Great. Just great.
That night Roger decided he’d better check on the thing in the bottle, but he didn’t know what the hell he’d do if he got himself up to the fourth floor and it had already broken loose.
When he pulled back the heavy draperies and saw the bottle still intact, Roger exhaled—only then realizing he’d been holding his breath. His luck was holding, but just barely, it seemed.
The creature had grown horribly. It didn’t look like there was any water left in the bottle at all. Just this bloated, sickly-green, tumorous thing. Its amorphous shape pulsed with life like a giant, beating heart. Jeez, it looked like it was growing larger as he watched it, like it would break the glass any second.
He had to get it out of there. Like right away. No way it was going to make it through another night. Just get it out. Dump it somewhere.
Roger told himself he’d worry about the details later as he hefted the bottle into his arms and slipped into the deserted hallway. It had to be at least three times as heavy as it had been before and he wondered how that could even be possible. Roger kept wondering what he would say if he saw any of the Montgomerys coming down from their apartments on the fifth floor. All he needed was to get caught by them before he reached the service elevator.
The old service elevator creaked and groaned its way to the musty basement, where Roger eased the bottle past the doors and across the cluttered floor. Lawn furniture, croquet sets, umbrellas, and other seasonal equipment littered the path to the exit doors. The bottle seemed to be getting heavier with each step and Roger prayed that he didn’t stumble on something or lose his grip.
It wasn’t until he’d carried it out to his four-year-old Camaro that he’d thought of what to do with it. Placing it carefully in the back seat, Roger tried to avoid looking into the dark center of its mass. There was something very much like an eye looking back at him. Its whole body, now pressed against the glass, heaved like a beating heart. He couldn’t wait to get rid of the ugly son-of-a-bitch.
Turning off Harbor Road onto Port Boulevard, Roger drove carefully through the center of Greystone Bay. It was getting late in the evening and things were quiet. Lightning flashed in the Northern skies and he wondered if a storm might be descending on the coast.
With the bottle wedged into the floor-well behind the shotgun seat, he headed straight out of town on Western Road, past the industrial parks and the other new development in some of the farmlands. There was a place up in the hills off Western Road where the government had operated a toxic waste dump. Public outcry had it closed down about fifteen years ago and since then it had become a favorite spot for adventurous kids who wanted to do some make-believe exploring and teen-agers who wanted to do some real exploring in the back-seats of their cars.
As Roger drove up the abandoned road with his headlights off, past the battered chain-link fence and gate, memories of evenings spent up here with Diana wafted back to him like a subtle perfume. He wished they’d been able to work things out. He still missed her sometimes. The thought wistfully distracted him as he pulled up and killed the engine.
Carefully, Roger slipped from behind the wheel, went around and pulled the bottle out from behind the passenger seat. When he reached down to pick it up, the thing inside lurched and churned, like it had tried to get at him through the glass. God, he hated it! He couldn’t wait to dump it into the well and be done with the whole mess.
He’d found the well years ago when he’d been kicking around the site. The wooden well-cover had half-rotted away and somebody had tried to batten it down with a piece of corrugated steel. It was a half-assed job, and Roger had pulled back the metal and peered down into the shaft in the earth. He couldn’t see any bottom and a stone dropped into the darkness fell for what seemed like a very long time before splooshing into the water.
The perfect place to dump this thing, thought Roger as he carried the bottle the remaining few feet to the lip of the well. The circumference of the opening looked narrow, but it wasn’t—certainly wide enough to swallow up the water-fountain bottle. Sucking in his breath, he wrapped his arms around it and prepared to lift it over the opening.
The timing was flawless.
The thing must have sensed its fate because as soon as he embraced the glass, the creature inside heaved upward. With a smart little snick! the neck of the bottle just snapped off, pushed out and up by a thick tendril-like arm. It happened so fast, Roger didn’t have time to react. All of a sudden this fleshy tuber shot up past his face.
Instantly he was stunned by the overpowering stench of it. The inside of his nose stung, actually burned from the acid-stink of decay, of swamps. It was a batrachian smell, a hideous smell, of something impossibly old. He staggered backwards, then spun around, still holding the bottle. And then the glass was cracking, fracturing in all directions. The thing, once free seemed to be expanding like a balloon being filled with air. Roger was awash in the foul bath of its prison, smelling like the grave. More tendrils shot out embracing him like clinging seaweed. He screamed and a long tuberous finger leaped into his mouth, forcing its way down his throat. He gagged, heaving and puking, but still the appendage wormed its way into the depths of his stomach. He could feel it wriggling about, and he puked again.
Reeling now, locked in a death-dance with the thing, he staggered forward and tripped over the lip of the well. Head-first, he pitched downward into the shaft. The opening was just large enough to accept the width of his shoulders, pinning his arms to his sides. He plummeted into the darkness, picking up speed. His mind threatened to blank out from the sheer panic, and then suddenly he was jerked to a jolting stop. Reaching a more narrow spot in the well, his body was wedged vise-like in the shaft.
And still the creature clung to him, wriggling and sliding about, appearing to assume a more comfortable position, probing him obscenely.
His thoughts were short-circuiting as he realized there was no getting out, that he was going to die suspended upside down and being slowly eaten from the inside out by the monster from the bottle. He wanted to scream, to cry out, but the tendril stuffed into his mouth wouldn’t allow it.
Slowly the creature kept adjusting its position, re-arranging itself, moving and exploring his body with its many arms, leaving a viscous trail of slime everywhere it touched his flesh. He was almost numb from shock and exposure as it moved against him, sending lancets and pincers and thorns into him.
Under his fingernails, in his ears and up his nose, through his armpits and groin, and even up his ass. The thing shot him through with a raging inferno of pain. All his nerve endings sang with torment. His brain threatened to buzz away into the idiot hum of white noise, of absolute pain.
And the thing swelled with pleasure and satiety.
Time lost all meaning in the dank confines of the well. The constant symphony of pain precluded any serious thinking, and all he wanted to do was die.
But Roger Easton didn’t die.
Days. Weeks. Time became an ugly smear across the back wall of his mind.
He had no idea how long he lay wedged in the well, but he knew it was longer than he should have lived without food or water. But gradually, in the short, dark spaces of thought between the rhythmic beats of agony, he grasped what must be happening: the thing was keeping him alive in the white-pain darkness. Somehow, the creature was feeding him parts of itself, as Roger in turn fed it.
It was the perfect relationship, and he knew it would last for a very long time…
One of the oldest (and often the dumbest) pieces of advice that gets tossed at young writers is “write what you know.” Yeah, right. Young writers, by dint of their very youth, usually do not know jack about much of anything. So what’s up with that old shopworn saw? Not much, usually. I always tell writers to write about what intrigues them, scares them, infuriates them, or makes them feel good, or whatever motivates them to write in the first place. Just keep writing—that’s the most important thing. I tell them sooner or later you will kno
w more than jack, and you’ll be an even better writer, but be patient. And once in a while, you will have something to write about that you actually do know from a personal experience.
Now the reason I slipped into lecture-mode for a moment is to prepare you for the background to the next story. Because it is based on a real guy named Kenny (not Denny), and his real story. It was one of those things I experienced and never forgot. I never knew I would ever turn it into a story until the day Dave Silva called me to invite me to contribute to an anthology he and Paul Olson were doing called Post Mortem—but it had to be a ghost story. I said yes, because I love Dave and his work, and because I love the challenge of taking the traditional ghost story and trying to do something different with it. I had no idea what I would do until I started to write, and then I remembered a night when I was back in college, and this guy was hanging at our apartment and he told us something that never left me…
“I even shot a pregnant woman, once,” Reitmann said. His voice was hard and crisp and totally without emotion, but there was a scary smile forming at the edges of his mouth.
I sat on the floor, listening to his story while rock music filled in the dead spots. My three room-mates and I were all half-drunk, but the wine did nothing to dispel the palpable sense of dread, the stench of a triumphant evil which pervaded the room.
The lights from our Christmas tree colored each of our faces in various hues of horror and revulsion, but nobody told Reitmann to stop—especially after he told us about the “Ring of Truth.”
⟡
Denny Reitmann was one of those guys you meet in college and you just know he isn’t going to be around for the commencement exercises. At least I knew it.
Ex-high school jock—but not the quarterback or shortstop type—Denny was your basic offensive guard, or maybe a catcher. In high school, he was the guy who could never get the experiments to come out right in chem lab, who was always clowning that he’d cut off his fingers in metal shop. He was the one who could eat fifteen hot dogs at the Spring Fever Fair, and cut the loudest farts during P.E.
And when a guy like Denny Reitmann went to college, it was only because there was nothing better to do at the time.
Then, it seemed like all of a sudden there was a shitty little “military action” going on in Central America, but most people didn’t care about places like El Salvador or Honduras or Nicaragua. The stock market was fluctuating as usual, interest rates were rising, and the import-wars were getting pretty fierce. A lot of the second-level nations like Mexico and Brazil had stopped paying even the interest on their billions-plus loans to the U.S., and a nasty recession was getting ready to take a bite out of the country’s hind-parts. As a result the poor minorities were being ground up in society’s gears pretty good.
But if you were twenty years old, while, and going to a monstrous diploma-factory like the University of Maryland, everything seemed to be just fine.
Denny Reitmann roomed in my dormitory on the College Park campus, and although you couldn’t say that he was my friend, or that I hung around with the guy, I guess I knew him as well as anybody did. He didn’t seem to have any real close buddies. Oh sure, everybody laughed at his crude jokes, and we all shook our heads when he would proudly announce his abysmal grades, but none of us was really “tight” with him.
It was like all the guys could sense Denny’s true “essence”—kind of bleakness. A void where his feelings should have been, is probably the best way to describe it. I mean, you could look into Reitmann’s eyes, and not be completely sure there was anything behind them.
It was right after Christmas vacation in my sophomore year, and everybody was piling back into their rooms to start boning up for the end-of-the-semester grind—Finals.
Everybody, that is, except for Reitmann. He came back with the rest of us, but only to clean out his dresser drawers, desk, and closet. “I’m packin’ it in, you guys,” he told anyone who would listen. “I figured it out, and even if I ace all my finals, I’m still gonna flunk out, so what the fuck, huh?”
I guess a few of us tried to talk him out of it in a half-assed kind of way, and some of the other guys took him down to the Rendezvous for a farewell drink, but the overall reaction to Denny Reitmann’s departure from academe’s fair grove was a big ho-hum. Besides, there wasn’t really much time to mourn the dead; those Finals were always a bitch, right?
I made out all right with all of them, even Organic Chemistry—the only one that really had me sweating. I knew that without decent numbers in Organic, not even that semi-bogus med school in Grenada would let me through the door. Thus triumphant, when Semester Break finally arrived, I went off with my room-mate, Bob, to ski in western Massachusetts at this great slope called Brody Mountain.
When we came back to the dorm to begin the Spring Semester, there was the usual joking and back-slapping and glad-handing. Everybody seemed keyed-up for the start of the long haul into Summer. So it wasn’t until a bunch of us were getting ready to take the hike to the dining hall that somebody noticed the postcard tacked to the bulletin board by the door to the lounge.
Postmarked at Fort Benning, Georgia, the card bore a short, hand-scrawled note which read:
Hey Guys,
I was getting board, so I joined the Marines. They shore do make things rough on us down here, but I think its going to be O.K. I like the rough stuff. Study hard and (smile) don’t be like me.
Denny Reitmann
“Jeez,” someone said. “The asshole joined the Marines, can you believe it?”
“With Reitmann, I’d believe anything…” I said.
“I guess that’s what happens when you get B-O-A-R-D,” said my room-mate, pulling the card off the corkboard and tossing it in the trash can.
Everybody had a quick laugh, and we piled out the door, on our way to get some over-cooked vegetables and the day’s Mystery-Meat Special. By the time we entered the dining hall, the conversation had become fixated upon the perfectly shaped ass of a blonde girl standing several places ahead of us in the line. I don’t think anybody gave Denny Reitmann another thought until he came back from a place everybody started calling “the ’Dor”…
…right before Christmas a year later. I was almost midway through my junior year. Bob and I had taken an apartment with two other guys from the dorm, and we were having a great time playing the sophisticated-young-man game.
A lot can happen in a year. I had discovered Mahler and Beethoven, French wines like Poulligny and Cabernet, the irrefutable logic of Bertrand Russell, the lyrical essays of Loren Eiseley, and—well, I think you’ve gotten the point. I was becoming enlightened and enriched and all that shit.
I was also becoming terrified of the El Salvador war.
They say that everything that goes around, comes around, and goddamn if this wasn’t the whole Vietnam mess all over again. The radio was daily talking about Sandinista body counts versus GI casualties—as if we were talking about sporting events instead of people killing each other. The network and cable evening news looked like an old Sam Peckinpah film, and I kept thinking about how close we all were to being part of the horror show.
The horror show crept a little closer the day the apartment phone rang five or six times before anybody bothered to answer it.
“Hello…” I said.
“Jack, is that you?”
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“It’s Reitmann! It’s me, Jack. How ya doin’, man?”
I did a mental double-take, realizing at last with whom I was speaking.
Reitmann, for God’s sake! Talk about the last guy I’d expect to hear from…
“Yeah, right…well, how are you, Denny? Where are you? What’ve you been doing?” I found myself saying the semi-automatic greetings, asking questions I didn’t really care to have answered.
“I’m back on leave…from the ’Dor, man. They were lettin’ us finish up our hitch a little early ’cause-a Christmas—you know how that goes…”
“Yeah
, right,” I said, at a total loss as to what to say next. What the hell did he want, calling me? How did he find the number? And most importantly, why me?
“Listen, I’m at my mom’s place, and it’s gettin’ kinda beat around here, and I was wonderin’ if I could stop over for little while, huh?”
“Jeez, Denny, I don’t know…we’re all getting ready to study for some exams.”
“Your mom gave me the address,” he said as though not hearing me. “And guess what? Your apartment’s pretty close to my mom’s, so it’s no hassle, man. I’ll see you around eight, okay?”
Before I could say anything, he’d hung up. I told Bob and Mike and Jay we were going to have company, and received a mixture of reactions. Of which, Mike’s was the best: “Well, at least he can tell us some war stories…”
And he certainly did.
⟡
“A pregnant woman…” said Jay. “Christ, Denny…why?”
“Because she was a fuckin’ ‘beaner,’ that’s why!” Reitmann’s eyes were like tiny steel balls, like a rat’s or maybe a raven’s. “They all carry grenades and shit, man…they all want to kill themselves an American. And besides, it was my job…I was a Sniper.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. Mike passed me the chianti bottle and I poured another glass. I was already blitzed pretty good, and this last one was just icing. I had been amazed at how the Marines had changed Reitmann in such a short time. His playful, kind of dumb, but almost likable, mannerisms had been sawed-off along all the edges, filed down until there was only a crude undercarriage left. And on that raw frame, the jarheads had constructed their killing machine—a guy full of hate and poison and a belief that everybody in the world was ultimately out to get you. Reitmann looked at me as I exhaled.
“A sniper, man! Don’t you know what a sniper is?” His voice had turned suddenly acidic, condescending.
“Yeah, I guess, but maybe you should clarify any misconceptions we might have.”
Fearful Symmetries Page 13
