Suddenly, directly behind his head came a thunderous crash, denting the metal inward. We barely had the chance to react when there was another, in the same spot, tearing open the tunnel. A hand, an arm, burst through so quickly that its fingers were wrapped around Bob's arm before we had a chance to run.
"Hit it! Hit it!" he screamed, his voice more desperate every instant. We beat and beat at that arm with our metal pipes, again and again until it was only me beating it and then even I had to stop because the arm had retreated and Bob, whose screams were dying into a whimpered gurgling, was pulled bloodily through the jagged-toothed tear of metal that was far too small for him.
I ran out of the tunnel and was confronted by another. I couldn't quiet myself now, as I stumbled, slapping my arms against the metal shells, coughing and whimpering with complete abandon, knowing that there was no way I would lose him making all this noise, and knowing that I would never find my way out of this cluster of giant pipes before he caught me. It was too late to hold back, too late to think or control my panic. All the tears smoldering inside me for the last month erupted, and my crying grew louder and louder with every turn.
And then, he stood before me, as if he'd just appeared out of thin air, blocking my path, the pitifully small and broken body of my friend hanging limp in his hand, the snowlight illuminating the front of his head, the grotesque field of flesh where a face should have been but wasn't.
I stopped. The pipe hung loose at my side as I stared at him. Neither of us moved. His hand opened and Bob Ritchie's body fell lifeless into the snow. The front of the giant's head twisted and contorted. The flesh began to pop and peel away in a slashing diagonal down his face, exposing blunt, oversized teeth that gleamed in the light. He laughed a familiar laugh.
And then I knew. Or thought I knew.
"NO!" I howled and tried to bolt. I felt the hand at my shoulder, the hot, death-fouled breath across the back of my neck. I turned with the pipe and caught him across the side of the head — a clean blow, unexpected and unblocked. I could feel the resonance of that connection all through my body.
He was leaning too far forward and the impact sent him sprawling. He fell sideways into the corrugated metal, his hands trying to break the fall. I hit him again, bringing the pipe straight down with both hands and all of my ninety-three pounds, feeling the head give beneath it. He let out a strange cry as his hands flailed —at me, at his split head—I don't know which.
I threw the pipe at him and ran.
My hands and body were wet with blood. My face was awash with tears and the snow melting against my cheeks as I ran. I found my way out of the maze of tunnels and began running through the open fields of snow, no longer caring where I was or where I might end up.
I knew I hadn't stopped him. He wasn't human. And though he was at least two feet taller than my father, he had my father's laugh.
I had no idea where I was when I finally found myself running along the edges of backyards. I moved between two houses and out towards an unfamiliar street. I slipped in the fresh snow and fell flat on my face in the street as a car came skidding around the corner. It slammed on the brakes as I rolled away, and looked up to see a '63 Bonneville full of greasers.
"Stupid little son of a bitch!" one of them growled as they passed, leaning out the passenger window and hurling a beer can that caught me in the cheek.
And then they were gone. The cheek stung. I could smell the beer in my hands as I clutched my face.
As I got up on the sidewalk I heard another car approaching the corner. It was garbage night on this block and the sidewalk was lined with cans, so I ducked behind one and watched as a Corvair came to a stop almost directly in front of me. I thought I recognized the car as one of our neighbors'. I crept out and grabbed the back fender just as he pulled away from the stop sign. It was an easy skitch, sliding along the snow that lay fresh against the ice-impacted street. I sank my head between my arms, smelled the exhaust and watched the street pass beneath me.
When I finally let go of the fender I was only four blocks from my house. I brushed myself off and began the slow trudge home. I thought of Jimmy Bugella, safe at home all this time. How could I explain Bob's death to him—or anyone? Could I even admit to having witnessed it? A boy, one of my best friends, suddenly reduced to a lifeless bag of collapsing, draining tissue, discarded in a snowdrift.
Suddenly I was struck by yellow light, as the giant's car screamed to a halt in front of me. A door opened and slammed and a shape was slapped down on the hood.
I backed away as my eyes adjusted to the light and I saw him clearly. The twisting pattern of teeth widened and parted into what almost seemed to be a hideous smile as he let out a dry, staccato whistle.
I was too exhausted to run. I couldn't even move. I felt his palm atop my head, the fingertips like gouged files pressing against my temples. I dropped to my knees and curled into the slush.
"Don't hurt me," I sobbed, "Please don't hurt me. I'm sorry… I didn't mean it… any of it… I don't wanna die, I don't wanna be dead. Please, please… I'll make it up to you. Father…"
He pulled the hand away. The whistling erupted into laughter. At first I was sure that it was my father's laugh, but as it continued, growing louder and filling the night, I realized that wasn't it at all, and the memory, the recognition it stirred in me was something deeper, more distant. I remembered waking up screaming behind the bars of my crib, seeing my father enter the room, and shuddering at the deep, angry tone of his voice. In that moment and in so many others just like it, the shadowy figure in my dream had fused with the dark side of my father.
He backed away. I heard a thump, then went sprawling into the street-slush as a body was hurled into me, a body which seemed to fall apart on impact. I struggled to get away as its arms flailed powerfully against mine even as they seemed to detach from the body. When I got free and looked down at the limp form on the street, I recognized it immediately.
So it was no surprise when I looked up and found the car had disappeared without a trace. Because Jimmy Bugella had cut off in the other direction—he would have been home before I'd even made it to the quarry. And yet it was his broken, mangled body at my feet.
I screamed, loud enough for anyone within a block's radius to hear me through locked doors and storm windows. I was standing alone and blood soaked over the remains of one of my best friends, and there was no way I could ever have explained how it had happened. And so it occurred to me how this might look to cops, or to those people who'd come in response to my screams.
So I ran. Mom would understand. No… no, maybe she wouldn't, but she'd listen, and believe, and hold me, and I could cry at last and tell her all the things about Dad that I missed but was already losing the ability to remember and express. And then it would be over. She'd protect me, solace me, move me away somewhere where no one would think or suspect that any of this had anything to do with me. Because it didn't, couldn't have anything to do with me, and she'd believe that. Mother, you'll believe just this once that there really are monsters, won't you? And that they exist quite apart from whatever dark and diseased thoughts I may have and you may have noticed in my eyes…
And then I saw the cars. My sister and her family's car, my Aunt Helen and Uncle Frank's station wagon, my Uncle Robert's car and my brother Skip's Austin Healey. I knew what I'd find of the other side of that door. All those people, surrounding and obscuring my mom, their words and features stern and uncomprehending. There was no place to go. And I knew that the bone-splintering reality soaking through me would not merely be unbelievable but inconsequential within the realm of their complex, troubled, so thoroughly adult thoughts.
The five steps up my front porch were the most strenuous steps of the entire night. I thought I was going to vomit on the welcome mat.
No sooner did I pull open the storm door than my sister Jeanine opened the inner door. She grabbed me by the wrist, swiftly found the bare skin under my coat and shirt and dug in with her nails
and hissed between grinding teeth: "Where have you been? Do you realize it's 10:30? We were about to call the police on you, you little brat. Mother's worried half to death about you." She let go as we left the hallway shadows and entered the living room light.
And there they were, all talking at once, to me, to each other, who knows? I missed most of it. My mom's brother Robert, the eccentric sixty-year-old fascist bachelor, sitting straight-backed in his chair, looking at me from under sweeping white eyebrows that looked like bird wings. My dad's sister Helen and her husband Frank, both drunk out of their minds, their voices booming above the rest. Jeanine's husband Ronnie, looking for all the world like Dennis the Menace's dad, trying to look concerned but beneath it all bored out of his mind just to be enduring yet another evening with all these people. My brother Skip, smiling, popping gum, quiet and trying to look friendly and sympathetic. His bride Donna, who was talking to the small, shadowy figure in the far corner—my mom, answering Donna in hushed tones and looking at me in a way she'd looked at Dad a thousand times, with cold, unredeemable contempt.
The droning in my ears subsided and I heard them speak.
"Don't think you can get away with this just because your father…"
"You aren't going to pull these kinds of stunts with your mother, boy, not if I'm around to stop it…"
"Fighting, hmmmm?"
“Have you been drinking beer?”
I could see that I was covered with blood—all kinds of blood. The gash near my temple throbbed.
Outside I could hear the sirens begin to wail.
"Poor eye contact is a sign of low self-esteem, son… Son! See, this is what I mean, look at me when I'm talking to you…"
I looked at my mom and then at my brother, avoiding all the rest. There was no point in standing there. I turned my back on them and started up the stairs.
I heard steps behind me. My sister. What could she want now? Something snapped and I thought, doesn't she realize what a chance she's taking?
"Danny, the girls are sleeping in Mother's room. You be quiet and make sure you don't wake them up. Do you understand me?"
I whirled around. My expression almost sent her reeling down the stairs. "Oh… Kay," I hissed.
She shook her head, measured her rage and cocked an eyebrow in an air of easy superiority.
"You spoiled brat. You've been just coasting along all these years, haven't you? Everyone doting on you, pampering you. Well, that's all over now, Daniel. Things are going to be tougher now, the way they were for me and Skip, back before Mother and Daddy had any money. You're not going to get away with this kind of stuff, honey. You try it and I'll send Ronnie up and he'll beat the living daylights out of you."
I already had my back turned. She didn't follow me.
I stood in my mom's doorway. There on the bed was my five year old niece, Karen, and in the port-a-crib, Lucy, aged two. Both of them as cute as could be, looking untroubled and angelic in their sleep. These, after all, were real children. They didn't abuse their parents or destroy property, and they weren't presumptuous enough to assume that they could experience or understand the kind of grief that adults felt. They were cherubs. Bundles of joy… I shut the door.
I sponged the blood off my coat and hung it on the shower curtain rod. I looked at my bloodied, black-headed, impossibly haggard face in the mirror as I began to undress.
I'll send Ronnie up and he'll beat the living daylights out of you.
I screamed. I punched the bathroom mirror, thinking, hoping it would break. It didn't. I stormed into my room, my hands and arms pumped murderously. I emptied the bookshelves, hurled my models against the walls, smashed my aquarium, tore books apart, all the while shouting out my grisly threats.
I'd kill them. Kill them all. My stupid family and their crummy, chicken-shit lives. I'd murder every last one of them. The bastards! The bastards! I'd kill them. Kill them all. Starting…
I stopped and looked at my shut bedroom door. Someone was standing right outside. I thought it was poor, beleaguered Ronnie, sent up here to slap me around a bit.
But Ronnie wouldn't have scraped on my door like that. He wouldn't have made that strange little whistle, or laughed that deep, dreampit laugh.
And the world suddenly spun out of alignment. I thought of the girls asleep in the next room.
"No, no," I muttered, my voice small and weak. "It isn't me, is it. Is it me? Is this the disease? Please go away, don't hurt anyone else, please," wondering if even Larry Lorazo had made it home alive. I begged the thing on the other side of the door to disappear back into its grave, its automobile, my mind…wherever it had come from. Begged it to disappear.
It didn't.
TINY ISLANDS
On my sixteenth birthday—having renounced God and wanting no more from life than the chance to withdraw into my own private hell and just maybe carve a piece of the outside world into the image of that hell—I spent fifty cents on a fossil trilobite at the gift shop of the Field Museum in Chicago, and decided to submit my fate to its ancient, pristine influence.
School had been out for a week. On the last day of school, my girlfriend of three months, Debbie Shepard, had dumped me for my friend, Curt Decker. In the course of milking all the melodrama I could out of this little tragedy, I'd managed to bore and depress everyone within earshot—including myself—so my first request to the fossil-charm was to clear the faithless ex-girlfriend from my thoughts once and for all. I should probably have been suspicious the moment I realized just how quickly and thoroughly it granted that request.
It was the summer of 1970, and it was our intention to spend the whole summer playing softball, listening to records, hanging around at Cunningham Beach or else just slumming our days away along the DuPage River. The river ran across three forest preserves, along the edges of backyards, through downtown, and behind Cunningham Beach, where its course was broken up by a number of tiny islands, some of which were overgrown with weeds and trees that in the height of summer created an imposing thicket in which we managed to find some of the privacy and isolation we seemed to hunger for so much. We would spend our afternoons swimming and carousing at the beach—which was an old quarry converted into the world's biggest and greenest swimming pool—and then, when the world seemed particularly dull or oppressive, we would head on out to the river and wade to the tiny islands and feel, for fleeting moments at a time, that we truly had escaped.
In reality, we were a fairly childish bunch of sixteen-year-olds. We weren't particularly tough or violent, and it would be another year before drugs would begin to wash over us like a sweet, corrosive perfume. None of us had a driver's license, few of us had anything remotely resembling jobs and I think, for some of us, all we really wanted was to hide out just a little longer before . . . well, whatever. Obviously, something had to happen to us sooner or later, and we had the unshakable conviction that this something would be bad. Lifetimes worth of responsibilities, compromises and tragedies awaited us, and these prospects filled us with what threatened to become an all-encompassing dread. I could see it in Kevin MacDonald's eyes, hear it in the halting monotones of Ralph Coleman's voice and in the sad, misanthropic ravings of Curt Decker.
As for me, well, I couldn't understand how I'd held out as long as I had. Three-and-a-half years before, during the Big Snow of '67, while living in another town, I'd gone out snowballing and skitching with some friends and had been attacked by . . . well, how can I tell you this in a way that will sound believable? Let's just say that three of my best friends were murdered that night and I subsequently went home and tried to kill myself. My father had just died a few weeks before, and I believe his death had driven me crazy. Here it was, three-and-a-half years later, and I was still convinced I was crazy.
I would sit out on the tiny islands, sometimes with my friends, sometimes alone, and I would try to will myself sane or will the world into something in which I would appear sane. I would gaze into the intricate impression the trilobite had left upon th
e coin-sized rock, who knows how many hundreds of millions of years ago, and try to create some kind of resonant connection between the life it had led in that distant Cambrian sea, to the life it was now accompanying me through, as though that connection made me a focused unit upon a predictable, benevolent time line.
Meanwhile, I was taking U. S. History in summer school. Every day at noon I would walk Colleen Carlisle home. It was a ten-minute walk, during which we were learning—almost in spite of ourselves—how to talk to each other in ways that neither of us could talk to anyone else in the world. And although Colleen was Ralph Coleman's girlfriend, and Ralph was my best friend, I began to realize that I was falling in love with her and that somehow, something had to be done about it.
One Saturday, two weeks after the beginning of summer school, we were at Cunningham Beach, sitting around on our towels on the lawn near the water. I kept a pained but watchful eye on Colleen and Ralph, trying to learn something from the way they looked and talked to each other. While Curt and Debbie gave each other those long, sweet looks they always wore when they were about to start making out in public, and Ralph argued with Marty Hiatt—for about the thousandth time in my recollection—about who were the best and, conversely, the most overrated guitarists "in the world," Colleen just sat there. Ralph didn't talk to her, didn't acknowledge her presence, didn't even seem to feel the light stroke of her fingertips up and down the center of his back. Colleen kept her soft blue eyes on him, on the water, or upon all the people passing back and forth in front of us, and I kept my eyes on her. It was easy. No one bothered to look at me at all, not even Colleen, although there were moments when I was sure she knew I was looking at her and was posing her prettiest for my benefit. After about a half hour of this shit, I had to get the hell out of there. They all said goodbye as though they couldn't understand why I had to leave at three in the afternoon and told me how much they hated to see me go and all of that. All except Colleen. She wouldn't even look at me.
Don't Clean the Aquarium! Page 13