The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (41 page)

I glanced at him, locked gazes again, and turned back to the paper, picking up the pen. His eyes reminded me of shore meeting sea, the core of his irises the pale ecru of sand, the limbic ring an aquatic blue.

Even though I could still feel the floorboards of the House of Water beneath my feet and see the paper before me, I began to feel as if I were standing on the dismal beach of an ocean. It stretched into the horizon and beyond that, ever and ever. The sky over that coast was a non-thing, the electric gray of blindness.

As the surf rolled up to my feet, the susurrance of the tides was a crescendo of whispering voices, millions of them, that flowed and ebbed.

I was in three places at once.

I knelt and scooped up a handful of the sand, letting it trickle through my fingers. When it was gone, I found that I was holding a rope. The rope trailed into the ocean.

“Relax. Keep pulling up that bucket.”

_______

Noreen creeps closer to the dark, rippling water, drawn by the sound. Bubbles of air are rising to the surface.

Something emerges from the water. It’s a white hand, as white as milk, as white as death, with five long fingers that curl into wizened claws and grip the edge of the sink. She can hear the drain gurgle as the water begins to drain out of it.

A white face breaks the surface, screaming as it breaches.

Speechless with terror, Noreen flees through a nearby doorway, slamming it shut.

A sickly greenish-blue light falls out of a crevice high in the ceiling, but fades before it can do much more than give shape and texture to the slick, stony floor below. She can see that she is in a large cavern, and a network of ruined, swollen timber beams comprise a grid of ribs that encircle the space like a bird cage and serve as a support structure for the rock.

She becomes aware of a constant, undulating noise emanating from the crevice, a rippling binaural tone that might drive her mad if she has to endure it much longer. It is like the steady drone of some vast machine, a thing of grinding black cogs greased with unspeakable ichors.

There are anonymous figures hanging from long ropes tied to some point high overhead.

They are draped in mildewed sackcloth so that only their gray, bloated feet are visible, and their nooses over that, so that their heads are hidden by hoods of taut burlap.

Water runs down them and drips from their black toenails, into puddles below. The beam of turquoise light streams down their bodies. Their shadows make them look as if they are standing atop columns of darkness.

A timid voice, muffled by the kitchen door, whispers, “Why did you leave?”

In a space between the timbers on the other side of the cavern, a hole appears. The stone seems to crumple backwards in measured, square increments, like paper being folded into origami, sliding into itself and out of sight. After several seconds of the whirring-grinding-scraping noise of it, there is a misshapen rectangle of empty space as large as a doorway.

The voice from the kitchen says, “You’re not supposed to leave.”

Noreen notices movement and looks up at the hanged figures. They seem to have been alarmed by the sound of the transforming stone, and are now fighting and thrashing as if trying to escape their nooses, swinging, pendulous.

Foul water drizzles from their kicking feet. She screams and runs, throwing herself into the hole in the wall.

She runs, her socks squelching in her boots, her boots knocking against the stone as she ventures deeper into what turns out to be a tunnel, as round as the inside of a pipe and just tall enough that she can stand up in it. The light behind her is less and less until she has to slow down, afraid that she might slam into a wall or step off into a pit.

The darkness becomes oppressive, weighing her down the farther she walks, ramping up the gravity as if the very air itself has metamorphosed into lead. Soon the tunnel is invisible and Noreen is reduced to crawling along, scraping her palms and bruising her knees on the rough limestone.

The dark presses her into the floor, more and more.

She pulls herself along on her belly, reaching ahead, dragging her logy body to each handhold, pushing in turn with her feet.

Some force conspires to draw her backward, and she inches along, clutching the stones under her, making her way deeper into the tunnel, fighting the pull that threatens to send her howling and flailing back into the place with the dead things.

Something resists her, does not want her to leave. Soon it’s even stronger than gravity itself, and she’s clinging to the floor. A light breeze courses over her exhausted body. Escape is near.

The next time she reaches for a handhold, Noreen finds nothing.

She is lying on the floor of the tunnel’s end, where it opens into a void so vast that her voice doesn’t echo back to her when she calls for Sawyer again. It is simply swallowed up, muffled by emptiness. She can hear
something,
though. It is the rushing of trees in the wind.

There is a light coming from somewhere below; she can see the stone around her now. She pulls herself to the edge and looks down, and sees a strange forest sprouting out of the wall around the end of the tunnel.

The light is coming from the intermittent flashing of a nearby neon sign: KING’S INN in giant yellow cursive, the second word much larger than the first. Next to it is a stylized image of a bearded man wearing a crown, also made of luminescent tubes. Below that is the word “VACANCY”.

It is then that Noreen realizes that she is climbing out of a well.

She grips the rim of the well and hauls herself out, tumbling down from the wall of the cistern and onto the ground where she rests, gulping air. At this angle she can see the sky...it is an empty, eternal black, shot through at a dozen places, leaving holes through which that same turquoise light shines in on her.

It only pierces the night, each beam swording downward into eventual dissolution.

That same swelling, swerving mechanical drone rains down from the sky, fainter this time but still enough to make her skin crawl.

She finally rolls over and gets up again, and starts walking toward the sign.

_______

I was startled by a pair of headphones. The Mariner had plugged a pair of stereo cup headphones into the record player, and put them on me. The strains of big-band music wafted out of the turntable...Glenn Miller, the Inkspots...and the voice I had been trying to ignore faded into the background. A man sang a lilting song about setting the world on fire.

“Maybe that’ll help,” I heard Ink say through the cups. “The motel sign, that was him poisoning the water. Keep doing your voo-doo, and I’ll do what I can to keep him out. I can’t last forever, but maybe I can hold him off just long enough.”

The Mariner looked away, his shoreline eyes searching the room. He had a thoughtful look on his face as if he were listening for something.

“He’s just outside, looking for the chink in our armor, looking for an unlocked window. He hasn’t seen your friend yet. The unremembered man is merely the avatar, the reaching hand, the representative, of the grand horror lurking in the abyss your friend now traverses underneath the Sea of Dreams. Pray she isn’t discovered. Keep hauling.”

I looked down at my sand-dusted hands.

The rope had become the ink-pen.

_______

The closer Noreen gets to the neon sign, the fiercer it buzzes, and the brighter it becomes, until she is feverish and her head aches. The neon tubing thrums with power until she is afraid that at any moment it is going to burst and shower her with burning plasma.

She recoils as the neon king’s eyes shift.

The electricity flicks from one tube-iris to the other, and suddenly...he is looking at her.

The sense of idiot madness, of antithetical malice welling from that stare is more than she can bear. It is enough to quail the trees and stones and earth itself with its sourceless hatred.

It is like staring into the guileless, unfeeling eye of a hurricane.

Noreen’s heart surges in her chest, and she breaks for the treeline. Only they aren’t trees, they are corroded girders standing up out of the soil at sharp, jostling angles, a graveyard of rusty swords. The soil underneath is a roiling black loam infused with an eternity of garbage.

The forest is not a forest at all, but a junkyard of forgotten things.

Tumbleweeds of crumpled paper and Christmas lights drift across the unending wasteland, clattering over heaps of dissected baby dolls and coffee filters, shattered glass and bent candlebra, scraps of car tires, crumbled statues.

A path has been cut in the refuse, and this is what she races along, pushing her tired body as hard as she can, pistoning legs carrying her forward. On the horizon of this hateful hell is a tremendous dark tower of filth and rust spindling upwards out of the desolation.

That must be where she must go.

She is no more than ten steps into this wretched place when the ground shifts underneath her feet.

The world spins madly up and down and in and out, as if perception itself has become a clockwork puppet show.

The trees wheel away, the ceiling heaves down at her until it is so close she can almost touch it, and the dirt sifts away through cracks in tile, as if the grout is a sieve.

Craggy, toothlike boulders punch up through the tile, and Noreen stumbles, flailing, into a shallow pool of dank water. Eyeless white fish scatter, writhing, from the splash. She groans and picks herself up.

She is in a sort of tremendous labyrinth, constructed from bottle-green castlestone. Before her and behind her stretches a corridor devised of what appears to be an infinity of bookshelves. These are filled with ancient tomes, their crumbling spines fractal with rot and mildew, their pages swollen with dank water.

Aquatic light shimmers down from holes in the ceiling, giving vague shape to her environment, guttering with that same mad binaural beat as before. Something behind the light shifts, curling protectively from her acknowledgement.

Noreen finally sees that this place does not conform to the whims of logic.

It is a nightmare outside of reality, beholden to neither time nor space, its laws fluid and rudimentary. It’s a non-place where dead dreams settle to the bottom and decay like dead fish on the floor of the universe.

(you’re almost th)

The girl looks up at the sound of a voice.

I’ve heard it too. I recognize it as Hel Grammatica, the Silen that spoke to me on the train. It fades in and out as before, like the bad reception of a broken radio. I write it down so Noreen can hear it.

(m here. i am in the void. keep moving! he knows you are h)

“Who is that?” she asks, fearful. Then, she understands. She understands because I understand.

(it’s going to take a concerted effort here)
, says the Silen. His voice comes from far away, but it is closer and more intimate than pillow-talk. It originates in the center of our heads, an erudite and muffled intonation.

The stone floor vibrates with a whirring-thudding-scraping. Noreen looks over her shoulder and senses something moving, a vast writhing that billows in the darkness like the shadow of a whale deep underwater. She can hear a leathery creaking, and a metallic rattling, underscored by the constant rumble of unseen machinery.

Then, as she is rooted in terror, staring into the black, a brilliant yellow eye opens back there, a neon mandala that twitches from wall to wall and then locks onto the trembling girl.

The hovering golden iris is easily the size of an automobile.

Without a word, Noreen darts in the other direction, sprinting at top speed, the puddles spraying at her footsteps.

The eye gives chase. The floor shakes.

She comes to an intersection and takes the
left-hand path,

(NO!)

the right-hand path, and a shelf full of rotten books disgorges its contents at her. The pile of slush-paper and book backings vomits out onto the floor. Noreen slows down just enough to keep from sliding in it, and clears the obstacle.

The dark behind her is rent in twain by the sudden appearance of the eye, as it comes around the corner in pursuit.

(now go left)

_______

We heeded the voice in unison, and I was writing and editing and writing and editing as Noreen hurled herself through the maze. I drew inspiration from the Vur Ukasha hand over fist as I stood on the shores of inspiration, altering it according to Hel Grammatica’s advice even as the prose led her ever closer to our imprisoned friends and the possibility of freedom.

My hand cramped as I furiously scribbled forth, changing and rewording, several times editing Noreen out of lethal mistakes and situations.

At length I was unsure if I was describing things as they happened outside of my control, or if I was setting events into motion with every word I transcribed.

The “past” and the “future” were irrelevant.

The three of us became one, the Silen’s broken advice filtering the dream-water as I drew it and poured it onto the page, trying to ignore the insidious whispers from the grim, cold face pressed against the second-story window in front of me.