Page 208 of The End of the World As We Know It
The crow ruffled his feathers. “You can’t think of it like that. I just am. I live. I notice. I remember. The rules are lax right now. He’s still half-asleep. My brothers and sisters and I roam. That’s why he can’t quite see you. When he wakes fully, I won’t be able to help. Sorry. I am what I am. Just like you.”
Fern moved her hands into the deep, thick wheat. “Which is what?”
“An eye. A witness. A thought. A memory. And you are… a mutation.”
Fern recoiled from King Sue’s word.
“Because he’s right, you know.” The crow prodded his cast-iron beak up toward the sickly sky. “You’re all wrong. You’re not supposed to be here. You’re new.”
Fern laughed, and nothing had ever felt stranger to her than laughing in this place. “Well, yeah. I’m a kid.”
The crow gave a short, sharp screech of irritation. “Notthat. You’recompletelynew. The wheel turns, but it turns slowly. And its spokes are many—but not infinite. There is a number, and the number has changed. This has happened many times. He rises, he falls. He rises. Like the sun and tides. Everything comes around again. And everyone. The saints and the devils, all the hands that turn the wheel. They change faces, names, places. They remember, but slowly. They do their part. They die in their turn. And when he rises again, so do they to balance it.
“So it goes and so it has gone for time beyond time. But the thing you call the handsome man was so close last time. I don’t know. I’m only an eye. Perhaps the thing he truly is never came so close to victory before. He always takes a bride. He always gets a child upon her. But perhaps the thing his last bride truly was never came so near to actually giving birth. Her labor was almost upon her. Even as she fell. The prince was almost here.”
The cancerous sky ripped and snarled above them. The crow’s eyes glittered. “You were almost here.”
Fern’s hand froze on the bale of black wheat. “Me?I don’t understand. Princes areboys.”
The crow’s ruff bristled. “Shhhhh. Don’t be stupid. I hear his footsteps grinding the sea. There is not much time. Itoldyou. The wheel turns and faces change. Faces, names, places… even bodies. What is a girl or a boy? Only the difference between one thrust and the next. The flip of a coin. He won’t like it one bit, I can tell you that much. But it willinteresthim, and that’s worse. Poor monster. You were never on the wheel before. You never came so close to the world that the wheel could catch you. And now you’re stuck with us. With no other lives to help you remember. With no ancient role waiting for you. You arenew. And you’re broken. You are incomplete. Youweren’tborn. Youaren’tright. You were never meant for the wheel. You are a mutation, a variant strain. You could be harmless. Or you could be the last sickness of this world. A Valkyrie in his army. His left-hand girl. The final momentum that shatters the wheel into darkness. Either way, youarehis. But also your mother’s. Bad luck on both counts, really.”
Fern thought of the falling woman. Of the schoolteacher. Their white hair like blank pages. Of the raccoon people scurrying and hissing and stealing and hiding from something none of them could name. Of the great bonging bell in the white belfry, calling the children in. Of the handsome man, how he smelled like home.
“I don’t know what any of that means,” she whimpered.
“Neither do I. But when he rouses fully, he will see right through you. You only got to sass-mouth the darkness that lies beneath all things because he is still gathering his strength. His flock. His wonderful, irresistible machines and all they can do. It will all happen again. Because you cannot have that clever, shiny complicated human world without him. Take one, the other rises. He is not yet awake, but when he is, you won’t fool anyone. And it is too early for his opposite number to protect you. He will claim you. The seed of him in you will yearn to do terrible things, if it does not already. And if I know my man, he’ll turn you loose on this world like a pet wolf. And you’ll like it.”
Fern knew the black bird was right. She remembered the towns dying around her. She remembered the cold inside her mind scraping the hills for someone weak. She remembered what the cold wanted. How good it felt.
“At least I won’t be alone,” Fern said hopefully.
The crow cawed horribly, like a dry laugh. “Yeah. Good luck with that.” His violet-black throat glistened. “There’s a story, you know. Long ago. Far away. Before America knew its own name. In the age of kings and vassals, the Devil set upon a noblewoman and got upon her his great and ravenous son come to end the world, who was called Robert. And this son was a good boy to both his parents. He loved his mother purely. And he caused death and mayhem wherever he went, as his father taught him. He delighted in blood and entrails and the burning of grapevines. In the prime of his strength, Robert, the son of the Devil, went on a crusade with a song in his heart and became the scourge of the East. His father was proud. But Robert was still a man, if only just, and he missed his mother. He journeyed home to her, taking his pleasure in the screams of the reddening countryside as he traveled. But when he came to his mother’s castle and she looked on him, he saw himself reflected in her eyes. Black with blood and pain and cruelty, a beast with no mind. She threw herself from a high tower and smashed her brains out on the stones below. And from that day, Robert turned away from his father.He took a vow of silence and of peace. The son of the Devil closed himself in a monastery and would not answer his father’s voice. His virtue grew so great it became as armor, and the Devil could not touch him. Robert died a-bed many years later, a good and honest man, though every minute of denying his true nature felt to him as a hundred thousand deaths, an agony beyond agonies.”
Tears poured down Fern’s strange little face. “What are you trying to tell me?”
“I don’t know. You figure it out.” The crow’s black tongue flicked in and out. It hopped around nervously on the dark grain. “He’s coming. He’s almost here.Wake up. Wake up, Fern.”
Winter, 2024
They’re building a church in the Adirondacks. They’re building churches everywhere now. Preachers are as plentiful as viral vectors and twice as contagious. Rumors thread a sour needle from town to town. Of a man across the sea who still has all his toys. A man who promises he can fix it. Fix everything. Of the bad old days come to ride again. Of wheels and how they turn.
There are some things you can’t ever get back. But war isn’t one of them. War is always happy to host a revival. Not today, not next year. It needs time to get everything just right.
But a long time from now, the church will still be there. The statues. The stained glass windows lovingly made by a nice old man named Oliver Bailey, who still remembers when he dreamed of Nebraska in the night and wishes sometimes those dreams still stopped by.
The windows will go up after the snow melts. All the saints. The green mother. The man with the red dog. The singer of songs. The quiet father. The martyr who spoke with his hands. The man in the straw hat.
Even the schoolteacher has her place, just as she had her lesson to teach. Oliver grinds the edge down on the milky blue glass of her baby’sswaddling as the schoolteacher holds her child in her arms, born, and whole, and innocent at last.
Mr. Bailey up there living cozy in someone else’s house never knew any of them, and he doesn’t remember names too well anymore. But that’s not important. He was old already when all this began, and he’s tired now. The last bad winter took his wife. This is his last good work. How he chose to spend the last of his soul.
Oliver looks down at his workbench, at his withered hands. At a thousand shards of color, half-assembled. Smashed lampshades and suncatchers and fancy dinner plates and any other glass they could scare up. Maybe he was too ambitious. Maybe the job was too big for the time he has left. Sometimes the parts are all there, but it still doesn’t work. Too many. Too many shards. Too crowded. Too much. He just wants to do right by them. He just wants to make them shine like the twilit wheat of his dreams.
And he will. Oliver Bailey won’t see the big ships start sailing the seas again, or the wars when they come fast as crows—or when they pass, just as swift. He won’t hear anybody say what pretty windows those are, and that’s okay by him. They’re pretty whether anyone says so or not.
I know because I spent last Christmas in that brand-new church, and you’d never believe how fine those windows turned the light. Oliver Bailey chose a quiet, pretty thing and cleaved to it. Everybody gets a choice, and the ones you make at the end pay for all. But he will do right by the color and the shards. He will do right by the light.
And you will, too, honey. I just know it, whoever you are. You’ll do right by us all.
