There had been a time when Montane had believed that he would be able to attract the sort of funding necessary for the success of the crusade, that God would speak through him and touch the hearts of men—but that had been six years ago. He almost groaned aloud when he thought of how much time had gone by since his awakening, and of how little had been achieved…
For the first fifty years of his life Corey Montane had been a conventional and unremarkable inhabitant of Pewterspear 97. The numerical suffix given to any place-name referred to the nearest portal, and that was as close as Orbitsville had come to devising a zip code system. The fact that Pewterspear had a number close to 100 meant that the city was almost as far from Beachhead as it was possible to get, but that had not troubled Montane. He had liked being well away from the great urban centres of commerce and industry. He had owned and run a small home bakery, which yielded a modest but comfortable income from the sale of a variety of spicy meat pies and elaborate Danish pastries. His wife, Milly, and grown-up daughter, Tara, had helped in the business in a relationship that was nearly always harmonious. He enjoyed a range of outdoor pursuits—principally flying light aircraft—and was well liked in the town.
The chances were that Montane would have lived out his allotted ninety years in the same pleasant and undemanding manner, but everything had changed for him in the space of a few seconds…
It was a wet morning in the early part of the year—but Montane was not in a mood to find the rain depressing. It was coming down in the form of very large, clean, tumbling drops, each of which created a spiky crystal crown in miniature as it impacted with the pavement. His vision seemed pretematurally clear—the way it could be in the prelude to a migraine—and he saw the crowns in diamond-sharp detail, just as he had done in childhood. He wondered if that could be what had inspired his present feelings of boyhood optimism, in which for him the bad weather was recreating the ambience of Christmas Eve. The section of the street he could see was crowded with shoppers, complete with umbrellas and turned-up collars, who were determined to obtain last-minute Christmas gifts in spite of the rain, and the lighted windows of the other stores were cheerily reflected on the wet ground, adding to the Yuletide atmosphere.
Montane smiled as he noted yet another similarity to the festive season—business had been exceptionally brisk that morning, so good that it was already necessary for him to replenish his window display. He decided to begin at once—while there was a break in the flow of customers—by slicing up a large veal-ham-and-egg pie, and perhaps a couple of the battenbergs, which sold well under the folksy name of marzipan windows.
“Milly,” he called out, taking a brick-shaped pie out of the refrigerator, “What did you do with the knives?”
“They’re here—in the steriliser.” His wife was in the kitchen at the rear of the shop.
“Wouldyou like to bring them out here?”
Milly gave a barely audible tut of impatience and he remembered that she was about to go over to the Canterbury to have morning coffee with a few friends. A moment later she came hurrying into the front of the shop with the knives on a tray. And somehow-it was surmised afterwards that wetness tramped in from the street had been responsible—she managed to slip and fall forwards.
Montane expected anything but tragedy on that nostalgic grey morning, but the sound that Milly emitted as she hit the floor told him at once that something terrible, something totally unreasonable and unfair had happened. It was an appalling sound-part grunt, part sigh—expressive of pain, surprise and fear.
“Milly!” Montane ran to the end of the counter, looked down and saw his wife lying face downwards on the floor. The tray was beneath her. Face contorting with shock, he dropped to his knees and rolled her over. A knife, which must have turned its point up to meet her descending body, was protruding from just below the left breast.
She died in his arms, staring up at him with a bemused expression, while the knife-handle—stirred by her heart’s last contractions-playfully wiggled and circled amid the growing stain on her tangerine blouse.
Montane tilted his head back and. howled with grief.
The hours and days that followed were almost as nightmarish as the initial cataclysmic event. After the police had made some preliminary enquiries and the ambulance had departed with the body, he turned to his daughter in the depths of his despair, needing support and consolation. To his astonishment, she reacted to him with silent, glacial fury, almost as though he had engineered her mother’s death. He was unable to penetrate the barrier she had erected between them, and as soon as the funeral was over she packed a bag and walked out, refusing to give any hint as to where she was going…
Thinking back to those traumatic days of six years ago, Montane found cause for philosophical wonderment in the fact that his awakening had been prompted, not by the loss of his wife and daughter, but by a geological peculiarity of the Pewterspear area.
The town was situated in a broad dish-shaped depression which, on the old survey maps, was designated as Mcintosh’s Bottom. Montane had always been aware of the name, but to him it had been little more than an inspiration for vulgar schoolboy jokes. He had also been aware, though with little interest, that the rocky soil on which the town was built was as little as two metres thick in many places. It was common practice in the local construction industry to support the more massive buildings on short piles which penetrated down to the Orbitsville shell, but that too had been of minimal concern to Montane—until his first visit to his wife’s grave.
He had been kneeling by the still-fresh plot, striving to wrest some degree of reconciliation from the notion that she would become one with the earth. Death was part of a natural cycle… springing from the soil, returning to the soil…
Then had come the shocking realisation that Milly’s body, her sacred body, was suspended only a hand’s breadth above the featureless grey sheet of ylem which formed Orbitsville’s vast shell. And beyond that, only centimetres away, was the harsh emptiness of interstellar space! There could never be any peace for her, for either of them, in those supremely unnatural circumstances; there could be no gentle absorption into the ancestral unity of a God-given world; there was no rightness to Milly’s shallow interment…
Montane had remained kneeling by the grave for more than an hour—his mind poised like a hovering kestrel half-way between divine inspiration and insanity—and when finally he had stood up on aching legs he had been a different man.
People with medical knowledge had later told him that his transformation had been a consequence of delayed shock, rather than a profound religious experience, but Montane had known better. Much better. Infinitely better.