What the Hell Did I Just Read

by David Wong

  Marconi asked everyone if we wanted a bottle of water, John and I declined, Amy said yes, as she always does. She must just like getting free stuff. When he returned and handed her the bottle, he nodded toward the penis figurine and said, “I thought you’d like that one. It’s the Egyptian god Min, popular in the fourth century B.C., the god of fertility. It is believed that during the coronation of a new Pharaoh, he would be required to masturbate in front of the crowd, to demonstrate that he himself possessed the fertility powers of Min. If you have watched a State of the Union address, you will find that the ritual has not changed much.”

  He took a seat behind his desk.

  He said, “It appears social media rumors have coalesced around the idea of a white winged creature, snatching the town’s children and building a great nest of their bones in one of this region’s many abandoned buildings.”

  I said, “Yeah, we may have accidentally started that rumor. You have to admit that’s way more straightforward than the truth.”

  “There is no element of truth to it, as far as you know?”

  “I … don’t think so? Shit, I don’t know. I have no idea what’s happening anymore.”

  “Does such a creature exist? My team said if the YouTube video is a fake, it is an excellent one.”

  John said, “It exists, we’ve seen it up close. Very close. Don’t think it eats children though.”

  I said, “Not much meat on them.”

  “Perhaps the subject of another episode, then. Is the situation the same as when we last spoke? Two larvae loose, ten set to arrive at any moment?”

  I said, “As far as we know. And Amy objects to killing them because they look like children.”

  Amy stared down Marconi and said, “Could you shoot a child in the face because somebody else was insisting it was really a monster?”

  Marconi put on a pair of wire frame reading glasses and said, “You are living in a cruel world, Ms. Sullivan. You see that oak tree, by the parking lot? That tree is a murderer, it would commit genocide if it could. Those leaves serve two purposes—to collect sunlight to nourish the tree, and to block sunlight from anything below it. Its height is a result of competition—growing taller than the plants next to it, getting between them and the sun. Starving them out. When you stroll through a tranquil forest, you are actually walking through a battlefield—it’s just that the attacks and counterattacks occur too slowly and quietly for you to perceive their ruthlessness. Do you enjoy the smell of fresh cut grass? What you are smelling is a chemical panic signal, released by each blade in the moment its head was severed. That is the nature of the universe in which we live. Thus, if another species has designs on mankind, the choice has been made for us.”

  I said, “Exactly.”

  Marconi said, “However, it is very easy to fall into the fallacy held by every violent zealot and corrupt policeman in the world, the idea that we are always faced with only two options—fierce violence and cowardly inaction. Real life provides us with a vast array of nuanced choices. As for me, I try to hold to one central rule, in all circumstances—do not act out of ignorance.”

  I said, “Well, I’d never get out of bed.”

  “With that in mind,” said Marconi, “we need a reliable method for seeing through the worker swarm’s camouflage, one that does not require the observer to ingest any extraordinarily dangerous substances. I have a method I’d like to test, but I need a specimen.”

  I said, “Is it like that questionnaire they used on the humanoid robots in Blade Runner?”

  Amy said, “The Voight-Kampff.”

  “I’ve got that whole Rutger Hauer speech memorized, if that will help. As far as a specimen, I guess you could try to bring in the Knoll girl, if the parents will cooperate.”

  Marconi shrugged, making a show of being casual. “Of course. But if you do not mind, I would like to test it now, just to get a general feel for the process. With those of us in the room. Get some control results down before diving in with an actual specimen. There will be no battery of confusing questions, just some cameras and an audience of some friends working off-site.”

  None of us moved. We all just looked at Marconi, in silence.

  He said, “It won’t take but a few minutes.”

  I turned to John and said, “Marconi thinks we’re doppelgangers.”

  Amy, looking the most nervous of the three of us, said, “This is part of the test, by the way. Seeing if we’re willing to do it.”

  Marconi said, “That should actually put you at ease. If you were not human, there would be a substantial risk of you becoming violent at the mere suggestion of a test. And, as you can see, I have taken no unusual precautions for such an eventuality.”

  Yet already, there has been too much hesitation.

  John said, “All right, but if we do this, we do it right. I don’t want some bullshit like Kurt Russell pulled in The Thing where we’re all tied up in the same room with somebody when they monster out. We go in one at a time, lock the door, everybody else waits outside the room, ready to escape.”

  I said, “That is the exact sort of thing a hive of shape-shifting monsters would suggest.”

  “We’ll see about that.” John turned his eyes on Marconi and said, “I assume we’ll need to be nude for this?”

  * * *

  We did not. John volunteered to go first. Marconi started setting up an array of various types of cameras on his desk, all pointing at his chair.

  “In situations like this,” he said, “I have had some success with layers of remote perception. You mentioned earlier that the Mikey Payton doppelganger was able to maintain his camouflage even through a live video feed, from outside the motel room. But every living entity has limitations. Here, I have four different devices—digital video, heat signature, ultraviolet, and a sensor pulled from a video game peripheral which creates a 3D map of the physical objects in the room using a method similar to sonar. The feeds from each are monitored by dozens of members of an Internet message board located in various parts of the world, who will each be able to observe the feeds and type up, via text, exactly what they are seeing. Members cannot see what the others are posting, and thus cannot be influenced as a group.

  “My hypothesis is that we have here a sort of camouflage that works on the observer end, but as they say, you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. So, the concept is to simply give the organism too many observers, in too many places, viewing it through too many different wavelengths, for it to maintain its subterfuge. To mimic plausible feedback from hundreds of strangers, being read simultaneously by three of us, would simply be too much. That is the hope, anyway.”

  John sat at the desk and Marconi moved to the cramped lounge area outside his office where he had set up a laptop that would monitor the feedback in real time. He motioned for me to close the door to the office.

  I made eye contact with John and said, “I just want you to know, if it turns out you’re a fake person inserted into my memory, my whole life will make so much more sense.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  I locked him in—the door seemed fairly sturdy—and the remaining three of us huddled on an uncomfortable little fold-out sofa so we could all see Marconi’s laptop. The man smelled like cologne and fancy pipe tobacco. The feeds were switched on and

  dried vomit cascading down the side of the sofa

  I found myself holding my breath.

  The laptop screen was split into quadrants, one for each camera feed. We didn’t see what the cameras were capturing—we only saw the scrolling text from the collective feedback from each. That was the idea.

  Digital video:

  I see a dude sitting in a chair, got long hair, handsome but in a way that makes me want to punch him.

  Ultraviolet:

  Man sitting in a chair, looks like he’s on heroin.

  Sonar:

  Either a male or a tall, flat-chested girl, nothin’ weird unless there’s not supposed t
o be anybody sitting there.

  Heat signature:

  Shape is like a tall thin male, check around the pelvis area he OH GOD HE HAS AN ERECTION.

  And so on. Nearly three hundred messages were posted, split across the four feeds, with little variation aside from people trying too hard to pick out curiosities in the background (“That doctorate doesn’t appear to be from an accredited university”). Marconi, Amy, and I took turns reading the messages out loud, all of us agreeing we were seeing the same text.

  We declared that round of testing over. I stuck my head through the doorway and said, “All clear, but the machine does show you have herpes. Also Marconi wants to do a drug test after this is done.”

  Amy was next, and strangely, I wasn’t as nervous for her. It honestly wouldn’t matter what they said—they’d be wrong. They might as well tell me the universe doesn’t exist. Amy is my constant, she is the only reason I continue to do any of this. If she’s not real then my life isn’t real and I’m not real and nothing matters anyway. If she’s a monster then I’ll take her home and hug her and we’ll be monsters together.

  We locked her in and John took her place on the narrow sofa. He watched the scrolling messages and said, “Marconi, your fans are kind of dicks.” Still, that was as alarming as the revelations got:

  Digital video:

  Redheaded girl with glasses, pretty eyes but body is nothing special. Is she missing a hand?

  Ultraviolet:

  Looks like a girl with bad posture. Does she only have one hand?

  Heat signature:

  Heat pattern looks like a petite girl, nothing weird, one hand doesn’t show up for some reason, did she have it dipped in ice water or something?

  Sonar:

  See a girl, sitting with her legs crossed, might be cute but I’d need to see the full-color vid.

  And there were a few of the obligatory:

  Wait, is that who I think it is?

  I let out a breath.

  It was my turn in the chair.

  Four different electronic eyes stared me down. Marconi asked me if I wanted anything and I said no, which really is one of the biggest lies I’ve ever told. He made an adjustment to one of the cameras—viewers asked for a wider view of the background, he said—and then he and John left the room.

  Amy, however, closed the door with her still on my side of it. She took a seat in front of the desk and looked right at me.

  I said, “A bunch of Marconi fans want your phone number.”

  “I look like I slept in a warehouse. Good thing they couldn’t smell me.”

  “Honestly, while this is a very clever setup and I can see what Marconi was going for, I don’t see why it would—”

  “OH, FUCK!”

  From the next room. John, not Marconi.

  Amy jumped to her feet, but didn’t make an effort to leave.

  I said, “What?”

  From the other side of the door, Marconi said, “One moment, please.”

  I said, “I am not a monster larva.”

  John, sounding like he was pressed up against the door, said, “It doesn’t show that. He changed the setup and it’s, uh…”

  “What does it show?”

  Marconi said, “Please remain calm.”

  “What does it show?”

  John said, “You have one in the room with you.”

  I was jumping to my feet now, knocking the chair over. “What? Where? Can you see it?”

  I stared at Amy.

  It can’t be.

  “They’re saying it’s that snowman thing.”

  I said, “The what?”

  I turned and looked at the filthy, misshapen concrete monstrosity, MR. ICEE etched on its chest and

  Have I seen it before?

  shards of broken memories went spraying across my mind, a dozen contradictory origin stories of this stupid concrete snowman wearing a shawl of bird shit, none of the memories making a bit of sense.

  The thing’s misshapen, eroded mouth started moving and out from it came the sound of screams. Small voices, in abject panic—a roomful of children pleading for their mothers, begging for mercy, moaning in pain.

  Its mouth grew and the noises grew louder, filling the room, vibrating my skull. Then the snowman exploded into a swirl of panicked and enraged fuckroaches. Amy screamed. The door lock clicked and the door opened—John coming in, completely defeating the purpose of the whole setup.

  I batted at the creatures with my hands, and tried frantically to locate the larva itself. They kept getting in front of me, creating images, people.

  The swarm formed a face—my face, the Nymph version. I swatted at them, grabbing one of the fuckroaches—it held the shape of my own laughing mouth—and crushed it in my hand. They couldn’t fool me. Not now.

  They scattered, then coalesced again. This time as my mother, a face I barely remembered. I smashed it with my fist. The whizzing insects were screeching and crying and laughing in voices from my past, the things sloppily sifting through my mind for something, anything. I heard Jim and Arnie and TJ and Hope and Jennifer and Krissy and Todd and Robert. I heard Molly’s bark. I heard them imitate Amy, making her cry and beg, saying things that made it sound like I was her attacker.

  I heard John, and I think it was the real John, say, “It’s behind y—” at the exact moment the larva crashed into my back, knocking me to the floor, sending the fuckroaches scattering once more.

  I rolled over just as the maggot raised up a mouth ringed by mandibles, at the center a gulping throat that made a sound like a drunken kiss in the back of a taxi. I tried to fight it off but it thrust is mouth down onto the side of my face, covering one ear. The mandibles bit down and …

  There was an explosion of pain.

  Then, all pain disappeared.

  It was replaced by a vague warmth, and I don’t mean the disgusting warmth like when you squeeze a bag of dog shit in your hand. It was warm like a hug, like a shared bed in winter.

  And then, it was the weirdest thing.

  The center of the universe just … shifted.

  In that moment, I was no longer the main character in my story. This thing that was attached to me, it was what mattered. It didn’t hate me, it didn’t hate anyone. It was hungry and cold and scared. In me, it found nourishment and warmth and safety. It not only didn’t wish me harm, it desperately needed me to remain safe and whole, to be the provider. It wanted nothing more than for us to survive, together, in a universe that would just as readily see us die alone and forgotten. In that moment, the creature was no longer afraid, because I was there, I was the rock it could cling to. I think that was the first time in my life I was really proud of myself.

  And then the creature recoiled, as if struck, or electrocuted. It unhooked itself, writhed and rolled off onto the floor next to me. I thought that John or Marconi had attacked it, but it had recoiled on its own. It had found that I was not its father, that I was poison, that I had nothing to offer.

  It cried out in despair.

  No, wait. That was me.

  I reached out for it, but I was being dragged from the room. The fuckroaches were getting their act together now, landing on the larva, covering it, recombobulating themselves into some new form. Then I was pulled through the door and John slammed it shut, locking it. Amy was kneeling over me, asking if I was okay, examining my face.

  From behind the door came the familiar screech of the maggot. Marconi got a look on his face that made me ask, “Who are you hearing?”

  “A boy…”

  Amy said, “It’s being Mikey again. Begging us to let him out.”

  There was a moment when I could see doubt creep into Marconi’s eyes, the fuckroaches’ voodoo starting to take hold. We quickly ushered him out of the RV, slammed the door, and got some distance away from the vehicle. We stood there in the Walmart parking lot in silence, listening to the rain making army marching sounds on our skulls. We tried to catch our breath.

  John said, “Wel
l, it’s Mikey’s bus now. Does that mean he gets to host your show?”

  Marconi said, “We gained some crucial information. Specifically, the fact that your ‘Soy Sauce’ does not give you perfect detection. And, more importantly, that the workers have the ability to imitate an inanimate object.”

  John said, “We actually already knew that. The first trick we saw one pull after we captured it was to mimic my cell phone. Sorry, I think I forgot to mention that.”

  “That would have been useful, yes. To know that not only any person or animal we encounter could in fact be these creatures in disguise, but literally anything in the environment itself. Any object in the universe. The implications of that are almost beyond my comprehension.”

  Amy said, “Hey, remember when this was just a missing person’s case?”

  I felt bumps on my face where the maggot had bitten me. Itchy, but not painful. That brief feeling of attachment … I felt dirty, just thinking about it. I wasn’t sure why.

  I said, “Just out of curiosity, Marconi, where did you think you had gotten a concrete snowman from?”

  “It was a supposed haunted artifact from a quaint post-war ice cream parlor in Vermont. I remember the case well, the owner of the establishment was a feisty old Scottish woman named…” He trailed off. “Her face fades even as I try to bring it to mind. Fascinating.”

  I said, “That’s one word for it. Well shit, now what?”

  John glanced behind him and said, “NON’s here.”

  * * *

  The agents rolled into the parking lot of the abandoned Walmart in a black sedan. The female agent I knew as Tasker stepped out, looked over Marconi’s TV production RVs, and said, “So when I told you to go home and avoid leaking anything about the case…”

  She was accompanied by her recently deceased male partner, Gibson, who was walking with a cane and seemed to be having some difficulty.

  John said, “I see you’re up and around.”

  He grunted. “Fuck off.”

  There was a thump and Amy jumped—Mikey’s face appeared in a window near the rear of the RV. He was crying and clawing at the glass. “Help! That old man lured me into his RV and he made me watch a puppet show he put on with his peepee!”