Prayers to Broken Stones

by Dan Simmons

  He was almost out of the room when he glanced at the mirror and saw movement. His mother continued to sleep but someone was sitting in the chair Louis had just vacated. He wheeled around.

  The chair was empty.

  Louis’s headache flared like the thrust of a heated wire behind his left eye. He turned back to the mirror, moving his head slowly so as not to exacerbate the pain and vertigo. The image in the mirror was more clear than his vision had been for days.

  Something was sitting in the chair he had just vacated.

  Louis blinked and moved closer to the wall mirror, squinting slightly to resolve the image. The figure on the chair was somewhat misty, slightly diffuse against a more focused background, but there was no denying the reality and solidity of it. At first Louis thought it was a child—the form was small and frail, the size of an emaciated ten-year-old—but then he leaned closer to the mirror, squinted through the haze of his headache, and all thoughts of children fled.

  The small figure leaning over his mother had a large, shaven head perched on a thin neck and even thinner body. Its skin was white—not flesh white but paper white, fish-belly white—and the arms were skin and tendon wrapped tightly around long bone. The hands were pale and enormous, fingers at least six inches long, and as Louis watched they unfolded and hovered over his mother’s bedclothes. As Louis squinted he realized that the figure’s head was not shaven but simply hairless—he could see veins through the translucent flesh—and the skull was disturbingly broad, brachycephalic, and so out of proportion with the body that the sight of it made him think of photographs of embryos and fetuses. As if in response to this thought, the thing’s head began to oscillate slowly as if the long, thin neck could no longer support its weight. Louis thought of a snake closing on its prey.

  Louis could do nothing but stare at the image of pale flesh, sharp bone and bruise-colored shadows. He thought fleetingly of concentration camp inmates shuffling to the wire, of week-dead corpses floating to the surface like inflatable things made of rotted white rubber. This was worse.

  It had no ears. A rimmed, ragged hole with reddened flanges of flesh opened directly into the misshapen skull. The eyes were bruised holes, sunken blue-black sockets in which someone had set two yellowed marbles as a joke. There were no eyelids. The eyes were obviously blind, clouded with yellow cataracts so thick that Louis could see layers of striated mucus. Yet they darted to and fro purposefully, a predator’s darting, lurking glare, as the great head moved closer to his mother’s sleeping form. In its own way, Louis realized, the thing could see.

  Louis whirled around, opened his mouth to shout, took two steps toward the bed and the suddenly empty chair, stopped with fists clenched, mouth still straining with his silent scream, and turned back to the mirror.

  The thing had no mouth as such, no lips, but under the long, thin nose the bones of cheeks and jaw seemed to flow forward under white flesh to form a funnel, a long tapered snout of muscle and cartilage which ended in a perfectly round opening that pulsed slightly as pale-pink sphincter muscles around the inner rim expanded and contracted with the creature’s breath or pulse. Louis staggered and grasped the back of an empty chair, closing his eyes, weak with waves of headache pain and sudden nausea. He was sure that nothing could be more obscene than what he had just seen.

  Louis opened his eyes and realized that he was wrong.

  The thing had slowly, almost lovingly, pulled down the thin blanket and topsheet which covered Louis’s mother. Now it lowered its misshapen head over his mother’s chest until the opening of that obscene proboscis was scant inches away from the faded blue-flower print of her hospital gown. Something appeared in the flesh-rimmed opening, something gray-green, segmented, and moist. Small, fleshy antennae tested the air. The great, white head bent lower, cartilage and muscle contracted, and a five-inch slug was slowly extruded, wiggling slightly as it hung above Louis’s mother.

  Louis threw his head back in a scream that finally could be heard, tried to turn, tried to remove his hands from their deathgrip on the back of the empty chair, tried to look away from the mirror. And could not.

  Under the slug’s polyps of antennae was a face that was all mouth, the feeding orifice of some deep-sea parasite. It pulsed as the moist slug fell softly onto his mother’s chest, coiled, writhed, and burrowed quickly away from the light. Into his mother. The thing left no mark, no trail, not even a hole in the hospital gown. Louis could see the slightest ripple of flesh as the slug disappeared under the pale flesh of his mother’s chest.

  The white head of the child-thing pulled back, the yellow eyes stared directly at Louis through the mirror, and then the face lowered to his mother’s flesh again. A second slug appeared, dropped, burrowed. A third.

  Louis screamed again, found freedom from paralysis, turned, ran to the bed and the apparently empty chair, thrashed the air, kicked the chair into a distant corner, and ripped the sheet and blanket and gown away from his mother.

  Two nurses and an attendant came running as they heard Louis’s screams. They burst into the room to find him crouched over his mother’s naked form, his nails clawing at her scarred and shrunken chest where the surgeons had recently removed both breasts. After a moment of shocked immobility, one nurse and the attendant seized and held Louis while the other nurse filled a syringe with a strong tranquilizer. But before she could administer it, Louis looked in the mirror, pointed to a space near the opposite side of the bed, screamed a final time, and fainted.

  “It’s perfectly natural,” said Lee the next day after their second trip to the Boulder Clinic. “A perfectly understandable reaction.”

  “Yes,” said Louis. He stood in his pajamas and watched her fold back the top sheet on his bed.

  “Dr. Kirby says that injuries to that part of the brain can cause strange emotional reactions,” said Debbie from her place by the window. “Sort of like whatshisname … Reagan’s press secretary who was shot years ago, only temporary, of course.”

  “Yeah,” said Louis, lying back, settling his head into the tall stack of pillows. There was a mirror on the wall opposite. His gaze never left it.

  “Mom was awake for a while this morning,” said Lee. “Really awake. I told her you’d been in to see her. She doesn’t … doesn’t remember your visit, of course. She wants to see you.”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” said Louis. The mirror showed the reversed images of the three of them. Just the three of them. Sunlight fell in a yellow band across Debbie’s red hair and Lee’s arm. The pillowcases behind Louis’s head were very white.

  “Tomorrow,” agreed Lee. “Or maybe the day after. Right now you need to take some of the medication Dr. Kirby gave you and get some sleep. We can go visit Mom together when you feel better.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Louis, and he closed his eyes.

  He stayed in bed for six days, rising only to go to the bathroom or to change channels on his portable TV. The headaches were constant but manageable. He saw nothing unusual in the mirror. On the seventh day he rose about ten A.M., showered slowly, dressed in his camel slacks, white shirt, and blue blazer, and was prepared to tell Lee that he was ready to visit the hospital when his sister came into the room red-eyed.

  “They just called,” she said. “Mother died about twenty minutes ago.”

  The funeral home was about two blocks from where his mother had lived, where Louis had grown up after they had moved from Des Moines when he was ten, just east of the Capitol Hill area where old brick homes were becoming rundown rentals and where Hispanic street gangs had claimed the night.

  According to his mother’s wishes there would be an “visitation” this night where Denver friends could pay their respects before the casket was flown back to Des Moines the next day for the funeral Mass at St. Mary’s and final interment at the small city cemetery where Louis’s father was buried. Louis thought that the open casket was an archaic act of barbarism. He stayed as far away from it as he could, greeting people at the door, catching glimpses
only of his mother’s nose, folded hands, or rouged cheeks.

  About sixty people showed up during the two-hour or- deal, most of them in their early seventies—his mother’s age—people from the block whom he hadn’t seen in fifteen years or new friends she had met through Bingo or the Senior Citizens Center. Several of Louis’s Boulder friends showed up, including two members of his Colorado Mountain Club hiking group and two colleagues from the physics labs at C.U. Debbie stayed by his side the entire time, watching his pale, sweaty face and occasionally squeezing his hand when she saw the pain from the headache wash across him.

  The visitation period was almost over when suddenly he could no longer stand it. “Do you have a compact?” he asked Debbie.

  “A what?”

  “A compact,” he said. “You know, one of those little make-up things with a mirror.”

  Debbie shook her head. “Louis, have you ever seen me with something like that?” She rummaged in her purse. “Wait a minute. I have this little hand mirror that I use to check my …”

  “Give it here,” said Louis. He raised the small plastic-backed rectangle, turning toward the doorway to get a better view behind him.

  About a dozen mourners remained, talking softly in the dim light and flower-scented stillness. Someone in the hallway beyond the doorway laughed and then lowered his voice. Lee stood near the casket, her black dress swallowing light, speaking quietly to old Mrs. Narmoth from across the alley.

  There were twenty or thirty other small figures in the room, moving like pale shadows between rows of folding chairs and dark-suited mourners. They moved slowly, carefully, seeming to balance their oversized heads in a delicate dance. Each of the child-sized forms awaited its turn to approach the casket and then moved forward, its pale body and bald head emitting its own soft penumbra of greenish-grayish glow. Each thing paused by the casket briefly and then lowered its head slowly, almost reverently.

  Gasping in air, his hand shaking so badly the mirror image blurred and vibrated, Louis was reminded of lines of celebrants at his First Communion … and of animals at a trough.

  “Louis, what is it?” asked Debbie.

  He shook off her hand, turned and ran toward the casket, shouldering past mourners, feeling cold churnings in his belly as he wondered if he was passing through the white things.

  “What?” asked Lee, her face a mask of concern as she took his arm.

  Louis shook her away and looked into the casket. Only the top half of the lid was raised. His mother lay there in her best blue dress, the make-up seeming to return some fullness to her ravaged face, her old rosary laced through her folded fingers. The cushioned lining under her was silk and beige and looked very soft. Louis raised the mirror. His only reaction then was slowly to lift his left hand and to grasp the rim of the casket very tightly, as if it were the railing of a ship in rough seas and he were in imminent danger of plunging overboard.

  There were several hundred of the slug-things in the coffin, flowing over everything inside it, filling it to the brim. They were more white than green or gray now and much, much larger, some as thick through the body as Louis’s forearm. Many were more than a foot long. The antennae tendrils had contracted and widened into tiny yellow eyes and the lamprey mouths were recognizably tapered now.

  As Louis watched, one of the pale, child-sized figures to his right approached the casket, laid long white fingers not six inches from Louis’s hands, and lowered its face as if to drink.

  Louis watched as the thing ingested four of the long, pale slugs, the creature’s entire face contracting and expanding almost erotically to absorb the soft mass of its meal. The yellow eyes did not blink. Others approached the casket and joined in the communion. Louis lowered the angle of the mirror and watched two more slugs flow effortlessly out of his mother, sliding through blue material into the churning mass of their fellows. Louis moved the mirror, looked behind him, seeing the half-dozen pale forms standing there, waiting patiently for him to move. Their bodies were pale and sexless blurs. Their fingers were very long and very sharp. Their eyes were hungry.

  Louis did not scream. He did not run. Very carefully he palmed the mirror, released his death grip on the edge of the casket, and walked slowly, carefully, away from there. Away from the casket. Away from Lee and Debbie’s distantly heard cries and questions. Away from the funeral home.

  He was hours and miles away, in a strange section of dark warehouses and factories, when he stopped in the mercury-arc circle of a streetlight, held the mirror high, swiveled 360 degrees to ascertain that nothing and no one was in sight, and then huddled at the base of the streetlight to hug his knees, rock, and croon.

  “I think they’re cancer vampires,” Louis told the psychiatrist. Between the wooden shutters on the doctor’s windows, Louis caught a glimpse of the rocky slabs that were the Flatirons. “They lay these tumor-slugs that hatch and change inside people. What we call tumors are really eggs. Then the cancer vampires take them back into themselves.”

  The psychiatrist nodded, tamped down his pipe, and lighted another match. “Do you wish to tell me more … ah … details … about these images you have?” He puffed his pipe alight.

  Louis started to shake his head and then stopped suddenly as headache pain rippled through him. “I’ve thought it all out in the last few weeks,” he said. “I mean, go back more than a hundred years and give me the name of one famous person who died of cancer. Go ahead.”

  The doctor drew on his pipe. His desk was in front of the shuttered windows and his face was in shadow, only occasionally illuminated when he turned as he relit his pipe. “I can’t think of one right now,” the doctor said, “but there must be many.”

  “Exactly,” said Louis in a more excited tone than he had meant to use. “I mean, today we expect people to die of cancer. One in six. Or maybe it’s one in four. I mean, I didn’t know anyone who died in Viet Nam, but everybody knows somebody—usually somebody in our family—who’s died of cancer. Just think of all the movie stars and politicians. I mean, it’s everywhere. It’s the plague of the Twentieth Century.”

  The doctor nodded and kept any patronizing tones out of his voice. “I see your point,” he said. “But just because modern diagnostic methods did not exist before this does not mean people did not die of cancer in previous centuries. Besides, research has shown that modern technology, pollutants, food additives and so forth have increased the risk of encountering carcinogens which …”

  “Yeah,” laughed Louis, “carcinogens. That’s what I used to believe in. But, Jesus, Doc, have you ever read over the AMA’s and American Cancer Society’s official lists of carcinogens? I mean it’s everything you eat, breathe, wear, touch, and do to have fun. I mean it’s everything. That’s the same as just saying that they don’t know. Believe me, I’ve been reading all of that crap, they don’t even know what makes a tumor start growing.”

  The doctor steepled his fingers. “But you believe that you do, Mr. Steig?”

  Louis took one of his mirrors from his shirt pocket and moved his head in quick half-circles. The room seemed empty. “Cancer vampires,” he said. “I don’t know how long they’ve been around. Maybe something we did this century allowed them to come through some … some gate or something. I don’t know.”

  “From another dimension?” the doctor asked in conversational tones. His pipe tobacco smelled vaguely of pine woods on a summer day.

  “Maybe,” shrugged Louis. “I don’t know. But they’re here and they’re busy feeding … and multiplying …”

  “Why do you think that you are the only one who has been allowed to see them?” asked the doctor brightly.

  Louis felt himself growing angry. “Goddammit, I don’t know that I’m the only one who can see them. I just know that something happened after my accident …”

  “Would it not be … equally probable,” suggested the doctor, “that the injury to your skull has caused some very realistic hallucinations? You admit that your sight has been somewhat
affected.” He removed his pipe, frowned at it, and fumbled for his matches.

  Louis gripped the arms of his chair, feeling the anger in him rise and fall on the waves of his headache. “I’ve been back to the Clinic,” he said. “They can’t find any sign of permanent damage. My vision’s a little funny—but that’s just because I can see more now. I mean, more colors and things. It’s like I can see radio waves almost.”

  “Let us assume that you do have the power to see these … cancer vampires,” said the doctor. The tobacco glowed on his third inhalation. The room smelled of sunwarmed pine needles. “Does this mean that you also have the power to control them?”

  Louis ran his hand across his brow, trying to rub away the pain. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Steig. I couldn’t hear …”

  “I don’t know!” shouted Louis. “I haven’t tried to touch one. I mean, I don’t know if … I’m afraid that it might … Look, so far the things … the cancer vampires—they’ve ignored me, but …”

  “If you can see them,” said the doctor, “doesn’t it follow that they can see you?”

  Louis rose and went to the window, tugging open the shutters so the room was filled with late afternoon light. “I think they see what they want to see,” said Louis, staring at the foothills beyond the city, playing with his hand mirror. “Maybe we’re just blurs to them. They find us easily enough when it’s time to lay their eggs.”

  The doctor squinted in the sudden brightness but removed his pipe and smiled. “You talk about eggs,” he said, “but what you described sounded more like feeding behavior. Does this discrepancy and the fact that the … vision … first occurred when your mother was dying suggest any deeper meanings to you? We all search for ways to control things we have no power over—things we find too difficult to accept. Especially when one’s mother is involved.”

  “Look,” sighed Louis, “I don’t need this Freudian crap. I agreed to come here today because Deb’s been on my case for weeks but …” Louis stopped and raised his mirror, and stared.