by S. T. Joshi
“Is this an antique generator you’re rebuilding?”
I brightened in spite of the circumstances. Very impressive! There was a brain behind the jackboot persona. Of course the pieces would add up to a generator, a term I’d never actually resorted to myself. “Why yes, I doubt it could be anything else.”
“How come it’s glowing?”
“That’s what I want to find out. I’ve determined the artifacts aren’t radioactive, if you were worried.”
He shrugged. “You’re the one with your face in it day and night. Anyway,” he waved dismissively at the box as he straightened his spine, “not why I’m here.”
From an inside jacket pocket he pulled and unfolded a sheet of Xerox paper. He watched me the whole while as if I might jump him any second. He thrust the paper under my nose. “Know her?”
I couldn’t immediately tell what, let alone who, was in front of me. Head and shoulders in shaky resolution must have been downloaded, cropped, and blown up from a gallery in Facebook or the like. But yes, I did recognize her, and my heart turned to lead as I guessed where this was going. “She was enrolled in one of my classes.”
“Was?”
“If she hadn’t disappeared, why would you be showing me her picture?”
“You didn’t notice she was absent the last couple of days?”
“It’s a big survey course. Taking roll call wouldn’t leave me time to teach.”
“So you’re denying she was a memorable student. You might be interested to learn you had the opposite effect on her. In fact, right before she vanished, she characterized you as ‘creepy’ and ‘borderline pathological.’ Any idea why?”
“No. I’d never even interacted with her.”
“Are you sure?”
“Did she say I had?” Delacroix had to be quoting out of context, deleting pertinent verbiage just to faze me, and he was succeeding. Some stranger, a literal face in the crowd, had been badmouthing me, and to what end, apart from incriminating me in the eyes of the law? And I couldn’t vent feelings of righteous indignation and betrayal, could I, because she was suddenly a crime statistic. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, right?
Delacroix was hanging on my next words, but he couldn’t have entertained serious prospects of a confession. I inquired, “What did the other missing persons have to say about me?”
“Very funny.” One fraught connection did not an airtight case make, did it? The only excuse for anyone to call me “pathological,” and it was a stretch, would have been my febrile obsession to reconstruct Tillinghast’s generator, and how ironic would it be if a casualty’s catty statement had condemned me for doing my best to prevent further deaths? Especially if the outcome was my arrest as the serial killer? If she had ever focused balefully on me in the lab, I’d been concentrating too hard to feel it.
Delacroix had let up needling me and was resurveying my knickknacks and the vacant fish tank, as if they were new to him. He seemed to approve no more than on the first go-round, but abstained from comment. Confusion and uncertainty clouded his brow as if he’d been afflicted with déjà vu. He blinked at me and cleared his throat. “Anything you’d care to get off your chest?” He was merely going through the motions of harassing me now. Too disoriented, blindsided somehow, for his heart to be in it. I couldn’t account for that, but I wasn’t complaining.
A change of subject might be salutary for both of us. “I’m a little surprised there’s no curfew in effect.”
“Me too.” He plucked the Xerox portrait from my grip, refolded and repocketed it. “You can’t even tell me her name, can you?”
“I’m seldom able to match faces in the classroom with names on test papers. That’s modern education for you.”
“For you, maybe. Pretty sad.” Something about my modest abode was definitely getting under his skin. The purple tinge escaping the box? “I’ve seen enough of you for one evening. Good luck with your doohickey. Stay in town.” Again he neglected to shut the door behind him. Despite faulty manners, in Delacroix I did find encouraging proof that vanishing persons, unlike vanishing tetras, weren’t yet “out of sight, out of mind.” The influence of the “doohickey,” so far anyhow, had its limits.
Nor did Delacroix have to fret about me as a flight risk. Skipping town was hardly an issue, since I was averse to leaving the apartment. And home wasn’t necessarily a sanctuary, as the fishless aquarium reminded me. With a nylon cord I strung one of Tillinghast’s luminous springs for a necklace, a latterday equivalent of my Egyptian faience charms.
Obviously I never disappeared, but impromptu talisman afforded me no help in my project. By Monday morning, my ambition was shot to hell. I’d progressed after forty-eight hours to the maddening stage of finding that the parts on the table were too interchangeable. Two-thirds of the elements did constitute an abstract, vaguely Art Nouveau sculpture, which left about three dozen loose items that wouldn’t go with one another or with the partial restoration.
I’d wasted the bulk of a precious week after all, and would have to start from scratch and pray I didn’t make a fresh batch of errors. People and their accustomed world were meanwhile in jeopardy, and it was my bungling fault. Plan B resurfaced as a more rational alternative. In hindsight, I’d have learned whether it was effective in much less time than I’d squandered on fruitless tinkering.
Behind the house was a forsaken, rectangular weedlot of a backyard, enclosed on three sides by weathered palisade fence, half of whose pointy tips were broken off. That was where, after breakfast, I carried shovel and a Stop & Shop paper bag stuffed with mechanical jumble. I cheated a bit by retaining the steel spring around my neck. Why not assess first whether burying 99% of the device banished Houdini fish from our dimension, before I disposed of my wearable “health insurance”?
I dug down two feet and some inches into rusty yellow sand. I gave no thought to laboring quietly, to scouting for witnesses in neighboring upper-story windows. Why should inhuming a load of scrap metal, or to an outside view a plain brown sack, rouse suspicions? Most likely and logically I was disposing of dead cat or parrot or hamster. Logic also recommended a backyard grave for convenience’s sake, in case I had to resume cobbling together the “doohickey.”
A leisurely shower and lunch before my one o’clock lecture were still in the cards after completing the job. When I swung by the lab later, no one remarked on the absent artifacts, or on absent classmate for that matter. Noses to the collective grindstone. Except now, paranoia tugged at my sleeve and whispered, How many of these kids were feigning tunnel vision because they found me “creepy”?
More felicitously, no Houdini fish swam in the soap. That guaranteed me nothing, though. Someone might have rinsed it down the drain, but on mulling how to ask if anyone in the lab could remember doing so, my brain stalled out. Or had the device’s output inhibited my wits, as it had inhibited curiosity about the fish?
In the interim till Phoebe’s homecoming, I encountered no Houdini fish, no Delacroix, no malign nimbus hovering behind me. Delacroix, I surmised, must have had other leads to chase besides me, thank God, red herrings though they had to be. Nor did the lack of something stalking me, like the lack of fish in soap, mean that reburial had achieved its goal. The prophylactic magic of my necklace might simply have kept the bogy at bay.
Hence when Phoebe phoned to announce she was at the train station, I firmly reiterated that she hail a taxi, but needn’t have bothered. She was already up to speed about the “East Side Snatcher,” who’d made the LA Times and BBC News.
Would she perceive her fish were gone the second she walked in? After a minute? An hour? On other occasions, her approaching taxi caught my ear. Not tonight. The trunk slammed, and a subjective instant later, the key jingled in the lock downstairs, and the wheels of her suitcase were ka-thunking rapidly against each step as she climbed. I managed to relieve her of luggage when she had a scant flight and a half to go.
On the landing we hugged and kissed and genuinely enjoyed the nove
lty of each other’s presence. She waltzed in ahead of me while I dragged her luggage the last few yards. At the threshold I stopped short as she shouted while hanging paisley twill blazer in the closet, “What’s that pile of clothing doing out front? That’s not one of your suits, is it?”
I went racing downstairs, had almost made it to the first floor, and voted to plunge on, flinching, when I heard, “Where the hell are the tetras?” Chances were nil, weren’t they, that apathy about the tropicals would take hold of Phoebe before I got back? Was I a heel wishing she’d postponed her return?
The garments were child’s play to locate. Creamy seersucker fabric fairly shone in the dimness between streetlights. New bundle overlapped the smudgy chalk boundaries of old bundles. Even if beige Impala weren’t parked across the street, my knees would have weakened with a queasy certainty of whom the invisible beast had disrobed, or devoured, or disintegrated. Whatever had transpired was, as usual, bloodless, which made it bearable to poke through jacket pockets for confirmatory badge. Brown Oxfords were, for reasons I didn’t dwell on, pointing in opposite directions, and the folds of pinstripe shirt swaddled a bulging letter-size envelope.
Headache began to throb as I gazed on the envelope in my clammy grasp. Of course its contents would relate to me. A search warrant? An arrest warrant? I balked at undoing the flap. I couldn’t picture anything it could be that wouldn’t be too much right now. I dropped the envelope on top of Delacroix’s other earthly remnants.
I turned my beleaguered sights toward third-floor windows, but the wife’s silhouette was in none of them. Phoebe would be fuming, or tearful, or baffled, or reassessing our relationship. She had no inkling, and never would, of how lucky she was, of how she owed ongoing existence to the bare minutes by which Delacroix had arrived first. His demise at least served to suggest that reburying the piecemeal contraption did not get rid of previous intruders. Or did it suggest that my holdout of one measly spring made all the difference? And what if planting that single artifact with the rest made no difference except to render Phoebe and me utterly vulnerable?
Meanwhile, I must have been crazy to loiter this long by the “scene of the crime.” The simple proximity of Delacroix’s effects to my address was bad, and to be placed here by witnesses might circumstantially clinch my guilt. But dealing with this mother lode of incrimination was impossible till I clarified my status with Phoebe.
The apartment was devoid of any sign my wife had returned, apart from bedroom door, formerly open but now, no doubt, bolted against me. “Phoebe? Are you okay?” I called in vain, an inch from varnished paneling. “Can I come in? Can we talk?” In a couple of respects I was glad she didn’t answer. The more she sulked, the more of an opportunity she allowed for detachment toward the fish to overtake her too. She’d also decide it was “just like me” to storm out for an hour, if she ever became aware of my absence.
The less she knew about my program of self-protection, the better. To save myself from wanton criminal prosecution, I elected to engage in flat-out criminal behavior. Rubber gloves were redeployed from under kitchen sink. On the porch I could discern no onlookers on sidewalks or in windows, and I dashed down, scooped up Delacroix’s attire, and scrambled to his car. It was unlocked. His keys were in trouser hip pocket.
I cruised in low gear along the darkest side streets, meandering the quarter-mile to the road skirting the waterfront park. I’d avoided leaving fingerprints, but it was a poor anthropologist who’d downplay the difficulties in erasing all traces of my DNA. I also wanted to work fast and minimize chances of being seen. Or mugged.
The neocolonial Marston Boathouse and its marina surroundings gave way to the alluvial terrain of India Point Park. I pulled over. No one was around, but that could change in a heartbeat. To crank down the windows and just ditch the Impala, and let salt breeze air out my dander and other vestiges, made for much less spectacle than rolling a car down grassy slope into the bay. Plus, if fortune smiled, some foolhardy delinquents might swallow the bait of keys in the ignition, and then where might official vehicle fetch up in the morning?
The loosely knotted wad of Delacroix’s belongings I flung past the outsized pegboard of rotten, stubby pilings into the clutches, if fortune kept smiling, of outbound tide. The afterthought of magenta rubber gloves followed suit.
I slunk homeward, gawking left and right on high alert for passersby to shun, and accompanied by a heckling awareness of my stupidity. Why hadn’t I thought sooner that Delacroix must have logged tonight’s itinerary somehow? Would I have done anything this dumb before the excavation of Tillinghast’s mind-altering debris? Cops would come knocking, possibly before dawn, and though Phoebe might be none the wiser I’d ever gone out, she’d seen Delacroix’s outfit, and her fine eye for detail would have absorbed telltale color and fabric.
I was screwed. I commenced to hyperventilate in anticipation of the third degree. How to protest my innocence? And of capitol offense, I was damn well innocent. No, I’d only taken what rash, cloddish steps I could to prevent entrapment by the legal system, though I’d thereby ensured the system had me hogtied. To my small comfort, the state had the burden of producing a body, and chances of that were negligible.
Suppose I stuffed a week’s essentials into a rucksack, hopped a midnight bus, vacated the state? Then when more East Siders vanished, dozens of witnesses could testify I was in New York or Philly or wherever. Yes, that would be this sinking man’s straw of choice. My feet picked up a more upbeat pace.
They carried me within three blocks of condos-cum-church where I’d almost been reduced to dirty laundry. The budget-minded owners of a nineteenth-century faux palazzo had enclosed their yard with plastic picket fence. Some extra color on a white corner post captured my attention and quashed my optimism. Streetlamps gleamed off a horde of tiny turquoise carapaces. I bent close enough to identify them as mites of freakishly star-shaped outline, a breeding population hundreds of times over, and whatever comprised their original diet, here they were feasting on plastic. The bottom several inches of the post had been ingested, and they were chewing madly on. It sounded like a thousand tiny dental drills.
Whether Tillinghast’s machinery was under the soil had become irrelevant, as had fleeing town or defending my innocence in the long term. I had a gut-level pessimism that rebuilding the generator wouldn’t help either, that enlisting the Engineering Department wouldn’t have altered the consequences. Even if alien bugs didn’t receive the same unnaturally bland reception as Houdini fish, they foreseeably spelled the collapse of modern culture. What the hell was my hurry? It was like racing toward the end of the world.
No squad cars were waiting by the house, a shallow consolation better than none. I should have savored it. I reentered quietly to sustain the illusion I’d never departed. Again, as with my entreaties that Phoebe take a cab, I needn’t have bothered.
The door still stood between us, with no disorder to show for it if she had sallied out. “Phoebe?” No sound or syllable emerged. Was she speechless with wrath, or with the apathy that should have been setting in by now? I dragged in a dining room chair and sat elbows on knees, chin upon fists, studying the glass doorknob. If I twisted it, would the door be locked? If it were or not, would the wife caterwaul blue murder? Or would the silent treatment go on forever because there was nothing of her in the bedroom but a bunch of clothes on the shag scatter rug?
I could have lent her my protective neckwear, or culled another talisman for her from Stop & Shop bag. But I hadn’t, and was I to blame for not thinking of that? Had my unconscious plotted to reinstate permanent bachelor quarters? I never used to agree with Freud that accidents never happened.
My eyes are now aching and bleary from watching the door. My ass has been numb for ages. I ought to pack according to plan or reconsider trying the doorknob. But I can’t conceive of moving, which binds me like a vacuum seal. Human decisions will soon carry no weight in any case, and Houdini fish will inherit the earth. Or actually they won�
�t, because turquoise mites will have eaten the soap dispensers.
When the cops finally do turn up, they’re welcome to bust their way in. Until then, my wife might simply be in communicado and nothing worse, and I might not be complicit in her death. And the longer I can dodge that complicity, the longer I can delay facing my role in the grander scheme of voracious chaos.
Dimply Dolly Doofy
DONALD R. BURLESON
Donald R. Burleson is the author of twenty-two books, including the short story collections Lemon Drops and Other Horrors, Four Shadowings, Beyond the Lamplight, and Wait for the Thunder, as well as four novels. His fiction has appeared in Twilight Zone, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lore, Cemetery Dance, Inhuman, Deathrealm, Terminal Fright, and many other magazines, as well as in dozens of anthologies, most recently Black Wings, Dead But Dreaming 2, and Horror for the Holidays. He lives in Roswell, New Mexico, with his writer wife Mollie and five cats.
CINDY’S HEAD WAS ENSHROUDED IN A THICK GRAY mantle of fog. Only she could see it, though. It was her private nebula, a swirling mental miasma of her very own, a chemical stratocumulus layer born of methamphetamines and nurtured by habit. Truth to tell, her condition bordered on outright stupor, a cerebral smog-bank that promised any day now to ripen into coma.
For now, however, she thought only of the present moment, a purposeless kaleidoscope of sense impressions with a dash of delirium. Sitting at a ramshackle wooden table in a malodorous apartment in which cleanliness was not even a comic memory, she stirred a half-warmed bowl of soup, lifting her spoon languidly from time to time to take a sip, dimly aware at some point that among the chunks of mushroom, two rotten yellow-gray teeth were floating in the liquid. She fished them out and flung them across the room. When had they fallen out, anyhow? Well, that was meth-mouth for you. A laugh a minute.
