Obsidian Sky

  Watch,” says the girl. “They’ll be coming soon.”

  The sun rides low on the horizon, slowly dousing the South Texas plain into red dusk. I stand there, wondering what it is about this strange girl that makes me want to stay. She bothers me. Not enough to make me want to leave, but enough to tease my curiosity into wispy strands of wonder and fear.

  “Who will be coming soon?”

  “Not who,” she says calmly, “but what.”

  People more judgmental—people like my parents—might take one look at the girl and turn their noses up at her, calling her ugly. But if you took a moment, you’d realize she’s not. She just looks different and in interesting ways—ways that don’t resonate on a simple spectrum of appearances. Not apples and oranges—more like apples and dragon fruit—so how do you even begin to compare? Well, to me, she’s interesting in all sorts of ways, and my parents aren’t around to bother me with annoying surface judgments. They’re off on their second honeymoon, which is why I’m here spending two weeks at my uncle Mason’s farm.

  Uncle Mason and Aunt Eunice’s kids are grown and gone. Even though it’s just my first day here, I can already sense that there are very few kids around at all. The empty fields reek of “maturity.” There’s not a ball or bike or video game between here and San Antonio. I’m pretty sure this odd girl is the only other kid within ten square miles of this place. She’s even got a strange name, too: Zephyr.

  Well, I figure it might not be so bad, on account of Zephyr knows things. She knows how to find snakes and hold them so they won’t bite. She can catch bugs in midair and never misses.

  But now she’s getting weird, standing here looking at the setting sun like it’s gonna jump up and do a dance for us.

  “Listen,” I tell her, “it’s been fun, but I’ve gotta get back for dinner.”

  “Shhh, Jack,” says Zephyr, turning her face to me. I can’t see much of her eyes because she wears dark shades. Each lens is in the shape of a valentine heart, surrounded by a bright pink frame. “Be quiet and listen,” she says.

  I listen, but I don’t hear anything out of the ordinary, just the distant lowing of cattle beneath the shrilling of katydids. Then a new sound begins to swell and overwhelms those other noises. A fluttering, like sheets on a windblown clothesline.

  Zephyr clears her throat—a raspy clicking sound, almost like a snicker. “Yes,” she says, “they’re coming.”

  Suddenly a swell of darkness obliterates the setting sun. The darkness rises in the distance like a black mushroom cloud. The fluttering grows more intense, and as I watch, to my amazement, I see that the cloud is not a cloud at all, but a swarm. Tiny dots of darkness fill almost every inch of sky, flitting madly in all directions. They draw closer, and I see the flapping of dark wings.

  “Are those… birds?” I ask.

  Zephyr shakes her head. “No, Jack,” she tells me. “They’re bats.”

  In an instant the swarm is over us, turning the twilight to night. I duck—I cover my head, expecting them to dive from the sky, to suck my blood, to tear at my flesh.

  But Zephyr only laughs. “They won’t bother you, silly,” she says. “They’re Mexican free-tails. They eat bugs.”

  I dare to turn my eyes upward to see the moving mass of bats, an endless stream of sinewy wings that beat past so powerfully they create a wind. The smell of bat guano is thick in the air, like a hot day at the zoo—but Zephyr takes a deep breath and smiles. “I love their smell,” she says. “It’s so… different.”

  The bats just keep flowing across the sky. I figure they have to stop eventually, but they don’t. “How many more could there be?”

  “It will take two or three hours for all of them to leave the roost. They’ll feed, then flood the sky again on their way back home, just before dawn.”

  “There must be millions of them!”

  “Twenty million,” Zephyr quickly says, “but my momma says there’s many, many more—more than anyone could ever count.”

  “That’s impossible,” I tell her. Now they’ve formed a blanket of night above us, as dark as coal. “Where do they come from?”

  Zephyr smiles. “Come back tomorrow,” she says, “and I’ll show you.”

  * * *

  “Stay away from that one,” Uncle Mason says when I tell him about my afternoon with Zephyr. “The girl’s touched in the head. So’s her mother.” He shovels his peach pie into his mouth, and takes his time before continuing. His thoughts are always well-measured, even if they are opinionated. “They’re not right. They got funny ways. The mother’s a recluse and never goes out. I think they’re in some kind of cult.”

  Aunt Eunice serves me up another slice of pie. “Just because they got their own way of seeing things doesn’t make them a cult,” she says, but I can tell she’s just saying it for the sake of argument. She doesn’t like Zephyr and her mother either. “The poor thing is so homely,” Aunt Eunice says. “You’ve got to have pity on a girl like that.”

  “I don’t gotta have pity on no one,” grumbles my uncle.

  “That’s because you don’t have a charitable bone in your body!”

  I can see that the two of them are working themselves up into a huff, so I try to change the subject.

  “What about the bats?”

  Uncle Mason puts down his fork. “So? We got bats round these parts, what of it?”

  “Do they always come?”

  “Yep,” he says. “Every night, spring through fall, before they migrate south.”

  “They clear out the bugs, that’s for sure,” adds Aunt Eunice. “Don’t even need to crop-dust the fields. Of course, there is that awful smell.”

  “Zephyr likes the smell,” I tell them.

  My uncle snorts. “I’m not surprised.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” says Aunt Eunice, again taking whatever side Uncle Mason isn’t on. “When I was a little girl, I liked the small of cow pies,” she says. “In the winter, on the way to school, I would even stick my feet in them to keep warm.”

  “Oh, gross!” The thought of sticking my feet into a steaming cow pie makes me want to hurl.

  “Now look what you’ve done, Eunice, you’ve gone and made the boy ill!”

  As I think about it, I wonder which is weirder: cow-pie footbaths or a sky full of bats.

  “So,” I say, “the bats are a good thing then?”

  Once again, Uncle Mason takes his time in answering, so Aunt Eunice answers for him. “Of course they are, Jack… but I do wish there weren’t so many of them.”

  Uncle Mason shakes his head. “More and more every year,” he says. “Can’t be natural. Can’t be natural at all.”

  * * *

  Zephyr, heart-shaped sunglasses still fixed on her face, leads me across field after field the following afternoon, until I can no longer see any houses behind us. There’s nothing but cactus and scrub brush around us, and the ever-growing aroma of bat. I begin to sense something strange—as if Zephyr isn’t strange enough: now I sense something off in the world around me. It’s like a premonition without words or thought, releasing itself on my senses instead of my brain. Gooseflesh rises on my arms and legs, sounds are hollow, and the afternoon light is somehow lessened, like a partial eclipse. The feeling is both disturbing and exciting; different—like the smell of the bats.

  “We’re here,” says Zephyr.

  We’ve stopped at the edge of what looks like a meteor crater. In the center is a huge hole, at least ten feet across.

  “That’s it,” says Zephyr, a grin of anticipation on her face. “That’s the entrance to Bracken Cave!” She brushes back her brittle hair and begins to descend toward the sinkhole mouth of the cave, but I hesitate. The mouth of the cave is speckled with bat droppings. Zephyr turns back and takes my hand. “Don’t be afraid,” she says. “I come here all the time. There’s nothing to worry about as long as you’re quiet. The bats sleep during the day.”

  I have to admit, I’m scared to go anywhere near the cave, and I begin to feel humiliated. Here I am afraid to go in, but Zephyr isn’t scared at all. The truth is most other girls—most other people—wouldn’t go anywhere near that cave. There are DANGER signs posted everywhere, and warnings not to disturb the bats. My brain goes into reverse, but my feet are like tires spinning in the mud—they simply won’t move me back. Then Zephyr gets close to me and whispers something in my ear that really should frighten me away, but instead it has the opposite effect.

  “I’ve never brought any other boy here,” she whispers to me. “And I’ll never bring anyone else here but you.”

  I don’t know what it is about her words that gets my feet moving toward that hole. Maybe the feeling of being special. Being chosen. Still holding my hand, she leads me toward the gaping mouth. “Come on, I’ll show you something amazing,” she whispers, and she climbs down into darkness, taking me with her.

  We reach the bottom of the cave, where I can see very little beside the fact that the walls are moving. I swallow my revulsion, and focus all my attention on Zephyr’s calmness. If she’s calm, then I can be too.

  “They’re everywhere,” Zephyr whispers. “A hundred babies in every square foot. Soon the mothers will be nursing.” She clears her throat again—that weird cackling noise—then she leads me forward into darkness. I want to resist but find that my fear, tired of being ignored, has finally slipped out of consciousness, leaving me numb and intoxicated by the acidic smell of bat droppings.

  Beneath our feet, something crunches like eggshells.

  “They’re carnivorous dermestid beetles,” she tells me, as if it’s something every kid should know. “They cover the floor, eating dead bats. If you stood in one place long enough, they’d eat you, too, but it might take a while.”

  She moves sure-footedly through the darkness, so fast that it scares me, but we don’t bump into a single wall. There are strange clicking sounds all around me.

  “What are those noises?” I ask.

  “The bats are echolocating,” she explains. “They make those clicks, and use sonar to ‘see’ in the dark.”

  Every once in a while, I feel a bat brush past my face. It really bothers me at first, but I soon become desensitized to it. I think about summer camp, and how during the first few days I’m always freaked out by the size of the bugs and spiders—but after a week I couldn’t care less. It’s funny the things you can get used to.

  Again, Zephyr clears her throat and changes directions. “This way!”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see.”

  We walk for what seems like forever, turning every now and then, and I think about how long the walk back will have to be, with beetles below and bats hanging above. I wonder if my fear will suddenly wake up again and send me off into a berserk screaming frenzy.

  Finally I see faint shades of light around us, gray on gray. “Okay. So, where are we?” I ask.

  “We’re home,” she says, then she pushes open a wooden door to reveal something I never expected. We step into a farmhouse. Her house. First, I breathe an incredible sigh of relief that the ordeal is over. Then, it occurs to me how very odd it is that her house opens up into Bracken Cave.

  “The cave leads many places,” she says, as if reading my mind. “No one knows how deep it goes. My momma says it has roots that grow out the bottom of the world.”

  I chuckle nervously. “Your momma says a lot of funny things, doesn’t she?”

  “Would you like to meet her?”

  “Not really.”

  But Zephyr has already gone to a back room—a dark room. I try to think of an excuse to leave, so I can hightail it across the field to my aunt and uncle’s house, only a few hundred yards away. But before I can bolt, I hear a voice from the dark room.

  “What is it, Zephyr?” The woman’s voice is soothing and musical. Her tone seems to coat me like sticky sap, and I can’t move. I have to see who belongs to that voice.

  “He’s here, Momma,” says Zephyr. “I brought him, just like you told me.”

  “Come in, Jack,” says the woman.

  Again, that sense of unsettled excitement fills me—a curiosity that buries my urge to flee. Slowly, planting one foot in front of the other, I step across the threshold of the dark room.

  The room is full of paintings—magnificent canvases, all of the same subject: bats escaping into a twilight sky. In the center of the room sits a woman, with eyelids half-closed.

  “Come closer, Jack. I don’t bite.”

  She’s dressed like some sort of hippy, or earth mother, or something. Her long brown hair is tied into a rope-braid so long it coils on the floor around her like a snake. “My name is Gaia, but you can call me Momma too. Everyone does.” The way she moves her head when she speaks, the way her small eyes don’t track, makes it clear to me that she’s blind. Yet she holds a brush, painting another black-winged portrait.

  “But… but how…?”

  I don’t have to ask the question. She knows what I’m about to ask. “You don’t need to see what you paint,” she says in that musical voice, “if you know every in and out of it.”

  She wipes the paint from her fingers with a towel and beckons me closer. I step over the coils of her braid, and she touches my face, moving her fingertips over my nose, cheeks, eyes, and neck. It tickles, but it isn’t an unpleasant feeling.

  “A strong face,” she says. “Good bone structure. A fine man he’ll grow to be.”

  “Uh… thanks,” I say, not sure what else to say when someone compliments you on your bone structure. “Listen, it’s probably getting late. I gotta get back for dinner.” Although the last thing I have right now is an appetite.

  “Not yet,” says the strange woman. “There’s something you must first see. Zephyr?”

  Obediently, Zephyr comes to her. “Show him,” the woman says, and Zephyr grabs a chair. Standing on it, she reaches up to the rafters and pulls down a single bat, handing it to her mother. “Here you go, Momma.”

  I shiver as I look up to see a small cluster of bats clinging to the ceiling. These people live with the bats! I tell myself. Their house opens into Bracken Cave. Uncle Mason was right. They’re weird—worse than weird! I have to get out of here! I feel panic welling inside me, but instead of making me run, it locks me in place, like a deer on a highway. I can’t escape this now. Whatever horror is bearing down on me, I can only watch it happen.

  Gaia gently brushes the bat’s fur, then stretches out its wing. “This isn’t your ordinary free-tailed bat,” she says. “This one comes from the new generation. The generation that will emerge for the first time tonight!” The skin of its wing is as dark as crude oil.

  “Touch it, Jack,” Gaia tells me. “Touch his wing.”

  Her voice is gentle, but it resonates in me like a command I can’t ignore. Besides, a part of me wants to touch the bat; a part of me that seems to be growing stronger the more time I spend with Zephyr and her mother.

  I move my finger toward the wing, which is so dark, I can’t see any texture on the thin membrane. What happens next catches me completely by surprise. I reach for the wing, moving my finger closer, and my finger passes right through it. I gasp and draw back, thinking that I’ve punctured the membrane of the wing. But when I look at it, I don’t see any hole in the wing. That’s when I realize that the wing isn’t really a membrane at all. It’s not flesh, but rather an absence of flesh. A hole in space, the shape of a wing. I reach forward again, and my whole hand passes through into the darkness of the wing, as if I’ve reached through a small window into another place. I can feel my fingertips getting cold, and I pull my hand back, shivering.

  I peer at the bat, trying to grasp what has happened. All I can see in that wing is obsidian darkness.

  I slip to my knees, suddenly dizzy. I’m afraid. I’m confused. “I… I don’t feel so good.”

  “Sit with me, then,” says Gaia, “and I’ll tell you a story.”

  I sit beside her, allowing her to comfort me. She starts to coil her heavy braid around me, and I begin to feel like a baby tightly wrapped in a warm blanket. Gaia rocks me gently.

  “Forever and forever ago,” she begins, “before time had a memory, a flock of bluebirds burst from a hole in the void and spread their wings across the chaos. They filled the space from yonder to yonder, until nothing remained but the blue of their wings, which became the blue sky above a new world of light.”

  Then she leans close to me; so close I can smell her breath. It smells like the depths of Bracken Cave, but somehow cleaner, as if the acid were washed away, leaving only a rich, organic aroma behind. “It’s time you knew, Jack,” she says, “that the age of the bluebird sky is over.” That’s when she touches my chin, turning my head to look at Zephyr—and for the first time, Zephyr reaches up, pulling off her dark sunglasses…

  … to reveal that she has no eyes.

  I gasp, but it comes out as a pained wheeze. I look away, not wanting to see, but Gaia gently turns my head back, forcing me to look at her daughter.

  There are only faint indentations where Zephyr’s eyes should be, covered by smooth skin. No lids, no lashes. No brow.

  “It’s all right,” Zephyr says brightly. “Don’t worry, I can still ‘see’ just fine.” Then she opens her mouth and clears her throat, as she’s done so many times before—only now I realize that she’s not clearing her throat at all. She’s sending out little sonar clicks, echolocating like a bat.

  For a brief instant I come to my senses enough to realize the depth of the trouble I’m in. I am bound in the endless coils of a massive braid, looking at a mutant girl, and I can’t escape.

  All at once I hear a sound outside—sheets flapping on a clothesline. I know that sound. It is the bats! Millions of black-winged bats taking to the sky.

  I struggle to pull myself free from the braid that ties me.

  “It’s no use,” Gaia tells me, “and it’s best that you don’t see. Stay here, Jack, with me and Zephyr.”