© 1998, by Paul Roasberry
Whence Cometh Evil
November 19, 1999
Let me see if I can make any sense out of it.
It was first noticed almost instantly by people all over the world –
or at least by that portion of it that had been awake when the event,
or whatever it was, had happened. Moreover, the experience seemed to
be universal: no one had missed it. It was as though you were doing
something ordinary one moment – drying your hair, or eating a meal –
and the next instant, there you were, still doing the same thing, only
you had this dreadful sense that something was horribly amiss. It felt
like you were coming out of a long trance, or dream; the world looked
as though it were a photograph taken through a gauze curtain, all
fuzzy-edged and not quite real. Wherever the earth was still in
daylight, there was the uncanny twilight effect, as though someone had
dimmed the sun momentarily. People stood blinking in confusion and
disbelief for a few moments and then began comparing notes – Did you
feel it? Yeah, I did. What on earth was it? What’s going on?
It’s been six months now, and there’s been a great deal of wild
speculation. Odd things keep turning up. Nothing you can really get
your teeth into. Things like lost objects suddenly reappearing in the
most unlikely places. Or things you thought you’d put away, and hadn’t
taken out in a long time, now gone, lost. Weird feelings that you
couldn’t quite pin down. Like reading a book and suddenly staring at a
single word, thinking that the spelling looks funny, only you go to
check the dictionary, and there it is, same spelling. But you can’t
shake the feeling. People you meet on the street who look so familiar
– as though you really ought to stop and say hello – and who look
back at you with the same questioning look of semi-recognition. You
pass in wordless acknowledgement of mutual embarrassment. But you
know. You’ve felt it, too. Something with the world has subtly
changed, just enough so to leave everyone suspicious of his own
perceptions.
But even more upsetting is the chronic feeling of anxiety, the feeling
that something is about to happen, something awful. Everyone has it.
Nerves are on edge. It takes hardly anything at all to trigger it –
the sight of a bird in the sky, a leaf trembling in the breeze, a look
on someone’s face. And the horror just beyond the mist comes back. It
could happen again, any time.
And oh, yes. The lost hour and twenty- three minutes. Where did that
slice of time go? Who swallowed it up? And even more nagging – what
happened during that hour and twenty-three minutes? No one knows. We
were all in a trance. Whatever it was, none of us saw it. But we can
feel it. We feel it every day, and it sends chills up our spines.
What thing, what black presence was abroad between 11:43 p.m. Greenwich
Mean Time, May 8th, 1999 and 1:06 a.m., May 9th? Wherever you were,
then, it was all around you. It has left its scent, so to speak, and
we are all uncomfortably aware of it. It was here.
If only anyone could say for sure. Was this a precursor of something
yet more horrible to come? Or was it just a kink in time, a little
rent or ripple in reality – some kind of perfectly explainable but
extremely rare physical phenomenon, perhaps? A one-time occurrence,
never to repeat itself? Or was it something yet more sinister, more
dark and unthinkable? We all ask ourselves these questions, and we all
try to drive the thing out of our minds. It happened, but because it
happened to everyone, and no one knows what to make of it, it’s just
easier to pretend it never happened at all. Or so it seems.
We go about our business a little more frightened, now. A little more
wary. There are mysterious things just under the surface of reality,
waiting to get out. Unnameable terrors hiding underneath the most
commonplace objects. Unpronounceable evil, lingering in the air. Will
we ever know?
************
February 3, 2066.
I turned ninety-three today. I’ve led an unusually long life. I keep
thinking back to the Event, to May 8, 1999. I was only twenty five at
the time. There are fewer and fewer of us left alive who remember it
clearly. Occasionally, they talk about it, the younger people do. It
is something handed down to them, almost a myth now, not quite to be
believed. No one really wants to believe it. It unsettles everything
else. The whole basis for trust in our perceptions. Everything is
suspect if you concede that it happened.
Still, the feelings continue. Even those who were born after the Event
report dreams in which the underlying assumptions about reality are
somehow altered, as though remembered from a distant past, and they
wake up disoriented, astonished that things are the way they are, and
not some other way. Not like a normal nightmare, in which you are glad
to be awake. There is a nagging, gnawing, haunting, uncertain,
troubling undercurrent to our existence that eats away at us like some
cancer.
They try not to think about it. They try to shrug it off as something
that happened too long ago to be of any importance. Who will talk
about it? It’s like talking about death. It makes us uncomfortable.
We brush the experience under the rug with pleasantries, with
platitudes. As though we are all mutually guilty of some inexpressibly
inhuman crime, we ignore the issue whenever we can. We act as though
the Event never happened.
But I know better. I was there.
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