by Aimee Bender
He looked back and saw her face, a snowflake in the collapsing furnace, and then he was over the wall, and the car’s axle nearly snapped as the car hit the onramp with the wheels at a right angle, sailed down the dry ice-plant embankment and swerved, amid a chorus of horns, into the flow of traffic.
Howell got off at the next exit and cleaned himself up in a gas station restroom. He did not look at himself in the mirror. Then he went to his appointment in Burbank.
It was some weeks before Howell could admit to himself that he wasn’t going to report the incident. To tell it would make it real, declare that he believed in it, but no one would believe him. How much easier to just go on, to leave it behind, when it fit nothing else in his life but his dreams, which he never remembered, anyway. For over a year, a bad dream was all it was, and all it would ever be.
Until he got lost again.
Driving up to Sacramento, an interview for a senior accounting position with the state comptroller’s office, and he would have flown, if not for the terror of handing over his life to some unseen mumbler with a bar tab in eight states. If he had been meticulous in his planning before, he was now obsessive. He bought maps and plotted his route and itinerary, and he researched Atwater, and made damned sure that nothing brought him any closer to it as he passed the junction he’d stumbled into last time.
He’d been stunned to discover it was a real place, an odd, isolated knothole in the haphazard sprawl of the San Fernando Valley, encircled by freeways and largely undeveloped since the early Seventies, but an unremarkable, ordinary place that had suffered only a few broken windows in the last earthquake. What might have driven a more curious man mad only salved the fear he hadn’t dared confront since it happened, because it confirmed that it was all a bad dream. He drove through the Valley, and passed Atwater unmolested.
He had the itinerary folded in his lap and the GPS unit in his new Volvo told him he was in the San Joaquin Valley on the northbound 5, entering Chowchilla, but the GPS unit had no way of knowing about the truck wreck, bodies strewn across both lanes and up the scrub-brush shoulders, naked children everywhere, and all he could do was clutch the map to his breast and tell himself, you’re not lost, not lost, don’t look—
But they were only pigs, scattered by the impact with a truck loaded with tanks of flammable gas that came off the Chowchilla onramp too fast. A pair of highway patrol cars was parked sideways on the highway, the troopers hanging their heads at the waste of good bacon.
Detour signs and sawhorses with rusty orange blinking lights diverted the traffic up through Chowchilla onto the two-lane eastbound 140. Howell followed the signs through the tiny town and turned north on the 99 at the promise of eventually reaching Sacramento thereby. Remarkably, almost no other cars joined him on the detour, preferring to sit in gridlock while the dead pigs were mopped up, and he should have sneered at their stupidity, but instead, he couldn’t stop wondering what they knew.
He was on the 99, he was sure of it, when it started to rain. Suddenly, he was driving through a car wash, and the GPS unit in the dash, in fact everything in the dash, blinked and went black.
He hit the windshield wipers, but they didn’t work. He braked soberly to a stop, angling to the right shoulder and hitting his hazard lights, though no sign that they worked, either. He was about to call Onstar and have them send a tow truck, and he had his map out on his lap, when he saw two men in workman’s coveralls step into the tiny arena of his headlights, arm in arm and grappling, legs crazily digging for traction in the slick mud.
Howell had his phone in his hand when the two men smashed their heads together and staggered back into the dark. He was pushing the number he had programmed to speed-dial the friendly Onstar operator somewhere in Bombay or New Delhi, who would use satellite imagery and impeccable, pleasingly accented English to guide him back to the highway, even though he was definitely not lost—
His eyes roved over the map, up the aortic 5 to the blue branching 140 to the 99, and up the 99 past Merced, and a tiny town just off the highway, though no roads to or from it showed on the map. The town was called ATWATER.
He looked out the window at the two men, but despaired of asking them for directions.
Each fighter had his hands around the other’s throat, and throttled his foe for all he was worth. Faces purple and streaming in the rain, they had wrung each other half to death when one suddenly kicked the other in the gut. The injured man folded, and his attacker pressed the advantage with ruthless abandon, smashing his head again and again into the pavement.
Howell sat there watching, even after the dashboard lights came back on, and the windshield wipers gave him a clearer view.
The victor lifted the vanquished up by his head, looking deeply, longingly, into the eyes of the man he’d beaten. Then his arms tensed and he squeezed the skull, crushing it as his mouth opened wider, jaw unhinged, skin stretching, to engulf the top of the broken head between his lips.
Howell’s hands fumbled for the gearshift, switched on the hi-beams. Oblivious to the light, the victor opened his mouth still wider, hoisting his twitching enemy off his feet and forcing the body, inch by inch, into his own.
Howell reversed and floored it, headed back the way he’d come. But the road was different. Corn crowded in on both sides. He saw peaked Victorian rooftops behind the waving stalks, but knew he’d find no help there. His brain crawled out of his skull and flew above the racing Volvo. If he hadn’t been so meticulous in his bathroom stops this trip, he would have voided his bladder as he screamed through the town of Atwater.
Not a single board of a building looked familiar, but he knew that somehow, it was the same town.
He passed an intersection that wasn’t there before, a big black sign swinging above an old wire-hung traffic light said, PENTACOST ROAD.
He passed a man dressed in his mother’s skin, that still screamed and nagged in his ear; a naked old woman who sweated fabulous tumors of molten gold, and goggled at him through crystalline growths like malignant diamonds, shining out of her eyeholes; an armless, legless nude woman in an eyeless rubber mask and a ball-gag stuffed in her mouth, racing alongside the car, borne aloft by black segmented tentacles growing from her gaping, snapping vagina.
The crumbling Victorian mansions crept closer to the road until they strangled it. In its death-throes, the road thrashed from left to right until a sprawling, misplaced mansion blocked it entirely. Howell aimed for the narrow alley between the colossal house and its neighbor, but the car wedged itself into the space and refused to budge in either direction. Howell climbed over the seats and out the back.
The storm battered the land with an ever-growing ferocity, but still he heard the somnolent music of those molten chimes, coming from everywhere and nowhere—and growing steadily louder. He looked frantically all around, waving a flashlight in the rain-slashed dark, but he still ran full into the honeycombed man before he saw him.
Howell fell on the pavement, but rolled and aimed the flashlight at the man. His problem with the bees had gotten worse. They were bigger, the size of hummingbirds circling his head, dancing secrets to each other on his shoulders, the hexagonal combs like shotgun holes in his face and neck and down beneath his shirt.
“Hurry,” the honeycombed man said, and the bees echoed, “she’s waiting for you.”
Howell backed away from the man, from his car, from his own body. There had to be a way out of this, a way to escape, to wake up—
He turned and took a long stride to run away, but there was the man who’d beaten—and eaten—his doppelganger. “Get me out of here,” the man said, and fingers squirmed out of his wide, froglike mouth, clawed at his lips. The fighter bent over, wracked by spasms and surges of movement under his muddy coveralls. He screamed, and Howell saw something thrashing in the seat of his pants, tearing away the fabric, a tail—no, a leg…
Howell backed away again, but he heard angry bees circling behind him. The fighter threw himself at Howell’s fee
t, screaming so loud, so wide, Howell could see the man inside him screaming, too.
“Come on,” the honeycombed man took his arm and dragged him to the porch of the mansion in the road. Cobalt blue lanterns saturated the darkness in the parlor, vertebral shadows of legions of ferns, and among them, a bed, and on it, a woman’s body.
But no, it wasn’t her, and had he hoped it would be? This one was enormous, a monstrous puffball belly with drained, flaccid limbs trailing away from it like the knotted fingers of empty surgical gloves. Sizzling wings at his back drove him closer.
“Mr. Howell,” she said, and he started, because underneath all that, it was her. “I know all about you, Howell. I even know your real name. What do you know?”
“I—” he looked around, at anything but her, and he heard creaking, crackling sounds, the ferns growing up through the floor so fast they glowed, feeding on the fever-heat, the light, pouring out of her. “I don’t know anything.”
“You got away, but you only think you keep getting lost… you keep coming back.”
“I got away because I don’t belong here. This is all some kind of—”
“A mistake?” Her breath hitched hurtfully inside her, like laughter, or something inside trying to escape. “You escaped because you have no imagination. You don’t dream.”
“I had a dream… about you, before. You—This… this is a dream…”
“This is a dream,” she agreed. The ground rumbled. Pictures and knickknacks shook off the walls. A window looking out on the street shattered, the wind and rain pried away the storm shutters. Her massive belly shivered and stirred. “But it’s more real than where you think you came from.”
Her hand shot out and caught his. He pulled away so hard he staggered into the wall. His shoulder went right through the moldy plaster. “You… did something to me. Why did you do… that?”
Her face brightened. “You remember! I didn’t want to give you the wrong idea, but there was no time. There’s no time, now, either.” Her hand caressed the turgid globe of her abdomen.
“I don’t understand what’s going on, here, but what are you?” He swallowed and choked as he realized he was most afraid that she was not real. “All of you? What happened to you?”
“You did.” She convulsed, pain drawing her into a ball around her pulsating womb.
He pointed and stammered, “No, that’s not mine.”
“You sound like you’ve done this before.” She shrieked and made ribbons of the sheets. Her heels dug into the mattress, kicking divots of flea-infested stuffing across the rumbling room.
Howell knew he should take her hand, but was terrified of coming any closer. Her belly contorted as if it caged a wild animal, then two animals battling, as each of them began to transform to catch the other at a disadvantage. Her skin stretched out into wild formations, stalks like roots and the eyes of overripe potatoes looking for anchorage or food to fuel its runaway metamorphosis—looking for him.
Howell backed into and right through the wall. He tripped over crumbling plaster and spilled into the atrium, narrowly dodging the heavy front door swinging in the whipping wind. The rain was no longer rain. Hot ash and bits of still-flaming trash swept by his face.
The hordes of Atwater, a hundred or more of them, crowded into the cul-de-sac before the mansion. On the horizon, a blood-red sun rose and swiftly grew, for it was not rising into the sky, but rolling up the road. The horde met this sight with bestial screams and wails of despair, but they remained rooted, distracting themselves with desperate last-minute orgies, battles and suicide attempts. Though they seemed incapable of coming, killing or dying, still they chased these forbidden states in the burning rain even as the red sun drew closer.
The chimes grew louder, a steamroller trampling a forest of tubular bells. Inside, the pregnant woman called out to him, but he was fixed to the spot.
As the sun swelled, it came clear to Howell. A towering, brazen idol, taller than the highest weathervane on any of the mansions it shouldered aside as it rolled down the street on gigantic iron-shod wheels.
A huge, saturnine head and torso, with great hands outstretched to lift its worshippers to its grinding mechanical jaws. The whole idol glowed dull red with the heat of the furnace raging inside it. All that it touched crumpled in white flames, but the hordes of freaks crowded closer, herded by cage-headed alienists armed with baling hooks and pikes.
The horde tortured itself, each tearing at the deformities of his or her neighbor as the heat between them came alive with white light and fire. Packed closer and closer together as the advancing idol trapped them in the cul-de-sac, they approached an ecstasy of panic, yet they meekly stepped or knelt, singly and in knots of writhing bodies, onto the spreading bronze palms of the glowing idol.
Howell knew this was the thing from which he had averted his eyes, the last time he got lost in Atwater. When she said, “He’s coming,” she meant this. Now, it was too late to escape. The horde danced on his trapped car. He could go through the mansion, dive out a window on the other side and run all the way home, if he had to, but he got no further than the parlor, where the woman’s ordeal was, for better or worse, nearly over.
The woman who raped him told him the thing inside her was his. He could come no closer than the hole he’d made in the wall, but he could not run away from it. Her legs jerked and wrenched impossibly akimbo, laying bare her outraged genitalia, and a glimpse of something fighting its way out of her.
No one had ever asked for what she took from him. No one had ever wanted anything from him but his facility as a calculator, and so the violence with which she had taken his seed had left him curiously stronger than he’d been, before. He’d never realized how much he feared human contact, and he saw in her slitted eyes, now, how much like him she was, how loathsome the act had been for her, but how desperately necessary.
That the act had produced some offspring, here in this place that was insanity itself, was the only sane thing Howell could find to cling to.
He went to her and took her hand. He tried to soothe her with words and touch, but she seemed beyond noticing. “If you’re going to be the mother of my child,” he said, “I think you could at least tell me your name.”
Her eyes rolled but focused on him, and in the midst of her panting seizure, she found breath to laugh at him. “Your child? Oh, Howell, you idiot—”
A wash of scalding heat raised blisters on his face, and the mansion’s outer wall melted away like a tortilla under a blowtorch. Outside, all he could see was a single red eye, glowering cruel and absolute with the fires of a collapsing sun behind it, a brain that blasted all it touched to atoms. It looked full on them, now, as, all at once, the woman gave birth.
Her hand clasped his and the mountain of her belly tore open like a water-balloon smashing into a wall.
Ferns curled and turned to silver tornadoes of ash. Swamps of sweat vaporized out of the sheets. The woman’s hand went slack and deflated in his grip, crumbled like a sheaf of autumn leaves. Howell’s own clothes smoldered and gave off puffs of steam and smoke, but he noticed none of it.
The thing that squatted in the ruined chrysalis of the woman at first looked like nothing more than her insides come to life: bones, muscles, guts and all, stirred and resculpted into a crude effigy of a newborn child, but it redefined itself as he watched. Swaddled in blood and shreds of uterine lining, the thing uncoiled and opened its eyes. Swollen sacs of tissue burst and unfurled into membranous wings, and Howell understood.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice piping and unsteady in its new vessel, “for helping me escape. I’m sorry you won’t.”
The iridescent wings snapped and beat the stagnant air, shaking off slime and lifting the newborn body out of its cocoon in one swift motion. Howell ducked, then made a half-hearted attempt to catch her, but she eluded him and dove out the window, into the eye of the idol.
And then the whole house was flying sideways, and Howell had no choice but to go with it
. The chiming, roaring explosion went on forever, the room rolling end over end and dancing wheels of fire all around him. And when it all stopped, he was too broken to move, but somehow, he was outside.
The brazen idol clawed at the sky, at a fleeting dart of light that was well away from its glowing grip, and the idol seemed to rust and come unhinged inside, all its parts simply disconnected from the others and the furnace, unleashed, spilled out waves of fire upon the hordes.
Howell ran and ran and still the sound of the fire rolling, gaining, eating up the land, grew in his ears, but he kept running, in his mind calculating his speed and caloric consumption and estimated time of arrival if he just ran and ran home, if he ran to Mexico, if he just ran around the world and came back to this exact point—
Somewhere, long before he got home, he dropped in his tracks and fainted, mind and body completely spent.
And he woke up in a ditch beside the 99 just outside the town of Chowchilla, a sheriff’s deputy in an orange poncho poking him in the ribs with a flashlight.
“Thought you was one of them pigs,” said the deputy.
He held his life together pretty well, after that, all told, and most of the time, he didn’t remember his dreams.
He worked from home, toting up accounts for several small, borderline illegal companies. He did not, could not, go outside. The fear that he would get lost again, that he might lose track of the route down the street to the corner store, kept him inside. In every corner of every place he did not know as intimately as his own body, a doorway to Atwater waited.
And yet he kept working, eating and sleeping, because, though he did not admit it even to himself while he was awake, he hoped for something.
He lurched on through life like this for months before the dreams started to push through into work, into the blank spaces on the screen and the black pauses between commercials on TV. Her face, her luminous blue wings lifting her out of the fire and into the sky. He still lived, he began to see, only because he hoped she would come back.
