Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Paul didn’t doubt, however, that much of his strength and composure could also be attributed to several other factors—for one, the banal acceptance, the unthinking mundane adaptability of humans (gypsy children played ball in Auschwitz), and also there was the numbness of disorientation, as after a fire or a car wreck. Numb disorientation made it easy to be calm.

  It didn’t make it easy to make decisions, though.. Here they stood in a huddle in the ladies’ room, and what was next?

  Biking to work today, waking up to soupy spaghetti, how could Paul have guessed that today wouldn’t be just another faceless factory night, with many before it and many to come? What if there were no more to come, after tonight?

  Talk about numbing and disorienting.

  ««—»»

  “Okay, I’ll got out first to see if it’s safe,” said Paul in his most solemn Audie Murphy voice. He had loved playing war with his cousin Ray as kids, but they had never opposed each other, choosing to team against an imaginary enemy. This was almost as exhilarating as a game.

  Strange concept. Steve dead in a tank of chemicals downstairs was no cap-gun casualty.

  The girls obeyed and allowed Paul to stalk out of the ladies’ room alone. Knife held low and ready, he looked like an extra from a production of West Side Story.

  But he didn’t feel he was acting over-dramatic; it seemed their environment was changing at the drop of a hat, as unstable as a dream.

  The cafeteria lay still and normal-looking, with its lurid orange and yellow plastic seats and tables. Soda stains on them, smeared ashes from cheap little metal ash trays. One night there had been three new cheap metal ash trays in the men’s room above the sinks. The company in a generous mood; who needed a union? The next night they were gone. Paul thought it bitterly funny—he had envisioned one of those five cent ash trays on somebody’s livingroom coffee table, which was probably one of those big wire spools or some cinder blocks with a hunk of wood on top.

  But then, Paul didn’t live in Graceland, either.

  He glanced up at the wall clock. Jesus—going on quarter of nine already. The building should have had lunch at 7:30, and Paul’s crew at 8:00, the only crew that elected to have a later lunch so they could have the cafeteria all to themselves. Their lunch would have just ended—but there had been no buzzers at 7:30 and 8:00 as there should have been. Paul was sure he would have taken notice. No more breaks tonight, apparently.

  Westman Freight would be here in less than an hour-and-a-half.

  Paul glanced out the glass windows in the cafeteria. Across from the longest wall was the “cage” in which had been stored the front housings he’d been making. It looked empty. Behind him was a door into the cardboard room. He crept to the door into the shipping department and peeked out.

  “Fuckin’ Christ! ” he hissed.

  He could see it from here.

  The door into the main offices at the far end of the room, the door they had tried drilling through, was gone. Much of that entire length of wall was gone. Not removed, but covered. From here it looked like black foam plastic of the kind that was used in the smaller of the two molding areas downstairs, and it appeared as if it had already hardened. It had run down the wall as if from a crack in the ceiling, and had puddled on the floor a little in a few spots. It looked like a wall caked in black candle wax. Paul could make out just one lower corner of the office door, and a poster on the wall—warning workers to be cautious on the job to avoid accidents—was covered across its left half.

  From here Paul couldn’t detect any crack over the door from which this stuff could have flowed down, and the hoses that injected foam into molds could never reach an upper floor. Could it be possible someone had sprayed some foam into a bucket downstairs, rushed it up here while they were hiding in the bathroom and tossed the hot liquid across the wall?

  There was more than a bucketful, more than one man could carry in one trip. And even from here it was apparent the stuff hadn’t been splashed; there were no spatters. It had flowed, like a descending curtain.

  Behind him Paul heard the girls gingerly emerging. “Is it safe?”

  Maureen whispered, her eyes large. Paul turned to face them, at a loss for words.

  Jean turned straight to the sandwich machine—it was after their lunch break, after all. She didn’t have her purse on her but she had a few coins in her pants pocket, enough maybe for a bagel and cream cheese she could heat in the microwave.

  “Look,” Paul said to Maureen, stepping to one side for her.

  With her right hand Jean fished for quarters, and with her left depressed the button that revolved the sandwich carousel with its many small compartments. Some plastic-tasting hamburgers, a burrito to attract a Hispanic appetite…

  “Oh my God—what is it?”

  “What?” Abby crowded in the doorway with them.

  “I think it’s foam,” Paul stated.

  “What?” Jean said, craning her neck. She couldn’t see past them. Her finger was still on the button, and as the carousel shifted to another row of selections Jean glanced instinctively down at the compartments. She let go of the button and pulled out her change, began to step away to join the others for a moment but caught herself. She squinted, wrinkled her nose. Curiously, she bent and peered down at the compartment second to the bottom…

  “How could anybody foam up here?” Maureen said.

  Jean shrieked. She jolted back as if rammed by a car, and luckily fell into one of the yellow plastic seats rather than strike her lower back on the edge of a table, but she shrieked again anyway and her hands fluttered up by her face.

  The others nearly fell over each other as they scrabbled to spin around and rush to her. “Jesus, what?” Paul barked as if disgusted, but only because she’d almost shocked his sphincter into relaxing.

  “Oh my God, look in there, look, look!” Jean blubbered. Her face was as livid a red-purple, almost black-purple, as Paul had ever seen in a person, and that and the way her tears seemed to pop out of her eyes without touching her cheeks was so weirdly fascinating that he was mesmerized a second before he followed her pointing finger.

  “What?” said Abby, crouching at the sandwich machine. “Shit—

  Jesus!” She too sprang backwards.

  Paul knelt a safe two feet away as if there might be a bomb in that second to the lowest compartment, or some creature that would bite.

  “Is that real, or what?” Abby gasped, hand to her chest.

  “What is it, for Chrissakes?” Maureen pleaded.

  “A hand,” Paul said flatly.

  “A what? ”

  “A hand, a hand, a human hand,” Abby told her.

  “A cut off hand?”

  “Yes, cut off, what do you think?”

  Paul drew nearer, that knotted look of utmost intensity commanding his face, a look that suggested no one and nothing else existed for him but the object of his attention. He felt as he had as a boy when his father would take him and his cousin Ray to the carnival that set up at the race track every summer for a couple weeks. More than the rides (even the haunted house, which they both dreaded and adored), more than the games and the food, they had been drawn to the haunting sideshows.

  Here the monsters they drew became tangible, here their misty imaginations condensed into flesh. They met a man with three eyes and two noses (or one halved) and a harelip that made the one Paul’s nephew had been born with look trifling. He had given Ray his autographed picture.

  They had seen a dog with three legs, a rooster with three legs, a dead stuffed cow with six (certainly enough to spare one for the dog). Ray had acquired a signed photo of a man and his baby girl, both suffering “suppression of digits,” billed as a “Lobster Family.” But most fascinating of all were the “Pickled Punks,” as they were called by carny folk, the Baby in a Bottle display. That eerie look to their flesh you could almost taste, like those bottles of lamb’s tongues and pickled pig knuckles you could find in a supermarket. Hideous little
being like aliens on display, removed from a wrecked spaceship (as told in the tabloids). There was nothing immoral about the fascination of these two boys—they did not wish deformity on others for their entertainment. But all life is a mirror, and in these bottles the boys confronted their fear of the instability of their own physical integrity, in a world of cancer and car crashes—confronted their frail material existence. Their mortality. As with spiders and ghosts, which greatly interested Paul and Ray, and violence, they were drawn to what frightened them most, in an effort to understand how it related to them personally, and hopefully to draw a peace with that fear.

  Paul could almost smell a formaldehyde stench from the thing he studied in the sandwich compartment. For some strange reason he glanced to the price for this selection—a dollar twenty-five.

  “It looks real,” he murmured, “but there’s no blood on it. I can’t see the stump good because the fingers are facing me.” Did he have a dollar twenty-five?

  Jean with her face like a plum having its juice wrung out of it sobbed,

  “I wanna get the fuck out of here!”

  Maureen felt her stomach roll onto its back and play dead. It didn’t help that, like Jean, she had been hungry and thinking about buying a snack. She managed, “Could it be Steve’s hand, Paul? Did you see both of his hands when you saw him?”

  “No, I didn’t. Could be. Maybe that was the blood we saw in the degreaser, and the chemicals washed the blood off the hand.”

  “When was it put in there?” Abby moaned. She glanced around her out the windows in the cafeteria, expecting some blood-drenched grinning fiend to be looming beyond brandishing a glue gun in one hand and a hatchet in the other.

  Paul envisioned an insane scenario with its own insane logic. Steve, after alternating between gluing all the windows and doors, and cata-tonia—exhausted from all this running around—snuck in here for a sandwich, paid his buck-and-a-quarter, and in reaching in for it the compartment door snapped shut, severing his hand. Clutching his stump so as not to dirty the factory, he stumbled downstairs, passed out and toppled into the degreaser. It made as much sense as anything.

  Paul rose from his haunches, hesitated, then depressed the selection button again. The carousel revolved.

  He shuddered. Jean clapped her hands over her eyes and wailed even though she couldn’t get a good look from where she sat, and Maureen began to retch. Abby, all retched out, looked away quickly and tried to command her heart to calm down as if it were a yapping neurotic poodle.

  “I don’t believe this, man,” she breathed.

  On eye level with Paul was another human hand. This time facing palm up. Also bloodless, but the stump more visible. It looked neat as a pork cut. The other hand had been a man’s hand; this was smoother, smaller, a woman’s. It looked more like a mannequin’s hand than the first, but with the ugly addition of two shards of glass stuck bloodlessly in the palm. Also in the compartment was a little unopened packet of ketchup.

  There were no identifying rings or distinctly painted nails or moles or birthmarks, but an intuition, a vertiginous gut feeling, told Paul he was staring at Donna’s dismembered hand.

  170

  Chapter

  7

  With a sob of defeat Ray lowered the .38 from his temple and turned away from his dog’s mournful gaze as if ashamed—though whether ashamed for putting the pistol to his head or ashamed for not using it the animal couldn’t know.

  ««—»»

  Days passed, as days will, but time does not heal all wounds; time is sometimes only a band-aid on a raw, festering stump.

  Ray worked, and working with this turmoil burdening him was a realization of the tales of the damned in hell. Back on the Chain Gang, sang the Pretenders on the radio, and Ray could relate to the torment in that song.Not long ago Ray and his friend Dicky on a stroll along the fringes of some woods had chanced upon a dead cat. Ray had been deeply sad-dened—had it been killed by some punks, had it been a lonely stray or someone’s loved pet, and if so did they wonder where it had gone, had death been slow and awful?—but also fascinated enough to draw quite near while Dicky hung back. He had wished for his video camera to be with him so he could record what he saw and incorporate it into a movie somehow, so that others might be subjected to the mesmerizing horror which now absorbed him. For the cat’s belly had been torn open or rotted open and inside it boiled maggots. Boiled was insufficient a term to convey the movements, so hideously fast and frenzied, as the glistening worms writhed across each other in a dense ball-like mass. It was like looking through a ragged portal into a hideous slithering-seething Other Dimension. A dimension that existed beneath the contrastingly placid green grass of a cemetery, as it now existed beneath the achingly contrasted familiarity of cat fur perhaps once fondly stroked. What Ray felt at work and at home was the movements of the Other Dimension inside him. Slithering, seething, boiling in a tumultuous mass. It was like bearing some monstrous deformed child and feeling it shift; a host of par-asitic offspring that when born would devour him as spiderlings might devour their mother. And yet he smiled at work, wanly joked. Outside mask. No one caught scent of the dead cat he carried to work in his figurative lunch box.

  Nor did he tell the people at work about the strange things that had been happening the past few nights at his isolated home.

  ««—»»

  It was late Friday night and Ray sat on the livingroom floor cross-legged close to the set, which was the only light in the house but for the fluorescent lamp on the kitchen table. He was watching one of those supernatural documentaries that played late at night, on Bigfoot or UFOs or out-of-body experiences when near death. This one was on psychic abilities—bending spoons, telepathy, spiritual healing. A young man was shown who furiously sketched portraits while supposedly possessed by the spirits of deceased artists, not unlike a case of automatic handwriting.

  He did this with his eyes closed at times or head averted, and with such a violent energy, with such a weird frenzy of movement that Ray suddenly felt frightened to be so close to the set, sitting on the cold floor with his back exposed to the blackness behind him. With a chilly near-panic, he sprang up and turned on the lights and continued to watch the man with fascination—from the safety of the couch.

  Ray didn’t believe that Renoir or even the most obscure spirit artist utilized this man as his paintbrush, but he didn’t necessarily believe the man was consciously lying. Ray had heard of artists, Alfred Kubin for one, who worked while in a trance of self-hypnosis. Ray believed such was the case here—self-hypnosis raised to the level of dissociation reaction hysteria. The realm of fugue states, somnambulism and multiple personality.

  If it were a hoax, it was disappointing though impressive. It if were true possession or else a self-induced phenomenon—well, which was actually the more frightening prospect?

  Ray remembered the “possessed” young girl who apparently starved to death during her futile exorcism, the tabloid photos of her anxious wasted face. And Ray recalled something else. He had encountered these clipped photos and their accompanying stories in a drawer accidentally a few days ago, not remembering having saved them, and he had been shocked that in the biggest close-up of this girl, while not the most hideous shot of her, she seemed to look remarkably like Heidi with no glasses on. Heidi with her hair greasy and in disarray, her head back and mouth open a bit…as if recovering from sex. Had this picture always looked this way? His mind told him it had been more hideous once; more demon, less human.

  The man finished his sketch, of a young girl, and it was displayed.

  In the kitchen the phone rang.

  Ray checked the time as he rose to get it; it was ten of three in the morning. He didn’t feel jolted, only irritated…he might miss something good.“Hello?”

  It was his aunt, who had raised him after the death of his parents. Often Ray forgot he had had other parents and thought of his aunt and uncle as his true parents, as though that distant first couple had never ex
isted. A dream.

  “Hi. It’s me. Ah, your father wants to know if you can help him bring Nipper to the vet tomorrow to have her ear fixed—he needs help with her.”

  “Yeah—when?” Even his aunt and uncle thought of themselves as his parents.

  “When?” he heard her ask her husband. It was not unusual for them both to be awake watching TV or reading at such an hour—this was no doubt how Ray had acquired the habit. They’d known he’d be awake.

  “Between eight and nine, so eight-thirty?”

  Only five-and-a-half hours from now? Ray sighed. “Yeah, alright.”

  “Um, okay.” His aunt sounded meek at his obvious irritation.

  “Okay—bye.”

  “Yeah, bye.” Ray hung up, returned to the sofa. The segment on the possessed artist continued. The telephone rang in the kitchen.

  Another annoyed sigh as he went to it. It was his aunt/mother again.

  Could he pay half for Nipper’s blood-engorged ear to be drained, his uncle had asked her to ask him. Ray had always helped with the family pets, his uncle being disabled and collecting social security.

  “Yes,” sighed Ray, remembering Nipper’s three previous ear hematomas over the past years and how they had cost him about ninety dollars each. Nipper had always been more his dog, since he had found her as a stray pup while skipping school, and he still felt closer to her than he did to Kelly, for whom he was actually babysitting while his cousin and her husband remained stationed in Greece. He loved Nipper and wished he could keep her here, but that was her home. He loved Kelly but she had that sometimes irritating mood about her, that victimized mood which almost made you want to victimize her, scold her, be sadistic. It was scary, but some animals—even people—sometimes attracted negative energy to them, he felt. Yes, actually more so people. If someone else tried to victimize Kelly, though, he’d shoot them.