Apocalypse (2 page)

It was not the yammering, flatulent roar of the mine down in the woods. That sound she knew well. It was far louder, and far less eerie. In this sound, somehow, were intimations of mortality.

Even the horse seemed to feel unease, and balked, reluctant. Cally kicked the animal to keep it moving across the clay and shale toward the woods. I know how the deer feels, she thought, when the hunters hang out the fluttering strips of plastic. I just have to go closer. Have to look. Have to see.

Then she saw, and understood.

Weeds stood at the edge of the strip site, thriving on the ravaged ground where nothing else would grow, tall and bright green except for—on every stalk, bending the crabgrass, clustered thick on the woody stems of chicory, a brown blight clung. Cally thought at first that she saw many small dead leaves hanging from the broad, fleshy milkweed leaves like leeches. Then she signaled her horse to halt and looked more closely: the things were hollow shells, tan husks out of which had crawled—

“Cicadas,” she said aloud.

In a single May night they had come bubbling up out of the ground by the thousand, by the hundreds of thousands, and now they hid in the scrub trees somewhere and shrilled. Closer now, Cally could hear within the humming roar the individual voices. Amid the buzz and chatter, something that sounded like a sigh. Or a scream.

“What in God's name …”

And again, and again, many times, from many voices, the cries: wailing, dying, chilly smooth cries cold as flute music, yet heartbreaking.

“It sounds like babies!”

Demon infants, descending to the pit …

“Lost souls,” Cally murmured. She knew the things were cicadas, yet she had never heard cicadas pine so. Their song cast a shadow on the day like the shadow of yellow smog.

“Huh,” she muttered. Her bony shoulders moved, shrugging off the mood. She rode on, taking the trail that ducked dark as a low mine tunnel into the green scarp of the woods.

A grown woman who rode horseback was considered peculiar in this part of Pennsylvania. Riding alone in the state game lands, even more so. Cally knew the women back in Hoadley, the ones she thought of as the “cows,” talked about her. God forbid what they would think if they knew what she was hearing: the cicadas, in the lettuce-green leaf shadow all around and above her, sighing “Doom … Doom …”

She looked around at the trash woods that stretched for mountainous miles, state land and logging land and mining land and rocky farmland gone back to half-dead scrub dense with grapevine. Rotting logs, bare groping snags, rocks hulking and desperate saplings reaching for light. No sound but the cicadas and the sharp protests of chipmunks. Nothing to justify the taut, portentous feeling in her back and buttocks.

Her horse broke into a trot.

Momentarily Cally was so delighted by surprise that she let the mare go. A ponylike dun named Dove, the horse was customarily placid. Dead safe, to Cally's pique. Boring. Trust Mark to buy her a horse that was safe and boring.… The mare's unexpected rebellion heartened her as if it were her own. She let Dove veer off the trail; meekly she braced herself in the saddle and ducked branches as Dove slalomed down a steep slope between trees, then plunged over a weedy embankment, almost on her haunches, to a logging road. On the dirt road the little horse speeded to a bobbing canter. “Okay, enough,” Cally said, and she tightened the reins.

Dove laid back her mouse-colored ears, tossed her head and fought the bit, cantering faster, though Cally's efforts to stop her turned her almost sideways. “Dove!” Cally exclaimed, more astonished than afraid. “Where do you think you're going?”

As if in answer the horse's ears came up and pricked forward. Cally stared and slackened rein. On her own Dove slowed, walking with dignity toward the presence that drew her. A red-tailed hawk swooped overhead, bound in the same direction. Cally grew aware of rustlings in the underbrush to both sides: animals of some sort—but she did not turn her head to look. She stared at the person sitting on the road's edge in front of her.

Cally prided herself on her intellect, her sophistication relative to the bovine women among whom she lived. The fact that this man was thoroughly naked in and of itself would not have made her gawk. There was more, much more.… The hawk sat on a crooked finger of deadwood near his shoulder. A black snake lay in cryptic loops at his side. Deer stood near enough for him to touch. A red fox sat flame-bright under his stroking hand. Birds chittered along with the cicadas in the trees all around, and squirrels flounced, and tick-ridden rabbits crowded around his bare strong feet. At night, Cally knew with unreasoning certainty, there would be black bear and wildcat and maybe even larger beasts out of the depths of the woods.

She came toward him until Dove stood with the deer, and then the horse stopped of her own accord and Cally sat on her back, looking down into caramel-brown eyes and shaking.

He was young, or ageless, and ridiculously beautiful, so much so that Cally knew he was unnatural, a fetch, what her Folklore in Literature professor used to call, erroneously, a doppelganger. Face and body, both were too beautiful for a human as Cally knew humans in Hoadley. His eyes were too bright, glass-clear, unveined, like hard honey candy. His body was that of a carved Greek hero, all the color of alabaster, no, butter-cream icing, too sweetly flesh for her to think long of stone. This is my body, take and eat.… She noticed his lips—there was no restraint, no morality about the way he held his full-lipped mouth, and though he did not move, suddenly Cally understood the meaning of the word “pagan” as the old farts in her Sunday School used it. There were Christians, and then there were the unbelievers.…

He sat at ease, leaning on one forearm, his knees bent and lazily spread. Despite herself, Cally shifted her gaze down his broad shoulders and chest to his genitals, so casually displayed. They bulked large even at rest. She had never seen the penis of an uncircumcised man before, and her lips moved; at once she wanted to swallow it into her mouth, tasting it, the new thing, the exotic fruit.… Her reaction moved hot and tight through her groin, ruining the depth and relaxation of her riding seat, and for a moment she thought, hit-and-run, of Mark. She loved him. She loved him. But it had been so long since he had moved her the same way, and another word for pagan was infidel.… She hoped she did not blush, but on the weird stranger's sculpted-sugar face she thought she saw the flicker of a smile.

He wet his lips with a slow, probing tongue, then spoke. “Prepare,” he said.

Cally's hand left Dove's reins and faltered to the buttons of her cotton shirt between her flat breasts. “What?” she whispered. “What do you mean?”

“Prepare,” he said again, the single word.

Though he had not moved, even his hand had not paused in its stroking of the red fox, though the snake had not uncoiled from its place at his side, though no part of him had roused, as Cally could plainly see, she could envision only one immediate event for which she might prepare, and think only one thought, half-frightened, half-thrilled: He Is Not Nice.

“Go away,” she said to him, since even on horseback she herself did not seem able to do so. “Let me alone.”

He grinned wickedly at her, then wavered like heat haze in the air, thinned and disappeared. On the ground where he had been lay a massive stub of log, three feet thick and oddly hacked and gouged as if someone had gone mad with a chain saw.

The deer, the fox, the hawk and snake remained, momentarily. Then the deer leaped away, the hawk wheeled into sky, the others darted into underbrush. The snake sluggishly coiled, regarding woman and horse with an impersonal stare. Dove seemed to see it for the first time, shied and snorted at it.

Cally turned the mare, kicked hard and sent her galloping back toward the stable. But Dove had reverted to her deadhead self and would not gallop long on the steep trails. Cally let her slow to her customary walk. What, in fact, was there to run from? She could not be hearing what she thought she was hearing in the cicada chorus; she could not have seen what she thought she had seen. She had to be going insane.

The thought did not trouble her. Insanity seemed reasonable under her personal circumstances.

The trail led past the coal mine, not running on that day, or she would not have been able to ride a horse past it, even so tame a horse as Dove. It made an appalling noise; it would have vibrated the woods like a gigantic purring cat. A huge beast hidden in blackness, buried and shaking the world.

She turned Dove onto the black-gravel mine road, bound for the rough-timber mine tipple that reared above the scrub woods.

The mine hermit was out as she came clopping through, Dove's hooves striking crisp beats from the brickle. “Hi, Mr. Zankowski,” Cally called, because as a tenet of etiquette she was pleasant to everyone always, no matter what her own state of mind. But she spoke too early, because Mr. Zankowski made her nervous.

She had seen him a few times before, and he had always answered her greeting with a shy smile and a tentative lift of the hand, nothing more. A small, scrawny man dressed in work clothes too big for him, he ran the mine alone, defying dozens of government regulations, and lived alone in the shack at the tipple. On its plywood walls and low, rusting roof he had spray-painted messages: “Repent!” and “Kilroy was here,” “Eternity Awaits!” and “Do Not Harm Snake.”

“Hi, Mr. Zankowski,” Cally said again when she got nearer.

He was standing on the mine road, apparently waiting for her, and he did not smile or lift his hand, but called out in a high, anxious voice, “Have you seen my black snake?”

She started to shake her head. Then her eyes widened, and she halted Dove. Mr. Zankowski took a few impulsive steps toward her.

“Keeps the rats out of the house,” he said. “Sort of company for me, too. Missing. Ain't drunk his milk. You seen him?”

Mr. Zankowski twitched all over when he talked. He had a sister named Rose, Cally had heard, and one named Lily, and one named Daisy, and his first name was Bud. Parents did awful things to their children sometimes. Cally sympathized.

“I saw a black snake,” she said. “Might not have been your snake.” Mr. Zankowski was so much more on the fringe than she was, she forgot to feel insane. Maybe the twitchy little recluse knew something about the naked manifestation she had seen. “It was lying by a sort of wild man out along the logging road.”

“What? What man?”

Finding she could not admit how eerie he was, and how beautiful, she grew terse. “No clothes. Kept saying, ‘Prepare.'”

Too late she realized she should have kept the details to herself. Mr. Zankowski turned ashen. His eyes rolled, and he folded to his knees on the hard black gravel and started to shout.

“Arr-mageddon!” His scrawny face turned skyward and seemed to catch the high-heavenly color; it looked blue. “Prepare to be raptured! Oh, Lord have mercy on me a sinner, men gonna wail and gnash their teeth. The moon gonna turn to blood! The streams gonna run wormwood! It's a sign, it's a sign!”

His shrilling voice blended into the cicada chorus. His wailing cries were of the same essence as theirs. That or his words jarred Cally's already shaken nerves so badly that she hurried Dove away, foregoing etiquette.

“It's the Judgment coming! The horses gonna trample in blood up to their bridles on that day of wrath. And the Beast, the Beast—”

Cally kicked Dove into a gallop and left the frail screaming voice behind her. She knew the words, even so. She was a churchgoer. The Beast was going to come up out of the bottomless pit.

The cicadas she could not leave behind her. They were everywhere.

Halfway up the next steep slope Cally let Dove slow to a walk, and found that her hands held the reins in shaking fists, and felt angry at herself for running away. It was because she had not eaten that she was hearing things, seeing things, that was all. Because of her rigorous diet, to which she would adhere no matter what. She would show some control of her own body, her own mind, her selfhood. She would never become like the napkin-tucking, narrow-minded, credulous, superstitious, omnivorous boors around her. Never.

“Ignorant,” she muttered, turning her anger against Mr. Zankowski. The simpleminded man had a bad case of millennial fever, obviously, and saw the end days in everything. A lot of the uneducated people had it as the end of the century drew near, especially the people in Hoadley, and absurdly so: Hoadley seemed permanently mired in the 1950s.

“Hysterics,” she grumbled, quieting and softening her hands on the reins.

Cally Fayleen Anderson Wilmore, intellectual, neurotic, and aspiring anorexic, was one of the few people in Hoadley who had not lived there all her life. Mark Cornelius Wilmore had brought her there after they were married, and for the ten ensuing years she had hovered, in her own perception and that of the townspeople, she had floated on the surface of Hoadley, moored only at the one point of marriage. She was a naught, a cipher; how was anyone to read her and comprehend her when they had not known her parents and grandparents and what vices ran in her family, her original church affiliation, her brothers and sisters and what pattern they had set in school? She was an oval zero-face in a slot labeled “Mark's wife.”

She rode past two junked cars and thought, I graduated with honors in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, and now my mind is becoming like this woods, full of people's garbage, their junk, their leavings, and I am seeing their ghosts. She rode past an inscrutable, yawning structure of concrete built into the hill, its gape full of coffee-black water. On clumps of mountain laurel the new leaves looked succulent, substantial, meaty to her, like little green steaks. She rode past a pile of twisted sheet metal, a slag heap, a springhouse buried in poison ivy, a ruinous stone farmhouse, all pierced by reaching trees.

She had seen an apparition, and all she remembered clearly was its sexual equipment. Very well. No one had to know.