I walked for hours, but it felt more like an elastic eternity. Nothing to look forward to. No hope of natural light. My flashlight helped to guide me. Then I encountered a darkness it could neither penetrate nor dispel.
A black ovoid lay in the road. It looked unnatural, so I approached it gingerly.
Vibrationally, it reminded me of the black blot I had mentally come into contact with — the old Richmond. This was smaller. Superficially, it resembled a hole in the earth. But my light failed to illuminate the sides of the “hole.” And it lacked any sense of dimensionality.
I dropped a stone into it. It abruptly vanished, as if relocating to another reality.
Only then did I sense a disturbing connection between this hole and the gaping mouth of the demonic cloud face that had regarded me so singularly.
I rushed on.
When I came upon an orderly file of people, I joined them, as if to lose myself in their numbers. They walked along in a single file of the condemned.
I turned to one and asked, “Where are you going?”
He pointed to the others ahead of him. “Wherever they are,” he said dully.
“Don’t you know?”
He nodded. “This is the food line.”
“There’s food up ahead?”
“No, we are the food.” He said it without hope, fear, or caring.
I stepped out of line.
I saw my first centaur then. That is, with my physical eyes. My non-physical vision had detected one during the RV session.
This one stood taller than a man. From approximately the thorax up, he looked human. He was a big burly black man, muscular in the extreme. His skull was shaven and his torso rippled with undraped muscles.
Where his pelvis devolved into legs, no legs as we know them supported the rest. The pelvis instead flared out into a wide skirt of some unappetizing flesh, like a columnar snail. It stood on this pad, moved on it via some snail-like form of locomotion.
But the lower appendage was not flesh, or even organic matter. I sensed this, and my perception was confirmed when the centaur glided over a great patch of unrelieved black that lay off the roadside like a pool of tar.
The black patch supported it. It would never support a physical man.
Confirmation of this came almost immediately.
A maddened dog tore running out of somewhere and lunged for it. The dog charged across grass and brush and seemed oblivious to the blackness until its paws came into contact with its unreflective surface.
Then its snarling was swallowed whole — as was the damned and doomed dog.
Seeing this, a teenage girl detached from the line and approached the spot where the dog had vanished. I moved in to intercept her. She got there first.
“What do you think is down there?’ she murmured as she stared into the unrelieved abyss, Gothic eyes blank.
“Nothing,” I said firmly, reaching out with care.
“Nothing,” she said dreamily. “Sounds like a better deal.”
I snatched at her too late. She simply stepped in and virtually winked out of existence. Above, one of the evil low-lying clouds pulsated briefly. It had done that when the dog disappeared too. Something in me shuddered in sympathy.
Some members of the procession saw this. They broke away from the others. Into the patch they leaped, lemmings on two legs. Into the void they vanished.
A booming voice lifted. “Humans! Escape into the void! Escape and you will not be consumed. Escape into death! There is freedom in death. And from the new masters of Earth!” It was a centaur.
A surge of humanity responded to that hellish promise. They stampeded for the blackness. Some were trampled. Others stumbled over them to seek dark oblivion. Soon, the greater portion of them were gone. Utterly gone. I felt a coldness in my soul.
Above, the clouds pulsated wildly, as if laughing uproariously in delight.
Recoiling, I put distance between me and the patch of voidy non-matter. As I ran, the glowing eyes of the centaur tracked me. They burned a weird pumpkin orange, like a seared jack o’lantern.
“Beware the voids!” he called after me, as if to taunt my flight. “Voids become vortices. Vortices become vornados. And vornados — ” He began laughing raucously. His laughter boomed and cannonaded like thunder.
The rest was lost to hearing.
I reached a hill and found shelter among the dying trees. They drooped, blackened leaves wilting, as if in despair.
As I watched the ragged line of humankind close up and reform itself to trudge on toward an unknowable destination, like some segmented worm, the great black void that lay upon the field began to swell. It spun. Black as it was, I could sense this inner churning. No sound came forth. But the void rose up and began to wheel and lift ponderously, growing in size as it reared to life.
It became a vortex. And as the vortex found coherence, it elongated, became towering, mighty, hungry.
Vornado! I thought wildly.
The vornado twisted and spun on its ever-changing ropy funnel, got itself organized, and moved for the line of humans with deliberate intent.
“Alive! It’s alive in some way!” I cried.
The vorando sought the last stragglers and ingested them, lunging after the rest. The screaming that followed was wild, but brief. The line broke, scattered, but the vornado moved about, with unerring instinct and consumed them all.
None were flung about or ejected by its centrifugal force, nor wasted.
When the last of the fleeing ones was gone, the vornado spun and searched in forlorn disappointment. Finally it sensed the laughing centaur.
It bore down on him too. His laugher chopped off. He turned to flee, urging himself along on his semi- fleshy pedestal. But it was designed for non-matter. The pad dragged on earthly grass, retarding him.
The centaur screamed until the last possible moment of life. After he was gulped up and digested, his scream seemed to linger, and the vornado gobbled up the echoes in a final voracious effort.
Then, howling with hunger, it moved along the road in search of new prey.
Above, the clouds danced with an unholy bluish-gray light.
Somewhere in the deep of the night, I came upon a man in black. He was fiftyish, with a deeply- lined face and gray stubble hair, charred eyes set in bony craters like spent meteorites.
I did not recognize him for what he really was.
“Can you show me the way to the plant?” I asked.
“Have people lost their faith so much that they seek hell itself?” he countered.
Then I noticed his soiled collar and crucifix.
“Sorry, Father. I’m with the government.”
The priest spat. “And you’re here to help, I suppose?”
“That’s classified.”
I noticed his crucifix. The broken hands and feet of Christ were present, still nailed to the cross, but the body had been forcibly wrenched off.
“Where’s Jesus?” I asked.
He lifted a gnarled hickory cane in my face. “Where’s Jesus, you say? That’s the question of the hour. Of the century! Isn’t it?” His voice rose in righteous indignation.
“All my life I preached the lesson of the cross. Now the world is tumbling into the abyss, and where is our Lord? The greatest battle between good and evil in human history and Jesus Christ is nowhere to be found!”
I could see he had a point. But I said nothing. He charged on.
“If this is the Day of Judgment, where is our Savior. Late? Overdue? Perhaps he’s busy on some other planet saving the sinful souls of lizard men. Do you think it likely? How else to explain his absence? For if the Second Coming is tomorrow, he’s a bit bloody late, isn’t he? Can he put back the entire world? Can he restore sanity? Has the Rapture been postponed? Or rescheduled like a damned pink tea?”