“Your air conditioners are a problem.”
Her father contorted his hand to slither free of the grasp. “How so?”
“The units stick out from the sides. That’s not allowed. It’ll have to be resolved or you’ll get a letter.”
Rachel turned to see the window units protruding as metallic warts from the living room and the kitchen on the side. They gave a rattle and hum she had not noticed before. The drone of the machinery and the gurgle of chemicals drawing energy from the very air blended with the airfield noise of approaches and departures.
People weren’t meant to fly, she thought. The words traveled through her mind like temporary fog and she could not explain what spawned them. On its heels, she thought, People write letters because there is no threat of swordplay any longer.
“We don’t have central air,” Mr. Rathburn said. “They were installed before we moved in. They were there when we bought the house.”
The man shrugged. “The guy before you was quite a monster. We had to place a lien on his property because he would not remove them. It was very ugly and the house was taken out from under him. Nasty business. My wife is on the Board and she’s drafting up a letter now. I just came to give you a chance to deal with it before it came to all that.”
“It’s a hundred degrees out.”
The fellow wiped his forehead and nodded. “I know. Relentless, isn’t it. She told me to ask you to wash the casserole dish before you return it, please.”
“Of course. Tell her we said thank you… and it was delicious, of course.”
Welcomed with the poison of life, thought Rachel.
“Very kind of you.” The husband of the board member turned to leave with his hands in his pockets, pulling the shorts tight over the curve of his cheeks. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
Her father stepped into the grass of the side yard. With one hand over his eyes, he waved above his head with the other. Distorted shadows danced across the sod squares around his feet.
One of the creatures mauling the fence met Mr. Rathburn’s eyes and wandered forward at his beckoning. “Sir?”
“I need the window units taken out. Can you assist me with that?”
The angular being cut his eyes back at the house, making Rachel think that some magic hung over the air conditioners wherein they could only be seen when one specifically looked for them and decided to see them. “A hammer can break most anything that duct tape can fix. Can we salvage the copper?”
“If you’ll accept that as partial payment. Sure.”
The creature wandered behind the garage and Rachel heard the hammers begin to steal the cold air from inside. She thought she should probably get out of the sun, but it would soon be as hot inside as out, so what was the point really?
She heard the metal door of the mailbox scream open and closed. Rachel turned and saw a young, porcelain-skinned girl in a flowered sundress. She might have been a few years younger than Rachel herself. Rachel raised her hand to wave, but the girl turned and shuffled away diagonally across the street.
Rachel stared at the mailbox a moment before she crossed the driveway toward the street. With the air conditioners silent, she heard the roar of engines between hammer blows. Two aircraft crossed in the air—one coming, one going.
In the mailbox, she found an unsealed envelope. RATHBURN blocked in black-penned characters across the front. She thumbed open the flap and slipped out the folded page. It was typed and mentioned both the fence and the unsightly units. She assumed that meant the air conditioners, but the vague wording left a lot open to interpretation. The final paragraph addressed the house itself. Pink was not an approved color and aluminum not an approved material. It all had to come down.
She walked up the drive and her father stepped out to meet her. She handed over the letter without trying to explain. She watched his expression shift darker as he processed all the information. He did not look up from the page before walking around the side of the house.
Rachel watched three more planes rise into the air. They were all leaving.
Who doesn’t have central air, she thought in the absent manner in which her thoughts seemed to be forming and passing. The heat was doing a number on her ability to form complete sentences.
The house screamed and she took a step away. The sun-wrinkled creatures that had touched her things and hammered apart the fence and air units for her father, now used pry bars and sledge hammers on the structure itself. She watched without comprehension as the siding peeled away from the insulation in drastic curls. Tentacles of pink siding with primer grey underneath reached above the roof and twisted around at her like mindless claws. More pink from the exposed bags of insulation spilled out puffy and sharp. She knew if she touched the threads of fiberglass, she would be cut thousands of times and itch without end.
Green and purple spots overtook her vision and prevented her from focusing on the unreal destruction. She could not wrap her mind around this being her home. She could not move her feet to go inside the stuffy belly of the pink-clawed beast, but she did not desire to remain in the Scully, Alabama sun to bake alive.
She could not form sentences in her thoughts any longer, even in the misty, disconnected way she had done before. All the edges blurred out of her vision and the house became shapes and colors that defied description. Her madness was surely heat exhaustion and a trick of the light, but it was madness just the same. She did not remember having a brother.
The engine noise changed tone, but she could not lift her eyes to look this time. She could not form a judgment of whether the craft approached or escaped. Rachel could not form a coherent wish to be upon the craft and out of the driveway any longer. She stood facing the house without really seeing it.
Soon she only saw the spots and Rachel whispered, “Stars? Not meant to voyage far…”
When she fell and struck her head on the concrete, she did not feel it. One of the movers set aside his tools and lifted her in his hairy, sweaty arms. Like her delicates and the family’s kitchen table before her, he carried her inside to become part of the home. She remained lost in a sea of blackness within her mind, ignorant that she was moving at all.
SHOO FLY PIE AND APPLE PAN DOWDY
Gary A. Braunbeck
“Man is a god in ruins.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
You can find what’s left of the Ben Hai Bastards hanging out on the benches around the courthouse, two soldiers who camped with their platoon on the stinky muddy-ass shores of the Ben Hai River along the DMZ on Vietnam’s 17th Parallel. They’ll be happy to tell you that the way you became an Official Bastard was to wade out into the river until you reached the five-kilometer mark (any farther violated the Geneva Accords and it would have been considered an act of aggression, giving the North Vietnamese camped on the other muddy-ass side a reason to take aim and turn you into red-foaming cottage cheese). Once you were there, you had to completely submerge yourself for at least three Jody-counts (“Got a gal lives on the hill, she won’t fuck but her sister will, sound off one two, sound off, three four…”) before showing your face again. Not as easy as it sounds they’ll tell you, these two soldiers who fought a war they didn’t believe in and came home to a country that didn’t want them, but what the hell? It’s fall of 1968 and they’re not a part of it anymore, let LBJ and his bought-and-paid-for war-mongering cronies escalate all the hell they want, these boys am done, hear what I’m saying?
Yes, you’ll find them hanging out on the benches around the courthouse, two decorated Cedar Hill veterans to whom no one will talk, but you’re a little different, aren’t you? A curious sort, you consider yourself to be a compassionate person, a person who joined protests against the war and wrote letters to the proper congressmen, so today you’re going to sit down and have a chat with them, see what all the bleak rumors and worried whispers and anxious hubbub is all about.
The first one you see is called “Shooter” because he just sits there with a six-round pistol pressed ag
ainst his temple, continuously pulling the trigger so the cylinder moves in its jerky clockwise motion, click-click-click-click-click-click! It doesn’t seem to bother him—and why should it? The gun is obviously empty—hell, it might not even be a real gun. But there he sits, every day, click-clicking the day away, almost but not quite smiling with every new cycle.
It’s his buddy, the one called Rafe, who does the talking for both of them, and after introducing yourself and taking Rafe’s offered cigarette, you sit there smoking and listening as he tells you this story, one that will damage—and maybe eventually fracture into ruins—the world you thought you knew:
“Take a good look at Shooter’s gun, will ya? Do you see? Yeah, it’s real, all right, and more than that, it’s loaded—see how the sunlight glints off the bullets in the chambers? You oughtta see the look on your face. Ever since the day we got home, he’s been trying to check out, but it ain’t happening. The gun’s in perfect working order—I know because it’s mine. See, him and me, we… we saw things in that river, things that didn’t fuckin’ stay there once we came back to shore. We were gonna check out together. We don’t sleep much and have to be careful about where we look because those things are always nearby someplace, looking like normal shit to you—knots of tree bark, shapes in clouds, patterns in wallpaper or sloppy drywall or an old lady’s quilt—stuff that you see every day but never think might be looking back at you, just waiting for its chance.
“One of the guys with us, he had this groovy hash that he called Shoo Fly Pie laced with some kind of acid he called Apple Pan Dowdy—he got the names from an old Stan Kenton song that he was always humming to himself. Anyway, before Shooter and me went into the river we got good and baked on the stuff so neither one of us was feeling any pain and thought we could take out all the gooks across the Ben Hai single-handedly if we needed to. We were gonna be the meanest Bastards yet, you know it.
“So it gets to be around noon—you had to do this in the middle of the day because nighttime baptisms were for pussies. You’re gonna be a Bastard, you did it at high noon, right in view of the North Vietnamese—and don’t think those fuckers didn’t watch us when we started wading out. You could tell they were just waiting for us to cross the middle of the river so they could open fire. It was like that every time someone was baptized.
“So me and Shooter, out we go, and not hesitant-like, nosir, we strutted out there like we owned the place, and when we got to within the five-kilometer mark, under we went—which wasn’t that much of a deal since by the time you got there the water was up to your chin. Down we went, the Jody-counts going through our heads, sounding off, one-two-three-four, one-two, three-four—doing that three times until it felt like our lungs were gonna squirt out through our assholes, and when we started to stand up, to get our heads above the surface, both him and me heard a… it wasn’t like a real voice, but the sound of the water, it stopped being that slapping, bubbling, whooshing sound you get in your ears when you’re swimming or under water… it became kind of like someone singing from way off in the distance, an echo, right? And it kept singing these five words over and over: In His house at R’lyeh… In His house at R’lyeh… It was the most beautiful voice I ever heard, even though it sounded like it was coming from the mouth of something rotten, something decayed and putrid. It reminded me of something I read about once, about this archeologist who found an old sealed vase that was covered in grime and mold, but he accidentally dropped it, and turns out there was a rose inside, a rose from maybe two thousand years ago, and as soon as it was exposed to the air, it crumbled into dust—but not before he caught a whiff of its scent, a smell from ancient times, right? For that one second, he was smelling what it smelled like thousands of years ago, and maybe, in that moment, he was, like, in two places at once. He’s standing there in this tomb with this shattered vase at his feet, but… in a way… also transported back to another time, because of the scent of that ancient rose.
“It was like that for us those last few seconds we were under the water, we were in two places at once because of that voice. We were there in the river but we were also in ‘His house at R’lyeh—wherever that is, whoever the fuck ‘He’ is. It was scary as hell but it was also… I dunno… kind of liberating is the best word for it, I think. We weren’t in our bodies anymore, we were part of the river, part of the mud, part of the death and life and night sounds and everything that flies through the sky… it was incredible. It was the best I’d felt since getting in-country. It was maybe the best I’d felt in my entire life. If I hadn’t needed to breathe again I would have been happy to stay down there with that voice and the feeling of liberation from the physical and all the goddam limitations the body has to struggle with. It was the closest thing to bliss that I’ve ever felt. And then Shooter and me, we made a mistake.
“We opened our eyes.
“Man, I can’t even begin to describe the things we saw coming at us, surrounding us, trying to ram deformed fingers into our mouths or eyes. These things, they looked like someone had fucked a fish and the fish gave birth to these things that were part fish and part human—and I’m not talking about mermaids or the Creature From the Black Lagoon or shit like that, so get that look off your face, okay? And it wasn’t just these deformed fish-things that were under there with us. There were things with tattered wings and faces with no eyes, things with tentacles and guts as big as boulders, terrible things, horrible things. For a moment I thought maybe all this was because of the Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy, that shit was major strong, but then one of these things, it grabbed me around the chest from behind. It was like a tentacle but it had an elbow and a human-like hand at the end, but this hand, it had seven fingers, triple-jointed things, inhuman. And it was covered in this glistening slime that pulsed like it was breathing. I tried to kick it away, I tried pulling at it, but it was strong, stronger than anything I’d ever had to face. The hand, it scraped up my chest toward my face—you ought to see the scars it left on my torso—and once it got to my face it forced my mouth open, I mean wrenched my jaw down, and it slid its fingers into my mouth and—and this is the most crazy part—even though it had these claws it didn’t cut my inside cheeks or tear out my tongue or anything. It just sort of patted the inside of my mouth, like a mother pats a kid’s head when that kid is upset—everything’s all right, honey, don’t you worry—that sort of thing. I looked over and saw that one of the fish-things, it was all wrapped around Shooter like it was trying to mate with him or something, and it was kissing him, its gills throbbing in and out like it was getting really excited.
“And then that voice, that singing voice, said, ‘For you, the veil is forever lifted, and the worlds will be forever split, again and again.’ Then the thing let go of me and the thing that was kissing Shooter let go of him and we bolted to the surface so fast a couple of the North Vietnamese on the other side grabbed their weapons like a curse from heaven was coming down on their unworthy heads. And it wasn’t just them who were unworthy. Shooter and me, we now know that all of us are unworthy. We’re like ants in an anthill and those things in the river, they serve something even more terrifying, even more ancient, and it’s angry. Ohgod, is it angry. To it, we’re just ants scrambling around, and it wouldn’t bother to try communicating with us no more than someone like, oh, say, fucking Pizarro when he was marching to Peru would stop at the anthill and try to communicate with all the scrambling insects. We are nothing to it, and it is the thing holding our reality together. We’re living in a false vacuum and don’t even realize it.
“You see, our universe is actually in a false phase state as part of a larger universe, like if it were a temporary thing. It’s like a pot of boiling water, and we’re just inside a bubble forming at the bottom of the pot. Eventually this false vacuum has to pop, even after billions of years in this false state, and we and everything we know in our visible universe will disappear in an instant with no warning whatsoever and there is nothing we can do about it and this thing,
this ancient being that those monsters in the river serve and worship, it’s just sitting there, watching the bubble form, angry and alone, waiting for the moment it decides to stick one of its clawed fingers into the pot and end everything.
“Ever since that afternoon, Shooter and me, we can’t get away from these things, these beings you can’t see or hear or smell or sense. They’re everywhere, all around us. You can’t see them because there’s a veil, right, a veil of perception that you can’t break through but they can, and they are. We don’t sleep inside anymore; we can’t, because for me and Shooter, that veil is fucking gone. These things form from the shapes in wallpaper or plaster or concrete, they come out of twisted bed sheets or the stains on a floor or a mattress, they jump out of ripples in sink or toilet water, they materialize through the static on a television screen after the station goes off the air—hell, one of them even came out of the goddamn test pattern one night when we chanced staying at the Open Shelter! And outside? Jesus—they pull themselves together through the twisted bark of trees, they crawl out of mud puddles clogged with twigs and bones of dead birds and feral animal shit, they emerge from the glistening mold patterns on stone or brick walls, they wriggle into shape through the strands of cobwebs, the cracks in layers of paint, the shadows between the streetlights, the scarred wood of broken doors, the lingering smoke from the factory chimneys, even the dents in the cars that pass by.
“And all of them, every jack-one of these creatures, they let us know, they remind us, that when that voice said ‘forever’ to us that day, it cursed us. That’s why Shooter’s gun will never fire, even though it’s loaded and in perfect working order. We’re being slowly pulled from this universe, him and me. Each time he finishes a round with that gun, the universe splits and the bubble gets a little bigger because of it. We’re not going to have to wait for that ancient thing, whatever it is, to pop the bubble—eventually the universe will split so much that maybe, maybe we’ll pop the bubble on our own. But maybe we’re also moving toward some kind of… I dunno… some kind of metaphysical evolution that will make us part of that being watching the bubble grow.
Shadows Over Main Street, Volume 2 Page 17
