Robert fell back in the grass, panting and shivering, making soft whimpering sounds. For the longest time his mind was an empty corridor, nothing but fear buzzing inside of his head like fluorescent lights. When he got up again, he rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself up and away so his back was to the pond. All the way through the field it felt like there were two heavy hands on his shoulders trying to pull him up and turn him back—trying to make him look at the thing in the grass.
Robert bit his bottom lip and kept walking, sliding into the tree line. He vowed to himself that he would never go back to the field and the pond there because he knew that forever after the thing would be waiting for him just out of frame. It was the first time his special reality had ever frightened him. Sure, it was strange and empty, but it wasn’t scary; the emptiness of it made it better to Robert, made it more mysterious. More beautiful.
He made it home early in the evening and smiled at his mother when she asked if he was okay. He lied and said sure, said he was fine then he went upstairs and popped two of the anti-anxiety pills his doctor had prescribed that he almost never took. Then he stood under the spray of a cold shower until the first tendrils of drowsiness crept across his mind.
Robert barely roused himself to have cake and supper with the family at his farewell party. He was still so doped that he no choice but to tell his parents he’d taken a pill then lied and told them it was because he was nervous about starting school. He promised them he would be okay by morning then he lurched back to bed and forgot for a little while that any world existed.
III
College was mostly what Robert expected it to be, full of noisy people and musty classrooms and halls that smelled of disinfectant, except on weekend nights in the dorms when the halls smelled liked spilled liquor and occasionally of vomit. He loved the library and his lectures and doing his homework, but dorm life was not for him. Robert being in the dorms did not exactly work for other people either. The first time someone caught him staring into the big mirror that stretched the entire length of the row of sinks in the shared bathroom, the guy that found him actually laughed it off. He thought Robert was high and told him to enjoy the trip.
He was inside the bathroom and looking through the mirror out of a window in his world. He was high in a building and looking down, head swimming with vertigo as the red waves of an alien ocean crashed against quartz-like stones jutting from the sandy floor. The water had stained them pink over the years so they looked like foggy tourmaline. Things reared up out of the water too far out for Robert to really see, but some of them were beautiful, they had hides that glittered like mosaics made of precious stones. Then there were the other things, things that set his teeth on edge and made his brain feel as though it was twitching inside his skull, trying to pull back. They had mottled grey-black skin that seemed on the verge of splitting. Their gruesome mouths would open and he could see teeth like rib bones filed down to points.
One of the beastly things came from beneath the churning waves and caught one of the mosaic creatures. It disappeared inside its hideous maw. When it surfaced again a few feet closer to shore and opened its mouth, pieces of the living mosaic were speared on those ragged rib-teeth. It was horrifying and fascinating and Robert could not look away. People came and went around him, someone elbowed him and another snapped his fingers in front of Robert’s face. One jerk yelled in his ear for him to WAKE UP, DRUGGIE, but no one tried to physically make him move away from the mirror.
The setting sun was turning the deep red water to black when one of the monsters came from the deep and thrashed around in the air as though trying to free itself. As Robert looked on, its side split and on a gout of pus and blood came a flood of smaller things; things that in the light glittered and shined like gemstones. Even as he screamed and stumbled away, Robert realized it was how the beautiful things were born—they were devoured by the ugly things and inside of them they disseminated and became new embryos. The beautiful things were parasites and monsters far more insidious than the things which ate them. Life in Robert’s secret world was a vicious circle and the distinction between predator and prey was nonexistent.
Robert wasn’t sure how long he lay on the floor, writhing and screaming with his hands over his eyes, pressing the heels of his palms against them through his eyelids until it hurt. At first he wanted to be blind, but he thought how he would be trapped then with that image inside his mind forevermore. He took his hands away from his eyes but left them closed as he drew his knees up to his chest and began to weep.
He wasn’t aware of much until a hand on his shoulder jerked him out of his sandblasted reverie. Robert snapped his burning eyes open to stare back into eyes of pale blue that looked as startled as he felt. Then the stranger moved back and Robert stared. He looked familiar. Robert finally remembered that he was the first guy that saw him, the one who had told him to enjoy his trip. When he stood and offered a hand for Robert to take, he hesitated, not over-fond of touching people and definitely not a fan of being touched. The guy wiggled his fingers at him and smiled and Robert took his hand at last and let himself be pulled to his feet.
The guy patted his shoulder and introduced himself as William Lanthorne. He told Robert not to sweat it; sometimes the trip became a fall, the dream a nightmare and it would all be over soon anyway. Robert started to tell him that he wasn’t high, but because he also wasn’t stupid, he opted not to. Instead, Robert thanked William and walked away before he could say anything else.
The extra awkward part came when William knocked on Robert’s door a few minutes later with a bottle each of Gatorade and water and a half-eaten pack of cookies. He gave the items to Robert then asked if he could come in and Robert didn’t know what to do with any of it, least of all William who was smiling at him. He had one dimple and that was uneven as hell, but it looked good on him and it made Robert scowl even as he stepped back and let William in.
A couple of weeks later, William kissed him in the library and his mouth tasted like chai tea and Robert didn’t tell him to fuck off. He kissed William back and it was strange because he had never kissed anyone before in his life other than to buss some relative on the cheek. When he drew back and looked into Willliam’s pale blue eyes and at the turrets and watchtowers of a great city wall running through the light reflected in those eyes, he thought that William was the beginning of the end and found himself feeling uncommonly cheerful about the revelation.
College went faster after he met William and in his second year they left the dorms behind for a crappy apartment in a rundown part of town that had more ghosts than living inhabitants. Walking home at night after the last bus had run and the fog slithered down the narrow old town streets was an exercise in bravery, but Robert held William’s hand and swore to himself he’d always do what he could to protect him. It should have been a funny thought to have since William seemed to watch over Robert more than Robert watched over him, but William didn’t like the dark and he didn’t like walking home from the bus stop on foggy nights.
William knew about the world by then. He had caught Robert staring into yet another puddle, this one on the sidewalk outside their dormitory. When he asked him what he was doing, Robert told him. It wasn’t easy to convince William that he was telling the truth about what he saw, but eventually William seemed to accept it. It was not a secret Robert could keep for very long from anyone because it went everywhere he did. With William, it wasn’t a secret that he wanted to keep and William didn’t let him down. He might not have totally believed him, but he didn’t leave Robert for it either.
Sometimes he would ask what Robert saw in the windows of shops and tenement buildings that they walked by. Robert told him about the darkly glittering stars or how it was storming and that, in the world beyond the windows, the lightning was the color of sour citrus candy; bright orange, neon yellow and nuclear core red. He told William how it would burn your tongue if you stood too close to the glass when there was a storm. He described the
screech of the wind and the far away sound of thunder.
On one such night two months before they graduated, Robert stopped in front of a huge display window in an old department store that had been closed for years. No one in their tired little college town was destructive or mischievous enough to run around busting out heavy-duty windows like that. Aside from the student population and university staff, the town was pretty much a wasteland, the school the only thing keeping it alive.
There was a wildfire raging in Robert’s world, the heat came through the glass and prickled against his skin. It was cold where he stood with William on the sidewalk, wind nipping at them and chapping their faces. Together, they looked into the mirror of the big window—William saw their silhouettes in the city-dark and Robert saw the fire and described it to him.
In its flickering glow, he got down on one knee and asked William to marry him. The firelight gilded William, sliding over his skin and Robert thought he had never looked as handsome as he did when he said yes. He pulled Robert up from the sidewalk and kissed him in the wind that was cold and damp from the north; hot and dry from the window. Robert felt like he was in Heaven even as Eden burned.
IV
Robert graduated college with a degree in philosophy. His favorite aunt’s asshole husband gave him a gift box wrapped in shiny silver foil paper. Something that looked like a cross between a frog and a scorpion but walked like a crab and had eyes on stalks sticking out from the sides of its head scuttled into view from one side of the box and out of view on the other. In hot pursuit was a thing like a cat but with two heads, six eyes and a row of spines that oozed what Robert guessed was poison. He could hear the poison sizzle where it hit the ground, shaken free by the cat-thing’s bounding steps. It leapt and its tailless rear-end was still in view when he heard a shriek from out of frame.
He ripped the paper open, aware that he was getting lost in his world again and that people were staring. When he lifted the lid from the box, he saw an application for a fast food restaurant inside. His uncle bellowed laughter and Robert glared at him, counting to ten in his head before he dared speak. William beat him to it though because one of the great things about William was that he didn’t care about counting to ten or minding his manners.
Robert smiled to himself and turned a piece of the foil paper over to see how things were going there. The cat-thing was eating the frog-scorpion even as something else crept up on it, something big and hulking and rippling with muscles and scales. It was one of those things Robert desperately did not want to see, like the thing that had been in the village field that day, so he wadded the paper up and dropped it on the floor. He looked up in time to see William punch his uncle in the face. Robert’s first and only reaction was to laugh and cheer; even his mother’s scolding look couldn’t make him stop.
He took William home to their crappy apartment that night and iced his knuckles and kissed his mouth and took out his shard of mirror to tell him what he saw while they passed a bottle of cheap vodka back and forth. It was snowing in the region he could see from their couch by the window and something with huge leathery wings that glittered with frost walked through the snow.
Robert described to William the sound of its taloned feet breaking through the crust of the ice. He told William how the cold must be truly brutal because the skin was coming off the bat-winged creature’s feet and it left bloody prints in its wake. It made no sound to indicate that it was in pain though and Robert watched it for over an hour, moving from place to place in the apartment to keep up with it. William was worried for it, but Robert didn’t know how to tell him that everything in his world lived solely to die, at least as far as he could tell.
Then the thing stopped and turned and stared right back at Robert. It met his eyes and he saw its pain then. He saw far more than that though; he saw its rage, rage at its situation, rage at its helplessness no matter its size, rage at having been seen by the likes of some boy barely become a man. It opened its mouth, a jagged slice through its left cheek, and screamed at Robert before he could throw the mirror. He clapped his hands over his ears and screamed, too.
William got down on the floor with him and took the mirror from his scarred hands. Robert had cut himself on its edges when he squeezed instead of throwing it. Robert clung to William and sobbed into his t-shirt, soaking the cloth with blood and wishing he had never seen the place to begin with. He wanted to go back to that long ago day of his childhood and walk right past the puddle at the end of the drive.
Yet, when William said, “No more” and “I’m sorry” Robert shook his head. Done was done and he could never go back to the time of before.
Robert took up work as a freelance writer, doing everything from fluff pieces in newspapers to writing articles for travel magazines about the best multivitamin to take while combating a cold abroad. It wasn’t glamorous and it barely paid better than flipping burgers would have. That was when it paid at all because there were query rejections and articles that were sent back; there were times when he was being paid by the word and the article was whittled down to three hundred words.
They got married anyway because, wedding vows weren’t going to make them any poorer. It was a cool day in early autumn and they had the ceremony in the backyard of Robert’s family home, a rambling old farmhouse full of good memories despite all of the broken mirrors. Most of Robert’s family was in attendance, including his favorite aunt—minus her bastard husband. William’s blind mother was there and she wept and clapped when they kissed. The rest of William’s family was either dead or lived too far away to come.
That night they danced and ate cake and drank too much homemade wine. They slept wrapped around each other in Robert’s childhood bed, neither one of them willing to consummate their marriage on a narrow twin bed with a squeaky mattress and Robert’s parents right down the hall. The next morning they went downstairs, hungover, but still so happy they could barely keep from giggling like schoolchildren with a juicy secret.
Robert’s mother made them omelets and his father made them strong coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. While they were eating, they went through some of their smaller gifts, including a plain brown envelope. When they opened it, they found a stack of cash inside and Robert’s mother told them they had all pitched in to take up money so they could have a honeymoon. Until that moment, William and Robert had planned on taking a long weekend in bed together before getting back to work; the real honeymoon would come later when they could afford it.
The money was really for them to do with as they pleased, but they found they did want to go on a honeymoon though to where they did not know. When William suggested a road trip, Robert couldn’t argue with that—it was a great idea. As they rushed home to pack he couldn’t help but think with a mix of fear and anticipation that travel in this world would mean more extensive travel in his world as well.
They left that afternoon and drove late into the night, swigging coffee and buying crappy gas station food for the hell of it. William drove while Robert watched the mirrors and told him if he saw anything of interest. The farther west they drove, the more the landscape in Robert’s world changed as well. The rolling hills and plains and seas of grass faded away; the distant roar and crash of the red ocean disappeared to nothing. Robert jumped and barely stopped from grabbing William’s arm as a sloth-like creature the size of a black bear with smaller spider-things feeding off its lumbering bulk staggered out in front of their car and collapsed. When William asked what it was, Robert only shook his head because saying, “More death,” was not a good answer. He still didn’t want William to know about the ugliest side of the reflection world; it was part of his promise to protect William from the dark.
As they drove, they climbed higher and higher into a cloud forest on the other side of the mirrors. Alien flowers bloomed from the sides of giant tree trunks, pulsing in the darkness with light and soft sounds like sighs. They were breathing, Robert realized. The trunk of one tree rippled and ope
ned along a seam, revealing slimy looking insides thick with mucus-like sap, then snapped closed, devouring a whole row of dreaming flowers. A fog of phosphorescent smoke drifted from the place that seam had opened up and Robert blinked stupidly; the tree had just belched. After that, he wasn’t even sure it was a tree; only something that looked like one.
The room they rented that night was in a roach motel with a neon sign that read _O_EL. On a lark they rented the honeymoon suite and William laughed when they saw there was a mirror over the bed. Robert did not because he had never slept with the world above him; he had never done anything with the world so close overhead. There was a genuine fear of the world breaking through and spilling all over them while they slept or talked or had sex. William saw the look on his face and asked if Robert was all right. Robert kissed him, muttered that his concerns were unfounded and William snickered at the phrasing as he ran his hands under Robert’s shirt.
There in the bed that night they moved together and when William leaned forward to press his mouth to Robert’s shoulder as shivers of pleasure ran down his spine as Robert held him close. Then he opened his eyes and looked over William’s shoulder, into the mirror and through to a ledge of silverish rock.
Perched there was a thing with a face like a wolf only more elongated at the snout and broader across the forehead. It had no mouth that Robert could see, but its eyes were huge and orange. Robert held tight to William’s hips, urging him on, chasing his pleasure as he watched the strange beast on the ledge watch them back as it touched itself with something Robert didn’t quite dare call a hand.
Strange is the Night Page 2
