by Joshi, S. T
Cheryl cast her dagger aside and lifted the dream stone that hung around her neck to her lips as if to kiss it. Instead, she inserted it into her mouth, then leaned quickly forward and took Tommy’s still-erect penis into her mouth, supporting herself on her hands. She began to perform fellatio on him, even as he lay dying. As you know, death from an abdominal wound is not immediate. The other four divided into two couples and lay on the bare concrete floor beside Tommy and Cheryl. They arranged themselves in what I believe is known as the sixty-nine position, and put their dream stones into their mouths as Cheryl had done, then proceeded to have oral sex with each other.
The candle burning in the socket of the large dream stone did not go out. I could see its flame fluttering, reflected from Cheryl’s upper arms and dangling breasts. It must have continued burning against her skin at the pit of her throat, but she gave no sign of pain. It was then I noticed the blood that dribbled from the corners of her mouth. I realized with a sick feeling throughout my entire body that she was chewing on Tommy’s penis as he lay dying beneath her. The other couples were doing the same thing—chewing on the sexual organs of their partners, so that the blood would wash over the dream stones held in their mouths.
I suppose I must have screamed or said something, although I have no memory of doing so. They all—all five of them I mean, because Tommy’s face was hidden behind Cheryl’s thigh—raised their heads from what they were doing and turned slowly to look directly at me, as Tommy had done just a few seconds earlier. Or maybe it was minutes, I don’t know how long I watched them. Their snarling faces were smeared with blood from their noses and cheeks down to the ends of their chins, and the golden chains of the pendants extended up in two loops and passed into their mouths between their barred teeth. They looked bestial—no, that’s not accurate, better to say they looked demonic.
Forgive me, I must pause just a few moments to catch my breath. No, I’m not hyperventilating, but a glass of water to help me swallow my pills would be appreciated. I find myself becoming faint as I remember these events. The memories are quite vivid.
5
WHAT I AM ABOUT TO SAY NEXT WILL SOUND INSANE. I AM FULLY aware of that. I can’t make you believe me, I can only assure you in this sworn statement that it is the truth, as I remember it. One instant I crouched outside the basement window, watching the murder of my only friend, and the next instant there was a disconnect, and my mind was fractured down the middle. I don’t know what else to call it. One half of my consciousness uncoupled from our common reality and went to another place.
I was aware of myself, crouched outside the basement window of the house on Henry Street, the snow falling on my hair—the rain had turned wholly to snow by then. But at the same time, another part of me stood beneath the vault of an alien sky that was shot with thousands of bright stars that did not twinkle but burned with a constant radiance. Almost directly overhead hung the disk of a white sun eclipsed by a moon or other body, so that it appeared as a blazing circle with a black center, or as a sun with a hole in it if you like. I don’t know why the sky was black. Maybe there was no air. The ground on which I stood may be described as an irregular crystalline plane of angled polyhedrons. It was completely black, but reflected the starlight like volcanic glass, so that the stars seemed to be both above and below.
With one part of my mind, I struggled to my feet on numb legs and staggered around the corner of the house and across the snow-covered grass toward the front door. The other part of my consciousness, which felt more real to me, resided in an irregular pillar of some black crystalline substance. Somehow I sensed its shape. There was no mirror in which to see myself, and when I examine the scene in memory I am quite sure I possessed no eyes with which to see. I had a sense of my identity and felt an intense need to go forward. This was accomplished by growing upward from the plain and deliberately toppling myself forward, so that I shattered and my broken shards flew off in all directions. From the shard that fell furthest in the direction I felt the need to go, I regrew myself, drawing upon the substance of the plain again, while my other fragments were absorbed into it. My consciousness was present in all the shattered pieces of my body to an equal degree, so that in falling forward and breaking into fragments, it was never diminished. This process of regrowth took centuries, or perhaps millennia, in subjective time.
The strange thing is that with the other part of my mind I saw myself as though from high above in the snow-flecked air as I staggered and fell on my face upon the cold, wet lawn, got up, and fell forward on my face once again. I did this repeatedly as though unable to take a forward step without falling. But this elicited no alarm or frustration within me. On the contrary, it seemed like the only sane way to progress forward.
With the other part of my mind, the part that was the real me, I became aware of a shallow valley ahead in the distance. In the middle of the bowl-like depression rested a great pentagram of black crystal, its five points angled sharply upward like spearheads. From the center arose a single vertical pillar, irregular in its polyhedral facets but much larger than the pillar I recognized as my body, which shattered and arose as it progressed across the glassy plain. There was utter silence, but I remember that the sensation produced by the vibrations as I toppled forward felt similar to the tinkle of a crystal wind chime in a light breeze.
I am not speaking nonsense, I am telling you what I remember. If you haven’t the patience to listen, then perhaps I would be wiser to tell you nothing at all. Are you going to listen? You’re sure? Very well, but do not interrupt me again. Remembering these events is intensely painful to me. What I say will not be repeated. If you want to dismiss me as a madman, have the courtesy to do it with your mouths shut. Thank you.
The door of the Henry Street house was unlocked. I opened it with a strange appendage I recognize as a hand, and fell across the threshold into the blackness. Picking myself up, I staggered and fell toward the entrance to the basement, the location of which I seemed instinctively to know. The basement door stood open. I fell forward down the stairs and landed on my face on the concrete floor of the basement. The sexually joined members of the cult did not appear to notice my presence as I crawled toward them.
It was a slow progress because I kept falling forward onto my face. This accounts for the many bruises and cuts on my body, and for the battered condition of my face, which as you see is still heavily wrapped in bandages. It was not, I assure you, an attempt to do injury to myself. On the contrary, it was like a frustrating dream. You know the kind, where you try to run but your feet sink into deep sand, or you try to raise your head to look at something but your eyelids won’t open. I tried to move forward, but I fell, and fell, over and over again.
As I drew nearer to the great pentagram of black crystal that loomed against the star-shot sky in the other part of my consciousness that I regarded as the real part, and started to descend the gentle slope of the valley, I became aware of black cables extending upward from the five points of the pentagram. A thicker cable arose from the top of the central pillar. I had not noticed them before because they merged into the general blackness of the sky and plain. They extended up into the starry sky toward the eclipsed sun. I had a sense that it was feeding upon the pentagram and the pillar, sucking nourishment up the black strands the way a spider sucks fluids from the living bodies of its prey.
Familiarity in the mental waves emanating from the black pillar. Somehow I recognized Tommy’s essence, his soul if you like, present inside the pillar. He recognized me. We embraced, with a lower level of our consciousness. This is somewhat hard to describe, so please bear with me. Our minds were twofold. On the higher level we were part of the black crystal that composed the plain—did I say that both of us grew out of the plain and were merely projections of the plain? Anyway, the parts of us that were of the black plain took up the higher area of consciousness, but on a lower and more primitive level we retained something resembling personalities. We recognized each other and, in a
curious way that I cannot explain, we embraced.
We did not converse in words but in emotions and concept-image gestalts that were psychically exchanged by changing the patterns in our crystalline structure. Tommy’s essence was not the only essence present in the great pillar. There were thousands of others. He had a limited control over its process of crystallization, but he could pattern no more than a small part of it independently. As he patterned that section of crystal that was his, a mathematical equation was completed, and a kind of complex thought was projected. I did the same thing, but my projections were on a simpler level—I was like a three-year-old child trying to talk to an adult.
He told me that we were both inside the dream stone—that space and time wrapped in upon itself within the stone, which held not only this black planet, but an entire universe of worlds. He told me that he was happy, that he had what he wanted. He offered to free my consciousness and send it back into my earthly body, as a final act of friendship. Even as he projected the possibility, I understood how it could be accomplished. I confess, I hesitated. The black world was strange, but infinitely orderly, infinitely peaceful. I was strongly tempted to remain with him. However, the uncouth way in which I had been ripped from my own dimension angered me. I told him I would go back.
With the other human part of my consciousness, which was becoming dimmer by the second, I remember picking up a broken shard of black crystal that was eight or nine inches long and triangular. It came to a sharp point. How it came to be lying on the concrete floor of the basement, I cannot imagine. I felt its hardness in the thing that is called a hand as I raised it up from the floor. It was only then that the cultists turned to look at me. Their heads were made of black crystal pentagrams of volcanic glass, and from their gaping mouths dripped small black crystal tears.
Using mathematical progressions in the other world, Tommy created a localized structure in the side of the great pillar. I made my own crystalline body into the same pattern, but its mirror opposite. A resonance sprang up between us. It grew stronger until the entire plain beneath us vibrated with it. From somewhere above there came a shock of outrage, followed by an attempt to disrupt our combined pattern, but the mathematics had progressed too far to be interrupted. I turned my attention upward, and then something happened that I hesitate to speak about. You will certainly dismiss me as insane when I tell you, but I will say it all this once, and then never again. As I looked upward without eyes from my crystalline body, the white sun with the black center winked at me, and I realized why it appeared so familiar—it was like the black eye of the homeless man who sold Tommy the dream stone, exactly like his all-black eye with the rim of white around its center. I felt my body shatter into glittering shards and knew nothing more.
Let me stop one final time here, and I promise you that I will finish my narrative. No, I am not hungry. Another glass of water would be appreciated. Let me close my eyes and collect my thoughts for a few minutes.
6
WHEN THE POLICE FOUND ME, I GATHER THAT I WAS LYING IN THE basement of the house on Henry Street. I have no memory of it. The last thing I recall was my crystalline body shattering. I have been told that it was my ceaseless screams that caused the neighbors to phone 911, and that when the police arrived they found me lying on my back on the floor in the basement, covered in blood, with a blood-stained dagger in my hand. The bodies of Thomas Straw and the five members of his cult lay around me, naked, bloody, sexually mutilated, and dead.
You tell me that you found no trace of the large dream stone, nor of its five smaller siblings. I must believe you, as I see little reason why you should lie about this matter, but I am able to offer no conjecture as to what became of the stones. I know what you are thinking; I can see it in your faces. You think I murdered them all and mutilated their bodies. You think I invented the dream stones and the homeless man on Barrington Street. Well, think as you wish. It is of no importance to me. I have told you the truth as I promised I would, and what you do with it is your affair.
I will not return to the university, nor to my apartment. The university has nothing more to teach me. Where will I sleep? Wherever I find a place to lay my head. It no longer matters to me where I sleep or what I eat. The needs of this flesh are trivial and without interest. No, I do not feel depressed. Quite the contrary, I feel liberated. I had so many worries and duties, and now they are all meaningless. Do I intend to commit suicide? No, nothing of the sort.
Let me only say in concluding this narrative that my mind is not quite the same as it was before that night. When I went to that other place and spent so many millennia there, rising and falling, I acquired mathematical skills that can under certain conditions be used as weapons. It is in my mind to seek out the old man who sold Tommy the dream stone and demand an explanation for his behavior. He is not human; that much you must have realized. I want to know why he chose Tommy as the bearer of the larger dream stone, and why he picked me as the one who would reveal his presence. Nothing happens by chance, that is another truth I have come to realize all too well.
It is within my power to return to the black plain, but I won’t do so until I have obtained an explanation from the old man. He can conceal himself from others through the use of dimensional veils, but not from me. Eventually I will find him. I will recognize his crystalline shape and its corresponding mathematical equation. There is nowhere he can hide from me. When I find him, I mean to give him a piece of my mind. A very sharp piece.
THE BLOOD IN MY MOUTH
LAIRD BARRON
“AT FIRST, THE SIGHT OF DEATH MAKES YOU WANT TO PUKE,” MY dad said when I was eleven. Without looking, he worked the action of his rifle, chambering a bullet. We crouched in a blind near a swamp. We shared a six-pack of Pabst, waiting on a moose to wander into the killing field. Gnats were fierce, crawling into my collar and ears to bite. Our family hadn’t eaten meat in nearly a week.
Years before he’d served with the Marines who overran Hué and lost some other places. He was accustomed to waiting and suffering. “Men cry and scream when they see their buddies shot. After a while you get used to it. Get used to anything, really. You’ll be eating a sandwich in the foxhole and a mortar shell explodes nearby and you’ll just crawl out of the hole and wipe what’s left of the guy next to you off your face to make sure all your own parts are still attached. Then you go right on eating lunch.”
A few minutes later a cow moose and her calf ambled into view. He dropped them with his .7mm, bang-bang, and we got busy skinning and quartering amid the swamp stink and the swarming bugs. He whistled while he dragged the guts free into steaming piles as high as my knee and the blood overflowed the toes of our boots. Said we had to work fast and make a lot of noise because a bear would likely come sniffing around the entrails and he’d forgotten to bring the shotgun with the heavy slug loads. Neither of us cared to meet a blackie without the shotgun.
Pop piloted a light cargo plane all across Alaska back in the 1970s. His older brother taught him on a Cessna 174 model. Uncle Mike was laid back; he stuck to the well-traveled air lanes and shook his head over Pop’s increasingly daredevil exploits, his obsession with conquering the most dangerous airstrips he could find. Bush piloting in Alaska has always been an occupation with a high element of what the old-timers call the “pucker factor.” The graybeards also said a man had to know when to get shut of the trade because sooner or later he was bound to crack up for good and no more chances. Didn’t seem to faze Pop, though. Nothing ruffled his feathers. He walked away from two out of three crashes and never had much to say. Two out of three ain’t bad, am I right?
The only time he ever seemed shaken by something that happened on one of his many flights was after a trip over a certain region, remote even by Alaska standards. Pop swore there were monsters swimming in the depths of Lake Iliamna; a whole pod, big as whales—hell, as big as nuclear submarines. He’d seen them as serpentine blurs beneath the surface from his vantage at five thousand feet.
; Pop’s description of those pale silhouettes skimming between light and dark stuck in my head. He’d cracked the seal on a bottle of Jim Beam and propped his cowboy boots on the coffee table the way Mom hated. His shaggy hair and mustache were black, his face burnt-copper from the glare, white patches around his eyes from his favorite set of amber-tinted aviator glasses. His teeth were bright white with a couple of gaps. A scar creased his brow. He’d fought a lot in his youth. Violence gave him a measure of joy that he’d lost after the war ended and only discovered again in wilderness flight.
That night I dreamed of paddling the lake in a canoe. I’d not been there in real life, never even seen a picture, so my imagination did the heavy lifting: an inland sea covered in swirls of mist from Arthurian legend, there was no end to it. The canoe sprung a slow leak and icy water sloshed around my ankles, then my shins, coming on fast.
A rotor whined and the shadow of a great bird floated across the void and the voice of darkness spoke into my ear, behind me as if from a distance, yet right there nonetheless. I don’t remember what it said, not sure I ever knew on a conscious level. The voice boomed and whispered, a garble of alien tongues and electromagnetic waves, colder than the ice bobbing near the shore. It was in dialogue with my cells. The creepily adult thought occurred to me that I was receiving a message from myself beamed across a gulf between realties. A Bizarro Universe me resonating at peak potential. Maybe it was Pop’s ghost a few years before the fact. Or maybe it was mine. They say, and I have little reason to quibble, that the universe cycles through itself. It is, as the Lake Iliamna of my dreams, endlessly repeating.