In The Falling Light (15 page)

The East River and the Hudson were being
sucked into New York Harbor like Colorado white water rapids, and
the harbor was being sucked out to sea. Hundreds of ships were
carried in the surge, some turning helplessly. A Circle Line boat
of sightseers slammed into a freighter and was quickly pulled
beneath the surface. To the right, a massive white Carnival cruise
ship had become locked against a bigger Royal Caribbean, and they
rushed out to sea side by side, paper boats caught in a storm
gutter.

The sharp angle of the asteroid trail hung
in the air out over the ocean, sketching a smoky line from the
heavens like God’s finger of judgment. Benjamin started to laugh.
He had been planning on stepping off a subway platform this
afternoon, right in front of the express from Grand Central. This
was so much better.

Within minutes the river bottoms and silt
bed of the harbor were exposed, clotted with beached ships and two
centuries of human trash, and the raging whisper of the
now-vanished rivers was replaced with a rumble. Benjamin wept and
smiled at it, a rising dark wall stretching across the horizon,
moving fast, pushing the air before it. He stepped into the cold,
salty wind and onto the ledge.

It was impossibly high and climbing still,
bluish green and foam crested, and as it neared its rumble made him
tremble. The locked pair of cruise ships, small as bathtub toys,
appeared to be scaling its vertical wall, and a blue whale tumbled
out of its surface, tadpole-sized against its magnitude.

The impact wave was over a mile high when it
hit.

As it arrived, blotting out the sun,
Benjamin tipped his head back and opened his arms wide.

“Come to Papa.”

And it did.

It was always midnight in Petershead.

Even before the Thorazine.

As a well-read resident, Courageous Little
Agnes Philomena – ‘Clap’ to her friends – knew about the Before
Time. She had learned of it in the library, and that was where she
was headed now.

Three feet tall and bony, Philomena strode
with a purpose along the cobbled street, her high, lace-up boots
with the pointy little toes
Click-Clacking
on the stones,
her head with the pointy little chin held high, and her hat with
the pointy little…well, with the pointy little point pulled firmly
over her long red ringlets of hair. Her dress was prison-matron
gray, her favorite color, with little black buttons running from
hem to throat.

Click-Clack-Click-Clack
, like a drill
instructor’s measured gait.

A pig dressed in bloody butcher’s whites
pedaled a bicycle towards her. He rang a little bell on the
handlebars as he called to her, the bike wobbling.

“Salutations, Clap!”

She smiled with her pointy little teeth and
waved. “Greetings, Hamhock.”

Click-Clack-Click-Clack
up the
street, past the tailor and the pipe shop and the mummifier. Just
beyond was a little shop with a big front window and a shingle hung
over the door. It showed a red and white striped candy wrapped in a
bow. Philomena stopped to press her pointy little nose against a
window pane. Fernando’s Sweets wasn’t open, but even through the
gloom within Philomena could make out shelf upon shelf of glass
jars, all filled with colorful, delicious, poisonous treats.

Her tummy growled.

Maybe she’d stop back by after the library.
If Fernando was open for business (he so rarely was, spending most
of his time asleep in a coffee can in his office), she’d spend a
penny and get her favorite sweet, a Putrid Puscake. Or maybe a
chocolate hemlock bar.

With a little sigh, Philomena pulled her
nose from the glass and marched on,
Click-Clack.

Once upon a time it had been Daylight in
Petershead, and there had been a family and children’s stories and
laughter. She knew this from her reading. Then the Twilight Time
crept in (but hadn’t it been there all along, really?) and the
laughter turned the same color. Soon Midnight came calling, and it
stayed. No more family. No more stories. And the laughter turned
black as a witch’s asshole.

Philomena giggled and covered her mouth. She
wasn’t supposed to curse, even in her own mind.

Click-Clack-Click-Clack
, past the
burnt church where deformed rats scampered and played and ate one
another. Past the bakery and the haberdashery. A cold burst of wind
sent dead leaves twirling and skirling down the street, and they
danced in a circle around her for a moment as Philomena jumped and
clapped her hands before they sailed on their way.

At the intersection a stoplight blinked red
in every direction. Philomena dutifully stopped and looked every
which way. There were only three cars in Petershead; An old-timey
flatbed truck with an
OOH-GAH
horn, driven by Skeleton Bob;
A silver minivan with tinted windows that drove off the Petershead
Bridge every day and burst into flames; a shiny white ambulance
driven by The Men in White. None were in view, so Philomena crossed
the street and started up the hill,
Click-Clack
.

Across the lane to her left was a big
Victorian house painted purple with white trim, every window
glowing with warm candlelight. In a smart little yard out front a
plump woman with a gray granny bun tended to a garden of black
tulips. She raised one hand, which wore a flower-printed gardening
glove.

“Courageous Little Philomena, how are you
dear?”

“
Agnes
Philomena.”

“Of course, dear. Off to the library
again?”

Philomena didn’t break stride. “Of
course.”

The woman tisked. “All that reading will
turn your brains to mush. Why not come in for some tea?”

Philomena waved, keeping to her side of the
street. “Not today, Mrs. Caul, thank you anyway.” It paid to be
polite to Mrs. Caul. And it paid even better to stay
out
of
Mrs. Caul’s kitchen. Where the knives were. And the pots. And her
cellar door.

The old woman went back to her tulips, and
Philomena continued her march up the hill,
Click-Clack.

At the top of the hill, the street turned
right. Growing out of the cobblestones, completely disrupting and
blocking the road, was the Wiggle Tree, a huge black oak with great
spreading boughs, each ending in viney twists, not a leaf upon any
of them. They appeared to sway, but due to wind or consciousness
was unknown. The Wiggle Tree slept a great deal of the time. Its
roots spread out in a riot, buckling the cobblestones and poking
out of the ruptured earth, as if it might at any moment decide to
go for a walk on some dread business. The only way round the corner
was to pass beneath its arms.

Philomena, wise beyond the ten years she was
and would ever be, took a deep breath and sprinted under the tree,
pointy little knees and elbows pumping fiercely. In a moment she
was past it and round the corner, and she stopped to look back. The
tree hadn’t moved. Perhaps it was indeed asleep. Perhaps she was
simply too fast for it – she liked to believe that. Or perhaps it
was already full.

In the Before Time, the Wiggle Tree had been
green and leafy and happy, and the family often picnicked under its
pleasant shade, the children climbing its inviting limbs. These
days it liked to snatch up pedestrians and cram them into its
toothy black maw.

Lots of things ate other things in
Petershead.

Past the corner, the upward slope continued,
though here the cobbled street was known as Twilliger’s Hill. All
along the right shoulder was a tall fence of iron bars with nasty
spikes at the top, dark ivy hanging thick upon the rusting metal.
Once upon a time this had been a white picket fence, but that was
in the Before Time. On the other side was Petershead Cemetery.

In the Before Time, it had been a lush
meadow of soft grass, blueberry bushes and sprawling, shady elms.
Wildflowers had grown in spectacular clusters, and the air was
always filled with butterflies. A friendly rabbit named Mr. Fobb
had lived there in a quaint little blue cottage, tending his
vegetable garden.

Then Midnight came. The flowers and the
blueberry bushes and the soft grass had turned black and died, the
butterflies started spinning webs and feeding on birds, and the
trees turned gnarled, sentient and cruel. Gravestones began
sprouting like weeds from the dead ground, old, chipped, weathered
things with illegible inscriptions, some with broken angels, some
with stone faces frozen in screams, all of them crooked. The crypts
and mausoleums grew next, gothic masses of cracked marble and
granite, iron doors yawning wide into blackness and cold. The ivy
covered them like hair.

Philomena marched up the long hill
Click-Clack-Click-Clack
and stopped at the crest, standing
before the gates of the cemetery. Here a stone archway stretched
over a wide entrance, where a pair of spiked iron gates stood open
amid high dead grass. She peered inside.

Sometimes a Reever or a Five-Legged
Bandolino (the ones with eight eyes, not six) could be seen peering
out from the dark entrance of a mausoleum, clicking their fangs and
drooling their poison, wondering if they could skitter out and
snatch up a victim before bursting into flame from the caress of
moonlight. There were no such monstrosities lurking around at the
moment, though, only Mr. Fobb the friendly rabbit. At present he
was upside-down on the face of an old gravestone, an iron spike
through his belly, pinning him there. His long ears hung limp on
the dead ground, and his arms dangled over his head.

“Hello, Mr. Fobb,” Philomena called.

The rabbit’s whisker twitched and he opened
one eye. It was bloodshot. “Well, well, how do you do, Clap?”

“Quite well, thank you. What nailed you to
that stone, Mr. Fobb?”

The rabbit’s left rear paw spasmed. “A
Reever. Interrupted my tea. Broke my teapot, sorry to say.”

Philomena made a sad little huff. “The white
one with the little blue flowers? You’ve had that teapot
forever!”

“Yes, yes, a terrible thing.” The rabbit
sighed.

The little girl took another look around the
immediate area and stepped closer to the cemetery entrance. “Shall
I pull you down?”

The rabbit waved a panicked paw. “No, no!
It’s still close by, I can smell it. I’d hate for it to get you
too, dear. They bite, you know.”

She did indeed know, and had the
semi-circular scar on her right calf to prove it. And they didn’t
just bite. They ate. But then Philomena could bite as well, as the
Reever that gave her the scar quickly learned.

“Besides, it would just nail me right back
up again.” He fingered the spike through his belly and wriggled his
pink nose. “Off to the library again? I’d have thought there was
nothing left for you to know.”

Philomena smiled her sharp smile. “Oh,
there’s still so much I haven’t learned!”

“You know about Early Twilight, and the
College Girl In The Trunk?”

“Read that. They never found the body.”

The rabbit wiggled his nose. “What about the
Anonymous Letter Bomb To Golden Books?”

Philomena smiled. “Of course, Mr. Fobb. Got
a junior editor with that one.”

He gave an experimental tug at the spike. It
wasn’t moving. “The Christmas Fire?”

Nod.

“The Hit And Run He Thought Was A Dream
Because Of The Painkillers And Tequila?”

Nod.

“Infant Sister Bathtub Accident?”

“Of course,” she said. “I’ve even read all
about you. In the Before Time you were very popular, and had dozens
of adventures. An entire series.”

Mr. Fobb sighed and hung limp on his spike.
“Yes, those were the days. Before the butterflies became predators
and my cottage turned into a crematorium.” As Philomena nodded in
sympathy, a black butterfly with lots of eyes floated onto one of
the rabbit’s ears. He flicked it off with an annoyed twitch. “What
could be left for you to learn?”

The little girl looked left and right, then
in a stage whisper called, “I need to know all about the
Crusk.”

The rabbit sucked a quick hiss of air
through his buck teeth, eyes wide. “For mercy’s sake, why?”

“Because I’m going to catch it.”

Mr. Fobb clasped his hands to the spike and
shuddered. “Oh dear, oh dear! Philomena, you mustn’t even think
such a thing!”

Courageous Little Philomena folded her thin
arms across her ten-year-old chest and stuck out her pointy little
chin. “Oh, I’m going to do it, Mr. Fobb. The Crusk has eaten far
too many children for far too long, and no one does anything about
it. So I will. If I don’t, I’ll be the only kid left in
Petershead!”

“Oh dear, oh dear,” the rabbit fretted,
fingering the spike.

Philomena looked up the street. “Well, time
for me to go, if you won’t let me pull out the spike, that is.”

The rabbit’s ears drooped even further than
before. “Please reconsider, Clap. I’d just hate to hear that you’d
been eaten too.”

“Not to worry, Mr. Fobb, I have a plan. Just
need to figure out the right bait.” And with that she was off, the
rabbit sending her a slow, sad wave, her little boots
Click-Clacking
over the cobblestone, up to the crest of
Twilliger’s Hill.

Over the hill and just beyond the cemetery,
the cobblestones ended in a great roundabout in front of the
library. In the center of the circle, rising from an overgrown
tangle of black ivy, was a statue of a great, chubby bear with wide
eyes and a curious expression. It was heavily stained with pigeon
shat. This was, of course, the Butter Bear, once a children’s
favorite in the Before Time. Philomena frowned as she walked around
the circle, looking at the statue. A shame how that had all turned
out. The rampage at the kindergarten picnic, the crazed bear
eventually brought down with a bloody rag doll clutched in each
paw.