Forever Twilight, Patrick Sean Lee [christmas read aloud txt] 📗

attention to me. “Everything about you is here. Watch. When you’re tired, just wave your hand again, then go to the end of the room we entered at and touch the surface. I have to leave you now. You wanted to see what was inside this gift? Have at it.”

Everything about me? I wondered what images of thousands upon thousands of men in an open field in battle dress slaughtering one another, and then riding and walking off into a nearby walled village to rape and slaughter more; of small groups waiting in the shadows of some Medieval fortress, and then leaping out to set themselves on another hapless victim had to do with Amelia McDougal from the 21st century?

Mari left in a dazzling swirl of light before I had time to ask her. Poof! I remained seated for probably an hour, watching scene after violently depressing scene roll by. A naked man lashed to what looked like goal posts in miniature, screaming as another hooded man flayed him. It was too gruesome. I turned my eyes away. I knew the scenes. I wasn’t stupid, I’d read many books describing it all.

A reminder. Thanks, invaders who simply, more humanely, slaughtered millions upon billions with some weapon that had no sharp edge or point. More efficiently.

“You” was not me. “You” was all of us. A lengthy history of who and what we were. I continued to watch as the scenes rolled on, all the same, with little variations of the brutalities inflicted. But the vast majority were committed by men! We…me…my gender more often than not were the victims. In dungeons lit by candlelight, strapped naked to hideously crafted wooden tables while men in dark robes…I’d had enough of this history lesson. I whisked my hand in an arc over the shroud of images. It collapsed in on itself, and then returned to its place above the table.

A dozen or more orbs shimmered in their various places around it, waiting patiently for my fingers to reach out. With disregard for their order, if there was one, I leaned forward and touched one whirling around far away at the right. Maybe the end of mankind’s ugliness. Maybe it would show Michelangelo or Mozart? We are…or were…not entirely sub-human after all. I hoped they hadn’t glossed over that part of what we were, and probably would have continued to be had they not decided to do us in. It traveled quickly to the center of the table, and then once again the unveiling.

Brief flashing images this time. Modern-looking. Men in khaki military uniforms. Viciously assaulting another terrified woman in some nondescript room. There, men in dusty pickup trucks with machine guns mounted near the cab. The lead truck speeding over a dirt road, leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. The man manning his machine gun mowing down everything that moved. North Africa, maybe. The horrible shrieks and cries of the surprised villagers, women in colorful robes trying to shield their children to no avail. The next image, a woman in uniform in a large town square, her hands and legs tethered by ropes. The ropes dangled listlessly, the other ends attached to the bumpers of four trucks as she lay there face up. Then the smoke of exhaust when the drivers started their engines with a roar, and then began to move. North, south, east, west. The woman’s screaming as the ropes tightened, and then began to yank her limbs from her body. Oh, Jesus!

End. New scene. Different in that these men…God, I thought, why is it always men?...weren’t slaughtering people. Wielding sledgehammers, they were slaughtering statues, and plaques of stone hanging on the walls. No looks of savagery on their own stony faces, merely intent in their insane acts of destruction. Accomplished with religious zeal.

End again. Another scene of death and destruction in some other desert locale. The middle east? A convoy of more worn and beaten pickup trucks bearing down on a town, each filled with excited and agitated men in black robes, their faces covered, waving rifles, anticipating…more slaughter.

I’d seen these same images in color, on TV four or five years ago. Played and replayed over the days as they occurred. Radical Jihadists. Horrible, but hadn’t we responded by slowly encircling them with our righteous soldiers? If our penchant for self-destruction was the problem, then why hadn’t these alien saviors of civilization merely wiped out the perpetrators selectively?

As if in answer, shift to a new scene. Men and women in a field. Wheat growing in the sunlight, but choked by weeds. The harvesters ripping out the wheat along with the weeds, roots entangled as they tore them out of the ground. Here and there a shaft of wheat remaining in the sunlit field.

Why rip them all out? Why not somehow disentangle the roots…the orb in its unfolded state seemed, like Mari had, to read my thoughts. The field and the workers disappeared. Enter a strange, at first, new image that began far away, and then swirled forward until it stopped, filling the curtain of light in front of my eyes. It rotated slowly. Some sort of gene, parts of its spiral body black and cancerous-looking.

That was it, I’d had quite enough. How dare they! I knew, Charles and Denise and Peter…all of us, including even Munster, knew what we were. Bernie? Probably not, but then again?

I angrily waved my hand over the curtain, then shoved the chair backward, rose, and left.

This Is What We'll Do

 

They were all standing well away from the tower when the door emerged and I flew out in disgust. Every eye (except Bernie’s) shot open, and every mouth voiced exclamations of relief, or meteor-like gusts of breath.

Peter bounded forward first. He threw his arms around me.

“Goddamit, Amelia, you scared the hell out of us! What in God’s name possessed you to…”

“Shush, Peter. I’m fine.”

The doorway had closed, the glistening black tower wall had reappeared, but not before Charles, and maybe everyone else, tried to explore the interior for half a second. They were on me in the seconds after that, ripping their glances back and forth from me to the wall, their eyes recovering from the burst of sudden harsh light that had knocked them backward a step when the tower opened.

But I wasn’t fine. I was confused, incensed that these holier than thou monsters had done what they did, and then had the audacity to leave those of us who’d survived a library, filled with a list of condemnations.

“What did you see? What did you find?” Charles asked excitedly.

“That thing doesn’t look big enough for a rat to live in,” Munster said.

“All the rats are dead and gone, dummy,” Cynthia lovingly corrected him.

“No they’re not,” Denise corrected her.

“Yeah, yeah, I know that. I was just making a…whatdya call them comparison-things, Denise?”

Peter released me and then took a step back, searching my face for any change that might…must have…occurred. In his mind, anyway.

“Amelia?”

He had this frightened look on his face. His eyes weren’t fixed on mine, rather slightly to the left, as if someone or thing was standing behind me, very close. Charles had stepped forward. He too was staring, but more pointedly, at the side of my face.

I turned quickly to see who or what might be behind me, but I was alone. I turned back to them.

“What? What is it you guys?”

“Get her inside,” Charles said to Peter. He’d come forward and placed a hand on the right side of my face, turning it. Very gently, but…

They were staring at my right cheek or temple. I raised a hand and brought it to my face and cheek. It felt absolutely normal. I ran my fingers through my hair on the top of my head. All there. All a mess as usual, but all good. Munster leapt beyond Charles, following his eyes.

“Ho-ly-fuckin-shit!” Cynthia was on him with her verbal bar of soap before he knew what hit him.

“Let’s go, Amelia. Come on. Please. You can look for yourself once we’re inside.” He elbowed Munster as he took hold of my arm and began to usher me away from the tower.

I was truly frightened by then. Charles and Peter led me to the main floor bath, took me in by the hand, and we walked across the tile to the vanity mirror. Charles pointed. I shrieked when I turned my head slightly and looked at the impossible image of me staring out at me! A long slash of hair was missing, as though I’d taken scissors and a razor to the side of my scalp behind my right ear. Worse, in the naked space, symbols were emblazoned, as though some psycho bookmaker from the Middle Ages had used a hammer and stamps to drive the symbols deep. Some of the same symbols that were visible at the top of the tower I’d just exited.

“What in the name of God? How did that get there?” I thought back—as everyone else tumbled into the bath to scrutinize my head in total shock—I scoured my memory of the half hour or so I’d been inside, minute by minute, but I couldn’t remember feeling anything, except the loathing of the gift they’d left.

“I was only in there for half an hour, maybe an hour at the most! No one but Mari was there, and she barely touched my hand!”

Charles looked at Peter. He was aghast.

“We’ve been waiting for ten hours for some hint that you were still alive, Amelia,” Charles finally said. “A long and painful vigil.”

“What! But…” Ten hours? The sun hadn’t set, but after hearing what Charles said, I remembered. I’d gone into the tower early in the morning. Even so, I only remembered watching maybe half a dozen—no more—sphere dissertations outlining the evil of humanity.

Time must be some manageable thing for the aliens, I thought in despondence. My head, though. Oh God, it killed me to look at it. The slash, the loss of my hair, my crown! Was I doomed to walk the rest of my life looking like some crazed Mad Max villain, or would it grow back? My first thought was that it had been ripped out without me knowing, and that it would never grow back. The stamped symbols frightened me more than the wounded vanity of the missing hair, though. Infinitely more. They were put there for some specific, and not friendly purpose. I was marked for something, and worse, maybe the roots of the marks had already begun to travel down…I broke down completely. I had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, with liver failure, with heart disease. I knew that my life was coming to an end. I collapsed and wept. Why had I entered the tower? They’d warned me not to touch it, to not get near it.