And the postman visits, which is hardly a visit at all. He's only supposed to drop the mail through the slot and be on his way. But the postman is a bad man who has been thinking bad thoughts about Mother for a very long time. Ever since he glanced her from the street through the attic window while she was working, he's always wondered if she lives alone and how easy it might be to slip inside one afternoon to do bad things to Mother.
How easy indeed. Unlike Mother's illness, the postman's brain problems work in reverse. As Mother's thought patterns fade, the postman's only intensify. Soon, where Mother thinks of nothing, she is all that he can think about.
And with intensity comes action. He does find a key to the front door. It's sitting there in the rock garden free for anybody to use. He brings latex gloves with him all week after finding the key — gathering up his nerves to actually go inside. And then one day he makes up his mind for real and lets himself in.
The walls are black — the real patterns of the house bleed through the wallpaper patterns that are there to make everybody who visits more comfortable. To the postman, it just looks like mold, of course. He pays it no mind. And it is just mold. But it is also something else too. And this is what the postman won't be expecting.
Then it's about the patterns, less the mold. And that's all Mother can really grasp these days. DNA has a pattern too — and this is what the black stuff growing out of the basement is based upon. It stretched up out of the basement and reached the attic where Mother toils a long while ago. And it overtook some of her dolls too — creeping along their artificial skin surfaces and eventually seeping inside of them.
Patterns. Inside the dolls, it grows in new patterns. Inside, the patterns of the human body form as black knots that quietly become liver, heart, lungs, esophagus. It eats away at the artificial insides to make room for its fetid living growth. There are as many of them as Mother can make. Her work is slow, but she is old. One day she will drop dead and leave them behind. If she still had her mind, she might like to think they would carry her downstairs and bury her in the basement with the others. Thankfully, she can no longer think about the basement, so everything is all right.
He climbs the stairs towards the attic. He takes them two at a time — which is a pattern of his. He's met at the top of the stairs by both darkness and the sound of hard feet on soft carpet. He doesn't know what it means so he just stands there. When their painted white faces emerge through the blackness, he understands too late that this was a bad idea. Not even a bad man idea, just a bad idea.
Then he's falling backward down the stairs. Then he's being carried away. They put him in the basement where it's dark and quiet. Dark and quiet like their home inside the walls. Dark and quiet like Mother happens to be. These are patterns too. They no longer learn or progress. They can't. So they can only protect their matron and put him somewhere safe and make sure that he never gets back up near the attic again.
When he is down there, it quickly moves over him like a mass of black fishing netting and very soon afterward, he becomes part of the spiral that corkscrews up from the basement to spread and permeate throughout the entire household.
Still Mother continues to build, mindless but for the patterns in her head, and still it continues to inhabit, also mindless — except for the patterns that it owns.
There's something wrong with the house.
It starts with the wallpaper and ends in patterns.
There's something wrong with the house.
* * *
Jeffery is twelve. Just trying to play baseball but Sue Ann can't hit the ball for shit because girls never can. So they trade and very quickly they discover Sue Ann can't throw for shit either. He's hit the ball out of the backyard on her second throw, and while that's funny to see her crying again, he has to go get the ball back, and it's in the garden of the Night House.
The Night House. It's what he calls the big place right behind his home. He's been watching the old lady working through the night from the top bunk in his bedroom. When he should be asleep, he's not. He's up watching her — postman in training maybe. Maybe not.
The Night House from a comic book — a witch lives inside and eats children. He can see others in the attic window too sometimes. Robots. And they eat children too. Skin them and then use their baby fat for fuel. Skin off their faces and put them overtop their steel faces to wear like masks. Only teenagers are safe, and Jeffery isn't a teenager. Is he?
He hops the fence. Sue Ann doesn't want to be left alone, and she wants to come as well. He lets her. Looks up her dress while she's climbing over the fence. Then the children push into the tangle of the backyard to find their lost baseball.
They find it, but nobody wants to touch it. It's snug against the bricks at the corner of the house. And it has turned black. Like a little sphere of onyx crafted solely to scare children. Sue Ann starts crying again, but Jeffrey doesn't find it funny anymore. Nothing is funny suddenly. All of a sudden, all he can think about is how the baseball that used to make Sue Ann cry has become something else that's making Sue Ann cry.
Then there's a robot coming out of the house and making its way towards them. It's broad daylight, and it isn't supposed to be doing that. Maybe Sue Ann's crying disturbed it. He doesn't know, but he runs for it. He leaves her behind for the robot to skin her to pieces and wear her like a new pair of pants. He changes his mind halfway across the backyard. He turns to go back. It's got her, and it's almost inside the house. Far enough away that he can grab the baseball. He grabs it and uses his shirt to pick it up just in case. Gets back to the house and runs inside.
There are patterns here. And they're already forming again.
It's a problem in Jeffrey's plan. Now Sue Ann is missing, but he also has the black sphere from the Night House in his possession, and they might find it. Anyone could find it.
So what to do? Hide it somewhere in the dark and quiet. Hide it in his room, in the bottom of his clothing cabinet where he keeps his socks. Of course, at night in his sleep, it comes to him in a dream that the sphere should not be hidden in such an obvious place.
Like a much- practiced somnambulist, he rises out of bed to take the sphere from the drawer and carry it past the main floor all the way down to the basement. He hides it behind the boiler where it is darker and quieter than before. Then he's awake, and he pisses his pajama pants.
He's standing there wondering how he got into the basement and trying to wipe the black gunk off his palms. No recollection of the black sphere, playing baseball, or Sue Ann.
Patterns get into your brain. Like the way that you swing a baseball bat, or the dozen or so ways you know to make your little sister cry, or when you piss your pants at a specific time in early morning every day because the robots from the Night House are coming to get you. This time it's that black pattern from behind the wallpaper growing upwards from the place in the basement where you buried your dead family members.
New blueprints that get into your brain while you sleep like a cloud of spores. They add new architecture to the things that already exist inside of there. Add new thoughts and new dreams that are alien to everything else you thought that you knew. Eventually, there's nothing left but the pattern — everything else is indistinguishable and no longer matters.
Jeffrey makes his way out of the basement. Back up the stairs to the second floor landing and into his bedroom and eventually, his bed. He sleeps. The whole family sleeps. They sleep as the new thing in the basement quietly basks in the warm heat from the side of the boiler. Then it spreads and spreads.
It yawns out and upward through the walls beneath the wallpaper.
They don't wake again. They only dream of these new things — a new existence in the void.
* * *
Things spiral outwards.
The three of them come dressed in armor. Not government because such things hardly exist anymore. Something different and rag-tag and pieced together from the tattered remains of things that existed before the
pattern came and bled through the fabric of reality.
Their suits are etched and pitted with scars from where the acid from its blooms has eaten away at the steel. Blackened patches also scar them. Not from growth but from the scorching blasts of their own flamethrowers.
The suits used to be impenetrable, but age and time and lack of resources to repair does make the armor weaker. The pattern can get in if left to crawl and seek a way to seep through the gaps. They lost Eric first. His face vanished behind his faceplate as the rot set in and replaced it with a visage of blackness. Then they had to kill him a second time. It is hard to destroy a fireproof suit when all you have at hand is fire — but they managed.
It feels as if it has taken forever to fight their way to the place where Mother waits. But they are finally here.
In the passing time, the house has continued to grow upward. A huge column of black and knotty tissue spirals up infinitely into the sky. It is so high that its apex can no longer be seen. Even in the grey daylight.
Things grow in it too. Beyond the acid-spewing blooms that seem so commonplace these days, it has grown what seems a collection of writhing and misshapen limbs that grasp into the air always seeking new prey to absorb.
Somewhere in the center of it sits Mother. Not quite dead but not quite alive either — plugged in, as she is.
Others have been here before. It is the only way the group knows this. Others have not survived to tell the tale but for a few sporadic clues between the bursts of static in their two-way radios. A pale figure at the center of the column's mass.
[We going in, Hailey?]
The question is asked through her headset and emphasized with a blast of piercing feedback at the end of it. Don blasts the ground in front of them with his flamethrower to drive home his point that he's anxious to get to work. He wants to burn through the mass to kill Mother. And he wants to do it yesterday.
But she's tired. Maybe the brain fatigue is getting to her, but they've fought long and hard to get to this point, and there is no turning back as badly as she just wants to do that.
After all, what exactly are they saving? At some point, it was feasible. But things have grown so far and so fast that she's not sure that there's anything left but the blackness.
[No.]
They both respond simultaneously, questioning her decision. The dual wavelengths result in a massive burst of static that causes a pain so great she almost tears off her helmet and throws it to the ground. She doesn't, of course. That would lead to death - or assimilation.
Once she's recovered, she responds.
[I have a better idea.]
She begins to climb, and they follow her lead. They burn only those limbs that grasp close enough to tear them from the column and drop them to their deaths.
Perhaps they are not here to kill Mother after all. Perhaps the pattern does exist for a reason: to feed the pillar and enable it to grow ever higher. What lies at its apex, though? Maybe they are destined to discover it.
Valhalla? Heaven? Paradise? There are always discrepancies even in the most thought out of formulae.
Frost begins to form on the steel of their armor when she decides ultimately... that ascending is the only variable that she can discern in an otherwise impenetrable and infinite pattern.
Candy Lady by Neil Davies
Dennis Wells watched the Candy Lady walk the wet sand of Point Clear.
It took him several long, frustrating seconds to get the focus on the binoculars just right. For a moment he was worried he had lost her, but she wasn't difficult to find again, her bright pink skirt a beacon at the water's edge. As he watched her, following her every move in magnified close-up, he knew he had a problem. She was becoming more than just an anonymous victim, more than just the bait in another of his many traps. She was becoming a person, and he was falling in love with her. His Candy Lady.
She had arrived in the Stalking Ground just two days ago, alone and with nothing but her handbag and a small overnight case. From where he sat, outside the Coach House Café at Brightlingsea harbour watching the raspberry sorbet ice cream in his hand slowly melting in the sun, she was impossible to ignore. The pink skirt, tight round the hips, gently flaring out to flap around her legs just below the knee, the same skirt that made her so easy to spot through the dubious focus of the binoculars, brought life and colour to the otherwise grey and faintly shabby surroundings of the typical Essex town. The pink skirt, the pink ice cream, memories of brightly coloured sweet jars... he named her Candy Lady there and then.
He was distracted by shuffling at a nearby table and watched a man in his early thirties lean forward, the delicate, almost feminine contours of his face anachronistic above the gym and steroid developed muscles displayed by the sleeveless t-shirt he wore. The face remained impassive, but the body language was clear. Grant Heddison, Dennis's reason for being in the South of England, had also seen Candy Lady and was equally captivated by her. That should be good, it meant everything was in place, and the plan could progress. Nevertheless, his stomach knotted uncharacteristically, and he felt a fluttering of uncertainty.
The Candy Lady, oblivious to the attention of the two men nearby, moved off at a stroll towards the far side of the harbour. Dennis followed. He did not look back at Heddison, understanding the man's pattern well enough to know there was no immediate threat and he was safe to concentrate on the woman ahead of him.
She was perfect. Not too tall, just over five foot, not too skinny, blonde, late twenties to early thirties. If he had designed the perfect bait for his trap, it would have looked just like her. In truth, he had designed it, on paper, scanned into the computer, digitised, 3D, lifelike... but even he hadn't thought of the almost fluorescent pink skirt, the bright blue top. She was more than perfect. The unfamiliar knot in his stomach was so tight he felt physically sick.
She walked up the steps and into the concrete complex of stylish apartments overlooking the marina. He watched her enter one of the buildings, dropped the remains of his uneaten, melted ice cream cone into a nearby bin, wiped his sticky hand on his jeans and walked into the nearby public toilets where he locked himself into a cubicle and masturbated. She really was that perfect.
Over on Point Clear a family had drifted close to where his Candy Lady stood watching the grey North Sea advancing slowly over sand still wet from the last high tide. For a moment, the daughter of the family pulled his attention away with her long legs, denim shorts and far too tight t-shirt, but she was too young, probably still in her teens, and brunette. She was not perfect enough to persuade Heddison to change his target. Even so, the family group was getting too close and could interfere, and there was a part of his mind that wished they would. For the first time that day, he began to sweat.
The day after her arrival, he had waited, drinking tea at Triscini's wine and coffee bar on the edge of the residential site, until she pushed her way through the double doors of her apartment block. Her choice of clothing was slightly disappointing, black leggings and a green t-shirt, but everything else about her was just as he remembered, just as he had dreamed about in the night.
He was thankful that Grant Heddison, true to his form, had stayed away to prepare. He suppressed a pang of guilt. He should have been watching Heddison, not the woman, but he was confused and driven by his need to see her again. It went against his professional judgement. He was helpless before these strange feelings and compulsions.
Once again, it was easy to follow as she spent an hour or so around the harbour, treating herself to a cone of chips from the Waterside Café, sitting on a bench in front of the yacht club to eat them while watching small pleasure boats drift back and forth on the placid water. After throwing the empty paper cone into a bin, she headed for the bus stop, and he stopped following. The boundaries of the Stalking Ground were very strict, and she was about to travel beyond them. He dare not stray too far from Heddison.
It was easy to scoop the paper cone out of the waste bin, and he once again u
tilised the cubicle in the public toilets. This time, masturbating into the paper cone her fingers had plucked chips from added an extra frisson that made his orgasm even stronger. Afterwards he felt exhausted, drained and confused. Could he abandon his months of planning, his careful trailing of the volatile Grant Heddison, all for a woman he barely knew?
The third day, today, he had once again waited alone at Triscini's. This time his Candy Lady did not disappoint. She was wearing the same pink skirt as on the first day but with a different, purple, t-shirt. He was excited, nervous, his knotted stomach twisting harder than ever as she made to walk towards the harbour and then changed her mind, heading for the wine bar where he sat.
She took a table one over from his and smiled as the waitress took her order for black coffee. He fought hard not to stare while also struggling with the compulsion to run. She was too close. He felt the blood rushing to his cheeks.
"Excuse me?"
For a moment, he did not react to the soft voice. He sat frozen in his seat, hoping she was talking to a returning waitress.
"Sorry to interrupt you but I wondered if you knew the times of the ferry to Point Clear?"
A short, frantic turn of the head confirmed the worst. There was no one else. She was talking to him.
He felt sick, and his voice broke as he tried to reply. He coughed, forced a smile. How could she affect him this way? He tried to speak again.
"I think they run about every fifteen minutes or so. I'm only visiting so I'm not too sure. Sorry."
She returned his smile, and the knot in his stomach unraveled and twisted again tighter than ever.
Detritus Page 5