The Emperor of the Ancient Word and Other Fantastic Stories. Darrell Schweitzer

her dry, bony hand over my mouth and whispered, “Quiet! They’re singing! Can’t you hear it? Isn’t it heavenly?”

      I only heard the faint whine and whoosh of a police skimmer drifting along the block behind us. Otherwise the night was still.

      Uncle Rob began sobbing.

      “I can’t stand any more of this,” he said, and got up and went toward the door. “Can’t we have a little dignity?”

      I hauled Louise to her feet and said, “You’ve got to come inside, now.” But she looked up at me with such a hurt expression that I let go of her. She wobbled. I caught hold of her. “Yes,” she said, “let me have a little dignity.” I think she was completely lucid at that moment. I think she knew exactly what she was doing. She sat down again.

      I turned to Uncle Rob. “You go on in. We’ll stay out here a while longer.” So we sat in the cold, autumn air, in front of the Fire Eggs, like couch potatoes in front of a four-panel TV. No, that’s not right. It doesn’t describe what Louise did at all. She listened raptly, rapturously, to voices I could not hear, to something which, perhaps, only dying people can hear as they slide out of this life. She turned from one Fire Egg to the next, to the next, as if all of them were conversing together. She reached out to touch them, hesitantly, like one of the apes in the ancient flatvideo classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, but of course she could not touch them, and her fingers slid away as if her hand couldn’t quite locate the points of space where the Fire Eggs were.

      At times she answered back, and sang something, as if accompanying old voices, but I think it was some rock-and-roll song from her psychedelic childhood, not an ethereal hymn from the Hereafter.

      Or maybe the Hereafter just likes Jefferson Airplane. Or the Fire Eggs do. I would like to be able to say that I achieved some epiphany myself, that I saw the Fire Eggs in a new way, as if the scales had fallen from my eyes and I saw truly for the first time. I would like to say that I heard something, that I received some revelation.

      But I only watched the pale reds and oranges drifting within the creamy, luminous white. I only saw the Fire Eggs, as every human being on Earth sees Fire Eggs every day of his or her life.

      I only heard the police skimmer slide around the block. Maybe one of the cops was staring at us through the darkened windows. Maybe not. The skimmer didn’t stop.

      And I looked up and saw the autumn stars, as inscrutable as the Fire Eggs, never twinkling, almost as if I were looking at them from space.

      Louise died during the night. She started drooling blood, but she looked content where she was, and it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, which may be a euphemism for something too painful to put into words.

      I just stayed there with her. After a while, her breathing had a gurgling sound to it, and she leaned over into my lap. I could see by the light of the Fire Eggs that she was bleeding from the bowels and the whole back of her bathrobe was stained dark. But she didn’t want to leave. She had what I suppose someone else might have called a beatific expression on her face. She reached up toward the Fire Eggs once more, groping in the air.

      And then I rocked her to sleep, by the light of the unblinking stars and of the Fire Eggs.

      * * * * * * *

      Somehow I fell asleep too. At dawn, Uncle Rob shook me awake. I got up stiffly, but I’d been dressed warmly enough that I was all right.

      He couldn’t bring himself to say anything, but the look in his eyes told me everything.

      I didn’t have to ask. I didn’t have to search. Aunt Louise was gone, bloody bathrobe and all.

      Of course any number of disappearances and murders had been attributed to the Fire Eggs in the past, as had so much else. “The Fire Egg ate my homework” was an old joke. “The Fire Egg ate Aunt Louise” didn’t go over well with the authorities, so there was an investigation, which concluded, for lack of any real evidence, that, despite what the two of us claimed, Louise had wandered off in the night and died of exposure or her disease, and finding her body would only be a matter of time.

      * * * * * * *

      “I’ll tell you what the fucking things are,” said Uncle Rob. “They’re pest-disposal units. They’re roach motels. They’re here to kill us, then to clean the place out to make room for somebody else. Maybe the poison tastes good to the roach and it dies happy, but does it make any difference?”

      “I don’t know, Uncle. I really don’t.”

      The night before I was to leave, he went out on the lawn and lay down underneath one of the Fire Eggs and blew his brains out with a pistol. I heard the shot. I saw him lying there.

      I just waited. I wanted to see what would happen. But I fell asleep again, or somehow failed to perceive the passing of time, and when I came to myself again, he was gone. The pistol was left behind.

      * * * * * * *

      It was Aunt Louise who first named them Fire Eggs. Not everybody knows that. Uncle Rob used the term on his television show, and it caught on. He gave her credit, over and over again, but no one listened and the whole world believes he was the one who coined it.

      That’s what his obituaries said, too.

      * * * * * * *

      I think that we’re wrong to wait for something to happen.

      I think it’s been happening all along.