Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  Daniel had always been a naturally affectionate man. He gave his love freely and he craved it in return. And when Angela finally learned this, she lunged for her newfound power with a vengeance. Her rejection ate him up like the crudest of cancers. When he would tell her he loved her, and only a cold, black silence welled up out of her in reply, the bottomless pain and naked fear in his heart ranged outward like a beacon of loneliness.

  Only Angela had the power to hurt him so exquisitely and she wielded her special weapon with the skill of a neurosurgeon. If he made no overtures, she could let them live like brother and sister for months at a time, and then almost whimsically deign to open her legs for him when she felt like it. Like a dumb mutt, he would sit up and get ready for her, waiting for her to toss him a doggie-treat.

  She turned and slipped out of his embrace, walked to the window, stared out at the manicured hedges and lawns of the grand old hotel. Keeping her back to him, she spoke to the leaded glass panes. “Oh yes, I keep forgetting. This is our ‘second honeymoon,’ isn’t it?”

  Daniel couldn’t ignore the sarcasm in her voice. “Well, we didn’t have much of a first one now, did we?”

  He was referring to her wrenching a disc in her back as she picked up a heavy suitcase from the airport’s luggage carousel. He was referring to ten days at Lake Tahoe with her complaining of increasingly intolerable lumbar pain and avoiding even a comforting touch from him the whole time. He was referring to her answer when he suggested they substitute with mutual oral sex until her back healed: I guess I should tell you now, Dan—I’ve always hated doing that to you, and honestly I don’t think I could ever do it again.

  He remembered wondering back then what her definition of love might be (since it obviously didn’t include giving to your lover because it made him feel good. Or deriving pleasure from simply knowing that you made him feel good).

  Angela whirled angrily from the window, her face twisted with a special loathing. “You prick! You always bring that up when you have nothing else to say!”

  “Well I guess it’s a measure of my pain, Angela. The memory won’t go away.”

  “You bastard! You act like it was my fault! Like I hurt my back on purpose…!”

  “You mean if you hurt it at all.” The words came out of him without a forethought. He knew immediately how much they would hurt her. He didn’t really want that, did he?

  She rushed him, raising her long fingernails at him like talons, going for his face. “You bastard!” she cried out, again and again.

  This was not going well at all, thought Daniel, as he fended her off.

  ⟡

  Roger ended up stashing the crate on the fourth floor, at the end of the wainscotted hall in Room 434. The smaller rooms up there were practically never used, especially in the off-season. And now that November was only a couple of weeks away, nobody would be checking that room very often, if at all.

  After he’d carefully hidden the container behind the valanced draperies, and turned to leave, Roger had decided that, damn it, he did need to know what was in that crate. Its size and weight indicated something substantial, and if it was something like a safe, then maybe he should know about it. A fantasy of the professor being a secret embezzler or bank-robber made him smile. Roger could confront him with his hidden cache of loot, and make him split the money. Yeah…

  But his get-rich-easy dreams faded quickly when he pried back one of the thin, wood slats of the crate to discover one of those big bottled-water bottles in there. Just like he’d first imagined. Now what the hell was going on here? Looking closer, Roger noted that the water was not clear like bottled water. Rather, it had a murky, greenish cast. Peering in through the single open slat, he could see nothing in the water, but his instincts told him the bottle could not be empty. After prying the top of the crate loose, he carefully eased the thick-walled glass container from the crate. It was bulky and probably more than three feet high. He carried the bottle closer to the window and even then, at first glance, he couldn’t see a damn thing. Now why the hell was he hiding a bottle of creek-water for?

  It wasn’t until he started to roll it back under the draperies that he saw it.

  Just for an instant, then it was gone. A flash of color and reflected light, like a polished fish-lure spinning through the water. Roger stopped moving the big bottle, again peered into the aquarium depths.

  There it was. The little bastard. Jeez, it was small, but it was there.

  The light had to hit it just right or he couldn’t even see it, but once he knew what he was looking for, he kept relocating it every time it would disappear. It reminded him of that tropical fish they called a neon—not because of its shape, just its colors, which kept changing like an electric rainbow. Its shape was hard to figure. Definitely not a fish-shape, though. It was more like a blob. No shape at all, really. Roger wondered if he could see arms or legs or eyes in that tiny shapeless mass, and decided that he couldn’t really see much of anything.

  But that had been more than a week ago…

  ⟡

  True to his word, the professor came by to check on things. Roger was very courteous to the man and persuaded him to let him tag along for the inspection.

  “All right,” said the professor. “Let’s have a look.”

  Roger nodded and uncovered the bottle, then jumped back away from it instinctively when he saw the shape within its brackish depths.

  “Damn…!” he said automatically, his breath hitching up in his throat. He hadn’t been prepared for what he now saw behind the glass.

  The tiny sliver of colored tissue had been replaced by something a little larger than a softball. No, that wasn’t right. It hadn’t been replaced…whatever it was in there had grown. The little bastard was growing, Jeez…

  The professor calmly went about observing the thing and making notes on a little pad he’d pulled from his coat. Roger peered down at the pulpy mass and winced. It was uglier than anything he’d ever seen. Essentially shapeless, it reminded him of a freshly excised organ like maybe a spleen or a brain or something. There were convolutions and folds of tissue; there were tendrils and other streamers of meat hanging off it; there were objects that might have been the beginnings of eyes and tiny clawed appendages. Roger remembered once as a kid his mother cracked open an egg and it had a half-developed chicken in it, and this thing in the bottle almost reminded him of that. It was the weirdest thing he’d ever seen, no doubt.

  But calling it weird didn’t cover all the bases. No way.

  As Roger stared into the dark green liquid, the creature moved toward him, flattening somewhat against the glass. He sensed the thing would have liked to have grabbed onto him, and he didn’t like that feeling even a little bit.

  He also sensed something else about the creature: that maybe it was evil.

  The professor continued to write something hastily in his notebook, not standing until he was finished. “All right, son, you can cover it up again.”

  As Roger followed his instruction, a question occurred to him—if that thing had grown so much, just what the hell was it eating? He decided he’d ask the professor.

  “A good question,” said the man. “But I’m afraid it’s a bit too early to tell. Let’s wait another week or so.”

  ⟡

  Melanie Cantrell checked the lock on the door to her hotel room. She’d already put the Do Not Disturb sign on the knob, but goodness knew she didn’t want any maids coming in while she was in the middle of…of what she was here to do.

  The last phrase stuck in her mind like a line of lyrics on a scratched record. Here she was ready to do it, and she couldn’t even bring herself to mention the word. She turned away from the door, passed a small mirror on the wall—something to afford a guest a last-second check of one’s hair or clothing before leaving the room—and stole a look at her own face.

  Bloodshot and raw-rimmed from all the tears, her eyes looked like some zombie’s from a bad movie. The muscles in her jaw, taut and
corded, had contorted her normally pretty features into a mask of tense pain. Oh God, what was she doing here? She turned away from the mirror and began to unpack her suitcase. She carried several changes of clothes, extra towels and dressings, a few books, and her diary. After she emptied her bag, her gaze fell upon the telephone, squatting like some kind of dark creature by the side of the bed.

  She still had a chance to call Teddy and tell him where she’d gone…and why.

  But no, she wasn’t going to involve him in any of it. She’d already decided that she would go through it alone. Besides Teddy would’ve went crazy if he ever found out she’d let herself get pregnant. He was like that when she did something he didn’t like, screaming and yelling, and even hitting her once in a while. She looked away from the phone, wishing just for a moment that Teddy was the kind of guy who could be gentle sometimes. She’d never known a man who could be gentle, and her mother had always told her there was no such thing. She figured it must be true.

  Well, she told herself bravely, it was time.

  Melanie opened her little travel-bag and dug through till she found the vial of pills her friend, Cathy, had given her. Cathy was the only person in the world who knew she was spending the weekend at the Seaharp. Melanie didn’t want anyone to know, but Cathy had been the one who got her the drugs that would make her miscarry (it was easy with Cathy’s older sister going to pharmacy school!). And besides, if anything happened to her, she wanted somebody to know where to look for her.

  Melanie walked into the bathroom and shook out three of the pinkish pills, washed them down with water just the way Cathy said she should. It would take a few hours before her body would begin to rebel against the intruder in her womb; it would be best if she went to sleep for a while. Walking from the bathroom, she passed an open closet harboring several coat-hangers.

  Pausing, Melanie looked into the darkness at the triangles of wire, and the memory of old horror stories rose up in her mind. She wondered what she would do if the pills didn’t work.

  Oh Teddy, she thought, as tears stained her cheeks. I love you.

  ⟡

  When Roger and the professor checked the bottle the following week, he hesitated in pulling back the draperies.

  “Go on, son” said the professor, notepad already in hand.

  Roger did it and looked into the water. What he saw made his stomach churn. The professor started writing like crazy.

  What was going on here? thought Roger. The damned thing was disgusting. A fuckin’ monster—that’s what they were growing in there.

  Jeez, it looked worse than ever. The image of the undeveloped egg-embryo needed to be revised; it had changed, warped into something really alien, something bad. And it had been doing some serious growing—the bulk of it barely fit within the confines of the bottle. The thing had grown not only larger, but darker. Its dissected-organ appearance glistened with pulsating life. There was a sac-like thing which almost glowed with orange movement. There was something that could have been an eye. A tendril-like arm. Was that a claw? Seaweed-like stuff flowed and wavered in self-contained currents. The amorphous body constantly in ebbing motion, Roger was unable to recognize what was really growing in there. But whatever it was, he knew two things for sure: it was a nasty motherfucker and it couldn’t get a whole hell of a lot bigger without busting the glass bottle.

  “You didn’t tell me it was gonna get so big,” he said.

  “I didn’t know what it was going to do. This was an experiment, remember?” The professor’s voice was calm, even. In control.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” said Roger. “But, man, it looks bad, doesn’t it? It’s getting crowded in there.”

  “No, I still think there’s plenty of room.”

  “What is it? You never told me?”

  The professor rubbed his chin pensively. “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, listen, is it dangerous?” Roger figured it was—no matter what the professor said.

  “Probably. I don’t know yet.”

  Roger swallowed hard. Now there was an honest answer if he ever heard one.

  “Where’d you get it anyway? Are you a biology-guy?”

  The man smiled thinly. “No, I’m an archeologist—I found the, ah, spores of this thing in a stoppered vial thousands of years old.”

  “Really? Where?”

  The professor shrugged. “The ruins of a building dating back to early Mycenaean times. I brought it back from my last dig.”

  “Yeah, I got you.” Roger didn’t know from mice an’ eons, but he figured the professor was onto something pretty weird, so he figured he oughta just play along.

  “There were writings, too,” said the professor. “They spoke of this as a deimophage. Fascinating, don’t you think? I tried controlled experiments at the university with laboratory animals, but I didn’t have much heart for the torturing necessary, you see.”

  Roger frankly didn’t see at all, but he nodded his head solemnly as the professor rambled on.

  “Besides, it wasn’t working. None of the spores did anything. I decided they required spontaneously generated human emotion, so I thought of the most suitable test environment—hence the Seaharp!”

  “Yeah…right,” said Roger, having lost the thread way back there somewhere. “Hey, is it okay to cover it up now?”

  The professor nodded. “Till next week.”

  “You sure it’s gonna be okay. If it grows as much this week as it did last—”

  The professor waved off his protest. “Everything will be just fine, Roger. Let’s be off.”

  ⟡

  “Yeah?” said Bobby Kaminski, grabbing the receiver from its cradle. He’d been pacing about the hotel room, waiting for the call for what seemed like an eternity.

  “Okay, man, we’re in the lobby. What room you in?”

  “Two-O-Five,” said Bobby. “You got the money?”

  “Hey, man…sure we do. You got the shit?”

  Bobby nodded, rubbed his nose. “Yeah, I got it.” He was getting bad feelings about all this, but there was no turning back now.

  “Okay, keep it stiff, man. We’ll be right up.”

  Bobby hung up the phone and began pacing the hotel room again. How did he ever get involved in this crazy bullshit? If he wasn’t such a goddamned cokehead…

  He didn’t much like himself, but he didn’t like dealing with this guy, Andy, a lot worse. Sherry’d hooked him up, but Bobby didn’t like the looks of Andy, didn’t like his scent. The Good Fathers of Greystone Bay didn’t have much compassion for dealers and Bobby was feeling pretty paranoid. Either this guy Andy was a narc, or he was just bad news. Either way, Bobby didn’t dig the set-up—that’s why he kept his jacket on; that’s why he kept his snub-nose .38 in his shoulder holster.

  Hard knocks at the door broke up his thoughts. He opened the door after checking the peep-hole.

  “Hey, dude, how’s it hangin’?”

  Andy was standing there in his leather gear, punctuated now and then by chrome studding and chains. He smelled of grease and road-grime. Behind him were two other bikers who looked like they could have been tag-team members from a World Federation Wrestling bout. One of them carried a small nylon Nike sportsbag.

  “I thought I told you to come alone,” said Bobby.

  “Hey, I don’t go nowhere without my stick-men,” said Andy, who remained standing in the hallway. “So, are we comin’ in, or what?”

  Bobby stood aside and the trio entered—the two goons immediately casing things out like good goons should. He didn’t like this situation at all. His nose was itching and burning. He’d love to take a toot right about now, but he needed to be clear, to be ready for anything.

  “Okay, where is it?” asked Andy.

  Bobby opened the top dresser drawer and pulled out the kilo, nicely wrapped and sanitized for their protection. “You got the money?” he asked. His voice sound weak, reedy. Scared.

  Andy smiled and nodded to the goon with the Nike bag
, who threw it on the bed. Unzipping it, Bobby wasn’t really surprised to see it was filled with cut-up newspapers. So it was going down like this…

  Swinging around, he reached for his gun. Better to take out Andy, then maybe reason with the other two.

  But before he could complete the turn, something stunned him, creating a stinging halo around the back of his head. His knees jellied up on him and huge arms caught him as he started to go down. Bobby was dazed as they frisked him.

  “You were right, Andy—he was hot,” said the goon, stripping out his piece.

  “So you were going to shoot me?” asked Andy.

  Bobby was too numb to respond. He knew it wouldn’t do any good anyway. One of them ripped open his shirt. Then somebody was fumbling with his belt and zipper.

  “Just for that” said Andy. “I’m gonna let my boys have a little fun before they ex you out, man.”

  The pain in the back of his head bloomed like a miniature nova, but it proved to be only a sweet prelude…

  ⟡

  Roger was getting very freaked out when the professor didn’t show up for his weekly visit. It had been a bad week at the Seaharp anyway—Mr. Montgomery had been highly upset by the murdered drug dealer they found in 205’s bathtub. Roger was just glad he hadn’t been the one to find the poor bastard.

  He waited all day on Saturday, and still no professor. Roger called at the University on Sunday, but nobody was answering any of the phones. On Monday, he spoke to a woman who gave him the bad news: the professor had slipped in the shower and fractured his skull. He was now at the Miskatonic University Hospital, comatose.