By John Hood
Hot and dry.
It had been hot and dry all summer, and it was hot and dry now.
Marc Robinson sat on the porch of the cabin, listening to the buzzing of summer insects high in the trees and the slow whisper of a faint arid breeze, absently peeling at the moist sticky label of the bottle of beer he was holding. He pressed the cold bottle to his forehead, then to the back of his neck, then took a long pull of the cold frothy liquid, letting it caress his throat. It was good. He already had that febrile, head achy sensation, familiar to all drinkers; the one that comes with several beers fired back in the heat of the midday summer sun. He was, in fact, half pissed - and he meant to enjoy it. He could hear Julie moving around the kitchen through the screen door. The radio was on, tuned to an easy pop station. The strains of Elvin Bishop’s "Fool Around and Fell in Love" faded and the news guy came on with the hourly update...
"...all day, with firefighters continuing to battle severe fires in the region of Independence Lake since yesterday. New blazes were reported near Truckee, and in Placer county, stretching the already overtaxed resources of local and regional fire departments. Calls for relief from other fire departments as far south as Sacremento were going out, and a steady stream of relief crews have been reaching the exhausted smoke eaters in Nevada county. In other news, Nevada county residents have tied up police and emergency lines with a deluge of reports of strange lights in the skies over the last two days. Some of these apparent UFO sightings are being investigated by US Air Force personnel..."
Flying saucers. Jesus. Anyway, It was no Goddamn wonder there were fires burning all around them; everything was dry as tinder.
(Be funny if we got burned to a crisp out here.)
Julie and he had been going through a very rough patch in their five year marriage. It seemed like they were always at cross purposes these days, as if they were pulling in opposite directions on a taut rope. Not that there were a lot of histrionics; neither of them was really like that. It just seemed that if she said red, he said blue, as though they had lost their groove and nothing was working anymore.
Cathy and Rinaldo had offered the use of the cabin in the hopes that some time alone together away from the heat and rush (and anger) of the city might help. Mark knew he had problems of his own to work on; the drinking thing had quietly been getting a bit out of hand for the last year or so, but God knew he still loved her, he still felt the excitement of her warm compact presence in the cabin behind him, out of sight but not out of mind.
But she was so...so inert...so emotionally shut down. She was alive inside, he knew, with a torrent of outraged anger, but it was artfully concealed behind a facade of indifference. He supposed she knew perfectly well that he had always been able to cope with her anger, but the indifference really stung him. She was doing it now-quietly moving about the little kitchen, involved in her own thoughts, not giving him the satisfaction of expressing concern or anger or annoyance at his slow afternoon descent into beer soaked oblivion. His recent unemployed status was a subject she studiously avoided speaking about, but her tense angry silent treatment spoke volumes to him on the subject.
The rusting hinges of the old screen door squealed resignedly as Julie poked her head delicately through the doorway behind him. He sat with his back to her, unmoving, tense, waiting for her. He looked across the red brown dirt of the heavily sloping ground in front of the porch at a line of dry evergreen, shimmering in the rising heat, that marked the boundary of heavy woods to the south of the building, about 100 feet away. She stood silently behind him for what seemed like quite a while, as if she were waiting too and he grew nervous but still he did not turn. Finally, with an almost inaudible sigh, she spoke quietly. Gently.
"Marc...come inside...supper is ready..."
He winced as he heard the anguish in her voice.
____________________
Julie’s dinner was beautifully prepared and delicious; chicken with vegetables, rice and beans in a savoury sauce, fresh salad washed down with more ice cold beer, but the undercurrent of tension between them made the meal painful and difficult. The radio shut off now, a subtle sound scape was provided by the evocative murmur of the surrounding woods. Outside the sky deepened in colour and the room grew darker and slowly filled with a sepulchral orange glow.
Marc washed up the dinner things and then went and stood silently next to Julie as she gazed from the porch towards the west. The evening sky rose bloody crimson from the horizon to arch into a high purple vault. Miles overhead, thin wisps of insubstantial cloud raced, but all else was clear; clear, except for the dense columns of thick black smoke that loomed from several points of the compass all around their location.
Julie remained quiet and distant through out the lengthening evening and moved disconsolately about the sultry little cabin, then retired to a back bedroom with hardly a word. Later, as he lay nearly naked and sweating on a couch in the living room, a forgotten beer bottle on the floor beside him, she emerged, silently gliding like a ghost across the floor, her sheer cotton nightdress eddying in the pale moonlight and revealing her supple form beneath. He gazed up at her wordlessly, wondering. She lifted her insubstantial garment over her thighs and head, and bending to him, she gently removed the one article of clothing he wore then straddled him without a sound and began to make love to him at first with a slow undulating rhythm but then with increasing tempo and anger.
When they were both finished, she leaned forward and kissed him hard on the mouth, with tears streaming from her eyes, then as silently as before she withdrew him from herself and left him alone in the still room.
____________________
Marc awoke with a sudden start. The room was very dark but a deep red glow lit the windows on the south and west side of the building. He could smell the sharp acrid tang of smoke and hear the sound of blazing timber. He jumped to his feet and nearly fell, but recovering his balance he pulled on his shorts and work boots then moved quickly to the cabin door and peered out into the night. To the south and west, high fierce tongues of flame were snapping at the sky over the treetops. He dashed out into the open area in front of the house. A rain of sparks and cinders was gently floating down to the earth, and onto the dry wooden shingles of the cabin roof. As he stood gaping at the blazing landscape, he became suddenly aware that the wind had freshened considerably since dusk and was now blowing from the southwest to the northeast. The little cabin lay squarely in the path of an oncoming juggernaut of flame.
Julie!...Julie! Wake up! Come out here! Wake up!" He shouted at her as he ran to the side of the cabin. They would have to leave very quickly he knew, but he hoped to provide some chance of saving the little building from the incipient conflagration. God-he hoped the road weren’t already blocked.
"Marc-what is it!" she called.
"Oh my God!" Julie burst through the doorway, fear and confusion in her eyes, as he twisted a hose onto the bib at the bottom of the cistern. He aimed the jet of water at the roof of the building and began to spray the shingles, soaking them.
"Get to the truck, honey...hurry now! We’ve got to get the hell out of here!" He shouted. She yelped and spun on her heels, headed back towards the cabin.
"Where the hell are you going?" He screamed after her, struggling to make his voice heard over the rising pitch of the approaching inferno.
"Our stuff...my things...I’ve got to get our things..."
"Forget everything...forget all that shit...just get into the truck! We’ve got to go. Right now!"
"I’m not dressed!" she wailed. She had on the cotton nightdress.
"Jesus honey-You look fine!"
He pointed the hose at the porch and began to wet it down. By now, water was sluicing off the top of the building. He was about to go around to soak the back side, when a dead fall exploded with a deafening report some 200 yards off in the woods, sending an enormous shower of sparks and flaming debris whirling up into the sky. He decided the cabin was as damp as it was going to get and bolted for the drivers side of the Chevy.
(Blazer)
She had opened the door for him. He felt quickly for keys. She produced them, and there was a brief moment of silence between them and then she dropped the keys into his open palm.
" Let’s go Marc..." she said her voice low, urgent. He jumped into the driver’s seat and started the pick-up, jammed it into reverse and began wheeling around, the big tires throwing up a shower of earth and loam as they pawed for traction on the rough ground. He gunned the motor, threw it into first and stomped on the gas. The big engine roared throatily and the truck leapt forward, bouncing hard to the left as it hit an outcropping of rock. The pair were jolted from side to side in the cab, but they hung on and Marc floored it as he went into second. About 100 feet to the north there was a narrow opening in the timber that let onto a rough little road through the woods. It travelled a mile and a bit through heavy woods before coming to an unpaved county road. Marc was badly worried about that first mile, and he was already doing 40 by the time they entered the trees.
"Oh God, Marc-be careful!" Julie cried as the truck careened along the rocky laneway.
"It’s alright baby-new shocks!" He flashed her a quick grin. She did not appear amused. The truck gave a hard jolt as it hit a big spur, and he fought to hang onto the wheel as it wrenched around in his hands.
"Oh shit...shit..." she began to scramble for the seat belt.
"Don’t do that up-we may need to get out in a hurry-just hold on!" He yelled. Marc glanced quickly to the left and saw tongues of flame on that side. He rapidly pivoted his neck around and saw Julie’s frightened, flushed face silhouetted against an angry mass of flame to the east.
She looked lovely. So lovely. Weird shadows cast by the intense flames danced on her exquisite cheekbones.
He glanced forward and saw that, as he had feared, fires were burning on either side of the road in front of them. He could see that some burning timber had fallen across the track about an eighth of a mile in front. A quick glance in the rear view showed the area surrounding the cabin engulfed in a raging inferno.
No stopping. Don’t want to get encircled in here, he thought...He gunned the motor again and the vehicle surged forward.
"Hold on, Julie-Hold on baby!"
"Oh shit Marc-what the hell-fuck fuck fuck!" She screamed and tightened her grip on the door side armrest. The pickup went briefly airborne at about 60 over a hump in the road, and came down hard on the front wheels, slewing violently to the left and right as Marc struggled to correct. The Blazer smashed into the burning tree trunk with a terrifying ear splitting cracking sound. The flaming hulk of oily pine disintegrated into a huge mass of sparks and flame and they burst through the gauntlet of fire into clear dark air on the other side. Marc could see the countryside open up ahead of them where the long cottage driveway met the county road. He kept the pedal to the metal and made for the open ground.
"We’re gonna be alright baby!" He sang to Julie.
"Nothing to worry about now..."
____________________
The two tone Grecian Bronze and Santa Fe Tan 1975 Chevy Blazer with long scratches and scorch marks on the door panels and a severely dented front end pulled gradually to a stop on the gravel road, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils crooning "Jackie Blue" on the Delco AM/FM. In the sky overhead, massive low flying dark cloud formations moved restively. The driver, dressed in cut off jeans and a pair of unlaced work boots and nothing more, thrust his head out the driver’s side window and craned his neck up at the roiling cloud scape above the truck. His passenger, a pretty woman in a sheer cotton nightdress, peered out through the windshield at the burning fires and flashes of lightning away to the west. Suddenly, the radio cut out and the ignition on the Blazer died.
___________________
Marc and Julie approached the weathered barn with caution. They had been able to tell from further down the road that there was an aging farmhouse around to the right of the barn, further off the road. Julie had thought it looked more than a little like the one in "Night of the Living Dead" but she had tried to keep this to herself. She had the frightening idea that they both sensed something was deeply, seriously wrong with the world this evening, all the more dreadful a sensation for the fact that they didn’t seem to have to articulate this thought to share it. She considered the shiny new fact of her apparently enhanced perception; she suddenly seemed able to know her husband’s thoughts and feelings without him speaking, and she had the sense that he was experiencing the same phenomena himself. Their precipitous flight through the burning woods had them both pretty unstrung to start with, but what the hell was the deal with all this crazy weather? The rain falling torrentially in highly localized areas, 200 or 300 feet across, the sudden high swirling winds, vanishing as quickly as they blew up, the bright violent flashes of lightning, over lit by the eerie cast of smoke and flame from the fires in the vicinity all around them. Julie was genuinely frightened. Marc was alarmed but somewhat less frightened; or perhaps he was merely trying harder to conceal it.
After attempting to restart the truck, they had agreed to check out this little group of old buildings to see if anyone had a booster cable, and could maybe give them a jumpstart. Now they had gingerly approached close enough that the view of the house was blocked by the big old barn with it’s silver grey weather beaten siding, Marc in front and protectively shielding her.
"Hey...hello?...Anybody home?" Marc called tentatively
"Anybody here? Anybody got a booster cable by any chance?" he called, a little more strongly this time.
"There doesn’t seem to be anybody around, honey." She had been thinking he would say this. He began to turn towards her as they came around the edge of the barn, to where they could see the farm house.
The heavy old barn doors, which had been slightly ajar, swung open in a gust of wind. They both heard, before they saw anything, an unintelligible slew of pleading terrified sounds. A tall heavy set man wearing overalls and a coarse shirt, possibly in his fifties, stood in the centre of the barn. They both noted simultaneously that his big shoulders were hunched in a tensed posture. He seemed to be in the act of begging for his life. His back was to them, but he turned his head ever so slowly and glanced at them with an expression of desperate horror on his face. Slowly, implacably, the perception of an unearthly myriad of spectral radiating colours of light intimated itself on to their mute naked consciousness. They seemed to see or rather feel colours that could not be known, colours from a spectrum as yet undiscovered; colours from a spectrum that somehow shouldn’t - no, really mustn’t be.
In a now shockingly hideous sort of slow motion, their field of vision seemed to widen; they became gradually aware of the thing, the entity, that glowed radiantly with it’s peculiar impossible bandwidth of alien chroma. The heavyset man renewed his incomprehensibly gurgled pathetic appeal. Marc had the feeling that if the singing, buzzing, colour didn’t shut off very soon he would go irreversibly insane in about 45 more seconds; Julie felt as though her eyes were being penetrated by minute razor sharp steel needles. While everything else seemed to move in a horribly nauseating slow torpidity, the thing rapidly advanced on the man and he issued a high shrill yell of abject terror. The thing had a sort of swirling whirlpool of plasma where it’s face would have been (if it had possessed a face as such) but in this spinning halo of energy a black void appeared and an owl like beak emerged. It gripped the man’s head and his big heavy body began to thrash around like an enormous game fish. Then the thing subsumed the man quickly, his tortured shrieks abruptly choking off as he was devoured.
That’s interesting, thought Julie with a kind of matter of fact detached horror; apparently this alien creature has the ability to somehow liquify or disassociate it’s prey on contact, like some sort of great big multi coloured spider...She sensed Marc’s amusement at this reflection in the middle of his helpless dread. Julie began to shake and sob; Marc, reaching for her, put his arms around her naked shuddering shoulders, as he too began to tremble involuntarily.
They stood clutching one another for support. The creature gave a convulsive heave and a round white mass about the size of a pumpkin began to emerge from somewhere inside of it, dropping down on the earthen barn floor with a sickeningly loud wet sound; the two watched in terror stricken fascination as the large egg like gelatinous sac began to expand and change colour, the thing entering into some kind of symbiosis with its offspring by the device of a tubular translucent appendage that appeared from where the egg had originated and began to caress and massage the squirming gelid orb. As it did so, Marc and Julie both became aware that they were receiving some kind of emanations from the creature. It seemed to focus it’s attention on them momentarily, and they began to be washed with a series of impressions, images and intuited bits of information transmitted telepathically. They both knew that the other was receiving this telepathic transmission, and were similiarly aware that the thing was scanning their minds and personalities as it did so, for reasons that they could not understand.
The unwelcome but inescapable probing of their consciousness imparted the understanding that the creature had no need to consume them like the unfortunate farmer, although had it needed to it would have done so without any hesitation or remorse. The creature also conveyed a rudimentary sense of its species and culture to them, but they were incapable of wholly comprehending the impression they received of a rapacious practicality, a kind of entirely self serving logical rationality that had no use for the concepts of mercy or virtue that it found in their heads and rejected as useless and absurd. Then, the area that ought to have comprised the creature’s face seemed to somehow coalesce into a more static form and what looked like a pair of eyes became discernible in the transparent multi coloured three dimensional structure of it’s cranial region. Rapidly, a number of images flashed inside the creature’s semi rigid skull, like a sort of holographic cinema. A sequence of images from both human, and the alien’s history were displayed, followed by a number of mathematical formulas. Marc and Julie understood that there was a deep significance to this information, but they were unable to grasp what it was; then the scale of the programme inside the creature’s head grew larger, and they saw and felt an image of themselves playing with their as yet unborn children. The image rotated crisply several times to display the sequence from a number of angles as it played. Julie and Marc now understood that the time had come to leave the barn, and they felt themselves slowly retreating from the interior into the night outside.
The next thing they were conscious of was standing some quarter mile on the other side of the farmhouse, watching a giant metallic craft studded with lights of piercing intensity, as it lifted from behind a wood lot and rose slowly above their heads then accelerated upward at an impossible speed and disappeared.
______________________
They were back inside the Blazer. Heading back to the city. Marc looked at Julie, and she returned his gaze; it seemed they were going to be allowed to keep some portion of the telepathic communion they had inherited from their encounter with the entity.
(Whether they wanted it or not)
"Maybe it will wear of..." he thought.
"Uhhm...maybe so..." she thought. She was aware, and would have been without any telepathic ability, that he was struggling to accept the uncomfortable new awareness of the complexity and mystery of their universe, the universe they now knew they shared with the entity, and a race of others like it. She likewise grappled with the profound sense of physical and spiritual horror and loathing she was experiencing.
They drove through the fresh clear night. There was a cooler on the backseat. Ice cold beer inside. Julie reached around and pulled out a frosty one, cracked it, and took a long swallow. Cold frothy foam rushed from the bottle and ran down it’s neck. She looked over at him and offered the bottle to him. He took a hand from the wheel and reached for it, threw his head back and took a pull, then tossed the half full bottle out the window of the Chevy. He grinned at her as he reached over and gently, tenderly brushed tears from her smiling face.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, born on this date in Dublin, Ireland during the Napoleonic era, was a masterful practioner of the short story and particularly the ghost story. Le Fanu came from literary stock; his great-uncle was the well known playright Richard Brinsley Sheridan1.
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