A Season In Carcosa
Page 29
Far away the bathroom door flew open and the author blundered forth. Blood poured from his right eye and all heads turned to watch him pass. The editor rushed to him and supported his enormous bulk with her slender shoulder. The music crashed and boomed and everyone else ignored them again.
She shouted over the din, entreating him to tell her what happened and to leave at once for the hospital.
–Bah, I’m fine. Woozy is all. He pawed at the blood and wagged his shaggy head in confusion. The gore gave him the appearance of having exploded through a windshield. –Some bastard sucker punched me. Didn’t see it coming. Don’t need no hospital. Take me home, E. My face hurts.
She took him back to his apartment in a taxi and washed his wounds with hydrogen peroxide. The apartment was a sty– boxes piled up in a maze, a cat box full of cat crap, a rusty radiator thumping beneath the lone window, and on the mildewed brick wall posters of Vonnegut and Einstein, and Vallejo nudes astride prehistoric beasts, overlooking a desk poached from some defunct high school upon which rested his circa 1970s electric typewriter and a mountain of manuscript paper, an overturned pickle bucket serving as office chair; the overwhelming odors of sweat, booze, smoke, and cat. Oh yeah, she instantly remembered why she loathed stepping across the threshold.
The author swigged from a bottle of Jameson and kneaded her ass with his free hand while rambling about his novel, the fucked state of the industry, and the fact he’d lost a step if some no good rat could flatten him with a single blow.
–Honey, I swear the shithead smacked me with a jack handle.
–Shut up and hold still. She dumped the last capful of peroxide into the vicious gash that split his brow and the sluice comingled blood and tears.
Those were the last words they ever exchanged. He fell into farting, snoring slumber punctuated by moans and cries of anguish. She crept away before dawn and collapsed into her own bed in her own flat. Sunday was the only day of the week she ever had to herself and often that simply meant catching up on the myriad clerical details involved in running a major magazine.
~*~
The cops found him three days later after a noise complaint – he’d left the radio volume blasting right before collapsing in the middle of the floor, stone dead. Cardiac arrest precipitated by a swollen liver, the ME said. Liquor and drugs were the main culprits, although some reports circulated that the suffered from Lyme disease.
So the editor attended two funerals in the course of a week. Alden the agent had also died alone and of heart failure. The editor dialed back on cigarettes and alcohol for several days, glimpsing her own future in the mirror of her colleagues’ fate. But the bleakness, the loneliness, proved inescapable, and so too the looming notion that her chosen life led to an ineluctable fate, and she wound up smoking and drinking more heavily than ever.
A vacation seemed in order, something to distract from her melancholy. She packed her camera, the author’s final manuscript (which she’d snagged from Alden’s office when she and a handful of mutual acquaintances carted his possessions into storage), rented a car and drove upstate into the Hudson Valley and took lodging at a quaint bed and breakfast near the hills where her lover often roamed. Her plan was to walk the trails and snap a few pics, shop in the boutiques, drink coffee at the corner café, and make a pass through the book if she could muster sufficient enthusiasm.
The proprietor handed her the keys to a cottage behind the main building and said to buzz if she needed anything. That first night she curled into a ball on the couch, sipped wine by candlelight, listened to a blues station on the radio, unpacked the novel from the travel case she’d stuffed it into, and read the first quarter. Working title D T, and damned if she could decipher from the increasingly esoteric text what that meant. The narrative was eerily disjointed, an amalgam of episodic descriptions of violence and sex and shadowy landscapes populated by alien figures whose inscrutable routines flashed homicidal every few pages. She nodded off and experienced dreams of the sphincter-clenching variety. The one she recalled was of fucking the author in a photo booth while the camera popped, except it was the author’s doppelganger and he gazed into her eyes and whispered, It was a warning. And the photo booth became something different–panels in the wall slid aside to reveal nozzle ports of flamethrowers, the teeth of buzz saws and augers–
She awoke with a scream for possibly the first time in her life. Following a dispirited breakfast in the main house dining room, she dressed in cargo shorts and hiking boots and spent the day wandering the wooded hills in a daze. Her legs were leaden, her skull ached, every crackling branch, every shifting leaf caused her to jump in fright, which in turn annoyed her enough to continue ever farther into the underbrush. There were no deer in evidence. She stubbornly photographed deer wallows and piles of deer scat, the meandering trails that bored like tunnels through the wood. In one respect her luck was better than the author’s: most of the bugs had died or gone into hibernation and after slathering herself in repellent she suffered few bites.
Dinner at the house, which she again had to herself except for the proprietor and a bored waiter. Then she stumbled to her cottage and fell onto the couch, foregoing the customary nightcap. All day her thoughts had inexorably cycled between last night’s nightmare and the nightmarish spell the novel had cast upon her.
Thus she sat by the flickering glow of a candle, the manuscript in her lap, her thumb poised to separate the pages to her previous mark. And thus she finally noticed the glossy black spot the diameter of a dime attached to her thigh, although several more seconds passed before she recognized this as the monstrously fattened body of a tick.
I fastened upon him one night…
Resisting the urge to shriek in terror and revulsion, she took a shuddering breath and snicked the wheel of her lighter and when it bloomed applied the flame to the insect. It retracted from her within moments and dropped onto the floor, leaking black fluid as it waddled for safety.
The editor snatched the block of a manuscript and walloped the tick, crushed it against the pine floorboards with an audible crunch. Blood trickled from the tiny hole in her thigh. More blood, black as an oil slick, oozed from beneath the book.
So much blood one would think…one might think…
Her head swam as it had that night at the bar and her bizarre encounter with the stranger and she covered her eyes to stop the room’s spinning. She was afraid to vomit because she was suddenly convinced blood would spray from her mouth instead of the salmon and curry she’d eaten for dinner.
The vertigo receded and she steadied herself, wiped away tears and snot, and lifted the manuscript, pried it, from the caved-in skull of the man at her feet, and the paper was heavy, sodden with all that blood and brain matter. Gore saturated the stack from the bottom; the paper sucked it up like a sponge until darkness blotched the title page, obliterated the title itself in a Rorschach pattern of Hell.
Someone knocked and the front door swung open and a figure stood silhouetted in the frame, behind it a purple twilight and the yellow moon cracked and gaping as it swooped toward the earth. The distant city should’ve glowed upon the horizon, but
The figure said in a voice that she recognized, –Where will we go?
–These pages are stuck together, she said. –I’ll never know how it ends.
there were no other lights
Salvation in Yellow
By Robin Spriggs
Daddy. Preacher Daddy. Preacher Daddy had said that Jesus would come—that Jesus would come before the Highway did. But Jesus had not come. The Highway had, but Jesus had not. The Highway had come within thirty cubits of Preacher Daddy’s porch. The front porch. The porch that was her porch now—now that Preacher Daddy was gone. The Highway had come and Jesus had not. The Highway had come and brought with it all that was wrong with the world, all that Preacher Daddy had warned against, all that God despised. But she had to be strong. She had to be brave. For Preacher Daddy as well as herself.
“Fear no
t, my child,” he had said, all those years ago. “Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.”
“Who is He?” she had asked.
“Why, Jesus, of course.”
“How do you know?”
“There’s no mistaking Jesus.”
“No. I mean, how do you know he’s in me?”
“Because I put him there, my child.”
“How?”
“With discipline and prayer. And with this!” He brandished his Bible above his head. “The word of the Almighty God!”
Discipline, prayer, and the Bible—the three great constants of her life, the three square meals of her spiritual day. Discipline she understood: Preacher Daddy’s belt, the back of his rock-hard hand, and the countless welts and bruises they had left upon her person. Prayer, though, was trickier. A thing of smoke and mist. Impossible to grasp. She had prayed, too, after all. Prayed for many things. Things she never got, but . . . but the Bible was even harder—harder, in a way, than Preacher Daddy’s hands and harder to grasp than prayer—the words too difficult, the language so strange. English, yes, but not. So Preacher Daddy helped her; God’s words were his words, after all, so who would know better than he?
But Preacher Daddy had other ways, too, other ways of putting Jesus in her—other, secret ways: when he came into her room in the night, came into her room with his rock-hard hands, and his rock-hard words, and the rock-hard something that lived between his legs.
Preacher Daddy was gone now, though. Long, long gone. All that remained was his house and his Bible and his promise—his promise that Jesus would come.
Promises. Contradictions. Riddles. How, she wondered, can Jesus be in me if I’m still waiting for him to come?
“One thing at a time,” she told herself aloud. “First the house, then the Bible, then the promise.” That’s how Preacher Daddy would have wanted it. Everything in its proper order. Everything in its place. House. Bible. Promise.
House.
Bible.
Promise.
~*~
Thirty cubits. Forty-five feet. She had measured the distance herself, with her own forearms, just as Preacher Daddy had taught her. She was a big girl. Tall. From elbow to the tip of her middle finger, exactly a foot and a half. “A cubit, right on the nose,” Preacher Daddy had said with a sparkle of pride in his eye. So of course she had measured the distance, stealing from the house late on a moonless night, when the traffic had slackened a bit and she was least likely to be seen. On the parched, cracked ground she crawled; on the hard red Georgia clay; from the base of the high front porch to the edge of the blacktop serpent that had done what Jesus had not; elbow to fingertip, elbow to fingertip.
Thirty cubits. The height of Noah’s Ark. The distance from the house to the—
She jerked her hand back from the asphalt. It tingled. Felt cold.
No, hot!
No, cold!
She shivered.
“The Enemy is strong,” Preach Daddy had said, “beyond our power to measure. But greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.”
The world, she thought, the earth, remembering another bit of scripture that Preacher Daddy had preached. From the book of Job. A dialogue between God and Satan. “Whence comest thou?” God had asked. And Satan had answered, “From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”
Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.
She looked from her hand to the Highway. The blacktop was hardly visible in the night, but the double yellow line that ran along its middle seemed to glow with a light of its own.
~*~
The pines had grown fast—the small, young pines she had gathered from the woods out back and planted in three long rows between the house and . . . and oh, how fast they had grown, from weeds to trees in a few short weeks. Or months. Or years. Time could be tricky, just like prayer. Maybe . . . maybe that’s what it was. A prayer. A prayer from the past to the future. Or from the future to the past. With moments
of . . . of “now” in between. Between. Between the house and the . . . the . . . “This house is our Ark,” Peacher Daddy had said. “Our bastion. Our fortress. Our sanctum afloat on a sea of boundless sin. It protects us, my child, and we—you and I alone—must protect it.”
Hence the pines, the wall of trees, the barrier between . . . between . . . But she could still see the accursed thing, by day at least, not clearly but enough, along with the roaring monsters that rode upon its back—the glinting, steel-skinned beasts whose thoughts were as loud as their roars.
Cacodemons, Preacher Daddy had called them. The Noisy Ones. The Screamers.
Screamers?
“Don’t be a Screamer,” Preacher Daddy had said, when he came into her room late at night with Jesus on his mind and Jesus on his lips and Jesus in his—
Is that what I sounded like? The thought made her dizzy. Sick to her stomach. “Forgive me, Preacher Daddy. Forgive me. I . . . I didn’t . . . I didn’t know.”
But now she did. It was her job to know. Her calling. Her purpose. The house must be protected, the Ark kept afloat, the Highway held at bay. The Highway and its . . . its . . . Even at night she could see them, their eyes burning bright beyond the pines, burning yellow-white, coming and going, going and coming.
What are they looking for?
“Your mama was a Screamer, too,” Preacher Daddy had said. “I tried to help her, but she wouldn’t listen. Screamers never do. All they do is—”
Me? For me? Why would they be looking for …?
She lowered the blinds, closed the drapes, turned away from the window. “No more,” she vowed. “No more looking. I promise, Preacher Daddy. I . . . I . . .” HouseBiblePromiseHouseBiblePromise …
~*~
And she had kept her word. She had always kept her word.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
But little good it had done. Her word. Her promise. She could still . . . still see them. See them with her ears. See them in her head. The Highway. The Noisy Ones. The …
Screamers never do. All they do is—
Their thoughts were so loud. So wicked. So …
“So why? Why me? Why are they thinking of me?”
So loud. So wrong. So … So she withdrew. Deeper into the house. Farther from the Highway. From its sounds. Its looking. Its thoughts. Deeper and deeper, forsaking first the parlor, then the living room, then her own bedroom, a room a week, or month, or year, hard to tell, to tell time, time and space, space and time, each a prayer, one inside the other, deep inside, deeper and deeper, first the parlor, then the living room, then her own bedroom, bearing the Bible with her, Preacher Daddy’s Bible, her Bible now, big, black, heavy, bursting with pages, splitting at the spine, sometimes open, sometimes closed, but talking all the way, to her, in Preacher Daddy’s voice, asking . . . Whence comest thou? . . . answering . . . From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it . . . promising . . . Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the . . . in the… but over all the talk—over it, below it, beyond it—she could still . . . still hear . . . still hear the . . . the Highway . . . the Highway and its . . . its . . . it’s still . . . still here . . . still here . . .
~*~
So deeper still she ventured, into areas of the house she had never before seen, rooms she never knew existed, some cluttered, some empty, but all of them—all of them . . . off . . . askew . . . just slightly at first, then more so, and more so, till finally she was forced to go about on all fours and brace herself against the walls and cling to doorways like a . . . like a sailor on a ship or . . . or Noah on his Ark or . . . or Jesus on his . . . on his . . .
“Cross my heart and hope to . . . hope to . . . cross my heart and hope to …”
HouseBiblePromiseHouseBiblePromise . . .
From doorway to doorway she staggered, lurched, crawled, room after room after . . . each o
ne more crooked, more canted than the last. Odder. Stranger.
A strange woman is a narrow pit.
“I know, Preacher Daddy. And I—I’m sorry. I’m sorry but . . . but I . . .But the Bible was changing too, changing right in her hands, under her arm, against her breast, in her lap . . . cover fading . . . pages darkening . . . once so white . . . so bright . . . now dingy . . . yellowed . . . like the . . . the double line . . . the double line that . . . and the bones . . . the bones in the woods . . . the woods out back . . . the pretty little bones that . . . that Preacher Daddy had arranged in . . . in strange patterns . . . in the garden . . . the secret garden . . . the Garden of . . . of Gethsemane . . . GetHimInMe . . . HimInMe . . . Him . . . Greater is He that is . . . arranged in strange patterns and . . . and forced her . . . once so white, so bright . . . forced her to . . . now dingy, yellowed . . . to squat above and . . . and make water . . . make water on the . . . the pretty little . . . over and over . . . again and again . . . so much water . . . so much rain . . . forty days and . . . and forty nights . . . or months . . . or years . . . hard to tell . . . to tell time . . . but time is . . . time is but a . . . life is but a . . . “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the . . . gently down the …”
~*~
The Lord sitteth upon the Flood; yea, the Lord sitteth King for ever.
“Yes, but . . . but which Lord? Which King?”
Greater is He that is in you than . . . than He that is in the . . . in the . . . the woods . . . the woods out back . . . back! . . . deeper and deeper . . . stranger and stranger . . . a strange woman is a . . . is a . . . arranged in strange patterns and . . . and forced . . . forced to . . . to . . .
“Gently down the . . . gently down the . . .”
“A doubt is a leak, my child,” Preacher Daddy had said. Or had he? Yes. Oh, yes. Many times. And was still . . . still saying it. In the Bible. In the House. In her head. A doubt is a leak, my child, a leak in the hull of the Ark. And the smallest leak left unrepaired will …