@ Three O’ Clock in the World

D. White

Description

Gene Tierney lives with her husband on an air force base in central Nevada. There sinister experiments are performed by ex-patriot scientists from Germany.
Gene is hoping to return to the movies soon, provided she can find a good script (and regain her health after nervous breakdowns that have involved a variety of hallucinations that may or may not include German scientists).

Sujets

• Realization
• Relationship
• Artist
• Biographie (escalade)
• Gene
• Life
• Fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 21 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781669876991
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

@ THREE O’CLOCK IN THE WORLD
Where Night Is Not Reconciled
D. White

Copyright © 2023 by D. White.
 
ISBN:
Softcover
978-1-6698-7700-4

eBook
978-1-6698-7699-1
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 05/17/2023
 
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
827213
CONTENTS
@ Three O’ Clock In The World
Where Night Is Not Reconciled
@ THREE O’ CLOCK IN THE WORLD

Oct. 03, 2015
“Can you hear that?”
“What?”
“Voices… over loudspeakers… talk on windy days for some reason. They call to me… They moan things I can’t hear for some reason.”
“Are you… Is it one of your…”
“No. No! I love you. I try to be good. I won’t hear them… I promise…”
“Who?”
“I told you. the Voices! You don’t hear them? Captain Purvis said it’s ‘equipment’ failure. The horn-beam is off its treadle or something like that caused by windy days, dust… gums up terminals or something… He said the P.A. system is from before the war…”
He watched his wife for another few instants then tucked his head back under a newspaper…
“I was walking to the PX the other day… Wednesday I think. I saw purple stains on sidewalks everywhere I looked.”
“Honey. Maybe you’d better go to the doctor…”
“No! I’m okay. I was okay Thursday.”
“But.”
“I’ll be good. You’ll see. I’ll try harder and won’t see the stains… Last time they didn’t have me come back for two months…”
“You ever hear those voices before?”
“Yes! And you have too so stop pretending? It’s… They’re clear as day… ghosts or dead men from the war…”
“Try harder, Honey. I understand but if anyone else hears. You’ll take your vitamins won’t you?”
“I hate those things… Nutro-bio… Yellow ‘yuck’.” She looked at his concerned face. “I’ll take them. I’ll take them right now. I forgot yesterday. I did! I’ll take them now.”
“Please honey… Please. I love you.”
“I love you too…”
I couldn’t be sure they were calling me though. Sometimes they sounded like they just wanted someone to listen. Oh sure, it sounded like moaning but also pleading too… as if they were pleading for someone to listen to them. But it sounded like moaning too (mixed up with wind in trees. it was all mixed together… the moaning and the wind. it was eerie… sent chills up my spine even when it was warm). They seemed to be complaining, arguing or something. I couldn’t be sure. It sounded like a boring radio show at times (even though I couldn’t make out even a single word. it was English… I was pretty sure).
At other times they sounded mysterious as if they were going to tell me something important we all should know but didn’t and that we would never in a million years guess).
“If they’re the dead… what war are they from?” George was curious now and for a brief time forgot his wife was prone to madness. His curiosity got the better of him.
“I don’t know, honey. I don’t know where they’re from… the war, maybe Korea. They could be our dead from Korea.”
“Are they all Americans? No Gooks?”
She didn’t answer at first… and then, “I think they’re speaking English. It sounds like English.”
“But you said you couldn’t make out any words…” Gene hated it when her husband started cross-examining her like a prosecuting attorney. It was as if he was looking for a loophole in her madness. If he could do that, he could make it go away (by superior logic and control of the physical world).
“It ‘sounded’ like English… the way, you know, the words flow and stuff, the ‘music’ of it. I can’t hear a single word… too much echo but it flowed like English… you know… what they call ‘inflection’. It sounds like English. Now will you quit!”
“Okay. Okay. I love you…” She didn’t answer. She was too angry with him.
“Why do I tell you anything if you aren’t going to listen?” She stared at three metal birds hanging on the dining room wall, decorations. She wished she could fly away like them. “I think we should paint the kitchen yellow…”
He paused. “But it is yellow.”
“I mean brighter. It’s too dull. No. I mean duller. It’s too bright. It’s hurting my eyes.” He didn’t say anything…
Whenever she kissed George she thought of a sign she saw at a carnival when she was a little girl, “Bacon Kisses – ten cents.”
“Maybe they’re announcing a baseball game or something.” There was no baseball diamond on the base…
“The ox-shade tree.” it looked dead, the leaves almost all gone. pioneers passed through here (central Nevada). “You know, we could run out of water here.”
“The water’s pretty bad, that’s for sure.” He explained to her patiently how he let it settle first. Under her bed she had a flute she used to play in the high school band. She didn’t dare think about playing it. It would bring up all sorts of memories (like corpses in a flood, coming up to shore to shock and horrify). Even anti-septic crème made her sick… the smell. (and small squirming rat babies… pink and purple around the eye-lids).
“What?” Even Genies… magical beings faced the three dimensions. Why couldn’t she? But they can change shape. Dog shadow on the curtain. “Didn’t that used to be the name of a flower?”
“What did you say, honey?”
“Did you try more water… on the ox-shade tree?”
“I thought I put too much on… besides, it’s so alkaline, I wonder if it’s doing the tree any good.”
“You never did like my mother (she gave us that tree).”
“Oh I don’t know. She’s okay…”
“That’s why you’re killing that tree.”
“Now look! I want that tree to live. Why would I kill a helpless thing like a tree? I just don’t know what to do with it, give it some fertilizer, some more water… I don’t know.” for a moment she saw a purple stain in the kitchen linoleum… in the pattern of dark brown and white like in checkers.
There was a part of the house she didn’t like to go. At night it was okay with the lamp on but in the late afternoon there seemed to be a lot of dread there, a wedge of shadow caused by the hall light (it stayed on day and night because that part of the house was so dark). She could imagine awful things there, faces looking at her with no eyes. “How! Just how did they get in here.” She always kept the front door locked. The back door. Sometimes when he wasn’t careful he went out the back door to empty the garbage. They could get in then… They’d usually go home by dinner time though. You could smell it across the plaza… gravy and steak and potatoes, hamburger meat in meat loaf, fried chicken…
Her nose was very sensitive.
They shot off a few rockets from here. It was always at 2 o’ clock (which everyone would say was ‘rocket time’). They were weather rockets or something… to test the high atmosphere, temperature and barometer readings mostly, wind direction.
“What is that?”
“What?”
“That yellow thing wriggling on the horizon. It makes me angry.”
“It could be heat waves… They distort things here in the desert.” she stared at the curve of the earth, the edge, the lip, the rim… Back behind the purple hills you could fall and descend into black empty space.
“Sometimes when I’m walking, I feel as if I’ve fallen into an open manhole. I drop down and there’s nothing at all to grab.” Then she thought of the men. She has black-outs and because of severe sexual repression, she has sex with the men in the moor-pool. she likes their smell, dirty and sweaty, an oily smell. When she thought of the open manhole cover, she thought of the motor pool and the men waiting there with their scent.
“It could be heat waves… Something out there is yellow and heat waves distort it… like a car or something.”
“Did you say ‘boat’?”
“No car… or army vehicle or a motorcycle or something.”
“That must be it…”
Rocket shadows crease the earth, ripples across her desert belly. a harmless mixture of hydrogen sulfide & cherry juice. People attacked at the standard. Reptile fertile love. her eyes, they rewind. “But in all this heat.” where’s my jet-coat. Commander Cody on the Moon.
“I didn’t press it or watch it.” I’m not doing that today. the men in the grease pit. the monkey wrench. “No. I forgot.” Captain Video had to ride out the asteroid storm. If any of the big ones would have hit him. in the deep freeze. It just seems so lonely in the deep freeze. Amazing that our own past is hidden from us. you can’t breath air in outer space. invisible daughter. She thought about the house where she grew up. It was still there just as it was in her memory. “To the east? The creek there?” dead things…
The base was named after General Egbert J. Mulville who went AWOL from the Union Army. He claimed in dispatches sent back to camp he and his men were pursuing men who had bolted from camp (AWOL themselves, absent without leave). Record keeping back then was often incomplete. He figured as long as he traveled west (in the hope of reaching San Francisco where he could leave on a freighter for South America or Europe) and sent back dispatches on his pr