World Without End by Shelley K. Davenport

World Without End by Shelley K. Davenport

Two days ago Kieran disappeared.

Around mid-afternoon he went up into the forest to cut firewood. Although we have to go farther and farther afield these days to find dead wood, I did not really worry until night fell and he wasn’t back. He only had with him the axe and a hunting knife. He didn’t even have a lantern with him.

I bundled up and went looking for him, aforementioned lantern and gun in hand, but it had begun to snow again. I followed his footsteps about halfway up the mountain when I came to a clearing which I in no way remember. In the dusk it glimmered pale, roughly circular, about thirty feet across, nearly perfectly flat. The woods hadn’t been cut back by anyone (certainly not by us)—the trees looked like they simply grew that way, naturally. Except that the clearing wasn’t there in the autumn. It’s as if the trees all stepped back, to make way for something.

Kieran’s steps ended right at the edge, but whether that was because of the thick snowfall or something more sinister, I didn’t know, so I stumbled back down to the house. It took me a long time to get warm again.

And now it’s been two days, two days of such frightful silence that I’ve begun to write, just to feel as if I’m talking to someone, or writing a letter.

“Hello, world. It’s me, Annamarie. I’m lonely because my best friend evaporated.”

This typewriter is a pretty thing. Kieran gave it to me for my birthday, along with a ream of fresh paper. He’d pilfered both from town and had been hiding them from me beneath the stairs where the spiders live and I never look. This is the first I’ve used it. It’s been years since I typed and errors are copious.

The guy who owned this house and built the bunker was a serious doomsday prepper and something of a Luddite (wind up clocks, lanterns, a wood burning stove). He was in it for the long haul—between all the canned food and medicine, and the foolproof hand tools. Books too, equally split between conspiracy theories and western romances. The one thing he didn’t stock up on was paper or pens. Maybe that’s what he was out buying when the Apocalypse happened. He wasn’t here when the Miasma hit.

That’s what Kieran calls it. A biological weapon, launched in multiple locations by…who knows? Putin, Kim Jong Un, our own dear President? It just happened so fast, nobody knew for sure who did it. It wasn’t a super-flu or smallpox or something that took days to kill you. It was more like an airborne poison that also happened to be contagious. Crazy efficient. People dropped in their steps, at their desks, on the bus. Mobs barely had time to start looting. Everyone I knew died within six hours on a beautiful September afternoon.

But I didn’t. I still don’t know why.

I was numb. I really thought it was the Second Coming. I threw everything I could into the car and headed for the mountains, thanking God that I did not have a husband or children to lose, that my parents were already gone, that I only lost friends and colleagues. I was absurdly, unbelievably lucky. The roads were still navigable, if you didn’t mind weaving around corpse-stuffed cars and the occasional pedestrian sprawled out, surprised expression on his puffy face.

 I reached the Laurel Highlands before my gas ran out and I had to switch cars (the gas station pumps refusing my credit card with maddening indifference). I apologized to the previous owner as I dragged him to the side of the road, transferred my stuff and drove on. I talked to one old man who was sitting in his front yard, smoking. He told me he’d heard it was a localized attack (not true), and that the army was on its way (possibly true). I never found out. All I know is that I was not within a blast radius when the nuclear bombs started falling. Someone in a bunker, pissed off about the biological attacks, had pressed the red button. I didn’t see the mushroom cloud over Pittsburgh from where I was in a mountain valley, but the sky went superwhite and I crashed into a tree. Again, eyes streaming as I sat by the road, I waited for the Second Coming. No such luck. Just like that, 99.99% of humanity was wiped out.

I didn’t get radiation sickness, or lesions or any of the horrific things you’re supposed to get. It was almost irritating how healthy, how immune I was. I considered for a long time that perhaps I was dead, or a ghost doomed to wander alone, invisible to all the other ghosts and they to me.

That first year I didn’t see anyone alive. I went from house to house, evicting and burying residents and living off their food, using their blankets and cooking over campfires. There was no electricity or running water, but with no competition it was surprisingly easy to survive. I was the last person on earth, as far as I knew.

But I stuck to the mountains. I wasn’t lonely enough to go back out into the remnants of civilization and risk whatever Mad Max culture had developed—if any. I wasn’t becoming a sex slave to any depraved mutant horde.

The first winter was very cold and very snowy. The following spring and summer were cold and wet. And then winter again. Nuclear winter? (Kieran later told me that nuclear winter is only theoretical, and he thought the maybe earth was just taking revenge on us for the last hundred years of global warming.)

Kieran.

The first time I saw Kieran was on a road deep in the southern Alleghenies in very early spring. We both stopped in our tracks, looked around us as if to say, are you seeing this? And then drew our weapons. We inched towards each other.

“Hey,” I said, making sure he wasn’t a mutant.

“Hey,” he said, making sure I wasn’t either.

He was filthy from the winter, hollow eyed and drastically unshaven. I didn’t exactly look like princess myself. He was—is—an escapee from Baltimore, and an economic analyst of some sort. He had the same idea I did, to flee for the mountains, where he’d spent childhood summers. The Miasma hadn’t been as efficient in the vast conurbation of Washington D.C.–Baltimore–Philadelphia–NYC. Looting and riots and fires broke out, and many more people were alive when the nuclear weapons began to fall. He never really talks about it, just like my grandfather refused to talk about the Korean War.

We hung around for a few days together at a farm with a good selection of home canned fruits and vegetables. He shot a rabbit so I had fresh meat for the first time in a year. I am a terrible shot and I hate killing things, but that rabbit was the best thing I’d eaten in my life. I kept a sharp eye on him and slept with my knife, because I didn’t know he wasn’t going to attack me, and he didn’t know how to properly assure me that he wasn’t.

Finally he told me he’d lost a husband in Baltimore, so that answered that. But thinking back, even if he had been straight I don’t think we would have become lovers. Neither of us had the slightest desire to accidentally repopulate the earth, after what had happened. (He felt that the earth had grown sick of us, and swatted us out of existence before we could destroy her. I thought that it was God’s punishment on us for being poor stewards, something he thought unpleasantly Old Testament of me.) Anyway, we have been content to live together like brother and sister. Let someone else play Adam and Eve and leave us out of it.

 That fall—two years after the Apocalypse—we found this house, tucked on the side of the mountain, with its own stream and doomsday bunker and enough ammunition to give the ATF nightmares. As I said, no one was here so we didn’t even have to bury anyone. The owner—his name was Troy Sipple (perfect Pennsylvania name, that)—had done a bang-up job here. There was a hand pump for well water and plenty of matches. The generator didn’t work, the batteries having corroded from lack of care, but it had been years since we’d used electricity so we didn’t mind.

We’ve been here for three years, so a little over five years since the Apocalypse. In that time we have not seen another person. The shortwave radio has enabled us to pick up on a few signals around the world—one in Sweden, one in Canberra, another, (lucky jerk) in Hawaii—a handful of survivors who have no chance in hell of ever meeting each other. After awhile, though, those batteries died, the replacements died too, and it’s been silent.

& & &

Dear Lord.

The snow let up a little so I went out after breakfast. In the knee-deep snow of the yard I found huge paw prints—canine, I’m pretty sure. They circled the house a few times, and then sank deep and dark into the ice, as if the giant animal (a wolf or dog?) had stood for a long time just staring at the front door.

I retreated in a hurry, slamming the door, and checked the revolver. The revolver we keep oiled and in excellent condition. It is our final exit strategy. We decided long ago that if it came down to it—starvation, cancer, murderous bicycle gangs—we were going to off ourselves Masada style—meaning he kills me and then himself, because I don’t have the stomach for either.

I’m going to have to go look for him again, but it’s snowing heavily.

& & &

I have double-bolted the door and shuttered the windows. I left a lantern burning on the porch so that, in the case that Kieran returns, he can find the house. But I am not optimistic. I am shivering, my fingers almost too stiff to type.

I set out early this morning, again finding that an animal—a wolf, I’ve decided—had visited our house, made a few circles, stared at the front door, and then made its way up the side of the mountain, I followed the paw prints as they took the trail, revolver in my pocket. It was a grey and muffled day, with flakes drifting down between tangled brown branches. Nothing cast a shadow, the light being so diffuse. Eventually I came out into the clearing again. It is still round and empty, except that it now appears sort of mounded in the middle, just a slight dome. Perhaps the wind had blown the snow into a kind of circular drift? I didn’t like the looks of it at all, and so I skirted round it to pick up the trail again.

I hiked to the top of the ridge, from which I could see down into the town of Fayette, abandoned, little dark houses under the snow, the crisscross grid of the streets discernible in all the wilderness. I saw no smoke from an emergency camp. I shouted myself hoarse. I held aloft the lantern until my arms shook. I looked all around at the purple shouldered mountains, white beneath the trees, fading away in every direction. Nothing. No one.

Back down the mountain. The crawly sensation, as I edged round the clearing, of being observed. By the time I saw the house I was running through the deep snow, feeling teeth at my back.

And now, as I sit at the table, eating baked beans from a can and boiled coffee, the fire stoked and all the candles lit, I still feel watched. I feel that shaggy beast outside, circling the house, its breath steaming on the windows, dribbling hot saliva into the snow.

There is something funny in the air. I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel out of place, like it isn’t my world anymore. Which of course it isn’t, but…

Was that a howl? Or creepy music? Now I’m hearing things.

Typing helps. Hard, precise strokes, the sturdy thwack thwack of the manmade keys. These square letters. The crisp paper.

Where did he go? I have no one to play checkers with, or to tell my stupid jokes to. Did he fall unconscious while the snow buried him? Is he hurt, in a rough shelter, slowly freezing?

Did the wolf get him?

& & &

Kieran and I had sometimes discussed how far back in history the Apocalypse had set us. Immediately, of course, after the nuclear attack, it set everything back a hundred and fifty years, prior to computers and phones and electricity, and even gaslights and trains. We’ve clung to a few anachronisms—the guns, the antibiotics we cravenly take when we don’t feel like dying of an infected hangnail, and this typewriter—but we’re really back to the 1700s, using axes and lanterns and getting our water from a well and cooking over a fire.

Is the whole world slipping back through time? If so, when will it stop? Will I be reduced to hunting with a bow and living in a cave? Without Kieran here I imagine the worst. Perhaps the dire wolves are back. And then saber tooth tigers, and mammoths, and, and…

& & &

The snow has melted considerably, it’s sunny so I’m going out again.

& & &

Well, hell’s bells and buckets of blood!

I climbed the trail to the clearing, noting that even more paw prints—those of two or three animals. They seem to be nocturnal; at least I hoped so. Shadows were etched periwinkle on the sparkling snow and the sky looked a hectic cobalt. I reached the clearing and squinted. The snow in the center again seemed higher than the snow around it, a sort of smooth dome. I got myself a long stick and went forward cautiously, poked it, but hit only dirt. I was afraid I’d find something truly weird, like the entrance to a bunker we’d somehow missed, or the hull of a UFO, I don’t know. But I scraped away at the snow with my hands and eventually uncovered what was basically a smallish round hill. It was as if the earth was growing a cyst or laying an egg. Unsettled, I hunted around the clearing, looking for axe marks on the trees, an abandoned glove, anything, but only found more paw prints.

I returned home, trying not to dwell on how alone I was. Prior to meeting Kieran I had entertained very few thoughts aside from what could I eat, where should I sleep, and were there going to be dead bodies to deal with? Since I met him I’d been living in luxury. We talked. We quarreled. We slept in the same bed for warmth. Even now I wanted to yell at him for going missing.

And then I saw the footprints. Bootprints, treadless, and very large, the toe queerly pointed. They came out of the woods from the right and stopped at our gate, as if whoever it was (clearly NOT a normal sized man) could not enter without permission. I looked around wildly then sprinted in to the house. Fumbled with the padlock, got inside, bolted it.

Holy water, I thought. Basil. Salt. Silver.

I checked all the windows and closed the shutters, drew the curtains and huddled by the fire. I want to sleep in the bunker but I am afraid that Kieran might come back and call for me, injured, stalked by dire wolves and an ogre with pointy boots. So I made a bed out of blankets and slept on the kitchen floor with the revolver at hand and a knife under my pillow, and I’m going to pray myself to sleep.

& & &

He’s back.

& & &

So much has happened. It’s two days since he came back. I’ve scarcely let him out of my sight. But there’s still something wrong with the world.

He came back right before dinner. I could hear him whistling, as he does, to let me know he’s coming. I opened the door and stared at him blankly as he came up the walk, arms filled with kindling.

“Annamarie, I’ve got a log just up the hill,” he said. “I need your help to drag it down so I can split it.”

He looked exactly the same as he had when he’d left, the same clothes, the same growth of stubble, and nothing secretive in his eyes.

“WHERE have you BEEN!?” I shrieked, like an abandoned wife, startling him into dropping half the wood.

“Cutting wood,” he said.

“For a WEEK?”

“No. Since lunch. I had to go way up—” he pointed.

“I know. I looked for you and looked and you weren’t there and there’s a wolf…”

I launched myself at him. It took me hours to convince him that I wasn’t insane. I know I looked crazy, red eyed and trembling. It started snowing again, a fresh coating, so I couldn’t even show him the prints to validate my story.

His story didn’t change, although he eventually agreed that something strange had happened in his absence. He said he’d gone up the hill to cut wood. He had come across the clearing (that at least we agreed that the clearing was new) and had sat down on a rock to eat a sandwich. Then he’d fallen asleep—for no more than fifteen minutes, he said. He’d gotten up, foraged for wood, and come back down to find me barricaded in the house having hysterics.

I didn’t care which one of us was delusional, I was just glad he was back, and I clung to him like a limpet to a rock.

That night in bed he spoke, in the dark.

“I had a dream,” he said. “A short one, during my nap.”

I waited.

“There was a hall,” he said. “With trees for pillars and stars on the ceiling. Some gray creatures with big eyes grabbed my hands and pulled me along, and then a beautiful woman in red brought me something to drink, but I said no thank you. I had to be going.”

I waited. After a moment I said, “That’s all?”

“Yes.” He sounded troubled. “It felt real.”

“You’re sure you didn’t drink anything?” I thought, for some reason, of Persephone.

“I’m sure.”

“Were their eyes black?” I asked after a moment. “The gray things?”

“No. Gold, and round.”

“Not aliens?”

“Not any aliens I’ve ever seen.”

We both realized this was funny because it was stupid and not really funny, and started laughing and couldn’t stop. Right before he fell asleep I leaned over and whispered, “You’re never going anywhere by yourself again, you hear me?”

 “Or what?” he murmured.

“Or I’ll fecking murder youse.”

“Sounds good,” he replied.

He’s back.

& & &

Or is he?

“Do you hear that?” he asked me, standing on the porch and looking up the mountain. The sun was just going down in a bonfire of rose and lavender.

I listened but heard only wind. “What?”

“Music,” he said. “Like in my dream.”

“You didn’t say there was music.”

“There were musicians in the hall.”

I studied him with narrowed eyes.

“I forgot,” he said defensively. “I just—it all happened so quickly, like a few frames of a movie.”

I felt his forehead with my hand.

“You don’t hear it?” he said. There was longing on his face.

“I don’t hear it.”

He whistled a few bars between his teeth, but it did not sound like proper music to me.

“What kind of music?” I asked.

“Pagan,” he said eventually.

I told him again about the paw prints and the boot prints. I pointed. I held my hands this far apart. I ranted about his weeklong absence. Then I rubbed the goosebumps on my arms.

“Lead,” he said eventually.

“What?”

“Lead in the pipes. We’re going mad like the Romans. Or the Arctic explorers.” He followed me into the house. “Or botulism? Does botulism make you hallucinate? I said we shouldn’t eat those tomatoes.”

“I think we’d be dead if it was botulism,” I told him, putting the kettle on to boil.

“Maybe we are,” he replied.

I like his insanity explanation. The snow has changed to rain. Tomorrow we are going to look at the clearing. Hopefully this has all been a case of food poisoning.

& & &

Not only is the clearing there, the bump in the center has doubled. It is now, undeniably, a hillock. It looks like it’s been there forever, grown over with dead grass and wet, black leaves.

“Where’s the rock you sat on?” I inquired.

“Um,” he circled a little and pointed to a flattish rock—more of a slab, really, half embedded in the slope. I narrowed my eyes. Deep in my head, with all my pre-Apocalyptic knowledge was stored, a bell faintly rang.

“You’re not supposed to touch those,” I said. “I don’t remember why. Well don’t sit on it again!”

“I wasn’t going to,” he said, aggrieved, but I think he was.

Later, as we were cooking dinner, I said, “Did you ever hear of the Mound Builders?”

“Native Americans?” he asked, inspecting the beef stew for signs of mold.

“Yeah. Ohio River valley, down south along the Mississippi.”

“Vaguely.”

“Burial mounds, mostly, or for ceremonies, I think. There was a mound in Pittsburgh,” I told him. “Right in the city. Behind a construction site. But I didn’t think the Mound Builders came this far east.”

“Even if they did,” he said, “That mound thing wasn’t here, and now it is. So.” He stirred the stew.

“Yeah. You remember my theory about time going backwards?” I asked. “The Celts made mounds too.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” Even I didn’t know what I meant.

But I kept thinking about the Mound Builders, and all the creepy lore of the Ohio River Valley. The Mothman, for instance. Strange figures in the woods. Redneck getting abducted by bright lights and no one believing them. These mountains. There were reasons, I thought. Reasons that the Scots-Irish settled here in Appalachia. The land—it reminded them of something.

& & &

In the middle of the night it came—the most fearsome howling racket I’ve ever heard. Pipes, horns, a mad fiddler, overhead, in the sky. Hounds baying, horses trampling the wind. Pagan, like he said. We clung to each other until it passed.

“Just a little hallucination,” he assured me in the dark.

Rationalist.

He eventually fell back asleep, but I lay awake, thinking. Formulating a theory.

I’m a professor of comparative literature, after all. I’ve read the Welsh stories, studied the lore. But it is one thing to read about it; quite another to confront the evidence. A little voice repeated something I’d read once: They were here before we came; they will be here when we’re gone.

The world has tipped over and it’s spilling.

& & &

“Faeries?” said Kieran. I cannot convey the complexity of his tone.

But that’s what it all adds up to, doesn’t it? His Rip Van Winkle sleep on the stone, the otherworldly music, the unnaturally large paw prints.

“Like Tinkerbell?”

“No,” I shouted. “The other kind!” The dangerous ones. The wild immortal ones.

“Honey,” he said.

I went out into the yard to sulk. I am as convinced of my theory as I am convinced that it is winter, that the world ended five years ago, and that I seriously need a drink.

And I wondered. Is it the same all across the earth? How many other mounds are erupting? Does Koschei the deathless stalk the tundra? Is Anansi playing tricks on survivors in Ghana? Have the bunyips overrun the outback? Are there winged serpents swooping over the ruins of Mexico City?

“But we aren’t in the British Isles,” said Kieran, when I felt I could talk to him again. I explained myself over a small glass of our carefully hoarded whisky. “Shouldn’t we be seeing wendigos and thunderbirds?”

“Is that all you know about Native American mythology?” I said, hoping to hurt his feelings. “Yes,” he admitted.

I sighed. “Me too.” We contemplated our ignorance sadly.

“Well,” I said finally. “Maybe we see what we’re genetically predisposed to see. European stuff.”

“Annamarie,” said Kieran.

“No listen. They’ve been waiting. Why do you think the generator never worked and the batteries died so quickly?”

“Well, batteries don’t really last as long as—” he began.

 “You know what?” I pointed. “I bet that gun won’t even fire anymore. And…And…” I waited for my drunken brain to help me. “Because iron, well, it will keep them away, but machines can’t work when they are…”

It was then that we heard something. Something big, something brushing against the house. Kieran grabbed the rifle and looked cautiously through the window. Nothing.

“I’m going out,” he said, putting on his boots.

“Good,” I said, brazen in my intoxicated state. “Now you’ll see.” I unsheathed a knife and slipped out after him.

There in the dark stood a white dog—not a wolf—but a gigantic hound, nearly the size of a horse. His ears glowed red, like hammered coals, and his eyes were black and shiny. His white flanks heaved; saliva dripped from his incredibly long fangs.

Click, went the rifle.

“Told you,” I said.

We fled back inside and locked the door, barricading it with whatever came to hand.

“They know we’re here,” I told him, feeling calm for the first time in ages. I remember feeling like this when I saw the unholy flash in the sky and knew the bombs were falling. I wasn’t afraid because it was happening and I thought it was all over.

“What. Was. That?” said Kieran.

“One of the Cwm Annwyn, I think.”

“A coomin what?”

 “A hound of the wild hunt,” I told him. “They’re trained to take down game and bring it back. It’s very common in European mythology…”

His face was pale and forehead sheened with sweat. “Take us to who?”

“Their master.”

“Who’s their master?”

Cerunnos, I thought. Herne. Arawn.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

But he was scared, more scared than I was. I took him by the hand and led him to the table. Gave him the rest of my whisky.

“Did you know?” I said, once he was calmer. “One of the names for the land of the Fair Folk is the Land of Youth. Or the Summer Country. Avalon. The Isles of the Blessed.”

“That creature didn’t look blessed to me.”

“No,” I said. “But—remember your dream? I think it was… I think you had an enchanted sleep, or maybe went into the Otherworld—which is where they’ve been hiding all along. That accounts for the time difference. And it wasn’t so bad there, was it? Beautiful people, goblets of wine, musicians.”

“Horrible little monsters.”

“Goblins, I bet. House pets, really.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“Occam’s Razor,” I said smugly.

He glowered at me and refilled his glass.

& & &

We went up to the mound today, taking care to go at midday, Kieran still clinging to his rifle. It was cloudy, the uppermost branches of the tree trailing with mist. The mound had pushed high into the air, now taller than we were. The stone stood almost like a door in its side. Kieran wandered off to the right.

“Don’t circle it!” I called after him. “Not unless you want to summon something.”

He came back to me in a hurry.

We stood and looked at it, this undeniable thing, massive and material.

“But we already lived through the end of the world,” he said.

I kissed him on the cheek. “And we can live through it again.”

On our way back down into the woods we stopped and turned at the same time. Atop the mound stood a hugely tall man. He wore a cloak of twilight, his black hair waved in the breeze. He was pale, and his eyes starry green. At his side stood a white hound with brilliant red ears.

Kieran swore under his breath. I bowed my head. The man bowed his, and then he held up three long fingers.

Three days.

& & &

A party before the end of the world (again). A new age with new rulers. Ancient, but new. Kieran and I drank all the whisky in the house, and ate all the best food we’d been hoarding for special occasions. We held hands. What will become of us? Will we be slaves? Courtiers? Will we have adventures and learn magic? Will we become dinner for a pack of hell hounds? Who can say?

We talked about how weird it was, to firmly believe that it was all over, and that nothing would ever change, and then to find a whole new story beginning. Pioneers topping the first of the ridges to find the Rockies like an endless sea before you. Kieran and I meeting each other and finding that we were not alone. His disappearance and how I knew—or thought I knew—that I would be alone again, forever.

 And now this. The story goes on and on, and for some reason we are still part of it.

There is—if you can believe it—more. Written on a 1938 Royal Model O

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Shelley K. Davenport 2024