Aaaiiieee

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Mother gently took my arm, pulled me back down beside her. And we barely left the room for the two days that followed.

  On the morning of the fourth day I awoke to see that the branches of the skulls surrounding us had reached and fused with each other, created a jagged white nest around us. Or a barrier, trapping us together. Digits of bone had stabbed into the plaster of ceiling and walls. It was as though we were hidden in the heart of some coral reef. Swallowed in some great skeleton. Would the ring close in on us, until at last we truly were trapped? Until we were crushed, ground in those white fangs?

  Mother slept. My stomach grumbled hungrily but I ignored it. Sitting cross-legged, I pulled toward me a stack of scrapbooks I had been meaning to page through. More of Mother’s art photographs.

  In the last book I found a series of enlargements that stunned me. They were of Mother naked…but older, in her late forties I guessed. Gray hair. Ass widening and breasts sagging. She was bound and gagged in one shot, sodomized in another. Her male partner in these photos was a man about her age, gray- haired, tall and lean and…and with horror, I realized it was my grandfather. My grandfather, in his forties, having sex with his daughter, in her forties…

  She had told me that she had seen the sphere at work before. Seven years ago, out West. Another ghost like her. Her father…as she best remembered him. As she had subconsciously called him back. And now I understood my grandfather. I understood my mother. Even as I felt sick, I pitied her. And I pitied myself, in turn.

  But it didn’t stop me from doing to her what grandfather had done, when she awakened…

  Mother straddled me again; she liked that control of movement. But she also liked submission; just before this, she’d had me tie her and spank her bottom until it glowed. She rocked atop me now, green eyes drugged in her intensity.

  “You missed me, darling. You gave me life as I gave you life. We understand each other. We’re alike. No one else understands us. We need each other. Don’t ever leave me, darling, I missed you, I missed you, I love you, oh fuck me, darling, fuck me…”

  Mother leaned her breasts down to dangle in my face. Thinking this was her intention, I sucked at them, but she sat back up and I saw the buck knife in her fist. And I realized she meant to use it.

  “No!” I blurted, thinking she intended to kill me; that I might be resurrected and be all the more like her.

  Mother plunged the knife down into her own side and cried out as if in orgasm. Blood spattered my belly, then began to flow hot down her body—down mine.

  “Fuck me, darling, cut me, fuck me, please…”

  “Oh God!”

  She raised herself off my erection, took hold of it, and guided me into her incision. She bore her weight down and I slid inside easily amid the lubrication of blood. Her guts were hot in there.

  She pushed the knife into my hand. I tried to hurl it away but she closed her fist around mine. She was strong, or I was weak, and she made me thrust the blade into her navel. “Cut me, darling, hurt me, love me, please…” She was sobbing hysterically. Maybe it hurt, or maybe it was the madness. I was sobbing, and now vomiting. I wrestled with her, both of us so slick it would have been hard for another to know which of us had been stabbed. I managed to roll her onto her back and began to slide out of her but she pulled me atop her, legs clinched around me. She inserted me into the second incision. I could barely get in against the push of her intestines, which began to emerge like a blue baby crowning, but I made it, to the hilt, my penis a knife, and I realized then that I had fought to bury my penis in that wound—that she no longer had to force me…

  She fellated me through a hole in her cheek. The first wound had healed without leaving a scar, the second was mostly healed, but I made new vaginas. One in her thigh so I could rub up against the bone within. The mattress was awash in blood, a pool in its center. The room smelled like a slaughterhouse must. There was vomit, and a heap of intestines but apparently she regenerated new ones inside, apparently she was immortal, and I heard the creak of the skulls around us as the bone Eden grew more lush.

  “Slut!” a voice behind us raged. “God-damn whore!”

  I whipped my head around. A man had come into the studio and he smashed himself a path through the bone foliage with his arms, unmindful of the lacerations the jagged branches tore in his flesh. He was naked, and his face was flushed red in fury, and I saw it was my grandfather.

  “Bitch! Cheat on me, will you? Run from me, will you? Thought you could hide from me?”

  Mother slipped out from under me, and I saw her face was slack with utter terror. All the cat-like confidence had fled her eyes, leaving only that fear I had seen ingrained in them. Hers was the face of a child, helpless to defend itself.

  I rose with the knife as Grandfather made it through the barrier. He caught my lunge and swung me aside. He had meant for me to fall into the waiting talons of bone, to become impaled, but I caught myself and only gashed my shoulder.

  “No, please, Daddy, please!” Mother wailed.

  I tackled Grandfather from behind, reaching around to slam the blade of the buck knife into his chest as I did so. He only grunted, and flipped me off him onto my back. He grunted again as he yanked the knife out of him, and grinned down at me.

  “You’ll pay for that one, boy.”

  I saw Mother look to the doorway abruptly. Grandfather looked. I looked. A small woman had entered the room through the path Grandfather had smashed. She was naked, and about the age she had been in most of the pictures I had seen of her in the photo album that first night. It was my grandmother.

  “Liz!” Grandfather hissed, as surprised as I was.

  “Go back, John,” she said quietly.

  “No! You go away!”

  “I should have stopped you long ago, John. God forgive me…”

  Grandmother came forward. Her husband swung the knife threateningly her way. Mother moaned fatalistically. Grandmother moved swiftly past her husband toward the work bench. We all understood what she was reaching for, and as Grandfather lunged to intercept her I tackled him yet again; around the legs this time. He almost fell, pin-wheeled his arms…

  I didn’t see what Grandmother with her dead, empty face did when she reached that skull with the sphere in its forehead. I couldn’t see her around Grandfather’s legs. But I knew she had done something when the legs I held became weirdly soft, and then insubstantial…smoke in my embrace. Dust. I began to inhale it, choked, held my breath. The buck knife had dropped to the floor.

  I pushed myself up on my hands and knees, facing toward Mother.

  Where I had last seen her—cowering on the drenched mattress, that terror in her face—a cloud of dust now hung in the air. For a moment only it held a human outline, as if struggling to retain its integrity, a tormented figure of ash. I thought I saw its eyes, somehow, and I did see an arm. A hand, reaching out to me.

  But then the cloud billowed outward, lost its form, swirled and dispersed and settled. Settled around me, on the floor, on the work bench, on the window sill. A sliver of sun showed around the window shade, and motes danced golden in its beam.

  I wept. I glanced around me. Grandfather was gone. Grandmother had vanished. Already I heard the cracking and splintering of the bone orchard, as chunks began to break free and drop to the floor.

  But the growths weren’t simply crumbling, I saw; they were undergoing some new metamorphosis. I saw a skull begin to climb down the wall off its hook. Its antlers moved stiffly like the legs of some great arthritic spider. It was the skull painted to look like it was covered in flesh and hair. But no, it wasn’t that one. It was covered in flesh and hair. One of its eyes was not a broken Christmas bulb. They were both intact. And they blinked.

  I ran out of the room then. I saw no more. I found my long forgotten clothing, and my car keys. I heard sounds from the studio, great crashings. I fled outside, into the light, into the fresh air. I had escaped…

  I didn’t see what the neighbors saw. No on
e believed that I knew nothing about it, but no crime was really committed. A few lawns were damaged. I paid for that when I sold the cows.

  How had a small herd of cattle been contained inside that house? I couldn’t explain it to the police. I professed not to know. Though Mother’s blood had simply disappeared from my skin, I had been afraid of what the police would find inside…but when at last I had the courage to return to the house, to the studio, I saw that the mattress was dry and unstained—just very dusty.

  There were no cattle skulls left in the studio. I collected up the scrapbooks. I would burn the one with the pictures of Grandfather and my mother. And I would sell the house.

  I viewed the penned animals once before I sold them. I looked closely at each one of them, felt their foreheads for hard lumps protruding. I found none. Perhaps one day these beasts will be found dead, mutilated, when the owners of the sphere come looking for it. But perhaps it’s already been restored to them.

  I couldn’t help but wonder, however fancifully, if the skulls of those cattle were painted black, and red, and blue like a desert sky, under the layers of skin and hair.

  I’m better now. Fewer nightmares. I can smile at the people I work with.

  But Mother was right, after all; your relationship with your parents does shape how you learn to love, and lust.

  I don’t think I can ever have sex with a woman again.

  Ouroborus

  The roots of great trees had burrowed through the ceiling over many years, growing ever downward and piercing into the floor as well. Into the walls, too…squeezing between mortared stones, the larger roots even nudging blocks out of their sockets so that they had fallen to the endless Tunnel’s floor here and there. Some of these roots were as big around as trees themselves. Noon marveled, because he estimated this stretch of the Tunnel was hundreds of feet below the surface. Not only that, but by his estimation the surface in this region was now a blasted desert devoid of any life. The forest that had once covered this area should be decades extinct. Maybe the trees were indeed gone, but their roots continued to dig blindly deeper and deeper, as if to one day sip the very magma from the planet’s core. These roots still alive like nerves after a tooth is extracted. Refusing to die, determined to survive at any cost, but without quite realizing why they should do so. Just like Noon.

  This spider-webbed lattice, this living weave, became so tight in spots that Noon could barely squeeze himself through it. He didn’t want to draw his machete and hack at the roots, because he didn’t want to leave a trail the Foeti could easily follow. Yet who was he deceiving, in that concern, but himself? Though the floor of the Tunnel here was of uneven flagstones, not dirt as it had been some miles back, he knew he was leaving plenty of signs of his passage for the Foeti and other denizens of the Tunnel to follow. The Foeti might not possess the sense of smell, but it/they could see clearly enough—just as other entities might not have the sense of sight, but could sniff the blood in his veins from a mile away.

  It was difficult to tell how far behind him the Foeti was/were. The Tunnel made its/their cries echo and distort. It/they might be lost way back in the steam as black as squid’s ink which he had groped his way through an hour ago, or as close as the beginning of the root forest. Its/their wails sounded like a nursery of newborn infants drowning at the bottom of the sea.

  Though the wails sounded like multiple creatures to him now—and on a few occasions he had injured the/a Foeti so badly that he was sure it would die of its wounds—he was not certain if there were many of them, or only a single individual. His opinion on the subject changed from day to day, from hour to hour.

  In any case—and fortunately for him—even if the Foeti was/were fairly near, the tangled roots were too dense to see through very deeply…and though there were bare light bulbs hanging from the low ceiling, they were spaced far apart so that the gaps between their pools of light offered brief shelters of darkness. He only hoped that nothing hostile was lying in wait for him in one of these intervals of darkness. The bulbs rested against the roots here and there, and their heat had scorched them black in spots though they hadn’t caught fire. Fire was perhaps Noon’s worst fear. If he ever came to a place in the Tunnel that was filled with flame, he would have to wait for the fire to die down before he could proceed. In that time, the Foeti might catch up to him. And if the fire was of a kind that would never die away, then he would have to turn back. That was simply impossible to contemplate. In all this time of running through the Tunnel, he had not once turned back.

  He estimated that he had been running for a year, at least…ever since he had fallen through the hole in the rotted floor of his moldering house in the old, old city—waking from unconsciousness to find himself in the Tunnel. The ceiling far above him, with just a dim bluish light showing him the hole his weight had broken open, so high and out of reach. Luckily, the floor of the Tunnel had been of a thick black soil in that section (churned up by a seething population of nightcrawlers), and it had broken his fall.

  The walls of that section were also of wood, and Noon had been attempting to climb back up, digging torn fingers and toes between the rough boards to find purchase, when the Foeti had lunged out of the shadows for the first time—its hairless head disproportionately immense, its naked body undeveloped, like an embryo as big as he was. He had dropped down from the wall and begun running, then. He had been running ever since. Sleeping when it was moderately safe enough to risk it. Eating what edible plants, mostly fungus, he could harvest, and whatever edible animals he could kill. Drinking water that trickled down tiled walls, or that pooled here and there, or that flooded whole areas of the Tunnel he had to wade through. When he couldn’t run, he dragged himself along. He had even crawled on all fours.

  In some places he had found doors blocking his way. Doors of decomposing gray-green wood. Doors of metal almost lost under incrustations of red rust or green verdigris. To his infinite relief on each occasion, he had not yet encountered a locked door. But he had done his best to barricade them once he was on the other side. Several times, in narrow parts of the Tunnel, he had even constructed and barricaded his own doors to impede, if not halt, the progress of the Foeti. Of course, elsewhere the Tunnel was so impossibly wide that he couldn’t see its sides, let alone create a door to block it. Only a few miles back, in fact, he had encountered one such region of the Tunnel, its walls lost in gloom but the ceiling so low he had needed to tuck in his head to avoid bumping it against a smooth surface apparently made of thick black (perhaps volcanic) glass.

  Over the months, this subterranean and stressful existence had taken its toll on him. His hair, formerly long and worn in a queue tied with a black ribbon, had begun to come out in stringy handfuls. He had lost weight, his skeletal condition impossible to ignore as his clothing tattered away until all he wore now were a pair of ragged trousers cut off at the knees. Worst of all were the headaches, so severe at times that he wanted nothing more than to stop running, running, running, to just drop down and curl in a fetal position and wait for his enemy to overtake him at last…to deliver him from his torment. His skull seemed to be literally and steadily ballooning with his pain, as though filling up with infected pus…

  The forest of roots was so dense that when Noon suddenly emerged from it he was surprised, shaken out of his numb, robotic reverie—not having seen its terminus approaching. Ahead of him loomed a great staircase, the ceiling sloping up at a steep angle, vanishing into a murk no longer illuminated by dangling light bulbs. Straightening up, Noon moved close to the bottom step. He prodded it with his toe, and reached out to run his hand over a black-painted wall with a crinkled texture. His suspicions about the surface of the staircase, walls, and the angled ceiling were confirmed when he tore free a little tab of the black material to reveal words beneath it, printed in a small type, black against white. Newspaper. The walls, ceiling and the stairs themselves were composed of papier-mache, covered over with a glossy black paint.

  Were the st
airs nothing more than glued paper, then? Would they support his weight? As he tested his foot on the first step, he realized there were odd symbols marked on it in a dark but flourescent purple paint. More symbols, but different, on the second step. And so on, these characters varying on each. Did they tell a saga? Some parable? But if so, was this story to be read from the bottom to the top of the staircase, or from the top to the bottom? Or might it be read either way?

  Noon had taken only three wary steps up the flight of paper or paper-coated stairs when a/the Foeti burst directly through the wall at the foot of the staircase. The thickly-painted papier-mache there had flimsily covered over and hidden a doorway in the true wall beneath.

  Noon then began racing up the steps as fast as his legs could propel him, terrified to have his foe so close at his heels in so unexpected a manner. He could no longer be timid about the staircase’s sturdiness. But he needn’t have worried, as it turned out, about the staircase supporting him or the Foeti catching him—just yet, at least. After several moments, he realized the Foeti was not pursuing him up the steps, and after a few moments more, he reined in enough fear that he was able to stop and look back down the way he had come.

  There had to be more than one Foeti, he decided (again). The first one that had attacked him had been entirely bald. This one had long cobwebs of hair hanging over its face, through which its lidless black eyes glared. And whereas the first ones he had encountered had always been crawling rapidly on all fours, lately the ones in this vicinity seemed to spend more time scurrying along on their hind legs, bent under the weight of huge heads which were still not as huge as the heads of the first Foeti he had known. This one even wore primitive, torn clothing.

  The wild-haired Foeti had not advanced up even one of the steps, paced back and forth at their foot, emitting terrible cries of frustration. Was the thing concerned that the steps might cave in under its weight? No…Noon understood what the problem was. The symbols on the steps. The Foeti was afraid of them. This was confirmed when he saw the Foeti lash out, dig its nails into the bottom step and tear away a strip of the papier-mache as he himself had done. It flicked the shred away, and tore another free. Then, it began flailing madly with both of its thin but powerful forelimbs.