The Best of Subterranean

by William Schafer

  “I don’t want it,” Mrs. Hartsock said.

  “But—” Renata began.

  “From almost the get-go it gave me the willies. I was glad when it wore out.”

  “But—”

  “And I hate its stupid song. My ex gave it to me as a gag, if not as a torment.”

  Roger noticed that the plaid Laz-E-Boy had emerged into visibility (of a limited kind, anyway) from the drifting cigarette smoke. Brad lay in this chair, whose footrest he had extended and whose arms he clutched like an astronaut enduring a rocky launch. But what most disturbed Roger was the fact that several large manikins, marionettes, or dolls either stood about the room or hung from pieces of wire from the ceiling. He made out an evil-looking Howdy Doody, a lifelike Creature from the Black Lagoon, and a less adept facsimile of Godzilla. Other simulacra haunted the corners and the stairwell so that 13-M now seemed a bizarre conflation of a menagerie and Madame Tussaud’s.

  As for Brad, he dully ogled his visitors through eyeballs that appeared pollen-dusted. His bottom lip hung down, and strands of hair on his balding pate rose and fell in the updraft of a heating vent on the floor. Tonight, as opposed to Roger’s last encounter with him at The Pile, he looked not only ill but also middle-aged—forty-five, at the very least. He’d lost weight and taken on wrinkles, and his skin had the sallow cast of a man long pent in a damp basement.

  “Brad?” Roger said. “Brad, is that you?”

  “Yeah,” Brad drawled mockingly. “Who’d you think I was, Beyoncé?”

  “Those are powerful allergies you’re fighting,” Roger said. He wanted to point out that Mrs. Hartsock shouldn’t smoke around him, but how could he in her own outré place? Besides, she ought to know that.

  “Allergies?” Mrs. Hartsock said. “Is that what he told you?”

  “Yes ma’am, he did.”

  “Oh, Bradley.” Then: “Oh, no. You see, he’s got this condition.”

  “What condition?” Renata gazed about the townhouse in evident discomfort and perplexity. Roger could see that she thought Halloween much too far away to justify such freaky décor now.

  Edie Hartsock said in an annoyed-sounding stage whisper, “I really don’t like to talk about it in front of him.”

  “Why?” Brad whined. “Because I’m fourteen and look forty? Or do I look even older tonight?”

  “Fourteen?” Renata said. “How can this person be fourteen?”

  “It’s really fast, his condition,” Mrs. Hartsock said.

  “What condition?” Renata asked again, almost demanding. “Progeria,” Brad said from the Laz-E-Boy. “I got progeria.”

  Roger pondered this. The only case of progeria he’d ever heard about— in a book about bad shit happening to good people which his father had made him tackle when their mother died of breast cancer—occurred in a kid who’d begun looking like a little old man at three and who died at— well, at fourteen.

  Brad’s progeria, if that’s what this was, had started at fourteen and was moving a lot faster than the disease of the kid in the book, as if to make up for lost time. It seemed impossible, but Roger had learned from his mama’s death that “impossible” crap could drop on you like a grand piano at any time and then resound smashingly in your head and your kicked-asunder life forever.

  “This is a pretty weird sort of progeria, isn’t it?” Roger asked Mrs. Hartsock. “I mean, if weirdness has degrees.” (The Hartsocks’ townhouse suggested that it had many degrees.)

  “Yeah,” Brad said weakly. “My doctor calls it an allelomorphic progeria, a sort of one-gene-off kind.”

  Renata stared at Brad Hartsock. “He’s a very smart fourteen.”

  “But I look forty,” Brad said. “Or is it fifty? Mama, is it fifty? Or is it like”—his adult voice poignantly broke—“maybe even six-tee?”

  “You look twenty-five, Brad: a handsome twenty-five.”

  “Right,” Brad said, but he visibly relaxed.

  “What can we do?” Renata asked. “To help, I mean.”

  “Maybe a little entertainment,” Roger said. He took the ape doll from Renata and switched it on: “The Macarena” blared into the room, and both he and the doll began hip-swiveling. Brad screamed. Mrs. Hartsock grabbed the doll away from Roger and fumbled to switch it off.

  “Brad can’t abide it anymore,” she said, not unkindly. “I can’t either.”

  “Nor can I,” Renata said, giving Roger a look. “I’m sorry—so sorry.”

  “Well, you could put the obnoxious thing back on The Pile for me.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Hartsock. We’ll do it tonight.”

  “Edie,” Brad’s mother said. “Call me Edie.” They had bonded over their disgust with Roger’s asininity and their concern for Mrs. Hartsock’s dying son.

  Mrs. Hartsock stepped onto the porch with them and unburdened herself as if they were paid confessors. “I divorced Bradley’s father seven years ago. He was never home much, and when he was, well, he was an abuser.”

  “What sort?” Renata asked. “Physical?”

  “That depended. He never hurt the boy, though. All that stuff in there—he makes models for movies, theaters, and Halloween festivals. When I told him by telephone that Bradley was—uh, terminally sick, he sent that hideous junk and had these guys who work for him come install it, just to cheer the boy up, and—” She began to cry.

  Renata embraced her. “Does Bradley like it, all that stuff? Does it cheer him up?”

  “I don’t know. He says so. But it may scare him. He’d rather his daddy came to see him, I think, but he won’t say that for fear of hurting my feelings. It wouldn’t—hurt my feelings, I mean—it would just scare me too.”

  “Has he threatened you?” Renata asked. “I mean, since your divorce.”

  “Not so I could ever convince anybody of it. But he’s always liked to hurt me, and I can’t help thinking that all this”—she waved one hand vaguely—“is all part of his plan to do that and to spread the hurt as far as possible.”

  * * *

  Renata carried Q.T. to The Pile and set the ape gently on the shelf of a flimsy, lopsided bookcase.

  “Don’t fetch him back,” she told Roger. “Or I’ll kick you out and get daddy to back me a hundred percent.” This was at once a joke and not a joke. It gave Roger all the incentive he needed to obey, for his otherwise sweet sister ruthlessly carried out even her most extravagant threats.

  “All that work,” Roger said looking at the gorilla doll.

  “You replaced a battery,” Renata said, “maybe two. Don’t pretend it was this big deal. Now maybe somebody sane can enjoy it.”

  “Until they’re driven bazooka,” Roger said.

  “Just don’t bring it back.”

  He didn’t. And Q.T.—under a wholly different name, if under any name at all—vanished from The Pile into the townhouse of another resident.

  In fact, Nigel Rabe appropriated it and set it up on a chest-of-drawers against the inner wall of Renata’s office. Whenever he or Lydia played it, Renata ground her teeth in chagrin and frustration.

  At length, she knocked on Nigel and Lydia’s door and offered fifteen dollars for the doll. Its “Macarena” binges irritated her even more than did their weekend bluegrass jams, because the doll sounded off on nights when she studied. Faced with her complaint, Nigel declined Renata’s money but returned the doll to The Pile himself. A friend indeed was Nigel. And, by returning it to The Pile, he sidestepped the punishments, deliberate or accidental, that possessing the thing often inflicted.

  Thereafter the doll began making the rounds of those Fidelity Plaza residents who visited The Pile. Kathi Stole took the singing and swaying ape after Nigel and Lydia, but put it back on The Pile when her two kids began fighting over it like piranhas flensing a baby pig. The next time it appeared, however, several people expressed interest in it, and Mr. Curtis, who didn’t care at all about the ape, became the comptroller of this item, the guy who decided who could have it. He inaugurated the ritual of hand
ing a small piece of red string to whomever he deemed its next legitimate inheritor.

  After Kathi Stole unloaded the gorilla, Mr. Curtis wandered into the crowd hanging out around The Pile like flea-market vultures and gave this red string to Creed Harvin, a political-science grad student. Creed took the toy home and promptly broke two knuckles thrusting them into a doorjamb while doing the hand motions that accompany “The Macarena.” (It was dark, and Harvin was drunk.)

  After Harvin, Bill Wilkes in Building J received the red string and of course the doll. The next morning, after he and his wife had hosted an intimate soirée at which the little ape did his repetitive stuff, a city trash truck rear-ended their Audi in the parking lot, and Bill Wilkes immediately returned the ape to The Pile.

  Then D.-K. Smith, the campus cop, slipped Mr. Curtis (whom no one suspected of bribe-ability) a ten for the red string and put the doll in a window of his townhouse as a symbol of defiance against the rumor that the toy precipitated misfortune on its owners. But working security the next day, he got into an argument with a middle-aged man, who insisted on entering an athletic dormitory without proper ID, and wound up handcuffing the troublemaker. Later that afternoon, at the insistence of the offended man (an alumnus and a high-level donor), Smith was summarily fired, with no chance of appeal. With his rent paid through the month, Smith carried Bonzo—formerly Q.T.—out to The Pile and slung the ape into a discarded baby carriage.

  Mr. Curtis was visiting relatives in Macon and so could neither pass the red string along to the doll’s next hapless soul nor accept another bribe. And although Roger could not imagine too many residents vying for the doll now, he saw two other persons waiting for the ape when Smith jettisoned it, both bachelors, a bartender and a drywaller, and they reached for it simultaneously, knocking the pram over and rolling in the ambient litter to establish ownership. In fact, they grunted and grappled barbarously. Finally, one wrestler yanked the doll away from his rival, rolled through the detritus on the edge of The Pile, gained his feet, and took off along one fenced side of the swimming pool. The other man, slimmer and swifter, pursued with blood in his eyes.

  Roger trotted down his own porch steps to keep both in view and marveled as first the larger man leapt the chain-link fence and then the slimmer gracefully took the same hurdle. It was late afternoon, and cool, but a small group of residents had gathered at the farther end of the pool beside the bathhouse; and, near the diving board in front of these people, the slimmer man caught the tail of his rival’s shirt and spun him about so that he bounced off the board’s butt end, flailed for balance without releasing his prize, and fell with a huge splash into the leaf-mottled water. The pursuer then jumped on the board and began pushing down on the bigger man’s head with one wet shoe, apparently doing all in his power to drown the guy.

  “Hey!” Roger opened the gate to the pool and burst through to the diving board. Two people seated before the bathhouse—a burly man and a woman in a floral dress and a loose beige sweater—hurried to help Roger drag the assailant from the board. A siren on a light pole, a siren used for fire drills and tornado warnings, started to keen, and the man in the water sank beneath churning ripples as the doll went down with him.

  Fully clothed, Roger plunged in after both. He had no coherent plan for saving either and so much fierce headache-inducing noise in his head that he despaired of ever hearing anything else again.

  * * *

  Renata knelt beside the supine, spread-eagled bartender with a nursing student from their building, a matter-of-fact young woman who said, “This poor dude is gone.” D.-K. Smith, the sacked campus cop, held the elbow of the unresisting drywaller who had just shoe-dunked the drowned man to a depth impossible to rise from. Although the Fidelity Plaza siren had stopped wailing a short while ago, the sirens on, first, an ambulance and, then, two city squad cars had superseded it.

  The ambulance left with the bartender; one of the squad cars, with the drywaller. Two policemen stayed to take statements from the on-site witnesses.

  They began with Roger, who’d seen far more than he cared to admit, and moved on to D.-K. Smith, the student nurse, Renata, and the group at poolside. The woman who had helped Roger halt the drywaller’s assault on the bartender (too late to prevent his death) turned out to be Edie Hartsock.

  When this fact penetrated Roger’s brain—as he stood on the slick concrete dripping like a spaniel in a cloudburst—he realized that the frail, wheelchair-bound figure at a round metal table in front of the bathhouse was Brad, drastically transfigured. Or was it? Could it possibly be?

  Roger squelched over to this mysterious personage.

  The man in the wheelchair squinted up at him out of a piggy grey eye in a deep-dug socket. He had a few thin wisps of hair across his skull and skin like wax-laminated tissue paper. He smelled of greasy menthol and stale pee.

  “Are you Brad Hartsock?”

  The codger blinked once and then blinked again. “Who’d you think I was?” he cackled faintly. “Methuselah?”

  Roger found he was clutching the sodden simian doll over which the barkeep and the drywaller had fought. Despite Brad’s screaming fit earlier in the week, he felt that he should give it to the “kid” as a wonky pool-party favor, a charm against early oblivion. Apparently, Renata telepathically parsed his intentions.

  “Roger!” she shouted. “Roger, don’t you do it!”

  But Q.T., or Bonzo, or Little King Kong, fell from Roger’s hands into Bradley’s plaid-blanketed lap. Brad gawped at the doll.

  Then he opened his mouth, which continued slack. No scream issued from it—no scream, no word, no whimper, no breath.

  * * *

  It was rumored that Edie Hartsock had a small closed-coffin family funeral for her son in her hometown. No one from Fidelity Plaza received an invitation to this event, and when Mrs. Hartsock returned a week or ten days later, she cloistered herself in her townhouse like a nun in a convent. Some residents speculated that she had had the gorilla doll buried with Brad, whereas others argued that she had weighted it with used flashlight batteries or old tractor lug nuts and spitefully committed it to an alligator hole in the swamp near her birthplace. These speculations were so outlandish, though, that Roger could not easily imagine what had prompted them.

  A few evenings after Mrs. Hartsock’s return, Renata saw a crowd gathered at The Pile in the twilight. She called Roger to her side on the porch. “There’s something new out there. Do you want to see what it is?”

  “I don’t know.” Despite their satisfaction with a couple of salvaged items (their garden table and an elegant little medicine cabinet), Roger had grown wary of The Pile.

  “Come on,” Renata said. “It might be worth it to look.”

  So they went to look. People parted for them—people gawking but not speaking, people stunned into a near-trancelike state.

  The Maharis siblings moved gingerly through them to a point where each felt like a supplicant in the presence of some august, or richly uncanny, superluminary—for they beheld in the lee of one cardboard-filled Dumpster a plaid Laz-E-Boy in which sat a pale white figure reminiscent of Bradley Hartsock before the advent of his virulent variety of progeria. This effigy wore a powder-blue T-shirt, multi-pocketed grey shorts, and some of the prettiest Italian sandals Roger had ever seen. Had the figure had any nerve endings, it would have been cold—but, given Brad’s death after fast-forward progeria, it existed only as a detailed manikin, not a living being, and Roger and his sister gaped at the real-looking humanoid artifact in bewilderment and awe.

  D.-K. Smith handed Roger a lace-bearing sign.

  The sign’s legend read “TAKE ME HOME.” Its obverse read “CHAIR AND ITS OCCUPANTS NOT TO BE SEPARATED.”

  “The Brad-thing was wearing this sign,” D.-K. told the Maharises.

  “ ‘Occupants’?” Renata said. “Why is that word plural?”

  Loretta Crider stepped up and showed them the worrisome little “Macarena” ape. “This was in the Bradley-t
hing’s lap,” she said. “It freaked D.-K. out, so I just picked it up and held it.”

  “Right,” D.-K. said. “Thanks. I’m leaving this spooky bullshit with you all. Take care, okay? I mean it: Take care.”

  And he left them all standing there at The Pile.

  Well, why not? There were laws against child abandonment, but none that Roger knew of against effigy abandonment.

  After a while, Loretta Crider said, “Mrs. Hartsock’s disappeared. Her townhouse is empty, flat-out empty. Who knows where she or all her stuff’s gone? It’s a mystery, is what it is.”

  She set the ape doll back in the lap of the Bradley-thing, and the remainder of the uneasy onlookers dispersed to their own places.

  After a longer while, Roger said, “Renata, I could make something with this Laz-E-Boy and this creepy Bradley-thing.”

  “What, for God’s sake?”

  “I don’t know—a sort of found-art installation, maybe.”

  Renata crossed her arms. Her face had grown lavender in the darkness.

  No moon shone. The pool lights cut off. A wind rose.

  Roger could feel the night, the month, and in fact the year itself all going deeply and dreadfully bazooka.

  —for my son Jamie, on whose notes this story is based

  The Bohemian Astrobleme

  by Kage Baker

  “Oh!” cried Enderley’s wife. “The pin has come off my brooch!”

  Enderley, lathering his face with soap, grunted and laid down the shaving brush. “Let’s see,” he said, turning from the washbasin. His wife held out her hand to display the brooch she had inherited from her mother. It was a heavy, old-fashioned thing of silver, set with a large oval stone. The stone looked to be dark red agate, swirled through with fernlike markings. Enderley didn’t much care for it, but he was mindful of his wife’s stricken expression as he said:

  “Easily fixed. We don’t need to take it to a jeweler; I can repair it at the laboratory.”

  “Can you?”

  “Of course. Dot of solder will do the job. Set it on the hall table and I’ll remember to take it with me.”