Haunted Worlds

by Jeffrey Thomas

  *

  Today she wore a tight black top under her open blouse. The black top made her belly—again, seemingly swollen much larger overnight—look taut and hard like a ripe fruit. Munching his cereal, Lambert wondered if the orb of her stretched skin was just as smooth and perfect as that epidermis of black fabric. Never having had children with his wife, he wondered what sex with his coworker would be like. He wouldn’t want to lie directly on top of her and press down on the fetus. Maybe they would lie on their sides, then, in a V, with just their legs entangled, like twins conjoined at the lower body.

  With his organ separated from the child only by thin membranes, as he rhythmically churned its mother’s insides right in front of its tiny face, would it smile smugly and speak to his mind telepathically? “You know this is only a dream. My father fucks her. Not you, old man.”

  In her constricting top, Lambert thought her ball-like belly resembled a giant black egg. And he pictured that egg stuffed full, stuffed hard, with countless black insects with jaws like stag beetles . . . fresh life just waiting to burst upon the world as if from Pandora’s box. To feed upon the rotting carrion of all that had gone before them.

  *

  The body of the dead, unknown animal was finally just a sack, a collapsed hollow hide like that molted cricket he had discovered in his bed. But this morning, just as his car was swooshing past it, from inside the carcass two long feelers emerged, whip-like and twitching, maybe probing the air for vibrations. As if they somehow sensed that Lambert was aware of them, they were yanked back down into the diminished remains in a flash.

  Lambert snapped his head around to look back over his shoulder, but his vehicle drifted over the double yellow lines, and a car traveling in the opposite lane honked at him. He faced forward again, startled, and continued on his way to work.

  *

  One night he was awakened, though not entirely, by a tickling sensation in his anus. He tried to dismiss it—probably one of his own hairs, or maybe an errant thread of his boxer shorts—but it was as niggling as if someone playing a half-mischievous, half-sadistic prank were tickling him with a feather. It was like something his wife might have done, but of course he lay alone in the darkness.

  Finally, coming a little bit further awake, he reached his hand down inside his boxer shorts to itch himself there, though he was as reluctant as if it were another man’s body he was being compelled to touch. As his fingers found the area, the tickling sensation passed over his thumb. He made an instinctive grab for whatever it was, a horrible image bursting into his imagination as if lit by a camera’s flash. In his mind’s eye, he saw a long intestinal parasite—a roundworm or tapeworm—sneaking a look out of him when it thought he was asleep. His hand closed around something, string-thin and all but insubstantial, but it was sucked through his fist and then gone. Seemingly sucked back inside him.

  Lambert scrambled out of bed, into the bathroom, slapped on the light, and felt at his nether region. He spread himself open with his fingers, twisting his upper body around awkwardly to try to get a look at his lower half in the mirror. He might have laughed at that man in the mirror . . . if it hadn’t been himself.

  He found no trace, no evidence, of what he had experienced, and in the stark light of the bathroom, with his adrenaline-flushed body fully alert, he asked himself if it had only been a hair or thread or purely his half-dreaming imagination after all.

  He glanced at the time. It was still pitch-dark outside, but it was already five-thirty in the morning. He’d have to be up and getting ready for work in another half hour anyway.

  With a heavy, soul-shuddering sigh, he trudged into his kitchen to make coffee.

  *

  He still took first break in the caf, but at lunch break—instead of sitting with his friends and waiting for the appearance of the Indian woman, trying to make eye contact with her without being too overt about it, and hoping she might follow that up with conversation even though it was entirely irrational to think she would want to do that—he had taken to napping in his car.

  He was exhausted from sleeping poorly recently. Sometimes those stealthy, tentative appendages seemed to emerge from his ear, his nostril, or even from his tear ducts, probing at his face. He had snapped awake one night to feel a thread being withdrawn quickly down the back of his throat. He had bounded out of bed, rushed to the bathroom, and gargled with mouthwash as if to chase the retreating invader with vengeful pesticide.

  He then stared at his shirtless body in the mirror. His saggy breasts, his rumpled flesh. His hairy belly seemed to be swelling by the day, as if he were expecting, too. Could his guts be full of roundworms?

  He considered making a doctor’s appointment, but in his heart of hearts he knew essentially what his doctor would tell him. That the only thing that infested him was mortality.

  *

  One day, the Indian/Eloi woman stopped coming to work. Was it that time already? It had all seemed to go so fast. Maybe she’d found another job, Lambert considered, but that was unlikely in her gravid state. No . . . time simply had its way of speeding along, as the earth hurtled and spun at unthinkable velocities.

  He gazed at other women, hoping someone else in particular would fire his fancy, someone who would make it just that little bit more bearable facing the daily commute, the crawling hours at his computer and boxing up disk drives. He watched, but so far no one else seemed an especially promising contender. Again, there were plenty of attractive women of all types at his company, but no one who inspired him in the same inexplicable way. Maybe he was just becoming too tired, in every sense, to rouse himself once more to such extremes of yearning.

  Sleep hadn’t gotten much better. The tickling, probing sensation persisted. Maybe because he expected it now. Perhaps it was psycho­somatic, he told himself, the way one becomes itchy with imaginary bugs after finding a real specimen on one’s body. A spectral giant tick seemed to be sucking away his life essence, a little bit more each night, each morning leaving him that much more shriveled and gray.

  *

  Somehow the dead animal’s carcass still lingered at the roadside, but then it must only be the equivalent of an empty fur glove by now. If it had seemed a mixed sort of gray before, it was absolutely gray now, and nothing more . . . a washed-out anti-color, as if not only the flesh and juices but the very pigments of the animal had been consumed by the insects and much smaller organisms that had feasted on it.

  As Lambert came up on the animal—he was actually watching for its appearance—he tightened his grip on the steering wheel involuntarily, as if he had a foreshadowing that this time he would witness something more. And sure enough, there they were: those two wavering feelers he had seen that other time, wire-thin but rigid, rising up from inside the tattered skin like twin curious periscopes. But it didn’t end there. Following these feelers, these antennae, an entire body pulled itself out of the carcass as if it were shedding an exoskeleton it had outgrown.

  It was an immense beetle, maybe bigger even than the furry animal had been in life. The monstrous insect was entirely a smoky, ghostly gray. Its barbed front mandibles were spread wide, like a bear trap waiting to be sprung.

  Lambert’s fists, squeezing the wheel, made another involuntary movement. This time, they turned the wheel sharply to the right. His instinctive reaction was to kill that creature before it could harm someone. Before it could breed more life like itself. He meant to crush it under his tires.

  As if he’d been jarred out of a nightmare, only at the last moment was he able to jerk the wheel the other way and stamp down on his brake. The nose of the car narrowly missed scraping across the trunk of one of the many trees that lined the wooded back road. With a jolt that rocked him forward against his seatbelt, his vehicle came to a stop.

  The car that had been riding behind him honked long and loudly at him, in alarm or irritation, as it whooshed past.

  Lambert sat there for several minutes, as more cars passed him obliviously. He wanted
to get out to see if he had succeeded in running over the monstrous beetle, but he was afraid to leave the safety of his vehicle. What if he hadn’t struck it, or it was only superficially injured and was waiting to come scuttling at him? What if even now it was climbing up onto his idling car or hiding in the undercarriage, waiting to be borne along as a parasite?

  He got his car moving forward again, toward his workplace. He glanced nervously into his rearview mirror, raising himself from his seat to do so, but he saw nothing behind him . . . not even the leeched scrap of dead animal.

  He kept moving, faster than he normally drove, even though he knew there was no running away from this creature.

  Not for him. Not for anyone.

  Not when its kind was already at work inside him.

  Spider Gates

  This all happened when I was a teenager. That may be significant. It’s an in-between time—between the worlds of children and adults. As if those are physical locations: the neighborhoods of childhood and adulthood. Sorry, that was a joke. But it’s true, and we all know that time is a place.

  I was fifteen, specifically. This was, God, twenty-five years ago. So my brother Christopher was ten.

  We lived in Spencer, in that thick band called Worcester County right in the middle of Massachusetts. Every Labor Day weekend we had—and they still have—the Spencer Fair, a county fair that demonstrates that rednecks don’t just live out west. That was a joke, too. I loved Spencer and I’d still live there if I didn’t live here, but I can never go back again. It’s not because of any bad memories, just the directions that our lives take us, sometimes too far to retrace. To me Spencer is bound with my teenage years and my childhood, too. As I said: a time and place that are far behind me.

  My father was chief of security at a big abrasives company in Worcester, and my mom worked for Mass Electric, so we lived comfortably in a big house on a pretty back road. We had a sizable back yard and a deck looking out on it, so there was many a summer cookout . . . and my mom being Italian, there were relatives visiting every Sunday after church. Right up into fall they’d sit out on the deck: Mom and her parents and some aunts and cousins having coffee and pizelles that my grandmother had made. They’d watch over Christopher as he played with all his Star Wars action figures and the like in the yard.

  Christopher was autistic. Well, he still is, of course, and he still lives with my mom and dad, but my parents left behind that time and place themselves. After my grandfather passed away and my father developed health issues and had to stop working, they sold the house in Spencer and moved into my grandmother’s smaller house in Worcester. There is only a postage stamp of a yard there, so the parties are all indoors. Christopher has a nice room of his own, and these days he likes to spend most his time in there on his computer, laughing at the same handful of videos on YouTube over and over. But he does have a job, bagging groceries at Price Chopper.

  When my folks can no longer care for him, I’ll take Christopher in myself. I know my husband John isn’t crazy about that idea, but he knows that’s just the way it is. It’s not that he doesn’t care about Christopher, and I understand how he feels, but why should my brother live in an adult-care situation when he has blood family? And I want my son, who’s fifteen now himself, to always keep his uncle’s welfare in mind when he’s an adult. That is to say, if anything ever happens to me so that I can’t care for my brother myself any longer. That doesn’t mean my son has to have Christopher live with him . . . I just want him to be certain that his uncle is doing okay, wherever he is. And I’m sure he will, because my son has always known how important my kid brother is to me.

  To Christopher, I don’t think time is as much a concrete place as it is for me. There isn’t that neat boundary between childhood and adulthood. There isn’t even a distinct barrier, in his mind, between reality and fantasy. It’s more like a low stone wall, overgrown with leaves and half tumbled down, that you can step over quite easily.

  *

  I wasn’t a wild teenager, in the smoking pot and drinking kind of way—I never even smoked a cigarette—but I made up for all that with being boy crazy. I lost my virginity at fourteen. Don’t tell my mom because she doesn’t know that, and she’d still give me an earful even though I’m now forty.

  My fifteenth birthday party was of course held out on the beautiful deck my dad and grandfather had built themselves, but we left the adults up there to chatter while we played horseshoes in the yard. For girls, there was my cousin Angela, my new friend Tracey, my best friend Megan, and our friend Beth, who was so pretty I wished looked like her—so pretty that my envy was more like a crush. She was that “every girl wants to be her, every boy wants to have her” girl. I would have hated her if she hadn’t been so nice to me.

  The boys at my party were my cousin Tony, Megan’s boyfriend Brad, and Derek, who I did have a mad crush on, though Derek clearly liked Beth. Beth was definitely lucky I didn’t hate her.

  At fifteen boys act like absolute asses to impress the girls, loud and boisterous, and Brad and Derek were going all out. Wrestling around with each other and even with us girls seemed to be a major tool in their skill set for winning females’ favor. The wrestling got a bit out of hand and my mom quelled that by yelling at us from the deck, so our boy-girl interactions grew more subdued: giggling at suggestive comments, and mock insults to replace the physical stuff. Teasing aggression, still, to mask the romantic impulse.

  Part of that aggressive flirtation took the form of trying to scare each other, and that was when Derek started telling us about Spider Gates.

  “Ooh, I’ve heard of that place,” Megan said.

  “Yeah,” Tracey concurred, nodding with sudden solemnity.

  I hadn’t though, and I asked, “What is it?”

  “You haven’t heard of Spider Gates?” Megan bugged her eyes at me, aghast, as if I’d just confessed I didn’t know how babies were made. Huh—and she was the virgin, not me.

  “No, bitch, so tell me!”

  Derek, seemingly the expert, said, “Oh, man, I’m surprised you don’t know.” He turned to point into the thick woods that bordered the rear of my yard, a contrast to the grass my dad kept as neat as Astroturf. The pine trees there seemed to form a wall. There was, in fact, a very old stone wall bordering our property at that point—one of the countless stone walls that trace through Massachusetts like corpse veins, marking out old properties that don’t exist anymore, yards and farmlands where the invisible ghosts of dead houses might still stand.

  Derek went on, “If you walked right into these woods, you’d eventually come to Spider Gates.”

  “I forget,” Megan asked. “Is it in Spencer?”

  “Leicester,” Derek told her. Leicester lay against Spencer the way the thick woods lay against my back yard. Then facing me again: “You’ve never gone into your own woods back here?”

  “Not very far. Why would I?”

  “Looking for Bigfoot,” my cousin Tony suggested.

  “So what the hell is Spider Gates?” Brad demanded, punching Derek in the arm to keep him focused.

  “Spider Gates is an old cemetery,” Megan told her boyfriend, cutting in. “Like, from the seventeen-hundreds. Those people made it . . . you know, on the oatmeal box?”

  “What?” Angela laughed.

  “Quakers,” Beth said quietly.

  She was the shy one, besides being so pretty. Megan had told me, in whispers, that Beth wasn’t happy at home. Her mother had divorced and remarried, and she apparently didn’t care for her stepfather. Beth had struck me as being sad a lot—if not always sad, in her reserved way—and maybe that was part of why she seemed so beautiful to me: sadness can make people appear poetic or wistful, when in reality what they’re feeling is pain.

  “Yeah,” Derek resumed, taking back the conversation. “Anyway, this cemetery is way back in the woods there. It’s hard to find, but my brother and his friends found it once and told me all about it.”

  “So you’ve ne
ver been there yourself?” Brad laughed.

  “Shut up and listen, man. The place has eight gates, metal gates that look like spiderwebs. If you go through every gate, one after another, when you go through the last gate you’ll disappear into hell. That’s why Satan-worshippers hold rituals in there all the time.”

  “Come on, ” Brad said.

  “Listen, lots of people know about this stuff! There’s this little hill, an altar right in the middle of the place, where they do their sacrifices. People say when you’re in Spider Gates you can hear these loud rumbling roars, from demons in the woods. And this weird white crap comes seeping up right out of the ground. That whole place is evil.”

  “Yeah . . . those devil-worshipping Quakers,” Brad said, “with their damn oatmeal! That must be what’s seeping out of the ground.”

  Everyone laughed, but Derek was doggedly determined to freak us out. “I’m not kidding. We should go there sometime, all of us. All kinds of things happen in that area. One kid hanged himself from a tree in the graveyard, and another time not far away they found a girl who was murdered and shoved into an old root cellar. And then down this old dirt road nearby there’s an abandoned house with a rusty old car out front with no wheels, and sometimes when you see the house the car isn’t there, and then the next time you see it the car will be back again.”

  Megan jumped back in: “There’re these rocks in the ground all around the outside of the graveyard, and if you flip them over you’ll find magic symbols carved in them . . . maybe to summon evil into the graveyard. Or maybe to keep evil forces trapped inside, so they can’t get out.”

  The rest of us had gradually grown more quiet. Derek was achieving the desired effect at last, and our imaginations were joining in his efforts.