Suddenly in the evening, the water. A car ferry, with great doors on either end. We crowd onto the ferry. We have almost nothing and nothing practical, refuges with plastic bags from Zehrs.
The ship slides down a slope and off a cliff -- suddenly free fall. I am standing at the bow with a little girl. Beneath the ship, green wrinkles of mountains. We are falling high over them, out over them. They turn into sand dunes. High wind, and my stomach dropping. I am glad I am and I wish I were not at the bow -- it's like the first car of the roller coaster, terrifying beautiful. There's the calm grey sea. We fall forward and down.
We slide into the water smoothly at first, then we plow up a wall of water that crashes onto the forward deck and then we ride mountains of waves, two, three, four.
We are on the sea. Our low island is flooding. The whole world is flooding. How many things can make the world flood? The sun lowers.
--Who has a watch? I want to record the time of the sunset. We have to figure this out. Marguerite is in the hold -- I find her and we rig a screen and throw an image of the sun up on it with a pinhole lens. The disk is spotted like a trout.
--Have you ever seen sunspots like --
--No, what do you --
And then something crests over the limb. It doesn't shine. There's nothing there. A spot of nothing with streamers of radiance coming into it. It pulls in the front of the disk. It has no form, just a distortion, a lens in front of the sun.
--Is that --
It is.
The world is awash. Some high ground is unflooded. There's a college high on the hill with no one in it. We dock and go through it. Who knows what we might need. Food -- not enough. We pour water into every jug and bottle and anything we can find. Take string and safety pins. Papers and pencils.
But -- something happens to people. There are pinprick red spiders, ticks, something -- the drop from dark places. People change into something -- no themselves. We have run back to the ship. What are they? They are everywhere still dry. Did they come on the black hole?
There are not enough ships. We go by a high place where a few people are huddled in a town. Construction workers. They are putting up a Christmas tree. They are using a crane to toss a Christmas tree into the air, to break the record for tallest Christmas tree. They wave. Grim laughter.
But we find one place, an oil rig or something. And stumble into a diner with brown shag carpeting. A woman carrying a pitcher of beer shushes us. There's a baby asleep upstairs.
--Upstairs, but --
We know the creatures like high places.
The woman tells us something keeps the creatures asleep. As long as we go quietly. We creep up the stairs.
About then I loose the threads of the dream and it ravels.
