Strange Weather by Joe Hill
“Good man,” Ronnie said. “We’re jumping in six weeks.”
Aubrey lifted his chin in a mild nod of acceptance, although his stomach knotted with nervous tension. Six weeks was so soon. Maybe his unease showed on his face anyway. Harriet was watching him with quiet, damp-eyed concern and— What the fuck? How had she wound up sitting on Ronnie’s knee?
The sight of her practically in Ronnie’s drunk-ass lap bothered him, made him uncharacteristically resentful.
“Course, we could all just go skydiving in our imaginations,” he said lightly. “And save money.”
Ronnie furrowed his brow. “And be complete pussies.”
“I thought you just said if you imagine something, it’s the same as if you lived it.”
“Jesus, man,” Ronnie said, beginning to cry. “I just lost my sister, and you’re going to make dick arguments?”
20
WHEN AUBREY AWOKE, ALMOST ELEVEN hours later, he knew something he should’ve understood months earlier. June had not told him he needed to move on from Harriet because she cared about him. June had told him to move on because she cared about Harriet, and Harriet was too sweet—or too lacking in assertiveness, take your pick—to tell Aubrey to get the fuck out of her life. That was what Harriet had been getting at on the day of the reception. What else did you and June discuss?
Harriet and June had maybe been only moments from breaking up their little goof of a folk act when he hijacked things that night in the Slithy Toves. He had made it all more serious than it had to be and than they had ever wanted it. The girls had made room for him in their lives, but only after he’d elbowed his way in and superimposed his own desires over their harmless fun.
There was, in fact, no one on the ground aside from his mother who would be unable to recover from his inexplicable disappearance. There was no life waiting for him down there, because he had never bothered to build one. He had left as little trace on the world below as the shadow of a cloud passing over a field—a notion that infuriated him and made him want to get back down there all the more.
He folded up the balloon silk just as he’d found it, following the timeworn creases. As he worked, he noted it had been reconfigured to open wider than a balloon normally would, although the ropes could still be drawn together to a single narrow point, about as wide as a man’s waist.
Aubrey trod through the wispy billows of the cloud with the thick mass of silk under one arm and the bundle of ropes under the other. His breath smoked. He quivered, although whether from the cold or indignation, he did not know. He was ashamed of the way he’d yearned for Harriet when she had so obviously not wanted him, ashamed he’d tried to back out of leaping from the plane, ashamed to be twenty-four years old and not yet to have begun to live. He clung to his shame as if it were another kind of weapon, maybe one of greater worth than the gun.
His bed and bath and coatrack were where he’d left them. He hung the piles of silk on the rack, next to his skydiving harness. If there was a point to keeping it . . . well, it wasn’t one he wanted to think about too closely. Not yet. Not when he had a gun. The gun had last been used for a suicide, but Aubrey thought it offered the possibility of a different, more satisfying form of escape. The silks and ropes, on the other hand, would do just fine later on, if all else failed and he truly had his heart set on killing himself.
He scooped up his helmet and buckled it onto his head (on the theory that you didn’t march toward a fight without armor) and turned in the direction of the palace. The spires and soaring battlements reached high into the sky, with that central dome looming above all. He’d tried to climb the dome once before and had been driven back. It seemed to him it was time to find out what it might be driving him back from. It was protecting something up there, and if it had something to protect . . . it had something that could be threatened.
He set out for the castle gates. He wondered what he’d find if he could get all the way to the top of that creamy white globe. He had a wild, probably slightly hysterical notion that there was a control panel up there, a hatch into a hidden cockpit. He imagined a black leather seat in a tiny capsule filled with blinking lights, and a bright red lever with the words “UP” and “DOWN” stamped alongside it. The thought was so adorably goofy he had to laugh.
He was still laughing at himself when he got to the moat around the palace and discovered that the bridge had been withdrawn. Twelve feet of open sky separated him from the yawning gates opening into the courtyard.
That shut him up.
21
THE VERDANT FOLDED LAND BELOW shone with the buttery golden glow of first light. The hills threw vast lakes of shadow across the vales. He spied a red barn and a silver silo, a pale green field drawn into shaggy furrows, some yellow buttons that were probably haycocks.
His Harriet of the sky watched from the far side of the moat, twisting nervously in her gown. Her Greek-statue face was hopeless and frightened.
His pulse was a hand beating a barbaric drum.
“What are you going to do if I take a step forward? Let me fall? If you could drop me, wouldn’t you have already?” he asked her. “It’s against the rules—that’s what I think.”
He wasn’t sure he really did think that. But the cloud had held on to the balloonists even after they died, had kept them for all the years since, when it could’ve drifted over Lake Erie anytime and dropped them unseen. What it caught, it kept. When he understood he was going to test this hypothesis, his abused insides seemed to overturn in a slow, heavy lurch.
“Not one thing you’ve shown me was real, and that includes your moat,” he said.
He shut his eyes and lifted one foot. His lungs seized up in his chest. His balls drew so tight to his body his testicles ached.
Aubrey stepped forward.
And dropped. His eyes flew open as he fell headfirst.
Cloud foamed outward as he plunged, spilling before him. For an instant he was tipping into open sky. But as he collapsed to hands and knees, the living fog boiled in under him and caught him.
The billowing vapor continued to spread out across the moat until it formed a slender bridge across the gap. He looked around for Sky Harriet, but she had melted away.
Aubrey pushed himself to his feet, unsteady on his legs. A portcullis of fog had dropped down into the archway. He walked into it with his head down.
Bands of cloud stretched like bungee cord, pulled tight against the bowling-ball surface of his helmet. He strained against it, taking one small step forward, then another. The portcullis warped and deformed, as if it were made of yarn, and then all at once it tore and dumped him face-first into the courtyard.
He picked himself up and marched into the great hall.
A harem waited there: two dozen lithe girls of whitest white, slim marble perfections, some in wavering opalescent silks and some nude. Couches and beds had been brought into the open space, and the girls tangled upon them, writhed in one another’s arms, between one another’s legs.
Other girls glided to him with blind eyes and faces desperate with eagerness. A woman he didn’t see grasped him from behind, pillowy breasts squeezed hard against his back, her lips on his neck. Sky Harriet was already on her knees in front of him, grasping for the zipper of his jumpsuit.
He dashed off her head with one backhand. Aubrey wrenched himself out of the arms of the woman clutching him from behind with so much force that her hands came apart in shreds of vapor. He waded through naked bodies. Every girl he’d ever jacked off to, from his first cello teacher to Jennifer Lawrence, tried to crowd in on him. He flailed right through them, tearing them into tattered banners of pearly mist.
He mounted the steps. Warriors waited in the dining hall: swollen marshmallow men, ten and twelve feet high, with cottony clubs, immense hammers of cloud. They were less fully formed than the girls in the hall below. They had Play-Doh hands and arms that bulged in lumps that had more to do with comic-book anatomy than with actual human bodies.
Au
A warrior swung his cloud sledge—the hammer’s head was as big as a Thanksgiving turkey—and caught him in the chest. Aubrey was surprised at how much it hurt, at the hard thud of pain that jolted through his torso. But he grabbed the business end of the sledge as it struck him and did not let go. Instead he pivoted, twisting and pulling the hammer along with him.
These things, these forms of hard cloud, were weak at the joints. They had to be, or they couldn’t bend and move. He ripped the sledge free from his attacker and tore an arm off with it. He came all the way around, whirling 360 degrees, and let the hammer go. It whipsawed into the oncoming mass of giants. It tore one in half, slicing through his waist, the top half of his body tumbling to the floor. The sledge was on a rising arc and took off the head of the marauder behind.
The gladiators of cloud surrounded him with fists and clubs.
He wrenched off a nearby arm and used it as a scythe, mowing the first wave down before him, in much the way a boy might use a stick to hack at weeds. He struggled through them as if he were plunging along in a waist-deep flood of custard.
They shrank from Aubrey, recoiling less from his fists than from his cheerful fury, his upper lip pulled back to show bared teeth. The cloud lacked the courage of its own convictions, was no more willing to really abuse him than it would allow him to fall. He did not share its reserve. By the time he made it halfway across the hall, he was panting, sweating in the chill, and he was alone.
He went on into the castle, but there wasn’t much to the place. After devising the entranceway and the feasting hall, the cloud seemed to have run out of ideas. He passed through the next soaring arch and found himself once again at the base of the dome.
The peak was a long way up, hundreds of feet above him. He felt a touch of light-headedness looking up there, and also something worse—the ghost of a glassy black pearl, hovering at the edge of his thoughts.
He pushed out a long, hard breath and began.
22
THE STOP COMMAND STRUCK WITH so much force it was almost a physical thing, snapping his head back. But when his thoughts returned to him, he had already climbed twenty feet. He blinked at tears, reached up, and drove his hand into the cliff face of cloud.
It nailed him again, a man stomping on a wounded wasp to make it stop crawling.
But he didn’t stop crawling. He shoved back.
NO, he roared, although he didn’t make a sound. It was a thought, reflexive and ugly.
His eyes watered over. The crest of the dazzling white globe blurred and doubled, then came back together. He was still climbing, seventy or eighty feet up.
Whatever was sending those psychic blows seemed to hesitate. Maybe it wasn’t used to being yelled at. Aubrey went another forty feet, reached a place where he felt that the slope had rounded off enough so it was safe for him to try standing up. He was just rising on wobbly legs when the black pearl took a cheap shot, struck him again. He staggered, his balance wavering, one heel sliding out from under him. If he’d gone backward, he might’ve tumbled a hundred and twenty feet down to the base, but instead he belly-flopped onto his stomach, hard enough to drive all the air out of his lungs. He sprawled, arms and legs spread out in an X, pressed hard to the curving floor of the cloud.
“Oh, you bitch,” he said, and forced himself up to his knees, then back to his feet.
He bore on. The frigid air tore at his lungs with each whooping breath. Gradually he became aware once more of a galvanic hum, felt as much as heard, right under his feet. It was like standing on a steel platform as a train approached. The thrumming sound increased as he climbed, until it was a deep, mechanical buzz that brought to mind the single note of feedback that opened “I Feel Fine” by the Beatles.
He stopped walking, fifty paces from the apex of the dome, and swayed on his heels. His head throbbed. His ears, too.
For the first time, he saw he was standing on something that wasn’t cloud. It was cloud-colored, a dull pewter shade, but it was harder than anything he’d felt yet, and it was right there, hidden under a carpet of vapor not even an inch thick.
He fell to his knees and fanned away the smoke. It seemed to lack the will or the density to thicken here. Beneath was the curve of what might’ve been the world’s largest pearl, a pearl the size of a ten-story building. It was not black but more closely resembled a polished sphere of ice. Except ice was cold, and this was warm and humming like a power transformer.
And something else. He could see something in it. Some dim form. It looked like an eel, frozen in the not-ice.
He crawled, sweeping cloud out of the way in puffs. The vapor did not resist him here. Aubrey uncovered what seemed to be a gold wire, as thin as a hair, running along the outside of the clouded glass. A dozen feet later, he discovered another gold filament. Soon he found a third, a fourth. All the gold wires were rising toward the very top of the globe to enwrap it in a fragile netting.
As his hand passed over one of the wires, he felt a cool breath against his palm. Aubrey paused and bent close and discovered that the lines were pricked with thousands of fine perforations, spilling wisps of white haze.
The whole impossible substance of the cloud began here, he thought. The pearl wore a coat of golden threads, which produced the cloud as a form of disguise, extruding a smoke that was lighter than air but as tough as human skin. It wasn’t magic but machinery.
This idea was followed closely by another. He wasn’t getting stepped on anymore. He had not felt the psychic impact of that black, glassy mace since finding the first golden thread.
I’m inside its defenses, he thought, certain without knowing how he could be sure. It can’t fight me here. And it can’t hide either.
He looked past the gold webbing and into the not-ice once more and spotted a second frozen eel, thick as a man’s thigh. He followed it upward to see where it led, scooping aside the thin mist as he went.
At last he was at the very top. He pursed his lips and blew away a tissue of smoke, and finally he had a view of what he’d been hearing for the last fifteen minutes. The globe was crowned by what looked like an upside-down dish of beautiful gold foil. Hundreds of shining lines radiated out of it, spokes from the hub of a wheel. The dish produced a steady electrical drone that he could feel in the fine hairs on his arms, on the surface of his skin, in his fillings.
Aubrey stood, wiped an arm across his brow. His eyes shifted focus, peering beneath the golden cup and into that great ball of not-glass. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at, and when it clicked into place, he was swept with an almost overpowering dizziness.
It was a face. The gray, smooth sphere contained a head, bigger than the head of a sperm whale. Aubrey saw a single closed eye, turned up toward him, an eye with the approximate diameter of a hot tub. Farther down was a beard of tentacles—those eels he’d seen—each ropy appendage thicker than a fire hose. It was hard to tell what color the creature might be. Everything within the sphere assumed a greenish-gray hue, like old, cold snot.
At some point he sank back to his knees. The gold platter set atop the pearl hummed steadily. He thought the thing inside the not-ice was either dead or in a state of coma very close to death, but the machinery that concealed it was alive and well.
He saw movement at the edge of his vision and turned his head. Sky Harriet waited a few yards away, nervously wringing her hands. The hem of her pale gown, ideal for a wedding, swept the steel-colored not-glass beneath her.
He gestured at the face in the sphere.
“What is that? Is that you in there?” he called out to her. “Is that the real you?”
He wasn’t sure she understood, and he thought again of an illiterate thumbing through a magazine full of pictures. But then she shook her head, almost desperately, and hugged herself.
No. No, he didn’t think so. He thought again (hoped was maybe mo
He was leaning forward a little, and he put one hand on that wrinkled, upside-down dish of gold foil.
It was like sticking a finger into a light socket, a charge so intense his whole body went rigid and his teeth clamped together, and for an instant his vision was wiped out by a flurry of silver lights, as if a dozen flashbulbs were going off in his face all at once. Only what galvanized him was not electricity but a five-hundred-thousand-volt shock of loneliness, a feeling of need so intense it could kill.
He yanked his hand free. When he blinked away the blurred afterglow of all those flashing lights, his Harriet of the heavens was regarding him with something like fear.
Aubrey held his left hand to his chest. It ached with pins and needles.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry for you. But you can’t keep me here. You’re killing me. I’m sorry you’re alone, but you have to let me go. I—I don’t want to be with you anymore.”
She gazed at him with complete incomprehension.
He felt not surprise but only a kind of weary disappointment. A sentient and empathic life-form made of smoke had come to this world who knew how long ago, with a single purpose—to conceal and protect a head in a ball. A monstrous, silent thing that had maybe not even survived the voyage.
The cloud consciousness lived by one law: protect its freight from discovery. There was no going down. And there was no letting anyone free who might endanger that thing inside the sphere, a decapitated head the size of a house. The living smoke had kept the balloonists—and no doubt tried to please them—so it would not be alone. It was holding on to him for the same reason. It did not understand that this temporary easing of its agonizing, endless loneliness would inevitably come at the cost of the only life Aubrey had.