by Laird Barron
"You know," Fulcher said.
"I hate word games, Roy. They make me hostile."
"Ask Anselm."
"I'm asking you."
"It brought you to us—one from multitudes. You still question what our work is here?"
"It? If you mean the Imago Sequence, then yeah, I'm full of questions."
"Anselm will answer your questions in due course."
"Well, Roy, problem is, I'm kind of stupid. People usually need to repeat stuff."
Fulcher's expression grew rigid. "You don't want to see. Surprise—it's too late. The fictions you've invented, your false assumptions, your pretenses, will soon be blown apart. I doubt it will profit you in the least. You're a thug."
"Story of my life; nobody likes me. I guess you'd be willing to show me the big picture. Shoot me down with your intellectual superiority."
"Anselm will show you the cosmic picture, Mr. Cortez."
"Isn't it customary for you religious zealots to have pamphlets lying around? Betcha there's a printing press somewhere in this Taj Mahal. Surely you've got propaganda for the recruits? And beads? I like beads."
"No pamphlets, no recruits. This is Imago Colony. Religion doesn't apply."
"Oh, no? What's with all the faux Roman crucifixes in the back forty?"
"The crucifixes? Those are authentic. Anselm imported them."
I tried to wrap my mind around that concept. The implications eluded me. I said, "Bullshit. What the hell for?"
"The obvious—sport. Anselm has exotic tastes. He enjoys aspects of cultural antiquity."
"Yeah, so I hear. And he has a thing about bugs, I guess; sort of similar to his mentor. Seems to be a reliable pattern with lunatics. An imago is an insect, right?"
"It's symbolic."
"Oh. I thought the bug thing was cute."
"An imago is not any insect. The final instar of an insect, its supreme incarnation. Care for another beer?"
"I'm good." I gestured at the ping-pong tournament. "Weedy crowd, Roy. Somebody told me there were forty, fifty of you in this camp."
"Far less, these days. Attrition."
"Uh, huh."
"You've come during harvest season, Mr. Cortez. That's what we do in the cold months. The others are engaged, those who remain. Things will quicken in the spring. People seem to be more driven to enlightenment during sandal weather. Spiritualists, nature enthusiasts, software engineers on holiday with wives and kiddies. We get all kinds."
"Thornton is off to play plantation overseer, eh? I wonder what you kids harvest in these parts—poppies? Opium is Afghanistan's chief export—ask the Taliban what it paid for its military hardware, the light bills in its palaces. The climate around here is about goddamned ideal. You'd be millionaires. I've got a couple pals, line you right out for a piece of the pie."
Fulcher rubbed his dented brow, smiled. "What wonderful irony! We do love to trip. You have me there. Poppies, that's very funny. I almost miss those days. I stick with cigarettes anymore."
"Lay your gimmick on me."
"Evolution."
"You and everybody else."
"What do people want?" Fulcher raised his grimy hand to forestall my answer. "What do people truly want—what would induce a man to sell his soul?"
"To be healthy, wealthy and wise." I said with mild sarcasm. Mild because as I uttered the punch line to the children's rhyme, coldness began to unfold in my bones. The tumblers in my head were turning again.
"Bravo, Mr. Cortez. Power, wisdom, immortality." His expression altered. "We have found something that will afford us . . .longevity, at least. With longevity comes everything else."
"The Fountain of Youth?" In the deep mountain woods a mossy statue spurted black water. Congregations of hillbillies in coveralls bathed in its viscid pool. A bonfire, a forest of uncured pelts swaying. A piper. I shuddered. "Dancing girls, winning lotto tickets?"
"A catalyst. A mechanism that compresses aeons of future human evolution. Although future is a relative term."
"Ammon's photographs." It seemed obvious. Everything seemed patently obvious, except that the room was undulating and I couldn't figure out who was playing the flute. A panpipe, actually; high, thin, discordant. It pierced my brain.
Fulcher ignored the music. He flushed, warming to my edification. "The Imago Sequence is a trigger. If you've got the right genes you might already be a winner."
I rubbed my ear; the pipe raised unpleasant specters to mind, set them gibbering. The monstrous hominid opened its mouth wider, wider. "How does that shit work?"
"Take a picture of God, tack it on the wall and see who bows. Recognition is the key. It doesn't make a difference what you comprehend intellectually, only what stirs on a cellular level, what awakens when it recognizes the wellspring of creation."
"Don't tell me you believe the caveman is God."
"I said there's no caveman. Look deeper, friend. Reality lies beyond the surface. It's not the Devil in the details, it's God."
"Aha! You are a bunch of Christian cultists."
"We do not exist to worship an incomprehensible being. A being which assuredly lacks the means to appreciate slavish devotion."
"Seems pointless to have a god at all, when you put it like that."
"Do you supplicate plutonium? Do you sing hymns to uranium? We bask in the corona of an insensate majesty. In its sway we seek to lay the foundation blocks of a new city, a new civilization. We're pioneers. Our frontier is the grand wasteland between Alpha and Omega."
"Will you transform into a being of pure energy and migrate to Alpha Centauri?"
"Quite opposite. Successful animal organisms are enduring organisms. Enduring organisms are extremely basic, extremely efficient. Tarantulas. Scorpions. Reptiles. Flies."
"Don't forget cockroaches. They're going to inherit the earth." I laughed, began coughing. The room wobbled. "So Thornton is what—the messiah helping you become the best imago you can be?"
"Anselm is the Imago. We are maggots. We are provender."
"I get it. He does the transcending and you get the slops."
"It is good to have a purpose in life. To be an integral part of the great and terrible cycle." Fulcher shook his head. "As I serve him, he served Ammon and Ammon served the one before him down through time gone to dust. 'By sating the image of the Power they fulfill their fleshly contract. By suckling the teat of godliness the worthy shall earn their reward.' Thus it is written in a book much more venerable than the Bible. For we who survive to remake ourselves in the image of the Power, all risks are acceptable."
"Reverend Jones rides again! Pass the grape Kool-Aid!"
"Hysterical, much?"
"Naw, just lately." I took a breath. "I wonder though, what does a guy do after he reaches the top of the ol' ladder? Live in a cave and compose epic poetry? Answer riddles? Pick up a sword and lay waste to Rome?"
"Caligula was one of us, actually."
I didn't know what to say to that. I plowed ahead. "Well?"
"Basic organisms require basic pleasures."
"Basic pleasures?" The chilly sensation linked hands with vertigo and did a Scottish jig. I was as a figurine in that enormous room.
"Subsistence and copulation. That's what the good life boils down to, my friend. Eating and fucking. Whoever you want, whatever you want, whenever you want."
The mouth opening, opening—
"Power to the people." I was slurring. Why was I slurring?
"Ready to go?" Fulcher rose, still smiling through his matted beard. We walked through the tall archway. He lightly gripped my elbow to steady me. One beer and I was drunk as a sailor on the third day of shore leave. The corridor expanded in the best Escher fashion, telescoping into infinite shadow. There were ragged tapestries at intervals, disfigured statues, a well-trammeled carpet with astrological designs. The corridor branched and branched again at grand arches marred by ages of smoke. At one fork, a kerosene lamp swung on a sooty chain. Behind a massive iron door the piping shri
lled, died, shrilled. Hoarse screams of the primordial sex act, exhausted sobs, laughter and applause. Mrs. Chin's photograph haunted me.
"The gallery," Fulcher said.
I recognized the musk upon him, finally. For a horrible moment I thought we would go through that door. We continued down the other hall.
Fulcher brought me to a dingy chamber lit by a single dirty bulb in an overhead cage. The room was windowless and bare except for a large chair made of wood and iron. The chair had arm straps and leg shackles; an artifact from the Spanish Inquisition. It was not difficult to picture the fallen bishops, the heretical nobles who had shrieked in its embrace.
"Please, make yourself comfortable." Fulcher helped me along with a shove.
I slumped in the strange chair, my head heavy as a wrecking ball, and watched as he produced a nasty looking bowie knife and expertly sliced off my clothes. When he encountered the revolver he emptied the cylinder, slid the weapon into his waistband without comment. He cinched my arms and legs; his fingers glowed, dragging tracers as they adjusted buckles and straps. Seemingly he had grown extra arms. I could only gawk at this phantasm; I felt quite docile. "Wow, Roy. What was in my beer? I feel terrific."
"One should hope. You ingested several hundred milligrams of synthetic mescaline—enough to launch a rhinoceros into orbit."
"Party foul, and on the first date too. I thought you didn't do dope anymore."
"I dabble in the manufacturing end of the spectrum. Frankly, all that metaphysical mumbo-jumbo about hallucinogens affecting perception in a meaningful way is wishful thinking. Poor Huxley." Fulcher stepped back, surveyed his handiwork while rolling a cigarette. The yellow flare of his lighter painted his face, made him a devil. "Oh, except for you. You're special. You've seen Alpha and Beta. As my pappy would say, you've got the taint, boy." He blurred around the edges. With each inhalation the cherry of his cigarette brightened, became Jupiter's red sore.
I noticed the walls were metallic—whorls whorled, pits and pocks formed. Condensation trickled. Smoke made arabesques and demons. The walls were a tapestry from a palace in Hell.
The panpipe started wheedling again and Thornton entered the room on cue. He pushed a rickety hospital tray with a domed cover. The cover was scalloped, silver finish flaking. A maroon handprint smeared its curve.
"This is a bad sign," I said.
Thornton was efficient. He produced an electric razor and shaved a portion of my head to stubble, dug a thumb under my carotid artery and traced veins in my skull with a felt-tip pen. He tweaked my nose in a fatherly manner, stripped off his coat and rolled his sleeves to the elbows. His skin gleamed like coral, cast faint reflections upon the walls and ceiling. Shoals of phantom fish scattered above, regrouped and swam into an abyss; a superhighway and its endless traffic looped beneath my feet; it rippled and collapsed into a trench of unimaginable depths.
I watched him remove a headpiece from the tray—a clumsy framework of clamps and screws; a dunce cap with a collar. Parts had never been cleaned. I wanted to scream when he fitted it over my head and neck, locked it in place with a screwdriver. I sighed.
Fulcher stubbed his cigarette, produced a palm-sized digital camera and aimed it at me. He gave Thornton a thumbs-up.
Thornton selected a scalpel from the instruments on the tray, weighed it in his hand. "Teddy was a friend—I would never use him as provender, but neither could I set him on the path to Olympus. There's limited room in the boat, you see. Weak, genetically flawed, but a jolly nice fellow. A gentleman. Imagine my disappointment when he showed up on my doorstep last fall. Not only had the old goat bought Parallax Alpha, he'd viewed Beta as well. He demanded to see Imago. As if I could simply snap my fingers and show him. Wouldn't listen to reason, wouldn't go home and fall to pieces quietly like a good boy. So I enlightened him. It was out of my hands after that. Now, we come to you." He sliced my forehead, peeled back a flap of skin. Fulcher taped it down.
"What?" I said. "What?"
Thornton raised a circular saw with a greasy wooden handle. He attached it to a socket in my headpiece. "Trephination. An ancient method to open the so-called Third Eye. Fairly crude; Ammon taught me how and a Polynesian tribe showed him—he wasn't a surgeon either. He performed his own in a Bangkok opium den with a serrated knife and a corkscrew while a stoned whore held a mirror. Fortunately, medical expertise is not a requisite in this procedure."
The dent in Fulcher's brow drew my gaze. I sighed again, saddened by wisdom acquired too late in the day.
Thornton patted me kindly. His touch lingered as a caress. "Don't fret, it's not a lobotomy. You wished to behold Imago, this is the way. What an extraordinary specimen you are, Marvin, my boy. Your transformation will be a most satisfying conquest as I have not savored in years. I am sure to delay your reintegration for the span of many delightful hours. I will have compensation for your temerity."
"Mr. Thornton," I gasped; trembled with the effort of rolling my eye to meet his. "Mrs. Chin said the glacier is coming. I dream it every night; flies buzzing in my brain. It's killing me. That's why I came."
Thornton nodded. "Of course. I've seen it a thousand times. Everyone who has crawled into my lair wanted to satisfy one desire or another. What will satisfy you, O juicy morsel? To hear, to know?" He yawned. "Would you be happy to learn there is but one God and that all things come from Him? Existence is infinitely simple, Marvin—cells within cells, dreams within dreams, from the molten Fingertip of God Almighty, to the antenna of a roach, on this frequency and each of a billion after. Thus it goes until the circuit completes its ambit of the core, a protean-reality where dwells an intellect of surpassing might, yet impotent, bound as it is in the well of its own gravity. Cognition does not flourish in that limitless quagmire, the cosmic repository of information. The lightning of Heaven is reduced to torpid impulses that spiral outward, seeking gratification by osmosis. And by proxy. We are bags of nerves and electrolytes, fragile and weak and we decompose so quickly. Which is the purpose, the very cunning design. Our experiences are readily digested to serve the biological imperative of a blind, vast sponge. Does it please you? Do you require more?"
A spike glinted within the ring of saw-teeth. Thornton casually pressed this spike into my skull, seated it with a few taps of a rubber mallet. He put his lips next to my ear. His breath reeked copper. "The prophets proclaim the end is near. I'll whisper to you something they don't know—the world ended this morning as you were sleeping, half-frozen on the mountainside. It ended aeons before your father squirted his genetic material into your mother. It will end tomorrow as it ends every day, same time, same station." He started cranking.
Listening to the rhythmic burr of metal on bone I was thankful the mescaline had soldered my nerve endings. Thornton divided and divided again until he crowded the room. Pith helmets, top hats, arctic coats, khakis, corporate suits, each double dressed for a singular occasion, each one animated by separate experience, but all of them smiling with tremendous pleasure as they turned the handle, turned the handle, turned the handle. Their faces sloughed, dough swelling and splitting. Beneath was something raw, and moist, and dark.
I glimpsed the face of the future and failed to comprehend its shape. Blood poured into my eyes. The panpipe went mad.
8.
The world ends every day.
Picture me walking in a rock garden under the dipping branches of cherry blossom trees. I love stones and there are heavy examples scattered across the garden; olive-bearded, embedded in the tough sod. God's voice echoes as through a gigantic gramophone horn, but softly from the lead plate of sky, and not God, it's Thornton guiding the progression, driving an auger into my skull while the music plays. Push it aside, keep moving toward a mound in the distance . . . .
No Thornton, auger, no music; only God, the garden, and I. Where is God? Everywhere, but especially in the earth, the dark, warm earth that opens as a cave mouth in the side of a hill. God calls from the hill, in voices of grinding rock and gurgling
water.
I walk toward the cave. Sleet falls, captured betwixt burning and freezing precisely as I am caught. Nor is the sleet truly sleet. A swirl of images falling, million-million shards fractured from a vast hoary mirror. There am I, and I and I a million-million times, broken, melting . . . .
I walk through God's rock garden, trampling incarnations of myself . . . .
Watery images flickered on the wall. A home movie with the volume lowered. Choppy because the cameraman kept adjusting to peer over the shoulder of a tall figure who attended a third person in the awful chair—my chair. The victim was not I; it was a mirror casting a false reflection. And it wasn't a movie in the strictest sense; I detected no camera, nor aperture to project the film. More hallucinations then. More something.
Teddy's face, trapped in the conical helm; his feet scuffed and rattled the shackles. Thornton blocked the view, elbow pumping with the practiced ease of a farmer's wife churning butter. Muffled laughter, walnuts being cracked. The image went dark, but the dim sounds persisted.
Claustrophobia gagged me. I was still strapped in the chair, the helm fixed to my head. There was a hole in my head. My right eye was crusted and blind. I was shuddering with chills. How much time had passed? Where had Fulcher and Thornton gone? Had they shown me Imago as promised? My memories balked.
As my faculties reengaged, my fear swelled. They had shredded my clothes, confiscated my belongings, tortured me. They would kill me. That was scarcely my fear. I dreaded what else would happen first.
The wall brightened with new images. Sperm wriggled, hungry and fast. A wasp made love to a tarantula, thrusting, thrusting with its stinger. Mastiffs flung themselves upon a threshing stag, dangled from its antlers like ornaments. Fire ants swarmed over a gourd half-buried in desert earth—
Fulcher drifted through the door, Clint at his heel. I remained limp when Fulcher scrutinized me briefly; he flashed a penlight in my good eye, checked my pulse. He murmured to his partner, and began unbuckling my straps. Clint hung back, perhaps to guard against a revival of my aggressive philosophy. Even so, he appeared bored, distracted.