Biblical (22 page)

And she wasn’t alone: others had seen things that weren’t there. The whole city had been shaken by an earthquake that hadn’t happened. How could she be sure she hadn’t experienced a hallucination? Or that she wouldn’t have another? But her OCD rituals remained her priority: they had to stop.

Dr Corbin had suggested she take time off to do an intensive period of ‘deprogramming’, as he called it. He could refer her to a New York clinic that specialized in deconstructing OCD rituals, taking them apart step by step, while also carrying out
deep phobia therapies. Karen had resisted, explaining she couldn’t just drop everything for some kind of nut-job detox. There was the Halverson meeting coming up. Maybe then – maybe after the Halverson meeting.

Karen’s employers were tolerant, if not entirely supportive, when it came to her OCD. And anyway, it didn’t make that much of an impact on her work: her firm was housed in a modern, clean-lined building with light decor and most of the offices were open-plan. Karen’s own office had wide double doors kept perpetually open. The ritual for leaving or entering her office through such a large portal was simpler and less obvious than the usual: she bowed low, as if passing through a tunnel, keeping as far away from the corners as possible, finishing with a flourish of web-busting hands as she straightened up. She also made an effort to be first in the office each morning and carried in her handbag an extendible duster, which she would run over the jambs and corners of the doorway.

But the Halverson meeting was not taking place in her firm’s offices.

The Halverson Building was an ornate mid-nineteenth-century edifice of Portland stone; all history-inundated nooks and crannies on the outside, marble and oak on the inside. As Karen, her boss Jack Court and her two corporate liability co-workers made their way through the foyer, having first patiently waited for Karen to complete her entrance ritual, she eyed the ceiling cornicing, the angles, details and edges of the paneling, the marble statuary mounted on plinths, the corners where the walls met.

A fact is not a dead thing. A fact is alive and can grow; wields huge power. A fact that lived constantly in Karen’s head was that the world crawled and seethed and teemed with insects. There were more types of insect – nine or ten million species – than the rest of Nature combined. Ninety per cent of all life, other than bacteria and single-celled organisms, was insect. It
was they who ruled the planet. And this old building with its countless hiding places was a haven for them. They were there, in the shadowed places and unseen spaces, waiting.

“Are you okay?” she heard Jack Court ask her. “I need you to be okay, Karen.”

She nodded. Then again, more firmly. She was not going to let this win. She was not going to have people ridicule or pity her any more. And she was not – definitely not – going to let it screw up this account.

*

The Halverson group of companies was a world-spanning empire: behind five hundred household brands, behind the logistics organizations that brought a thousand more to markets around the globe, and – rumor had it – behind the election of half a dozen senators and, at least in part, the current President. The reason Drew Halverson had not stood for Presidential office himself, it was said without much irony, was because it would mean a diminishment of his power and influence.

That Halverson was personally heading the meeting signified its importance. After a decade of rapid growth and merger, there was governmental concern that the Halverson Group was beginning to hold too much sway over the nation’s economic destiny, compounded by public unease over Drew Halverson’s close relationship with President Yates, whose strong religious beliefs he shared. There were even rumors of prayer sessions in the White House.

In addition to the four members of Karen’s team, there was a guy from the DOJ’s Anti-Trust Department and a woman from the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC woman was small, dumpy and not making a good job of being middle-aged and eyed Karen with the intense animosity that the homely reserve for the comely. The Feds were there by invitation – part of Halverson’s very public commitment to total transparency – and it was up to Karen and her team to convince them that the
proposed schedules of expansion, which included making Halverson the biggest national exporter to the soon-to-be-federalized European Union, did not violate Anti-Trust legislation.

She had spent a great deal of time preparing for this presentation and, as Jack Court introduced her, Karen felt calm, composed, ready. Whatever else was going on in her life, Karen was a consummate professional.

She took her place at the podium and started her presentation. In much the same way that she felt detached during her OCD episodes, whenever she was making a presentation she felt separated from herself. She saw herself, heard herself. And she was good. Really good. Five minutes in, she caught Jack Court’s expression and knew that he was thinking the same.

She had it nailed. Every possible infraction was revealed as well within the FTC’s rules and the Department of Justice’s guidelines. Even the frump nodded approvingly as each box was ticked, each corner shown uncut. All the time Drew Halverson sat at the head of the conference table and smiled an approbatory smile.

Halfway through she felt it: the same sensation she had on the street immediately before she had seen the little girl. Like déjà vu.

Focus.

She pressed on with the presentation, but the feeling of unreality, of repetition, of otherness intensified. She stumbled over a couple of lines, causing Jack to frown and Halverson’s smile to fade.

The air changed. It became not just different, but alien; like no air she had experienced before. Heavy, dense, moist and rich, clinging to her skin like a warm, damp vestment and oiling her mouth, her nostrils, her lungs.

The sunlight through the window dimmed. Everything was becoming vague. Inconsistent.

Karen gripped the sides of the lectern, the only thing that seemed solid, real to her.

Focus. Concentrate. Work through it.

Something fell onto the angled lectern. A tight black disc, about the size of a dime, that must have come from the ceiling. It had a shiny, ridged appearance, a coil of geometric pattern. She jumped back and brushed it off the lectern with the back of her hand. Karen looked up but could not see where it had come from. She started the last section again, not looking up to see her audience’s reactions. Three more black discs fell onto the lectern, two bouncing straight off, the third rolling down her notes before being caught on the page rest at the bottom.

“What the hell …” Karen began, this time looking up at the others who now stared at her the same way people stared at her in shop doorways. The fat bitch from the FTC was smiling malevolently. But it was as if they were all looking at her from behind thick, rippling glass, or a screen of viscous film.

Karen’s confusion was gone in an instant. The terror that now filled her left no room for anything else. As she watched, the black disc twitched, then uncurled. A pelmet fringe of hair-like black legs rippled nauseatingly from the flanks of the four-inch-long, three-quarter-inch-wide millipede, and Karen heard the scuttling rattle of a thousand sharp feet on the paper of her notes. Something shrill and penetrating filled the room and Karen realized she was screaming. The room, her audience, the building around her were now just layers of glassy, rippling outlines.

There was a sound above her. Karen looked up and barely noticed that the roof of the building had gone and daylight filtered through the fronds of impossibly tall ferns, her attention focused on the granular cloud that tumbled towards her. Hundreds, thousands of curled-up millipedes fell on her: into her hair, onto her clothes, into her screaming mouth. The podium, the floor, everything turned black with them as they uncurled and scuttled across every surface, over each other’s bodies. Over Karen. She spat them from her mouth, tore them
from her hair, stamped on them in a demented frenzy. She looked to the others for help, but they were gone. The Halverson Building with its wood paneling, marble floors and Portland stone was no longer there. Not even as a glassy outline.

I am mad, she thought through her panic. I have gone insane.

She had been in a room. The room had had a building around it; there had been a city around the building. But the conference room was gone, the Halverson Building was gone, Boston was gone.

She was surrounded by a forest.

The millipedes had stopped falling but still she clawed frenetically at her hair, face, body. She felt her whole body itch. God oh God oh God … She realized they were inside her blouse. They were crawling up her legs. She tore her navy jacket off, ripped at the silk of her blouse. She was covered with them. They scurried over her, each one a ripple of pin feet on her skin. Urgent hands beat, clawed and swept them from her. Feet stamped at a seething black carpet of them.

Karen ran, stumbling over roots and tubers, getting up and running on … anything to get away from the churning, writhing mass of millipedes, still furiously brushing them from her body as she ran. The ground was mulchy, moist, and her high heels had been sucked from her feet after only a few strides. She ran and ran but there seemed to be no end to the forest.

There was no sense to this. What had happened to her? What had happened to the world? Think, Karen, she told herself. Use your brain. Make sense of this. She stopped running and checked she was clear of the crawling bugs. With a shudder she scrubbed the last of them from her skin.

Something else made no sense: Karen, insensitive to anything except her terror, had lost track of how long she had been running, but she knew it had been a while and over difficult terrain. So why wasn’t she out of breath? Her breathing was heavy, but not labored, as if she had trotted up a flight of stairs rather than run for her life through a tangle of subtropical forest.

The forest. The inexplicable forest.

It was dense and dark, but unlike any other she had ever seen. Everything around her was impossibly tall but, for the most part, they weren’t trees. Impossibly tall ferns – huge, branchless trunks topped with fronds – soared above her, crisscrossing each other to create a green cathedral of vaulted ceilings. There was no grass beneath her feet, or anywhere to be seen, just a dense, sodden carpet of moss and lichen. Even these seemed supersized: thicker and bigger. And the air: the cloying, rich, thick air.

Standing there, Karen sought desperately to make sense of what was happening. This forest that wasn’t a forest, this air that wasn’t air, this world that wasn’t her world.

Insane.

Maybe
that
was the explanation: she was mad. Whatever Dr Corbin had said to reassure her, Karen knew she had had psychological problems. Was the insanity surrounding her really just insanity within her? Was this all some kind of elaborate delusion or hallucination?

Despite the sticky heat, Karen realized she was shivering, trembling almost convulsively. If this was a hallucination, then it was convincing enough to have put her into shock. A spasm in her gut caused her to double over and she vomited onto a clump of ferns. The spasms continued until there was nothing left in her stomach to expel and her retching became dry and pained her muscles.

Straightening up, she wiped her mouth with the back of her shaking hand and looked down at herself. Her jacket, blouse and shoes were gone; her stockings were ripped and laddered. She was left wearing just her skirt and brassiere. Karen the city lawyer was half-naked and half-demented in the middle of an alien jungle. If this was a delusion, then it was one that invaded every sense. However improbable, this world didn’t just look real, it smelled, tasted, felt and sounded real.

Karen needed to find help, but the dense foliage made every
direction look the same. Deciding to press on in the direction her panic had first impelled her, she stumbled through the undergrowth for an hour, her mouth dry, her head aching. After throwing up and in this heat, she knew there was a real danger of dehydration. Driven by the need to find water, Karen pushed on, parting curtains of ferns and clambering over algae and moss-slimed rocks.

She froze. Something was moving. To the right and hidden from view. Karen realized at that moment that there had been something else odd about the forest: no sounds. No bird song or cries. No monkey calls. Absolutely no animal noises. No hint of anything moving around.

Until now.

She stood still, straining to hear above the rushing sound of the pulse in her ears. Another sound. Another scuttling insect, but this time something big. Karen sobbed as she began running again, charging through the undergrowth, blind to hazards, focused only on getting away from whatever had been scurrying towards her, hidden in the foliage.

She was under its surface, the water filling her nose and mouth, before her brain had time to register the river. The forest had opened out so suddenly, staying dense and impenetrable until the very edge of the water, that she hadn’t seen the wide expanse of river until she plunged headlong into it. Kicking her way desperately back to the surface, her hand found a low, smooth rock with an edge she could grip and hung on while she coughed, retched and spluttered the water from her body, gasping huge lungfuls of air.

Once more she sobbed disconsolately: was there no end to these torments?

She took a moment to compose herself, her cheek pressed against the sleek, cool surface of the rock. Again she was amazed at how quickly it took her to recover her breath, as if the air in this green hell was somehow richer.

The rock beneath her cheek moved.

Karen jumped to her feet. The hump of smooth black stone moved again, and more of it emerged from the gritty mud. No scream this time: Karen stood mute and watched as it slowly twitched and quivered and wriggled itself free of the soil it had buried itself in. A segmented back arched, black lobster-like legs sprang up and out. And still Karen, struck dumb, watched as the giant millipede, eight feet long and two wide, emerged from the earth. Two long antennae, segmented like the legs, twitched into life, each moving independently, circling and probing as if tasting the air. Like a column of legionnaires sheltering beneath their shields, the millipede’s legs rippled as it began to move. Still frozen in fear, Karen remained still even when she felt its legs ripple over her naked foot. Unaware of what had woken it from its slumber, the monstrous arthropod weaved its way back into the forest undergrowth.