by Mike Allen
He walked the empty streets of the City of Mazes, with its towers like teeth, the ribs of its arches, doors like sphincters, eaves like cheekbones, gutters like stretched intestines, streets merging and splitting at impossible angles, the corners of buildings deadly as razor blades. His shoes splashed in dark puddles, the sound echoing from vacant storefronts.
Seeing this place, this horror from his childhood, badly rattled him. But he knew he dreamed. He counted, one two three beats, moved his eyes: right, left, right, left.
Above him, the clouded sky roiled, bruised-meat haze. One two three right left right left. He heard a heartbeat, presumably his own, though as he walked the noise grew louder. Another noise, the sound of something sliding. Snake on its belly. I know that I am dreaming. I will remember what I dream.
A thin cord brushed his face, a spider thread; he backed away, flailing. How could he not have seen it, this glistening red string stretched in front of him? Many of them, twitching like fishing line, reeling something in, dragged through the muck behind him. One two three right left right left. He turned.
Shapes thrashed behind him, slimy cocoons drawn forward by the glistening red wires. Were these the marionette people, pulled from the grave of his childhood by some unseen puppeteer to haunt him again? Stop , he thought, and the threads broke. I know that I am dreaming.
And then the threads reattached, and the forms slid past him, men and women crusted and scabbed, mouths open in silent shrieks. He stepped after them, called Stop! as they disappeared into the expanding shadow ahead, where the heartbeat grew louder, louder, louder. Right left one two three.
Something was happening that had never happened when he dreamed this before.
The buildings before him caved into a growing sinkhole. Architecture suppurated, bricks and mortar sloughed off like corpse skin as a thunderous heartbeat shook the world. The City of his childhood nightmares, consumed in a whirlpool, a hurricane pit with a devouring heart for an eye. Bryan teetered as the edge of the great hole raced at him, a reverse tsunami that sucked down all it touched. I will remember what I dream. Stop. Stop! STOP!
His command changed nothing. The expanding abyss had its own will. He couldn’t control it. Beyond the edge a new nightmare teemed, worms under pressure at the bottom of a well, slithering over each other in suffocated madness. The hole grew and grew, as fast as he could flee, the things at the bottom boiling at him like lava. Bryan screamed in his bed of electrodes as he plummeted into the squirming maelstrom, as the underworld swallowed him.
The first living man to enter their realm, unwitting, unwilling sacrifice, found no rivers, no castles, no gods. Just the pressure. The pressure. The pressure that crushed his lungs, jellied his stomach, bent and squashed his limbs as the thick red worms swarmed over him.
In seconds he was airless fathoms beneath their mass, the weight of a billion slick serpents pushing against him, thrusting into him. He thrashed and spat helplessly as an eyeless snout forced its way into his mouth, burst his throat from the inside.
“Bryan!” Hands shook his shoulders, yanked the electrodes from his head. Cold water on his face. A slap. Harder.
Bryan sat up, blood drenched. The Blessings dripped from his forehead. The pressure. He couldn’t breathe. The pressure.
But he could still see the great worms. Crawling behind the walls, above the ceiling tile, beneath the floor. He felt them in his veins, nightcrawlers bunching and stretching inside the cavities of his body.
He had become their dream.
And when he knew that, he knew them, a terrible knowledge that bloomed in his brain, branches of a many-tendrilled tree. They writhed within him, these primordial powers that had grown in strength since mankind first awakened to sentience, phantasmal beasts that gorged on flesh-tearing violence; mindless creatures the ignorant spilled offerings to without ever fully understanding the things they fed, misnaming them as gods, massacring thousands in order to feel just a fraction of the sensation electrifying Bryan’s viscera.
The accumulated slaughters of the modern age had so swollen these beasts of blood, placed them under such crushing pressure, their residue had begun to seep out of the underworld, drip into the land of flesh. They drenched him in their cravings, eager to ride their captive completely out of dream. Their searing hunger coursed in the fluids of his heart, eyes, spine, bled from the pores of his skin…
He opened his mouth to tell Raj, to scream a warning, They’re dreaming me now , and gurgled as blood sprayed from his throat.
“Call an ambulance,” Patel barked. Sonoko ran to the booth outside, as Pegah helped the professor lower their charge back onto the bloodied mattress. Bryan had an arm around his friend’s shoulders, clutching at him like a drowning man clings to driftwood.
And yet he couldn’t be saved from drowning. Their desires submerged him, flooded all corners of his mind and body. He was the breach in the dam and having found him they couldn’t force their way through fast enough. No reason motivated them other than the overpowering urge to be born, and he would widen the fracture. He would be the first vessel ruptured open to relieve the pressure but not the last.
Could Patel see how he cried tears of blood, how he was nothing but stigmata from head to toe? “I’m sorry, my friend,” Patel said. “I could not have imagined this would happen.”
Bryan bubbled back, “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry,” as the worms that ruled his flesh guided his hand, found the pocketknife on the bedside table, brought it to the professor’s neck.
As Patel stumbled away, life spurting through his fingers, Bryan subdued the Iranian assistant, clamped his free hand around Pegah’s windpipe, squeezed away any possible noise.
He didn’t know what made Sonoko drop the receiver; the sight of him as he dashed into the lab, compelled by his puppeteers, or the view into the sleep room through the one-way glass, where a dark hydra rose from the spreading blood like a monstrous tree and stretched a dozen hungry necks.
Bryan dragged her into the room by the black cords of her hair, pulled her under the shadow of the beast with many heads and no face, offspring of consciousness and bloodlust, and opened her to it. The reward of the serpent’s pleasure rushed through him as it drank. He shuddered, moaned: millions had died for just a sliver of this.
The hydra swelled to fill the room, and he fell to his knees before it, for the first time in his life awestruck, for the first time in his life a true believer.
* * *
The derelict lay curled in the stairwell again, filthy beneath the merciless fluorescent light. Bryan showed the man a mercy, watched in mute rapture as the black fluid escaped its shabby house of flesh. It swam upward from the exit he had made, a tentacle of blood spiraling through the air to join its new master.
He had called Regina and left a message as he departed the lab. “Stay with me again tonight. I need you. You still have the key?”
Her answer, yes i’ll be there.
Regina, his love, who could believe without evidence or proof, would surely become his first convert. The first to understand the lesson: that the bloodstained feeling he had foolishly agonized over for so long was not a stain at all, but the wondrous sprouting of a long-gestated seed, the birth of a true Tree of Life, a Lord whose existence could not be doubted.
The door was unlocked. Eager red tendrils coiled around and around his hand as he turned the knob. His master followed him inside.
She watched his approach, wide-eyed and tremulous. Her silence could have been reverence.
HUMPTY
“Michael. Michael, wake up.”
Soft-paw caresses gently shook me awake. I crawled from the sludge of dream-sleep, my body still soaked through with the movement-suppressing drugs of slumber. I only vaguely sensed the weight upon my chest.
A long snake-like limb jabbed at my face. I jerked my head up from the pillow.
Humpty smiled, his ragged teeth like shards of broken glass. One of his serpentine arms twisted forward to scratch me under th
e chin. “Rise and shine,” he tittered. A sickly green glow burned in place of his missing eye, blinking shut in time with his laughter.
* * *
It’s my oldest childhood memory:
The bars of my crib slice a cage of shadow out of the moonlight shining through my window. The air feels thick as a pillow, wet and hot, all sound muffled, a wall of silence sealing me from my father, who’s sleeping in the room across the hall; the night congealed so dense not even an insect could scuttle through its murk.
Humpty crouches over me, his button eyes and felt smile an idiot mask, his blue-striped arms coiling slowly around my throat.
I pull him off and throw him out of the crib. He makes no noise when he strikes the hardwood floor. I stand up, my hands clamping around the comforting solidity of the crib rail, and watch my new enemy right himself.
He gets up on all fours, his spindly tubular limbs arched around his egg-shaped body like spider’s legs. His face tips up to look at me, then he scurries underneath the crib. When I turn around he’s climbing up the bars, his limbs coiling and uncoiling like monkeys’ tails, his idiotic grin unchanged.
When he reaches the top of the rail I tear him from the bars and toss him away. Immediately he rights himself again, spidery limbs splayed around him, and ascends the bars of the crib. He’s fast, but neither heavy nor strong. I throw him down, over and over and over again, each time watching as he recovers his balance and scurries back.
I don’t remember how the conflict ended. I’d always assumed I was recalling a nightmare.
* * *
“It took me ages to find you.”
His voice was deep, gravelly, but fused with a oddly whiny desperation, and it sounded as if it came from around a corner somewhere, not from the toothy grin sparkling before me. “You should thank the Creator I’ve come in time,” he said.
My own voice came out a croak. “What are you going to do?”
“You didn’t understand then. Why would you now?” The red glare from my alarm clock glinted off his teeth. How dangerous was he, in this new form? Could I just toss him away?
“I’m glad you came to help,” I said, scanning the room. No bars etched in moonlight entrapped me. The clutter of familiar objects served to further convince me this was no dream: My guitar with both E-strings unstrung, sprawled on top of the clutter of my desk, awaiting my attention. The picture of Melissa on my bedside table, trapped behind cracked glass I hadn’t yet gotten around to replacing. The grinning-skull poster she gave me just last week, taped to the door that leads onto the balcony. The dirty uniform of my dreaded burger-flipping employment, strewn limp across the foot of my bed.
“Then maybe you’ll listen to me?” His green eye-cavity kindled bright.
“Yes,” I said, and grabbed for him. His teeth closed around my wrist.
* * *
The morning after that endless nightmare in my crib, I begged my father to get rid of the doll.
“You love that doll. You’ve had it since before your mother died.” He glared down at me, the corners of his jaw flexing. When I grew older I would learn to recognize that tensing of his jawline as an involuntary warning, an outward sign that his annoyance had reached a dangerous edge. “You’ll be whining for it back as soon as I throw it in the trash.”
“No, Dad. It tried to hurt me.”
“What?” He hunched toward me, his teeth showing as he spoke.
“It came to life. It wanted to hurt me.”
“What? What did you say?” His face twisted in a rictus. He lunged. He’d boiled over so suddenly I had no chance to react, but instead of reaching for me he pulled the Humpty doll out of my crib. “You don’t want this any more?” He tore an arm off the doll. It made a meek thread-popping sound as it was mutilated.
I started to wail; I hadn’t yet learned not to. This only egged my father on. He was panting through his teeth, the rush of the kill taking over.
Humpty’s oval body split at the seams, and I thought I saw a yellow vapor pour out from the wound, pour into my father through his mouth, eyes, ears. A final roar of effort from my father’s throat, and Humpty’s white innards sprayed everywhere. I screamed.
“Won’t hurt you now, will he?”
I looked up into my father’s lunatic eyes. This time, he reached for me.
* * *
Humpty’s teeth shattered against my skin. As wicked as they looked, they were fragile as eggshells. My hand closed on something, stuffing, intestines, a tongue. I sprang from the bed and pushed open the sliding doors. He’d been able to climb back over the rails of my crib; but a fall from a fifth-story balcony into the traffic of Salem Boulevard, still busy even at this time of night, would present a more formidable challenge. Not to mention the wind that blows so cold and hard at this height, a wind that would sweep my tiny friend into God-knew-what predicament.
But only silence and darkness greeted me beyond the balcony. Empty heat stifled the air. No half-shaded windows ogled me sleepily from across the street, no bloodstream flow of headlights washed the boulevard. I’d walked out onto a perch offering a view of a vast, empty stage. What was worse, the structure housing my apartment continued down into darkness, a featureless pillar, no other balconies or lights adorning it.
The piece of Humpty in my grip squirmed. I tossed him aside with a yell. He propped himself up on all fours in his spiderlike manner, his face oriented topside. His mouth opened and closed, his gums flexing like a shark’s, new teeth popping in to replace the broken ones.
“Explain this,” I demanded, grateful my voice didn’t shake.
“I was trying to when you attacked me.” He used the balcony grillwork to pull himself upright. “You are in metareality. The auxiliary macrocosm of the timestream you inhabit. Connected events that you would normally experience as single points along the long straight line of your existence are directly linked here, grouped into wholes through the grace of a higher dimension. We’re at the heart of everything, here. And everything here, is you.”
I barely heard him. A pall of familiarity had settled over this strange new landscape. The mottled plain I perceived far below might be nothing more than a mite’s-eye view of carpet. The pillar we looked out from, and the identical ones looming to either side, nothing more than bars of a crib.
An evil shape, unimaginably huge, approached through the greater darkness, its titanic footfalls muffled by the stagnant air. Amorphous, mottled with shifting light and shadow, it towered into the gray sky. I backed away, meaning to hide, but Humpty whispered, “No! Stay. Watch.”
From behind us, a burst of blue light suddenly cast the shifting form into full relief—my father, his broad bare chest, his thin sinewy arms, bulbous belly, the malformed moon of his face. He opened his mouth and an orange jack-o’-lantern glow gushed in a stream from his throat. Behind us, a horrible scream rose, as my father’s ectoplasmic vomitus bored through a sudden blue light, and I screamed too, in recognition.
* * *
It felt like a tongue, a sandpapery cat’s tongue, scouring me out from the inside.
Hollowing me out…
My father’s demon visage hovered over me, his skull outlined in flame beneath his skin, a monstrous sun over the well of my crib. That stream of yellow spiraling out of his mouth, burrowing into me. I knew the blue shining out of me was my defense, my only way to fend him off, but I didn’t know how to use it. I didn’t know how.
* * *
“Good,” Humpty whispered. “You remember. But do you understand?”
The stage was empty again; my father had vanished.
“Understand what? What was he doing to me?”
“You don’t know, Michael? After all you’ve done?”
The temptation to hurl my tormentor off the balcony returned. I thought about how his strange flesh would feel, tearing apart underneath my grip. “You’re on thin ice. I don’t care what kind of little god you might be here. Don’t talk in circles. Tell me what this is about.”
<
br /> Humpty curled his limbs into the grillwork of the rail. His smoldering eye-socket winked at me. “I should have known. Here inside your macrocosm, you’re insulated from who you are. Here, you’re what you want to be.”
“You’re full of shit.”
“No, foam.” He grinned. All his teeth were restored. “So who are you, really? And whose apartment are we in?”
I knelt down to glare at this demon from my past, eyes to eye. “My name is Michael Carver. And this is my apartment. If you weren’t in my head, I’d be looking down on Salem Boulevard right now.”
