believe much of it, of course--who in his right mind would?--but what a relief in the telling! And certain elements of the story have given him pause, because they are verifiable. Pastor Danny, for instance. Even now, a Google search for that name will yield almost a million results; check it yourself if you don't believe me. Whether or not any of his cures were genuine remains a matter of debate, but that is true even of Pope John Paul, who supposedly cured a French nun of Parkinson's while alive, and a Costa Rican woman of an aneurysm six years after he died. (A good trick!) What happened to many of Charlie's cures--what they did to themselves and what they did to others--is also a matter of fact rather than of conjecture. Ed Braithwaite believes I wove those facts into my narrative to give them verisimilitude. He almost said as much one day late last year, when he quoted Jung to me: "The world's most brilliant confabulators are in asylums."
I am not in an asylum; when I finish my sessions at Martin Psychiatric, I'm free to leave and go back to my silent, sunny apartment. For this I am grateful. I'm also grateful to still be alive, because many of Pastor Danny's cures are not. Between the summer of 2014 and the fall of 2015, they committed suicide by the dozens. Perhaps by the hundreds--it's hard to be sure. I'm helpless not to imagine them reawakening in that other world, marching naked beneath the howling stars, harried along by terrible ant-soldiers, and I am very glad I am not among them. I think that gratitude for life, whatever the cause, indicates that one has managed to hold on to the core of one's sanity. That some of my sanity is gone forever--amputated, like an arm or a leg, by what I saw in Mary Fay's deathroom--is a fact I have learned to live with.
And for fifty minutes every Tuesday and Thursday, between two o'clock and two fifty, I talk.
How I do talk.
*
On the morning after the storm, I woke up on one of the couches in the lobby of the Goat Mountain Resort. My face hurt and my bladder was bursting, but I had no desire to relieve myself in the men's room across from the restaurant. There were mirrors in there, and I didn't want to glimpse my reflection even by accident.
I went outside to piss and saw one of the resort's golf carts crashed into the porch steps. There was blood on the seat and the rudimentary dashboard. I looked down at my shirt and saw more blood. When I wiped my swollen nose, a maroon crust flaked off on my finger. So I had driven the golf cart, and crashed it, and bumped my face, although I could remember doing none of that.
To say I didn't want to go back to the cottage near Skytop would be the understatement of the century, but I had to. Getting into the golf cart was the easy part. Driving it back down the path through the woods was more difficult, and every time I had to stop and move fallen branches, it was harder to get going again. My nose was throbbing and my head was thumping with a tension headache.
The door was still standing open. I parked, got out of the cart, and at first could only stand there, rubbing at my poor swollen nose until it began to ooze blood again. The day was sunny and beautiful--the storm had washed away all the heat and humidity--but the room beyond that open door was a cave of shadows.
There's nothing to worry about, I told myself. Nothing will happen. It's over.
Only what if it wasn't? What if the something was still happening?
What if she was waiting for me, and ready to reach with that claw made of faces?
I forced myself up the steps, one at a time, and when a crow cawed harshly from the woods behind me, I cringed and screamed and covered my head. The only thing that kept me from bolting was the knowledge that if I didn't see what was in there, Mary Fay's deathroom would haunt me for the rest of my life.
There was no pulsing abomination with a single black eye. Charlie's Patient Omega lay as she had when I last saw her, with two bullet holes in her nightgown and two more in the sheet around her hips. Her mouth was open, and although there was no sign of that horrible black extrusion, I didn't even try to tell myself I had imagined it all. I knew better.
The metal band, now dull and dark, still circled her forehead.
Jacobs's position had changed. Instead of lying on his side next to the bed with his knees drawn up, he was propped in a sitting position on the other side of the room, against the bureau. My first thought was that he hadn't been dead after all. The terror of what had happened in here had brought on another stroke, but not an immediately fatal one. He had come to, crawled as far as the bureau, and died there.
It could have been, except for the revolver in his hand.
I stared at it for a long time, frowning, trying to recall. I couldn't then, and I have refused Ed Braithwaite's offer to hypnotize me in an effort to recover my blocked memories. Partly this is because I'm afraid of what hypnosis might release from the darker regions of my mind. Mostly it's because I know what must have happened.
I turned from Charlie's body (that expression of horror was still stamped on his face) to look at Mary Fay. I had fired the revolver five times, I was sure of that, but only four bullets had gone into her. One had gone wild, not surprising when you consider my state of mind. But when I lifted my eyes to the wall, I saw two bullet holes there.
Had I gone back to the resort, then returned the previous evening? I supposed it was possible, but
I didn't think I could have brought myself to do that, even in a blackout. No, I had fixed this scene before I left. Then I went back, crashed the golf cart, staggered up the steps, and fell asleep in the lobby.
Charlie hadn't dragged himself across the room; I was the one who did the dragging. I propped him against the bureau, put the gun in his right hand, and fired it into the wall. The cops who would eventually discover this bizarre scene might not test Charlie's hand for gunshot residue, but if they did, they would find it.
I wanted to cover Mary Fay's face, but everything had to be left exactly as it was, and what I wanted most of all was to escape that room of shadows. I took a moment longer, though. I knelt beside my old fifth business and touched one of his thin wrists.
"You should have stopped, Charlie," I said. "You should have stopped a long time ago."
But could he have done that? It would be easy to say yes, because that would allow me to lay blame. Only I'd have to blame myself as well, because I hadn't stopped, either. Curiosity is a terrible thing, but it's human.
So human.
*
"I hadn't been there at all," I told Dr. Braithwaite. "That's what I decided, and there was only one person who could testify that I had been."
"The nurse," Ed said. "Jenny Knowlton."
"I thought she'd have no choice but to help me. We had to help each other, and the way to do it would be to say we'd left Goat Mountain together, when Jacobs started raving about turning off Mary Fay's life support. I was sure Jenny would go along with that, if only to make certain I kept quiet about her part in it. I didn't have her cell number, but I knew Jacobs would. His address book was in the Cooper Suite, and sure enough, her number was in it. I called and got voicemail. I told her to call me back. Astrid's number was also in his book, so I tried her next."
"And also got voicemail."