Xeno Sapiens (50 page)

“
Who is it,”
Mark called, his voice
sharp and brittle as kindling in his mouth. The wind was an Arctic
intruder, prowling his home on soundless feet. “Who's out
there?”

Save for the chilling cries of distant night
fowl, there was no reply. The figure's stoic complacency was eerily
threatening. Mark turned the outside light on. The feeble glow
opened a useless parasol of light that lit only ten feet beyond the
rickety wooden steps. He stepped onto the top plank. The make-do
staircase wobbled and groaned, tilting sideways three inches. Mark
raised his club and smacked it into the palm of his left hand, but
was unable to put any real menace into it. He imagined himself,
wrapped in a blanket like a feeble woman, shaking with cold and
fright, threatening shadows from his stoop like an old man with a
cane.

“Come closer, asshole,” he challenged,
swelling his voice with a tinny belligerence that was contrived,
wondering if anything he could do would make a difference. “Come
closer and see if I can't scramble your brains for you.”

Any human would have answered the slur with
a threat of its own, run, or come closer. This figure did none of
those things.

Dartlike cold prickled Mark's bare feet as
he eased down the steps, club at the ready. He stepped onto the
earthen floor of the forest. Fallen leaves, thick with a coating of
frost, stuck to his heels.

He thought he knew who it was that awaited
him in this place of thick shadows, mirrored lives and endless
nightmares. It was the dark Narcissus from the sinkhole.

He moved towards the shadowy figure like one
mesmerized by a
rara avis,
unaware of the darkness that
cloaked him as he retreated from the safe glow of his lights. Dried
weeds, snap-happy as arthritic bones, grated across his naked
shins. The rip saw of the wind sliced through him, whipping the
folds of the blanket up and away as it searched for ingress. Rocks
and hard knots of earth frozen into erratic shapes bruised and
slashed the soles of his feet.

The figure remained rock still until Mark
was within thirty feet, then began to move backwards. Not walking
in any sense that Mark could see. It just seemed to recede away,
like the water as Tantalus tried to draw a drink. Trying to catch
and hold the phantom would be as impossible as Sisyphus rolling his
stone up the hill.

The figure drew him onward, away from the
false safety of his trailer and its logical, man-made walls, and
into the lightless, ancient woods where nothing of man's constructs
had prospered. It was a fatally hypnotic need to know that pushed
him ahead. A humid raft of wind, cold and sharp with the sting of
water droplets, bit his eyes and he knew he was near one of the
sinkholes. There was something in the sinkholes, perhaps something
as wondrous as a wall of gold sunken in its depths, or something as
dark and corrupting as a legion of lost and tortured souls that
would arise at his bidding, their only need his ability to flesh
them out; to make them breathe again.

A clearing emerged from the velvet wall of
night and Mark saw the faint glimmer of starshine mirrored on the
rippling surface of the sinkhole, as delicate as a rue anemone. It
twinkled and faded, glowing bright then dim as the wind stirred the
waves. There were new fingers and freshets of ice under his feet,
channels carved by the ever-advancing water. His toes were frozen
wooden blocks, his nose a dripping chunk of ice. He still held the
club in his hand, but he drew no courage from it.

Any time now the figure would slip from the
edge of reality, tumbling backwards into the fantasy world of the
sinkholes. It was at the edge now, and fading. It grew shorter,
first its feet, then its legs disappearing.

Mark trudged forward, gathering speed,
needing to see more than just the hazy form of his nemesis. Deep in
his mind, warning bells clanged, ordering him to halt his headlong
rush. The sinkhole was too close, the ice too slick.

The figure was only head and shoulders now,
peering above the center of the sinkhole like some creature from a
horror movie, its body submerged. There had been not a breath nor
ripple of water as it had slipped silently and completely into its
numbing depths.

The lip of the sinkhole was ten feet away,
now five, yet Mark never diverted his eyes from the puzzling enigma
of the man in the lake.

The figure slipped elusively away. Its
shoulders went under, then its chin. For a fraction of a second
Mark thought he saw the flash of eyes before they, too, submerged,
leaving not even a ripple to mark their passage.

Mark's leading foot suddenly slipped on a
frozen slate, plunging his right leg knee-deep into the paralyzing
waters. A cold as painful as the sting of a jellyfish shot down the
pathways of his nervous system and violent shudders instantly
wrested control of his muscles.

He jerked his right leg from the freezing
water and his balance failed him. He fell to his left, throwing his
right arm out for equilibrium. The heavy club in his right hand
swung out and its inertia added the final touch to his loss of
stasis. As he toppled, the club was thrown clear somewhere in the
woods. He heard it snapping off small branches in flight before
landing with a crackling thud. The blanket fell away from him and
he landed hard on the packed earth, naked to the cold except for
his cotton briefs.

Somehow, both of his feet had managed to
find their way into the sinkhole, and he yanked them out. That old,
pre-adult dread of something grabbing an exposed limb blotted out
his pain. It had been an irrational fear in childhood, now it
wasn't. He had seen the thing himself. It could grab him, pull him
down with its skeletal arms, hold him under until his lungs filled
with water, all his struggles useless. It had happened before, he
was sure of it.

His feet had already numbed to the biting
cold settling upon his exposed body. The hair on his chest stung as
the wind tore at it. His shoulder where he had fallen ached like
frostbite. He pushed the pain aside as he searched for his quilt.
His only thought was to wrap himself in the quilt, restore some
warmth to his body. He had fallen into such cold water once before,
and he knew it could kill him in less than fifteen minutes.

His groping hand happened on the blanket and
he wrapped it around his quaking shoulders, sitting huddled on the
ground. He didn't trust himself to make it all the way back until
some warmth returned to his body.
Just a couple of minutes,
he told himself.

Clear mucus ran from his nose, trembling on
his upper lip as the chattering castanets of his teeth clicked
together. He stared glassily at the wind-lapped surface of the
sinkhole, expecting the phantom to return and take him as he sat
swooning and immobile. The circle of trees around him writhed into
arcing life, bending and stooping, whipped by a freshening wind.
Frozen bark cracked and thick trunks creaked like bone-dry boards.
Leaves loosened by fall's imperative fluttered down, some of them
falling on the surface of the sinkhole where they floated, odd
little boats with no passengers or cargo.

Frozen starshine refracted and trebled in
his watering eyes, as ephemeral as the figure itself had been. Time
had somehow sped up and he had been out in the subfreezing
temperatures for more than three quarters of an hour, first drawn
by the figure, then seduced by his own memories. No good thing
could come of it. 'Scilla had said whatever was here cried out to
be worshiped, or fed. There was no God here, only something with a
ravenous hunger for pain. And if he fed it would it not grow?
Become even stronger?

The light in his eyes burned brighter,
swelling into more than starshine. He blinked and shook his head,
trying to drive out this new nightmare. But it was no nightmare,
unless it was a waking one. Near the center of the pond, a
silver-white light burned, coming to life near its unknown floor.
It rose from the depths like the lambent, shining eye of a sea
monster.

The disc of light was eight feet across and
rising slowly as if on currents, bubbling and pushing the water
ahead of it in a gurgling wave. The water roiled and eddied, as if
some huge creature were turning beneath the surface. Some
pre-human, Lovecraftian abomination with the head of an alligator
and the body of an eel, with two gigantic saucers of light for
eyes.

A second flat disc of light slowly came into
view, turning from flat profile to hazy full face, slightly glazed
and shimmering from the lapping waters. The flat, glassy saucers
drifted up with laconic stateliness, as subdued as the headlights
of a funeral procession.

The two spherical lights filled the width of
the pond. They never surfaced completely, only drifted dreamily
inches beneath the wave crests. Mark watched them, a new rime of
fear icing his heart.

They came in a rush, all their former
docility and sluggishness gone. In one second they went from
enigmatic, shining questions to active dangers. Their advance was
preceded by a slight dimming as they pushed a new depth of water
ahead of them in a bow wave. The reflected light from the saucers
ran over and over the wave crests, running into a backwash like a
wake. Rushing liquid hissed and foamed.

Mark yanked himself up from the ground with
a screech of still-locked tendons in his knees. He staggered
backward in a daze as the first wave of dark water crashed over the
bank. The icy spray broke apart and washed over him. Spinning water
droplets glittered like sparklers in the night, congealing into
streaks of shining ice on his skin. His hair froze to his scalp in
icy spikes. He waited for the thunderous tremor as whatever was
under the waves crashed into the granite walls of the sinkhole. He
stared with dreamy apprehension at the sullenly glowing lights that
had begun to pulsate slowly, like a tediously beating heart.

The crash never came. In its place, the
water bubbled and swelled. With a heart as heavy as the weight of
the endless depths, he realized that it was coming out. It would
drag its behemoth, slimy bulk from the black fathoms and take him
to sate its endless hunger.

Mark squeaked out a strangled,
incomprehensible cry and turned to run. His legs were too cold and
the muscles had stiffened. The blanket swirled around and between
legs that moved as rigidly as wooden bowling pins. There was a
groaning, sub-bass rumble in his head that almost overpowered the
ghost's whistle of the wind. It was the voice of the beast only he
could hear.

He blundered blindly with no light to show
him the way but the dim bulb outside of his trailer. And even that
light was intermittently masked by hanging vines and the ebony
bones of naked tree limbs.

He raced, white-livered, through the woods,
passing the crumbling relic of the church. An orange, Halloween
light burned from within, lighting the frost-covered windows with a
macabre glow. Its crossless spire strained against the purple
blackness of the night sky. Goose flesh from more than the cold
crept down his chilled body as a maniacal cackling that was the
voice of all-consuming madness shrilled out of the church's open
doorway. It was the sound a crazed deacon might make as he poured
gasoline over the pew cushions and hymnals while the congregation
sat stunned at gunpoint. He would have already shot a couple of the
parishioners as a lesson before setting fire to the doused paper
and fabric. Mark heard the screams of the trapped parishioners,
yelling and yammering like a congregation trapped and set ablaze by
a madman.

Thorns and prickly shrubs blocked his path,
as if they had moved stealthily to impede him like the living trees
in
The Wizard of Oz
. One reaching branch hooked his blanket
and ripped it from his back. He stumbled on, tearing his gaze from
the haunted church, past the open foundation of a destroyed
building. A groaning wind blew out of the ground from the wishing
well that had magically blown away its cover of boards and vines.
Its endless blackness led, perhaps, to an underground cave filled
with Native American artifacts and life-sized horses carved from
the finest gold, with emeralds for eyes and dried scalps dangling
their curly, blond and brown locks from golden pegs wrought into
their beaten flanks. A place he had seen before when he was eleven
years old, dragged away from his tent one night when he was camping
in his back yard by crazy Willy, a drunken reprobate who suffered
from emphysema and cirrhosis.

“You comin' wid me, boy,” Willy had breathed
into his pale face, wrinkling it with gin fumes. His one gold tooth
had gleamed like a pirate's earring in the moonlight, his face
emaciated and cragged by the wages of disease.

“Willy goan show you somethin', boy,” he had
grinned, the last of his sanity faintly gleaming in those rolling
white eyes.

And Mark had gone, following the crazy,
drunken old wino deep into the woods, watching him as he staggered
over a bolt set into a wooden door in the floor of the forest.
Willy had unsteadily scraped leaves from the bolt, then had Mark
help him haul the door open. A disturbed cold had bellowed from the
hole as the door had squeaked back on its rotted hinges. Mark had
followed Willy down into that cavern he had just thought of.

Willy had died two weeks later, and Mark
could never remember where or in what woods around his home those
fabulous treasures had lain secreted. But he had never forgotten
they were there. Could this have been the spoiled land that Willy
had brought him to?

Mark looked away from the hole. The light of
the trailer was close beyond a newly opened clearing. He ran as
fast as he could, the pitiful cries of damned souls at his heels,
the destructive crashing of the beast from the lake not far behind.
He stubbed his numb toes on the stairs as he misjudged their height
and his teeth clenched in unendurable agony. His hands shook so
badly that the door handle jittered in his fingers and he had to
steady them with his other hand to get the door open.