T Klein: Ceremonies

The buzzing had grown louder, more insistent. As she brought her wounded hand to her lips, the blood flowing salty and warm, something occurred at the end of the branch just inches from her face.

A rosebud moved.

Her eyes widened. Why hadn't she noticed it before? The bud was fatter than the others, the skin moist and somehow pulpy-looking. It was clinging to the thin branch like a lump of rotting meat.

Warily she reached for it. It shifted at her touch. The air shrilled with an angry insect sound that clamored like a warning in her ears, and there beneath the radiance of the moon, in the heat of that rose-perfumed night, she felt a chill.

Torn from the branch, the bud seemed heavy in her hand. Her fingers probed the dark-veined leafy covering. One by one the leaves peeled back; like a piece of hollow fruit the skin split and fell away. Inside lay a pale, ropy thing curled like a length of intestine. As the moonlight fell on it, it stirred.

She saw now what it was: a plump white worm, thick as a baby's finger – a plump white worm that, as she watched, uncurled, raised its unwrinkled head, and glared at her. A plump white worm with a human face.

Grimacing, she dropped it to the ground. She was sure she heard the creature scream as she crushed it beneath her shoe: scream words at her as from a human mouth, human lungs, a human throat, words in some dark ancient tongue she'd never heard spoken aloud, but whose meaning, upon waking, she'd felt sure she understood.

And now, just this afternoon, she had seen the visitor, all plump and pink and innocent, arriving with her son. She had recognized something in his innocent face. The dream had not lied. The Pictures were real. For the first time in her life, she felt too tired to pray.

Absolom, the Old One, still lived: she'd known it all along, all her blighted life. She'd always known that one day he would make his move, assemble the performers – the man, the woman, the Dhol -and allow the process to begin. She had known that it would start the first of May and end the first of August, in a month with two full moons.

But she'd always believed she had at least a decade left to her. She'd believed she would have more time to prepare. She hadn't realized it would come so soon. This year. This May.

This summer.

His journey takes him south, where rows of skyscrapers reflect the westering sun and cast giant shadows up and down the avenue. An idle weekend crowd fills the sidewalks, strolling past the ranks of street vendors and spilling from the shops to join the mass that merges and splits and merges again into a living stream.

Unnoticed, the Old One walks among them.

A half-naked boy limps toward him, pale head swollen like overripe fruit, clutching a thumb-stained envelope. A blind trumpeter blares against the traffic from the doorway of an abandoned building. Someone stands hunched over a pay phone, mouth working furiously. On the corner a haggard woman waves a blackboard scribbled with names and exhorts the planet to save itself; humanity, she cries, has been judged and found wanting.

He knows that she is right. That judgement is his as well. Turning his back on the woman, he's confronted by his reflection in a store window: the short, plump figure swinging an umbrella, the blue serge suit gone baggy at the knees, the wide cherubic face beneath its halo of fine white hair.

It is the reflection of a little old man.

Once he had something in common with the figures crowding past him on the sidewalk; once, more than a century ago, he was one of them, part of the loathsome race that swarms over this planet. Now only the semblance remains, the organs, bones, and flesh. He has been washed clean of humanity; he feels no trace of kinship for these odious doomed beings, only a cold and unremitting hatred. As he passes down the avenue they part before him like stalks of corn.

Stoplights change from red to green and the crowd surges forward. A bus groans, lumbering away from the curb. Brakes screech as a taxi sounds its horn. Dark feline shapes crouch beneath a parked car, then dart into an alley. From the next block echo the cries of children and, from another part of the city, the wail of sirens. As the Old One turns westward once more, the sun is sinking toward the distant Jersey hills, toward the factories and the dumps and the oil refineries. Suddenly the land is touched with red and the refineries glow as if ignited, hills turning to flame. The river shines with fire.

The Old One blinks his mild eyes and smiles. Great events are imminent, and nothing that he looks upon will ever be the same. The crowds, the traffic, the hateful little faces of the children- soon, after the Voolas, they will trouble him no more.

But first there are a few more preparations to be made. There is not much time left, and he will never get another chance: five thousand years must pass before the signs again are right. He will have to act quickly.

He has already selected the man: some insignificant little academic with no family and no prospects. There are hundreds just like him in the city – all young, all hopeful, all doomed – but this one has been born on the necessary day, and (though the young fool doesn't know it yet) his interests lie in just the right direction. At this very moment he'll be out there on the farm, no doubt busily convincing himself that he likes it. He appears to be highly suggestible. He will do.

Now the Old One is faced with an even more important task, a task which has to be completed by Midsummer's Day.

He has to find a woman.

Not just any woman. The age has to be right. And the background. And the color of her hair.

And, of course, she will have to possess that very special qualification…

'Wonderful place you've got here.' He was being just a little ingenuous, tramping through the undergrowth with Poroth. The farm looked better than it had in the photographs – greener, certainly -but it plainly needed a lot of work. Even Freirs could tell that, and the last farm he'd seen had been in Days of Heaven, with Richard Gere shoving a screwdriver into Sam Shepard. The Poroths had already cleared an irregularly shaped plot of land nearly twice the size of a football field, extending westward from the farmhouse's back lawn, past the barn and down to the meandering little brook that curved across the southern edge of the property, but there appeared to be many times this area still to be attended to, including a huge uncultivated section on the far side of the brook that Poroth had spoken of 'saving for next year.'

The place was much bigger than it had looked from the road -close to fifty acres, all told, though most of this was forest, or fields of weed too thick and high to walk through. Freirs reminded himself that the Poroths had moved in just last fall, and that, till then, the land had lain untended for seven or eight years. Perhaps this was why a young couple like the Poroths had been able to afford it.

He would have liked to ask Poroth how much the place had cost, now that the two of them were alone out here, lunch under their belts and the land stretching green and sun-soaked before them, but for most of the day – at least ever since they'd passed his mother's house, back there on the road – Poroth had fallen into some kind of mood, replying to Freirs' occasional polite questions with an air of gloomy distraction. Here was Brother Lucas Flinders' place, he'd said, barely nodding toward some tidy farmhouse they were passing. That one was the Reids'. Down this way lived Brother Matt Geisel… More than that he'd seemed disinclined to say. And then, toward the end, barreling down the three miles of pitted, unpaved road that wound through woods and brambles to the Poroths' farm, he'd barely talked at all, too preoccupied with keeping the old truck from going off into a ditch. Before them the road had seemed to buck and twist beneath their wheels like a wild thing, at times almost doubling back upon itself- 'like it's trying to throw us off,' Freirs had said, holding tightly to the door handle and wishing the other would slow down. What in hell was he trying to prove? Poroth had said only, 'This sort of road's not meant for driving on,' and hadn't so much as glanced in Freirs' direction.