Apocalypse (30 page)

The world turned hollow underneath her.

She heard Devil's hoofbeats sound deep, deep, as if vibrating a great earthen gong. Hastily she pulled the horse to a halt, and for once he obeyed her without a struggle; he too had felt the sudden void, the elephant trap, the thin and treacherous footing underneath, and he stood spraddle-legged and still, ears uncertain.

The others had stopped some distance behind Cally. “Must be a mine shaft under there,” called Gigi briskly. “Nothing to worry about.”

“It was never there before,” said Cally. Her words fell blunt and stark as stones into a chasm, silencing Gigi.

From a mile ahead, where Hoadley lay in its river valley, came a rumbling sound. Dust rose over the trees.

“Hell,” Elspeth spoke up suddenly, her tea-colored skin draining to gray. “Let's go back.”

“To what?” Nodules of bruise-purple had proliferated on Shirley's face and arms, painfully livid on her pale skin. “We've got to go on.”

Gigi found her voice again. “One at a time,” she said, “and we'll be safe enough over that hollow place. Devil hasn't fallen through yet. Cally, move that horse's butt.”

Cally touched her legs lightly to Devil's sides. But instead of walking on, the black horse swung his head and pawed with one forefoot, as if he had decided to return to the hell from which he, or his namesake, came. The striking hoof rang the ground like a great bell of clay. “Hey!” Cally yelled, terrified, and she kicked him hard. He jumped from a standstill into his runaway gallop.

Devil swept down on Hoadley like a black angel. And the other horses were of like mind with him, and the other riders as reckless as starving, half-suicidal Cally (hanging on with her aching, rawboned hind end in the air, riding by balance and stirrup and knee, like a jockey), as daring as old ever-dying Gigi. They crossed the dangerous span with a single leap and ran like wildfire. Sometime during the few moments of that hurtling ride, Cally comprehended: the hidden hollow, the empty place—call it coal shaft, worm hole, beast lair—had been on a straight line between Zankowski's mine and Hoadley.

Between the tarpaper shacks of the outskirts and into the town proper, where the mouse-brown mine-town row houses minced down the hill like shabby dowagers on steps, the four horsewomen rode at daredevil speed. “Yee-hah!” Gigi yelled, enjoying herself. Hoadley matrons, brought out of their kitchens and off their porches by thunderous noises and fire-siren clamor and shouting voices farther downtown, stood crowded on the sidewalks, chittering like locusts; Gigi lifted a hand and thumbed her nose at them. Elspeth, feeling a similar defiance, smiled darkly, but Shirley—who had more cause for rancor than any of them—would or could not smile; this was her home town, and she thought with bittersweet longing of estranged family, of old friends who were friends no longer. Face blotched and taut, she pressed heels to Shady Lady, keeping up the breakneck pace. Cally, whose horse needed no urging, rode as if in a trance.

Down Main Street, four abreast, the four horsewomen swept: Shirley with the claws of pestilence marking her skin, Gigi grinning like a skull, famished Cally, and Elspeth wearing a sword.

Ahead of them, dust had turned to a pillar of smoke reaching toward the yellow clouds of the Hoadley sky. And in a moment Devil slowed his headlong gallop, and shied, and stopped, not because he wanted to but because he had to. And the others stopped and looked; the four horses stood in a row with ribs heaving, nostrils wide and heavily blowing, and forehooves near the edge of a precipice.

A sinkhole had opened at the center of Hoadley, a black abyss, gradually widening. From where they stood the horsewomen could see no bottom to it; perhaps there was none to be seen. The Municipal Building, the gargoyled redstone structure housing the borough offices, had already disappeared into it, along with the town's only traffic light. Thick wires writhed up over the lip of the town's wound like worms, sparking, and from somewhere came the sound of rushing water; mains were broken. A fire truck swayed on its belly, half in the chasm, and heavy-booted firemen had given up on trying to save it or the Tropical Beauty Tanning Salon splintering and burning, slowly dropping portions of itself like torches into the darkness below. Shouting, the firefighters scrambled away or made small, futile sorties along the disaster's rim. Townspeople gathered to look at the coal-black hole—a huge mine shaft with no lift cage—alternately hurrying to look down the gullet of hell or screaming and scrambling to run away from it. In the park nearby, six hundred sixty-six misfits wearing Ahira's mark had gathered near the gazebo, where they huddled, waiting for a leader who had not yet arrived.

With shouts and screams the spectators surged back; another portion of pavement was dropping away, sending baritone reverberations through the town. Over the hollow bowels beneath Hoadley now swayed a row of parking meters and the corner of the only modern brick building in the town, the Post Office. Foundation cinderblock and bricks broke away and fell without a sound to tell that they had struck bottom. From somewhere inside, envelopes postmarked with the date of the rapture day fluttered down like white butterflies into the depths.

“That reminds me,” said Elspeth as coolly as if she had ridden into Hoadley merely to check her box; the artist, the observer, she had distanced herself from the bizarre events going on around her. She was watching; in a sense she was watching herself, her own superbly aesthetic aplomb as in a tunic pocket she found the letter she had meant to give Cally when returning to the stable, passed it over. But as she did so, her glance caught the name to which it was addressed.

“Apocalypse?” she demanded, poise lost. “That's what ‘Cally' stands for? Apocalypse?”

“Don't call me that!” Cally ordered, heartily and irrationally annoyed that her secret had been found out, afraid she would have to battle the unattractive name now for the rest of her life in this place. She took the envelope without much comprehension, too harrowed by the events of the day to wonder how Elspeth had come to have a letter for her, knowing only that it was from her mother. No one except her mother called her Apocalypse.

“God!” exclaimed Gigi with a horror she had not showed for the body of Bud Zankowski or for the town going down into the belly of hell. “Who would name a poor baby Apocalypse?”

“My mother would.” Cally held the envelope in her hand, noting the torn flap but not yet pulling out the message. “She was in a sort of Pentecostal phase when she had me.” She glanced around her as if looking for a quiet place to sit down and read. Beneath her horse's feet, the pavement was starting to shake.

“Let's get out of here,” Shirley said abruptly and with something of passion. “Not just out of this mess. What I mean, all the way out. Over the mountains.” Out of Hoadley, the town with the long memory; away from what it had made her: a misfit, a freak.

No one answered her, though Elspeth backed her red horse, looking to Shirley to lead off. But Cally sat where she was, gazing down into the black pit taking the town.

She said, “Mark's down there.”

“Huh?” Tabling her own agenda, Shirley inched closer to the edge, leaned and looked. Through shadows, dust, and eye-stinging, tear-inducing smoke, she could see nothing. “You sure?”

“Sure.”

“But how can you—”

“And who the hell cares?” Gigi interrupted with sudden violence. “He's a goddamn no-good man. What do you care what happens to him, Cally? I'd kill him if I was you.”

“Right,” replied Cally tonelessly, and she turned her horse. The four women rode down a narrow alley to Railroad Street, which put them a block downslope of the devastation taking the genteel shops and homes and funeral establishments along Main Street. On Railroad Street were bran-colored houses again and boarded-up corner stores and wide-open corner taverns and the ethnic lodges: Slovak Eagles, Polish Club, Fraternal Order of American Italy. Men in Sears work coveralls were spewing out of the bars and clubs. The earth was trembling underfoot. Steel horseshoes slipped on the cracking asphalt, and the horses tossed their heads in reined-in panic, wanting to run.

To Cally it seemed only natural that earth, footing, certitude were collapsing and sliding away underfoot. The fundament of her life had been quaking since the night she had left Mark; she scarcely questioned the undermining of Hoadley, so condign, so apt, so inevitable did it seem to her. Sluggishly she felt moved, however, to remonstrate with Gigi. Mark was not one to whom something was going to happen, however richly deserved. Rather, Mark was the agent of the disaster. Watching at the edge of the abyss, she had recognized a technique. Mark was dispatching Hoadley methodically, joyously, gluttonously, relentlessly, the way he would go through a greasy paper bag of roasted peanuts.

Sojourner Hieronymus sat straight-backed in the cold metal chair on her gaunt, gray front porch, refusing to be coaxed down to the sidewalk, drawn into the panic. She disapproved of panic, messiness, untidiness; she disapproved of most of what she was seeing. Because there was so much of which to disapprove, she could not help thinly smiling. She felt very nearly cheerful, watching her foolish neighbors.

From the direction of the commotion downtown a whirlwind, a dust devil, came spinning up the street. No one liked to walk through a dust devil—it was choking dirty, and reputed to be bad luck—but on this day people cried out and scrambled away from it without dignity. Sojourner watched: one of them candy striper girls coming home from the hospital, crossing the street, was cut off from the sidewalk and caught by the edge of the thing. It lifted her skirt all around, blew it up above her waist, no matter how she tried to hold it down with her hands. Everybody could see her panties, them indecent skimpy-cut silky-lacy kind. Some old folks would have said her boyfriend was thinking about her, but Sojourner knew better. The Devil was thinking about that one. The Devil knew what she had on under that prissy-sweet mint-candy dress. The Devil had come to have a look and take her as his own. Sojourner knew. The girl shaved her legs, too, Sojourner felt sure of that, and everybody knew shaving any part of a woman just made the hair grow back thick and bristly, like a man's beard—

The teenager screamed, because as her hands had smoothed down her skirt after the dust devil's mischief they had felt, she had looked—hair, dark and thick and curling, sprouting from her legs, bursting out through her pantyhose. Already it grew so thick it hung like pantaloons, swished like fur trousers as she ran, still screaming, toward the somewhat-refuge of her parents' house.

Sojourner laughed out loud, a surprised, delighted squawk of laughter, and turned quick gray eyes, beady-hard and pitiless as a bird's eyes, toward another victim. That Jessie Rzeszut, the beefy woman from down by the corner, the one who dyed her hair straw blond, she tanned herself until she looked like a nigger, all winter running to that Tropical Beauty place, spending hours under them money-wasting machines, cooking herself like in a microwave—

The woman shrieked and fell to the sidewalk, where she lay on her back, her heavy bosom tilted skyward, savory-brown and crisp as a turkey on Thanksgiving.

All her life Sojourner had felt frustrated, helpless to rectify or understand the evil of the world, of her community, of her neighbors; the rush of rapture, the long-awaited joy of consummate power, the ecstasy she felt at that Apocalypse moment shook her as strongly as the collapse of Hoadley was shaking the porch on which she sat. She shouted aloud as if seized by the holy spirit, and from her snapping-turtle mouth her word issued forth, creating misfits to replace those Ahira had healed.

“You play with fire, you're gonna wet the bed!” She bounced on her chair, her head thrust forward, her old eyes gleaming with the glory of the coming of the Lord. “You women wear men's clothes, you're gonna get hair on your breasts! You men play with yourselves, you're gonna get hair on your palms!”

Every man in sight looked startled and clenched his hands. So compelling, though, were the events downtown that no one paid any further immediate attention to the hair or the manner in which it had appeared.

Uplifted, Sojourner teetered to her feet. “World ain't been the same since them government fellows messed around with the moon!”

Oona Litwack, who was standing out front of her half of the house wearing her customary polyester slacks, and who had felt a peculiar prickling on her bosom—her comfortable bosom, soft as the cotton fiberfill cushion on her living room sofa, the one embroidered, “Ewe's Not Fat, Ewe's Just Fluffy,” with a fleece appliqued sheep in the center—Oona Litwack, who had lived next door to Sojourner Hieronymus for twenty-one years, turned and looked carefully at the lean, gray old woman standing on the lean, gray porch, then came up her front walk toward her own porch.

“Step on a crack, break your mother's back!” Sojourner shrilled at her.

Oona proceeded in her plump, flat-footed fashion between her American Beauty rosebushes and a row of plaster ducks, stepping on numerous cracks. “My mother's dead, so she don't care.” No doubt the spine had shattered in the casket, six feet underground in the old town cemetery. No doubt at all. Oona stopped at the top of her porch steps and looked across the dividing rail at Sojourner.

“You sneeze on Sunday, or what?”

Ignorant people said that if a person sneezed on Sunday, the Devil would be with that person all week long. Sojourner didn't hold with such superstition. She had, in fact, sneezed the Sunday past and didn't feel any different than usual.

“Them impatiens of yours is hanging over my porch and dropping leaves,” Sojourner accused.

Oona ignored that. “Instead of saying things about people around here, better you should say the sea is gonna turn to blood, things like that,” she gently advised. “Sea's not around here.”

Sojourner gave her a hard look. “You wish on a white horse, you're gonna cry,” Sojourner snapped. “You dream of a white horse, you're gonna die.”