The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

by Brian Evenson

  My brother-in-law was not at his desk. “Has he perhaps taken a very late lunch?” I wondered aloud. One of his colleagues was looking at me with a certain amount of what I interpreted to be anxiety. I asked him if he knew where my brother-in-law was.

  “Morgue,” he said, and turned away, a look of disgust creasing his face.

  And so I thanked him and made my way to the morgue.

  He had a body laid out on the table. It looked fresh, but perhaps it was not all that fresh and had merely been kept cold in a refrigerated drawer. It was very pale, no doubt exsanguinated. He had cut open the breastbone and spread the ribs. He appeared to be removing and examining the organs one by one, occasionally speaking into a portable tape recorder. He was wearing a mask and gloves, a smock. After a few moments he noticed me out of the corner of his eye.

  “You can’t be in here, miss,” he said. And then, “Oh, it’s you, Peter.” And then, “Is that Helen’s dress?”

  “Hello, Magnus,” I said, and tugged the trench coat closed again.

  “Hello,” he said warily.

  “It’s nice to see you,” I said.

  “It’s nice to see you too,” he claimed, but he sounded less than certain of this. “You look awful. What’s wrong with you?”

  “That’s what I came to see you about,” I said. “I need a doctor’s note.”

  “A doctor’s note?”

  “Saying I’m ill. To give to the Corporation. Otherwise, I’ll be terminated.”

  “You want me to recommend a doctor?”

  “No,” I said patiently. “I want you to write the note for me.”

  “I’m not that kind of doctor. I only deal with corpses.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’re a medical professional. They’ll accept a note from you.”

  He stripped off his gloves and deposited them in a bin. He kept his mask and smock on. He came closer. His brow furrowed.

  “What’s the matter with your stomach?” he asked. He reached out to open my trench coat, then thought better of it. Instead he went over to the dispenser and took out a new set of nitrile gloves, wriggled them on. Only then did he coax my hands away and pull the trench coat open.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  When he pushed against my belly, I groaned. I had to grab hold of a table to keep from collapsing.

  “You’ve got to get to the hospital, Peter,” he said. “Right away.”

  “It’ll go away,” I said. “I’m just going through a bad patch.” Even as I said this I realized I mostly didn’t believe it, but something compelled me to say it anyway.

  “Remember what happened to Helen,” he said. “You need to go to the hospital. I’ll call an ambulance.”

  “I can make it,” I said. “I’ll walk there.”

  He looked at me a long moment, then shook his head. “No,” he said.

  “No?”

  “You’ll die on the way. Come on. I’ll drive you. We’re going now.”

  He turned and picked up his tape recorder, slipping it into the pocket of his smock. While he was turned, I pocketed the scalpel he had been using. You never know when you are going to need a good scalpel, a part of my mind thought. The rest of my mind was puzzled as to what I was doing stealing a scalpel, though not sufficiently to stop myself from doing it.

  He wore his mask and gloves as he drove. He kept glancing over at me nervously. The funny thing was that on the way to the hospital, I realized I didn’t remember what had happened to my wife, to Helen. It was at that moment that I began to suspect my mind was not entirely my own. I knew she was dead, but the specifics of her death had grown vague. It was as if there was a curtain in my mind, gray and fibrous, and behind it were things I was not allowed to remember. What else was to be found behind it?

  “You should have gone to the hospital days ago,” my brother-inlaw was saying. “Lord knows how advanced you are.”

  “Like Helen did,” I said, trying to get some information from him.

  “Like Helen should have,” he said. “It’s the same damned thing all over again.”

  “It was terrible what happened to Helen,” I claimed.

  “Yes,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road. “Terrible. But you look even worse.”

  When we pulled up to the emergency entrance, my brother-in-law said, “Stay here. I’ll go get help. Don’t move.”

  “All right,” I said.

  He ran inside. Then he ran back out and removed the key from the ignition, and ran back in again.

  You should leave, a part of my mind told me. I have since come to understand that it was not part of my mind at all, but something quite different. You can’t stay here.

  I need to stay here, I told myself. My brother-in-law told me to stay here. He’s getting me help. But even as I thought this, I felt my body getting out of the car. It was like I was watching it, riding in a little chamber behind the eyes as it moved, jerky and swaying, across the drive and over the curb and through a stretch of ground strewn with woodchips, finally pushing its way into the bushes before collapsing there. Someone was groaning. With surprise, I realized it was me.

  From where I was, I could see Magnus’s car. After a moment two men wearing protective suits came out of the hospital, my brotherin-law following them. They stopped at the open door of the car, looked around.

  “He can’t have gotten far,” my brother-in-law said, and they began to search for me.

  Quickly, my mind that was not my mind said, you don’t have much time.

  …

  I did not know what this meant. But as the men in protective suits ran to the far end of the drive searching for me, my hand fumbled in my pocket until it closed on the scalpel. In a moment I had cut open the dress over my belly. I could see my brother-in-law’s legs; they weren’t far from me. He would find me soon. And then I felt a prickling and looked down to see my hand push the scalpel into my belly and draw the blade quickly down.

  There was a kind of whoosh of fetid air and an uprush of yellow fluid. The smell was awful, as of something dead. There was very little blood, but yes, there was some blood too. There was little pain, or rather what pain there was seemed to be muffled, as if hidden behind the gray curtain and beating its wings against it.

  I reached in and let my fingers travel over the slick dampness within myself. I did not know what I was looking for or why I was doing it. After a moment, something slid through my fingers and wrapped around my wrist. I tried to withdraw my hand but could not. I tugged hard, then harder still, until, with a sudden pop, it came free.

  Pain came roaring over me and I cried out. Suddenly the gray curtain parted and I remembered how my wife had died of the same bloating, and how in the emergency room, short staffed, they had needed me to immobilize her hands as, with an insanely long needle, they had injected her belly, or rather the thing within her belly, with poison. But since the thing was attached to her spine, the poison took her along with it. And in her struggle to break away as I held her, she had managed to bite me and had broken the skin.

  Around my hand was something that seemed like a lamprey, slick and dark, strangely ridged along its spine.

  “Jesus,” said my brother-in-law.

  The thing released my hand and flowed quickly toward him and up his boot. He cried out and shook it off. This time it flowed instead the other way, away from him, wriggling into the bushes. He followed it, stomping, trying to crush it. I was in so much pain that all I could do was lie there and wait to die. The two men in protective suits suddenly appeared, peering down at me. Somewhere out of sight my brother-in-law was screaming, screaming. I passed out.

  When I came to days later, I was not the same person. I was in an isolation chamber, lying in a hospital bed. I could not move my legs. A nurse was there, beside me. At least I assume it was a nurse; she was in a protective suit with a mirrored faceplate. In it, I could see reflected an image of an emaciated man on the verge of death. It took me some time to realize this was me.
>
  The person in the suit could have been a doctor, I suppose. To be honest, I’m not even sure if the suit contained a man or a woman.

  “How are you feeling?” a voice asked. It came from a box on the neck of the suit and was electronically processed, flat.

  “I …,” I said. “Am I going to be okay?”

  “No,” said the box. “You are going to die. We would like permission to study you, both before and after your death.”

  “Study me?”

  “We want to understand what happened to you. So we can keep it from happening to other people.”

  “I … Where’s Magnus? My brother-in-law? Did he kill it?”

  “He killed it, but not in time.”

  “Not in time for what?”

  Instead of answering, the faceless figure pressed a button on the side of my bed. Slowly the head of the bed lifted until I was sitting upright. At that height, I could see through the window into the isolation chamber next to mine. There was a bed in it, and in this bed was my brother-in-law. His belly was swollen, though not to the extent mine had been. A respirator was strapped over his face.

  “Will he die too?” I asked.

  “We are seeing what we can do,” the box on the neck of the suit said. “We might be able to save him. We have refined our procedure since your wife underwent it.”

  I leaned back. I closed my eyes.

  “Do we have your permission to study you?” asked the box.

  “No,” I said.

  I opened my eyes. The suited figure remained motionless. I did not, I realized, have any idea who was in it at all.

  “To clarify,” said the box, “technically we do not need your permission. We ask only as a courtesy.”

  I chose not to respond. After a time, the being in the protective suit left and entered an adjacent decontamination chamber. Later, I saw both a doctor and a nurse on the outside of the wall, looking in through the glass at me and my brother-in-law. I do not know which one of them, if either, had been in the suit.

  I do not know how much time I have left. I am weak, and the way the creature was separated from my spine left me paralyzed from the waist down. My belly, now flat and crisscrossed with stitches, feels empty. My stomach no longer functions as a stomach, and I take my nourishment by drip. They will study me whether I want them to or not.

  All I can do is elevate the head of my bed slightly and sit there, waiting, looking through the glass at my brother-in-law. Despite the distance I can see his belly roiling. It swells bigger every day. At first, from what the box on the neck of the suit said, I thought they had plans to try to remove the creature, but I have come to believe that their plans have changed. They are more interested in studying it, in seeing what happens once the creature is allowed to mature. There are individuals in protective suits with Magnus day and night now, two at a time, monitoring him, measuring him. Sometimes he struggles or resists, but so far the straps have held him in place.

  That could be me, I sometimes think. I know the creature convinced me not to go to the hospital for its own purposes, but, still, had I gone, what good would it have done? I would have spent the rest of my brief life in isolation under bright lights as a group of individuals in protective suits watched my creature kill me.

  Soon, it will burst out of its own accord. These suits think they have the situation under control, but I know better. It was part of me for long enough that I can still sense it, its impulses, behind the tattered gray curtain within my mind. From this, I know that we have seen nothing yet. The suits have never seen one that is fullgrown, one that leaves the host not prematurely out of fear but because, simply, it is ready to unfurl.

  I watch. I wait. When it finally happens, the creature opening and spreading redly in the window before me like a movie on a screen, the suits disposed of quickly one by one, I will not look away.

  Hospice

  In late July, suddenly and without warning, Buhl found himself incapable of drawing a breath. He crawled from his study to the head of the stairs, and there he beat on the wall, trying to signal his girlfriend. By the time she arrived, he had lost consciousness and had tumbled to the foot of the stairs.

  He awoke sore, confused. Something had been strapped over his face to help him breathe. He couldn’t swallow. His girlfriend was speaking to a woman in white who it took him much longer than it should have to realize was a nurse.

  He tried to speak, but nothing came out. They didn’t notice him. It still hurt to breathe.

  The nurse explained to his girlfriend that they would have to make a hole through his ribs and force a tube in. It would be painful, she told her, probably the worst pain Buhl had ever felt. Buhl, she told her, placing a hand on her shoulder, needed to be told this.

  His girlfriend nodded as if she understood, and then the nurse left.

  …

  Buhl closed his eyes, pretended to sleep. He could hear his girlfriend breathing beside him. For a while he just listened to that. Then he heard her step away from the bed, dial her phone, and speak in a hushed voice.

  At first he thought she was speaking to his parents, telling them what had happened. But, though he couldn’t quite hear the words, he heard in her tone, in her cadence, a different kind of intimacy. He opened his eyes and stared at her. When she realized she was being observed, the look that came over her face convinced him she had been talking to a lover.

  When he told the story later, he often claimed this was the last time he saw his girlfriend. This was false—though it was true that after that he could no longer think of her as his girlfriend. He said nothing about the phone call. He had no interest in knowing who her lover was. He only wanted her to leave him alone.

  And yet she kept coming, day after day, despite being clearly uncomfortable being there. She felt perhaps some obligation, or simply was afraid of being judged by others: his nurse, say. He watched her, tried to read her, waited for her to say something. In another act of betrayal, she had said nothing about the tube that would be thrust through his ribs, how painful it would be, and he had done his level best not to let on that he had some inkling, that he’d heard anything. But yes, it turned out to be as painful as the nurse had promised his girlfriend it would be. The way his girlfriend watched him through the procedure, the careful, unblinking attention she paid to his pain, made him very nervous indeed.

  Look who’s here, the nurse would say. Look who’s come to visit. And then his girlfriend would appear, pretending to be happy to see him until the nurse left the room.

  …

  Why was she torturing him? Why wouldn’t she go? And why couldn’t he say anything?

  If he had the strength, he began to feel, he would strangle her.

  In a way, he told himself, thinking again of how she’d looked at him, it could be called self-defense.

  Do you need anything? the nurse asked, late at night. Can I bring you anything?

  He shook his head. Beneath the sheets he tensed his hands into fists and released them, tensed and released them, building his strength, thinking of the woman still pretending to be his girlfriend the whole time.

  Soon, he told himself. It wouldn’t be long now.

  The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

  It began with Hekla’s sister, who had always been, so she liked to style herself, a seeker. There was a workshop she was dying to attend, with a guru of sorts, concerning attunement. But it was taking place some distance away, far outside the city. Would Hekla accompany her? It was a long way to go, and she didn’t want to make the drive alone.

  “Not really my thing,” said Hekla.

  “I’ll pay your way,” said her sister. “You’ll share my room and I’ll cover the workshop fee. It’s in a place called Verglas lodge, out in the middle of nowhere: birds, cows, trees, probably. Come on, it’ll be fun.” Initially Hekla resisted. She didn’t have a believing bone in her body. But when her sister continued to pester her, she began to think, Why not? It would be a vacation, a chance to get out
of the city. The workshop would do nothing for her—none of the events her sister convinced her to attend ever did—but she’d tune it out, just as she always did, and enjoy spending time with her sister.

  When the day came and she arrived at her sister’s place with her bag, she found her hunched over the toilet, vomiting. “I can’t go,” her sister said between bouts. “Too sick. Something I ate.”

  “We’ll skip it then,” said Hekla. “Or go late.”

  Her sister groaned. “We can’t go late. It isn’t done. But you go.”

  “I’d rather skip. I was only going for you.”

  “It’s nonrefundable,” said her exhausted sister. “Take my car. I need you to go so I won’t feel like I lost all my money.”

  Hekla, as much to avoid seeing her sister vomit again as anything else, reluctantly assented.

  She arrived at Verglas lodge quite late, hours after the other participants. She had no excuse. Her sister’s car had not broken down, nor had she been unavoidably detained. It was simply that, outside the confines of the city for the first time in a decade, she had allowed herself to meander. She had stopped in a gravel pull-out beside a river and watched the eddy and flow of the water below, finally picking her way down the slope. She waded in up to her knees, and then, instead of climbing back straightaway, wandered along the bank. Only once she saw the sun setting did she realize how much time she had lost and how far she still had to go.

  She arrived at an hour that, in the city, would have been considered merely uncomfortably late, still within the range of acceptability. Apparently, country etiquette was different. The chest-high gate at the bottom of the property was chained closed.

  She parked the car on the road’s shoulder, heaved her bag over the gate, then clambered over as well. The gravel of the drive was coarse enough that her bag’s wheels wouldn’t turn. She was forced to carry it.

  She followed the road up through the trees until it opened into a weedy parking area, Verglas lodge looming above it. Tired from lugging the bag, she set it down and stretched, taking a moment to catch her breath. Above, the lights of Verglas lodge, both inside and out, had been extinguished.