Apocalypse Read online

  All her adult life, she would have been glad to work some other job, in an office or the mills or wherever, even stand out on a road in the hot sun and flag the traffic for the construction crews the way some women did. But nothing would suit Homer but that she should stay home and “do” for him. Well, she had stayed home, all right, and found herself a way to make money right there in the house, and that money was hers, because he didn’t know what she was doing while he was at work and the kids were in school. And her parents never knew how she was using the nurse’s training they’d shoved down her throat.

  For all Homer or her parents knew, Duty had been her middle name all the time the kids were growing up. Now the ungrateful youngsters were gone, and Homer had retired, hanging around the house, in her way, and like an overgrown kid he thought she should be there to babysit him still.

  Too bad for Homer. She had her horse, six miles out of Hoadley, out in the country, where a person could breathe. And she had her car to get there. And she had her cancer, so that he couldn’t take either away from her.

  She swung out of the car, swaying her hips, swinging her ass. Too bad there were no men around to see her. She knew better than to think Snake Oil would be impressed. Shirley was leading Shady Lady in from the pasture; Gigi flashed her hard little grin at her and strode into the stable, where her gelding was waiting, and put her scarred old arms around his neck, and kissed him on the smooth, aromatic fur of his face.

  After the others were out of the barn and mounted, Elspeth rode in from the ring to join them. It was typical of her not to join in the talk beforehand. She had her pride. On this day, though, she had further reason for staying aloof, so trenchant a reason that she had hidden it in the tall grass near the riding ring at first, where Shirley would not see it until the last minute. Once she put it on, it felt far heavier than its actual weight, hanging at her waist.

  She rode in with flat-faced bravado, showing none of the uncertainty she felt. Lashed to her leg, the thing did not get in her way as she had feared or hoped.

  “Whoa!” Shirley exclaimed at once, as Elspeth had known she would. “Where’d you get that?”

  Like a bizarre fashion accessory pendant from Elspeth’s belt, in a scabbard covered with Prussian-blue velvet, hung a sword.

  “Flea market,” Elspeth replied, purposely not answering the unspoken questions: Why a weapon? What for? She drew the sword and brandished it briefly. A lightweight, slashing extension of her arm, it responded to the twisting of her wrist. The blade flexed and flashed, spooking the red bay—“Blood bay,” Elspeth always called it, insisting that the others do likewise in her hearing. The color was dense and lustrous, every bit as bright as red chestnut, but richer, not as coppery. Aside from her color the mare was no beauty: heavy-headed, rough-gaited and sour-tempered. Elspeth did not care. She let the horse shy and jump sideways, bumping into the others. She had bought the blood bay for the color, and named her Warrior.

  The other women spooked from the sword much as the mare did, and from Elspeth, with her blood-colored Warrior, her sardonic stare, her weapon. For a moment the apron outside the barn was a picturesque melee of mounted women, milling horses and shining, uplifted sword. “God’s sake, Elspeth,” ordered Shirley with far less than her usual serenity, “put that thing away.”

  Elspeth obliged, sheathing the long blade, and the scene quieted.

  “What you want that thing for, anyways?” Shirley demanded.

  “You’re always saying how the trails are getting grown over.”

  It was a flip, quick, easy answer, prepared in advance. In fact, Elspeth herself did not know why she had bought the sword. A genuine Sudanese kaskara, it had not been cheap, even at a flea market, even in Hoadley. But she had felt the bone-deep pang of some odd, dark, nameless yearning when her hand had touched the thong-bound grip.… Her glib words were enough to reassure Shirley so that the big woman flung back her head and laughed uproariously at her own fears.

  “You got that there for the blackberries!”

  The brambles, Shirley meant, always reaching with thorny fingers, grasping at riders on the trails. When the fruit was in season, it would stain the blade of the sword blood black.

  “Name it Berrysmiter,” Cally put in. Name the sword, she meant. How did the little snot know a sword needed a name? How dare she? It was a private matter, what Elspeth named her sword. Hard-eyed, Elspeth stared at her. Cally met the look, unsmiling.

  The little turd. Elspeth wanted to detest her, because Shirley liked her too much. But there was some quality, some quiddity about Cally that made her something more than just another neurotic woman. Perhaps it was only her extreme thinness making her seem somehow more than self, as a whippet seems somehow more than just a dog.… Perhaps all such perceptions were merely in Elspeth’s mind. Despite herself, Elspeth thought often about Cally. Wondering.

  This time, clutching the hilt of a still-nameless sword, Elspeth wondered about Cally’s name. What was “Cally” short for? Calypso? Calliope? Once in Elspeth’s hearing Gigi had asked, but Cally had given an annoyingly inadequate laugh and not answered. Now she had the temerity to suggest a name for the sword. What did Cally know about names, about what to call things? As if she expected the weapon to be used on nothing but blackberries.…

  Shirley still laughed like a great brass bell, but Cally was not laughing. Damn her, she knew, somehow, that—what? There was nothing to know.

  Elspeth dropped her grip from the sword hilt. “Certainly,” said Elspeth coolly. “Berrysmiter it is.”

  So they went riding, four women far too old for that sort of thing: gray-haired Gigi with her own death riding inside her, and full-breasted, brassy-curled Shirley, and Cally, whippet-thin and neurotic, and an absurdity in pseudo-medieval garb who called herself Elspeth. But even as they mounted and moved away from the stable they felt themselves expanding with the swaying of the walk, the primal rhythm of the trot, the rocking canter, so that they were no longer Shirley, Cally, Gigi and Elspeth, but something more, something ancient and powerful and uncaring.

  It was good, even better than most days, to be on the move. There was more than usual to be left behind. The talk in the stable as they readied the horses had been constrained, not as pleasant as usual. Something unspoken had lurked like a rat in the shadows of the aisleway.

  Elspeth, usually the silent one, blurted, “Where shall we go?”

  Elspeth looked to Shirley, but it was Cally who spoke. Already, after the first jog down the pasture line, her taut face, haggard with constant dieting, had smoothed and softened. “Back behind the mine,” she said. On horseback, with her fellow riders, she was ready to face the same things that sent her fleeing in her nightmares, in the nuptial bed at home. She wanted to return to the place where she had seen—him. The naked one whose face she could not recall nearly as plainly as she did his crotch.

  Cally led off. She took them the roundabout way, which no one minded; the longer the ride the better. Ridge trail to what they called the Periwinkle Path to the old Seldom road, then up the Grapevine Trail … Even though the grapevines looped low, Elspeth did not offer to use the sword. No one mentioned it.

  “Where are the cicadas today?” Cally asked suddenly.

  Elspeth stiffened, because in her sketchbook was a drawing she had not made; something had taken control of her hand. But she covered up her discomfiture with scorn. “Gone away. Where were you expecting them to be?”

  “I’m expecting something else,” said Cally. Being on horseback made her brave, comparatively. The comradeship of the ride, the bond of women on horseback, made her able to tell the others about the eerie encounter she had mentioned to no one else. They let their horses browse and listened: Shirley intent, Gigi dourly smiling, Elspeth hiding as always behind her sulky, beautiful face.

  “He was buck naked?” asked Gigi, salacious rather than shocked.

  “There were animals all around him, and it was like he was another animal. But he looked at me like he w
as thinking.”

  Even Gigi did not snicker. The feel of the day was too shadowy for that. Cicada silence hung heavy as the saffron haze over Hoadley.

  “All he said was ‘Prepare’?” Shirley had been a bus driver, a plumber, a forklift operator, a short order cook. As a longtime manager of practical affairs, she wanted to make sure she had the message straight.

  “Prepare. That’s all he said. Then he disappeared.”

  “I want to see him,” said Gigi, who plunged her horse down cliffsides and into rivers, the boldest rider in the stable, always, even though she was by far the oldest. Perhaps because she was the oldest. She had the least to lose.

  “I don’t,” said Elspeth, honest for a change. She felt chilled as if by the shivery stare of eyes weirdly bright as a wolf’s.

  “Now, it ain’t likely to be up to us, whether or not we see him,” Shirley put in, quelling argument before it could start. Even more than most women she spoke mildly and strove to keep peace. This was the role of a Hoadley woman in her family, to smooth things over, and to Shirley the world was family. “We can at least go to see where he was,” she added like a good mother to disappointed children.

  The women bullied their horses away from their browsing and sent them forward again. And for a while, riding the narrow, vine-choked trail, they kept an unnatural silence.

  “Do you suppose it could be the, you know?” asked Gigi when finally they came out onto the logging road. “The Second Coming we’re supposed to prepare for?”

  “The millennium? The Last Judgment?” Elspeth spoke with trembling scorn and a voice that rose in pitch with every word.

  “Don’t have to be that,” Shirley soothed. “Could be something else.”

  “Like what?” Just as sharply Elspeth turned on her.

  “Like, I dunno! Like them crazy people out in California with their coven.”

  “A witch.” Elspeth began suddenly, too shrilly, to laugh. “That’s all we need. A witch hunt.”

  “Plenty of people in this town who might qualify as witches,” said Gigi with her own peculiar dry, blunt zest. “Anybody know Sojourner Hieronymus?”

  Cally thought of Sojourner Hieronymus sitting on her pristine porch and hating butterflies. Sojourner had once told her that there was a woman who had got a butterfly up her skirt and stuck in her underpants in a public place and it fluttered her to death. Gave her such a strong orgasm that she got a heart attack from sheer exertion and embarrassment. Died on the spot. Wherever Sojourner went, she carried a cane for striking away butterflies and mice and whatever small creatures might assault the sanctuaries of her skirt. Sojourner never wore slacks. She didn’t approve of them.

  But instead of saying she knew Sojourner Hieronymus, Cally said, “Listen.” She stopped her horse, and the others, who were following her lead, necessarily stopped theirs.

  “Huh?” Shirley complained. “Listen to what?”

  Then they all heard it. The primal sound, empty, angry and yearning, hollow as Cally’s belly, lonesome as her childhood heart.

  “Locusts,” Shirley answered herself.

  “Cicadas,” said Cally, “all around.”

  Elspeth said with unnecessary force. “So what?” And Cally shrugged her thin shoulders and sent Dove forward again.

  The road narrowed to a grassy trail. Woods closed around like felons in an alley, and the women began to hear within the hollow mob-roar the individual voices, the shrillings and snickerings and tiny screams. They began to see the sere husks clinging by the thousands to the twigs.

  “It’s locusts, all right,” said Gigi.

  “Cicadas,” said Cally.

  “Whatever,” Gigi retorted. In each woman’s voice was a stretched harp string of tension. Shirley, also, looked uneasy. “They don’t hurt nothing,” she offered with far less than her usual volume. “Not even the trees. I heard someplace where they don’t chew, all they do is suck. They come up—out of the ground.…” Her voice dwindled away. She had tightened rein on her horse, stopping where she was, and the others stopped with her. They did not let their horses browse, but sat with the reins in their clenched hands, listening. From the woods on either side and all around them sounded the voices of thousands upon thousands unto millions of—what?

  Something was crying. Or, many somethings. Amid the clickings and chucklings and hum and clamor they heard the wailing cries.

  “It sounds like babies!” Elspeth exclaimed.

  “That’s what I said, the first time I heard them.” Cally controlled her voice, but her body shook, a fine vibration, at one with the mobbed and trembling trees, the cicada resonance.

  Shirley, more prone than any of the others to say whatever came to mind, blurted, “Did you ever hear about the woman died a few years back, over in Mine 27? They went through her things, they found babies in her attic. Five babies, all brown and dried up, wrapped in newspapers and stuffed in a box. Can you imagine? They said one of them was almost a year old before she—”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Cally interrupted, shaking harder.

  With more anxiety and less sense than was usual for her, Gigi put in, “I’ve heard that deer make a noise like that sometimes. Like humans.”

  “That’s not deer,” said Elspeth flatly.

  And with a twiggy sound, a dry, rattling buzz of wings, the chorus made itself visible.

  In spectral colors, Halloween colors: black bodies, orange legs, orange veining in their crisp, translucent wings, spherical orange eyes on their blunt, black heads. They were little more than an inch long, the size of the first joint of Shirley’s work-callused thumbs. With a plangent shriek one flew past Cally’s ear to the crest of Dove’s mane—seemed to topple there and stick in the coarse hair, rather, like a winter leaf in a storm wind—and with a noise of disgust in her throat and heaving stomach Cally struck it off before she realized.

  The cicada had a human face.

  A round, flat face like that of a baby, though still of that dead black-rubber-eraser color and still with those beadlike orange eyes, as if someone had stuck them into the infant sockets with pins. Cally did not at first comprehend; only as her hand, a huge doom, came down and swatted the clinging body into oblivion did she see the tiny triangular suckling mouth open to wail. Then her own mouth came open and screamed panting cries that made no sense, though they tried to form a word.

  It finally came. “Babies!” she cried.

  And the babies, bugs, cicadas, whatever they could properly be called, were swarming in such numbers that their pudgy bodies and frail wings darkened the world. Whether for revenge or for loneliness or love, there was no telling, but they lurched through air until they encountered big, warm, soft, and that they embraced. They caught hold on the horses and on the women, on their clothes, their collars, their hair; Shirley and Elspeth and Gigi, like Cally, had seen the pathos of their chinless, fumbling mouths, their tiny upturned noses, and tried to remove them gently, but they could not be gently removed. Their clawed hands stuck like thorns, like burrs. They flew toward faces. They clung to soft, whiskered noses, invaded flaring nostrils; the horses reared in protest. They crawled down collars, through plackets, searching for breasts—finding little enough on Cally and Elspeth, and only polyurethane on Gigi—and big-breasted Shirley screamed, a struggling, unaccustomed sound from her, alto in pitch, at variance with the soprano screams of the cicadas.

  For scream the cicadas did, as they clung to bodies and faces, as they were struck down, they squealed and rasped and shrieked the hungry, demanding cries of babies, and all the women were fighting them with hard hands and swinging arms, and struggling to stay on the horses, and the horses were running wild, unreined, away from the fearsome place, toward the sheltering stable, where Shirley would give them food in the evening.

  Gigi got control of her horse and herself first, for she was a steely old woman, and Snake Oil was accustomed to obeying her. She stopped him once he had run clear of the cicada swarm, and she batted away the bugs w
ho had ridden with her, and pulled a fistful of squashed ones out of her post-mastectomy bra, and looked at them curiously, then dropped them with a muttered curse. Cally came straggling up and stopped beside her, for Dove was slow and calmed quickly. Cally did not calm so quickly; she was shaking thinly, like teazels in winter.

  “Did you see!” she cried out to Gigi, more in plaint than in query. “Babies!”

  “I saw.”

  “But what the hun is going on? What are we going to do?”

  There was, of course, no answer.

  Shirley and Elspeth had been longer stopping their horses. Once they had collected the animals and themselves somewhat, they rode cautiously back down the trail, looking for the others. Shirley’s ample face showed wholehearted relief when she saw Gigi and Cally safe, neither thrown by their horses nor savaged by anything weird and unaccountable. Elspeth, as usual, showed nothing, but she said, without embroidery. “Hoadley babies.”

  The others all stared at her, and Cally cried out in the same aggrieved tone, “There aren’t that many babies in Hoadley!”

  “Dead ones. Out of the ground.” Elspeth stared over their heads with the glaze of intuition in her eyes. “Aren’t the dead supposed to come up out of the ground?”

  This came close to speaking something none of them wanted to say. Shirley gawked, and even Gigi seemed shaken. But Cally, oddly, turned suddenly serene. Death procedures were familiar footing to her.