by Paula Guran
All these things came through the attic walls and floor and ceiling, like it wasn’t there.
The buzzing sound was there but it was like I couldn’t exactly hear it – I felt it instead, in my bones and in my stomach and head. I couldn’t hear the humming anymore at all.
I heard Mr. Tillinghast’s voice all echoey say, “Your vital signs are elevated but you do not seem to have succumbed to panic.” (I had to look up succumbed at a dictionary site, later. I thought he was saying I didn’t suck or something but I didn’t see how that fit with the rest of it.) “You will have observed several organisms. Perhaps the blue-spotted slitherers are alarming in appearance, but they are harmless, and even friendly. They are aware of us – the more intelligent creatures in the Alternating World are aware of us, as soon as we are aware of them.”
“How can they be here and be so big and we can’t see them without your machine?” My voice sounded strange in my ears.
“Think of it this way: our universe happens in beats. Let us say that for every other one millionth of a second our universe’s reality does not exist; then it does exist, then it doesn’t, all in millionths of a second. Or cut the fractions even finer than that! Less than momentary – and yet our reality appears and reappears in the stream of time so fast we do not detect its going and coming – it seems continuous. Let us then say that this other world, which you are seeing now, vibrates in and out of existence, too, but it is here when ours is gone, and ours is gone when the Alternating World is here! The particularly potent resonance waves my grandfather distilled . . . and the even more powerful and malleable waves I have distilled . . . have rendered this world visible, so that we can see their appearance and ours at once – and made a great deal more possible, as you may learn, some day. It creates a tunnel between those two realities.”
I still don’t understand what he said. Not real well. But that’s what he said.
I was thinking about it – and then one of the blue-spotted slitherers reared up and looked me right in the eyes. Up close.
“Do not be afraid, Syl!” Mr. Tillinghast yelled. “He is friendly!”
I looked into the slitherer’s eyes. They were a color that was sort of like green but not.
Then the blue-spotted slitherer laid its head in my lap, and wriggled against my stomach, and looked up at me.
I don’t know why, but I scratched it on the head. It pushed back against my fingers to get some more. It liked the scratching.
“Good lord! They do not take to me so! You have made a friend!”
I was starting to feel dizzy; my head was hurting. It ached deep inside. My stomach felt like it was turning inside out.
It wasn’t the slitherer doing that. I just felt like I’d had that buzz feeling and tingling too long.
Then I was gagging. The slitherer slipped away and I felt sicker and sicker . . .
I heard a loud click and the buzz feeling stopped – I heard the humming and then it stopped, too. The room was rocking like a boat when the wind comes in. Then it stopped rocking and I threw up.
I tried to tell Mr. Tillinghast I was sorry for puking but he had helped me up and took the monitors off me and he said, “It is I who should apologize.” There was a ringing in my ears so loud I could barely hear him. “I was swept away, all too intrigued, by your apparently gifted pineal capacity, Syl! I should not have proceeded with the experiment so precipitously, but these opportunities come so rarely. Come along . . .”
He helped me down the stairs, which was good, because my knees were wobbly. He gave me some water and I said I wanted to go home and he said, “Certainly, of course, but Syl – please – may I trust you to tell no one? Remember that if you do speak of it they will take you to a doctor and give you some horrible antipsychotic medicine and you will not like it, I assure you.”
“I won’t tell.” He was right, no one would believe me. They’d think I was psycho. I couldn’t even tell Bebe. Not all of it.
So I went back to the trailer park. I didn’t see Bebe waiting around. I was glad. I didn’t want to talk to her yet. I went in our doublewide and it felt all strange there, the television and the smell of some real skunky weed and my mom sitting with some guy I didn’t know, like it was the strange world and not the one I seen in the attic. My mom’s lipstick was messed up and her hair was, too. But that’s not what was strange. It’s just that everything I seen a million times looked like I never seen it before. The cigarette butts in the ashtray looked like some horrible little dead animals.
She said the guy’s name was Merk. He just got here from California. He was a friend of her friend Belinda who moved to California.
“What up, little dude,” Merk said. He looked older than my dad, and drunker than my mom. He had long, bleached blond hair and tattoos of women who looked like whores. His eyes were kind of saggy and red. He had a can of Bud in one hand and a blunt in the other.
I remembered that this Merk was hanging around the Fourth of July barbecue. He had a can of Bud in one hand and a blunt in the other then, too.
Mom, sitting real close to Merk, didn’t look that happy to see me. “I thought you were out with Bebe.”
It was hard to hear Mom talking over the ringing in my ears.
“She’s . . . Bebe went home.”
I could tell I wasn’t supposed to be there so I went for a walk. The sky over the avenue was way overfull of stars. I didn’t think all of them were supposed to be there. Sometimes they slipped around and made the shapes of faces. When I looked at the ground, I seen slitherers slipping by. My ears were still ringing.
I seen something else, too.
It was standing out in the field between the park and Mr. Tillinghast’s house – it was a two-legged thing and it had this big fan of spikes around its neck like some guy in a metal band, and it had toothy tongues for fingers and it had a face like a goat but sort of dinosaur, too. It was about a hundred feet from me.
It looked at me with eyes like a goat. Looked right at me. I could feel it seeing me.
But then the ringing in my ears stopped and that thing went away, too. Just blinked out.
I was only scared of it after it was gone. I ran back to the Cumberland Glory and found Bebe on her front steps. I sat down below her and told her a little.
But not everything.
I almost didn’t go back to Mr. Tillinghast’s. I got more scared the next day, from what I seen in his attic. It was like, the night I seen it I wasn’t feeling like I was real, right then, and after, so I couldn’t be scared, because what could hurt you if you weren’t real.
But that was wrong.
I was real and they were real.
I thought, later, maybe it was like seeing stuff on dope. That happened the two times I smoked pot, the squirmy stuff that wasn’t really there.
But I didn’t think it was like those little weed hallucinations like wallpaper moving. And I wanted to know what it really, really was. There was something wicked cool about it. And I didn’t want to be in the trailer park because, what was there anymore? A month after that night, Bebe’s mom took her away. They just pulled up and moved out. Bebe texted me for a while but then my phone broke and my mom couldn’t get me another one right away.
I didn’t have any other friends around there. And that dude Merk was there most of the time. He was swallowing his blue pills and smoking and banging my mom in her bedroom. They didn’t care if I was in the trailer anymore they just shut the door and turned up his Van Halen.
So I went back to Mr. Tillinghast. “Can I help?” I asked when he came to the door.
“I am quite relieved to see you, my boy. Would you like to join me? I have a simple repast prepared.”
“A what?”
“Hamburgers. Would you care for one? I can easily make another for you. Afterward we can discuss electronics. I have some books to show you.”
It’s more than year since I wrote all that earlier stuff.
Merk is still here, living in the trailer now. W
hen he takes off his shoes, his feet stink bad. He doesn’t wear socks. He has this really girly sounding laugh when he gets high or when he’s trying to laugh something off.
About eight months ago I told my mom I saw him feeling up a drunk lady at the bowling alley and she asked him about it and he made that laugh and then he came outside, when I was out there on the steps and he said, “Kid you don’t fuck with me, I won’t fuck with you. But if you fuck up my thing I’ll fuck you up. You know?”
I laughed and he slapped me on the back of the head, hard.
I jumped up and tried to hit him back and he pushed me over. I got up and backed away and then I just left.
So I went to Oswald’s house. To Mr. Tillinghast’s laboratory.
We worked on the blueprints and I fixed the resonator with him. He needs my help for soldering. His eyes aren’t that good up close. He won’t go to an eye doctor. He doesn’t like how they write things down about him.
Oswald used the resonator many times. We went to the Alternating World, and some of it came to us. Spot, my slitherer, seems like he waits for me. He knows me good, and sometimes I hear his thoughts. He says he will always be my friend, that it was intended by the stars who speak.
Me and Oswald have learned we can breathe the air over there, in the Alternating World, and Oswald believes we can find things to eat there if we want longer trips.
Oswald showed me his bestiary, he calls it, of that world. He drew it himself. It has really good pictures of the flappers and the slitherers and the crepuscules and the linkages and the akishra and the dancing monoliths and the weeblers and the thing he calls the Baphomet. I looked up Baphomet online and I told him, that’s not exactly what it looks like to me. And he said, “I know, my boy. But it seems like a relative. The diabolic goat man, don’t you know.”
“Kind of like a dinosaur, too.”
“Rather more intelligent, I believe, than a dinosaur, in a malign sort of way. Fortunately we have the counter rings.”
The counter rings are actually more like bracelets. We put them on our wrists and they give out a resonance that keeps the Baphomet from getting too close when we’re in the resonation field. The Baphomet comes a little ways off and looks at us like he wants to taste us but he doesn’t come any closer. Sometimes if I look at him too long, he comes closer to me. Once I thought, “I wish you’d go behind something” and he did. Like he would do what I would think.
Here it is, almost Christmas. I am getting more used to the Alternating World, and less used to ours. Cars and cigarettes and televisions and cell phones all look sort of strange to me. When I saw people looking into their cell phones it was like I could see an eel coming from the cell phones, licking their brains, and it’s wearing their brains down like a hard candy. They didn’t know it was there, but I could see it.
One night last week I told Oswald about this eel thing, as we worked over a new amplification circuit, and he looked worried.
“Oh dear. That was a crossover beast.”
A crossover beast is one that can come into our world for a little while. To feed on things. Normal people can’t see them. There aren’t very many.
He scratched his nose and said, “It was an akishra. You shouldn’t be seeing such things in our world, without the resonator going – or without having used it quite recently.”
“I told you I saw them before without it.”
“But that was soon after you’d used it – you saw the akishra three days after you were here last! And out of the blue!”
“Yep.”
“So there it is. Well we may have to embrace the transition, after all – if you choose to. I will not make up your mind for you.”
He was going to tell me about the transition but then my new cell made a text ding. I should have said I gave my mom most of the money that Oswald gave me but not all of it. I made her get me a new cell phone with some of it. It’s pretty tight.
“My mom says I have to come home.”
“We shall speak of it later.”
So I started walking home, across the field.
I could see Christmas lights blinking on our trailer, over there. And lights in the little fir tree in the middle of the Cumberland Glory turnaround. Greel puts up those lights every year.
I knew Merk was there and I was fantasizing again about feeding him to the Baphomet. I could lure him up to the attic when Oswald wasn’t home. Dude, there’s shrooms up in that attic. Tillinghast grows ’em. You can get high.
Merk wouldn’t have the countering rings. But killing him might put Oswald in danger. You can’t just kill people. You could get bagged.
I looked up at the stars – and they started roiling around. I was getting the tingling and I started seeing things flying by up there. One of them I hadn’t seen before was like entrails with wings. It made me sick to see it. Another one was like a big ugly baby that was floating along eating some little furry animal and it was eating it alive.
There were the floppers up there, too, and the crepuscules and there was the slow-motion exploder that kept rewinding back and exploding all over again and there was The Yellow Fog That Hates. (That’s what Oswald calls that fog creature.)
I didn’t want to see that stuff, not then, and suddenly, between looking at the Christmas lights and seeing those flying entrails – I didn’t want to see that kind of stuff anymore.
I would miss the feeling I got from working with Oswald. But I had to choose my mom and my world. I had to choose Christmas and summer vacation and learning how to fix cars and having a girlfriend.
I got nightmares, sometimes, from Oswald’s attic. It seemed worth it, then, but now, looking at the Christmas lights, I thought, it’s not worth it. I need to forget that stuff or I won’t ever come back. Maybe I’ll get crazy like Crawford Tillinghast and get stuck in some place in my mind so they take me away and give me that antipsychotic shit.
Thinking about that, I really wanted to see my mom. I climbed over the fence by our trailer and then I saw my mom was driving away. I could see she was crying. I ran up and tried to wave her down but she wouldn’t stop and the side mirror on her old Chevy coupe clipped my arm as she went by. I don’t think she knew it. My arm wasn’t broken but it really hurt and I felt like I was falling in a hole.
I found the trailer door open and I seen Merk in there under my mom’s artificial Christmas tree, opening all the presents. He got most of them open already.
“You looking for shit to steal?” I asked.
He turned around, fast. He looked wicked hammered and mad. “She owes me money.”
“Not much to steal there. We haven’t got much. Steal from somebody rich, down the road.”
He stood up, and staggered, and fell back against the Christmas tree. Bash, it went over. Christmas tree bulbs broke. “Come here, kid, you little fucker.” He was getting up, pulling tree lights off him. “Fuck!”
He was standing in the middle of Christmas, kicking it.
I guess it was always kind of stupid anyway. Christmas.
I said, “Man I wish I could feed you to the Baphomet.”
He didn’t know what I meant.
I turned around and ran around the trailer to the fence, climbed over, jumped into the field, ran down the trail. Only then did it come to me, whoa, I made this trail, me alone, to Oswald’s house.
Then I was close to the house and yelling for him. For Oswald.
He came to the door and shushed me. “Do you wish to alert the authorities? Come in, come in, then. What of your mother?”
“She left. I don’t want to talk about that shit.”
“I do wish you wouldn’t use that vulgar, ah, lingo. Well, well, well. Come in, then. Perhaps we shall discuss transition.”
I’m going to write this out and leave it in resonant-blocking shield we have, and during transition it’ll fall right through the floor and land in the field. If you’re reading this then somebody found it.
I am not going to say too much more. I guess I got in
the habit of being secret, like Oswald.
I’ll tell you a few things. We set up the fuel cells Oswald collected for the generator, to use after full transition, and we increased the output of the resonator, so that it does more than letting us see that world, and a little physical contact with it.
It can take us there all permanent so we don’t have to come back.
It can take the whole house, too. It’s a portable house, I guess. Like a trailer. But it rides vibrations into another world.
First we had to do what Oswald calls a preliminary attempt, while we still had a way to get back if we wanted. So, Oswald started up the machine and put it on the new setting that would really open up major big time to that world. We had to go transition careful so careful, shifting in space Oswald said, in a way that wouldn’t get the animals in the Alternating World stuck in our bodies and we’d show up in a place where there was room for the whole house. That was part of the preliminary.
But one thing went wrong. The Baphomet showed up, during that test, when we were almost completely into that world, and because of the wider resonation field, we opened a door for him, and he went totally right the fuck into our world.
And the walls were transparent, I could see them but they were like dirty glass. And I seen the Baphomet running over to the Cumberland Glory Trailer Park. He was running right to our house. My mom’s car was gone. But Merk was still there. I knew he was there because I knew I had called that Baphomet in some way, to go find Merk. I don’t understand how. But I did. Like that time I made him hide behind something. He went where I wanted. And he went to my mom’s doublewide because of me. And he went in it.