A Dark Matter (33 page)

Donald was running around in circles, and Mallon was staring straight ahead as if he was about to go into shock, and Keith Hayward, he wasn’t paying any attention at all to this amazing
stuff
going on right in front of their faces, and neither was Milstrap. Keith was staring right at Meredith, and Hayward’s terrible face—because it was terrible, anything she might have once thought to the contrary was dead wrong—looked like a cement mask hung in front of a blazing fire. Meredith said to herself,
That guy better stay where he is, because he’s completely off his rocker
.

The world of the Bear King and the crazy queen spilled from its diorama and rolled through all the others, filling their spaces and the spaces between. All the silvery people reeled around, declaiming to themselves with drunken, oversize gestures. Meredith thought this scene had a wild, spooky charm. It delighted her, especially when the mad queen swung in her direction and leveled the staff at her head.

Some kind of light, grainy beam flew from the end of the staff and struck Meredith’s forehead with an impact like that of a flying moth, then passed through the wall of her skull and entered her brain, where it became a short, cool wand. The wand pulsed once, then evaporated into her brain tissue.

The great blessing had been bestowed and received.

The Bear King waved a beer stein and slapped his mount on the head, and the Roaring Queen swung her arm a couple of inches and aimed her distaff (it seemed to Meredith) at the Eel. Then Meredith paid no more attention to anyone or anything else, be it visionary royal personage, visionary animal creature, or ordinary everyday human commoner, because all of her attention was focused on the three great principles that had begun to take root in the center of her brain and just then were clearing their throats and getting ready to sound off. When they spoke, however, it was not in the southern-politician, ham-bone tones she had expected from this windup, but in a slender, cool female voice.

And that, gentlemen, was when Meredith Bright finally began to figure things out. The great blessing was, you could say, a vision of a new heaven and a new earth. Only the new heaven and earth were not at all what people imagined they would be, no no no. Meredith giggled at the disparity between the world as it truly was and what almost everyone, including her former addlepated self, imagined it to be. What came from the point of that distaff was wisdom—the wisdom of those three great principles.

Yes, Meredith knew, Meredith understood, the men before her wanted to hear more about this wisdom that had been passed on so efficiently from a realm beyond all understanding, but they’d have to wait, because they still had more to learn about the events of that all-important evening.

A whole lot seemed to happen all at once. The crazy scene in front of them began to move forward, as if to surround them, which would have meant they’d be lost forever in some eternal horror show, but it had moved only the tiniest part of a centimeter, say, the tiniest distance possible, which no one but Meredith and maybe the Eel even noticed, and the dog-things were just beginning to perk up, when two things happened at the far end of their row. The first was that Keith Hayward, of course not noticing the peril he was about to be in, that idiot, jumped out of position and started to sprint toward Meredith. He wanted to pick her up and snatch her away—Hayward wanted to kidnap her, she understood that: she was
really
clear about his mission. It was in his terrible, terrible eyes, that intention. Or desire, or whatever you call it. He’d starved long enough, and he was going to make his move.

At the same time, Brett Milstrap finally got his hands on that weird point in space he had been looking at and puzzling over so long. He was concentrating so hard he never even noticed that his partner had taken off and left him by himself. While Hayward was barreling toward Meredith, Milstrap bent over and tugged at something like a seam on the edge of the eternal diorama. When he got his fingers through the crack he had spotted, he closed his fists and pulled, hard. Muscles Meredith hadn’t known the kid possessed popped out on his forearms, and he leaned into his work. A four-foot section of the diorama peeled up like a flexible screen, and both the Bear King and the insane queen turned to gaze at what he was doing. The king banged his heels into the bear’s sides, the appalled queen roared and flailed her long stick, they wanted him to stop—

But then Meredith could see no more, as some big dark form slipped in front of her and blocked her vision. At first, she thought it was one of the dog-creatures, for all of those things were beginning to move forward in order (Meredith realized) to shield their group from the happy campers in eternity, or whatever it was. But it was not a dog-creature, it was too big, and besides it had a really weird smell, so awful it was almost beautiful. Honestly, if you made that odor into a perfume, some women would wear it all the time, and a lot of women would wear it maybe once a year, when a little serious business had to be done. That smell, that weird fragrance, made Meredith dizzy, which meant her vision lost a little reliability, since it’s hard to know if you’re seeing things accurately when the ground is wobbling and your knees don’t work and a funny floating sensation has taken over what used to be your head.

Right? I mean,
you can’t really be sure
.

However, while Meredith was coping with the effects of that odor, which she realized was much the same as the raw hot sexy crushed-mandarin-orange-inside-of-Bobby-Flynn’s-lower-lip smell she had enjoyed earlier, only dialed way up, it seemed to her that the creature before her slowly, slowly turned to her and gave her a beatific smile only slightly undercut by the fact of the smiling lips being red with the blood of Keith Hayward, and the parallel fact that Keith Hayward’s limp and utterly dead body, minus its head and right arm, drooped from the great creature’s hands. She couldn’t really describe this thing. It appeared to shapeshift from something like a short King Kong to a terrible naked old male giant with streaming white hair, its maw filled with flesh and shattered bone, and from that to an almost cartoonish purple thing that spat out red and white bits of Keith Hayward even as it graced her with its smile. Actually, all of them smiled at Meredith Bright, the big ape, the naked giant, and the cartoon—all of them smiled, and leftover bits of Keith Hayward dribbled and oozed from all three of their mouths, which were really all the same mouth.

At this point, I had the odd sensation that while Meredith was telling me the truth about all this smiling, she was, although she may not have even been aware of it, also lying, and about something I could define only as obscene. Meredith Walsh, I advised myself, inhabited a dizzying moral realm. I asked her a question.

No, the smiling didn’t surprise Meredith, why should it? In those days, and for a good long time after, decades actually, everybody who crossed the path of Meredith Bright, including even the people who looked at her from the other side of the street, not forgetting even the men driving pizza wagons through the streets of Madison, Fayetteville, Greenwich, Connecticut, and so on, all of these people, these stupid men, they smiled at her until their faces ached. That was how it worked. If the Bear King and the Bellowing Queen had possessed faces, they would have smiled at her, too. In fact, although they did not have actual faces, visible ones, they smiled at her anyhow.

Meredith smiled back, of course, being polite, and as she did so, the creature vanished. Through the empty space he had just finished occupying, she happened to catch a glimpse of Brett Milstrap making an irrevocable decision, if that’s what it was. It might have been a whim, even an accident. Milstrap had managed to peel back a long section of the Bear King’s chaotic world, exposing a deep blackness pieced by one laserlike white light. That’s all she could see back there, anyhow. Milstrap leaned into the gap and was sucked in, instantly gone. The gap sealed up, and for a couple of seconds, Meredith caught sight of him far back in the riotous world of shiny people and shiny things. He was waving his arms. He knew Meredith had seen him, and he wanted her to help him escape! Brett Milstrap lowered his arms, leaned forward, and began to run as fast as he could, as if he thought he could outrace his destiny. Before he had taken three long strides, he winked out of sight and disappeared.

Meredith checked her fellow travelers, wondering if they had witnessed these two extraordinary events, and to her amazement discovered that they were all on separate wavelengths. Now, she wasn’t sure
how
she knew these things. Empathy had never exactly been her strong suit. But looking at Boats, she knew instantly that he found himself in a field of corpses, rising to his feet near a great tower made entirely of the bodies of dead children. Both Donald and Mallon saw billows of downpouring rose-orange light and upright dogs in human clothing, except Mallon saw more dogs and nastier ones. Mallon’s dogs wanted to kill him for his audacity and his incompetence, and he had to take off and get out of there in a hurry. The hurry was crucial for another reason, that Mallon had also seen Keith Hayward ripped to pieces by some huge and ferocious creature he could not identify, but which he knew he had summoned to the meadow.

When Meredith turned her gaze to Hootie, what she saw, a mighty blazing sun crowded stuffed crammed jammed with words and sentences, nearly flattened her. She thought it may have been the face of God
burning through
all those humming writhing coiling sentences and paragraphs, all of them making their claim and all of them sacred … Hootie was too much for her. She knew that if she looked a moment longer into God’s massive, sentence-packed face she would crack and fall asunder, a broken vessel, so she did what she had to do and took off running. Because Mallon and Donald were still fighting through the pouring neon light, she could have been the first to leave. The first who wound up alive and on earth, anyhow.

And now, Meredith imagined Donald undoubtedly wanted her to tell him something explanatory about the dogs. He’d heard something, hadn’t he? A long time ago, he’d heard one of his friends mention a “dog”—or heard little Eel say something he didn’t understand about “dogs,” right?—and he had been smart enough to figure something out. Well, here’s what she had to say. The creatures that these men called dogs, and Lee Harwell wrote about in his entertaining book—no, of course she hadn’t read it, but she’d heard enough about the novel to know what he had done—were not dogs or “agents” or anything of the kind.
They were what kept us from seeing that which we are not equipped to see
. All these Mallon people were marked now, and the “dogs” kept an eye on them, not to keep them safe, because they cared nothing for human beings—Meredith thought they saw people as garbage—but to ensure that none of them got so far out of line again. Meredith had seen the dog-things advance toward the eternal, chaotic realm, and she knew what they really looked like, but she could not, not ever, describe them. It wasn’t possible. Our words don’t go that far, sorry.

“Oh, the three great principles?” Meredith Walsh asked, enjoying her moment even as she detested those with whom it was shared. “You want to know what they are? Are you interested in learning what the loony-tune queen sent to me, which changed my life entirely?”