Aberrations of Reality

by Aaron J. French

  When Detective Browning pulled alongside the curb in his sharp blue Pontiac with the white roof, windshield wipers flapping, I pushed through the rain and slipped in the passenger door.

  “Summers,” he said.

  “Howdy, Robert.” I took this opportunity of dryness to light a cigarette. Smoke filled the cab, but I knew Rob didn’t care: he customarily puffed cigars in the damn thing.

  “I’m going ’round the block,” he commented.

  “Why?”

  He said nothing, but piloted the Pontiac into the storm of souls. He was a larger man, nearly twice my size, with rubbery skin and a face like a grizzly bear. His meaty forearms, poking out the sleeves of his coat, bristled with black hairs, and his muscles strained as he manipulated the wheel.

  I had expected him to hand over the file, for me to pay, and then to be on our ways. It was how things had worked in the past. But now he was weaving through city blocks sluiced with rain, and there was something tense about him.

  I chose not to speak until we reached our final destination: a nondescript alley behind this Chinese restaurant I’d been meaning to try. I thought of having lunch there and taking a cab back to my car.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked, as rain drummed on the roof of the car. “It’s not like we haven’t done this before.”

  He shifted his bulky weight and the Pontiac squeaked on its axles. His weary brown eyes observed me. “This one’s different, Summers,” he said. “Not to say it’s high priority, but just that it’s… different. Which is strange because nobody even died. Yeah, some eleven-year-old kid got assaulted, but last week we found a teenage girl in the dumpster with a hot curling iron shoved up her—and you don’t hear diddly about that.”

  I grimaced. “Jesus.”

  He waited, took a deep breath, then continued: “Yeah… Well, this Hogan case’s got some weird vibes about it. Everyone down at the station is going bonkers. But there ain’t a thing to go off of, so they’re all staying away from it. Not to mention the Jeffrey kid is completely nuts now, and his folks are right up there with him. Plus the media’s been all over it, don’t ask me why. There are even rumors of one of those Unsolved Mysteries shows running a spot on it. Christ, and because of this brouhaha, the chief and other detectives, not including myself, are hellbent on getting it solved, or at least putting it down to rest. Yet they won’t touch it! I think they just wanna believe the Hogan kid sheared his own tongue with a pair of pliers and knocked his teeth out with a rock. Meh. Who knows what really happened.”

  He was silent. The back door of the Chinese restaurant opened and a thin Asian man dressed in white, carrying a trash bag, moved past the Pontiac. He glanced at us, knit his brows, then continued walking.

  Rob grunted, withdrew a sealed manila folder from his coat. He smiled, showing coffee-stained teeth. “Thanks for letting me bitch.”

  I took the folder. “Don’t mention it. And thank you.” I handed him the envelope containing his payment.

  He nodded, disappeared it into his coat, but he still seemed worried.

  “Listen,” I said. “The worst that can happen is we get caught, at which point I’ll contact the Chief Deputy District Attorney myself and get things straightened out. Howels and I go way back, so don’t fret. Everything’s gonna be okay.”

  This placated him. He smiled and nodded again. “Want a lift back?”

  “Nah, I’ve been wanting to try this place.” I hooked a finger toward the restaurant and got the passenger door open. The sound of rain emerged like a roaring beast. I flicked the last of my smoke into its gullet.

  As I closed the door, he said, “Hey, Summers?”

  I peeked my head back into the cab.

  “Take care on this one. Something different about it. Got some bad vibes. I’d hate for either of us to get in trouble.”

  I nodded, thanked him again, closed the door, and watched him coast away. Then I went into the restaurant and ordered egg foo young.

  * * *

  Later, back at my apartment, I uncorked a bottle of merlot and sat at my kitchen table under the harsh glare of the florescent and sipped, smoked, read. Inside the case file there were several stacks of photographs, the police reports, medical reports, some statements given by neighbors and the boy’s parents.

  I read through everything, fueled by the wine and the increasing darkness outside the window. The medical reports I found significantly disturbing, with doctors being baffled as to how Jeffrey Hogan’s teeth and tongue had been removed, evincing that not a single tear or cut appeared in the flesh or gums of his mouth. There were no signs of trauma, which there would’ve been if the teeth had been yanked out. They’d been removed cleanly, as if by a master surgeon.

  The photos mostly showed long swaths of empty wilderness and rows of standing pines. One showed a disgusting puddle of excrement in which the boy had been found. Various photos documented the extent of his wounds, some grizzly closeup shots of the severed tongue and the vacant teeth.

  Finally—having pushed through innumerable chills and waves of unease—I got around to the statements given by the parents. Maria Hogan seemed the most adamant on the subject. Her statements made up seventy-five percent of the report. She went into explicit detail about several previous incidents in which Jeffrey had had unusual experiences in the woods.

  The officer conducting the interview had jotted in his notes that Mrs. Hogan “appeared slightly unnerved, and although her story seemed fabricated, there was an aspect of sincerity about her. She believed she was telling the truth.”

  The first time Jeffrey claimed to hear sounds and see lights coming from the Mintano Wilderness was a year or two before the incident. According to Mrs. Hogan, he had been in the backyard playing in the grass for most of the evening while she had been washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen. At one point, she glanced out the window and didn’t see him, but figured he was merely playing around the side of the house.

  Later, he came in the back door looking pale and shivering with fright. When asked about it, he claimed he had followed some “whirling machine man” into the woods where he saw a ghost weaving in and out of the branches.

  Maria, disturbed, put her son to bed, thinking he was coming down with something. Over the next year, however, Jeffrey claimed again to have contact with a “whirling machine man” and to have seen more spirits or ghosts in the trees. She grew unsettled, but when he came with his story a third time, she started thinking it was only his imagination; that he was playing a child’s game.

  The boy’s father, Henry Hogan, when told of Jeffrey’s claims, dismissed them as mere imaginings and told his wife not to worry about it. His statement in the report consisted of two meager paragraphs in which he stuck to his belief that the boy had imagined it. He felt, begrudgingly, that Jeffrey had somehow done it to himself—though why and for what purpose, he had no idea.

  In the final incident leading up to the terrible night when Jeffrey lost his tongue and teeth, as reported by Maria Hogan, Jeffrey didn’t show up for dinner. Maria was alone in the house and her husband had been working late at the office. Placing Henry’s plate in the oven to keep warm, she stuck her head out the window and hollered for Jeffrey. When he didn’t come, she put on her coat and went outside.

  She’d only gone a dozen feet into the trees when she became enshrouded in a light mist, such as forms after a heavy rain. She pierced through the mist and found her son kneeling on the spongy sod, his hands clasped before his chest in prayer. A bulky shape hunched on a network of roots sat before him, which her fanciful mind took, at first, to be goblin or a squatting gnome.

  But as she got closer she saw it was a collection of metal slabs leaned around a thick wood pole, with a series of old tubing hooking one to the other; draped over this bizarre junk was something long and stringy that resembled human hair.

  She touched her son on the shoulder and he opened his eyes and was shivering. When she asked him what he was doing, he pointed toward the jun
k pile and said he was speaking with the machine man, who had showed him the “hidden cabin” in the woods.

  Unnerved, she picked him up off the ground and led him back through the mist, through the backyard, and back into the house, installing him at the dinner table. They spoke no more, but when Jeffrey’s father came home and Maria told him what happened, Henry said that the boy had probably made a play toy out of some old junk. But he agreed it wasn’t safe, and assured her he would get rid of it in the morning.

  However when morning came he searched the wilderness and found no sign of the junk heap. Maria even led him to the exact spot, but they found only an empty space on the roots. They told Jeffrey he wasn’t allowed to play in the Mintano Wilderness anymore, and Jeffrey accepted this new limitation agreeably. But one week later they woke to find him submerged in his own feces on the kitchen floor with a hole in the center of his face.

  I had reached my limit at this point and put the file down, lit a fresh cigarette, and poured another glass of wine. Glancing at my wrist watch, I saw it was nearly midnight. The city lights twinkled in the darkness through my fourth floor apartment window. I thought of what I had read, recalling the grizzly photos and the “machine man.” My thoughts then wandered to the letter Mrs. Hogan had showed me, an absurd item signed by someone calling himself The Amputator. I shook my head and blew smoke: it all seemed crazy.

  Reaching into my pocket, I took out the small gold key Maria had given me. The key to the lab, said the letter which had been left on her porch. Luckily Mrs. Hogan had agreed to hold on to the strange metal piece with the human teeth wedged into it. I wasn’t able to have something like that in my house; yet I stared at the key for a long time, wondering where it came from.

  I called it quits and retired to bed but I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept seeing visions from the case file: the junk heap, the swirling mist, the lights in the woods, the empty cavities where teeth should have been.

  Eventually I passed out, but sleep was poor due to nightmares, and I awoke in the middle of the night to a scratching sound coming from the wall. I sat up in the darkness, trying to unhear the sound, convinced it was some remnant hanger-on from my nightmare. When it didn’t stop, I got out of bed and flipped on the light.

  It came from the opposite side of the west wall. Mine was the final-most apartment on the fourth floor, which meant that, unless it was a bird, the sound-maker was hovering in midair or perched precariously on the building ledge.

  I moved closer, saw that the scraping was accompanied by an impressing indentation that moved correspondingly along the wall, as if something on the other side was digging through the bricks and plaster, the sharp tip poking through to this side. Of course that was ludicrous. Still, I watched in awe as the impressing groove moved up and down the wall, scribbling like a pen.

  After several minutes of watching, the sound stopped, and I stood staring at the words etched onto my wall.

  The

  Amputator

  I tried blinking them away but they wouldn’t vanish, so at length I grabbed my blanket and pillow and went into the living room, turning on the TV and the lights, smoking and drinking more wine until I fell back asleep. This time sleep was dreamless, and in the morning the words on my bedroom wall had disappeared.

  * * *

  I called Maria Hogan.

  “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Hogan? Morgan. I finished reading your son’s case file.”

  “And?”

  “And… I’m starting to think maybe you’re telling the truth.”

  A pause, then a sigh. “That’s a relief. So you’ll go?”

  I knew what she meant. She meant go into the Mintano Wilderness and search for this lab mentioned by The Amputator in his letter.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “But first I’d like to speak to your husband.”

  “No, he doesn’t know about the letter.”

  “Can’t we inform him?”

  “I’d rather not. He seems so fragile lately. His belief that Jeffrey did this to himself is the only thing keeping him sane.”

  “I’d like us all to be in on this.”

  A longer pause this time. “Okay, he’s here right now. I’ll go and tell him if you want to stop by.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  She gave me the directions and then I hung up the phone. I donned my coat and pistol and thrummed down the stairs, out into the overcast morning.

  * * *

  Henry Hogan was sitting in the armchair in his living room, staring out the window toward the dirt road leading to the highway, which I had piloted my Honda Civic up not five minutes ago. He was holding a coffee mug and had a section of the newspaper outspread on his lap. He wasn’t reading or drinking, just staring straight ahead.

  When Mrs. Hogan had answered the door, she invited me in and then leaned her blond head beside my ear. “It wasn’t easy, but I told him,” she whispered. “I showed him this, too.” She held out the metal piece with the teeth wedged into it.

  I walked over by the armchair. “Mr. Hogan? I’m Morgan Summers. You’re wife hired me to—”

  “I know why she hired you.” His voice was gruff, and when he flicked his eyes at me for a moment, they appeared weary and drawn. “Don’t expect to find anything, there’s nothing there, she made it all up. No hidden cabin, no laboratory. Jeffrey went nutso, plain and simple. The rest, well… mothers get awfully attached to their children.”

  “Stop being a jerk!” Maria snapped.

  Henry sighed and his whole body seemed to deflate in the dirt brown suit he was wearing. “Well…,” he muttered, before trailing off. He looked so small, so defeated to me, shrunken, like a sailor drowning at sea, going down with his ship, and I suddenly understood there was nothing to be gained by speaking with him.

  “All the same,” I said, cultivating my most neutral, most tension-dissolving voice. “Since she did hire me, I’m going to have a look behind your home.”

  “Cops been all through there,” he muttered. “You won’t find nothing.”

  I didn’t deign to respond to him. I simply bowed slightly, then turned and headed over to Maria. She looked on edge, arms crossed, chewing on her lip. “Satisfied now?” she said.

  “I am actually, thank you. I’d like to see the spot.”

  She nodded and led me through a narrow hallway lined with framed photographs, which I glanced at as we passed, catching Jeffrey’s baby-blue eyes staring back at me.

  “We found him here,” she said as we entered the sizable kitchen. The floors were smooth and made of wood; a kitchen island encompassed the center of the room; the countertops, fridge, and sink were all made of stainless steel; several rows of oak cupboards adorned the wall.

  Next to where Mrs. Hogan stood, a dark spot about four feet in diameter stained the floor. I recalled from the case file that Jeffrey had sat in a puddle of his own excrement all night. I was slightly nauseated. “What exactly is that stain?” I asked. “Is it…?”

  “Most of it,” she said. “Blood, too. And something else, something the investigators said they’re unsure of—add that to a hundred other things they’re unsure of.” The bitterness of her tone cut into the kitchen air. “They said it would come out, but it didn’t, and no matter how much I scrub and mop, the stain remains. I’ve given up.”

  I waited for the last of my nausea to pass, then told her I was ready to go into the Mintano Wilderness. She nodded and I followed her through the adjacent backdoor. The wall of trees and bushes seemed to rear itself forward right up to the back of the house. The density of the foliage was astounding, like an encroaching tsunami of leaves and branches that was going to crash into the porch at any second.

  “Jesus,” I said. I reached into my pocket to retrieve my pack of cigarettes.

  “The city has made a significant effort to preserve this section of the Mintano Wilderness. All the houses in this area border it. I believe there’s a bike path winding through it, several hiking trails… the rest is
feral nature.”

  “Amazing,” I said. And I meant it.

  She turned and started toward the house. “Guess I’ll leave you to it.” She stopped on her way, glancing at my cigarette. “Make sure you dispose of that properly.”

  I nodded. “You got it, ma’am.”

  She started walking, then stopped again. “Thank you, Morgan. My husband… he…”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand this has been hard on both of you. Besides, I’m doing my job, and…” I suddenly recalled the scratching sounds of the previous night, and the pair of words that had magically appeared on my bedroom wall. “I have my own reasons for checking this out.”

  “Oh?” There was a pause, and I knew she wanted to ask what they were, but instead I just turned and headed across the grass, denying her the opportunity. In no time I had been swallowed by the darkening wilds.

  * * *

  When I came across the first letter—the A—I stood looking at it, questioning the reliability of my physical senses. I did drink and smoke a lot, after all. But by the time I spotted the lowercase r on the oak trunk—the collection of nine letters coalescing to form the word Amputator—I was convinced I was going crazy.

  I stayed for a while with the r letter, leaning against the tree. I smoked a cigarette or two, making sure to bury the butts properly. Finally I summoned the nerve to continue, telling myself I had to play this movie out to the end.

  I hadn’t gone twenty paces when the mist appeared, the air hanging beneath the branches swirling and churning to life. I became immersed in it, groping blindly, certain that I was getting myself more lost. The mist grew thicker and I saw shapes materialize out of the softly billowing haze. Abstractly humanoid, they bent through the network of branches, weaving in and out of the treetops, bodies elongating and stretching like taffy, then shrinking down to their original size.