Phantom (31 page)

The woman led Ned through the forest, not in
a straight line, but by a zigzag route, as if she were following an
invisible trail. They came out into a small clearing. Just ahead
was a natural rock wall and a cave leading into it. The woman swept
on, without hesitating. The utter darkness was spooky at first, but
they moved through it easily.

The cave proved to be a short tunnel. The
first thing Ned noticed when they emerged from it on the other side
was the red disk on the horizon. It was not much bigger than the
head of a pin.

What is that?

—
The sun.

The sun?!

—
Yes, what's left of
it.

Then, this is the planet Earth.

—
Of course.

When?

—
At the end of the sun, at
the end of time.

Why are we here, now?

—
Child.

They came to a small city, or at least what
had once been a small city. Now it was a charred ruin. The outline
of streets was still clear, although blanketed with black sand and
littered with debris. The buildings were mere shells, with blasted
walls and beds of rubble. But new colors introduced themselves to
the scene—shades of blue and green in the form of odd, coral like
encrustations that rose from the ground here and there. They were
anemic, spindly creations. Diseased flowers—that was all Ned could
think of them as. He wondered if they were what "life" had been
reduced to here, mindless chemical or crystalline growth, a kind of
hideous postscript to the past. How long ago was the past?

What year is this?

The woman's laughter filled his mind. As
they passed along the street, Ned kicked one of the "plants." It
disintegrated in a shower of dust. The thing had felt so flimsy and
insubstantial that Ned wondered how they could exist at all; a
little gust of wind would blow them all away. But, he noticed,
there wasn't even the slightest hint of a breeze in this place.
Then he was startled to discover that he wasn't breathing at all.
Of course—why should he? The dead don't breathe.

As they moved from the outskirts toward the
center of the city, the old roadway narrowed, at times becoming
little more than an irregular lane through mounds of rubble and the
tangle of weird growth.

—
Stay close.

The woman needn't have bothered. Ned
couldn't leave even if he'd wanted to, and in this place he had no
desire to lose the woman. What would he do here on his own, where
would he go? Only the world and the life he had left behind might
attract him now, but that was a million miles and a million years
away—and already it was taking on the aspect of an ancient memory.
It was distant, detached, and it hardly seemed to have anything to
do with Ned. Were his parents mourning him? The thought seemed
unreal, and the boy let it slip out of his mind.

They turned a corner and the woman stopped
for the first time since they had set out on this journey. She
looked at Ned and her eyes completely relaxed him.

—
It will be all
right.

Why? What is it?

—
You will see things now,
but it will be all right.

The way ahead was a narrow path down the
middle of a long street crammed full of tall, thin tubes that
reared up about eight feet from the ground. They were blood red and
they clicked against each other, sounding like plastic. Ned saw
that they were rooted to the black earth in dense clusters. As he
and the woman entered the street, the tubes bristled, as if
reacting to a static charge. They leaned and swayed like a field of
nightmare com in a wind. The clicking noise grew louder, but what
was more disturbing was the sight of the tubes so close. Their hard
casing was transparent, and they were filled with organs in a red
liquid that Ned realized must be blood. These things were living
creatures—Ned could see the blood pulsating now. Suddenly he looked
up. At the top of each tube a fist-size head could be seen. Some of
them protruded, while others lurked just inside the casing, or
moved in and out. Ned felt dizzy and sick-the faces were almost
human. Tiny, wizened, they looked piteously on the two people
moving through their midst. Their mouths moved silently and their
eyes seemed to cry out for some unknown meaning. They're trapped
here forever, Ned thought, and he began to understand the terrible
expression on all their faces. They were harmless, but to move
among them was to be subjected to a powerful emotional and psychic
assault. Ned wanted to shut his eyes and block his ears, but
something in him rejected that idea. It would be too much like
walking away from a paralyzed infant in need of help. But what
could Ned do for these tube creatures with the haunting faces?
Nothing.

Who—what—

—
Dead.

They're not dead. Look at them.

—
Still, they are
dead.

What will happen? Do they just stay like
this?

—
This is their
place.

But why?

—
Child.

The woman soothed his mind and they walked
on, but after a while the clicking mounted again. Ned tried to keep
his eyes on the woman alone, but it was impossible to ignore the
virtual wall of pumping blood and tightly packed organs that
surrounded them. There was no end in sight. It seemed to Ned that
they must have passed tens of thousands or even hundreds of
thousands of the wretched things. Finally, he was numb to their
plight. They were a nuisance, an irritation that wouldn't go away.
For a moment Ned wished he had an ax, so that he could chop them
all down. The woman, knowing his thoughts, turned and stared at
him, but this time there was no love or comfort in her eyes. Ned
suddenly felt ashamed and confused.

—
You still have that in
you.

Ned remembered chopping down the scarecrow;
perhaps that had been wrong. He remembered flinging chunks of
plaster into the spider webs at the spa, when perhaps he should
have left them alone. Small actions, arising out of small
impulses—or were they? What, if anything, was the woman trying to
make him see?

—
You.

Now she let the boy feel the cold touch of
fear. The thought came to Ned that he had been brought here to be
rooted in place and transformed into one of these tube creatures.
It was the fate in store for everyone after death, and he was no
different. His skin and his muscles would be peeled away, his arms
and legs severed, and he would be poured into a plaster tube and
anchored there. His head would shrink to a mockery of itself. He
would be just one more in the meaningless, forgotten throng, a
prospect that was as humbling as it was terrifying.

—
Come.

Somewhat relieved, Ned followed the woman.
He couldn't imagine anything worse than to be one of those tube
creatures. Were they really, or had they once been, people?
Immobile in a wasteland, unable even to speak. It would be better
to be dead—but then Ned remembered that this was death: in this
place you couldn't die again. Welcome to eternity.

After what seemed like hours of walking,
they emerged on a large square, bordered by more of the shattered
remains of old buildings. They continued on, across the open
ground. Maybe there had been a park here once, Ned thought. Now it
was just a barren expanse of black sand, petrified stumps and a few
of those strange "plants." They had not gone far when a band of
animals appeared thirty yards away. It was a pack of dogs, Ned saw,
as they drew closer. The woman stopped, and the boy stayed near
her. The dogs numbered about twenty, and they approached
cautiously. They moved in single file and skirted around the two
people. Now Ned could see that these were not ordinary dogs. His
mouth opened in astonishment. These beasts, too, had faces that
were almost human. The canine snout was absent. They walked on four
legs and were covered with hair, but that didn't obscure the
uncanny similarity of features, particularly the intelligence in
their eyes. The most obvious and menacing part of their makeup was
the single fang or saber tooth that curled down from the center of
the upper jaw. It must be four or five inches long, Ned
thought.

The procession passed by. Ned turned to
watch the grotesque animals, almost certain that he had just seen
the results of another monstrous human transformation. The dogs
went straight to the tube creatures, and most of them disappeared
into the mass. But at least one dog stayed in sight at the outer
edge. This animal walked back and forth, as if studying the scene.
Then, apparently having chosen, it punctured one tube creature with
its prominent fang and stood rigidly, attached. It was revolting to
see, but Ned couldn't look away.

They eat them?

—
No, merely drink of
them.

Through that tooth?

—
It is their way.

Do they kill the tube creatures?

The question was absurd, as the woman's
laugh told Ned. There had to be other bands of dogs that came here
to drink, perhaps thousands of them. What was the point of it,
here, where nothing could die? It is their way, the woman had said.
It was probably a ritual, and one that could exist and continue in
this place only as a final irrelevancy. The original point of the
act, survival, now rendered pointless by its inevitability.

—
Come.

Are they, or were they, human beings?

—
Do you know
them?

Ned wasn't sure if the woman was making fun
of him or not. He thought he had recognized something in both the
dogs and the tubes, but perhaps he had been wrong. No, in each case
his reaction had been strong and immediate. They were related to
him, in some way. It was a terrifying thought, and this time the
woman did nothing to banish it from Ned's mind. Those dogs, he
reflected, were like a combination of the werewolf and the vampire.
Both human and not human.

Ned tried to stop, but he couldn't. In spite
of himself, he kept pace with the woman. But, like someone who has
only just fully awakened, his mind was beginning to make
connections. A subtle change had come over the aura between the two
of them. The woman had made him feel fear once. The fact that she
had broken her promise cracked the illusion of her benevolence. It
had taken Ned a while to realize this: that he was not her equal on
this new plane of existence, that he was being led, taken,
protected and preserved. But for what? He could no longer avoid
wondering what he would be brought to at the end of the journey.
The top of the mountain—but why? What awaited him there? A demonic
laboratory, where he would be made over into a tube creature or a
vampire dog—or something worse? The fact that he could even think
this way now told him something else. The woman was giving him back
his mind, bit by bit. Why—so that nothing of his destiny would be
lost on him?

What will happen to me?

—
You will be with
me.

Be what?

—
What you are.

What am I?

—
Come.

Before, the word had seemed like an
invitation, a fond beckoning of one mind to another, but now it was
a quiet order, which Ned could not disobey. Helplessness, which he
had known so many times while being haunted or stalked in the other
world, came back to nest in him again. One more fateful
connection.

Ned looked around and was surprised to find
that they had left the city. It might not have been a city after
all, he thought. Just ruins and old roadbeds. If he had to guess,
he would say they had been walking for the better part of a day.
But time meant nothing here. The light scarcely changed at all and
the sun remained a dying ember, always roughly the same distance
from the horizon. Only the twists and turns in their route moved
the tiny red disk slightly.

Eventually, they came up onto a small
plateau, and the woman promptly made Ned look back. The view was
devastating. As far as he could see, the earth was strewn with the
relics of catastrophe. It's beyond deciphering, Ned thought. If a
team of scientists from another planet landed here, they would be
unable to reconstruct anything from this. It's too far gone, all
lost. Then another thought hit him and he scanned the sky above. No
stars, nothing. Nothing but the ghost of the sun.

Was it war, or a nova ... ?

The woman laughed again, this time as if to
say, Nothing so paltry. It made Ned think of something she had said
earlier. The end of time. How nonchalantly he had accepted those
words at first. Now he understood that they might well be the last
words, after which no others were necessary. Was this what death,
one human death, amounted to—the end of the universe? Does it
happen all the time, with each human death, the universe dying
billions of times? Ned was losing himself in a maze of implications
and possibilities. The woman rescued him.

—
Child.

He turned around. And saw the mountain.

They were still some distance from it, but
the mountain dominated the landscape, so much so that Ned couldn't
understand how he had failed to notice it sooner. It was huge,
awesome, impossible to overlook. The weak red sunlight must play
tricks on the eyes, and disguise things, he decided. The mountain
towered above the earth, and yet it was unlike any mountain Ned had
ever seen. There were no sharp planes, jagged ridges of rocky
faces. It looked more like an enormous matte-black lump, a mound
that had grown to extraordinary dimensions over a period of time
that defied reckoning. Geography no longer applied here. Nothing
like this mountain had existed in that part of the country where
Ned had once lived, and probably not on the entire planet. But that
was the other world, a time and a place that had ceased to be.