The Fifth Day Read online

  “Zolzaya, Vincent.” She gave a harsh sigh. “Zolzaya.”

  “Whatever.”

  Vincent walked out of the room, setting the beaded curtain swinging again.

  Zolzaya, still staring at Bonnie’s horrific cards, said under her breath, “But I didn’t do it deliberately. Why would I do that?”

  She pulled the cards together and shuffled them thoroughly, making sure they were mixed back in at random. She had even worked her way back into a passable semblance of Mystical Oneness with the universe by the time another client walked in fifteen minutes later, this time an eager-looking college student being trailed by two buddies who were laughing behind their hands at him, and most likely at her as well.

  Maybe she’d get a great reaction from this one, and his friends would be so impressed that they’d want readings, too. Sixty bucks would pay for a large pizza and some left over. She shuffled the cards again, to be sure, and had him cut them, laid out the nine cards in the shape of a cross on her table. Centered herself, remembered the books she’d read, prepared herself to dispense the Wisdom of the Ancients.

  But when the first card she turned over was Death, she found that she couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, Zolzaya went out for coffee with her best friend, Angela Morley. Angela and then-Caroline had met at Griffiths Life Insurance Agency of Oldenburg, California, where Angela was a salesperson and Caroline had been the receptionist until six months ago, when she had chucked her day job to pursue a career as a psychic. Angela still couldn’t quite bring herself to call her Zolzaya, but at least had started calling her Z instead of Carrie, which was progress.

  “How’s the fortunetelling business going?” Angela asked after they sat down with their order of a cinnamon bun and a latté—Angela—and a raspberry scone and a large coffee—Zolzaya.

  “The usual. I’m making enough to pay the rent. Barely.”

  “Vinnie still sponging off of you?” Angela took a bite of her cinnamon bun, and regarded her with one eyebrow raised.

  “For the last time, he’s not sponging. He’s looking for work. He applied for a couple of jobs just yesterday.”

  “Where?”

  “The bicycle shop over on Fredericks Street, and the REI down in Furness.”

  “Did any of them have actual openings?”

  She regarded her friend with a wry eye. “Well, no. But he’s putting his applications out there.”

  “You know what, Z?” Angela leaned forward on her elbows. “He could get a job at the grocery store or a Burger King or whatever. But as long as you pay for the rent and food, he doesn’t have much of an incentive. Easier to throw around a few applications to places he knows aren’t hiring and won’t give him a call that he then has to deal with. You need to give Vinnie-boy an ultimatum.”

  Zolzaya sighed. “He’s trying.”

  “He certainly is. He’s extremely trying. I don’t know why you put up with him, in fact.”

  “Well, it’s not like I get nothing out of the relationship. He’s good in bed.”

  “He could live in his own apartment, and come over for conjugal visits.” Angela shook her head and gestured with one hand. “I know what it is, of course. You feel sorry for him. You always have a way of taking in strays.”

  Zolzaya took a sip of her coffee, and didn’t say anything.

  “Ha. Hit home with that one. You know I’m right.”

  “Okay, maybe you’re right. But I can’t throw Vincent out. He needs someone to take care of him.”

  “So do most strays. That doesn’t mean they’re all your responsibility. Look, Z, I’m only trying to look out for you. I don’t like seeing a friend being taken advantage of.”

  “I know.” She leaned back in her chair. “I’m sorry if I’m snippy. I had two readings go south last night. That’s forty bucks I could have made, that I didn’t. I’m not in the best of moods.”

  “What happened?”

  She gave Angela a brief rundown of her doom-and-despair card reading for Bonnie, Bonnie’s reaction, and the subsequent one for the college boy, which had gone much the same way except that it involved a great deal more profanity.

  “Geez,” Angela said. “What’s the likelihood of getting two nearly identical card patterns, one right after the other like that?”

  “Dunno. I should have paid more attention when I took statistics. There’s probably a way to figure it out, but I don’t know what it is. I’m guessing it’s somewhere around a shitload to one against.”

  “Yeah.” Angela yawned. “God, I’m glad for the caffeine this morning. I’m gonna fall asleep at my desk today.”

  “Bad night’s sleep?”

  “Awful dreams.” Angela took a big sip of her latté. “Kept me up most of the night.”

  “What did you dream about?”

  “Well, I…” Angela stopped. “It was about death, destruction, and heading toward disaster,” she said in a hushed voice.

  The two women stared at each other for a moment.

  “It was horrible. People dying. Monsters. Horrible creatures destroying stuff, eating people. The worst part was that I kept running up to people, and then they’d wither away. Like, they’d turn into mummies, and then kind of crumble.” She took another drink of latté. The hand holding the cup trembled. “Death. You know? Like your Tarot cards.”

  Zolzaya cleared her throat. “I don’t believe in psychic shit.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s why I went into this. Purely a money-making proposition. All I had to do was to learn the shtick. No chance of my falling for it.”

  “I know.”

  “So this can’t mean anything, right?”

  Angela looked at her with a dubious expression. “Adding my dream to the coincidence of two card readings that came out the same, and all three of which were about the end of the world? Any two of those, okay. Three?”

  “My Tarot readings weren’t about the end of the world—exactly.”

  “Close enough.”

  “Look. Weird coincidences happen. You wait long enough, and there’ll eventually be a pile-up of stuff that looks the same. It’s random chance, added to a long enough time scale.”

  “Three in the course of twelve hours?”

  Zolzaya frowned and looked down at her half-eaten scone, unsure of how to answer that. It turned out she didn’t have to.

  A nearby voice said, “Excuse me.”

  She looked up and saw an elderly woman in an old-fashioned paisley skirt and pale green blouse coming toward them, looking at Angela with an apologetic expression.

  “I’m so sorry for interrupting your conversation, but I couldn’t help overhearing. Did I hear you mention that you’d had bad dreams last night? About the world ending?”

  “Yes.” Angela gave a sidelong, and rather frightened, look at Zolzaya.

  “So did I. I dreamed about the apocalypse. Like from the Book of Revelation. People being attacked by monsters. Eaten up. Things coming out of the sea.” She shuddered. “It was horrifying.”

  Before Angela could respond, the barista, a bespectacled twenty-something guy named Josh, with tattoos on his forearms and an earring in his left ear, leaned forward, his elbows on the counter. “No shit? I dreamed that, too.”

  The elderly woman turned toward him. “This is… is extraordinary.”

  “Still putting your money on random chance and long time scales, Z?” Angela said, sotto voce.

  “Yeah,” Josh continued. “I was by the ocean. And this thing came up. It looked like, what’s it called? The Loch Ness Monster. Big long neck, lots of teeth. It was picking people off the beach. Behind me was a city that was in flames. It was like, you know, one of those movies about the fall of civilization.”

  “With monsters.” Angela sounded spooked.

  “Yeah. There were definitely monsters.”

  “What’s the chance of three people having similar bad dreams on the same night?”
r />   Josh shook his head. “Zero.”

  “About the same as someone doing two identical Tarot card readings in a row.” Angela gave a pointed glance in Zolzaya’s direction.

  By this time, others in the coffee shop were listening, in increasing interest and fear, to the conversation. Within five minutes, the patrons and staff had sorted themselves into two very unequal groups—people who had had dreams of destruction and terror—most of them—and people who hadn’t experienced any remarkable dreams at all—the remaining three, including Zolzaya.

  “What does it mean?” A balding man in a dress shirt and tie looked up. His laptop lay open on the table in front of him, a cup of coffee and a half-eaten low-fat vanilla yogurt forgotten next to it.

  “Beats the hell out of me.” The barista gave them a flirty smile. “But it’s kind of cool, isn’t it? Synchronicity.”

  “It may be synchronicity,” Angela said, “but I wouldn’t call it cool. This is scaring the living hell out of me.”

  “Me, too,” said a young woman from across the room.

  The barista shrugged. “I dunno. Doesn’t bother me. I’d kind of like it if there were monsters and zombies and shit. More exciting than what I do on a daily basis.” He suddenly seemed to realize where he was and added, “I mean, no offense.”

  But no one appeared to be worried about taking umbrage at Josh’s assessment of life in a coffee shop. Most of the people there looked somewhere between terrified and a complete freak-out. Even one of the ones who hadn’t had the bad dreams looked upset.

  “On the other hand,” Angela said, “there’s not much we can do about it. Maybe this is some kind of precognitive dream, or whatever they’re called. Maybe we’re hooked into a psychic thing that means something symbolic. Or maybe it’s a group delusion. But whatever it is, what can we do? Makes sense to go about our business and deal with the monsters when and if they come.”

  “But I dreamed that everyone was gone,” said a college-age boy, whose muscular torso filled out a t-shirt conspicuously chosen to be a couple of sizes too small. His voice, however, was trembling, and he sounded very young. “I mean, there were monsters, too, but there were all these empty houses and empty streets and abandoned cars. And I passed people who looked right through me, like I wasn’t there—like I was one of… one of the vanished.”

  The temperature in the room felt as if it dropped a few degrees.

  “I think I’ll go home and pray,” the elderly woman said.

  “Couldn’t hurt,” the businessman said.

  The college boy laughed, a desperate, hysterical sound. “Maybe I should go to my girlfriend’s apartment and see if I can get laid. I mean, if this is a sign that I’m gonna die, may as well get off a couple of times while I’m still alive to enjoy it, right?”

  Angela looked at her friend, who had been silent ever since the elderly woman came up to the table with her tale of an apocalyptic nightmare.

  “What do you think now, Z?”

  “I think I’m going to go home.”

  “You gonna jump Vinnie one last time? Like that kid?”

  “No. I want to—to check on him.”

  “You honestly care about that loser, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, okay, then.” She looked at her watch. “Since the world hasn’t ended yet, I gotta get to work. If I’m late, Steve’s gonna chew my ass off, apocalypse or no apocalypse. I’ll see you soon, okay, Zolzaya?”

  She nodded silently.

  Angela had called her Zolzaya. Not Z, and not slipping back into calling her Carrie or Caroline.

  It felt like a turning point, somehow.

  But turning toward what?

  2

  THE WORLD TURNS. The planets move in the Sacred Dance, each stepping to a singular rhythm. The stars turn in their courses, looking down on the Earth with stern and pitiless gazes, glittering like ice crystals in the dark.

  They slip into alignment, a glancing touch there and gone like a child’s kiss, and the World trembles and falls silent in fear as it changes beneath them.

  —

  “MOM?” BEN INGERSOLL looked up hopefully from his bowl of oatmeal at his mom, who was rinsing out her coffee cup in a perfunctory fashion.

  “Yes, sweetie?”

  “Can we go star watching tonight?”

  Marnie Ingersoll smiled at her son. “I think that’d be okay. Your dad said he’d be home from the lab early. You’re not tired of looking at all of those little points of light?”

  Ben shook his head. “Nope. Never.”

  “We should see about getting you a better telescope. And maybe, in a year or two, you could learn how to mount a camera on it and take some astronomical photographs. There’s a whole lot else up there that you’re not seeing, even with the scope you have.”

  “I know, Mom. Neutron stars and quasars and pulsars and black holes. Not that we could take pictures of black holes anyhow. They’re black,” he added, just to make sure it was clear.

  “Would you be interested in a camera? Maybe for next Christmas?”

  “Yeah!” A surge of excitement swept through him. “But we can still go star watching tonight, right?”

  “I expect we can. Did you remember to pack a lunch? I don’t want Missus Acosta having to feed you every day.”

  “Not yet. But I will.”

  “Good. She’s expecting you at eight-thirty. Don’t dawdle or she’ll worry.”

  “I won’t.”

  Marnie smiled at him. “Have fun today.”

  He took a sip of orange juice. “You too.”

  She left the kitchen, and there was the familiar bustle of getting together her purse and folders of papers to bring to the engineering firm where she worked. Marnie called to Ben’s sister, “Hannah, come on! I need to go.” Hannah’s footsteps clattered down the stairs. Marnie’s said, “Tell Sarah’s mom that I’ll pick you up at four. Do you have your backpack?” Hannah answered in the affirmative, sounding annoyed at having to be reminded. The front door opened and closed. A moment later, there was the sound of the car starting up, then the crunch of the tires as it backed out into the street.

  Silence descended over the Ingersoll house.

  Ben loved quiet. Quiet gave him space to think. One of the reasons he liked spending time with his best friend and next-door neighbor, Jimmy Acosta, was that Jimmy was often content to wander with him, walking down to Cutter Creek to catch salamanders or the four blocks to the ocean, and not say anything at all.

  Just being was enough.

  Ben glanced at the clock, and made a small noise of dismay. 8:25. He snarfed down the rest of his oatmeal, put the bowl in the sink, ran some water in it, and threw together a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich as fast as he could. He ran upstairs and grabbed a book—D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths—that he wanted Jimmy to see.

  He pelted down the stairs and out the front door, only at the last minute remembering to lock the door behind him. Missus Acosta was a sweet woman but a perennial worrier. If he was more than three minutes late, she’d be walking over to Ben’s house to see what horrible calamity had befallen him. Easier to rush now and relax later, and avoid the interrogation about what had delayed him.

  Down the front steps of his house, across the yard, he leaped over the little raised-bed garden that marked the border between his yard and Jimmy’s. Across Jimmy’s yard, up their steps, and a quick rap on the door. He listened for footsteps approaching as he tried to catch his breath, and had recovered from his sprint enough to give Missus Acosta a big grin when she opened the door and said, “Hi, Ben. I was wondering when you’d get here.”

  “Sorry I’m late, Missus Acosta.”

  “No need to apologize.” She smiled and patted him on the shoulder as he came in. She was big on patting people’s shoulders, not to mention ruffling hair, poking for emphasis while she talked, and giving rib-cracking hugs. “Jimmy’s upstairs. Did you eat breakfast?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

/>   “Good. You want me to put your lunch in the fridge?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  “Tell that mama of yours that you don’t need to bring your lunch. We can feed you.” She gave him a poke with her index finger to indicate that this was important, even though she’d told him the same thing dozens of times before.

  “I will. But mom always says bring a lunch, so I did.”

  “Okay, then.” She took the bag with his peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. “Have fun. Jimmy’s upstairs drawing monsters or something, but I hope you won’t spend the whole day indoors.”

  Ben assured her they wouldn’t, and trotted upstairs.

  Jimmy looked up as Ben burst into his room without so much as a knock. “Hi, Jimmy.”

  “Hey, Ben.”

  He plunked down cross-legged next to his friend. “Whatcha drawing?”

  Jimmy pushed a pencil drawing across the floor with a solemn expression.

  Ben whistled. “Wow. Man, that is awesome.”

  Staring out from the paper was a grotesque figure. It had long arms ending in claws, short, bowed legs, and a face that was slumped to one side like a wax figurine held too close to the fire. Sparse black hair sprouted from its head. Its golden eyes regarded Ben with a wicked leer.

  “What is it?” Ben said.

  “A monster,” Jimmy said, a bit unnecessarily.

  “Cool. I brought a mythology book I got from the library. It’s got some great monsters in it, too.” He opened D’Aulaire’s, flipped a few pages, and held up a drawing of a Cyclops holding a club.

  Jimmy peered at it. “Wicked. Maybe I’ll draw him next.”

  “You are such a good artist.”

  Jimmy shrugged. “I dunno. I just like doing it.”

  So Jimmy did a sketch of the Cyclops, its baleful single eye glaring, while Ben compensated by drawing hundred-eyed Argos, Zeus’s guardian who never slept.