400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

"Oh, the good stuff," she said. "I'll take that as a sign you're ready."

  "Ready," he said.

  "For the kiss of Valis."

  "Valis," he repeated.

  She knelt before him, and now the others came through the curtains behind her. They had been making some preparations in there, talking in hushed voices. He smelled incense burning.

  "This was his house," she said. "That's only the first of the secrets to be revealed to you tonight."

  "Whose house?" he asked.

  "Phil's."

  "Philip K. Dick? He lived here?"

  "When he was starting out. . .it's a focal point for Valis now. A shrine. Why do you think you've been drawn here?"

  "I—I didn't know—"

  "You haven't read Valis, of course. It's only in manuscript. Secret copies have been passed around. Later we'll show it to you, and you can read and understand. Soon it will be revealed to the world, but for the moment our society is still very secret. Even when the light has dawned, we shall be the small dark heart of it, at the center of the mystery, and you, Morris, perhaps you will be at the center of that heart, if you can clear your mind of all else tonight and make room for the movement of the spirit."

  "Philip K. Dick lived here," he said, shifting and feeling the floorboards splintering softly beneath him. He felt that he could easily kick a hole through with his heel, and dig right into the earth beneath the house. If he pushed hard enough on the wall behind him, it would give way. His skull felt equally soft, equally invaded by something stranger than mold; as if the slightest bit of pressure would cause it to burst, letting his thoughts out.

  "Was. . .was there something in that wine?"

  Janet crouched before him, and put out her hand, palm up. In the center sat a small purple pill.

  "What. . ."

  "Chew-Z," she said. "The sacrament."

  "What is it really? Is it LSD?" Because in this respect, also, he was a virgin.

  "Don't be afraid, Morris. Valis will come through tonight. Maybe you will be chosen."

  "Chosen for. . .for what?"

  She put the pill on her tongue and closed her mouth. Then took his hands and drew him to his feet, leading him back toward the veiled room. Through clacking plastic beads, into a room dark except for a small pink globe like a nightlight in the center of the room.

  "The pink light touches us deep within," Janet intoned, urging him to sink to a sitting position. "Beyond all rational thought. It shows us the truth. Gaze into the light, Morris."

  Morris gazed. He could see the wire filament inside the round globe. It was intricately coiled; it was difficult to believe that anything could be so small and fine. What hand could have shaped it so precisely? What immortal hand of fire did shape thy nightlight's burning wire? He was thinking insanely, but it was no less than was expected of him. The others now had shed their clothes, and in the pink dimness began to move around him, forming a human freize of interwoven forms— only, when he jerked to look at them they weren't moving. Except that Janet came forward now, bearing two bright pink human figures in her hands, naked plastic dolls. She bathed them in the pink light, and he almost laughed to see Barbie and Ken stripped of their garments, sexless, except that the ceremony with which she handled them made them seem portentous, more menacing than voodoo dolls, if you believed in that sort of thing. Belief was not exactly what filled Morris at the moment; there was little room left in him for anything but fear.

  "For behold," she said, "in the days of Perky Pat, Valis did move among them, and bring life even to the frozen forms. And Valis did descend among the discarded objects, the shattered toys of childhood, past the amphetamine capsules and empty prescription vials, into the very tomb of the world, into the keys of his typewriter, and through those keys into Phil's fingers, so that the light first blossomed there and came to us that we might see the workings of Valis in the world. And the demiurge sensed that Valis had arrived, and was working to undo his evil works, and in that moment the battle proper was joined."

  Janet Kutz pressed Barbie to her lips, and held out her hand so that Ken might lay his cold sealed mouth against Morris's mouth, a tiny frigid peck that filled him with terror, since he could feel his life sucking out of him, into the doll. His teeth began to chatter.

  Now he felt hands kneading his shoulders, and twisted around to see Sherwood Spierman behind him, unclothed again. He tried to rise, but the hands pushed him down gently, and he was so weak and wobbly that he couldn't resist even the fat little science fiction writer. And then something very warm and firm enclosed him, like an enormous snake, and the pink light drew far away below him, like a star burning in an abyss, the only star in existence. But it wasn't Valis. Its light could not heal him. It was only a pink nightlight, too far away to do any good, and Janet Kutz had hold of him, nor could he move, for his socketed limbs obeyed only hers, and his eyes were sightless and his lips were sealed and he had no sex.

  Through the abyss came Perky Pat, his ideal mate. The sexless two of them were fated for some unimaginable union. Her stiff blonde tresses, her nipple-less breasts, her belly devoid of umbilical scars. . .. Whatever had given birth to her, whatever machine had stamped her out, he also was the child of that soulless monster, and between them they would give rise to the next race of men, the demiurge's true spawn, the plastic people, the unsexed race, the machinists and manufacturers, immortals, beyond the reach of decay or growth alike.

  "Let go of fear, let go of self, let go of will," the air intoned. "Let Valis in, let Valis in, let Valis is."

  But it was not Valis, whatever that was, who came in.

  There was a commotion in the room, and Morris was dropped, dumped on the carpet. He sprawled by the pink light, staring at the stained ceiling, as the half-robed others stared at the beaded doorway where now a hairy, bearded, beer-bellied, grey- haired man stood in a grubby white t-shirt. Morris was lost between bodies, half in the form of Ken, half in his own flesh. His vision was doubled, with one of the two turned sideways and superimposed at an angle upon the other, so that the world looked as though it had been mirrored and fractured and badly reset.

  The Kutzwoods rushed toward the intruder, but the faintly seedy figure in dirty white raised one hand and they recoiled as if burned with a flamethrower. Janet said, "Phil!"

  "Get out of my house!" he intoned. "Get out, all of you. You bunch of quacks and crackpots! Charlatans!"

  "Valis moves among us!" Sherwood cried. "He comes in human form!"

  "I said clear out, you fucking windbag!" Phil stepped in, his beer gut hanging out between his flapping t-shirt and his bleach-stained whitish flares.

  "Valis isn't in here," he said sourly, "but I can call it. This is the work of the demiurge—this is evil, illusion. Sucking this boy's life out of him. Fucking him full of death. It's my house and I want you all out of it right now, before I summon Valis through that snapping turtle and sic him on you. Catch a few snaps of that beak and I'll bet you won't be so eager to feel Valis."

  When even after all this, no one moved to obey him, Phil stepped fully into the room and aimed a kick that Morris irrationally feared was meant for his head. He flinched, but Phil's toe merely shattered the pink bulb, and as it popped Morris jerked upright, and staggered for the exit, the plastic beads dragging over his face. The others were behind him, fleeing in a rush, and looking back into the room he saw a huge, an inconceivable shape seemed to mushroom into existence in the center of the room, beyond the beaded curtain, striking the Kutzwoods full of a revealing pink irradiation, their skeletons standing side by side, one short and squat, the other tall and angular. And as the light died they came staggering out as if blind, clutching at each other's hands, and followed the rest of their followers out the front door, sandals and bare feet slapping away on the weedy path.

  Morris sat in a corner of the room, where he had fallen, his hand on the stack of Philip K. Dick novels. And then Philip K. Dick himself came out of the room and gave him a concerned look.


  "Assholes," Phil said. "I would like to have messed with their heads a little bit longer, though."

  "You—you're really here?"

  "Sure," Phil said. "Aren't you?" "I'm—-" He was about to answer affirmatively, but a wave of something negative swept through him. All his fear came flooding out of him, then. It dawned on him suddenly where he was, and what was happening to him, and his surroundings sprang into awful clarity—so bright that he could barely look around himself.

  "Take these," Phil said. He took a pillbottle out of his pants pocket and emptied it into his palm. There were pills of all sizes and shapes, all colors. He sorted through until he had picked out a yellow capsule, a golden gelatinous globes, a red ones and a green one. Some of the pills had the names of pharmaceutical companies on them, number codes, but these were all blank.

  "Relax, they're vitamins. I've been experimenting with megadoses, and I think this combination will do you good. I'm not exactly sure what they dosed you with, but this can't hurt."

  Morris swallowed them dry, and soon the surfaces of things began to cling more firmly to the objects which they normally covered; the edges of reality were all tacked back in place. Phil ghosted around the house, muttering to himself at the state of the place, waiting for Morris to settle. He brewed coffee and washed cups and finally came down and handed Morris a mug, and sat opposite him and gave him a wink.

  "How did you know to come?" Morris asked.

  Phil opened his hand. In it was a pink pill. "This," he said, "is Can-D." He popped it in his mouth.

  Morris spilled out his story, as much of it made sense to him. Phil listened, and when he was finished, he began to speak, just weaving stories about the demiurge who had created this world, and how humanity was trapped in a false creation far below the notice of the demiurge's own creator—except that Valis moved among them, with messages of hope, with practical methods of transcendence, ways of unknotting the hopelessly tangled strands of reality and following them to. . .to what? Morris could not follow a fraction of it; he only lay there, letting the voice speak on, while he dodged in and out of consciousness. Toward morning, Phil rose and gestured him to his feet, and they set out under the paling skies, past quiet houses and trim green lawns marked inexplicably with Clorox bottles like squat little sentries beneath the camellia hedges. Phil brought him to the BART station and showed him how to buy his ticket, which train to take to the Oakland Airport. He turned from the turnstile after feeding his ticket through, turned to thank Phil, but he was already gone.

  * * *

  “To Lie Between the Loins of Perky Pat” copyright 1996 by Marc Laidlaw. First appeared at Dark Carnival Online, February 1996, edited by Paul McEnery.

  NETHER REACHES

  To our right, the Reaches fell away into bottomless blackness. We struggled down a narrow trail, hugging close to the rock, every hundred yards or so coming upon the mouths of inner caves that coiled away where our lights could not penetrate. We hurried past, feeling the exhalations of dry air from deeper galleries, no one wishing to linger on those thresholds despite the escape they offered from the brink.

  I began to imagine that down in the valley of blackness, luminous shapes stirred and swam. These may have been afterimages of lamplight and my companions' faces, or the random firing of sensors in my optic nerve; but that knowledge, uncertain at best, did nothing to reassure me when I began to imagine huge blind eyes floating up like helium balloons from between imaginary grey-glowing peaks deep in the abyss.

  My fear, in fact my very behavior, became childlike. Not since childhood had I felt any such terror of the dark. It was nothing I had ever imagined facing again, not as an adult, an experienced explorer among others of equal skill. It took me by surprise, nor was I reassured to discover I was not the only one.

  Katherine was the first to speak of it. Ward had begged a halt some three hours into our descent. We squatted down on the trail carved unknown ages before, and untouched for millenia— until recently. Still tethered together, we shared water and food. As I offered the canteen to Katherine, I noticed her gaze fixed not on the abyss, the sight of which I also kept avoiding, but on the unbroken ceiling of darkness above us.

  “Can’t see it anymore,” she said.

  I knew she meant the outer threshhold, which for a time had hung behind us like a dim grey star, visible only in contrast to such utter blackness. Now it was long gone, and except for the light we carried, or could generate, there would be no more until we reached the camp. I squeezed her shoulder. Like me she was covered with perspiration despite the chill of the Reaches. Mine was an icy, unpleasant sweat, like that which one feels when rising from a nightmare.

  “Why am I so frightened?” she said.

  Justin, a veteran of the Reaches, laughed. “Afraid of the dark?”

  “There’s just so much of it,” she answered, unashamed. “No stars. . .nothing.”

  “Try turning off all the lights,” he said. “Then you’ll really feel it. It’s a good idea to let yourself get used to it. “

  “That’ll happen soon enough,” said Beth, our leader.

  “Really,” said Ward, who like Katherine and myself was making his first trek into the cavern. “I’m in no hurry. It’s claustrophobic enough already.”

  “Claustrophobic?” I said. “There’s nothing but open space.”

  “But the blackness feels solid. As if, if we didn’t have lights, it would completely crush us.”

  “Jesus, don’t say that!” said Katherine, rising. “You’re really scaring me now.”

  “Relax,” I whispered, trying to pull her down next to me.

  It made me nervous when she moved so near the edge of the trail. But my own reaction, though I kept it to myself, was the opposite of Ward’s. I felt as if I were expanding outward infinitely, sending my mind into the Reaches, to touch their limits, to fill the entire interior tracts of the icy cave-riddled planet.

  “You’re like a bunch of kids around a campfire,” Beth said. “Come on, we’re not doing any good sitting here scaring each other. We’ve a long way to go before. . .”

  Katherine laughed, forcing it. “Before what? Nightfall?”

  “Before we can stop,” Beth finished. She was already striding away, forcing Justin to jump up before the cable could pull taut between them. Ward followed Justin, and I rose up reluctantly, clasping Katherine’s hand for a short moment.

  “It’ll be all right,” I said. “When we get to the catacombs, it’ll seem worthwhile.”

  I didn’t understand her expression of doubt.

  We had covered less than a third of our journey, as Beth indicated, but we were already near the end of the ridge route. Within a short time the trail broadened further. We pulled away from the brink of the abyss, still without any sight of its bottom, and moved first along the face of a sheer wall that rose to our left, then headed directly out across a broad stone plain whose surface undulated like the swells of a petrified sea, crazed with deep rifts. The narrower of these were spanned by rigid plastic ramps, still nearly brand-new, scuffed by very few boots. I grew a little bolder on the plain, because the fear of falling was gone, and I walked with ever lighter steps despite the occasional thought that I might be visible to anything peering down from above—though what I expected to be watching from the black heights above, I could never have named. I stabbed beams of light out into the surrounding plains, picking out heaps of stone, shattered scales that must have flaked and fallen from the cavern’s ceiling miles above. It seemed strange that the whole surface was not thickly littered with these piles, as if they had been swept up into tidy mounds over the eons, leaving all else clear. They reminded me disturbingly of enormous anthills, and after a time I stopped looking at them.

  Justin fired a flare out into the dark; and while Beth cursed him for wasting it, the rest of us stood and watched it arc up and up and finally peak and fall, to land sputtering far out on the plain, somewhere beyond a jagged wall of stone scrapings. It made the silhouett
es and shadows of those heaps twitch and shamble toward us. Dreadful illusions multiplied behind my eyes, and I felt an unlikely terror grow until I had to look away. The dull flare flickered for much longer than seemed right, and I glanced back at it repeatedly as we marched on.

  Hours later, we saw another light ahead of us, first a dim suspicion, like a wishful mirage; but gradually it brightened. As we gained higher ground, we saw a raw spark of white fluorescence, stationary, with three smaller reddish sparks beneath it. It was the central beacon of the catacomb camp. As we grew closer, we saw the somewhat dimmer lamps mounted on shorter poles all around the site for constant illumination; and then we gradually made out the shapes of the camp shelters, tents and prefab huts, scattered pieces of machinery and vehicles, even a one-man pedal glider—all the necessities, as well as the detritus, of a three month occupation. The camp was staffed with nearly fifty people, yet none were visible as we approached.

  Beth raised her radio, addressed the main station loudly, but received only static in reply.

  Suddenly Katherine collapsed. I called to the others and sank down next to her to find her gasping, hyperventilating, full of repressed terror.

  “Goddamn it, what now?” Beth said.

  “She’s dizzy—she needs to rest.”

  “Well stay with her then, unclip your line, we’re going on.”

  “No!” Katherine said, struggling to pull herself upright. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Have it your way.” Beth tried the radio again.

  “Where are they?” Justin said.

  “In the catacombs, where else?”

  “All of them?”

  We hurried to keep up, Katherine keeping one hand in mine, but we needn’t have worried about falling behind. Beth hadn’t gone fifty yards when suddenly she stopped short, cursing. At her feet was a rift much wider than any we had crossed thus far.

  “Where’s the bridge?” Justin said.

  Beth didn’t speak for a moment, watching the luminous screen of her hand-map. She shone her light left and right along the fissure, but there was nothing. Finally she aimed it straight down into the cleft, but I could tell without moving to the brink myself that she could see nothing down there.