Weird Tales, Volume 352

by Ann VanderMeer

  I might have claimed that all life was eating, in one form or another: we swallow sensations all around us, and receive pleasant little squirts of endorphins in return. Whether in a slab of steak or a well-muscled pair of legs, we scavenge hungrily to nourish our flesh, and for this it allows us to feel satisfied. The body manufactures its own forms of heroin, and in the painful absence of a fix we are sharply reminded to eat, drink, and procreate.

  My gut expanded, my liver rotted, and my skin deteriorated, but I never lacked for friends, or more intimate company. Even the girls themselves admitted they had a hard time pinning down what made me so attractive to them; I assumed it was my natural charisma, enhanced with liquid courage and unhindered by my now outrageous girth.

  My career at the restaurant had accelerated by the following spring, when my supervisor departed for some exclusive resort on Sicily. Though the position of head chef consumed more hours than ever before, I quickly learned to offset the stress and exhaustion with an ever-present decanter of some imported libation or other. And in my rare off-hours, my Bacchanalian revels grew in infamy until the city's most renowned Bohemian artists would appear at the height of an evening's indulgences, seeking artistic inspiration.

  Late in that oppressively balmy summer, my desire came to exceed my tolerance. It was the weekend of Labor Day, and my porch was overflowing with stumbling, heaving freeloaders and strangers, as well as a few old friends. The living room had long ago filled with the choking stench of sweat, methane, and the numerous other excretions of man's diverse orifices, so I had proceeded, tumbler in hand, out onto the porch to bask in the soft sunlight of the late afternoon.

  Drink can perform strange distortions on a man's motives, especially when in the company of other chemicals; he may set out to find an object or a place, only to abruptly and firmly decide that he must obtain or visit an entirely different one. This was the case with me; I continued out onto the lawn, around the side of the house, and out into the woods that encircled my property. I must have emptied my stomach along the way; I certainly remember twitching and quivering, and feeling by turns cold, hot, and extremely itchy.

  My walk terminated in a shallow, stone-filled creek, into which I collapsed head-first. I remember the cool smoothness of the running water, like a delicate blanket wrapping around my face. And I remember a painful sense of warmth emanating from between my eyes, spreading across my face and head. The rock and the water were turning crimson, I saw, and the realization that I must be bleeding forced its way to the top of my clouded mind.

  When I awoke, I had been pulled into a sitting position, my head resting against the rough bark of a tree. The creek was nearby, and I could make out a partially dried spray of blood spattered across a portion of the bank. It was definitely night, and a breeze scratched icy little razors across my tingling skin.

  I seemed to have sobered up, because it took me only a moment to take stock of the scene around me. My stomach churned, and my mouth tasted like it had been filled with dried mud. A tangy smell wafted from somewhere beneath my waist, and I concluded, to my humiliation, that I had soiled myself. For perhaps a minute I simply sat there, shivering in the cold, retching in gasps and trying to block the forceful stink of my own waste from permeating my nostrils, hoping to God that no one would stumble across the pathetic spectacle that I must make.

  Then they approached me, their forms coagulating out of the shadowy lattice of moonlit trees. They seemed to resemble tall men in duster coats, their bald heads bobbing as their oddly wavering walk brought them to the other side of the creek. There were three of them, all about seven feet tall, slim, and rippling with a feverish sort of twitching and pulsing motion, backlit into vague outlines by the light of the half-moon.

  When the one in the center spoke, it sounded as if his voice were being played by the string section of an orchestra; a chimerical assemblage of hissing and buzzing tones blended dissonant, ethereal notes. I could discern no words, but my mind formed a translatable sense of meaning, not in the sense of having thoughts projected into my head, but as a small child, conditioned to know the tone and rhythm of its mother's voice, may grasp at her mood and intent.

  I could tell he was displeased, though I was unsure why this should be. I knew I had never met this man and his companions before, but he emanated a clear and overpowering message of long-festering disdain. It was given to me to understand that I had misbehaved; I had offended; I was not fulfilling my purpose. I felt scolded, beaten; his chastisement whipped me as one might thrash a dog that has pissed its kennel. When they spoke to me I was an animal, and I crawled and genuflected in my shame.

  They allowed me to understand what I must do: I was to free myself of the substances that were consuming my flesh. I was to eat, and grow fat and strong. I was to continue flirting, charming, and fucking, and if I did not want to repeat this encounter I would do well to behave in the ways I was commanded. At last they retreated into the woods, leaving their message to reverberate through the chambers of my consciousness until it was I who berated myself, and their memory became no more than the looming shadow of an abusive parent, a specter of some vague humiliation.

  By the time I returned to the party, most of the guests had left, which was a relief, as the man in the bathroom mirror looked more dead than alive. My skin had become waxy and varicose, to say nothing of the cracked cap of dried brownish blood that covered nearly half of my face. Perhaps, I thought, I was seeing myself through sober eyes for the first time in years. I stepped into the shower, and I resolved to clean more than just my skin.

  My drugs went in the trash the next morning, and over the next few days I set myself to work cleaning the mess that had been made of my house. Before long I began work on the yard, which had become overgrown; I alternated shifts at the restaurant with manual labor around my property.

  The greatest surprise to me was how quickly I regained my strength, once I stopped filling my body with the diverse poisons to which it had become accustomed. My body began to submit, and, contrary to one of Their orders, I began to lose a great deal of weight. For the first time in my life, I had attained a truly attractive physique, and my female acquaintances responded with renewed advances. This time, however, it was not my status with which they were enamored; like never before, I felt like a man.

  Yet I began to reflect on the events of that night. Often, in the minutes before sleep, I would find myself fixated on those slender figures and their weird song. In the light of day, though, it would all seem so ephemeral, and I would find myself drawn back into my tasks and occupations; the flowing wine and steaming food that filled my days. But such an experience doesn't easily loosen its grip on a man.

  That Thanksgiving, I was supervising a catered banquet at the University, and I happened to steal a few hours of free time during the dessert course and subsequent speeches. I was strolling through the campus, enjoying the brisk November evening, when I came across the library.

  Browsing the reference stacks on the ground floor, I found a bookcase bearing works on psychology. Amidst the usual Freud, Jung, and a few obscure hangers-on, my eyes fell on a spine bearing a name unknown to me. The psychologist's name was Andros, and the title was On Psychotically Induced Dream-Imagery. I opened the marbled green cover and traced my finger down the brittle page bearing the table of contents. The chapter headings descended from the typical “Incest and Other Paraphilia” to the evocative “A Variety of Hells.” The last few headings were outright disturbing, and the very title of the final chapter sent a shiver down my neck.

  Settling at a table, I selected chapter three, titled “Personages of Various Semi-Human or Non-Human Types.” It began with case histories concerning dreams of visits from deceased parents, progressed through descriptions of mythological and literary archetypes and characters, and culminated in a section concerning wholly unique imagery. It was here that I read a paragraph that, I am not ashamed to say, stilled my heart for a moment:

  “I have myself in
terviewed some small number of patients who have described a trio of tall, slender figures, cloaked in shadow, whose outlines seem to waver and shift even as they stand still. They convey to the dreamer a strong sense of disapproval and disdain, often described as having caused the dreamer to feel like a whipped cur. Some have expressed a firm conviction that these apparitions have visited them in their waking hours as well; this has rarely been remedied, and displays a singular tenacity in connection with these particular dream-personages.”

  When one is afflicted with some rare disease, it must be a comfort to read a detailed description of familiar symptoms on a printed page, but what I felt in that recognition was not relief. Whether I had stumbled on this book by sheer accident, or had been somehow led to this very paragraph, the weight now given to my experience was undeniable.

  And I could, perhaps, have stopped there, and assumed myself afflicted with some psychosis. Even if I had believed in the veracity of my vision, and had raced back to the banquet to drown myself in pleasure again; if I had ended my life weakened, bloated, and despondent, I would still have remained joyously ignorant of the full truth. Any belief, any knowledge, any miserable waste of a life, would have been preferable to knowing what I now understand.

  Another paragraph followed the one I had just read. In three frank, scientific sentences, the truth of my masters' purpose was laid bare. The explanation was, of course, included as merely another aspect of the dream-psychosis, but it fit all too well with my brief impressions of them. I wanted to doubt; I pleaded with myself to reject the explanation as the product of wild ravings, but it had battened on my mind and would not relinquish its hold.

  My stomach sank, my head reeled, and I stumbled into the frost-bitten night like a vagrant. I had not been the only one to meet my masters, nor had those patients, locked away for realizing the very nature of man. We generally consider humanity to be a noble virtue, a name for that single race that has crawled to the top of the heap of creatures that inhabit this world of ours. If we knew why we have been allowed to breed unchecked, to laugh and drink and grow corpulent, to make friends and make love, to fill the earth to bursting with our flesh, we would scream to be plunged back into the empty dimness of beast-hood.

  We are, indeed, animals like no other, and with good reason! For we were inspected, branded, and sent out to stud before we had clambered down from the trees. When we were picking fruit and chittering to each other, notes were made, stocks were taken, and our gristle and bone, ever pliable, was molded into a more desirable shape. We are bred, we are pastured, and we ignorantly enjoy it. Every kiss and every smile has been arranged for us.

  But when the day of collection arrives, we will realize our true purpose, and we will beg for the familiar fires of hell to yawn wide and claim us. Hell was, after all, imagined by men, and no man could conceive a destiny so supremely malign and vicious as that toward which we hurtle.

  My despair overcame any desire for self-preservation; any hope of fighting such beings was out of the question, and would not lie to myself or to others. I went straight home, and I prepared a warm bath. I sank into the water, razor in hand. I extricated the blades, and sliced myself like meat, clenching my teeth at the red-hot protests that my frantic nerves sent up and down my arm. With dimming perception, I watched as the water filled with bright red clouds. My field of vision decreased; I thought vaguely of the end of a scene in a silent movie. Sound was the last to go; the dull thud of my heartbeat softened, until at last it turned to a whisper, and then to nothing.

  I woke to find them standing over me, right there in my bathroom, fully illuminated in the white glow of my fluorescent lights. I had died this time; there was no mistake to be made. My arms were in tatters, and there was at least as much blood as water overflowing, drying in large blotches across the tile floor. My bladder and intestines had vacated themselves as before, and the organic reek of my offal mingled with their scent, a moldy, almost fish-like odor that hung in the back of my throat. I would have heaved the contents of my stomach across the room, if my unconscious body had not already purged it thoroughly.

  Of course, they were not anything like men; they were like towers composed of spiders, of anemones and worms, of millions of tiny crawling things that grasped and clambered and clung in one semi-coherent mass. Their quivering bodies spluttered and clutched in a synchrony of disparate tiny appendages, twitching colonies piled upon one another, all supporting those heads—those bulbous cephalons, rolling and bobbing atop necks that were not necks, that were extensions and pseudopods of that same writhing stew of feelers, mouths, and less coherent appendages.

  For some reason I had no will to scream, or to flee; perhaps I understood the futility of such acts. I lay in the tub, mouth agape, gasping for each breath and retching with each exhalation. After a few moments one of them began to speak, its minor-key violin voice stabbing through the thick noise of my breathing.

  Yes, it's all true, it seemed to say. Yes, you were dead, and now you are alive. Your flesh is ours, and we mold it as we see fit, as we have molded it since long before your history began.

  And now you will continue with the Plan. Food and sex and drugs are the Plan. Joy and love and hope are the Plan. Life is the Plan. Mankind is the Plan. All you will ever know and be is the Plan.

  These were the words that formed dimly in my mind as that awful hiss permeated the room. The feelings that produced the words were overpowering, and the instructions themselves were perhaps vague, but I understood. I was to do nothing more or less than be me. To live life, to enjoy oneself, to do what comes naturally, that is the Plan.

  My new career path took me first to a soapbox on a street corner, where I decried the prison of the flesh, or being human. That was where I met Voss and Cumberland; before they were my assistants, they were my only two faithful converts, believers in a sea of sneering, laughing faces. No one wants to hear a gospel of despair. Those two, though, somehow saw through the frantic theatricality of my manner, and received the message. They urged me to move my performances into the realm of art, and to allow disciples to be driven to me by their own curiosity.

  I continued my suicide attempts, trying more destructive methods. Razorblades were replaced by steak knives; I graduated to sleeping pills, then to toxic chemicals, but I always awoke in agony, watching as my flesh re-stitched itself. Their mastery reaches within our very sinews, moving in our cells and atoms.

  One night, my assistants discovered my flayed body; they watched as I sat up and wept, bewailing the prison, not only of my flesh, but of my humanity. We decided to incorporate my self-butchery, my “escape attempts,” as we called them, into the act. It was amidst tears and sobs that night that I spoke the words of the riddle, now so famous among my devotees: What is the one thing a man can do that God cannot? And the answer, of course, is that God cannot die.

  God can never choose to put a stop to himself, to vanish into peace and silence. That choice was also stolen from me; godhood was forced down my throat. I cannot escape; I will watch as this human race cascades blindly down the path of the Plan, and I will still be here when it draws to its conclusion. They want me to watch, to know that my efforts were for naught.

  So the answer to the riddle is the central truth of my message. Escape while you can. Destroy yourself, and hope their whim is not that you should be remade. Be repulsed and nauseated at the little joys and pleasures of life; each and every one has been prepared for you. Hate your flesh, and the flesh of every man and woman; it is being used and shaped for hideous purposes. The body is a prison from which there is no real freedom. But if you have the ability to make it useless to them, I urge you to do so while you can.

  We had reached a small park, and he finished his story as we sat together on a concrete bench beneath a malnourished birch tree. His eyes locked on mine, unmoving and lucid. His body had, at some point, reconstituted itself. He absentmindedly scratched at a patch of dried blood on his arm; it flaked off, revealing waxy skin crisscros
sed with scars of varying sizes. I had just watched a man die, and I had walked with him as his body was remade—the world seemed to be tilting beneath me.

  “You know,” I said, “I used to wonder if there was a religion that believed everyone went to hell.”

  “We don't go anywhere,” he sighed. “We're already here.”

  “This is it, then. ‘Nausea or oblivion; choose your path'.”

  “It's easier to just laugh me off the stage, I know. You wouldn't be the first.”

  For a while, neither of us said anything. At last, I asked in a cracking voice, thick with exhaustion, “does it have to be painful?”

  He made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “Depends,” he said, “on whether they want to stop you. Although if that's the case, your chances are slim to say the least. But I think it's better to be safe, and destroy—as much as possible.” I nodded, and he nodded back. I rose from the bench, and did not say goodbye. As I drove home through mercifully empty streets, I realized my mind was already made up. I saw myself not as cowardly, but akin to a guerilla fighter. I was one fly who they would not enjoy the privilege of swatting.

  The bath was warm. The pills made me tingle and laugh stupidly before they put me to sleep; I thought of smoking weed in college, and of laughing on soft couches with my friends. I remembered beautiful girls, and beautiful art, and cafeteria food. I thought of skin, and of fat, and about the way scars look. Just before my thoughts slowed to a halt, I held onto a mental image of my hands, floating in the cooling water. I would have liked to have touched more people, I thought. Then the lights dimmed, and I came to a halt.

  When I opened my eyes, three of them were standing over me. They hissed, and I sobbed.

  Ben Thomas tends to divide his time equally among literature, horticulture, fencing, terpsichory, and translating Sumerian poetry into Attic Greek for reasons known only to himself. While Carolyn is his first love, he will usually also settle for a bottle of single-malt Scotch, a gas-lamp, and a first-edition copy of Machen's The House of Souls. In addition to writing, he is also the founder and lead editor of the international magazine The Willows.