Here, the black matter grew along the floor, but did not fill the entire space, as it did below. It grew in nerve fibers up and throughout the plasticized muscles and bones, so that the individual specimens fused into one nervous system with hundreds of plastic eyes, exploded into the myriad layers of human anatomy, so that it could experience every dimension and biological system, and be trapped by the tessellations of it, by the repetition of cells.
The phone, now slick in Justin’s hand from his swim through primordial soup, led him to the stairs. He took them two at a time, sometimes three or ten or negative thirteen. But he never got anywhere because the stairs kept growing new flights and landings, kept corkscrewing and looping upside down and changing from wood to concrete, sometimes steel. Now they weren’t stairs at all but a skyway, like a planetary ring around Specht’s building, curving ahead asymptotically.
Justin could see the doctor’s building through the steel-framed glass of the skyway, could see the black matter growing out the windows and up the brick in a mess of tentacles and body parts and mouths, entwining and meshing and fighting itself and texting on phones—but only on the left side of the building; a crawling chaos, devoid of symmetry. Yet it was the same shape as Justin’s tattoo. The exact same design.
Only on the left.
Above it all, hovering like some giant, omnipotent eye, the objective lens of a monocle and a head too macrocosmic to perceive, perhaps the same head that had thought to use the scalpel and tweezers, and the light to suffuse the dark matter below.
According to Justin’s cell, the skywalk terminated ahead. The floor transitioned from carpet to glass, and he could see hundreds of stories below, where overpasses and bridges looped in knots, and parking structures escalated like hives. Modular buildings extruded and recessed in cubes, and strangely twisted, strangely curved pillars held up a network of cable trains.
Portland beyond rose in fossils of crumbling masonry and rebar and hulking steel frames. Smoke loomed on the horizon and obscured the view in certain directions, obscured the peak of Mount Hood. Fires blazed. Things exploded.
Rickety ships sailed the Willamette toward Shanghai.
At the foot of Specht’s building, ant-sized people crowded, some kneeling in prayer, others rioting and tearing each other apart, so even from above Justin could see the streams of red carrying litter and hair down the gutters, into the sewers, which were made of black maws. The people weren’t just people but conjoined twins, conjoined sextuplets, or people who were just blobs with a flap instead of legs.
Men with white coats and stethoscopes transported some of the people into Specht’s building on gurneys, either as patients or guinea pigs.
Finally Justin’s skybridge transitioned back into the stairwell of the building. It made no architectural sense.
The phone directed him downward, which made less sense, but he descended anyway because he was upside down now, and down was the new up. He felt the burn in his right leg, the huff in his lung.
On the walls of the stairwell, black vines grew along wallpaper as yellow and dusty in the air as chalk. The creepers, tipped with black fungal cocks, curled into Arabesque vines. They stood out from the paper in wires and veins and toadstool caps blowing spores.
The fungal phalluses thrust into Rorschach blots of vagina dentata. Blood and semen, both oily and indistinguishable, swirled and mushroomed together, blackening the yellow paper, inseminating it, and spitting warm on Justin’s skin.
Tendrils of it began to reach out for him, sparking with electricity. His own tendrils reached out too, yearning for the fhtagn it would find in the sweet connection.
Justin stepped up to embrace the wall…and suddenly stepped into the elevator with Dr. Specht.
The door slid shut.
The elevator moved in strange spirals, its floor indicator depicting the golden ratio.
Specht said, “The human mind seeks symmetry.”
“[sic]…fhtagn,” Justin said through clenched teeth. The cell phone had lost its signal. “Where is it? I need it!”
“The mind seeks order and meaning.”
Justin grabbed him by the lab coat. “Look, Doc—enough of the tour! Give me the [sic] fhtagn!”
“But the universe is asymmetrical. Energy mutates and mutates forever toward chaos, with neither meaning nor end.”
“Give it to me!” Justin screamed, spitting involuntarily. The mouths on his tattoo nipped at the doctor’s coat. “Give it to me, you [sic] fuck!”
He bashed Specht against the wall of the elevator, clawed at him, bit at him, tasted his blood with various mouths. His tendrils hooked into him, wet-wired them together so intimately that Justin could feel his victim’s pain.
The psychiatrist’s monocle cracked and fell off. His eye, no longer magnified, looked hideously small. Worse than beady. Insectile.
Justin raked it out.
The doctor neither fought back nor reacted to the pain. And a second later, everything in the elevator reset: Specht stood in his corner, and Justin stood in his own, cell phone in hand.
The elevator stopped. The doors opened and three doctors wheeled something in on a gurney.
Justin supposed the thing was human. All of its limbs sprouted out its left side. Like half a centipede, only with less intelligent design, its angles skeletal, disjointed and odd. Some of its eyes cried to him. Some of them scowled.
He stepped away from it, as far as he could.
“Ah, a specimen of chaos,” Specht said, “of entropic evolution. As environments become more diverse and conflicting, so, too, must the organism. Now cancer isn’t a disease, it’s survivalism.”
Justin tried to ignore the thing on the gurney, its pleading eyes, its groping hands. He focused on the phone, its promise of drugs—the phone had rediscovered the signal.
“Consider this specimen as if it were reflected,” Specht said, and the cell phone showed Justin a visual aid, an exact mirror image of the hopeless thing on the gurney before him.
“Suddenly there is pattern,” said Specht, “there is design. There is synchronicity of motion.”
The elevator stopped, and the doctors wheeled the mutation out the door, down a long corridor of flickering lights. Dr. Specht left with them. Yet he remained in the car as well, like a subatomic particle: here, there, everywhere.
The cell phone refocused on the fhtagn, still a few floors higher, to the top. The elevator began to move again, and Justin rode it out.
Specht said, “You could be the mirror, Justin. Mirror of the idiot gods. After all, you are their mind.”
Justin looked down at his tattoo, the full expanse of it, a spastic mess glommed onto the right side of his body. In its withdrawals, the pores of it had begun to excrete and vomit. “Fhtagn,” said the mouths, the quivering mouths.
But one of them uttered Theresa, said it almost incoherently, its malformed teeth and lips lisping the name. And the taste on those lips was of plain lip gloss.
Specht, glancing at the deviant mouth, as if to address it, command it, said, “Ut, Nyarlathotep—fhtagn!” and the mouth began to drool and snore through its deviated septum as the name on its lips faded to a dream. Gone, except the phone was now searching for the name, searching for Theresa.
Locating, said the caption.
Justin no longer stood in the elevator, but at the entrance to the dance studio with its parallel mirrors, reflecting each other ad infinitum.
The black tissues from the basement had overgrown the entire left side of the room. They sprouted from a man, a lefty, utterly black—and utterly identical to the dissected men in the museum far below. The Mushroom Man. He hung crucified on half a cross.
Specht said, “You will be his mirror image.” He stood in the stairwell directly behind Justin, in the dark. “Ut, Nyarlathotep fhtagn—vulgtlagln Christ!” he shouted. “And I will be the god who interprets you. For I am neither idiotic nor blind.”
And then he shoved Justin into the room and slammed the door. Tent
acles snaked toward him as his tentacles snaked too.
They coupled and intertwined as the phone discovered Theresa, showering in an outdoor stall of timber and tarp.
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
—H.P. Lovecraft
Justin opened his eyes.
His father stood by the bedroom door, smiling. On the wall directly above him, a little window peeked through to the straw bales that composed their hut. Sometimes Justin thought he saw the slightest vein of mold.
“Morning, Sunshine,” his father said with a smile on his face.
“G’morning, Pop.”
“Breakfast’s on the table.”
“Okay.”
Justin slipped out of bed and into his overalls. He always wondered what the tag meant, OshKosh B’Gosh. Father had taught him how to say it, but not what it meant.
They ate breakfast—bacon and eggs—then went out to feed the animals.
Sprinkling grain for the chickens, which clucked and pecked, Justin looked out over their tall fence, to the blot constantly there on the horizon. Father called it the Rorschach, sometimes the Pattern. Sometimes nothing at all. It was always changing shape, even as everything else remained the same; changing to a butterfly, or a mushroom reflected.
He saw movement in the trees—a deer!
Justin crouched down to hide behind a pile of firewood that stood somewhere between him and the fence. He peeked over the top of the pile as carefully as he could. The deer always ran if they saw him.
Instead of a deer, a boy about his size came out of the woods—but only half of him, as if he had been chopped in two like firewood, the left half of him gone or burned for the winter; permanently, either way.
He hopped along on one leg, and the side of his face looked scarred and black.
To Justin he seemed like an odd boy because he had long hair, which might have shined golden if not for all the dirt; and his one leg bent more gracefully, like a fawn’s.
One time when Justin had asked Father why they got haircuts, Father had said that only girls have long hair. Justin had asked him what were girls? And Father said, “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
So this weird boy must have been a girl.
She stopped when she saw Justin, but didn’t seem afraid. Justin stood up slowly, like he did sometimes for deer.
The girl waved.
He sort of waved back, and wondered if she would like to see his fort in the hay.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Father asked from behind him.
Justin jumped, whirled around.
Father held a watering can, destined for the garden. He took a sip from it without ever losing his smile.
When Justin glanced back toward the woods, the half a girl was gone.
“What’s on your mind?” Father repeated.
Justin shook his head and kept sprinkling grain for the chickens, which chuckled and picked algorithmically. “Nothing,” he said.
His father smiled. “There is no such thing.”
Justin’s eyes flicked to the horizon, to the Pattern, which now looked like a giant black face.
“Why are we here?” Justin finally asked.
“What do you mean?”
Justin frowned. “I don’t know.” He didn’t think he could explain it.
“You mean why did the chicken cross the road?”
“What? No. What’s that mean?”
“Well, that’s basically what you asked me. Why did the chicken cross the road, right?”
“No. That’s not what I meant.”
“But it’s potāto potãto. And so is the answer.”
Father took off his glasses to shine them on his shirt. He squinted, his eyes already imperceptibly small, but more so as he gazed out at the Pattern, which he did faithfully every day. Sometimes Father prayed to it. Sometimes it took the form he asked.
“Have you ever cried, Justin?”
“No.”
“Have you ever been scarred or hurt?”
“No, huh uh.”
“Ever been sad or lonely or unhappy in any way?”
“No. I don’t know. Not really.”
Father’s eyes met Justin’s. “So then why did the chicken cross the road?”
“I…I don’t know.”
“Because,” Father said, and then he started making chicken sounds and flapping his arms like wings.
Justin laughed. “That makes no sense.”
Father tousled his hair and said, “That’s what makes it so funny. Now hurry up—you’ll be late for the doctor’s.”
That night, as Justin listened to the crickets outside his bedroom, as if listening to the music of stars, he thought about the half a girl and how he would never see her again, and how nothing ever seemed finished or meaningful or answered in any way, and that it would never-ever end, and for the first time in his life he wondered if he would cry.
Nemesis Theory
Tim Curran
1
His first day at Grissenberg, Johnny Coogan heard all about the three guys who’d gone over the wall. Dead of night, lockdown, and still they had gotten out. The hacks were watching everyone closely in case there would be more, some kind of mass escape like on TV, but the cons knew better. The warden could talk trash all he wanted to, but there was no way he was going to put a spin on it. Because there was one thing for sure: people were disappearing from his prison.
2
Over in C-Block, Coogan’s cellmate, Luis Cardone, had been a dirt-crazy Latin terror on the streets, an enforcer for the Latin Lords street gang who’d been called the Junk Monkeys in Spanish Harlem because they pushed skag and rock to the poor and underprivileged. But inside the walls—doing life for multiple murder—he had become fascinated by the stars above. He talked at length about nebulas and pulsars and spiral galaxies. It got that way with cons, Coogan knew. When they went behind the walls and their old vices were denied them, they looked inside themselves and found something purely personal to obsess over. And if they didn’t, they went insane.
“You ever hear of the Oort Cloud, home?” Luis asked him.
“Can’t say that I have.”
“It’s something I keep dreaming about. The Oort Cloud.”
Luis said the Oort Cloud was, theoretically, a misty spherical cloud of water, ammonia, and methane ices that existed just beyond Pluto. He said it was thought to be the remnant of the original solar nebula that collapsed into itself to form the sun and planets. It was also thought to be the home of comets that came shooting towards Earth and inner space.
“A passing star every thirty million years—a red dwarf maybe—sets loose a chain reaction of comets that bombard the Earth and cause mass extinctions,” Luis explained, totally mesmerized by the subject. “That’s called the Nemesis Theory. See, they think this star is a companion star to our sun, a dark star, they call it.”
“You say it like you don’t believe it.”
Luis shrugged. “Oh, I believe it all right. I just wonder sometimes if it’s more than that. Maybe not comets that come visiting us but something else…something not dislodged by a star but something that comes here because it wants to.”
“Like something alive you mean?”
Luis shrugged again.
“Why do you dream about the Cloud?” Coogan asked him.
Luis shook his head. “I don’t know. But the dreams are bad, man. Same dream all the time…that there’s something out in the Oort Cloud, something watching us, something…terrible. It makes me wonder about the next extinction event.”
Luis was a nut, but there was something almost sincere in his insanity as if he were trying to caution his audience, warning the curious, be careful, my brother, for here there be monsters.
When he had been at Leavenworth, Coogan had celled with an old-school bank robber named Bobby LeForest who’d been raised right, meaning he’d been around the prison block a few times. Bobby
was great, but now and then he’d go crazy and start foaming at the mouth, shouting at the ghosts of men long dead.
So, all things considered, Coogan understood crazy and figured he could live with it. Besides, when you were in a cage, you had to learn tolerance. And part of that was taking an interest in your cellmate’s obsession.
“Hear you didn’t like the accommodations at the Hot House, home,” Luis said to him, meaning the Leavenworth Federal pen.
“Nah. I decided to leave in the back of a bakery truck. Problem was; they caught me.”
Luis laughed.
Coogan was sitting on a Federal stretch for armed robbery, extortion, and grand larceny, ten years, which ran consecutively with the three years state time he’d already pulled at Auburn in New York for burglary. And that—the ten years—was only because his lawyer, some greasy Jew who talked out of the side of mouth, plea bargained it down. Otherwise, it would have been twenty, easy. Except…now it was fifteen years because of that escape attempt at Leavenworth that had landed him here at Grissenberg.
Fifteen years. Some of the cons, especially those doing all-day, said you could do fifteen years standing on your head. Wasn’t shit. But as Coogan sat there, looking at the walls of his cage, fifteen years was a long time. Fifteen years could squeeze the juice from a man. He’d already been squatting in the darkness of Leavenworth for two years and Auburn Correctional for three, be another seven before he was even eligible for parole.
“Well, I hope you like it here in Griss City,” Luis told him. “Even though I know you won’t.”
Coogan figured he wouldn’t either. He could see all those years stretching out before him, an endless black corridor with no light at the end.
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