(Further: Following this ominous note — which is our only written entry from Sophie during an unknown period of several days — the transcription for the second story of Silas continues immediately thereafter. Clearly, Sophie felt that it was urgent to record and honor Silas’ tales above all else, and did not expect him to live for very much longer. This is almost certainly why the upcoming “SC Chronicle” travelogue section of the diary is so uneven and sporadic, leaping from what is known as the Second Testament of the One, below, directly into what I term IV-7, a chronicle of Sophie’s and Silas’s escape and emergence from the High Shelter and into the Burning World. ~S.-G.C.)
“Oh, the world. Before we go, I will tell you.
“It is blackest night now, sister moon is dead and the sun is become the crimson moon and he is riding high.
“Yes, let me tell it like I will. Been thinking about how to tell you for a very long time.
“Let this be my song.
“It’s like this, the Burning World. You only know night now, Mrs. S.-G., when there is nothing but the choke and the twisting black and the howling of those endless winds. There’s these mounds with skyward axles sticking out of them, lumps of melted tires and melted cars, cars all bearded by their stubble of bone stumps dangling out everywhere. People. Dead hands and faces all lain open on the pavement. And only once or thrice baby carriages, crumpled and rolling free in the wind right by you, rolling by at the edge of night. Some of them maybe rolling now as more of the buildings crumble. Those are the worst, the carriages. With their laced, burned-up doll-bundles hanging out.
“But they ain’t dolls.
“Driving, oh it’s slow and endless and ever on. You can’t, you ain’t even see but your own frail and ghosted headlights, beams of a drowning glow like vapor spider-webs, swirling maybe twenty feet out in front of you. And you behold, the things them headlights catch in their failing candlelight, you close your eyes so many times and when you hit something soft, soft piles you need to go through, you hit the gas and you just slurry your way through all those bodies and all the low hills that they have made, Lord receive them, choked body-floods with them cars ring all around.
“The people, it seems so many in their dying wanted only, only to… they crawled out of their car windows and they held each other until the end. Piles in the middle of every street where those people all went fetal, buried by the other splayed ones up on top of them, all burned and hollowed out like scarecrows, where all them other burning and dying piled on.
“And oh, the world it is feasting on its ashes. Hungering, howling, the ashes of everything. It’s like the Beast, twisting, dead and feasting, and he’s disintegrating while he drags himself everywhere on all his thousand hands. Phantom hands made of smoke and dust, crawling over all.
“Them ashes, they slither across the road in sticky cables, tentacles of dust that keep together somehow. It’s like some glue made of melted plastic bags that keeps all them ashes together and turns them into churning snakes. It is horror to see, those snakes smogging across beneath and up your headlights, some flying and some crawling, all made of concrete shards and beads of glass and lumps of dead women’s hair.
“The roads? They are the hollowed veins of this old earth now, the termite tracks eaten through the flesh of the endless black. They’s all the world is now. But the lines, the lines that those veins are all cored away and railed on — the breakdown lanes, them yellow dashes for the passing zones — those are the lifelines now. In the dark, the lines will guide you. Those lifelines, they tells you when you’re driving true, they’s tell you as you’re crawling along, following their last threads up into the maze of wreckage.
“You think you guided well and on, you go. But then the wind howl up, and the ash-snakes come a-winding and the world is all a-swirl, tentacles of dust. That sound, them snakes gliding, it’s like dead people sighing all around you. I know that don’t make sense, but that’s what it feels. Endless, endless sighs of the lost, the fingers of that ashen Beast feeling their way through the dark, clawing away the road in front of you. They’s migrating, ever and ever on, ever east. Them’s fingers crawling all over your car on their pilgrimage into darkness.
“Hell come to all souls now still alive, those few souls that the fingers might be crawling to. No forgiveness, no power going to save them.
“And then you drive on and the dust clear with a great moan and the gashes in the sky, the sky is glow-lined. The sky is black cloud in circles, it’s like you’re looking up from the eye of some hurricane straight into a thousand upside-down drains spiraling ashes into the air, that crimson sun enthroned over his wasteland of burning dust, oh I don’t even know how to tell you.
“And the one greatest storm, on high. Archangel.”
“If there was a God, he’s done with us now, his failed experiment. The world is all dried out now, all we are is ashes. The hourglass is turned over, and the bloody husks of sand, of us, are all flowing out upward into that feasting sky. That is all. That is all there will ever be and you know this, you see as you drive on in the endless. And then the great wind come and then — O thank the spirits — all your beholding is gone again.
“And a new black crystal storm is coming, oh it’s time to drive a little faster over the dead and follow those road-lines like strangle-wire into the ever night, like fragile painted spider-threads high into the mountains.
“And let me tell you, Mrs. S.-G., the blind night? She is a mercy laid low compared to all you see in that black and cinder radiance of the day, the Burning World under the Archangel.
“May we be blind, may we never see the path we played behind us.
“Jesus forsake us. Jesus, walk away.
“That blackest storm I went through? She went and gone, on my way up into the mountain. Remember, I was gone up into the west, on to Black Hawk and then to find you. That storm crawling east on all its claws, He’s got another storm coming soon, I know.
“You want out of here, you got to hurry. There be nothing to stop the wind next time, all the trees done burned up, all the grasses gone, and without the green the world’s old skin has been peeled back to set free the fire-blood and the earthen bone. It’s all become dust now, and the dust be the dead people and all their Hondas and Infinitis and all their piles of stupid things.
“Oh I know, I lay as guilty as them all.
“That’s what I fear, the next storm with nothing to be held down. Only the wreckage might be keeping down what’s left of the elder world, that’s all there be now. There’s no forests, no skyscrapers nailing down the tapestry no more.
“But through all that Great Dying, from the Fire, I made it here, oh I did. All the way to Black Hawk, sweet way up known to my heart because the missus, Jenny she like to gamble, see? And pray that I don’t mind.
“Deep dark over mountain, to Black Hawk I knew the way even at twenty feet a span, even the glow and gaslight crawl of my old burned-out car. Plowing through those piles. Headlights all aglow forever on.
“But I did stop and out to look back once, to try to loose my bowels upon the road. What I did see? First nothing. There was only a sound like the cries of dragons welling up from beyond the horizon make me look, bellowing of those dragons given birth out to the east. I had stopped just before I made my black car crawl up that pass, there was horrible sounds below all where Denver once was.