Witch, you think, and take a step backward.
The smile grows more ghastly and gloating, stretched impossibly wide, and you think that the rubber, the latex or whatever, of the Abi costume she’s been wearing will split, a great seam will open between her breasts, and the skinny demoness inside with shiny putrescent skin and black nails hard as horn will step forth.
Vile, unholy witch.
Enemy of God, the god whom you’ve never believed in, but in whom you now yearn to seek refuge.
Kali lacking her necklace of skulls would look no less fearsome, her face no more devoid of human qualities, and you can’t help thinking that this is her nature revealed, this voodoo bitch in her green viney gaud. She’s been waiting for this moment, waiting to show you, waiting to laugh at you. You reject the notion, but then she stretches forth her hand to you and you know she’s about to cast a spell—she’ll lure you close, snatch out your spine and brandish it aloft, a dripping bone spear to plunge into your heart, mash it into pudding, and then she’ll slurp up your soul as it squirts from the torn flesh. Her vast life surrounds you, surrounds all things. She dwells in the timestream, a pearl spider god dances on her finger, and she is reaching out to slaughter whatever her hand encounters, be it a strand of DNA or a burning city whose flames she’ll snuff out so as to inhale the fumes that ascend from its dying…
In your panic, and it’s not even a full-on panic, because you don’t entirely credit your senses and also because you recall what she said about not interfering…in your partial panic, then, you’ve forgotten that the kitchen door only swings one way, and when you turn and attempt to flee the room, you slam headfirst into its unyielding surface. The impact stuns you, sends you staggering sideways. You lose your balance, instinctively grope for something to hold yourself up. Your hand catches at the bookcase, the same pierced by one of the frozen currents of time, and, as you fall, your hand locks onto the edge of a shelf, pulling the whole thing down atop you. Digging out from beneath a cascade of trade paperbacks, you hear a tremendous crack, followed by an ear-splitting shredding noise. You come to one knee. Abi’s staring at you, her eyes no longer rolled up into her head. The voodoo bitch of whom you were so terrified has been replaced by a frightened woman who realizes she has lost some crucial measure of control. Behind her, it looks as if something has bitten a chunk out of the corner of the room, creating a ragged hole that’s as wide as a church door. The treelike shape, the green confluence of time, has lost its structural integrity, and its currents, unfrozen now, are washing past Abi, flooding through the hole and merging with a flux of darker stuff that appears to be flowing just beyond it. She’s about to be washed out along with them, and she, too, is losing her structural integrity, her limbs elongating and bending in odd ways, as in a funhouse mirror—yet she’s struggling to keep her feet, still reaching toward you, fingers splayed, silently imploring you to help. You have an instant to become aware of this, but before you can act, she’s sucked back toward the hole, strikes her head on a broken board, and is gone. There’s a scream, fainter than you’d expect, muted by some imponderable distance as she pinwheels away, her pale figure dwindling against the dark flow of…you don’t know what it is, but it seems infinitely deep and, if you had to give it a name right now, you’d call it God.
You stand there, racked first by the beginnings of anguish, then by guilt (she told you not to interfere), then by disbelief. The tea, the drug she gave you…maybe this has all been a production of the drug. But the hole in the wall presents incontrovertible evidence against disbelief, stable and solid, its edges displaying strata of plaster and insulation undeniable in their authenticity; though the dark flux beyond it lacks a certain reality and may be, like the tree of green time, a metaphorical construction, the simplified rendering your mind has contrived to represent an unfathomable phenomenon.
Something is gathering in its depths, accumulating form from the void. A face, you think. It acquires detail, growing larger, swelling from the darkness, and, yes, it’s definitely a face. Abi’s face, pale and painted with vines. Improbable though it seems, she must have found a way to fight against the flow, she’s forging upstream, coming back to the world. But the larger her face grows, the less you believe it. It’s rippling, wavering, like the painting of a face borne upward on dark water, threatening to dissolve at any moment…and it’s enormous. Close to the hole, all that’s visible is its lower half, chin and lips, a bit of jawline, the point of her nose, and, drawing closer yet, it’s reduced to a huge photo-real scarlet mouth that’s pressed up against the hole.
The lips purse convulsively, making a squelching noise that puts you in mind of someone worrying at a sliver of meat stuck between their teeth. The mouth opens and an immense human tongue lolls forth, expelling the mass of bloody tissue, bone, and hair that rested upon its tip. This lands with a soggy thump and is, most assuredly, no metaphor. The pulped organs and macerated bone shards, they’re Abi’s remains. You recognize them by the orange streaks in her matted hair. Something breaks in you, and you run through the kitchen, out the back door, expecting God to swallow you and spit up your bones…but you don’t care. If extinction’s what it takes to wipe that image from your brain, let it come.
The cloudy sky is ancient water-damaged wallboard, the motionless firs are stage props, the dim rush of the freeway is a sound effect. It closely resembles the world you once knew, but now you’ve seen what lies behind it, you know it was never what it seemed. The black chow mix in the yard next door is going insane, barking and hurling itself to the end of its chain. You move to the opposite side of the house and sit, resting your head on your knees. Grief sets in. Or maybe grief comes later, and this is merely shock. You welcome it, whatever its name. You seek refuge in tears, in the hot weight lodged in your chest, the absence in your skull. You still can’t believe what’s happened and these physical proofs of loss are all you have to rely on. Abi warned you not to interfere and you fucked up, you blundered, you bungled her to death. Grief and guilt mixed together are too much to bear. Shivering from the cold, you get to your feet and walk stiffly to the kitchen door. You can’t bring yourself to go inside and that’s when the problem of what to do next surfaces from the moil of your thoughts. Call the police. Run away. Join a monastic order and devote yourself to good works. Off yourself. That’s tempting, but you’re not that kind of coward. Not yet. The chow takes up barking again, like barking is its fucking religion, and that drives you back inside.
The phone’s ringing.
Could be it’s your mom forgetting again what time it is in Seattle, or your neighbor calling to complain about how you upset his dog, or a friend who knows you wake up early. Whichever, it offers you temporary relief from being alone. You pick up the kitchen extension and say hello.
“Is Abi there?” The inimitable voice of Mauve, the pixie from Oberlin.