Tears of a God
This is my fourth entry for the writing competition, brigits_flame. My prompt this week was:
Tears of a God
I think that lots of people would have you believe that it was night-time when we last saw the sky; actually, it was daytime. You’d think that people would have a firmer recollection of such an event as the sun going out but the thing is, we went thirty-eight days without seeing the sun or the sky or the stars, and that tends to fuck up one’s perception of time. There is no night or day when there’s literally nothing but a frosty twilight every time you wake up or go to bed.
The first thing I suppose I ought to properly cover is: who am I? Well, here goes. My name is Dana Weisman, and I’m 23 years old. I’m one of those extreme gothic lesbian artist types - you know the kind. I’ve got long, white-blonde hair that I love to whip artfully into a tight bun on the top of my head. I love to shave off my eyebrows and paint them back in, long daggers of black, stark against my white skin. My eyelids are always darkly shadowed around my bright green eyes, and my favourite lipstick is called "Snow White’s Shame" - you can imagine. I’m petite, slim, I have three piercings in each ear, and the most divinely painted sleeve tattoos on both of my arms, which snake into crossed bat wings across my shoulder blades. I’m quite into wearing black and red at the moment, making a statement with long, slinky dresses, or corsets with tutus. I’m just expressing my individuality - but I don’t think my neighbours like it.
You see, I live in a quite well-to-do part of the downtown area - a gift from daddy before he died. My block only has two apartments on each floor, and each one is quite enormous. The elderly Mr and Mrs Shapiro live across the hall from me. Every morning I try to leave my apartment at exactly the right time, so that I can offend their delicate sensibilities with a sharp stiletto heel below a smart pair of suspenders, or my white flesh flashing inside a halter-neck made entirely of belts. The scandalised widening of Mrs Shapiro’s rheumy eyes in her mean, narrow face never ceases to amuse me. Downstairs we have Mr Kim-eul Park. He’s only 29 but he made it big with a chain of Korean restaurants so now he lives down there with a wine cellar and, from what I see from my windows, several different prostitutes. He may have a harem going; I’m not entirely sure. The other apartment downstairs belongs to the Retsons. They’re an African-American family, and I really don’t know much about them or their apartment, except that Mr Retson is a doctor, and from passing glances I’ve managed to grab on my way past their door, their house is filled with toys, because they have three small kids. Mrs Retson has her work cut out for her; I hear various screamings at all hours.
And then there’s me. I live on the first floor, right hand side. I have my entire home in reds and whites, and each of my walls in each of my rooms is a tribute to a different artist, both with the paintings and the style of decoration, from Van Gogh to Warhol to Banksy. My enormous windows let in a lot of light from outside when the sun is high. I have all the armchairs and sofas and even my bed arranged by those windows so that I can loll in the sun like a cat whenever I like.
That’s exactly what I was doing, when the sun went out. I was sprawled across my big white fur rug on the floor, enjoying the ambient street-sounds of children playing and cars rolling by through the open window, and the afternoon warmth and light. The first thing I noticed was that the children stopped laughing and the dogs started to bark. I didn’t open my eyes, but in some subtle way I could feel the benevolence of the atmosphere from outside change. I heard the harsh screech of a car halting, followed by the sharp smash of a collision from further down the street. The children started to scream. I sat bolt upright as my entire lounge went dark. It wasn’t even like the light went from full-on, to muted, to darkened, to dark, it just went out. After a moment, the streetlights came on, automatically triggered by the sudden darkness. I scrambled to the window ledge, my tights ripping audibly on a splinter in the hardwood floor, and when I looked out there were the kids in the play-park across the street, childminders nearby; parents with pushchairs stationary; tethered dogs going ballistic, choking themselves on their leashes; businessmen and women in suits with briefcases. Everyone was standing perfectly still in the gloom, some were pointing, and all looking upwards. And then so did I.
To my left, the last sliver of bright sky was disappearing beyond...well, at first I thought it was an enormous black cloud, but its edge was too perfectly semi-circular, bold against the blue. As finally the light was snuffed out altogether, my eyes had to adjust to the absence of light, and as they did so I could see the people in the street below were running, probably through some kind of primal instinct to try and remain in the light, though it was disappearing so quickly that they really had no chance. With my new adjusted sight I could gather that the darkness was quite unlike night - it was a kind of disturbing orange twilight, robbing shapes of their definition. The streetlights were a meagre comfort. Looking up, from my safe place by the windowsill, I could also see that whatever was above, it wasn’t darkness and it wasn’t clouds. Something was up there, still moving, sliding through the murk probably a hundred feet above. Something solid.
I got up, finding my very shaky legs and grabbing a long white silk overcoat to fling around myself as I stumbled to the door and opened it onto the landing. There was no scandal in Mrs Shapiro’s eyes today - only fear. She was alone on her doorstep, and as she looked at me, in the gleam from the landing light, I could see some kind of fearful detachment there. Softly, she spoke:
"What’s happening, dear?"
So taken aback was I by the lack of emotion in her voice, I simply gaped. There was something wrong. I couldn’t think of what to say.
"Um. I don’t know, Mrs Shapiro" My voice was more frail even than hers. I cleared my throat and spoke louder. "Stay here. Where is Mr Shapiro?" For a moment she looked terrified, then she seemed to kind of shrug, and said,
"Inside."
"Stay here," I repeated, and went to the stairs. As I descended, everything felt wrong. It was supposed to be daytime - these stairs were supposed to be flooded with light, and here I was picking my way down them as if drunk. I got to the lower landing and was greeted with a shock of noise as Mrs Retson opened her door. She had a silent little girl in her arms, who was staring at me with big doleful eyes, and her two small sons, tugging at her clothes and arms and bombarding my ears with loud and urgent questions meant for their mother.
"What the Hell is going on?" she mouthed from behind the wall of noise.
I shook my head. "I don’t know, I’m sorry," I called above the boys, grimacing at their shouts. Not sure why I felt the need, I said "I’m going to go outside". I turned away from her and she closed her door, muting the cries but not completely erasing them. Mr Park’s door was shut.
Stepping out into the street, I wished I had put on more than my thin overcoat. The sidewalk beneath my feet was warm, the blazing sun having been shining on it not three minutes before, but the air had now taken on a chill. Already the street was full of people on the move, but I didn’t recognise any of them. They were on the sidewalks and in the streets, and surprisingly no cars were passing through. In hindsight I doubt they were from our neighbourhood - probably from one further east, travelling to the west, following the disappearing sky. A few people looked at me as they passed by, but most had their eyes fixed on the sliver of sky still visible far in the distance. It disturbed me to watch - their eyes held a kind of naked determination, an unquestioning survival instinct. They had to keep moving. I stood there, a white shape in the dark, clutching my sides, my gown billowing in the cold, alien wind.
Looking up, it was now much easier to see the great thing obscuring the sky from us. From between the apartment blocks I could see this vast, solid thing, lit softly from below by the feeble streetlamps. It looked a little like a vast expanse of smooth, cracked earth, dark blue in colour. Or perhaps like some kind of armour; gigantic plates like the skin of an armadillo or the carapace of some weird and mammoth insect. It was too big for me to properly think about. How the fuck was it suspended up there?
Walking out into the path of the throngs of moving people I looked down the street, towards the centre of town, and could see nothing but this enormous overhead thing as far as I could see. I turned and could now see nothing in the other direction either, not even that much-sought-after slice of sky. It occurred to me, then, that this twilight surrounding us could not possibly be coming from the streetlamps alone - the thing itself was exuding a soft orange glow, though from where I couldn’t see.
Baffled and shivering, I carefully picked my way between the clusters of moving people back up the steps to the door to my lobby, and entered using my key. Mr Park’s door was still closed. From behind Mrs Renton’s door I could still hear the muffled shouts of her two little boys, and her own voice speaking loudly to her husband, on the telephone. Climbing the stairs, I found Mrs Shapiro still standing on her doormat. She hadn’t moved.
"Mrs Shapiro?" No answer. I leaned over and touched her on the arm. "Mrs Shapiro?" With a start her eyes focussed, and a little smile touched her lips.
"Oh, hello, dear."
With my hand still on her arm, I said firmly,
"Mrs Shapiro, I think you and Mr Shapiro had best pack a bag and head for the hills. I don’t know what’s going on but...I think it’s better if we all leave."
"Mr...I don’t think that...what...what is happening?" Her eyes were moving slowly in her head, focussing now on me, now on the landing light, now on my open door, now on the window into the darkness outside.
"I’m sorry, Mrs Shapiro, I don’t know, but..." I trailed off. I didn’t think this approach was working. "Mrs Shapiro, there’s trouble going on outside, and I really think it would be best if you and Mr Shapiro left the city."
She swayed slightly to the left, as if losing her balance, but stayed like that.
"I worry that we can’t do that," she murmured, and she wouldn’t say any more.
***
Like many in that first week, the first thing I did was to pack a bag and head for the hills - literally. I packed a small bag full of what I thought I might need and set out into the droves to find my way out of the city, or at least out from under that thing, whatever it was. I walked for probably about 6 or 7 hours, all in all, surrounded, amused by the sights of opportunists at the sides of the streets selling bottles of water and food at ridiculous prices, and even more amused by the desperate idiots buying them. I walked until I got to my Aunt Nora’s house, which was a good twenty miles away. When I got there my feet were sore and aching, but my aunt was there in her colourful jerkin and puffy trousers to bundle me into her arms and tell me how glad she was that I’d made it.
She lives alone, my aunt Nora, in a little townhouse that smells like sandalwood. Crystals and charms adorn every shelf, corner, nook and cranny. After I’d gotten in and settled, there was coffee and cake. We sat tensely in her living room and watched the news, drinking and nibbling. It felt so bizarre to look at the screen and see the time read 16:24, and yet it be so dark outside that it could have been midnight. The facts were apparently these: as yet, we didn’t know anything. We didn’t know what the thing was, if indeed it was a thing. We didn’t know how far out this phenomenon was happening. We didn’t know what effect this was having (aside from mass migration). We didn’t know how it managed to get right over us without any warning. We simply didn’t know anything. The movement of people outside was continuous, but calmer now, groups and families trundling by, sometimes pulling trailers or pushing wheelbarrows. We never saw a single car. My guess is that the roads were simply too congested with migrants for a car to make it safely through.
I had stayed at Nora’s house for three days before the news told us anything conclusive. First of all it was just spoken, with the reporter telling us about the "gigantic entity" and "enormous sentient phenomenon". Then pictures started coming in. They’d managed to get jets out from under the thing to take these pictures. I remember the first one I saw. It was 10.30am, and I remember actually laughing out loud because, as we had come to expect, it was dark outside, but the picture had been taken in full daylight. It was taken from so high you couldn’t see the ground, just miles and miles of fluffy white cloud and in the middle, rising out of it all like a mountain, was this "entity". It was, quite simply, huge. Roughly spherical in shape, rising high above the clouds, a flat dark blue colour, and covered in those plates I’d seen before, like chitin or carapace. Apart from this it really had no notable features, although the picture was taken from too far away and was of bad quality.
The next day there was a video on the news. Another jet had flown around the circumference of the thing, taking video all the while, and shown that it was about forty miles in diameter, dwarfing the city and extending past a lot of the towns on its outskirts. I remember watching the video in awe - it was taken close enough that you could see the surface, this cobalt blue carapace, which was...shifting subtly. The plates were moving, grinding against each other, causing pale blue dust to drift out and away from the cracks. It also showed that the entity had two long, straight tails, probably ten or twenty miles each. I couldn’t stop thinking about it as a great big floating horseshoe crab after seeing that.
At its rim, the video showed, the carapace was thicker, a lighter blue, and there were structures like jointed stalactites protruding from underneath. I couldn’t think what they were - legs, maybe? But then why was it floating? The whole thing was a mystery and it filled me with wonder. I remember that news report ended with the reporter saying that the air force had confirmed that the creature had no discernable head or limbs to speak of (though still I thought of those stalactites), and as yet they didn’t know how it was floating.
It was the night after that that Big Blue (for that’s what the media had begun to call it) started to sing. I was asleep when I was awoken by the whole building shaking, crystals falling off the walls of my little spare room at the back of the house. Chimes were chiming, windows were smashing and I could hear car alarms going off outside. Suspecting an earthquake, I jumped out of bed and got under the doorframe, but I didn’t really realise until a few moments had passed that the earth itself wasn’t moving. It was the very air; it was vibrating, making my lips tremble and tickle, my ears ring, and my hair stand on end. Then came the enormous sound - I had to cover my ears, such was its intensity. From above came a great moan, a low, keening wail. I ran through the house, arms about my head, meeting Aunt Nora in the kitchen. We ran outside to see everyone else doing the same, looking up at the sky, and their hands over their ears. After about thirty seconds the noise died down and we could finally take our hands away comfortably. Then it came again: lilting, ululating and slow, like whale song. It wasn’t so loud this time - I didn’t even have to cover my ears. It grumbled mournfully overhead like thunder. It was a miserable sort of sound.
It took about ten days for people to realise that although Big Blue was covering us above, it wasn’t actually doing anything. Looking outside on day eleven, I could see the same throngs of people travelling in the opposite direction, back into the heart of the city. Cars began to appear on the streets again, headlamps bright in the gloom. The little café across the street opened up for business again, lighting up the street, and when Nora and I visited it was even quite busy. Everyone still had jobs to do, places to go, people to see, and so they did. Nora and I, well, she was retired, and I was an artist, so we didn’t have much to do. She drove me back to my apartment on the thirteenth day to pick up my easel and painting supplies so I could take up my painting again at her house. Without night and day to mark the passage of time, I’d stay up for twenty-four hours at a time painting great black and white landscapes with the enormous blue creature rising like a colossal shell out of mist and clouds. Painting in the dark, never felt quite the same, but when Big Blue sang it moved me so much that whole and elegant worlds were drawn out of my brush.
This was the way life was for a further twenty-four days. For most, life went on as normal: shopping, working, taking their kids to school, kissing their spouses goodbye before they went to work in the dark. All the while, Big Blue groaned long and loud above the city. The lack of sunlight caused the air to grow bitterly cold and fingers of frost gripped windows and sidewalks and trees and old bones. On one trip back to my apartment to fetch my winter clothes, I met Mrs Shapiro coming out of her apartment. She looked haunted, and somehow terribly thin. I learned from her that on the day that Big Blue had appeared, Mr Shapiro (who had been very elderly much like herself) had taken one look at it and promptly died. Moved, I expressed my condolences to her, and I think she was quietly grateful for it. I had known on that day that something was wrong, but I didn’t think...well, anyway. I felt bad leaving her - she was all alone, after all - but she had her business to deal with, and so did I.
The reports in the news with regards to Big Blue came fewer and further between. The songs were occurring less frequently now, only once every seven or eight hours, and certainly never as intense as that first which had shook the foundations of our city. He did not rotate, we now knew, but he had shifted just over a mile to the north. Superficialities.
On day thirty-eight, Nora and I had just finished breakfast (or was it lunch, or dinner? We had lost track by then. Clocks could tell us differently, but in constant night time felt like a free-for-all) by the light of a candle, when we heard the soft patter of rain on the roof and windows. At first, it didn’t really bother us, but as it grew louder and more noticeable, we slowly looked up at each other across the table, then ran as one to the window. Looking outside, rain was indeed falling. We strained to look up; as far as we could tell, the rain was coming directly out of Big Blue. I threw on my raincoat, Nora threw a waterproof poncho on over her dressing gown, and we staggered outside.
Passers-by had stopped to stare, many dressed in thick overcoats, as rain fell from where our sky should be. Cars stopped in the street, their drivers stepping out to marvel. As Nora put her arm round me, Big Blue piped up with a song so low that at first I thought I could feel my bones and teeth vibrating. It reached its crescendo, and it turned into the most expressive and beautiful song. Instead of just the usual deep roar, it reached highs we had never heard, elegantly sliding through scales from ear-piercing soprano notes to bass notes which made pebbles rattle on the ground. Standing there despondent in the cold rain, I thought it was the saddest thing I ever heard.
"The tears of a god," I heard Nora murmur.
All of a sudden there was a great wind, which blew Nora’s poncho up about her face, and whipped my hair back. The wind was pulling up, up, and I saw trash cans lifted into the air. People on the street scattered unsteadily to grab hold of something, anything solid to keep themselves on the ground. Sheltered as Nora and I were by the porch above our heads, the window just blew past us through the door and into the house, scattering papers and crystals and disturbing chimes.
The wind was still pulling upwards, and so great was its force that the rain was pulling upwards as well. I saw the front of a car slowly lifted into the air, appearing to do a wheelie, and staying there, stationary, too heavy to be pulled further. People held on to railings and fire hydrants or just lay right down on the wet ground with their arms over their heads, and as one we all looked up. Big Blue was rising. He was slowly but definitely rising straight up into the air, the rain continuing but lessening as he gained height. The wind lessened now and I could see people starting to pick themselves up, letting go of their anchors and looking up in wonder at our Big Blue rising up and up. Light started to filter into our consciousness - a lightening, the orange fading into purple, the purple fading into blue, and gradually heading for white. After a minute or so, he was high enough that I could see the sky starting to creep in at his edges, and as he shrank, the sky rushed in to fill his absence. At last I could see his whole shape, a dark spot in the sky, with those slender, rigid tails trailing out behind him. I think I even waved. He rose and rose, shrinking, disappearing and reappearing behind clouds until he was just blue on blue, a dark star in the sky. Then he disappeared completely.
I realised I had been holding Nora’s hand very tightly, and I let her go, only to have her leap on me and smother me in a tight embrace. Over her shoulder I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow city-dwellers, watched the first sunset in thirty-eight days, as the rain began to dry, the frost to thaw.
© Jerrard Doran, 2008
Tears of a God
I think that lots of people would have you believe that it was night-time when we last saw the sky; actually, it was daytime. You’d think that people would have a firmer recollection of such an event as the sun going out but the thing is, we went thirty-eight days without seeing the sun or the sky or the stars, and that tends to fuck up one’s perception of time. There is no night or day when there’s literally nothing but a frosty twilight every time you wake up or go to bed.
The first thing I suppose I ought to properly cover is: who am I? Well, here goes. My name is Dana Weisman, and I’m 23 years old. I’m one of those extreme gothic lesbian artist types - you know the kind. I’ve got long, white-blonde hair that I love to whip artfully into a tight bun on the top of my head. I love to shave off my eyebrows and paint them back in, long daggers of black, stark against my white skin. My eyelids are always darkly shadowed around my bright green eyes, and my favourite lipstick is called "Snow White’s Shame" - you can imagine. I’m petite, slim, I have three piercings in each ear, and the most divinely painted sleeve tattoos on both of my arms, which snake into crossed bat wings across my shoulder blades. I’m quite into wearing black and red at the moment, making a statement with long, slinky dresses, or corsets with tutus. I’m just expressing my individuality - but I don’t think my neighbours like it.
You see, I live in a quite well-to-do part of the downtown area - a gift from daddy before he died. My block only has two apartments on each floor, and each one is quite enormous. The elderly Mr and Mrs Shapiro live across the hall from me. Every morning I try to leave my apartment at exactly the right time, so that I can offend their delicate sensibilities with a sharp stiletto heel below a smart pair of suspenders, or my white flesh flashing inside a halter-neck made entirely of belts. The scandalised widening of Mrs Shapiro’s rheumy eyes in her mean, narrow face never ceases to amuse me. Downstairs we have Mr Kim-eul Park. He’s only 29 but he made it big with a chain of Korean restaurants so now he lives down there with a wine cellar and, from what I see from my windows, several different prostitutes. He may have a harem going; I’m not entirely sure. The other apartment downstairs belongs to the Retsons. They’re an African-American family, and I really don’t know much about them or their apartment, except that Mr Retson is a doctor, and from passing glances I’ve managed to grab on my way past their door, their house is filled with toys, because they have three small kids. Mrs Retson has her work cut out for her; I hear various screamings at all hours.
And then there’s me. I live on the first floor, right hand side. I have my entire home in reds and whites, and each of my walls in each of my rooms is a tribute to a different artist, both with the paintings and the style of decoration, from Van Gogh to Warhol to Banksy. My enormous windows let in a lot of light from outside when the sun is high. I have all the armchairs and sofas and even my bed arranged by those windows so that I can loll in the sun like a cat whenever I like.
That’s exactly what I was doing, when the sun went out. I was sprawled across my big white fur rug on the floor, enjoying the ambient street-sounds of children playing and cars rolling by through the open window, and the afternoon warmth and light. The first thing I noticed was that the children stopped laughing and the dogs started to bark. I didn’t open my eyes, but in some subtle way I could feel the benevolence of the atmosphere from outside change. I heard the harsh screech of a car halting, followed by the sharp smash of a collision from further down the street. The children started to scream. I sat bolt upright as my entire lounge went dark. It wasn’t even like the light went from full-on, to muted, to darkened, to dark, it just went out. After a moment, the streetlights came on, automatically triggered by the sudden darkness. I scrambled to the window ledge, my tights ripping audibly on a splinter in the hardwood floor, and when I looked out there were the kids in the play-park across the street, childminders nearby; parents with pushchairs stationary; tethered dogs going ballistic, choking themselves on their leashes; businessmen and women in suits with briefcases. Everyone was standing perfectly still in the gloom, some were pointing, and all looking upwards. And then so did I.
To my left, the last sliver of bright sky was disappearing beyond...well, at first I thought it was an enormous black cloud, but its edge was too perfectly semi-circular, bold against the blue. As finally the light was snuffed out altogether, my eyes had to adjust to the absence of light, and as they did so I could see the people in the street below were running, probably through some kind of primal instinct to try and remain in the light, though it was disappearing so quickly that they really had no chance. With my new adjusted sight I could gather that the darkness was quite unlike night - it was a kind of disturbing orange twilight, robbing shapes of their definition. The streetlights were a meagre comfort. Looking up, from my safe place by the windowsill, I could also see that whatever was above, it wasn’t darkness and it wasn’t clouds. Something was up there, still moving, sliding through the murk probably a hundred feet above. Something solid.
I got up, finding my very shaky legs and grabbing a long white silk overcoat to fling around myself as I stumbled to the door and opened it onto the landing. There was no scandal in Mrs Shapiro’s eyes today - only fear. She was alone on her doorstep, and as she looked at me, in the gleam from the landing light, I could see some kind of fearful detachment there. Softly, she spoke:
"What’s happening, dear?"
So taken aback was I by the lack of emotion in her voice, I simply gaped. There was something wrong. I couldn’t think of what to say.
"Um. I don’t know, Mrs Shapiro" My voice was more frail even than hers. I cleared my throat and spoke louder. "Stay here. Where is Mr Shapiro?" For a moment she looked terrified, then she seemed to kind of shrug, and said,
"Inside."
"Stay here," I repeated, and went to the stairs. As I descended, everything felt wrong. It was supposed to be daytime - these stairs were supposed to be flooded with light, and here I was picking my way down them as if drunk. I got to the lower landing and was greeted with a shock of noise as Mrs Retson opened her door. She had a silent little girl in her arms, who was staring at me with big doleful eyes, and her two small sons, tugging at her clothes and arms and bombarding my ears with loud and urgent questions meant for their mother.
"What the Hell is going on?" she mouthed from behind the wall of noise.
I shook my head. "I don’t know, I’m sorry," I called above the boys, grimacing at their shouts. Not sure why I felt the need, I said "I’m going to go outside". I turned away from her and she closed her door, muting the cries but not completely erasing them. Mr Park’s door was shut.
Stepping out into the street, I wished I had put on more than my thin overcoat. The sidewalk beneath my feet was warm, the blazing sun having been shining on it not three minutes before, but the air had now taken on a chill. Already the street was full of people on the move, but I didn’t recognise any of them. They were on the sidewalks and in the streets, and surprisingly no cars were passing through. In hindsight I doubt they were from our neighbourhood - probably from one further east, travelling to the west, following the disappearing sky. A few people looked at me as they passed by, but most had their eyes fixed on the sliver of sky still visible far in the distance. It disturbed me to watch - their eyes held a kind of naked determination, an unquestioning survival instinct. They had to keep moving. I stood there, a white shape in the dark, clutching my sides, my gown billowing in the cold, alien wind.
Looking up, it was now much easier to see the great thing obscuring the sky from us. From between the apartment blocks I could see this vast, solid thing, lit softly from below by the feeble streetlamps. It looked a little like a vast expanse of smooth, cracked earth, dark blue in colour. Or perhaps like some kind of armour; gigantic plates like the skin of an armadillo or the carapace of some weird and mammoth insect. It was too big for me to properly think about. How the fuck was it suspended up there?
Walking out into the path of the throngs of moving people I looked down the street, towards the centre of town, and could see nothing but this enormous overhead thing as far as I could see. I turned and could now see nothing in the other direction either, not even that much-sought-after slice of sky. It occurred to me, then, that this twilight surrounding us could not possibly be coming from the streetlamps alone - the thing itself was exuding a soft orange glow, though from where I couldn’t see.
Baffled and shivering, I carefully picked my way between the clusters of moving people back up the steps to the door to my lobby, and entered using my key. Mr Park’s door was still closed. From behind Mrs Renton’s door I could still hear the muffled shouts of her two little boys, and her own voice speaking loudly to her husband, on the telephone. Climbing the stairs, I found Mrs Shapiro still standing on her doormat. She hadn’t moved.
"Mrs Shapiro?" No answer. I leaned over and touched her on the arm. "Mrs Shapiro?" With a start her eyes focussed, and a little smile touched her lips.
"Oh, hello, dear."
With my hand still on her arm, I said firmly,
"Mrs Shapiro, I think you and Mr Shapiro had best pack a bag and head for the hills. I don’t know what’s going on but...I think it’s better if we all leave."
"Mr...I don’t think that...what...what is happening?" Her eyes were moving slowly in her head, focussing now on me, now on the landing light, now on my open door, now on the window into the darkness outside.
"I’m sorry, Mrs Shapiro, I don’t know, but..." I trailed off. I didn’t think this approach was working. "Mrs Shapiro, there’s trouble going on outside, and I really think it would be best if you and Mr Shapiro left the city."
She swayed slightly to the left, as if losing her balance, but stayed like that.
"I worry that we can’t do that," she murmured, and she wouldn’t say any more.
***
Like many in that first week, the first thing I did was to pack a bag and head for the hills - literally. I packed a small bag full of what I thought I might need and set out into the droves to find my way out of the city, or at least out from under that thing, whatever it was. I walked for probably about 6 or 7 hours, all in all, surrounded, amused by the sights of opportunists at the sides of the streets selling bottles of water and food at ridiculous prices, and even more amused by the desperate idiots buying them. I walked until I got to my Aunt Nora’s house, which was a good twenty miles away. When I got there my feet were sore and aching, but my aunt was there in her colourful jerkin and puffy trousers to bundle me into her arms and tell me how glad she was that I’d made it.
She lives alone, my aunt Nora, in a little townhouse that smells like sandalwood. Crystals and charms adorn every shelf, corner, nook and cranny. After I’d gotten in and settled, there was coffee and cake. We sat tensely in her living room and watched the news, drinking and nibbling. It felt so bizarre to look at the screen and see the time read 16:24, and yet it be so dark outside that it could have been midnight. The facts were apparently these: as yet, we didn’t know anything. We didn’t know what the thing was, if indeed it was a thing. We didn’t know how far out this phenomenon was happening. We didn’t know what effect this was having (aside from mass migration). We didn’t know how it managed to get right over us without any warning. We simply didn’t know anything. The movement of people outside was continuous, but calmer now, groups and families trundling by, sometimes pulling trailers or pushing wheelbarrows. We never saw a single car. My guess is that the roads were simply too congested with migrants for a car to make it safely through.
I had stayed at Nora’s house for three days before the news told us anything conclusive. First of all it was just spoken, with the reporter telling us about the "gigantic entity" and "enormous sentient phenomenon". Then pictures started coming in. They’d managed to get jets out from under the thing to take these pictures. I remember the first one I saw. It was 10.30am, and I remember actually laughing out loud because, as we had come to expect, it was dark outside, but the picture had been taken in full daylight. It was taken from so high you couldn’t see the ground, just miles and miles of fluffy white cloud and in the middle, rising out of it all like a mountain, was this "entity". It was, quite simply, huge. Roughly spherical in shape, rising high above the clouds, a flat dark blue colour, and covered in those plates I’d seen before, like chitin or carapace. Apart from this it really had no notable features, although the picture was taken from too far away and was of bad quality.
The next day there was a video on the news. Another jet had flown around the circumference of the thing, taking video all the while, and shown that it was about forty miles in diameter, dwarfing the city and extending past a lot of the towns on its outskirts. I remember watching the video in awe - it was taken close enough that you could see the surface, this cobalt blue carapace, which was...shifting subtly. The plates were moving, grinding against each other, causing pale blue dust to drift out and away from the cracks. It also showed that the entity had two long, straight tails, probably ten or twenty miles each. I couldn’t stop thinking about it as a great big floating horseshoe crab after seeing that.
At its rim, the video showed, the carapace was thicker, a lighter blue, and there were structures like jointed stalactites protruding from underneath. I couldn’t think what they were - legs, maybe? But then why was it floating? The whole thing was a mystery and it filled me with wonder. I remember that news report ended with the reporter saying that the air force had confirmed that the creature had no discernable head or limbs to speak of (though still I thought of those stalactites), and as yet they didn’t know how it was floating.
It was the night after that that Big Blue (for that’s what the media had begun to call it) started to sing. I was asleep when I was awoken by the whole building shaking, crystals falling off the walls of my little spare room at the back of the house. Chimes were chiming, windows were smashing and I could hear car alarms going off outside. Suspecting an earthquake, I jumped out of bed and got under the doorframe, but I didn’t really realise until a few moments had passed that the earth itself wasn’t moving. It was the very air; it was vibrating, making my lips tremble and tickle, my ears ring, and my hair stand on end. Then came the enormous sound - I had to cover my ears, such was its intensity. From above came a great moan, a low, keening wail. I ran through the house, arms about my head, meeting Aunt Nora in the kitchen. We ran outside to see everyone else doing the same, looking up at the sky, and their hands over their ears. After about thirty seconds the noise died down and we could finally take our hands away comfortably. Then it came again: lilting, ululating and slow, like whale song. It wasn’t so loud this time - I didn’t even have to cover my ears. It grumbled mournfully overhead like thunder. It was a miserable sort of sound.
It took about ten days for people to realise that although Big Blue was covering us above, it wasn’t actually doing anything. Looking outside on day eleven, I could see the same throngs of people travelling in the opposite direction, back into the heart of the city. Cars began to appear on the streets again, headlamps bright in the gloom. The little café across the street opened up for business again, lighting up the street, and when Nora and I visited it was even quite busy. Everyone still had jobs to do, places to go, people to see, and so they did. Nora and I, well, she was retired, and I was an artist, so we didn’t have much to do. She drove me back to my apartment on the thirteenth day to pick up my easel and painting supplies so I could take up my painting again at her house. Without night and day to mark the passage of time, I’d stay up for twenty-four hours at a time painting great black and white landscapes with the enormous blue creature rising like a colossal shell out of mist and clouds. Painting in the dark, never felt quite the same, but when Big Blue sang it moved me so much that whole and elegant worlds were drawn out of my brush.
This was the way life was for a further twenty-four days. For most, life went on as normal: shopping, working, taking their kids to school, kissing their spouses goodbye before they went to work in the dark. All the while, Big Blue groaned long and loud above the city. The lack of sunlight caused the air to grow bitterly cold and fingers of frost gripped windows and sidewalks and trees and old bones. On one trip back to my apartment to fetch my winter clothes, I met Mrs Shapiro coming out of her apartment. She looked haunted, and somehow terribly thin. I learned from her that on the day that Big Blue had appeared, Mr Shapiro (who had been very elderly much like herself) had taken one look at it and promptly died. Moved, I expressed my condolences to her, and I think she was quietly grateful for it. I had known on that day that something was wrong, but I didn’t think...well, anyway. I felt bad leaving her - she was all alone, after all - but she had her business to deal with, and so did I.
The reports in the news with regards to Big Blue came fewer and further between. The songs were occurring less frequently now, only once every seven or eight hours, and certainly never as intense as that first which had shook the foundations of our city. He did not rotate, we now knew, but he had shifted just over a mile to the north. Superficialities.
On day thirty-eight, Nora and I had just finished breakfast (or was it lunch, or dinner? We had lost track by then. Clocks could tell us differently, but in constant night time felt like a free-for-all) by the light of a candle, when we heard the soft patter of rain on the roof and windows. At first, it didn’t really bother us, but as it grew louder and more noticeable, we slowly looked up at each other across the table, then ran as one to the window. Looking outside, rain was indeed falling. We strained to look up; as far as we could tell, the rain was coming directly out of Big Blue. I threw on my raincoat, Nora threw a waterproof poncho on over her dressing gown, and we staggered outside.
Passers-by had stopped to stare, many dressed in thick overcoats, as rain fell from where our sky should be. Cars stopped in the street, their drivers stepping out to marvel. As Nora put her arm round me, Big Blue piped up with a song so low that at first I thought I could feel my bones and teeth vibrating. It reached its crescendo, and it turned into the most expressive and beautiful song. Instead of just the usual deep roar, it reached highs we had never heard, elegantly sliding through scales from ear-piercing soprano notes to bass notes which made pebbles rattle on the ground. Standing there despondent in the cold rain, I thought it was the saddest thing I ever heard.
"The tears of a god," I heard Nora murmur.
All of a sudden there was a great wind, which blew Nora’s poncho up about her face, and whipped my hair back. The wind was pulling up, up, and I saw trash cans lifted into the air. People on the street scattered unsteadily to grab hold of something, anything solid to keep themselves on the ground. Sheltered as Nora and I were by the porch above our heads, the window just blew past us through the door and into the house, scattering papers and crystals and disturbing chimes.
The wind was still pulling upwards, and so great was its force that the rain was pulling upwards as well. I saw the front of a car slowly lifted into the air, appearing to do a wheelie, and staying there, stationary, too heavy to be pulled further. People held on to railings and fire hydrants or just lay right down on the wet ground with their arms over their heads, and as one we all looked up. Big Blue was rising. He was slowly but definitely rising straight up into the air, the rain continuing but lessening as he gained height. The wind lessened now and I could see people starting to pick themselves up, letting go of their anchors and looking up in wonder at our Big Blue rising up and up. Light started to filter into our consciousness - a lightening, the orange fading into purple, the purple fading into blue, and gradually heading for white. After a minute or so, he was high enough that I could see the sky starting to creep in at his edges, and as he shrank, the sky rushed in to fill his absence. At last I could see his whole shape, a dark spot in the sky, with those slender, rigid tails trailing out behind him. I think I even waved. He rose and rose, shrinking, disappearing and reappearing behind clouds until he was just blue on blue, a dark star in the sky. Then he disappeared completely.
I realised I had been holding Nora’s hand very tightly, and I let her go, only to have her leap on me and smother me in a tight embrace. Over her shoulder I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow city-dwellers, watched the first sunset in thirty-eight days, as the rain began to dry, the frost to thaw.
© Jerrard Doran, 2008