by Hodge, Brian
“Tell me something,” Maisie said.
“All right. What?”
“Anything.” Her words took on a pleading tone. “I think that’s what I miss the most. The sound of someone else’s voice.”
So Wendy told her how she’d come to live here, and that she’d found the dream journal, and how something in it called to her, like a voice on the other side of a hill.
How many minutes gone now—three? Four?
When Wendy told her that Blake had never stopped missing her, it didn’t seem to matter, trivia from a life so far gone it was now somebody else’s. Instead, Maisie became wary again, and shifted as if to better guard the door.
The sauna. Something was moving inside the sauna.
“You’re not alone,” Wendy murmured.
“Neither were you.” Maisie peered back across the floor, and for a moment seemed to brighten. “Is that Barrett? Wait—what’s wrong with him?”
Wendy shook her head. “I don’t think we have time for that.”
“You’re probably right.” Maisie seemed to sense something in the air. “You should go. It’s all going to rip apart again any time now. It’s got to. I don’t know why it hasn’t already. Or could be it’s waiting for you and me to go our separate ways. You’re the bridge now.”
An unsettling thought. She wanted no part of this malfunctioning process.
“You’re not coming too? You can—” Finally go home, Wendy almost said, until she realized how meaningless the word may have been by now.
“That’s so cute. You think I still belong somewhere. I don’t. Not anywhere. So I’d rather stick with the place I’m used to not belonging.”
Maisie shifted again, but her body language was different. Now she was just impatient. Ready for Wendy to be gone, had things to do. No mistaking that. She’d seen it throughout years of marriage, feeling smaller every time.
The sauna, though. She couldn’t leave without knowing.
“Can I see?” she said, with a nod at the door.
Maisie’s eyes narrowed, protective, like a sister. “Why?”
“Because nobody else will.”
Maybe it was the right thing to say. Or maybe it didn’t matter, any reason as good as another to someone who once, just once, craved the validation of a witness.
“You’ll want to stare. You won’t be able to help that,” Maisie warned. “Just mind how you do it, okay? Don’t look appalled. And for gods’ sake, don’t scream, if that’s something you do.”
She opened the door and steam curled out, hot air colliding with cold. Not wide, a sliver and then some, just enough for a lingering peek. It was enough. Such a simple sight—someone keeping warm in a sauna—but Wendy knew she would be trying to take it in for the rest of her life.
“Yeah. She’s me,” Maisie said. “Me on the other side. Me after a few hundred million years down a different path.”
She had a torso, but it was rounder than a person’s. She had a head, but more oblong than any human skull, and armored, the middle of her face layered into plates like a stacked trio of iron helmets. She had a mouth, what a beak might look like after being flattened over millions of years. She had skin, smooth and mottled as if to blend with the weeds and shadows of the sea. She had limbs, but no joints, eight of them, four sinuous ones from her shoulders and four thicker ones below, studded with suckers that pulsed and rippled as if she could control them one by one.
Lastly, she had eyes, gazing back at the doorway, sentient but so dark and unknowable it was impossible to tell if she was staring with interest or hatred or fear.
“That’s enough,” Maisie said, and shut the door. “She keeps me safe over there. So I have to keep her safe here.” An angry swipe at the falling snow. “She isn’t made for this, and I don’t know how long that sauna heater can keep working.”
Wendy knew she could have stood here until she too froze to death, and never run out of questions. How had they found each other? Did each of them feel what the other felt? Kept her safe from what? As it was, she’d only run out of time. But couldn’t leave without asking one:
“What would happen to the other if one of you died?”
“Let’s not find out today,” Maisie said. “Just go. I don’t need you. Barrett does. He looks awful.”
Then she slipped back into the sauna. The last Wendy saw of her was the briefest glimpse of the pair of them, two bodies that shared one soul, reaching for each other.
How many minutes now—five? Six? She’d overstayed, for sure.
When she picked her way back to Barrett, she discovered the urgency was gone, because he was too. All at once she could no longer stand. She dropped beside him, knees freezing in the watery slush, and now she’d lost two of them. She’d helped no one. Her best intentions had brought only catastrophes.
A part of her knew Barrett never would have made it downstairs. She told herself that maybe he’d known, too, and decided when to quit. It didn’t help. Only one thing did:
He remained in the chair she’d righted for him, his head canted limply to one side but his eyes still open as he seemed to gaze far across that ghostly expanse of shallow seas and archipelagos. There was something in it that must have called to him, delighted him more than he feared dying. The only thing that made this bearable was that now he seemed to smile.
She followed his line of sight, trying to see what he saw.
What came back went beyond anything her eyes could perceive. Instead, it was something that crept upon her in the heartbreak and wintery silence: a whispered sense that she wasn’t only here, but somewhere out there, too: her correlate, her analog in this alternate world.
Better that they never meet. It could only bring more ruin.
Of Barrett, nothing she could do for him felt right, neither leaving him here, nor taking him downstairs. If she even could. She was still debating how best to do right by him when the murky water of the swimming pool seemed to boil.
She shot to her feet again and backed toward the stairwell. For all she knew, the bridge between worlds was still standing; the portal was still open. The last she’d seen of the pool was the least of the day’s impossibilities, a deep blue well plunging into deeper indigo, and she hadn’t given it another thought. Now it was all there was.
Something broke the surface in a spray of frost and foam. It rose, surging up and falling back again, as if struggling to squeeze through a passage too small to let it fit. It was skin and shell and mantle, conical and bulbous, and if someone dared suggest it was the top of something’s head, she would’ve laughed and not stopped for hours. Nothing’s head could be that big. Why, its feet—if it had feet at all—would have to be braced five stories down.
Then she remembered the line from Maisie’s journal:
If horses had gods, they would look like horses.
Would that other Maisie have called this beast a god? Without a doubt, it was something you would beg for mercy. The question was: Would it hear?
At first she thought they were tree trunks, they were so big around, two logs bursting up through the water, until they flexed and slapped down onto the pool deck like a pair of pythons. They coiled and uncoiled toward Barrett, their tips flared and fleshy, shaped like leaves as long as coffins. They grasped him, claimed him, held him, lifted him. She watched, mesmerized. They were surprisingly dexterous, their handling of his body astonishingly gentle.
Only now did she begin to grasp the connection.
They drew him closer to the pool, then over it, turning him this way and that, as if for a long, exploratory look.
As if, now that this being had found him, it would know him anywhere.
Then it found him wanting, with a violence and loathing beyond anything she could have imagined if she hadn’t seen it for herself. One soul, two bodies, a servant in this world and a tyrant in the next—the one had only contempt for the other, for its weaknesses and frailties. With a cracking of bones and a shower of blood, while viscera slopped to the deck,
it ripped Barrett’s body apart and flung the pieces aside with a force that could only come from abhorrence.
Just as abruptly, it was gone, its extremities slithering back into the pool as the rest of it submerged into the depths with a final froth of spray.
She ran for the stairs, then down them, bounding two and three at a time, as the worlds decoupled now that the last links were severed. She ran chased by fresh cascades of water and a grinding sound, as if the building were coming down on top of her now that everything that propped up the wreckage had been withdrawn to let the pieces fall where they may.
Barrett had been right: Going down was a lot easier.
She didn’t stop once.
««—»»
There was a special sense of dislocation that came from seeing a place that used to be home. From the outside, it might still look the same, while everything about the relationship had changed. It was like a lover once eager to let you in, who no longer recognized you. Like a friend to whom you once confided everything, and now couldn’t trust with your secrets.
Five months gone since she’d seen Chicago, this neighborhood, this place.
The house waited, two stories of betrayal on a shady street. So much living done within the shelter of its walls. I laughed here, cried here. Bled here, could’ve died here. She supposed it was normal to imagine that a house you no longer lived in vanished after you left it behind. Silly, right? And humbling, to see that it was standing fine without her.
Five months gone, and worlds between.
Wendy started each morning before dawn, and now that it was late May, dawn came too soon after five. She would leave the motel in her rental car, merging with the flow of early commuters, until she could wind through the old neighborhoods that were all now guilty by association. She couldn’t love any of it any more.
Reunions with the past could be bittersweet. This one was only bitter.
She would park along the curb, across the street and down one house. She didn’t care what kind of car she’d rented, only that the windows were hard to see through from the outside.
She would watch Logan leave for work, then go about the day. She’d be back in time to watch him return each evening, and that was when the long vigils began. After nightfall, she would follow the progression of lights through the house and know right where he was. Bedroom and kitchen, living room and bathroom. He rarely lit up more than one at a time. Hated to waste electricity. She could’ve recited the lectures by rote, if she didn’t think it would make her sick, literally sick.
So far, so good. He was as alone as she was. He hadn’t replaced her. Maybe on the outside he had, but not on the home front, not yet. She had to remind herself he was a predator, and predators had to be patient. They took their time conditioning you in what you would accept. This was one more pleasure of the hunt. They took their time conditioning you until you could be devoured and the first duty you felt was to thank them for their teeth.
Finally. Something that looked like it was going to be easy. She was awake now, to so much more than she was five months ago. It seemed the only time the universe made things easy was when something had to suffer.
She watched him for four days before she made her move.
««—»»
I don’t need the advice of any psychiatrist to start a dream journal of my own. I just know that when something feels this right, there’s a reason for it, even if I can’t see the whole picture yet. It’s there, though. I’ll work it out. It will come together.
What I have to be careful of is jumping to conclusions. We dream what we dream, and we can’t always say where it comes from.
Am I too suggestible? Is it that a part of me liked and admired Maisie so much that now I’ve got to dream like her? Or do I have every right to call these dreams my own?
Am I still working through what happened in January? Or does this have everything to do with the present and future?
I know this much: I looked across the gulf between, and I saw that other world. I know it’s there. I know I go there in my sleep sometimes, or it reaches back to me. I know what I am there.
Worst of all, I know I’m not alone.
That’s about it. Maisie was better at remembering than I am. This is like knowing you’ve been someplace but forgetting what happened there, everything but this feeling that whatever it was, it must have been so bad you blocked it out.
««—»»
Up the flagstone walkway, Wendy traveled light: a stun gun and a fresh roll of cling wrap. Everything else she needed, she knew she could dig up in the house. There would be time to improvise, and plenty to do it with. Meat mallet, pliers, cutlery—unless he’d moved everything around, she could find it all blindfolded.
One maxed-out zap and Logan went down hard in the vestibule, as she kicked the door shut behind them. She’d overcome the fear by realizing there could be no safer place on earth for her than directly in front of him those first twenty or thirty seconds. This was a moment he would want to savor. Crawling back—that’s how he would see it. Crawling back with a scar on her cheek. You don’t rush a moment like that.
She’d picked it all out in advance, like the inverse of a wedding gift registry. She knew which chair she wanted him in, which dishrag to stuff in his mouth. Which roll of tape she would use to keep the gag in place and his eyes shut, if she felt like it.
“What happened to your face?” he asked before she got the gag in, while he was still too insensible for anger.
“Tuition,” she said.
She let him sit awhile as she went back out to move the rental inside the garage, half its space unused now, a void waiting for anything to come along and fill it. The door rolled down behind her with a grinding of gears overhead, and the fit was perfect.
««—»»
I’m getting better at remembering them. Little fragments, at least. I just wish I wasn’t. Sleep is supposed to be an escape, your getaway from the woes of the world, but not when it makes you take on the woes of another.
She is me and I am her, no matter what we look like. And I guess Logan is Logan wherever he is.
My god. What must it be like to be inside the head of a man who despises a woman so much that his spite carries over to the next world? It’s kind of amazing, really, that it all branched off down a different path half a billion years ago, and yet with some of us, it’s still the same hateful dramas playing themselves out all over again.
One thing Maisie could’ve warned me about was our skin. It seems even more sensitive over there. So many more nerve endings so close to the surface.
««—»»
She started small, bashing Logan in the knee with the meat tenderizer to get his attention. Above the wad of cloth and the X of tape holding it in place, his eyes popped wide and he erupted with muffled and impotent rage.
“There’s another world out there,” Wendy told him after he’d quieted down again. “It’s almost impossible to get to. Only when something goes really wrong. But it’s closer than you think.”
She bashed the other knee and waited for him to absorb the blow and make it a part of himself.
“I know…I know what this sounds like. I’ve seen it, though. Up close and far away, too. All that damage in New York back during the January blizzard? I was there. Right in the middle of it. It wasn’t bombs, like they said. That was just the best they could do. They’ve got holes in buildings and whole floors falling in on themselves, what else are they going to say? Bombs, that’s easy to believe. A lot easier on everybody than trying to explain how alternate realities collide.”
Even through the gag, she could make out the most emphatic barks of what he was trying to say. Bitch. Cunt. How they loved those words.
“I’ve seen what lives there. A little of it. Most of it, I wouldn’t want to see again. But you’re there, I’m there. Everybody we know is probably there. We don’t look the same, not even close. Some things, though…some things just don’t change.”
Log
an looked as though he’d been sweating for hours. Beneath that shell of cling wrap, it was going to get positively steamy in the days to come.
“I’m not going to kill you,” she said. “That’s not me. Besides, how would any of you learn anything that way? I’m just going to make you wish I had. And you know what that will be? A good start. We’ve got a long way to go after that. I’m going to cause you so much pain your soul is going to cry out across worlds.”
Maisie hadn’t gotten into it in her journal, and Wendy wished they’d had enough time together to sit and talk and think, and follow where it led.
Because why would there be just one?
If there was one world next door, a photon’s width away, then why wouldn’t there be more? Worlds where other asteroids had hit, and comets had missed; where supervolcanoes had erupted to blacken out the sun for years, and worlds where they hadn’t. A malleable ball of rock and water, where catastrophes and chaos shuffled and stirred, and throughout it all, life. Across every iteration, life, resilient and vengeful.
There could be a thousand Maisies in a thousand forms. An infinity of Wendys lashed by an infinity of tormentors. They would know each other anywhere.
She bashed him atop the shoulder and heard bone crack.
“I’m going to hurt you and hurt you and hurt you until we finally get you past the hate. I’m going to hurt you until all that’s left is fear. By god, you’re going to learn to fear me.”
She knew there would be moments of weakness and remorse. Knew she would get to a stage when she would break down and start questioning it all. That’s why she’d chosen to do this in the kitchen, where any time she needed a reminder, all she had to do was look at the island in the middle, wrap her hand around that wrought iron towel bar, feel how sturdy it was, and remember the night it was her cage.