She wonders if this is love.
She watches a bubble climb her clear IV tube then stop at the incline.
She tries to suck with the veins in her foot but the bubble is stubborn.
In it is a world, she knows. One she could live in.
•
He has to shake her awake. It’s later. It’s always later. Never before. No matter how hard she tries.
Her legs have hairs pushing up through the scabs. She imagines a giant, sloppy dog walking in in its lanky way, licking the dried blood from her. Licking and licking. Watching her the whole while.
She’s pretty sure the clear fluid coming through her tube is saliva, too. His, probably. He’s been saving for months, before finally working up the nerve to grab her.
Maybe this is sex, for him. For somebody like him.
Maybe it’s better.
He lets her shoulders go as soon as she’s awake.
“Hey, Billy,” she says, her voice light, noncommittal. “Hey, Ron.”
It’s her new game.
He doesn’t play along.
“Frederick,” she adds, over-enunciating by about half a mile. It’s hilarious.
He holds the flashcard up.
They’re onto her scalp, now. It’s been re-shaved. She’s having to trust him, about whether the grey triangle is staying in place or not.
But she does. Trust him.
“Jonathan Mutragen,” she says, with all proper flair. “Junior.” She almost smiles from it. “The third. ‘Esquire.’”
When she looks back to the silence he’s emanating, that she can feel roiling off him, he’s lowered the card a bit, and he’s breathing deep. His eyes alive like he’s getting away with something, here. No: like he’s gotten away with something.
“Jonathan?” she says, honestly scared for the first time in weeks.
He flips the card over in his hand.
On the back is the hieroglyph’s meaning. The ideogram’s meaning. What the Sumerians had meant, when they pressed it into clay.
Three.
The most complicated, useless, ornamental three there ever was in the world. In the whole history of man.
She swallows, looks up, and feels her face flush with accomplishment.
It’s the first day they don’t play the game.
Because she guessed right.
She stamps her feet as much as she can. In celebration. She pees her cathether tube full, imagines it frothing in there, lapping at the sides in joy.
“Three!” she yells out to him in his dark corridor, his black catwalk, his hiding place. “Three three three third!”
It doesn’t matter that he stays back there. That he doesn’t respond. She can see his project, now. The dim outline of it. There are right answers to his questions. And those answers, they’re answers she couldn’t know.
He’s improving her. He’s making her better. He’s making her reach inside for what he needs, for the trivial, impossible solutions to his arbitrary problems, but she’s not reaching into herself. She’s reaching into some place deeper. Some place the world’s forgotten how to access.
Until him.
He’s turning her into an oracle. He’s bleeding the truth from her.
It’s what any crazy person would think.
The next day—she’s back to days—he uses a ballpoint pen to write on the palm of his hand.
It’s numbers. And letters. Operators. Blue ink, calluses.
Algebra, trig, calculus, something far past any chalkboard she’s ever seen.
R(5,5)=
An obvious blank on the right side.
She looks up to him.
•
The game when it gets to her collarbones hurts in the same way the dentist used to hurt, when she lived in that world. When that world was real. She can hear the narrow point of the blade scraping bone.
None of those grey triangles stay on. Not even one.
It doesn’t matter.
Soon she’ll be The Girl Without Skin. The Twice Naked Woman. The Lady Made of Pain.
The One Who Disappeared.
The Oracle of Open Flesh.
He moves onto the virgin expanse of her back. What he can get to, around the chair.
Her shoulder blades. The ridges of her spine.
She tries to imagine herself as somebody else. Somebody else getting a tattoo. The most complicated tattoo.
She cries afterwards, just from habit. Some of the tears are making their way to her right wrist, she notices. Under the tape.
Because her daughter would want her to try, wouldn’t she?
Whatever her daughter’s name is. Or was.
No, is. Is is is.
Always is.
When he comes in next, he’s got the roll of tape, the utility knife, but a pad of paper, too. Graph paper.
Meaning the answer to R(5,5), it’s more complicated than three was.
She looks away.
Not because she doesn’t want to try. Not because luck isn’t real. It’s because he’ll have to remove her tape to let her try, which would start that tape over.
“Red on bottom,” he prompts. Like reminding her. Priming her.
She tastes this, considers this.
He’s talking about the graph. The one she guesses she’s going to need map colors for. To make it red on bottom.
She chuckles in her chest and her shoulders move with it.
“The tongue, then,” he says, obviously disappointed, putting the pen back in its pocket, the sound of that plastic barrel on fabric deafening, an avalanche, each thread a rope, the pen’s yellow skin impossibly rough.
“I’m sorry,” she says, not meaning it, and then her daughter stands up on her toes, whispers something in her ear.
44?
She repeats it, but not to him, to her. Wherever she’s scampered off to. Whatever her name is. Was.
“Forty four?” he asks, his breath coming hard and sudden, his eyes too full.
She remembers him, she comes back to him.
“Nothing,” she says.
“Forty four,” he says again, insisting, and reaches into his back pocket. “Ramsey’s Theorum. ”
The strip of paper with R(5,5)= has the blank filled in. With a range of numbers from 43 to 49.
“It’s a range because it’s unsolveable,” he says, watching her eyes. “That’s as close as we can get.” He breathes in, breathes back out. Adds, “Until now.”
She shakes her head, amused.
At the end, that’s the main thing left.
“Sweetie?” she says past him, into the Black Hallway. Through the Dark Curtain. To the distinct scrape of a little girl’s shoes on concrete.
He looks with her, and when he doesn’t see, could never see, she reaches up with her right hand. No: she sees her right hand reaching up.
The soggy tape tears away, trails behind.
He goes solid, his eyes alive in a new way—she’s messing it all up, she knows—but when her right hand gets to him, it just climbs his chest finger by finger. To his shirt pocket. For the red pen.
She takes it, clicks it open.
He offers her the pad, his face awash with wonder.
“Thank you,” she says, and he sets it on her lap, the thin cardboard backing already sticking to the tops of her thighs.
“Forty four,” she says, and, point by drilled-in point, as if she’s taking divine dictation, she starts to plot a line that must have been nestled inside her, her whole life.
All it needed was the right person to cut it out.
She draws like this through the night, or what she thinks must be the night, and when sleep starts to insist upon itself, she pulls one eyelid out as tight as it will go, reminds him about the utility knife, and at the precise moment of incision she remembers her daughter’s name, her beautiful, beautiful name, and has to suck her breath in through her teeth.
“Again,” she says, guiding his wrist, “deeper, please,” and she’s in the right room after all, it turns out. S
he was the right person all along.
Thirteen
I told Paula Guran I would write a Halloween story for her, but every time I tried to think “Halloween,” I always ended up at some Neil Gaiman story I never can remember the title of, that for some reason reminded me of Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ said the Ticktockman.” So I did what I always do: fell back on the horror stories I heard growing up. This one was of some bad stuff that happened in the bathroom of the Big Chief movie theater in Midland, Texas, bad stuff that made us all so scared to go there that it finally just shut down. Then I called it “Thirteen” because there was a movie just out with that title, that everybody kept telling me I had to see, but I was scared to see it, and still haven’t. So that title was scary for me.
Brushdogs
Richard Thomas and I had hammered out the story order for this collection, but there was a big gaping hole in position two. So I told him I’d write something, probably with an angel in it—a story I’ve still got swimming in my head. But then Ross Lockhart and Justin Steele hit me up for a story for a Laird Barron mythos kind of story, and I was just days back from hunting, where, eating dinner one night, one of my cousins had said how when he was a kid he’d always been a brushdog for one of my great uncles, and that was a word I hadn’t heard. And, that cairn: I saw it on top of a hill, and walked back there—took like an hour, was a lot farther than it looked through my rifle scope—climbed it, and hadn’t brought nearly enough jackets. It was super windy up there. I can’t remember if I left a rock on top or not. I know I didn’t mess it up, though. And I didn’t walk between it and the drop-off it was close to, either. Because I wanted to live.
Welcome to the Reptile House
T.E. Grau had just started editing fiction at Strange Aeons, and he asked if I had anything for him to consider. I think I said no, but give me a few days. And I wrote this. But it wasn’t working. I was talking to Zack Wentz about something at the time, so I got him to help me with it, and he made it work. Bauhaus, or whatever that band is? No clue. That’s all Zack. And any other music or punk culture stuff. I listen mostly to country and hair metal, I mean. I can plug John Conlee or Kix into any piece of fiction at any hour of the day, but with punk, all I know starts and ends with Adrien Brody’s character from Summer of Sam. At the same time, if I got those details wrong, the story would feel fake. It’s good to have smart friends. They save me all the time.
This is Love
I wrote this story for Vince Liaguno’s Unspeakable Horrors II: Abominations of Desire, where it might still show up, but when Steve Berman asked if I had something for Icarus a couple of years later: yep. And then when he selected it for Best Gay Fiction, man, wow, an honor. Anyway—seen Retroactive? Triangle? I crawled inside that whole genre years ago, such that it’s hard for each story I write not to be shaped like that. Like this one, I mean. And I think I’m halfway ripping off Gene Wolf’s “A Fish Story.” Or, there’s a key scary thing that happens in there that I couldn’t get out of my head while writing this one. Also, I wrote it right after driving from Montana to somewhere way far away, and there were a lot of rest stops involved, and each one I went to seemed more primed for something bloody than the last. And, years before that trip, I’d once walked into a rest-stop bathroom of nothing but blood, so, you know: of course I’m going to set a horror story at a rest-stop.
The Spindly Man
Thanks to Ellen Datlow for allowing me to sneak this one into this collection. It’s showing up a little bit close to its appearance in her Fearful Symmetries. I should dedicate it to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, though. I mean, I knew King’s “The Man in the Black Suit,” of course, but hadn’t read it for a while, until their The Weird. And then it hit me that King was kind of doing something really elegant there. Something about the tone or voice or distance in that story, I realized I could step into it for a few pages, maybe. I mean, I realized I was going to the next time I wrote something, so it seemed kind of fair to go ahead and reel that story into this one, so as not to pretend I was coming up with it all alone.
The Black Sleeve of Destiny
I wrote this right after I’d done a reading in Orlando, Florida, for Toni Jensen. When she asked what I wanted to do with some free hours I had, I said “Goodwill,” of course. It’s my favorite place. I never need historical sites or museums or fancy restaurants. Take me to a thrift store and I’ll be the happiest dude of all. Anyway, skulking around there, carrying all my treasures, I started watching people more than usual. And this black sweatjacket, I nearly bought it, until I realized it was a factory reject, had one sleeve too long. Also, that word, “hoodie,” I don’t handle it so well. I’d already tried to get okay with it by naming a character “Kid Hoodie” in one book, but, I don’t know. It’s still not a term I feel remotely comfortable using. It’s terrifying to me. To use it would be to trade in a piece of my soul. So, since it was already scary, I figured I’d see if I could spook it up for others as well.
The Spider Box
This is one of those rare times where I had the title before the story. I just sat down one afternoon, knew I had two or three hours for writing that I wasn’t going to waste, so I put this title up-top, to see what would happen. What I completely figured was that spiders were going to take over the world. Except spiders are startling, they’re not really scary. Or, they’re harbingers for the real horror, like. At least to me. At least here. And, as for the dump: my grandad used to take me and my brother there some Sundays, let us play. It was the best place ever. Every single item was more magic than the last, but we were always under orders never to lock ourselves in the old refrigerators. So they became these magical portals to other places, in my head. And, portals can work both ways, of course.
Snow Monsters
My wife was working at the mall one winter, and would always get off way late, and since I didn’t like her walking in the parking lot alone, I’d always try to be there waiting. But, I’d always be waiting among all these giant dirty snow mounds. And I got to watching them in my mirrors, and wondering who was living in them, and what they might say to me if they came to talk. Also, I’d run into a dude who wore one of those, like, small-brimmed, straw, not-really-a-fedora hats, and that whole night I was in the room with him, I just kept watching him. Because I’d never seen anybody wear a hat like that. So, because he was so hard to explain for me, I figured he maybe lived in a snow mound in the parking lot. This story kind of terrifies me, too. Because it’s a trade we’d all make in a heartbeat. It’s a trade that might be happening all around us all the time. A trade we might have benefitted from, even.
Doc’s Story
Jesse Bullington had invited me to submit a story to his Letters to HP Lovecraft anthology, where we all respond to some passage from “Supernatural in Horror Literature,” which is a long essay that synopsizes a lot better than it actually reads. But, I knew it already, of course, and had it dialed up a moment or two after Jesse’s invite. And what I searched for in there, it was “werewolves.” Bingo. I wrote back, told him I could write a werewolf story, sure, one skirting the boundaries of Gaiman’s werewolf issue of Sandman but also somehow involving a “grandam” (HPL’s word) telling a story to a youngster (which is the context for the werewolf passage I chose to ramp off). Except, a hundred and twenty pages later, I hadn’t found the end of that one. And I still haven’t. So, one day before this was due, I ate a whole jar of chocolate-covered sunflower seeds, studied hard on a werewolf action figure I’d bought at a toy store in Baltimore with Matthew Hobson, and wrote this. In under two hours, I think. And now it’s the first chapter of a novel I just finished. And, the core of it, that dad with the ball-peen hammer, that’s from my great-granddad Pop. It was a story he used to always tell. It was hilarious, the way he would tell it, trying to hold that dog’s collar with one hand and whap it with the hammer at the same time, the dog kicking and yowling and biting the whole time. It’s the main story I remember from him, growing up.
&nb
sp; The Dead Are Not
It’s really hard for all of my stories not to be about aliens. Whitley Strieber fried my brain at an early age. Whenever I wake up sore, my knee-jerk thought is always that it’s because the aliens just re-assembled me. Of course there’s going to be some stiffness. Get over it, dude. Be happy they got everything back where it’s supposed to be. But, this story in particular, I think it comes from how alien we all feel at funerals. Or, me, anyway, I’m always trying so hard not to think about what’s actually happening that I halfway study the people I don’t recognize, and wonder what’s their story. And this is usually where I land: they’re tourists, studying this unusual phenomenon. Because it is so, so unusual, yes? I don’t quite understand it yet. And I guess I hope I never do.
Xebico
Another one stemming from The Weird. I so loved and will forever be a fool for H.F. Arnold’s “The Nightwire.” Whoever “H.F. Arnold” was, or wasn’t. And it’s not because of the possibility of Xebico so much, but because of that guy who can type different stuff with both hands simultaneously. I still get shivery, just thinking about that. Freaks me completely the heck out. I researched it as much as I could, too, but this is the only place I find it. Which makes it more real for me. It’s just a throwaway detail, something to make this station real in the story. But it’s also the center of the story, for me. The beating heart. I didn’t want it to be over just yet, or ever, so I tried to make Xebico more real. Just to touch the magic, I guess. Or fool myself that I was. I had to use both hands at the same time, though. I’m not like that guy in the story. And I don’t guess I want to be. But I can’t stop watching him, either.
Second Chances
Until “Brushdogs,” this was the newest story in the collection. And all I had going in was this idea that each animal on Earth might be Noah’s Ark. It just needs to be artificially sustained in order to exhibit its true potential. Which is a science fiction story, of course, not horror. Not until the end, which surprised me. I mean, I went into this one for the wonder, but then that wonder turned itself inside-out in just a single line. And, the pared-down diction of this one, that’s always so fun for me. My two favorite styles to adopt are just-the-facts and “ridiculously ornate” (see Dalimpere’s letters in Ledfeather, or the narrator for “Captain’s Lament”—each of those are my natural voice, pretty much). But this scientist, she wasn’t going to be indulgent with her prose, of course. She’s indulging herself in other ways.
After the People Lights Have Gone Off Page 22