“Gentleman.”
Darby and Broussard turned to find Chapel standing at the edge of the trees, Render, McNulty, Medrano, and Morganfield just behind him, dressed, geared, and holding their weapons.
“It’s time to take our positions.”
35. We the Devastating Machines
The men stand on the ridgeline above the valley, rifles ready, minds racing, hearts in throats. The mystery threatens to end them all.
I am one of the men.
I remember.
And so
here
I
am
again.
The River has brought me back here. To here. My past is my present and my future doesn’t fucking matter now, or ever.
Present future past, past perfect nightmare.
The drain at the bottom of the world swirls with the River water of everything that has collected above it. The hound, sent here for reasons beyond my understanding, guards this drain, looking for scraps. I am one of these scraps. That is how it found me.
I am here, just as the River wants it, a passenger along for the ride of the grand nostalgia tour inside my own body, playing out the great cosmic mindfuck created to entertain whatever is watching and taking notes. I know that I will probably come back here again, and again, and again, for all eternity. This is my fate, written on this very night. It has become canon. Good God in heaven and anyone or anything else that is watching, please take me from here. I know what’s coming. I can’t take it again.
Chapel served me an orange. A single fucking orange, the size of a child’s head.
The trees behind us—I see, I remember, I see again—stand black against the pink of the darkening sky. They’re rigged with heavy speakers mounted inside black wooden boxes, spread out at intervals, bowing forward just the slightest bit with the weight of bearing these strange fruit.
Chapel stands in front of the four plus one which is me which equals five. He regards each of us with a proud, solemn look, as Morganfield walks from man to man, handing out a small plastic baggie to each one.
“What are these?” McNulty says, holding up the baggie and squinting at the two small round pieces of foam inside.
“Earplugs.” Chapel says. “I’ll let you know when you should use them.”
The men look at each other, all formulating their own vision of what sort of horror would necessitate a total negation of sound by those issuing it.
“You don’t want us to hear the tape?” McNulty says.
Chapel says nothing.
“Why can’t we hear the tape?” McNulty is now asking anyone who will listen, his panic rising. “Why can’t we hear it?”
The sun finally dies in the western sky. The dome above them is black at the apex and dropping slow like a curtain toward the edge of the world, peppered by the salt of a billion billion stars, most of them dead a trillion years back. Maybe I died then, too, and came back to the third planet orbiting this tiny star each and every night as the candlelight shadow of the long dead. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
“Gentlemen, please insert your ear plugs,” Chapel says.
We all do, stuffing plastic into our ears with shaky, clumsy fingers. My plugs don’t fit very well, and sound leaks through the gaps. I jam my fingers into each ear in a real-time déjà vu, doing this again and again by habit, pushing at the plugs, hoping they’ll hold this time.
“Morganfield, would you do the honors?” Chapel says. I can still see his face, as the last of the light hasn’t yet be sucked from the world. He looks triumphant, and looking back with my new eyes through those old ones, Chapel looks smug, a vainglorious portrait of Varro at the dawning moments of the Battle of Cannae.
“Sir, I’d be honored,” Morganfield’s mouth says, the words coming seconds after the movement, the sound of his voice still making its way to my brain as it links up with an additional host. He walks to an electronic setup fixed with two reel-to-reel spools, powered by four large battery arrays stacked in the grass behind it. The back reel is full. The front is empty.
Morganfield presses a button, then steps back, cocking his .45.
Chapel puts his unlit pipe into his mouth then crosses his arms, a look of intense concentration on his face.
The fat spool spins, growing the empty one.
The shaking of my atoms and the sweat running down my head pushes one of my ear plugs free, and it falls to ground in the darkness. I don’t even bother looking for it, because I know what’s coming, because I remember now.
The sounds that whisper, stretch, then pour from the speakers in the trees surrounding the valley feel like tendrils of a living thing, tentacles of a huge creature buried somewhere in the ground, only showing hints of what it really is.
These are nightmares turned inside out. Roars of beasts, pushed to higher registers by male human screams that seem ripped from constricted throats seconds before death. Moans, whispers and guttural curses in two dozen Southeast Asian dialects. Chittering sounds of insects, claws and teeth scraping across polished stone. And a rumbling, throbbing bass note captured as the death rattle of a distant black star. I can’t understand how anything living or mechanical could create such sounds, and don’t believe anything can.
Puncturing this first wave is the high, screedling voice of Arceneaux the swamp witch, calling to me in Vietnamese from the edge of the swamp, her quivering nakedness peeking through the layer of mud, pale gray against her black skin, vines wrapped around her like a rotting shroud.
And the gnashing bark of a hound, rumbling from a massive chest. I finally hear its voice, and did before I even met it face to face. It was there the whole time, waiting for me to arrive.
The tape is transcribed as the reels spin, one diminishing as one grows, twirling twirling in the spiral that rules all things in this universe, and maybe all others.
The mad symphony of horrors continues, human utterances joined by a low register organ crash, a baritone hum lingering, as the exhortations in Vietnamese and in Lao continue, cut by screams, cackles, and howls from human and hound. Over all of this is an entreaty in a mournful child’s voice, heartbreak in each word, warning all who listen. Warning them before it’s too late.
This is data too big and alien to understand. The density cannot be properly absorbed and sorted. It’s the soundtrack of the abyss, sung by those who swirl around its rim, mad with fear and ecstasy.
What comes out of those speakers is the most repulsive thing I’ve heard in my life, and yet it remains fresh and wet like an open wound, no matter how many times I’m forced to endure it.
I drop my rifle and clamp my hands over my ears. I can’t hear this again. I couldn’t hear it the first time, and have never been the same since.
On cue, Chapel grabs my arm and yells into my ear. “Guns up, Broussard!”
“I can’t take it,” I say through gritted teeth. “Not again.” I don’t know if this is the first time I’m saying this, or is just my line to say in this insane cosmic stage play.
“Yes, you can,” Chapel says. “And you will. Take it in, and let it come right out. You have the strength.”
“I can’t. I can’t!”
“It’s not for you. It’s for them,” he says, pointing at the two mountains across the valley. “Don’t fear that which doesn’t know you.”
I look at his face. I’ve never heard him say this before. He must have broken the chain.
He releases me and is gone. I stagger in the darkness, drowning in this horrible sound, projected out a half mile through two dozen speakers, and see activity up and down the mountains. Lights, flares, smoke of moving vehicles, the canopy of trees sway as things move past and through them.