“Kowalski!” I screamed. “You bastard!”
An echo was my only response.
“Alright, you’ve read about things like this,” I said to myself. “Any minute now, you’ll wake up. Kowalski’ll be there and he’ll say, “It was all a hallucination, Junior. I slipped some acid in your cream soda as a little initiation. What do ya think about that?””
But a dark voice offered a more disturbing possibility.
Maybe not, the dark voice said. Maybe you’re supposed to climb down from here, bearing tidings of doom and destiny. You know...like Moses.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I fired back. “Do I look like Charlton Fucking Heston?”
The dark voice chuckled.
Maybe you’re going to die up here.
“Shut up!” I screamed.
Abruptly the sick green cloud cover parted.
The ground was closer than I’d imagined. Shadowed mountains surrounded my golf tee, forming a kind of bowl that extended as far as I could see. Far below me, lights flickered across a valley that formed the floor of the bowl. From the surrounding terrain I estimated that I was only five or six thousand feet above a field of moving lights.
A vast plain stretched out before me, a plain covered by the pulsing light field. The lights displayed every color imaginable and some I couldn’t begin to describe. Some of them flickered and danced like the gleam of distant campfires. Others shone steadily, like the glow from a million electric lamps.
As I watched, a new cluster of lights entered the great plain from somewhere beyond the horizon. The new cluster was the same sick color as the gangrenous moon.
As the emerald lights rushed toward the field, the other lights moved away from them, crowding together, blending their colors, seemingly in an effort to escape. But the corpse lights were too fast. They fanned out and surrounded a vast cluster of multi-colored orbs, trapping them inside a swiftly closing emerald circle.
When the noose was complete, the dimmer orbs on the edges of the circle turned the same pallid shade of green. As each green orb attacked the brightly-colored individuals, those orbs would erupt into dazzling doomed brilliance. Then the bright orbs would fade and vanish. The space formerly occupied by the bright orbs would then be replaced by a new green one.
When the last orb had turned green and joined its fellows, the circle moved on, larger, gaining speed as it undulated across the dark landscape, consuming and transforming any individual lights that drifted too close.
I heard a savage voice screaming into the wind. After a moment, I realized that it was mine. The dance of the lights, the conversion of the multicolored orbs was the most horrible thing I’d ever seen.
“And so we meet again.”
I whirled, hoping to see Kowalski grinning behind me, knowing that Kowalski was a million miles away.
“No,” I said.
The thing that couldn’t be there, not in that place, not at that moment, raised its right hand and performed a perfect karate chop. Then it laughed, a high, rasping shriek that scraped at the inside of my head like a rusted trowel.
“Remember me, O-dog?”
I tried to scream, but my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth.
“Gonna set you at my right hand, O-dog,” the thing pronounced. “I’m comin’ for you.”
I couldn’t stop myself: I scrambled backward, forgetting where I was. The thing from my nightmares floated after me.
“July 25thth, O-dog,” it shrieked. “Then it’s lights out for Kowalski!”
“Stop it!” I screamed.
Then my foot slipped over the ledge and I plunged backward over the precipice—
“Into the blackness of space rides the Fighting 509th!”
—And looked up into the face of Neville Kowalski.
I was back in the cave beneath Kalakuta, lying flat on my ass with my head in Kowalski’s lap. Behind him, the starwoman stood still as unyielding stone.
Kowalski jerked his thumb toward the Amazon.
“Ain’t that a kick in the nuts?”
He leaned in and sniffed.
“Oops,” he snorted. “I’d better go cop you a change o’ skivvies.”
“No,” I said.
I glared at Kowalski, then at the starwoman, then back at Kowalski, then back at the starwoman, my focus bouncing back and forth between the Alcoholic and the Amazon.
“No!” I moaned.
“Calm down,” Kowalski said.
“Fuck you!”
I was done. I threw off Kowalski’s arm, leaped to my feet and bolted for the door, ranting my denial as I scrambled up the stairs.
“No oh no oh nononono...”
“Obadiah, wait!” Kowalski thundered. “Goddamit!”
But I was already halfway up the stairs.
Forty seconds later, I tore open the front door, burst out of Kalakuta, and hit the driveway running.
“No no no oh no no no...”
Kowalski had called it the Wraithing, an alien dreamland connected to the waking world. Our world. But the thing that had spoken to me atop the cosmic golf tee was no dream. The thing atop that dark dais was real.
Because Carlos Vulpe was real.
I’d seen his picture earlier that afternoon but failed to make the connection: Carlos Vulpe was also the star of my favorite classic TV show, Time Rangers, a hand-carved marionette with a Death-ray Lazer Blaster and perfect karate chop; a forgotten bogeyman that had once convinced a lonely little boy that it wielded the power of Life and Death.
Somehow, Carlos Vulpe and Doctor Necropolis were one and the same.
And he lived in a realm called the Wraithing.
15
Witness
June 18thth.Northern Seattle Forensic Care Facility.
The N.S.F.C.F was chronically understaffed and tragically under-funded. Originally, the facility had catered to non-forensic (non-violent) patients, mostly homeless alcoholics and chronic drug-abusers who’d run afoul of the legal system and been consigned to the permanent company of others like themselves.
A state budget crisis—along with an increase in violent criminal convictions in the late eighties—had left Washington State’s maximum security prisons so overcrowded that even the most violent felons had begun to receive ridiculously lenient prison sentences.
Seeking a solution to the overcrowding, the Governor had re-tasked the state’s oldest mental hospitals, earmarking them for the most violent criminal offenders. As a result, by the early nineties the N.S.F.C.F housed some of the most dangerous psychopaths in the country.
Ward 7F was where they kept the bad ones.
At 12:33 pm, Nurse Sandra Woo came on late for the graveyard shift. She’d spent fifteen minutes arguing with her boyfriend Donny about his Rottweiler, Sonny Chiba.
Sonny Chiba was named after Donny’s favorite’s ‘70’s kung fu action movie star. Donny was white, but he had a thing for Asian: girls, food, movies... everything. He’d quit his job at the bowling alley recently and seemed more interested in watching kung-fu movies on DVD and playing “Godzilla Smash” with Sonny Chiba.
Sandra Woo had ended their relationship earlier that evening after discovering two of Sonny Chiba’s turds snugged inside a brand new pair of Sam & Libbys she hadn’t even worn yet. After a heated argument she’d announced it was time to make a change and kicked Donny and Sonny Chiba out for good.
Sandra Woo knew Donny was a loser. She didn’t know that he was about to become the least of her problems.
“Sorry,” she gasped as she approached the seventh-floor nurse’s station. Carla Fredericks, the on-duty nurse, yawned and waved Sandra’s apologies away.
“New admission in bed thirty-four,” Fredericks said. “Asian male, appears healthy but he’s unresponsive. Cops found him wandering naked through Rathbone Park this morning.”
“What’s his name?” Sandra said.
“No I.D.” Fredericks said. “But he’s got one hell of a wound on the right upper facial. Lost an eye, but Dr.
Mackenzie couldn’t say how. They’re trying to dig up his family. ‘Til then we get to watch him, change his dressing and blah blah blah blah blah.”
“Great,” Sandra said.
“He’s on Halcyone,” Fredericks said. “Half a milligram. He should sleep through the night. Byeee.”
Sandra set her bag down and took off her jacket.
There should have been two other R.N.s and three security guards on duty that night, but the state had cut the nursing positions the previous month. Meanwhile, management was in the process of “cultivating a more cost effective relationship” with a cheaper security firm.
“Looks like you’re on your own, girlfriend,” Sandra said.
She reached into her bag, pulled out her copy of Wuthering Heights and settled down behind the nurse’s station.
“Heathcliff, take me away.”
She’d barely gotten past the moment when Heathcliff offered Mr. Lockwood a glass of wine, when a noise from the dormitory made her start. It sounded like something heavy had fallen to the floor.
Sandra groaned. Beltran, the old Puerto-Rican self-mutilator in bed thirty-one, had an uncanny knack for wriggling out of his state-mandated sleep harness when no one was watching.
Sandra put her book down, got up and walked down the hall. If she didn’t secure his harness, Señor Beltran would claw himself to bloody rags. She pushed through the door that led into the dormitory and paused.
“Here we go.”
Budgetary restrictions had also made electricity a luxury at most state mental health facilities. Harold Garnish, Sandra’s boss, had removed every light bulb not deemed “absolutely necessary for safe navigation” from every room in the building. Sandra stood in a tepid circle of light no wider than the reach of her outstretched arms. The opposite end of the dormitory was lost in the darkness.
Sandra moved quickly. Ward 7F normally held twenty-five beds, but ten more had been added to accommodate the overflow of homicidal maniacs who arrived on a monthly basis. Ward 7F gave Sandra the creeps with a capital C.
“Señor Beltran?” Sandra whispered.
The other residents were all snoring peacefully in their restraints.
Something shifted in the darkness behind Sandra and she turned toward the sound. A second later, the light bulb over her head went out.
“Goddamit.”
When nothing jumped out at her she chided herself silently. Her nerves always played up on her when she walked 7F.
Sandra turned and stomped toward the back of the dormitory. In the crisp moonlight that shone overhead she could make out the lumpen shape of Mr. Beltran where he lay on his bed.
“Señor Beltran, you’re being a real pain in the ass,” she muttered.
A moment later, Sandra froze, uncertain of what she was seeing in the half-light. It took her brain a moment to decipher the chaos in front of her.
Beltran was a self mutilator, a “cutter.” Before being committed he’d used razors, knives, even his own teeth, to open wounds in the prison of his flesh in order to release the demons that haunted his dreams.
But a demon of another sort had been at Beltran.
The sodden red mess that lay strewn across his bed testified to an atrocity: Someone had torn Beltran apart: Parts of him, an arm, his legs and most of his right buttock, had been stripped of flesh.
Sandra stared at the mess on his bed for nearly thirty seconds. Then she turned and ran.
A part of her noticed that bed number thirty-four was empty, noticed the handfuls of matted black hair scattered across the bed and knew that she was in terrible trouble.
Then a dark shape detached itself from the shadows near the dormitory entrance, and Sandra Woo understood that her real troubles were just beginning.
16
Wings Over
Central Park
Whenever I feel overwhelmed, I feed the pigeons.
Believe it or not, giving bread to disease-ridden, winged vermin actually helps me gain perspective.
I was still struggling with the destruction of my reality when I found myself wandering through Central Park the next morning, burdened with a heavy heart and an extra large loaf of Wonder Bread.
The things I’d seen at Kalakuta had put me in one Hell of a lonely spot. Who could I turn to? Who the hell would believe me? Even if I was crazy enough to tell anyone in the first place. My mother? She was no help. Kowalski?
Kowalski’s dead already, O-dog. He just doesn’t know it yet.
I couldn’t tell my father’s partner without revealing what Vulpe had told me: That Death had put Kowalski’s name at the top of her “To Do” list.
The date was the 23rd of July. If Vulpe was right, Kowalski was scheduled to die in less than forty-eight hours.
But telling Kowalski meant admitting that everything I’d experienced was real; that a superwoman stood frozen in a basement somewhere in Yonkers; that flesh-eating monsters stalked the night, and that my father had really been some kind of...
Stop it.
I sat down on my favorite bench, in a shaded spot near the Sheep’s Meadow. With its sweeping views of the Upper East Side, the Sheep’s Meadow was where I went when I needed to think.
The day was dreary enough to require a raincoat but I’d left mine back at the apartment. As a result, the thin drizzle sought out all my dry spaces.
“What difference does it make, Frank?” I said.
Frank was my favorite of the Sheep’s Meadow pigeons. Charcoal gray with a distinctive white stripe down the center of his chest, Frank was elegant in an understated, avian way. Frank was always there for me.
“It’s all bullshit,” I continued.
Frank cooed and pecked at my right shoe.
I tore open the Wonder Bread, broke off a piece and dropped it on the ground. Frank pecked at it, and I shuddered, swallowing the surge of bile that rumbled up my throat. I hadn’t actually eaten bread since I was twelve years old. Even as a kid I’d loathed the idea of chewing the stuff; its doughy pliability repulsed me. The idea of it, wet and pasty, sliding half-chewed down my unwilling throat, was enough to ruin an otherwise serviceable meal.
Lenore, on the other hand, believed in Wonder Bread. She regularly force-fed me long and grueling lectures about its “Wholesome Goodness,” the number of vitamins and minerals with which it had been impregnated by its sadistic creators back in their mysterious laboratories in the Deep South. As a result, I was forbidden to leave the table until I’d eaten at least one slice.
In retaliation, I’d gleefully imagined myself choking to death on the stuff; saw myself gasping for breath and turning gray while it swelled and clogged my throat. In my most cherished death scenario, Lenore would return to the kitchen only to discover me dead, my throat swollen to three times its normal size. Later, at the morgue, forced to identify my cooling remains, she would throw back the sheet and discover that my dead flesh had actually turned into Wonder Bread: There before her would lie the results of her maniacal obsession with my vitamin-enrichment. How I would savor the sound of her screams, and the irony: my mother, that lover of White Death, betrayed by its image as an “All American” staple, now ruined, morally bankrupt, and bottom-heavy.
At the same time, I'd always been fascinated by its texture, especially White bread, which seemed like the bland, urban cousin to the more wholesome (but morally ambiguous) Wheat. When I was ten years old, my teacher caught me trying to ignite a ‘crude plastic explosive device’ I'd cobbled together, using white bread, Elmer's glue, three lumps of charcoal and a tin of lighter fluid. The teacher, a child-hating sadist named Miss Lily, had suggested, in front of the class, that the reason my father was absent was because I was “...a snotty little know-it-all who didn't deserve a nice daddy.” In retaliation, Lenore made me eat two slices of white bread every night for a month. She also made me compose an essay: “The Evils of American Children Who Waste Perfectly Nutritious Food on Boneheaded Terrorist Activities.”
It was only after years of therapy t
hat I understood that my lifelong habit of mutilating bread was really a declaration of war: a line drawn in the shifting sands between me, my mother, and the emptiness I felt in Marcus's absence.
Frank pecked at it thoughtfully.
“I mean, what’s it all about, Frank?” I asked.
Frank finished off his slice of artery paste, shook out his feathers and eyed me for more.
“I’ll tell you what it’s all about,” I said. “The totality of existence, you, me: It’s all an illusion.”
Frank cooed and fluttered up onto my knee.
I jumped, startled. Normally, Frank barely acknowledged any human’s presence beyond strafing unwary joggers with pigeon crap.
I scratched at an itch that had sprung up on the back of my hand, so taken by Frank’s sudden display of affection that I ignored the burning sensation this action produced.
“Frank, I think this may be the beginning of a beautiful...”
That’s when I noticed the first worm.
It was red, about six inches long. And it was hanging out of Frank’s left eye.
“Jesus,” I hissed.
As gently as I could, I kicked Frank off my lap. He landed on the ground a few feet away, flapped his wings and took off. But I barely noticed.
My legs were covered with red worms.
“Uggghh,” I said, shooting to my feet and brushing at the worms. The nagging itch on the backs of my hands became a burning sensation. A warm flush was slowly creeping up the back of my neck and my tongue abruptly grew two sizes too big for my mouth.
I looked at the backs of my hands and gasped.
Seven worms dangled there, battened onto my flesh like red leeches. I yelped and snatched the worms out of my skin, stomped them into red mush. The smashed worms wriggled and began to creep across the sidewalk toward me.
There came a flutter of wings and a second later, Frank struck again. I heard the sound a large Italian woman sitting in a plate of warm risotto might make and looked down.
My shirt was covered with red worms.
There are times when blind panic is the only sensible choice: I panicked.
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