He reached out and lightly ran his fingers along the petrified figure’s forearm, bared by the rolled up sleeve of its mock shirt. The young man’s body was as smooth and glossy and dead as the face of a granite gravestone.
A thin cry started up like a teakettle’s whistle as its water begins to steam. It was distant but growing louder and seemingly closer like an approaching train. He drew his hand back from the arm of the resin mannequin and gooseflesh pebbled up all over his own arms and still the wail grew louder and closer and he was certain it was coming from that placid lucent face with its unmoving lips held in a possible half smile.
An explosive boom caused the boards under his feet to tremble or was that only the startled spasm of his heart? Another heavy boom followed and another with the terrible mounting howl stringing these detonations together.
He realized this sustained shriek was not coming from the frozen figure but, along with those evenly spaced out reverberating thuds, from downstairs instead.
He turned from the solid yet empty effigy, which was like a tainted window with no particular view, and crept toward a doorway in the opposite wall beyond the last of the clicker machines there, for above it was a sign reading EXIT except someone had spray-painted a question mark after the T.
The door was off its hinges and he went down the further of the building’s two stairwells with his hatchet held at the ready. The pounding went on unabated but sometimes the wailing dipped and almost stopped only to ascend to full power again as the screamer drew new air into their lungs.
Having reached the ground floor he stuck his head out a little into the central corridor and determined the screaming/pounding came from a good distance further along. So he slipped into the long gloomy hallway and started creeping in that direction with his heartbeat all but suspended lest the screamer hear it nearing like footsteps.
He was past the front door/reception area and the office section when he guessed or intuited where the booms that sent vibrations skittering along his nerves, like rhythmic blows against a gong, were coming from. He didn’t know if he could bring himself to open that door which upon his last visit here he himself had closed.
He made his way slowly, hesitant and uncertain, wondering if he should continue on past the shut door and out of the building and up out of the crater to his waiting car. As he was contemplating this, torn between trepidation and curiosity in equal immensity, the noises abruptly ceased and the contrasting silence caused him to freeze in his tracks and his heart to stagger out of its pattern.
Should he go to the door or past the door and had the scream and thumps been more terrifying or was this sudden absolute quiet even worse?
Ultimately he had to give in to his curiosity, the curiosity that had brought him to this desolate location in the first place, the curiosity that was all that really motivated and sustained him now.
The door’s tongue was not engaged so he pushed it open with his forearm wide enough to be able to see inside.
Of the great sphere of silk that had bulged from the ceiling like a distended belly now only burst tatters remained, hanging down in shredded gauzy curtains. Under these remnants like the torn and faded flags of extinct countries lay a figure curled on the bare floor almost in a fetal position. It was the nude body of a woman. Not far from her in a corner lay a crumpled and discarded garment. He shifted closer to this and knelt down to pick it up and it was like a slippery membrane in his hands edged in intricate web work. The red silk and lace of a nightie. Absently, he shoved it into his pocket in a ball and studied the woman again.
She lay facing away from him and she was petrified like a figure that had been molded in plaster after having been buried under volcanic ash ages ago except that she was beautifully crystallized in honey-colored matter marred by not even a bubble within, as far as he could tell. Though her long hair, spread so realistically onto the floor around her head, was also honey-colored he imagined that if she were an actual human being that thick curly hair would be dark and fragrant with life.
He had expected to find his mysteriously tormented neighbor here and at first in a way he thought he had but the figure now reminded him more of a woman he had known and loved many years ago as if in another life. Her identity dodged and blurred in his mind and he knelt down to reach out and touch her as if that might help remind him. He ran his hand along the bare curve of her waist, up the slope of her hip and it came to rest on the smooth globe of a buttock clear as a scryer’s crystal ball. He was becoming aroused and wondered whether the orifices and channels of her body had been reproduced as well but he knew that would be like kissing a mirror for want of soft lips.
He edged closer to the figure to look down at her face reposing in profile but as he did this his gaze slid down her body instead and for the first time he noticed her interior was not empty after all. A dark mass was lodged inside her low in her body and hard to make out in this windowless room with only pale light misting in from the corridor without. She was too hardened for him to roll her over but he leaned in closer still and moved to the side a bit so his body wouldn’t block the anemic light, and though her belly was only sensually rounded and not gravidly swollen he saw that this dark mass was in the shape of a child curled inside her as if to replicate her own position.
No sooner had he recognized the shadowy outline in her abdomen for what it was than he thought he saw it move, kicking out with both of its feet at once as if to pound them against the constraining wall of her womb. At the sight of this there was an inaudible boom in his mind – a realization. The child was alive within this ossified form, with no chance of being delivered. Surely it would suffocate and die trapped within her.
A sense of desperate urgency came over him. He had to rescue the child, set it free.
He still gripped the heavy little cobbler’s hatchet in his fist by its stubby metal handle and he raised it above his head. Brought it down. It gouged the side of the woman’s body between where her ribcage and pelvis would have been had she possessed bones inside her. He hacked at her in the same place again then again, creating new gouges and deepening existent ones. This activity seemed to trigger the child into kicking out again in whatever space it occupied in that body which glistened like hard butterscotch candy.
With more blows, the hatchet almost slipping out of his hand several time as his palm became sweaty, fine cracks began spreading out from the area he was chewing into. Then, a deep cleft appeared and a large fragment of the woman’s waist betrayed that it was loose. Seeing this, he worked it from both angles as if chopping a wedge to fell a tree and then he was able to lever the edge of the blade under the chunk and pry it free to clatter on the floor. He was that much closer to the shadow baby’s womb.
Seeing his success with the first sizable piece he continued in the same manner, hacking in from opposing angles and prying out more chunks with the blade or sore fingers, widening and deepening the wound but mindful of the vulnerability of the baby within.
Finally he shattered his way into the hollow core wherein the baby lay on its side. A few shards and jagged pebbles fell onto the child and he was just ready to toss his hatchet aside and reach in to sweep the debris from its body and lift it out into his arms and perhaps take it home for he and his wife to raise as their own when he saw the black shape of the child break up into myriad tiny components that came swarming up out of the exposed hollow.
He cried out and fell onto his rump and then he was scuttling backwards with his hands as the thousands of spiders that had tightly amassed themselves inside the effigy’s belly swept toward him in a black wave.
He didn’t recall leaving the forsaken boot factory or climbing the basin’s slope or crossing the road and ascending his steeply inclined driveway or trudging up the wooden steps to his second floor apartment. He came to himself standing at his kitchen sink looking out the window above it at the parking lot below. He realized he must have left his car parked by the side of the road across the street because he didn�
��t see it down there. As his wife had pointed out, the car of the young woman downstairs had been missing for a while now and even his other two neighbors weren’t home from work yet apparently. And though his wife was usually home before him making dinner she must have gone out on an errand because he didn’t hear her moving around anywhere in the apartment behind him and her car too was absent from the parking lot. The lot was completely desolate.
That was okay though. He liked having this place all to himself.
His feet were numb and if he directed his consciousness toward them, without taking his gaze off the parking lot, he couldn’t sense where they contacted the floor beneath them, as if he either floated above the floor or was one with its solidity. His feet might as well have been wooden lasts inside his shoes.
As if a paralyzing venom were at work within him, a subtle wave of feeling or rather a negation of feeling was spreading up his ankles and into his calves, as his nethermost cells one by one seemed to fade out like stars in morning’s firmament. As each cell crystallized he became that much more deadened and hence that much more at peace like one who feels the dark cloak of sleep lowering over them.
He watched several large balls of spider silk race and bounce across the parking lot in a breeze like tumbleweeds and his only regret as he became rooted there, and so emptily transparent that the world could be observed through his absence, was that the view below him was not the green overgrown back yard of his sadly lost house which had been, for a flicker of time, his little piece of the universe.
THE PROSTHESIS
He should be proud of himself, his supervisor had assured Thomas, because he was performing an important service for people.
He was no physician or therapist, and yet he and every other employee of Gale Therapeutic Appliances no matter their function was part of a healing process. Other departments than his created prosthetic arms and legs for victims of mishap, and upon his initial interview he had toured the entire plant and viewed these processes. He had seen yet other departments where glass eyes were produced, or portions of faces lost to accident or disease. A nose, a whole upper section of face or perhaps a bottom jaw, these facial appliances held in place with magnets.
The products his own department fashioned were similar, and yet different. His was an especially, perhaps even more important function, his immediate supervisor had told him with pride upon that first tour through the plant six months earlier. The healing process they were a part of, in their department, was purely psychological rather than physical – and wasn’t emotional suffering worse even than somatic pain?
What their particular customers experienced, Thomas’s supervisor explained in words that no doubt came from promotional literature, was a “phantom pain of the psyche.”
“Did you hear about Lucinda?” Bao asked him during a lull in activity. She was smiling, which meant it couldn’t be pleasant, as he knew Bao disliked Lucinda. She disliked all her female coworkers, but seemed to like chatting with him. Bao was short and thickset, with a broad ruddy face and long slitted eyes; she had once told him the name of her home country but he’d forgotten it and hadn’t recognized it anyway. Somewhere small and obscure on the border of somewhere big and desolate.
She left a space hanging open for him so he obliged her and asked, “No, what?”
Bao whispered, “She got fired for smuggling out a wee-wee!”
“Oh no,” Thomas said. He was going to ask what Lucinda had needed that for, but stopped himself.
“Isn’t that stupid? She could buy herself a toy for next to nothing – it’s like getting fired for stealing paperclips.” Bao supplied the answer to the question he had nearly asked. “But you know, her husband died in that accident and all, so I guess she’s lonely.” Instead of sounding sympathetic, however, Bao snorted a little laugh.
Having been divorced for a few years now, Thomas experienced an unpleasant, sickly craving for Bao when she was near him. It was an unsolicited kind of desire. She was sufficiently exotic to stir him, with her scissor-cut eyes and long frizzy-black hair – and the fecund pendulous breasts that pushed out the front of her white lab coat – but she smelled of hot plastic when she was close to him. She’d once told him that she had six children, but her husband had recently left her for a younger woman. Her pain, anger and loneliness were as plain as the smell of hot plastic.
At the time Bao had revealed this personal information to him, she had said, “Some people have too many children, and some people don’t have any.” This comment was in regard to the work they performed in their particular department. “Nothing is balanced, is it?”
Knowing that Bao hadn’t liked Lucinda, Thomas didn’t want to sound too concerned for her, but nevertheless he mused, “It’s like when Paul got fired for stealing those two breasts.” Their coworker Paul had been the quality control inspector for the department that created artificial breasts for women who had undergone mastectomies.
“Oh, poor Paul,” Bao said, sympathetic because she had liked flirting with Paul, too, “that was different. You didn’t hear? He lived with his mom and she had cancer.”
“Did she lose her breasts?” Thomas asked, confused.
“No – she died. He lost all of her.”
The baby was still warm in Thomas’s hands as he used scissors to trim away the irregular fringe along its seams. They called this extra plastic, squeezed out where the two halves of the mold fit together, “flash.” The baby was heavy, solid, though it wasn’t one of the more expensive models with the articulated steel skeletons inside. Its limbs jiggled a little as he handled the doll. But the employees were sternly instructed never to use the word “doll.” It was “prosthetic infants” they produced in their department – for women who had lost their own babies to illness, accident, or Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. They were a therapeutic product and many insurance companies covered their expense. They might only be utilized for a short while, after which the mothers might donate their baby to another needy mother, though Thomas had heard of women who had cared for their prosthesis – even walking it in the park in a stroller – for decades.
As he clipped the seam that ran over the top of the infant’s as yet hairless, healthy pink head with its closed eyes and peaceful smile, he heard Bao speaking to the babies at the end of the line where she inspected them. He glanced over at her. She wasn’t cooing baby talk to the infants, however, but grumbling such comments as, “You’re an especially ugly one, aren’t you?” He saw her give the baby she held a good loud smack on its jiggly bottom before she tossed it through the air into a big bin full of babies waiting to be pushed out into the packaging room before they went on to the shipping department or the warehouse.
“Hey, Thomas,” a voice behind him said. He recognized it as belonging to his coworker David, a muscular black man, and turned toward him. He saw that David had acquired a big pink pregnant belly. The black man was grinning.
Thomas smiled, but in a low voice advised, “Be careful Bao doesn’t see you fooling around with that stuff or she might say something to Derek.”
“Do you think Bao was bigger than this when she had her six kids?” David said, setting the plastic belly aside. Women who had suffered miscarriages and had never even had the chance to see their baby come into the world were said to benefit from wearing such a prosthesis – sometimes for a few months. Sometimes for years. David went on, “I think the bitch carried all six babies in one litter.”
“Shh, David,” Thomas warned.
David picked up the next tiny golem Thomas needed to trim and turned it over in his big hands. In a more serious tone he observed, “It must be a horrible thing to go through, losing a baby – I don’t want to even think about what it would be like if I lost my son. He’s my whole life.”
“I know what you mean,” Thomas said. He looked up at David with a worried eye as his friend began trimming the baby he held. David was trying to help him stay caught up but Thomas felt his coworker was a bit careless when he tri
mmed, leaving too much flash here but snipping into the flesh a little bit there. While observing him, Thomas added almost unconsciously, “I’ve always mourned somebody I never even knew.”
“How’s that?”
“I was supposed to be a twin, but my brother was stillborn.”
David reacted with a pained expression. “Really? Oh wow, man.”
“We were going to be Thomas and Mason. I guess I’m the one who got to be Thomas. But it could just as easily have been him.”
Thomas walked home every evening from Gale Therapeutic Appliances, the tenement building that housed his flat being only fifteen minutes away on foot.
He carried a thick plastic shopping bag, black with the name of a clothing store in gold lettering. He had done his best not to look over his shoulder nervously while he was still close to his place of employment, but it was out of sight now and he relaxed somewhat. He had made sure to remain in the restroom for a good fifteen minutes after clock-out time, so that when he finally emerged the parking lot was all but empty. Earlier, as always, he had declined offers of a ride home from both David and Bao.
Normally he enjoyed the walk, but as autumn deepened the days were growing more chilly – and on top of that, this evening it was beginning to drizzle. From past experience Thomas was prepared for this eventuality, however, and carried a small plastic flashlight in his coat pocket. He left the sidewalk and approached a deceased brick factory with its arched windows boarded up and covered in menacing black graffiti like hordes of giant insects. Since he had been a boy most of the industries in his hometown of Gosston had closed down – largely for economic reasons, but there had also been chemical spills, gas explosions, fires. Gosston seemed to have more than its share of accidents, and a disproportionate number of citizens with artificial limbs, and that might well have had something to do with the fact that Gale Therapeutic Appliances, at least, continued to thrive.
The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Page 7