David Leo Rice
After everything they'd set in motion in the States had run its gruesome course, the Brothers Squimbop decided to ship out east, back where their something-something-somethings had sailed from, once upon a time, to see if things were any funnier on the other side. Refreshed by this possibility, they made it across in a little under a week, stowing away on a nineteenth-century steamer carrying oats, horses, and touched-up Model T's.
They disembarked at the Hook of Holland along with a sweaty and cursing rabble, and wended their way into the narrow streets, flexing their nostrils against the smoke and blackening meat in the air. As their wending went on and the crowd thinned out, they found themselves lost among blind men and women draped in rags and dragging carts while legless children went scooting along the cobblestones on tricked-out skateboards.
These sights and others like them proliferated until the Brothers stopped to lean against a grease-stained and graffitied bus station wall, and thought to themselves, say, doesn't this all look a little more like how we always imagined things back then, and a little less like how we always imagined them now? Not that there was much recourse if there'd indeed been a switcheroo, but it couldn't hurt to find out, and, seeing as they were leaning against a bus station wall, they figured they were already partway toward turning up someone they could ask, or, at the very least, a trustworthy piece of signage.
So they peeled themselves off the wall and sauntered through the automatic doors, which whooshed open onto a dim terminal full of muffled footsteps and rolling gusts of air-conditioning. Everything was immaculate, like an exhibit of a bus station from an earlier or a later time, a testament to how things once were or might one day be, if the chips fell one way and not another, complete with demo-people sitting on benches, watching the Brothers pass.
Through this heavy quiet, they made their way to an InfoKiosk, labeled as such, and put their swarthy faces up to the polished, fresh face of a young woman in a blue pantsuit with a short red scarf tied around her neck and asked, in unison, whether this here was now or then.
The woman blinked, computed for part of a second, and looked from one Brother to the other, as if keen to assign them roles. Then she replied, "Well, gentlemen, that depends on whom you ask." She sighed, as if the implications of this statement ought to be obvious, the burden it conveyed shared by all. The Brothers attempted to appear as if this were so, but their attempt must've been unconvincing, because she added, a moment later, "There have been a number of referendums lately, attempts to determine whether the modern era you see in here, or the medieval era you see out there, is the pretend one. Because certainly—nearly everyone agrees on this much, though not an inch more—they can't both be genuine. One must be the pageant, the other the actual present time. But who's to say which is which? Well, the people are to say, of course, and yet what happens when the people become no more than a volatile surplus of ghoul-eyed persons?"
She paused here, as if waiting for an answer, then adjusted her scarf, looked from one Brother to the other, cleared her throat and said, "Well, gentlemen, that depends on whom you ask." She sighed. "There have been a number of referendums lately, attempts to determine whether the modern era you see in here, or the medieval era you see out there, is the pretend one. Because certainly—nearly everyone agrees on this much, though not an inch more—they can't both be genuine. One must be the pageant, the other the actual present time. But who's to say which is which? Well, the people are to say, of course, and yet what happens when the people become no more than a volatile surplus of ghoul-eyed persons?"
When she'd finished, the Brothers thanked her for the info and, sensing opportunity, hurried back out of the bus station and into the throng surrounding it.
They posted up at a plastic table fronting a meat and flatbread stall, bought as much as the last of their dollars would get them, and ate with their hands, kicking the stray cats that poured in to nip at their ankles. The eating and the wincing and the kicking took on the rhythm of a routine, a clown escapade, and, before long, a filth-crusted public had clustered in to watch. Faces grew out of the shoulders wedged behind them, eclipsing all necks, and mouths fell open to jeer and excrete tobacco in unison, like it was a multi-headed beast the Brothers had summoned, a bulbous hee-hawing demon they could puppet with their legs, each time they kicked a cat, or with their mouths, each time they howled in pain, or with their arms, now that these too had become incorporated, slamming up and down on the uncleared tabletop, spraying meat leavings in a cloud that surrounded their vision, grease on grease, hovering there as the day heated up.
Now that they were in rhythm, nothing prevented them from reverting all the way back to their roots, tumbling awake, sticky with afterbirth, in the grass of a county fairground in some corn town in Indiana, or on some brown-grassed riverside in Missouri, they could never agree which, but the image of the place, or the feeling of the image, saturated them, and lent their current slapstick an air of pathos, which caused them to drill so deeply into the performance that, by the time they resurfaced, the sun was going down and the crowd was dissipating, leaving in its wake a pile of wilting reddish bills whose value the Brothers could only pray wasn't nothing.
They stood, shivering as they came back to the present, and scooped the haul into their fists, divvying it fifty-fifty. Then they walked into the darkening side streets behind the market square, past the circle of cats they'd kicked to death, through air heavy with the scent of damp wool and frying gristle. "Through air heavy with the scent of damp wool and frying gristle," they repeated in unison, storing the line for future use. It wasn't until they'd rounded several blind corners, climbed a steep set of concrete stairs past a cathedral whose stained glass windows had been reduced to trembling stalactites, and traversed a boardwalk whose boards had long since rotted to nail-bitten slats, that they came to the ocean, black and calm and fishy as any ocean anywhere.
They walked out of the light of a row of hotels and beach bars, past a harbor where dinghies and sailboats bobbed at anchor, and up to a cove at the edge of the city, which, they judged, was as safe a place as any to sit and think.
A scuttling in a spruce tree overhead forced them to reconsider, but a glance revealed it to be no more than a squirrel, and a second glance revealed it to be, perhaps, not even that. Still, they reasoned, it would be wise to buy knives.
With this much decided, they spread their haul across the sand, counted it by feel in the dark and, agreeing to believe that it represented a substantial sum, looked toward the future. Whatever place this is, they thought, it seems to contain a receptive audience, if today's is any indication.
Satisfied with their new prospects, and thus relieved to be free of the deadening alternation of Missouri and Michigan, Arkansas and Arizona, state after state drying up and blowing away as they lectured in empty halls watered by dripping spigots, they burrowed into the sand, hot on top and cool underneath, and slept amidst the sandflies and the crashing surf, dreaming of glory.
The sun broiled them awake a few hours later, so fast and hot the first thing that reached them was the smell of their own smoking skin, a rich, meaty aroma that sent them out in search of breakfast.
After a quick repast of stewed goat and black bread at a stall staffed by almond-eyed gypsies, they set out on the road that led up from the valley in which the Hook of Holland nestled, and soon found themselves tracing a network of mountain passes, looking down at blue lagoons and up at destitute settlements freckling rock faces, their streets so steep it seemed to the Brothers that only spidermen could live there.
As the day wore on and the lack of water took its toll, it began to seem that spidermen were indeed clinging to the streets of these jagged mountain towns, nailed to chairs outside smoky cafes or leaning over iron balconies with pipes dangling from their mouths, watching through motionless eyes as these two dehydrated and improbable wanderers passed by below. The streets were now so steep they closed in overhead, forming a dome that the Brothers had to lean back and stare up at, making eye contact with elderly spidermen and -women sipping coffee from tiny cups and picking at wilting pastries that, through a logic all their own, held fast to their ornate china platters.
"Either we've wandered someplace heavy, Brother," Jim whispered once it was clear that both of them were perceiving the same tableau, "or we've got about five minutes to find something to drink before we collapse."
Joe, whose skin was steaming, had already come to this conclusion and thus began hectoring an old woman dragging a donkey cart who'd just appeared. He begged her to spare some of the black liquid that dangled in a clear canister from a leather strap tied to her wrist, hoping it wasn't tar or motor oil. Though she didn't speak, she seemed to understand the request well enough to pull the donkey's metal bowl from a clattering pile of tools in the cart and place it on the ground with a sigh, bracing it with her foot as she poured it half full.
When she'd done this, she stood back, placed her hands on her hips, and looked the Brothers over. Recognition played across her face, like she expected them to know her, but they ignored it, and she made no move to force the issue.
Joe sank to his knees, then down to his belly, propping his upper body on his flat palms so as to swivel his face into the black liquid. He spooled his tongue down into its viscid depths and tasted molasses and honey and possibly something fermented, but it was sweet and hearty and, as far as he could tell, not poisonous.
He drank until the woman kicked him aside. Then he rolled into the dust and watched as Jim took his turn, lapping until the woman kicked him aside as well, so as to make room for the donkey.
When the donkey had also finished—the woman didn't kick it aside, but merely waited until the creature looked up—the Brothers wiped their mouths, got to their feet, and looked the woman over. She was old and hunched and her left side had a pronounced tremor. Though she had both eyes, they could already hear themselves telling a roomful of townspeople tonight, if they were lucky enough to find a town, how they'd met a crazed one-eyed sorceress on the road, and how she'd nursed them back to health with some black poison that had imbued them with the power to contact the dead, or to detect the winging of notional creatures in the high ether, or perhaps to . . .
But there'd be plenty of time for all that later. The thing now was to impress upon her their need to end up in this imagined place by nightfall. They pointed up the road, which had returned most of the way to horizontality, and squinted at the sky to show that the sun was blinding them. There was no means by which they could convey the nature of the hallucinations they'd had before meeting her, but they hoped their pantomime would nevertheless prove that their condition was dire. They were careful to both look in the same direction, lest she tell one of them to go one way, and the other another.
"We need food, shelter," they intoned, hugging themselves and dancing, which had the effect of making the old woman smile. As they went on, clownishly exaggerating their motions, she began to guffaw.
She rocked back and forth on her heels, and didn't stop until the Brothers had winded themselves and staggered over to the remnants of a cement wall by the edge of the road, where they panted and spat up long gobs of brown phlegm.
When this routine too had reached its conclusion, she lurched over to them and, as if she'd been joking all this time in her bafflement at the language they spoke, said, in a clean Dutch or German accent, "Nearest town's up that way, about an hour. Rough place. Take care, boys."
Then she kicked the donkey, tightened the screw cap on her empty bottle, and trudged off with a knowing wave.
The Brothers made haste in the direction she'd indicated, heads full of loose story that, by the time they arrived, would have compacted itself into an open-road tale that ought to earn them a drink or two, and, if they were lucky, a few mouthfuls of fried meat to mop it up with. They riffed and rehearsed as they went, and the road seemed to flatten out to accommodate them, apparently satisfied with the ordeal it'd put them through.
As they emerged into the twilit glow of the outskirts, they ambled across smooth cobblestones, rows of high-end Scandinavian cars parked on one side, piles of horse dung intermingled on the other, and crossed what felt like an unguarded but highly tangible border, away from the open road and into the stagnant sanctum of a new town. Immediately, townspeople began to look them over with a mix of wariness and intrigue.
The very fact that they'd managed to enter the town from outside seemed sufficient to arouse the interest of these people, who appeared, like everyone the Brothers had met so far except for the woman on the road, to be stuck in place, circling a vanishingly small center of gravity. More like plants than people, the Brothers thought, as they climbed the concrete base of a towering statue of some chisel-jawed dictator. It's almost, they thought, clearing their throats and beholding the gathering crowd, like these people haven't succeeded in being born yet. Like they're still tethered by some umbilical link to this tiny patch of earth, absorbing ever more degraded nutrience as they wait for the clarifying event that we are now here to deliver.
Opening their mouths, when they judged the crowd sufficiently swollen, Jim began, "We are, good people, free agents who've made our way here all the way from America to tell you that, even as we speak, there are lurkers on the surrounding roadways."
Joe continued, after a nudge from Jim, "Indeed, we came to tell you that witches are massing on the peripheries. They're flocking together, gaining strength. Why, just today, we passed a one-eyed sorceress who forced us to kneel beside her donkey and drink a gout of blackest poison. If we'd refused, she would've turned us into infants and left us to await our deaths in the crushing heat. The poison was the lesser evil, though only very slightly."
He held his side and mimed collapse from stomach pain, inducing Jim to join in. The crowd laughed, cautiously, everyone looking to the person beside them to be sure they were laughing too.
"We dispatched that witch," Joe groaned, "only after great toil, and at great personal risk." He fumbled in his pocket for a hank of fur he'd torn from the donkey while Jim was supping. "Here's the last of her. But be warned, more are coming. They are, even now, meeting in hollows in the surrounding wilderness, planning their onslaught. As we've said, we come from America, a land already ruined by sorcery. It is too late for us, but not, thank God, for you."
"Not," Jim added, shouting over the growing clamor of the crowd, "provided you enlist our services. For we alone, good people, can preserve the order that has suddenly grown fragile. For a modest fee, we will enchant the peripheries of your town, seeing to it that no witches penetrate the inner sanctum, which all of you have worked so hard to preserve for yourselves, and your children, and your children's children."
It was almost too easy. The Brothers hadn't come to Europe in search of a challenge, but something about the speed with which these people foisted their crumpled currency upon them and proffered food, drink, and lodging at the ramshackle inn behind the slaughterhouse left them with a queasy feeling, like that of eating a milky pudding whose sweetness has begun to curdle.
Nevertheless, they left that town the next day in high spirits, and set out back on the open road with the promise that no witches would ever penetrate the protective spell they were about to cast. They made their way upward, farther, as they imagined it, from the Hook of Holland, though their memory of arriving in Europe already felt warped and dented by the heat, a useless thing they ought to throw away before it went off in their rucksacks.
Day by day, town by town, business began to boom. The Brothers worked through all the classics, spreading tell of well poisonings and child abduction, changelings and incest and miscegenation by ravening wildmen eager to rape young girls out milking at dawn, or picking red berries in the pastor's woods for Sunday breakfast; they warned of currency manipulation and the malicious spread of occult science; they fanned the already flickering flames of suspicion that desert religions were seeping into the groundwater of mountain ones, and vice versa, turning the True Word into a mush-mouthed abomination thereof, blasphemy upon blasphemy, moral decrepitude and decline, and they sowed fear of paternity, of bloodlines sundered and contaminated by Moors and Masons and Jews, of politicians serving as the puppets of unseen masters, simpering in the boardrooms of cities that no one present had ever seen, and few had ever heard of. They called into question whether the year was 1613 or 1835 or 1999, and they turned neighbor against neighbor, seeing to it that none could trust any of what they read or heard or—once the Brothers really got going—even any of what they themselves thought. They bribed printers to issue contradictory versions of the same local papers and claimed that orphan trains had been found in the Ukrainian steppe, thousands upon thousands of children strong, worshipping star deities and tattooing themselves with runes and hieroglyphs, breeding in ever quicker succession, children begetting children, then infants begetting infants, triplets emerging from wombs where only one child had been conceived. Trains of goats birthing blind children who in turn birthed goats, all of them growing into mad kings and queens, wrecking the world while pretending to run it.
"No one but us can be trusted," the Brothers Squimbop told town after town after town, the crowds sometimes composed of gap-toothed peasants riven with buboes, and sometimes of gap-toothed teenagers in torn jeans and soccer jerseys, "because we alone have traveled the open road, and the high seas, and we have seen what's afoot out there. We know the full scope of what can happen. The entirety of America, ruined before our eyes. Here in the towns, lies beget lies, and those who appear most blameless are surely the most corrupt."
As the weeks became months, they expanded their repertoire, deviating from the classics and ranging more boldly into tales of their own design. "Werewolves are stealing in from the deep Carpathian woods at night," they told the people of one town, "and impregnating your cows, so that any calves born to them must be buried in molten iron, lest they grow into three-headed demons, their milk the fibrous nectar of the Gnostic Satan, who will, in time, be born to a human mother and crawl into your pantries to sup."
In the next town, they said that chickens all over the countryside had been caught in the dark of a lunar eclipse and sent backward on their evolutionary path, so that soon lizards would begin hatching from their eggs and then, if nothing was done to stop it, dinosaurs. Dinosaurs, they stressed, that would take to the skies and reduce whole regions to ash in the course of one long Walpurgisnacht, as soon as the next eclipse happened to occur.
There was, it seemed, nothing they couldn't sell. Any tale at all, delivered by the Brothers Squimbop, would send any town into a frenzy of preparation, in which the people would, without hesitating, slaughter their cows or drown their chickens, or, in the towns where the Brothers suggested that the monsters were already amongst them, having assumed human form, turn the market square into a pyre whose flames loomed above all the buildings surrounding it.
They dragged their roadshow through Belgian swamps and up jagged alpine ridges, brandishing the knives they'd purchased at a silversmith's in Zürich at monkeys and bears and the occasional lowland fox. They rode sometimes in military vans driven by silent, masked soldiers, and sometimes they stowed away on boats crossing pristine glacial fjords or sweltering stretches of sea between one Greek isle and the next. They told themselves that they cared little for their lives, yet nothing seemed eager to kill them. On the contrary, it seemed as though everything and everyone they came in contact with was operating at a remove, like there was an invisible dead space between themselves and the world they were describing, or conjuring, so that while they could trudge across fields of unexploded mines in the hills above Sarajevo, or swim to land after an Italian pleasure boat they'd snuck aboard capsized off the coast of Sicily, there was never any threat, or chance, of a permanent reprieve. The demand for our services, they thought, while basking in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, is too great to let us go. Indeed, perhaps, it's all there is. The only factor still in play.
It was only when, in a mountainside hamlet outside Belgrade, the Brothers beheld a troupe of eyeless, infant-sized creatures leading a herd of goats on chains through the square that they were forced to pause. They observed the goats birthing more of these creatures as casually as excreting the roughage of their morning kibble, hardly stopping as the monsters fell out of them. These monsters then rose to their feet, produced chains from someplace the Brothers couldn't identify and, perhaps from that same place, produced more goats, which in turn produced more monsters and chains and goats, which in turn sent the Brothers scrabbling along a steep, dusty goat path all the way back to Belgrade, where they holed up in a WWI-era pension, desperate only for a little time to think.
They lay in bed the next morning until the sunlight through the window began to singe their foreheads. Then they got up, hosed down in the shower stall on the first floor, and went into the square for flatbread and coffee. Here, as over the days that followed, they watched chaos begin to mount, voices rising in Serbian and Greek and Russian and dialects they couldn't identify, a sense of alarm rising toward a breaking point they sensed was near. As newspapers and broadsides began to circulate photos of mass riots, villages in flame, altars and effigies soaked in blood, the tables around them began to empty out. Everyone, so far as they could tell, was mobilizing, mobbing the train stations and bus terminals, or marching, en masse, out of Belgrade and toward what the Brothers assumed must be the coast.
Just like that, they thought, among the crumbs at their breakfast table in the now empty square a week later, our journey has taken a turn. Today, they decided, is likewise the day for us to flee. So they packed their few belongings and hustled up the cobbled streets, strewn with the heads of chickens and the entrails of sheep, past capsized buggies and corpses writhing with strange new life, until they made it to the teeming train station. They were jostled this way and that, hauled off a train they'd already boarded and shoved onto another, destination unknown, and yet still they were happy to be aboard. They sat back in their seats, among passengers wearing antlers on their heads, or on shrunken heads around their necks—the Brothers could dimly remember spreading tales of this faction.
They wriggled down on the leather banquette and fell into a spell of nightmares. When they awoke, perhaps days later, the few remaining passengers were disembarking. Even so, the Brothers tried to remain, eyes closed and knees hugged to their chests, but the conductor came by and, as if expecting to find them in precisely this aspect, sighed, barked something in a language they couldn't understand, and dragged them out, first Jim and then Joe, depositing them both on the disused track beside the one where the train sat idling. Then, though the conductor had sworn this was the last stop, the train rushed off to the south.
That night, in what appeared to be a town in southern Germany, the Brothers, exhausted and clean out of currency, took to the podium in the central square and simply told what they'd seen. They began with the chains and the goats, continued on through Belgrade, and ended with their journey here. "Europe, good people, is turning strange. There is nothing to say but this. All attempts at warding off what is coming have failed."
Looking out at the crowd, they saw the woman in the black dress with her donkey. She had only one eye, just as they'd cast her in their dozens of speeches across the continent. This eye took them in, sparkling with concern. She mouthed something, her expression dire. A warning, they thought. Then she vanished.
They finished speaking and retired to a room above the alehouse, eager to buy themselves more time to think, though they knew they'd already bought plenty. They drifted off, back to their nightmare.
The next morning, after a repast of rolls and cold meat at the communal table downstairs, where the few townspeople present granted them a wide berth, the Brothers set out, agreeing to spend the day shoring up their routine. Time to get back on solid ground, they each thought. Put our act back together, update our itinerary, refill our coffers. Ensure that the show goes on.
But no sooner had they reached the next village than each Brother found his attention pulled from his head like stuffing from a dummy. Jim and Joe took to peering away from one another and into butcher shops, blacksmiths', and haberdasheries, imagining the lives of the men undertaking these professions, the colossal quiet that must fill the space of all that was shrieking in the Brothers' heads. True ignorance is true innocence, they found themselves thinking, as if the time to become fathers was drawing near and they were thus imagining these unsuspecting villagers as the children they were soon to have, hammering anvils and flensing steaks within the safety of a village-sized womb.
The day wore on and the Brothers gawped at churchgoers and gravediggers and schoolchildren until the sun began to set and they found themselves at a crowded wooden table outside another alehouse. It's only a matter of time, they thought, watching the villagers sup, before the star-children and money-lenders make their way here, as well. Before the sky fills with runes. There's no stopping it now, and thus, they decided, dipping a hot pretzel in lard, nothing to do but warn them.
So, once they'd finished their meal, such as it was, they took up a perch in the square and Jim began their routine. "We two Brothers have come all the way here from America," he proclaimed, taking comfort in the familiar salvo. "Bearing a simple warning. Something too vast to name, something knowable only in its infinite particulars, lay waste to our land, and is now laying waste to yours, as well."
The ring of truth choked the Brothers Squimbop, but they forced their way past it, looking away from the eye of the woman in the black cloak, who'd reappeared near the front of the growing crowd.
Joe took over. "Trains of blind children leading pregnant goats on chains through the squares of formerly peaceful villages just like this one, making of them a wasteland in the course of a single moonlit spree. Mass rearrangements of the stars, polarities shifting, magnetisms shifting . . . entire orbits shifting . . ." He found he couldn't finish a sentence before the next one began. "Wells choked with severed bat wings . . . goats b-begetting . . . girl-children fathering halfwits with their outstretched index fingers in obeisance to . . . to . . ." His gaze snared, once again, on the woman in the black cloak, and he fell silent.
"In obeisance to," Jim continued, though something told him not to, "a one-eyed sorceress in a black cloak, who . . . who . . ."
The crowd, as one, closed in on her. All attention lapsed from the Brothers, rendering them a two-man witness to what was fast becoming a village-wide riot. While they stood there, torches were produced and the alehouse went up in flames. Then the church, the butcher's shop, and the village stables. A grunting and growling emanated from the townspeople, a mass-voice that belonged to none of them in particular, reverberating off the cobblestones and the buckling wood.
Looking up, the Brothers saw the stars rushing together, leaving powdery traces across the firmament, and they heard a low slithering from the distance, and began to hear the smashing of bottles, the breaking of bones, and the spilling of blood. Amidst all this, they bowed to their absent audience and set out running, skirting the edge of the melee as best they could, leaving the sorceress for dead.
They ran through the side streets, avoiding the doorways through which streamed knife-wielding men, women, and children, and made it intact to the sheds and garden plots flanking the outskirts. Here, they deemed it safe to catch their breath before venturing into the surrounding wilderness, which grew hot and misty as it welcomed them, sealing itself off beneath the changed sky.
Now they were lost in a deep wood. The air turned thicker and blacker still, the trunks of tremendous black oaks now brighter than the sky. They marched on, looking straight ahead, or down at their feet, or up at the hint of leaves, anywhere but at one another.
Before long, they were marching through knee-deep moss, past eerie, dripping ferns, singing nursery rhymes at full volume while the forest whispered louder and louder, until it wasn't a whisper at all. Now the forest was ringing and echoing in earnest, their own voices rubbed out, the air filling with traces and smudges in the watery distance, which flickered, trembled, and, as they approached it, resolved into two figures, one of them draped in a black cloak, the other a donkey.
The one-eyed sorceress smiled as they approached, her arms outstretched to receive them. They marched, half-conscious, into her embrace, desperate to be forgiven for what they had made her suffer. Then it was as if she were everywhere, all around them, blotting out the woods and the moss and the smudge of stars, until all they could see or feel or smell was black cloth and red blood, and they felt themselves shrinking inside it, their bones and muscles uncoupling, reverting to unformed flesh.
When the Brothers Squimbop awoke, it was dim, late afternoon or early evening. They winced up to a sitting position, cradled their soft elbows, and scraped thick, sticky ropes of blood and mucus from their thighs and shoulders, then used the backs of their hands to wipe their brows, many times, until they could see.
Looking over, they saw the one-eyed sorceress, mopping between her legs with a black cloth. She smiled at them. "One of these times," she said, looking from Joe to Jim, "I'm going to get tired of doing this."
But she said it without rancor, and even smiled as they rose to their feet and asked if they could help her to hers. She waved them off. "I'll be alright. I ought to be by now." She laughed, but when they stayed, standing above her, and began to laugh as well, her face grew worried. "Go!" she shouted. "What are you waiting for? There's clothes and provisions in the donkey's pack. Take them and be off. Europe is no place for bright young men any longer."
Eager, for once, to obey, the Brothers Squimbop gathered these provisions, dressed themselves, and set out running, out of the forest and into the crackling ruins of a village they could remember just barely, an echo from another lifetime. They hoped to stop for bread and ale, but nothing remained, not even bodies. Well-fed jackals paced among the embers, eyeing the Brothers.
They hurried past a ransacked chicken coop at the far edge of town, lizard skin spooling out of gigantic crushed eggs, and then down a mountainside and through many dense woods, through fields of fire and ash, through deserts and the shells of cities in which ostrich-headed deities presided over mass sacrifices and stars churned and boiled overhead, forming symbols the Brothers took turns staring up at, unable to look away, whatever the psychic cost.
Finally, they arrived in a rubble-strewn metropolis that they decided to call the Hook of Holland. They turned to regard a group of monks or penitents in an alley, roasting a naked boy on an open flame, and, though their hunger was great, their eagerness to set sail was greater.
Thus, they gathered their cloaks about themselves and made their way to the harbor, where, though half the ships were capsized and half of those that remained had been hacked to splinters, they boarded a vessel that appeared primed to depart.
After long, dark hours hiding in the hold, among horses and threshers, the ship pulled anchor and began to wheeze out of the harbor, leaving the blighted continent behind at last.
When they judged it safe, the Brothers climbed to the upper deck and watched the last of what remained of Europe vanish to the east. Then they turned westward and watched the sun begin its dimming journey to America.
"This time, Brother, maybe we ought to," Jim Squimbop began, but Joe, eager to enjoy what respite the passage might hold, raised a hand to stop him. If he'd learned anything after all these years, it was to expect peace only so long as neither coast was visible.