Fearful Symmetries (36 page)

With a shimmer of cymbals and a flourish of notes from the saxophone, the song on the jukebox ended and was replaced by the vibrating twang of a guitar set to a country complaint. Lynch looked at Melinda, who was surveying the rest of the bar, and said, “Thank you.”

“It’s important to do stuff like that when you can. It helps you stay . . . coherent longer.”

“Maybe I should wait for it to come on again.”

“Some do,” Melinda said. “Not that they hang around jukeboxes for that special song, but they attach to places that, you know, had meaning for them.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t. For that matter, neither did you.”

“No.”

“You sound less than happy. Is that what you would’ve wanted, hovering over their shoulders, watching them grieve?”

“I . . .”

“Worse, watching them stop grieving, get on with their lives.”

“It would have been something.”

“It would have been nothing. You would have drifted off to the basement, attic, some corner of the house or another, and sat there moping. Every now and again, when everyone was asleep, you’d have gone for a walk, wandered from room to room feeling miserable, spooking the cat.”

“We didn’t have an attic. Just a crawl space.”

“Oh. How about a cat?”

“Yes. A white cat, with a black mark on her forehead. The kids named her—”

“Spot?”

“Ashley. For Ash Wednesday, you know.”

“Not really. Anyway, the point is, it wouldn’t have been long until you’d faded to next to nothing, just a tissue of a couple of unconnected memories. A year, two at the outside. And not long after that, you wouldn’t have been anything more than a cold spot, a disturbance in the atmosphere. Your wife, kids, would’ve walked through the space that was you and shivered, rubbed the goosebumps on their arms and wondered if they’d left a window open. You can’t honestly tell me you would’ve wanted any of that.”

“I would have been with them.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You think you would have, but trust me, that kind of situation—the inertia—it sticks to you. I’ve seen it, seen guys who had the same idea as you reduced to a single word they keep whispering as they melt into the wall. Not pretty. Believe me—this is better, way better.”

“This?” Lynch raised a hand to the room. “This place? I can’t even remember its name.”

“It’s not much on the ambiance, I’ll give you that. But they do have Ella on the jukebox.”

Despite himself, Lynch smiled. “Yeah.”

“Hey—remember when you got here and you thought it was heaven? I guess it kind of made sense, what with all the white around, but still.”

“Well, I revised my assessment the minute I met you.”

“What are you talking about?” She sounded almost aggrieved. “You count yourself damned lucky if I’m the angel waiting at the end of your tunnel of light. Just see how well you do on your own. Five minutes, and you’d be roaming the streets, scaring people half to death with your moaning.”

“‘Half to death’: very funny.”

“Whatever.”

The jukebox exchanged one country song for another that Lynch knew, Kenny Rogers rasping “The Gambler.” After a moment, he said, “So what about this van?”

“What about it?”

“What happened to it?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I’m the new one, remember? I think you know exactly who did this.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Then you have a very good idea.”

“No, nothing that would count as very good.”

“Stop playing word games.”

“I’m not. The most I’ve got is a couple of facts I don’t like very much.”

“There was no one, no
impression
, at the accident scene. We already said that.”

“Yeah,” Melinda said, “but what it means . . . the thing that did this—you figure it has to be some kind of animal, right?”

“I don’t know about that,” Lynch said.

“Have you ever seen a collision between two cars that looked like that?”

“I haven’t seen many—any accidents at all, if that’s your reference point. Bad as it was, though, if another car had been involved, I can’t imagine it would have been in any kind of shape to drive away.”

“Yes, exactly.”

Lynch held up his hand. “But there’s no animal that could have done that to a van. Maybe a bunch of tigers, or polar bears, only those things don’t hunt in groups, do they? Not to mention, they’re pretty scarce in these parts. No, I think what happened to that family was the fault of people, some kind of gang, or a cult, maybe.”

“How do you explain the damage to the van? You saw the shape that thing was in, like a bag of potato chips that’d been torn open. Not to mention the family—their physical remains. I saw you trying not to look too closely, but you know what I’m talking about. There’s a gang of super-strong cannibals on the loose, waylaying hapless motorists?”

“It’s better than rabid polar bears.”

“Not by much.”

“What, then?”

“Something that makes me uber-nervous. Something strong enough to push a decent-sized van that must have been going a decent speed off the road, get into it, and devour the passengers, body and soul.”

“I thought we weren’t souls.”

“Figure of speech. Something that can consume their flesh and their impression on the quantum subjectile—their ghosts. Better?”

“What can do that? You’re describing a monster.”

Melinda nodded. “I am.”

“And you’re serious.”

“It’s what fits the facts.”

“A monster?”

“For all intents and purposes, yes.”

“And this is better than the super-strong cannibals how?”

“Would it help if I called it a self-precipitating and -perpetuating anomaly that’s accumulated sufficient energy to allow it to pierce the ontological membrane?”

“Monster it is, then.”

“Don’t look so offended. You can’t tell me you never saw this kind of thing on the way here. It hasn’t been that long since I made the Walk; I know what it’s like. There’s that long, blank time when you don’t know anything. Then you realize you’re moving, shuffling along a road, which looks an awful lot like one of the main roads you live near, except that it’s colorless, not white or gray so much as
faint
, a pencil drawing done on cheap paper. Whatever lies to either side of you is too vague for you to make out, but you don’t worry about that very much, if at all. You’re surrounded by people all around you, some heading in your direction, the rest bound for God-knows-where. Just about everyone’s dressed in one version or another of normal clothing; although maybe you see an old woman over there who’s in her nightgown and slippers, a guy over here who’s too old and fat for the baseball uniform he’s squeezed into. To your right, there’s a kid—you thought he was a kid, sixteen or seventeen, but when you turn your head again, you see he’s fifty if he’s a day. That’s a little strange, but it isn’t as bad as the woman ahead who keeps
flickering
. While you watch her, she goes from being stick-legged twelve to broad-hipped thirty, like a jump-cut in a movie. You look down, and maybe the hand you hold up looks a little rough at the edges. A few folks try to walk together—could be you’re one of them—but it doesn’t last long. For one thing, you can’t hear each other too well. It’s as if your ears are clogged. Even your own voice sounds as if it’s coming more from inside your head than your mouth. For another thing, you can’t stay focused on what anyone else is saying long enough for a meaningful exchange. Your mind keeps returning to this question, to the Question: What happened to me?

“But it’s a question that isn’t really a question. It’s a placeholder for an image. You, stomping the brake and steering hard to the right as the truck backs out of the alley directly ahead of you. Or you, lying in a hospital bed wired to a host of machines, a ridge of bandages rising over the fresh scar up the center of your chest. Or you, stepping backwards as the kid holding the gun sweeps it in your direction, this lavish gesture that he probably picked up in a movie he watched in rerun on Channel 9. You see his index finger tightening on the trigger, and then—

“That’s just it, though: there isn’t any
then
. There’s that moment, then this moment, this place that looks vaguely familiar, but it’s like looking through a lens smeared with Vaseline. The only thing that seems one hundred percent, undeniably real is the compulsion that’s drawing you forward, step-by-step, east west north south. You don’t have a way to describe it. It’s like nothing you’ve felt before, as if you’re an iron filing and the biggest magnet in creation is saying,
Come to me
. What can you do? So you walk.

“And on the way to wherever it is you’re bound, there are these people. A man wearing a black suit fifty years out of date, the collar of his shirt open, the ends of an actual bowtie flapping out from under the collar in the wind that blows up as the guy approaches you. From his thin hair, the lines of his face, you take him for an old man, until he draws near enough for you to tell that he isn’t, he’s maybe the same age as you, he just has one of those old faces, and probably has since he was in his twenties. It’s the kind of face he would’ve spent all his life trying to catch up to. There’s about two days’ worth of blond stubble on his chin, his long cheeks, which is odd—not that you’ve made a survey or anything, but the other men you’ve noticed so far have been by and large clean-shaven. Even the couple of guys with beards you’ve run across have been pretty well-groomed.

“The man comes closer to you—he staggers, lurches, as if his legs don’t work properly, the knees stiff, the hips locked. It’s like when you’re a kid and you play at being Frankenstein’s monster, those same exaggerated motions. All he needs is both arms held out in front of him. They aren’t, though. His arms weave and windmill to either side of him, trying to help his balance. He draws closer to you, bringing with him this smell, a thick stink like milk well on its way to becoming cheese. You would think the wind that surrounds him would clear the air, but it’s as if the smell is threaded through it. Right before this guy reaches you, clamps one hand on your shoulder, leans toward you, so that you can see his eyes are the same blank color as the road—right then, you realize that this is the first thing you’ve smelled since—since the scorched rubber of your tires scraping over the blacktop; or the flat, antiseptic hand-sanitizer that your family has to rub over their hands when they enter your cubicle in the ICU, and that clings to their fingers as they slide chips of ice between your lips; or the thick grease the man pointing the gun at you applied to it before he left his apartment to walk to the little bodega you like to stop at for a glass bottle of Mexican Coke.

“When the man, this old-young man in the black suit that has a vest, too, speaks, his voice is a distant shriek, as if the wind around him is carrying it from a long distance. You can’t understand everything he’s saying, but you hear words like, ‘Over here,’ and, ‘Please,’ and, ‘Salvation.’ The man is gesturing for you to follow him, to leave the road for a place off to one side. The terrain in that direction does seem to be a little more distinct. There are other people there, a surprising number of them. They’re standing around a huge bonfire—it’s orange, the brightest color you’ve seen since you started walking. You can’t believe how good it feels to see something that vivid. It’s almost enough to send you off the road into this . . . pocket.

“What stops you is the figure on the opposite side of the fire from you. You have a hard time seeing it clearly, because the fire’s giving off a lot of heavy, black smoke, but it looks enormous, far taller than anyone you’ve met, and wider, too. Its proportions are wrong, the arms too long, overdeveloped, the chest massive. Its head is narrow, rising almost to a point, as if it’s wearing some kind of helmet, and you have the absurd thought that this is no person: it’s an ape, a gorilla; although it’s nothing like the animals you’ve stared at in zoos or watched in nature documentaries. This is something that pulls itself up skyscrapers with one hand while swatting airplanes with the other. You’re afraid, because how could you not be? But you’re fascinated, too, by the sight of something so fantastic. There’s still a chance you’ll go with the man in the black suit, follow his distant scream, until, trying to peer through the smoke, you see that what the fire’s burning are bodies, men and women who continue to move as the flames roar over them. You have the impression that the smoke is being inhaled by the thing on the other side of it—that maybe the smoke
is
it—but you’re already moving away from the place, running along the road, in terror that whatever you’ve witnessed is going to abandon its spot and come after you.

“You wonder what all of this is. It’s a question you’ll have the chance to ask yourself several more times on your way to whatever your destination is. If you’re lucky, you’ll be pulled in the direction of one of the major currents, and once you enter it, you’ll be whipped along at what feels like a thousand miles an hour. If you’re less fortunate, there’s more walking in your future; maybe a lot. Either way, in the course of your journey, you’ll see a number of other pockets, some of them pretty elaborate, all of them presided over by huge figures that seem as if they were dreamed up for a Hollywood soundstage.”

As ever, Melinda told a good story. It shared enough details with Lynch’s actual experience to have him nodding. “Yes,” he said, “but I thought you told me the creatures in those pockets were confined to them. Also, that they were made up of the people in the fires, that the men and women in the pockets surrendered themselves to the flames to keep the creatures going.”

“That’s not the point,” Melinda said. “The fact is, there’s a whole lot of weird shit out there, so don’t be too surprised that we’re dealing with some more of it.”

Lynch’s reply was swallowed in the wave of sound that swept through the bar. It came from his right, where the wall behind the jukebox burst inwards in a spray of wood and drywall. Dust swirled across the floor, blown by the freezing air that rushed into the room. For an instant, the jukebox gave voice to a man insisting that he was so much cooler online, and then a second wave of sound surged through the room. It was a roar, though such a roar as Lynch could not remember ever having heard. Half freight-whistle and half avalanche, it shook the glasses on the tables, clattered the liquor bottles against one another. At the bar, someone screamed, and that solo noise swelled to a chorus when the author of the roar thrust its great head through the breach it had forced.