Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  Of course the room had really been built for her Shrine.

  Soft, corniced and baffled lighting kept harsh shadows away from everything, and discreet spots and high-hats accented and highlighted the prize pieces in his collection. He paused in the center of the room, as he always did, and allowed himself the small ritual of surveying everything, of absorbing the warm glow of the artifacts, the memorabilia, the kitsch. He could feel its radiation penetrating him like gamma particles and it was truly good. Everywhere her image and her presence assaulted the eye.

  Movie posters from every celluloid appearance; blow-ups of all the famous photographs; original paintings, sculptures and collages; rare record albums; and shelves of books. Then the rarer items like shoes and dresses from various films, autographed napkins, and even a man’s handkerchief with the imprint of her blotted lipstick. There were tapestries, souvenir glasses, ashtrays, even lamps in her image. If her spirit had inspired the creation of the object, Stanley had tracked it down and made it his own, had brought its energy into the reservoir that was the Shrine.

  Indeed, her Shrine was unique. It was a psychosexual power plant, a place where mythic lines of force converged and matrixed into something greater than the sum of its parts. He could just stand there and feel the energy of her spirit humming through the room’s atmosphere. Like high-voltage wires vibrating in the nightwinds, the place sang to him. Stanley knew it was unique in the world. No place like his Shrine. He’d created it for her as much as for himself. As long as the Shrine existed, she would never really be dead.

  Stanley didn’t merely believe that. He knew it as surely as he breathed. You couldn’t enter this hallowed place and not feel it, not know it instantly.

  In his hands, the velvet bag grew warm, began to breathe like the bellows on a respirator.

  No. That’s crazy.

  He stared at the bag and it was still. It was dead.

  Standing before the altar, he loosened the drawstrings. The first thing revealed: her hair. Even in the dim light, he was shocked to see the platinum brightness of it, undulled by time His erection began anew, his breath hitched.

  Her hair. My God, I’m actually touching her hair…

  With trembling fingers, he peeled back the rest of the velvet.

  No!

  Even as he touched the side of her head, the skin cracked, flaking away like old plaster. Stanley dropped the velvet bag to the carpet as he stared at the skull—for that’s really what it was. Despite the blonde hair still clinging to the partially preserved scalp, exposure to the air had quickly attacked the rest of her head. Lidless and eyeless, her dark sockets stared into that place where everyone will eventually look. Once pink flesh now ash-gray and crumbling even as he watched, like a delicate French pastry. His stomach lurched, his tumescence faded, as he watched the rest of her lips fracture and fall away to reveal a smile never caught by eye or camera.

  It couldn’t be her…

  The thought flared and died like a damp match. She was going to dust in his hands! Quickly he moved her to the place he’d reserved at the center of the altar, gently facing her outward before any more of her classic beauty disintegrated in his hands.

  Tears pooled in the corner of his eyes as he stared at the grim parody of what she’d once been. In that instant, he felt the entropic weight of an unfeeling universe, sensed the pointlessness of all that crawled and struggled for a few brief years of life. Everything was nothing, he thought. Nothing but a cruel joke if even a goddess eventually comes to this.

  He rubbed away the tears, his moisture mixing with the dust of her flesh to make an exotic mud upon his fingertips. The thought both chilled and excited him. What a way to finally join with her…

  Looking up from the grim cement between thumb and index, his gaze fell again upon her skull. Perhaps it was the indirect light, or the shadows cast by the high-hats, he wasn’t sure. But her face, what was left of it, had reassumed some of the glow it once held in life. Maybe it was just his imagination, but since reaching the altar, her skull seemed more acceptable, more beautiful.

  And finally Stanley could smile. It was the magic of this place, he knew now. The collective force of all her myriad totems. As long as there were memories of her, as long as there were places like his Shrine, she would never really die.

  Her skull stared at him, smiling most beguilingly, and it seemed to radiate a warmth, a perceptible glow. She was pleased with what he’d done for her, for bringing her back to life…and she wanted him.

  Stanley stepped forward, feeling his erection rise once again.

  There have been times in my checkered and storied career when I was a member of several different writers’ organizations.1 In every instance, in the fullness of time, I learned the error of my ways and quit each and every one of them. But before I did, I gave of my time and my abilities to each group in the hope it would do some good both for them and for me. One of the things the HWA had inaugurated was a series of theme anthologies for its members, with each volume being edited by a well-known writer who would select a theme that would resonate well with his or her own corpus of work. Robert R. (Rick) McCammon edited one called Under the Fang; my buddy F. Paul Wilson created an interconnected masterpiece called Freak Show, and another of my pals, Peter Straub, edited one called Ghosts. 2

  McCammon’s concept was a “shared world” book in which all the stories must take place in a world in which the “vampires do the math”—that is the eventual geometric progression that would logically occur if mortals continued to be bitten and infected and turned into vampires. In a surprisingly brief amount of time, practically the entire population of the planet would be vampires. At first reading, this sounded challenging, but you see, I have a problem with writing “traditional” stories about the more traditional horror and dark fantasy themes3 and writing the 118th variation of the whole vampire shtick4 just didn’t interest me at all. But the anthologies were paying something on the order of 15 cents/word, which translated into some serious jing, and I wanted to cop some for my own pockets. So what to do? The answer was write a vampire story that was in some way not a vampire story. Why don’t you check out this next one to see if I pulled it off.

  1 One of the worst was the National Writers Alliance, which eventually coalesced into a mouthpiece for all the usual leftist, socialist, anti-free enterprise bullshit that I just absolutely hate. When I attended a meeting in which the New York City Chairman showed up saying we had to start working harder for “writers of color,” I stood up and announced I was quitting. I told her nobody needs to know the shade of a writer’s skin; they only need know his/her thoughts; and the only colors any writers need to worry about was black print on white pages. End of that tune. Another more entertaining group was the SFWA, and perhaps the most sadly earnest bunch, the HWA.

  2 These earliest HWA anthologies received quite a bit of critical acclaim, produced some award-winning material, and in the case of Freak Show, became something of a genre classic. However, some of the later offerings were far less successful in both conception and execution. One of the most embarrassingly bad was Beneath the Tarmac, which examined a really sparkling original concept—a haunted airport built on the always-reliable Indian burial ground, and I still refuse to believe Ramsey Campbell was the progenitor of such a numbingly stupid idea. Others in the series included Whitley Strieber’s Aliens and Robert Bloch’s Psychos, about which I will have some words later.

  3 A philosophy which became the primary editorial beacon for our Borderlands anthologies—no ghosts, serial killers, vampires, serial killers, werewolves, serial killers, mummies, or serial killers need apply. They didn’t, and the stories we published were groundbreaking and generally excellent. But that’s material for another time.

  4 Hey, I got it! I’m gonna write a novel about a vampire who’s a detective!…a day care mother!…a soldier!…an astronaut!…an archeologist!…a movie star!…a hematologist! and well, you get the picture, right?

  Vandemeer ha
d tasted its heat, felt its light ripple, his flesh like boiling oil. Its memories burned in him, a phantom-fire that whipsawed across the ragged prairie of his mind. Doomed to remember pain so exquisite, he discovered a strange and asymmetrical beauty in it.

  He suspected his suffering had altered him, but in what way, he didn’t yet know. Darkness capered on the other side of the hospital room window like some strange beast. He longed to run along the nearby beach and drink in the coolness of the night. Even more than a draught of human blood, he needed the freedom, which lay beyond evening’s gate.

  “You’re looking better tonight,” said a familiar voice.

  Looking away from the half-slatted blinds, Vandemeer assayed his visitor, a man named Cordescu, who had been part of the First Generation, and who had been in charge of Project Lux since its inception. The man moved to his bedside, pretended to be checking the fittings of an IV tube, through which coursed the intimate, dark river.

  “Thanks,” said Vandemeer. “But I don’t really feel better.”

  “But the physicians say you are. So do I.”

  “What do you want, Professor?”

  “Would you rather I left you alone?”

  Vandemeer nodded, looked between the lines of the window blinds. “Soon enough.” Cordescu smiled thinly. He was tall and silvery gray, his bearing aristocratic. “Some news first.”

  Vandemeer sighed. “If you’re here to tell me they’re letting me out of bed tonight, I already know that.”

  The professor waved off his words with a casual turn of the wrist. “This is more important. You’re popular among the masses, Vandemeer. You’re the first of our kind who’s gone to Hell and come back to tell about it. You’re their hero.”

  He snorted, shook his head. “I’m a curiosity, maybe. Maybe even a freak, but no hero. What do they want with me?”

  “They want you in the Senate.”

  “Take that shit out of here, would you please…” Vandemeer wouldn’t look at him.

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I,” he said. “I’m a scientist, not a politician.”

  “You’re a public figure now.” Cordescu smirked as he paced with careful measure about the white room. “The first, of our kind to survive a complete sun-cycle. You are a fait accompli celebrity.”

  “I didn’t do it for fame.”

  Cordescu shrugged. “Nevertheless, you’re famous. You’re their hero.”

  Vandemeer shook his head, chuckled bitterly. “Some hero! For a week I was half-blind, half-crazy, and so weak I couldn’t walk! Has my adoring public been getting all the clinical details?”

  The professor, looked at him with well-dark eyes framed by his proto-typical Slavic face. “The public, as always, remains on a need-to-know basis.”

  Vandemeer looked away, letting his mind race with the moon for a moment. Although he looked no older than thirty-five, he approached his one-hundred-twentieth birthday. There was a rugged handsomeness about him—not movie-star material, but women liked him well enough. In life, in a time which now lay in the pre-Cambrian epoch of his days, he’d been an immunologist on the come, building a rep as one of the smart guys, one of Stanford’s best bets for a Nobel. But that was a long time ago. They don’t give out prizes anymore.

  “I need an answer,” said Cordescu.

  “I need lots of them.”

  The Professor’s unflappable exterior started to slip. “Is this new arrogance part of your malaise?”

  It was Vandemeer’s turn to shrug. “You’re the doctor. You tell me.”

  Cordescu’s refined edge crumbled. “Listen to me, you bastard…! I don’t care if the sun almost made you a basket-case. If you want to remain on this project, you’ll stop talking to me like that!”

  “Then how am I going to continue my research if I have to be in the Senate? Make sense, and I’ll try to do the same.”

  Cordescu scowled at him. “You idiot! Don’t you realize it’s just a figurehead position? You’re a hero to our kind. We’re entering the second century of war with the human scum, and you represent the Final Solution. Don’t you understand that?”

  Vandemeer smiled. “Perfectly…”

  “Then you will accept?”

  “Why do I have this feeling I never had a choice.”

  Cordescu smiled. “Vandemeer, please. There’re always choices…”

  He turned in his bed. His flesh still tingled, but movement was no longer the painful exercise it had been. “Get me out of this bed, and I don’t care what else you have planned for me.”

  “We’re almost ready to duplicate your experiment. Hastur has volunteered. I imagined you’d want to be there when we commenced the dosage.”

  “So thoughtful of you…especially since it is my experiment.” Vandemeer sat up straighter. For the first time since being hospitalized, he found himself regarding his work with his old fervor.

  “We’ll be running a final batch of tests nightmorrow, then Hastur will be ready.”

  “I’ll want to see the numbers before you expose him.”

  Vandemeer did not particularly care for Hastur, but he saw no need to make him suffer prematurely.

  “And so you shall.” Cordescu nodded, turned and walked to the door before looking back. “Take a walk, Van. Get your legs and your appetite back. We have history to be made.”

  Vandemeer said nothing as his Project Chief vanished beyond the threshold. As if on cue, a nurse appeared in the door. Leggy, with very strong thighs and a generous ass, she was the kind of woman he would normally desire. Oddly, he felt nothing as she performed her scheduled maintenances. Something might be wrong with him. An after-shock from the exposure? There was always the risk of some delayed reaction. The undead suddenly dead. He smiled at the ultimate cosmic prank.

  “Something funny?” she asked.

  “No, not really…”

  She shrugged as she punched some new numbers into his diagnostic console. “Are you ready to get out of that bed?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Are you going to need some help?”

  He’d needed no help. Indeed, after an hour of attentive workouts in the physical therapy ward, he was cleared for whatever he wanted to try. First he wanted to visit his lab, and then perhaps, a walk on the beach. The soft sand would be both a challenge and comfort. His laboratory was deserted. His equipment and instruments appeared to be untouched in his absence. Only the centralized, and therefore shared, laminar-flow cabinets and cryo-chambers where all the recombinant work was done showed signs of others’ presence. Vandemeer stood in the center of the room and stared into the glass-walled case where his vaccine awaited further tests. He approached the case and stared in at the vials of precious liquid. He smiled ironically. Less than two hundred milliliters represented almost twenty years of research. Would it work for anyone else, or was he merely a freak? He reached out to touch the security cabinet.

  His palm-print accessed the digital scanning lock and the glass barrier slid into a recess in the case. Picking up one of the two hundred-milliliter vials, he stared into its depths as though answers might be suspended within its colorless solution.

  What have you done to me?

  The thought rattled within him as he recalled the agony of the sun. But he’d survived, and that had been the point of it all, wasn’t it?

  The glass vial felt slippery in his cool grasp. Had to be careful. Replacing it would require years of lab-time. Slowly, he returned the container to its special shelf and palmed the lock shut. There was nothing for him to do down here for now; the laboratory no longer felt like his special and private place.

  He left the lab and exited the building, walking slowly and carefully down to the edge of the continent. Even in summer, the nights on this part of California’s coast were bracingly cool. Vandemeer stood on the beach listening to the endless symphony of the sea. Breakers on the rock jetties, gulls screaming out their hunger, the whisper of receding tides. Behind him, the Point Lobos Insta
llation loomed above the cliffs like a gathering of featureless tombstones in pale moonlight. Against the blue-black music of the spheres and the sea, the buildings seemed obscene to him. As a signature of humankind’s arrogance, the Installation had been ugly enough, but the presence of his own breed had perhaps further corrupted the beauty of the place.

  Turning his back on the cliffs, he regarded the ocean and its magic as if seeing it for the first time. He walked without measuring time or distance, or even his thoughts. As he walked along the water’s edge, entering a small cove, he noticed an oddity about the place. Perhaps it was the underwater configuration of the shoreline, or maybe a lack of the under-tow, he could not know for certain. But as the tide retreated, the wet sand became littered with the casual debris of life.

  Creatures, once cast out, that could not return whose presence created a narrow band of sand where death scurried boldly. Even as he approached the place, gulls swooped down to feast among the dead and dying organisms of the sea. The screams of the birds were a final alarm, a final solution.

  It made Vandemeer think of the unpredictability of the sea and of all living things. And from such thoughts, he thought of his own non-life. The sea, wellspring of life, brought him to that grim awareness. Even though he was undead, but not living, he remembered what it had been like.

  To be alive.

  It burst out of him in an instant of soul-pain, exploding as the primordial galaxies had done, expanding into endless night.

  It was a sensation, a memory, an emotion not felt in an achingly long time. Vandemeer wasn’t sure he’d like it, but he’d recognized it for what it was, and could at least accept it as genuine.