But, he told himself, there comes a point when it does not matter whether what you see is real: you have no choice but to go toward it.
Even as he thought this, the door to Justle began to swing open and, swaying, he lost consciousness.
When he awoke, he was alone on a rickety metal cot. His throat still hurt, his eyes still wept, but the air here was a little better, breathable, or at least he thought so. He was, in any case, alive.
“Where am I?” he asked.
No one answered. He was alone in a small octagonal metal room whose interior walls had been burnished to a mirrorlike sheen. A flashlight stood on its end in the center of the octagon and its flashbeam made the walls glow madly around him. He stood and stumbled toward the flashlight and watched his warped reflections stumbling all about as well, a clamor of mimed motion. Except one of these warped selves did not move in the same fashion as the rest, but instead placed its finger to where its lips would have been had it had lips and made a muted, hushing noise. Yet when he tried to look straight at it, he could perceive nothing at all.
I’m going mad, he thought.
No, said a voice barely above a whisper from just behind him. Whatever madness you have, you brought with you.
He whirled about, but no one was there. In turning, he lost his balance and fell to his knees. There he remained until halfglimpsed and barely substantial hands lifted him again and coaxed him back onto the cot.
Hold still, said another whispered voice, one that, despite also being a whisper, he could recognize as different from the first. You prefer to live, don’t you?
A blur of movement out of the corner of his eye and the flashlight tipped and clattered over, and either went out or was switched off.
He could see something now, two indistinct figures, vaguely human, hazy as ash, just visible in the near-darkness. One approached him very slowly, as if walking underwater. He could see nothing of the features of either figure. It was as if smoke or static had been poured into roughly human forms and kept threatening to come asunder and billow away. One, though, was larger than the other, and the general shape of it, despite its vagueness, struck him as female, though ambiguously so.
Now it’s dark, it said. The voice seemed a little louder now, though only just.
Does that feel better? asked the other, the smaller one.
“Who are you?” asked my father.
We have a proposition for you, said the female, if female was the right word. Perhaps it had been once.
Would you like to live? asked the smaller.
“Live?”
It’s a simple question, said the smaller.
We can help you, said the larger. We can save you. We can take you to safety.
But, claimed the other, there’s a price.
They explained things to my father, whispering by turns in his ear. They were trapped there, in Justle—though they did not use that name—and they wished to leave. They had been there for a long time: months, maybe years. Within Justle they could survive and persist—though, as he could see, just barely. But, without help, they couldn’t depart.
We were once just like you, said the larger.
But now we are not like you at all, said the smaller.
This place has changed us.
If they were to leave, it would have to be with him. Or not so much with him as in him. They could make a place for themselves within his body, hollow a place out under his skin in which they could live.
A sort of pouch within your flesh, said the smaller. You will mother us.
But we will not do this without your permission, said the larger.
At least we prefer not to, the smaller said.
Yes, admitted the larger. That is what we prefer.
In either case, we will have to take charge of you, the smaller said.
“Take charge of me?”
Ever so briefly, claimed the larger. We will manage the body and keep it alive.
It was not lost on my father that she referred to it as the body rather than as your body.
“Why would I ever allow this?” he asked.
Why? Because of the alternative. Without us, you will die. And if you stay here much longer, you will become like us.
…
For some time, hours maybe, even days, my father held out. He was waiting for someone to come looking for him, someone to discover his abandoned glove and follow it to Justle, but nobody came.
No one will come, said the larger, as if reading his mind.
Still he waited. The world grew strange around him. He became desperately hungry and then that too faded. His tongue grew dry and stuck to his palate. In the near-darkness he watched the two figures come and go, moving slowly around Justle. Often they were beside him, observing him. Sometimes, though, they withdrew, and he glimpsed them standing near the wall, the head of the smaller inclined toward the head of the larger, as if paying obeisance.
They illuminated the upended flashlight again and Justle was again ablaze with light. The distorted images of my father’s own face all around him made him dizzy. And then the flashlight was extinguished. In the silent and sudden darkness the pair came very, very close.
You haven’t much time, the larger said. Soon you shall reach a point beyond which we cannot use you.
And then, soon after, you will be like us.
Will you invite us in? Before it is too late?
After a long hesitation, seeing no alternative, my father reluctantly assented.
The pain, my father told me, was tremendous, nearly unbearable. He must have already begun to become like them, for as they approached he could see them much better than when he had first arrived. First, the pair of them drew close together and then closer still and began, as he observed them, to melt into or meld with one another, the larger engulfing the smaller. The resultant mass looked not human but monstrous and fluid, the head of one rising up as if out of a dark tide only to be quickly swallowed again and replaced, momentarily, by the other. The form undulated more than ambulated toward him and then billowed down upon him and over his prone body. It began to insinuate its way in. It did this first through his nostrils and mouth, sliding in in a way that made him feel he was suffocating. Soon it also did so through his ears, creating a thrumming against the eardrums he could hardly bear, and through his eyes, working its way through the sclera and sending a torrent of broken images along the optic nerve. He cried out but it did not relent, and now he could feel it leeching its way into his very skin, penetrating each pore and pushing its way into an inner place that was too small for both it and him to occupy at the same time.
It was as if his every nerve was on fire at once, and even after the shadowy mass was fully within him the burning didn’t stop. It felt like the lining of his body had become terminally inflamed.
We lied to you, said a warbling voice within him that was half the larger’s and half the smaller’s. There is no pouch. Or, rather, the pouch shall be the whole of your body.
And then he felt his body stand. He could do nothing to prevent it. They were—or it was—in charge of the body now. Even though the body kept moving, my father was unaware of it. For he had fainted, though his body kept on.
After that, he offered me only scattered images. Perhaps my father’s drinking had caught up with him and this was the only way he could finish his story: The body lurching its way back to the path. The body trying and failing to replace the glove on its hand and so leaving it there in the road before stumbling on toward Polx.
The body did not make it far. It fell on the path and lay there, but the being or beings inside of my father did something to preserve it, to keep it alive. The body lay there for several days, my father drifting in and out of awareness until, suddenly, he awoke to find individuals in protective suits all around him, slapping his face, affixing a regulator over his nose and mouth, welcoming him back to the land of the living.
My father paused. I thought perhaps the story had reached its end. Or
that he would simply pass out and leave the story unfinished.
For a long moment he stared straight ahead, and then abruptly he turned and regarded me. Momentarily, he seemed confused as to who I was and what I was doing there. But then recognition warmed his eyes, and he looked away and continued.
“They did not release me. When I awoke, in a hospital bed in Polx, they were still with me, still in control of the body. Everything the body did, it did at their behest. Surprisingly, they seemed intent on continuing my life just as I had planned it. I watched myself finish my job in the recovery sector, then buy a place in a domed city, this very city in fact. And then I met your mother.”
He looked at me again, furtively, then looked away.
“Or rather, they met your mother. They courted her, seduced her, married her. It was not I who climbed into the conjugal bed with her, but they. It was not I who formed the beast with two backs with her, but they. Which I suppose would make it a beast with three backs. Or perhaps, if you count the body itself, four.”
I did not know at the time what he was talking about.
“In that coupling I felt them flow out of me and into her. Not, as I initially thought, to do to her what they had done to me, but because they saw it as a way back to being truly human again.”
He looked again at me.
“Can you not guess what happened?” he asked. “Can you not divine what I am going to say next?”
But I could not. I was, after all, just a boy.
“What went into the making of you is not something of me and something of your mother, no matter how much you might believe you resemble us,” he said. “Rather it is those two creatures that came from Justle and who saw your inception as an opportunity to become flesh again. I named you Justle so that I would not forget what you were.” He leaned very close to me. “I’ve thought many times of killing you,” he said in a low voice. “The only thing that stops me is my worry that were I to do so, it would let them out again.”
…
Now that I have come to what seems to be the end, I find myself compelled to go further, to tell not just what I set out to tell but everything.
There was, I will admit, one other evening when my father was drunk enough to tell me about Justle. A third time, just a few months after the second. When he started to talk, I made excuses and tried to retreat to my room. Sloppily, he grabbed my wrist, hard enough to make the bones ache.
“No, you don’t,” he said. “You need to hear this. You need to know what you are.”
And so, wincing, I was made to sit. Pretending like nothing was wrong as my father kept a tight hold of my wrist, I once again listened.
He told the story just as before, if slightly off: The same paired settlements (though this time he called them camps), the same journey with a broken regulator (though this time he called it a respirator), the same odd sign (though this time greenish rather than whitish). And, above all, that same arrival at that small, singleroomed structure he called Justle.
He had just reached the temporary safety of Justle itself and was beginning to detail the discovery of the two indistinct beings hiding among his reflections when a movement caught my eye. I turned. It was my mother, standing in the doorway, an expression on her face I had never seen before, listening.
For a time my father kept speaking, but finally he noticed her too. When he did, he stopped midsentence, releasing my wrist. No blood remained in his face. He looked afraid.
“Go to your room, Justle,” my mother said, not taking her eyes off my father.
“But—” I started.
“Go to your room,” she said, more forcefully this time, still not looking at me. “And stay there.”
And so I did. I would like to say that through the walls or door I went on to hear something that told me what my parents said or did to one another in my absence, but the truth is I heard nothing at all. The truth is, after a while, I fell asleep.
When I awoke, my father was nowhere to be found. The room he had been in had been cleaned. The walls had been wiped down and the floor polished so much you could see your blurred reflection in its surface. When I asked my mother about my father, she simply said, “He’s gone.” She still would not look at me. And when I pushed farther: “He won’t be coming back.” And then finally, when I foolishly inquired if his leaving had to do with the story he had told, she turned her gaze upon me and said, “What story? There was no story.”
Just for a moment, when she looked at me, angry eyes blazing, I had the feeling my father had been wrong, that he had misjudged. I had never believed the two beings my father feared, if they did actually exist, were inside of me. Indeed, I hardly believed his story at all. But perhaps, I thought, after seeing my mother like that, I could believe they had remained in her all this time, hidden there, imperceptible, cautious, until my father said too much to me and they decided it was time to take action. I could, I felt, see them staring out through my mother’s eyes.
But I knew better than to let on I thought this. I pretended there was nothing wrong with my mother. I pretended I did not miss my father. I pretended everything was fine.
I, Justle, am still pretending to this day.
The Devil’s Hand
In late January Carlton received a letter from his friend Alton Smythe asking if he would care to visit. He was, Smythe wrote, away from London and alone at his estate. His wife and daughter had left shortly after the new year to return to the city, taking both servants with them, leaving him to his own devices. At first, his letter claimed, he had welcomed the isolation, but now, several weeks later, he longed for companionship. So much so, he wrote, that I have walked several miles through muck to the village so as to post this letter.
It is of no use to write back, he continued, for I am not likely to see your letter for several weeks at least. I have no intention of repeating the trek to the miserable albeit picturesque village any time soon. Thus, any correspondence will simply await me there, unclaimed. If you choose to come, and I hope you shall so choose, simply come. I shall be glad to see you.
He included in the letter instructions for where to transfer trains, as well as a crude map that would, in theory, lead Carlton from the branch line stop through the village and, eventually, to Smythe’s estate.
…
The letter arrived at an auspicious moment when Carlton, like Smythe, was at loose ends. Upon receipt of it, he immediately packed his bag and boarded the evening train. Only once he was aboard and the train in motion did he learn from the conductor that the branch line train to which he intended to transfer only ran early in the day. He would have to spend the night twenty miles shy of Smythe’s estate, then take the branch line train the remainder of the way the following morning.
The compartment he had chosen to occupy when he left London was, except for Carlton himself, empty. Each time the train stopped, he expected to be joined by someone else, but though the platform was often crowded and he could hear the sounds of heavy footsteps as individuals boarded and jostled their way down the corridor, nobody opened the compartment door, let alone entered. In his haste to leave, Carlton had not thought to bring an annual or a newspaper, and so he sat, bored, staring out the window at the surrounding countryside until night fell fully and the window became a square of darkness. Eventually, almost without being aware of it, he fell asleep.
When he awoke the Pintsch lamp in the ceiling had come on. There was someone else in the compartment with him, a man still clad in his coat. The man had his legs crossed at the knees, his two bony hands resting clasped atop the higher knee. One of the man’s thumbs, Carlton noticed, was missing, sheared off neatly at the base. His face was thin and pale, of an almost waxen appearance, his mouth cruel. His eyes, too, struck Carlton as sharp and cruel. The man seemed to regard him keenly. As Carlton regained his senses, the man made no effort to look away.
Carlton looked away himself but, still feeling the man’s gaze upon him, cleared his throat. When he looked back,
he saw the man continued to inspect him, but now he was smiling. The thinness of the smile, Carlton reflected, made his mouth no less cruel.
“I awakened you,” the man stated, matter of fact. His voice was in direct contrast to his appearance, almost soothing.
Carlton demurred. He had not intended to fall asleep and, in any case, his stop would soon be here.
“What stop is yours?” the man asked. And when Carlton told him where he would transfer to the branch line, the man said, “What a coincidence. I step off there as well.”
For some reason this troubled Carlton—though, he wondered, why should it? After all, there were only so many stops the train had left to make, and surely several of the remaining passengers, like him, intended to transfer to the branch line.
“You’re transferring trains there?” Carlton asked.
The man shook his head. “And you?” he asked. “No other trains passing tonight, I’m afraid.”
“No,” said Carlton. “I was told.”
“What do you intend to do?” asked the man.
“To stay in the station,” said Carlton. “In the traveler’s room. One sleepless night won’t kill me.”
The man’s grin tightened. “Station?” he asked. “What station?”
Indeed, when Carlton gathered his bag and climbed down, he found the man had been correct. There was no station, only a stretch of weedy gravel. To one side of it was the track for the train from which he had just debarked, to the other the narrower-gauge track of the local. In the middle of the gravel stretch squatted a rusted wrought iron bench, a single guttering gas lamp beside it.
It was raining lightly. There was no roof over the bench, nor any cover nearby. There would be no spending the night here.
The other man had stopped near him. He possessed, so it seemed, no bags. Together they watched the train build steam and pull away.
“A pleasure to travel with you,” said the man. Tipping his hat slightly, he turned to leave.
It began to rain a little harder.
The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell Page 13