Stories for Chip

by Nisi Shawl

  She tapped the end of her roll-up against her knee.

  “You make it sound so prosaic. But you know, maybe there is something there, too. We don’t know yet.” She lit her cigarette and inhaled, blowing a smoke ring out into the glare of the light. “All the factors have not been eliminated.”

  “They will be,” said Dan.

  “Many studies have carried out detailed surveys of such locations and revealed potential contributing influences from (1) contextual and situational specific factors, (2) diverse lighting levels, (3) drafts, (4) infrasound levels, (5) the localized distribution and changes in geomagnetic fields (GMFs), (6) time-varying electromagnetic fields (EMFs), and (7) transient tectonic events, to name but a few. All of these factors, either collectively or individually, could either induce a direct experience or facilitate an experience-prone state in certain observers and under certain circumstances.”

  Megan clawed toward consciousness with desperation and regret. Sharks had chased her through murky waters following the scent of blood; this she knew although she wasn’t injured. When she’d reached the surface and walked out onto the dusty beach, she’d turned to see the Earth hanging in the sky, big and round and beautiful and impossibly far away. There was a terrible pain in her lower back and she turned to find a tiny shark, its jaws locked around her spine. She turned and tried to grasp its slippery body. The sense of dread she felt seemed disproportionate to the circumstances, and when she came to herself, pain wracking her sacrum where she’d slumped awkwardly in her chair, the dread didn’t pass. It was always the bloody sharks, even though she could watch Jaws all the way through now with barely a twitch of fear. You never shook off the six-year-old inside.

  “Dan,” she said, feeling as if she was still underwater. She couldn’t hear her own voice. “Dan,” she tried again. “What did you mean, hospice? I thought this was a hotel?” Although her pulse was racing as if she’d just run a mile uphill, when she turned her head to look at him, it was the motion of rock grinding against rock. He was sitting at the laptop, his back to her. He hadn’t heard. She tried to lift her hand, but it stayed resolutely still, resting on her knee. The other was the same. The left foot, the right foot; nothing was shifting. She felt her breath start to quicken and her chest constrict. It’s OK, she told herself. Sleep paralysis. Night terrors. Happens to people all the time.

  She knew all about sleep events. They explained a lot of haunt-type experiences. Knowing about something didn’t make you immune to it, though. She closed her eyes and sent a message to whoever might be listening. When I said I wanted something to happen I didn’t mean a crappy old night terror. This isn’t any fun at all. Her breathing was still accelerating. She fought to regain control. Nothing to fear. You’ll fall asleep again soon. Won’t even remember it in the morning. She imagined herself at eight years old, with her mother’s arms around her, the old yellow blanket that always made her feel safe. She could almost smell it, but her heart still beat in her throat. The dread pooling in her stomach writhed and split into two and her awareness doubled: déjà vu. Had she been suffering from night terrors all along and just not remembered it? Was this a cycle?

  She reached out to Dan with her frantic mind, begging him to turn around, please, please turn around and see that her eyes were open, and come over and wake her, take her in his arms and stroke her hair and make everything all right. He didn’t turn. Figures rolled across the laptop screen. In the blue light it cast, his hands quested across the keyboard, pale and unearthly like the albino lobster she’d once seen in a restaurant aquarium.

  A clattering, scrambling sound echoed in the corridor outside the room.

  In the corner of her eye she could see a blue-green glow quite like to the one coming from the screen, creeping misty through the empty doorframe and onto the parquet. An eternity of arrhythmic heartbeats and the battle for control of her rigid neck muscles brought Megan’s head around. The sounds stopped as the creature came to a halt in front of her. Silhouettes stretching in two directions were rendered faint by the creature’s own ethereal glimmer. It dropped its silver horn to the ground, flashed one eye at her, and spoke.

  This shouldn’t be. Paralysis yes, a sense of dread, sure, auditory hallucinations, maybe. Something sinister in the room. The hag on your chest, the succubus stealing your breath. Not this. Not the complexity of dreams, not talking fantasies, not…for fuck’s sake. Unicorns. Breathe.

  “Megan?”

  Not a voice so much as an increase in the pressure in her chest, a prickling at the back of her neck. Still the snakes twisting in her gut. Still the déjà vu, never gone on this long, and she knew, knew for sure, that this could not have happened before.

  “Aren’t you pleased to see me?”

  Her eyes were watering. She choked, fought to swallow. The beast took a step toward her, and she could see that tears rolled from its eyes, too. She tried to cringe away from it. It stepped forward again, and she could smell its breath. Like summer afternoons. Its hoofs were silver, its coat was white and its mane and tail were lavender. A memory caught her, pulled her back twelve years, to an attic room, a yellow blanket on a high bed beneath an open window. Her collection of toy unicorns arrayed in front of her. Larha, her favorite. Porcelain, fragile, smooth beneath her hands, a gift from her grandmother, not one to be played with.

  “Here I am, Megan. Won’t you stroke my neck?” It turned its head, presenting shimmering inches of silver fur. Something glistened gray, attached to its head just below the ear. Whatever it was, she couldn’t look at it.

  “Wrong,” she whispered. This is wrong.

  It turned to look at her again, and its tears were thickening, darkening, leaving dirty streaks on its face. “She kept me safe for sixty years. You had me for six. Unicorns can’t fly, Megan, didn’t you know?”

  She’d known. Fly, she’d told the little china thing, fly to Granny. Shattered pieces on the patio. Her mother crying. Her mother, crying. Granny was my mum, Megan. I miss her just like you’d miss me if I had to go away and not come back.

  The unicorn’s tears were taking off the fur where they passed.

  “I’m sorry.” She wanted to cry, but terror was stronger. She wanted to reach out and comfort Larha, but still she couldn’t move. She wanted to leap from her chair and run, drive through the night to her parents’ house in Clapham, hurl herself onto her mother’s bed. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. And—don’t leave me.

  The tears were cutting furrows in his skin. Scarlet mixed with the black droplets and dripped onto the floor.

  “Dies,” he said, kneeling on the ground and laying his chin on the ground. “Everything dies. Why did you let go of me?”

  Larha collapsed onto his side. A collection of broken bits laid on a blue silk scarf. Her mother, her hands still supple, folding the cloth over. Wordlessly putting the bundle away in a drawer in the sideboard. She turned toward Megan and stepped through the cone of light shining on the active sensor. Her hair was long and loose, and she wore a brown cotton dress that left her tanned arms bare.

  Megan still couldn’t breathe properly. She felt her eyes trying to roll up into her skull, and yet could not draw them away from the impossible vision of her mother walking gracefully toward her.

  “Megan?”

  “Mum?”

  “Hello, muffin,” she said, smiling and bending down so her face was close to Megan’s. She smelled of shampoo and Chanel 19. “I hear you’re still having trouble sleeping. Do you want me to tell you a story?”

  Suddenly Megan felt terribly tired. The fight went out of her limbs, and they no longer felt trapped and rigid, but heavy and useless.

  “Once upon a time,” said her mother, seating herself on the floor, “there was a beautiful princess.”

  “Is the story about me?” Megan whispered without meaning to.

  Her mother hesitated, and frowned. “It was always about you, wasn’t it? My youth, devoted to your happiness. You and your father.” The frown became a scowl.
Looking up at Megan, she drew back her lips and bared her teeth. They were tiny arrowheads set into her gums, a row of chipped flints she flicked her tongue across. “Everything you touched you broke. And you abandoned me here! Tied up and forgotten! A hundred years of isolation. A hundred aching years.” She moaned. “Chaos. Terror. You don’t understand Megan, you’ll never understand.”

  It was true. She didn’t understand, had always shied away from understanding. She woke in the night with fragments of understanding scurrying away from her conscious mind like cockroaches from the light.

  Her mother lay back on the floor. Her moans became shrieks of pain and fear. Megan had the idea that if she tried to move, she’d be able to now, could go to her mother’s side and help her. But she couldn’t try. Her face was still wet with tears, but the flow had stopped and she longed to be able to cry again.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean to break him. I didn’t know what would happen.”

  Hands bunched and released the fabric of the cotton dress that now clung to her mother’s skin, sweat-soaked. Something squirmed beneath the fabric. Her legs began to thrash, then spread wide and, from beneath that chocolate-colored canopy across her knees, the something emerged. Through bloody mucus she could see gray flesh, slick and alien. Like the leech-thing on Larha’s white neck, only bigger. It fought free of the placenta and uncurled; a head, a body. Fins. Tail. Teeth. Her mother still sobbed. As the shark-baby moved up her body, another came, and another. Four sharks swam over her, and where they passed her skin sagged. Muscle melted away leaving bone and sinew. They traveled along her limbs and positioned themselves at her joints, opened tooth-filled jaws and bit down. At the ankles, wrists, knees, elbows, her mother was divided. There was no blood.

  When they bit into her throat, the screaming stopped.

  The sharks swam away into shadow, but their presence filled the room. The body on the floor was a pile of broken bits. I didn’t mean to let you go.

  The lassitude still wrapped her mind and body in poison, but she found she no longer minded not being able to breathe. The pain, the paralysis, even the fear; she understood that they were deserved. She was exhausted, though.

  She blinked slowly and looked around the room. Susurrations away by the walls let her know the sharks were still out there. The upturned sofa still loomed evilly to one side of her, and Dan’s hands still worked the keyboard at the other.

  “Dan?”

  Her voice was shaky, but came out more or less like a real voice. He turned from the screen. “Megan? What’s up?”

  She checked herself. The faintest whisper of the sharks slithering over the asylum’s detritus at the very edge of hearing. No bodies on the ground. Residue, that’s all it was. The residue of a dream.

  “Nothing. I fell asleep for a while there. Dreamed about sodding sharks again.” She tried a laugh. “I’m OK, a bit stiff is all. Anything on the sensors yet?”

  “There’s regular pulse event the same as the one we had at the castle last month. Nothing else obvious. Are you sure you’re OK? You look a bit wiped out. Maybe you should go back to sleep.”

  Megan’s pulse fluttered.

  “No, I’m fine, honest. I’m wide awake now.”

  Tentatively, she wiggled her fingers. The results were promising. She couldn’t quite bring herself to stand up, but Dan surprised her by getting up and coming over to her. He crouched down, in the same spot where—but there were no remains there now, no sign that anything had happened.

  He reached out one long finger and stroked her damp hair back from her face. The touch sent her blood pressure soaring once again. He rested his hands on her legs and sighed.

  “What’s this about?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Does it have to be about anything?” one of his hands stroked absently up and down the outside of her thigh. She could barely feel it through the heavy wool of her overcoat, and yet every pass sent tremors through her that threatened to become cramps.

  “You look so tired, that’s all. I feel bad for dragging you out here and keeping you up all night. I know you have a lot to deal with at the moment.”

  “Nothing I haven’t been dealing with for years already, Dan.”

  He took one of her hands in his, turned it over and kissed her palm.

  “I’ve been alone,” he said softly. There was a note in his voice she’d never heard before. “That is, I’ve been lonely. I mean—I mean it would be lonely here without you.”

  His eyes were lost in the shadow of his hood, leaving his mouth as the only focus of her attention. Something about his teeth made her shiver, and for a second she caught herself listening for shark bellies slithering in the dirt. She pushed back his hood to expose his face fully. His eyes crinkled as he smiled. God, he was beautiful.

  “You want this, don’t you?” his intonation was somewhere between a question and a statement of fact. All Megan could do was nod. He pushed himself forward, weight pressing through his arms and down onto her thighs, and pressed his lips to hers. His tongue pushed into her mouth and this time she heard it for certain, the whisper of unseen things moving in the building, rubbery flesh over rotting leaves, communicating with one another through strange scents and the poetry of half-light. Peeling wallpaper shivered like leaves in a breeze she couldn’t feel. Her arms froze at her sides again and her neck stiffened. She tried to push his tongue away and close her mouth, but her pushes were without force, without effect. He probed deeper, his weight pressing against her chest now. When he finally pulled back and looked at her, the laughter in his eyes had gone; they were onyx marbles set in skin the texture of linoleum. Merciless.

  He pulled her hips forward and knelt between her knees. She was entirely paralyzed again, but for her heart, which beat furiously, filling her ears with the rushing of her own blood, mixing her blood with the whispering song of her fear. And mixed with the fear was lust. She did want this. Her lips, as soon as his left them, felt the grief of loss, the agony of unfulfilled desire.

  “Do you fear it?” asked Dan, whom she was no longer sure was Dan at all.

  She nodded.

  “You won’t break,” he said, through teeth as sharp as knives, “even if you bleed. You’re not a china doll. You’re meat, just like the rest of us. You want me at arm’s length so you can imagine I’m perfect, don’t you? So we won’t break one another? But I’m meat, and you can cut meat and you can make it die but we all die in the end. You have to touch something in your life, and you have to risk watching it die. Everything dies. Look.”

  He stood up and pulled off his anorak, and his sweater with the University logo on it, and his blue T-shirt. Then he bunched the skin at his waist between his fingers, and pulled. A seam opened from his throat to his navel and he peeled the skin back to reveal the musculature beneath, and the soft glistening organs.

  “People are just walking steak and liver, same as cattle. I—we suffer. Does that stop us needing one another?”

  Black eyes bored into her.

  He undid his belt buckle.

  “Say you need it.”

  She thought of her mother, wasted to a skeleton, limbs shot with phantom pain and real spasms, confined to a hospice bed for years, and the light leeching away from her smile and the words leaking away from her mind, and she found herself surrounded. Fluorescent light flooded the room, shining down from strips fitted to a high, ornamented ceiling. The sofa by the wall was upright and cushioned. Two more sofas and several huddles of armchairs were arranged to give views out of the six bay windows. Everywhere, there were people. Sick, dying, broken people.

  None of them were looking at her and Dan, but she felt their emotions pressing up to her like a tide, like the jellyfish carried by that tide, slapping into her mind and trailing their stinging sorrow across it. Abandoned people. Trapped people. Alone with only the phantoms their own minds had created.

  “Say you need it.”

  Images and sensations overwhelmed her; needles reaching f
or her naked skin, cuffs around her wrists, bitter medicines, unrecognized faces, voices in her ears telling her she was a bad, bad person; Gerry is a bad person; she mouthed it helplessly, knowing that it didn’t belong to her, and that it did.

  “Say it, Megan.”

  She couldn’t speak. Her tongue was swollen and the poison coursed in her veins, veins she was acutely aware of, carrying envenomed blood around her body. Meat, yes meat, but mind too, and the mind was all too brittle. The Dan-thing was lying to her. But she needed it even more, knowing that.

  When he—it—unzipped its fly she wasn’t surprised to see something there that wasn’t pink, but gray.

  Its teeth ripped through her clothes and into her body. She saw fins sliding inside her, the powerful tail slapping against her legs as it drove further in. Dan was holding her by the shoulders and looking at her.

  “I won’t let you go, Megan. Wherever you go, I’ll be with you.” Jaws lined with tiny arrowheads closed around soft flesh deep inside her, and she felt blood soaking her thighs.

  Her fingertips flexed with remembered feeling. Without moving, they traced the hard curves of a porcelain figurine. The waves of a mane, the cool planes of belly and flanks, the slender legs.

  “Won’t let you go.”

  Three days after the unicorn had failed to fly, Megan’s mother had collapsed. The diagnosis had taken another month to come in, and by that time Megan was quite sure it was her fault. She kissed Larha’s perfect curves with her mind.

  She let go.

  “With respect to magnetic fields, researchers are proposing that perhaps some aspect of these fields have “experience-inducing properties”—even more so if observers have shown a degree of increased neuronal hypersensitivity and susceptibility to these fields. The general hypothesis from this is that such Experience Inducing Fields (EIFs) could be present at reputedly haunted locations and may well underlie a number of reports ranging from nebulous and ambiguous sensations to extreme and complex hallucinations.”