The World Ends at Five & Other Stories Read online

  Praise for M Pepper Langlinais' Work

  "Proficient and touching." -- Steven McKnight, DC Theatre Scene

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  The World Ends at Five & Other Stories

  M Pepper Langlinais

  Second Edition

  (c) 2012 M Pepper Langlinais

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Introduction to the Second Edition

  With the exception of “Milling Wind,” all the stories in this collection were written between 2000 and 2005. The first edition of The World Ends at Five was published in 2008 in paperback form; it is no longer in print.

  At the time I wrote these stories, I was finishing graduate school and only just beginning to be A Writer. Those readers familiar with my more recent works might well see a difference in style and tone, and certainly in subject matter. Much of The World Ends at Five is filled with magical realism, and there is at least one fairy tale.

  For this edition, some of the stories have been edited, though none are significantly changed from their originals. I might have considered rewriting all of them, but we Writers must ever till new ground. It would be easy to go dig in earth that has already been turned over—that soil is loose and requires less effort—but eventually there are no new treasures to find, and if I spent all my time making an old field perfect, I would be neglecting the harvesting of fresh crops in other pastures. (I have mixed my metaphors, but you get the idea. That’s the thing about being A Writer—it is part archaeology and part farming and all of it hard work.) So think of these stories as old, lost treasures. Or think of them as old, dried crops. Whichever suits your fancy. Risking yet another metaphor, I will say for me these tales will always represent a starting point, the moment I set my token on the board and rolled the dice.

  Notes on the Second Edition

  "A.B.C" was originally published in Futures Mysterious Anthology Magazine, Autumn 2004.

  "Raising the Ruins," "The World Ends at Five," and "Immanent" have been revised and expanded for this edition.

  "Milling Wind" appears in this edition for the first time.

  All other stories appear as they did in the 2008 edition.

  Contents

  Milling Wind

  Aerwyth, born Beverly

  Raising the Ruins

  The World Ends at Five

  A.B.C.

  On the Ruins of Eden

  A Tale of Two Queens

  Immanent

  Also by M Pepper Langlinais

  About the Author

  Connect with the Author

  Milling Wind

  In the echoing silence their voices were too loud to use.

  They decided to drive up to the wind farm and climb the hills there, the best view for the end of the world. They parked on the gravel shoulder (despite the NO STOPPING sign) and clambered over the chain link (despite the NO TRESPASSING sign) and sat under one of the turbines, its blades still in the heat.

  There was no shade. There might never be shade again.

  Aerwyth, born Beverly

  I remember seeing her in person when I was six years old. My parents and I were in the subway, waiting for a train, when she came down the stairs. She seemed to float, I recall, and I thought she was the most beautiful person I had ever seen.

  She wore faded blue jeans and a gray top that looked to be made of flannel or some sweatshirt-like material. Her long red hair fell in foamy waves around her face. She wasn’t pale, though, like a lot of redheads. In fact, she was quite tan, which made her pale blue eyes stand out in her face.

  Once people saw her, they swiftly moved aside, out of her way. I saw that she wore the necklace, and noticed how the adults around me darted their eyes to it and away. But I was a six-year-old and had not learned to be shy, so I openly stared.

  She saw me looking and smiled. She stood on the platform to wait not far from me, and so I asked her, “Why are you taking the train?” My voice echoed loudly in the cavernous station, and I realized then that everyone had fallen silent when she’d arrived. Now there were a few soft whispers in the wake of my childish question.

  She leaned over, her hands on her knees. The necklace dangled near my nose, and I went cross-eyed trying to see it. She didn’t seem aware of it at all; years of wearing it must have made her take it for granted.

  “I have somewhere to go,” she told me. Her voice was kind, a low, smooth sound.

  “But you don’t have to take the train!” I said. Behind me, I sensed the unease and uncertainty of my parents. They wanted to stop me, but their fear of her prevented them from coming closer.

  “No. But I like to,” she said. The bright blue stone in her necklace flashed in punctuation of her words.

  “What does it say?” I asked. “Your necklace?” Everyone in the tunnel gasped collectively at my impertinence.

  “It says,” she began in a conspiratorial stage whisper, and the stone set in silver and engraved with the oldest known language began to glow and burn, “that children should not ask it such questions.” It was said with a smile, and I remember she touched my nose with one cool fingertip before she straightened back to her full height.

  The train rumbled into the station, and my parents ushered me to a different car from the one she boarded.

  She wasn’t the only one of them, Aerwyth born Beverly, although she was the best known. Most of them remained secluded. But she seemed to love and embrace our world, the common world, that must have been so different from the one she inhabited.

  Those not of The Order have only the vaguest comprehension of what they do or how they live. The rest of the world understands that their plane of existence, their dimension, is more elevated than ours. They see and comprehended more than average people.

  Which puts them in the difficult position of doing something about it.

  In the early years, The Order lived in isolation and refused to reveal their knowledge for fear of corrupting the world or changing destiny, or some such excuse. Then, at some point a group of them decided it was wrong of them not to put their gifts to use for the common good. Some of them were humanitarians, some were entrepreneurs, and there was nearly a century of rivalry amongst factions before The Order was reconstructed into what it was to become when Beverly was admitted into it and given her new name.

  The funeral had the biggest turnout in history, the people on the television said. I would have gone, too, except that I was sure she wouldn’t remember me, and the thought made me bitter and sad in a way I’d never thought could be possible, for in that moment I hated her. Had I really spent my life watching her, loving her from afar, subconsciously waiting for reciprocation—all based on a few minutes spent in the subway tunnel when I was six?

  And yet I was one of the millions stuck to my couch, not daring to get up even to go to the bathroom, for fear of missing a moment of the rites.

  The casket was alabaster, nearly transparent but not quite, and I could only just make out her form, the splash of red hair. Aerwyth, born Beverly to two middle-class suburbanites who had died when she was young; she’d spent more time than most inside the walls of Steorra, the majestic compound that housed The Order. She had been their most po
werful member, and now the world watched and waited, as they say, to see who would rise to the pedestal she’d vacated.

  But I didn’t care. All I knew was that she was gone, and all I was left with was my scrapbook and no hope of ever encountering her again.

  The night of her funeral, I dreamed of her. In all the years I’d followed her with my heart, I’d never once dreamed of her. But that night she came to me, dressed in her faded jeans and her gray tee-shirt, and she told me the world was going to change. That it needed to change.

  I woke up pleased that she hadn’t forgotten me after all.

  The news that morning was chaotic; no one seemed to know what was going on, and the news stations were reporting anything and everything, every rumor and conjecture.

  Aerwyth’s necklace was missing.

  There was talk of opening the vault and checking the body, despite the sacrilege such would entail. There was worry that someone “natural” had got hold of it and would misuse it—assuming someone lacking Orderly gifts could use it at all, which was questionable; apparently it had never been tried. “Chances are they’d just end up hurting themselves,” one political commentator theorized in an attempt to ease the panic.

  But the greatest fear was that someone within The Order had taken the necklace. And that that person meant to misuse it. One news program had a panel of politicians and religious leaders arguing about it. “They all have their own necklaces!” one man kept pointing out. And every time he said it, the woman sitting across from him would reply, “But this is Aerwyth’s necklace we’re talking about!”

  What it boiled down to was that no one was sure whether Aerwyth’s necklace was any more powerful than any other member of The Order’s own jewel. No “natural” person knew, anyway. And if The Order knew anything, it was keeping quiet. Until late that afternoon, anyway, when one of them came out of Steorra, outside which the news cameras had been parked since the funeral the day before, to read a statement.

  “Do not be alarmed,” he read, his voice clear and ringing like a bell knolling over a battlefield where the dead still lay, and I wondered what made me think of it that way. “We do not believe Aerwyth’s necklace to be a danger.”

  “Beverly,” I heard myself say to the television. “She’s just Beverly now.” And I wondered what made me think that, too. And which name was engraved on the vault.

  “Do you know where it is?” a reporter was asking. The Order spokesman, whose name according to the television news graphic was Maewyn, tilted his pale face in a way that caught the evening light, causing it to gleam like a small moon. His short, curly hair was so fair it seemed almost white, and in his Orderly robes, he made me think of an old Roman statue. One I’d like to break.

  The sudden surge of venom towards Maewyn startled and perplexed me. I tried to negotiate my feelings, but the longer I looked at him, the higher the tide of dislike for him rose within me. All at once I was sure he was going to try to take Aerwyth’s place within The Order. And that it would be a disaster if he did.

  “We have some reasonable ideas,” he told the reporter.

  “Is it a member of The Order?” another newsperson called.

  “I cannot confirm that at this time,” Maewyn replied, a bit smugly I thought.

  And then I had the sudden urge to see Steorra, but it was angled away behind Maewyn, mostly off-screen. I had this image of it in my mind, its white walls and domed roofs glowing in the twilight with the dark forest surrounding it. . . Had I seen a picture of it thus? I wondered. Why did I keep thinking all these unnatural thoughts?

  And yet I found myself flipping through the television channels, looking for a news broadcast that would give me a camera angle on Steorra. None of them had one. Then I remembered there were restrictions on filming or photographing it. I eventually turned off the television in disgust and it stayed off the rest of that evening.

  When I checked my mail the following morning, I had a lot of bills, a fair amount of junk mail, a couple of catalogues, and one little package. It was one of those padded envelope things, and it smelled funny. Actually, it smelled like roses.

  I took it all upstairs and dumped it onto my coffee table. The package gave me a strange feeling, almost like déjà vu. I went through all the bills first, to make myself feel dutiful. Then I thumbed through the catalogues. I even glanced over the junk mail, pretending to be interested in the grocery store flyer.

  But then all that was left was the package. So I opened it. And of course it was Aerwyth’s necklace. Just as I’d expected, had been expecting, really, since the news of its disappearance.

  She hadn’t forgotten me. Maybe she’d even thought about me from time to time, wondering what had happened to that child from the subway station.

  That night, as I was combing the tangles out of my hair, there was a brief moment in which I was sure the image reflected in the mirror was not me but her. “We are the same,” I heard her low, smooth voice say. “You will do this for me because you will be doing it for yourself.”

  I looked around the bathroom, just to make sure I really was as crazy as I seemed to be. I was, indeed, alone. Alone and hearing voices. Seeing dead people. I slowly turned back towards the mirror, watching for her out of the corner of my eye, but she didn’t appear again.

  I awoke to find a pair of faded blue jeans and a gray flannel tee-shirt neatly folded at the foot of my bed.

  I began to suspect she might not even be dead. After all, one as powerful as she could surely fake her own death. . . Maybe, after I helped her with this, she would come out of hiding and we’d really meet and talk.

  In the pocket of the jeans, I found a map showing how to get to Steorra.

  The train ride seemed longer than it actually was, and I had trouble sleeping in my reclining coach seat. I tossed and turned, alternately too warm and too chilly to be comfortable. I was glad I had the whole bank of seats to myself; I would have felt guilty for disturbing any neighboring passengers.

  I disembarked at a stop that few people opted for; there weren’t many people headed into the woods this time of year. Which was funny, because the cool air felt perfect to me.

  The trees were still green, despite the oncoming autumn. But hadn’t I heard that the forest around Steorra was eternally green? Or was that an old tale, one of the myths that had grown up just as green and eternal, about The Order?

  I had with me a backpack containing the jeans and tee, as well as food, water, a flashlight, and a blanket. I didn’t expect to have to camp out, but the hike would take until evening, and I anticipated wanting to take at least one break.

  The grass was tall, thick and heavy with morning dew. Not being much of an outdoor person, I found tramping through the forest tiring and difficult, the hiking boots weighing down my feet. I also developed a headache, which made me wonder if I had allergies.

  I was grateful when a little past noon I arrived at the lake my map identified as Tuy. I chose the lakeshore for my breaking point. I pulled out my blanket to sit on and stopped to eat. The surface of the water moved gently, the sun sparking off the tiny waves that bobbed and swayed. Their brightness forced me to squint, and I found it difficult to believe I was really there at all; I kept seeing myself as if from outside my body, this person dangling their bare feet in the cool water. And yet, in this vision of myself, I looked like her.

  I awoke with a start. The sun was no longer high overhead; now it danced over the treetops, escaping their embracing limbs, although it wouldn’t be long before they captured it, only to have themselves burned for their trouble.

  I shook my head to clear it. Where did these strange thoughts come from?

  I packed myself up and headed out again. I wanted to reach Steorra before full nightfall. I wanted to see it gleam in the purple twilight; I might never have the chance again.

  I did get there before nightfall, but only just. Hiding in a thick stand of trees, I took a few moments to just look at it. Steorra, the Star of the Forest. It seemed to
shine in the dark, its white walls radiating some kind of stored-up luminescence.

  After a long look, drinking it up as if I’d been dying of thirst for the sight of it, I decided I’d better get moving. I opened my backpack and swiftly changed my clothes. But when it came time for the necklace, I froze.

  It sat at the bottom of my backpack, still wrapped in the padded envelope in which it had arrived. I could see the silver chain glinting faintly where it had escaped the package, in what light I couldn’t tell. After a moment of staring, I realized that it was glowing in the light of the necklace’s blue stone, which was shining inside the envelope that concealed it.

  “I can’t put this on,” I whispered aloud. “They’ll see me coming.”

  If I expected a response, I was disappointed.

  A low hissing sound from the bottom of my pack caught my attention. The padded envelope began to smolder, the smell of the burning plastic bubble wrap causing me to gag. Now the blue stone shone without obstruction, as its wrappings burned away.

  When my bag started to burn, I knew I had no other choice. I snatched up the necklace. The minute it touched my hand, it ceased to glow.

  I heaved a sigh of relief and clasped the silver-ensconced jewel around my neck. I waited a moment to see what would happen, but nothing did.

  Leaving my pack crammed in the roots of a tree, I started off across the open thicket that surrounded Steorra. I was thankful it was now dark out, although the compound continued to blaze softly, like a star fallen to Earth.

  I was amazed at the lack of security. No sentries. No one to question me. Even as I came to the gate in the outer wall, there was no one. The place was silent. All around me, the only sound was the hum of crickets and other insects of the night.