by Brian Bowyer
“Thank you, Mother.”
“You’re welcome.” She quickly prepared a syringe. Then she injected herself with heroin and passed out.
Alicia went into the kitchenette. She cooked the meat and ate it.
She went back into the living room. She looked for Darnell on the radio, but didn’t find him. He was probably working on one of his manuscripts.
She went into the bedroom and closed the door. She grabbed a book to read, a notebook, and an ink pen. She spent the day as she had been spending most of her days recently: either reading, sleeping, or writing about her dreams.
• • •
Alicia woke up and looked out the bedroom window. Night had fallen. She found it amazing how many more stars were visible in the sky from a forest than from a city.
She got up and went into the living room. Her mother was not on the couch, and neither was her blanket. She went to the bathroom door, but it was closed. She knocked on it. “Mother? Are you okay?”
“Yes. Do you need in here?”
“No. Just checking on you.”
“I’m going to take a bath.”
“Okay Mother. Do you mind if I change the radio station?”
“No. Go right ahead.”
Alicia went back into the living room. She switched to AM radio and heard Darnell’s voice. She sat down on the floor, and listened.
“But none of that matters anyway,” Darnell said, “for there is beauty and wisdom here, not the horror and the madness that they would have you to believe. Anything that they don’t understand, they call it madness. But it is not madness. It is the natural progression of humanity. They try to tell us that doing what we were placed here to do by our creators is evil, that slicing open the divine fruit of knowledge is wrong, but it is not evil. It is not wrong. And right now my mission and the mission of others in the service of truth is the most important work that humanity is undertaking on planet Earth. And I and others like me will continue to wage war against those who oppose this information.”
Alicia heard Darnell take a drink. Then he started speaking again.
“Before I got here, I spent a lot of my time thinking about all the despair and terror and savagery that humanity inflicts upon itself. But now, even when I’m working—which, I’ll admit, is pretty much always—I’m thinking about the paintings by Jan Vermeer, and the music of Beethoven, and the transcendent works of literature by humanity’s greatest authors. I used to think about how matter is nothing more than energy that’s been brought to a halt, and about humanity’s tendency to fling itself impatiently into a void of total annihilation. But now I spend my time thinking about our ability to compose music and write literature, to formulate equations to explain the universe, to create engines that power crafts to explore outer space. And we’re only getting started. All that we’ve achieved in this short amount of time is only a small fraction of our potential. The universe itself is a constant work in progress, and so are we.”
Alicia heard Darnell take a drink. Then he started talking again.
“Our destiny is a sacred place beyond good and evil. Beyond darkness and light. Beyond love and grief. Beyond violence and bliss. Beyond grace and prayer and meditation. The truth of all truths, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, is that we were created to return to our creators in a place of eternal creation. With that, I’m signing off. I have work to do. Beware the black-cat bones.”
Alicia needed to pee. She switched to FM radio, got up, and went to the bathroom door. It was still closed, but unlocked. She opened it and stepped into the bathroom.
Her mother was dead in the bathtub. Her black blanket was on the floor beside the tub. She had not run any bathwater, but she was naked. Her legs were shredded and missing several chunks of flesh. Apparently, her mother had not been killing any rabbits. Apparently, the meat that Alicia had been eating the past few days had come from her mother’s legs.
Needlessly, Alicia checked to see if her mother was breathing: she was not. She also checked to see if she could feel a heartbeat: she could not. Her mother was definitely dead.
Alicia emptied her bladder. She washed her hands and brushed her teeth. Then she left the bathroom and closed the door.
She went into the bedroom. She didn’t want to spend the night in the cabin with her mother’s corpse. It was summertime, and therefore warm outside. Perhaps she would go sleep in their broken-down car on the side of the road. It wasn’t that far away. Maybe a mile or so. Then she could walk the twenty or so miles back to the nearest town in the morning.
She decided to just leave her stuff behind. Maybe she would come back for it later. All she grabbed was an ink pen and the notebook she had been writing in recently. She clipped the ink pen to her shirt. She took the notebook into the living room and put it in the briefcase that was full of cash. She picked the briefcase up with her left hand and the handgun with her right.
Then she left the cabin and stepped down off the front porch.
The forest was abuzz with a cacophony of nocturnal insects. Otherwise, the night was calm. The sky was starry, but not too dark. The moon was a silver sickle that provided plenty of illumination.
Alicia took off walking down the narrow dirt road, but not in the direction of her mother’s broken-down car. Instead she started heading toward the flashing red light of the tower that loomed behind the cabin in the distance.
Soon she found an access road that branched off from the dirt road and led up into the hills of the forest. To Alicia, the flashing red light of the tower looked like an otherworldly eye keeping watch on the trees and ground below.
Alicia walked quickly, happy that she was rapidly getting closer to the flashing red light. After a short time, she saw a stand of trees on a ridge just above. As she neared, she saw a small house squatting amidst the trees. The house looked very old. The tower was directly behind the house.
Alicia quickened her pace and approached the house. She walked to the front door and leaned against it, listening. She heard Darnell’s voice. It was faint, but it was most certainly his. Alicia tried the door. It was unlocked. She opened it. Golden light spilled out into the night. Darnell’s voice was louder. Alicia stepped inside.
The small entry room was lit by yellow bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The light cast shadows on stacks of boxes and manuscripts. Darnell’s voice was coming from a back room, sectioned off by a black curtain. Alicia walked to the curtain and pushed it back.
Darnell was seated at a desk with a microphone on it. He was wearing headphones. He was also still wearing his Army field coat, a hood over his head, and gloves on his hands despite the heat of the interior. His walking stick was leaning against the desk. The room was full of books, folders, journals, notebooks, and radio equipment. When Darnell saw Alicia, his smile seemed to light up his entire face. He spoke into the microphone: “To be continued. Beware the black-cat bones.”
Then he pushed a button and took his headphones off. “Hello, Alicia. They told me that someone special would be arriving to help me with the work, but I had no idea that it would be you.”
“Who told you that?”
“Those who tell me that the time of the transcendence is near, and that our preparations have become more important than ever. You’ll meet them soon enough. But you and I have much to discuss.” There was an empty chair beside the one Darnell was sitting on. “Be seated. I’ll share what I have learned, and then you and I can learn and work together.”
Alicia had a seat. She put the handgun on his desk. Then she opened the briefcase and took out her notebook.
FIRST YEAR OF SPRING
Jack raised his glass of whiskey. “To the baby.”
Elaine’s labor was scheduled to be induced at nine a.m. tomorrow. The baby was a boy and they had already named him Carl.
Elaine smiled at Jack from across the table. “His first year of spring.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Human life expectancy,” Elaine said, �
�is eighty years. Well, slightly more for a woman. A little less for a man. But for simplicity, we’ll say eighty years. Eighty divided by the four seasons is twenty. So the first twenty years of life is spring. After that, ages twenty to forty is summer, forty to sixty is autumn, and then sixty to eighty is winter. You and I are in the summers of our lives.”
Jack swallowed a drink. “So if life was just like a football game . . . you know, with four quarters—anything after eighty would be overtime.”
Elaine shrugged. “Yes, you could say that.” Then she raised her glass of water. “To the baby.”
• • •
Carl was normal when he came out. Jack cut the cord and Carl screamed silently until the nurse dislodged something that had been stuck inside his throat, and then his mouth opened wide and his loud voice filled the hospital room. To Elaine, Carl’s cries sounded like knives being raked across sheet metal.
“He’s beautiful,” the nurse said, but she wouldn’t make eye contact with Elaine. Jack wouldn’t look at her, either. He was simply staring at a wall, looking dumbfounded. Elaine thought he was probably thinking the same thing she was: their baby was downright hideous.
• • •
They took Carl home and he sucked Elaine dry within an hour. Jack went to a store and bought some formula and Carl quickly ate every bit of it. Jack made beef stew for dinner and Carl kept trying to stick his face into the pot. His head seemed abnormally large to Elaine—bigger than it had been earlier. He’d been born bald that morning but had already grown some black hair at the base of his fat neck. Elaine shuddered just looking at her son, but chalked it up to postpartum depression.
• • •
Carl refused to sleep in his bassinet. He would scream and cry until they put him in bed with them. Then he refused to let Jack sleep in bed with him and Elaine. He would scream and cry until Jack would get up for a shot of whiskey or a cigarette and then Carl would immediately become quiet and act peaceful. After that, Jack just started sleeping on the couch every night.
• • •
Carl grew every night. Every morning Elaine would wake up and see him lying on the bed with his diaper burst open. By the fourth day, his penis was easily the size of a grown man’s. He grew to fifty pounds within a week and seventy halfway through the next, with a full head of black hair and several scattered teeth that didn’t look like baby teeth at all.
• • •
Carl called Elaine Baby when he was one month old. It was his first word. She was breastfeeding him, and he pulled her nipple out of his mouth with a fist. Then he smiled up at her and she noticed a few more of those evil-looking teeth. “Baby,” he said.
“Yes,” Elaine said. “You’re Mommy’s little baby.”
Carl shook his head. Then he smiled again. “No. You’re my little baby. I’m Carl. You’re Baby.”
A part of Elaine was horrified and another part was proud of her infant son for speaking in complete sentences.
• • •
Carl never talked around Jack, however—only Elaine. For the most part, Carl barely acknowledged the fact that his father even existed.
• • •
One morning, when Carl was almost two months old, Elaine had to pluck splinters from his gums with tweezers because he had chewed through one of the wooden bars of his playpen. Jack was seated across from them at the kitchen table, drinking whiskey. “I was watching videos on YouTube earlier,” Jack said, “of unnaturally large babies. I saw one about a girl who looked like she was twelve, but the parents claimed she wasn’t even a year old yet. The girl was wearing a diaper that the father had fashioned out of a living-room curtain. So, I mean, it does happen. Some babies just get freakishly big. But, other than being freakishly big, the little girl seemed perfectly normal. Carl does not seem normal. I swear I think Carl’s some kind of monster.”
While Elaine still worked on his gums with the tweezers, Carl shot his father an angry look and hissed.
Jack took another shot of whiskey. Then he laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I think he understood what I just said.”
He did, Elaine thought. Carl understands everything we say. But she elected not to say anything.
• • •
They took Carl to a doctor. Carl didn’t talk at all and pretended to be just as dumb as he pretended to be around his father. The doctor weighed Carl and he was up to eighty pounds with his third month still two weeks away.
“What on Earth are you feeding him?” the doctor said. He seemed—like Jack—to be revolted by Carl’s appearance, but Elaine thought her baby boy was growing into a handsome little man.
“Carl,” Jack said, “eats pretty much whatever he wants to.”
The doctor shook his head. “He shouldn’t be eating table food.”
The doctor sent them home. Before that he told them to watch what Carl ate and to make sure he got plenty of exercise.
• • •
That night, while Elaine gave Carl a bath, his penis got hard and poked up out of the water. Jack walked in to blow his nose and saw Carl’s erection. “Boy’s got a bigger pecker than I do,” Jack said. “Sometimes I wonder if he’s even mine.”
Elaine shot her husband an angry look. “I’ve never cheated on you.”
“If you say so.” Jack walked out and closed the bathroom door.
• • •
When Carl was six months old, he walked into the kitchen one morning and opened the refrigerator. Jack and Elaine were seated at the table, eating breakfast. Carl closed the refrigerator. Then he stood up on his tiptoes and opened the freezer door. The freezer was where Jack kept his whiskey. After that, Jack started keeping Carl downstairs in the basement.
• • •
“Carl doesn’t like the basement,” Elaine told Jack one day when Carl was eight months old. “He gets lonely down there. And scared. And cold.”
Jack took a drink of whiskey. “I’ll turn the heat up for him. And give him a couple more blankets.”
Elaine wanted to protest, but Jack sometimes got violent and beat her when he was drinking, so instead she said nothing and walked away.
• • •
On the night before his first birthday, Carl fell asleep on the living-room floor in front of the TV. Jack was drinking whiskey on the couch, and he had not yet taken Carl downstairs into the basement for the night. When he noticed that Carl was sleeping on the floor, Jack got up and staggered into his and Elaine’s bedroom.
Elaine was lying on the bed, dressed only in a bra and panties. She was reading a novel. Jack stretched out beside her on the bed. He took the novel out of her hands and set it on the nightstand. Then he raked a hand through her hair and began kissing her neck.
“Not tonight, Jack. I don’t feel good.”
“But we haven’t had sex in months.”
“I’m sorry,” Elaine said. “I have a headache.”
“Well apparently your head’s not hurting too bad to read one of those stupid romance books.”
A sound drew their attention to the bedroom doorway.
Carl was standing in the doorway. “I’m hungry,” he said.
“You’re always goddamn hungry,” Jack said. “I’m taking your stupid ass down to the basement.”
“No!” Carl said. He took off running.
Jack got up and took off chasing Carl.
The door to the basement was in the kitchen. By the time Elaine caught up with them, Jack had Carl by the hair and was opening the door to the basement.
“Leave him alone!” Elaine said. “Let him go!”
Jack spun around from the open door and released his hold on Carl. “Or else what, bitch? What the fuck are you gonna do about it?”
A red rage rose up inside of Elaine. Without even thinking about it, she raised both arms and gave Jack a hard shove. Jack’s eyes widened and then he tumbled backward down the stairs. He flipped two or three times on the way down. Elaine heard a couple of his bones break. His head smacked the cinderbl
ock wall with a resounding thud when he crashed at the bottom. His skull cracked open and blood shot out all over the wall. Then he just lay motionless on the concrete floor in a broken heap that resembled a human swastika.
“He’s dead,” Carl said.
“Yes.” Elaine closed the door and locked it. “I’ll tell the police he got drunk and fell down the stairs. But first I need to feed you. I know you’re hungry.”
Carl followed his mother into her bedroom.
Elaine had a seat on the bed and Carl sat down on her lap. Elaine pulled a breast out and Carl licked her nipple. His diaper burst open and he had a massive erection.
“I love you, son.”
“I love you too, Baby.” Carl put a hand down her panties.
Elaine reached over and turned off the lamp.
THE BOX
Young Melanie, wriggling and squirming in her highchair, looked up at Judith. “Want some, Mommy?”
Judith forced a smile as Jim attempted to get another spoonful of cereal into their daughter’s mouth. “No thank you,” Judith said. “Mommy’s already eaten. Finish your breakfast.”
A noise out in the hallway beyond their apartment door made Melanie look away. At almost two years of age, she was easily distracted by nearly anything. Then she reached a hand out for her cup and knocked it onto the floor. Spilled milk splashed across the linoleum.
“Great,” Jim said.
Judith said, “Do you want me to finish feeding her?”
Jim shook his head. “No. It’s almost time for you to go to work.”
Jim was a writer and worked at home, which eliminated their need for a babysitter.
Judith checked the time on her phone. “I am so ready for vacation.”
Jim looked up from where he was wiping spilled milk off the floor. “Me too. Just a few more weeks.”
Judith leaned down and kissed him. “I’d better go.”
“Okay Baby. I love you.”
“I love you too.” She left.