Thought Forms

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Three black doorways surrounded him, and fragile bay windows, and maybe someone behind the love seat.

  The rifle swung into his studio first—more awkward to maneuver inside a house with its long barrel, a definite drawback, but its thirty bullets too persuasive. Ray jerked the light cord. Empty. Windows down and locked, shades drawn. No Kelly curled on the dirty little rug. His face glowered at him from the leaning Van Gogh-inspired portrait.

  On to the far room where he’d been staying while painting his bedroom. Again, no one. He left the light on as he had in his studio. Despite his eagerness to kill, he was increasingly relieved. Just his bedroom left.

  The rifle poked into the room, prodded around the corner like a spear.

  Ray turned on the overhead light and the black walls glistened alive, glass aquarium walls holding back a fathomless primal ocean from flooding into the room. Fragile glass. Who could tell what creatures swam in those depths, peering out at him in the light. No—it was he who was in the aquarium, small and lit and vulnerable.

  He checked the closet. Empty. That was it—his apartment, at least, was secure.

  There was still the cellar below, damp and webbed, dirt-floored, and the apartment above, and the attic above that. He pictured those dark layers of rooms above him.

  His intuition told him, however, that they weren’t in those places.

  They weren’t here yet. They were in their woods; they had waited for him to enter his Alamo. Maybe he was being foolish to let his guard down, fooled because his apartment was secure, but he almost knew that they weren’t in the house. He wouldn’t let himself believe it totally, but it still felt like something he could now take almost for granted.

  Back into the central livingroom, an arena within an arena. What to do now but wait some more? They would come…they knew he was home. He stood ready in the center of the room, a gladiator with a trident, waiting for his opponents, be they other gladiators—or maybe lions?

  There was a crunch outside the bay windows.

  Ray half-crouched, very nearly fired through the glass.

  Another crunch, now further to the right.

  Something had moved past the windows from left to right.

  Ray ran into the kitchen. His heart pulled him like a dog on a leash.

  His gun pulled him.

  This was it—he simply accepted it, had shifted into mindless instinct.

  This was no obscene telephone call. This was real.

  He knew, as he neared the kitchen door, that the person out there would have just about reached the outside door to the hall. They had moved together to meet each other, only the wall of the house between them, and now approached their respective doors, their movement up to this point identical. Ray could only hope that the person beyond didn’t also have a gun in his hands, and this roaring need to kill tugging at the chains of his nerves.

  His left hand left the gun to open the kitchen door—no hesitation.

  Ray was in the hall. He had finally outrun his reflection. As a boy he had tried to turn his head quickly enough to see his mirrored face turn a fraction too late—or just its eyes—had tried to fool the laws of Nature.

  The person outside had only just stepped onto the door stoop because his face was framed in the glass, looking in at Ray.

  Ray, still moving, never stopping, shouldered the rifle and fired.

  Crack, crack, crack, and the glass of inner and outer doors shattered like the glass in Heidi’s house. The face fell away and was gone as if it had been painted on the glass.

  Ray hurled inward the inner door and kicked out the outer door and took a step onto the door stoop and a step off the door stoop and stood over the writhing, flopping figure on the ground and aimed the rifle down at its head.

  The thrashing head quit thrashing to gape up at him soundlessly, one eye wide and the left eye gone, a blood-filled drooling crater. Framed in the black hood of a black robe was the face of a black man. So…this was the enemy, finally. Ray was a little surprised; he didn’t hate black people in a general way. Only a second had passed since their eyes had locked, and Ray pulled the trigger. Crack. It was ridiculous to shoot someone with a rifle this close—he might as well have had a telescopic lens, too. Crack. No more writhing; the remaining eye had rolled up under its lid. Ray stared down a moment dispassionately, more like a boy who had stabbed a stick twice into mud, pretending he was a prehistoric hunter lancing a mammoth, than a man who had just pumped two bullets into the forehead of a man.

  Looking up and around him into the night, he smiled. He took a step beyond the man and yelled.

  “Come on, you fuckers! Come on! I’m ready for you!”

  His voice echoed back faintly. Crickets sang but there was no breeze, just stagnant stillness. No chanting. No stampede, Zulu-like, out of the black to answer his challenge. Ray had always like the film Zulu, its Alamo-like ending. Maybe the black man hadn’t been so inappropriate.

  Ray’s eyes fell upon it—had he missed it before or had it just appeared? Distant in the woods beyond his yard, beyond the dividing wall of tumbled down stone, deep in where the chanting procession had vanished in his dream. A fire, far away, now hidden, now there, almost a will-o’-the-wisp. A campfire, maybe, or the torch from his dream.

  A tremble ran through Ray, from the inside spreading out. His challenging air of triumph withered a bit. He suddenly felt vulnerable here outside, and foolish for his vulnerability. He had to get back in the fort, quickly.

  First a last look at the dead man. There was no remorse, no nausea, unfortunately no time for curious lengthy observation. Ray took in relevant details, information; no identifying ring or amulet, blank black shoes, and most important, no visible weapon. He didn’t dare touch him—too many corpses sprang back to life in horror movies when you tried that. Ray plunged back into his house. Locked the kitchen door.

  He didn’t feel all that much safer, other than for the fact that he had his weapons dispersed here. He found the need to put more space between himself and the enemy, to gain a higher castle-like vantage point to defend.

  Also, he could fool them by hiding upstairs. Better yet, in the attic.

  The hidden guns could remain where they were should he have to work his way down. He had twenty-five bullets in the rifle and five in the .38, and he was desperate to get upstairs away from all these ground level windows lest they all shatter simultaneously, the flood washing in. Ray thought of Straw Dogs, another very favorite movie, seemed to remember Dustin Hoffman advising his wife to leave the lower lights on and the upper ones off so they could look down on their enemy without being seen.

  Ray entered his back hall again, locked the door behind him. He had his key. Let them think he was in there, let them work a little. He charged up the stairs, turned into the second floor hall, half expecting to come face-to-face with one of them in the dark. No one. He should have known.

  They were still out there, gathering up their power for the attack—the dead man had simply been a scout, like an ant scout. They were ants. A black horde, silent and mindless and deadly and primal.

  Ray let himself into the shed off the back hall, closed the door. Blue light through the bare glass of one window. Ray crept to the back stairs to the attic. This opening to the attic, through the attic’s floor, had been sealed off once by someone—Ray’s father or uncle?—by having an old door nailed across it, but one of the panels of the door had been knocked out by Ray and Paul. Ray kept an ancient empty trunk over the hole, reached up to push it aside. He poked his head and the .38 up through. This darkness seemed safe. He passed the rifle up first, squeezed his chest through the narrow opening. Several moments of desperate dread while he squeezed, certain that someone or something below would seize his legs like a shark.

  Nothing did. He wriggled clear, grateful his legs followed him up intact, and he was on his feet, pushing the trunk over the hole.

  The attic was separated into two distinct parts. This half was primarily just a long and n
arrow tunnel with slanting walls, one bare window behind him at its end (he glanced out and could see a bit of the driveway’s head and street—quiet). Piles of old rotting lumber, rusty cans of paint and nails, worthless discarded articles of furniture, leaning bed frames.

  The rest of the attic beyond had once been an apartment, was more open, with a bedroom off the main livingroom/kitchen space, but had been stripped down to white plaster walls, the kitchen linoleum ripped up. Just cardboard boxes of books, bags of tabloids, trash bags of clothing on the floor. The clothing for Ray and Paul to use in their video movies, old and unwanted and hence perfect for bloody scenes. The old bedroom contained boxes of forgotten toys, movie props, masks Paul had made of cardboard and Styrofoam and latex, but impressive, and given life in their movies. A door separated the two attic portions but it was open and the larger area, in its dim blue light, looked safe from here.

  Ray hunched down, tucked himself into the narrow inner slant of the roof behind a bed frame of many bare coiled springs. Spiders were too small an enemy to consider—just a boyhood monster, now ridiculously outgrown. Likewise the dark. Even a month ago he probably wouldn’t have had the guts to come up into the attic alone, with or without a flashlight. But that was when fear had had no name, no face, no direction. Now it had a definite focus.

  Now all that remained was to wait.

  He didn’t like keeping still. Keeping still might prove a trap. He was tempted to go on hands and knees, on his belly, and worm deeper into the stored debris, hide and hope he could stay hidden from their searching until day came—for certainly they would have to flee in the day. But he didn’t do this. For one, that could really prove a trap. Also—he had to face them. Fight them. Beat them or die trying.

  Go to the windows, an inner voice urged him, pick them off as they enter the moat of light; lower their number before they finally, inevitably gain access to the house. But the urge to hide was so strong that he had to half give in to it. Let them come in close. A one man ambush. Then he would strike, and they would stumble over each other in confused retreat, and he’d have killed as many, or more, as he would from the windows.

  They had to get into the house, anyway—it was necessary, not just inevitable. He had to fight them and this house was the battleground.

  The house below him sounded still. There was no telling where they were now; whether they were still out there where he’d seen the tiny torch flame like swamp gas, or even now stealing through the rooms beneath his feet, stealthy as ninjas.

  His nose was blocked but he didn’t dare sniff to clear it. He did, however, allow himself to swallow rather loudly.

  Strange, tiny voices began whispering at him…first one, then another, another. The voice that told him to sniff, and which because he didn’t sniff became louder, more persistent, until he had to open his mouth to breathe.

  Another voice that grew louder once he had recognized it was the pain in his left hand’s thumb and index finger, where he had nibbled at the skin around his nails. The nails of both hands had been gnawed through the years to the point where some nails seemed only half their natural length, the pink chewed down, not just the white, and the skin framing his nails was ever frayed and scarred, always raw and torn in places as now, so that a constant pain persisted, sometimes badly enough to irritate him at work, make it difficult to sleep. The pain gained power from his attention. He rubbed the sore spots with his other fingers, ached to bite those raw areas more, as if further mutilation would rectify matters.

  His scalp itched. Another spot. Now he was beginning to wonder about spiders…this tickle on his scalp felt like a spider. He itched it violently. Invisible bugs stole through his hair forest. His own smell of moist warmth came to him strongly to distract him, another voice, and his hungry belly gurgled like some noxious doughy baby in his arms, damp as a mushroom, making that smell. The smell might give him away. His hot back inside his shirt prickled with itches. His body was rebelling to betray him, divert him while the enemy closed in! His soft belly felt heavy, weighing him down. He had put on this belly since his lean days of martial arts study. He felt slow, soggy, a damp ineffectual blob. While naked and standing before Heidi he had had to hold his belly in tight and straighten his usual slumped posture.

  He could also sometimes force his crooked left eye straight, but only for a moment. Some people didn’t know which eye to look into, switched from one to the other, which mortified him and usually kept him from meeting the gaze of people directly. Some people noticed it immediately; some, like Heidi, didn’t until he pointed it out. She had only with bland gentleness assured him (lying?) that she hadn’t noticed. He was disappointed if she hadn’t looked at him that closely enough. His left eye’s vision was mostly just a peripheral slice, but a doctor had assured him that if he lost his right eye then his left would straighten and gain power, take over. He hated it, it made him a freak, he wanted to have it operated on. His friend Dicky told him he was crazy, it was nothing. But Dicky didn’t have to look at it in the mirror, in photographs, getting more and more pronounced through the years.

  The last time he had had his hair cut, the barber had told him his hair seemed to be thinning a bit above his forehead. Now the hair in the sink after he shampooed looked to him like great wet blobs of hair, as if he suffered radiation poisoning. At his age he still got pimples on his neck, beside his nose…once in a while even one on the end of his nose, surfacing with sadistic glee, a Rudolph beacon. Where he had had his ear pierced and the crescent moon earring inserted, so artistic, so hip, so fashionable, his lobe was now swollen red and sore—infected.

  I’m pathetic, Ray thought in the face of this jeering chorus. I’m weak and tired and spiritless. I don’t stand a chance.

  Ray remembered going to the local health clinic about the large blotches of reddish-brown skin like giant freckles on his shins, thinking he might have cancer, being reassured that it wasn’t—simply discolorations caused by broken blood vessels, iron stains almost like rust under his skin, caused by too many years standing on his legs in factories. They wouldn’t spread above his knees, but they would never go away. Ray never wore shorts.

  He had gone to the same clinic concerned that one testicle seemed too much lower than the other, wondering if this was due to his hernia operation at six, his concerns and questions having mounted to this need for reassurance of his normalcy. He was sure he felt pains, was sure he felt nothing connective inside the scrotum on the side where he’d been cut, no squiggly cables in there. Maybe it was Ray’s imagination, but he was certain of the doctor’s amusement, though he did point out diagrams and photos in a book and feel Ray’s scrotum briefly, gloved. Ray feared the doctor was secretly disgusted and took him for a pervert who simply wanted to be fondled. You are perfectly normal, the doctor had assured him.

  Ray’s sense of Quasimodo ugliness was so powerful at times that he despised his body. Sometimes he found his face attractive, secretly admired his reflection, and yet oddly he doubted that anyone else could, despite Heidi’s compliments. His physical vehicle was a deformed traitor, a malfunctioned repulsive machine, a gallery of freaks on legs. He recognized that all people had defects, flaws, the like—Heidi had shown him some scars, one breast larger, and he could find fault with her—but this body was his planet, he drove in this car, and it seemed to him that most people did better. He could almost imagine the horde swarming in on him only to stone him to death like some poor Medieval hunchback taken for one possessed.

  Ray was breathing deeply, he found, and almost crying. He felt so sorry for himself. He knew others had it worse, he knew, he knew. But he was mangled inside, inside, and it never went away, it was always raw and torn and bleeding somewhere like the fingers he mutilated but created things with.

  “I don’t want to die,” Ray whispered, choked, blinking against the moistening of his eyes. He said it almost as a protest, an appeal to an executioner.

  People loved him. His aunt and uncle who had raised him, Paul who
had been a brother to him, friends—he was valuable. He had worth. He needed time. He needed to live…

  Ray heard the storm door rattle a little far below as it opened. It was so quiet that he even heard the pebbles of glass crunch under a foot or two.

  He let out one long raspy exhalation, drew in fresh air to regain composure.

  They had lost the element of surprise—now it belonged to him. Now it was his turn to lurk in the shadow, draw power from the dark, observe and strike when he was ready. Heidi and Kelly and his mother and father hadn’t been expecting them. Hadn’t had guns.

  Ray had killed a man. Killed one of them. And he hadn’t cracked, hadn’t caved in on himself. That had been no slow motion dream fight where punches were jelly and weapons ineffective as smoke. He wasn’t too soft in the belly, too pale and weak, too blind and too old. He could kill, he was ready, he had the power.

  Ray turned his power up with a crank, raising the sail for his fury to billow, and the new sounds below inspired fear which he quickly transmuted into this delicious angry cranking. He flinched, gritted his teeth, as the faint sounds became a powerful insistent banging. Boom…boom…boom. A splintering.

  They were in his house, the first floor apartment.

  Ray was trembling, too hot to breathe; a headache starting, dull and pushing. He didn’t like having them in his apartment—his belongings were private. His art and videos, his life open and vulnerable to their cold, perhaps scoffing scrutiny. Bastards…

  Vague sounds, hard to focus on, almost nothing, perhaps just his imagination…but Ray judged that they must have pretty much moved into and explored every room by about now. He flinched again as he heard his sliding closet door slammed open. The saliva ball Ray fought down for a suffocating moment was a slimy dead frog.

  I can’t let them kill me, I can’t, I have things to live for…

  His existence was desired…he wasn’t expendable.

  Fucking bastards! Why were they doing this? They had no right to hurt him! He had never hurt anyone!