I knew it had come to Pleasant Grove long before I felt it directly. People were bickering more. Impatience pervaded even the most basic intercourse between proprietor and customer. Mothers snapped at children. Fathers criticized their sons for minor offenses and castigated their daughters for what they were wearing. At night, dogs barked at slight disturbances or the sound of what a delicate wind rattled. I noticed fewer birds, and those that visited the feeding stations were scrawny and nervous, hinting that only the picked-on would forage in such environs. At a Strawberry Days bike race that I organized, good sportsmanship was abandoned in multiple altercations.
I called my aged mother in New York. In her thick Roma accent, she told me to leave. To go. To get away. I told her I would not and demanded instructions. She cried and cried and cried but, in the end, told me all I needed to know.
From Romania we’d gone to Germany. From there to Italy. Then on to New York, where I received my degree in history. But no one wanted me. Perhaps it was my thick accent. Or as likely it was my nervousness when I interviewed. I do not know, but my dreams of being a professor slowly dried, became brittle, and crumbled.
Pleasant Grove, however, embraced me as son rather than stranger. The Mormons welcomed me to their church. A banker blessed me with his daughter. I opened a bike repair shop and worked hard and sent six children to Brigham Young University. Last year my wife died at a mere sixty-one years. I would see her again in that better place. Of that I had no doubt.
I belonged here. So I would protect this place. My place. Which meant I would hunt for it and do what was necessary. I rode my old steel-framed Schwinn through the city, watching, observing, noting the changes, trying to triangulate its location. It was the children at the bus stop who finally gave it away.
There was a boy with fiery red hair. Active. Rambunctious. I would see him laughing, throwing sticks, teasing girls, or playing with a terrier that escorted the kids onto the bus. He was ever in motion—that, or in arm-waving conversation with his companions. But then for the last two days I saw him wrapped in strangeness—coat hanging loosely, staring straight ahead, waiting for the bus quietly, suppressed in stillness unnatural. I knew for such an effect as this, it was close, and as I looked up at the abandoned house that fronted the stop I knew. It was there. I knew.
I waited and hesitated, gathering my courage. But it was getting worse, and the city was falling into anger and dissolution.
It is time to act.
So tonight I sit thinking. My mind is playing over my life and the joys this place has given. The moon has leapt the horizon. It was on a night like this my mother left my father so long ago in Italy. I had stolen a backpack from a tourist at a rock concert. I brought it to my father and he asked if I had taken anything out before giving it to him. I had. A candy bar. He picked up a pool cue and hit me across the face. He was drunk. When the moon came up, my mother woke me, and we walked away hand in hand. She held my hand for hours even though I was eleven, even though I was crying, even though I’d been bad. She enrolled me in an Italian school run by the sisters. Full moons have always portended good things.
I ride my bike to the house. It is 4 a.m. I kick in the door and am overwhelmed with taint, with putrefaction, with a nauseating miasma that folds over me in waves and permeates my skin as if it were as thin and porous as a spider web. I can taste something warty, dry, and rancid in the air. It is a smell—no, more than a smell, there is heft and substance to it that reminds me of the heavy dust of vacuum cleaners run through houses long abandoned, or the moldering lint scraped from the screen of a clothes dryer used to tumble brittle churchyard bones.
I must find it swiftly before my courage fails. It occurs to me I must sing a song and I think, What will work? “Master the Tempest Is Raging”? No, that will not do, that is a song of the frightened. I am not. Yet. Suddenly, as if on command, my deep voice bellows, “All Creatures of Our God and King”! St. Francis of Assisi’s great hymn. My blood boils with courage and rage. And the darkness is surprised. I hunt the house like a mad man, singing verses with loud bravado and reckless abandon. I find it under the stairs. It is a sphere of night hovering over the ground, and there is no time because already a scream is bursting from my lungs and only by turning it into song am I not overcome and emptied.
I thrust my hands into the cold blackness, and although they go numb I know they can still do the work my mother instructed me to do. I set them to so doing—pushing, kneading, squeezing the malefic horror smaller and smaller like a child might try to squash a wad of paper. It is the size of a beach ball, then a soccer ball, on and on I push and pull and squeeze, my mind screaming as I continue the work. I ignore the choking fear and annihilation pulsating from the shrinking nothingness. I repeat “All Creatures of Our God and King” like a mantra. Then at last, drenched in sweat. Crying. Lost. And nearly drained. I push it to the size of a grape. Into my mouth I place it and taste the poison balefulness of pestilent death. I grab my water bottle. I’ve filled it with water from the sacrament table from all four wards that meet in our church building. I know it is just water now, but I have a strange hope that some tincture of grace remains that will allow me to swallow this malice of darkness.
Numb coldness spreads from my navel. I cannot sing now. I keep my mouth closed. It must not escape. I run from the house and jump on my bike. I find myself pedaling like I’ve never pedaled in my life. At age fifty, I rode the Lotoja from Logan, Utah, to Jackson Hole, Wyoming. At fifty-five, I did the Salt-to-Saint relay alone. But never has a race meant more. Up Provo Canyon. Right up the winding road. My lungs feel cold and the thing within me rages as it spreads darkness. But my teeth are clenched and I will not open my mouth. I am at the top and I drop my bike and run to the cliff’s edge at Squaw Peak. The ledge falls straight into Rock Canyon, yet I do not stop, but leap in a swan dive and fall. And fall.
Joy fills my heart as I drop and I hear angels singing the final strains of St. Francis’s hymn, “Alleluia! Alleluia! Oh, praise him! Alleluia!” My wife’s voice is among them. Then my heart leaps in ecstasy as I hear the thing scream in terror at the only thing it fears: oblivion. Nonexistence. For a fragment of a breath, as my body explodes on the rocks, I feel exultation and triumph as the thing shrieks in dismay and in a blink it bursts like a soap bubble.
Steven L. Peck is an Associate Professor of Biology at BYU and the author of A Short Stay in Hell and Heike’s Void.
Art by Rowan Forsyth.