We Will All Go Down Together (32 page)

In the absence left by the fear, meanwhile, exhaustion fell on me like a lead-lined blanket; I had to exert effort just to turn the door handle. A minute later found me trudging along the bare-wood hallway to the kitchen, where (I hoped) Vivia would have made her usual industrial-strength pot of Joe. I couldn’t recall ever being so grateful for her innate morning-person tendencies.

Actual first thing out of Aaron’s mouth, on seeing me: “Dude, dig it—the dead walk.” Vivia, uncharacteristically, didn’t say anything at all; just stared, mouth open, like she was catching flies.

“And a good fucking morning to you, too,” I snapped back. Pointing to the coffeepot in Vivia’s hand: “Viv, pour me some of that, and I’ll be your slave for life.”

“Where’ve you been?”

“Out; what’re you, my Mom?” Typical Vivia: statement with a question, question with a question. But even this momentary annoyance was well-leavened with relief at its familiarity. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, at last, with what I hoped was sufficient finality. “Not now, probably never. Just give me some coffee, tell me the shower’s working, and let me get some sleep.”

Aaron raised an eyebrow. To Vivia: “She’s okay, wherever she went.”

Vivia, meanwhile, had already put down the coffeepot—still making no move towards getting me a mug, I noticed with some irritation. “Jan, I, ah—” She moistened her lips. “I think you’d better come upstairs and see something.”

And suddenly, all the fear came back: not driving, beating terror, but a frozen paralytic grip of
oh-shit
dread; like I was a cancer patient and Viv the doctor I’d been hoping would smile, but hadn’t. Not so much what she’d said, as the way she’d said it: the half-drop of the th- in “think,” making it almost “t’ink”; the slackening of the vowel in “come” to something more like “comb,” with something similar flattening “see” closer to “say,” Vivia’s loathed Maritime accent creeping back into her speech, the way it only ever did when she was
seriously
upset.

Took a lot to scare Vivia, a fact I well knew. A fact that was, in itself . . . sort of scary.

My mouth moved, so suddenly dry I couldn’t find enough saliva to wet my own lips. “Show me,” I husked.

Halfway up the stairs to the top floor, I saw the first traces of it—heard the change in the sound of my footsteps, felt something gritty and resilient shifting under my feet. I frowned down at the greyish whorls my shoes kicked up, drew in a breath to say something, and coughed at the dry acrid stink in my nostrils. “Jesus H. What—?”

Vivia flipped on the light in the upstairs hallway, and I wondered—for a split second—at its strange dimness. Before I saw what had caused it.

Ash.

Long waves of grey and black powder streaked ceiling, walls, and floor in much the same way snowghosts eddy down winter streets, if snowghosts could be caught in photographic negative and frozen on plaster. The naked lightbulb was covered in it, carbonized powder keeping time with a faint, percussive crackle and pop under its heat.

Wordlessly, I moved into the centre of the hallway, down to where the ash-waves gathered like the accretion disk ’round a black hole: my door, ground zero, Hiroshima central. Event horizon for a strange new pocket-dimension.

It was worst in my room, where the stench of burning lay so thick I could barely breathe; black-grey dust an inch deep on every surface, kicking up spray with every step we made. And here too, the ash had fallen in patterns suggesting some sort of sudden surge, some impossible explosion emanating out from a central point at (nearly) unimaginable speed.

“You know the
really
fucked thing?” Aaron asked, as he knelt by my chair—delicately brushing ash off its vinyl seat, only to reveal the unblemished cushion beneath. “Shitload of soot, crap for days, but far as I can tell there’s nothing actually
burnt
anywhere.” Shaking his head, more bemused than frightened: “Just . . . utterly. Fuckin’. Fucked.”

“Translation: you didn’t hear shit.”

“When the ash bomb went off? Nope.” Aaron braced himself on the desk and stood, groaning. “First I know about it’s when Vivia comes home about two this morning, goes upstairs, sees the damage, and pitches a hissy.”

“
Said
I was sorry, didn’t I?” Vivia muttered.

“Kicked me out of bed, screaming how I’d burnt the house down, man, that’s what you
did
. The top floor, anyway.”

“Well, the hell else was I supposed to think?” Accent creeping back again here, while she wasn’t looking:
s’posed
,
t’ink
. “Jan’s gone, and the place was normal enough when
I
left it. . . .”

And on and on and on. But I’d already tuned them both out, my eyes locked fast to what I’d noticed the instant I stepped in: the core of this silent, flameless explosion, very centre of the ash-blast. The one object in the whole grey-swathed room, from window to desk to bookshelves to bed, which’d somehow ended up with no ash on it at all—that still gleamed bright, pristine, spotless amidst the ruin.

Abbott’s mirror shining back at me like a fang from where it stood out against the damage, my entire bedroom wall its backdrop, like a half-lifted feline lip.

Aaron, fading up through my haze: “. . . you think you’re gonna stick
me
with the bill, you got another think comin’.”

“Oh, big damn shock. Like you ever clean
anything
up—”

“We’ll
all
clean it up.” I had to raise my voice over theirs, and a fresh surge of exhausted resentment almost burned away my requisite embarrassment at my own bad behaviour: like I didn’t have enough to feel guilty over already, for shit’s sake. . . .

But I just rolled on anyways, like a bulldozer: “Viv, you get the broom—Aaron, garbage bags; they’re in the kitchen drawer. We’ll do the hallway first.”

Brave words. The ash, however—eager as it was to come boiling up off floors, walls, and furniture in equally dense, choking, cornea-scratching clouds—proved equally eager to condense clingingly back onto plaster, wood, and fabric; in fact, to go anywhere
except
into dustpan or receptacle. Before long, the general irritation factor had both Aaron and Vivia coughing up gack and blinking redly, while my unhealing breast-rash flared back to full, radiation-fiery half-life. Finally, Vivia called a halt.

“What
is
that?” she demanded, as I paused yet once more —well, “discreetly” had been my first impulse, but it obviously hadn’t exactly taken—to rake at my boobs.

“Same thing.”

“Thought I told you to
see
somebody about that.” To Aaron, as I just shrugged, helplessly: “You—coffee. Fresh coffee. And as for
you
—”

She dragged me off into the bathroom to treat my wounds. Demanding, while I held up my breasts with both hands, giving her room to slap on iodine and bandages with equal profligacy: “How long’s it been now, exactly?”

“Since—”

(—that experiment started, dumb-ass. The one
you
hooked me up with?)

But I wasn’t about to go there, not even at this late date. So:

“—I don’t remember,” I finished, toneless.

“Well, strikes me you should be starting to worry about this, I’m serious. Forget the over-the-counter crap; this could be gangrene, for all either of us know.”

“Re your bedside manner? It needs work.”

“Fuck you too, Jan-girl.” Vivia straightened up, pressing the small of her back with a groan as I tugged one of her borrowed T-shirts down over the bandages. “That should hold together, for a bit, anyway, and—oh, you’re not serious.” This in response to the fact that I’d flipped open the medicine cabinet and was—even now—popping a couple of Nytols out of their protective foil packet. “You can’t possibly think you’re gonna sleep in that room, Janis.”

“It’s
my
room; I’m not letting some poltergeist bullshit force me out of my
room
, Vivia.” Adding, with a wryness I only wished was a joke: “Besides, you know I can’t sleep anywhere else, Nytol or not.”

Viv closed her eyes and shook her head. My naturally insomniac bent had long remained a running gag between the two of us, even on those occasions when—like now—it became anything but funny.

“I’ll clean the rest of it up in the morning,” I added, trying to reassure her.

“That’s not what I’m worried about.”

Bitterly, I restrained the urge to snap at her so-well-meaning-it-smothered “concern”: did she think I wasn’t scared? That I was literally too dumb to recognize danger when I—

(saw)

—it?

But the fact is, I was too tired to think about any of it anymore, barely awake enough to breathe. Only awake enough to be aware of exactly how tired—and angry and fed up—I was.

And beneath that, like static, like bass . . . like some guerilla signal flickering between stations, buried under layers of figurative snow . . . the fear of eight years of half-anticipated failure, dimming me from my skull on down. That indefinable
knowing
that, if and once I allowed myself to be driven from that room, I’d never be able to enter it again; afraid, on no level I could explain (or explain away), that to lose my home would be to lose—

—momentum. Faith. Hope. That failure here would mean failure everywhere. Would mean I
was
a failure; always had been. Always would be.

(And who’s told me so, exactly, ever? Not Mr. and Mrs. Mol, for sure. Not my so-called friends.)

Just me, as ever. Me, somehow hollow at the core from birth, struck and ringing now with a dissonant tone pitched so that it could be heard only by dogs, or fish, or insects. Dead houseplants, barren trees. Rats in the walls.

. . . ghosts.

“I need to sleep,” I told Vivia, one last time—then swallowed the Nytols dry, and went back upstairs to my ash-choked room. With careful steps, trying to kick up as little as possible, I pulled the blankets off the bed in a cloud of dust, holding my breath to keep the overage out of my lungs. Using my pillows to sweep the last of the ash from the bare dirt-pocked sheets.

And collapsing onto them, closing my eyes, feeling sleep sweeping upon me like fabric falling in thick, multiple layers over my face. Falling out of light, into shadow.

Into the penumbra.

I slept ’til three that morning, resurfaced only gradually, in horrible increments. And then—

—I found myself hovering in that half-waking state between fatigue and sleep, the same one during which any or all visions that may have hovered imperceptibly at the corners of your mind all day tend to swim into focus, into sharp and dreadful relief. Yet another long-repressed childhood fear, just waiting for a chance at revelation: the room and its vibrations, resonating in time with my Nytol-induced haze, had conspired to send me ratcheting back to nightmare circuit territory. I would be almost gone, my lids lead-heavy, when suddenly I would know, with utter certainty, that if I did close my eyes, a face would come rising up over the end of my bed, like some hideous, pale sun—

—and oh, Christ, I can
see
it now, utterly unchanged by decades of conscious personal evolution: too pink, as if carved from soap-brittle; smooth and overemphasized, like the face of a bad actor. Something inhuman in human form. On occasion, it even put on expressions; an ironic cocked eyebrow, a limp moue of surprise. Its mouth would hang half-open, showing improbably white teeth, but its eyes would be dead.

One day, I felt, it would speak to me, and if it did, I would go completely insane.

It wasn’t a dream, not really, because I was never fully asleep when it happened:
hic vigilans somniat
—he dreams awake. The Roman epithet for poets, seers, or madmen. So which would people think I was, if ever I told them what waited for me on the border—the penumbra—between sleep and waking?

And:
Open your eyes
, I remember thinking, sternly.
Get up, get out. Wrench yourself bodily away from this smell of ash, breath-cloggingly thick in your nostrils
; heat like a djinn’s giant hand on every part of me, pressing me down. Sweat running down my temples, slicking my hair and collecting under my breasts, shaking the itch awake once more—deeper this time, more painful, burning like gelignite in every pore. Like the lit track of a phosphorus grenade.

I raised my lids, or at least struggled to; felt my eyeballs roll back in my head, zombie-white and scarlet-threaded. Sensed, without seeing it, how the ceiling would shift lazily in my blurred vision, roiling and streaming like a single noxious fume—how it would seem to heave in and out like breathing, the rhythmic lift and lower of something too huge to take in all at once.

Nightmare breeding on nightmare, giving birth to fresher horrors. And suddenly, I was trapped fathoms deep under a textureless weight of water while a thing bigger than the whole waking world sunk down towards me through faraway beams of light: my formative ideation, alive at last, reborn from the corruption of its own decay—alive, and aware, and. . . .

 . . . hungry.

More sweat trickled down my face, as icy knots cramped in my stomach. I tried to move. Found I couldn’t.

No more than mere seconds, inevitably, eddying slow as geological epochs. I knew light, flickering in the corner of my cracked-open eyelids, blurry through the glaze of dried tears; tried to blink my eyes clear, but couldn’t do that either. Felt my limbs, heavy and motionless at my sides, stiff as if I had steel weights strapped to them. Felt a newer, rawer rush of heat lap my face in time with the flickering light, and “saw” the dancing shadows of flames on the wall.

(Oh God, I’m going to
burn
here)

At the end of my bed, a crouched and bulbous outline stood stark black against the flames, hidden just below my frozen line of sight. Waiting to rise.

Sensations scudded across me like moonlight flickering through an overcast: a stitch twanging in my back, reflexive nervous spasm. The pressure of my bladder, acutely, painfully full. And then—with absurd clarity—the wordless echo of Vivia’s voice downstairs, querulous and angry and amused by turns. Which was enough, in turn, to summon every ounce of willpower I had left: contort my lips into shaping her name, letting the autonomic outrush of breath give sound to the only word my numb brain could still form: