The Strange

by Nathan Ballingrud

“Doesn’t an old thing always know when a new thing comes?” RAY BRADBURY, “—AND THE MOON BE STILL AS BRIGHT”

I pressed my face into her shoulder, soaking her blouse with my stupid, useless tears. “Why can’t you just stay! She might not even be alive when you get there!” She smoothed my hair with her hand and pressed her lips against my forehead. “Because she’s my mother,” she said. “I want to say goodbye to her. I’m afraid it might be my only chance, and it would hurt me forever to miss it. The way you love me is exactly the way I love her.” That made sense to me, of course. But it also defeated me, because the love I felt in that moment was as terrifying and hungry as any starved dog. It left no room for anyone else, not even for my own father. And if it was true that there was no room in my heart for him, then it must also be true that there was no room in hers for me. I understood at last why it was so easy for her to leave me. “One day,” she said, “you’ll want to say goodbye to me, too.”

I shook my head. “They wrecked it. They wrecked the whole place. We lost everything.” “What do you mean? Who did?” “Everybody,” I said. “Our neighbors. Our friends.” I could see the understanding break over him slowly, watch it change his face. He stepped away from the bars and sat heavily on the bed. He looked confused. The last vestige of resilience inside him started to die. I saw it happen, just like that. “Dad,” I said. He looked like he was far away from me. Far away from this cell. Somewhere lonely. “You know,” he said, “I know it’s not her. I know she’s not there. It’s just, I really need to hear her voice.” “Dad? What do I do?” He didn’t have any answers for me. I wasn’t even sure he knew I was there anymore.

Almost since I had known her, she’d been little more than a figure of sorrow, wearing black in mourning for her dead husband, still answering to a name that defined her by his absence. It seemed pathetic to me sometimes, the way she surrendered her full claim to personhood, accepting her new life as a dead man’s shadow. To see her now, a flare of purpose and hard motion, was to see someone altogether new.

He looked at the rock, turning it over and over in his hand. Little green flecks flashed in the lantern light—the Strange. It must be shot through these caverns, too. They weren’t breathing in its pulverized dust like those who worked in the mine, but the whole crater was rich with it. “Yeah,” Silas said. “I’ll give you the cylinder tomorrow.” “No. I want it now.” “There’s no point. You can’t leave until the morning anyway. It’s too cold, and them War Engines that followed you here are still out.” “What are they, anyway?” He considered for a moment, then chucked the rock to me. I caught it. “You know what that is?” I knew he meant the green striations. “It’s the Strange.” “Why do you think it’s called that?” It seemed an absurd question, considering all I’d seen the past few days. “ ’Cause it brings out ghosts. ’Cause it makes people’s eyes change color, makes them act crazy. Turns them mean.” He stared at me a moment. I noticed, too, Sally and Joe sneak the occasional glance this way. I suspect it surprised them to see me talking amiably to Silas Mundt as much as it surprised me to be doing it. “No,” he said. “It don’t do none of those things. Except maybe the eye color. Can’t argue with that one.” “I saw all of it,” I said, bristling. “Everybody in Dig Town is crazy with it. They’re moving underground!” “That’s what you think you saw. What you really saw is Mars, trying to speak with us.” He reached over, traced his dust-grimed finger along the stripes in the rock. “The ...

The pitch of the engines increased, and the Lamplighter jostled gently into the air. I looked up into my mother’s face. She stared back at me. Mushrooms crowded one of her eye sockets. A chorus of sound filled the air, a strange undercurrent to the engines: whispers; weeping; splintering rock, like the language of stone. The garden of ghosts, packed neatly in their crates, awakened by something—the Lamplighter, perhaps, but most likely by the swelling presence of the dark aspect, the thing that was Mars, so heavy in the air that it slicked the back of my throat. It was like a holy visitation. Silas stepped forward, putting his hand on her shoulder. “No. No! We can’t take them! There’s not enough fuel! Not enough air!” She looked at him. This intruder into our reunion. This crawling mite on her body. An invader. “Filth,” she said. “Get away from me.” “What?” Desperately, he put his hands on Mother’s arm, tried to force her around to face him. “No. You said you’d take me. This isn’t even you, it’s that goddamn cylinder she put in—” “Never touch me,” she said, turning on him. “Never look at me.” Turning away from him, she faced my father instead. My father stepped into her embrace. Silas’s expression went flat. To be rebuked by God. To be rejected by the very ground you stood on. I watched something dim in Silas’s green eyes, some essential energy exit his body. He stepped away from us. Through the viewport behind him I could see the landscape of Mars scrolling slowly by, at ...