by Peter Straub
How much time had passed? Roland’s vision was blurred, and would not correct. His head throbbed painfully. It was dark and the air was somehow different. Maybe he was in a cave. He could just make out flickering firelight, and the busy movements of his captors. Roland couldn’t move. They held him to the ground, his arms outstretched.
They were like kids—not yet fully grown, voices unformed. He thought there were about a half dozen of them. He had no idea what was going on, he couldn’t understand anything. An unnatural silence alarmed him. Roland tried to speak to them, but they sat on his chest and legs, pinned his head in place, and stuffed foul rags in his mouth. Then he saw the dull glint of an axe blade as it began its downward descent to the spot where his left hand was firmly held. Same thing on the right a few seconds later, but by then Roland was already unconscious.
Searing pain revived him; that, and perhaps a lingering will to struggle and save his life. He was alone for the moment, but he could hear them—their squeaky murmurs, and a disturbing wet scraping noise.
Demented teenagers. Maybe some weird sect or cult. Or they could be a brain-stunted, inbred rural clan that preyed on anyone who was foolish enough to stray into their territory. How could this happen? Was the whole town in on it? What could they want? Perhaps in exploring and photographing Jorgenson’s Italian folly, he had somehow violated their sacred ground. But it seemed most likely that they were insane, pure and simple.
Roland still couldn’t move. His wrist-stumps were bandaged. The bastards had actually chopped his hands off. The realization nearly knocked him out again but Roland fought off total panic. He had to think clearly, or he was surely lost. The rest of his body from the neck down seemed to be wrapped in some kind of wire mesh. His mouth was still clogged with the hideous rags, and he had to breathe through his nose. He tried to lever his tongue to push the rags out, or to one side, so he could speak, but at that moment they came back for him.
They dragged him, and it became clear to Roland that some of the monstrous pain he felt was coming from where his two feet had been. They threw him down in a torch-lit clearing. They spread his legs, held his arms out, and began to smear some thick, gooey substance on him. Roland flipped and squirmed like a fish on the floor of a boat until they clubbed him again.
Fresh air, dusk light.
The same day? Couldn’t be. But overcast, the wind whipping loudly—and that choral sound Roland had heard his first night in town. They carried him out of the cave, and the wailing noise seemed to fill his brain. He was in the center of it, and it was unbearable.
Only his head was exposed—the rest of his body now stone. It came up to his neck in a rigid collar and forced his head back at a painful angle. Roland caught sight of them as they propped him in his place on the third rank of the statuary. They weren’t kids, they didn’t even look human—pinched little faces, stubby fingers, a manic bustle to their movements, and the insect jabber that was all but lost in the boiling wind.
Like caricature scientists, they turned him one way and then another, tilting, nudging, and adjusting. They finally yanked the rags out of his mouth. Roland tried to croak out a few words but his tongue was too dry. Then the final mystery was solved as his captors thrust a curious device into his mouth. He saw it for an instant—a wire cage that contained several loose wooden balls. They were of varying sizes, and Roland thought he saw grooves and holes cut in them. It fit so well that his tongue was pressed to the floor of his mouth. A couple of strands of rawhide were tied around his head, securing the device even more tightly.
A last corrective nudge, and then the wind took hold and the wooden balls danced and bounced. Another voice joined the choir. Satisfied, they went on to complete their work, covering the rest of his head with the sticky cement and then applying the exterior finish. Only his open mouth was left untouched.
Roland thought of insects nesting there. He pictured a warm mist billowing out on cool mornings as he rotted inside. And he wondered how long it would take to die. They must do repair work later, to keep the cages in place after the flesh disappeared. A strangely comforting thought in the giddy swirl of despair.
The wind came gusting down the glen. Empty arms raised, his anonymous face lifted to the unseeing sky, he sang.
Plot Twist
David J. Schow
On the morning of the fifth day, Donny announced that he’d figured it all out. It wasn’t the first time.
“Okay,” he said. “Millions of years ago, these aliens come to Earth and find all this slowly evolving microspodia. Maybe they’re, like, college students working on their thesis project. And they seed the planet with germs that eventually evolve into human society—our culture is literally a culture, right? Except that we’re not what was intended. It was an impure formula or something. And they come back after millennia, which is like summer vacation to them, and they see their science experiment has spoiled in the dish. We’re the worst thing that could have happened. We’ve blown their control baseline, their work is down the toilet, and they have to declare us a cull, flush the first experiment, and start over. But they take a look at us and decide, hey, maybe there’s something here worth saving. Something they can use to, you know, rescue their asses from flunking. So they take this teeny sample, like one cell, and decide to test it to see if it does anything interesting. And that’s why we’re here.”
Vira said, “That’s above and beyond your previous bullshit, and I think I’ve hit my patience ceiling.”
Zach didn’t say anything because he was staring forlornly at their remaining food supply—one energy bar, destined for a three-way split, one tin of Vienna sausage (eight count), and a pint of bottled water that had already been hit hard.
“I’m waiting for your brilliant explanation,” Donny said sourly. His real name was Demetrius, but he hated it. Vira’s real name was Ellen, but she’d legally changed it. Zach was born “Kevyn” same general deal.
“I’m out,” said Vira, tired of the game. “Tapped. Done. I give up.” She looked up at the reddening sunrise sky and shouted. “Hey! Hear me? I quit. Fuck you. If there’s aliens up there toying with us, then they can kiss my anal squint!”
Donny startled, as though he actually thought outer space men might materialize to punish them. At least that would have brought some sort of closure.
“Don’t yell,” said Zach, nailing her, still playing leader. “That’ll dry you up. Who got to the water while I was sleeping?”
Donny and Vira both denied it; the usual stalemate. Zach expected this, and let it slide because he already knew he’d stolen that bonus sip himself.
“Sun’s coming up,” said Donny unnecessarily. “The only constant seems to be this man-against-nature thing.”
“You said that yesterday, too, sexist asshole,” said Vira.
“Look around you,” said Zach, pointing to each extreme of the compass. “Desert. Road. Desert. More road. More desert. And so on. Do you see, for example, a crashed plane that we could rebuild into a cleverly composited escape vehicle? No. A glint on the horizon that would indicate a breath of civilization? No way. A social dynamic among us, two men and one woman, that will lead to some sort of revelation that can save us? Uhuh, negative.” He pointed again. “Road. Desert. Let’s get moving.”
“Why?” said Vira, watching her little patch of shade dwindle.
“Because when we moved the first time, and didn’t stay put, we found the food, didn’t we?”
“That’s the only reason?”
“We might find something else.”
She colored with anger, or perhaps it was just the odd, vividly tilted light of dawn. “So we can just keep going, keep doing this?”
“We last another day, we might figure something out.”
“Like the ‘why’?” Donny said. “As in ‘why us’?”
“No, all I meant was we might get back to normal, and we certainly won’t do that sitting on our butts and staying in one place waiting for the supplies to run out.�
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Vira snorted at the all-encompassing grandeur of the word “supplies” pertaining to their edibles, which did not even total to a snack.
“I want an answer,” said Donny. “I want to know why.”
“That’s your biggest problem, Don-O.” Zach extended his open hand to Vira, who rose tropistically, like a plant turning automatically to meet the light. “Come on, sweetie, let’s go.”
They turned their backs on the sun and began their march, in the same direction they’d been tracking since, well, forever.
Most of the fourth day had been wasted on equally stupid theories.
“I’ve got it,” Donny said, which caused Vira to roll her eyes. It was becoming her comedic double-take reaction to anything Donny proposed. Donny was an endlessly hopeful idiot.
“Okay, like, we’re characters in this movie, or a novel or something. And we can’t figure out where we are or how we got here, and shit keeps happening, and we keep on keeping on, but our memories and characters keep altering when we’re not looking. It’s because we’re fictional characters, right, except we don’t know we are. And the movie studio guys keep asking for changes, or the editors at the publishing house keep saying, ‘what’s their arc?’ or ‘how do they grow from their experience?’ And we don’t know because we were just made up by some writer, who has no idea we’re cognizant and suffering.”
“I wish there was a big, shiny-new toilet, right here in the middle of the scrub,” said Vira.
“Why?” said Donny, tired of performing his body functions in the wild.
“Because I don’t know what I’d do first,” said Vira. “Drink some water from the tank, or jam your head into the bowl and flush.”
“Children, children,” said Zach. “Come on. We hit a spot of luck yesterday, didn’t we? The food.”
“Yeah,” Donny chimed in. “Plot twist, see? Nobody’d ever expect that we’d just find food when we needed it. In stories, everything has to be explained; everything has to pay off.”
“Your definition of food and mine differ radically,” said Vira. “I want a quart of goddamn seltzer, and then a bacon cheeseburger and a goddamn fucking chocolate malt, with a goddamn fucking cherry, and fuck you and your latest fucking lame-ass, bullshit story.”
“Yeah, great, terrific,” said Donny. “Thanks for your boundlessly vast contribution to the resolution of our predicament. You’re not helping.”
“I’m the chaos factor,” said Vira. “I’m here precisely to fuck up all your neat little explanations.”
“And I’m the third wheel,” said Donny. “You guys will kill me first, because you’ve already got a, you know, relationship.”
“Yeah, that’ll get us far,” said Zach, trying for drollery and failing. It was just too hot to screw around.
They kept their bearings on the sun and tried not to deviate from the straight line inscribed on the sand by their passage. Yesterday’s footprints had blown away as soon as they were out of sight. The desert was harshly Saharan—dunes tessellated by wind, with vegetation so sporadic it appeared to be an afterthought, or really sub-par set dressing. They were amazed by the appearance of a paddle cactus, just one, and even more amazed when Zach demonstrated how it could provide drinkable moisture.
“Perfect example,” Donny said. “How did you know that?”
“I don’t know,” said Zach. “I’ve always known it.”
“Read it in a manual? See it on a nature documentary? Or maybe you came wired with that specific information for a reason.”
“There is no reason,” said Zach, trying to work up spit and failing at that, too. His throat was arid. His brain was frying. “I just knew it.”
“It doesn’t work,” Donny said, shaking his head, sniffing at denial. “There’s gotta be a reason.”
“Reason for what?!” Vira apparently had plenty of spit left. “We had an accident! You are so full of shit.”
“Maybe it wasn’t an accident,” said Donny. He was trying for an ominous tone, but neither Zach nor Vira cared to appreciate his dramatic sense.
By the middle of the third day, they were all sunburnt, peeling, and dehydrated. They resembled lost Foreign Legionnaires, dusted to a desert tan, with wildly white Lawrence of Arabia eyes, long sleeves and makeshift burnooses keeping the solar peril from most of their desperately thirsty flesh.
“If you mention God to me one more time, I’m going to knock a few of your teeth out, and you can drink your own blood,” warned Zach.
“My only point is that this strongly resembles some sort of biblical test,” said Donny, chastened. “This kind of stuff happens all the time in the Bible, the Koran, Taoist philosophy, native superstitions—they’re all moral parables. Guys are always undergoing extreme physical hardship, and at the end there’s a revelation. That’s what a vision quest is.”
“A vision quest is when you starve yourself until you see hallucinations,” said Vira. “We’ve been there and done that. I don’t feel particularly revelated.”
“We haven’t gone far enough, is all.”
“Then explain why we haven’t seen a smidge of traffic on this goddamn road since we started walking. We should have seen a thousand cars by now, all headed to and from Vegas. We should have passed a dozen convenience marts and gas stations with nice, air-conditioned restrooms. And all we’ve got since we lost sight of our own car, which was alone on the road, is hot, hot, more hot, and about a bazillion highway stripes, all cooking on this goddamn fucking roadway that leads to fucking nowhere!”
“Alternate dimension,” said Donny.
Zach actually stopped walking to crank around and peer at Donny with disgust. “What?”
“Alternate dimension, co-existing simultaneously with our own reality. We got knocked out of sync. And now we’re trapped in a place that’s sort of like where we were—the world we came from—except there’s nothing around, and nobody, and we’ve got to find a rift or convergence and wait for the planes to re-synchronize, and plop, we’re back to normal.”
“Do you want to strangle him, or should I?” said Vira.
“I liked the God explanation better,” said Zach. He was joking, but no one appreciated it just now.
“Aren’t we grown-ups?” said Vira. “Aren’t we rational adults? Can we please leave all that goddamn God shit and the fucking Bible and all that outmoded tripe and corrupt thinking behind in the twentieth century, where it belongs? Shit, it was useless and stupid a couple of whole centuries earlier than that—enslaving people, giving sheep a butcher to canonize. Giving morons false hope. Pie in the sky by and by when you die. It’s such exhausted, wheezy, rote crap.”
“Aren’t we operating on false hope?” said Donny.
“No, Donny,” said Zach. “We’re operating on the tightrope between slim, pathetic hope and none at all. Free your mind. You’re too strictured and trapped by your need to organize everything so it has a nice, neat ending—a little snap in the tail to make idiots go woooo. You want to know reasons, and there ain’t no reasons, and you want to know something real? I’ll tell you this one for free: Real freedom is the complete loss of hope.”
“That’s deep,” said Donny, not getting it.
Vira shielded her eyes and tried to see into the future. “Forget cars and stop-marts,” she said. “We haven’t seen any animals. Desert animals lie low in the daytime, but we haven’t seen any. Not a single bird. Not a vulture, even.”
“It’s not life, but it’s a living,” joked Zach.
“The sun is cooking me,” said Vira. “Pretty soon we’ll all be deep-fried to a golden-black.” She shielded her eyes to indict the glowering sphere above, which was slow-cooking them like a laggard comet. The sky was cloudless.
“If it is the sun,” said Donny.
Zach and Vira could not complain anymore. They merely stopped, turned in unison, and sighed at Donny, who would not stop. Donny, naturally, took this as a cue to elaborate.
“I mean, this east-to-west trajectory could be
just an assumption on our part. We could be walking north for all we really know. What if it’s not the sun? What if it’s just some errant fireball, messing with us?”
“Then we just spent another day walking in the wrong direction,” said Zach.
“What if it’s not a ‘day’?” said Donny. He dug his wristwatch out of his pocket. He’d stowed it yesterday when the heat had begun to brand his wrist with convection. Now he noticed, for the first time, that his watch had stopped.
“Five thirty-five,” he said. “Weird.”
Zach and Vira turned slowly (conserving energy), did not speak (conserving moisture), and glowered at Donny with an expression Donny had come to class as The Look. When people gave you The Look, they were awaiting a punch line they were sure they would dislike.
“It’s when the car shut down yesterday,” he said. “I remember because I made a mental note of it.”
“That’s it?” said Vira. “No dumb theory about how we’re all slip-slid into the spaces between ticks of the clock?”
“Donny, when was the last time you looked at your watch before yesterday? Isn’t it possible that your crappy watch just doesn’t work, and has been dead all this time, and you just thought it was 5:35 when you glanced at it yesterday?” Somehow, while Donny wasn’t looking, Zach had become the leader of their little expedition.
“You guys aren’t listening to me,” Donny said, feeling somewhat whipped. “The watch shut down the same time the car did.”
Vira was strapping on attitude, full-bore: “And that’s got to mean something, right? Spare us.”
What Donny spared them was the hurt reaction that had almost made it past his lips: I thought you guys were my friends. He just stared, blankly, as though channeling alien radio.
“Hey.” Zach had found something. Topic closed.
A black nylon loop was sticking out of the sand off the right shoulder of the road. When Zach pulled, he freed a small backpack that looked identical to the one Vira was already toting. They both waited, almost fatalistically, for Donny to make a point of this.