The kid woke her, only she knew without opening her eyes that the kid was not there. The kid was gone. He tugged on her sleeve and the bottle fell, but he was gone. Except he didn’t want to stay that way. Perdy didn’t want to think about the kid. She didn’t want to think at all. She only wanted to sleep and she wished the kid would let her.
She heard the Wizard of Oklahoma in the next room, fucking around with his grimoires and his quantum-sigil-projector or whatever it was, his “Device.” Not that his efforts would be worth anything. She knew he couldn’t bring them back, that he had punched them a one-way ticket. All the king’s horses. Then again, he might not be totally wasting his time. Maybe his next cosmic mega-fuckup would put them out of their misery altogether. And that would probably be a good thing. Anything was better than this. Anything was better than thinking about the kid. Anything was better than whatever was outside. But without electricity, she didn’t see how he was going to do shit. The device hung from the ceiling, dead as his dick. Maybe if he had actually finished college he would’ve been smart enough to buy a generator for all his fancy electronics. Asshole.
Perdy wanted to go back to sleep, but the Wizard was making too much noise, cussing and slamming tools. Probably on purpose, just to piss her off. Meanwhile, her head shouted burst blood vessel—if only she were so lucky—and she knew there was no more booze. No more crystal or Vicodin either. That supply had been gone for days. Smokes was all. But hell, the Big C was the least of her worries now.
She shuffled into the reeking bathroom with its mounded, unflushable toilet. Even the minimal changes in cranial pressure that came with each step blasted sheets of black lightning through her skull. She held her breath against the stink long enough to poke in the medicine cabinet, found the rattling dregs of a bottle of 200 mg Ibuprofens, stumbled gasping into the hall.
She carried the little jar into the kitchen, downed what was left with a glass of warm OJ from the dead fridge, and sparked a bent Newport from the last crushed pack in the waistband of her skirt. She leaned against the fridge with her head back until first the nic and then the pills began to kick in, and when she felt ready to move again she staggered toward the room where Connor was up to whatever he was up to, steadying herself against the wall with one hand. Useless, whatever he was doing. He had fucked them well and truly, him and his Psychic TV-Aleister Crowley-Chaos Magick bullshit. Only the sad thing was it wasn’t all bullshit. One look out the window would show her that Connor really did know some magic, some serious fucking magic, with or without the “k.” Seriously fucked-up magic, that is. Magic he had seriously fucked up and in the process fucked them all. Especially the kid. But Perdy didn’t want to look out the window. She’d seen enough of that. Once was more than enough.
She thought of an old joke: What do a hurricane, a tornado, and a redneck divorce have in common? Answer: Someone’s gonna lose a trailer. Well, the trailer was lost, and they were lost with it. Only it hadn’t landed on any witch, there weren’t any ruby slippers, and no one was going home. Game fucking over. It wasn’t fair, it’s not like she’d married the guy or anything. She’d only been with him a few weeks. But then what in her life had ever been fair?
Especially wasn’t fair to the kid. They met Connor AKA The Wizard AKA St Mortuus at the Flaming Lips’ Zombie March in Oklahoma City, and the Zombie March had been the one thing the kid had actually wanted to do together with her. They even had a rare mother-son moment when she was making him up into a little kid zombie, all white face cream and fake blood.
And the kid had been a hit, people snapping his pics with their phones and saying, “Whoa, check out the little zombie dude!” This kind of attention was new for him and he ate it up in his awkward way, but when they called him cute, he growled and said, “I’m not cute! I’ll eat your brains!” Which of course just made him cuter.
Then Mortuus had come along, 6’2” of lanky Okie zombie, black Wranglers and black cowboy boots and black leather vest over ghost-white arms, full-sleeve tats showing through the makeup. Cheap black vented cowboy hat, shirt open to show latex and TP edged gashes down his chest, fake exposed ribs with fake dark blood congealing between. Dirty blond hair past his shoulders and a narrow ass she knew would be bone-hard. She wanted to grab that butt from the get-go, oh yes.
He told the kid how sca-a-ary he looked and won him straight over. Of course he had Perdy before he opened his mouth, and she could tell he knew it. Like that wasn’t always her problem. He told them how to say his bullshit made-up name. He pronounced the first part “est” not “saint,” only Perdy didn’t give a shit anymore since she’d seen his driver’s license and the name on that was Connor Goodman. But then Perdita wasn’t her given name either. Fuck him anyway. And then he said he was some kind of wizard, how he had powers, how he was combining “magick” and technology. Told her how he had some good crystal, too. Crystal, not some crystal ball—although he had one of those, too. She’d gone home with him that night, the kid in tow, and after the kid conked out they’d hit the pipe and fucked till they fell out of bed and kept going into the hall, the kid out cold on the sofa. The whole time still in their zombie makeup, faces gangrenous, flat slats of the pig bone he glued on for ribs popping off on her back and stomach as he humped away. Too bad it turned out that kind of energy was not typical for him.
Mortuus had a rundown singlewide in Valley Brook, south of town. She knew the area, had danced in a strip joint nearby for a while, quit because there was no one to watch the kid while she was grinding out eagles in her purple sequined g-string. She was more serious about her maternal responsibilities then.
They didn’t go back to her apartment except to pick up her clothes and shit and some of the kid’s toys that he was whining for. Beat two months’ rent. Tough on the landlord: you snooze, you lose. She slept in the back bedroom with Mortuus and the kid slept on the couch. There was a master bedroom, but it belonged to the Device. She wasn’t allowed in there, let alone the kid, and at first she thought he was hiding a meth lab, which would have been cool with her. Totally cool.
But it only took a couple days for him to start bragging to her about the machine. “The Device.” After that he wouldn’t shut up about it. He went on and on about how long he’d worked on this thing, stealing components for it the whole time he’d been in college. And he talked about hells. Asian hells and Judaeo-Christian hells. Only hells were really other universes or other dimensions or something. That was the part other people hadn’t understood about magic for centuries. But he did. He called the hells branes, other branes, said there were lots of them (B-R-A-N-E-S—not brains like zombies eat—he had to spell it out like she was stupid on top of her other issues). The Device was supposed to create openings to other branes, let him communicate with whatever it was that lived there. “Inorganic entities,” he called them. The Device was supposed to allow him to control the inorganic entities. Obviously, that part needed work.
There was a kind of wired-up metal cap he claimed helped him tune into the quantum activity of his brain (regular B-R-A-I-N), and lasers that were supposed to convert this activity into sigils and project them all the fuck over the walls. A sigil was a magical formula reduced to letters and then the letters were combined into symbols. She knew this, but he went on about it anyway. He said he used them to focus his will. That was something else he was big on: will. “Do what thou wilt,” he was always saying. This was more Crowley crap. She recognized it from her old crowd, as far back as high school. A Crowley-spouting tinfoil-hat-wearer. But she’d done worse before. Or so she thought.
According to the Wizard, the quantum component was the main thing magicians and wizards and shamans had been missing about magic for thousands of years. But he almost had it down: big things were coming, blah, blah, blah...she usually zoned out around this point.
Tube lights like for Christmas made a circle on the floor, three overlapping pentagrams painted inside. The Device itself came down from the ceiling like a submarine periscope
, club lasers clamped to the sides, wires running all over and back up through the roof. The whole thing was linked to a laptop that sat on a cheap metal folding chair in the center of the circle. The lasers reminded her of Bonerz, the club where she’d been a dancer. All the Device room was missing was a crotch-light and a smoke machine.
She’d known Wiccans and even Satanists among the Goths she’d run with at Del City High before she got pregnant and dropped out, before she began her romance with crystal. But none of this sounded much like anything she’d ever heard from any of her old crowd. The Wizard was a dropout, too, but from OU, a bona fide Sooner, if only for just a little over two years. Double major in physics and religious studies, which helped explain The Device. She remembered back in the day one of her friends telling her that Edison built a machine to communicate with the dead. She supposed this wasn’t so different. Only Edison wasn’t a loser. Wasn’t any dropout either.
She should have known right off Mortuus was only interested in the kid.
Not in a pervert pedo way. She’s not the best mother in the world—not even close—but she thinks she could’ve spotted that early on. She’s had her own experiences, after all. No, this was something even creepier.
After the first couple days with Mortuus she just kind of drifted. He didn’t have a lot of crystal, but he usually had enough to keep her quiet. There was whiskey, too, when she wanted to come down a little. Sometimes they fucked, but after the first few days, he didn’t show much interest, and when she tried to initiate things, neither he nor little Mortuus responded. He mostly messed around with his machine while she hugged the pipe. The kid did whatever: watched TV, played outside in the dirt, who the fuck cared. Perdy didn’t have to work, which was cool, but Mortuus didn’t seem to work either. Every now and then he went out for more crystal, booze, electronics, even a few groceries. He never took her or the kid.
She was aware that he didn’t get high as much as her. He pretty much ignored her. Her spider-sense was tingling, only it was telling her she was the one in the web. Her and the kid. But spider-sense was easy to silence. The pipe or the bottle did it fine.
One night about three weeks after Perdy moved in, the tide of bourbon and Vicodin she was sailing withdrew and beached her on the shore of her own bleak existence. Right off she got hung up thinking about her dad, the kid’s dad, the others, all the things they’d done to her. She needed a boost and there was no more crystal.
She wandered across the trailer, wanting to ask Mortuus, Connor, whatever, to make a run. She knew he was in the Device room because she could hear his voice. And another voice with it, probably the radio. Like he was ripped and talking back to Frito on KJ103 or something. Fucking fail. She realized then she hated him, but right now she didn’t care as long as he could hook her up with some fresh gak.
The door was closed, but she tried it anyway. Unlocked. There were lights inside, pretty, like Christmas, only maybe Christmas in Hell.
The Device spun as she watched, rising and falling in calliope rhythm, lasers painting sigils up and down the walls, on the ceiling—everywhere beyond the lit circle on the floor. A thousand brilliant zigzag hieroglyphs in red and blue and green sprang up and faded in seconds, scoring her retina with intricate afterimages, floating black tangles that each crisscrossed the next batch of sigils until her vision was streaked with black cobwebs and dead spots and she felt half-blind and dizzy.
St Mortuus sat in the center of the circle, crosslegged and naked, tapping the laptop with his back toward the door. Vertebrae stuck out in stark bumps from his shoulders to his ass crack. A lizard’s back. He faced the far wall, the one whose only window he’d covered with tar paper and duct tape. Only there was no window now, no wall either, only a huge whirling circle of darkness. First Perdy thought the darkness was smoke. But where was the fire then? Somehow the edges of the circle looked wider than the wall, and the absolute nothing in its center seemed way too deep. No light where the lasers struck it. Freaky.
Before she could say shit, the bulky clot of shadow exploded across the circle, ploughing over Mortuus and wrapping her in black. It gave her no chance to dodge. An acrid oiliness stuffed her nostrils, the stink of tire fires, of dog shit on pavement on a hot summer day. She gagged and fell to one knee. Something spoke in what was no more a voice than bubbles bursting from toxic mud. Said her name. Greasy laugh. Said the kid’s name. Laughed again. Then the kid’s own voice called from the suffocating cloud that enveloped her: “Mommy!” A second cry choked off, and the darkness passed. The choking stink was gone, at least mostly. Perdy staggered toward the edge of the lighted circle and Mortuus.
The Wizard had fallen, but he was back on his knees. He turned toward her, cursing and waving frantically, yelling at her to back off, to stay outside the circle, leave the room. She decided to cross it anyway just to fuck with him. Before she could the whole trailer lurched, and then everything tilted and spun counter-clockwise. She just had time to think: “Twister!”, and how she’d lived her whole life in OK and never been in one, when she tumbled forward and her head struck the doorframe. Hard. That was it for a while.
Perdy woke where she’d fallen in the doorway of the Device room, face pressed into a drool-sodden patch of the filthy carpet, hair stiff with dried blood. That bastard Connor could’ve moved her to the bed or the couch or something, but no. She got to her feet, which was trickier than it should’ve been. Her head throbbed, the floor was humped and buckled, and the whole trailer tilted toward the Device room. Jagged boards stuck through the living room carpet, and in the kitchen the doors of the cabinets hung open all crazy, whole and broken dishes mingling on the floor with uprooted linoleum tiles like shed scales of an enormous reptile.
The light was wrong: cold, gray, directionless. What time was it? How long had she been out?
Perdy looked for the kid. He wasn’t on the couch. Not in the bedroom or the kitchen or the bathroom or any of the closets or the Device room. Obviously wasn’t in the living room. She even checked the cabinets. Nothing. Asked the Wizard, who just shrugged, wouldn’t say anything, wouldn’t meet her eyes, just stood staring with his face through the part in the curtains of the living room picture window. She finally said, “So what the fuck are you lookin’ at anyway?” and shoved in beside him. And then she knew the kid was really gone—and so were they. So was everything. Gone, gone, gone. The other crappy trailers in the crappy trailer park, the bleak but familiar red earth of Oklahoma...a landscape even more desolate had replaced it all, a monochrome expanse of quicksilver dunes rolling away to the edges of sight in every direction, pocked only by isolate scatters of wreckage: some unidentifiable and corroded farm machinery here—a hay-baler? A gap-toothed windmill there, seriously old school, hanging motionless with three blades gone from its upper half. An ancient upside-down Ford, Model A or B or whatever, tires sagging, a big dead turtle. Turtle? Tortoise? Further off, what she took for the half-collapsed remains of an old sod house, the grass on its sunken roof shriveled and brown. Other, less identifiable structures pimpled the distance. The sky was a raging emptiness that hurt her eyes just to look at, pained her plain old B-R-A-I-N to ponder. There was no horizon—except sometimes there was: a lifeless oscilloscope line that flickered, faded, reappeared, faded.
She thought about going outside to look for the kid. It wasn’t her first thought, but she gave herself credit for at least getting to it while she was still at the window, before she saw the thing, before she hit the bottle, hit it hard. She even said to Mortuus: “He’s out there. We’ve got to go look for him!” The Wizard wouldn’t face her, just laughed a humorless laugh, flat as the light. “Are you blind? Do you see this shit? He ain’t comin’ back, bitch. Deal.” And before she could respond, there it was, rising from the dust.
After that Perdy didn’t look out the windows at all as she moved through the bowed and sagging trailer, head throbbing. She didn’t need to look, didn’t want to, and she had long since closed the curtains as tight as she could ove
r all of them. Even still, she knew that thing was out there, slithering and burrowing through the dunes. She could hear it. The sound never fully left no matter how far off it withdrew, but most of the time she just felt it, a quivering wrongness down her spine, mix of nails over a blackboard, whacking her funny bone, biting a fork, the effect preceding and heralding the cause. It rose and fell with the variable drone of cicadas on the hottest day of the 17th summer. Bad enough, but even more she dreaded its scream, when it would come again. That was the worst, the blank electrical howl that violated all her senses, filling her nostrils with feces and ozone, her mouth with the awful sweetness of brain-corroding lead...and underneath it all, faintly, the kid’s voice, calling.
She had seen it that first time as she peered through the curtains next to Mortuus, and that had been enough. It began as a flowing disturbance beneath the dust. Then a vast, rifled serpentine trunk rose in low, hollow arcs from the dead platinum dunes, before it dove back down and the silver-gray powder closed around it smooth as biscuit gravy, the plain kind without sausage. It stretched for miles.
Then she hit the booze, which was the strongest stuff they had left. First the Comfort, then the generic store brand vodka to kill the hangover. Last the two bottles of Beam, one after the other, no break.
The kid would come back when her guard was down, and she couldn’t deny a part of her was glad of the company. Perdy had never thought she would miss him, but she did. A surprise, but then the last few days had been full of surprises, hadn’t they? Still, his visits drove her harder into the bottle, right up until there wasn’t any bottle to ride anymore.
As wasted as she got, she could not blank out the obvious recognition that Mortuus had hooked up with her to get at the kid, that she had known it almost from the start. He had used the kid as some kind of offering. To what exactly, she didn’t know. An inorganic entity. Apparently the kid hadn’t been enough so it had taken them, too. Taken the whole trailer. She couldn’t imagine why it wanted the piece of shit. Or Mortuus. Or her. They were all pieces of shit.
Resonator: New Lovecraftian Tales From Beyond Page 18
