by Peter Straub
“I’m a friend of Norman’s,” I answered.
“Oh, I guess I’m sorry then. Well, those’re his pants I threw at you.”
“Were you mending them or something?” I asked innocently, checking them as if looking for the scars of repair.
“No, he just didn’t have time to put them back on the other night when I threw him out, you know what I mean? I’m moving out of this creepy dump just to get away from him, and you can tell him those words.”
“Please come in from that drafty hallway and you can tell him yourself.”
I smiled my smile and she, not unresponsively, smiled hers. I closed the door behind her.
“So, do you have a name?” she asked.
“Penzance,” I replied. “Call me Pete.”
“Well, at least you’re not Harold Wackers, or whatever the name is on those lousy books of Norman’s.”
“I believe it’s Wickers, H. J. Wickers.”
“Anyway, you don’t seem at all like Norman, or even someone who’d be a friend of his.”
“I’m sure that was intended as a compliment, from what I’ve gathered about you and Norm. Actually, though, I too write books not unlike those of H. J. Wickers. My apartment across town is being painted, and Norman was kind enough to take me in, even loan me his desk for a while.” I manually indicated the cluttered, weeped-upon object of my last remark. “In fact, Norman and I sometimes collaborate under a common pen-name, and right now we’re working together on a manuscript.” That was an eternity ago, but somehow it seems like the seconds and minutes of those days are still nipping at our heels. What tricks human clocks can play, even on us who are no longer subject to them! But it’s a sort of reverse magic, I suppose, to enshackle the timeless with Granddaddy’s wrist-grips of time, just as it is the most negative of miracles to smother unburdened spirits with the burdensome overcoat of matter.
“That’s nice, I’m sure,” she replied to what I said a few statements back. “By the way. I’m Laura—”
“O’Finney,” I finished. “Norman’s spoken quite highly of you.” I didn’t mention that he had also spoken quite lowly of her too.
“Where is the creep, anyway?” she inquired.
“He’s sleeping,” I answered, lifting a vague finger toward the rear section of the apartment, where a shadowy indention led to bathrooms and bedrooms. “He’s had a hard night of writing.”
The girl’s face assumed a disgusted expression.
“Forget it,” she said, heading for the door. Then she turned and very slowly walked a little ways back toward me. “Maybe we’ll see each other again.”
“Anything is possible,” I assured her.
“Just do me a favor and keep Norman away from me, if you don’t mind.”
“I think I can do that very easily. But you have to do something for me.”
“What?”
I leaned toward her very confidentially.
“Please die, Desiderata,” I whispered in her ear, while gripping her neck with both hands, cutting short a scream along with her life. Then I really went to work.
“Wake up, Norman,” I shouted a little later. I was standing at the foot of his bed, my hands positioned behind my back. “You were really dead to the world, you know that?”
A little drama took place on Norman’s face in which surprise overcame sleepiness and both were vanquished by anxiety. He had been through a lot the past couple nights, struggling with our “Notes” and other things, and really needed his sleep. I hated to wake him up.
“Who? What do you want?” he said, quickly sitting up in bed.
“Never mind what I want. Right now we are concerned with what you want, you know what I mean? Remember what you told that girl the other night, remember what you wanted her to do that got her so upset?”
“If you don’t get the hell out of here—”
“That’s what she said too, remember? And then she said she wished she had never met you. And that was the line, wasn’t it, that gave you the inspiration for our fictionalized adventure. Poor Nathan never had the chance you had. Oh yes, very fancy rigmarole with the enchanted trousers. Blame it all on some old bitch and her dead husband. Very realistic, I’m sure. When the real reason—”
“Get out of here!” he yelled. But he calmed down somewhat when he saw that ferocity in itself had no effect on me.
“What did you expect from that girl. You did tell her that you wanted to embrace, what was it? Oh yes, a headless woman. A headless woman, for heaven’s sake, that’s asking a lot. And you did want her to make herself look like one, at least for a little while. Well, I’ve got the answer to your prayers. How’s this for headless?” I said, holding up the head from behind my back.
He didn’t make a sound, though his two eyes screamed a thousand times louder than any single mouth. I tossed the long-haired and bloody noggin in his lap, but he threw the bedcovers over it and frantically pushed the whole business onto the floor with his feet.
“The rest of her is in the bathtub. Go see, if you want. I’ll wait.”
He didn’t make a move or say a word for quite a few moments. But when he finally did speak, each syllable came out so calm and smooth, so free of the vibrations of fear, that I have to say it shook me up a bit.
“Whooo are you?” he asked as if he already knew.
“Do you really need to have a name, and would it even do any good? Should we call that disengaged head down there Laura or Lorna, or just plain Desiderata? And what, in heaven’s name, should I call you—Norman or Nathan, Harold or Gerald?”
“I thought so,” he said disgustedly. Then he began to speak in an eerily rational voice, but very rapidly. He did not even seem to be talking to anyone in particular. “Since the thing to which I am speaking,” he said, “since this thing knows what only I could know, and since it tells me what only I could tell myself, I must therefore be completely alone in this room, or perhaps even dreaming. Yes, dreaming. Otherwise the diagnosis is insanity. Very true. Profoundly certain. Go away now, Mr. Madness. Go away, Dr. Dream. You made your point, now let me sleep. I’m through with you.” Then he lay his head down on the pillow and closed his eyes.
“Norman,” I said. “Do you always go to bed with your trousers on?”
He opened his eyes and now noticed what he had been too deranged to notice before. He sat up again.
“Very good, Mr. Madness. These look like the real thing. But that’s not possible since Laura still has them, sorry about that. Funny, they won’t come off. The imaginary zipper must be stuck. Gee, I guess I’m in trouble now. I’m a dead man if there ever was one, hoo. Always make sure you know what you’re buying, that’s what I say. Heaven help me, please. You never know what you might be getting into. Come off, damn you! Oh, what grief. Well, so when do I start to rot, Mr. Madness? Are you still there? What happened to the lights?”
The lights had gone out in the room and everything glowed with a bluish luminescence. Lightning began flashing outside the bedroom window, and thunder resounded through a rainless night. The moon shone through an opening in the clouds, a blood-red moon only the damned and the dead can see.
“Rot your way back to us, you freak of creation. Rot your way out of this world. Come home to a pain so great that it is bliss itself. You were born to be bones not flesh. Rot your way free of that skin of mere skin.”
“Is this really happening to me? I mean, I’m doing my best, sir. It isn’t easy, not at all. Horrible electricity down there. Horrible. Am I bathed in magic acid or something? Oh, it hurts, my love. Ah, ah, ah. It hurts so much. Never let it end. If I have to be like this, then never let me wake up, Dr. Dream. Can you do that, at least?”
I could feel my bony wings rising out of my back and saw them spread gloriously in the blue mirror before me. My eyes were now jewels, hard and radiant. My jaws were a cavern of dripping silver and through my veins ran rivers of putrescent gold. He was writhing on the bed like a wounded insect, making sounds like nothing in human memory.
I swept him up and wrapped my sticky arms again and again around his trembling body. He was laughing like a child, the child of another world. And a great wrong was about to be rectified.
I signaled the windows to open onto the night, and, very slowly, they did. His infant’s laughter had now turned to tears, but they would soon run dry, I knew this. At last we would be free of the earth. The windows opened wide over the city below and the profound blackness above welcomed us.
I had never tried this before. But when the time came, I found it all so easy.
Unearthed
Benjamin Percy
Denis began acting strangely soon after he dug up the dead Indian. This happened in Christmas Valley, in Eastern Oregon, among the sand dunes and sage flats and rimrock canyons where he and his son, Elwood, often spent their weekends. They called themselves rock hounds, fossil hunters, archaeologists, and they carried on their backs shovels and picks and trowels and paintbrushes to whisk away the dust and calcite. When they hiked through the high desert, their eyes studied the soil for the sparkle of a quartzite vein, the scattered depressions of a long-rotted Paiute village, some hint of treasure, some sign they might point to and say, “There!”
They dug up thunder eggs, opals, petrified wood, fist-sized agates that seemed to emit a foggy light, like tiny suns breaking through a cloud. In a grotto with a small spring bubbling from it, they discovered a deer skull encased in rose quartz. And in the Mt. Mazama ash—as hard-packed as kiln-cooked clay—they found fossils of all sorts, of leaves and clams and ferns. After they filled their Bronco and drove the hundred miles back to Redmond, they cleaned their treasures and labeled them and put them on display so that their house resembled a museum.
In the center of their dining room table sat the rose-quartz skull, glowing pink, like a crystallized ham. Their bookcases and tables overflowed with precious stones, and their walls were crowded with velvet-lined display cases holding chert and obsidian projectile points—“Not arrowheads,” Denis would say. “Arrowhead is an all-encompassing hack term that should not be used with reference to carving tools or spear and atlatal points.” He talked like that, like a textbook—using words like prismatic and tetrahedron, occipital, Macedonian—and Elwood listened to him with the same polite disinterest he gave his tenth-grade teachers.
Which was not far off the mark. His father worked as an anthropology lecturer at Central Oregon Community College—though at first glance you would guess him a construction worker or a truck driver, not a scholar. Years ago he had played catcher for the Oregon State Beavers, and he looked like a catcher, at once too short and too wide for most clothes. When he got excited, he would repeatedly pound his hand into his palm as if it were the peach basket of a mitt.
Elwood loved and half-loved many things about him, but more than anything, he felt sorry for him. How else can you feel about a man who randomly bursts into tears—at the grocery store, the movies, the buffet at the Golden Corral—mourning his dead wife? What else can you do except follow him into the desert, where there were no enclosures, where everything seemed to draw a free breath, and where the two of them regularly escaped the present in a quest to dig up the past?
Elwood remembered his mother, Misty. He remembered her hair, a deep brown, almost black. He remembered how she always wore tank tops and how the bones came out of her shoulders like angel wings. He remembered his father constantly telling him how sick she was, how very sick. He remembered the medications—the Prozac, the Lithium, the green-and-white pills meant to tame the yo-yo effect of her bipolar condition—and how they sometimes made her act drunk, made her dizzy, made her slur her words. She would stroke his cheek and look at him with her eyes half-lidded, like a set of collapsing moons, and say, “My Elwood. Thank God for my Elwood.” He remembered her laughing one instant, sobbing the next—one time lurching up from the dinner table with sudden tears on her cheeks, sweeping the turkey off its platter, onto the floor, because his father said it tasted “a bit dry, but good.”
And he remembered, finally, the night she shook him awake and said, “You know I love you, right?” Somewhere between waking and dreaming, he saw her hovering above him in the dark and he said, “Yeah, Mom. Love you, too.” She left him then and he lay there, still tangled in his dreams’ cobwebs, realizing too late—after he tossed away the covers, after he hurried down the hall, down the stairs, after he heard the snap of the rifle—that something was wrong.
She left him a red carnation of brain matter on the wall, and on the kitchen table she left him a letter, its handwriting so sharp and hurried it reminded him of barbed wire. “I’m so sorry,” it read. “And I know that doesn’t mean anything. I know that’s just a bunch of shitty words. But I’m really truly sorry.”
It didn’t make any sense. She didn’t make any sense. He tore the letter up and let its pieces flutter into the toilet, but six months later the words remained imprinted on his brain like the patterns of a long-dead leaf, fossilized by the intense pressure of the moment.
Summers in Eastern Oregon, the wind blows in heated gusts, like the breath of a big animal. The July day Elwood and Denis discovered the dead Indian, to keep the seething grit from their eyes and lungs, they wore sunglasses and tied wet bandanas around their faces as bandits would.
They were hiking through a shallow canyon when they noticed among its basalt pillars a six-foot notch with a cool wind blowing from it, indicating depth. This wind brought with it a low drone, like someone blowing across the mouth of an open bottle. They clicked on their flashlights and ducked inside, and the notch opened up into a cave over a hundred-feet deep and thirty-feet wide.
They took off their sunglasses and bandanas in a hurry. Here, breathing was like drinking from a cellar floor puddle, a taste both cool and mineraly and tinged with mold. Their flashlights spotlighted the many suns and rattlesnakes and antelope and men with gigantic penises that covered the walls. Some were pictographs—colored blends of ocher and blood and berry juices—and some were petroglyphs, crudely chipped into the stone. Above all this hung many bats, chirping softly in their upside-down sleep, their brown bodies tangled together and moving so that the cave seemed a living thing.
“Man,” Elwood said, and Denis said, “Wow.”
Denis took out some butcher paper and held it against a petroglyph and rubbed it lightly with a crayon. The image of a pig or a bear or a dog—something—transferred onto the paper, and he rolled it up and put it in a plastic tube.
It wasn’t long before they prostrated their bodies and began to dig. Their fingers had darkened and thickened from so much time in the desert, and they used them now, along with their trowels, to claw away the soil.
For the next several hours they filled their backpacks with the cave soil—so cool and black with guano—and carried it outside, dumping it in a pile that grew larger as the cave grew deeper. They discovered a seed cache, a thick layer of charcoal, obsidian chips, and a collection of bones, so broken they no longer had names. Then Elwood’s trowel scraped across something smooth and brown.
“Dad,” he said. “I think I’ve got something here.”
The Indian had been buried upright, in a fetal position. A soft cocoon of dust and papery skin surrounded its brown bones. Elwood and Denis whisked away the soil, revealing first the skull’s round crown—erratically haired—and then the hollows of its eyes, and then its shriveled nose, its teeth showing in an eternal snarl.
The more they unearthed, the more agitated Denis became. He pounded his fist into his palm, his cheeks glowing a painful red, his breath coming in big gusts as if some desert storm brewed within him. From the look on his face, Elwood could not tell if his father was blissfully happy or simply afraid.
“Dad?” he said. “You okay?”
Denis ran a hand across his face, leaving dirt there, and said, “Are you kidding? This is unbelievable. I’m in Paleolithic heaven, buddy.” Despite his apparent enthusiasm, his voice struck Elwood as robotic, insincere, as a gray thing that swa
llowed emotion and gave nothing back.
Buried with the Indian were a pipe, a knife, an atlatal, a pair of moccasins, and a decayed leather robe braided with elk teeth. Denis and Elwood took everything.
They never thought about the legality or the rightness of what they did. They only knew that it brought them pleasure, somehow—taking these things, these hidden treasures, and making them their own.
It was nearly night when they left and a massive flapping followed them as hundreds of bats escaped the cave, like ashes blown from a chimney, riding the hot gusts into the purpling sky until they were lost from sight.
Their house was an ordinary house—a tan two-story box with plastic siding—except that it was full of dead things. Bones and fossils, tools from long-dead tribes, and now, a mummified Paiute Indian. Denis carried the body across the threshold as you would a bride, proudly, staring down at the thing in his arms as if it held great promise.
He could not decide where he would put the Indian. On the end table in the corner of the living room? Perched on top of the television, the refrigerator? Or how about…Denis removed the rose-quartz deer skull from the dining room table and replaced it with the corpse…how about here?
Elwood watched all this with a vague sense of disgust, and when his father asked him what he thought, he said, “I don’t really like it anywhere. I don’t really want it in the house at all.”
Denis gave him a look, like: why on earth not?
Because of the dresses hanging in your closet, the perfume in the bathroom, the photographs staring at me from the mantel, the spackled section of wall where the bullet lodged itself like a seed. Because this house is full of too much death already, is what Elwood wanted to say, but didn’t.
