Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “Maybe there was a fire alarm and we didn’t hear it,” Abby said.

  “Maybe they’re all playing a trick on us,” Paul joked humorlessly. He shut off the hard rock music. The room grew filled with heavy silence that settled everywhere like the gray dust. Volcanic ash…industrial fall-out.

  “Did you check every where?” asked Jean.

  “The offices are locked. The only other place is on the first floor: the back docks and the paint room. I don’t know why they’d be back in there but I guess I should look.” With that, Paul made his way through the long dusty work benches toward a door in the back of the room. The building’s smaller freight elevator was here; unlike the diagonal one, it communicated between all three floors. Steps here would take him down into the cardboard storage room on his floor, or further down to the rear dock area on the ground floor.

  Abby skipped after him. “Can I come, Paulie?”

  “Yeah.” He called over his shoulder to Jean, “Why don’t you got downstairs and keep Maureen company—she’s lonely.”

  Paul froze at that and Abby almost collided with his back; he swung around abruptly. “Is Donna down there?”

  “Um,” said Jean, “she went to the can.”

  “Go see.” Paul aimed for the door again, his lean face clipped with intensity, and Abby springing after him like some loyal puppy.

  Jean swivelled in the direction of her assignment and abandoned the sanding room. Ugh, she thought with a last look. How could you even put a coffee down in here? If you turned your back a few minutes you wouldn’t be able to find it under all the dust. She held the hanging strips away from her white T-shirt with purple and black squiggles and new designer jeans as she passed through them. Letting them go, they slapped against each other and stirred like the tentacles of a giant jellyfish.

  Paul and Abby faced the elevator now and the gloomy steps leading down. The back wall between the two was heaped with dusty cardboard boxes. The elevator was up here with nothing on it. A sign prohibited living passengers. Abby tailed Paul to the worn wooden staircase.

  A box tumbled down the barrow-mound of boxes behind them.

  In half turn Paul and Abby heard another cairn-box tumble.

  In full turn their hearts jolted in synchronization at the sight of a human head heaped amidst the boxes, the hair gray with dust and eyes bulging at them, mouth a black orifice.

  “Jesus!” Paul gasped. Abby clutched his arm.

  A box tumbled as a hand emerged. The mouth quivered and the head whimpered.

  Paul laughed hard. “You fuckin’ asshole, Steve! You made me shit in my pants—”

  A wail issued from Steve’s trembling orifice, long and chilling, a coyote-like cry, the shriek of a forlorn banshee, his unblinking eyes locked on them but blazing through them, and his hand thrust at them, blindly closing and unclosing.

  “Steve,” Abby said, stepping forward.

  Paul’s first impression had been that Dave would be hiding in the boxes, too, and the deflashers in the men’s room, the sanders in the paint room—hah, hah, hah! But Steve’s cry and expression rooted him to his spot, blanked his mind, even as Abby was lunging to dig Steve out.

  “Help me, Paul, he’s hurt!”

  Without any conscious decision Paul found himself helping the young woman tear boxes away from Steve. One box Paul grabbed Steve seized impulsively, too, and Paul had to yank it away from him. He whimpered again and his eyes were almost following them now; he tried to shrink from them timidly deeper into the box pile. Abby touched his arm and he grasped her shoulder, his eyes snapping fully onto her with pleading insanity, mouth working with exaggerated convulsions but only whimpers coming forth.

  “Ow!” Abby tried to twist out of his grasp. Paul had to pry Steve’s fingers off her shoulder. Now Steve was more or less simply sprawled on the boxes uncovered and apparently physically uninjured.

  “We’d better call an ambulance or something,” Paul muttered. They had withdrawn a bit from Steve and gazed helplessly down at him, and he helplessly up at them, whimpering. He pulled a box to him and squashed it to his chest like a teddy bear.

  “I think he’s on drugs, Paul—really, he’s flipping out.”

  “Maybe. Go call an ambulance and I’ll watch him.”

  “Maybe he’s epileptic!” Abby yelled, trotting away.

  Yeah, Paul’s mind answered, and he buried himself in boxes so he wouldn’t upset anybody with his seizure. Now alone with Steve the tall, quiet painter, Paul scowled at him with his most intense scrutiny—a scrutiny which appeared almost as perplexed contempt. Paul felt an immediate and concerned compassion for Steve beneath his hard, unrelenting intensity, but Steve in this alien state seemed so inhuman, so unlike the

  Steve Paul knew or any person Paul knew, that he felt he were in the presence of some wounded and vulnerable creature from another dimension.

  Paul knelt by Steve’s sneakers, Steve’s eyes following him. Bulging.

  “What is it, Steve? What happened?”

  Steve’s lower lip trembled, his glassy eyes trembled but didn’t blink.

  His terror seemed directed at and focused on Paul.

  “Do you know who I am?” Paul asked.

  ««—»»

  “Busy?” Maureen said.

  Abby slammed the phone down. “Jesus Christ, how come I can’t get a call out?” She picked the receiver back up and tried another line’s button, another. “What the fuck is going on? Here.” She handed the receiver to Maureen. “Keep trying. I’m gonna go ask Paul if we should just drive Steve to the hospital or something.”

  “I think you should go try the pay phone, Abby—you can get sued if you try to move a sick person and fuck ‘em up even worse.”

  “Well he could be dying for all we know.”

  “Yeah, I say we take him,” Jean agreed, rather anxious to partake of the excitement—it beat working.

  “Where’s Donna at, still in the girls’ room?”

  “I guess.” Maureen shrugged. She tried another button. “I say we try the pay phone.”

  ”Okay, go for it. I’m goin’ back upstairs. Jean, go see if Donna’s in the bathroom.”

  “She’s taking a shit,” Jean grumped. “I want to see if I can help Paul with Steve.” She had to see how badly he was flipping out.

  “Jean, Dave is missing, the sanders and deflashers are missing—

  Donna’s been in the john too long. Paul told me to have someone check.”

  “Alright, blah-blah-blah.” Jean tramped off toward the cafeteria.

  Maureen bolted after her.

  “I’ll try the pay phone!”

  Abby sprang out of the office and pounded back upstairs.

  In the cafeteria Maureen broke off toward the pay phone and Jean broke off into the ladies’ room. As Maureen dug in her jeans pocket for a dime, squirming because the jeans were so tight, the receiver tucked between her jaw and shoulder, her eyes chanced upon the tiny single window in the cafeteria, just above her, higher than she could reach. In the day you could see moving silhouettes behind the translucent plastic covering: pigeons rested on the sill, perhaps having built a nest there. It was only dark out there now, the pigeons maybe present but silent and asleep. Maureen squinted her eyes, a little perplexed, a little like Paul, when she made out streams of resin-colored goo that had run down the wall from the window almost to the floor, though they looked like they had hardened, no longer fluid.

  ««—»»

  At Paul’s behest, Abby rolled a wooden push cart from the painting department, through the sanding department and into the elevator area.

  The cart was paint-smeared, used to transport paint cans. Paul had suggested they move Steve downstairs.

  Steve had grown subdued, though not catatonic; he still seemed conscious of them, but he had become fatalistically compliant, like a groggy drugged animal. He didn’t clutch at either of them nor even whimper as Paul and Abby stepped into the crushed boxes to gently take him by one arm and o
ne leg each and carry him onto the push cart. He was light, for all his physical span, like a daddy-long-legs, and like a mannequin he allowed Abby to bend his legs so he could curl on the cart in a fetal position. Steve drew further into that shape of his own accord.

  “We could take him down to the first floor with this elevator,” Abby suggested.

  “I want him on my floor. We’re gonna wait for an ambulance.

  Besides, this elevator’s too small for me to ride on it with the cart and I wanna ride down with him in case he suddenly flips out again—he could really get hurt.”

  “Get on the cart beside him and scrunch down.”

  “There’s no room,” snapped Paul, “we’ll use the bigger one. Help me push him.”

  “Don’t bite my head off,” Abby mumbled. They grunted as they wheeled the cart around to point it into the sanding room. At this Steve rolled his head a little and his eyes darted a few times over the ceiling fluorescents. One was ambery and flickering, making a feeble ticking sound.

  “Take it easy, Steve-o, you’re gonna be okay.”

  The cart rumbled along the dusty sanding room floor, Paul and Abby straining behind it. Steve’s eyes gazed with horrified suspicion into each spray-booth as they passed it, the plastic strips they had nosed the cart through still slapping against each other lightly.

  They eased the cart to a stop near the head of the diagonal freight lift and Paul had to bring it up from the first floor; it seemed to take forever.

  Paul then unhooked the chained safety bar, swinging it to one side. They rolled the cart with Steve on it onto the platform and Paul stood beside it, the platform sagging unpleasantly with their combined weight. Abby replaced the safety bar and sent them down. Again it took forever.

  Paul gazed down at Steve; Steve gazed bug-eyed up at him.

  The elevator gently met with the second floor. Abby came clumping downstairs rapidly so she wouldn’t miss anything. Maureen and Jean were here and they helped Paul wheel Steve out of the elevator shaft.

  “Oh my God,” Maureen breathed. She knelt by Steve and cooed to him with true concern, “Steve, can’t you hear us? What’s wrong?”

  “Wow,” said Jean, “the poor guy.” She leaned over Paul’s shoulder.

  “You’ll be okay, Steve, we’ll get you to a doctor.”

  “Did you use the pay phone?” Paul asked them.

  Maureen glanced up. “Yeah—it doesn’t work! No shit, all I get is a far-away busy signal. I think the power is fucked in the whole building, not just in molding.”

  “You’re kiddin’—all the lights are on and everything…the elevator works. I don’t think a power failure would fuck up the phones anyway.”

  “Maybe it’s just one circuit or whatever, one fuse—I dunno.”

  “So where’s Donna, is she in the bathroom or what?”

  “Yeah, Jean, show him.”

  “Check this out,” said Jean, taking a step away.

  “Check what out?”

  “Come on.”

  Paul followed her brisk pace. Abby looked to Maureen.

  “What is it?”

  Maureen told her.

  Paul tailed Jean into the ladies’ room. “Watch out,” Jean said, but already Paul felt the gravelly crunch under his heels. He halted fast and looked down—glass fragments littered the grimy linoleum floor. Jean, who had stepped carefully, bent to delicately pick up a label to which glass shards still clung, held it like a dead smelly fish for Paul to inspect, which he did with his sharp look of perplexed contempt.

  “Peppermint Schnapps. It was all smashed when you came in?”

  “Yup.”

  “And Donna wasn’t here?”

  “Nope.”

  114

  Chapter

  5

  Ray wouldn’t remember the nightmare when he woke—or rather, his conscious mind wouldn’t remember it—but his subconscious remembered every dream he had ever dreamed, every last dream image, adventure and dreamed romance, just as his subconscious had photographed every face he had ever seen in his entire life, every frame and word from every film and book he had exposed himself to in his entire existence—it was just that, like those people who obses-sively videotape movies and sports programs but never get around to playing back any but the most relevant, the conscious chose to narrow its focus to prevent the fragile human mind from short-circuiting on over-load; it selected one choice book at a time from a dusty library no single human being could ever fully exhaust in a mortal lifetime. The conscious mind was the censor for sanity, the guardian at the border check-point of subconsciousness, letting only so many carefully screened immigrants through.

  But there was always that percentage of illegal aliens.

  In the first major part of his nightmare Ray found himself at the purse factory. He was in the high-ceilinged stock room, its shelves filled with every color and texture of dully shining bundled leather. That half of a cow skin was nailed to the wall near the ceiling, and the tacked up half skin looked amazingly like a map of the United States (the neck Maine, front leg Florida, hind leg Texas), and it was tacked in such a place of honor because it was a hideous skin, branded and scarred, badly colored, like the skin off some cow mutation. Below it a hand-scrawled sign read something illegible and part of the skin had fallen loose (Maine) and hung down, showing the lighter colored wall behind it, and the light outline could be seen as the skin stirred in the breeze from a powerful fan across the room in which Ray stood staring up at the skin as it billowed out from the wall like a lazy sail, pulsing, the ugly squiggled brand rippling. The skin throbbed in the eerie death throes of crucifixion. Ray was mesmerized. Where was its head now…its skeleton—who had eaten its meat? He remembered petting cows on the head in his life, their eyes on him.

  Where were this one’s eyes now and what had they seen? One human petting it on the head, another delivering the stroke of death? Had he petted it? Had he consumed it? In answer, the skin only waved to him, a flag of death—a map of pain.

  The brand was different in the dream. It was a pentagram.

  Now there was an apparent buckshot scattering of dream fragments that didn’t coalesce, a commercial break or the random flipping of channels before Ray returned to the main story. Time had elapsed (timeless dream time) and he was driving home from work in the dark, in the rain.

  The swishhh-tick, swishhh-tick of his windshield wipers, his headlights catching in fluid glimmers across the glass, the glimmers running and disappearing like stars dribbling into oblivion. A song on the radio—Billy Idol— Eyes Without A Face. It made the dream incarnation of Ray, his astral projection doppelganger, think of his cousin Paul and something awful that had happened to him back—when? February, March? It had happened in this world but he wouldn’t remember it when he woke up and it was too awful for his dream memory to remember now.

  He was getting closer to home now, but these narrow, winding country roads seemed longer than he remembered them. He seemed to doze in and out but always awoke still safe and on the road, as good a driver asleep as awake, so he wasn’t alarmed at this. There were some streetlights along this stretch, though spaced far apart, and he could see a mist swelling in from right to left. Soon he was in it, and it glowed with his headlights and all around him was mist, but he again remained safely on the road.

  As he emerged from the nucleus of the fog he found himself passing a meadow on his right fenced off with rusty barbed wire, and cows stood in an uneven line along the fence at the edge of the meadow watching him as he passed, their faces in succession lit and eyes flashing dully in his lights but the rest of their bodies shading back into blackness like the meadow—disembodied floating cow heads, they looked like. Then the cows were behind him. Ray turned onto a little bridge and slowed, turned again and to his right was an isolated farmhouse. He crawled past it, strained to see out his fluid passenger’s side window. On the front porch he thought he saw two dark figures sitting in rocking chairs with no lights on in the house to bleed
out and illuminate them. But he felt their eyes on him. In his dream he didn’t like it and he accelerated, left them behind. A brief flash in his headlights, then a vibration against his windshield—

  “tic!”—and he realized a toy flying saucer had been thrown at his car from the black woods and had rebounded off his wet windshield.

  Annoyed, he accelerated more.

  It stepped out of the trees from the right directly in his path, vulnerable but challengingly still, starkly and garishly bold in his headlights—a goat—its eyes catching the headlight flash and blazing green like a cat’s eyes and even as Ray drove his foot to the brake his car jolted with the impact. Thud, and the sickening vibration Ray felt all through him of obliteration. Blood streamers on his windshield, smeared by the blades to mix and dribble with the rain. Screech of tires trying hard to grasp the slick pavement. Starkly textured tree bark suddenly rushed at his face but his tires had seized their hold at last. Ray sat a moment with his engine panting…then he cracked his door and stepped out into the rain.

  He left his headlights and motor on, door open, walked back to the animal he saw lying on its side on the perimeter of street lamp glow.

  He stood over it, looking down as it lay dying at his feet.

  The tongue had lolled out and it was panting, its lungs no doubt speared with the punji sticks of its own blasted ribs. It snorted out some blood that hit Ray’s shoe, but he didn’t withdraw. It turned its eye up at him and matched his gaze. As the rain pelted Ray’s head and exploded off his shoulders and diluted the goat’s pouring blood the goat’s tongue lashed and its mouth moved and it said to him in a coarse, dying voice,

  “Read Jung all you want you pathetic little boy, who are you impressing, Heidi?—she won’t stay with you to be impressed so are you impressing yourself or are you just hiding? You haven’t killed me—we have a later more apocalyptic date though in microcosm because that is your karma this is 1984 and that’s one of your favorite books, and this year we’ll find out who our next president and potential murderer of all life on Earth is and we’ll find out, more important to some, who wins the Olympic medals and this is the year a man kills more than twenty people in a fast food restaurant in the most all-American crime you could conceive of right down to camouflage pants and apple pies and you couldn’t ask for a better year to lose your virginity and do battle with me, little boy.”