Quicksilver, page 16
As to the latter, when we followed Panthea into the Quonset hut, she seemed to have heard my thoughts, though she was merely acting in her role as the squad’s seer, disabusing us of whatever credibility we might have given to the possibility of mother ships and off-worlders who were gray or any other color. “This isn’t about extraterrestrials from other galaxies, or from a farther arm of our own, or from a moon of Saturn. That stuff is for the movies. If only our adversaries were evil ETs, I’d rejoice. But the war into which we’ve been drafted is older than Earth itself and older than the stars, and we have no choice but to give ourselves to the current battle. The war predates the universe, as do our enemies.”
How like madness that sounded at the time Panthea said it.
As I wrote earlier, I see every human being as an eccentric to one degree or another. This can be true only if our assumption that there is a standard for normality is wrong. And I believe it is wrong. The human race is at the apex of all life-forms because, no matter how strenuously sociologists and politicians and others of their persuasion insist on defining our species into interest groups and factions and classes and tribes, the better to control us, in truth our greatest strength is in the uniqueness of each of us. Einstein, in his genius, can reveal to us much about the workings of the universe, and a child with Down syndrome can teach us, by his or her profound gentleness and humility, how urgently this troubled world needs kindness. Everyone has something to contribute.
Everyone but sociopaths. Those empty souls possess no genuine human feelings—other than a lust for power—but are excellent at faking them. Some say that as many as 10 percent of human beings are sociopaths. Some are street thugs who will kill you for the contents of your wallet or merely for the thrill of it. Others are among the most elite and privileged groups in society.
Although Panthea’s claim that our adversaries were older than the universe sounded like lunacy, I knew she wasn’t a sociopath. I found it nearly impossible to think of John Kennedy Ching producing one. However, madness is a different thing from sociopathy, and the potential lies in every heart. Auschwitz and Dachau and Belsen. The killing fields of Cambodia. The tens of millions murdered by Stalin, by Mao. When feverish politics and demented ideology entwine, those who are not well anchored to the beliefs that allow a civil society can be swept away, becoming part of the storm of madness that lays waste to everything. When she spoke of a war that had raged before stars ever formed, she seemed to have bought into a cultish creed that might lead to fanaticism and madness.
In Panthea’s home, however, Bridget and I found our experience of the morning—what we had seen when drawn into mirrors as if into another world—replicated on the walls of the front room. If these murals were part of Panthea’s madness, then we were mad as well.
As we would learn, the Quonset hut, which faced directly east at its entrance and west at its back door, was laid out like a shotgun house, without hallways: first, a large living room; then beyond a doorway, a smaller dining room; thereafter, another door into a kitchen; beyond the kitchen, a bathroom; beyond the bath, a garage in which a vintage Range Rover stood in wait.
The initial space, a living room with a circle of six armchairs and small tables to serve them, also included a large adjustable drawing table with a tall swiveling chair, a cabinet in which she stored brushes and paints, and a pair of easels to each of which was fixed a painting in progress.
Judging by just those two incomplete works, I thought Panthea Ching was immensely talented. Sadly, the paintings by the fry cooks Phil and Jill Beane—he with spiky purple hair and shaved eyebrows; she with spiky green hair, black pajamas, and red shoes—were by comparison much less affecting. If my friends, the twins, shaved their heads and dyed their skin blue, and if the art establishment decided they were marketable, perhaps the two paintings of theirs that I’d bought, which currently hung in the employee bathrooms at Arizona! magazine, would soar in value and provide me with the funds for a comfortable retirement. However, I had to admit that such a bonanza now seemed even less likely than a monster hunter’s living long enough to retire.
The Quonset hut was big, and the front room, by far the largest of its spaces, measured perhaps sixty feet square. On the long north and south walls were the halves of the mural she purported to have painted in her sleep.
“Each wall was completed over a period of weeks,” Panthea said. “I would often wake at night and be working on these. At times during the day, I’d be overcome with weariness, lie down, fall into sleep, only to wake hours later and find myself with the trolley, brushes and tubes of acrylics arranged on top, painting feverishly.”
We moved to the left of the front door, to the long south wall, where the eight-foot-tall mural began, portraying in vivid detail what I had seen in the motel-bathroom mirror that morning. Then it had been a three-dimensional underworld with its denizens in motion. Here it was a two-dimensional static image, although the artist’s passion and technique gave it unsettling power. The labyrinth of tunnels, the surreal architecture. Dead people hanging from the walls or lying on catafalques, spectral light emanating from their open mouths and sunken eyes. Ghouls devouring.
There were other terrors that I had only half registered when falling through the world of the mirror, a scene with the intricacy of a canvas by Hieronymus Bosch, but more horrific than anything Bosch could have conceived.
Panthea had painted this weeks before Bridget and I had been briefly plunged into a vision of this wretched, perilous future—if that’s what it was.
The mural continued on the north wall. Swarms of terrified, naked people panicked through a dark train tunnel in which cattle cars packed with the condemned rollicked along. The burning city, violent crime rampant in every corner. The shrieking horse pulling the blazing carriage. The sobbing woman with a bloody baby held in her arms. In this end-times metropolis, the Screamers moved among the rapists and murderers, as though more than observing, as though mentoring, encouraging. Yet we came to something that unsettled us more than anything we’d seen elsewhere in the mural. Floating above the dying city in a smoky sky orange with reflected fire, rendered as a pair of pale moons, were my face and Bridget’s, gazing down on the destruction and brutal murders, our expressions as they almost certainly had been when we’d looked into the motel mirrors and found ourselves plunging into the abyss.
“You painted us before we’d ever had this vision,” Bridget marveled. “You knew we’d have it.”
“I knew nothing,” Panthea said. “I really did paint it all as a sleepwalker, or in a fugue state if you prefer. When I woke, I was always chilled by the images I’d created. But when I finished it—then I knew you’d be coming and that together we would do our small part to resist the world becoming as it is here on these walls.”
Hearing this, Sparky turned to his granddaughter, his scowl so fierce that it confirmed he could have been, in his younger years, capable of merciless retribution against the enemies of his country. “Vision? You saw all this in a vision, not a mere presentiment? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was only this morning, Grandpa. Quinn and I experienced it separately. I’ve been processing it ever since. So has he. I didn’t want to talk about it until I understood it.”
“You evidently talked about it to Quinn.”
“Not really, not much,” I said. “We only confirmed with each other that we’d seen something terrible in our mirrors.”
Bridget put a hand on my shoulder to silence me.
Sparky said, “Girl, we’ve never hidden a thing from each other. We’ve been in this together.”
“And we still are, Grandpa. I wasn’t hiding it from you. I only needed time to think it through and then to understand what Quinn made of it.” She went to him and put one hand to his cheek. “You know, Sparky, it’s not just two of us anymore. It’s three of us—”
“Four,” said Panthea.
“Four of us,” Bridget corrected.
Winston grumbled.
“Five,” Bridget said. “You and me, Sparky—we’ve been through a lot together, and we’ve been great. But we need help now, and it’s being given to us. How many were in a SEAL team? Just two? I don’t think it was just two.”
Face-to-face with her, he could not hold his scowl. He shook his head and sighed. “Suddenly, I feel old.”
“You’re not old,” she said. “You’re seasoned. The squad needs someone seasoned. It doesn’t work without you.”
Sparky looked at me and said he was sorry, and I said he didn’t need to be, and he told Panthea Ching that he still wasn’t sure about her, and she said, “Likewise,” which made him smile.
Bridget withheld from him her presentiment that not all of us would survive. I wondered if she had withheld anything from me.
| 23 |
Although the desert lives with less water than seashores and forested mountains and fruited plains, the rare storms sometimes pound the earth in torrents that turn dry arroyos into raging rivers and inundate low-lying areas with flash floods. The rain that broke upon us that day didn’t gently rataplan upon the Quonset hut, but rattled against it in violent barrages, as if Nature misunderstood our purpose and, siding with the Screamers, had gone to war with us.
Panthea said that we would be called to service soon, would be leaving Peptoe this evening, and needed to have dinner to fortify us for what we might endure between now and dawn. She spoke with quiet confidence and authority. Her pellucid blue eyes seemed like windows to a serene mind incapable of deceit. Bridget, Sparky, and I didn’t doubt she was a seer and our ally; if we were anxious about what came next, we were also relieved that we’d found the person able to lead us to a full understanding of the Screamers and our purpose.
Given her petiteness and seeming inclination toward mysticism, Panthea might have been expected to put before us a meal of organic greens and tofu, but happily her tastes ran counter to those of the kale-and-carrots crowd. She had prepared for our visit, and the spread that she produced included sliced roast beef, sliced ham, sliced chicken breast, a variety of cheeses, three artisanal breads that she baked herself, potato salad, three-bean salad with bacon, and numerous condiments. She intended that we accompany dinner with icy bottles of beer kept in a refrigerated drawer at thirty-six degrees, and she was met with no objections.
The Dionysian nature of the buffet suggested the indulgent last meal of those condemned to death, but if Panthea foresaw that this feast would be followed by multiple fatalities, she had the grace to keep that knowledge to herself.
Her dining room, an industrial-chic space, featured two big round tables of polished pine with seating for eight at each, to accommodate gatherings of her family. We sat at one table with an open chair between each of us, and yet the moment felt intimate. The room was illuminated by maybe sixteen flames wimpling on wicks in red cut-glass cups and by pulses of fierce lightning that flared through the small windows and made shadows leap as if they were agitated spirits. The effect was like a séance with refreshments.
Noble Winston sat on what would otherwise have been the empty captain’s chair between Bridget and me. He accepted pieces of beef from her—refusing them from me—but never begged, behaving with the decorum of a prime minister.
“What you call Screamers,” Panthea said, “were once beautiful beings, not monsters in appearance, though in their minds and hearts they became monsters. I’ve dreamed of them for fifteen years. My dreams aren’t just dreams, but lessons in the reality of the cosmos. I’m being instructed in dreams. The Screamers are from the first universe, which preceded ours. The envious among them corrupted all of their kind, seeding suspicion and resentment that became hatred, which they called a virtue, bitter hatred so destructive that they brought Earth to ruin. That devastated world was the legacy they made for themselves. The physical appearance of those who survived the destruction then changed to reflect the condition of their souls. They became immortal monsters in the prison of that first universe. When they were beautiful and radiant, they were called Rishon. When they became monsters, they were called Nihilim.”
The softness of her voice and the ease with which she spoke reminded me of a girl, Annie Piper, at the orphanage. Annie was eight years older than me, and for a few years when my age was in the single digits, she read stories to us, tales written by others but also by her. They were stories of things that had never happened and could never happen, but she told them with such quiet verve and conviction that we believed them and wanted to continue believing even after time robbed us of our sense of wonder. Encouraged by Sister Margaret, who took a special interest in her writing, Annie went to college on a scholarship, and we all expected great things of her, at least that she’d become a well-known writer one day. Instead, she dropped out of college after a year and drifted into some other life she evidently preferred, and we never heard from her again.
Sad as that was, I could nevertheless understand it. Writing novels seems like a glamorous and exciting occupation, although in reality I suspect that it’s a lot less glamorous than professional wrestling and only marginally more exciting than being a librarian.
To create good fiction, you have to like people enough to want to write about the human condition—but close yourself alone in a room for a large part of your life to get the job done right. It’s as if a wrestler forsook the ring in favor of getting his own head in an armlock and slamming himself into walls for a few hours every day.
“We are the Rishon of the second universe,” Panthea continued, “though we’re a species with fewer gifts than those that the Rishon of the first universe possessed. Think of it like this—the genome of those original Rishon was edited to make us humbler and give us a better chance of avoiding the arrogance that would destroy our world as they destroyed theirs. The Nihilim, those you call the Screamers, can never by their own choice cross from their universe into ours. But the worst among us, the most morally deranged, are able to open a door to them, invite them, which is what happened long ago.”
Sparky said, “What dunce would invite those wormheads?”
Winston chuffed as if in agreement.
“A dunce,” Panthea said, “who believes all the legends that are based on the Nihilim, who knows the Nihilim by other names that have been given them in myths that in fact are not merely myths, a dunce who admires them for their selfishness and ruthlessness, who wants them to make him powerful. There are rituals to open the door, but it’s not rituals that draw the Nihilim. They’re drawn by the passion of those who call them. Rituals aren’t essential. The Nihilim can also be welcomed into our world by someone who’s been consumed by such an intense desire for power that he or she will commit any crime, any atrocity, to gain dominance over others. That person becomes a doorway without even knowing it.”
“Then we’re doomed,” I declared, and shoveled a heaping forkful of the delicious three-bean salad into my gob. I didn’t mean we were without hope. Even as a one-ton chunk of limestone cornice falls from ten floors above and you stand directly under it, puzzling over the meaning of the swiftly growing shadow on the sidewalk, there is still hope. If I’d thought there was no hope, I would have put aside the bean salad and gone straight for the cinnamon-pecan rolls that waited as dessert. “Doomed,” I repeated.
Bridget knew what I meant. While my mouth was full, she said, “Increasingly, everywhere in the world, people are not governed by those who wish to serve them, but ruled by those mad with power and determined to have total submission. They seem ever more fiercely inspired to greater ruthlessness. They call their hatred justice and see it as a virtue. How many Screamers, Nihilim, have they knowingly and unknowingly brought among us?”
Panthea said, “Could be legions. Or not. But when those who govern us achieve absolute power, it always and everywhere leads to insanity and mass murder. Regardless of the numbers arrayed against us, we must resist. If we fail, then the sane among us will die in holocaust after holocaust, along with the madmen and madwomen who hate us for not sharing their delusions.”
Maybe it was time for the cinnamon-pecan rolls.
We ate in silence for a minute or two as drafts stirred candle flames, as salamanders of light wriggled up the walls and slithered across the food laid out before us. Thunder crashing, rolling. Wind-driven rain snapping hard off the corrugated metal roof and walls. In the movies, they call that “atmosphere.” Mother Nature was being Hitchcock when what we needed was the Hallmark Channel. Each bite I took only seemed to leave me hungrier, and the beer did not affect my sobriety, as perhaps no volume of fine food and drink can satisfy a prisoner dining in the shadow of the electric chair.
Sparky had been considering all Panthea told us. “‘Immortal,’ you say. But we killed two of them at a truck stop just yesterday evening.”
“They’re immortal in the first universe. They’ve been condemned to immortality there. But they’re mortal when they come here where they don’t belong. And when they come here, they pass as Rishon.”
To anyone who hadn’t experienced what we’d been through, the conversation would have sounded like teatime exchanges at the Mad Hatter’s table.
Sparky persisted. “Why would they surrender immortality to come here and risk dying?”
Although Panthea had an appetite of someone twice her size, and although in her soft-spoken way she was a powerful presence, in that shadowy room lighted by tongues of flame, she seemed at times as thin and transparent as the diaphanous films of light that passed through the red cut-glass cups to reveal her. “Why risk death? Because in their world, they live in the ruins they made, and they have no capacity to create anything new. They exist to destroy. Destruction is their only joy. That’s the condition to which they willfully reduced themselves when they achieved the complete depravity of the Nihilim. Because in their world nothing remains to be torn down. There’s only rubble and dust. They live in frustration and rage that can never be assuaged. What would it avail them to reduce the remaining rubble to dust, the dust to even finer dust? There’s no pleasure in that. Being immortal, they lack the power to kill one another or themselves. And so they yearn for this second universe, where so much remains to be obliterated, where there are people on whom to impose great suffering, so many waiting to be corrupted and killed—and so many who are already on the path to becoming Nihilim themselves. Having once been favored godlings, the Nihilim know a new creation exists, and they yearn to rise from their universe to ours and be among us, even at the cost of losing their immortality.”
