by Laird Barron
* * *
Late that night I wake to the drum of rain on tarp. Pitch black.
“Elmer.” Monroe sounds tense.
“Yeah?”
“Why’d you bring me here?”
“I didn’t. You wanted to.”
“Uh-uh. You wanted this.”
“Monroe, shut the fuck up and let me sleep.”
“Something occurred to me when I saw that grave. You made it. You made it and then brought me to it.”
I lie very still. I smell the fear on his breath.
“Elmer?”
“Yeah?”
“Great minds think alike. This is for Ferris.”
He sighs heavily in the dark before smashing the rock down on my head.
* * *
You are stripped utterly naked when confronted by your own mortality. You are stripped utterly naked when you are dropped to the bottom of a hole and buried in the mud, handful by handful, and left to rot. The worms crawl in.
* * *
Two items from the grim days of my youth.
Dad and his brothers were into cockfighting. Many a blue-collar paycheck was won and lost on his prize Lubaang and Asil warrior birds. My people spent generations in El Paso and they’d picked up the sport from the Mexicans. Gorgeous destroyers, our fighting roosters. These weren’t simple chickens like you see on a farm. A damn sight bigger and meaner than their domestic kin. Orange and black and sheened emerald, tall as a man’s knee, and eager for violence. One glimpse and you could see the devil in them, you could trace the line of descent back to dinosaur raptors.
Dad taped razorblades and jags of glass to their spurs and turned them loose in a killing pit. Hell of a lot of blood and feathers, afterward. I liked the blood and the smell of the blood. The black feathers were my favorite. I gathered a bunch and made a war bonnet. A boy at school offended me and I pursued him in my war bonnet of orange and black feathers and threw him down and rubbed his face in the playground dirt.
In retrospect, Mom and little sister flying the coop — so to speak— when I was four, the cockfighting, boozy gambling, and a procession of whores that followed my dad around might’ve had an effect on me. Also, we relocated from Texas to Alaska. The main difference between the two states is the distinct lack of an electric chair in the Land of the Midnight Sun.
The other thing is, I could do a weird trick with my mind. Got hooked on the idea of telekinesis after reading an old science fiction novel called The Power about some dude with superhuman abilities. God alone can say how many hours I spent squinting in concentration. And it worked, sometimes. I tipped water glasses and caused electronic devices to go haywire without touching them. I could stop a clock by beaming death-thoughts at it. Once I concentrated hard enough to levitate a cinderblock about six inches above the garage floor. Dad stumbled upon me; I was out cold, bleeding from my nose and ears. A three-day coma followed; doctors diagnosed it as epilepsy. Dear lord, the apocalyptic nightmares I suffered: Oceans of blood, rivers of maggots, the damned leading the damned across plains of fire and ash. The damned pointing their crisped, skeletal fingers at me and wailing in unison.
Shot a silver streak through my hair. At least the girls thought it cute. I was too scared to screw around with ESP and telekinesis after that. Set it aside with other childish things.
* * *
There’s nothing dramatic about the transmogrification of lowly Elmer D. from dead meat into a walking and talking abomination unleashed upon the hapless people of the Earth. It occurs between one drip of rain from a spruce bough and the next. An owl glides in and snatches a squirrel. A cloud smokes across the face of the moon. The night takes a long breath, and then I am among all that is.
I have no memory of clawing up out of the muck, although it would be keen if my cadaverous hand had thrust free of the soil like in all those old movies. One moment I lie interred in smothering blackness, the next I find myself striding through a twilight forest where mist hangs from evergreen branches. Gray upon gray. In this instant, I question nothing, I ponder nothing. My only goal is to plow forward into the infinite grayness.
A strange sensation to be plugged into every birdcall, every snapped twig, every stir of grass in the breeze, the scents of dead leaves, loam, and moose droppings; yet disconnected, numb. My body is a lead float, adrift. It oscillates between here and there, and fat and thin. Hideously immense, yet helium light. I lurch, dragging my left foot. My power is enormous. I brush tree trunks and they crackle and uproot and crash.
Flames leap from a pile of logs. This clues me in to the fact it isn’t sunset or dawn, but rather the dark of night. My sight penetrates spectrums beyond the human norm. Constellations flare, white against gray. I hear the stars as a celestial chorus, molten atoms colliding and chiming.
Three hunters squat around the fire as men have done since saber-tooth tigers prowled the land. A motor home is parked nearby. Electric light streams from the windows. I’ve crossed many miles in a blink to arrive in the parking lot. Sweat, beer, gun oil, I smell it all. Seven hundred yards to my left, an owl regurgitates the pellet of the squirrel it gobbled for dinner. I smell that too.
None of the hunters notice my apparition at the edge of the cheery circle of their fire. Unlike me, they can’t see in the dark. Soap bubbles form above the head of the nearest man. The bubbles shimmer and expand. They contain images of a blue-collar truck commercial: happy children, barking dogs, muddy Fords; him sighting down on a bighorn ram and blasting it off a ledge; him plowing his stolid wife, blowing out the candles on a cake; that sort of deal. One glance tells me the life story of Hunter Numero Uno.
A phantom approximation of his face swells the last unburst bubble. It whispers to me in the language of electron particles, “Master!”
I nearly swoon in an ecstasy of desire and my tongue lolls to my grimy navel. I am starved.
One by one, I seize them and crack their skulls and scoop out the brain matter and gulp it whole. Sparks sizzle and drip down my chin, light me up from the inside. For a few moments, before the incredible rush fades, I, as Whitman said, contain multitudes.
* * *
This transformation started long before the inciting incident in the hole. Maybe it had been occurring my entire life. Ten bucks says Dad’s sperm was already mutating when it t-boned Mom’s egg. He’d gotten spritzed with Agent Orange during his tour in Vietnam and suffered all kinds of health problems afterward. He drank, and so did Mom. There was also a sense of cursedness haunting the family line. Dad went in a wreck. Dad’s cousin was an ace Alaskan bush pilot who death spiraled his Cessna into Lake Illiamna. An uncle was eaten up by cancer despite living a clean, Presbyterian life, no smokes, no booze. An aunt did ten years in the pen and got hit by a motorcyclist three days after her parole. Somebody else got shanked in a brawl at the Gold Digger, back when it really was a saloon with sawdust and a mechanical bull and full of motorcycle club thugs and crank heads looking to stab you in the kidney. My sister, she joined the FBI. Her name was Jeanie and last I saw her she was eighteen months and counting. Rumor is she went down in a corruption sting and sliced her wrists.
Dumb luck I didn’t pop out of the womb with two heads.
I like the idea that death is a transitory state; my passage from pupa to final instar. I’m a whole new insect. While the notion I’ve become posthuman sends my nerves a-twanging, I’m not exactly afraid, or even concerned. Oh, a tiny fragment of the old me mewls and screeches in its cage, but to no greater effect than the whine of a fly under glass.
The Usurper deigns to answer my imprecations at one point.
We are the next big thing. This whisper issues from inside me; it oozes forth. The whisper is blood welling from a puncture. Sexless, dispassionate. We are Omega, we are Kingdom Come. We have always been; we will always be. I receive a picture, muddy and flickering, of warm seas and green light, of trilobites and worms and moss. Dinosaurs have not been invented, but the devil is everywhere.
We are the apparat
us. We are the apex. We are first.
I cannot reply. I’m trying to decide if apex means precisely what it intimates and if it’s something I want to be (of course you do, you ninny!). Again, images coalesce from the ether, like bursts of speech through shortwave static. The future unravels in an arc of projectile vomit from the jaws of Saturn: an approaching tsunami of blood and peeled flesh and more blood. A thousand feet tall, rolling at a thousand miles per hour. The first of many such waves. Wave after wave of carnage, and me in gigantic repose atop a heap of bones. My friends and foes, beneath me at last!
Ferris is fucking Monroe. We don’t have to take that kind of bullshit. We should fix their wagons. We are the apparatus. We are the way.
That sounds reasonable. A man should attend his priorities. Family comes first.
* * *
I loved monster movies as a kid. Don’t all boys love monster movies?
Dawn of the Dead. Evil Dead. Re-Animator. From Beyond. The Fly. The Thing. Right on. I dug it, especially zombie flicks. The shambling undead did it for me.
Had my first hot and heavy teen make out session with Julie Vellum during a screening of Night of the Living Dead at her dad’s split level house. I’d seen the movie plenty of times, but this was super-fucking hot cheerleader Julie Vellum; shag rugs, a leather couch, and her pop’s brand new RCA television. That’s why Mr. V tolerated me sniffing around his princess that lost summer of my junior year in high school — like me, he was a devout fan of classic fright features. Val Lewton and George Romero were unto gods in Mr. V’s estimation. Death gods, I thought, but kept such smart-ass observations to myself by concentrating upon the sky-high hemline of his daughter’s skirt. I didn’t even find out until much later that Mr. V was dying of cancer. The Vellums kept it hush-hush until he finally got sick enough for hospice care.
The three of us camped on that giant couch. Me on one end, Julie on the other, her dad, larger than life, occupying the middle. We kids sipped bottles of Coke while Mr. V blasted his way through a fifth of Maker’s Mark and talked over all the good parts. Soon, he slurred and blessedly lengthy gaps interrupted his monologue. He rose and staggered toward the kitchen in quest of more booze. There followed a series of thuds and then a crash that shook the living room.
I jumped a little and then froze, unsure about the etiquette of rushing to the aid of collapsed drunk who happens to be the father of the chick you’re trying to score with. Do you say something or do you pretend you didn’t hear a damned thing?
She came to my rescue.
“Oh, don’t worry. That’s him passing out. He does it all the time.” Julie gave me a cat-eyed look. Two seconds later we met in the middle. She kissed me as my hands went roaming places they had no business, and then she jacked me off like she’d done it before.
I made it with Julie a half dozen times before school started again. Once the frost set in, she dropped me like a bad habit. Despite my momentary anguish, it was for the best. White trash, both of us. She had a little money, and that made all the difference. She also carried a torch for the quarterback on our football team. Beating his ass wouldn’t have been a problem; I was really good at inflicting pain by then. Size and meanness were on my side, although I made certain to keep the latter under wraps. My gambit was to smile and keep my mouth shut whenever possible. Didn’t matter. Most everyone was piss-scared of me for reasons they couldn’t express. The assholes voted me most likely to wind up in prison or in an early grave.
That’s why I suppressed my rage, and why I let JV saunter into the sunset with her trophy jock. The things I envisioned doing in the name of love would’ve landed me in Goose Bay Penitentiary or a nuthouse. Instead, I slunk into the garden and ate worms and went quietly mad exactly as the moldy poets from parchment and quill days had done.
Nightmares afflicted me with a ferocity I hadn’t experienced since childhood. Who knows what caused them. Stress? Hormones? Whatever the case, these were the stuff of legends. Imagine being trapped inside a waxworks dedicated to atrocities, and all the doors sealed. Horrors from pre-adolescence reinvented themselves into subtler, more sophisticated iterations freighted with guilt and shame. My nightmares had matured and they took a cat o’ nine tails to my psyche. I was visited every night for several months.
The phenomenon leaked into waking life. I became gaunt, pallid, and terser than ever. I forced myself to wear a shit-eating grin while secretly worrying that I’d gone around the bend. I began to hallucinate. At school I caught glimpses of my classmates and teachers wearing death masks. Some were pale and serene, others contorted and agonized, and still others dripping blood, or caved in, or sheared away entirely to expose the cavern of the mind.
The unexpected result of this being that I got better with my own mask, more scrupulous about tightening the bolts. Even so, it’s a miracle I kept a straight face while gazing at exposed brains or punctured eyeballs. I got good at nodding and smiling.
A particular incident almost undid me anyhow. One morning during passing period Julie’s locker door was open and for some reason – don’t know what the hell I was thinking – I eased on over to chat her up. Second week of school, me being lonely and horny, not in my right mind— which covers any teenage boy — but me moreso. The door swung shut and there she stood, enfolded in the jock’s arms, playing tonsil hockey. The bell broke up their tryst and they sauntered away, not acknowledging my presence as I stared after them.
I didn’t feel anything, the exact same way I didn’t feel anything the time Dad got drunk and slugged me in the jaw and laid me on my ass. The same lights flickered in the dark regions of my mind, the same roar of distant wind rose in my ears. The locker and a section of the concrete floor dissolved as if by acid. A hole bored into the earth and I had an erection that nearly split my pants. No nose bleed this time around. I was afraid, though. Terrified enough that I got away and got drunk on Dad’s stock of Old Crow, damn the consequences were he to discover the theft, and I made myself forget. But the nightmares. Jesus. Jesus.
Dogged, simple-minded stubbornness got me though the autumn more or less intact, and largely unscarred.
What scarred me was getting ejected face-first through the windshield of Dad’s ‘82 Chevy that winter. He hit a patch of ice and left the road doing around sixty-five and smacked a berm of snow packed tight as concrete by the state road graders. Never a compulsive buckler of seatbelts, I flew over the berm and burrowed into the virgin snow beyond. Dad burned up with the Chevy. Odd, how of all the folks that were rendered a horror show in my visions, I hadn’t seen his death mask until I glimpsed him through the flames and melting glass.
No more nightmares for a long, long time after that incident. No dreams of any kind. Sleep became a chrysalis.
* * *
Apparently, a side effect of apex prowess is peckishness. The Glenn Highway spreads before me, a glistening buffet table strung with cozy sodium lights for mood.
Whatever manipulates me is not traveling of its own volition so much as being pulled as a steel filing by the mother of all magnets. The delays and digressions are but zigzag deviations of a neutron star as it’s dragged into a black hole.
In any event, I zig through a rest stop near Eagle River and am compelled to annihilate the dozen or so inhabitants. Well, I say compelled — it’s not as if I require much arm-twisting.
I wrench doors from semi-trucks and peel the roofs off compact cars. I am a beast cracking oyster shells. My need is overwhelming; my appetite is profound. I lick eyes from sockets, then the brains, the guts, the cracked-from-the-bone marrow, and even swallow a few bones whole. I expand and contract, I divide and reform. I squirm and slash. I am a pit that is everywhere. Light bends around me, or it is consumed.
A handful of survivors flee into the dour Plexiglas and cement octagon with a stylized eagle blazoned on the sloped roof. My reflection warps against the glass, or perhaps warps the glass itself. A cockscomb of jagged flint erupts from the sundered dome of my cranium. Spurs of razor-t
ipped basalt extrude from my wrists, elbows, and knees. Even as I take it in, its ghastly splendor, my physiognomy alters and is transfigured into something far worse, something that overwhelms my capacity to articulate its awfulness.
I am resplendently dire. I am a figure of awe. I am a horror.
They barricade the entrance with soda machines and that delays me for a few seconds once I finish outside. I find them cowering and gibbering prayers under Formica tables and in bathroom stalls. Somebody stabs me with a hunting knife, somebody else plugs me with a small caliber handgun. Six or seven teeny popgun flashes in the dark among the roaring and screaming. It hardly matters.
Toward the end, I flop, maw agape, on the concrete floor at the end of the demolished gallery and let that sweet hot stream of blood and viscera roll down my gullet. Overhead, the lights flicker crazily and shadows rip themselves apart. When it’s finished, I shamble forth from the despoiled building. Pasted in gore and excrement, crowned by a garland of intestines, I strike a Jesus Christ pose in the center of the highway.
Traffic routes around me, makes me consider the legend of the stampeding buffalo herd breaking around a man if he remains motionless and tall in his boots. The sun arcs across the sky four times, and so swiftly it sheds tracers of flame. A green-gold ball of bubbling gas, a bacterium in division. The amoeba sun segments in rhythm with my own squamous brain cells. The sun strobes and vanishes. The sliver of moon swings down and sinks into my breast, cold as a fang of ice. That which nests within my DNA blooms and reticulates as it rewrites parameters of operation.
The city awaits. I project myself forward along a corridor of alternating light and darkness, contract through a crimson doorway, and flow into a dance hall. My need to gorge is satiated and replaced by an urge I don’t recognize. A wormhole opens behind my left eye. The void shivers and yearns; it lusts for sensation. Music dies as the DJ apprehends me with his bemused gaze. Then the dancing. All heads turn toward my dreadful countenance.