“So, how have you heard the song?”
Sixteen times I’d heard that question today. I wanted to smack, punch, kick, and swear at the brightly cheerful face asking me the question six miles into a ten mile hike. The bus driver wouldn’t take us to the Inglevale stop.
That didn’t deter anyone else packed on there with me. They’d all heard a song, you see, and what was a little walk compared to that? And besides, it gave them a chance to compare notes. Constantly.
So I smiled and I lied and I spun my little story about how it had been. Every bit of it was true, but not all the bits were from the same place. God only knows we’d had enough choices back at the bureau. Half the hitchhiking traffic in the country was Inglevale-bound.
“Great!” said the cheerful idiot when I was done waxing earnest at her. Her face was half freckles and half grin and all mad. “Not far now!”
And it wasn’t. Inglevale town limits were ahead, just on the lip of the hill.
***
Up until six months ago, the most noteworthy thing Inglevale produced was dirt. Gravel, to be specific. Decent stone there for that, and not much else.
Then the bottom of a gravel pit opened up and dropped a bulldozer down it, and the man inside – dragged out after six breathless hours of the first actual excitement the place had ever known – says he saw god.
Fair enough, that happens sometimes.
Then the whole town listened to him.
That’s a little rarer.
And now there’s whole busloads and roving vans and train cars packed full of pilgrims, all moving across the country in bands of one to forty, following the song that Bowser Fenton told them would come.
That’s downright rare. Who the fuck names their kid ‘Bowser’?
***
I’d expected a little less… purpose, I admit.
Cults have enthusiasm. They don’t necessary have know-how. No matter how earnest and fervent the loonies are, once everyone’s busy diving the will of the universe they tend to let toilets clog and streets fill with trash.
Inglevale was an anthill. A proper, functioning anthill, not one overturned by a careless shoe. The streets were full and they were churning; bodies going every which way, people hurrying eagerly from task to task, moving metal, moving timber, clearing away garbage, and laughing, talking, chattering constantly, always about that damned song.
Was this a religion or a construction crew?
What were they building?
And what was the fastest way for me to answer those two questions, so that –
“So, how have you heard the song?”
– I would never have to hear that one again?
***
Work answered some of my problems. I grabbed onto a repurposed dump truck laden with shiny new parts along with half the crowd around me, took it down to the construction site.
It was by the lake. Made sense, I suppose, since it’s the one thing Inglevale has that’s noteworthy. Big ol’ gravel pit that flooded out and they just shrugged and put up some beaches.
What made less sense was what they were building. At first I thought it was obscured by a cloud of scaffolding; then we got closer and I realized it was nothing BUT scaffolding. Some kind of lunatic antenna?
“The song swells!” called down a worker, sweaty and smiling and forty feet in the air.
“So it does!” chorused the truckers.
Work wasn’t too bad. People did what they were comfortable with; welding, hauling, assembly. I’d seen worse safety setups on certified and monitored construction sites, frankly, which was all the more impressive given there didn’t seem to be any foremen. Nobody giving any instruction at all, actually. Made finding out what I was meant to be doing all the more troublesome; people just went were they were needed which – against all reason – always seemed to be the right place. I felt like a blind cat in a rocking chair factory, only all the chairs were full of other perfectly happy blind cats that wouldn’t stop yowling encouragement at me.
And asking me about the damned song.
Rest for the night was surprisingly comfy. The out-of-towners were being put up across town in a patchwork of spare rooms, Inglevale’s singular hotel, and the many motels scattered along the fringe of its desolate highway – I scored an empty room in the latter, where I spent the night making notes and trying to ignore someone noisily having bad but enthusiastic sex next door.
I must have looked bad in the morning; I stumbled outside into a parking lot that had been turned into an emergency breakfast buffet, and by the time I made it out the other side I’d had four brownies and a waffle stuffed into my arms.
The waffle was buttered. Wonder if the song told them to do that.
***
The report was due in three days and I still wasn’t learning anything new besides how to be a perfectly adequate and safe high-rise worker.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. I’d gotten several more unanswered questions.
How the hell did the town get swept up in this so…fully? Everyone was in on it. EVERYONE. No cult’s that good. No sign of expulsion of the unbelievers or mass graves in the woods.
What was the thing we were building? Progress was lightning-fast, but the structure itself still looked like a pylon and a radio tower fucked and had one hell of an ugly baby.
Who was in charge? Bowser Fenton, maybe – still hadn’t tracked him down – but he wasn’t giving orders. Nobody was giving orders.
How did that even WORK? How was anything working? There was no chaos, or if there was it was the purposeful and planned kind. Everyone knew exactly what they were doing.
Well, except me. But I was good at improv, and a convincing liar. All I had to do was follow a line.
Which everyone refused to feed me. Just the song. The song, the song, the song.
I’d shared my fictional account of the song a hundred times. Never once seen a hint of disbelief. These people were infants. Naïve, born-again-yesterday hopefuls, thinking they were truly in at the ground floor of the Most Important Thing Ever.
That was pretty much the only thing about them that made any sense at all.
“The song swells!” sang the woman next to me.
“The song swells,” I replied, but she wasn’t listening. Instead, she was clambering down the side of the antenna, leaving only a trail of liquid from the open, pulsating glands dotting her exposed and muscled forearms.
Suddenly, I had another question.
***
I had no idea how I’d missed them until then. They were EVERYWHERE.
Old men with soft hands, glistening with eternal dew.
Construction crew that were covered with more than just heavy perspiration.
One of the guys serving lunch had a blue throat. Just the throat. Whenever he laughed – which he did often, they all did so damned often – it pulsed and jiggled.
It was odourless, which didn’t surprise me but did unsettle me.
I wasn’t a doctor, but I hadn’t heard of anything like this. Some kind of mass poisoning? I felt like an idiot for eating the food without even a cursory inspection, but I stayed up all night running basic checks on a smuggled dinner roll and found nothing. No radiation, no obvious additives. Whatever was doing this, either it was something really unusual or it wasn’t in the food. Or both.
Still stayed up too late worrying about it, which meant I was really in need of the breakfast I didn’t get when I opened my door and found about twenty happy faces waiting for me.
“Hello, Agent Tabitha!” said Bowser Fenton. “We’re just finishing up! Want to see?”
***
He looked just like the photos, besides the blue, glandular skin. Big shaggy beard, intense eyes hidden under massive eyebushes. He looked a lot happier now, though. The lines on his face weren’t built for the cheery grin he sported; the wrinkles made him look older.
“We thought you would appreciate a familiar face for this,” he explained. “Just understand, I’m not in charge around here. None of us are.”
I had a good poker face.
“Not like THAT, Tabitha,” he said, pulling a face. “I assure you, someone is in charge. Just not one of us. Don’t you wonder how we found you out?”
“I fucked up.”
“No, no, goodness no. But you haven’t heard the song.”
“I-”
“Please, no need to repeat yourself. We know you hate it. And don’t feel so guilty about feeling so relieved. It sours the song, you know?”
“No.”
“Right, sorry. I’m very clumsy with my words; most of our important work nowadays doesn’t use them. Which is what I’m here to explain to you – our work, that is – and why you need to listen carefully, despite my muddling. There needs to be a message, you see, and since you aren’t one of us you’re the ideal messenger. A sort of unprophet.”
“Of what? The song?”
“Oh no. The song just told us how to do this. Which we’re getting to. Here we are! Thank you for helping build it, by the way.”
The antenna had acquired a pronounced tilt in the past two days, like a skeletal Tower of Pisa. Overnight a large and complicated cross between a clock and a radar dish had been attached to the pinnacle.
“What does it do?”
“This,” said Bowser. “The song swells!” he and everyone else cheered, and then there was a teething-achingly enormous SNAP and the entire thing toppled over into the lake with that particularly slow motion giant disasters have.
“There,” said Bowser. “All done.”
I laughed, I admit. Against all self-control and reason, I laughed. I laughed despite my best efforts and Bowser and the others laughed too and that was when I felt it tunnel up from the dirt, through the soil, through the water, up to the top of my head and escape into the broader atmosphere.
I didn’t scream, but it took effort.
“I did warn you,” said Bowser sympathetically.
“Is that the song?” I wrenched out. It felt like my body was being used as a bass string.
“No,” he said. “Not quite. Or at least, not the one we’ve been hearing. This is a little bit bigger, and it’s not instructions. Our song was to tell us how to make this.”
“What is it?”
“Orders. To tell the world to be mended. Breath, Tabitha.”
I breathed. The air hissed in my lungs like angry cockroaches.
“Can you feel it? It’s changing.” Bowser was watching me carefully, and for the very first time he wasn’t smiling. He looked like the old man he was, probably in the middle of telling me some bad news about my fuse box. “It’s all changing now. It tried to warn us, but nobody was able to hear it until I fell. And by then it was too late. We’d already made quite a mess of the atmosphere. But this? There’s still time for this. Tabitha, LISTEN. Go to them. Tell them not to touch this. Tell them not to touch us. We’ll do what we can to protect this while it’s working, but it’d be easier if we can expect nobody to try and wreck it in the first place. Easier still if they can help. Are you listening, Tabitha? Tell them that.”
I nodded.
“Tell them that. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said, and his face slid back into a sort of smile, but a distant one. “Now you can go. Louise’ll drive you out to where the bus usually stops. Take some butter tarts. And no, there’s nothing in them. This-” and he rubbed his fingers over the soft, slipper surface of his face – “just happens when you work a bit too close and long with the stuff we put in the receiver. It’s why we never put you too high up it, if that makes sense.”
The next bus rolled in an hour after Louise dropped me off.
“I haven’t heard the song,” I told the head of the procession as we passed each other by.
“Yeah,” she said. “We knew.”
***
I told them everything. I’m not sure if we’re sending messages or missiles. I’m not sure if the missiles will work. I’m not sure what happens if they work.
I’m not sure what Bowser Fenton found under the gravel pit.
I’m not sure if it’ll make things better or worse.