Vox Mentis

Well that's that I guess! Better pack it in then.
Sike.
Make them tell you where Danny is at and march yourself there.

You could use the word; they won’t listen to you otherwise. But you could do it: could make them tell you where Danny is, then herd this entire freaking town into the desert. The only question is whether you can save them before Thoreau’s hammer falls. “You have to get out,” you say. “You all have to get out.”

Promise yourself, whatever happens next, you'll make Thoreau pay for it

He'll pay for this. He'll pay dearly. You promise yourself that and stash that promise deep inside yourself.

You pick up the pen. You're surprised, because you didn't mean to do that. It doesn’t make any sense to leave a note for Danny now. But you start writing anyway. You are going to perform this test for me, my dear, Thoreau had said, and the first letter is K and you suddenly realize what's coming. You try to pull back your hand but decide no, it's okay, you'll just write this instruction first. Thoreau isn’t coming. He's already here, inside you. You begin to scrabble and claw for the part of your mind that isn’t you but your hand writes KILL EVERYONE anyway. You take the bareword from the satchel. You manage to close your eyes; you can do that. Your left hand finds the bulge, the sharp protuberance that cut you in DC, and your right impales the paper upon it.

There is grunting. A slap of skin. “Get him off-” a woman says, and it becomes a choke. Footsteps. You set the bareword on the counter, the paper dangling from it. You want to rip it away, knock it over, obscure it in some way, but your mind says that is a bad idea and you can't convince it otherwise.

Someone hits you. You fall to the floor. You open your eyes and see a bright spot of your own blood. Your mouth is numb. Ahead, an older man with a cane rises from the waiting room seats, his eyes full of concern, but his gaze shifts to the thing above your head and everything about his face changes. He shuffles in a half circle to face the woman beside him, who you know as Maureen - she came into Tangled Threads sometimes to buy clothes for her niece - and he brings up his cane and swings it at her so hard he overbalances.

You get to your feet. The receptionist has his hands around the nurse’s neck. You take one step toward them and the security boy shoots the receptionist and then the nurse, one after the other. You skid and fall. You go on hands and knees for the seats, crawling for your life. Someone shouts, “Help in the ER, code black, code black,” and within about two minutes every red-blooded male in the building will be in this room, you realize; that's how it works here. You want to scream at them to get out, let nobody in here, but you have no words.

Finally you flee. You crawl beneath seats, and that as much as anything feels like murder. By the time you reach the doors, the room is full of howls. Like wolves.

~

Then the thing. Which at first seems insignificant compared to what is happening, but later, you come to understand it isn't. As you escape the emergency room, Danny’s white paramedic van jumps the curb. Danny stares at you through the windshield. Then his eyes shift to the room behind you. His expression tightens, filling with purpose, and he throws open the van door. You get to your feet and back away, your hands up, thinking he's coming to kill you, that somehow despite what happened earlier he has succumbed to the word. But he runs right by you, and you realize the purpose in his eyes is his own. He's going to help.

You leave. You make it two blocks before your gut clenches so badly you have to bend over. You gag but nothing comes out. A police car blows by, lights and sirens, heading for the ER. They will all go there: the cops, anyone trying to help, the injured. It will be endless. You break into a shuffling run.

Your eye is burning. It feels like a hard prick of light in there. The thing is, when the van’s door bounced open, the glass reflected the ER for a moment. It was only a flash. But you have the terrible feeling that you got something in your eye.

~

The helicopter moves through darkness and you peer through the plexiglass at what lies below. Broken Hill is a small cluster of sulfurous lights, like a ship on an ocean of black glass. Occasionally you catch a tiny spark or glimmer, but those are the only signs that something is happening.

“Can’t raise any of them, Thoreau,” says a voice in your ear. You are wearing a headset; the voice belongs to Plath, sitting opposite you. “Eliot, the ground team, no one, sir.” She swaps headsets and begins to bark into that one and you return your attention to the landscape. A circular pinprick of lights come into view, surrounding a depthless black hole, which you recognize as the main quarry. You've never seen it in person before; it's larger than you expected. When you’d first taken an interest, some decades before, following hints of something ancient and significant buried there, you could still make out remnants of the hill that had loaned the town its name. Now that is gone - not just erased but inverted, to become this great pit. You find this notable for the demonstration of force it represents. Civilizations rise and fall; what causes them to be remembered is not their contribution to knowledge or culture, not even the size of their empires, but rather how much force they exerted upon the landscape. This is what survives them. A hundred billion lives have passed without leaving a mark since the Egyptians raised their pyramids, changing the world not figuratively but literally. You admire that. This hole in Broken Hill is nothing, of course, but it will outlast every person on the planet.

“Okay,” says Plath. “We’ve got buildings on fire now.”

You look. There is indeed a flickering.

“I have to say, I think we’re operating at a high degree of probability that Woolf has deployed the word.” Plath looks at you as if she expects a reaction here: if not an Oh god no then at least an Are you sure; some kind of response to validate her feeling that this is a shocking development, possibly the worst thing she can imagine.

What do you say?