by S. T. Joshi
The Crawling Chaos stripped the flesh away
From my frail mortal husk, and the decay
Began to set in; and yet I was shown
Behind the mask as He beheld his prey.
The laughter grew, only it was my own.
Teshtigo Creek
AARON BITTNER
Aaron Bittner is a writer by trade, most of his output being industrial nonfiction. The first book he ever bought for himself was a short story collection, The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury. He lives in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where he is indentured servant to his wife, two of his four children, one dog, and too many cats.
“IT LOOKED BETTER IN THE PHOTOS,” KELLY SAID, eyeing the faded, peeling sign that read Teshtigo Creek State Park. The bald cypress trees that lined the road seemed to agree.
Jim checked his watch. “It’s already after five. Too late to go anywhere else today,” he said. “Let’s get a site.”
“Looks like we’ll get our pick,” said Kelly. “The parking lot’s empty.”
“On the first weekend in June?”
The gravel lot lay empty under the deep shade of the cypresses. As Kelly glanced at Jim he thought, She’s blaming me. Another lousy Jim decision.
“So we’ll have the place to ourselves,” he said. Kelly didn’t reply.
It had seemed like such a good idea at first, Jim thought. Take a long weekend and be alone, out in the woods that Kelly had always loved so much. It would give them a chance to reconnect—maybe a chance to patch things up.
Not looking good, he thought as he stepped out of the Tahoe and closed the door. The park office appeared to be deserted. Fluffy gray handfuls of mosquitoes hummed around the doorway and settled on Jim and Kelly like old friends.
“Hello?” Jim called through the open window, and the echo rattled through the empty office and faded away. The mosquitoes hummed in the drowsy afternoon. Jim slapped at them and peered about, confused.
“Jim,” Kelly said, and he turned to see a man in a rumpled greenish uniform walking slowly toward them. He was coming from the direction of the ranger’s cabin.
“Didn’t hear you pull up,” said the ranger, as though it were an accusation. He was compactly built, lean, dark, perhaps forty. His face gave away nothing.
“We’d like to get a site for the weekend,” said Jim, too loudly.
“Most people don’t come during bug season,” the ranger said, and didn’t go to the office. Jim looked for a name tag. The ranger wasn’t wearing one.
“Well, we need a site.”
“All the sites are canoe access only,” said the ranger.
“Bug season?” inquired Kelly, her eyebrows arched.
“You rent canoes, right?” said Jim.
“Pretty much the summer,” said the ranger.
“How much do the canoes run?” said Jim.
“What kind of bugs?” put in Kelly.
The ranger turned abruptly and went into the office. The clouds of mosquitoes parted as he passed through. Jim and Kelly followed, a moveable feast. Jim glanced at his wife’s butt as they went. Yep, he thought, still hot.
The office was also hot, and dingy. The walls were lined with ancient paneling that didn’t look good the day it was put up. A rack by the door held dusty pamphlets on local attractions, and posters showed pictures of the wildlife one might find in and around Teshtigo Creek. There was a map on one wall tracing the creek from its origin in a swamp to where it poured into Bennett’s Creek. Adjacent to the map was a big poster touting the “History of the Teshtigo Creek Region.”
From behind a sagging customer counter, the ranger handed them brochures on mosquitoes, chiggers, blackflies, leeches, and two kinds of ticks.
“You have all these?” Kelly asked.
“And then some,” said the ranger, and didn’t smile. A mosquito hovered near the ranger’s ear. Jim felt an unreasoning urge to clap his hands and squash the insect. Quelling the urge made him sound more irritated than he really was when he said, “We need a campsite and a canoe. Please.”
Kelly was still eyeing the brochures. “Jim, I’m not sure . . .”
“The bugs will eat you up,” said a dry old voice from the back of the room. A stooped, white-haired, ancient version of the park ranger had just come through a doorway in the back of the office. He too was wearing a ranger’s uniform, but this one was faded and threadbare. A tag on the breast pocket read Robbins. He had the same dark eyes as the younger man, but his seamed face showed concern.
“Really,” said the old man. “You don’t want to do this. Not now.”
“He made his choice,” snapped the younger ranger. He opened his mouth, about to say something else, but abruptly closed it.
Kelly was looking at the poster. “Pardon me . . . Is this an old park?”
“The oldest in the county, and one of the oldest in the state,” said the old man.
“And there were Indian settlements here? The poster says that the place used to belong to the Cho—Chowa . . .” Kelly stammered.
“Chowanoc.” The younger ranger’s eyes bored into Jim’s.
“What happened to them?” asked Kelly.
“Smallpox, mostly,” said the old man.
“The usual story,” said the younger one, and clamped his jaw.
Jim shook his head. “We’re out of time,” he said. “It’s camp here or sleep in the car.” Attaboy, Jim, he thought. Way to be decisive.
Kelly rolled her eyes and sighed. “If I get Lyme disease you will never hear the end of this.”
* * *
By the time Jim pounded in the last tent peg, it was good and dark. Kelly had gathered a pile of dead branches and had a fire going. Jim sat up, sighed, then looked around for his backpack.
“I figured it out,” Kelly said.
“Figured out what?” replied Jim.
“What was strange about the guy at the park office.”
“You mean, aside from getting an F in customer service?” Jim found the pack and began rummaging.
“The mosquitoes weren’t biting him.”
“Those guys probably have some really good repellent.”
“Hmmm.”
He pulled out a bulky sweatshirt and threw it aside.
“What are you looking for?” Kelly asked as he rooted in the nylon depths.
“This,” he said, pulling out a pretty good bottle of Cabernet.
She frowned at him. “Jim, the sign said no alcoholic beverages.”
“Kelly,” he began, then stopped himself. Be nice, he thought, and tried again. “Sweetheart, I understand what the sign said, but it’s more important to me that we do what we came here to do. Remember? We’re here to try to rebuild our relationship.”
“Our relationship is not built on booze!” she snorted.
“No,” he admitted. “It’s built on us cooperating with each other.” He groped in the pack for the bottle opener. “Now I’ve done my part. I’m trying, as you asked me to do. Can you work with me a little?”
He could tell he’d won that point when she changed the subject. “I wonder if drinking wine will help keep the mosquitoes away,” she said, “or if they’ll just like the stuff.”
“Only one way to tell,” he said, and handed her a plastic cup.
* * *
With most of the bottle gone and the fire burning low, Jim surveyed the scene with a happy expression. Things are looking up, he thought, as he considered his wife nestled into his right shoulder, her hair draped over his arm. How long since I smelled the shampoo in her hair? he wondered. Too long.
“You know, I’d forgotten,” Kelly said.
“Forgotten what?”
“That I really do like you.” She sipped from the cup. A dozen smartass answers rolled through Jim’s mind and he suppressed them all.
Instead he said, “And love me?” He felt so painfully vulnerable, but he had to ask it.
For an answer, she turned her face up to him and kissed him. Now this is
communication, Jim thought. This kiss is a promise.
At just that moment a mosquito started drilling a private well on the end of his nose. He stood it as long as he could, but after ninety seconds he began to squirm.
“What?” said Kelly, backing off a bit.
“Friggin’ mosquito,” said Jim, and as he moved to squish it he suddenly he got an idea.
“How cold do you think that water is?” Jim asked.
“Why? . . . You’re nuts!” blurted Kelly, but she was smiling at him.
“Too cold for a midnight dip, do you think?”
“Not for a crazy man, maybe. I’ll stay up here.” She burrowed deeper under his arm and took another drink of Cabernet.
“Do you remember the last time we went skinnydipping?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It was summer at the time.”
“It’s almost summer again. Come on!”
“That water is nasty.”
“No, it isn’t.”
He was being honest; the water was clean, gin-clear to ten feet down in the deep spots.
She made a face at him. “You just want to see if I’ll do it.”
He put on his best innocent look. “Well, yeah,” he said, as if it were obvious. “Hey, at least the mosquitoes won’t be able to get at the parts that are underwater.”
The night air was about 75 degrees, not super warm but not cold either. When Jim stood up and started stripping off his shirt, Kelly stood up with him.
“This is crazy,” she said, but in the glow of the campfire anything seemed possible. They left their clothes in the dirt.
* * *
Even though they had set up camp practically on the creek bank, in the dark the water seemed further away than Jim remembered, even by flashlight. He took Kelly’s hand and they walked ooh-ah-ooh-ooh over sticks and gravel to the cool mud of the beaver pond. Jim stepped in first and sucked in his breath.
“Cold, huh?”
“Gimme a minute,” he murmured. After a few seconds he found he could manage, and took another step.
Kelly giggled and shone the flashlight on him. “Don’t look now, Mister Hero, but you’ve got mosquitoes all over your butt.”
“Not for long,” Jim said, and strode into the water. As it climbed up past his knees he felt his guts bracing for impact. He turned to look at Kelly.
“You comin’ in?” he called.
“Not sure,” she called back. “What’s it like?”
“I—”
As he was taking a step something like a dozen little pins bored into the bottom of his right foot. Jim immediately picked up the foot again and, overbalanced, fell face-first into Teshtigo Creek.
Jim’s first thought was COLD and his second was MY HEAD IS FULL OF WATER and his third was which way was the air again? It may have been the wine, or it may have been the darkness, or it just might have been the quart or so of water that had jetted into his nose and mouth when his face hit, but he had momentarily lost track of which way was up, and the water seemed much deeper than it had any right to be.
Suddenly there was a light glimmering at him, and a hand reached for his. He took it and nearly pulled Kelly under with him, but she kept her footing and his head broke the surface again.
“Jim! Jim! What happened? Are you okay?” she was shouting at him, but he was too busy coughing and gasping for air to make any reply. He held her hand and nodded his head to say gimme a minute, and she did.
“I—I’m okay,” he finally croaked out.
“You sure as hell didn’t look okay!” Kelly snapped at him. “This water is freezing. What were you thinking? What happened to you anyway?”
“I stepped on something sharp and lost my balance.”
“Oh, great. Are you hurt?”
Jim had forgotten about his foot, and now that it was brought back to his memory, he realized he couldn’t feel it. “I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s get back to the campfire and check it out.” Suddenly skinnydipping had lost all its appeal.
Back at the camp with his clothes on, Jim shone the flashlight on the bottom of his right foot. Under the arch was a semicircle of twelve or fifteen tiny puncture wounds, fairly superficial but all full of mud. Jim wiped them clean as best he could with alcohol pads, then applied antibiotic ointment and a clean pair of socks.
Kelly wasn’t speaking to him, and the way she crawled into her sleeping bag and turned her back to him made it clear that all promises earlier expressed or implied were now rendered null and void. Once more and all together now, Jim thought, Another lousy Jim decision. To top it all off, by the time they’d broken camp the next day he had a cold.
On the way out they saw the park office was deserted.
* * *
The next day was Monday. That morning at the office, Jim stumbled through a miserable haze of pain and fatigue. Two cups of bad office coffee and a double dose of Ibuprofen couldn’t touch the throbbing in his head, and his nose was jammed solid.
Closed for business, he thought. My whole head is closed for business. His latest assignment was open on his computer desktop, but as usual, behind it were two browser windows, one with the financials, the other with the sports news. He usually tried hard not to lose more than five minutes per hour surfing the web, but this morning his locked-up head made it impossible to concentrate. As he stared glassy-eyed at the ball scores, all he wanted to do was sleep.
It got to be so bad that at lunchtime his boss found him slumped in his chair when he’d normally be out for a sandwich. “Jesus, Jim,” he said, concern in his voice. “You look like hell. I think you’d better go home.” Brian was a no-nonsense kind of guy, middle-aged, with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut and an advanced case of crow’s feet. Normally he was all business, but this morning he looked a little worried.
“I can manage,” Jim croaked. He sat up, bleary-eyed, and did his best to look alert.
“Look, it’s not that I don’t think you can manage. It’s that after seeing you, I really don’t want what you’ve got. Go home and don’t come back until you’re over this, all right?”
Jim felt so bad he didn’t argue. He locked down his computer and headed for the door.
* * *
He was so miserable when he got home that at first he didn’t notice that anything was different. He had made it all the way to the bedroom of their apartment and was half undressed before it registered: Kelly’s dresser was bare. No jewelry, no brushes, no makeup, no perfume. Jim stared at the dresser for a moment and blinked. The dresser stared back, as empty of Kelly’s presence as the day they’d bought it.
He looked in the chest of drawers, the closet. All her things were gone. Her shampoo and razors were missing from the bathroom too. There was no note.
Not surprising, he thought. What more was there to say?
He sat on the edge of the bed and held his face in his hands. For just a minute he let himself feel how miserable he was, then he made a decision. He would call. She wouldn’t pick up, of course, but he had to call because he wasn’t going to be the kind of guy who didn’t call when his wife walked out on him.
Her cell phone rang through to voice mail just as he’d thought. “Kelly,” he said, “you don’t have to tell me why. I know why. I just need to know—is this for a few days or is it forever? Because if it’s a few days or even a week or two I can get through. If it’s forever, well . . .” He broke off for a minute. “I’ll want to talk. Look, I’m home sick today and probably tomorrow. I’ve got the mother of all sinus infections. Call me at home if you—”
Need me, he had been about to say. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? She didn’t need him or even want him. He’d taken her for granted, and now she wasn’t granted any more.
“Just call me,” he said, and hung up. He took four aspirin and a double dose of NyQuil and crawled into his bed with his socks still on.
* * *
The pain woke him. Was it really something stabbing between his eyes? His head was still buzzing fro
m the antihistamine, and by all that was holy he should have been asleep. For a long moment he didn’t even know where he was—just that someone seemed to be driving an icepick into his face. The alarm clock read 2:36 A.M.
“Good grief,” he said, and flailed out for the bedside lamp. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed and, as he did so, the room reeled in lazy loops around him. He gasped and clutched at the bedclothes, trying to keep from falling onto the floor. The pain behind his face flared and he heard and felt a soft slurrch as something in his pressurized sinuses shifted, pushed from chamber to chamber inside his aching skull.
He could still feel the effects of the NyQuil, but his nose and sinuses weren’t even close to clear. His head felt as though it had been packed full of hot mud. His throat was raw, and by the way the room was continuing to spin, it looked as if his ears had also joined the party. He took a breath and then another, stood up, and staggered to the bathroom.
The sight in the mirror was appalling. The first thing he noticed was the blood that had spilled out of his nose and crusted his right cheek in a thick, red-brown clot.
No wonder I couldn’t breathe, he thought. My nose is clotted shut.
The second thing he saw was that there was swelling around both of his bloodshot eyes. As he looked the face in the mirror doubled, blurred, then swam into focus again. He was going to have to clear that nose if it was ever going to heal—but then again, did he really want to start it bleeding again?
There was a squelching sound in his head and the feeling of something—something?—squirming in the bones behind his nose. He wadded up some toilet paper and attempted to blow it clear.
“GAAAAHHHH!” he shouted as the pain hammered between his eyes. Not only did nothing in his head budge a millimeter, but he discovered that the pain knob on this particular sinus infection went to eleven.
Forget this, he thought. I need help.
But who could he call at a quarter to three in the morning?
Normally Kelly would have been there to help, but he wasn’t going to call her now. The doctor’s office phone message informed him that office hours were from eight to five, but for after-hours service he should call the Urgent Care facility, and for emergency service dial 911.
