My folks asked me to come back, of course. Promised me everything. Said I could go to college whenever I wanted. All that stuff.
But their voices sounded weak. I heard the terror in those voices, and I felt so sorry for them, because they knew the walls of their cage were painted gray. Oh, I’ll go back to Greystone Bay sometime—but not until later. Not until I’ve found out who I am and what I am. I’m Bob Deaken now.
I still can’t figure it out. Was it planned? Was it happenstance? Did those creatures that loved fire just fit me into their lives by accident, or on purpose? You know, they say the Devil craves fire. But whatever the Sikeses were, they unlocked me from a cage. They weren’t evil. Like Virgil Sikes said: Fire creates as well as it destroys.
They’re not dead. Oh, no. They’re just…somewhere else. Maybe I’ll meet them again sometime. Anything’s possible.
I may not be a red house. I may be a blue one, or a green one, or some other color I haven’t even seen yet. But I know I’m not a gray house. I know that for sure.
And that’s my story.
Something Passed By
1
JOHNNY JAMES WAS SITTING on the front porch, sipping from a glass of gasoline in the December heat, when the doom-screamer came. Of course doomscreamers were nothing new; these days they were as common as blue moons. This one was of the usual variety: skinny-framed, with haunted dark eyes and a long black beard full of dust and filth. He wore dirty khaki trousers and a faded green Izod shirt, and on his feet were sandals made from tires with the emblem still showing: Michelin. Johnny sipped his Exxon Super Unleaded and pondered that the doomscreamer’s outfit must be the yuppie version of sackcloth and ashes.
“Prepare for the end! Prepare to meet your Maker!” The doomscreamer had a loud, booming voice that echoed in the stillness over the town that stood on the edge of Nebraskan cornfields. It floated over Grant Street, where the statues of town fathers stood, past the Victorian houses at the end of King’s Lane that had burned with such beautiful flames, past the empty playground at the silent Bloch school, over Bradbury park where paint flaked off the grinning carousel horses, down Koontz Street where the businesses used to thrive, over Ellison Field where no bat would ever smack another softball. The doomscreamer’s voice filled the town, and ignited the ears of all who remained: “No refuge for the wicked! Prepare for the end! Prepare! Prepare!”
Johnny heard a screen door slam. His neighbor in the white house across the way stood on his own porch loading a rifle. Johnny called, “Hey! Gordon! What’re you doin’, man?”
Gordon Mayfield continued to push bullets into his rifle. Between Johnny and Gordon, the air shimmered with hazy heat. “Target practice!” Gordon shouted; his voice cracked, and his hands were shaking. He was a big fleshy man with a shaved head, and he wore only blue jeans, his bare chest and shoulders glistening with sweat. “Gonna do me some target practice!” he said as he pushed the last shell into the rifle’s magazine and clicked the safety off.
Johnny swallowed gasoline and rocked in his chair. “Prepare! Prepare!” the doomscreamer hollered as he approached his end. The man was standing in front of the empty house next to Gordon’s, where the Carmichael family had lived before they fled with a wandering evangelist and his flock on his way to California. “Prepare!” The doomscreamer lifted his arms, sweat stains on his Izod, and shouted to the sky, “O ye sinners, prepare to—”
His voice faltered. He looked down at his Michelins, which had begun to sink into the street.
The doomscreamer made a small terrified squeak. He was not prepared. His ankles had sunk into the gray concrete, which sparkled like quicksilver in a circle around him. Swiftly he sank to his waist in the mire, his mouth open in a righteous O.
Gordon had lifted the rifle to put a bullet through the doomscreamer’s skull. Now he realized a pull of the trigger would be wasted energy, and might even increase his own risk of spontaneous combustion. He released the trigger and slowly lowered his gun.
“Help me!” The doomscreamer saw Johnny, and lifted his hands in supplication. “Help me, brother!” He was up to his alligator in the shimmering, hungry concrete. His eyes begged like those of a lost puppy. “Please…help me!”
Johnny was on his feet, though he didn’t remember standing. He had set the glass of gasoline aside, and he was about to walk down the porch steps, across the scorched yard, and offer his hand to the sinking doomscreamer. But he paused, because he knew he’d never get there in time, and when the concrete pooled like that, you never knew how firm the dirt would be either.
“Help me!” The doomscreamer had gone down to his chin. He stretched, trying to claw his way out, but quicksilver offers no handholds. “For God’s sake, hel—” His face went under. His head slid down, and the concrete swirled through his hair. Then—perhaps two seconds later—his clawing hands were all that was left of him, and as they slid down after him, the street suddenly solidified again in a ripple of hardening silver. Concrete locked around the ex-doomscreamer’s wrists, and his hands looked like white plants growing out of the center of the street. The fingers twitched a few times, then went rigid.
Gordon went down his steps and walked carefully to the upthrust hands, prodding his path with the rifle’s barrel. When he was certain, or as certain as he could be, that the street wouldn’t suck him under too, he knelt beside the hands and just sat there staring.
“What is it? What’s going on?” Brenda James had come out of the house, her light brown hair damp with sweat. Johnny pointed at the hands, and his wife whispered, “Oh, my God.”
“Got on a nice wristwatch,” Gordon said after another moment. He leaned closer, squinting at the dial. “It’s a Rolex. You want it, Johnny?”
“No,” Johnny said. “I don’t think so.”
“Brenda? You want it? Looks like it tells good time.”
She shook her head and grasped Johnny’s arm.
“It’d be a waste to leave it out here. First car that comes along, no more watch.” Gordon glanced up and down the street. It had been a long time since a car had passed this way, but you never knew. He decided, and took the Rolex off the dead man’s wrist. The crystal was cracked and there were flecks of dried concrete on it, but it was a nice shiny watch. He put it on and stood up. “Happened too fast to do anythin’ about. Didn’t it, Johnny?”
“Yeah. Way too fast.” His throat was dry. He took the last sip of gasoline from the glass. His breath smelled like the pumps at Lansdale’s Exxon Station on deLint Street.
Gordon started to walk away. Brenda said, “Are you…are you just going to leave him there?”
Gordon stopped. He looked down at the hands, wiped his brow with his forearm, and returned his gaze to Brenda and Johnny. “I’ve got an ax in my garage.”
“Just leave him there,” Johnny said, and Gordon nodded and walked up his porch steps, still testing the earth with the rifle’s barrel. He sighed with relief when he reached the porch’s sturdy floor.
“Poker game at Ray’s tonight,” Gordon reminded them. “You gonna make it?”
“Yeah. We’d planned on it.”
“Good.” His gaze slid toward the white hands, then quickly away again. “Nothin’ like winnin’ a little cash to take your mind off your troubles, right?”
“Right,” Johnny agreed. “Except you’re the one who usually wins all the money.”
“Hey, what can I say?” Gordon shrugged. “I’m a lucky dude.”
“I thought I’d bring J.J. tonight,” Brenda offered in a high, merry voice. Both Johnny and Gordon flinched, a little. “J.J. needs to get out of the house,” Brenda went on. “He likes to be around people.”
“Uh…sure.” Gordon glanced quickly at Johnny. “Sure, Brenda. Ray won’t mind. See you folks later, then.” He darted another look at the white hands sticking out of the street, and then he went into his house and the screen door slammed behind him.
Brenda began to sing softly as Johnny followed her into their house. An old n
ursery song, one she’d sung to J.J. when he was just an infant: “Go to sleep, little baby, when you wake I’ll give you some cake and you can ride the pretty little poneeee…”
“Brenda? I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“What?” She turned toward him, smiling, her blue eyes without luster. “What’s not a good idea, hon?”
“Taking J.J. out of his room. You know how he likes it in there.”
Brenda’s smile fractured. “That’s what you say! You’re always trying to hurt me, and keep me from being with J.J. Why can’t I take J.J. outside? Why can’t I sit on the porch with my baby like other mothers do? Why can’t I? Answer me, Johnny?” Her face had reddened with anger. “Why?”
Johnny’s expression remained calm. They’d been over this territory many times. “Go ask J.J. why,” he suggested, and he saw her eyes lose their focus, like ice forming over blue pools.
Brenda turned away from him and strode purposefully down the corridor. She stopped before the closed door to J.J.’s room. Hanging on a wall hook next to the door was a small orange oxygen tank on a backpack, connected to a clear plastic oxygen mask. Brenda had had much practice in slipping the tank on, and she did it with little difficulty. Then she turned on the airflow and strapped the hissing oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. She picked up a crowbar, inserting it into a scarred furrow in the doorjamb of J.J.’s room. She pushed against it, but the door wouldn’t budge.
“I’ll help you,” Johnny said, and started toward her.
“No! No, I’ll do it!” Brenda strained against the crowbar with desperate strength, her oxygen mask fogging up. And then there was a small cracking noise followed by a whoosh that never failed to remind Johnny of a pop top coming off a vacuum-sealed pack of tennis balls. Air shrilled for a few seconds in the hallway, the suction staggering Johnny and Brenda off balance, and then the door to J.J.’s room was unsealed. Brenda went in, and lodged the crowbar between the doorjamb and the door so it wouldn’t trap her when the air started to leak away again, which would be in less than two minutes.
Brenda sat down on Johnny Junior’s bed. The room’s wallpaper had airplanes on it, but the glue was cracking in the dry, airless heat and the paper sagged, the airplanes falling to earth. “J.J?” Brenda said. “J.J? Wake up, J.J.” She reached out and touched the boy’s shoulder. He lay nestled under the sheet, having a good long sleep. “J.J, it’s Momma,” Brenda said, and stroked the limp dark hair back from the mummified, gasping face.
Johnny waited in the corridor. He could hear Brenda talking to the dead boy, her voice rising and falling, her words muffled by the oxygen mask. Johnny’s heart ached. He knew the routine. She would pick up the dry husk and hold him—carefully, because even in her madness she knew how fragile J.J. was—and maybe sing him that nursery rhyme a few times. But it would dawn on her that time was short, and the air was being sucked out of that room into a vacuum-sealed unknown dimension. The longer the door was left open, the harder the oxygen was pulled into the walls. If you stayed in there over two or three minutes, you could feel the walls pulling at you, as if they were trying to suck you right through the seams. The scientists had a name for it: the “pharaoh effect.” The scientists had a name for everything, like “concrete quicksand” and “gravity howitzers” and “hutomic blast,” among others. Oh, those scientists were a real smart bunch, weren’t they? Johnny heard Brenda begin to sing, in an oddly disconnected, wispy voice: “Go to sleep, little baby, when you wake I’ll give you some cake…”
It had happened almost two months ago. J.J. was four years old. Of course, things were crazy by then, and Johnny and Brenda had heard about the “pharaoh effect” on the TV news, but you never thought such a thing could ever happen in your own house. J.J. had gone to bed, like any other night, and sometime before morning all the air had been sucked out of his room. Just like that. All gone. Air was the room’s enemy; the walls hated oxygen, and sucked it all into that unknown dimension before it could collect. They both had been too shocked to bury J.J., and it was Johnny who’d realized that J.J.’s body was rapidly mummifying in the airless heat. So they let the body stay in that room, though they could never bring J.J. out because the corpse would surely fall apart after a few hours of exposure to oxygen.
Johnny felt the air swirling past him, being drawn into J.J.’s room. “Brenda?” he called. “You’d better come on out now.”
Brenda’s singing died. He heard her sob quietly. The air was beginning to whistle around the crowbar, a dangerous sound. Inside the room, Brenda’s hair danced and her clothes were plucked by invisible fingers. A storm of air whirled around her, being drawn into the walls. She was transfixed by the sight of J.J.’s white baby teeth in his brown, wrinkled face: the face of an Egyptian prince. “Brenda!” Johnny’s voice was firm now. “Come on!”
She drew the sheet back up to J.J.’s chin; the sheet crackled like a dead leaf. Then she smoothed his dried-out hair and backed toward the door with insane winds battering at her body.
They both had to strain to dislodge the crowbar. As soon as it came loose, Johnny grasped the door’s edge to keep it from slamming shut. He held it, his strength in jeopardy, as Brenda squeezed through. Then he let the door go. It slammed with a force that shook the house. Along the door’s edge was a quick whoooosh as it was sealed tight. Then silence.
Brenda stood in the dim light, her shoulders bowed. Johnny lifted the oxygen tank and backpack off her, then took the mask from her face. He checked the oxygen gauge; have to fill it up again pretty soon. He hung the equipment back on its hook. There was a shrill little steampipe whistle of air being drawn through the crack at the bottom of the door, and Johnny pressed a towel into it. The whistle ceased.
Brenda’s back straightened. “J.J. says he’s fine,” she told him. She was smiling again, and her eyes glinted with a false, horrible happiness. “He says he doesn’t want to go to Ray’s tonight. But he doesn’t mind that we go. Not one little bit.”
“That’s good,” Johnny said, and he walked to the front room. When he glanced at his wife, he saw Brenda still standing before the door to the room that ate oxygen. “Want to watch some TV?” he asked her.
“TV. Oh. Yes. Let’s watch some TV.” She turned away from the door and came back to him.
Brenda sat down on the den’s sofa, and Johnny turned on the Sony. Most of the channels showed static, but a few of them still worked: on them you could see the negative images of old shows like “Hawaiian Eye,” “My Mother the Car,” “Checkmate,” and “Amos Burke, Secret Agent.” The networks had gone off the air a month or so ago, and Johnny figured these shows were just bouncing around in space, maybe hurled to Earth out of the unknown dimension. Their eyes were used to the negative images by now. It beat listening to the radio, because on the only station they could get, Beatles songs were played backward at half-speed, over and over again.
Between “Checkmate” and a commercial for Brylcreem Hair Dressing—“A Little Dab’ll Do Ya!”—Brenda began to Gry. Johnny put his arm around her, and she leaned her head against his shoulder. He smelled J.J. on her: the odor of dry corn husks, burning in the midsummer heat. Except it was almost Christmastime, ho ho ho.
Something passed by, Johnny thought. That’s what the scientists had said, almost six months ago. Something passed by. That was the headline in the newspapers, and on the cover of every magazine that used to be sold over at Sarrantonio’s newsstand on Gresham Street. And what it was that passed by, the scientists didn’t know. They took some guesses, though: magnetic storm, black hole, time warp, gas cloud, a comet of some material that kinked the very fabric of physics. A scientist up in Oregon said he thought the universe had just stopped expanding and was now crushing inward on itself. Somebody else said he believed the cosmos was dying of old age. Galactic cancer. A tumor in the brain of Creation. Cosmic AIDS. Whatever. The fact was that things were not what they’d been six months ago, and nobody was saying it was going to get better. Or that six months from now the
re’d be an Earth, or a universe where it used to hang.
Something passed by. Three words. A death sentence.
On this asylum planet called Earth, the molecules of matter had warped. Water had a disturbing tendency to explode like nitrogylcerine, which had rearranged the intestines of a few hundred thousand people before the scientists figured it out. Gasoline, on the contrary, was now safe to drink, as well as engine oil, furniture polish, hydrochloric acid, and rat poison. Concrete melted into pools of quicksand, the clouds rained stones, and…well, there were other things too terrible to contemplate, like the day Johnny had been with Marty Chesley and Bo Duggan, finishing off a few bottles at one of the bars on Monteleone Street. Bo had complained of a headache, and the next minute his brains had spewed out of his ears like gray soup.
Something passed by. And because of that, anything could happen.
We made somebody mad, Johnny thought; he watched the negative images of Doug McClure and Sebastian Cabot. We screwed it up, somehow. Walked where we shouldn’t have. Done what we didn’t need to do. We picked a fruit off a tree we had no business picking, and…
God help us, he thought. Brenda made a small sobbing sound.
Sometime later, red-bellied clouds came in from the prairie, their shadows sliding over the straight and empty highways. There was no thunder or lightning, just a slow, thick drizzle. The windows of the James house streamed crimson, and blood ran in the gutters. Pieces of raw flesh and entrails thunked down onto the roofs, fell onto the streets, lay steaming in the heat-scorched yards. A blizzard of flies followed the clouds, and buzzards followed the flies.
2
“READ ’EM AND WEEP, gents,” Gordon said, showing his royal flush. He swept the pot of dimes and quarters toward him, and the other men at the round table moaned and muttered. “Like I say, I’m a lucky dude.”