runs. Away from the center of the circle. She runs out of view of the disembodied ceiling observer, and the thing crawls so fast around and across the surface of the invisible barrier, scuttling spider- fast, as Lynda lurches too late to catch her daughter.
All through this, Meaghan’s whisper has never stopped.
“Don’t you want to know really why we love you so? Because you’re just like us, just one of us, all part of us and us part of you. We ate you all up, we did. You made the spell work, you made the monster back into mommy and me with that magic from my blood, but we’re still it and it’s still in you, it’s always been in you, changing you inside, one slow cell at a time, because your spell can’t protect you that small.”
The dream camera coldly documents what follows. The burst of dark fluid that sprays into the circle. A woman’s severed arm lands on the floor, a foot lands another place, snakelike black limbs greedily snatch them up, gulp them down. The man’s face a mask of horror, but he doesn’t stop his chant, even as the multi-limbed thing joins him within the invisible aquarium, squeezing in through the opening made when the outer circle was fatally crossed. The dream- Delmar doesn’t stop his chant, even when the creature sends long hooked limbs around the burning inner circle to hook into his vulnerable belly, punch in and drag out the gray ropes coiled inside. The man’s face contorts in unspeakable agony and mystic ecstasy as he howls his final syllables. And it’s at that moment that the inner circle surges in a pillar of blinding fire, and the film changes to color,
“But, Daddy, the part of us inside you is going to wake up. And then we’ll be together like we should be and you’ll never be alone again. You’ll never, ever, ever be left alone. When you hear my voice, I’m saying other words too, words that you can’t hear, but the sleeping part of me that’s inside you can. It hears me and it wants to wake up. And when it does, that voice you always hear won’t really be yours. It’ll be ours. And we’ll trick you, and you’ll ruin the spell. We’ll trick you, Daddy, when we wake up.”
The burning circle, now a blackened spot in a beautiful pasture. And the man, his body whole, his clothes changed to suit his surroundings, picks himself up as he watches a black mass shrink and thicken and transform into a new, familiar shape. But only one shape. Never two.
And behind them, at the edge of the pasture, the fog. And above them, the grey clouds that will never, ever lift.
A tickling at his ear, a whisper.
“Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.”
He springs awake and gropes for the lamp. The bulb casts its light across the comfortable contours of his bedroom.
His wife lies on her side, sleeping peacefully, her back to him, the cartoon cat on her favorite nightshirt flashing its inane grin.
From under her collar a dark tendril stretches, no thicker than a strand of yarn. Its end rests on his pillow, bulging out into a plush- lipped mouth that nestles beside the indentation where his head had rested. It continues to mouth words as if it doesn’t know he’s not there any more.
Delmar trembles, staring at the tiny mutant mouth that mutters in his daughter’s voice. His eyes bulge. Tears smear his cheeks. All the barriers he’s built inside his own mind to survive day to day in this world he created for his family, for what remains of them, have crumbled. He comprehends everything.
He only ever hears Meaghan’s voice when it speaks from Lynda’s body. Confronting this truth isn’t what was causing him such disgust and dismay. What rips deep inside him, aggravating once again that pricking beneath his skin: never before has that voice turned against him, said things that Meaghan herself would never have said.
He leaves the bedroom, comes back with the book. Sets it down. Sits on the edge of the bed beside Lynda, sets to work with a blowtorch and knife. His tears never stop.
He returns to the book, starts to read aloud.
It’s dark beneath the ever-present clouds, but he knows the way. He walks across the verdant pastures that always stay green and thick with grass no matter how long the animals graze. He walks past the burnt circle, its ember glow patterns pulsating brighter than he’s ever seen, a silent blare of strident warning. He leaves the circle behind, strides into the fog, consumed by the message he needs to deliver.
The rustling of his feet through the damp grass grows muffled in the dense mist, then fades altogether. It’s as if his steps alight on the fog itself.
He takes ten strides, twenty, thirty, and then, as abruptly as a bird striking glass, the fog ends. His land ends. The entire world ends.
Beyond the edge: an ocean of inhuman flesh, seen from undersea.
Just as the protective circle he drew in his horribly failed attempt to save his wife and daughter gave rise to a clear fishbowl barrier against the things it was intended to keep out, so does this island of sanity built from his daughter’s blood and his father’s rambling stories terminate at a barrier, one that shuts out the madness that swallowed the earth whole. He and what’s left of his family — that disgusting black thing, forced to take the form of his wife when the spell touched her piecemeal remains, but not enough of his daughter left to take form too, only a voice — he and his family dwell now in this single pocket of peace, a bubble in the belly of the all-consuming beast.
On the other side of that barrier, pressed hard against it, pink translucent ropes thick as tanker trucks pulse and swell as rivers of ichor flow through their veiny channels. These titanic kraken tentacles move slowly, like slugs on glass, and plasma churns and boils in the spaces between them. Sometimes the bubbles look like faces. Sometimes smaller things squeeze in between the vast squirming limbs, enormous urchins with eyes lining and crowning the spines, or amoebic creatures that spontaneously form mouths or multi-jointed arms as they flow bonelessly through the cramped liquid spaces. Sometimes gray skinless beings, sculpted crudely humanoid, emerge and scrabble desperately against the invisible barricade before the currents sweep them back into the sickening organic soup.
Delmar understands all now. If the clouds ever parted above and around his farm, these sights would form his heaven and his horizon.
He stares into the nausea- inducing chaos, unblinking, and speaks. “I’ll keep them alive, as long as I can.” He spreads his arms. “I’ll keep this alive, as long as I can. I’ll never, ever give you what you want.”
Behind the sliding pink tentacles, a vast eye peels open. Even through the layers of wormy flesh, he can see it.
And when it opens, pores gape all along the massed coils of pink, translucent flesh. They gape and flex like octopus siphons sucking water. Perhaps it’s these that make the noise Delmar hears as countless whispers speaking in one voice.
While the orifices whisper, an immense mouth yaws apart above the eye. Things crawl inside its lips. And somewhere inside the crawling darkness, a man screams. He howls in such a magnitude of pain that Delmar can’t begin to imagine what’s being done to him. The man screams and screams, over and over — then perhaps there comes a fraction of respite, for the howls crumble into high-pitched and pathetic sobs. Maybe there are words, repeated pleas, but Delmar can’t make them out before the screams start again, and the mouth closes, sealing them away.
The voice of the screaming, sobbing man — it is his own voice. The voice of his future self, once his safe haven has perished.
Delmar’s eyes are wet and bright and knowing. But his voice doesn’t waver. “I’ll keep them alive. As long as I can.”
As he retreats into the fog, the million-strong voice whispers back.
Light streams through the open kitchen window as Delmar slices onions for the omelets. The soothing breeze accepts his invitation to drift inside.
Delmar has the vaguest memory of an upsetting night, but a voice whispers in his ear, his own voice, telling him he has to forget for now, compartmentalize, or the weight of knowledge will keep him from what happiness he has left, with what’s left of his family, in the time he has left.
Whatever it was, it hardly seems to matter now. He breathes in the warm, sweet air that mingles with the smell of his own cooking and knows he can handle whatever life has to throw at him.
