The Reality Conspiracy (69 page)

T
abitha wished she had a live link-up with the station. If this story were going out in real time, it would be the on-the-scene scoop of the century.

Damn this low budget, rinky-dink operation!

Well, no matter. If she was the only reporter to get the whole thing on tape—she looked around, still no more media folks had arrived—it would surely be the story of a lifetime. It would make her career, get her the attention needed to secure a network position. Maybe get her snapped up by CNN
.

"You gettin' it? Huh? You gettin' it all okay?" Hap Hautala was fidgeting beside her. She suspected his thoughts were as grandiose as her own. No doubt he saw himself as a major participant, an eyewitness who'd appear on every television screen in the nation, maybe the world. "Ssssssh," she told him as she watched the huge round light crossing the sky, inching gracefully toward them. With nothing in her viewfinder for contrast, its impressive size didn't communicate clearly.

Okay
, she thought,
we'll take care of that
. Tabitha stopped shooting and unscrewed the camera from its tripod. She kneeled on the wet spongy ground to compose an angle that would include the crowd silhouetted before the moving sun.

Cold ground water saturated the knees of her jeans.

One man—
he sure acts a little crazy
, she thought—
was
moving about, talking constantly to the spectators. She wished he'd shut up. But no real problem, she could delete his ranting when she got back to the editing suite. His voice just
irritated
her.

"Those who are faithful shall be rewarded, those who have lost faith shall have faith renewed. Those who've never known faith, shall find it in the Light."

Some soapbox preacher
, she concluded. Probably she should record his ravings after all, it might be amusing. To get the perfect shot, Tabitha had to lie all the way down on her back. Cold water found its way beneath her collar and chilled the back of her head. Her hair was probably a muddy mess, but it didn't matter; she'd look more in-the-trenches on camera.

The light—it must have been a hundred feet across—began to pass over the gathering. She couldn't judge its distance above their heads: it could be thirty feet, it could be a thousand. But she noticed one thing immediately: it wasn't raining beneath the light. That means it's solid!

Holy fuck! This was no vision, no optical illusion. The thing was large and round and silent. It sheltered the crowd from the rain like a giant's umbrella.

It's gotta be a UFO
,
she thought
. Holy
God, maybe something's making contact!

"Feel it!" The ranting man went on, "feel the warmth and power of the Light."

Three members of the crowd dropped to their knees. Tabitha zoomed in on the handsome man who stood behind the girl in the wheelchair. Oddly, the girl's head was down, her hand covered her eyes as if she wasn't buying any of this
.

Or maybe she's praying.

"We are the chosen ones," the bald man sang. "We are the witnesses, the selected servants who'll see this great event. The Light will illuminate the worthy. And it'll blast the soulless to the deepest bowels of hell! The Light is the way of the world."

(8.)

And finally, to demonstrate an editor's true worth, let me show you how he kept me from making a big mistake with the ending. The final chapter of the published book ends with the line (spoken by Jeff to Karen), 'When you're rested up, I'm going to try to talk you into marrying me."

Okay, a nice happy ending. But—much to my embarrassment—the deleted material from the original manuscript continues . . .

A
s they held each other, a pretty woman doctor carrying an aluminum chart hurried forward from the nurses' station. She wore oversized glasses with a yellow pencil pinched between her temple and the frame. "Dr. Karen Bradley?"

Jeff and Karen separated, still holding hands. "Yes?"

"I have the results of your X-rays and tests. Who's this?" She looked at Jeff.

"This is my husband-to-be," Karen beamed. "You can speak in front of him. It's okay."

The doctor nodded. "Well, folks, all the news I have is good. Considering what you must have been through, you're in excellent shape, Dr. Bradley."

"My feeling exactly," Jeff said, squeezing Karen's hand.

"And you'll be delighted to know than in spite of any trauma you might have experienced, the baby seems to be just fine."

Jeff blanched. He looked at Karen.

She felt the blood drain from her face, her knees weakened; she thought she was going to fall.

The doctor seemed alarmed. "Good heavens, I'm sorry! You did know you were pregnant, didn't you?"

What the editor had written to me was simply, "The pregnancy seems too much like a TV-movie-style surprise ending. Let's drop it."

Amen. And with that bit of editorial wisdom, the outtakes are over.

Let us begin by noting that there are, in and about us, "bad places." If you visit a "bad place," deliberately or inadvertently, you may see "bad things."

N
ow that you've read
DEUS-X
, let's chat for a page or ten, shall we?

As Joe himself says in these very pages,
DEUS-X
is a "cursed book."

As Joe Citro's most Fortean novel, in the true sense of that term, I find it strangely reassuring that what was damned in the early 20
^th
Century is still damned today—after all, Charles Fort's first Fortean book was entitled
The Book of the Damned
(1919).

Mind you, Mr. Fort knew a thing or two about damned books before then; his first and only published novel,
The Outcast Manufacturers
(1909), had already been damned, consigned into oblivion by indifference and lack of sales. Fort's subsequent pair of novels, ominously titled
X
and
Y
, never saw print and may have never been completed, despite Theodore Dreiser's attempts to interest publishers. Despondent, Fort torched the manuscripts.

Now,
those
are "cursed books."

Joe wouldn't stomach my comparing
The Book of the Damned
to
DEUS-X
, but I'd argue (I
am
arguing) that
DEUS-X
was damned at conception and birth, and possibly damned by design.

From my very first reading of the manuscript, it seemed to me
DEUS-X
was a significant work, arguably quite groundbreaking—and I've been reading horror fiction and non-fiction since a tender age. I assert here and now that
DEUS-X
remains significant and even groundbreaking, given the shallowness of most of what passes for "groundbreaking" in the genres
DEUS-X
embraces and eclipses.

In terms of Joe's own body of work,
DEUS-X
was apocalyptic in every sense of the word:
a revelation
.

It still is.

And within the genre Joe was consciously seeding, cultivating, and harvesting, it was a revelation, too. It remains as revelatory in 2012 as it was almost two decades ago. But you won't need me to persuade you;
DEUS-X
does that all on its own.

Let us furthermore note, that if you visit a "bad place," deliberately or inadvertently, "bad things" may happen to you there.

G
iven all the sanctimonious, overtly destructive baggage attached to the word "apocalypse" in our generation, I hasten to evoke the literal definition of the word, from the greek
À¿º¬»Åȹ / apokálypsis—a "lifting of the veil" or "revelation," a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind.
DEUS-X
truly is a novel of the apocalypse, though not in the way so many contemporary "apocalyptic" novels aspire to. It is not a novel of destruction, or even of the end of the world, per se. It is a lifting of the veil. A revelation. As such, it transcended—and transcends—not only the entirety of Joe's previous four novels, but most of what passes for horror fiction and apocalyptic fiction in an era marked by impoverished, unimaginative, dogmatic "apocalyptic" religious fantasies like the
Left Behind
series and its bizarre wish-fulfillment ilk.

Let us take some comfort in the knowledge that, in many and perhaps even most cases, if you visit a "bad place," deliberately or inadvertently, and "bad things" are seen or even happen to you there, you may leave the "bad place" and save yourself, as long as you take nothing with you.

J
oe's plethora of Fortean non-fiction works—or, as he prefers to put it, books comprised of "stories that might not be fiction"—most often deal with haunts, ghosts, and intangibles: things seen, even heard, but almost never tangible, touched, or touching (as in physical contact or interaction).

The procession of "stories that might not be fiction" in his oddity collections and his lengthy stint as a public radio commentator now comprise a formidable body of work, more than many accomplish in a lifetime.

We can take some comfort in the fact that the haunts, ghosts, and intangibles he describes only occasionally manifest materially in our day-to-day world, in ways we can document or measure or hold in our hands.

But what if those that
do
manifest are not only
seen
, but
see us?
What if they do materialize? What then? What to do?

A personal favorite among the many "stories that might be fiction" Joe has shared over the past two decades remains a short one in one of our joint projects,
The Vermont Ghost Guide
. It remains a favorite because it's one of the few accounts in which the witness does just what I know in my heart of hearts I would do:

"In the late 1980s a carpenter working alone on the second floor of an old farmhouse on Route 114 (just outside Island Pond) chanced to look out the window. There he saw a pasture with a flock of sheep and a young girl herding them. Odd, he thought, there weren't any working farms nearby. But when he went out to talk to the girl, he couldn't find her. The sheep were gone, too, and the pasture was all grown up. Stubbornly, he continued working until he saw the girl again. This time she was waving to him. He quit the job and left."
(
The Vermont Ghost Guide
, Island Pond, pg. 41)

Joe's fiction, though, is quite something else. The haunts manifest in his novels are things that not only are seen and heard, and that not only wave at you, but haunts that are also smelled, felt, tasted, touched, and capable of touching, chasing, catching, tearing, savaging, maiming, devouring, killing, and worse.

Still, these are localized haunts, if you will. In his four prior novels Joe keeps his focus pretty close to home, in the most literal sense: born and raised in Vermont, all his novels are set in his home state, as is
DEUS-X
. Each offers an original tale of a fictional "haunt," a haunt that eventually becomes terribly concrete.

DEUS-X
is different. What is terrifying in
DEUS-X
isn't just that what begins with barely-perceived haunts or shades becomes concrete—it's that "concrete" barely scratches the surface of what malingers in
DEUS-X
. Materialization would be terrible, but somehow a relief. What lurks here isn't just real, or "real"—it's Joe's perception and evocation of what we used to call "realer than real," when we were young and grasping for the means to describe the indescribable.

As a novelist, Joe is in top form here, applying all his skills, observations, intuitions, and inventions to create a cyclopean work greater than the sum of its insidious parts. 

Let us warn the timid and cautious reader, however, that if you visit a "bad place," deliberately or inadvertently, and "bad things" are seen or happen to you there, and you do depart and flee the "bad place," you may no longer be the same person you were before you visited the "bad place."

What we have here, too, is something that sets Citro apart from his immediate contemporaries in the genre.

As in his previous quartet of novels,
DEUS-X
is also informed from stem to stern by Citro's extensive work as a folklorist, a Fortean, and an archivist of regional "stories that might not be fiction." In this, he is not just conceptually following in the footsteps of the pioneering Charles Fort; he is a fellow traveler. Like those who have also followed Fort's example—John Keel, Loren Coleman, and others to numerous to mention—Joe has done
real
field work. He has interviewed eyewitnesses, combed ancient documents, searched for hard evidence, traveled to "bad places" and mysterious places and magical places, and been irrevocably marked and changed by that process. I recently had the very good fortune to dine with Joe Citro and cryptozoologist Loren Coleman, and saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears their genuine comradery: they are fellow travelers. There are countless horror writers who evoke Fort and Fort's legacy, but few who have actually walked in his footsteps. Joe has.