Fearful Symmetries

by Thomas F Monteleone

  As soon as the old priest turned to face his adversary, the Eucharist began to glow with white heat and light, a miniature sun in his hands. The shadows in the small village church were banished by the brilliant explosion of light. The golden benediction mantle became a torch so bright that no one dare look directly upon it.

  Lyrica had almost finished the transformation and it progressed rapidly now. In the short moments of the priest’s preparations she had assumed the changeling shape of the magnificent green serpent. She reveled in the return to her natural form, and writhed in ecstasy as the Duke and Mauro reeled back from the horror they now perceived. She moved quickly, arching up in her spine and dislocating the hinge of her jaws, unfurling her great hollow fangs. Cobra-like, she reared up to face the foolish priest and his pyrotechnic show to impress the masses. Tightening her coils, she prepared to spring—

  —and was stunned into immobility by the searing white wave of energy which hit her like the shock wave of a fiery explosion.

  How foolish she had been! How wildly overconfident and arrogant! She had amused herself by walking proudly and defiantly into the lair of her natural enemy, and now he was proving to be her match…!

  “Behold the beast!” cried Mazzetti. There was a collective, horrified gasp from the assembled dinner party, Carmina had swooned into the arms of her mother.

  “My God!” cried out young Mauro, who fell to his knees, grasping the legs of his father in supplication for forgiveness and in thankfulness for seeing the true evil with which he had become involved.

  Lyrica could see everything taking place with a deadly clarity, but at the same time she felt totally blinded, totally overwhelmed by the power and light emanating from the Eucharist. It was the first time in her very long life that she had ever encountered such a force, and she was truly shocked by its fury and total domination. Resisting with all her strength, she could do nothing, and as the priest approached her with the Eucharist, the blinding light felt as though it would sear the flesh from her bones. The pain became an intolerable wave, and she succumbed to its numbing paralysis, slipping into a terrible coma-like state in which she was stingingly aware of everything around her, but completely and irrevocably powerless to react.

  The priest reached out and touched her dry, scaling flesh. She tottered for an instant, then fell to the stone floor. Her coils remained stiff and tight in the grip of a rigor mortis-like power.

  Moving to the altar, Father Mazzetti spoke again. “Lift the altar stone! Quickly now!”

  “Father, what are you doing?” asked the Duke, as he moved with his son to fulfill the priest’s request.

  “Just do as I ask!” said Mazzetti, almost delirious over the show of power at his command.

  Quickly, silently, Mauro and his father grasped the corners of the marble altar and heaved upward and away from the massive base. Lyrica lay frozen in constricted coils by their feet, watching and suddenly understanding what the priest intended. A shudder of abject horror rushed through her, and she wanted to scream, but no sound could ever come.

  The two men eased the marble slab to the floor and looked up to face the priest.

  “Take the beast and commend it herewith!” cried Mazzetti. He had a wild-eyed, prophet-in-the-desert look to his features. Mauro and the Duke moved rapidly, automatically. She could feel them as they hunched over, reaching out to wrap their fingers around her girth. The touch of their warm, soft flesh against her scaled coolness repulsed her, and a shudder passed through. Unable to fight back against the blinding heart-of-the-sun light of the Eucharist, she felt herself being lifted from the floor.

  Up, over the edge of the altar she was roughly carried. The droning Latin prayers of Mazzetti accompanied this, and despite her terror, she felt a spasm of utter hate wash through her. She vowed her vengeance against this old man who deceived her. She would punish him! He would regret his actions of this day!

  Now she was being dropped into the hollow center of the altar. Like a thick-walled casket vault, like a coffin, it accepted her with a dark, mute finality. She felt the cold stone against her flesh, colder even than the scales that protected her.

  No! This could not be…! She fought against the paralysis which gripped her, railed against the force of the Host, but her power was for nothing compared to the awesome magic of the priest.

  Looking up from her crypt, framed by its rectangular walls, she could see the streaming light of the Host still lacing her like a lethal radiation. She heard the grunting effort of the men as they lifted the capstone, an immense slab of white marble, and heaved it up to the edge of the altar.

  “Enclose the beast called lamia!” cried out Mazzetti. “And the Lord shall entomb his Adversary forever!”

  The sound of heavy stone, grinding, grating, sliding against heavier stone echoed through the hollow crypt of the altar. She cried out to them for mercy, but the sounds were only in her mind. She could do nothing but watch the rectangular slab slowly creep across the altar’s topmost edges, sealing her within like a moldering corpse.

  Except that there would be no moldering.

  There would be no mindless, black oblivion here. No, she realized with a rising panic, with a thick column of terror rising up in her mind. Instead, she would be alive in this total darkness, in this state of eternal paralysis. She would be conscious of the nothingness that entombed her.

  Forever.

  The thought shot through her being with a searing, exquisitely painful reality.

  No! The single word reverberated through her mind as she watched the last edge of light being constricted and finally pinched off as the slab slid into place. Stone met stone with a final resonant thud, leaving her in a place of total darkness, of a silence so deep and so profound that she felt she might go immediately mad…

  Coda: Scarpino, Sicily 1944

  The plane was a B-17, a bomber called the Flying Fortress. It had been coruscated by flak over Anzio and the navigator’s instruments had been knocked out. The pilot, a 26-year-old farmer’s son from Kankakee, Illinois named William Stoudt, had lost his bearings and was trying to pick up some landmarks by heading vaguely south from his target. He’d dropped his eggs just as some shrapnel ripped through his plane’s underbelly, half-closing one of his bomb-bay doors, and hanging up the last 500-pounder in his bomb-release rack.

  As he struggled to get his crew home, they scurried about the tunnel-like fuselage of the plane in a desperate effort to free the final bomb. Making a landing with 500 pounds of H.E. in your gut would be suicide and Captain Wild Bill Stoudt knew they were all doomed unless they could kick free of that fat boy with its tail fin hung up on the hinges of the bay door.

  Waist gunner Sammy Sharpe from Brooklyn, New York decided to be the hero. He unraveled his auxiliary parachute and tied his silks into the bulkhead. Always a daredevil, Sammy loved the challenge of dangling himself through the bomb bay 10,000 feet above the Sicilian mountainside. Inch by inch, he lowered himself down until his boot reached the jammed up bay door and the twisted hinge. A good kick and one of two things would happen: the thin white metal of the bomb’s fin would collapse and the payload would drop free, or it wouldn’t and the bomb would probably detonate against the bay door.

  Either way, the problem would be over.

  Leather touched metal and Sammy Sharpe from East 24th Street (just up from Avenue R) smiled as he watched the last half-ton egg fade away. The B-17 had just passed over Palermo, so the bomb should land harmlessly in the mountains. Nothing down there for miles but a little village, and what were the odds…?

  When people ask what is the favorite story I’ve ever written, I usually tell them it’s the one I’m writing at that moment. Mainly because it’s true—I have to absolutely love what I’m writing, or it simply will not get written. But in some ways, I regard this next story as one of my favorites because it contains some deep, long ago autobiographical childhood stuff and also because I like what it says about the things that shape us. It also could be one of
my silliest because the “bad guy” of the story might be nothing more than a few dumb pieces of wood. Of course, it might be something far more menacing, but that is for you to decide.

  It was written, for Peter Straub’s HWA anthology called Ghosts, and again, I had no desire to write a story about something that has become such a shopworn staple of the genre as a ghost. Peter told me he wasn’t getting very much good material, and I’d promised I’d try to get him something of substance—in length and quality. I had to stretch it; I bad to give the standard ghost tale a good tweaking or I couldn’t make myself do it. In my idea notebook, I spied a line which asked how a writer who’d run dry might recapture the magic that made him a writer in the first place? (In parentheses, I had added later: is he looking for the ghost of his own childhood?)

  Perhaps he was. And perhaps I had found the kernel of a thought that could develop into my own personal vision of what a modern ghost story could be…

  I started writing and I let out all the chucks, both consciously and unconsciously. Even though this one is a long novelette, it almost wrote itself, and I think I had a first draft complete in about four days, which is damned fast for me. When I finished, I had a feeling I might have something pretty good, and Peter agreed with me. So did the HWA when they included it on the final Stoker Awards ballot for Novella.1 Some of you may recognize some of the source material for the story and the characters but I hope it will enhance, rather than detract from the reading experience.2

  1 It came in second to “Lunch at the Gotham Cafe” by Stephen King.

  2 The name of “Mr. Flip” comes from something Stephen King wrote in one of his earlier books. It was one of those things you read in other peoples’ work that resonates totally with your own experience (like going to a drive-in with your parents to see The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms). Steve had this quasi-toy that was either incredibly similar or exactly the same as the one I had as a very small boy, and when he described it, I was blown away as a rush of almost identical memories crashed over me. But King had taken me one step farther, because he actually remembered the toy’s name, something I had refused to allow myself to do. As a little kid, I had wanted all reference to its existence banished forever from my mind. But here was Stephen King, dredging it up forty-plus years later, and I was amazed and gratified that we unwittingly shared an early trauma together. When Elizabeth read King’s reference, she accused me of stealing it as my own, and I had a hard time convincing her that most of us writer-mutants have many shared experiences that left indelible marks. (Sometimes I think Paul Wilson and I led the same early lives…) She remains, I fear, skeptical, preferring to believe we are all participating in a mass-psychosis. Also: the meeting with Vonnegut on Third Avenue really did happen between him and me, and yeah, the conversation we had was pretty damned strange…

  A writer has nothing to say after the age of forty;

  if he is clever he knows how to hide it.

  —Georges Simenon

  (It would be so easy to just unlock this sucker, slide it to the right, step out into space, and turn myself into a street pizza…)

  Jack Trent stood at the window of his co-op overlooking the upper west side of Manhattan and the improbable swatch of Autumn they called Central Park. Fifty-five stories away from the land of yellow cabs and mid-eastern hacks, everything looked somehow unreal.

  (How do people have the stones for it?)

  Jack continued to stare downward, realizing that people who jumped out of windows were either a lot dumber or a lot crazier than he was. As bad as he was feeling right about now, (and for the past year and a half to be honest…) there was no way in hell he could kill himself.

  Another minute passed staring down at the micro-machine traffic in a kind of detached, fog-like state. So blanked-out. Not even aware of his thoughts. Then he stepped back and turned to face his office. It was a great looking room. Anybody who came to visit him always admired it openly. And who wouldn’t? It was a tastefully decorated celebration of the achievements of Jack Trent—known to a book-buying public as R. Jackson Trent.

  The bookcases covering the walls were bone white with blond oak trim. Four floor-to-ceiling cases were reserved for Jack’s many appearances in print. Three and a half shelves of novels, story collections, and anthologies he’d edited. Another whole case for all the foreign editions of those. Then more than two entire cases of all the places his short stories, columns, articles, and interviews had appeared: hundreds of anthologies, magazines, journals, and newspapers.

  Then there was the Henrendon étagère in the corner with all the awards. From every literary society, writers organization, and artsy cultural klatsch in Manhattan. The hall leading into the room was lined with photos of tuxedoed Poohbahs handing him statuettes, plaques, and sculptures.

  Almost an entire wall of Jack Trent.

  Sure, it was impressive, even to Jack himself. There were some mornings when he would shamble into this sacred space and the thought would just kind of smack him in the face.

  (Jesus, did I really write all this stuff?)

  Yes, he did. And therein, as Will Shakespeare once wrote, lies the rub.

  You see, Jack Trent, whose agents at William Morris, just landed him a two-book deal for more than 11 million dollars, was totally burned out. Toasted. Crispy fried. Reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned. Screwed, blewed, and tattooed. He’d been martinized, simonized, and sanitized—although not necessarily for his own protection.

  Jack Trent couldn’t write jackshit.

  (For more than a year now…)

  And this was from a guy who had literally burned up two IBM Selectrics, worn down countless type-ball elements, and kept the ribbon companies in the black. From a guy who, when word processing became the main heat back in the early Eighties, filled his 20 meg hard-drive with so many novels they had to be stacked up at his publisher like 737s waiting to land at JFK.

  (Those were the days, my friend…)

  He moved automatically to his desk, sank deep into the leather palm of his writing chair. Glaring at him like a modern gargoyle, a techno-demon of the White Space, was the paper-white screen of his Mac. The title of his next book, Malefaction, floated in the center of an empty page. The White Space that all writers must conquer was finally getting the best of him. As in Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, or Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, the metaphor had finally come round to become horrifyingly real.

  Picking up the keyboard, Jack placed it on his lap, stretched out in his chair and lightly laid his fingers on the keys. The letters had become alien symbols. Small runic scratches that held as much sense for him as stories written in Mycenean. His fingers felt cramped, unnaturally positioned over the home row. Myasthenia gravis or acute arthritis could not have crippled him more effectively than the sense of utter helplessness, of…emptiness that encapsuled him.

  To put it as simply as possible, the words would not come forth. For a half a thousand nights, Jack lay staring into the blackness of his ceiling, wondering if he was dealing with the symptoms or the disease. The questions rattled around in his head like seeds in a gourd. What was the sudden terror that welled up in him like a column of rancid vomit every time he even thought about trying to write? Could he have truly run out of things to say? How could he have ever grown weary of entertaining himself, of telling his stories to himself? Jack put the keyboard back on the desk, avoided looking at the book’s title lying naked on the face of the monitor.

  (Book title. Yeah right…)

  It was not a book title. He chuckled to fight back the tears of frustration. It was merely a title—there was no book.

  There was a sound from one of the other rooms in the apartment. Someone had entered the front door and the security monitoring system beep-beeped to let him know the door had been opened.

  “Mr. Trent? It’s just me.” A female voice passed through the rooms to find him. Betsy, his office assistant, had reported to work.

  (11:00 o’clock already? Chris
t, another day half shot.)

  Time, Jack had realized for a number of years did not fly—it red-shifted away from us. Memories from childhood capered before him as though things from the night before. And they were as clean and crisp as the little Eton suits his mother used to make him wear. The memories were stacked up behind him like the pages of all his manuscripts.

  (How many would it take to reach the moon?)

  A presence filled the threshold behind him. Sensing it, he turned slowly and looked at Betsy Moranovic. She was what you would call plain. A late Seventies graduate of Smith or Barnard or one of those places—Jack could never remember. She preferred short brown hair cut in what they used to call a page boy style, tortoise shell glasses, and shapeless skirts and blouses that could not be called out of style because they lacked any style in the first place. Betsy was the perfect office assistant: soft-spoken, obsessively efficient, and almost totally invisible.

  “How’s the new book doing?” she said as she faced him with an armful of mail from the post office box.

  “How many times are you going to ask me that?” said Jack, trying to control a sudden anger. “You know it’s doing for shit!”

  “I’m sorry, I really am,” she said, sounding like an embarrassed child. Then she stood looking at her shoes, waiting for his next words.

  (Just like my agent…and my readers…)

  He looked at the huge stack of mail in her arms and was touched by a bittersweet reminiscence of how he used to love to get mail. How he’d drive to the post office like a kid waiting, expecting his cereal box toy. And every time he’d open the little box and see a manila envelope folded up in there, he’d feel a little piece of the dream wither up and die. But those rejection slips used to get him so juiced! So outraged that he couldn’t wait to get back to his little apartment and write something so damned brilliant they couldn’t turn it down.