Nebula Awards Showcase 2017

by Julie E. Czerneda

  Webslingers have a lot of theories about the things they see in the webworld, none of it backed up by science but all of it rooted strongly in This Happened To a Friend of a Friend of Mine. Some visions were real things, transformed, like how Marge became Pug-Marge. The brachiosaurus could have been a tractor, or a bug. Some visions were total figments of the imagination—though whose imagination exactly, and what they meant, was the subject of endless webhead debate. Some slingers said the visions couldn’t hurt you—So and So got stabbed like a dozen times by Bettie Crocker and that teapot from Beauty and the Beast one time and she bled until she passed out and when she woke up she was stone cold sober and unharmed—and some said web-world wounds would follow you, Freddie-Kruger-style, into the real world. Drugs are maddeningly resistant to methodical study, or even rational scrutiny.

  To be honest, though, all the dinosaurs were a good sign. Timmy used to love dinosaurs. When he was little. The fact that his webworld was packed full of them meant maybe he was in a peaceful happy childlike state of mind.

  I passed a skate park. Teenagers moved through the little hills and curves, on rollerblades and skateboards, enjoying the sudden snap of early-spring warmth. What did it mean, I wondered, that every one of them had a horse head? That they were dumb animals, or that they were strong and noble? Being on drugs was a lot of work. I’d only been under for a half hour and already I was exhausted.

  You may imagine, fellow congregant, that risking death or imprisonment by venturing out into the world Under the Influence was the most frightening part of my ordeal. Not so! For I realized, as the horses watched me pass with hostile looks on their faces, that the law and bodily harm were the least of my worries. The real terror came from two warring forces that threatened to crack me open. The first was love: that tether that tied me down, a choking liquid swamp I floundered in, thick and warm as phlegm, floodwaters that had started rising the second I took a hit of webbing, the only thing I couldn’t vanquish with a Good Attitude. Love for Timmy, helpless maternal love that overpowered my anger at everything he’d put us through.

  The second was fear.

  Every webworld has a boogeyman. That’s because pretty much every person has a boogeyman. A monster, a nemesis, a person or thing they fear most. I felt mine, as I drove. I had no idea what it was. I had no phobias, no enemies, except maybe for Carolina Bugtuttle, but she doesn’t count, for anything, ever. But something was there, and it had always been there, just below the surface, and now it was threatening to burst through.

  A Barbie doll answered Susan’s door, oversized headphones yoking her neck, looking for all the world like a chicken disturbed while doing something it shouldn’t be.

  “Ummm . . . hi?”

  “Morning, Susan!” I said, suddenly inexplicably frightened by the emptiness of her porcelain-rubber stare.

  “Um . . . my mom’s not . . . here?”

  “Not here to see your mom, Susan. I’m here to see you.”

  “Oh. Come in?” A slight bow, church manners intact, so maybe her mother didn’t raise her quite as badly as I’d thought she had. “You, uhh . . . Want a soda?”

  “No, Susan, thanks so much.”

  She sat. I sat. The couch sagged. They’d needed to buy a new one when Susan was six and her mother worked at Wal-Mart, and now she’s sixteen and her mom’s still there and the couch is still here.

  “Nice . . . weather we’ve been having?”

  “It is.”

  We watched each other. I wasn’t sure how to start, though surely I wasn’t the first mother in history to plant her feet in the living room of her son’s Whore Girlfriend. Probably not even the first one who used to babysit said son’s Whore Girlfriend. But I figured awkward silence benefited me more than her, threw her off balance, so I’d let it ride for as long as I could.

  “You’re looking for Tim,” she said.

  “You know where he is?”

  “Nope.”

  “I wonder if I believe you.”

  Barbie-Susan shrugged, hardening, and I saw that I’d miscalculated—she’d found her footing, gotten over the awkwardness, she was seizing the reins, danger, abort. “He said you were a meek obedient housewife,” she said. “That doesn’t seem . . . accurate.”

  “My son thinks he knows me,” I said. “But he’s wrong.”

  No one knows me, I thought, but was that true? I didn’t. My husband didn’t. Did Tim? There it was again—the tug, the pull from Route 29. I shut my eyes, tried to seize hold of it and snap it, but it stuck to my hands like flypaper and tied me tighter.

  Susan said “Because here you are, with a very faint but very definite gray tint to the white of your eyes. You’re webbed, Mrs. Wilde. Don’t worry. It’s nothing anyone would spot if they didn’t know what they were looking for.”

  “And you?” I asked. “Are you? Is he? Are you both here—”

  “Ugh, no,” she said. “I hate that stuff. Do you even know what you’re doing? Let me guess—you Googled it? Christ, an old woman Googling is more dangerous than a drunk blind bus driver asleep at the wheel.”

  “Did you just call me old?”

  “Ummm . . . no?”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “You know where he is. You two—”

  “Your son might not know you, but you clearly don’t know him either.” We watched clouds, out the thin dusty windows. I wondered what she saw when she looked at them. For me they were cheese, vast walls of cold supermarket cheese. “What did you want to be when you grew up?” she asked.

  “My favorite subject was biology,” I said, willing to tolerate any digression that might eventually lead me where I wanted to go. “Followed closely by chemistry. Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you ever heard?”

  “Why is that ridiculous?” she asked. “You never dreamed of doing something with that?”

  “I wanted to get married,” I said, the words coming easy from lots of practice. “I met someone wonderful, and I wanted to be his wife and support his dreams and have his kids. Speaking of whom. Where is Timmy?”

  Her voice, now, was weirdly gentle. “Tim and I broke up six months ago, Mrs. Wilde. If we were ever really a thing.”

  Spiders rattled against the glass of her boxy old television. I listened while the sound got louder.

  Whore Susan scooched closer. “Tim told me that you never defend him, when his father is screaming at him. When your husband hits him.”

  “That is most certainly not true,” I said, quick enough to keep from wondering whether it was true and what it meant.

  I longed to curse her out. Hiss That boy has shattered our domestic harmony, my husband is trying his make his son a good man the best way he knows how, shut your filthy mouth you Skank Whore Bitch. But this is why people with bad attitudes make a mess of everything. Because this wasn’t about me. It was about Timmy. My own hurt feelings at her attempt to wound me would have to wait.

  “I’m trying to help here,” she said, unhelpfully. “Tim said he’ll be damned if he ends up like you.”

  A word, perhaps, would be useful, here, about my son Timmy.

  My fellow congregants may remember him as the charming rapscallion seven-year-old who delighted in shredding hymnals. Or perhaps you recall the smiling scallywag twelve-year-old who got on the PA system and made farting noises after Sunday worship on more than one occasion. You probably remember very little after that, because he decided then that he Hated Church and God and Religion and Pastor Jerome and decided to settle for merely making our home lives miserable. Before you—my beloved husband, my wise Pastor Jerome—decided to stop ignoring Timmy’s harmless aggressions and engage him as an enemy combatant, matching each new hostility with one of your own, an arms race that never abated, and of course anyone who’s ever sat through one of Pastor Jerome’s sermons when he’s in a foul mood knows well enough how deep his dagger-tongue can stab. Pretty soon the Bible stayed on the dinner table, and every night brought a new lecture on the evil of rock and roll or
idolatry or rap music or vegetarianism or socialism or feminism, and Timmy never, never failed to argue back, until the shouting became superlatively unkind on both sides. And the favorite subject of Timmy’s screaming was his parents’ marriage, the sham he believed it to be.

  So I didn’t doubt that he told her vicious things, spectacularly ridiculous absurd lies, preposterous suggestions no sane churchgoing Christian could have spent a half-second taking seriously. But who knew what this unbeliever believed. “God bless you,” I said, smiling to beat the devil, and fled that kitty-litter stinking house.

  A twelve-year-old boy sat on the bumper of my car. My son, but not. Identical to how Tim had looked, at that age, but something in his face told me at once that he was someone else. And that he was terrified.

  “Hi, mom,” he said, and got up to give me a hug. His arms clasped me below my breasts.

  “Hi, Matt,” I said, because I knew who this was, this perfect little boy I’d met inside my son’s mind. At twelve, Timmy wanted a twin brother more than anything else in the world. He’d had one for an imaginary friend, named him and given him all sorts of attributes (favorite color: blue, to Timmy’s red; favorite food: spaghetti, while Timmy’s was hamburgers), and now here he was, in the flesh, in the wonderful terrible world of my son’s head.

  “Where’s your brother?” I whispered, squatting to stroke the cheek of this marvelous creature, this fly stuck in amber, this last vestige of a beautiful happy boy I’d lost a long time ago—but why was he so pale, why did his lip tremble so? He was an emissary, this poor wretch, sent to me by my son’s subconscious, a harkening-back to the last safe place he’d known. Even before Matt answered my question, I knew what he was going to say.

  Colby’s house. The last place on the planet I wanted to go.

  The place the tether of warmth had been tugging me all along.

  “Do you want to come with me?” I asked.

  “No,” Matt said. “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  His face reddened, my little boy, my son who never was, precisely like my real son in the quick uncontrollable rush of his emotions. “Timmy doesn’t need me anymore.”

  “Okay,” I said, and sadness cut through something essential, one of the cords that kept the hot air balloon that is my soul anchored to the good and the positive. The world began to wobble. I kissed his forehead, grabbed both shoulders and shook, in that way that Timmy had liked, but did not like anymore.

  Matt grinned, a puppy after a belly rub, and then shivered, and looked away.

  Figment of my son’s imagination or not, I felt sorry for the little tyke.

  Matt was a cry for help. A demand to be rescued. Rescued from a monster. A vicious, cruel captor, determined to mold him into a man my son had no interest in becoming. Timmy’s boogeyman.

  And here, fellow congregant, I don’t mind saying, is where I started getting worried. Maybe it was the parked police cruiser I passed. Or the heavily-populated part of town where I was heading. But mostly it was this: the boogeyman was real. I knew who he was. Before my eyes the double-yellow line in the middle of the road stretched and bulged, a seam that barely held back a tidal surge of spiders.

  The sky darkened. I drove faster. Shut my eyes. But with my eyes shut I could hear them, scritching away, three fat gray furred spiders stuck under the sun visor. The warmth got warmer, the tether pulled tighter, and it was him, my son, my Timmy, the boy I abandoned, the boy whose heart I broke by siding with his father, his boogeyman.

  When I arrived, her car wasn’t there. That was one blessing. Carolina Bugtuttle was out, of course, working hard, neglecting her son and husband, keeping the books and preparing the pamphlets down at Christ the Healer, so focused on God’s reward for her in heaven she failed to see the one he gave her on earth, because God is merciful, God is kind even to the unkindest, lavishing largesse on selfish gossipy wenches.

  “Beth,” he said, opening the door.

  “Hi, Colby,” I said, to Brent’s dad, Carolina Bugtuttle’s husband.

  Colby, Pastor Jerome had said, the night they met, the night I’d been trying to prevent in the six months since we got married. What the hell kind of a man is named after a cheese? Then he gave me that chin-twitch that says Laugh At My Joke, which is what you sign up for when you say Til Death Do Us, so I laughed, but maybe not as much as I normally did, because then he gave the subtle head tilt that says You Have Disappointed Me—but to be honest I knew Colby before I ever heard such a cheese, and to this day when I taste it I think of him, and hold it in my mouth until it is gone.

  In the webworld, Colby Goldfarb stood before me precisely as he was when we were eighteen, in the parking lot outside Crossgates Mall, lit up by arc-sodium lights that turned him amber in that pelting rainstorm, right after I said the sentence I’d spent all week working up to, the one that broke his heart, and mine to boot, but mine didn’t matter, and he stood outside the car, looking in, at me, for so long. Thin, young, wide-eyed, all hipbones and elbows and nose and thick black hair. He was even soaking wet, here, now, although his skin was dry and warm as summer when he stuck out his hand and I shook it.

  “You’re looking for your son,” he said.

  “Is he here?”

  “I am under strict orders not to answer that question.”

  He grinned, and my mighty unbendable momma-bear knees buckled.

  “What the hell, Colby,” I said, pushing past him, hand hot on his shoulder. “I would have called you, if Brent was hiding out at my place.”

  “That’s because you’re a better person than me.”

  I wasn’t, and I wondered if I really would have called him. I had no idea what I’d do to keep my son’s trust, because I hadn’t had it in a long time. Because I didn’t deserve it. Because I’d left him to fight his boogeyman alone. I had failed him so utterly. The magnitude of it sent twitches down my arms, started spiders leaking from the door hinges.

  Colby’s smile made my head hurt, ushering me in, the smile of a man who loved his son, who didn’t believe they were mortal enemies and his mission in life was to crush the child’s spirit.

  “Sit,” Colby said, gesturing to the kitchen table, turning to the Keurig machine to make me a coffee. Spiders swam in the thing’s water tank. At any moment now the burst would shatter my brain and my son’s.

  “Where is he?”

  “In the basement.”

  “With Brent?”

  “Do you have any secrets from your husband?” Colby asked, and his freckled face was so earnest and sad I knew he wasn’t talking about him and me. The fridge shook, rumbled, packed with spiders to the point it could not keep closed.

  “Of course not,” I said, because no other answer could be admitted, let alone uttered aloud.

  “Could you keep one? A big one?”

  Stuck to the fridge was a gorgeous drawing, in colored pencils, of a blue-and-red feathered ceratosaur. Colby’s son was an incredible artist. “Brent’s favorite dinosaur,” I whispered. “I saw one of those this morning. It led me here.”

  Colby raised an eyebrow, leaned in, scanned the white of my eyes. Laughed out loud, the magnificent heaven’s-trumpet sound I’d given up on ever hearing again. “Bethesda Wilde, are you webslinging?”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  He laughed harder. “Is it fun? I confess there’s a part of me that’s always—”

  “I’m not doing this for fun,” I said, standing up, getting angry on purpose because anger was safe, anger was armor, against the spiders, against what Colby was doing to my gut; anger was the weapon my husband used whenever he didn’t know what to do, and there had to be something other than my son that I had to show for all the time I’d spent with Pastor Jerome. I headed for the basement.

  “No no no,” Colby said, genuinely afraid, actually running, but I had a head start and for all my size I can move fast when I need to, and I got to the basement and wrenched open the door and slammed it behind me and locked it, and stomped dow
n into the laundry-and-mildew smell of Carolina Bugtuttle’s underground nest.

  “Beth, stop,” he said, pounding on the door. “Listen to me. You can’t. Okay? Respect their privacy. You’ll only—”

  A cocoon, I guess, is the best I can do when it comes to describing what I found in the basement. A globe of densely-wrapped spiderwebs the size of a small car, lit up slightly from within, and I felt him in there, smelled him, my son, and I put my hands against it, felt its heat, felt the warm safe world it contained, and slowly seized fists full of spiderweb and ripped, tore it open, watched thickened water slosh out in a rush that reminded me of giving birth. Upstairs, I heard Colby unscrewing the lock to take off the doorknob.

  “Timmy!” I screamed.

  Two shapes churned out of the web cocoon—dolphins, I thought, but then not, because fast as blinking they were boys, young men, drenched, hands clasped.

  “Mom?” my son said, and let go of Brent’s hand like it had suddenly caught fire. “What the hell, mom!”

  “Where were you?” I asked. “What’s in there?”

  “In . . . there?” Timmy said, and turned to take in the ruined cocoon. “Wait—you can see this? You’re here? You’re in the web with us?”

  “Now, look,” I said, stammering for the explanation I’d practiced, back when this was all seemed like a good idea.

  Timmy laughed out loud. “Look, Brent! A ceratosaurus. We’ve been trying for months to make one.”

  The dinosaur stood between me and Colby, who had just arrived, disemboweled doorknob in hand. Father and son exchanged a glance that said let’s keep quiet, let’s let them say what they need to say, and I ached for that, for the kind of trust that lets parents communicate wordlessly with their kids.

  “I want you to come home with me, Timmy. We’ll get you help. One of your father’s friends runs a Christian rehabilitation clinic—”

  “You think I’m a drug addict, mom?” He started laughing again. “I told you guys. I told you my parents work so hard to not see the truth that they don’t know how to stop.”

  Brent started to say something, then decided against it. They watched me put the pieces together. These boys, these men, my teenage son, my teenage lover, his teenage son who was my teenage son’s lover; they dripped with blue-green amniotic fluid and watched the truth widen my eyes, watched me fight it all the way.