The Fall of Never(136)

She saw the surface of a massive, pumping organ—a heart—slick with membrane and embedded with a network of enormous veins and arteries, each twisted and tangled about one another. White pustules clung to its surface in patchy clusters, like wild mushrooms. At the top of the heart was a large, fleshy, muscular value that opened and closed like a mouth. It was from within this valve, this opening, the red light issued. With each closing of the valve, the light was cut off, though it was strong enough to radiate at half its potency through the walls of the organ; subsequently, each time the valve opened, the red light broke out and flooded the room amidst a billowing waft of steam. It was like an engine, Kelly thought—a living engine, thriving beneath the floor and buried deep within the ground…

The heart of Never, she thought.

“Do you know what the heart is?” Simon whispered beside her. She could hardly hear him now, her mind too focused on the steady pulsation in the pit just beyond her feet. “Do you know what the true heart of Never really is, Kellerella?”

It’s life, she thought. It’s the originator of this whole mess, the catalyst for all this insanity. It beats…

The valve suddenly seized, stretched, and folded back on itself like a sleeve. The intensity of the light seemed to grow. The steady rise in heat caused the splintered ends of the overhanging floorboards to blacken and curl. Tendrils of black smoke spiraled to the ceiling.

Kelly felt a thousand cold hands at her back. Again, she was consumed by the feeling that Simon was all around her—even a part of her—and that he was struggling to control her. She struggled harder to fight his control.

“In,” Simon said.

She could feel her feet sliding toward the mouth of the pit, the hair on her head now being blown back by the tremendous heat pouring from the heart. In her mind she forced herself to remain still, but Simon was too strong. There was truth to all he said: that over time, he’d become stronger while she’d grown weaker. And was there any way of refusing him now? Any way of beating him?

Heart, she thought. Heart.

“Do you know what the heart is?” he asked again. “Do you really understand it all?”

And for one outrageous instant, she thought she understood—that she almost grasped what the heart actually symbolized—but the notion was fleeting, and too quick for her to retain.

“In,” Simon repeated, his voice now infused with a million other voices, a million hands still at Kelly’s back. “Cross through the dream world, Kelly.”

And he shoved her.

The world spun in slow motion. Up and down repositioned perspectives. She saw bright, soundless flashes of memories whip through her mind like subliminal codes, each punctuating a certain moment of her descent. In the air—in the air—in the air—the world turning and turning and turning about her.

She felt a swarming heat overtake her, followed by the cushioned embrace of unconsciousness. Her last thoughts before falling into the black were of hopelessness.



“She seems calm now,” Josh said. He was sitting beside Nellie’s bed in a chair from the kitchen, bent over the side with his hands folded between his knees. “Is there something you can do for her? Something you can check?”

Carlos smoked outside the bedroom door. “Check?” he said. “What is there to check? She’s breathing…”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe she lost the grip on your friend. Maybe it was a false alarm.” But he didn’t believe it himself. The air was still alive with Nellie’s static charge; even breathing felt like swallowing oxygen diluted with battery acid. Perhaps the prior calamity had been the result of Nellie crossing over some mental fence, and now she was safely on the other side, safely nestled in this Kelly woman’s head. Or, he also thought, maybe Kelly had suddenly ceased to exist, leaving the old woman in a deep and harmless sleep.

Leaning his head back against the frame of the door, Carlos closed his eyes and tried to reach for the waves of current rippling in the air. It felt like daydreaming, nothing more, and the deeper he allowed himself to slide, the more potent the current seemed to become—as if his resignation enabled him to become an empty container ready to be filled. Daydreaming…yet with a certain momentum behind each thought. The air was a hallucinogen, capable of undefined manipulation.

He thought of his unborn son. Dreamlike and suspended, he tried to seek out truth in the airborne power. Fueled by the consumption of such power, his mind coalesced poorly defined notions and images into specifics, into unconscious reality. Where are you, Julian? he called. Is there any part of you out here that I can grab hold of? Is there any part of you lingering in all this power that can give me some sort of sign, some sort of reassurance?

“She’s moving,” Josh said, startling the doctor.

Carlos opened his eyes. His cigarette had burned down to the quick, nearly to his fingers. He wondered just how long he’d been meditating. “Waking up?”

Josh shook his head and stood from the chair. “No, I don’t think so. Just…moving.”

Slowly, as if influenced by some outside force, the old woman’s head moved side to side against her pillow. She did not look relaxed; rather, her eyes were squeezed shut and moisture had collected at the corners. The muscles in her jaw flexed. Her good hand quivered the slightest bit, the fingers twitching.