Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

There was a brief silence, and then one of the sisters shrieked and I turned to see that all but one light had risen above her too. She looked at us, motionless, her face contorted with terror.

“Run!” George called to her. “Run!”

Her sister grabbed her hand and pulled and together they started toward us, but they hadn’t taken three steps before lights entered them too, entered their mouths, and like the first woman they froze in position, their expressions blank, their eyes unfocused, unseeing.

All at once Kent, Blake, and I turned to run, but where the end of this secret grove had been now lay lighted trees as far as we could see. Had we gotten turned around? I spun, but the lights surrounded us completely. I was growing dizzy, faint, as though I’d been toppled by a big wave and eclipsed by current, when I saw Kent, calm, point.

Blake and I followed, and though I didn’t look back, I could tell by the silence that the lights had not released their victims. Kent dodged beneath a low branch, and lights began to follow him as if pulled by eddies in the air. They were getting closer, and Kent was weaving, looking above him and panicking, slowing down, when suddenly a head appeared between two close-standing trees to the left of us, and with it an arm, and the arm reached out and grabbed Kent and yanked him sideways. Kent disappeared and the head returned and I could see now that it was Cooper.

“Quick,” he said calmly.

He pulled Blake and me in past him to either side. Kent was there, his face and body slack but alert, conscious, and after looking into Blake’s eyes to make sure she was okay, I noticed Cooper was half in, half out of the forest edge. He was calling, trying to get someone else through, until he turned abruptly and looked back at us.

“Are you okay?”

I nodded.

George Washington emerged from the forest ten feet away and immediately fell to his knees and pounded the ground with his fists.

When I looked back at Cooper, the invisible curtain had changed. Instead of projecting an illusion of continued forest, it was now reflecting us. There I was: Kent to one side of me and Blake to the other; there was George Washington on his knees, pointing both into and out of the hidden forest, and there was Dale Cooper, a two-headed body, stretched and distorted by the reflection down his back. And as I began to realize with a crushing certainty that this reflection was somehow a kind of seeing, of perception, a light crossed the mirrored boundary, just inches behind and above Dale’s head. Blake let out a cry and I uselessly called his name, but it was too late. The light dropped directly down into the top of his head, and his arms dropped and he froze, staring blankly at us as the others had.

Blake leaned forward and Kent held her back, and then the three of us turned and ran. We ran away from the forest, into the dark trees toward camp, and I looked back to see if we were being chased but all I saw was us, running in the other direction, my face shining back toward me, a pale disc floating up from the black forest floor. I remembered what Graves had said about how we’d arrived here, and what I’d considered dumb at the time came to me now with the force of inevitability and I tried to remember, to look back. I tried to piece together how I’d come, how I’d reached this exact spot, and the more I tried to picture it, to remember it, the more it receded from view, pulling farther and farther away like the sea before a great wave.

AT THE BUSINESS END of a too-long summer month without rain, the ubiquitous metastasized rhodies had begun to visibly wither, their once slick, plump leaves now wan, their crooked, overextended boughs sagging and slack, and the Lights, fearful for their food supply, were agitated. They swarmed the overworked white vans filled with the zombied arborists who watered and pruned the ailing flora — some had even been found trying to penetrate the protective suits worn by people who’d volunteered to stay put. Weyerhaeuser, speaking on behalf of the visitors, explained that these latter were the unsanctioned actions of errant or otherwise rogue Lights, but of course no one really believed this.

Would it have mattered if we had? Would it have mattered to those of us who’d already been Lit, who’d already served the Lights once, twice, and lived? Or to those who’d been Lit but not yet called to serve — and of these, would it have mattered more to those who waited with eagerness to serve, or to those who waited with dread, just hoping their survival was part of the plan? These groups comprised most of the people still in Seattle, and none of them wore suits. The rest of us, here to work triage or simply pay witness, had already decided to put others before ourselves — an act that had at its root the sort of deep resignation that relieved vague, ambient threats of the Lights’ power to incapacitate.

I’d recently crossed the threshold between taking the situation for granted and knowing I was taking it for granted, and in addition to inspiring a return to some level of fascination with Weyerhaeuser, the Lights, and “the state we’re in,” the knowledge had made me nostalgic: for my brother, for Blake, for more innocent times. This nostalgia stood in marked contrast to the kind of blunt exasperation shared by most people not in the throes of ecstasy or fear, and it was strangely awkward, embarrassing. It was bourgeois emotion, superfluous and unearned, and because I’d kept it to myself it had grown stronger.

Home alone, I watched a pair of arborists fuss over the rhododendron across the street in what used to be Fred’s front yard. Around them spiraled a dozen Lights on different orbits, though one splintered off now and then to run an errand. I was waiting for two things: Zane, who’d be coming by with some Klonopin, and Alice, who’d just be coming by. The television was off, the air conditioner was off, and the Weyerhaeuser radio murmured on its lowest volume from beneath a pillow in the kitchen. Last night a parade had passed down the street, nearly a hundred near-naked men and women drumming and dancing and celebrating their recent decision to “let the light in,” a refrain sung to the tune of Foreigner’s I Want to Know What Love Is . They’d left makeshift confetti strewn around — torn-up scraps of paper that made the block look even more deserted than it was — and one of the arborists was picking a few pieces of it out of the lower branches of his tree. He held one up and a Light zoomed in to hover before it as though trying to divine its origin. Was the scrap being read? Smelled? Photographed? Or was it being processed in some way entirely unfamiliar? In all the years since the Lights had moved into this city — into all places with a similar climate — we’d learned not one practical thing about how they lived, or even whether they were alive, technically. I stepped away from the window. My head throbbed. Where was Zane?

There were two reasons I wanted the delivery before Alice showed up: mostly to avoid her judgmental stare and the associated feeling, however brief, of guilt or something like it; but also, I had the sense that Zane had a thing for Alice, and I didn’t want to encourage them. Alice was easily swayed by confidence, and I knew she was already drawn to his dark past, his strange connections. His facial tattoos. They were much closer in age, after all. Really, it was stupid of me to be fucking her. I thought about how, although my mother was skeptical of my relationship with Alice, she never once raised the issue. She kept her opinions about it to herself.

And then I thought: Shit, I started thinking about my mother right after I was thinking about fucking.