by Aaron Dries
A little black girl, slightly younger, stepped into sight. “I’m Mariama,” she said. Her sunken and jaundiced skin was puckered with weeping lesions. Even her words sounded infected. “Can you play us a song? It makes things nice.”
The ukulele scowled up at Tobias from his sand-covered feet. His fingers began to itch, craving something he never knew he wanted. He glanced up again, and the group of children had increased to include another young girl with hair as white as snow and a boy who looked just shy of his toddler years. His pants were wet with urine. Next to him there stood a tallish girl in a ruby-red dress whose porcelain features were misshapen by twitches. She held the hand of another boy who Tobias guessed couldn’t be more than two; he was clothed in a Spider-Man onesie.
“Matt climbed the tree,” Joe said, tilting his brow to those out-of-reach branches. “He left us behind.”
“Nous sommes effrayés,” said the girl in the ruby dress between twitches. Tears beaded off her face and plopped against the little boy’s costume.
“Wait, did you say Matt?”
The child named Joe Mccormack gave Tobias with a single nod.
Blood began to pool among the great white tree’s roots.
4
Shadow hands came together, intertwining fingers that blotted out what little light there was. Still, it wasn’t pitch-black yet. Matt could still see where he was stepping, could still see the bodies of decomposed tropical insects—the grasshoppers and the butterflies—strung between the sticky webs ahead of him. There were even sparrows trapped there too, their wings splayed in a grotesque pantomime of flight.
Matt’s smile was unearthly. The color had drained from his face, drawing dark bags under his eyes. His cheeks were gaunt. He peered out at this tempting scene from beneath The Body’s brow. The only sounds were the groaning jungle, the crunch of deadfall beneath each of his steps. The trickle of blood dropping from his mangled hand.
There were no mosquitoes down here.
I’m all alone. For the first time in my life. Man, it feels…it feels…
But the thought wouldn’t assemble because he was so giddy with excitement. He spared a thought for Tobias, ole Captain Sensible. He wondered how he was dealing down below with all of The Others, those diseased and pathetic leeches who’d sucked the life out of him for years on end.
Now you know what it’s like, Tobias. Now you know.
Good luck trying to make sense of Apolonia’s gibberish. Have fun cleaning Mariama, Uwe and Paw-Paw when they piss and shit themselves. Enjoy Maëlle’s company, the whack-job. Can you blame me for wanting to go above?
Can you, huh?
He’d been abandoned for too long. For too many nights he’d sat on the white tree’s largest root and plucked at the old ukulele, to settle them when they grew restless. And who could blame them, really? It was cold and barren down there. An emptied place, devoid of taste and life and sensation. Just thinking about it made his skin crawl, just as The Ugly One, Tobias’s younger brother, the one who seemed to descend further and further into some unreachable place where it was okay to drool when you smiled, where you didn’t have to care how repulsive you were…
The flesh could be cruel. Hideous. And yet, as Matt had now found out, it could be angelic too, just as he’d always suspected. And his pursuit had been worth it. Climbing that tree, branch by branch, had not been a futile exercise.
There were questions and answers in the flesh; faith and disbelief. It was so easy to be in awe of its anarchy. The slow and winding road to self-destruction was paved with pleasure and pain, sometimes in unequal amounts. And despite certain fear and possible reward, he would never shy from his pursuit. He had been determined to climb the tree even if it killed him.
In turn, The Body was responding to the thrill he was providing it with. It was all a case of give and take. He was gifting it with sights and sensations Captain Sensible had always denied it, and in return, the nausea was subsiding; it now caressed his groin and was drawing his prick to a blood-filled point.
He and The Others were roller coaster babies, knit from nowhere. Matt was positive that he was meant to be here. Right now. This was how it was meant to be.
So take another step.
And ever obedient, The Body had no choice but to comply.
5
The earth shook, shifting tiles of dry mud and strumming the ukulele’s strings.
One by one, they turned toward the thundering crash of the roller coaster. Tobias watched the dim silhouette of the unsound structure crumble to the ground.
“What is happening here?” he asked. He received no response from the children. All of their faces were matching portraits of uncertainty—eyes impossibly wide and mouths slightly open.
The last of the roller coaster’s beams crashed and thumped and drummed, and the dark reclaimed its eerie silence. The children held one another, gripped tight in a knot of interwoven limbs. “Tobias, make it stop!” Joe cried. His fear, which was stark and innocent, seemed to age him. In fact, it had aged them all. They were withered and emancipated.
An enormous dust cloud billowed toward them. A great, ashy wing.
“Cover your faces, cover your eyes!”
Tobias rushed over to the group and ushered them behind the girth of the tree, unsure of what reservoir his newfound courage was being drawn from. All he wanted to do was bury his head in the sand and pretend like none of this was happening; and yet it was. Nothing was going to change that, or take him back to that other world, a place where he was happy knowing that none of these people existed or were dependent upon him.
Denial would get him nowhere. This existed. These children, who trembled under his arms, were his responsibility, just as Jörg had been his responsibility. Tobias was caught off guard by how protective he was of them. He couldn’t explain it, but the kinship he felt for them was immediate and as real as the dust cloud rushing at them from the other end of the void.
The cloud passed over them all, staining the world.
A plucking ukulele in the middle of the night. Laughter from a darkened hallway. And even further back, there was Matt, a man who Tobias could have sworn had walked by his side through those winding Thai backstreets.
Go deeper.
The awareness of not being alone, of being watched in classrooms during tests, in open fields playing sports. Out-of-focus and difficult-to-recall dreams of stitching children’s clothes and dabbing burning foreheads. All of those alien emotions bubbling up to the surface and expressing themselves in peculiar ways, through art or the singing of songs or random words that made no sense…
These memories were an unfolding flower within him. And they were beautiful—and yet not at the same time, because at the delicate core of the flower, where petal met stem, there was no pollen to be found. Instead there was nothingness, abysmal and endless.
That nothingness was guilt. And it was growing.
Tobias huddled near them, trying not to breathe in the dirt and rust. There, he accepted the truth of the flower. He said the words in this head so they were real.
I think I knew about The Others and ignored them.
I’m sorry.
Everything was quiet except for the clattering of his teeth. The dusty fog lingered, staining the void pale gray. His body loosened and he stepped away from the children.
He remembered that day on the roller coaster as a kid. His parents had taken him to the carnival because he’d been so kind to his brother, who sometimes didn’t clean up after himself and who couldn’t communicate like other kids could. The fair had been a swirling place of lights and smells and screams of excitement.
The clattering of their carriage rocketing down the tracks. The thrill of it all. The complete and utter belief that at any moment their train would skirt off into the sky and come crashing down among the crowd. His mother had been on the ride with him. She, like he, would die, their bodies burst open against the dusty fairground floor.
But none of this had hap
pened.
His stomach might have lifted up into his chest, his heart might have wrestled with his rib cage in its attempt to flee, but they were alive.
The city lights had not dimmed the glow of the stars. His terror was complete. And now in the carriages behind him there were The Others. Their arms were waving above their heads as they neared another crest. Their laughter was infectious, their cheers unadulterated by sorrow, by regret.
Matt had been there too, dressed in his black leather jacket. His hair had been slicked back in a 1950s quiff. An expanse of possibility was spelled out in his expression. It was then, just as the carriage had descended, that Matt reached around from behind and pulled himself close to Tobias’s ear. His words came in a rush, loud and clear over the clattering of wheels against rails.
“You only get one ride.” His breath had stunk of grease and cigarette tar. The moon slid out of sight. “One chance! So ride the rap! ’Cause one of these days they’ll drop the bomb and we’ll all go Rocky Mountain high!”
The children’s tears streaked their faces. Their hair was bleached with dust. They looked hewn from the same white tree that had protected them. Tobias ached for them and for the life that had been taken away from him.
“You have to save us,” Joe whispered. “Please.”
You got to ride the rap. The words carried. Ride it.
Tobias wasn’t conscious of his nodding head. He looked at his hands. They seemed so strong and no longer shook.
If I don’t fight for us, I won’t exist. None of us will.
I’ll never see my parents again. I’ll never get to New Zealand and earn my way. I’ll never get home and hug Jörg. Caleb will just be a memory.
Tobias let his eyelids drop and saw his boyfriend, lit in the glow of floating lanterns. Tobias could see Caleb’s crooked smile as clear as day, could almost taste the charm and faux-confidence it radiated. There was that slightly crooked nose, a testament to bravery. And there was the tattoo on his right arm. Family Love.
Tobias put his hands against the tree and gripped.
“Ich kann dies tun.”
(“I can do this.”)
He started to climb.
6
Matt drove The Body into a run. There was only a single thought in his head at that point. It was stark. It was simple.
This is magnificent.
He dived into the hollow. Twisted. Turned among the webs. The threads latched to his skin as though fashioned from billions of tiny barbs. Everything tugged, knocking the wind out of him. Matt took a huge gulp of air, and for the first time since commandeering The Body, even worse than when the monkey had bitten off his fingers, he struggled. The webs were as thick as wet sheets, suffocating and heavy and dense and unnerving. Fear flickered through his brain.
But then again, fear was what this was all about.
He was going all the way to the edge—over it, even. This was what he was born for. The ultimate kick.
Between bouts of awkward laughter, Matt inhaled the webs and the decayed bodies of insects into his throat, where they scratched at the tender flesh. He flailed his arms, trying to double over. He choked, coughed and became very aware of how hot it was.
“I’m riding it,” he growled. “I fucking am! Fuck! FUCK!”
The webs had clawed and cocooned, lifted up his shirt to expose the flat curve of The Body’s belly. “Come on! I’m ready. BRING IT!”
And as though the spiders had been listening to his cry, they began to crawl out of their burrows, quick as lightning. They were not afraid of his bulk and thrashing.
Matt saw them coming out of the corners of his eyes, which were upturned toward the hundreds of funnels above his head.
Their attack was soundless. The only sounds came from him—that awkward meshing of snicker and yelp, and from the crunching of dead animal bodies beneath his feet.
They were so much larger than he’d expected them to be. Each of their yellow and brown abdomens equaled golf balls in size. Their long, dexterous legs skittered along the whispery ladders, little skull-faces covered with eyes.
Even Matt couldn’t help admiring all of those teeth.
7
The white wood was cold and dead; it bore no scent. There had been no life in its branches for many years. Maintaining a firm grip on its bark was difficult, and the exertion was juicing a stream of sweat from every pore. It was as though the tree had been eroded, its surfaced buffered by unseen hands in the gloom. However, this didn’t stop the occasional splinter from shooting up into his palms.
Hold tight, Tobias. You let go and we all come crashing down. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never put us all back together again.
Blood continued to pump down the other side of the tree, forming a substantial pool among the exposed root system. The children stared up at him, their pale faces reflecting some light source he couldn’t pinpoint. They only moved when the pool widened, taking careful steps backward and yet keeping their eyes on him.
Dust floated through the void and made breathing difficult.
Come on. Keep going. You can do this—
“Tobias!”
Joe’s wail: fingernails on a chalkboard. It made him loosen his grip on the wizened branch. “Tobias, there’s something up there!”
Don’t tell me that, Joe. That’s the last thing I want to hear.
But he had been told, and like a seed of doubt that can corrupt without control, the child’s cry wouldn’t let him be. And even though it took great effort to do so, Tobias lifted his head to where where tree hazed with shadow.
Joe was right.
There was something moving up there.
A suggestion of deeper black against all of the black. A sickly chill frosted the breath in his throat. A silvery rope swept past his shoulder. It moved through the air in sluggish curves, a perverted ballet.
Is that crepe paper?
No, it wasn’t.
Tobias tried to convince himself that someone was planning a party for them up there in the dark. Somewhere, not too far out of reach, there were glasses being filled with lager, plates being loaded up with pretzels and Bavarian mustard. Yet he knew this wasn’t true.
It wasn’t crepe paper. That lightweight cord was closer to finely woven silk.
The giant spider shot out of the shadows and scurried over Tobias. It had not seen him. Huge pole legs thumped against him, tearing holes in his shirt and splitting the flesh beneath. He gritted his teeth and flattened his face against the bark.
It moved on, and took its icy shadow with it.
Tobias glanced over his shoulder. It took all of his will not to vomit right there and then. The spider’s abdomen was the size of a tub chair, cheerful yellow streaks against its gristle-brown hide. He couldn’t see its upper half over the blur of lashing legs, and was grateful.
That thing just touched me! It ran right over me! I’m dead. I must be dead—
Another spider, this one slightly smaller in size, dropped in lurches on a taut cord threading from a wet, puckered teat on its rear. Its legs were bunched in close, but not for long. He watched them spread, spanning yards, curling and then uncurling like a teasing hand.
Tickle, tickle, tickle, the act implied.
The children screamed, scattered. Except for little Joe Mccormack, who stood rooted to the spot, a deer in the headlights. The first spider splashed through the pool of blood, scurried across the cracked earth and took Joe in a single sweep.
“No!” The power of the word was as empty as the void. Tobias was sure that a part of him was dying. His grip on the branches grew even stronger. His ear was flush against the bark and he could hear the hollow thumping of another monster’s feet as it followed the scarlet stream toward the children on the other side of the tree.
Tobias watched the spider latch its pincers around Joe’s face, crushing it in a detonation of flesh and venom. The boy’s arms jerked once, took a blind swipe at one of the spider’s many gelatinous eyes, a
nd fell to the ground. Dead.
Shock looped around Tobias’s neck, a tightening noose. He tried to tell the monsters to stop, to go back where they had come from, but the words were dry and brittle nothings on an already dry tongue, crumbling and dying before they ever had a chance to sound off.
The scream of the girl in the ruby-red dress was sharp and cutting. She had the toddler in his Spider-Man onesie cradled in her arms. The second spider chased them down and snatched them off their feet, tearing them to shreds. A scarlet arc across the dust. Tobias watched the spider’s back dance and throb as it sucked them dry and wrapped them in its webs.
8
“STOP!”
A spider had clamped itself to his lower lip, filling the tender flesh with venom. He bit down on its legs and felt them flex in his mouth, lodging in his soft palate. He could no longer see. One eye was swollen in an inflamed welt that had sprung up at a disorienting pace. Added to this, he’d spun around on the spot and thickened his silky prison.
Those tiny mouths continued to bite. Fireballs of pain seared into him. The tears flung from his face were snagged in the webs, diamonds on a thread. The arachnids continued to scurry back and forth over The Body, stabbing every patch of exposed skin.
Matt stopped.
The thought was paralyzing.
This isn’t what I signed up for. This hurts.
I’ve…been misled.
Matt closed his one remaining good eye in defeat. The glory of the flesh had blinded him, and he felt a fool. He knew what he had to do, even though it humiliated him. There was no longer any alternative. The roller coaster, after all of these years, had finally derailed.
9
“Do you think I’ll come back here one day and it’ll all be just as awesome? Just as special?” Caleb had asked. It had been at night along the beach, and the lanterns had been set to sail the sky. One had caught alight and trailed toward the horizon in a rain of sparks.
“No,” Tobias had replied.
