Thirteen Specimens

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  “Well, I’m not as unselfish as all that,” the Angel replied. “It’s for this guy.” He smiled down at his child, but a half-stifled sob made him look up at Davina. She came to him, put her arms around him. He laughed uncomfortably, patted her back, “Hey, you can share my son, but you can’t share me...sorry.” He flicked his chin at Roger. “This guy is pretty bad-ass...I wouldn’t want to mess with him.”

  “What about your wife?” Davina asked huskily.

  He slid out of her embrace, his smile strained. “No,” was all he could answer.

  * * *

  Another knocking at the door, and this time Michael rose to answer it. Despite what he’d told Roger earlier, he brought his M16 with him. Mark was awake now, and watched his father with concern.

  Michael unlocked and opened the door to see Dawn standing in the hallway beyond, escorted by the two eerie Celestials.

  “Honey...” Michael said.

  He saw that her eyes were red, but she smiled and told him, “I’m staying, too.”

  Michael pulled her through the door, into his arms. The ethereal Celestials looked on without feeling. After they had held each other for a good minute, Dawn peered over her husband’s shoulder and said, “Hi, baby...”

  Mark approached them uneasily, but Dawn gathered him into their embrace.

  “I’m sorry, Dawn,” he mumbled.

  “Shhh. I love you, baby,” she said, her lips moving against the top of his head.

  Roger slipped his arm around Davina, should she become troubled by the sight of the reunited family, but she was content and whispered to him, “What about Mark’s real mother, when she dies? She was an atheist; she’ll be here. But we Damned can’t see our loved ones from when we were alive – we’re kept impossible distances apart. So do you think Michael can make them bring Mark’s mother here, too?”

  “I don’t know if that’s possible,” he told her. “But this man is...rather determined. And there’s always the apartment of our neighbors, on the other side.” He indicated the opposite wall.

  “Hm.” She pressed her smile into his neck. “I’m so very proud of you...my husband”

  “And I, you...my love.”

  On Making Clam Chowder

  STEP 1: Using a rusty opener, remove the lid from the can, being sure to slice the ball of your RIGHT thumb so that exactly four drops of blood swirl into the white gruel. Stir until pink. Pour into sauce pan.

  STEP 2: Add three marbles, one gray pebble and one barnacle, that the soup might have texture. Crush twelve generic aspirin and sprinkle into broth.

  STEP 3: Heat your fork over the stove's burner so that you can thrust it into the wildly panicked eyes that will blink open in the soup's bubbling skin. Enjoy!

  DOOR 7

  DOOR 1

  The fantasy writer H. P. Lovecraft wrote of a god-like alien being named Cthulhu, who was locked in a kind of coma or living death at the bottom of the ocean, and who one day would awaken and arise to destroy the puny human race.

  Did you know that the microbes living under the floor of our planet’s oceans make up perhaps a third of all living matter? The amount of methane produced from these mindless, primitive creatures is greater than all the earth’s coal, oil and natural gas combined. It has been postulated that one day the right conditions or some undersea disturbance might release a tremendous “belch” of methane – as may have occurred with devastating effects at the end of the Permian Period – which if it made it to the surface and ignited, could set our whole world aflame. This vast, sleeping giant made up of so many individual slimy cells sounds an awful lot like the hibernating, mollusk-headed Cthulhu to me.

  This not so trivial trivia was in the back of my mind when I saw the tank bearing the stenciled word METHANE on the grounds of the company called Odyllic – a great sprawl of heterogeneous offices, plant buildings, warehouses and various smaller satellite structures just down the street from where I lived. Odyllic had apparently gone through several owners and names over the decades, and had to all appearances been abandoned to disuse at last. Or near disuse – but I’ll get to that. Except for the most obscure twitch of life, akin to a flea moving through the hide of a rotting deer, the factory complex was as seemingly dead as the bed of the deepest sea. As a tentacle-faced alien god.

  Since I had become laid off from Sunderland Farms, which was located on another forested periphery of this same town, I had taken to long walks during the morning, pushing Logan’s baby stroller. I had started out as a third shift security guard at the Sunderland Farms plant over twenty years earlier, later going into the bakery department – making bread and doughnuts for the Sunderland Farms convenience stores – and later still into the soda plant, where carbonated soft drinks were mixed in huge tanks, bottled and labeled, and where I had eventually become third shift supervisor. Until the Sunderland Farms convenience stores began to disappear, one by one. Until the soda plant’s third shift was abolished. Until the lay offs.

  My sleep pattern was disrupted by the change. For the most part I had reverted to a kind of first shift schedule, though there were those nights when I remained awake straight through, plodding aimlessly through web sites, stumbling through an endless loop of numbing TV channels. During the day, my walks pushing Logan’s stroller became longer and longer. Soon I was taking several walks a day. Late afternoon. Early evening. Even, finally, as late as eleven at night, pushing Logan’s squeaky little stroller along the sidewalks of my quiet neighborhood. My street, Mill Street, was bordered on one side by the small outermost buildings of Odyllic – which seemed more of a city unto itself, really, than a mere factory complex. Or even another country altogether. At the end of Mill Street, crossing from its row of drab little houses to the cracked and weed-tufted parking lot of the larger plant structures was more like crossing a boundary line of some kind.

  My Aunt Joan and Uncle Ron had both worked at Odyllic for decades, before it was Odyllic. Back then it had still been Farmer Plastics. I can still picture their logo, its cheery font-style against a sky blue oval seeming to represent a 1950's notion of the futuristic, projecting an innocent and beaming faith in the potential of all things plastic. Uncle Ron had worked at Farmer right up until his death from colon cancer in 1967. Aunt Joan had retired shortly before Odyllic took over, and died from cancer herself in a nursing home not so very far away from the company. She had suffered a malignant brain tumor, and my memories of visiting her in the nursing home, my memories of her ranting and babbling, her bellowing curses and her eerie whispers, still echoed in my own brain from time to time.

  Though I had been too young to recall, my Aunt had told me that before being Farmer Plastics, the then much smaller company had been Lethe Toys. I remember mourning, as a child, that this toy factory had closed down before I could ever see or visit it. She remembered it from her own childhood, recalled rescuing deformed baby dolls from the trash bins, and described the massive colorful clown face that once loomed across the front of the main plant building, blistering and blackening over the years until it was ultimately taken down. The pale silhouette of the clown’s wigged and huge-eared head could still be discerned, however, if one looked for it.

  Wouldn’t Logan have loved to gaze up at that, I thought this afternoon, pushing his stroller across a frozen sea of asphalt, the yellow lines of its parking slots faded to a barely decipherable grid. We passed a little brick warehouse, its one metal door padlocked and its high bullet-shaped windows filled in with cinder blocks. More of a shed than a warehouse, really, it reminded me of the brick storage building near the entrance to Pine Grove Cemetery here in town, which as a boy I had always imagined to be stacked with unburied coffins during the winter – though one summer when the grass was being cut the double doors had been left ajar and I had glimpsed only hanging tools and wheelbarrows inside, disappointingly enough. That cemetery shed had since been converted into a chapel. I supposed this warehouse looked something like a chapel, then, too.

  There was no long
er any ingress into this warehouse structure except for a lower panel busted out of a big green garage-type door that had obviously once been used for loading or unloading trucks. I could imagine that the stray cats I sometimes saw in the neighborhood, or the kids who bicycled through the parking lot in the summer, might occasionally get down and crawl into that hole to explore the interior of the warehouse. Once I had paused beside the cement ramp that led to the folding garage door, and inclined my head a little to peek inside, but I saw only blackness and had never got down on hands and knees to peer inside more closely.

  I pushed Logan’s stroller on, toward the back of the parking lot, its white wheels bucking as they crunched over little bits of gravel and broken beer bottles. By now, I thought, the contoured grips of the stroller’s handles should have left permanent indented marks in the palms of my hands. The stroller had become like a lawn mower I pushed, or a snow blower, a machine I ceaselessly and diligently and mindlessly operated, like one of the machines in the bakery or soda plant at Sunderland Farms...

  Even before the lay off, four months previously, my financial situation had often been dire. Money problems make for marital problems, and the tension already existent between my wife and I had been exacerbated to the shattering point by monetary concerns. She had left me just over a year ago. I didn’t delude myself; my long and frequent walks were a distraction, an escape from the too-small house that still rang emptily with her absence. She had a new boyfriend already, even lived in a new town. I was fortunate at least that we had had a fifteen year mortgage on our home and that it was paid off. But Pam was after me to sell the house, so that she could have her half of the money. For my part, I had been putting off pursuing the divorce, so I wouldn’t have to do just that. Because then where would I be, without a home, without a job? I had to admit that she was being very understanding, even sympathetic, despite her frustration with me. Just as my brother was being very patient, after having lent me so much money to get me caught up in my bills, such as my ridiculously huge property taxes. But what was I to do? My fate was in the hands of other men. Politicians and corporations, which are really conjoined twins anyway, loping around horrible and multi-limbed in their beautiful three-piece suits.

  I glanced back over my shoulder at the brick warehouse, a stray bit of flotsam that had drifted away from the rest of the complex, sitting like an island in the middle of that desolate parking lot. The late afternoon sun glittered on the pulverized glass of bottles, making the asphalt sparkle like desert sands. The sunlight gave the bricks of the warehouse an ember-colored glow. The golden light fell onto the words stenciled in white paint against the flaking green paint of the padlocked garage-type door. The words read: DOOR 1.

  At the far edge of the parking lot there was a paved road tunneling off into the woods that encroached upon the town (though of course it would be more fair to say the town encroached upon the woods). The road ran parallel to train tracks that in turn ran parallel to some of the largest of the factory buildings, themselves like a long line of decommissioned boxcars. I had strolled partway down this tree-flanked path before, but had always been too timid, too concerned about trespassing, to venture very far before I turned back again. But I had to admit it; it was more than simply being reluctant to trespass. That isolated path into the forest conjured a plethora of child-like terrors, instinctual fears. Beasts in the forest; there had been coyotes sighted in town. There were rumors of stray black bears. And strangers, perverts, madmen with knives, might very well lurk in such isolated spots. It just didn’t seem to be a very safe sort of place for a man pushing a baby stroller to embark.

  And yet, the little road called to me. How could it not? Because it also conjured a plethora of child-like possibilities. Though I had stepped onto it only a half dozen times at best, each time I had gone just a little bit further than the time before.

  I pushed Logan’s stroller to the mouth of the little road. At its threshold I paused. Up ahead, on the right in a little dirt clearing covered in a fringe of grass so thin that it was ghostly, four tractor trailer freight cars had been left like bodies without their heads, oil stains on the pebbles below like blood from their decapitations. I took the first step onto the pavement, in my paranoia expecting some psychopath to step out from behind one of those looming rectangular boxes. Or someone, I didn’t know quite what kind of someone, who would accuse me of trespassing on private property.

  Yet my surroundings were desolate. I heard no traffic from the town somewhere off behind me, no radios blaring, no children screaming in play. Not even a dog barking. But the scene was not always undisturbed by man or beast, evidently; I noticed that the road had been resurfaced since the last time I’d been here. It was a smooth, uncracked blackness like a river of hot flowing tar. It felt vaguely soft beneath my soles. It was very curious, considering the decay and disregard that permeated the factory complex. How much traffic down this path could warrant this effort? Those disused freight cars were streaked in rust. Soon they were left behind me. At least the wheels of Logan’s stroller spun smoothly and noiselessly across this new dark coating.

  On my left, running alongside this access road, a bed of gravel rose from the tall grass and underbrush to support train tracks. I knew that an offshoot of these tracks had once directed boxcars right into the factory complex, though those rails had long since been left to sprout weeds between their ties.

  I looked back over my shoulder. My smooth, comfortable pace along the road had taken me further than I had expected; I saw how distant those freight cars were, looking like a cluster of grazing cows. Facing ahead again, slowing my pace somewhat, I could see what I imagined must be the end of the access road in the distance. There appeared to be an open chain-link gate, with a sign affixed to it. I was already halfway to it. I was already farther down the road than I had ever ventured previously.

  “Whew...it’ll be dark soon, huh?” I said, dropping my eyes to the stroller. It was an excuse to go no further. And yet, lifting my gaze again, I said, “Just a little further, huh? Then we’ll turn back and go home. Okay?”

  But the road’s straightness and evenness impelled me on, as if I were a train with rails slotted into the grooves of its wheels, being pulled on and on mindlessly.

  On my right, now, I could see that a thin stream trickled between the dense trees. From what I could glimpse, it was thickly coated in a vivid green scum, and I imagined it was this that gave the air its new swampy stench. Here and there on the side of the road I saw the occasional heavily corroded mechanical device – whether chunks broken off from a vehicle or a factory machine I had no idea – littered like fragments dropped off some titanic robot that had trudged down this road long ago in search of a lonely place to die.

  It was indeed a chain-link gate ahead of me, I could tell clearly now. I couldn’t make out the words on the blistered metal sign attached to it. It appeared that long weeds had grown through the links. The gate was indeed open.

  As I glanced down at the quiet bundle in the stroller again, my eyes were drawn to something on the surface of the road. I stopped, let go of the stroller handles to bend over for a closer look. It was a frog that had been run over by a car. No, I realized, it had been pressed under the drum of the vehicle which had smoothed out the then-hot asphalt of this road. The frog had been stamped flat into the tar, and had since decayed into a desiccated mummy-like afterimage of its former self, spread-eagled there, like a fossil.

  “Poor guy, huh?” I said, giving the frog a backward look as I pushed the stroller on again. Killed in the very stuff that now preserved it, like a mammoth or giant sloth sunken in a tar bit.

  The swampy smell was worse. The sun was lowering behind the treetops, but in the dim woods I could still see that snaking green stream of sludge. I now noticed that the trees bordering the stream were entangled in dark vines. Was it some kind of ivy? As shoelace thin as the creepers were, they still managed to absolutely coat some of the trees, hiding their bark altogether. I drew
nearer to the edge of the road, peering more closely at the trees as I moved forward. The vines seemed to grow more profuse which each step I took. If they were ivy, they had withered and lost their leaves; the vines were a dark brown in color, twisty and tendrilled, without any sort of leaves at all. Soon, strands of it actually spanned the air from one tree to another, connecting them up in a huge web. One would need a machete to pass between some of those trunks.

  But it was not only the vines that grew so abundantly here. There were small honey-colored mushrooms thronged around the bases of these ensnared trees. Encircling them in a necklace, as if to strangle each tree at its base. And indeed, these trees that were choked in vines and girdled with mushrooms looked sick, or dead altogether.

  As strongly as the access road compelled me, lured me on, those vines repelled me. There was nothing that could spark my curiosity enough to make me step into that forest, and let those withered brown vines touch my flesh. I imagined them capturing me, too, in their suspended net.

  “Hm,” I grunted, gauging my nearness to that gate. Close as it had become (as if floating toward me while I walked in place on a treadmill), I still couldn’t make sense of its blistered letters, however big and bold they had once been. “I’m getting a headache,” I muttered. “We should be heading back, huh?”

  Something else on the surface of the road caused me to stop to inspect it. It was harder to miss than the fossilized frog had been. It was a large turtle, that had been horribly smashed under the wheel of a car or truck. I drew a little closer timidly. The poor thing had just eaten; what I had at first taken to be its intestines were actually several earthworms, pressed out of its belly when it was squashed.

  I straightened up, then, to look both ways along the access road. The turtle had been killed recently. So there was still traffic down this road. Well, there had to be, right? They had bothered resurfacing it. They...