The gray metal doors of the service elevator pull themselves apart and wait silently to suck her in.
Margarita knocks at the door of Room 504, receives no answer, then unlocks it and cautiously walks in. Although she has been working here nearly three months, the unkempt and filthy condition of more than a few of the rooms still disgusts her. The reek of vomit and unwashed clothing in some of the so-called apartments is enough to make her gag just thinking of it.
A sixty-second check of the linen shelves in the bathroom indicates that 504 doesn’t need her services today. As she’s closing the door behind her, an unexpected sound issues faintly from the bathroom. She stops to listen for a moment. Her mother had eight children; Margarita, the third-born, can never forget the only source of such a sound.
It comes from the lungs and throat and mouth of a newborn bebe.
“Dios mio . . .” Margarita can’t bring herself to go in there again—not after what happened this morning in her own squalid little bathroom.
Leaning against the outer wall, she places a fluttering hand against her bosom and waits for the heartbeats to stop hurting. Waiting, too, for the awful, maddening sound to begin again. But all she hears is the rasping of her own shallow breath. Margarita swallows dryly and closes her eyes for a few peaceful seconds. It’s only natural she should have babies clogging her thoughts today—Bebes muertos.
Dead babies.
A moment later she is moving down the hallway like someone who has heard a dozen smoke alarms go off. She knows she must keep moving. Always to live with the knowledge of what she has done to herself and her unborn child is a sin she isn’t yet prepared to suffer. The dull, throbbing pain returns; Margarita clutches her belly, her other hand grasping the side of the cart for support. Her mouth makes weak, meaningless sounds, uncomfortably similar to those she has just heard.
Margarita blinks her eyes rapidly to keep the tears under control. The teenager isn’t sure if she should be pleased or worried that she has seen no one on her rounds. The empty corridors don’t seem to have heard the sound of footsteps or voices for many years. Looking down their length as she turns a corner, she cannot avoid the sensation of some subtle warping of the walls, the ceiling. The doors appear unevenly matched in size and dimension. The frayed carpeting stretches unendingly like a diseased tongue, the material stained and threadbare. Like the service elevator, the closed doors are hungry mouths waiting to be opened. Waiting to be fed.
Margarita stops the cart’s roll outside Room 515.
She listens there for a few moments after knocking at the door to see if anyone is inside. Silence.
Taking a deep breath, she unlocks it and steps inside, leaving the door open wide. She moves quickly through 515. She checks the linen shelves in the bathroom and efficiently deals with the items that must be replaced.
Silence.
Leaves Room 515. Carefully locks the door as if she’s never going to return there.
The thought is permitted only after she’s around the corner again: No noises came from the bathroom. No old foundation settling. No rusty pipes shrieking. Nothing. It’s the same situation on the next three floors, where Margarita checks a total of nine rooms. She doubts that, if it weren’t for the holiday, so many of the rooms would be unoccupied. There is no one to disturb while getting drunk or shooting up.
Chewing nervously at her thumb, Margarita moves along a corridor that’s a drab twin to the previous one. Certainly someone will see her before she collapses from nervous exhaustion!
Arms aching, she drops off bundles of sheets and towels in four other rooms before unlocking 208. On a few other occasions, she has met the young family of six who presently resides here. Like everyone else, they have apparently gone outside to watch the parade. The quiet surrounding her becomes increasingly unsettling.
Placing her hand on the doorknob to shut the door after her routine is again completed, Margarita hears something. In the bathroom. She doesn’t want to listen, but can’t help hearing it.
Cries. Much like a newborn baby’s crying. Yet so loud it’s as if the very walls were pleading to be heard by someone who gives a damn.
“Dios mio, ayudame! Dios mio!” she screams back, clutching the doorknob as if she might use it to turn off what she’s hearing.
As if triggered by the pitiful cries, Margarita is stricken by a new wave of cramps that rise up inside her belly. The intense wails make it difficult for her to think clearly; they virtually rise and fall with the rhythm of her own heartbeats. Gasping, she rushes from 208 and slams the door shut with a force that startles her. But before she can move far enough away, the young woman overhears the old toilet flushing, gurgling unnaturally loud and long. Cleansing and swirling sounds.
Swirling and drowning.
Drowning.
Then the cries are no more.
Too nauseous to return the cart to the floor station, Margarita finds herself suddenly afraid to take the service elevator. Hands pressed against her damp forehead she considers all the countless secrets within the rooms of this crumbling welfare hotel. Memories which are so intensely painful that they can never be swept away, lingering like the rectangular traces of the framed paintings that once hung in the barren hallways.
Crazily, Margarita recalls how, when she first arrived here, a goldfish was given away to her and Junior at a pet-store opening. How the tiny creature died right after she had brought it back in the water-filled sandwich bag. And how no one had thought anything the matter as the beautiful, shiny little life was unceremoniously flushed away. Now she understands.
Hotel bathrooms possess their own dirty secrets that no one wants to remember. Now the traces of their sins are finally calling out, though no one wants to hear.
Twisting a handkerchief around sweating hands, Margarita listens fitfully to the sobs issuing faintly from Room 110. And from Room 114. Doesn’t anyone hear them? Worse, there’s something strange in the way the cries come, as if from mouths that aren’t yet fully formed. Just fleshy, tiny holes. She spins in a circle as the wailing grows louder still, like a boom-box being thoughtlessly turned up to the max.
Stifling a scream, Margarita runs to the end of the hall and down the two flights of stairs to the basement and the sanctuary of her own squalid apartment. The lighting is out again over one section of the stairwell, forcing her to hold out her arms to grope along the wall. At this level, the handrails broke off years ago and were never replaced. The walls are pimply, warm in the dark, like the skin of some exotic animal Junior couldn’t identify for her when they once visited a zoo. The wall feels ready to give away at any instant, its moist surface almost indented by the pressure from her sweating hands.
She slips over something soft yet bulky lying in a corner where another section of stairs begins. The released fetid smell is nearly overpowering. Momentarily losing her balance, Margarita falls against the darkened wall. Some skin scrapes off her fingers; it feels like removing a glove that is lined with dull razors. The unseen object had vaguely felt like a stuffed toy as it gave way under her foot. Another discarded plaything, left to rot where no one will see.
Like so many unwanted things in this hotel.
As she finally reaches the fire door, her sneaker slides across a substance as warm and slimy as the inner walls. She tells herself it’s only some drunk’s fresh vomit as the heavy metal door opens sluggishly, its weight almost too great for her to force in her weakened condition. The reinforced glass window in its center is blacked out with dirt and grime, but Margarita knows the apartment is on the other side. It slowly pulls open with a rusty screech-sounding too much like her own voice should she lose all control and start screaming again. Then, at last, she’s through.
And now the smell of fresh blood and new flesh is everywhere.
Rushing blindly into the apartment, Margarita lurches toward the bedroom and collapses on the still unmade bed. No odors. No noises here. In a few moments she realizes she is safe, if still alone. It was simply too
much to hope that Junior might be there, waiting for her to return to him. The thought begins to creep into her mind that he just might never come back.
Shooting pains stab between her legs when she tries to get off the bed.
Biting her lower lip, Margarita can only lie quietly and pray that the pain won’t worsen. She reaches up to pull a lumpy pillow under her head. Flat on her back, her pain subsides slightly when she spreads out her legs. She doesn’t dare touch herself now, though her underwear is soaked through; the sticky wetness seeps into it. She knows she should bathe somehow, but it’s so hard just to keep her pale brown eyes open.
A huge plastic crucifix looks down at her from over the headboard of the bed, seeming to share her suddenly renewed agony.
Hours appear to have passed. A different kind of dull ache tells the girl she must use the toilet or stain the sheets once more. At least the hot needles in her belly have departed. Pulling herself up, she considers using the employees’ rest room on the first floor. But with legs as stiff as the bed, she can’t possibly make it in time.
“Estaba sonando, solamente sonando” she whispers over and over to try to reassure herself. Hoping desperately that, when he does return, Junior will take her to the free clinic just to make sure everything is all right inside her.
He has to come back! Junior has to or she’ll—
Margarita’s head jerks around as she hears noises suddenly from outside the bedroom. Crouching on the edge of the bed, she is unable to recognize them, though they’re obviously increasing in both intensity and number. One sound, however, is unmistakable: the toilet flushing.
Junior—has he finally come home? Or is it just the cold, rusty water giving back its unwanted wastes? Her ninety-pound body shudders violently; she starts to weep again.
Margarita realizes she must still be sleeping.
This guilty imagining of sounds that several unborn infants would make if gathering together in a brood. Why, she can even visualize clearly their tiny little hands—hands not yet completely formed in their various fetal stages—pulling in unison to move aside the tremendously heavy bathroom door. Then slowly, painfully, crawling across the cracked and warped linoleum floor on their way into the bedroom.
In the dream, they are leaving behind a trail of bright scarlet mucus like a multitude of snails in their search, their minute eyes not yet capable of seeing a world that didn’t want them to be born. Crawling from a moist, filthy blackness, unable to shed tears for those who didn’t wish ever to have to see them return, ever to acknowledge that—even in this sluglike form—they still exist; can still cry out for another chance at love, until finally heard by someone who understands what it means to be completely undesired.
While me drenched, fragile hands complete their task at the bedroom door, Margarita’s own mouth opens wide to lead the others in their unending, wailing chorus. Then at last, at long last, she feels the smallest, freshest one grasp her bare ankle and begin instinctively to ascend toward her inner thigh. The tears stop falling from her eyes.
“Bienvenida, pequena, bienvenida a esta casa,” she says, smiling down at him benevolently as the floor is covered in a dripping, stinking mixture of red and black and pink. While the others, no longer alone and no longer crying, slide over one another in fervent search of her open legs. Impatiently awaiting a second chance.
Bruce Boston and
Robert Frazier
RETURN TO THE
MUTANT RAIN FOREST
BOSTON, born July 16, 1943, has appeared in Nebula Awards 21, Twilight Zone, Night Cry, 100 Great Fantasy Short-Shorts, and Asimov’s. Bruce won the Rhysling Award for SF poetry and in ‘76 the Pushcart Prize for Fiction. He’s the author of six collections of fiction and poetry, notably the brilliant, heartrending Bruce Boston Omnibus (Ocean View Press, ‘87), The Nightmare Collector (2AM Publications, ‘88), and Skin Trades (Drumm, ‘88).
Frazier, born April 28, 1951, is the son of an army cryptologist and a landscape artist. His dad was among those who cracked the Nazis’ Project Ultra code. Married to Karol, he has sold poems to Night Cry, F&SF, Asimov’s, and Weird Tales, and appeared in such anthologies as Synergy and The Umbral Anthology of SF Poetry.
This work’s predecessor, “Night Fishing on the Caribbean Littoral of the Mutant Rain Forest,” was published in Tim Sullivan’s Tropical Chills anthology (Avon, ‘88). While never published before, the present poem won the 1988 Odyssey SF Poetry Contest, held by Brigham Young University. It’s wonderfully ominous.
RETURN TO THE
MUTANT RAIN FOREST
Bruce Boston and Robert Frazier
Years later we come back to find the fauna and flora
more alien than ever, the landscape unrecognizable,
the course of rivers altered, small opalescent lakes
springing up where before there was only underbrush,
as if the land itself has somehow changed to keep pace
with the metaprotean life forms which now inhabit it.
Here magnetism proves as variable as other phenomena.
Our compass needle shifts constantly and at random,
and we must fix direction by the stars and sun alone.
Above our heads the canopy writhes in undiscovered life:
tiny albino lemurs flit silently from branch to branch,
tenuous as arboreal ghosts in the leaf purple shadow.
Here time seems as meaningless as our abstracted data.
The days stretch before us in soft bands of verdigris,
in hours marked by slanting white shafts of illumination.
At our feet we watch warily for the tripvines of arrowroot,
while beetles and multipedes of every possible perversion
boil about us, reclaiming their dead with voracious zeal.
By the light of irradiated biota the night proliferates:
a roving carpet of scavenger fungi seeks out each kill
to drape and consume the carcass in an iridescent shroud.
A carnivorous mushroom spore roots on my exposed forearm
and Tomaz must dig deeply beneath the flesh to excise
the wrinkled neon growth which has sprouted in minutes.
We have returned to the mutant rain forest to trace
rumors spread by the natives who fish the white water,
to embark on a reconnaissance into adaptation and myth.
Where are the toucans, Genna wonders, once we explain
the cries which fill the darkness as those of panthers,
mating in heat, nearly articulate in their complexity.
Tomaz chews stale tortillas, pounds roots for breakfast,
and relates a tale of the Parakana who ruled this land.
One morning the Chief’s wife, aglow, bronzed and naked
in the eddies of a rocky pool, succumbed to an attack
both brutal and sublime, which left her body inscribed
with scars confirming the bestial origins of her lover.
At term, the massive woman was said to have borne a child
covered with the finest gossamer caul of ebon-blue hair.
The fiery vertical slits of its eyes enraged the Chief.
After he murdered the boy, a great cat screamed for weeks
and stalked about their tribal home, driving them north.
His story over, Tomaz leads our way into the damp jungle.
From base camp south we hack one trail after another
until we encounter impenetrable walls of a sinewy fiber,
lianas as thick and indestructible as titanium cables,
twining back on themselves in a solid Gordian sheath,
feeding on their own past growth; while farther south,
slender silver trees rise like pylons into the clouds.
From our campo each day we hack useless trail after trail,
until we come upon the pathways that others have forged
and maintained, sinuous and waist-high, winding inward
here we discover a transfigured ceiba, its rugged bark
incised with the fresh runes of a primitive ideography.
Genna calls a halt in our passage to load her Minicam.
She circles about the tree, shrugging off our protests.
As we feared, her careless movement triggers a tripvine,
but instead of a hail of deadly spines we are bombarded
by balled leaves exploding into dust—marking us with
luminous ejecta and a third eye on Genna’s forehead.
Souza dies that night, limbs locked in rigid fibrogenesis.
A panther cries; Tomaz wants us to regroup at our campo.
Genna decides she has been chosen, scarified for passage.
She notches her own trail to some paradise born of dream
hallucination, but stumbles back, wounded and half-mad,
the Minicam lost, a cassette gripped in whitened knuckles.
From base camp north we flail at the miraculous regrowth
which walls off our retreat to the airstrip by the river.
The ghost lemurs now spin about our heads, they mock us
with a chorus as feverish and compulsive as our thoughts.
We move relentlessly forward, as one, the final scenes
of Genna’s tape flickering over and over in our brains.
In the depths of the mutant rain forest where the water
falls each afternoon in a light filtered to vermilion,
a feline stone idol stands against the opaque foliage.
On the screen of the monitor it rises up from nowhere,
upon its hind legs, both taller and thicker than a man
how the cellular accretion has distended its skull,
how the naturally sleek architecture of the countenance
has evolved into a distorted and angular grotesquerie,
how the taloned forepaws now possess opposable digits.
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