Fearful Symmetries by Ellen Datlow Page B

boots hard and solid as he made his way towards the hole in the ground. When he reached it, he went down onto his knees and peered over the rim. It was deep, with standing water gathered at its base, and in each of the toe prints. There was no sign of a body, or of body parts. His family were wiped out, deleted, removed without trace from the face of the earth.
    He smiled, gritting his teeth.
    As a boy he’d loved monsters. As a man, he wasn’t so sure how he felt.
    If it were not for the Storm, he would have been forced to think of some other way to dispose of them, but the monster answered his desperate prayers and came to cleanse him, to remove the evidence of his crimes.
    He wondered . . .
    If he hoped hard enough, wished for long enough, might it come back? There were other people he wanted to get rid of. It was a nice thought, but he knew it was a fantasy. The situation had nothing to do with him; it was simply a handy coincidence. Even now, it amused him to think something this absurd had saved him from being found out. It was as if one of those childhood comic books had come to life.
    Jeff got to his feet and moved slowly away from the ruins. The breeze turned into a light wind, and it whipped up a mass of litter, sending papers and packets and scraps of material scampering into the gutter. Jeff watched them as they tussled. He remembered the way his family struggled: Katherine and the girls, fighting for their sad little lives. It was like watching a movie, only less real. The actors didn’t even look like the people they were trying to portray.
    They’d never looked like his family, those actors. The woman he’d married, the daughters he’d fathered, were at some point replaced by strangers. That was why they had to go. It all seemed so clear, and then, without thinking, he’d done it: he had ended them. There was no memory of planning, or running through it all in his mind. There was only the act itself, and the mess left behind.
    The wind died down. The litter went still. He smelled old fires and diesel fumes. He tasted bitterness at the back of his throat. Something huge loomed against the horizon, its form unclear, fluttering and unstable.
    Jeff walked back to the car, climbed inside, turned on the engine, and waited. He watched the woman as she made her way across the street, towards yet another ruined house. He smiled. Inside his head, he heard the voice of the Storm.
    The roaming woman sat down in the rubble, staring at the ground. She clenched and unclenched her hands and then started rooting in the dirt, as if she might find her lost children there, somewhere beneath the disturbed top soil. He imagined her brushing away gravel to see a face staring up at her, eyes closed, lips sealed shut on a silent scream.
    Clouds moved behind her, shifting across the low red sky. Something dark shimmered beyond them, like a promise straining to be fulfilled. He thought of giant butterfly wings, and then of the opening mouth of the Storm.
    Jeff started the car but waited a few moments—still watching the woman—before driving away. He didn’t turn on the radio. All they ever talked about was the Storm.
    As he headed down the road, towards some unidentified place he’d never been before, he thought about this new world and wondered how everyone would cope with the way things were now, the changes happening in the wake of the monster. Jeff had stepped through the veil, but the rest of the world followed behind him.
    He drove all night, and then he stopped the car in a lonely place to sit and look up at the sky. Trees stirred like wraiths against the breezy evening. The stars pulsed, the darkness bulged, threatening to burst open like a ripe melon, and he tried to catch a glimpse of the old world, the one they’d all left behind. After a long time, he gave up trying.
    And at the bottom of the sea, curled up among the old wrecks in a long, deep, nameless trench, something yawns and blinks its eyes before