Borderlands 6

by Thomas F Monteleone

  He bagged it and trashed it, then brought out the hose to wash away the blood and any loose pieces of meat. That’s what you did with this sort of thing. That’s how you handled it. You cleaned up the mess and then you went on with your life.

  Later he grabbed his binoculars and studied the field and the trees beyond, checking for any signs of movement. He saw nothing. If he had been ambitious, he would have climbed over the fence and walked through the field to the row of trees that bordered the canal. He could have followed that canal into some other place. The water might not be running through the canal anymore, but it was still a passage to something, wasn’t it? But he wasn’t ambitious. And he didn’t want to go there.

  Matt drank and watched TV until about midnight. The house was a mess—Clala hadn’t cleaned in weeks. He couldn’t abide a messy house, but he worked all day—he didn’t have the time. But if he had the time, he knew he’d do a great job. It wasn’t that hard keeping up a house—you just had to understand how to manage time and not let it get away from you. He hadn’t signed up for this. He’d tried—and you owed your wife at least to try. But everybody had limits. You couldn’t expect a man not to have his limits.

  She didn’t wake up when he crawled into bed with her. Good thing—she’d ask about the rabbit, and he didn’t want to talk about that damn rabbit anymore.

  He woke up once and saw her standing at the window, looking out onto the backyard. He started to say something, started to ask her what was wrong, but he stopped himself. He was tired, and he knew what was wrong.

  He woke up alone. He didn’t like waking up alone, but he didn’t want to answer any of her questions. He fell back asleep, and when he woke up again the room was bright from the sun coming through the window. He’d overslept, but at least it was the weekend. Nothing important ever came up on the weekend. They’d stopped doing the important stuff a long time ago.

  “Clara, you up here?” She didn’t answer. “Clara!” Nothing.

  He got his pants and shoes on and went downstairs. He still couldn’t find her. He felt a little panicky, and he was mad at himself for feeling a little panicky. He made himself be methodical. He went back upstairs and searched each bedroom as he went down the hall. He wasn’t sure why they had all these bedrooms—they didn’t have any kids. They had way too much house, but he’d gotten such a good deal on the place.

  He felt a pressure building behind his eyes. He tried to shake it off. He went back into their bedroom and looked in the closet and in the master bathroom. He got down on his knees and looked under the bed. There were several socks, another larger, unidentifiable piece of clothing. He made a note to sweep under there later.

  He called again from the top of the stairs, “Clara! Are you in the house?” Nothing. No steps, no rustle, just the soft hum of the refrigerator. He went downstairs and jerked open the front door a little too hard. It banged against the rubber bumper mounted on the wall. He hadn’t realized it before, but he was beginning to feel pretty angry. Maybe she couldn’t help it, but this was ridiculous.

  She wasn’t lying on the front lawn again, thank God. And the Subaru was still there, which was a big relief. Matt thought about getting in his car and driving around looking for her. But she could be anywhere, and besides, he knew that once you started chasing after someone like that, it never ended, not until you’d given yourself a heart attack. She was a grown woman—he shouldn’t have to be searching for her.

  He made himself stop. Most things got better that way: taking a break, waiting. People needed to be patient, not make such a big deal out of everything.

  He went out to the porch and sat down. That’s when he saw her kneeling down at the bottom of the yard, her back turned to him. Just like she always did. Her shoulders were heaving.

  He slid open the door and stepped outside. “Clara?”

  She didn’t speak, but he could hear her crying. Then he saw the blood streaks on her sleeves. He started running. “Clara!” Not again. Not again.

  He came up behind her and grabbed her by the shoulders, twisting them to stop her from whatever she was doing. He grabbed both of her hands and raised them, trying to get a good look at her wrists. Her forearms, his hands, everything slick with blood. “Where’s the knife, Clara!”

  She looked up at him, wide-eyed and dull. “No knife. I didn’t see a knife.”

  He couldn’t find any cuts on her wrists, her arms, her hands. He looked down at her knees, and then the grass, and then the bloody bits he was standing on. He jumped back in alarm. It was another rabbit, skinned and gutted, its flesh weeping fresh blood.

  “It’s back!” she said, her voice rising. “It’s back!”

  “Dammit, Clara. It’s not the same rabbit!”

  She stared at him, her face tilted. “But how can you tell it’s a different rabbit? How do you know for sure?”

  He started to explain, but what was there to explain? “Because this is real life. We live in real life, Clara! Just stay right here. I’ll get something to cover it with, and then we’ll go wash you up, okay?”

  He ran into the garage and grabbed a drop cloth, and on his way out he grabbed the rake too, just in case of . . . just in case he needed it. But when he got back Clara was gone. The rabbit was still lying there, but there was no sign of Clara in the yard. How could she have moved so quickly? He stared down at the rabbit. It looked like all the others, as far as he could tell. One huge eye, pushed almost out of its socket, stared up at him.

  He looked around the yard, the edge of the house, inside the house. He couldn’t find her anywhere. He gave up. He imagined her walking around the neighborhood, her shirt bloody, her arms and hands bloody. Somebody would call the police. Well, the hell with it. He’d done everything he could.

  Matt left the rabbit and went back inside. At least he could clean himself up. At least he could get that much done.

  After his shower he grabbed a jar of peanut butter out of the fridge and stood at the kitchen window digging two fingers into the jar and eating the peanut butter right off them. Looking through the window into the porch and then through the sliding glass doors made the yard seem a pretty safe distance away. He could still see the fields and the line of trees beyond, and he was sure he’d be able to see any movement out there if there were any. But there was not.

  After a while he collapsed into that old chair on the back porch and sat watching the yard for a couple of hours. It was midafternoon by then and he hadn’t had any lunch. He supposed he could find something in the fridge to heat up, but then maybe Clara would come home. Fixing him something might occupy her, keep her mind off things.

  He was actually pretty surprised she hadn’t shown up yet. If the police had picked her up, they would have come by now. He was used to her being anxious, but she usually snapped out of it after an hour or so and managed to get going on whatever needed to be done. He’d call some of her friends but that woman, Ann, had moved away six months ago and he didn’t know any of the others, if there were any others. Clara never made friends easily, at least not since he’d known her.

  He couldn’t get over those damn rabbits. Whatever had gotten to them, it must have wiped out an entire den. Why had the thing left its kills in his yard anyway? Like a house cat dropping the mouse it slaughtered at your feet. But you had to trust your eye—most of the time it was the one thing you could trust.

  Clara needed to be back soon. She’d always been this timid thing, couldn’t protect herself worth a damn. Terrible things happened to timid creatures like that. She knew. That’s why she kept saying that. Well, terrible things do happen, Clara. It wasn’t too hard predicting that.

  He must have dozed, because the backyard suddenly looked dimmer. That shady bit down by the fence had grown, spread halfway up the yard toward the house. Lights were popping on over at the neighbors’.

  He sat up suddenly as a chill grabbed his throat. “Clara!”
he yelled as loudly as he could to scare it away. Still no answer. He listened hard now. The refrigerator still hummed. It was as if he were living by himself again.

  He could check with all the neighbors, but the last thing he needed was for everybody to know his business. He could call the police, but would they even take a report? Maybe if he told them Clara was a danger to herself. She’d cut her wrists more than once, but she’d always botched the job. Timid people like that, he reckoned, they intended to botch the job.

  He thought about talking to some young policeman, trying to explain how Clara was, trying to explain about the skinned rabbits, how they must have a predator in the neighborhood, and how the cop would act deliberately patient and condescending to this older guy who had just called in about his missing wife, who’d only been gone a few hours, probably on some impulsive shopping trip. Matt couldn’t bear it.

  She’d been a lovely girl when he met her—pretty and shy. She’d made him feel like he was about the greatest man in the world. Then she got nervous, and then she got old, and surely she was crazy now. Maybe if he were truly a good man he could handle that—he’d stick with her and make the best out of a sad situation. But people had to be realistic. Good men were few and far between.

  Flashing red lights broke through the trees on the other side of the field. They made it look as if parts of that line of trees bordering the old canal were on fire. But then the wind shifted the branches a bit and he could see that he was mistaken. There were scattered fires on the interstate beyond. And many more lights and faint, but explosive, noises. People shouting maybe. Or cars being pried open like clamshells to get to the meat inside. The Jaws of Life, that’s what they called them. But only if the people inside were still living. If not, then they were the Jaws of Death, weren’t they?

  The radio was right by the chair, so he could have turned it on. But he’d rather wait until Clara showed up and then they could learn together what terrible thing might have happened over on the highway. Matt supposed it was an unhealthy thing in people, how listening or watching together as the news told the details of some new disaster tended to bring couples and families together.

  He sat and watched the red flashes and the burning and listened hard for the noises and the voices until it was dark enough for the automatic yard lights to come on. The gnawing in his belly was painful but he had no interest in eating, assuming eating was even the sort of remedy required.

  He could see everything, except for that shadowy region down near the fence. He could see the rake where he’d left it, and the folded-up drop cloth. But there was no sign of that rabbit. Something had moved it, or maybe—and the idea made him queasy—it hadn’t been completely dead. Skinned, but not dead. Crawling around suffering.

  As Matt’s eyes grew weary he found himself focusing on that area of shadow. It had always seemed odd that the longer you stared at a shadow the more likely you were to find other shadows swimming inside it. Something moved out of the edge.

  In the border between dark and light a skinned body lay in the slickened grass. Bleeding heavily and this one much too large for a rabbit. Stripped to muscle and bone, it was an anatomical human figure made real. The skin over part of one breast remained. And when it reached its scarlet arms toward the house it called his name.

  Miracle Meadows

  Darren O. Godfrey

  This marks Darren Godfrey’s third appearance in the Borderlands series, and his current Freudian offering examines the power of one’s subconscious—and decides it can be supremely terrifying. The idea that conscious control is merely an illusion may be the scariest proposition with which we ever grapple.

  The truth hurts. But sometimes it’s so slow to act, so slow to sink in, that when it does come forward, it is often hard to recognize it for the beast it is. It took seven blurry years for me to learn the truth surrounding my wife’s death; that many, nearly to the day, and even then it had trouble solidifying in my mind.

  It began with lost memories: one, the memory of an event, the other, the memory of a dream.

  This was the event: Heather Rossier, my wife, sat on the corner of our bed with her back to me, just after putting baby Kenny down for his nap. She lifted up her blouse, pulled her soft auburn hair over one shoulder, turned her head, and asked, “How does it look, Michael?”

  “About the same. Maybe a little purpler and scalier.”

  The mole at the center of her lightly freckled back had been there as long as I’d known her, and was once the size of a dime. It had grown roughly to that of a quarter and fattened to almost oyster thickness.

  “Purpler?”

  “Yeah, there’s some purple to it. A little whitish around the scaly part, like a sunburn ready to peel.”

  “So peel it.”

  The idea had already occurred to me.

  “No way, babe,” I said, “That can’t be good for it.”

  “I don’t care what’s good for it, Michael. Do it.”

  This is where memory gets prickly—not at all hazy, you understand, just uncomfortable. I tweezed the first flake away from that little knoll of tissue with my overlong fingernails, and the notion entered my head, This could be releasing poisons into her body. I envisioned a tiny spurt of black liquid on the inside of her flesh just as I yanked the scale from its outside.

  I did it again: peeled and imagined.

  So clear in my mind’s eye: the inky ejaculations mixing with the surging red of her blood in a clockwise-shooting spiral, the new blend racing through her system, providing the cells of her flesh with both nourishment and . . . what?

  Well, cancer, of course.

  I’d like it to be known that Heather and I didn’t know a damn thing about moles or melanoma at that time.

  The recalled dream was the same basic setup: Heather with her back to me as I examine the mole. She says, “Peel it, baby,” turning her head just enough to where I can see the corner of her smile; she’s being seductive and that makes me happy. “Peel it good,” she breathes, and I oblige. I try to get a better look at her face; I see long eyelashes drop slowly as she moans. I peel another layer and her head hangs lower, the ends of her lovely hair now brushing the top of one bare thigh. She begs for more. Never one to deny her any pleasure, I continue to peel at the purple-black lump, I peel and peel, until it is no longer a lump at all but a bleeding black hole, and she gasps, groans, shudders, and cries my name, her breath quickening, her hands on her lap, clenching, spreading, clenching . . .

  I find myself suddenly without clothing, and my prick as hard as steel. The hole in her back opens up to me as I rise up onto my knees . . .

  . . . and really sick things happen in dreams sometimes, don’t they?

  I’d somehow forgotten these things over the course of years, much in the same way, perhaps, that Kenny (no longer a baby, but not quite an adult) had forgotten how to be himself since his mother’s departure from this world. But when reality, or rather when the memories of that reality came back, it felt like a one-two punch to the gut.

  Punch number one landed two weeks ago, after I spotted the dime-sized mole on the back of my son’s left leg, at about midcalf, while he was getting ready for school.

  Heather had a mole like that, I thought. And it grew, and I peeled it . . .

  Later that morning, I made a doctor appointment for Kenny.

  Punch number two, the dreadful dream memory, came three days ago as I surfed cancer websites—peel it, baby—and saw black ciphers centered in flesh. It sickened me.

  And excited me.

  Kenny had claimed to understand what happened when Heather died (“Mommy’s body got bad stuff in it and it stopped working,” he’d whispered as the ICU nurse turned off the flatlining heart monitor), but then, as the days, weeks, and months followed, he withdrew into himself more and more. He stopped talking. Stopped smiling, stopped laughing.

  He is
now thirteen and most days he’s little more than a moving mannequin.

  For my forty-third birthday, he “gave” me the laptop I’m currently tapping away on. In reality, though, it was purchased, wrapped, and delivered by my sister Barbara (always Kenny’s fave aunt), but it had Kenny’s name on the to/from tag.

  What experience I’d had with these damned things stemmed mainly from work (environmental engineering) where I used the Word and Excel programs quite a lot, and accessed the World Wide Web very little. But as my fascination with cancer has grown, so has my willingness to learn to use this convenient yet maddening technology.

  I understand hyperlinks, the highlighted text on web pages, there to be clicked upon and to whisk you to somewhere else. I understand, too, that these links normally have something to do with the page you’re clicking from, and that the highlighted words, in some way, tell you where you’ll go by clicking them.

  Three days ago, on a melanoma-related website, I encountered a photograph of a mole identical to that of Heather’s in its later stages. The flaky edges recalled the dream (“Peel it, baby.”) and forcefully landed that second punch.

  Near the bottom of the site’s page, my watering eyes caught this:

  “ . . . while no such miracles can be expected in . . . ”

  I rolled the cursor over to miracles (which was colored blue), where the thin arrow morphed into a white hand with a pointing finger. I checked the narrow space at the bottom of the window, the display where the hyperlink’s address would take me should I chose to click it: www.miraclemeadows.com.