The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Leslie was stripping a negative for an artist's representative out of New York. She copied the name down on a scrap of paper dutifully, without enthusiasm; she had few illusions as to how difficult it was to become recognized, to be accepted, especially since she had applied for a job in the art department here at work.

  The position was posted, as required, over the punch clock. Two of the company's three artists, all young women, had left within about a month of each other. Leslie was encouraged – even excited. To work upstairs, to make good (presumably) money, to no longer be just some monkey in a corner down here. The company could get away with paying her less than someone straight out of art school, since she had no credentials, and also she was familiar with the company's tastes and needs. She believed her chances were very good. She phoned personnel and was accepted for an interview, a chance to show her portfolio to the head of personnel and the head of the art department.

  But twenty people, she was told later, would be called back for second interviews. She didn't know whether to believe this, since most of these people were said to be from outside, but she learned of four other people within the company besides herself who had applied.

  The printing industry attracted many artists, despite its involving more craftwork and outright mechanical unskilled labor than artistry. But there were even other artistic people who didn't apply, and others Leslie had known who had quit by now.

  Of the four, she had really only seen one other person's portfolio. A first shift commercial stripper named Craig. She had even been the one to tell Craig about the posted job, since he hadn't noticed, and had urged him to pursue it. He was a nice shy kid and she couldn't keep the opportunity hidden from him. But when she saw his portfolio she worried about her wisdom in her decision to prompt him. His pencil portraits of rock stars were fantastic, as good, probably, as her portraits of rock and movie stars in ball point pen, which were the pride of her portfolio. But other than that she had much more material to show, of a greater variety of styles and content and in a greater diversity of mediums. Other people told her, also, she was more talented than the other three. She still had a lot of optimism.

  For several nights she had stayed up late drawing designs especially for the interview; birth announcement designs, stationery designs, a Bar Mitzvah invitation card design – as the company was Jewish-owned with a largely Jewish clientele – all on company stock. She had cartoons, portraits, high school newsletters she'd illustrated, and a few imaginative (but nonviolent) fantasy drawings.

  The personnel manager was fairly generous with praise, the young head artist was coolly, professionally composed but did offer some compliments. Inorganic Organism, which showed a skeleton-like robot rabbit drawn in ball point, painstakingly detailed, one of Leslie's favorite drawings, was passed by without comment from either.

  The work she'd done on company stock in the company style excited a bit of interest, but when Leslie left she couldn't tell what kind of impression she'd made. Her optimism had waned. They'd get back to her.

  Several months later, after she had given up hope, she was called for a second interview, this time with the head artist again and the owner of the company herself. Leslie was thrilled. Next week. It was her vacation next week but she wasn't going anywhere so she would be only too happy to come in.

  As it turned out, the other four artistic employees were called back for a second interview also. "We've had a hard time choosing," the personnel head told Leslie by way of an apology for the long suspenseful wait.

  This time the head artist seemed a little looser, but the company owner was pretty stony throughout except for an earnest smile one of the cuter birth announcement designs won from her.

  "I was thinking," said the head artist, "it would be great to have Leslie illustrate the company newsletter."

  "Mm," agreed the owner.

  Two weeks later Leslie got a call. The job had been awarded to the first shift commercial stripping group leader, who'd graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design. She has a piece of paper to prove she's an artist, Leslie thought. But she began to think that they had probably made the proper choice; the woman had to be good to have graduated from a school like that.

  But it couldn't have hurt that she was a group leader, or – as Leslie learned – that every day for some time the woman had taken her lunch with the head of the art department.

  They were only placating me, Leslie told herself now as she moved on to the next neg. They have to post a job, even if they know already who they want. They have to act like they're giving everyone a fair shake. Two interviews for everyone...each ego stroked. But they never seriously considered me, she thought. I'm a whiner, a complainer, a prima donna and a trouble maker. I'm no robot clone zombie with her nose up someone's ass. I'm a sculptor, not clay. They don't want that.

  She glanced up, around. She was alone in the room.

  Leslie was tempted to take Rita's work and dab a touch of opaque paint over a letter or two here and there, to scratch a few negs with her X-Acto's blade, so Rita would get marked down for letting these errors get past her...but she couldn't bring herself to attack them so directly.

  The new purpose for the machine and its new color came to her almost side-by-side as ideas at work.

  Luckily she hadn't bought any black paint yet. The new color was red.

  It clicked. That was it – she knew she had it locked now, and couldn't wait to get home and throw herself into it. She did, that night, and the next day bought the paint. A lot of it.

  The title would be Hate Machine. She knew that the day-to-day stressful frustration of work was eating her up inside, fighting to rend its way out of her. This would serve as a release as much as an expression, a reflection of her emotions. As therapeutic as it was artistic. The psychic device could wait until a braver day, when her grandmother lying on the floor upstairs whispering about Eddy and her party wasn't so strong in her mind.

  Hate was with her constantly, waiting to be vented. Hate was her frame of mind. Everything she felt now...frustration, sadness, loneliness...blended into one blood red ray. Her feelings would make it powerful as a work of art; authentic. And maybe it would suck much of the suffocating hatred out of her. Hate was the theme.

  She began painting the skeletal structure, and her enthusiastic choice was confirmed and reinforced as she saw how it was coming out. It was a deep dark red she had wanted, a rich Chinese red, a glossy fire engine red, with silvery wheels and trim and knobs set out against it. She wasn't afraid to splatter the red paint on her white t-shirt and white coveralls and bare feet. Her hands were thickly caked in it. She imagined she was painting the machine in human blood.

  She could barely restrain herself from adding the details – that would be the most fun, the most imaginative part – but she forced herself to wait. When she was ready for it, she called in sick to work. Let Rita do some work for a change.

  This was the work that counted. Her life's work. Being a "stripper" was actually only the meaningless hobby. Here was her own little factory.

  Across the entire top of the machine, jutting out, their handles hidden inside the machine, were knife blades...thirteen gleaming kitchen knife blades in all, cheap ones bought for the purpose. There were clear glass telephone pole insulators. Sliding panels with red and blue wires inside like veins. There were three bottles with a large, dead black beetle in each, the bottles set into the hollows carved from a long piece of styrofoam painted in extra thick coats to mask the spongy texture. There was a red spray-painted typewriter keyboard (the rest of this machine disappearing into the greater machine), and fastened to either side of the machine were two horseshoe crabs, one above the other, painted glossy red.

  The crystal ball was there as in her earlier design, just for more power. Wires seemed to come out from under it and vanished into other areas on a protruding shelf-like console. In the front center of the machine there were three silver wheels – the main controls. Switches to flip, a few kni
fe handle levers to be thrown. Black rubber tubing snaked in and out in places. A small antique mirror of her Nana's was incorporated, the ornate frame painted red. Above the mirror was a cast-iron geisha mask decoration, maybe a mock Noh theater mask, once painted various colors, now all crimson but for the silver teeth.

  A dead mouse she'd found was in another bottle with a silver-painted cap. In a styrofoam hollow, a trilobite fossil, and beside that a red-painted telephone with the receiver hooked into another part of the machine like a computer tie-in. There were four new meat thermometers plunged deep into styrofoam to form a row of gauges. Bills were behind, but this was more important. There was a red-painted old plastic radio set into the machine to be turned on for static, the dial glowing orange, and a string of large outdoors Christmas bulbs poked out of a long strip of styrofoam but all thirteen exposed bulbs glowed red. To make noise and vibrate the machine, behind a panel at its base she had hidden the air compressor for her airbrush set.

  She'd decided against a TV and video recorder. Along the front of the machine under the wheels were four picture frames in a row painted red, and several smaller ones elsewhere. Under the mirror, in the very center of the machine, was a more ornate antique picture frame. That would be her main "screen."

  The lesser ones she could fill now. Into one frame she slipped a black and white photo of a Mafioso dead in his car, magazine ink streaming generously down his face. In another was a photo clipped from a book about death, written from pathological, psychological, philosophical, and theological viewpoints, showing the decapitated and partly mummified head of a fifteen-year-old Pakistani girl murdered by her own father. In a third frame she displayed another photo from this book: a man slumped against an ominous-looking factory machine which had apparently sucked his arm into it to the shoulder, killing him.

  She used other pictures from this book and several others. She could order intact replacements later; for now the machine was all. She called in sick a second day – work was slow anyway, wasn't it? Clipping a picture, she bobbed her head to a song from her tape player, sitting cross-legged on a flattened box on the basement floor.

  The evening of her second day off from work she crept down to a small cemetery a few streets over, where she remembered there was a tomb up against the bordering fence whose earthen roof was a little caved in near the stone of its front. She had worried that a child playing on top might fall through one day, but tonight she was grateful for it.

  She wore white, though black would have been wiser. Let a spectator, if one came along, take her for a ghost. She lay on the cold frozen dome of the tomb and shone a flashlight down through the crevice. Her gratification was doubled, and now she began to employ the broomstick she had brought along, a coat hanger fitted at its end. She had to reach her entire arm to the shoulder into the hole and press her face to the dirt but she was too excited to be afraid that something would seize her from the other side.

  The brittle brown skull lacked a bottom jaw, lacked upper teeth; what she took to be mummified brains rattled inside it. Smallish, perhaps that of a child or a small woman. Whether or not the pelvis and the femur belonged to the same individual she had no idea.

  She painted the three components red and set them aside to dry, to be incorporated later. She would just have enough room to fit them in; she didn't want to crowd the machine with an overabundance of detail – it must have system and symmetry, be aesthetically balanced.

  As it was, she thought, regarding the nearly completed work, the machine looked like the main controls for hell's furnace. Or, she considered, it might be Satan's baroque and no doubt cacophonous upright piano, decorated with framed photos of the damned.

  The final, missing component was the photograph to frame in the central place of honor. This subject would be the object of the machine's focus. It would be interchangeable. But what, or whom, to start off with?

  She found the answer in a copy of Newsweek in the break room at work the next day. There, grinning, stood General Jambiya with several other men inside the chemical warfare research and development plant they had just ceremoniously opened this week.

  Even grinning, Jambiya's face horrified her. The eyes were a gleaming black, more soulless than those of a shark. Maybe he was too obvious, too "popular" a target for her hate projector, but she couldn't resist. This would be the ceremonious opening of her machine. The reflection was too great, too humorous – too symmetrical – to resist.

  When she had lit the red candles poking up from either end of the shelf console (the skull now in the center of this), had lit the string of red phallic-tipped Christmas bulbs, and switched on the radio's dim orange face – bringing to life a hissing crackling static – Leslie went and turned off the rest of the lights in the cellar. When she returned to the machine, the flickering candle light and the deep red glow played on the white canvas of her utterly naked body.

  "General." She raised a glass of sparkling wine from the shelf, saluted the picture framed in the place of honor. Jambiya and friends in the factory. She sipped, set the glass down delicately, and took in a deep breath so as to begin.

  She first knelt to reach in and activate the air compressor. It sputtered to life, droned muffledly behind its panel, making the great machine tremble with power. The beetles jiggled in their three bottles. With small circular patches cut from black electrical tape, Leslie fastened two red wires to her temples, the other two ends disappearing into an open panel in the machine. She fastened two others on her breasts above her nipples. Finally she pulled a black rubber hose from the machine and calmly plugged it into her body, between her legs, like an umbilical cord below her belly. She must siphon all her energy, all her power, into and through the machine.

  She pushed a few levers, and smiled. She tapped out the keys that spelled General Jambiya on the keyboard, as if programming a computer. She flipped switches and turned some dials. Despite her smile, she did all this with the utmost intensity and concentration, slowly and methodically, as if acting out a precise Japanese tea ritual. Before she had come down here she had taken a hot bath in the completely dark bathroom to cleanse her mind of all else save her purpose. Of all else but hate.

  Finally, all that remained were the three silver wheels.

  She turned the first wheel once, twice, three times. The second wheel once, twice, three times. All the while she stared unblinking at the photograph of General Jambiya before her on her view screen. Leslie turned the third wheel once, twice, three times to the right.

  She stared at the photo a bit longer, gripping her support handles, feet together on her black rubber mat, body rigid. And then it was over. She reversed the entire procedure. The wheels turned once, twice, three times to the left. She was just as gracefully methodical and unhurried now as before.

  When the machine was fully off she slumped a little against it for support, and finally her nakedness made her cold.

  There had been an explosion, the newspaper said. Ninety-two people had died. Among them, General Jambiya and the plant directors pictured in the photograph from Newsweek. Terrorist sabotage was suspected. The U.S. was being accused.

  "My God," Leslie breathed, trembling as if still hooked up to the machine, "my God..."

  Rita tapped her on the head with a rolled up piece of paper. "Back to work, Les." Rita left the break room. Leslie sat there for a few moments more.

  Too bad those other men had had their picture taken with him, eh? And the plant itself, behind them.

  Leslie shuddered and grinned.

  She could hardly wait to go home.

  Sympathetic magic, wasn't that what they called it? Leslie stood apart from the Hate Machine, clothed, regarding it, arms crossed against the chilly air. The Hate Machine was also a death machine, then. She hadn't intended to actually try to reach out and kill General Jambiya – had she?

  Her desire had been real enough. And obviously the original notion of the machine as being a device to focus psychic energy like the sun through a magn
ifying glass had remained in the back of her mind throughout her creation of the machine, influencing the outcome.

  What was the part that had most made this possible? The crystal ball? The skull? The photos? How could she understand her creation so little as to wonder that? It was obviously the entire composition, the sum of all the parts; wasn't that the whole point? The entire machine, and none of it. Just something to focus on...could have been a shoe.

  But a chemical research and development plant had to be a volatile thing to begin with. She must experiment further.

  Upstairs, she paged through the rest of today’s newspaper she'd taken from work. She found it quickly. You didn't have to look far in a newspaper for horror. Len Huffman, on trial amid much media attention for the alleged rape and murder of his four-year-old adopted daughter. Alleged, but they had to say that, didn't they, even when it was pretty obvious, as it was here? Most people seemed to be pretty convinced of his guilt. Leslie read the article on him. Yes. She nodded. She felt sufficiently convinced.

  The evening paper the next day reported that the alleged rapist/murderer of four-year-old Barbara Huffman, Len Huffman, had died in custody during the night between three and four in the morning, of cardiac arrest.

  He had had no history of heart problems.

  Leslie had plugged into her machine at exactly three o'clock AM.

  The next day's paper related the death of reputed mafia don Dominic Chilorio, victim of a cerebral aneurysm. Two-thirty in the morning.

  The following day's paper told of the death of the imprisoned, mesmeric George Ballard, whose strange cult had murdered a total of eight affluent Californians during the late sixties. Somehow he had managed to hang himself in his cell. Three-thirty in the morning, prison officials figured.

  The next day it was eighteen-year-old Dave Capuccio, arraigned for vehicular homicide while driving under the influence, dead of a blow to the head while in his cell – apparently he'd tripped and struck his skull against something, though it hadn't yet been determined what. One in the morning. Leslie got out of work at twelve-thirty. She hadn't wasted any time, that night.