INFINITY

Michael drove by the old Victorian house and dashed up the steps. Even before he cleared the last one, he could see where drapes were missing from Emma’s apartment windows. He pressed his face into the bare panes in disbelief and despair. No furniture was in the front room, although there were several dusty boxes.

“Can I help you?”

He spun around to see a young woman stepping up onto the porch.

“Where is the person who lives in this apartment?” he asked.

Her look was hard. “No one lives in that apartment. It’s just used for storage.”

“But someone does live here.”

The apparent resident pointed at a dark stain on the clapboards. “This apartment has no mailbox.”

“But that’s where the attic apartment mailbox was removed.”

“Someone lives in the attic apartment.”

Michael saw no tag on the adjacent mailbox, but a uniform catalog was poking out of the top of the slot. “Is this woman a maid?”  (He rephrased.) "Does she wear maid uniforms?"

The leery resident shrugged.

The man shot back down the steps to his car.

The Peek-a-boo Motel would be ten minutes by the main highway, but seeing celebrating students were still thick on the bypass, the motorist opted to take the old state road, which effectively doubled the distance. He had taken this road twice before with the photographer, though remembered there being more road signs.

A gas station blazed ahead over cornstalks, and as Michael was turning onto its lot an old red and white Cady ambulance was peeling off. A store employee was chasing after the vehicle and waving a pistol recklessly over his head. It was too late to reconsider the turn, so the traveler dodged toppled pumpkins from a stand to stop short of the pumps. He threw the station attendant a cautious smile, but it was doubtful he could be seen for his headlights. Once the disgruntled fellow had gone back inside the station, Michael felt it safe to follow him in.

The young man was still huffing as he rounded the counter. He dropped his gun down among the scratch-off lotto tickets and sticky buns. “Damn college students!” he growled. “The world’s going to hell and they’re out stealing pumpkins!”

An AM radio was blaring next to the register, and the cashier was quickly hunkered down over it in rapt attention.

“What is it?” Michael inquired nervously.

The boy looked up in disbelief. “Haven’t you heard, mister? We’re under attack! Damn Martians have landed back east!”

The motorist immediately recognized what the two were listening to on the radio. “That’s Orson Welles,” he explained. “This is a radio rebroadcast of his famous Halloween prank, the teleplay for The War of the Worlds.”

The attendant rolled his eyes. “Look, fella, I don’t know squat about Halloween pranks, but spaceships are dropping out of the sky like bird shit and I don’t get off work ‘til midnight!”

“Try another station.”

“There ain’t other stations.”

Michael realized the futility of his argument. “Am I on the right road to Eastfawn?”

“Just follow the signs.”

“There are no signs.”

“Are you heading east?”

“Yes.”

“Well… there you go.”

Returning to his idling car, the driver proceeded on his uncertain way.

After several more miles of dark rural road, Michael encountered no further traffic and was beginning to feel like he was on the Moon. The little used highway continued to narrow, and when the shoulders all but disappeared the driver feared the pavement would turn to gravel at any moment. Trees on the passenger side of the car became steadily more uniform in density and height, and after a couple of miles of the monotony it became downright creepy. The tree trunks formed an impregnable wall, and with no roads cutting across them. It was possibly a cultivated boundary marking off private property, or a military facility. The traveler’s headlights soon detected a defect ahead, and on reaching a conspicuous breach in the trees he finally had a place to pull off the road. He turned on his emergency blinkers to get out and investigate, and just when a wedge of the light broke through black cloud cover to the west. A low red Sun (long thought to have set) illuminated a cornfield with portent. Hewed in the eerie light, an ethereal grouping of downed trees was north and opposite the breach. They were stripped of their foliage and inexplicably heaped up in a skyscraping latticework, as if for a monumental bonfire. It was hard to gauge their distance on the horizon, whether they were sitting on it or, allowing for the curvature of the Earth, originating below it. The structure could have been new building construction going up in Chicago some forty miles away, but to see such a tower so high in the sky would require it being mind-bogglingly huge. The form was soon twirling up to pierce clouds, with its struts distorting in the manner of a corkscrew Eiffel Tower or mechanical bird wing. The dark sky above it was insufficient to contain it, or even allow for it to be properly understood. The building (if this is what it was) was hardly connected to anything, like a dirigible floating by snapshot increments. The sensation reminded Michael of the first time he saw the Andromeda Galaxy in a pair of binoculars and realized the photons of light striking in his eye were many millions of years old. Was he witnessing some transpired cataclysmic event? The tip of the contraption attenuated to an imperceptible point, and appeared aimed, in holographic manner, to within inches of the man’s nose. As he moved sideways to evade the vertigo induced by it, the point moved with him. Queasy and frightened, Michael averted his eyes and circled his car to the cutaway; a clatter broke out overhead. Tree branches, black with squawking crows, rose up in the blood-tinged dusk to greet him; the hesitant explorer passed under their cursed portico.

Twilit in shadow, and lying only a short distance in front of him, was his elusive train track. He approached it with more disorientation, thinking he was upon the tracks seconds before he actually was. The enormous rails came almost to his waist, and the ties were the size of tree trunks. The track was perfectly straight, though more to the point so was his depth of vision. He could practically see forever. It was a strange phenomenon, and given the topography of the surrounding area, impossible. Dead leaves started drifting down in the ebbing light. The restless crows blew free in a shroud to let more sunset in through the branches. Michael watched the flock draw up into the funneling structure across the field.

“Are those birds?” he muttered. “Are those goddamn birds?”

Despite their departure, the leaves continued to rustle. But there was no wind to explain the disturbance. A tingly feeling began to push up through the soles of his shoes. Alarmed, he put his hand on the rail; it was warm, and getting warmer by the second, probably from friction down the line. A low rumble worked its way up into his abdomen just when the leaves started raining down in greater number. Michael could see nothing coming from either side, but something was definitely coming. A sound arose out of the countryside, although the bellow was closer to a Baskerville hound than the wail of a train whistle. He turned eastward and could just make out a dark form hugging the tracks, but it was like peering into a shimmering dark blue bottle, one whose tornadic movement resembled a crease working its way out of a rug. A backdraft began tugging at his pants legs, even sucking the air out of his lungs. Time slipped too—film catching in a projector and speeding up. Michael had no idea how long he had been standing there. He raised a foot—the ground was now pounding against the bottom of it. Terrified, he pushed forward, or at least willed himself in that direction. The earth was rapidly losing solidity underneath him, and the vibrations were becoming so strong so fast he feared the molecules in his body would fly apart. Inconceivably he was back at the car and grabbing around the edge of the vehicle to get to the driver’s side. A deep bluish-black shadow was fast approaching over the treetops, although he could have easily been seeing the interior of his skull given the violent tremors. He turned back to the darkening north sky in time to see the building-like structure sharply etched in the last gleam of Sun. In one instance it resembled a sickle flickering over rustling corn, and in the next, an airliner turned on its side. With no time left, the driver fought to open the car door and slid as deliberately as he could into the front seat. For a moment he thought he was still outside the car when he was inside. He raised the blurring key to the ignition; again, another time shift occurred. The vehicle was already heading down the highway, but proceeding sluggishly. As the inevitable encounter drew closer, it was impossible to tell whether or not the car was moving. Then, like a row of wobbly bowling pins, the trees began to bow outward along the dark highway in front of him. Whatever was on the track was pushing out a massive amount of air in front of it. Snapped-off branches were spewed out along the roadside to catch in the car’s dimming headlights. It would be only by the grace of God if a tree did not topple over and crush his small Saturn. Instantly, a gentle, nearly imperceptible puff of air passed through Michael’s bones. A deaf-like silence preceded it by a fraction of a second; a hush of scratching rushed in after it to fill the void. Thousands of leaves, and for as far as his feeble lights could reach, were whirling high into the night sky to resemble a Ferris wheel. Michael looked back over his shoulder to see the massive blue-black shadow retreating rapidly down the road. It reminded him of eyewitness accounts relating the experience of a solar eclipse in the mountains, where the blanketing shadow of the Moon was seen moving thousands of miles per hour across vast expanses of land. Leaves were just then scurrying up onto the hood and windshield of his car. Beyond them, a large tree blocked the road, and beyond that—nothing. He was at most a mile from his intended destination, but there were no lights of any kind on the horizon. A mile marker, pelted by mud and all but uprooted, swayed against the corn. The numb man climbed out of his car to better see it:

Stonesthrow 1 mile

Michael looked back at the car, and with a sense something had just wandered off into the high grass and out of reach of his high beams. Lost to his shadow on the pavement, he returned to the vehicle. The steering wheel was still warm from hands—no doubt from his hands. He maneuvered the Saturn around on the shoulder amid more blowing leaves. A white line emerged to point in the only direction known to him.