What Hides Within

by Jason Parent

  “You’re such good friends with him, yet you’re telling me that you’re the last person to know that Clive is having surgery to remove a brain tumor? Didn’t you get the card we passed around?”

  Oops. So that’s what that was. How was I supposed to know I should read it first? Guess I shouldn’t have written “Happy Birthday.”

  “Of course I knew that,” Felix said. “Duh! Who would actually believe he was abducted by aliens?”

  “Felix, you’ve got to be… never mind. That’s not important. What is important is the call I got from Clive’s friend. He’s trying to organize a post-surgery night out for the guy. You interested?”

  “Will there be strippers, alcohol, whipped cream, and Cheez Whiz?”

  “Alcohol, definitely. The rest, I doubt it. The guy said something about paintball maybe. And, Felix, please never tell me what you use the Cheez Whiz for.”

  “Well, one out of four is a start, and a good one at that. Alcohol is the beginning of many a fine occasion. When is this going down?”

  “Not this Friday but the next, if Clive is well enough. He doesn’t know anything about it, so let’s keep it that way. Same goes for everybody else here.”

  “You haven’t invited anyone else from work?”

  “You’re the first person I’ve spoken to. Do you know anyone else here whom Clive’s friends with?”

  “He talks to Kim a lot. Probably Spencer, too, and that dork Bradford in sales. Not to mention Carrie from claims.”

  The last person was a new employee that Clive hadn’t met yet, but Felix found her sexy and wanted her there. He figured Clive wouldn’t mind her name thrown into the mix.

  “All right. I’ll talk to them. Let me know if you think of anyone else, and don’t forget. Mark the date on your calendar.”

  “Will do. While I’m marking my calendar, if you’d like to schedule some private time—”

  “I’ll talk to you later, Felix.”

  With that, Connie headed toward Kim’s cubicle. Felix was left with a social occasion entered on his mostly unsocially inclined calendar and a semihard penis from his blatant ogling of Connie’s body. He adjusted himself and sat down before anyone could notice his excitement. It wasn’t often that women of Connie’s caliber spoke to Felix. In fact, it wasn’t often that women of any caliber spoke to Felix, except those in the chat rooms he paid for.

  * * *

  Around a corner, Judith hovered about as well as an elephant on water. Still, her presence had remained unseen throughout Felix and Connie’s conversation. She sighed heavily. She wouldn’t receive an invite to Clive’s party. No one from work ever invited her anywhere.

  It’s because I’m the boss. I’ll show them, though. I can be a lot of fun once the work clothes come off. They’re going to want me at that party. No, they need me at that party. How could I possibly let them all down?

  CHAPTER 16

  D r. Landenberg held out his hand. “Give me that little electric saw thing.”

  “You mean the bone saw?” his nurse asked.

  “How many other saws do we have, Rosie?”

  A circular blade with shark-fin teeth was placed into the neurosurgeon’s hand. Dr. Landenberg scrutinized Clive’s shaved and pinned-back scalp. A small white segment of Clive’s skull, with connect-the-dot marker lines painted on it in a rectangular pattern, lay unnaturally exposed. All blood had been swabbed off it, leaving a clean, polished surface that was about to get soiled. I should have been a proctologist.

  He switched on the blade. A high-volume, high-pitched electric buzzing blotted out normal vocal tones and Dr. Landenberg’s heavy breathing. It was the only sound heard, save for the faint, infrequent, yet stable beeps of Clive’s anesthetized heartbeat on the EKG monitor. Dr. Landenberg’s own heartbeat ran much faster. He lowered the saw and began connecting the dots.

  Skull fragments and other biological substances splattered upon the doctor’s frock and speckled his glasses. His facemask resembled the bib of a dental patient after a cleaning with that power drill dentists called a toothbrush. His work made him sweat, yet his hands remained steady. The incision was perfect, deep enough to pry open the skull segment like a manhole cover without slicing into the brain. Blood filled the target area. He dabbed it with a sponge clenched within the grasp of his forceps.

  With the horizontal trenches dug, Dr. Landenberg rotated clockwise around Clive’s head just far enough to saw along the vertical marker lines. Once cut, he removed the rectangular, concave section of Clive’s skull. He peered into the cavity.

  “Uh-oh.”

  “What is it, Doctor?”

  Dr. Landenberg ignored the question. Instead, he examined the exposed portion of frontal lobe with astonishment. After a few moments of intense scrutiny, he broke his silence. “Let me see the scans.”

  “Is everything all right, Dr. Landenberg?”

  Rosie leaned in for a closer look at Clive’s brain. She wiped the skull chips and bile splatter from her goggles as she strained her eyes to locate the tumor.

  “Back off him,” Dr. Landenberg grumbled, ushering his nurse away from Clive. “Give me a second.” Another nurse handed him a folder containing CAT scanned images of what purported to be Clive’s most vital organ. But something didn’t match up.

  Dr. Landenberg didn’t bother to remove his soiled gloves before riffling through the images. His bloody thumbprints smeared their edges.

  “Dr. Landenberg?”

  Rosie’s pestering was becoming increasingly more irritating. The longer Clive’s brain remained naked to the outside world, the more likely his chances for infection or worse. Dr. Landenberg knew Rosie didn’t need to have his degrees to see that there was a serious problem with the exposed portion of Clive’s brain: there was nothing wrong with it at all!

  “I don’t see any tumors, Dr. Landenberg,” she said, verbalizing the dread in his own mind.

  Dr. Landenberg again dismissed his assistant. “We’re in the right quadrant,” he said, mostly for his own comfort. He slapped a backhand across one of the CAT scan images. “I pinpointed the incision perfectly.”

  He looked up at his staff, whose faces were aghast and directionless. He thrust his arm toward Clive’s man-made orifice, dangerously close to committing an undoubtedly rare assault—the puncturing of someone else’s brain with one’s forefinger.

  “The anomaly should be right there!” He pointed. “Yet all I see is healthy brain tissue.”

  “Maybe it was just a pebble or something that dislodged when you removed the skull piece.”

  “Rosie, how long have you been a nurse? That has got to be the stupidest thing I…”

  Dr. Landenberg’s pause was prompted by an equally stupid idea. He reached for the carved-out segment of Clive’s skull and raised it between his fingertips to eye level. He flipped it over to glimpse its undersection, hoping to find his tumor rooted to the bone like some upside-down mushroom.

  Among the droplets of red, Dr. Landenberg saw, or thought he saw, something glossy and white, like a contact lens doused with milk. He could have sworn it moved.

  “Shit!” he shouted, dropping the bone to the floor. He squirmed to remove his gloves, squinting one eye shut as he hurried to the sink. He turned the faucet and removed his glasses.

  “What is it, Dr. Landenberg?” Rosie asked, a hint of amusement in her tone.

  “I got something in my eye.”

  “That’s why we’re supposed to wear goggles over our glasses, Dr. Landenberg.”

  Fucking cunt. Why can’t I fire that bitch? Dr. Landenberg washed and disinfected his hands thoroughly before beginning the delicate operation on himself. He could feel a hair, an eyelash perhaps, against his eyeball. When he wiped his fingertips underneath his eye, his hand caught the strand. He gave it a tug, but it was slow to give way, as though it were glued to his eye. It snapped off his cornea with a stinging pop.

  “It’s a long hair,” he said with irritation. “Probably one of yours. That’s why
we tie our hair back, Rosie.”

  Rosie sneered, but he let it slide. His patient lay unconscious, heavily sedated, and unappealingly spliced open like a frog in science class minus the formaldehyde. If he didn’t return to Clive soon, formaldehyde could be the patient’s next drink. He wiped dry his glasses with a paper towel, slid on a fresh pair of gloves, and headed back to gainful employment.

  The sound of shattering ceramic pulverized under foot sent something just short of fright to all of Dr. Landenberg’s nerve endings. He stood frozen in time. His staff stared back at him, their faces dull and blank.

  “Where’s the skull piece?” he managed after a hard swallow.

  “On the ground,” Rosie said, “where you dropped it.”

  “And nobody thought to pick it up?”

  His staff stood, dumbfounded. Dr. Landenberg crouched down to salvage the remains of Clive’s now fragmented skull. He breathed a heavy sigh before picking up a large portion of the removed section, then another smaller piece, then another.

  “Phew!” he said, all the pieces apparently gathered in his open hand. “No sharp edges at least. It looks like I just broke off one corner. Anyone got any Superglue? If not, this broken-off part is just a little piece. He probably won’t miss it.”

  Dr. Landenberg scanned the underside of the skull fragment a second time. It appeared normal in all respects, save for some lint or crud it had accumulated off the floor. He blew it off with his mouth.

  Only the most sterile conditions in Massachusetts hospitals. He washed the bone clean with a squirt bottle of saline solution. Whatever he’d seen on it earlier was gone. He dismissed the glossy-white object as something he just thought he saw, a symptom of his hair-damaged vision.

  “Well, no tumor, no problem. Let’s patch him back up and call this one a success.”

  Now is probably as good a time as any to lay down some ground rules.

  In a veiled world between consciousness and dreamscape, Clive heard a voice whose source he couldn’t make out. The room around him went from black to white to rainbow then back to black again, a merry-go-round of colors and nothingness. He felt weightless, a floating spirit separated from his body, submersed in cushy-cozy warmth. Visions of happy frogs dancing to mischievous tunes flirted in and out of sight. Lollipop and butterfly apparitions splurged upon a canvas of air, and he wondered if the frogs would eat them. All around him, the hushed voice swirled, drawing him closer.

  In short, he was more fucked-up than a hippie at a Grateful Dead concert. The post-operation painkillers and the lingering anesthetic combined into a potent hallucinogenic.

  By now, you ought to realize that you can’t get rid of me.

  Clive looked everywhere for the voice’s owner. The cartoon images began to fade. Were they real? Was anything he was experiencing real, or would it all just disappear with the close of a dream cycle?

  Again, the voice beckoned him toward it. He blinked—his vision was lost. Everything went dark, except for a smidgeon of glossy white propped at the end of his nose. He peered cross-eyed down his nose’s crooked path. The image of a tiny creature blinked in and out of focus with metronomic consistency. Was it… waving?

  “Hey there, little guy,” Clive said, sucking back his drool. “What are you doing on my nose?”

  Trying to get your fucking attention, the creature answered without moving its mouth. And I’m not a guy.

  Had Clive been capable of even sporadic coherency, he might have feared the hideous being perched on his snout. The minute animal protruded like a wart no more than a third of an inch off Clive’s skin. Despite its size and his heavily medicated state, Clive could easily make out what it was: a spider, but unlike any he’d seen before. Oddly colored—a nearly transparent white all over its shiny, hairless body and legs, with two streaks marking the sides of its bulbous abdomen like bloodred lightning bolts—it was ugly enough to make an arachnophobe faint even at a distance. Up close and personal, with seven of its eight legs crouched beneath it, concealing its full dimensions, the spider barely covered the tip of Clive’s nose.

  The ends of the back two legs were bristled like teeth on combs. The thought of the creature grooming made Clive’s belly jiggle. Its eighth leg was raised up for Clive’s examination. The spider resembled an old man shaking his fist at meddlesome children, only this old man had many more fists and an equal number of eyes—black, empty eyes. Despite menacing incisors hanging disproportionately large, like walrus tusks, from an uncannily blank face, the creature failed to impress any danger upon Clive. The anesthesia that should have kept him unconscious a few more hours left him carefree.

  “You’re a cute little spider, aren’t you?”

  Clive reached out with one finger to pet the arachnid. “Boop!” he said, attempting to pat it on its head. His motor functions completely out of whack, he monumentally missed the spider. His hand crashed onto his chest.

  Don’t touch me, the spider warned, but Clive was in no state to heed warnings.

  “Relax, little man,” Clive slurred.

  Something had slid partially over his left eye. He brushed back the bandage that covered his forehead. It felt wet, but then again, so did everything else.

  I told you, I’m not a man. Anyway, I thought this would be a good time to reveal myself, what with all the dope you have in your system. I wasn’t sure what waking you up would do to you, but I wanted to catch you at a moment when you wouldn’t scream like a bitch at the mere sight of me. Plus, we have work to do. So here I am.

  “Yeah!” Clive shouted, laughing for no discernable reason. “I see you.”

  I warned you, didn’t I? I told you I’d still be here after the operation, but you didn’t want to listen.

  Clive cackled like a drunkard. “You’re too funny. I may not be… thinking clearly, but I know talking spiders aren’t real. This is a dream. When I wake up, you’ll be gone. Don’t worry, though. I’ll tell Morgan about you.”

  Still unable to accept the truth, huh, Clive? Let me give you the bottom line. You destroyed my home. Now, you are my home. Sound fair?

  And I like it here. I have new purpose and plans for you. It’s been a long time since I last entered what your kind passes for civilization. A lot has changed, and a lot has stayed the same, and I’ll view this new age through your eyes. You can either embrace that and all that I can offer you, or resist me and suffer the consequences. I’ll grant you one pass since you did have brain surgery for no reason.

  “Boy, you’re a serious little buggie. Come on, now! Let’s see you turn that frown upside down.” Clive gurgled, and the drool ran freely.

  Perhaps this wasn’t the best time to talk to you. At least you’re not panicking like you’ve been so fond of doing lately.

  “Since you’re my new ‘real’ friend, shouldn’t I call you by your name?”

  Thank you, Clive. Finally, some semblance of maturity. I’ve been called by many different names over the years. My preferred name, though, is probably—

  “Captain Fuckwad!” Clive giggled so uncontrollably that he broke wind. He knew that there was about a fifty-fifty chance that he’d sharted, but he was too fucked-up to give a damn.

  I stand corrected. The spider stepped around the curve of his nose. We’ll talk again soon. I have business to attend to. You’re lucky I don’t take a shit on your nose for that one, though.

  “No, wait! I didn’t mean it,” Clive said through fits of laughter. “How about Charlotte, then?”

  What? You mean like Charlotte’s Web? You unoriginal bastard. That’s lame.

  “Okay. How about Chester?”

  Do you have some strange fetish for Ch names? Not to mention, I already told you that I’m not a guy. I’m female. You wouldn’t want me calling you Sally, I presume.

  “Oooh! I got one! Cornelius Cornhole of the Klondike.”

  Chester it is. Glad to officially make your acquaintance, Clive.

  “Same here, Chester Molester.” Clive’s joke was both antiquate
d and unfunny, but that didn’t stop it from sending him roaring.

  You’d think one might pay a bit more attention to a talking spider. Anyway, I’m out of here. I got places to go and people to see. Actually, you do, so heal up quickly. Call me when your mental capacities return, and we’ll finish this conversation. Oh, and be sure to thank that doctor for giving me a skylight.

  “Chester” retreated into Clive’s nostril. Her steps tickled Clive’s nose hairs and provoked his laughter. As she settled back into her new home, Chester left Clive with some parting words.

  Think about what I said. We could be friends, or we could be enemies. That’s your call. I’ll make sure you remember this conversation when you’re more… together. I can do that up here. I can do lots of things to you up here. After all, I’m in your head.

  CHAPTER 17

  S

  hrill screams and ghastly wailing reverberated through the hollow air, echoing off the thick concrete walls. Quiet sobbing came from ground-level breaths. Cries for help went unanswered.

  In the cafeteria, bodies lay strewn among ham salad sandwiches, lukewarm hot dogs, and tater tots. Pieces of plaster and people burned in small bouts of fire. Flesh melted like cheese off pizza.

  Across campus, a science lab released noxious fumes as flammable chemicals threatened greater destruction. A French class lay devastated. A rec hall fell to pieces. After a while, the only sound coming from inside was the crackling of the fire.

  Outside, a mass gathered in the courtyard. They stared in silence and grief at the smoky haze casting shadowy darkness about the school, blocking out the sky.

  Friends searched for each other through the crowds. Faculty did its best to tally the students—a futile task. So many were fleeing. So many were disassembled. Campus police tried to keep the chaos from spreading. None dared reenter the university.

  As fires raged, the extent of death and destruction could not be gauged. Some inside were still alive and in need of immediate medical attention, their skin seared, their bones shattered, their lungs contaminated, and their veins opened. For most, medical attention would come far too late. Those who did survive wouldn’t be without their scars and sad stories. Of the crowd outside, none would be without a sense of fear or loss.