knew what it was. I think most of us knew, on some deep level, the moment we saw it enhanced. We just couldn’t accept it. Psychological block. We argued our way right through the truth, until the truth was behind us and we didn’t have to see it anymore. I deluded myself, like all the rest, but I don’t delude myself anymore.”
He settled into silence. A gurgle and splash indicated that he was pouring something out of a bottle into a glass. He took a drink of it.
In silence, Bobby and I sucked at our beers.
I wondered if you could get beer in this world of the red sky and the fleshy black trees. Although I like a beer occasionally, I would have no difficulty living without it. Now, however, this bottle of Corona in my hand was the avatar of all the countless humble pleasures of daily life, of all that could be lost through human arrogance, and I held fast to it as though it were more precious than diamonds, which in one sense it was.
Delacroix began to speak in that incomprehensible tongue again, and this time he murmured the same few words over and over, as though chanting in a whisper. As before, though I couldn’t understand one word, there was a familiarity in these syllables and in the cadence of his speech that sent a corkscrew chill through the hollows of my spine.
“He’s drunk or kooking out,” Bobby said. “Maybe both.”
When I began to worry that Delacroix would not continue with his revelations, he switched to English.
“Should never have sent a manned expedition across. Wasn’t on the schedule. Not for years, maybe not ever. But there was another project at Wyvern, one of many others, where something went wrong. I don’t know what. Something big. Most of the projects, I think…they’re just money-burning machines. But something went too right in this one. The top brass were scared shitless. Lot of pressure came down on us, pressure for the Mystery Train to speed up. They wanted a good look at the future. To see whether there was any future. They didn’t quite put it that way, but everyone involved with the train thought that was their motivation. To see whether this screwup on the other project was going to have major consequences. So against everyone’s better judgment, or almost everyone’s, we put together the first expedition.”
Another silence.
Then more rhythmic, whispery chanting.
Bobby said, “There’s your mom, bro. The ‘other project,’ the one that got the top brass scared about the future.”
“So she wasn’t part of the Mystery Train.”
“The train was just…reconnaissance. Or that’s all it was meant to be. But something went way wrong there, too. In fact, maybe what went wrong with the train was the worse of the two.”
I said, “What do you think was on that videotape? The flying thing, I mean.”
“I’m hoping the man is gonna tell us.”
The whispering continued for a minute or more, and in the middle of it, Delacroix hit the
When he resumed recording, he was in a new location. The sound quality wasn’t as good as before, and there was a steady background noise.
“Car engine,” Bobby said.
Engine noise, a faint whistle of wind, and the hum of tires racing over pavement: Delacroix was on the move.
His driver’s license had given an address in Monterey, a couple hours up the coast. He must have left his family’s bodies there.
A whispering arose. Delacroix was talking to himself in such a low voice that we could barely discern he was speaking in the unknown language. Gradually, the muttering faded away.
After a silence, when he began to speak louder and in English, his voice wasn’t as clear as we would have liked. The microphone wasn’t as close to his mouth as it should have been. The recorder was either on the seat beside him or, more likely, balanced on the dashboard.
His depression had given way to fear again. He spoke faster, and his voice frequently cracked with anxiety.
“I’m on Highway 1, driving south. I sort of remember getting in the car but not…not driving this far. I poured gasoline over them. Set them on fire. I half remember doing it. Don’t know why I didn’t…why I didn’t kill myself. Took the rings off her finger. Brought some pictures from the album. It didn’t want me to. I took the time…anyway. And the recorder. It didn’t want me to. I guess I know where I’m going. I guess I know, all right.”
Delacroix wept.
Bobby said, “He’s losing control.”
“But not the way you mean.”
“Huh?”
“He’s not losing his mind. He’s losing control to…something else.”
As we listened to Delacroix weep, Bobby said, “You mean losing control to…?”
“Yeah.”
“To whatever was fluttering.”
“Yeah.”
“Everyone died. Everyone on the first expedition. Three men, one woman. Blake, Jackson, Chang, and Hodgson. And only one came back. Only Hodgson came back. Except it wasn’t Bill Hodgson in the suit.”
Delacroix cried out with sudden pain, as if he’d been stabbed.
The tortured cry was followed by an astonishing spell of violent cursing: every obscenity I had ever heard or read, plus others that either weren’t part of my education or were invented by Delacroix, a vile torrent of rapid-fire vulgarities and blasphemies. This stream of raw filth was venomously ejected, snarled and shouted with a fury so blazing that I felt seared even when exposed to only the recording of it.
Evidently, Delacroix’s vocal outburst was accompanied by erratic driving. His cursing was punctuated by the blaring horns of passing cars and trucks.
The cursing sputtered to a stop. The last of the horns faded. For a while Delacroix’s raggedly drawn breaths were the loudest sounds on the tape. Then:
“Kevin, maybe you remember, you once told me that science alone couldn’t give us meaningful lives. You said science would actually make life unlivable if it ever explained everything to us and robbed the universe of mystery. We desperately need our mystery, you said. In the mystery is the hope. That’s what you believe. Well, what I saw over on the other side…. Kevin, what I saw over there is more mystery than a million years of scientists can explain. The universe is stranger than we ever conceived…and yet, at the same time, it’s eerily like our most primitive concepts of it.”
He drove in silence for a minute or so and then began to murmur to himself in that cryptic language.
Bobby said, “Who’s Kevin?”
“His brother? Earlier, he referred to him as ‘big brother.’ I think Kevin might be a reporter somewhere.”
Still speaking what was gibberish to us, Delacroix shut off the recorder. I was afraid this was the last piece of an incomplete testament, but then he returned.
“Pumped cyanide gas into the translation capsule. That didn’t kill Hodgson, or what had come back in Hodgson’s place.”
“Translation capsule,” Bobby said.
“The egg room,” I guessed.
