The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  "Is that where I got that?"

  "Yes, from me, last year, for Christmas."

  "Oh...oh. Well, why don't you take it now? Your sister will just come in and steal it anyway."

  "Nana, don't you let her scare you with that crap – she's just teasing you."

  "She's come in here and stolen from me many times already – she took my best cactus book, she took my old clock and put some crummy cheap one in its place. She thinks I don't notice. Where did she get a key? Does she have one? I lock up every night." The grandmother looked bewildered. "I've heard her a couple times but by the time I get downstairs she's gone."

  Leslie shivered with a nervous chill, her sympathy for her grandmother such that for a moment she almost believed someone was creeping through this house late in the night. She knew, however, that Aileen never sneaked in here or stole anything. Her grandmother was senile. And she'd always been a pack rat, a collector, very possessive of her heaps of junk treasure, the antiques, the boxes of old movie magazines, Life magazines with Monroe and JFK on the covers. "Anal retentive," according to Aileen, in Freud's lingo. "Won't part with her shit."

  "She won't steal the ball, Nana. Just keep it."

  "Did I tell you I spoke to Eddy in it one night?"

  "Yes." Another shiver.

  "He said he was happy and he was getting a big party ready for me soon. I saw his face in it. If she ever tries to take that crystal and put a cheap fake in its place she'll hear from me...I haven't said anything yet but I'm about to blow my top at her, your sister. She stole my cactus book and my favorite old clock and put a cheap plastic one up there instead. I can tell the difference."

  "Have you used the ball lately, Nana?"

  "Oh no, I can't right now...I'm too tired and distracted all the time. I can't concentrate."

  "I wish I could watch you contact Grand-dad."

  "I have to be alone for that, honey. Remember when you were a little girl and your mother would leave you over here for the day, and we'd watch TV, and I'd show you the tarot cards?"

  "And you taught me to read palms."

  "And we used the ouija board, and the pendulum. Nothing much ever happened to me when someone else did it with me, but when I was alone I got through clear. I spoke to that Mr. Johnson all those times. It's been a long while since I talked to him, but Eddy said he'll be at the party. You have to be alone and concentrate but I can't anymore. You should take the ball and try it, honey. You'll do it some day. It doesn't matter how. Ouija board, séance, crystal, whatever. It's just a medium. Something you focus on to get your power concentrated. Better than having nothing to focus on. It could be a shoe, as long as you focused enough on it."

  Leslie laughed. She adored this woman. She was so frightened leaving her alone as often as she did, but she tried to drop in at least for an hour every day. Her mother lived in Vermont with her new husband, and Aileen seldom crossed the street to this house directly opposite the one the two sisters shared.

  "I'd like to try to develop my psychic abilities like that, communicate with the other side, foresee the future...but it's scary, too."

  "Don't be scared; you can control it. You just have to concentrate. Take the ball and keep it, honey, I can't use it anymore. I'm going to die soon anyway...Eddy told me."

  "Nana, don't say that. You're doing okay."

  "Well take it. I want you to have it. I can't use it. I don't even know where I got it, but I want you to have it before your sister sneaks in here and steals it."

  Leslie took the crystal sphere and its little ebony stand. She was surprised. Her grandmother was indeed possessive of her possessions and rarely parted with so much as a single magazine.

  "Hey, no drawing in here," joked Rita, the commercial stripping group leader, leaving fresh folders of negs on Leslie's side table. She leaned over Leslie's shoulder. "What is it? A machine?"

  "I guess so. An art project I thought of. An industrial sculpture."

  "What does it do? Play movies?" There was a TV screen in the machine.

  "I thought of putting a TV in there hooked up to a VCR and have it play tapes I'd make with a rented camera."

  "Oh-kay," Rita chuckled, wagging her head. She went back to her own light table. "But you'd better not turn yourself into a giant fly with it." She laughed.

  "I'll try not to." Leslie set her sketch aside. She hadn't drawn for weeks and Rita had gone from the room for a half hour, chatting in paste-up, but of course she had to walk in and catch her just then. Maybe she'd tell their supervisor tomorrow. Let her, Leslie thought.

  Injustice ate at Leslie. Favoritism. Lack of integrity. Laziness and apathy. It all abounded here. Pressmen lounged talking, threw paper balls at each other, chased each other with spray water bottles. The supervisors lounged around talking about golf and skiing for hours. Leslie didn't want to see them all become mindless robots, hardworking ants. But she was hardworking while still remaining a strong individual.

  Her individuality was all. They must never defeat that. Never break her spirit. To attempt that would be no different than an attempt to murder her.

  But weren't they trying? Weren't they?

  The rickety steps creaked, the entire bottom half of the staircase shifted as Leslie crept down to the basement with a dead black and white TV in her arms, a broken pre-ghetto blaster tape recorder on top of that, its circuits exposed and wires dangling out from an earlier project. She set these materials down amidst her growing collection. There were oddly shaped pieces of packing styrofoam from her new TV and VCR, and from Aileen's. More from her microwave. Smaller strips, a whole trash bag full, from the boxes of metal press plates at work. Two toasters, hubcaps, rain gutters, a toaster oven, a heavy old style blender, a rusty muffler and three old radios. She had a large box filled with sheets of cardboard, filed according to size, most of it from work.

  Still, the base structure was not yet decided on and at this point she could only accumulate more potential components. The entire machine needn't be designed first – she'd rather improvise, let it unfold of its own will under her hands – but she needed that foundation. The meager materials she possessed failed her vision, for one thing. She saw the machine as filling the entire back wall of the basement where now there was sooty webbed stone, and the machine would be metal, probably a glossy obsidian black, with chrome-painted wheels and levers, dials and buttons, glass transformers and wood and leather like some old fashioned conception of a mad scientist's device. Something from Frankenstein's lab. A console from the spacecraft of a 50s B-movie. Something from the Industrial Age. All of these things, ominous and heavy, the foundation in welded metal plates. But she didn't know how to weld. And where would she get large plates of metal?

  There was a bookcase-like utility shelf unit of metal in the shed adjacent to the house, upstairs. Maybe that. A removed refrigerator door leaned in there, too. She could solder, if not weld. She was good with tools. But she knew a lot of her creation was going to have to be wood. She would just have to cover it with extra coats of thick enamel paint to hide the grain, or cover the wood first in linoleum tiles. She had a stack of those.

  Stove pipes, an air-conditioner, a box of car parts. She had enough to work with. She needed that basic design.

  It would help, also, if she knew what the "purpose," as Aileen would say, of the sculpture was. The purpose of the machine.

  Industrial Shrine, she thought, in keeping with the idea of her last project, the pink cow skull. Some updated primal or mythical concept.

  If only her grandmother would let her go through her husband's great collection of tools, auto parts, pipes and building materials in her cellar. Leslie's grandfather had been as much of a pack rat in his way as his wife. Again Leslie distracted herself from the challenge of the design by thinking of the components and small detail. She hadn't had to create the foundation for the cow skull.

  Thinking of her grandmother, Leslie suddenly realized the purpose of her machine.

  It would be a modern
-age focus for psychic energy. An Industrial Age crystal ball. She would even incorporate the crystal ball into it. A TV hooked up to a VCR, both hidden but for the screen, on which would be shown tarot cards, just one after another after another. She smiled, fresh inspiration lifting her from her inhibiting doubts.

  Leslie's group leader Rita, the male commercial stripper Kenny, and Sharon came back to work an hour and fifteen minutes after the start of second shift's half hour lunch break. Kenny's eyes were red and glassy, and when Leslie asked Rita a question about work Rita hid her mouth behind her hand and actually hiccupped once. There was a Chinese restaurant just down the highway, though usually their half hour lunch breaks there didn't extend beyond forty to fifty minutes. Forty minutes was, however, their lowest limit. The thing was, they punched back in. The proof of their actions was stamped in ink.

  A few months ago Leslie had been called into her supervisor Keith's office and given a verbal warning for being late several minutes about once a week. She was told a continuance of this behavior might "jeopardize" her employment. Now she came in at three every day though her shift began at three-thirty, just to be safe, and had a coffee.

  Keith had to know some of it. He was simply afraid to speak to his group leaders for fear of scaring them off. There were few workers who had stayed with the company for more than several years, but these group leaders had been working here since high school. Though they each made around ten dollars an hour, it was the group leader status which most appealed to them, Leslie believed. Telling others what to do, the liberties they felt they warranted. Keith had to tolerate their behavior or he'd lose them...though Leslie saw them as lifers. If the company could stay in business that long, which was doubtful.

  Injustice. And when she spoke up against it he told her she had a bad attitude, and threatened her. Yes, she did have a bad attitude. They had fostered it in her.

  And it ate at her more every day. They were in their post-Thanksgiving slow period. Not enough work for all three commercial strippers...so Rita and Kenny disappeared into paste-up with Sharon to make paper chains for Christmas. The pay rate for this function was ten dollars an hour. Leslie made seven-fifty to strip negatives, after three and a half years here. People on second shift now started at six-fifty, with a pay raise in three months. Leslie spoke with a male Puerto Rican pressman who had admitted he made over eight-fifty an hour after one year of employment.

  It wasn't the money. She could handle low pay – if the company were consistently stingy. It was what it represented. Exploitation. Lack of respect. She could work for too little pay or too little respect, but not both simultaneously. It made her feel weak, humiliated...victimized. She had been victimized as a child. It was an unpleasant feeling that lived in the gut like a nest of tapeworms.

  She heard laughter from paste-up. Leslie lifted the flap titled "Don't Look" to expose her bloody series of cartoons, and pinned the flap open with a loose razor-sharp X-Acto blade. With her red marker she drew blood running down the inside of the flap from where the blade now punctured it.

  It was Aileen who found their grandmother. She was lying on the floor of her study, the table on its side where she'd pulled it down with her. Aileen had called to find out if Nana wanted some dinner brought to her, and she and Jason had gone over when the phone went unanswered.

  She was still alive for a few minutes, Aileen told Leslie. She asked who had stolen her crystal ball, accused Aileen of it, sobbed at her to go away. "Eddy is waiting for us...we can see him," she had finally said in a whispery child's voice, weirdly speaking of herself in the plural. And then she'd died just moments before the ambulance pulled up.

  Leslie was both relieved that she hadn't been there for those final minutes, and agonized that she hadn't.

  Several days later came the next, less foreseen, development.

  The grandmother had left the house the girls lived in, Eddy's old station wagon, and ten thousand dollars to her daughter in Vermont. To Aileen she had left five thousand dollars. To Leslie she had left her remaining five thousand, and her house with everything in it.

  The will was found to be legitimate. She had had it changed last year, and her daughter and granddaughters were never made aware. The previous arrangement had called for the daughter to receive the old house and its contents, the car, and the granddaughters would be awarded ten thousand each and split the newer house they rented. The change, as their grandmother's lawyer now confessed, had been implemented so that Leslie could live in the house and take good care of what she chose to retain of the vast collection of treasures therein. The grandmother knew Leslie would retain much of it...and reverently so.

  "Of course you realize you have to restore the will to the way it was before," Aileen raved at the lawyer's glossy expansive table. "She was senile when she changed it – it's not valid. Crazy!"

  Leslie avoided the eyes of her mother, gazed at her reflection in the table. "Nana wanted it this way...we have to honor her wishes."

  "Oh right – yeah!" Aileen bolted up from the table, her face a clenched red fist. "Mom gets a house, you get a house full of antiques, and I get five thousand dollars. Of course you want to honor Nana's wishes – you're probably the one who got her to alter the will!"

  "I didn't!" Now Leslie looked up at her sister, blue eyes moistening.

  "Oh sure...you went over there every goddamn day."

  "Maybe that's why she left me her house."

  "You can't do this to me, Leslie, I wouldn't do it to you! Goddamn you, what did you do – huh?" Aileen slammed the table with the flat of her hand. "Huh?"

  "Aileen," their mother said. "Sit down and calm down."

  "Just shut up, ma... Jesus! How do you think I feel? Why is she leaving me out like this; I didn't do anything! I stayed with her while she died!" Aileen broke down into gasping, heaving sobs of frustration. Her moody all black garb was finally filling a more than chic function. "What kind of lawyer are you, anyway?"

  The lawyer kept an even temper. "Her family physician was present and signed the will as a witness, if I might remind you."

  "Then that old idiot is senile, too! All three of you were crazy! God, you can't fool me, I know how nutty she talked and forgetful she was! Even last year!" Aileen whirled on her sister. "Leslie, if you do this..."

  "You can have my five thousand, too."

  "I don't want your five thousand!" Aileen laughed hysterically. "I want my half of that house!"

  "I'm sorry," Leslie said softly, looking down.

  "You're just jealous of me, you ungrateful bitch!" Aileen stabbed a finger in Leslie's face. "This is your way of showing me up for your pathetic feelings of inferiority, isn't it? This is your revenge."

  "Aileen," said their mother.

  "You can't even afford to live there alone!"

  "The mortgage is paid for," the lawyer spoke up in Leslie's defense, seeing how Aileen was grouping them together. "The property taxes are under two hundred a month." You couldn't beat that for a rent.

  "I'll give you all the money I make from the antiques I sell," Leslie said. "But I decide what to sell and what not to."

  "I want my share! All my share!" Aileen thumped her chest.

  "I'm giving you some of mine. It was Nana's stuff to give away."

  The finger in the face again. "You don't exist for me anymore, do you understand that? You are now a nonentity."

  "Aileen, sit down for God's sake!" their mother yelled, tears streaming.

  Leslie said no more in her or her grandmother's defense.

  The machine had begun to take form, but not where Leslie had originally planned it. It would fill one narrow wall of the damp basement of her grandmother's old house. Leslie's new house.

  Her grandfather had bequeathed to her a wealth of materials and tools. Even some of her grandmother's things from upstairs and the attic would be utilized. Leslie alternated between working on the machine and the intimidating challenge of organizing her grandmother's belongings. She really didn't w
ant to give up any of it for sale, but knew she must.

  She played tapes while she worked on the machine; the quiet of the old house and the unfamiliarity of this darker, damper cellar made her somewhat jumpy. Boards would creak softly overhead. She thought of her Nana's imagined phantom burglaries. A few times she even caught herself wondering if Aileen were skulking around up there. Did she have a key?

  The obvious use for the psychic machine would be to contact her grandmother. This was her house, Leslie had the crystal ball – the energy was right. But still, the thought of it chilled her. She was so intrigued, yet so hesitant. But she kept building the machine. It would serve as an artwork now...an actual psychic medium later if she ever screwed up enough courage to try it.

  There must be another way to test her psychic ability, she mused as she spray-painted some tarnished metal pieces a bright new silver, newspapers spread to protect the cement floor. Another kind of psychic energy could be concentrated through the machine. Maybe she would strive to contact some living person telepathically. Roll a pencil across the floor. Start a fire in a metal pail full of paper. The possibilities unfolded.

  Sometimes instead of tapes she listened to the radio. A news report told her how a plant which would research and develop chemical warfare weapons was soon to open in Libya. The construction of the plant had been supervised, nominally, by America's current favorite villain, the much-hated and furious-faced General Jambiya. In several weeks Jambiya would attend the plant's opening ceremonies. Leslie despised Jambiya as much as any good American did. His face actually frightened her. Once while walking on the street she had chanced to look down at a discarded newspaper and had been startled by a photo of him. She had taken the face to be that of a monster, some demon, and actually had had to go back and retrieve the paper to discover the identity of what she'd seen. Leslie could easily imagine that this was the face of the Antichrist, of the one with the blue turban foretold by Nostradamus, who would bring about Armageddon. Like any good American, Leslie wanted to see General Jambiya dead.