by Marc Laidlaw
She offered the infant again, not like a gift but like a thing to be disposed of. The Seer sensed a great coldness in the woman; one little reason and she was ready to surrender the child. In that case, it was just as well to save the infant from her “tender” care.
The black-wrapped bundle was lighter than the Seer had expected. She kept her fingers at the base of the head, to support the strangely heavy skull, but it didn’t seem necessary. The infant was remarkably strong. She lifted her head and stared up at the Seer.
“There, little darling,” she started to say.
But the Seer choked on her words.
Her tongue began to swell in her throat; her pulse hammered on the anvils of her ears. The child’s golden eyes held hers riveted, hanging before her like twin suns while the rest of the world went up in flames. She felt her body ravaged from within, the polynerves writhing like a nest of earwigs suddenly exposed, stinging and thrashing inside her.
A sharp, searing field of energy thrust repeatedly into her ribs and skull, stabbing her with electric knives.
Golden eyes . . .
A monster!
The little freak who couldn’t form a syllable was playing the Seer’s wires like a practiced tech, drawing power from the rest of the studio, flipping on circuits that should have stayed off.
Sender, receiver, the Seer lost track of what she was. She felt a sly, invasive presence, totally foreign to her experience, like a hand that snatched up the tangle of her body’s nerves and squeezed them together, crying, “This is what wires are for!” As if she had wasted them all her life . . .
“What—what—”
She gasped, unable to speak, hardly able to breathe.
A surge began to oscillate from one end of her body to the other, slow at first but building, peaking very near her heart. She tried to drop the child but her fingers would not obey; her palms were scorching.
“Take—her—back!”
The Daughter of Kali did not move. “I thought you wanted her.”
The Seer went deaf and blind. She felt more isolated than she ever had in the astral of the wires. There seemed no escape from this place, and no sense in returning to her body, not as it was now.
Visions fluttered in. For a moment she saw the cloth she’d woven and then dropped. A final strand of knowledge joined the tapestry, forming a black border around it, a frame to set it apart from everything else. A slim bit of knowledge, but crucial:
Her fearful vision was true.
But she had failed to foresee this part of it. There must be other aspects she had overlooked—and that gave her a last glint of hope. There might be ways out of this . . . not for her but for everyone else. Or maybe not.
The weight of the child was lifted from her hands, but it came too late to benefit her. The nervous rhythm of her heart was out of control. That vital organ ceased to beat with any regularity and now shivered all over like a bag of worms.
Fibrillation is a far from painless death, but the Seer didn’t really mind. It was good that her last sensations should be so . . . intense. Pain helped demarcate the boundary between realms. She wondered which death prayers best suited her mood. Tibetan, Egyptian, or something more modern? Om mani padme Anubis Jesus Hermes almotherofgodhuuuuu—
S01E06. Poppies Will Make Them Sleep
The great California deserts had drowned beneath a waterless sea of homes. The Mojave was no more, although the sun still remembered it, and glared nostalgically down on shopping-mall cactus roof-gardens and air-conditioning maintenance crews with the same lack of mercy it had shown the prior hard-baked earth and yucca plants, junipers, and jackrabbits. Yucca and juniper still grew there, though mainly now in bonsai pots, keeping the roof-bound cacti company. Jackrabbits, horned toads, and defanged rattlesnakes retained nearly invulnerable niches as household pets. And there were new things under the sun as well. The coyoodle, a clever hybrid of toy poodle and native coyote, was popular among the spry septuagenarians who comprised so much of the erstwhile desert’s populace.
But one thing the old desert had had in plenty, and which now was nowhere to be seen, was land itself. Houses sat on concrete shelves that once had been hills of sere, majestic tone: mineral black, rust orange, coppery green. All such subtle colors were now generalized, homogenized, democratized into brash pastels. Instead of gravelly soil, one walked on soiled gravel. The land was veined with driveways and highways; it suffocated under a heavy coat of parking lots crowded with vehicular homes. In fact, the pavement drank up so much desert sun that excess heat had to be siphoned off and sold to chillier climes. Winter snow—in fact any precipitation at all—was almost unheard of.
The desert was hardly hospitable to humanity, but that had never stopped developers before. Death Valley Estates, the favorite mockery of a generation of famous-name architects during its planning and construction, now featured many of the same names on its ten-year waiting list for homes. A similar list held applicants for membership in the Devil’s Golf Course Country Club, although the wait was not nearly so long: players dropped dead at the rate of two or three a week in the summer heat. (The rate was much higher for caddies.)
For all that, it was a mercifully cool day when Poppy Figueroa, Clarence Starko, and a one-man sensory crew named Chick Woola ended their drive through the cluttered Mojave at the gates of a tiny resort.
The spot was as isolated as any vacationer could wish, being situated at the far brink of a played-out gravel quarry half full of green brine and spanned by a dangerous narrow bridge. Woola, doubling as driver of the studio van, hesitated before crossing. Clarry looked across the gulf and saw clusters of drab hemispherical and cubical lock-to-fit quondos scattered among rusted scraps of abandoned machines and factory buildings. The little hutches were windowless, devoid of ornament or appeal. Gravel dust swirled in the lanes. The only sign of life was a row of hunchbacked palm trees, their fronds a startling shade of crimson.
A sign on the bridge gave the name of the settlement:
BLEEDING PALMS
—A Martyr’s Place—
It didn’t appear on many maps.
“I don’t like the looks of this,” Woola the senseman said.
“You kidding?” Clarry said. “This is beautiful stuff. Beautiful.” But he was slurping up baccorish like it was spaghetti.
He tried to sound positive, but inwardly he was probably more anxious than Poppy. And for good reason. Foul luck had brought them here; bad rumors that could bring him real trouble.
Two days ago, Poppy’s message service had fielded an anonymous five-word blip: “I know where she is.” The tag bore this address in the middle of nowhere—or the next thing to it.
Clarry had been monitoring her mail, but not carefully enough. He would have destroyed it before it ruined him, but it slipped past. No one was supposed to know the baby’s whereabouts. Not even he knew that, and he was closer to the deal than anybody except the old witch-bitch who’d set it up. If he could have gotten in touch with her, he’d have asked her advice, though he hated her more than ever now that the danger to himself had deepened. Unfortunately, Clarry had no idea how to reach her; he didn’t know who she was or where she lived. Once the job was done, the goods delivered, there’d been no more messages or visitations. Until this one. Someone else was talking now. Maybe one of her own people, turned traitor.
He rode alone with his fears, hardly sensing Poppy beside him—as if his anguish were any match for hers. No one could help him, no one could hear his warnings. There was no help either of them could offer the other.
Poppy was dragging him deeper in the shit all the time. Because she trusted him, not knowing that he’d put her there in the first place. Poor Poppy. Poor Clarry.
So there was no turning back, not for any of them. Especially not for Clarry. No, sir. He had to find out who was talking and exactly what they knew, if anything. See if he was implicated.
The bridge trembled under the weight of the van. Clarry stared down at the murky
water. Grotesquely smooth, slick salt pillars poked up like stiff drowned fingers from gelatinous puffs of silky, fluorescent, lime green moss.
“What a scene,” Poppy whispered, leaning out the half-open window to look. A shudder passed through her, registered as a dance of lights and needles on the wireboard. It was beautiful stuff, Clarry admitted inwardly. Truly morbid. Under other circumstances he would have appreciated its dramatic possibilities. Anyone who lived out here must be twisted, sick. He only prayed it was all a deception, a false lead, some nutty hermit thinking he’d divined an answer to the mystery show. That was exactly what they needed for “Poppy on the Run”: more bizarre distractions on the ever more twisted trail of the Figueroa baby, more weird illusions disguising the truth, clues leading nowhere. False tracks could save Clarry’s skin and the show’s ratings at the same time—as if there were any difference between the two.
Woola parked the van near the trunk of one scabrous palm tree and shut off the engine. The scarlet fronds scraped and clacked overhead like hermit-crab claws in a dry breeze. The sound summed up the desolation of the place. Clarry gulped another time-release antidepressant, swallowing it dry except for the tobacco juice already in his mouth.
Poppy got out and Woola took her seat. Clarry craned over the meters to check signal quality.
“You be careful,” he called after her.
She glanced back and gave him a brave little smile. She looked terrible.
Clarry wished he could go along with her—go instead of her—but he didn’t figure in the show. He was strictly a wire-puller, behind the scenes. Anyway, through the wires, riding in her skin, he knew everything the moment she knew it. Everything but her thoughts.
Right now she was bearing him along toward a little quondo with a sign above the door reading OFFICE.
“Intense,” said Woola.
“Sh.”
***
A bell jingled absurdly as Poppy closed the office door behind her. The place was empty, walls bare except for an old lunar calendar years out of date. The only light came from a dingy lens mounted in the middle of the domed ceiling. At least she thought it was a lens: it could have been a dirty skylight. After a few moments, her eyes adjusted to the dimness and she went to the plastic counter looking for a bell she could ring for service.
Instead she discovered a man curled up on the floor behind the counter. A ragged terry-cloth bathrobe covered most of his head but left his ancient gray legs exposed. Dead, she thought. Then he muttered, “No vacancy.”
Nothing moved but his lips, between the folds of terry cloth.
“I . . . I’m looking for someone.”
“Oh, wow. Do I look like someone? Wow, with my luck I probably do.”
“I got an invitation to Number Six.”
“We don’t allow visitors. Punishment only. And one meal a day. Like, whoa. You’re not here to punish anyone, are you?”
“No. I mean—”
“Wow, like, that’s too bad. You . . . you wouldn’t have any idea how to go about it, I guess? I mean, to, to really hurt someone . . . not just physically, but their feelings too, like, you wouldn’t know how to do that, would you? 1 mean, like, wow, that would be just. . .” The man seemed to be working himself into action.
“I can find it myself,” she said, eager to put him at ease; and he subsided.
“Sure. Leave me here. I mean, obviously I can take care of myself. No problem here, no sir. I’ve got nice clothes, a comfy place to sleep. Like, sure, you just run along. I don’t need any attention.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Like, wow.”
Outside, she shaded her eyes with a hand, avoiding sight of the van. With somewhat more ominous feelings, she headed into the shadows of ruined machinery. In the distance, heat shimmered over a craggy range of hills covered with what looked like factory-made spit bubbles: the newest form of quondominium. Polyhedral, they locked together into cozy, instant neighborhoods, infectious to the earth and spreading. She wondered how much longer Bleeding Palms could maintain its dreary isolation.
The heat was dizzying. Putting out her hand, she leaned against the side of a tall, silo-like building. The corrugated sheet metal was incongruously cold, and flaking away into rust. A beetle touched briefly on her knuckle and buzzed off. She closed her eyes, felt the wires deep within, imagined them humming away with a life of their own, parallel to her life but separate, inhuman. It was reassuring to know that every bit of this was being recorded, right down to this very moment . . . and this one . . . and this . . . not in broken pieces as she experienced them, but continuously, creating an illusion of a fluid, unified reality. This moment would never be lost, no matter what happened to her later. Clarry was getting it all on ice.
She felt, lately, that something terrible was coming. Nothing as bad as what had happened already, of course; only a neat way of tying things up. “Things” being her life, which had ended, really, on the night she lost the baby. That had been the climax of Poppy’s story. After that, she might as well skip to the end.
That’s what she was doing now. Skipping. From moment to moment to moment, the good parts all behind her, a few loose ends to tie up before slipping out of the wires. Time to start another story.
This desert trek was a false lead, and she knew it.
She didn’t want to be pessimistic, but she knew there would be no easy solution to the mystery. No hard solution, either. Her audience would gradually come to realize that Calafia wasn’t going to reappear. The “gimmick” would soon lose its appeal. People hated unsolved mysteries in a wire show. There’s no suspense in knowing that you’ll never know a thing.
Like her, they would soon give up wondering. Give up hope. Perhaps that was why she felt so calm now, so detached. She was readying her audience—though they couldn’t know it-—for a huge disappointment.
Her thoughts meshed with the feel of rust beneath her abraded fingertips. I’m flaking away, too, she thought.
She swallowed a dry mouthful, gravel dust gritting between her teeth. Clarry must be wondering what she was up to. Oh, well, he could cut this part later.
Lifting her eyes, she saw Number Six. It was a cracked dome like the crown of a long-buried skull, baked and blistered by the sun. The door, ajar, looked as if it would never shut again. Cold in winter, an oven in summer. Some poor soul’s home, that broken head. The brain all withered inside it . . .
She went forward, laid a hand on the warped wood, and gave the door a gentle push. A lizard scurried out between her feet. She put her head through the opening. Was that singing she heard?
“. . . Tum-tum-tumbleweeds . . .”
“Hello?”
She stepped inside, and felt a cold pulse pass through her, an electric tingle that caught her up short for a moment then vanished. A fleeting sensation, but one she had felt before, going into office buildings during business hours.
Her signal was being jammed or scrambled. As long as she stood inside this room, she could neither send nor receive. Suddenly, her isolation magnified, she felt afraid.
***
As Poppy stepped into the hut, Clarry stayed with her. He wished he could work her manually, like a remote human camera—turn this way, now that, zoom in, fall back. He wasn’t content seeing only what she saw, doing only what she did. But that was wires for you.
The tiny dome was full of branches, pale and scraggly lumps of dead vegetation. A thin little voice wailing an off-key tune told him what he was seeing: “Tumbling . . . with the tumbling tumbleweeds . . .”
Tumbleweeds, yes. Their branches scraped at Poppy’s hands, snagged her clothes. Across the room, at the far curve of the dome, he saw the face of the terrible singer drowning in the dry weedy clumps. Her skin was white as sun-bleached bone; her gray hair drifted like a winter cloud, tangled in the tumbleweeds. When she saw Poppy, she started to rise, and half a dozen weeds leaped toward her, dragged up like marionettes by the strands of her hair.
Clarry felt physically relieved. T
here would be no clues here, only madness and senility. Nothing to give him away.
“Tumbling, tumbling, tumbleweeds,” the old woman piped.
“Hello,” Poppy said. “Are you the one I’m suppose to meet?”
“Meet? Oh, yes. There’s not much time. I need help with the garden. Everything’s forgotten how to bloom.”
Poppy made an attempt to get closer, but the weeds were much too dense.
“I’m Poppy,” she said. “Poppy Figueroa?”
“Poppies? Poppies will make them sleep!” The frail voice grew almost musical, though out of tune. “You can remind them how. Once they were everywhere, just like the tum-tum-tumbling tumbleweeds. I loved to look at them. They covered the hills and the green valleys, a mist of lovely colors. Poppies were the state flower, you know. Now there’s nothing but the tumbling tumbleweed.”
The hag turned toward Poppy, involuntarily drawing the weeds into bunches around her midriff. She scooped them closer still, as if gathering a flock of desiccated children to her breast. “Tumbling, tumbling . . .”
“Did you send me a message?” Poppy asked. “About my daughter? Was that you?”
“Poppy!” the old woman barked, her eyes turning bright and alive. But the spell passed like a cloud’s shadow.
The woman sank down in her crackling throne; the tumbleweeds buoyed her up. Her dry weeping wended through the thin branches. Abruptly she lurched forward, causing the tumbleweeds in her hair to leap forcefully free of the other weeds that snared them. They sprang almost to the ceiling as she flailed her hands. Her fingers were covered with lacerations, scabbed with old blood; her gingham dress was in rags.
“I was there when you lost her,” the woman intoned. “I was there. And I know where she is, yes, I know.”
Clarry’s fingers twitched on the wireboard. Crazy old bat, why didn’t she come right out and say it? Why torment him like this?