by S. T. Joshi
The day before Brad was to leave the hospital, a wizened man with a close-cropped gray beard came to visit him. The man wore a light blue shirt, tan slacks, and a brown sports jacket. He was pale and sickly looking, wearing glasses with thick black frames, glasses that a younger man would have worn for comic or ironic effect. He introduced himself, and Brad said, “So, how am I doing? Do I still get to leave tomorrow?”
The man frowned, perplexed. “I don’t—” He realized his mistake then and said, “I’m sorry. I’m not a medical doctor. That’s what I get for calling myself a doctor in a hospital. I’m a Ph.D. I taught at Baylor but I’m retired now.”
It was Brad’s turn to look stumped. Dr. Michael Parkington introduced himself again. He said that he was writing a book on the desert and was particularly interested in unusual anecdotal material. He’d heard about Brad’s encounter with a swarm of wasps, and he wondered if Brad would mind telling him about it.
Brad had nothing better to do—Meta was seeing her parents off at the airport and wouldn’t be back for hours—and he was interested in what this man could tell him.
Parkington asked if it would be all right if he recorded Brad’s recollections of the accident, and Brad almost said no, which was irrational, of course, but he would have preferred an undocumented chat. He’d heard his voice on a recorder once, and his voice sounded thin and full of complaint. But he said, “Sure,” and the professor turned on a small, cell-phone-sized recorder, and Brad told him everything he could remember, ending with, “I got woozy standing out there on the road, and I just passed out, I guess.”
“How many times were you stung?” Parkington asked.
Brad shrugged. “Maybe half a dozen times. I don’t know. It’s hard to keep count when you’re flying through a windshield.”
Parkington smiled ruefully. “Any welts? Any swellings or discolorations?”
Brad looked down at his forearm where he’d seen the wasp sting him. Nothing. His skin was smooth, unblemished. He lifted his hand to touch his cheek. No soreness there, and, shaving for the first time that morning, he hadn’t noticed any redness or swelling.
“No,” he said, slightly puzzled. “I didn’t even think to look.”
Parkington turned the recorder off and put it in his pocket. “I want to thank you for your time, Mr. Phelps.” He stood up.
“Sure. How many people have you interviewed?” Brad asked.
The professor sat down again. He took his glasses off, rubbed his forehead, and put the glasses back on. “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything to Sheriff Winslow about my coming by.”
“Why’s that?” Brad was starting to feel a little miffed. He hadn’t wanted that recorder running, and he should have trusted his intuition, because...well, here was this guy getting all circumspect, enlisting him in some local intrigue.
“Winslow thinks I’m trying to stir things up. Truth is, he thinks I’m a crackpot,” Parkington said. “He’d be pissed if he knew I’d come out here.” He looked at the doorway, as though expecting the sheriff to come walking through it on cue. He made a decision then. Brad could see it in the way he straightened his spine and narrowed his eyes. “I haven’t been entirely candid with you.”
The man leaned over and fumbled in his briefcase. “I’ve already written a book,” he said. He retrieved a book and handed it to Brad. Brad knew a self-published book when he saw one. The title was set in a lurid, old-English typeface: Haunted Mountains: Atlantis in the Desert by Michael Parkington, Ph.D. Translucent ocean waves were superimposed over a photograph of a desert panorama, mountains in the background. This computer-manipulated image, murky and lurid, offended Brad’s artistic sensibility while managing to instill a queasy sense of dislocation.
Brad looked up from the book in his hands and said, “And what, exactly, haven’t you told me?”
Parkington nodded his head. “I didn’t tell you that after interviewing some other people who encountered hostile swarm phenomena, I’ve come to the conclusion that these people were not attacked, not physically, in any event. I believe they all experienced a psychic derangement. I’m telling you that I don’t think you were attacked by wasps, Mr. Phelps. I think you were the victim of an induced hallucination.”
Brad sighed, disgusted. “The last week hasn’t been one of my best, but I think I know what I saw.” Brad held out the book, but Parkington smiled and shook his head.
“You keep the book. Maybe you’ll want to read it sometime. You know, not a single wasp was found in your vehicle, which is what I expected. I’ve documented five other cases of people being attacked by swarms, all within a half-mile of where you were found.”
Brad was silent.
Parkington held his hand up, fingers wide, and lowered each successive finger as he ticked off an attack: “Birds, bats, rattlesnakes, ants, and—my favorite menace—moths. In all but one case, the subjects were driving down Route 9 when they were attacked. The drivers were all forced to abandon their vehicles as a result of an onslaught of bats or flying ants or sparrows or moths, and all the attack victims seem to have lost consciousness for some period of time. Your adventure was the only life-threatening encounter, although any of the attacks could have resulted in a fatal accident.
“I might add that I know about these attacks because other travelers along that lonely stretch spotted the abandoned vehicles or the confused, semi-conscious owners and stopped to offer assistance. It seems reasonable to assume that some other drivers suffered swarm attacks during times when traffic was sparse, came to their senses, shrugged off their weird adventures, and drove on.”
Parkington said that there was one man who was not in a car when attacked. A man named Charlie Musgrove was on foot when he found himself surrounded by rattlesnakes. Musgrove maintained that he was bitten by five or six of the creatures, but a sample of his blood revealed no toxins, other than the alcohol he habitually imbibed.
“He’s a local, a homeless alcoholic,” Parkington said, “and not a credible witness, but I’m inclined to believe him, because he was in the vicinity of the other reported incidents, and his account is consistent with them.”
Parkington said that, in every single one of these reported attacks, no sign of the attacking creatures was found, no birds, bats, rattlesnakes, ants, or moths. And in the case of the birds, the driver was adamant in her description of their thrashing and banging around in the car, feathers flying everywhere, much avian carnage, so one would think that the most cursory forensic examination would have produced some corroborating evidence. Nothing could be found. “I’m guessing Sheriff Winslow hasn’t told you any of this.”
“He hasn’t,” Brad said. “Probably because he is a professional and understands that it is not his job to share bizarre theories with someone who has just been traumatized by a near-fatal accident. Now my meds are kicking in, and I’m going to close my eyes and get some sleep. Thanks for the book.”
And Brad closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, it was dark outside his window, and Meta was sitting in a chair with the book on her lap. She looked up, smiled, and said, “It says here that during the Permian age this whole area was under an ocean. That was 250 million years ago. Who gave you this book?”
“The ancient mariner,” Brad said.
THEY DROVE BACK TO AUSTIN IN A RENTED HONDA Accord. Meta did all the driving. Brad remained bundled in a semi-fog of pain meds, and a substantial cast girded his left leg. He’d been instructed in the use of crutches, but they were of limited utility thanks to his ravaged rib cage. A folded wheelchair, which would be his primary mode of transportation for the next six weeks, lay in the car’s trunk.
Once home, Brad called friends and family, quickly wearied of telling his story, and cast a forlorn eye on the upcoming weeks of recuperation.
On the positive side, he accompanied Meta to an appointment with her oncologist, who was pleased to tell them that all tests were negative; there was no trace of the cancer that had short-circuited their li
ves for the last year and a half. They had celebrated that night, with champagne and sex.
The sex had not been entirely successful. Brad had been struck with the intense conviction that, should he experience an orgasm, it would kill him; something vital to sustaining his life would be seized and devoured by his partner’s need. This thought robbed him of an erection, but his failure to achieve orgasm was, paradoxically, a great relief, as though he had survived a brush with death, so it wasn’t the worst sex he’d ever had, but it didn’t bode well for his erotic future.
Brad called work and had to talk to the insufferable Kent, a completely insincere creature, ambitious and feral, who assured Brad that he could avail himself of as much time off as his recuperation required. “I got your back, Brad-O,” he said, which didn’t cheer Brad at all. And yet, Brad felt no urgency about returning to work. Work felt like some remote, arcane endeavor, the rituals of some strange religion in which he had long ago ceased to believe.
Having plenty of time on his hands, Brad read Parkington’s book, Haunted Mountains: Atlantis in the Desert. The bulk of the book, after its author had argued unconvincingly for a sunken Atlantis near the town of Silo, presented the usual lost civilization stories. The only part of the book that was interesting (and poignant for the insights it offered) was Parkington’s revelation that his own father, a lawyer and amateur paleontologist, had encountered an Entity (his father’s word) while camping in the mountains outside of Silo. Parkington’s father referred to this alien visitation as a “remnant manifestation” and had embarked on a book about this visitation. He believed that there was an alien enclave established under the mountains in a “waiting configuration” that would transform the world when its time came round.
The author’s father disappeared in 1977 after a sudden decline in his mental state, characterized by paranoia, hallucinations, and a fervid hatred and fear of Christian doctrine. On more than one occasion, the man had entered one of Silo’s numerous churches during a Sunday service, wild-eyed and disheveled, and beseeched the minister and his congregation to “be silent and know that the only thing that hears you is monstrous and indifferent to prayers.” Much of the man’s rant was in an unknown tongue, and he was committed to private mental asylums on two occasions, but he was never at such places for long, because he grew remarkably calm and rational after a brief period of confinement. When he disappeared, he left a note for his son, which, Parkington writes, “I destroyed after reading, or, rather, after I had read as much as my sanity could bear.”
It was this last part of the book that spoke most directly to Brad, because it explained the author’s attempt to find some explanation for his father’s last years. The book Brad held in his hands was an artifact of two generations of pathology, and, as such, it was sadder and more profound than its clichéd, sensational subject initially suggested.
There was no mention of the swarm attacks, and Brad assumed that such attacks were a more recent phenomenon.
BRAD’S HEALTH IMPROVED, AND HE CEASED TO RELY on the wheelchair. The cast came off his leg, and his ribs were protected by a more flexible, shower-friendly fiberglass cage. With the help of a cane—he’d never had any success with the crutches, which promoted a form of locomotion too unnatural to be taken seriously—he was able to hobble to the kitchen and back to the bedroom, exhausted at first but slowly regaining his stamina, reclaiming his will.
He had much time for solitary reflection, because Meta, on his urging, had returned to her job at the UT library. In the evenings, she’d talk to him about her day, her voice his only window on a larger world.
Brad found his attention straying from her words. His mind, his heart was otherwise occupied: he was waiting (every day, every hour, every second) to feel, again, her presence. Since the accident, she had turned invisible...and opaque. Both words described her, despite their warring definitions. She was a ghost in his mind when out of his sight. His psychic compass could no longer find her. She could be anywhere, pursuing any activity—and he imagined her in the strangest places: curled amid warm towels in a clothes dryer; hanging upside down in a closet; smiling with her eyes open while underwater in the upstairs bathtub—and when she was in front of him, he did not know her. She seemed to study him with cool interest and an absence of any binding emotion. Even her voice had altered, and he found himself marveling at how skillfully this woman reproduced his wife’s sounds, failing only in recreating certain resonances that were within the province of her soul.
He should have been afraid, but he was not—not, that is, until he received a call from Sheriff Winslow, who informed Brad that Michael Parkington had left Silo, abruptly and without notice. The date of his departure was uncertain, since he kept to himself. Only when Parkington failed to show up on the first with the rent check did anyone (i.e., his landlord) evince interest in his whereabouts.
Brad was wondering why he had been called, since he had only met the man once, but the sheriff must have been anticipating this question, because he answered it before Brad asked.
“I called because we don’t know whether the man is dead or alive, and he may be dangerous.” Winslow explained that, on entering Parkington’s apartment, they had immediately been confronted with a wall of photographs and newspaper clippings, and while the bulk of these items had yet to suggest anything relevant to the man’s disappearance, the investigation had discovered an interesting and disturbing connection between four people (one woman and three men). These people were all the subjects of hometown newspaper articles (newspapers in Newark, El Paso, Phoenix, and Santa Fe) and had all, prior to the appearance of these articles, been interviewed by Dr. Parkington.
“We also discovered a small digital recorder and listened to your interview,” Winslow said.
“I still don’t understand why you called me,” Brad said, mildly irked, again, for having allowed Parkington to record him.
“Those newspaper articles are about people who have disappeared. They are the people Parkington interviewed. Since they all disappeared between one and four months after he interviewed them, and since he took the trouble to track those clippings down and stick them on his wall, it is likely those vanished folks are connected, in some way, to Parkington. I wanted to call and give you a heads up, in case he comes knocking on your door. You might not want to open it.”
“You think he killed those people?” Brad had difficulty envisioning a homicidal Parkington.
“I don’t know what to think. Do you?”
Brad didn’t, and he promised to call if Parkington showed up in Austin.
After he replaced the phone in its cradle, he went to the refrigerator and got a beer. He drank half of it and decided to call Meta at work.
“She left early today,” someone told him. “A couple of hours ago, I guess.”
Brad sat in a kitchen chair and drank the rest of his beer. He had no idea where she was.
But he did. He realized he did know. Not in the way he had always known, not with that magical (gone and now precious) lost sense but with the new cold logic that had replaced it. She was on her way to Silo, the town where it had all unraveled and where, now, some accursed force awaited her.
He set off at once, driving toward Silo, stopping every hundred miles or so to empty his bladder and take on gas and supplies (which consisted primarily of beer and snacks). He wasn’t up for such a trip, not fully recovered from the accident and emotionally exhausted by Meta’s betrayal, her retreat from his love and protection into the arms of some monstrous Casanova from Atlantis—and, yes, he admitted that he now swallowed Parkington’s nutcase scenarios, and they went down easy; there was something out there in the mountains—under the mountains—that had reached out and wrecked his marriage and was now dragging Meta toward its lair.
But he was exhausted and would be no good at all unless he rested. So, on the far side of midnight, miles away from morning, he pulled into a rest stop and turned the engine off and slept.
The sun was up when
he woke, and it was late afternoon when he drove down Silo’s Main Street. It was a lean town, not given to airs, saturated with the sun’s weight, sidewalks cracked by time, two old men on a bench in front of Roy’s Restaurant, the Silo Library next door, then a barbershop called Curly’s Quick Hair. Brad parked in front of a bar, B&G (which he knew, having eaten lunch there with Meta on a therapeutic outing from the hospital, stood for Bar & Grill, minimalist humor or the lack of it).
Brad wasn’t a drinker, and his overindulgence of the day before was now taking its toll. So he went into B&G and sat at the bar counter. He ordered a beer and a fried egg sandwich from the barmaid, a middle-aged woman of undecided hair color with a tattoo on her shoulder that said “Dwayne” over a heart. Under the heart, clearly the work of a less skilled artist, it read: “Stinks.” It made Brad sad, that tattoo. He thought of the entropy inherent in all relationships, and he ordered another beer. He considered a plan of action.
He didn’t have one, he realized. The certainty that had brought him here had drained out over the miles, and he was left with a panicky sense of abandonment. Who did he know in town? No one. Well, Sheriff Winslow, but what could he say to him? Nothing relevant. He’d sound like a madman.
Am I? he wondered. But it was the truth itself that was mad, and how could it help but irradiate him, taint his own sanity?
His musings were interrupted by the barmaid, shouting “Musky! Hey Musky! Wake up! Come on. I got a couple of beers for you if you take out the trash.”
She was leaning over a man and shaking his shoulder. He stirred, raised his head like an ancient bloodhound scenting a rabbit, and said, “Trash.” He was a bearded man with a pocked face and heavy-lidded eyes stained yellow, the same color as the bar’s smoke-saturated walls, and he had been sleeping in a corner booth, the only other patrons an elderly couple who were dancing to tinny sounds from the jukebox, the sort of music you could make with a comb and a piece of wax paper.