“Do you know who I am?” Pet asked in a sandpapery wheeze, and Clyde, realizing that he was in deep shit, understanding that it didn’t much matter how he responded, answered, “George Michaels’s dad?” Pet bared his teeth in a yellow smile. “Tube his ass!”
The tubes were situated at the opposite end of town from the Dots, occupying the summit of a sixty-foot-high granite mound and hidden by a high concrete block wall overgrown by lichen—it looked like an old WWII gun emplacement guarding the entrance to Halloween. That evening, however, it radiated evil energies visible to Clyde as pulsating streams of gray vapor and had the gargantuan aspect of an ancient citadel, a habitat fit for wizards and eldritch beasts. After the one-sided struggle to subdue him, someone had given Clyde an injection. Nothing calmative. His heart raced, his nerves twitched, and his thoughts flared like fireworks, illuminating one or another heretofore hidden corner of his brain before being dissipated by a new pyrotechnic display of insights and colors. Tattered glowing white wings without bodies, the relics of revenant birds and angels, swerved near and then vanished into the purple gloom; troll faces materialized from the coarse rock and spoke booming words, like the magic words in a children’s book, and the black water acquired a skin of serpent scales. If he had not been trussed like a mummy, thin ropes pinning his arms to his sides and lashing his legs together, he could have gotten behind the hallucinations, and he would have offered a vociferous complaint if he hadn’t also been gagged. As it was, he rolled about, rocking the skiff, until Spooz kicked him in the liver.
Making jokes at his expense, they lugged him up from the river and through a door and laid him down on a concrete slab lit by arc lamps, a penitentiary setting that had the industrial look and soul-shriveling feel and dry negative smell of an execution ground. A single star shone in the sky crack, its name unknown, so he called it Azrael, then Disney, then Fremont Phil or Capricorn Sue, depending on its sex. He lifted his head and saw six, no, seven perfectly round openings in the concrete, one of them covered with a piece of sheet iron, a winch mounted above each, and he flashed on the idea that perfectly round holes were a motif in Halloween, there were the Dots and the Tubes and . . . well, there were a couple of examples, anyway, and he imagined that some gigantic, perfectly round, acid-exuding worm or humongous beetle with diamond-hard mandibles had bored the holes, and pictured gaping mouths waiting at the bottom to be fed. A voice among other voices, Brad’s voice, distracted him, and he tried to find him, craning his neck, rolling his eyes, a friend come to intercede, and Brad kneeled beside him, his stubby dreadlocks looking like a tarantula hat, and hooked a chain to one of the ropes strapping his chest and said, “Sorry, man. Nothing personal.” He measured the width of Clyde’s shoulders with a tape and said, “Number Five’ll do,” and Clyde made eye contact with him and saw only a core impersonality—the man derived pleasure from being impersonal, from just doing his job and following orders, the glad-handing, Dallas Cowboy-loving torturer of Halloween town, and he couldn’t fathom why he had failed to see this before and supposed that the blackness of Brad’s skin absorbed the light and thus prevented him from . . . no, no, no, don’t go there, he chuckled inwardly at the nuttiness of worrying about being politically correct, like a prisoner of the Inquisition fretting over his eczema, and then he was picked up and suspended over Number Five, and felt the chain grow taut, Brad steadying him as he was lowered, saying with relish, the last voice Clyde heard, “If you twist around too much, man, you’ll rub off the chain and we’ll have to fish you out with hooks,” and Clyde, at eye-level with Brad’s feet, envisioned hooks tearing off chunks of flesh grown too soft and rotten to impale, an image he carried down into the dark, the dank, claustrophobia-inducing dark of a pit that fit around him more tightly than a coffin, down, down, down, scraping the walls (the tube was canted at a slight angle), scarcely enough room to tip back his head and see the coin of lesser darkness above being devalued, dwindling and dwindling until it was the size of a half dollar, a quarter, a dime . . . and that was when he fell, bumping and battering his way to the bottom. A shred of instinct came into play and he bent his knees as much as possible to absorb the blow, landing with most of his weight on the left foot, the resultant pain so bad it seemed to fill his entire body until he forced it back, compressed it into a throbbing ache beneath his knee, shifting onto his right foot to alleviate it further, and yet the pain was still very bad, burning like a cancer in the bone, and something slithered, rattled, clinked down the tube and lashed him across the face, chipping a tooth, and he tasted blood (they had dropped the chain, or else it had torn loose from the winch) and he panicked and tried to spit out the gag and scream for what must have been a couple of minutes before he recognized the chain attached to his chest remained taut and they had flung down a second chain. Playing a trick. Having their little joke. Anger helped him deal with the pain, but he was incapable of sustaining it. Time grew sluggish, the seconds oozed past, each one a complex droplet of fear, agony, hope, fatalism, despair. He began to see and hear things that he hoped were unreal. Fish with fangs and cicatrice grins swam at him through the walls. The stone was a living depth of stone, breathing in and out, each contraction bruising his ribs, compressing his lungs. He couldn’t think, poisoned by shock and trauma, and he wished they would finish him, drench him with scalding water or drown him in oil . . . it didn’t matter. Ragged, grating voices doubled by echoes told him things about himself that he thought only he knew, things he hadn’t known, and things he wanted to deny. He said her name as though it were a charm against them, Annalisa, and kept on saying it until it became as meaningless as rosary devotions. The voices persisted and told him lies about her. That whey-faced bitch gamed you, man. Every night she goes home to that yellow smile and those gnarly bones. You know what they do? Think about it. What was she? His groupie? And she still lives with him? Come on! You think that’s going to change? Look where you are. She gave up a little tongue, a little tit, and threw you a quickie . . . now she’s laughing at you while Pet’s hitting that big white butt of hers over and over and. . . .
The voices became garbled, too many to hear, an inchoate stew of vowels and consonants that eventually faded, leaving only a single voice, that of a young man saying, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death, amen,” speaking so rapidly, the words ran together, and then, “ . . . blessed be the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, Holy Mary . . . ” repeating this fragment, this same broken prayer, again and again. It annoyed him that the guy didn’t know the words and he tried to beam them at him (it sounded like he was right next door), and the guy must have received the transmission, because he began to say it correctly, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with theeblessedartthouamong . . . etcetera. Clyde got caught up in the rhythm of the prayer, in the sheer velocity of it. He seemed to be skittering across the prayer’s surface as if it were a globe and he was a spider seeking to maintain his place by scuttling along the equator, but the globe spun too quickly and, dizzy from the spin, he lost traction and was blown off into the abyss, pinwheeling down into a noiseless, bottomless dark where there was a complete absence of pain and even spiders feared to tread.
A transformative thought visited Clyde, dropping down from the aether where it customarily dallied, occasionally occupying the minds of cosmic beings, the type of thought with which, if he could have mastered it, he might have comprehended the process of the world as though it were a problem in simple arithmetic, or affect the path of astronomical objects, or divine the future by the mere contemplation of a grape. Of course he was incapable of mastering it—it was too vast, too important, surrounding him the way a balloon night surround an ant. He inhaled its heady atmosphere, trying to absorb all the intelligence he could, but retained only fragments that translated into useless homily, some garbage about fitting a purpose to his life and finding (or was it founding?) a kingdom, and one item more specific, no less fragmentary, the phrase, “ . . . below the fifty-seventh parallel.” Yet he
took these things to heart. He passed through the skin of the thought, clung to its outer surface until it wafted away, leaving him woozily awake and marginally aware of his surroundings, his leg aching (but the pain greatly diminished), watching a boatman—an indistinct black figure—thrust with his pole, making a faint splash and sending the skiff skimming beneath a dim sprinkle of white stars, dull and unwinking as breadcrumbs on a dark blue cloth. He lay in the prow, with someone breathing regularly beside him (he was too exhausted to turn his head and determine who), and flirted with the notion that the ancient Greeks had been accurate concerning their speculations on the afterlife, and old What’s-his-face, Charon, had come to ferry them across the River Styx into the mouths of Hell. Though this was patently untrue (he smelled rotten walnuts and suspected they were crossing the third Dot), he had no doubt that the imagery was apt, that one of Pet’s boys had been ordered to take them south and dump the bodies. He struggled to kindle a spark of rebellion, to resist this fate, but fatigue and whatever narcotic had been given him for the pain muffled his fire. He just wanted to sleep. Before passing out, the last question he asked (of whomever it is we ask these questions) was, he wondered if this was what had happened to Dell. . . .
They were crossing an underground lake, a stretch of water whose dimensions were impossible to judge—the walls and ceiling were lost in darkness, though lamps had been hung off the sides and both ends of the skiff, making them look, Clyde supposed, like one of those strange electric creatures that inhabited ocean trenches. Light from a lantern in the stern sprayed around the mysterious figure of the boatman, somewhat less mysterious now that he could see baggy jeans and a green down jacket patched with duct tape, a hood hiding the face. His leg throbbed and there was a considerable swelling beneath the knee (his trousers had been cut away). He eased onto his side and came face-to-face with a young brown-skinned man wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and clutching a blanket about his shoulders, gathered at the throat, a pose that made him appear boyish; yet his arms were thick and well muscled, those of a man. A gash on his cheekbone leaked a pink mixture of blood and serum. As if registering the weight of Clyde’s scrutiny, his eyes fluttered open, murmured something, and closed them again.
“That’s David Batista,” said Annalisa. “Pet’s editor. He was in the tube next to you.”
She pushed back the cowl and shook out her hair; she had puffy half-circles under her eyes. Clyde wanted to ask a basic question, but his tongue stuck to his palette.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
He wetted his lips and swallowed. “Leg hurts.”
“Yeah, Roberta says it’s fractured.”
“Roberta?”
“Mary Alonso’s Roberta. I’ll give you another pill.”
At her feet, he noticed a tarpaulin covering someone wearing jeans and a pair of gray boots.
“And that,” she said in a deliberate manner. “That is Pet.”
Energy appeared to run out from her, rendering her a stony figure whose pallid animating principle stemmed from some un-alive source, as if the name pronounced had the power to transform warmth into cold, joy into hatred, every vital thing into its deathly opposite, and she stood motionless, frozen to her pole, with sunken cheek and haunted eye, a steerswoman dread and implacable, more so than Charon. Then, stepping back from the place where memory or emotion had borne her, she thrust with the pole, propelling the skiff into a channel with pitted walls like those of old castle. Clyde felt a cold brush of anxiety that, although triggered by her reaction, seemed a general anxiety springing from every element of their situation.
Annalisa fed him a white tablet not much larger than a pinhead, warned him to keep his hands clear of the water, saying, “There’s things in there will take it off,” and returned to her position in the stern. Batista woke and slid over to allow Clyde more room; then he sat up and Clyde asked him what was going on.
“All I know is these four women pulled us out and tubed Brad,” Batista said. “Milly Sussman . . . you know her? Big, good-looking woman? She seemed to be the one running the show. She had the gun, anyway. She said she wanted us put somewhere safe until things got settled, so Annalisa’s taking us south. I don’t know what they’ve got in mind for Pet.”
Annalisa was off in her own world, not listening to the conversation.
“If half the stuff in his memoirs is true,” Batista went on, “they can drop him in the Tubes and leave him for all I care.”
Clyde recognized Batista’s voice as that of the guy who had said his Hail Marys wrong, if that were possible; he thought about inquiring whether or not he, Batista, had heard his advice, but decided it would be too much of a complication. “That’s what you were doing?” he asked. “Helping him write his memoirs?”
Batista nodded. “Routing out a sewer would have been cleaner work. I told him I was quitting, so he tubed me.” He shot Clyde an appraising look. “Did they give you drugs? This guy I know said they had drugs that made it worse.”
“They gave me something nasty,” Clyde said.
The white tablet kicked in. He felt warm, muddled, distant from pain. He luxuriated in the sense of bodily perfection that attended even the movement of a finger and admired the swelling on his shinbone for the subtlety of its coloration. A cloying vegetable scent infused the air and this, too, pleased him, though he was not able to identify it. The most apt comparative he could find (only this odor was far more acidic) was the incense his mom had ordered from a catalogue during her charismatic Catholic phase, Genuine Biblical Times Incense from Jerusalem, smell what our Lord and Savior smelled, and she had hated the stuff, said she couldn’t get the stink out of her new sofa, so Clyde had appropriated the incense and used it to mask the smell of pot.
They emerged from the channel into another section of the gorge, skimming along beneath a gray-blue sky, a broad expanse in relation to Halloween’s sky crack. The cliffs here were perpendicular to the river and higher than the cliffs in town. Some ninety or a hundred feet wide, the Mossbach had here acquired a murky greenish tint, meandering between steep, sloping banks from which sprouted dense tangles of strange vegetation: blackish green grass sprinkled with starfish-shaped white blossoms and stubby, many-branched trees that resembled a hybrid of bonsai and gorgonians; the majority of these were also blackish green, yet some of the fans were tinged with indigo. Dark globular bushes, each with thousands of tiny leaves, quivered as they drifted past, and vines, some thick as hawsers, others fine as wires, looped in and out like exposed veins feeding the micro-environment. The place had the dire atmospherics of a wicked fairy tale, a secret grotto poisoned by the presence of an evil spirit, and the early morning light held a pall that seemed a byproduct of the pungent odor (Clyde thought he recognized the base smell as cat shit, but doubted that could be right). Fat insects with wings like fractured blades of zircon wobbled drunkenly from shrub to shrub, giving the impression that the work they did was making them ill.
They rounded a bend and Clyde, glancing over his shoulder, was presented with a vista that to his eyes, grown accustomed to confined spaces, was a virtual Grand Canyon of confinements. Here the shore widened and the cliffs made him think of illustrations in children’s dinosaur books, having a Paleolithic jaggedness, their summits tattered with mist. Bracketed to the rock was a Halloween house of black metal (two columns of six stories). The walls had a dull chitin-like finish that lent the rooms (quite a bit larger than usual) the aspect of twelve rectangular beetles crawling up the cliff in tight formation. Fifteen feet below the first floor of house, directly beneath it, tucked flush against the rock and fronted by a pebbly shingle that continued on to fringe the shoreline farther south, stood a flat-roofed, one-story building painted bluish green, a shade too bright to be called viridian. Clyde soon realized that paint was not responsible for the color—the structure was furred with lichen, the odd patch of raw concrete showing through. In one such spot the stenciled black letters MU AGE beneath a portion of a skull-and-crossbones added an in
definite yet ominous caption to the scene. Mutagenics, Clyde said to himself, remembering his conversation with Dell. The window screens were rusted but intact; the door was cracked open. To the left of the building lay a plot of fenced-in, furrowed dirt. Ordinary ferns sprouted from the rock above it, fluttering in the breeze as if signaling for help, hoping to be rescued from the encroachment of more alien growth. One thing distinguished the place above all else, verifying Clyde’s suspicions concerning the odor: cats of every breed and description sunned themselves on the building’s roof, peeped from thickets, crept along the margin of the water, perched primly in rocky niches and gazed scornfully down on those below. The shingle, their sandbox, was littered with turds. He took them to be feral descendants of the survivors of the cat-killer, yet they reacted with neither aggression nor fear and merely turned an incurious eye toward the intruders. There were hundreds of them, yet they made precious little noise, a scattering of miaows where one might have expected an incessant caterwauling. Some rubbed against Batista’s ankles as he half-carried Clyde to the lee of the building and helped him sit with his back to the wall.
The derelict building; the house of black metal; the strangely silent cats; the unusual vegetation; the sluggish jade river winding between towering cliffs—these things caused Clyde to envision that they were characters in a great unwritten fantasy novel by Joseph Conrad, the ruins of civilization subsumed by elements of an emergent one ruled by the sentient offspring of our former housepets and, in this semi-subterranean backwater, the narrator and a handful of his friends were attempting to stave off the inevitable eternal night of their species by swapping anecdotes about mankind’s downfall, individual tales of apocalyptic folly that, taken in sum, constituted a mosaic of defeat and sounded the death knell of the human spirit. He pictured a venerable storyteller, his gray-bearded jaw clenched round a pipe stem, rotted teeth tilted like old gravestones in the tobacco-stained earth of his gums, puffing vigorously to keep his coal alive and exhaling a cloud of pale smoke that engulfed his listeners as he spoke and seemed by this noxious inclusion to draw their circle closer. . . . Clyde laughed soddenly, amused by his ornate bullshit.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010 Page 76