Forever never ends Read online

  “I’ve been here three years and I’ve not seen anything like it.”

  Chester stood on quivering legs and hooked his thumbs under the straps of his blue jean overalls. He looked out from the doorway at the tops of the Blue Ridge Mountains that bucked and swooped all around the horizon.

  When he was a boy, he'd been able to see clear to Tennessee from right here on the porch. Now he could barely see forty miles on a good day, and sometimes at night he couldn't even make out the little pinpricks of orange and blue light that marked Windshake about twenty miles below.

  “Well, three hundred years of Mulls have come and gone, and none of them ever told of green rain,” he said, though the clouds cast a peculiar color. He figured it was the angle of the sun. Or maybe the jar of corn liquor in his hand.

  “All that pollution-”

  “You ain’t from around here,” Chester said. “You ain’t earned the right to bitch about the ruination of the mountains.”

  Over on Sugarfoot, a twenty-story condominium complex rose above the ridge, looking sort of unreal, like something Hollywood dreamed up for one of its outer space picture shows. Below the condo, a gang of bulldozers had gouged a ski slope into the side of the mountain. Thanks to snow blowers, the white strip of slope still zigzagged down the side of the hill even though the last freeze had been three weeks ago.

  Most of the prime peaks had summer homes strewn across them. The ones that hadn't been heavily developed were scarred by the bleached bones of balsam that the acid rain had killed off. The blasting crews had been going at it hard and heavy, too, knocking red holes in the mountainsides. And those big silvery slabs of granite weren't all that eye-catching to Chester.

  “Besides,” Chester said. “I sold you a chunk, so you’re part of the problem.”

  “I was surprised you’d part with your family keep.”

  “Simple economics. I was seven when Daddy stuck a hoe in my hands and said ‘Get to work.’ Sixty years later, what did it get me? Knotted-up fingers and a bad back. Since I got your money, I don’t have to strike a lick at a snake if I don’t feel like it.”

  “Maybe I’ll come over later and talk about the weather in person.”

  “Good. I ain’t heard any good complainin’ since Hattie passed on.”

  “Watch the sky.”

  Chester hung up and couldn’t resist studying the clouds, but he was more interested in the angle of the sun.

  "Close enough to noon, I reckon," he said, settling his trembling varicose flesh in the rocking chair. One of the chair runners pinched Boomer's tail and the hound yelped.

  "You old blessid fool, you'd think by now you'd keep your ass end out from under there." Chester smoothed the mange on the dog's wrinkled forehead. Boomer looked up at him with sad, droopy eyes that had chunks of sleep crust tucked in the corners.

  The sky was darker now and the wind was mashing the clouds together like lumps of rotten potatoes. The mountains grew shadowy, their features lost. Chester reached into his mouth, plucked out his chaw, and laid it on the porch rail. Looked like one of old Boomer's turds, Hattie always said, but she’d been big on snuff herself and hadn't had much room to talk.

  The first drops of rain fell on the tin roof of the porch. The rain sounded like a mess of elves working away with shoe hammers. DeWalt said it was a relaxing sound and liked to sit here on the porch during rainy afternoons. But Chester thought a man might as well have marbles rolling around inside his skull. Chester watched the drops bounce off the Ford's black hood. Rivulets of red clay ran down the twin dirt tracks of the driveway. He'd be going nowhere today if this kept up.

  But that was just fine with Chester. That meant nobody would be out to bother him, either. That slack-eyed Johnny Mack wouldn't be trying to hit him up for liquor money and Sylvester wouldn't be wanting to take him squirrel hunting. And DeWalt, even though he had a shiny four-wheel drive, didn't like getting his two-hundred- dollar boots muddy. DeWalt liked to keep his things just the way they looked in the catalog.

  "About time for a little liquid lunch, Boomer," Chester said. Boomer looked up, thumped his tail a couple of times, and farted.

  "You're entitled to your opinion," Chester said.

  The rain began falling in thick silver sheets, and Chester could barely see across the yard. But at the edge of the forest, about two miles up the slope, that weird green stuff was still glowing. Sure as hell wasn't foxfire, the glow-in-the-dark fungus that freaked out city folk. The glow had been there a couple of days now, but Chester hadn't yet mustered the energy to walk out and check on it.

  In all those damned stories Chester had to listen to growing up, sitting on the plank edge of Grandpappy's knee, he'd never heard anything about shiny green stuff. Sure, the old lady with the lamp that haunted the Brushy Fork bridge, the scarecrow boy in the barn, the panther that screamed like a woman while it followed the wagon in from the fields, he'd heard all those. But nothing about no green stuff.

  Of course, they didn't pass on stories like they used to. Chester’s dad had tried to get him to carry on the oral tradition, but Chester didn't see the point. They had picture shows in Windshake and now almost everybody in these parts had a television. Who wanted to sit around and listen to a toothless old geezer flapping his jowls?

  Chester stretched and his spine popped. His joints were tightening up on him for sure. He forgot all about the shiny green stuff. It was time for some good old Southern self-medication.

  He lifted the jar and toasted the clouds, whatever color they wanted to be.

  The alien stretched its tendrils into the soil, edging its way deeper into the cave. It found a quiet, moist place between two large rocks. Its slick effluence coated the granite surrounding it, and its cells mutated to mimic those of the humus and loam that coated the skin of this new world. Since emerging from its seed, the alien had probed the exotic chemical soup around it, drawing nourishment, assimilating the structural order of the strange biosystem, fulfilling the necessities of survival.

  A native life form slid from a crevice, this one far more complex than the bacteria that had provided the alien sustenance in the wake of its impact. The life form was as cool as the air, sluggish, and emanated a primitive intelligence. The life form slithered into contact with one of the alien’s tendrils, exhaling in pain as its nervous system fused with that of the alien’s. The life form writhed as its metabolism slowed, then it fell still and its warmth faded.

  The alien tried to comprehend the sound that had fallen from the life form’s forked tongue.

  Shhh.

  Shu-shaaa.

  A symbol.

  A sound, a fluctuation in air pressure, a varying system of vibrations. The alien tried the symbol again, experimenting, seeking to give it meaning.

  Shu-shaaa.

  Nettie Hartbarger glanced up from the Bible, sneaking a peek at the handsome man across the table.

  "Will you read some more scripture for me?" Bill Lemly asked in his deep, quiet voice. "It makes more sense when you say it. It sounds like poetry."

  Bill clutched a Sprite in his big-knuckled hands. He looked at Nettie with his soft brown eyes and smiled. She was in the middle of St. Luke, Chapter Four. Maybe that wasn't the best verse of choice for spinning a web of seduction.

  She read: "And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the spirit into the desert for the space of forty days, and was tempted by the devil. And he ate nothing in those days, and when they were ended, he was hungry."

  She looked up again, and Bill was nodding gently as if transfixed by the rhythm of the scriptures. Or maybe he had been listening to the rain bouncing off her apartment roof.

  Nettie continued: "And the devil said to him, 'If thou be the Son of God, say to this stone that it may be made bread.' And Jesus answered him, 'It is written that man liveth not by bread alone, but by every word of God.'

  "And the devil led him into a high mountain, and shewed him all the kingdoms of the world in a mom
ent of time, and he said to Him, 'To Thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them, for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them. If thou therefore wilt adore before me, all shall be thine.'"

  Nettie was thinking that she wouldn't mind if Bill would adore her. And all of the kingdoms of her flesh would most definitely be his.

  Bill hunched forward, hands under the table, jaw clenched as if he, too, were looking out over the devil's vistas of gold and marble. He appeared to be in a state of rapture. Nettie took a sip of her soft drink. She would have loved a glass of wine, but was afraid Bill would disapprove. She swallowed and continued.

  "And Jesus answering said to him, 'It is written, thou shalt adore the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.' And the devil brought him to Jerusalem and set him on a pinnacle of the temple, and he said to him, 'If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself from hence. For it is written, that he hath given his angels charge over thee, that they keep thee, and that in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest perhaps thou dash thy foot against a stone.'"

  Nettie wished that she were an angel. Not like the one she was going to be when she went to heaven, but one here on earth, so Bill would love her. She knew her hair was dark and angels were supposed to be blonde. And she was petite, not buxom and curvy. No wonder Bill hadn't made a pass at her, even after four months of dating.

  She glanced at him and caught him looking away and frowning in self-reproach. He must have been chastising himself for going out with such a homely girl. Maybe she was a mercy case, and Bill was being nice to her out of a sense of Christian duty. She finished the chapter and closed her Bible. She put her hands out halfway across the table, hoping he would take hold of them. Bill still looked lost in thought.

  "Would you like to watch some television?" she asked, hoping she didn't sound desperate.

  At least if they were on the couch together, he couldn't avoid touching her. And that would not be bad at all, being close to his warm, strong body, smelling his subtle masculine aftershave and maybe just a teeny hint of sweat. And maybe she could get up the nerve to lean her head oh so lightly on his shoulder until his breath was on her cheek.

  And she was thinking "couch," when she really wanted "bed," when she really wanted him to stand up and carry her in his arms and lay her gently on her clean white bedspread and lean over her with his lips and hair and hands all over Bill stood, making the chair squeak on the linoleum in his haste. "I'm afraid I have to go, Nettie," he said, hands clasped in front of him like a Quaker. "Got a few phone calls to make."

  She looked down at the tabletop, hoping her disappointment didn't show.

  "But your reading was pretty. I thank you so much." He started for the door.

  "Bill?" she said, and he turned.

  Ask me out again, ask me out again, even if “out” is “in,” sitting in my apartment with a Bible. It doesn't have to be once a week.

  "Yes, Nettie?"

  "See you in church."

  Bill nodded and smiled, then ducked through the doorway into the rainy night.

  In bed, Tamara rolled over and felt Robert stir. He grunted and yawned, and she reached for him.

  “Hey,” he whispered in the dark.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  “Great. Just when I was dreaming about a guest spot on ‘Larry King Live.’”

  “Tough day, huh?”

  "Lousy. Patterson's just about unbearable. The great Oompah Loompah strikes again. And that same crappy music over and over."

  "At least it's radio work."

  "Well, I'm getting a little too old to try and figure out what I want to be when I grow up. And it looks like the big time is just going to pass Bobby Lee right on by."

  He’d referred to his on-air handle, which meant that he was stuck inside himself again, dwelling on his own problems, and wouldn’t have any room in his soul for Tamara’s. For their mutual problems. "Now, Robert, we've been over this a hundred times already. Stick with what you like."

  Tamara rubbed Robert's hairy chest and snuggled against his shoulder. "Besides, you’re not getting older, you're just getting better. You'll make it one day, just wait and see."

  Robert's hand dropped to her belly and caressed its way up to her breasts. She felt a small stir under her skin and her pulse accelerated. But the Gloomies hovered in the back of her mind like old ghosts, ghosts of her father and half-buried memories, and bad things yet to crawl from the shadows.

  "Robert, I don't think-"

  She gasped in involuntary arousal. Then the Gloomies crested and crashed like a tidal wave, sweeping the shores of her mind.

  Shu-shaaa.

  She took Robert's hand from her chest and held it. "I'm sorry, I'm just not in the mood tonight."

  Robert puffed like a schoolboy who had been denied a toy. "What's wrong?"

  "The Gloomies. You know."

  She felt him tense in anger and then relax. Oh, just her being crazy again, he was probably thinking. Nothing serious.

  "Honey, that was so many years ago,” he finally said. “You've got to stop blaming yourself."

  "I can't help it."

  Robert sighed and then was quiet as the rain drummed off the roof, its fury seeming to diminish along with their passion. Tamara looked out the window, trying to give her anxiety a shape in the darkness.

  In a few minutes, Robert was snoring but Tamara was more wide-awake than before. She was worried that she would have the dream again, the one where her family was swallowed by… by… she wasn't sure what.

  She only knew that she was alone with the Gloomies. And she could tell they were ready to dance the night away.

  The alien snatched the faint vibration out of the air, testing it, tasting it.

  Maz-zaaa.

  Another symbol. It added it to the shu-shaaa, this planet’s original symbol. The maz-zaaa had been less distinct, as if radiated from a distant constellation. Perhaps it had no meaning. Perhaps none of this planet’s life forms were intelligent enough to combine multiple symbols. Perhaps this planet had nothing to offer besides its nutrients.

  Now that the alien had grown comfortable in the cave, roots spreading through the forest and siphoning energy, it allowed a moment to open its pulsing center to the strange world that surrounded it.

  The oxygen mixture swirled through the vegetation above and a soft hydrogen-oxygen mixture pelted the skin of the planet. Static electricity caused the alien’s tendrils to tingle. A small creature raced across the soil, its passage echoing through the alien’s cave. The vibrations were almost painful, and the alien slipped back into a state of rest, focusing on that strange symbol shu-shaaa.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was turning out to be one of those nightmare shifts. First, the printer had gone berserk and started eating the AP feed so he couldn't read the weather copy, and then Melvin Patterson, the station GM, had popped into the studio to chew his rear about skipping around in the playlist. Now this squeaky birdbrain was calling in to report some green lights. Robert Leon, known to WRNC's listening audience as "Bobby Lee," let out a sigh and pressed the phone more tightly to his ear.

  "I haven't heard anything about it, ma'am," he said, wondering why in the hell she had called the radio station. Didn't she have any friends, for God's sake?

  "Ain't you got no other reports of ‘em?" The voice on the other end of the phone screeched like fingernails across a blackboard. "Up around Bear Claw?"

  "Not that I know of. You may want to try the local authorities, ma’am."

  Robert looked at the countdown cue on the Denon CD player. Twelve more seconds of Mariah Carey trying to shatter glass. He rubbed his forehead.

  "But they's lights, don't you see?” the caller said. “Up in the woods. Might be one of them UFO's I been hearing about."

  Why would an intelligent alien species want to land in Windshake? Robert slid a CD into the second player.

  "Maybe you ought to videotape it and send it in to Unsolved Mysteries," he
said. "Listen, I've got to go. Bye, now, and thanks for listening to WRNC.”

  He hung up the phone and flipped the mic switch over at the same time. He drew air down into his abdomen, the way he had learned in college, and belted out in his artificially cheery baritone.

  "That was 'Dream Lover' by Mariah Carey."

  And I hope you were smart enough to turn your radio off before she really got rolling.

  "It's fourteen minutes after eleven and forty-one degrees in the High Country under cloudy skies. Bobby Lee here sharing your day with you."

  Only because I can't find a better job.

  "You're listening to AM 1220, WRNC, your source for local news and sports.”

  Because all our sponsors ARE the news or else their sons play on the high school football team.

  "Coming up after the break, I'll have a look at the weather."

  Let the radio crap on your head for three more minutes just so I can tell you what you would already know if you had enough sense to look out the window. And I'm really being a flaming asswipe today, so I'll shut up now.

  Robert punched the button on the cart player. Save-a-Ton was having a sale on spare ribs. The cart machine held three spots that fired off in sequence, so Robert had time to leave the control room and catch a couple of drags off a cigarette. He swung open the back door and stood under the small awning, watching the weeds wilt in the gravel parking lot.

  Betty Turnbill, the station secretary, stepped out beside him.

  "Mornin', Bobby." She batted her false eyelashes. "Mind if I join you?"

  "It's a free country," Robert said, sucking smoke into his lungs. Betty tucked a cigarette between her rose-painted lips and leaned forward, expecting a light. Her red bouffant wiggled slightly as she shook her shoulders.

  It was the first time Robert had ever seen her hair actually move. Well, except for that one time, but it had been dark then. And he was positive he'd be reminded of that for the rest of his career at WRNC.

  Robert fumbled in his pockets and drew out a Bic and put fire to the end of Betty's Virginia Slim. She puffed, making caves in her hollow jaws, and exhaled a curling gray pillar of smoke. Robert looked at her. Her hazel irises clashed miserably with her aqua eye shadow, and the blush on her cheekbones looked as if it had been applied with a putty knife. She drew the cigarette away from her mouth and tiny clumps of lipstick clung to the butt. The sight made the coffee in his stomach gurgle and roil.