Swift to Chase
Page 33
Meanwhile II:
Lucius returned to the basement, seeking the safety of numbers. She tried, at any rate. The narrow stairwell twisted at a strange angle and she stumbled into a chamber made of brass plates and a concrete floor. Double doors slammed shut and sealed her fate.
Mr. Speck waited patiently. “To think, a mere flute solo could induce such dramatic metabolic changes. Were you to live another thirty years, I’m confident you’d exhibit an array of phenomenal adaptive responses. You’d transcend the bonds of your waterlogged skin and become superhuman by any local objective measure. The tiny mass of cells incubating within your womb represents even greater potential. A girl, by the way. That’s why, upon due consideration, I’ve decided to cut to the chase and dig it out of you and take my leave.” He flexed his fingers like a pianist limbering up.
To her credit, she didn’t dwell upon the unreality of the situation; she didn’t assume someone had dosed her with LSD and everything was a hallucination. She didn’t bother with who, what, or why. Mr. Speck was insane, or something far worse, or she’d fallen headfirst into a nightmare of the likes Alice never conceived. Lucius simply bared her teeth and girded herself for whatever fresh hell came next.
“I have felt strange today. Feels like a high voltage current in my guts.” She clenched her right hand. “I’m a mother, you say?”
“Yes, for a moment longer.”
“Mothers are dangerous animals, Mr. Speck. Don’t underestimate us.”
“Dangerous animals are still animals.”
“When I kill you will it all be over?”
“We control everything you see and hear. One experiment ends and another begins. So, yes, and no.”
She tried to answer, but the electric sensation spread from her middle and blocked her throat. Power filled her lungs. Power clogged her veins. Lucius stared at her fist. Bubbles formed in the metal of her rings. Crimson radiation leaked between her fingers and boiled down her arm. Her reflection warped in the brass double doors — her eyes were violet magma against the silhouette of her skull. Her jacket flapped gently, like a cape. The concrete walls flexed in, then out, with the rhythm of her breath.
The angel on her left shoulder, the teenaged spirit who delighted in cruelty and schadenfreude, murmured that perhaps Mr. Speck’s experiment with punctuated equilibrium had surpassed his estimation.
“Now, now, Lucius—” Mr. Speck said.
She laughed and swung.
Somewhere, Sometime VII (The Purgatory of Slasher Victims, 1977):
…Molly Vile dove through the motel doorway and plummeted into a well of darkness. The fall knocked the breath from her lungs. After a flash of sickening pain, her legs went dead. She dragged herself forward, digging her nails into soft earth. The night sky glazed and coagulated until it scraped her shoulders and spine. She crawled through a dirt tunnel lit by the soft purple light. Rivulets of blood glistened between her fingers and trickled over patches of bare rock. Butch Tooms could be gaining. She imagined him at her heels, expressionlessly burrowing with his arms at his sides like an earthworm. The visual elicited a gibbering moan and spurred her onward.
She forced her way through an opening, born again. A steep downslope caught her by surprise and she began to slide across a stone rim scored with ancient grooves that channeled the streams of blood toward a lip and a vertical drop. She wedged her forearms into the groove and arrested her momentum, albeit only for an instant or two. Long enough she took in the Plutonian vault, its upper limits shrouded in pinkish miasma.
The stone rim encircled a colossal pit sloshing full with a lake of blood and gore and partially-submerged bodies. Hundreds of tunnel exits, like the one she’d crawled through, drooled crimson above the pit. Each of the tunnels periodically emitted a battered and bloodied figure. Some alive, some dead; girls and boys alike, each wounded, each fleeing a mortal doom only to land someplace worse. The living corpses came skidding down the sluices and plopped into the frothy stew.
Molly tried to reverse direction and climb toward the mundane awfulness of her own past. She shrieked prayers to her God. Unfortunately, her God didn’t seem to be present and there was no going home.
Epilogue (Anchorage, winter 1979/1980):
Esteban didn’t remember the party. He’d gotten crocked and smacked his skull. Lucky to be alive, the docs said.
“We’re pregnant,” Lucius said with menacing cheer as she snuggled into the hospital bed next to him.
“Oh, sweetheart, that’s wonderful!” Esteban’s own smile concealed his horror.
Photo taken by: Henry Stampfel
Laird Barron spent his early years in Alaska, where he raced the Iditarod three times during the early 1990s and worked in the fishing and construction industries. He is the author of several books, including The Croning, The Imago Sequence, Occultation, The Light Is the Darkness, and The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. His work has also appeared in many magazines and anthologies. An expatriate Alaskan, Barron currently resides in upstate New York.