Soft Apocalypses Read Online Free PDF

the last six sections, the box came alive in his hands, rose from his palms as if it were a bubble, a leaf in the wind.
    And it began to spin. There was no way to tell if it were spinning slow or fast because the interior sections caught the light from the single bulb overhead and turned it into a prism, the colors shooting out and slicing over the surface of the basement walls, the music from within nearly deafening as now the sound of a great pealing bell overpowered all others. Lewis could feel his heart slamming against his ribcage in time with the bell. He looked over and saw that Penny now sat close to Carl, the two of them holding one another, staring at the miraculous thing happening in front of their eyes.
    The whirling colors slowed as the dancing box began to spin downward, and with each turn the light in the basement flickered in, then out, until, at the last, everything was cast into a darkness so complete that for an instant Lewis thought he might have just died and discovered that there was no God, after all. Not even a hint of a God. Only nothing…except, however, grief and loneliness.
    A moment later the single bulb came back on, only now it seemed to glow much brighter than before. Looking around, it seemed to Lewis that the structure of the basement had changed; there were corners where none had been before, and areas once easily seen were now in cavernous shadows. The place even smelled different; the overlaying stink that had been their constant companion was gone, replaced by something damp and heavy with rot. Were things like this supposed to happen when you released a genie?
    He began to say something to Carl and Penny but the first word came out as a broken whisper and fell to the ground, writhing there for a moment before it crumbled to dust.
    Lewis was aware of every aspect of his physical self in so complete a way that he would not have been surprised to hear his very cells talking to one another. Even the house seemed to be breathing. Lewis froze in place, his eyes wide, and that’s when the genie that had been hiding in one of the newly shadowed corners began moving into the light.
    It is magic! Lewis sang within himself, barely able to contain his joy. The box was magic and there was a genie and he knew exactly, precisely what his first wish was going to be … but then he pulled in a deep breath and nearly gagged on the damp, heavy stink of rot that assaulted him.
    “Who summons us?” said the genie.
    Lewis’ mouth hung open, lips and tongue dumb meat, made mute by a single word: us. Who summons us?
    Sounds of movement from other corners, deeper shadows, crept and slithered forward. Lewis looked around once, quickly, and then closed his eyes as he tried to rid his mind of what he’d glimpsed; unable to do that, he willed these sights to break apart, to fragment, to become the disconnected pieces of a picture puzzle that by themselves were still horrible, but so much easier to confront than the whole. This was an old trick he’d taught himself long ago, when the searing ugliness of things he’d seen, things he’d been forced to do, to watch, to imagine, threatened to consume him: take the memory, the image, the lingering sensation and all thoughts connected with it, snap them apart, and scatter them to the wind.
    And so he scattered: impressions of things turned inside-out; flayed skin that billowed out like a dress caught in an updraft; fresh, sick-making scars that covered entire bodies; eyes burned closed; noses split down the center and peeled backwards; hooks and nails and staples mangling genitals; shiny black liquid dribbling from torn lips; bowels on the outside stretched into tubes that fed a creature’s own filth back into its mouth. Break and scatter, break and scatter.
    There.
    Facing the first genie—which surely wasn’t a genie at all—he steeled himself and opened his eyes.
    “I asked a question, boy,” said the creature. “Who summons the Order of the