by Aimee Bender
I followed, and once again, I was surprised. The cabin went back far deeper than its exterior façade would indicate, and the long room in which we found ourselves sloped steeply downward from the door, with the ceiling at the entrance barely above five feet and that at the opposite end twelve to fifteen feet high. The room had obviously been dug into the ground at an angle, but there were no windows, the floor was wood as were the walls, and that gave the room the appearance of space that grew as it moved away from us, like the optical illusion of an amusement park haunted shack.
“It’s like a fuckin’ fun house,” Big Bill said, shining his light around.
Andre remained silent.
We clomped down the sloping floor in our heavy boots. There was furniture only on the sides of the room: two twin tables with collections of nearly identical gray rocks arranged on their dusty tops. Though it stretched back far, the room was half the width of the hallway, so there had to be another chamber behind the wall to our left, although no way to enter it from this room. In front of us, however, a closed door was built into the back wall, a construct of solid wood hewn from a single section of tree that had been bolted to the surrounding planks. It had no handle or knob, no visible means by which it might be opened, and there was something both secretive and intriguing about the tightly sealed entrance. It was Ed Barr who said what all of us were thinking: “Let’s see what’s back there.”
“No!” Andre said, and there was fear in his voice.
“This building’s obviously abandoned, the area around it’s burned to a crisp, let’s break down the door and see what’s behind it.”
“You can’t!” Andre shouted.
“Out of the way.” Rossi pushed him aside and hefted his ax.
Andre actually started crying, and that, more than anything else, creeped me out. Standing half-underground in an ancient windowless cabin in front of a knobless door watching a grown man the size of a football player sob was just plain unnerving, and at that moment I wanted to get the hell out of there.
The door was tough and it took several swings, but Rossi finally managed to smash a hole through the wood large enough to put his hand and arm through. There was an inside latch, and he used it to open the door. Four flashlights shone into the darkness, and there was sudden silence as we saw what lay in the small dank room beyond.
It was a mummified creature of some sort, a wrinkled shriveled figure that looked like a dried black monkey. The skin of its face had been pulled back from its skull, and it appeared to be grinning, its sharp rotted teeth exposed in a way that made it seem insanely gleeful. It was seated on the floor of the small room, next to a small pile of those gray rocks. Behind it, a rounded section of the wall had been bleached white, as though exposed to harsh sunlight or radiation.
Andre fell to his knees in front of the monkey thing like some primitive tribesman worshipping a stone idol. Rossi dropped his ax and followed suit. I would have laughed, but I could see similar expressions of awe on the faces of the others, and I have to admit that I felt something myself. I thought of Anna Howell’s buried panties, and at that moment I wished that I had not stolen them, had not planted them, had not peed on them. I was filled with an emptiness, a sadness, a sense that I had gone off track somewhere, that I had lost something that should have been very important to me. The feeling radiating from the dead creature was one of great sorrow, and its mood affected my own, made me want to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.
And then . . .
Something changed.
I don’t know what it was, if it came from that mummified creature in the middle of the floor, if it came from my fellow firemen or if it was simply a figment of my imagination, but the sadness I felt was suddenly replaced by fear, a cold bone-deep terror that left me rooted in place, filled with the certainty that all of us were doomed, that we would never leave this place but would spent eternity in this tiny room with that hideous black monkey.
To my left, Ed Barr let out a strangled stifled cry. Andre was sobbing, though from religious fervor or despair it was impossible to tell. Garcia’s flashlight dimmed, went out. Big Bill’s and the others followed suit and moments later we were in darkness, an inky jet so deep and penetrating that I could not tell whether my eyes were open or closed. I stood there, stock still, waiting for the end. Someone cried out. Someone else giggled. There were more noises, more cries, and I felt soft fingers gently stroking my hand and then teeth sink painfully into my right calf.
I have no idea how much time we spent in that place, but by the time we emerged, the sun was high in the sky. Everyone was disheveled. Big Bill was naked.
We left the mummy there, sealing up the room as best we could with additional branches and mud from a small slough to the side of the shack. That was Andre’s idea, and the rest of the brigade went along with it, some more willingly than others. I wanted to burn the fucking place down—whatever that dried black creature was, it did not deserve to exist—but I knew I was a minority of one and kept my feelings to myself. It would be enough just to get away from here and make sure that I never came anywhere near that cabin and its horrid occupant again.
I quit the volunteer fire department a few days after.
So did Rossi.
So did Ed Barr.
And though we saw each other on almost a daily basis, we didn’t talk about it, didn’t ask each other why, didn’t discuss what we’d seen, what had happened in that shack.
A week later, Andre killed himself. Ate his shotgun in the woods.
And we didn’t talk about that either.
After that, the panties sprouted. I was standing in front of the oak tree when the moon finally reemerged after a week of cloudy nights, and I saw a pale shoot poking upward through the mulchy dirt, a blue-white almost gelatinous tendril that was clearly growing, aspiring to some greater form.
What would it be, I wondered, when it reached maturity?
I pulled out my pecker and pissed on it.
I saw Anna Howell the next day, waved to her over the fence while she hung her laundry out to dry, tried not to look at the underwear she was pinning on the clothesline. She smiled at me, waved back, said it was a nice day, and if she suspected that I had stolen a pair of her panties she did an amazing job of hiding it.
I slunk back inside and realized that I had some soul searching to do. What exactly did I want from that thing I was growing in the forest? As much as I admired and recognized Anna Howell’s beauty, I still did not desire her, and I did not think that I was growing the woman for a sex partner, as a substitute for the real McCoy.
The woman.
I said it to myself for the first time, admitting what I had known subconsciously all along—that I was growing a person from Anna Howell’s panties.
A woman.
But why?
That was still not clear to me, though I felt the impulse to continue even more strongly than I had before. My every waking moment seemed consumed with the thought of my secret in the woods, and I got through each boring day only with the knowledge that at night, if there was a moon, I would be able to visit my spot at the foot of the oak where I had buried my neighbor’s freshly laundered underwear in the soft and fertile soil.
The next time I saw the sprout, it had a face. Under the moonlight, it had grown to nearly two feet high and now had the vague contours of a woman. Although they were closed, there were eyes, and while there was no nose to speak of, the thing had Kewpie doll lips pursed in an unappealing fashion that needed only color to grant them authenticity. Small nubs halfway down the form looked as though they would eventually differentiate themselves into hands and arms.
It seemed wrong to water the figure at this stage of its growth, so I turned my back and relieved my bladder on a bush, then zipped up and crouched down before the oak tree to look at what I’d wrought. The sight was horrible, a travesty of humanity so fundamentally unnatural that my first impulse should have been to destroy it. But instead I sat on my h
aunches and examined its emerging form. The figure was small but perfectly in proportion rather than dwarflike, and despite the garish elements of its evolving face, I could tell that it would grow into a beautiful woman. Looking closely, I could see a slight indentation that would become the vaginal cleft, two small bumps that would expand into breasts. It was composed of that same translucent bluish-white material, a slimy looking substance that shone in the moonlight and appeared sticky to the touch. I wanted to reach out and press my finger against the shiny skin to see if it felt the way it looked, but I did not want to jeopardize the form’s growth by tainting it with my touch, so I refrained.
The night air was moist and dewy, the ground itself damp, but I wondered if that would be enough to keep the budding woman watered and facilitate her growth. I looked at the nascent crotch, thought about what Anna Howell’s own vagina must look like under her panties and found myself thinking that I should masturbate on the figure to provide it with moisture and nutrients.
I stood, pulled down my pants, took my penis in hand and started stroking, my head filled with dark thoughts, my fantasy scenario one of depraved perversity, but at the last minute I pulled away, spurting all over a lushly growing fern rather than onto that blue-white flesh, grunting with animal abandon as I emptied my loins on the hapless plant.
The pursed colorless lips seemed to me to be almost smiling.
I arrived home long after midnight, too wound and wired to sleep, my head filled with ideas I did not want to acknowledge, my body wracked with impulses I dared not act upon. Under a lone lamp in the living room, I read the local paper which had been delivered with the mail that afternoon. On the front page was a photo of Giff McCarty, head ranger for the region. He was wearing a woman’s wig and thick mascara, his dark lipstick obvious even through the black-and-white newsprint. FOREST SERVICE OFFICIAL ACCUSED OF MOLESTATION, the banner headline read, and I suddenly understood why we had been called to put out the fire at the old resort. I remembered what had happened inside that shack
God lives there
and saw the madness in the old ranger’s eyes, the whorishly roughed cheeks bookending his carefully drawn lips, and I crumpled up the paper and made my way to bed.
In my dream, I was standing at the dirty urinal of an old gas station—Enco, Richfield, Gulf, one of those chains that no longer existed—and next to me, at the adjacent urinal, was a wino, a filthy man with wild gray hair and an unkempt beard, wearing a greasy topcoat and smelling of spilled beer and sewer stink. He was nearly a head shorter than me, and when I glanced over at him, he winked. I saw that he was peeing not in the urinal but on the tiled floor between his shoes. From the growing puddle on the chipped stained tile slithered reptilian creatures of every hue and color, horrid creatures with too many legs, small sickening monsters with multiple eyes but no legs at all, formless pulsating slime that inched wormlike toward me.
“The piss of life,” the old man said, cackling. “It’s the piss of life.”
And in the instant before I woke up, I realized that he was God.
I made myself stay away after that.
There was nothing I wanted more than to go out into the woods and continue to care for the budding being I had created, to monitor its growth by moonlight and experience the joy of watching it blossom. But I knew those drives were not mine, I knew they had been imposed on me, and as desperately as I desired to sneak into the forest in the dead of night, I forced myself to remain indoors, trying in vain to fall asleep, fighting the urge to check on the status of the woman I had grown.
Finally, however, I could no longer resist, and exactly two weeks after my last visit, I once again found myself slipping between the trees under the cover of night.
The danger warnings had been heightened over the past week. Two bears had come down into the town, one of them killing a collie, and a mountain lion had mangled a cache of stuffed animals that had inadvertently been left out on a back porch at night. But I was not thinking rationally as I made my way into the woods. I was not thinking at all. I’d made no conscious decision to return, I simply found myself walking through the forest to the old oak, the action as involuntary and devoid of thought as taking a breath.
It was gone.
There was a hole at the foot of the tree, a ragged cavity roughly the size of a woman that was lined with old leaves and a twisted net of roots and smelled of raw sewage. I searched around for footprints or a trail of slime or something that would indicate to me in which direction she had headed, but I was not a woodsman or a tracker, and the forest looked the same to me as it always had.
Staring into the white netted roots that formed the womanly contours of the hole, I was reminded of something I’d seen before, a specific sight or image that nagged at the corner of my mind begging to be identified. The roots were clearly of the same substance that had formed the woman, but their bleached quality, as though they’d been exposed to a blast of radiation or a blinding burst of sunlight, reminded me of another scene entirely.
I stepped closer, peered into the bottom of the space and saw a rotted piece of panty held down by several small gray rocks.
It was the rocks that jiggled my memory.
I suddenly knew where I had to go.
I ran through the trees back to my neighborhood, back to my house, then hopped in my old Jeep and sped down the control road through hills and canyons and forest, braking to a dusty stop on the flat land past Dripping Springs where the resort had been.
I got out of the Jeep. The door of the shack was open, and though the moon was temporarily behind a cloud, leaving the woods in darkness, a soft yellowish light spilled from the small rectangular entryway, granting the surrounding brush a disturbing malevolence.
The last time I had been here, it had been with the fire brigade. That had been scary enough. But now I was all alone, and though part of me wanted to turn tail and run, the part of me that had quit the fire department and vowed never to return to this spot, another more instinctual portion of my brain was urging me forward.
I’m out of here, I could imagine Rossi saying. But Rossi was not here. No one else was here. And though I didn’t really want to, I walked up to the shack, ducked into the doorway.
There were candles lighting the hallway that ran the width of the structure, even more candles in the long narrow room that sloped down to the chamber containing the mummified monkey thing.
God lives there
Like the doorway to the shack, the entrance to the back chamber was open, as though waiting for me, and I accepted the invitation and stepped inside.
There were no candles here, but the entire room was suffused with a rosy glow that reminded me of those Victorian prostitute’s lamps with scarves and stockings thrown over them, although there was no lamp in sight and indeed the illumination did not have an identifiable source.
I stopped just inside the doorway. A naked woman was seated next to the desiccated mummy on a wooden bench that looked older than the earth itself, and there was something about the way she reclined next to the diminutive figure, something about the way her arm was wrapped about its small skeletal shoulder that bespoke intimacy. They’re married, I thought, and the second the idea occurred to me, I knew it was true. She was the wife of that thing. She had always been its intended.
The woman’s skin was no longer a slimy bluish white. Instead it was the soft peach of a newborn infant, its fresh color emphasized by the mysterious rose lighting of the chamber. She had blonde hair like Anna Howell, and her pubic hair was blond, too. Which made the dried blackened features of the creature next to her seem that much more grotesque. The face of that monkey and its hideously gleeful rictus had haunted my nightmares, and I looked now upon that dead parchment skin pulled back from those sharp rotted teeth and felt the same fear I had before. The fear was not tempered by the presence of the foolishly grinning woman next to it. If anything, the juxtaposition of the two was even more frightening.
The woman nodded at me,
wiggling the fingers of her free hand.
She wasn’t a real person, I had to remind myself. She had sprouted from the panties. I had grown her.
As I watched, she spread her legs wide, and from the shadowed cleft between her thighs came flowers, an endless bouquet that flowed out like water from a spring, a floral fountain that cascaded over the edge of the chair onto the floor in an almost liquid wave, covering the dirt and the small gray rocks so completely that the floor of the chamber was buried beneath a rainbow of color. I smelled the perfume of my mother, my grandmother, my aunts and cousins, my teachers, every girlfriend I had ever had. The scents of all women were tied up in that olfactory cornucopia, each of the wonderful flowery fragrances triggering memories of the females in my life, and I was momentarily overwhelmed by nostalgia that was at once happily welcome and profoundly sad.
The blackened figure had not changed its expression—it couldn’t change its expression—but emotion still emanated from its unmoving form, and the feeling I got from it now was one of gratitude. I had given it a wife, and it was thankful.
God was no longer alone.
That was crazythinking. I knew this wasn’t God. It wasn’t even a god. Yet there was no doubt in my mind that the emotion washing over me was real, and though no words were spoken, no thoughts or images transmitted to me, I suddenly understood that the mummified creature wanted to show its gratitude.
