Forever never ends

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Driving yourself crazy.

What else could you call it when your car almost seemed to steer itself, when the road beneath the wheels was predetermined, when God’s skyhook towed you toward an unknown destination?

No. Tamara wasn’t heading toward craziness. She was either already there or miles from it, saner now than she had ever been. The green light on the ridge above her grew stronger as she approached, and though the curving dirt road often took the glow out of her sight, the electric throb in her head was constant, more intense with each heartbeat.

She’d slammed some breezy, take-it-easy Jackson Browne into the tape deck, as if mindless melancholy were the proper soundtrack for this unwanted mission. As she ascended, and the road grew more rough and rutted, the forest had taken on a dark look, the canopy hiding quick shadows. The houses had grown sparser along the way, here and there tucked in little glens, gray outbuildings warped with age amid pastures worn low by diseased-looking cattle.

Tamara downshifted and cut around a particularly steep curve, and for a moment the world fell away at the shoulder of the road, and she could see Windshake below, brick and wood blocks with some sunset lights already on, the uneven highway leading away from town like a black river. Jackson sang something about not being confronted with his failures, as if the mirror didn’t do that to every human being on earth. Then she was between the trees again, and the creeping insistent voice tickled the top of her spine.

Shu-shaaa tah-mah-raaa.

The Gloomies were around, floating, seeping, flowing. If she couldn't come to them, they would come to her, or perhaps they would collide with each other. She hadn’t dreamed this part. Or maybe this was a waking dream, one where her own life was the centerpiece, not her father’s or her children’s. This was the forest of night, the oaks surreal and the pines undulating their branches, the tint of the leaves slightly off-kilter, as if viewed through a smudged kaleidoscope.

She took another curve, skidding on the moist stones where a ditch leaked spring water across the sodden road. The tires spun and caught, but as she straightened the wheel to head deeper up the cut of the mountain, the bank on the far side gave way and a gnarled giant oak fell toward the Toyota.

She swerved, but the thick branches batted the side of the car in falling, cracking the windshield. The weight of the tree nudged the Toyota into the ditch, bottoming out the car and leaving the left front wheel hanging suspended. She shifted into four-wheel drive, but the mud, the tangled grip of the tree branches, and the grounded oil pan kept the Toyota from doing anything more than quivering in place.

After a minute of revving the engine, Tamara tried to open her door. It was pinned by a splintered branch as thick as her arm, its new leaves pressed against the glass in greasy smears. Up close, the leaves looked as if they had turgid blue veins, like the varicose veins of an old person.

She crawled across the seat to the passenger door, opened it, and wriggled out. She stood and looked at the oak, with its gray bark and dark knotholes that seemed to be watchful eyes. The exposed roots, thrust up from the soil, undulated like white worms.

No. The tree isn’t alive, not in THAT sense of the word.

She looked past the fallen oak to the forest beyond, which was pocked here and there with granite outcroppings. Other trees lay fallen or bent, almost in a line up the slope. The destruction led in the direction of the glow, and she could see a faint shimmering between the stick figures of the trees.

Tamara sensed a change in the atmosphere, as if a storm was approaching, but the clouds of sunset were thin and red. The thing, the source, the shu-shaaa, had brought her here, and now she was alone. Now the tide had turned, giving the advantage to whatever strange force haunted the ridge top. The air was electric with it, and the March wind carried its taint.

She should have gone home. Robert would be sitting at the kitchen table with milk and cookies for himself and the kids, frowning as he watched the hands spin on their wooden owl clock. Then his face would become a rictus of anger as the Six O’clock News came and went on the television. Then he'd put on a mask of studied calm while at the same time trying to reassure the kids by telling them their mother was probably out picking up pizzas. Even though it wasn't like her to just take off without leaving a message and refusing to carry her cell phone.

She looked around at the forest shadows that grew long like sharp arms. Small animals chittered in the tangled boughs and tree limbs creaked in brittle agony. Red buds and bright green sprigs fought toward the sinking sun in painful birth. Trees screamed into the sky as if burning alive. Even the loamy soil cried from the harsh clutch of roots.

The MOUNTAIN is not talking to ME.

Tamara clasped her hands over her ears as if to block out the unwelcome call of the wild. But the sound was already inside, circling the globe of her brain, spinning its fibrous web in her psyche. She leaned against the Toyota, bright sparks streaking behind her closed eyes. The Gloomies had joined in harmony with the forest’s raging chorus.

She fell to her knees on the weedy roadside. Among the clatter of bonelike wood and harping briar and babbling brook and frenzied fern, she didn't hear the footsteps kicking leaves as they neared. But she didn't need to hear, because she felt.

She looked up to see a teenager standing over her. He had dark hair and a Bulls jacket and a wide jaw, a typical teenager who happened to walk out of nowhere-normal, everyday, out-of-the-ordinary-his flesh swollen and moist. Menace flashed in his eyes, which glittered deep and green and empty. Tenderness flashed in his blissful smile, showing petrified teeth. And now he groped her with mental hands.

Because he was one of the Gloomies, part of whatever had been niggling at her mind like a loose jumper-wire. And she was inside his mind now, only his mind was pulp and mush, a fruity tree made paper. A name, yes, " shu-shaaa " was his name, and it was also "Wade." But that made no sense. Then again, nothing did at the moment. No sense, only a sensing.

And she was pounded with the impression that she'd better fall beyond his reach, because he wanted to make an offer. An offering. Of her.

Then his hand was on her shoulder, pulling at the fabric of her blouse, loosening her bra strap and exposing her shoulder to the fading sunlight. He pulled her close, his breath like a dead mist rising over the wooden corpses of a windfall. And in his touch, she felt the parent behind him and inside him. She felt its hunger, its instinct, its will to possess.

She saw the vision it carried in its hot seed of a heart: the great shu-shaaa reunited, the bright pinwheel of galaxies folding back upon itself, the nebulous clouds of space being summoned home, matter consumed and excreted as dark matter, the universe swallowing its own tail.

Then, after the hands of time reversed, after the sand had been stuffed back into the top of the hourglass, after history was once again unwritten and unmade, only a calm black nothingness would remain. The horrible eternal peace of a collapsed cosmos, with not a glimmer of light or life. She saw the future.

The vision came through a single touch. But now the touch was gone and the contact no longer burned, because she dropped on her back and kicked at the teenager. His flesh yielded like an overripe peach.

The initial stunning power of the psychic invasion had eased. The impressions of galactic anticlimax still stormed Tamara’s mind, but she compartmentalized them, put them aside for later study. First she needed to survive.

The teen fell away, but approached again like a drugged snail. The boy throbbed, pulsed with dewy joy, steaming like a hothouse orchid. Tamara instinctively knew he wanted to rape her. Not just a rape of orifice and flesh, but a violation of her deeper self. Her organic being, her fluid and cells and neurons and synapses, her blood and spit and sweat. Her soul.

She rolled to her feet and grabbed for the car door. Her fingernails screeched across the sheet metal until she found the door handle, then she was diving inside, banging her knee on the gear shift as she struggled into the bucket seat. She slammed the door just as the boy reached into the Toyota.

Tamara heard a sound like green beans snapping as the car's weight shifted. No surprise flashed across those fluorescent eyes as his severed fingers dropped into her lap. She slapped them into the floorboard, and milky fluid leaked from the wounds. Even disconnected from their host, the fingers worked, wriggling in some blind and silent search.

Then the boy's face was low on the windshield, soggy lips pressed against the glass in a cold kiss. The eyes gleamed longingly as oozing palms searched the glass, seeking entry. Tamara slammed down the door lock.

Did the shu-shaaa thing, the source of her Gloomies, have knowledge of locks?

She sensed that shu-shaaa was growing strong, eating the mountain, spreading like kudzu, soaking up sun and water and bacteria. It was ravenous, like the boy at her window who ached to convert her, to consume her energy and reduce her to a rotting husk. Just as its parent would leave the entire world as a husk after it had taken its fill.

No more voices. No more doubt.

All that was left was survival in a world gone mad.

Tamara crawled into the back seat and put her hand on the door lever. The boy sloughed his way down the side of the car, his marred hand leaving a wet trail on the glass. He moved slowly, but Tamara wasn’t sure that flight was wise. She could outrun this one, but she sensed that others of his kind were out there. Lots of others.

Still, she couldn’t stay here all night. It might be hours before anyone passed this stretch of nowhere road. Or it might be tomorrow. Mountain folks had a tendency to turn in early. And how could she expect help when the entire mountain seemed allied against her?

She decided to risk it. If she followed the road, she would soon come to a house. And with the moon coming out, she didn't really need light to avoid the others who had become infected- converted — like the boy had. She could easily pick up their chaotic vibes, because her sensitivity seemed to have grown with the nearness of the shu-shaaa, as if the Gloomies were as psychically tuned in to her as she was to them.

Whatever had shaped the mind or consciousness or soul that called itself shu-shaaa, it was growing stronger and more at ease in this environment.

In its natural environment.

And its understanding of Tamara mirrored her own understanding of it.

“Mah-raaa…” the boy said. “Tah-mah-raaa…”

Oh, God. It’s speaking. It knows my NAME.

Tamara flipped the latch and then kicked the door open with both feet, shoving the boy backward. As he staggered, she hopped to the roadbed. She ran toward the east in the direction she had driven up. She took one glance back at the boy, who stumped slowly after her, his feetless legs- no, STEMS, not legs — scissoring with a wretched slosh.

She heard its pathetic call with both her ears and her mind.

"Shu-shaaa… mah-raaa… eyezzzz.”

But underneath that voice, which was piped directly from whatever force drove the Gloomies, inside the blissful mist of that cosmic possessor, Tamara sensed the human part, the boy who wished he were somewhere getting high or flirting with cheerleaders or singing in the church choir. The part that was aware enough to know what it once was and could no longer be. The part that screamed inside, even while the parent hummed its pacific lullabies.

Then she fled down the road. She wasn't a jogger, but she exercised daily and found the work was paying off. Of course, she never thought her life might depend on it. Even one who sometimes saw the future wasn't always prepared for the worst.

Her mind turned cartwheels as she covered her first quarter mile with darkness falling like a dark shroud from above. She was out of immediate range of whatever had clogged her senses, the raging mountain that had croaked its appetite upon the world.

She tried to understand what could have brought something like that into the world. But maybe it had always been there, somewhere across a billion skies, across the not-quite-endless universe.

And it was not only growing, it was learning. It had adapted to the strange environment and was evolving in order to survive, assimilating itself into the biosystem. Or, perhaps, it was assimilating that system into itself in a mutual transference, a symbiosis where both predator and prey were the same.

Because it knew her name…

She was so lost in her thoughts that the car was almost upon her around the bend before she saw it. Its headlights washed over her as she jumped to the side of the road. Her ankle twisted as she fell in the ditch. The car slid to a halt, tires rasping on the gravel as they grabbed for traction. A door opened, lighting up the passenger compartment.

"You okay?" called a voice. She counted the heads of three men. Risky, even here in the low-crime region of the mountains. Still, she didn't have much choice, if she wanted to get home before the sun rose. Before the Gloomies swarmed.

"Uh, sure," she said, limping cautiously to the open door. “Had a breakdown up the road.”

“Yeah, saw the car,” an old man in the front seat said. He talked with the rural drawl that marked him as a native. “And the… uh.. boy…”

Under the interior light, she made out the faces of the men inside the Mercedes. The man in the back seat, who looked to be in his fifties, was well-dressed and had friendly blue eyes. The driver wore an expensive suit, his styled blond hair trimmed evenly three inches above his collar. He seemed a little nervous. She watched in the rearview mirror as his eyes kept flicking to the leather-faced old man beside him.

"Hop in, young lady,” said the man in back. “You don't want to be out there on a night like this.” He slid over behind the driver. “I’m Herbert DeWalt. Your chauffeur is Kyle Emerland and that there’s Chester Mull.”

“Tamara,” she said. “Tamara Leon. Thanks for the lift.”

Tamara got into the seat he’d vacated and looked at the two men up front as the Mercedes pulled away. They had driven out into an open stretch of valley, with hay fields on both sides. The rising moon bathed the valley, making the distant ridges look creamy and vague. She almost relaxed. Then she saw that the old man in the front passenger seat had a shotgun.

"Don't be alarmed, ma'am,” DeWalt said. “Nobody's going to hurt you. We're on a little business trip here."

Chester turned and grinned at her, showing his few teeth as if they were precious jewels. A dark knot of tobacco was lodged in one jaw. He smelled as if he had crawled out of a whiskey barrel.

"Ain't a fit night for man nor beast. Nor woman, for that matter," he said, glancing appreciatively at her face. "We don't mind the company nary bit. You got green eyes, but they're the right kind of green.”

"Hush, Chester," DeWalt said. "We don't need to frighten her any more than she already is."

The driver glanced at the shotgun. Chester tilted the gun toward him. "Nothing to be scared of, Emerland, as long as you don’t drive over any big potholes and make my trigger finger slip," he said to the driver.

"Emerland," Tamara said. “You’re the developer.”

Emerland beamed a little at the recognition, even though his eyes twitched with anxiety.

"Nothing personal, but I heard you were a real jerk," she said. DeWalt and Chester laughed. Emerland seemed to shrink in his seat a little.

"Goddamn, look out!" Chester yelled. Emerland yanked the wheel, dodging the figure that seemed to have risen from the roadbed out of nowhere. Tamara heard a thump against the rear quarter panel.

“Did I just hit somebody?” Emerland’s eyes were wide in the rearview mirror.

"It was a frigging mushbrain," Chester said, gurgling from a mouthful of brown saliva. He relieved his burden onto the Mercedes’s burgundy carpet. "Saw its green eyes flashing. Sonuvawhores must be all over the place by now. Keep driving before it decides to stand up again.”

Chester pointed the shotgun again for additional encouragement. Emerland floored the Mercedes and kicked up a rash of gravel. Emerland’s cell phone rang, and Chester lifted it from the seat, cracked open his door, and chucked the phone out of the car. “Don’t want you blabbing to your buddies before we’re done,” Chester said to Emerland.

"We were right, Chester,” DeWalt said. “I don't know if it's a disease, but it seems to be spreading. That's what-the fourth one of them?”

Tamara startled them by saying, "There are dozens by now."

DeWalt and Chester turned to her and Emerland dared a glance in the mirror.

“It’s up on the mountain, whatever it is,” she said. “The thing that caused all this.”

"Hey, that's what we was thinking…" Chester trailed away.

"I know about them," she said, not sure how to begin. “They’ve been in my head… I see things.”

She knew she sounded insane, but the world was insane, as if God had tipped the universe upside down and shaken the laws of existence. And right now, she needed allies. Some madnesses were best shared. Robert was miles away, safe with the kids. At least, she hoped they were safe. She’d have to trust Robert to take care of the family while she dealt with this.

“You see things." Emerland shook his head. “Christ. I’ve been kidnapped by a traveling freak show."

"Shut up and drive,” Chester said. "And don't open your yap till we get to your dynamite shed. You seen them things as plain as we did." He turned to the back seat, giving Tamara his wet, crooked smile. "Go ahead, now. We're listening."

She told them about her knack for seeing the future, the quick version, no frills and no embarrassment. It was the first time she'd ever told anyone besides Robert. It gave her confidence somehow, to tell a bunch of strangers who weren't in a position to be skeptical. But it also made the clairvoyant gift seem more real than ever before, as if she could no longer deny it, even to herself. They didn't laugh once.

As the Mercedes slid through the greasy night onto the main highway, she described the shu-shaaa, what she had sensed from the forest and the boy. She told them about its "cosmic mission," realizing as she explained it just how farfetched it sounded. They didn't interrupt, only nodded and grunted. When she finished, DeWalt told her about the Earth Mouth they had found.

"That's it," she said. "The strange music I heard that wasn't really music. It's the source. Its voice.”

“You mean it talks? ” Chester said.

“It called me by my name. Through the boy.”

Chester had lowered his shotgun so that the occasional passing motorist wouldn't see it in the flash of headlights. He said, "Ordinarily, I'd call it a bunch of hippie claptrap and think somebody's been smoking some funny weed. But I seen it with my own eyes, and ain't no dope ever filled this old head. But something's as fucked up as a football bat, and it ain't just me. They’re like zombie creeps in some picture show."

"Well, it's got its ‘mission,’ as you say, Tamara," DeWalt said. "And we have ours."

He told her about their plan to dynamite the cave. "We know it's probably a job for the military or the FBI or whoever has jurisdiction over alien invasions-"

"But it would take days, maybe weeks, before you convinced somebody you weren't crazy,” Tamara said, the resident expert in being called crazy. “And it’s getting stronger by the minute. I can feel it. It’s learning about the world, growing, getting smarter."

Chester peered at her with one bleary eye, crow's feet crinkling as he squinted. "One more thing's bothering me. Hell, lots of things is. But what’s this ‘ shu-shaaa ’ business?"

"Maybe it absorbed the sound from some life form in the woods. Something it converted. But the boy tried to talk to me. So it must be learning language. Human language."

"I expect it already knows tree talk, then. And the talk of pigs and chickens and whatever rot Don Oscar’s head was filled with. Maybe that explains why old Boomer was trying to bark but kept on making them swampy sounds."

"And the people who have turned, they still have some of their own thoughts, but the thoughts are trapped and mixed in with the parent, the shu-shaaa."

"I'm no Einstein," DeWalt said, "but what you're saying doesn't really follow what we know about physics."

"Well, Einstein didn’t know about this thing, either," Tamara said. “Rules are made to be broken.”

DeWalt thought for a moment and nodded, then looked out the window.

Chester turned to her again. "You say there's more of these dirt-bag zombiemakers up in the sky somewhere?"

Tamara nodded. "All heading for their version of heaven, nirvana, whatever you want to call it. This may sound corny, but each is like a spirit energy going home, and one day, maybe ten thousand, maybe ten million years from now, they'll join together and… "

Emerland shook his head again. Chester looked out the window at the stars. DeWalt said, "And what, Tamara? You're preaching to the converted here. You’re the closest thing to an expert we might ever have."

"They'll become a god."

“Shit fire,” Chester said.

They rode on in silence as the pavement sloped up toward Sugarfoot.