Mr. Shivers

EPILOGUE

Dawn falls across the country.

The sun’s warming fingers reach down into the plains. What little growth there is stretches to its touch but goes ignored by the shifting thread of people that wanders by it, heads bowed. They have traveled far but will travel farther, maundering the edges of these cracked lands as they search for a place that can sustain them for a little while longer.

The people are many and know countless countries and many creeds. They know no nation and no course, no government and no law. They navigate by hunger alone and in doing so survive another day. They are pilgrims and nomads, drifters and wanderers, bound to nothing more than whatever fruits the earth is willing to offer. From the Great Lakes to the Pacific. From where the Rocky Mountains form their long wall to where the Atlantic swirls its muddy waters. They have walked there and called these places home and made their names and then moved on.

They have seen much and they will see more. They have been here before. Have always been here. Will always be here until the world fails and only then will they be truly homeless and pass on.

From somewhere among them comes word. Rumors of the scarred man who still moves among their ranks, bringing with him his coat of night and his grim smile. We have seen him, some say. We have seen him treading the very ground we tread now. He’s come back. Come again.

The whispers grow as the dawn rolls across the land. He comes from the west, they say. Comes striding from the west, eyes forever fixed on the east. A great, tall man with wild hair and a thick black beard, scarred from head to toe. But he is different now. Not half so wicked, not half so savage. He has grown to be a huge thing, blank and dour, his face expressionless yet grim. He is a new man who walks in a different way and so leaves something different in his wake.

From a cabbie comes word that with each step he takes one can hear the footfalls of thousands falling in line, an army marching somewhere in the shadows behind him. When he sets up camp and starts his fire the smoke forms shapes in the air that suggest a crowd of people huddling with him, millions of them, gray and cold and hopeless. The gypsy-folk whisper that when he slumbers in the fields his chest makes sounds of screaming steel and from his nose and mouth comes a thick black smoke, like burning oil. And a street-preacher claims that when the scarred man passed through St. Louis the entire city was struck with nightmares, envisioning a great fire, and that fire spread and consumed the blind eye that made the world.

They say that in his pockets he does not hold the fates of single men but the fates of cities, of countries, of the world. To him we are as ants, scuttling around the face of our hill. With a wave of his hand he scorches the sky and merely by closing his eyes a whole city may perish. He brings the new way. He brings the new world. He brings tomorrow, and so we grieve.

Others listen. The word spreads. Soon it is among all of them, all the drifters, all the travelers. It seeps into towns and bleeds into the cities. Jumps among ports and swims down rivers. And as the story spreads they become aware of a growing darkness, a sense of deep dread as the ground beneath them moves and revolves and twists itself into a new form.

Things are changing, they say. Time is moving on and leaving us behind.

They quiet and for the first time they stop walking. They stop shifting all at once and stand where they are and lift their heads. The people in the cities and the people in the farms, those at work and those at rest, men and women, young and old, they all stop and turn to the horizon, to the east and to the west, toward what is brewing there and what hides behind the next second or month or year.

Something is close, they whisper as the clouds darken above them. Something is near.

Listen. Listen. Do you hear it? Listen.