by Laird Barron
At first the spheres appeared to be some sort of glow-in-the-dark graffiti. The spheres, black yet somehow glowing, were three to five feet tall—and everywhere. Stacked upon each other like the shipwreck was some sort of abandoned, ethereal storage unit. And then all at once, yellow eyes blinked and shark-like mouths opened wide across the shadow-like flesh of the spheres. The eyes floated as if in a jelly, the mouths whispered unspeakable words.
Mark scuttled backwards like a crab, but a tendril with the texture of a fine-haired cactus unfurled from the dark and dragged him closer. In the many eyes of the sphere that held him close, Mark saw puppet versions of Anna and himself playing out the most intimate moments of their lives. Witnessing the puppets act out their obscene domestic drama, their movements so unnatural, Mark understood that love was nothing more than madness—and decided he would do everything in his power to reclaim it.
This discovery made, the world would never be the same for Mark. Not for him or Anna or anyone else.
***
Anna had received no word from Mark in weeks, not since their call was disconnected the day after she broke up with him. She’d called dozens of times a day since then, but his phone went straight to voicemail every time. She’d gone to the police and filed a missing person report. His name turned up in the registration at a state park in southern Oregon. An attempted debit charge had been declined from a gas station in Medford. The bank’s fraud department had put a freeze on the card due to perceived suspicious activity. Although Anna sorted everything out with the bank later that day, Mark never ran his debit card again. His cellphone remained off, and no hotels or campgrounds reported anyone registering under his name or matching his description. Mark Rothko had simply vanished.
When she and Mark had had the blowout fight that resulted in him leaving, she’d been aware that her period was late, but only weeks later did she muster the courage to take a pregnancy test. The smiley face that appeared on the pale pink stick confirmed that everything she never wanted out of life was coming true.
Now, on the day before Christmas Eve, Anna sat at the kitchen table after getting off the phone with her sister, who’d offered to fly Anna home to Fresno for Christmas. Anna had declined. She wanted to be home in case Mark happened to return, unlikely considering the severity of their fight, or if any news of him came in from the police.
The knock on the door startled her. Her legs felt weak as she stood. Balancing herself on the kitchen counter, she shuffled to the door. She held her breath, pressed her face to the peephole, and peered out.
She caught the back of the postman as he returned to his mail truck. He waved to her as he drove away.
Anna waved faintly. The postman had left a package on her doorstep.
The handwriting on the shipping label was unmistakably Mark’s, but provided no return address.
She took the package inside and set it on the kitchen table. After staring at the package for too long, she sliced the packing tape with a knife and peeled back the flaps of the box, timidly, as if a jack-in-the-box might leap out. Inside there was a gallon-sized Ziploc bag and a handwritten note. The note read: I miss the feel of your soft skin. Please take me back.
She pursed her lips into a smile. “Asshole,” she whispered, feeling affection for her missing ex-fiancé.
She opened the Ziploc bag. The stench of rot was overwhelming. The bag contained an object wrapped in a handkerchief, which appeared to be the source of the smell. She pulled away the handkerchief, uncovering two human hands.
They’d been severed at the wrists. Bones jagged, as if cut with a dull saw. The hands were clean of blood, as if they’d been bled out and wiped down with a wet cloth before the sender bundled them in the handkerchief and shipped them to Anna.
***
The police came and went, taking the hands with them. They assured Anna that an officer would drive by the house every hour, but without any leads or suspects, there was nothing to be done, no protection offered.
Anna called her sister as soon as they left.
“Are you okay?” her sister asked.
Words did not form easily.
“If you need to be here, just say yes.”
“Yes,” Anna said.
“I’ll book your ticket and call you back.”
Anna remained on the line long after her sister hung up. So long, in fact, that by the time her sister called back with the flight information, there was no Anna left at all. In the apartment, a darkly translucent Anna-sized sphere sat in her seat at the kitchen table. Anna’s cellphone vibrated on the table in front of the sphere, but the sphere did not answer the phone.
Deep inside the Anna sphere, the embryo formed eyes and mouths. So many eyes and so many mouths that soon the barely-formed baby was little more than a swarming mass of lidless eyes and screaming mouths, trapped in the slime of endless dark.
***
The phone rang and rang before going to voicemail for the umpteenth time. “Dammit, Anna, pick up,” Tess said. She texted the itinerary to her sister, then called again, hoping to reach Anna and instead reaching her voicemail.
Anna had been troubled, hardly uttered a word on the phone, but they lived so far away, Tess could not jump in her car and drive to Truckee. She did not know any of Anna’s friends, no one in that town. She dialed Mark’s number, on a hunch that her sister was upset because Mark had returned. No such luck. His phone remained off.
In frustration, Tess smashed her phone against the tile floor.
She knelt down, tears welling in her eyes, and began stuffing the shards of phone screen into her mouth. The edges cut her tongue, cut her mouth. She wept as she choked down the phone, the sharp triangles of glass sticking in her throat, cutting off her airflow.
When James, her husband, returned from the car dealership that evening, he found that Tess was not at home. He turned on all the lights and called her cellphone. Her ringtone emanated from somewhere in the house. He followed it into the kitchen, where a hollow glass sphere sat upon the floor. The sphere was approximately four feet tall and four feet wide. The sphere emitted Tess’s ringtone, the grating jingle of a popular sitcom that James only begrudgingly sat through on Tuesday nights.
Then, as he went to end the call, the sphere spoke.
“Hello?” it said, in Tess’s voice.
“Tess, is that you? Where are you?”
“I’m right here, silly. Why don’t you crawl inside me?” The voice was almost just like hers, but wrong in a way James could not identify.
James ended the call because what was the use talking to a sphere? Clearly this was some kind of sick joke, or the lead-up to an early Christmas gift.
“This isn’t funny,” he said.
The lack of response, the silence that permeated the house like a draft of cold air, unsettled him.
“Answer me, Tess. You’ve had your laugh.”
Fed up, he dialed her number again. The sphere rang, then promptly answered.
“Why’d you hang up?” it asked, again sounding like Tess, but not.
“I hung up because you’re not my wife,” James said.
“Then what am I?”
A red liquid filled the sphere in plumes. The red spread until the translucent sphere was no longer see-through, and then the sphere darkened, flickered at first like an octopus James once saw on the Discovery Channel. Color was the language of the octopus. James wondered what it meant that the sphere was now a shimmering, roiling obsidian, a blackness so complete that he could think of nothing else, eyes fixated, pupils dilating to obliterate the blue irises.
“Then what am I?” the sphere repeated.
“You’re my wife,” James said.
He dropped his phone and approached the sphere, one shuffling footstep at a time. The sphere appeared to be solid, but this did not prevent him from crawling inside, as if the sphere were a bottomless sea and not a sphere at all.
***
By the early hours of Christmas Eve, the reported mis
sing reached unprecedented numbers. By the afternoon, police stations sat empty. By the time a state of emergency was declared, there was hardly anyone around to listen. The loveless were lucky. Everyone who’d ever loved had become a dark sphere, except for one man, who was still trying.
***
The earth was silent as it snowed on Christmas morning. In California, near the Nevada border, in the town of Truckee, a man without hands stumbled through the forest. He’d walked for many days, maybe a whole lifetime, trying to get back to something he’d left behind. Slung over his shoulder was a knapsack that held a vintage bottle of scotch, but he was incapable of opening it with his scabbed and gnarled nubs.
The man stopped in his tracks. Ten feet away, a doe grazed on a shrub. Somehow he hadn’t startled her, but as soon as he noticed her, paused to admire her beauty and grace, she ran off into the wilderness, leaving behind no trace of her existence except for hoofprints and a torn shrub.
The man marched onward through the falling snow. Ahead lay the apartment where he knew he belonged. Night was coming and he still hoped to arrive before the sun vanished. His feet ached from soreness and blisters, but he persisted. The whole world was waiting for him. He couldn’t wait to see her again.
ASSEMBLAGE POINT
Scott R. Jones
for Ramsey Campbell
You’ll want to know about the body liquescing at the bottom of the stair, of course, and I will get to that, I promise, but first I need to warm up my pen a little, work the kinks of long disuse out of my cursive, and tell you a few things. Three things.
First, I want you to think about predation. I mean, beyond the Mutual of Omaha dramatics we all grew up on, beyond plummy British voiceovers on high-def video. I mean real predation. The complete slavery that the food chain ensures. First Law of the Universe? It’s simple: Everybody Hungry. Doesn’t matter how you’ve incarnated here, whether you’re a galaxy or a microbe, or where you are on the chain, top link or scraping bottom, if you want to live to see tomorrow, you’d best have something on your plate tonight.
I’ve thought about predation a great deal lately, and what makes the perfect predator, and it’s not the sharpness of the teeth, or the fleetness of the feet, or the keenness of the eyes, or the brute power of the muscles, although those things help, obviously, those things make for great documentary TV. No. No, it’s camouflage. Chasing after your prey is for chumps and show-offs. Waiting quietly, appearing to be what you’re not, appearing to be benign, appearing to be nothing at all, even, so that your prey places itself in your mouth all unawares… I’ve been thinking about that a lot. Ultimate predators. Ultimate camouflage.
See, there’s camouflage. And then there’s camouflage.
And as I sit here writing this, I’m thinking about the old stories, too, that used to amuse me so much. You know the ones. The tales of dark deeds done, awful and rare books acquired, terrible knowledge gained, sanity sacrificed, then lives. As a boy, I’d read those stories and be properly enthralled as any twelve-year-old would be, along for the ride as the tale’s contents were correlated towards a mind-shattering conclusion, painfully identifying with the narrator because, after all, he was me, wasn’t he? A seeker. If not a hero, than at least a quester after lost, hidden things. A sorcerer, even.
You could see it coming, of course. The end of that search. The arrival of the vengeful Thing. The conclusion of the deal with a devil. The narrator would telegraph that final, shattering revelation from miles away, which was part of the fun.
Here’s the amusing bit, though: in the face of utter horror, as Death (or worse) loomed from out of the night to greet him, he’d still write out his final moments, our narrator, that dedicated fellow. In a wild and unsteady hand, naturally, but still. As they were happening. A goddamn play-by-play.
That hand! The window! The window!
The three-lobed burning eye!
I am it, and it is I.
Well. It’s a cliché, but I found it funny, even at twelve when it was new and I didn’t know what cliché was. It should have scared, but I’d laugh instead, taken out of the story by a paragraph of frenzied italics that amounted to little more than a wordy boo!
But then, for the reader, I suppose that’s the perfect time to be taken out of a story. At the end.
Which, again, I will get to. But first, one more item: I should tell you that I’m naked as I write this. You’ll find my clothes neatly folded on the desk next to these pages. You’re looking at them right now, I’ll bet. I half-considered arranging them, on the chair and the surrounding floor, in such a way as to suggest that my body had been spirited away, snatched to heaven “in the twinkling of an eye”, as the Rapturous Christians like to say. For a moment, I thought that would be amusing, but then decided that it was too much trouble for a gag. I mean, on top of the hilarity that’s about to ensue. Don’t think I’m not aware of how funny this is.
Honestly, though, I just don’t want to shit in my pants when it happens. They don’t tell you about that when you begin these practices, when you enter this appalling lifestyle, but if you’re doing things right, or you’ve read your Castenada, you learn fast. You shit yourself a few times before you get wise.
I got wise. And now I impart this wisdom, and more, to you.
That was the warm-up. I’ll begin.
***
It was Castaneda, that old fraud, who brought me to this. Yes, that Castaneda. Little Carlos. The Second Ring of Power. Journey to Ixtlan. Peyote and mushrooms and oneiric dopplegangers and shapeshifting and the loosest of academic standards.
See, if you’ve a certain sort of mind, if that early sense of being a searcher after hidden truths is more than just a byproduct of hormones and teenage romanticism, if you are, basically, me, then you move on from the old stories with their amusing finales and stumble into fictions more potent and far less trustworthy. The gravity of secret knowledge pulls you from the shelves that hold Fantasy, and Horror, to the dimly lit ones in the back of the store labeled New Age Thought and Spirituality. Occult. Witchcraft.
It’s a pit trap, naturally, but a poorly camouflaged one. The contents of those shelves are there to put a little numinous thrill into the grasping, sad lives of proto-Crowleys, urban shamans, and menopausal women. And again, if you’re like me (and you are, aren’t you? You must be, to be sitting there, reading this) you don’t stay in the trap for too many years. It’s long and deep, though, this pit, and occasionally there are jewels embedded in the walls. Ideas that you pluck from the muck and pocket almost without thinking, concepts that stick like burrs to your skin long after you’ve crawled out of there.
Castaneda was definitely a burr, one that stuck deep in me, even after his dangerous hucksterism was exposed to the world. His three missing-presumed-dead witches slash sexual partners. The suicide pacts. A banal, hushed-up death by cancer: camouflaged cells dropping the act, finally, and killing from within, and not the heroic sorcerer’s journey into the Second Attention his followers claimed for him. Yeah, Castaneda. Here was a guy who had sold his humanity, and convinced most of his readers that he’d done it for real knowledge, real power, and not just for a dreary SoCal compound full of witchy pussy.
Still, there were ideas in those books that affected me strangely. Weirdly practical suggestions for practice, like removing your clothes before doing any sorcerous work. That way, Castaneda’s teacher don Juan Matus explained, when you shat yourself from fear at the things you were seeing and the deeds of power you were accomplishing, all you’d have to do is go wash up in the river. Pick up your clean clothes on the way back to the house.
Castaneda was all about seeing, too. True perception. Shifting awareness from this world to others. Moving what he called the “assemblage point”, that focus of attention that builds the human world, to another spot on the “luminous egg” that formed your energetic body, so that you would assemble a different world. A world that was more true. Serene and primal and potent. A sorcerer’s world.
&
nbsp; Well. That was the huckster’s line, anyway. He was, maybe, a better sorcerer than he was an anthropologist, at the end. A series of debunkings and high-profile exposures pushed Castaneda out of the spotlight, though his book sales weren’t hurt any. Definitely a better writer than anything else.
I wasn’t convinced or anything. I mean, if you jump from a cliff because a talking eagle tells you that the experience is going to trigger your transition to an exalted energetic state where you will receive special knowledge, then brother, you get what you deserve. I wasn’t convinced.
But it was compelling stuff, nonetheless. Just practical enough, just strange enough, just a hair on the other side of comprehensible enough to smack of something legitimate. Something truly otherworldly. I got things from Castaneda that I couldn’t find in Crowley, or Bertiaux, and certainly not in the standard New Age boilerplate.
A burr, worrying its way inside. An itch to see.
Reading about sorcery is like reading about sex. It’s not the real thing, but it gets you hot for it, makes you want it more. So, I left the bookshelves behind, and began to move in strange circles. I began to fall away from the human world, waded into the deep pools of night that surround that pretentious little island of grand ideas and goofy hubris.
I don’t like to go into great detail about those years. Sites were visited. Temples, ruins, forgotten wastelands. An island off Nan Madol. An abandoned forestry camp in the Olympic Mountains of western Washington. Even visited the Yucatán stomping grounds of Little Carlos, though for a purpose that was not merely nostalgic. Something darker.
Yes. Dark things were done, terrible things, as you no doubt know. Whoever you are, you’re sitting here reading this, which means you’ve tracked me this far, a not inconsiderable feat. Let me congratulate you on your cleverness, for what it’s worth. So of course you don’t need details; you already know about the things, or some of the things, I’ve done. The sacrifices made. The ones left behind, damaged. More than damaged. I’ve hurt a lot of people. Could be you’re hoping for answers about one of those people.