Revving the chainsaw motor, I forced the image out of my skull. Instead I concentrated on the blurring teeth that bit through the timber. The world was getting stranger by the day. No doubt about that. Hell, I just wondered what strange turn lay around the corner to take us all by surprise.
Later I made my deliveries in the hot sun. With the pickup piled with firewood I drove through town. Everything looked rock-solid normal. People waved at me. If anything their mood seemed lighter now that a goodly number of days had passed since I killed the outsider. Normal rhythms reasserted themselves. The supermarket had its usual quota of customers pushing shopping carts of groceries to their cars. The McDonald’s just across from the cinema boasted a few people chewing the fat over coffees and cake (the old Ronald McDonald menu had varied through necessity over the last few months). Cars cruised by. A cop on a motorbike gave me a thumbs-up as I made a left into the residential area. Here I found the few children who remained in Sullivan playing on skateboards, riding bikes. A couple of toddlers were running in and out of a lawn sprinkler shrieking like crazy. Even when I at last reached Crowther’s house all he did was shoot me a sullen look before sloping indoors. I piled wood on the drive for him to collect at his own sweet leisure, then pointed the nose of the pickup back into town.
I’d just helped myself to a Swiss cheese sandwich and a jug of iced water in the supermarket coffeehouse when Ben saw me and hurried in through the door. “Help yourself,” I said nodding at the iced water. “It’s hot as hell outside today.”
“Yeah, it’s getting more like hell every day.” He pulled a grim smile. “Take a look at that.” He pushed a book across the table at me.
I checked the title. “ Secrets of the Arcane. Whatever lights your lamp, Ben.”
“After we saw that head yesterday I did some reading.”
I gave a heartfelt groan. “That head? Do you have to remind me? I’m still eating.”
“But what the hell was it, Greg?” This was more like the old Ben. The proto-scientist Ben who enthusiastically searched for answers. “Every now and again you hear of four-legged chickens and two-headed lambs. But have you seen a human being with an extra set of eyes?”
I groaned again and pushed the uneaten sandwich to one side. “I asked you not to mention it. I can feel eyeballs in the cheese with my tongue now.”
“You find people with genetic defects and mutations, but have you ever see anything as… as severe as that?”
“Listen, Ben… here, let me get that for you.” He made as if to pour water from the jug into a glass, but with those shaky hands he splashed liquid over the tabletop (and my now unloved sandwich).
“Thanks.” He took a thirsty swallow.
“Ben. You see weird mutant stuff in the Fortean Times and Ripley’s . Men covered with hair like apes. Women with three nostrils. Kids with paws instead of fingers.”
“But that head was nothing like I’ve ever seen before in a book.”
“It was probably some poor devil who’d spent his life locked in the attic being fed a pail of fish heads every Thursday. He escaped after the crash, then wondered ’round until he wound up in the lake. End of sad story.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“You really think it might be something else?”
“Who knows? You might have noticed, but the world’s taken a weird jump out left of field these days.” He smiled. “Now listen to this.” And he started to read from the book. “ ‘Long ago the alchemist Thomas Vaughn wrote the hermetic treatise Lumen de Lumine. He described a process where animal and human bodies can be made to descend into primal matter, the tenebrae activae, as he termed it.’ No, Greg, don’t shake your head, just listen, will you? It says here that Vaughn believed this was a kind of melting pot into which you can feed human beings and from which new life could be created.”
“You’re saying that’s what happened to old Johnny Cluster Eyes you found in the lake?”
“Maybe.”
I leaned forward. “Ben, listen to your buddy. You need to find yourself a girlfriend, you really do.”
He shot me a kind of startled look, then he read something in my face. For a second I thought he’d be insulted, but he started laughing with that breathless bray of his. Right from the first time we met I’d found the laugh infectious, and now I started laughing, too. The other customers in the coffeehouse looked at us as if we might have gone half crazy.
Come to think of it, they might have been half right at that.
Eleven
Days slipped by in that breathless heat. In the cool of early morning I hooked driftwood from the lake. Sometimes I’d find human corpses in the shallows. Most were so far gone that you couldn’t tell if they were male or female. Young or old. Bread bandit or Yankee. They were mushy things resembling old leather satchels with ragged holes where the fish had picked away the soft tissues. They always went for the eyes, too. Fish must find eye meat the sweetest. Every so often Lake Coben would offer up a fresh specimen that proved to me that there were still people out there in the forests and hills beyond Sullivan. For reasons unknown to me they sometimes wound up dead in the lake. Maybe bread bandits hunted them down like wild dogs out there, beat them to death, then tossed them into a stream that fed the lake where they eventually floated here.
As the days passed there were no more outsiders showing up either. What’s more, I didn’t see any more of that light in the ruins of Lewis, so the urge to take a boat across there sort of went off the boil.
The rest of my workday was taken up with cutting the wood and delivering it in the pickup. With electricity rationed to those six hours in the evening, anyone wanting a hot drink or a cooked meal used wood stoves, which were nothing grander than barbecues out in their backyards.
Every night I fitted more stones to the tomb and made it that much larger.
Hey, it wasn’t all work. We went to the cinema to see a movie that we might have seen a dozen times before. After all, with the world in pieces there’d be no new features coming to town. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. There was something magical about seeing the world as it once was, before the crash. Most nights the cinema was a good half full. Then there were the bars, the pool hall, bowling, or maybe just a tub full of beers swimming in a gallon of water and ice. A few of us would gather on a porch to sip beer while chewing the fat beneath starry skies.
To say the whole world had gone shit-faced sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? I remember the beach barbecue when we must have eaten a whole hog, grunt and all. There weren’t a lot of young people in Sullivan, but we made a real party of it at night. We emptied a few cases of wine while the empty beer bottles rose in a glittering pyramid on the sand. A kid with a Jeep that boasted the mother and father of all sound systems drove it down to the shore. The music boomed across the lake. If the 50,000 ghosts that must surely haunt Lewis had ears they’d have had a feast of music that night.
But there I go, remembering the good times. A kind of golden six weeks after the arrival of the pregnant woman and her family. There was no trouble. Unless you can count the underpants bunting that some drunken kids strung across the town hall. Or the Caucus complaining that certain work quotas weren’t being met. Like who cares that ten thousand tins of baked beans in warehouse A should have been moved two hundred yards to warehouse B? Or that some of the residents grumbled that the music was getting too loud? Or-horror of horrors-those young people were actually enjoying themselves and laughing in the streets at night? If you ask me, I say to hell with the whiny complaints. Those young people were taking a vacation from the cold, brutal reality surrounding us.
And yeah, you’ve guessed right. It was too good to last.
One Sunday in July a storm came down on the town like a landslide. Thunder. Lighting. Torrential rain. The lake turned to cream. Surf broke over the jetties. One of the fishing boats tore loose and went rolling away through the waves, never to be seen again.