So I turned off the palmcomp right then and there, extracted the clip of ammo from my gun, removed a few solid bullets from that, and inserted three green plasma capsules instead.
***
IT WAS EVENING by the time I arrived upground; the rain continued to smash to the streets. In the tube station where I disembarked there was a row of shops not yet closed, and in one of them I purchased a poncho-style purple rain slicker with a hood, which would protect me from the elements and help obscure my face. Purple was the big fad color lately, I noticed, so I was nondescript.
Entering my apartment building, I felt as jumpy as if I were on a mission to assassinate a new victim. Don’t they say that murderers are compelled to revisit the scenes of their crimes?
This was the exhilarating freedom I mentioned before? To be going to view the corpse of my former lover, whom I had killed?
I thought of the gun seller Rabal’s tapestry, showing people consumed by the chameleon-like yin/yang devil/god, master of life/death Ugghiutu...his worshipers killed and ground up and digested and then shat back into a new existence. Yeah, that was me. From one hell reborn into another.
I feared confronting a neighbor who might know me, or even the landlord. Forcers, detectives, outside my apartment door in the middle of their investigation. But I met no one in my hallway. My hand trembled as I tapped out my password on the keypad. Like an impostor of my former self, I got the password wrong, had to try it again. The door opened inward. It opened half-way, at least, then was blocked.
A locomotive of stench struck me dead on, nearly flattening me.
It was dark in the apartment, but I plunged into it and shut the door hurriedly before more of the stench escaped. Before someone happened along. But a panic washed over me, worse than the reek, to be closed in the darkness with Gabrielle, and I clawed at a wall switch to turn on the overhead lights.
Oh, if only I hadn’t.
Bodies can bloat with decomposition, fill balloon-like with the gases of corruption. But could such a phenomenon account for this?
The door had been blocked by Gabrielle’s body. But Gabrielle had fallen more toward the center of the livingroom. In death, she had spread out from that center. She had reached all the walls, and her belly was pressed flat against the ceiling, and I wondered if she had even bulged through the bedroom doorway.
The ceiling lights shone through the purple-black translucent flesh of her abdomen, making her seem to glow from the inside. And the light passed directly through the crater of a hole where her chest window had once been.
Through silhouetted nests of veins I could see organs inside her, seeming to float in an aquarium of cloudy liquid. I couldn’t distinguish her swollen limbs from her torso, except I thought I recognized an immense, distorted foot squashed up against one of the walls.
That smell...
I clamped a hand over my nose and mouth, fought back a rattling gag. With my free hand I fumbled the Thor out of my waistband. I had to burn this blasphemy, burn the witch, burn it from my sight before I lost my nerve and my mind...
There was a muffled sloshing sound. A kind of gurgle like a stopped drain might make. And then I saw one of the murky organs move inside Gabrielle. At first I thought it was merely drifting, but I realized it had paddled itself along, trailing jellyfish-like arms of various lengths and thicknesses.
It wasn’t an organ.
I lifted and pointed and fired the Thor at Gabrielle’s belly. At the thing swimming inside her.
Just a sound like a door slamming, from the gun. The pellet pierced her. The entrance hole was so small that only a trickle of clear fluid ran out, down the glossy stretched skin. But the smell that was released was like a waterfall crashing over me, and I dropped to my knees and vomited.
Above me, I vaguely saw the light inside Gabrielle turn greenish, and fluttery.
A sizzling sound. A bubbling. Now I looked up and saw the green inferno boiling inside the blackish balloon. I scrambled to my feet and pressed myself back against the wall as the fire spread to the skin of the balloon and holes began to widen and a flood gushed free. It lapped around my feet, my ankles. I quickly slid along the wall and sprang up onto a small chest of drawers, kicking aside the table lamp there. I didn’t want the fluid – or the fire that suffused it – to touch me.
The great bulk began to recede from me, to hollow itself out. I aimed a bit further back and fired a second plasma round. More green fire spread. A sort of cave was being tunneled back through the corpse. It was not a cave I wanted to explore. I saw organs drop to the floor in the rush of fluid, melting into red-black puddles. I saw no trace of the swimming thing I had glimpsed vaguely through her skin.
I fired a third shot. My last gel cap in the gun.
The flood on the floor began to recede, as well, replaced by a curling, churning fog...perhaps of evaporation. The ebbing tide left the carpet eaten and sodden. That would come out of my security deposit, I thought madly. I started to laugh, vomited again instead, falling from the chest. My hands pressed flat to the floor and I expected plasma traces to corrode their palms but the fire was short-lived and already spent here, the last traces of it chasing the hulk as it attempted to flee to the bedroom.
Lifting my one-ton head, I saw the last of Gabrielle. Her own head, larger than my body, compressed into an hour-glass shape, half of it in the livingroom and half in the bedroom. Thank God there was enough life left in the last gel cap to consume it. Thank Ugghiutu for his greedy consumption...
She was gone.
I retrieved my dropped gun and regained my footing, though I staggered forward several steps. The vapor around my feet was dispersing, fading away like a ghost. The green fire had even eaten the stench. Most of that was gone, as well.
Gun held before me, I explored my apartment, as if I feared that the swimming thing had somehow escaped her, taken refuge in the bathtub, or under my bed. I didn’t find it. It was a relief.
I thought of the ritual we had playfully performed; to conjure a demon to do our bidding. Had she succeeded, after all? But done its bidding, instead? I despaired to think of Gabrielle as completely controlled, possessed, by that thing. Perversely, I preferred to think that she had mostly chosen to give herself over to this path. As shameful as the feeling was, I preferred to believe I had killed a person who had become evil, than a primarily innocent victim trapped within herself. That, then, would be like shooting through a baby in order to kill its kidnapper.
I blotted out that possibility as if slamming and bolting an iron door. Gaby had invited their influence, I told myself, melded with it willingly. The doorway she had opened was within herself. Perhaps literally. And their power had suffused and seduced her. These forces, these entities, had cultivated her own potential for evil. But listen to me. Evil. Demons. They were not Judeo-Christian demons. And evil is subjective. No more terrible demon ever existed than a man looming over a pig in a slaughterhouse.
I returned from my inspection of the rest of my flat. Except for stains on the floor and to a lesser extent the walls and ceiling, the apartment was restored. A tomb containing my former life.
Since I was here, I decided to take some more things back to my new apartment, and filled a large plastic trash bag. My computer was beyond salvage – it lay in the center of the floor where Gabrielle had fallen upon it, crushed and partially melted. I stuffed its pieces into the trash zapper and vaporized them entirely.
I had an inspiration. I would write a suicide note, then leave my gun on the floor. When the landlord summoned the police, they would think it was I who had melted here, marring the floor. My freedom would be complete. Christopher Ruby would be officially obliterated.
But what if it were possible to return to this life, should I want to one day? What if I needed those abstract numbers of identification that proved I was a legitimate physical entity? My money wouldn’t last forever. Much as I rejected so ridiculously prosaic a concept as a job, I would need to work again one day. No, I didn’t dare murder Chr
istopher Ruby.
Would the landlord call the forcers anyway, to complain about the stains? If they came, would they bother to examine them closely? I couldn’t be sure, but at least it was better than them finding Gabrielle’s body.
Gabrielle’s body, which I had once kissed, caressed, entered. I had expected to feel more remorse, pity, but I mostly felt revulsion just then. She had been so transformed. The Gabrielle I mourned was another body than the thing I had disposed of here; a body made from memory. It’s all about time and space.
I fled my apartment, fled to the underworld, for a second time.
***
THEY KEPT THE heat high in the Kalian Reading Room. The humidity was tropical; I thought I might faint in one of the suffocating coffins of an aisle, and had to go quickly sit down at one of the central tables with a few books I’d pulled from a shelf at random. It was like sitting near to an oven at the height of summer. But I knew there was a fever inside me as well.
There was a deep stink of sweat plastered thinly with a too-bright layer of cologne, like makeup on a decaying corpse. Had it been this hot in here yesterday? Yesterday I had wandered here as if sleep-walking, had seemed to wake up in this room. I didn’t stay, yesterday – I simply browsed for a few minutes, scanned for a familiar face. But it had not appeared.
Today I had sleep-walked here again. This time I’d decided to stay. Where else did I have to go?
With a start I realized a figure stood over me; glimmer of gold fabric out of the tail of my eye. I twisted and looked up anxiously to see a gray face with a subtle compressed smile. The characteristic brand-like scars. But this woman was older, thinner than the young woman I’d admired previously, and she wore a blue velvet turban. She proffered a tray covered in miniature tea cups like a doll might drink from. In her other hand she carried a steaming spouted kettle.
“No thanks,” I said, smiling.
I saw men look up sharply from their books and newspapers and their games with the yellow sticks, at the other tables around me. Did the woman’s carefully sculpted smile flick at the corners? Had I erred by talking to her, or declining the offering? Embarrassed, flushed even hotter, I nodded and selected a dainty cup. The Kalian woman filled it with a clear tea, then floated away. Eyes were still on me. I sipped the tea tentatively, as if I expected to be poisoned or at least scalded. It had a subtle hint of an anise-like flavor. Good. I sipped it again. The looks subsided.
The books I’d chosen were in Kalian. No wonder no one had seemed to object to my taking them. Not even pictures in them. I closed them and pushed them aside.
The wood of the table was a whitish-yellow, bone-like color, and varnished to a high gloss but with the grain of the wood still clearly visible through the sheen. A Kalian species, perhaps. I rubbed my hands across it but they were sweating and squeaked, resisted, smeared moisture stains. I removed my hands and watched the moisture stains grow smaller, smaller, fade. Fade away like Gabrielle. Like me.
She had not only died, a tragedy enough, but it was as though she had never existed, which seemed to me even worse. Father dead – a suicide. Mother lost somewhere in the city, presumably dead as well. Her friends would forget her after a time.
Could I be the murderer of a person who had not existed? By not being recognized for my crime, it was as though I myself did not exist. No forcers seeking me out. My loss at work an irritant but not crippling; I would be replaced and forgotten.
My parents were divorced. Mother, a veterinarian, lived with a man in Miniosis, close by and even greater in size than Punktown but not nearly as – colorful. My father, an art history professor at Paxton University (good old PU), lived with a woman in an apartment off Oval Square. Mother administered to her pampered small animals. Father administered to his wealthy, large children. I hadn’t seen either of them since Christmas. I had an older brother. He’d moved to Earth.
I wanted to call them up. “I’m a murderer,” I’d tell them, like another son might announce his engagement or job promotion. I wanted to run through the streets, shouting it. But people wouldn’t pay any more attention to me than they did the old Choom I’d passed on my way here, shambling along the sidewalk in filthy pajamas, bellowing something about winged whales that were coming, like someone who’d been awakened by a traumatic dream and had never recovered from it.
There was a knothole in the wood near my right hand, a large darkish whorl, like a whirlpool or vortex that had solidified, frozen in time. It had the shape of a miniature, fossilized galaxy. I was put in mind of that old chestnut about a whole universe existing inside a dust speck. I wondered if the cells had grown out uniformly from the center of that knothole, or if they had slowly, so slowly grown around and around in a spiraling shape. Nature loved a spiral. Like a sea shell. The maze-like whorl of my thumb print. It connected me with this dead thing. I looked down the length of the table. A single piece of wood. How many minute units, once alive, composed this slab? And it was just a small part of a larger whole, cut down and sliced up to make that other table there, those shelves, someone’s house. How long had it taken for this bone-like dismembered slab to grow to this length, microscopic cell upon cell like brick upon brick? An intricate structure...a mind-boggling composition. And me hovering too high above it to grasp its inner patterns, dead but still intact like microorganisms fossilized in rock. Me like some mindless god unable to comprehend the world he had fashioned...unable to lower himself close enough to see the particles of life within the grain...to see that the lines in the grain spelled out mysteries that might be translated if one knew the key to break their code...
“Hi,” said someone at my elbow. I saw peripheral gold. More tea being offered, perhaps, and I looked up to see a subtly smiling gray face. But this woman wore no turban; her thick black hair fell behind her shoulders. It was the face I hadn’t found yesterday.
Again, around me, the heads coming up. The hot glares. I tried to ignore them.
The young woman wore a gold sarong-like skirt wrapped around her ample hips, and a tight indigo blue top with long sleeves. This time, when she smiled, I saw a hint of bright teeth against her charcoal gray lips. Unthinkable. Blasphemy.
“Interested in our culture?” she asked in a near-whisper, nodding at my unread books and my tea.
“Um, yeah,” I said. And I was. In a specific aspect of her culture. Her.
“Is there – something I can help you with?”
“Well, uh...sure...I...”
“You began to approach me the other day, when you were here.”
“Yeah, right...I did...I was looking for someone...I was going to ask for help...”
“Did you find them?” Her voice was not “lewd”. It was indigo blue, and gold.
“Yes. All set, thanks.”
“That’s good.”
I nodded. “So...ah, would you care to sit down? I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind. About your people. Your customs...”
She lowered herself into the chair to my left. The chair was also of bone-like wood. Her skirt seemed to bind her legs, mermaid-like. “Are you a student?” she asked me.
“No. I’m, um, unemployed right now. I’m just interested in your people. You have a very intriguing culture...”
“Perhaps you’re as drawn to the similarities between us as to the differences. You’ve heard of the story of Ugghiutu, and how he seeded the universe with our peoples?”
“A little. Maybe not that part”
“My name’s Saleet Yekemma-Ur.”
I shook her hand. More glares, some stealthy and some open, burned me hotter than the air. I expected someone to leap up from one of the tables and swing his chair over his head at any moment. But Saleet seemed much less concerned than I.
“Friends call me Sal, or Sally,” she went on. “Or Emma.”
I preferred Saleet. Much more exotic. “I’m Christopher Ruby,” I told her. “People call me Chris.” I didn’t mention how Gabrielle had called me Topher. Later on I’d
realize that I could have made up a new name for myself, seeing as how I was a nonentity, a feeling that was both vertiginous and weirdly liberating. Since I had self-obliterated, I could self-invent. Well, I’d design a brand new Christopher Ruby. I just wished he was less shy.
“Well, Chris, on Kali it’s believed that the devil-god Ugghiutu created all the universe. There are various groups who believe different things, as in any religion, but most of them agree Ugghiutu at least created the Kalians and those who are like them. Some say he didn’t form the universe itself. Others say the universe is a living being even greater than Ugghiutu, in which we all dwell. Some say Ugghiutu was merely one of a group of gods who came into this universe from another one. Those believers are called the Cult of the Outer Gods.”
“Which schism do you subscribe to?”
She smiled. “I’m an agnostic.”
“I’m an atheist.”
“Well, you shouldn’t entirely close your eyes to the mysteries of the universe. An Earth man named John Muir, in 1869 AD, said, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’”
“Very nice. You have a good memory.”
“I have a good memory implant – a Mnemosyne-998.”
“Ah. That must come in handy in school? Work?”
“Work. I graduated from PU. I’m twenty-two.” She smiled knowingly. Knowing that I wanted to know. I felt more bashful still.
“So – you were saying that Ugghiutu seeded human-like races throughout the galaxies...”
“Yes. That’s why Earth humans, Chooms, Tikkihottos, a few other races so closely resemble the Kalians. How else could we all be so humanoid? What are the odds? Each seeded race adapted to our various environments, but...”
“What about evolution?”
“It was guided by Ugghiutu. Directed by him. When I say he seeded the planets, I don’t mean to say he set down a Kalian Adam and Eve here, a Choom Adam and Eve there, fully developed...”
“Ahh...”
“I’m just relating the myths. It doesn’t mean I subscribe to them.”
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