The Lost Country, Episode Three

by | Wayne Kyle Spitzer-6

AS FOR HOW LONG I WAS out, who can say—maybe it was a matter of minutes; maybe it was an hour. All I know for certain is that by the time I came to we had been lashed to wooden crosses and raised, vertically, so that we were even with Penny and whoever had been covered with the tarp—probably Fred—easily a full 10 feet off the ground (or rather the fountain, for the crosses were secured somehow beneath whatever filled it; something I was now convinced was gasoline).

Blake, meanwhile (who was still on the roof of my car) was busy playing; soloing, working his guitar like a demon as Valerie danced n***d on the hood and the crowd waved lighters and the band laid down a muscular beat—all of which had proven too much for Penny, who had passed out on her cross so that her head hung heavy and the rain, which had passed, continued to drip from her hair.

And then all of it just stopped—stopped as if on a dime, whatever that even means, and the mall and its capitol lay silent as Blake rested his hands on his guitar and Valerie stepped down from the hood (and into a waiting black robe) and the clouds continued to rumble—at which Blake gazed out across the crowd, his crowd, and said, commandingly, peremptorily, like he was f*****g Caligula, “Enough! Now is the time.”

“Now is the time,” they repeated, and raised their pointy hoods.

“Time for our honored guests to know what we know—and to see what we have seen.” He put up his cowl so that only his mouth and chin were visible. “For a devil has fallen from the firmaments; a devil bearing the likeness of the Flashback itself. And this devil spoke to us—not in words but the language of dream—and he said to us: Pay me homage and I shall protect you; yea, even from the beasts of prey shall I protect you, if you but honor my name, which is Algrathach. Do this and ye shall thrive; but fail this, and ye shall surely die.”

He turned to look us and at me in particular, I have no idea why. “And now you will see the truth of it; which is that the Flashback, the time-storm, more than just an unfathomable, impersonal force, has physical form. It has a face. And that face is looking upon us even now.” He raised a hand and brought it down, crisply, decisively. “The face of Algrathach, of They Who Walk the Clouds. Yea, his very body—to whom we offer these three souls!”

And then the tarp was being pulled free (even as the fountain was ignited), sliding from the shape like an octopus, clinging to it—briefly—like tentacles, as the thing on the cross was bared for all to see and Linda gasped, fighting her bonds—as I looked at it and saw something vaguely human (but with tapered eyes and a tapered head, goat-like horns, bird-like shanks) and knew—in a way I cannot explain—from whence all our demons had come: our devils of myth and legend, our dragons from the east of Eden, and so, also, where the saurians of a parallel dimension had gone; for they had evolved into this, this demon named Algrathach, this fusion of man and monster.

And I knew, too, why they were here: which was to right a wrong (as they perceived it) and to recreate their origin—to play God. And to reinvent evolution as they saw fit.

None of which mattered as the flames licked our crosses and Blake resumed playing: picking and sliding and working his instrument like a virtuoso; causing the audience to cheer and make horn-hands. Lending our deaths a soundtrack as the wood started to heat and the wind began to gust and I looked at Linda to find her staring up into the storm—a storm through which a vast, black object (an object shaped like a rounded arrowhead) could be seen, blotting the sun like an eclipse, rotating—ponderously, almost imperceptibly—like a giant Ouija planchette.

“Is that—is that part of it?” —Linda, bound only several feet from me and yet seemingly light years away. “Oh, God. Chris.”

I peered at the object, at its perfectly black surface—like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey—which nonetheless generated light; light and color, though of a wavelength that hurt the eyes; hurt the mind. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Don’t look at it.”

“For you!” cried Blake—drawing my attention so that I saw him gazing up at the thing. “Everything for you, at last!”

He raised his arms in supplication even as the cloak’s hood blew back and his hair cycloned—like he was standing in a vortex. Like he was standing before God.

“Lapithae!” he shouted. “Your kingdom is come!”

At which the thing’s shadow fell over him—fell over us all—and it gradually came to a stop (for it had been descending all the while): hovering above us like a storm cloud, which rumbled from deep inside; turning like a tempest, which whipped the crowd’s dark cloaks. And upon which, too, Penny awakened—and, seeing that everyone was looking up, quickly did the same.

And screamed.

Which of course is when it happened—when the thing just opened, blossomed, rather, like a flower, and unleashed its great and terrible light. When it loosed its awful threads (for lack of a better term) on Blake and the crowd and “wove” them, in a sense, into a kind of circuitous loop—and then sent something through that loop so that they were electrocuted one by one. So that they exploded into clouds of blood and bone and viscera even as more threads appeared and began probing Penny and Linda and myself—ultimately abandoning Linda and I to focus on Penny exclusively.

Until she too had been released and the things retracted, engulfing the crucified alien as they went (cocooning it, I suppose); carrying it into the object’s belly and vanishing, along with the ship—into the tumultuous, tempestuous, wine-dark sky.

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