Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  They ate scrambled eggs seasoned with onion, tomato, and herbs off thin plastic plates—discolored with use. Vinnie watched the older women suspiciously, and Tamara sensed her irritation at having to share Jerusha.

  “What do you do for a living, Jerusha?” Tamara asked, aware of how rude it sounded.

  “Oh, there is some widow’s pension from Abner’s company, and some welfare. I do not need much.”

  Especially with your own little unpaid slave. Tamara watched Vinnie pour soap into the dishpan. But she had to admit the furnishings here were spare enough, and Jerusha’s biggest bill was probably electricity to run the vaporizer.

  “And is your husban’ dead too, Tamara?”

  That question, asked with the cheerful lilt, brought back the night before, the letter, and the signs of a nocturnal eating binge still on the table. She’d managed to block it all out for a while.

  “No, I’m divorced.” And Gilbert Whelan remarried a woman with two children. That’s how he goes about finding himself?

  “I am sorry if my question upset you, Tamara,” the skeleton face said. Even Jerusha Fistler’s laughter was low and melodic—almost tuneful. It mixed with Vinnie’s higher giggle as Tamara hurried across the backyard to the door of her own utility porch.

  Vague terrors added up from all her mother’s warnings, plus all the things the world told Adrian and refused to tell her, had seemed like a big black block sneaking closer with every day.

  News of her father’s remarriage had pushed the block into sight and dropped it on her. The weight made it difficult for her to fill her lungs deeply. And if her breathing sounded like sighing, it was only a fight for oxygen. The block enveloped her and extended for miles around. Every movement, every gesture, seemed to be slower yet take extra effort, as if she lived underwater.

  “My problem is with your mother, not with you,” her daddy had said. “You’ll always be my little girl.”

  Now he had two new kids, and Adrian’s body had not stayed little. She’d grown too big and fat to love, to be worth even a letter of explanation. An end to all the daydreams of a reconciliation.

  Adrian slipped out the front door at the sound of her mother’s approach to the back. Her sandals flapped under her heels, the white grit worked its way between her damp skin and the sole. Adrian walked up the chalk road until she came abreast of the burned-out foundation, where insects clicked to each other in the weeds and the world smelled hot already.

  She roamed the ghost rooms, wishing some of the dangers her mother warned were lurking here would make themselves known—prove fatal. She hated herself as much as her father did. It would be a relief not to have to live with Adrian Louise Whelan anymore.

  Her mother came out to check on her and then went back into the house. Adrian picked up a wedge of glass, roughly triangular. It wasn’t blackened like much of the glass around and had taken on a tinge of that lavender color glass assumes when exposed long to the sun.

  The little brat, Vinnie Hope, unfolded a webbed lawn chair on the porch of the Fistler apartment and led out the thinnest woman Adrian had ever seen. Her legs looked like sticks, and Adrian was amazed to see them bend as the woman settled in the chair and turned her face to the sun.

  “Aye, woman-child, come please and talk to me,” the stick woman called.

  Vinnie crawled up on the stone-and-brick parapet rimming the porch and looked at Adrian. “She means you, stupid.”

  “Now, Vinnie, you must not speak in that way to my new neighbor,” the woman said as Adrian shuffled reluctantly over to the porch and stopped on the steps. “Please, come on up and sit. I am Jerusha, and the girl-child here tells me you are Adrian.”

  Adrian thought the woman must be dying, the way the bones and teeth stuck out of her face. That thought gave Jerusha more authority than the average stranger, and Adrian obediently walked up onto the porch and leaned against the shady side of the parapet.

  “Oh, such lovely eyes.” Jerusha’s eyes hid in the shadows of their sockets. “And so sad. It makes me want to cry.” She didn’t sound like she wanted to cry. Her voice moved along as if she were singing. “What makes such beautiful eyes so sad, I wonder.”

  Adrian felt tears coming, and looked down at the glass in her hand. She scraped the sharp edge lightly across the inside of her wrist and left a white line on her skin. She looked up to see Jerusha staring at the glass and then at Adrian’s face.

  “Such lovely skin and hair. How lucky you are to have these things.”

  “Yah, but she’s fat,” Vinnie said.

  “Oh, fat, what does that matter? It can be gotten rid of—fat. But there is no place in the whole world you can go for skin and hair so fine as that.”

  Vinnie looked at Adrian as if she’d never seen her before. “Really?”

  “Yes. And, Adrian, you must be careful.” She nodded toward the ruin next door. “There is much glass and nails over there.”

  “How did it burn?” Adrian didn’t care, but she felt she ought to say something.

  “Oh, that was my second experiment,” Jerusha said wistfully.

  “You mean you burned it down?”

  But Jerusha Fistler just closed her eyes as if going to sleep. Adrian wrinkled her nose rudely at Vinnie, walked quietly off the porch and around the duplex. She could feel the loose flesh on her thighs wobble, hear her fat legs slap together beneath her shorts. Only somebody as ugly as the woman back on the porch could find anything beautiful in Adrian Whelan.

  “And you like anybody who’ll scratch you, huh, boy?” She ran her fingernails between Alice’s little horns, and the goat playfully lipped her leg through the fence.

  She slipped behind the chickenhouse and peeked around the corner. No sign of movement or of anyone watching from the Whelan side of the building. Adrian made a dash to the rusted gondola cars and checked again. She ran bent over along the tracks until she was far enough around Iron Mountain to be hidden from the settlement below, and began to climb—sweating, puffing, the piece of glass still in her hand, salty tears on her lips.

  Adrian walked around a rock outcropping and stopped in front of a hole with old boards across it—some of which had fallen in. She stood swaying with the heat and exertion, hunger and thirst. Carefully she bent to pick up a rock and tossed it into the hole. She listened a long time before it hit.

  She looked from the piece of glass to the hole. Excitement and fear tingled in her stomach, drained the last bit of moisture from her throat. Adrian relaxed a little, and that increased the swaying motion.

  If she could let herself just fall into that hole … Adrian clenched her teeth and eyes shut, felt the glass cut into her hand as she forgot and clenched that too.

  “Hey! Jerusha said to tell you not to do anything silly!”

  The shout came from behind and jerked Adrian out of her trance so suddenly her foot slipped. She slid over the edge of the hole and flung her arms out.

  One hand hit something. She grabbed it, reaching with the other hand to hold it, and hung on. Icy air surrounded her bare legs. Her screams echoed around and around the hole.

  Vinnie Hope’s face leaned over between Adrian and the sky. Her lips moved, yet Adrian could hear nothing but her own voice. Vinnie pointed down and then to one side. Her mouth looked like she was yelling now.

  Whatever Adrian was holding on to moved and shook, and dirt fell into her face. She screamed harder and looked down. There was a broad shelf with grass growing on it about six inches from her knees. The noise stopped in her throat.

  “Why don’t you just stand on that ledge and crawl out, retard?”

  Adrian hiccuped, brought first one leg and then the other up onto the ledge, and let go of the board. When she straightened, her head and shoulders were aboveground. She had to tighten herself to keep from wetting her pants.

  “Jerusha said not to let you do anything silly, and now I know what she meant.”

  Adrian looked down to find the shelf covered more area than the entrance to th
e deep hole did. She pulled herself out and sat cross-legged next to Vinnie, and listened to her heart.

  “If you’re such a grown-up ‘woman-child’ like Jerusha said, then how come you cry for your mommy?” Vinnie said with a sneer. “You were yelling, ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.’”

  “Oh, shut up, baby.” Adrian couldn’t even try to die without making a fool of herself.

  “Maybe that’s why.” Vinnie stared at Adrian’s crotch. “Does it hurt?”

  “What?” She looked down to see the slow spread of menstrual blood staining her shorts. Adrian stretched out with her head on her arms and sobbed long shuddering spasms against the rusty soil of Iron Mountain.

  Tamara watched her daughter sneak up the side of the mountain from the kitchen window and saw Vinnie follow. Probably some attempt at revenge, a strategy to hurt or frighten Tamara because she alone was responsible for the divorce, Gil’s remarriage, Adrian’s weight, and probably World War III when it arrived. She sighed and walked over to the schoolhouse to work on lesson plans. There must be some reason why people wanted to have children.

  When she returned to the apartment for a late lunch, Adrian was in the shower. All the emotional strain had left Tamara with a headache, so she took a couple of aspirin and lay down on Miriam Kopecky’s bed, setting an alarm to be sure she wouldn’t sleep the day away.

  She was immediately glad she had, because as she began to drift off, she felt the familiar pull and knew she was in for one of those dreams. Perhaps she’d see the man called Backra again. Anything would be a pleasant change from the present state of her life. She smelled the sea first and then heard it.

  Tamara stood in that incredible graveyard on the beach next to a statue of the Virgin, who held her arms out as if blessing the white sarcophagus on which she stood. The engraved inscription filled with dirt read: MARIA ELENA ESQUIVEL. EN SAGRADA MEMORIA DE MI HIJA.

  Footprints rumpled the sand, and a stretch of long patterns resembling the skeleton of an endless leaf. Clouds dimmed the light. People rushed about in excitement farther down the beach. Three fair-skinned children—two boys and a girl—knelt to peer under one of the shaggy thatched huts lining that end of the cemetery. These cabins stood a few feet up off the beach on wooden pilings.

  “Oh, gross.”

  “I feel sorry for it,” the little girl said. “Can’t we help it?”

  “Yeah, shoot it.”

  Just then a man emerged from the crowd around the dock. He wore the remnants of a rubberized suit like divers wear on top, and tattered swim trunks below. His legs were scratched and bruised between streaks of dried blood. As he drew closer, she could see his nose was swollen, his eyes blank and staring. He was the Backra of that other dream.

  For a moment he seemed to be looking at her, almost recognizing her as he turned from the sea to angle toward his house. But the little girl spoke to him, and he blinked back the blankness.

  “Hey, mister? Can you help this poor dog?”

  A piercing whine sounded from under the thatched cabin, and Backra turned to kneel beside the children. Then he lay flat, grunting as if the movement hurt him. Sliding back on his stomach, he withdrew a limp dog and stumbled to his knees and then to his feet.

  The buzzing of her alarm clock descended from the clouds as Tamara watched the wreck of the once-beautiful Backra stagger toward the house with the net hammock, cradling the dog in his arms.

  12

  The dead man on the bottom of the boat still looked surprised, but Thad felt himself incapable of any more. He pointed listlessly past Harry to the engulfing shadow almost upon them.

  Some had seen it and watched without speaking. Others turned now that the light was getting funny, shielded their eyes to see what was happening to the sun.

  “Listen,” Don said, and Thad noticed the quiet, the fading away of the sounds of the sea against the boat. The world turned yellow.

  The water under the shadow appeared higher than that under the boat. The quiet intensified. Martha Durwent’s lips moved as if she spoke, but no sound came to Thad. A wave of darkness instead of ocean swept the boat into the air with the heaving motion of a carnival ride gone berserk.

  Thad had some cornball ideas of their being sucked up into a giant spacecraft to be examined by alien beings and taken off somewhere and reported as another missing victim of unexplainable happenings like those missing in the Bermuda Triangle. Except this wasn’t the Bermuda Triangle. This was the Metnál. And those unexplainable happenings were all explainable if the facts could be known. There was a perfectly logical explanation for the giant eyeball. Just because he didn’t know what it was didn’t mean one didn’t exist.

  The ends of his hair rose up off his head. He grabbed the edge of the shelf seat to keep from floating. His legs floated out in front of him anyway, and on air, not on water. But there was no air to breathe. Still his body drifted upward, moored to the boat and reality only by his hold on the seat. The blackness was so intense that when he closed his eyes it seemed lighter.

  Some military experiment that was top-secret, and this luckless group happened on it just when it was being tested. This and the eyeball were all part of the same experiment.

  This was nightmare country, an extended dream which came from reading all that glop his father wrote.

  He had been going slowly insane on Mayan Cay, or even since Ricky died, and he hadn’t known it, and now the crazed part of his brain was in full control and he was hallucinating with a vengeance.

  But the physical part of Thad Alexander needed air, so desperately writhing muscles forced his body back to the seat and his brain drifted toward blankness. He felt another body against his leg as the agony of suffocation twisted him in convulsive shapes, and his hands tore from their hold on the seat.

  He floated into someone in the dark, and held on, still floating slow-motion-wise, until he bumped against another person and that sent him off in yet a different direction. He thought fleetingly of movies of astronauts floating weightless in space labs, and then he sank helplessly and was flung, jackknifed, over the edge of the boat. The slap of the gunwales into his midsection forced an intake of breath which he was shocked to find available, but the air was filled with salt spray and it burned and he gagged.

  Dark yellow light spread over the world. Someone took hold of his ankles and yanked him into the boat. The light continued to brighten, and the boat settled back into the water. The water seemed to lower.

  They’d lost Abrams’ body, and Aulalio Paz. Eliseo hung over the side, alternately calling for his brother and vomiting. The remaining air tanks were gone, sucked up out of their holes.

  Martha and Don-the-salesman huddled together on the floor of the boat. He sobbed against her shoulder and she patted his hair, murmured automatic comfort, and stared beyond him.

  Thad had dull pains in more places than he could monitor. Even the teeth hurt that had been loosened when his regulator was ripped from his mouth. But each breath answered with air seemed a joy. He drew in all he could and held on to it as long as possible.

  He’d never seen so many weather changes on one patch of ocean in one afternoon. Now a fog bank rolled in their direction, shoving cool misty air ahead of it.

  Thad’s conscious mind still scanned possible reasons for all the impossible events of the afternoon, his lungs still gratified themselves with gulping breaths while he watched what was at first a shadow and then a solid form pull away from the mist—a two-masted yacht, sails reefed and skimming choppy water under engine power.

  Thad smiled and reopened a cut on his lip. It was the Ambergris, of course. Perhaps the Kellers would know what was going on. Men waved and shouted, and Thad joined them. The Ambergris headed straight for them.

  There were two worlds existing side by side that couldn’t see each other (normally at least). The Ambergris belonged to one now, and Mayan Cay and everything else Thad knew belonged to the other. That afternoon the dive boat had passed into the Ambergris’ world. Thad nodded th
oughtfully. That made sense.

  But the yacht that pulled up alongside didn’t have blue gunwales and red life preservers and dinghy. They were all dark maroon. And the man who threw them a line wasn’t Milt Keller or even young David. Two others joined him, and they weren’t Milt either. The three faces above him looked shocked as they stared into the dive boat.

  One shimmied down a rope, and the others began throwing things to him. Women appeared at the rail to help, and soon Thad was wrapped in a blanket, drinking water and then hot coffee laced with brandy. The yacht was the Golden Goose, a rented boat out of Roatan, with three couples from the U.S. aboard. Two of the men were medical doctors.

  That was the nice thing about people doctors, Thad mused. They had the money to travel, and you met them almost anywhere. And they always carried a few things more than just booze and cash in case of an emergency.

  While the Golden Goose towed them, both doctors and one of the wives worked in the dive boat. The wife passed him a cheese sandwich, and the mere act of eating gave Thad enormous pleasure. The brandy eased the aches in his body. One M.D. cleaned Martha Durwent’s head wound while the other applied a makeshift splint to someone’s swollen arm.

  When one of their rescuers pulled deck splinters from his shoulder, Thad asked, “Did they send you from Mayan Cay to look for us?”

  “No, but that’s where we were headed when we saw a … tidal wave, or some kind of wave, and your boat being tossed around in it. How could that wave just subside like that?”

  “Didn’t it get dark suddenly where you were?”

  “It was like a solar eclipse. But none are scheduled.”

  “I thought maybe the whole thing was a secret military experiment.” Thad didn’t go into the wilder theories that had occurred to him.

  The other M.D. joined them. “From what I can gather, they’ve lost five of their number, and one guy keeps babbling about a mammoth egg coming up out of the water.” Both M.D.’s looked to Thad for explanation.

  “I thought it looked more like an eyeball, but it was egg-shaped.”