by Jeffrey Ford
Of course, the sick children and their families could not leave Chanticleer. A field hospital was set up within the boundary of the wall and that’s where they were treated. It was made evident to the fathers of those affected that they were required to continue working. The women, though, had formed a bond of solidarity and felt strength in their numbers. Henrietta wrote about the other women to say, “I underestimated them. Any one of them has as much if not more courage, cunning, and love for their children as me. When we drink now, we talk of escape.” They approached the lieutenant colonel in charge of the community and demanded that tests be done to determine what was causing their children to become ill. He agreed to their demands but took no action. Then right around the time the first child died despite the doctors’ treatments and their predictions (they’d never seen a form of the disease so virulent before), a rash of cases broke out, and not all were children this time.
Mason contracted something. The doctors weren’t sure what it might be. He turned a shade of gray, and lost his nails and hair. Large lesions formed on his back and chest. When not caring for Henry, Henrietta spent all of her time at the field hospital. The women of the community whose families had not been affected stepped in to help her with child care. Mason died a month into his illness and was buried in a makeshift cemetery on that piece of meadow where she’d once read to Henry. And then Henry became sick, and before five months was up, he was buried alongside his father in the poisoned earth that had killed them.
The lieutenant colonel finally ordered a full evacuation of Chanticleer. Henrietta signed the sheet that assured she was accounted for in the helicopter, but at the last second ducked away. When her name was called before liftoff, one of the other women shouted, “Present,” in her voice. She hid in the basement of her house and listened to the choppers carrying the survivors away. Only when the workers came two days later to brick up the opening to Chanticleer did she wake from her stupor. She spied on their progress from her attic window, watching carefully their every move. And then they left. The sun was setting, and the only sound was the mountain wind.
When the community was evacuated, everything was left behind. Only the citizens were taken out. Henrietta had no way of knowing what I know, that every last one of them was killed execution style, duct tape wrapped around the wrists and ankles, a kneeling position, one bullet to the base of the skull. The cover-up of that killing spree was funded by a federal sales tax put on alcohol. Instead, she lived on inside the walls of Chanticleer. She found generators and manuals about how to employ them. There were years of sustenance in the canned goods left behind, and a king’s ransom in wine and bottled water. She scavenged the neighborhood, invading houses and stores.
As to what her solitary existence was like in the seasons that followed, you can use your imagination. In one particular entry in her diary she writes that if she were to ever try to sell her story to Hollywood, she’d pitch it as “Robinson Crusoe meets ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter.’ ” She survived on her imagination, her writing, and the ritual of exercise. As a way to fill her days, she began invading the homes of her neighbors and tried to read the nature of their families like an archeologist might, sifting through the artifacts left behind. She discovered hidden letters that told of secret affairs, and sinister photographs of wives in bondage, heartbreaking artwork of children, and then the mundane remains of fashions in the closet, curtains, the things that filled their refrigerators, that hung on the walls in their bedrooms. “I feel like a ghost sometimes,” she wrote. “It’s as if I, like Mason and Henry, died and am held here to bear witness to all that’s been left behind.” Sometimes her discoveries would fill her with a mild excitement, for instance, “Today, I came to the realization that Margi Nelson was a transvestite and that her husband was well aware of it. I sat in the shadows of their living room, staring out at the late-afternoon sky, and imagined for hours the story of their lives.”
Three-quarters of the way through the diary, Henrietta made her first entry concerning changes at Chanticleer—“Almost overnight, great disruptions of the earth with thick roots poking through everywhere.” Soon after, she noted that a fissure had formed in the bottom of the swimming pool. She feared that she’d lose the water, but didn’t. Instead a glowing light shone through the crack and formed a cloud of phosphorescence down deep in the twelve-foot section. “When I swim through that bright plume, it feels like I’m out in the sun and its rays are leaching into me, burning away my misgivings.” A month following, she commented on the ashy shade of her complexion.
As Henrietta continued to record the process of her metamorphosis and the mutation of the world around her, her writing slowly became more disorganized, her expressions more erratic. Her penmanship debilitated from a neat script to some private system of slash marks and poorly formed circles. Before her entries fell completely into the incomprehensible, she confessed to spending more and more time in the pool. “The crack in the bottom has opened up into a rock tunnel through which I can swim to the other pools in the neighborhood,” she wrote. Of course, I have doubts about the actuality of the pool-tunnel system, but to whom would she be lying? I believe she was beginning to lose her human sense of reality at this point. The last thing she recorded that makes sense is a dream she had while floating in the light at the deep end. “The sky was blue. White clouds. Henry in my arms, giggling.”
The day after Rabella Cayce and her four colleagues left Chanticleer, the community was covered over with a few million tons of concrete, like cake mix poured into a giant pan whose edge was the circular wall. A modern village of Pompeii, it waits for future generations to reveal its secrets. How little they will understand about the nature of their find. The strange life forms will be evident. The radiation and the viral strains should still be a nasty brew for thousands of years. They may understand the point of the community, and, in reviewing existing documents, who ordered it built, but what they’ll miss, as we miss even now, is the reason for it.
Don’t ask me how I know this, but under the influence of a long-distance mind-control expert, a psychic known in the black-ops community as Garland, a certain MP of a poetic frame of mind who guards a gray figure will, on an appointed day, at a given hour, draw his sidearm and shoot out the glass of Sirena’s cylindrical tank, freeing her from the prison of sleep. He will then turn the gun on himself. She will awaken to roam the dim tunnels of the hive of secrets, free to hunt and feed, desecrating the most sacred heart of our nation. My contacts and I have estimated that she’ll kill dozens before they stop her.
A Note About “The Hag’s Peak Affair”
The initial spark of this idea came to me many, many years ago, during a long stint on the overnight shift at a central security station in a town in upstate New York. My job was to sit in front of a big board with audio speakers and lights, listening and watching for warnings of break-ins at homes and businesses around town. The place was located at the end of a hallway that ran the length of the back of a mostly boarded-up strip mall in a part of town that had fallen on hard times. The only two businesses still operating in the mall were a doughnut shop and an X-rated bookstore.
In my security station (more like just a concrete bunker), there was a video monitor that watched that hallway 24/7. The security company actually had a lot of high-end customers (well, as high-end as that town could muster), and night-security personnel had to be vigilant about the security of the central station as well as the properties of the clients around town in case bad guys stormed the station and took us out in order to run rampant, looting the town.
My boss really got into this scenario, and every night before he left and I started on my eight hours of staring at the board and snoozing, he’d recount how it would all go down. “They’ll come in with guns blazing,” he’d say. He was a kooky guy and had a lot of weird bullshit stories. One I remember was about some Czechoslovakian twin doctors who created a cure for cancer out of horse hooves, but were forced out of business by a nefarious
conspiracy concocted by the AMA because doctors didn’t really want to cure cancer.
In any event, the door of the central station was only stormed once, and that was by my boss’s wife, whom he’d caught cheating on him with a guy who sold cheese to grocery stores. He had called me and told me not to let her in the station, even though she was actually part owner of the security company. That night she came by and pounded on the outer door and demanded through the intercom that I let her in. Of course, I let her in. What did I give a shit? I wasn’t going to hassle his wife just like I wasn’t going to throw myself into a hail of bullets for minimum wage.
Anyway, what’s important here is that in that hallway I watched all night on the video camera, waiting for criminals to attack, the concrete floor was severely buckled in one spot. It had a huge fissure in it, and a side of the crack was raised about five inches over the other side of it. I’d see rats crawl out of that hole and scurry up and down the hallway. And, man, the stink in that grim corridor was like the Devil’s farts—some kind of mutated cabbage miasma that on a bad night could make your eyes water.
One afternoon I was talking to my boss and this guy, Wes, the alarm technician, and I asked them what was going on in the hallway. The tech laughed and said, “That’s the entrance to Hell.” My boss told me that the strip mall we were in was built years ago over a landfill. The only problem was, they never put in any vents to leach off the methane gas, and now it was pushing its way up to the surface. The boss, who had a mad comb-over and always wore glasses with smoky lenses, like some kind of spy/used-car salesman, shook his head, and said, “If I lose the business in my divorce settlement, I’m gonna go out in the hallway and light a cigarette and blow this whole fucking place to kingdom come.” Wes and I laughed, but the boss didn’t. I didn’t stick around long after that.
I was only there long enough to contemplate the idea of structures and complexes being built to cover over the sins of the past. I thought of Love Canal. I wondered, how many places must there be like this in the country that nobody remembers or cares about yet? What kind of biological or nuclear detritus of the Cold War must be lying dormant, waiting to rear its ugly head and storm the metaphorical security door of our placid lives? Those long nights in the central station, contemplating the invisible, rising evil, gave rise themselves to a nascent story concept I entertained my half-sleeping imagination with. I thought of it as “Neptune’s Daughter.”
The Coral Heart
His sword’s grip was polished blood coral, its branches perfect doubles for the aorta. They fed into a guard that was a thin silver crown, beyond which lay the blade (the heart), slightly curved, with the inscription of a spell in a language no one could read. He was a devotee of the art of the cut, and when he wielded this weapon, the blade exactly parallel to the direction of motion, the blood groove caught the breeze and whistled like a bird of night. He’d learned his art from a hermit in the mountains where he’d practiced on human cadavers.
That sword had a history before it fell to Ismet Toler. How it came to him, he swore he would never tell. Legend had it that the blade belonged first to the ancient hero who’d beheaded the Gorgon; a creature whose gaze turned men to smooth marble. After he’d slain her, he punctured her eyeballs with the tip of his blade and then bathed the cutting edge in their ichor. The character of the weapon seized the magic of the Gorgon’s stare and, ever after, if a victim’s flesh was sliced or punctured to the extent where blood was drawn, that unlucky soul would be turned instantly to coral.
The statuary of Toler’s skill could be found throughout the realm. Three hardened headless bodies lay atop the Lowbry Hill, and on the slopes three hardened heads. A woman crouching at the entrance to the Funeral Gardens. A score of soldiers at the center of the market at Camiar. A child missing an arm, twisting away with fear forever, resting perfectly on one heel, in the southeastern corner of the Summer Square. All deepest red and gleaming with reflection. There were those who believed that only insanity could account for the vast battlefields of coral warriors frozen in the kill, but none was brave enough to speak it.
The Valator of Camiar once said of the Coral Heart, “He serves the good because it is a minority, leaving the majority to slay in the name of Truth.” The Valator is now, himself, red coral, his head cleaved like a roasted sausage. Toler dispatched evil with dedication and stunning haste. It was said that the fate of the sword was tied to that of the world. When enough of its victims had been turned to coral, their accumulated weight would affect the spin of the planet and it would fly out of orbit into darkness.
There are countless stories about the Coral Heart, and nearly all of them are the same story. Tales about a man who shares a name and a spirit with his weapon. They’re always filled with fallen ranks of coral men. Some he kicks and shatters in the mêlée. There is always betrayal and treachery. A few of these stories involve the hermit master with whom he’d studied. Most all of them mention his servant, Garone, a tulpa or thought-form creation physically coalesced from his focused imagination. The descriptions of killing in these classical tales are painstaking and brutal, encrusted with predictable glory.
There are a handful of stories about the Coral Heart, though, that do not end on a battlefield. You don’t hear them often. Most find the exploits of the weapon more enchanting than those of the man. Your average citizen enjoys a tale of slaughter. You, though, if I’m not mistaken, understand as well the deadly nature of the human heart and would rather decipher the swordsman’s dreams than the magic spell engraved upon his blade.
And so . . . in the last days of summer, in the Year of the Thistle, after transforming the army of the Igridots, upon the dunes of Weilawan, into a petrified forest, Ismet Toler wandered north in search of nothing more than a cold day. He rode upon Nod, his red steed of a rare archaic stock—toes instead of hooves and short, spiral horns, jutting out from either side of its forelock. Walking beside Toler, appearing and disappearing like the moon behind wind-driven clouds, was Garone. The servant, when visible, drifted along, hands clasped at his waist, slightly hunched, the hood of his brown robe always obscuring any definitive view of his face. You might catch a glimpse of one of his yellow eyes, but never both at once.
As they followed a trail that wound beneath giant trees, leaves falling everywhere, Toler pulled the reins on Nod and was still. “Was that a breeze, Garone?”
The tulpa disappeared but was as quickly back. “I believe so,” he said in a whisper only his master could hear.
Another, more perceptible gust came down the trail and washed over them. Toler sighed as it passed. “I’m weary of turning men to coral,” he said.
“I hadn’t noticed,” said Garone.
The Coral Heart smiled and nodded slightly.
“Up ahead in these yellow woods, we will find a palace and you will fall in love,” said the servant.
“There are times I wish you wouldn’t tell me what you know.”
“There are times I wish I didn’t know it. If you command me to reveal my face to you, I will disappear forever.”
“No,” said Toler, “not yet. That day will come, though. I promise you.”
“Perhaps sooner rather than later, master.”
“Perhaps not,” said Toler and nudged his mount in the ribs. Again moving along the trail, the swordsman recalled the frozen expressions of his victims at Weilawan, each countenance set with the same look of terrible surprise.
In late afternoon, the travelers came to a fork in the trail, and Garone said, “We must take the right-hand path to reach that palace.”
“What lies to the left?” asked Toler.
“Tribulation and certain death,” said the servant.
“To the right,” said the swordsman. “You may rest now, Garone.”
Garone became a rippling flame, clear as water, and then disappeared.
As twilight set in, Toler caught sight of two towers silhouetted against the orange sky. He coaxed Nod into a gallop, hoping to arrive a
t the palace gates before nightfall. As he flew away from the forest and across barren fields, the cool of the coming night refreshing him, he thought, “I have never been in love.” Every time he tried to picture the face of one of his amorous conquests what came before him instead were the faces of his victims.
He arrived just as the palace guards were about to lift the moat bridge. The four men saw him approaching and drew their weapons.
“An appeal for lodging for the night,” called Toler from a safe distance.
“Who are you?” one of the men shouted.
“A traveler,” said the swordsman.
“Your name, fool,” said the same man.
“Ismet Toler.”
There was a moment of silence, and then a different one of the guards said, in a far less demanding tone, “The Coral Heart?”
“Yes.”
The guard who had spoken harshly fell to his knees and begged forgiveness. Two others sheathed their swords and came forward to help the gentleman from his horse. The fourth ran ahead into the palace, announcing to all he passed that the Coral Heart was at the gate.
Toler dismounted and one of the men took Nod’s reigns. The swordsman approached the guard who knelt on the ground, and said, “I’ll not be killing anyone tonight. I’m too weary. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.” The man rose up, and then the three guards, with Toler’s help, turned the huge wooden wheel that lifted the moat bridge.