Unseaming

by Mike Allen

  “Wrong. This is Melissa’s apartment. Or at least that’s the name she gave you. If you weren’t outside space-time, the view you’d see from here would be the view you had when you tipped her body out over the street.”

  A worm slithered inside me. Humpty casually unwound one of his arms, held out a hand as if offering change to a beggar. “Would you like me to tell you what you did to her before you pitched her into the dark?”

  My fingers crooked into claws. “This is a dream, and this is a lie.”

  “The T-shirt you’re wearing.” His free hand tugged at my collar. “It belongs to Jerry Coolidge. You remember him?”

  “My name is Michael Carver. I live here above Salem Boulevard. I fucking flip burgers for a living, stay home at night and try to write music. I’ve even sold jingles to a local auto dealership.”

  “You met Jerry at…the kind of establishment you frequent, and invited him back to your domicile, which looks nothing like this. He even agreed to the handcuffs. Then you strangled him.”

  I grabbed for himm—his teeth gnashed, even more of them shattering—but my fingers were suddenly on fire. When I held my hand up, the slashes across my knuckles were outlined in radioactive green. They faded as I watched, the sting that accompanied them lingering a few seconds more.

  “See,” he said, “I’m more dangerous then you think. Just hear me out.”

  “No. My name is Michael Carver. These calluses on my hands come from plucking guitar strings, thinking notes out loud. I would never do what you’re accusing me of.”

  “But you do, all the time. You don’t flip burgers, Michael. You work in a slaughter house. You line up the necks of turkeys so that the spinning blades cut their throats. The little peeping sound they make when they die drives you absolutely ape. You couldn’t even finger the first chord on a guitar neck. Carver isn’t even your last name. It’s what you do.”

  My insides writhed. “That’s not true.”

  Humpty’s fiery eye-socket narrowed. “Would you like it not to be true?”

  What if it wasn’t a dream? What if it wasn’t? “Yes. Okay. How?”

  “We have to leave this place.”

  Whether I was dreaming or truly in another universe, it made sense to me to follow this homunculus from my childhood and bring this nightmare to a quick end. And wake up to what? Fingering guitar strings above a flow of headlights, or dried blood, sweat, and a stink of death in my pores?

  Strutting like a majorette, he lead me out into a featureless hallway that terminated in stairs. “They’re steep,” he remarked. “Be careful.”

  The stairs plunged in a tight spiral. Their texture gradually changed, from the rugged carpeting of my apartment complex to the warped and creaking boards of my grandfather’s house, that conglomeration of peeling plaster and rotting wood where my father raised me. Humpty scurried before me on all fours.

  I called down to him, “Why are you helping me? I made my father shred you into pieces.”

  The glint of green that was his eye-socket paused in shadow. “There’s no more time. Even using the shortcut of your macrocosm, I nearly found you too late.” He continued his descent. “Right now, within the bounds of normal space-time, the police are on their way to your flat. And they’re going to find the things you have stuffed under your bed. And they’ll find what you have soaking in your bathtub.”

  “I told you I haven’t done anything.”

  “Once they find those things, once you’re caught, it’s all over. Too many other time-streams mingled with yours. It won’t be possible to fix what your father did.”

  We emerged from a portal, began a hike across the convoluted terrain of sheets and blankets. Cresting a fold, I beheld the remains of my childhood. The body I wore in infancy, a boneless shell, a shriveled egg case. Empty eyeholes stared in wildly different directions from my collapsed, deflated face.

  “He’s in there,” Humpty said. Your father.”

  * * *

  We ascended the spongy slope of a boneless cheek, lowered ourselves into the fleshy cavern of an empty eye. “He lives here now,” said Humpty. “If you want to save yourself, you’ll have to evict him.”

  “How?” No answer came. Humpty had vanished, swallowed up, it seemed, in the folds of my childhood’s hollowed-out husk. This abandonment brought only a moment’s panic, quickly replaced by relief. That creature was no source of nostalgia; I was glad he’d left me.

  I continued the descent, intent on bringing this ordeal to its conclusion. I clambered down through the optic nerve channel, through a heavy wooden trapdoor, into a space I assumed to be my own skull cavity. But it was my father’s cluttered study, a room I’d only seen via forbidden glimpses through a keyhole while my father was still alive. The same room where he’d finally had his heart attack.

  He was seated at his desk, digging a fountain pen into a cut on his hand, using the blood to write in a book. All at once he started, looked up at me and bellowed, “What the hell are you doing in here?”

  “This is my universe,” I said. “You don’t belong in it.”

  “The hell I don’t. I created everything here, including you.” He stood up.

  “You scooped this out of me. You stole the life that belonged to me.” I could feel the blue aura building inside me that I’d been helpless to use as a child, that I never had learned to use.

  “Shut up!” Fire erupted from his mouth. Suddenly I was blind. I stumbled over something and fell, my face a mask of pain. My vision returned, blurred with agony. He stood over me, smoke streaming from his eyes, mouth radiating red from the magma heat inside him.

  Blue light reflected from the polished floor, that glow coming out of me, and I was helpless, unable to strike with it, unable to comprehend how. My frustration imploded into the purest rage I’ve ever felt. I came roaring up, seizing the leg of the lamp table as I rose. The lamp shattered on the floor as I swung the table at my father’s head. The blow connected, the impact jarring my elbow, wrenching my shoulder; then the table exploded in a burst of fire.

  The force threw me against a wall. I felt a hundred splinters embed themselves. I screamed. A stack of storage crates collapsed on top of me, their weight crushing the air out of my lungs. Humpty’s idiot smile leered at me, his torn-up remains spilled from one of the boxes.

  I grasped one of his long cloth arms.

  My father loomed over me, grinning, gloating. He opened his mouth to breathe. I hooked his ankle with mine, and sent him sprawling. He grunted like a boar when he landed. I sprang on him before he could recover, and wrapped Humpty’s arm around his throat.

  He drew in breath to blast me, but I twisted my arm-tourniquet tighter. He thrashed, his face purpling. The smoke from his eyes fizzled to nothing, leaving empty sockets.

  Humpty’s arm twitched in my grip.

  I cried out, jumped back. Instead of releasing, the arm began to tighten of its own accord.

  My father’s face withered like paper set aflame. First smoke rose from his chest, then flickers of combustion, then a roaring fire. I scrambled to find a door, but I couldn’t see for the smoke. The soot from my father’s pyre filled my lungs, and the chaos of the scene drifted away.

  * * *

  “Well, brother, I have to thank you.” Humpty sat on my chest, whole again, his ruptured stitches repaired with shimmering threads of ethereal yellow, that essence I’d seen my father swallow so long ago. “You’re free now. We’re both free now.”

  We were back in my bedroom—or was it Melissa’s? Mine, I decided. “You. You were my father’s familiar. His magic totem. His power source.” A vast shape squatted on the bed, something hunched and multilimbed and only vaguely humanoid, formed of nothing more than pinpricks of darkness. Its convoluted anatomy corresponded with the doll’s in only one place—the wide, glass-filled mouth.

  “So you can see me. What I really am. You could never do that before.” I felt the combined weight of his two forms squeezing out my breath. “I never enjoyed
being owned. Your father was strong, as you are strong. You would not believe what I went through, to sneak a way out of your private hell, to bring you in. Now we can both leave.”

  “Get off me. Please.”

  “Your innocence has always been so delectable. I’ve always known that if I could claim your strength I could escape. But under your father’s iron fist I was too weak. No more. No weakness now.”

  He began his four-limbed spider crawl toward me. The vast black shape shifted above me. I tried to throw him off, but he was too heavy.

  His teeth closed around my face.

  * * *

  I awaken in Melissa’s apartment. Mine, as well—we live together. I hear her breath rasping beside me. Her face, round and beautiful, is rendered ghoulish in the green illumination. The greenish glow is emanating from me.

  I get up, go to the sliding doors that lead to the balcony, stare at my reflection in the glass. Green embers smolder in one hollow eye-socket. My own idiot smile flashes back at me.

  A great form composed of darkness looms behind me, the pitch black of its presence matched only by the abyss of hunger that yawns inside me, that causes me to turn to my sleeping partner with a new appreciation for her innocence.

  HER ACRES OF PASTORAL PLAYGROUND

  Lynda chews her peas. Her husband watches, his wary gaze fixed on the beauty mark beneath her left eye, no bigger than a felt-tip stipple, fetching accent to the delicate sweep of her cheekbone.

  When Delmar first placed her plate in front of her, that mark wasn’t there.

  “Your pork chop okay?” he asks. “Not too dry?”

  She nods, mutters “It’s fine” through a mouthful. The muscles at her temples flex as she chews, drawing his attention to the lovely streaks of gray that flare above her ears, so exotic, so witchy—the angles of her project into his mind just so and a sleepy flutter of lust stirs deep within him. And a flutter of alarm, too, though why that is, he doesn’t understand.

  Then the black spot on her face moves. It’s larger now, no longer a beauty mark, a lumpy mole with a thick black hair sprouting from its center. The hair twitches again, like a bug’s antenna.

  A whippoorwill starts its saw-motion song outside as a warm breeze stirs the kitchen curtains. Through the window Delmar notes two of the Appaloosas grazing in the pasture closest to the barn. Despite the brooding, overcast sky, sunlight washes the farm in soft watercolor hues.

  Lynda picks up her ear of corn, peers out the window just as a faint spatter of rain belies the filtered sunlight.

  “The Devil’s beating his wife,” she says. “Meaghan would love this. I hope she’s better soon.”

  “She will be,” Delmar replies. He says it automatic, like it’s a programmed response, a catechism. The growth on the side of his wife’s face thickens into an articulated tentacle, long as a tablespoon, and like one of those it flares and bulges at its end. The growth waves up and down as if it’s sniffing the air. Lynda brings the cob to her mouth, paying no attention to her new deformity.

  Delmar goes to the stove, where he has set a wooden-handled butcher knife so that the top half of its blade rests on a red hot coil. He picks up the knife. “Honey, I’m sorry, but I need you to hold still a second.”

  What he does next he does with the impassive face of the parent who must every day hold his daughter with cystic fibrosis upside down and beat her to make sure she can breathe another day. Lynda holds still, closes her eyes, seems to shut down, almost. When he finishes, there’s a raw circle on her cheek, like a cross-section of severed sausage, bloodless, and in seconds it’s stretched over with new skin, pink and healthy. She starts again as if nothing has happened, picks up her ear of corn and starts to gnaw.

  The black thing squirming in Delmar’s hands screams when he drops it in the pot, but he clamps the lid over the boiling water before it can crawl out. Before it can speak. He knows he can’t let it speak. Why he knows this, he can’t really say; it’s as if someone is whispering in his ear, whispering frantically, don’t let it, don’t let it, don’t let it , but there’s no one else in the room, just him and Lynda.

  Outside, the rain-sound stops, and the landscape brightens, though the clouds stay gray as ever.

  “Sweetie,” calls Lynda, “could you bring me the butter?”

  “You bet,” he says, keeping the pot lid pressed down hard. “In a minute. Just a minute.” He eyes her sidelong. “Just don’t forget who loves you.”

  She smiles wide over the decimated contents of her plate. “I haven’t. Ever.”

  * * *

  After lunch, he trudges out to the vegetable garden, not a trouble on his mind. Though there’s no break in the clouds, the light that so kindly warms his land makes its gentle presence known on his face. Most of his farm is given over to pastureland—he likes to joke to Lynda that he’s renting from the horses—but he keeps a half-acre tilled, and the animals, with preternatural discretion, leave it alone. He’s never even had to put a fence around it.

  He’s imagining a sweaty but productive day spent plucking hungry bugs off the potato leaves, pulling weeds from between the beanstalks, harvesting the ripest ears of corn. How easy the work comes to him, a lifestyle he once knew only from the half-listened-to tales—more like shaggy-dog complaints, really, long growly rants with no real point—from his grouchy father, God rest his soul. Delmar agrees now with his father, that he really was born to this work. He can hardly remember his life before he brought Lynda and Meaghan here.

  The corn rows tower at the edge of the tilled square furthest from the house. He gets to that task last of all, and once he’s there something in him grows uneasy, and a sensation crawls through his shoulders—like the prick, prick, prick when a wasp alights and starts to scurry across exposed flesh—but he feels this on the inside of his skin, not the outside.

  And at once his mind fills with the sight of the black limb twitching on his wife’s face. The texture of her flesh when he cut into it, spongy and yielding not a speck of blood. He doubles over, his insides pricking, but that voice is back, soothing in his ear, Don’t think about it, just don’t think about it, don’t let yourself think about it.

  And though his heart is racing, he can stand up straight. The pricking sensation is gone. He breathes deep, his eyes take in the beauty that surrounds him, the grass-green slopes, the fecund garden, thriving as a result of his proud handiwork. Yet he’s still not at ease.

  Beyond the corn lounges a long stretch of pasture that the animals hardly ever visit. Beyond that rises a gray haze of fog. He thinks nothing of it—this wall of fog is always there, misting up in a thick curtain to join with the low-hanging clouds overhead.

  Instead, a spark of light in the pasture catches his eye, orange and pulsing like fireplace embers. A brush fire? Couldn’t be. Something pricks in his belly, once, sharp, and stops.

  His boots whisk softly through the grass.

  For as long as he can remember, there’s been an oddity present in this particular pasture, a blackened spot, perfectly circular, about the size of a manhole, where nothing grows. It’s a lightning strike , that internal voice always tells him, whenever he gets close. Nothing special. Not important.

  But now the burnt circle in the ground has rekindled. He comes upon it to find it alive with curling lines of pulsating orange and yellow light. Stranger still, the lines etched by the glow form patterns, some of which he recognizes, though it’s as if a brick barrier stands in his mind between recognition and understanding. The patterns throb.

  A sound from the fog bank. A sob.

  The pricking beneath his skin returns. Delmar takes a step toward the foggy veil, despite the voice whispering, Stay away. Stay far away.

  “Who’s out there?” he means to shout, but the sound barely leaves his throat.

  The sobbing within the fog continues. It’s unquestionably the sound of a man, weeping.

  Delmar goes pale. It’s been months at least since he’s heard another human voice out here. T
here’s been no one save him and his wife and his daughter, safe from the rest of the world, the way he’s wanted it to be. Confusion and anger and that hideous pricking fear all slither inside him.

  Worse, he thinks he recognizes the voice, but he can’t place it. The man’s sobs grow louder, the sound of someone unhinged with grief, a father finding a child’s murdered body in the trunk of a car.

  Delmar takes another step toward the gray wall. “Get out of here,” he says, louder, but still not with the strength he’d like. “You’re trespassing. Go back where you came.”

  The man in the fog starts to scream. It’s a sound ripped from the belly, and the screams keep coming, like the man is being shredded inside by something small and burrowing. And Delmar has heard this agony before, this man screaming in torture, and he covers his ears, because he can almost make out words. He reels and steps back—