Swallowed By The Cracks e-Pub

by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith

  The bedroom dressers went next, followed by a floor lamp, two nightstands, and finally the bed. By the time Grant finished, the afternoon had nearly run itself out. Soft light filtered in through the windows as Grant stood in the middle of the bedroom, listening to the walls, his eyes closed and his arms outstretched. Energy coursed through him. He could almost hear a lock disengaging to a hidden passage.

  Downstairs, the doorbell rang.

  Grant ignored it at first, but the doorbell kept ringing, its insistent knell boring into his mind like a drill. When he opened his eyes, the walls stopped humming. Aggravated, Grant ran out of the bedroom and down the stairs. An instant before he reached the door, the bell stopped ringing.

  He opened the front door, hoping to catch one of the shadowy men, but the porch stood empty. Grant stepped outside and looked around, expecting to see a figure hiding in the bushes or running away, but the only movement he saw was a fluttering of wings as a gathering of swallows flew off into the approaching twilight.

  After one last glance around the front yard, Grant walked back inside and closed the door, staring through the peephole before turning to look into the living room. Fading sunlight drifted through the front window, casting shadows against the barren, silent walls. The longer Grant studied the shadows, the more they looked like the shapes of men wearing overcoats and hats, and he began to wonder if the regulators could somehow get inside his house.

  Not wanting to take any chances, Grant locked up the house and drove to the hardware store, where he bought a dozen large sheets of plywood, a box of four-inch nails, two gallons of flat white paint, and a one-hundred-foot roll of barbed wire. By the time he returned home, night had stretched out full and black across the sky.

  First, Grant strung the barbed wire across the front porch in an impenetrable web, preventing anyone from reaching either the door or the doorbell. As an afterthought, he disconnected the doorbell chime with a hammer. Once he nailed the front door shut, he turned his attention to the downstairs windows.

  After removing the shades and curtains, Grant cut the plywood and nailed it into place, then applied two coats of paint, sealing off the windows and enclosing the entire downstairs. Once he finished, he headed upstairs to complete his fortress.

  Outside, car alarms sounded up and down the neighboring streets while sirens screamed in the distance.

  As midnight approached, Grant stood at the window in his dead wife's study preparing to install the final piece of plywood. In the wash of light from the lamp across the street, Grant glimpsed several figures dressed in overcoats standing in pools of darkness. He waved to them, then gave them the finger before he nailed the plywood into place. Once the last coat of paint was applied, Grant walked into the bedroom, sat down on the floor, and closed his eyes.

  The walls hummed louder now, reverberating, as if a circuit of energy surrounded him, increasing in its intensity, penetrating his soul. In the expanded landscape of his mind, Grant saw a barrier, an enormous stone wall that stretched beyond imaginable heights and endlessly in either direction. Although formidable, the wall had developed a network of cracks and fissures. Through the breaches glowed a light, brighter than anything Grant had ever known, pulsing and pressing against the wall, pouring through the cracks, building up an enormous pressure until the wall could no longer contain it.

  The wall collapsed in an explosion of light that flooded into Grant, filling him up, drowning him in perception. It was like a portal had opened to another intelligence. A door to heaven. A nexus with God. He screamed, not in pain or fear but in wonder and glory – his body shaking in orgasm, tears flowing down his cheeks as his scream turned to laughter.

  Grant had no memory of returning to his room, but he was suddenly at his desk, revelations pouring out across his computer screen as if he'd tapped directly into a conduit of knowledge. He didn't eat. He didn't sleep. He didn't stop to relieve his bladder but continued to write, his fingers never leaving the keyboard, the words never stopping as the sun rose and fell in oblivion and the stack on his desk grew to more than six-hundred pages.

  And yet there was more, pages and pages waiting to be written, epiphanies and truths streaming into him faster than he could think. Grant's fingers attacked the keyboard as the stack of pages climbed past seven hundred, then eight hundred. Time passed without heed. Neither food nor sleep mattered, for the power of the words nourished him.

  His senses expanded and his reality shifted. The room distorted – the walls and floor and ceiling curving, reshaping, until the corners and edges vanished and his room became a single continuous wall that encompassed him. The monitor stretched and curved like a windshield, through which existed another universe filled with words and thoughts and concepts that formed planets and stars and galaxies. His desk became the command console of a spaceship, his keyboard the controls, lifting him up and away.

  He flew through an endless macrocosm, watching the words that formed, absorbing their energy, listening to what they had to teach, reveling in discovery. Days passed, then months. Months turned into years, years into decades, decades into centuries. Still the words came, infinite and wondrous, lyrical and hypnotic, a symphony of consciousness.

  From the distant fringes of that consciousness, foreign sounds emerged, discordant and intrusive. They started out low, barely discernable as anything more than static, then grew louder until the sounds were unmistakable.

  An alarm, blaring. Someone pounding against a wall. Voices calling out. Sirens in the distance, growing louder.

  Some unseen force grabbed Grant, pulling him away from the words and dragging him out of his new universe, past familiar planets and stars, past the sun, sucking him down through layers of gas and clouds, slamming him through his senses, through the roof of his own house, back into his room.

  From downstairs came the sound of splintering wood and shattering glass, followed by footsteps thundering into the house and up the stairs. Shadowy figures surrounded him, overcoats flapping like wings, indistinct faces floating beneath wide-brimmed hats. Hands reached out to him, held him, subdued him, twisted him around and bound his limbs. Something stung him in the arm. Grant turned and saw a gloved hand pull away as a needle retracted into the flesh of an index finger.

  His thoughts became muddled. Voices and sounds grew distant, distorted. Phantom shapes drifted past. The room slipped out of focus. As he floated through the doorway, Grant glanced back and saw a man in a trench coat and hat feeding his manuscript into a furnace that had once been his closet. Then the room fell away and darkness descended.

  * * * * *

  Grant sat on the edge of the white, sterile bed, the door to the room closed and the late afternoon sun shining through the window on the wall behind him. He'd lost track of how many days he'd been here, but he knew another week must have passed because Debbie had come to visit.

  "Dr. Brooks says you're making great strides," she said from a chair opposite Grant, her hair pulled back in a ponytail. In her lap she worked a ball of blue yarn with a pair of knitting needles. "He says you should be ready to go home in another month."

  Grant couldn't recall how he'd come to be a patient here. Fragments of images came to him in his sleep – barbed wire strung across his front porch, Debbie's dead body on the kitchen floor, and other memories too bizarre to be real. The doctors and nurses listened to him and talked with him and helped him to make sense out of his dreams. Still, the events preceding his breakdown remained ambiguous.

  "When can I start writing again?" Grant asked.

  "You know what Dr. Brooks thinks about that," Debbie said as she continued her knitting. "He said any attempt at writing might trigger another episode, so I think we should take his advice and not rush into anything. The last thing you need right now is another case of writer's block."

  Sometimes Grant sensed that prior to his breakdown, he'
d been working on something monumental, life changing, a novel of unparalleled discovery. But Debbie assured him he hadn't written a word in weeks.

  "I think we should take a vacation," Debbie said. "Go somewhere relaxing like the mountains or the beach, spend some time alone while we still can." She set down her knitting needles and held up a single, blue booty. "What do you think?"

  Grant stared at the booty, then dropped his gaze to the curve of Debbie's distended abdomen.

  "Whoops," Debbie said, looking at her watch. "I've gotta go." She leaned over to stuff her yarn and needles into her bag. When she did, her ponytail fell to one side, revealing a series of jagged, fading scars along the back of her neck.

  She stood up and kissed Grant goodbye. "See you next Thursday, honey."

  As Debbie opened the door and stepped out of the room, she nodded to someone. For an instant, Grant saw the shadow of a man wearing an overcoat and a hat moving along the hallway wall, then the shadow became a doctor with a clipboard, making his rounds.

  The door closed with a hollow click and the room fell silent. Grant closed his eyes and took in a deep breath, held it, then let it out, repeating the breathing while he envisioned an infinite body of water, blue and serene. The exercise was a form of mediation to help him remember, but lately the water kept turning into a sea of plaster.

  Grant opened his eyes and stared at the wall. He didn't want to go home and he didn't want to take a vacation. He liked it here. He felt safe. He'd even made a few friends. But mostly he liked his room, with its single bed and blank, white walls. True, the room had a window, but when the sun went down he could almost imagine the window wasn't there.

  During the day Grant often sat and stared at the walls, listening to a faint hum that seemed to emanate from somewhere beyond them. Sometimes he thought he could almost discern a message. But at night, when the sounds of the clinic died down and the other patients went to sleep, the words became clearer.

  Grant figured getting paper would probably be easy, but the nurses wouldn't give him anything sharp, so he couldn't ask for a ball point pen or a pencil. If only he could get his hands on a Black Berol marker or a piece of chalk. Maybe even a crayon.

  Grant stared at the wall and waited for night to come.

  Outside, an alarm wailed in the distance.

  «-ô-»

  Dr. Lullaby

  By S. G. Browne

  People still get confused about my name.

  I suppose I shouldn't take it personally. After all, it's not like I've ever done any interviews or tried to set the matter straight. I'm not even the one who came up with the moniker. I think The New York Post was the first to print it. That was my first big headline. The one that turned me into a local celebrity. Though celebrity isn't really the right word, since no one knows for sure who I am. Who any of us are.

  Still, you'd think that after all of the press surrounding the events that have transpired over the past few months, people would understand what it is I do. But from what I hear on the street and on talk radio, a lot of people still think I'm some kind of serenading physician or an academic pedophile.

  I'm thinking I need to hire a good publicist.

  Before I go any further, I should probably explain a few things. So let me start at the beginning. Or maybe we should start in the middle. Isn't that where stories are supposed to start? In the middle? Not with the hero graduating from college and getting a job working for an advertising agency in Manhattan, then getting downsized and blowing through his severance and savings in less than a year and trying to figure out how he's going to earn a living.

  You don't start with all of that expository crap.

  The wistful reverie.

  The character building.

  It's not: Lights. Camera. Backstory.

  What you start with is action.

  * * * * *

  I'm walking along Canal Street through Chinatown late at night on my way home to my one-bedroom apartment on the Lower East Side, just a few blocks from the Tenement Museum and right around the corner from The Doughnut Plant, the best doughnuts in Manhattan.

  That's a personal endorsement, not a statement of fact.

  Anyway, I'm just turning onto Bowery and walking past the New York Jeweler's Exchange when I hear shouting and I see Vic and Charlie across the street in front of the Kowloon Bay Chinese Market. They're not shouting at me but at a couple of young punks who are beating up a homeless man, shoving him and kicking him and laughing.

  I run across the street to help but just as I get there, one of the punks suddenly starts throwing up while the other one drops to the ground and goes into convulsions. When Vic and Charlie go over to see if the homeless guy is all right, a third punk comes running up behind them, shouting, a knife in one hand. Before he can take another step, he goes sprawling to the ground and doesn't get up.

  Before one of us has a chance to call 911, we hear the police sirens and scatter.

  Wait a minute. Let me back up.

  * * * * *

  Three months earlier, I'm sitting in an examination room on a chair with a disposable thermometer in my mouth and a blood pressure cuff around my upper left arm. On the walls around me are posters of the human body. Of vascular systems. Of reproductive organs. Fluorescent lights wash everything in a yellowish hue. A clock ticks away the morning. Outside the closed door, someone is asking for a breath mint.

  I notice that my lips have gone numb.

  This has never happened before. Usually I don't feel anything more than drowsy or lightheaded, though that doesn't happen as often as it used to. Occasionally I get cotton mouth or feel like I have food poisoning. More often than not, I'll get a headache. Nothing major. We're not talking migraine and vomiting. That would be serious. What I get is pretty typical, nothing 400 milligrams of Ibuprofin won't fix.

  But numbness in my lips? That's definitely a first.

  The medical technician sitting across from me removes the thermometer and the cuff, then records my temperature and my blood pressure on a chart attached to a clipboard. When the tech isn't looking, I reach up with one finger and poke at my lower lip. I still can't feel it.

  "How are you feeling?" he asks.

  "Good," I say, hoping I don't drool on my shirt.

  "Any problems with your vision?" he asks, looking down at his clipboard.

  I shake my head and say no.

  "Cognitive functions?"

  No.

  "Speech?"

  I shake my head, though my lips feel as big as Long Island.

  "Cotton mouth?"

  No.

  "Cramps?"

  No.

  "Any tingling or numbness in your extremities?"

  I shake my head. Since my extremities don't include my lips, I'm not technically lying.

  "Nausea?"

  "Headaches?"

  "Rashes?"

  Sometimes just hearing the word rash makes me want to itch, but I answer in the negative three more times.

  "Are you feeling dizzy or light headed?"

  Most of the time, the questions are the same.

  Headaches.

  Nausea.

  Diarrhea.

  Frequently they'll throw in night sweats or loss of appetite, with an occasional sinus inflammation and the odd sexual performance question. But I've never been asked about an irregular heartbeat. Or renal failure.

  No matter what the question, I tell them the truth. Otherwise, I could get into trouble if they find out I've been lying. But I don't want to let them know about my numb lips because I'm afraid I'll end up on some kind of list. And then I'll really be screwed.

  So I'm hoping it's just a temporary reaction.

  Temporary reactions are easier to dis
miss as inconsequential, even though I'm supposed to report anything out of the ordinary.

  Gas.

  Swelling.

  Hot flashes.

  Anything of the smallest significance that isn't normal. That I don't experience on a regular, daily basis. Which is a lot harder than it sounds. You have to be focused. You have to pay attention. You have to write down every physical sensation you experience, everything that you eat and drink and how many times a day you empty your bladder or evacuate your bowels.

  It's like taking notes in college, only without mid-terms. And you don't get to go on spring break to Ft. Lauderdale and do beer bongs and watch your roommate have sex with a freshman from Duke.

  "No," I tell him. "No dizziness."

  The tech takes another five minutes to run through the rest of his questions. By the time he sends me off for my blood and urine tests, my lips have returned to normal.

  In another room, a phlebotomist wraps an elastic tourniquet around my arm and sterilizes the soft flesh just inside my left elbow.

  I'm not a big fan of needles. Even after more than five years, I still have to look away. I can't stand the sight of my own blood. And I flinch when the needle penetrates my skin. I can't even watch movies where someone sticks a needle or a blade into flesh. I know it's not real, just Hollywood special effects, but I still cringe.

  I take a deep breath and stare at the wall as the phlebotomist draws half a dozen blood samples into evacuated tubes. Normally she's supposed to ask a list of questions before drawing samples and record my answers on a form:

  Am I on anticoagulation therapy?

  Do I have a history of fits?

  Do I have any bleeding disorders?

  Am I pregnant?

  Have I fasted?