Forever never ends

CHAPTER TWO

A black cloud crawled across the sky, scrubbing the top of Bear Claw as it headed east. Little gray dots of cumulus followed in its trail like deformed cows bound for pasture. At sunrise, the clouds had been spread as thin as apple butter. In the few hours since, they had clumped up like they meant business. And this time of year, raining was the sky’s main piece of business.

Chester Mull rubbed the knots of his hands together, hoping the friction would melt the arthritis away. March in the High Country was always miserable. The cold and damp weather alternated with brief bursts of sunshine to keep his joints in constant agony, one moment shrunk tighter than fiddle strings and the next looser than Eula Mae Pritcher's morals. Now his aching bones told him that the daily thunderstorm was right on schedule.

Static electricity prickled the wiry gray hairs on the back of his hands. He looked out across the yard at the blue banty hens scratching in the dirt. They wouldn't have sense enough to get out of the rain, and Chester was damned if he was going to go down and shoo them into the barn. He was happy right where he was, with his bony hind end parked in the roped-together bottom of his rocking chair.

A concussion sounded over the mountain, echoing off the granite slopes and stinging Chester's ears. Those boys were blasting away over on Sugarfoot again, chiseling that mountain apart one piece at a time. A wonder the whole damned peak hadn't slid down already, the way they stoked the dynamite. Well, that was the price of progress. He only wished they’d do their progressing a few hundred miles closer to the flatlands.

He turned his head and shot a brown stream of tobacco off the side of the porch. The arc came up a little short, the juice hitting on one of the warped pine planks and quivering in the dust before beginning the slow job of making a permanent stain.

"Damn Days O' Work never did make a good hockwad," he muttered to the air. He had started talking to himself about six years ago, a few months after Hattie had left him to join the Lord. But he made good company, even if he did say so himself. And there was nobody around to disagree with that opinion. Plus, this way, he didn't have to worry about no back sass.

Chester scratched the red gorkle of his neck, the neck that Hattie had always said looked like a turkey's. He mashed his gums together, trying to squeeze a little more nicotine out of his chaw. A dark line of saliva trickled down one side of his mouth, adding yet another color to his possum-hide beard. He reached down and scratched his ragged redbone hound, Boomer, behind the ears and looked out over his farm like a king surveying his castle keep.

The barn was almost ready to give up the ghost. Johnny and Sylvester, his good-for-nothing young-uns, had propped long locust poles against the side of the barn where it sagged toward the ground. The rusty tin roof had buckled under the strain of gravity, and there were gaps in it big enough to drop a hay bale through. Chester didn't really mind, because he sure as hell wasn't going to chase no cows around over these hills and put them up of a night. He'd culled his herd down to a half dozen last spring and sold them at the auction house down in Windshake.

As far as he knew, the only things that lived in the barn now were the rats, because the pointy-nosed bastards never seemed to get tired of moldy corn. The chickens were just as likely to roost up on the porch rails, and the bats had been driven out by the winter sleet that played Ping-Pong with their radar.

So, as far as Chester cared, the whole thing could fall over. DeWalt, the California Yankee who lived over the ridge, had already offered to buy the barn for its wormy chestnut beams and planks.

The tool shed had already collapsed, squatting down in the side yard like a bullfrog with a rump full of wet bugs. An old horse-drawn hay rake quietly flaked away at the back of the shed, its tines curving into the brown turf. The barnyard spread out into stubbled pasture, broken here and there by slack barbed wire strung between gray posts. Johnson grass and saw briars covered what used to be the potato patch, and locust sprigs and blackberry thickets had crept down from the forest slopes to lay claim to the hay fields.

The Mull family had once owned land as far as the eye could see, both sides of Bear Claw and a big chunk of Antler Ridge, plus a pie-shaped wedge of Brushy Fork where the headwaters of the Little Hawk River sprang from between the cracks of mossy rocks. The acreage had been chopped up and married off until each branch of the family was now down to a few hundred acres. Chester had inherited a prime spot here in the valley, but his outlands were all granite cliffs and crags bristling with jack pine. He had been lucky to palm a piece of it off on DeWalt.

Chester chuckled at DeWalt’s bid to become a country boy. Some tobacco juice slid down the wrong way and caused him to cough. His lungs caught fire as they worked like bellows to push out the bad air. Thinking about DeWalt always made him laugh, but even a good belly laugh wasn't worth this kind of pain. When he recovered, and his scrawny head had stopped bobbing like an apple on the seat of a moving hay wagon, he ratched his throat clear and spat out the offending gob.

Chester had sold the darned fool twenty acres of rock face, so straight up and down that from an airplane the lot looked barely the size of a football field. DeWalt had given him ninety thousand dollars in California Yankee money, but it spent just as good up here in North Carolina. Better, in fact.

Chester decided to call the new neighbor.

“What you up to?”

“Watching the weather.” DeWalt answered in his educated tone as if expecting the call. The fellow didn’t get out much for a rich man.

Chester squinted up into the sky, trying to place the sun's position in the smear of clouds. “Just a little storm coming through.”

“Does it look a little green to you?”

“Hell, DeWalt, did you finally give in and try some of Don Oscar’s moonshine?”

“Seriously. Something’s odd about it.”

“Don’t give me your ‘acid rain’ lecture. You been reading too many of them books.”

“I’ve been here three years and I’ve not seen anything like it.”

Chester stood on quivering legs and hooked his thumbs under the straps of his blue jean overalls. He looked out from the doorway at the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains that bucked and swooped all around the horizon.

When he was a boy, he'd been able to see clear to Tennessee from right here on the porch. Now he could barely see forty miles on a good day, and sometimes at night he couldn't even make out the little pinpricks of orange and blue light that marked Windshake about twenty miles below.

“Well, three hundred years of Mulls have come and gone, and none of them ever told of green rain,” he said, though the clouds cast a peculiar color. He figured it was the angle of the sun. Or maybe the jar of corn liquor in his hand.

“All that pollution-”

“You ain’t from around here,” Chester said. “You ain’t earned the right to bitch about the ruination of the mountains.”

Over on Sugarfoot, a twenty-story condominium complex rose above the ridge, looking sort of unreal, like something Hollywood dreamed up for one of its outer space picture shows. Below the condo, a gang of bulldozers had gouged a ski slope into the side of the mountain. Thanks to snow blowers, the white strip of slope still zigzagged down the side of the hill even though the last freeze had been three weeks ago.

Most of the prime peaks had summer homes strewn across them. The ones that hadn't been heavily developed were scarred by the bleached bones of balsam that the acid rain had killed off. The blasting crews had been going at it hard and heavy, too, knocking red holes in the mountainsides. And those big silvery slabs of granite weren't all that eye-catching to Chester.

“Besides,” Chester said. “I sold you a chunk, so you’re part of the problem.”

“I was surprised you’d part with your family keep.”

“Simple economics. I was seven when Daddy stuck a hoe in my hands and said ‘Get to work.’ Sixty years later, what did it get me? Knotted-up fingers and a bad back. Since I got your money, I don’t have to strike a lick at a snake if I don’t feel like it.”

“Maybe I’ll come over later and talk about the weather in person.”

“Good. I ain’t heard any good complainin’ since Hattie passed on.”

“Watch the sky.”

Chester hung up and couldn’t resist studying the clouds, but he was more interested in the angle of the sun.

"Close enough to noon, I reckon," he said, settling his trembling varicose flesh in the rocking chair. One of the chair runners pinched Boomer's tail and the hound yelped.

"You old blessid fool, you'd think by now you'd keep your ass end out from under there." Chester smoothed the mange on the dog's wrinkled forehead. Boomer looked up at him with sad, droopy eyes that had chunks of sleep crust tucked in the corners.

The sky was darker now and the wind was mashing the clouds together like lumps of rotten potatoes. The mountains grew shadowy, their features lost. Chester reached into his mouth, plucked out his chaw, and laid it on the porch rail. Looked like one of old Boomer's turds, Hattie always said, but she’d been big on snuff herself and hadn't had much room to talk.

The first drops of rain fell on the tin roof of the porch. The rain sounded like a mess of elves working away with shoe hammers. DeWalt said it was a relaxing sound and liked to sit here on the porch during rainy afternoons. But Chester thought a man might as well have marbles rolling around inside his skull. Chester watched the drops bounce off the Ford's black hood. Rivulets of red clay ran down the twin dirt tracks of the driveway. He'd be going nowhere today if this kept up.

But that was just fine with Chester. That meant nobody would be out to bother him, either. That slack-eyed Johnny Mack wouldn't be trying to hit him up for liquor money and Sylvester wouldn't be wanting to take him squirrel hunting. And DeWalt, even though he had a shiny four-wheel drive, didn't like getting his two-hundred- dollar boots muddy. DeWalt liked to keep his things just the way they looked in the catalog.

"About time for a little liquid lunch, Boomer," Chester said. Boomer looked up, thumped his tail a couple of times, and farted.

"You're entitled to your opinion," Chester said.

The rain began falling in thick silver sheets, and Chester could barely see across the yard. But at the edge of the forest, about two miles up the slope, that weird green stuff was still glowing. Sure as hell wasn't foxfire, the glow-in-the-dark fungus that freaked out city folk. The glow had been there a couple of days now, but Chester hadn't yet mustered the energy to walk out and check on it.

In all those damned stories Chester had to listen to growing up, sitting on the plank edge of Grandpappy's knee, he'd never heard anything about shiny green stuff. Sure, the old lady with the lamp that haunted the Brushy Fork bridge, the scarecrow boy in the barn, the panther that screamed like a woman while it followed the wagon in from the fields, he'd heard all those. But nothing about no green stuff.

Of course, they didn't pass on stories like they used to. Chester’s dad had tried to get him to carry on the oral tradition, but Chester didn't see the point. They had picture shows in Windshake and now almost everybody in these parts had a television. Who wanted to sit around and listen to a toothless old geezer flapping his jowls?

Chester stretched and his spine popped. His joints were tightening up on him for sure. He forgot all about the shiny green stuff. It was time for some good old Southern self-medication.

He lifted the jar and toasted the clouds, whatever color they wanted to be.

The alien stretched its tendrils into the soil, edging its way deeper into the cave. It found a quiet, moist place between two large rocks. Its slick effluence coated the granite surrounding it, and its cells mutated to mimic those of the humus and loam that coated the skin of this new world. Since emerging from its seed, the alien had probed the exotic chemical soup around it, drawing nourishment, assimilating the structural order of the strange biosystem, fulfilling the necessities of survival.

A native life form slid from a crevice, this one far more complex than the bacteria that had provided the alien sustenance in the wake of its impact. The life form was as cool as the air, sluggish, and emanated a primitive intelligence. The life form slithered into contact with one of the alien’s tendrils, exhaling in pain as its nervous system fused with that of the alien’s. The life form writhed as its metabolism slowed, then it fell still and its warmth faded.

The alien tried to comprehend the sound that had fallen from the life form’s forked tongue.

Shhh.

Shu-shaaa.

A symbol.

A sound, a fluctuation in air pressure, a varying system of vibrations. The alien tried the symbol again, experimenting, seeking to give it meaning.

Shu-shaaa.

Nettie Hartbarger glanced up from the Bible, sneaking a peek at the handsome man across the table.

"Will you read some more scripture for me?" Bill Lemly asked in his deep, quiet voice. "It makes more sense when you say it. It sounds like poetry."

Bill clutched a Sprite in his big-knuckled hands. He looked at Nettie with his soft brown eyes and smiled. She was in the middle of St. Luke, Chapter Four. Maybe that wasn't the best verse of choice for spinning a web of seduction.

She read: "And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the spirit into the desert for the space of forty days, and was tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing in those days, and when they were ended, he was hungry."

She looked up again, and Bill was nodding gently as if transfixed by the rhythm of the scriptures. Or maybe he had been listening to the rain bouncing off her apartment roof.

Nettie continued: "And the devil said to him, 'If thou be the Son of God, say to this stone that it may be made bread.' And Jesus answered him, 'It is written that man liveth not by bread alone, but by every word of God.'

"And the devil led him into a high mountain, and shewed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time, and he said to Him, 'To Thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them, for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them. If thou therefore wilt adore before me, all shall be thine.'"

Nettie was thinking that she wouldn't mind if Bill would adore her. And all of the kingdoms of her flesh would most definitely be his.

Bill hunched forward, hands under the table, jaw clenched as if he, too, were looking out over the devil's vistas of gold and marble. He appeared to be in a state of rapture. Nettie took a sip of her soft drink. She would have loved a glass of wine, but was afraid Bill would disapprove. She swallowed and continued.

"And Jesus answering said to him, 'It is written, thou shalt adore the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.' And the devil brought him to Jerusalem and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and he said to him, 'If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself from hence. For it is written, that he hath given his angels charge over thee, that they keep thee, and that in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest perhaps thou dash thy foot against a stone.'"

Nettie wished that she were an angel. Not like the one she was going to be when she went to heaven, but one here on earth, so Bill would love her. She knew her hair was dark and angels were supposed to be blonde. And she was petite, not buxom and curvy. No wonder Bill hadn't made a pass at her, even after four months of dating.

She glanced at him and caught him looking away and frowning in self-reproach. He must have been chastising himself for going out with such a homely girl. Maybe she was a mercy case, and Bill was being nice to her out of a sense of Christian duty. She finished the chapter and closed her Bible. She put her hands out halfway across the table, hoping he would take hold of them. Bill still looked lost in thought.

"Would you like to watch some television?" she asked, hoping she didn't sound desperate.

At least if they were on the couch together, he couldn't avoid touching her. And that would not be bad at all, being close to his warm, strong body, smelling his subtle masculine aftershave and maybe just a teeny hint of sweat. And maybe she could get up the nerve to lean her head oh so lightly on his shoulder until his breath was on her cheek.

And she was thinking "couch," when she really wanted "bed," when she really wanted him to stand up and carry her in his arms and lay her gently on her clean white bedspread and lean over her with his lips and hair and hands all over Bill stood, making the chair squeak on the linoleum in his haste. "I'm afraid I have to go, Nettie," he said, hands clasped in front of him like a Quaker. "Got a few phone calls to make."

She looked down at the tabletop, hoping her disappointment didn't show.

"But your reading was pretty. I thank you so much." He started for the door.

"Bill?" she said, and he turned.

Ask me out again, ask me out again, even if “out” is “in,” sitting in my apartment with a Bible. It doesn't have to be once a week.

"Yes, Nettie?"

"See you in church."

Bill nodded and smiled, then ducked through the doorway into the rainy night.

In bed, Tamara rolled over and felt Robert stir. He grunted and yawned, and she reached for him.

“Hey,” he whispered in the dark.

“We need to talk,” she said.

“Great. Just when I was dreaming about a guest spot on ‘Larry King Live.’”

“Tough day, huh?”

"Lousy. Patterson's just about unbearable. The great Oompah Loompah strikes again. And that same crappy music over and over."

"At least it's radio work."

"Well, I'm getting a little too old to try and figure out what I want to be when I grow up. And it looks like the big time is just going to pass Bobby Lee right on by."

He’d referred to his on-air handle, which meant that he was stuck inside himself again, dwelling on his own problems, and wouldn’t have any room in his soul for Tamara’s. For their mutual problems. "Now, Robert, we've been over this a hundred times already. Stick with what you like."

Tamara rubbed Robert's hairy chest and snuggled against his shoulder. "Besides, you’re not getting older, you're just getting better. You'll make it one day, just wait and see."

Robert's hand dropped to her belly and caressed its way up to her breasts. She felt a small stir under her skin and her pulse accelerated. But the Gloomies hovered in the back of her mind like old ghosts, ghosts of her father and half-buried memories, and bad things yet to crawl from the shadows.

"Robert, I don't think-"

She gasped in involuntary arousal. Then the Gloomies crested and crashed like a tidal wave, sweeping the shores of her mind.

Shu-shaaa.

She took Robert's hand from her chest and held it. "I'm sorry, I'm just not in the mood tonight."

Robert puffed like a schoolboy who had been denied a toy. "What's wrong?"

"The Gloomies. You know."

She felt him tense in anger and then relax. Oh, just her being crazy again, he was probably thinking. Nothing serious.

"Honey, that was so many years ago,” he finally said. “You've got to stop blaming yourself."

"I can't help it."

Robert sighed and then was quiet as the rain drummed off the roof, its fury seeming to diminish along with their passion. Tamara looked out the window, trying to give her anxiety a shape in the darkness.

In a few minutes, Robert was snoring but Tamara was more wide-awake than before. She was worried that she would have the dream again, the one where her family was swallowed by… by… she wasn't sure what.

She only knew that she was alone with the Gloomies. And she could tell they were ready to dance the night away.

The alien snatched the faint vibration out of the air, testing it, tasting it.

Maz-zaaa.

Another symbol. It added it to the shu-shaaa, this planet’s original symbol. The maz-zaaa had been less distinct, as if radiated from a distant constellation. Perhaps it had no meaning. Perhaps none of this planet’s life forms were intelligent enough to combine multiple symbols. Perhaps this planet had nothing to offer besides its nutrients.

Now that the alien had grown comfortable in the cave, roots spreading through the forest and siphoning energy, it allowed a moment to open its pulsing center to the strange world that surrounded it.

The oxygen mixture swirled through the vegetation above and a soft hydrogen-oxygen mixture pelted the skin of the planet. Static electricity caused the alien’s tendrils to tingle. A small creature raced across the soil, its passage echoing through the alien’s cave. The vibrations were almost painful, and the alien slipped back into a state of rest, focusing on that strange symbol shu-shaaa.