Part of that rustling, though, had to be from the restless skeletal forms secreted within the ash-colored flesh. In some places, white spines had punched through the outer membrane, while elsewhere the calcified growths had emerged from the jelly entirely, to perch atop the coils and spasm in what looked like feverish dances.
“There are Those Above,” said one of the Stokes, “and Those Below. Rising from the dark places…not so much places within our world, as portals to their world. A tide rising a little bit higher every day.”
“When the two forces meet, like great hands coming together,” said the other brother rapturously, “then we will know the true God.”
Here and there the tapered end of a fat tubular limb had wound itself around a pillar, as if the seemingly infinite mass were using these to hoist itself up from below.
The party of men stood on a stone platform, elevated like a little cliff above this ponderously churning expanse. Hind stood with hot tears streaming down his cheeks, like the blood that had flowed down Tweed’s face. He even wondered if what he felt on his skin was blood, not water, as his blasted eyes took in this scene. He had stopped struggling in the grip of the constables. He had quit ranting. In the face of this revelation, all the strength had gone out of him. The last spark of rebellion.
It wasn’t acceptance, however. It wasn’t a hope for conversion. He did not see the hands of God coming together to cup his world between them like a precious egg. He saw two hands coming together to crush that egg out of existence.
If he had any hope at all now, it was that he and his family would not become one with this deity and thus live on in a unified, transfigured state. His hope was that existence would indeed end for them, utterly.
And so it was, that when the constables urged him to walk forward between them – toward the edge of the stone platform – he walked along freely, without protest and without prayer.
THE INDIVIDUAL IN QUESTION
The individual in question gave me his consent to interview him, regarding tonight’s occurrences, in the hotel room that he believes is his own. He cannot say with absolute certainty that it is in fact the room he rented, but he found the door left open when he returned from the event. He reports that the door to the next room was also standing partly open, and in that room as he passed it he heard a woman apparently speaking on the phone in a very agitated manner, while sobbing.
The subject of my interview relates that he feels it is surprising enough that he was able to locate his hotel at all, considering the state he was in, if this is indeed the same hotel in which he rented a room. There are several hotels in the vicinity of the outdoor activity or performance he attended, though he can’t now recall what the nature of that activity or performance was. He seems to feel it was a large-scale magic act or fireworks display gone awry, and vaguely recollects a huge shape looming out of a strobe-lit fog that put him in mind of the brontosaurus balloon named Dino that as a child in the 1960s he looked forward to seeing on TV during the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. He also references a giant floating pig he once saw at a concert by the music group Pink Floyd, but he stresses the shape in question was not a brontosaurus or pig.
As I interview the person I’m facing it’s hard to believe he can actually see me, and yet he moves his head to follow me as if maintaining eye contact. Brimming from both his eye sockets are thick clusters of long crystals like quartz, but black like obsidian. The whole of my subject’s head, face, and hands appears to be badly burned, with all traces of hair gone from his head, all his exposed skin being charred black and yet also with a strangely metallic aspect, giving his skin the effect of crumpled aluminum foil blackened by fire. Strangely, his clothing is entirely undamaged. The interviewee recounts that as he was ascending to this floor in the elevator, another hotel guest who was attending the same convention that the subject believes he was attending – though he cannot at present confirm that he was in this city for that purpose – asked the interviewee, “So what are you supposed to be?”
To which my subject replied, “I’m supposed to be a man.”
Given the unknown nature of the injuries both physical and psychological sustained by the interviewee in the course of tonight’s events, he cannot offer an opinion on his chances for recovery. On a positive note, however, he reports that he is not in any pain, only experiencing a profound disorientation. But even this he says is more in the nature of a stunned euphoria than involving any degree of anxiety. Though he can’t explain why this might be so, he says that he feels he is now perhaps “better configured for the future.”
I’m not sure I share his sentiments, myself – though as I turn away from the wretched figure in the bathroom mirror, my interview with the individual in question completed, I am surprised that I too can see perfectly well through the black crystals that have sprouted where I once had eyes.
In fact, I feel I can see too well.
As if from a vantage point in space, I see a reconfigured Earth, in some unknown future epoch, crumpled like a ball of aluminum foil blackened by fire.
THE RED MACHINE
Leslie was a stripper. A commercial stripper, to be more precise – as opposed to a social stripper. The printing company for which she'd been working for three and a half years divided its work thus: social work meant personal stationery, wedding or party invitations, birth announcements and the like...commercial work being business letterheads and envelopes, and business cards. As a stripper, she "stripped" the negatives from which the plates would be made for the presses; that is, she positioned the negatives on graph-lined sheets of paper with the use of a light table. She had once been a plate burner, the one who transferred the negative's image onto the plate, but she had grown restless and her supervisor had made her a stripper to "make better use of her artistic talents."
Positioning negatives on yellow paper sheets and cutting out the areas to be exposed with an X-Acto knife was little more artistic to Leslie than would be stuffing the red pimento in olives. She wondered if her boss really believed that she felt artistically fulfilled simply because she occasionally had to use a cheap watercolor brush to dab opaque brown paint on the scratches and dust spots on the negatives.
Her boss, who acted as though he were encouraging her talent, was the one who had told her not to pin so many of her drawings on her section of the cork bulletin board which entirely encircled the commercial stripping room. Some people had found the cartoons offensive, he explained a little bashfully – naturally he himself admired her talent. She had taken everything down the first time, but slowly new ones returned in their place, finally in greater profusion. One series, though drawn in black pen, utilized a lot of red marker blood. Her boss asked her again to refrain...couldn't she just hang one picture, and change that from time to time? People would think all she did was draw instead of work, he said (the evidence of her rate sheet aside). She did hang only one picture. For Thanksgiving she drew a rotting turkey carcass buzzing with flies, with the caption, "What do you want for meat – white, dark, or green?" A white sheet of paper hung from the bulletin board, with the words "Don't Look" on it. If flipped open it revealed the bloody series of sardonic cartoons. Those easily offended didn't have to look if they didn't want to, did they?
Anyway, other strippers displayed the photos of their insipidly grinning boyfriends, of their cars (!), sexy postcards from vacation cruises, calendars of oiled tanned hunks. Leslie found these things offensive, but she didn't try forcing her sense of aesthetics and values onto others. She had as much right to express herself as they, she felt.
A lot of people did compliment her on her drawings. "What are you doing working here?" had been the words most directed to her over the past three and a half years. Followed closely, however – with chuckles and wagging heads – by something like, "You're sick."
"What do you call that, H. R. Giger meets Georgia O'Keefe?" said Aileen.
Leslie had sent away for the cattle skull from a mail order house speciali
zing in replica weapons and authentic war memorabilia. Once painted a fake bleached white, it was now a glossy inner sea shell pink, resting on newspapers spread on Leslie's work table. The entire surface of the skull, before painting, had been covered with plastic pieces snipped from tank and car models, little oddly shaped pieces of metal she'd collected, and sanded chicken bones, all super-glued in place. Only the horns were a glossy black, and smooth.
"I call it Icon...and I've never seen anything like it," Leslie mumbled, folding clothes.
Aileen, tea in hand, smirked. "Oh, come on, Les. I know how much you love Giger and O'Keefe."
"Everything resembles something. Everything's been done before. There are only new approaches and combinations, and I've never seen a combination just like this before."
"Well, I'm your sister – I can trace it pretty easily. I mean, it's good...I can see a lot of work went into it. But what does it do? You're obviously just out to shock people again. Shock can be good, but shock can really put people off. Have you ever thought of seduction instead?" Aileen was, of course, referring to the approach of her own art. She was now exhibiting fourteen of her erotic acrylics at one of the galleries along Boston's Newbury Street. She'd invited Leslie to the opening night party but she'd declined, reminding Aileen that she worked second shift. "You should really try something other than shocking people. I swear you want revenge instead of attention."
"It has meaning," Leslie said, her back to Aileen as she slid open a bureau drawer. "It's an updated tribal icon, a modern...interpretation of ancient magic. It has mythic resonance."
Aileen laughed hard, almost sloshing tea to the floor. "Did you rehearse that line in an imaginary talk show in your head? Les, that thing is just another version of that fetus in the fridge." Aileen was referring to a mutant embryo Leslie had made of clay painted over with latex rubber she'd ordered from a theatrical supply house, the sculpture kept in an old pickle jar in the refrigerator. It was labeled Unwanted Child and Leslie had been tempted to leave it in the refrigerator at work. She considered defending the meaning of that piece, but remembering her temptation to bring it to work, Leslie wondered, as she often did, if her sister were a little – or a lot – correct.
All of the clothes Leslie folded away in the drawer were white. She hadn't worn so much as a colored pair of panties for eight months now, and had worn primarily white for months before that. Leslie expected Aileen to comment on this at any minute, with the drawers opening under her nose, looking as if they were full of nurse's uniforms. She didn't. What could she say, anyway, Leslie thought. All Aileen had been wearing for the past year, it seemed, like all the people down on Newbury Street, was black.
Aileen was no prettier, really...even Leslie had to admit. Bustier, a rounder bottom and hips, but Aileen had professed to envy Leslie's slenderness instead. They both were very pale and clear-complexioned, and both had striking acetylene blue eyes, but Aileen had a tangled mass of black curls (she joked to Leslie she was trying to look Jewish) and Leslie had a choppy, boyishly short cut, dyed a bright blond. She turned heads, particularly back in summer in her white dresses, low cut and with thin shoulder straps, for it seemed the only real color on her was her pale pink lips and the startling blue of her eyes.
Even now at work men eyed her constantly but none had asked her out for a long time. She'd reluctantly accepted a few first dates, but no seconds. One pressman had given her flowers at work in front of everyone on the night of their first date. Now he no longer even talked to her. Sometimes Leslie felt that she radiated too strongly, in white, with her dyed hair, would have liked to hide in black, trap light instead. But she couldn't. Not while Aileen had claimed it.
"What's that, the head of a robot minotaur?" Jason said, smiling, having entered Leslie's spare bedroom with a coffee in hand. He'd been looking through books on the coffee table; one on medical curiosities and one on supposedly true cases of ghosts, hauntings and poltergeists. The kind of books Aileen said Leslie left out in the open to shock people. Leslie had replied that she liked to shock herself, and – yes – others too. Shock them awake. Shock them to feel.
"A futuristic...shaman's icon," Aileen said, trying to mock Leslie's explanation but coming up short. "She calls it Icon."
"You have some imagination, Les. How long did it take you to do this?"
"I really don't know...I did it over a period of three weeks."
"You gonna hang it up in the house?"
"Maybe. In the kitchen.”
"Naturally," said Aileen. "I'm glad I live downstairs." Three floors; two complete apartments plus a large attic and the basement. They rented from their maternal grandmother, who lived across the street. Aileen had claimed half of the bright attic, once a third apartment, as her studio; the rest was their mutual storage area. Leslie had the cellar. She was quite content with this arrangement.
"I think Leslie's apartment is fascinating. She has a unique touch."
"Jason, gluing dried-up dog turds on the walls would be a unique touch as well...but unique isn't always most important. Mood, feeling, intent...purpose. Much more meaningful. Les has the talent, but I'm trying to help guide her into more meaningful work instead of trying to assail people. H. R. Giger's stuff is unique too but it's just repetitious ugliness. He's wasting his talent, too."
"Many people like his stuff, and I like your sister's." Jason smiled at Leslie.
"Thank you." She smiled back, returned to her folding.
She loved Jason.
She loved her sister. She felt guilty whenever she thought how she'd love to trade with Aileen. She'd take Jason, and Aileen could have their father, who had molested Leslie, the quieter, meeker of the two girls...the vulnerable one...from the age of ten until she was fifteen, when her mother found out and divorced him. Leslie felt guilty that she was somewhat resentful that Aileen had never had to go through what she had – had never once been touched. It was almost as if Aileen and their father had betrayed her together, in a conspiracy to keep her down.
There was a going-away party for one of the paste-up girls at work. The crew was dwindling; the pay was bad. Burger King paid more to start. Second shift now had only one full-time pressman on the social line. Leslie felt like she'd been there for a decade. She felt left behind, and signed the going away card: "Good luck – Lucky! Leslie." Once she would have drawn in a quick little sketch, but she hardly drew anything at work anymore.
"Ah, okay, we're gonna have break in a little while so everybody should go back now, huh?" said the social stripping group leader, who was twenty. At twenty-four, Leslie was the oldest person in the prep department. She returned to commercial stripping. She sat in there alone.
A half hour later the commercial group leader, who was twenty-one, returned from wherever and settled down to go through an Avon catalog. Leslie developed a headache from staring into the light table. She excused herself, went to the small nonsmoking break room to down her aspirins with a cup of water.
The social group leader was still sitting in the break room with the girl who was leaving and the other paste-up girl, an hour since she'd told everyone to return to work. Another social stripper, a friend of the group leader, was using the pay phone.
She could sense the tension of the group leader, Sharon, at having been discovered. A few months ago Leslie had taken thirty extra minutes after a fifteen minute break on a slow night, and her group leader had burst into the caf and yelled at her in front of the others in there to go back to work. The next day, with the prep supervisor's blessings, both group leaders called her into the office to give her a verbal warning.
When she returned to work, there was a greater pile of negs on her desk, magically, and her group leader was gone; she'd been paged on the intercom to come down to a press where the operator, a burly handsome flirt who even flirted with Leslie, would fill the group
leader in nightly on the soaps he videotaped for when he came home. He spoke of the soap opera characters with the same authority with which he
spoke of sports stars and hokey wrestlers.
The other commercial stripper, a twenty-year-old male friend of Sharon's who made three dollars an hour more than Leslie, had vanished into the camera room to chat with the camera operator...long ago.
Leslie complained of these things to her supervisor on first shift, though it was easier to do it in letters she left him. He had told Leslie during their last meeting, after she had started to tremble and raise her voice, that her bad attitude might affect her raise potential and her employment.
He'd probably thought she was close to tears that time. She wasn't. She was close to screaming at him. It was fury that had shaken her.
Leslie blew dust motes off the small crystal ball on the table in her grandmother's dark, cozy study with its built-in shelves of musty books. It was a house the Addams Family wouldn't live in, according to Aileen. Aileen often told their grandmother that one day she was going to rent a dumpster and just toss everything out for her. "Oh no you won't," said their grandmother, not amused by these teasing threats.
"Why don't you take that home with you, honey?" The grandmother, a mummy-like wizened gnome, lowered her body into a chair opposite Leslie.
"The ball? I bought it for you, Nana – as a present."
The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Page 19