“No heartbeat,” he said. “Yet she lives. She lives!”
No, I thought. She waits. But the wait is almost over.
Jacobs turned back to her and lowered his half-frozen face until it was only inches from her dead one—a Romeo with his Juliet. “Mary! Mary Fay! Come back to us! Come back and tell us where you’ve been!”
It’s hard for me to think of what happened next, let alone write it down, but I must, if only as a warning for anyone else who contemplates some similar experiment in damnation, and may read these words, and turn back because of them.
She opened her eyes.
Mary Fay opened her eyes, but they were no longer human eyes. Lightning had smashed the lock on a door that was never supposed to be opened, and Mother came through.
They were blue eyes at first. Bright blue. There was nothing in them. They were utterly blank. They stared at the ceiling through Jacobs’s avid face, and through the ceiling, and through the cloudy sky beyond. Then they came back. They registered him, and some understanding—some comprehension—came into them. She made that humming sound again, but I hadn’t seen her draw a single breath. What need? She was a dead thing… except for those inhuman staring eyes.
“Where have you been, Mary Fay?” His voice trembled. Saliva continued to drip from the bad side of his mouth, leaving damp spots on the sheet. “Where have you been, what did you see there? What waits beyond death? What’s on the other side? Tell me!”
Her head began to pulse, as if the dead brain within had grown too big for its casing. Her eyes began to darken, first to lavender, then to purple, then to indigo. Her lips drew back in a smile that widened and became a grin. It grew until I could see all of her teeth. One of her hands trundled across the counterpane, spiderlike, and seized Jacobs’s wrist. He gasped at her cold grip and flailed for balance with his free hand. I took it, and thus the three of us—two living, one dead—were joined. Her head pulsed on the pillow. Growing. Bloating. She was no longer beautiful; she was no longer even human.
The room didn’t fade; it was still there, but I saw it was an illusion. The cottage was an illusion, and Skytop, and the resort. The whole living world was an illusion. What I’d thought of as reality was nothing but a scrim, as flimsy as an old nylon stocking.
The true world was behind it.
Basalt blocks rose to a black sky punched with howling stars. I think those blocks were all that remained of a vast ruined city. It stood in a barren landscape. Barren, yes, but not empty. A wide and seemingly endless column of naked human beings trudged through it, heads down, feet stumbling. This nightmare parade stretched all the way to the distant horizon. Driving the humans were antlike creatures, most black, some the dark red of venous blood. When humans fell, the ant-things would lunge at them, biting and butting, until they gained their feet again. I saw young men and old women. I saw teenagers with babies in their arms. I saw children trying to help each other along. And on every face was the same expression of blank horror.
They marched beneath the howling stars, they fell, they were punished and chivvied to their feet with gaping but bloodless bite wounds on their arms and legs and abdomens. Bloodless because these were the dead. The foolish mirage of earthly life had been torn away and instead of the heaven preachers of all persuasions promised, what awaited them was a dead city of cyclopean stone blocks below a sky that was itself a scrim. The howling stars weren’t stars at all. They were holes, and the howls emerging from them came from the true potestas magnum universum. Beyond the sky were entities. They were alive, and all-powerful, and totally insane.
The aftereffects are trailing fragments of an unknown existence beyond our lives, Charlie had said, and that existence lay close in this sterile place, a prismatic world of insane truth that would drive a man or woman mad if it were so much as glimpsed. The ant-things served those great entities, just as the marching, naked dead served the ant-things.
Perhaps the city wasn’t a city at all but a kind of anthill where all the dead of earth were first enslaved and then eaten. And once that happened, did they finally die for good? Perhaps not. I didn’t want to remember the couplet Bree had quoted in her email, but was helpless not to: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die.
Somewhere in that marching horde were Patsy Jacobs and Tag-Along-Morrie. Somewhere in it was Claire—who deserved heaven and had gotten this instead: a sterile world below hollow stars, a charnel kingdom where guardian ant-things sometimes crawled and sometimes stood upright, their faces hideously suggestive of the human. This horror was the afterlife, and it was waiting not just for the evil ones among us but for us all.
My mind began to totter. It was a relief, and I almost let go. One idea saved my sanity, and I still cling to it: the possibility that this nightmare landscape was itself a mirage.
“No!” I shouted.
The marching dead turned toward my voice. The ant-things did likewise, their mandibles gnashing, their loathsome eyes (loathsome but intelligent) glaring. Overhead, the sky began to tear open with a titanic ripping sound. An enormous black leg covered with tufts of spiny fur pushed through it. The leg ended in a vast claw made of human faces. Its owner wanted one thing and one thing only: to silence the voice of negation.
It was Mother.
“No!” I shouted again. “No, no, no, no!”
It was our connection to the revived dead woman that was causing this vision; even in the extremity of my horror, I knew it. Jacobs’s hand clutched mine like a manacle. If it had been the right hand—the good hand—I could never have freed myself in time. But it was the weakened left. I pulled with all my might as that obscene leg stretched toward me and that claw of screaming faces groped, meaning to yank me upward into the unknowable universe of horror that awaited beyond that black paper sky. Now, through the rip in the firmament, I could see insane light and colors never meant to be looked upon by mortal creatures. The colors were alive. I could feel them crawling over me.
I gave one final yank, freeing myself from Charlie’s grip, and went tumbling backward. The empty plain, the vast broken city, the groping claw—they all disappeared. I was in the bedroom of the cottage again, sprawled on the floor. My old fifth business stood beside the bed. Mary Fay—or whatever dark creature Jacobs’s secret electricity had summoned into her corpse and dead brain—gripped his hand. Her head had become a pulsing jellyfish with a human face crudely scrawled upon it. Her eyes were a lusterless black. Her grin… you would say no one can actually grin ear to ear, it’s just a saying, but the dead woman who was no longer dead was doing exactly that. The lower half of her face had become a black pit that trembled and throbbed.
Jacobs stared at her with bulging eyes. His face had gone a cheesy yellow-white. “Patricia? Patsy? Where are you? Where’s Morrie?”
The thing spoke for the first and last time.
“Gone to serve the Great Ones, in the Null. No death, no light, no rest.”
“No.” His chest hitched and he screamed it. “No!”
He tried to pull back. She—it—held him fast.