Glimmering

Nothing will grow but stones and thorns
Nothing will fall from the sky but as blood from a wound
They will cease not in their laughter until the end
They will watch as women suckle the dead
They will watch as enticing magicians are performing;
Fear the beguiling, hypnotizing phantoms of the Kali Yuga
Fear the end of the end.

Jack staggered to his feet. She reached to steady him and he took her hand, frightened yet comforted by the sense that something in the room was real.

“It’s all really happening, Jack,” she murmured, as though she read his thoughts.

“That’s how it works, when it doesn’t kill us. We become gates.”

“Gates?”

“This.” Her hand fumbled at her jeans pocket. When she held it up again he saw a small bottle there, brown glass, rubber dropper-bulb, white label with black letters—Fusax 687.

He dug into his own pocket. His fingers closed around the familiar vial, drew it out. He stared at it in terror, then at her.

“Yes.” Nellie nodded. “Me too. And more—more of us than you can imagine.”

Jack shook his head. “But—how?” he whispered.

“Leonard Thrope. Among others. He travels, he gives them to people he meets—”

“But why? Why?”

“So that we can change. Petra virus, hanta virus, AIDS, torminos simplex—they change our bodies and make us vulnerable. Even exposure to UV light can do it. It all makes us susceptible, Jack—do you understand what that means? It means we are capable of taking, of receiving. The viruses change us, but they also open us, so that things can get inside. They kill us—usually, depending on what we have—but sometimes they make it possible for other changes to happen—”

“Fuck you. AIDS is not a fucking gate, this is not some fucking—”

Nellie smiled, maddeningly. “Fusax is what makes us gates, Jack. Do you know what it really is?”

He stared, desperate, trying to remember what Leonard had said about the drug, dredged up nothing save the image of a grinning demon who held a staff impaled with human skulls.

“It’s a type of bacteria.” Her hands moved as she spoke, drawing circles in the air. “A kind of spirochete: a symbiotic microbe. We all have remnants of them inside our brains. These particular spirochetes—the fusarium—once they were just simple bacteria. But millions of years ago they attached themselves to us. They merged with our brain cells, they became neurotubules—part of the passageways that transmit thought and sensation, part of our neurochemistry. And now they’re part of us—all of us, not just you and me. They orchestrate the way we think; they may even be what gives us consciousness.

“Fusarium is a mutation. An independent researcher discovered it, and then he decided to share it, with people here, in the States. And in Japan. At first they thought it might keep the petra virus from replicating. Because in the right individuals—people whose body chemistry has been altered by cancer, or UV radiation; people whose immune systems have been damaged by AIDS or petra virus or chemotherapy; in people whose immune systems have already been changed—the fusarium attach themselves to proteins and—”

“You’re fucking nuts.” Jack stumbled backward and bumped into the wall. “This is crazy, you’re—”

Nellie shook her head emphatically. “No. It works. It threads itself inside us—within our brain cells, within our neurochemistry, our immune systems. There’s no one place where it happens. The immune system is like a cloud, it’s everywhere inside us. Like consciousness. It’s not just in our lymph nodes, or liver—it’s there, too, of course, but the immune system can move, just like consciousness can move. That’s why people die from a broken heart, or depression. That’s why sometimes we live, even when we should die: because our emotions and T cells, our thoughts and our blood are all woven together. There are things dancing inside us, Jack—cells and bacteria and bits of light. They make a cloud, they form a web. And now, with fusarium, this cloud of—of knowing—it can move outside us. Our consciousness can move between us. Over great distances, between the living and the dead.”

He shook his head.

“There are doors opening everywhere, Jack. The world has changed. We must change, too, or die—and that’s what the Fusax does. It changes us. It doesn’t always work, but when it does—it’s not crazy, Jack. It’s evolution.”

“Get the fuck away from me! You’re a fucking lunatic—how would you even know—”