by Lee Baldwin
The door opens easily. Punches a device on his wrist, speaks a coded word, steps in and closes the door behind him. The open room has the look that someone removed the walls with a large implement to form a living room, kitchen and dining room together, populated with second-hand furniture. Under one window there is a large wooden teacher’s desk with drawers down both sides and a clutter of metal parts, small electronic devices, a sketchpad and pencils, a couple magazines with airplanes on their covers. There is no television.
The remaining walls set off a bedroom and a bath. The floor is barn wood, reclaimed redwood, heavy sixteen-inch planks that show every mark gouge and stain that ever they knew. The ceiling is white, the only visible painted surface, discolored with smoke where the woodstove flue exits.
An open staircase leads to a landing, which doubles back to the left as a hallway, with a bedroom and bathroom. To the right of the landing there is a small closet. Activating the video camera on his bicycle helmet, the agent hurries up the stairs.
A coded knock on the door below. The agent’s team member coming in to help search. Bedroom here, must be the girl’s, lots of occult stuff but no weapons, no bomb manuals, no porn. Cloth bag containing sex toys in a drawer, no photos of the Pentagon. Beneath the rug a chalked pentagram, looks like it was drawn and rubbed out several times. Books, posters, pencil sketches on the walls. The operative photographs it all. His partner joins him after checking the bathroom.
“This is the girl’s bedroom, we...” A fast beeping in their ears. The men hurry down the stairs, onto their bikes, take off through the woods. On the main road they stop beside a third man on bicycle, their lookout, as the dust trail from a black Aston Martin swirls the afternoon air. They start down the road, one speaking into a Bluetooth.
“I smell sweat,” Lillian says when she walks inside. But the day is warm and the windows are open, the scent fades quickly. What Clay smells is the hollow of Lillian’s neck, as he eases her toward his rumpled bed.
Converging on a Number
Lian throws back his head and laughs. “You expect everyone to agree? One hundred percent? You are not that naïve.”
“Hey! Don’t forget this was your girlfriend’s big idea.”
“We have discussed that sufficiently.”
“Well then. How about seventy-five?”
“As in percent?”
“Yep.”
“That will never happen in all eternity.”
Tharcia and Lian sit side by side on a bench. She’s missed her exercise, so spent forty minutes doing yoga poses, out of sight on the other side of the gazebo. Her T-shirt and leggings cling to her, dark with sweat.
For a distraction, she picks up his hand, traces the lines on his palm with a finger. Tries to recall the words Althea said during her palm readings. Most of it sounded foolish.
“Which hand do you write with?”
“I don’t write. Assistants perform my every whim.”
“Mm. Long straight head line. Very realistic. Separate from the life line, so you are carefree and adventurous.”
“I am anything but adventurous.”
“Heart line is weak and broken. You have an unstable love life.”
“Let me remind you, I have been separated from my love for eons. Thanks to chance, we are again united.”
“Thanks to me, you mean.”
“You might have had a part in that, yes. What are you doing?”
“Call it chiromancy. Woo, spoo-keee. Your heart line is parallel to the head line, so good emotional control. Aha. Fate line joins the life line in the middle of the palm. Have you had to give up control of your life path for family obligations?”
“Never.”
“The Psychic Tharcia is here to tell you that’s bullshit.” She looks at him with a charming smile. “You’re still having a little time out. Those pesky parental issues, remember? But hey, your fate line breaks at the head line. That’s interesting.”
“Don’t waste my time with such foolishness. What does it say?”
“Look for a midlife career change.”
“Talk sense. Can we get back to business here?”
“You scoffed at my seventy-five percent. I’ll see your seventy-five and lower it to fifty.”
“You know nothing about human nature. You have no idea how many people will be looking the wrong way when the time comes.”
“K, then. Thirty-four percent, and that’s final.”
“That could work. What? Hey wait, I am supposed to be keeping the standards high here.”
“Standards? You’re the one who’s so effing wise, dude. I accept your reasoning, thirty-four is my final offer.”
Lian thinks about it. “So you are saying, if thirty-four percent of all humanity wants the race to evolve, I let that happen. I let people see through the illusions of ego.”
“You got it.”
“And if at least thirty-four percent vote for things to stay as they are, then the ego is unchanged.”
“Yeh. There’s also some other stuff.”
“Wait a minute, we were done.”
“Nope. If you are so sure about human nature, throw some skin in the game. I sure am.”
“Don’t think I’m agreeing to anything more.”
“You will, because you find me fascinating. Next, you go through the rest of time as a female.”
“I have taken human form as both genders, actually.”
“Not what I mean. You need to be incarcerated as a woman to see the truth. Aren’t you hooked on the truth? Your holy idea is that all is one, right? Be a chick for the next eon.”
Lian smiles. “Incarcerated. Funny. So let me get this straight. I can’t bargain for souls anymore, and I have to become a female.”
“Yes and one more thing.”
“What!”
“Patience, I’m not through. Humanity gets to see the truth. No more distortions. If thirty-four percent of us want it, everybody gets to experience the Creator directly.”
“Hmm, could be possible.”
“And we get to experience you too Lian. I would want that.”
Lian extends his hand. “Shake?” Faint puff of steam from flared nostrils.
She extends her hand, pulls it back abruptly. “Wait. One more thing.”
“What! No way.”
“Yes way. I want Mom back.”
“Why?”
“I need to heal her. She was so... I don’t want her soul to go through time with all that damage.”
“Thought you wanted to beat her up.”
“Girls get to change their minds about stuff.”
“Do we have a deal?” Lian extends his hand.
Tharcia turns away. “Let me think it over. My people will be in touch. Meanwhile I want to take a break. Clay will be worried.”
Lian is looking at his hand, mostly to humor her. “What was that thing about my fate line breaking at my head line?”
“Wait wait! I just thought of something else.”
“Okay then off you go.”
The Real Boogeyman
Arnold Friedman lies entwined with his wife in the bedroom of their Georgetown townhouse, both shiny with sweat. In the past week, the Friedmans have been jiggy three times a day, every day. Completely limp, Gail reaches for his hand. Their eyes meet. Pleased, exhausted expressions.
“Want anything brought?” Friedman asks her.
“No, I’m okay.”
“Good. Couldn’t move anyway.”
Friedman studies the play of morning light across the white ceiling, reflections of sunlight on passing cars. As in every waking hour, his mind finds its way to the imponderable events that have come with increasing force since the Pentagon intrusion. From his perspective as a psychologist schooled in mass hallucination, Friedman sees that basic human drives are breaking free of social conditioning. Humans deeply fear their own unfettered desires. What dark drives will manifest if people lose control, en masse?
There has been much talk of the
devil, prompted by the Pentagon intrusion and fed by the televised, blogged and tweeted security cam images of a tall winged lizard-thing that occupies the courtyard. To Friedman, the devil is no supernatural being, but an inner force that calls forth bad behavior. His view of supernatural forces is collective projections of the mass mind, nothing more. In this lens, the devil is neither being nor cause. Instinctive drives are the true horror story. But if that is true, what is the creature in the photographs?
The psychologist marvels at his complete lack of guilt. The ninety minutes he’d spent humping Louise Kraft in the storeroom oddly does not bother him. In twenty-two years of marriage, Friedman has never strayed. He’d heard some incidents of public sex, but this was the first in his own experience. Eye contact across the table, the woman looking back with flared nostrils, irises wide, smoldering gaze drilling right into his soul. Into his sex. A sensation as being swallowed beneath a wave. There needs to be a study. Friedman laughs out loud.
Gail looks over with a broad smile. He has not mentioned the marks on her body, nor she his. He’s had no time to study the many macabre events of recent days, except for the original courtyard intrusion and the Fish Jump meeting he was assigned to investigate. The world outside is berserk and unsafe. Markets are low on supplies, losing the staff resolute enough to come to work even with police protection, which has become unreliable. Cops are humans first. People are withdrawing to the relative safety of their homes.
Even here in peaceful, clannish Georgetown, emergency sirens split the night. Friedman has followed the unprecedented rash of violence via TV news, the blogs, and in the tweet-storms that splash across the collective unconscious called the Internet. He sees the flywheel of human desires spinning faster, without its customary governing force, basic drives inside every person breaking for freedom, raw hungers wanting to be seen, heard, sated. Strange monsters walk the world, hungry addictions all people carry.
Friedman groans inwardly. The darkness behind the curtain of every mind is coming out to party. And that malignant fool Shackleford is one of the darkest among them.
How Very Familiar
One second she is sitting with Lian, ready to deliver another from her wish list of demands, the next she’s on her porch at home. Bright sun peeks between high treetops, the day is warm. On the boards, a dark stain of spilled coffee, days old. She inhales the fragrance of the woods, so different from the Eastern climate, trees there sleeping naked for the winter. She smells something else, sniffs inside her shirt neckline. “Gawd, it’s a culture alright!”
Runs inside and up the stairs. Bomber awakes from a deep sleep on the sofa, takes one look at Tharcia, bolts with tail high and eyes wide for his hidden exit. She rushes into her room, skins out of skanky Goddess shirt and stretchies, then it hits her. Everything in her bedroom is normal. Looks around. It’s the same as when she last walked out the door. No ice. The window open on a warm California morning, her bed neatly made, sketchbook open to a page of her old poetry on the bedspread. Stuffs dirty clothes in a bag, sees the candles and altar things neat in their proper places. Smiles, relieved and joyful. She had completely forgotten about her bedroom. Below the doorknob, the bundle of ferns she’d tied there. Well, damn. Althea.
Zips into the bathroom and twists the faucets, sprinkles in some bubble gel, back in her room looks through drawers as the tub melodically fills. Finds a perfect pair of faded red jeans that fit just so, black sports halter and stretch shorts, puts a pair of clean sweat socks beside her running shoes. She’s been parked on her butt for days, what her body needs is a good solid run! After a sweet soak in the tub.
Something stops her, one of the angel posters on her wall. Two small girls guided toward the light from dark woods. Tharcia cannot recall when that poster came into her life, it’s been with her forever. The angel’s caring face. Recognition tickles, tries to surface, does not.
The tub is ready, high mounds of suds float on water nearly too hot, but in she goes, gingerly, as the heat bites its way up her legs. Finally down with a contented Ahhh she picks up a washcloth to do her face and is suddenly in tears. The relief of being home, warm and safe in this familiar private place, fearsome memories of being yanked away and nearly crushed in the grip of that awful reptile thing, a spin of strange ideas those two people talked about. Lian and Lylit. Should she believe anything they say? A woman talking in her noggin, sounding so like the secret twin in her dream. Spirit beings unstuck in time, too much too much.
For a while, Tharcia is nothing. A small puddle of wretched sobs, hugging her knees fiercely in comforting warmth. At last it ends, her chemicals balance, she feels better. Lies back, wipes her eyes, begins washing herself, takes the soap…
Takes the soap…
Tharcia finds herself doing what many young women will do, naked and alone in a tub full of hot sudsy water. She takes her time. Her eyes sometimes closed, sometimes drifting amid treetops beyond the window, she swims in strange mix of body-mind, dancing with erotic heat and scattered attempts to make sense of the last days, the last weeks, the last year. She tries to bring to mind the date. Yes. In another week it will be one year. One year since her mom got her stupid self fucking killed. She feels some regret that she had not kept her mother front and center in talking to Lian and Lylit. So much to learn and think about! But she knows, somewhere, knows in a thought that’s clear but pushed for the moment far away as yummy shuddering orgasms rock her, that in whatever deal she makes with Lian, her mom will be there.
She rolls on her tummy beneath the water. Suds thinly patch the surface. Reaches back for her feet, pulls her body into a bow, so damn good to stretch. Feeling closer to normal, she finally steps out, pink clean, wraps a towel round her head, dries her legs, wraps another around her torso, tied above her breasts. Steps to the mirror, with the side of her fist wipes in a circular motion the steamy misted coating, watching her image appear.
Her breath catches, fear squeezes her heart. On her shoulder is perched the ugliest little animal she has ever seen. It is light green, its fleshy surface rippled with small scales. It has a muscled torso, and folded, leathery wings. On its face a toothy expression of dopey adolescent love. Its three-clawed feet indent the flesh of her shoulder, a leathery hand strokes the little whang that projects straight out from its hairless crotch.
Tharcia screeches, throws herself back against the wall, hands scrabbling wildly at her shoulder to scrape the ugly thing off off off. Screaming still she pulls off the towel and mops her shoulder with it, looks to see. Nothing.
Mouth agape, Tharcia scans the bathroom, continuing to swab at her flesh, to wipe the grotesque beast off her! But where? There is nothing in the bathroom, not in the tub. Steels herself to look in the mirror, and there it is!
In the mirror she watches dreamlike her hand reach to push it off. And pass right through it. Turns her head, looks directly at where it should be, sees nothing. Turns to the mirror, there it is. Her passenger. Still playing with itself. She scarcely registers that her hair is completely white.
Stunned and embarrassed, she hides behind the towel and screams at the mirror, “Cut that out!”
The goblinesque winged thing folds both small hands politely in front of its crotch, gives a toothy smile, and speaks.
“Yes, my Precious.” A reedy croak.
She hears the voice distinctly, whether in the room or in her head she hasn’t time to process, but hear it she does.
“Are. Are. Are you Lian’s friend?”
“Ah yes, Peach Pie. Vardøger’s the name, watchin’s the game.”
“You slimy son of a bitch! How dare you peep me in the tub! You’ll never do that again. I am reporting you.”
The little goblin places both hands over its misshapen snout, and closes its eyes. “Vardøger is sorry, my Cupcake. Won’t happen again, no siree.”
“You total jerk! Keep your hands over your eyes from now on or you’re busted!”
The animal does as she says.
“Don
’t you have any clothes? Put something on.” In the reflection, his little dink points right at her.
Vardøger opens his hands like shutters, solemnly regards Tharcia in the mirror. She raises the towel in front of her. “Ah, Slinkycheeks, there I cannot help you. I have a skin condition, very painful to have cloth against my virile body you understand.”
“Like hell I do. I am taking you back to Lian this instant.” Soon as she blinks, the small goblin wears a tiny tuxedo, hands shuttered over its eyes. No shoes. In the mirror image taloned feet clutch dimples in her flesh, but she feels nothing.
“Stay like that and shut up until I get dressed.”
No reply from the goblin in the tux. Tharcia finishes what she needs to do and gets out of the bathroom in record time, for her, goes ahead with her plan for a run, and is soon dashing uphill headed for a summit trail and the four-mile hilly track that awaits her. The stupid thing is on her shoulder, must be weightless, she has no sensation of it. Lian had warned her, think of it like a watchdog, he’d said, or a pager.
Ugly! Bad enough to have someone lurking around in her head her whole life. At least Lylit is female. Now there’s this winged green pervo stuck to her. She groans, recalling her sweet moments in the tub, hoping the little jerk sees her only in a mirror, but not completely confident in that. But then she recalls Lian had mentioned disturbances, murders. She sighs, no time for a run right now, stuff to do. She turns around.
Bomber sees her coming from under the porch, scoots frantic behind the house. She gets her phone, her laptop, checks news sites. The news is a nightmare. Car crashes, fainting epidemics, road rage, murders, a laughing fit that took over a university in Idaho. Random shootings, a mall in Kentucky invaded by three men with semiautomatic rifles, hundreds dead. Random sex on the streets, in buses and taxicabs, laundromats, banks. Businesses close down, a run on food, markets empty.
The worst is her email, many from friends, and several hundred postings to her Facebook page. She logs in and looks, and there it is, someone she knows from university has posted photos of her and a scaly lizard thing from an Internet TV show called Take Your Medicine. The photo has two million ‘likes.’