Softspoken

by Lucius Shepard

  “Well, that supports what Rayfield said,” Sanie says. “Maybe the vortex wasn’t strong enough to affect your grandfather, but by when Rayfield was born, maybe it had gotten strong enough to affect a baby.”

  Will mulls this over. “You think Jackson’s doing what my daddy did?”

  “Yeah, I do. I can’t be a hundred percent sure, but that’s what I think.”

  “I expect…” Will does some more blinking and scratching. “I expect we ought to help him, then.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do. But I need your help.”

  “Sir William!” Allie half-sings her dialogue again, sounding like a senile old lady calling to her cat.

  Will waves her to silence. “In a minute.” He scuffs the floor with his foot, inadvertently opening a magazine with a flying saucer on the cover. “What you want I should do?”

  “Give me some of your peyote,” Sanie says. “I need to see the vortex.”

  “Why?”

  “When I talk to Jackson, I have to be convincing. I have to know what I’m saying is true. It’ll take a hard sell to persuade him.”

  Will struggles with the idea. “Peyote’s not for everybody.”

  “I’ve done acid,” Sanie says, not wanting to admit she’s stolen from him. “The last time was years ago, but I didn’t have a problem.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Please! I’ve got to do this.”

  “You can’t always see it,” Will says. “Not unless it’s in a strong cycle. It don’t always run strong.”

  “Come on, Will. I don’t know if I believe in this thing. I’m sorry, but I can’t trust what you’re telling me…and the person who told me about it originally, I can’t trust her, either. I want to see for myself.”

  “All right.” He gives a complaining noise as he stands. “You’re lucky today’s overcast. The clouds make it easier to see. Best place to see it’s from the edge of the woods. You know where the woods fall away about fifty feet behind the house? It’s like a notch? Get back in the notch.”

  He doles out seven gray-green buttons from his box—they look deadlier than before, like little armor-plated bulbs from the Cretaceous—and, when she asks if she needs to take them all, he says, “You said you wanted to see it, right?”

  Feeling imperiled now that she has gotten what she asked for, she’s suddenly frightened of the drug, of what she’ll have to endure, the foul taste, the poisons. Doubts crowd in, but she refuses to let them possess her. Whether she’s crazy or the Bullards are crazy, this is the only way she can think to get a line on the vortex. Still, she tries to delay the experience, asking Will if he and Louise can do anything by way of influencing Jackson. He assures her that they will do their very best. Lingering by the door, she says, “Y’all have fun, now.” And then, addressing herself to Will, making a pale joke, adds, “If you untied her, you might have more fun.”

  Will appears to be giving the idea a turn, but the submissive, slightly miffed, is adamant in her rejection. “Personally,” she says, “I prefer a strong hand.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Out in the November chill, Sanie’s mind goes tumbling and she isn’t sure she’ll be able to focus on anything. Seven buttons turns out to be a potent dose, and why not? It’s almost half-again what she took the last time. And these are special buttons, hand-selected by Sir William, the Master of Boom-Boom. She breaks a rank sweat and sheds the winter coat she’s bundled up in, not because it’s too warm, but because its thickness, its weight, is controlling her. She can’t get comfortable for more than seconds at a time, whether sitting or standing. She walks around for a while, but that makes her dizzy and upsets her stomach, which is bloated and hard as a cantaloupe. Even after she pukes violently over some twigs of which someone—Will, most likely—has constructed a tiny fort at the foot of an oak tree, she wants to puke more, and she doesn’t start to feel better until she moves farther into the woods, away from the house.

  The woods are actually no more than a stand of locust and hickory and ironwood, some blackjack oaks on the fringe, and one lone willow, that separates the Bullard property from a working dairy farm. It only covers a handful of acres, but despite this, despite the barren trees, a few red and brown leaves left clinging, at its center it seems mysterious and deep, with the heavy scents of damp, rotting vegetation, the dripping quiet nicked by her twig-snapping footsteps, the thick mulch of dead leaves, the slow push of gray-dark clouds across the lower sky. She marvels at their complexity, how their edges breed tendrils, wisps that evolve and coalesce with such particularity, she can detect the particles of dust and moisture that comprise each delicate shift. Pattern is everywhere, of course. The world is an infinite mosaic overlay—look closely, peer down through the patterns of leaf, bark, mold, and dirt, and you might eventually arrive at a comprehension of the Grand Design; but she’s not into patterns, she’s impatient to explore the woods and she wanders among the trees, between the gates of their rain-slickered trunks. There are gates everywhere, too—one tree forming a gateway with the next, and so forth, and, as she passes through each, she senses that she is changing, that her edges are dissolving and coalescing into new forms. Her toes turn up beetles and bait worms, a shard of red plastic, a rusted key to no door, a headless action figure, toadstools with empurpled tumescent caps that crumble when they’re nudged, revealing a chambered flesh, the penis everywhere, she’ll write a poem someday…but she doesn’t stop to look at them, she pushes on across the lower sky, breeding a new Sanie from the cloud-smoke of the old.

  She begins to notice crows high in the branches. They creep her, there are so many. She counts to fifty-eight and gives up, because they’re vibrating too rapidly to look at—when she stops the count, she finds they no longer unnerve her and tells herself there’s a larger lesson in that, but it’s one she knows intuitively, and thus she doesn’t pursue it. At the foot of an ironwood tree, one in whose smooth, muscular bark and twisted limbs she perceives a female torso with arms upflung, imprisoned or incapable of movement, awaiting the formation of legs to split from the fathering trunk…Two crows are perched close together in that tree, sharing a branch, and the eyes of the bigger crow appear made of dull silver. She imagines if she were to give a sign, perform an obeisance, it would counsel her or drop some divine token that, in itself, would be a counsel. Yet though she’s tempted to believe the crow is a spirit, it’s not the sort of totem she can accept; she has too cynical a cast of mind to credit nature with the capacity to manifest such a creature.

  She assumes she’s lost, but she emerges from the trees very near where she entered them and shortly after her encounter with the silver-eyed crow, as if by her rejection of it, her right to be in the woods has been revoked, her adventure terminated. She finds her coat, bundles up again—she’s cold and welcomes its constricting weight. She gulps down water from a bottle tucked in a side vent, sits and inspects the packet of bread and cheese she’s brought, but decides she’s not ready to eat. She glances at the house. No vortex. Just the wind currents, visible as translucent swirls against the churning, mud-ugly sky. She pinches the collar tightly about her throat and shivers. The shiver seems to run out of her into the earth, where it joins a profound trembling, a vibration that never ceases, and she’s purged again, this time of cold. Calmness fills her, like she’s a jug held under the surface of a stream. Rather than seeking out experience, she allows it to come to her. The remnants of the cornfield file away to her horizon, strands of cornsilk showing as silver-gray braid against the sere, darkened husks, the stalks all broken and bent akimbo—she imagines if she could see the entire field from above, it would present a pictographic record of the place. Gray shadow cats with gleaming green eyes slalom around the stalks, moving along the separate rows, weaving in and out, disappearing when they draw near, then reappearing at the far ends of the rows and beginning a new approach. The seven-button world. It rocks. She tries to throw a net over her thoughts to keep them from escaping, to think about the thing
she has to think about, but they squirt through the mesh and go scooting off in every direction. This must be her time for faces, because faces start popping up from the dead leaves, from tree bark, from the blotchy patterns on her skin. Different faces. Devils, animals, a movie-star-looking guy with glossy hair. They all have the same wicked grin. It’s beginning to bother her that she can’t settle her mind. The calm she felt must have been a false calm, not the steady, solidifying calm that comes after the peak. Which means she hasn’t peaked yet. She wonders if there’s a remedy for peyote. Valium or something. Her jeans are soaked from the damp ground, her eyes itch, her legs are unaccountably sore. Maybe she should go inside. That could be rough. If she bumps into Jackson…Maybe she should eat first, maybe that would slow her head down. If he gives her one of his stern looks, she’ll hurt herself laughing. And yet the thought of him, the basic concept of Jackson Bullard, alpha male fraud, husband, sobers her a hair. This is serious. For all its amateurish groping and bungling, her Nancy Drew-ish investigation of the paranormal may have terribly serious consequences, and, remembering the thing she needed to think about, the vortex, she turns toward the house, intending to give it the study it deserves.

  The currents of the wind have multiplied and grown larger. They describe sweeping curves that transect the old house, passing through it, around and above it, seeming less currents than a single torsion, a translucent muscle shaped like a Moebius strip that is evolving into a knotted complexity, flowing faster and faster, increasing in size until its volume is three or four times that of the house. It tugs at Sanie, at something inside her, some crucial milligram of soul or spark trapped in the flesh, and its powerful pulse, though silent, is like the oscillations of those huge dynamos utilized in dams. She’s so entranced by its power that, after realizing that this cannot possibly be the wind, she remains entranced for almost a half-hour, unmindful of its potentials, watching as it continues to expand, a great circularity that soon comes to fill all the air with a single disturbance. At length she achieves a distance from the event. There is nothing salubrious about this particular vortex, she decides, if that’s what this monstrosity is. It harbors no tranquil spirit, it obscures no well of benign wisdom. It rages, broken from the rock, from the magma, from the planet’s aether body, from some unguessable source, a random, aberrant discharge of energy, and if vortexes, vortices, or whatever attract spirits, or breed them, if an infant spirit is even now forming in this ravening womb, then by nature it’s a collector, greedy and wholly self-absorbed; it acquires things, bright things that catch its eye and lend it coloration. In that, it reminds her of Jackson.

  These thoughts seem like intuitions, ideas visited upon her, not the product of reason; but they make a kind of sense. Having a neutral value to begin with, the vortex must have derived its character from the Bullards. Had it been born on, say, a mountainside, a place frequented by antelope and birds and butterflies, or atop a Himalayan peak, it might have been a benign, salubrious vortex, but here in Culliver County, it’s steeped in human corruption, in generational sin, and if it has come to incorporate a spirit, or if a spirit is awakening within it, then it is a Bullardian spirit, the great Demon Bullard taking shape in the spring of energy, bathing in its floods. The vortex is alarming, but she doesn’t find it threatening. She doubts its capacity to harm her, unless she remains within its sphere of influence, and that’s not something she will allow to happen.

  Movement closer at hand, in the cornfield, distracts her. Wind shifting the stalks. She’s been made wary by Janine’s story about a herd of wild horses, but none materialize, no cattle or buffalo or Confederate troops. Just crows massing overhead, wheeling beneath the rain-sodden clouds, others flying up from the woods to join the flock, until hundreds of crows are circling the field in a black eddy. Are crows migratory? She supposes they are and that this massing presages a trip south to more temperate climes, to some crow paradise or vacationland where they will kick back on fences and play harmonicas, led in concert by the blind silver-eyed crow who plucks a strand of barbed wire to accompany his gravelly vocals, singing a dirge blues, “I killed a finch in Houston just to watch the feathers fly.” A murder of crows, an extermination, a genocide of crows, gathering above her. She keeps an eye on them, anticipating an attack, but when they abruptly break off wheeling, moving in unison as might a school of fish, they aim straight for the house—they arrow down toward it and merge with the current of the vortex, becoming a black funnel that appears to be pouring itself through a kitchen window. The window isn’t open, yet they pass through the panes without the least sign of breakage, the entire lunatic flock streaming inside and vanishing to the last straggler.

  Sanie might not swear on a stack of Bibles that she saw this, but she would wager a tidy sum on the proposition. She gets to her feet and stands rooted to the spot, waiting for the crows to reappear, but they do not, though the currents of the vortex wash gray, as if their passage has removed a trace of color from them or distilled their negative essence. It’s too early to go in, but she has to risk it. She takes a step, teeters, and recognizes how stoned she is. After a tentative second step, a firmer third, she’s walking with reasonable confidence over the half-frozen ground toward the house, which ripples and bulges, distortions that she’s no longer convinced are hallucinatory. She can’t see the currents of the vortex anymore, neither can she feel its pull, and that unnerves her. But it will be good inside, she tells herself. Warm. She, too, is half-frozen.

  On reaching the rear of the house, she peeks in through a window. The kitchen contains its usual complement of table and chairs, sink, refrigerator. No broken crow bodies fluttering and bloody on the floor. No crows flapping against the walls or perched on the faucets and cupboards. They’ve flown to somewhere else or to nowhere at all. She steps through the door and, where nobody was a second before, there’s Rayfield sitting at the table, poring over a newspaper. The sight jumps her heart rate, but she doesn’t shrink from him. He’s a younger version of himself, hair not yet completely gray; but, like the first time she saw him, he’s naked. The heat is up so high, if he were alive he’d be comfortable. He turns the page. Folds it back, irons it flat with the heel of his before continuing to read. Exactly the way Jackson does it. The paper is the March 12, 1991, edition of the Edenburg Courier, an enterprise long since lapsed into bankruptcy.

  The abstract pattern on the linoleum is floating up from the ochre tiles, and the whole room is busy with minute shiftings of a similar nature. Rayfield is the only stable form. The air’s cooler close to him. Sanie eases through the door into the corridor, which looks no less unstable, the walls undulating, the wallpaper a pointillist confusion, but is unpopulated. The study door’s open. Taking a chance, she peeks inside. Nary a Jackson in sight. She cracks the front door and discovers the SUV missing from its parking spot. He must have gone into town for copies—he’ll be upset that she wasn’t around to run the errand. She drops into his desk chair, grateful for the chance to relax amid this absence of Jackson. It occurs to her that she hasn’t a clue what he’s been doing in here. The words on the papers spread across the desktop hop about like fleas. She’s not up to reading. In the shallow center drawer are pens, paper clips, thumb tacks, scissors, and so on. One side drawer is filled by a stack of skin magazines with slick, bright covers. The topmost displays two women who have just finished performing oral sex on a man, not depicted, and are licking copious amounts of fake sperm off each other’s face. Frosted Faces reads the title in letters that resemble dripping ice cream.

  “What the fuck,” she says.

  She examines the other magazines. Bondage Sluts, Cum City Girls, Shaved Teenies, and the like. Her personal favorite, Cumlovers Anonymous, features women (many of them portly) who are masked and blindfolded. Each is festooned with miniature Post-its, denoting pages—she assumes—with especially titillating pictures. From a second side drawer she unearths an entire series of a rag entitled Oral Dungeon, numbers I-XVI. So this is what he’s been
doing? Spanking the monkey to the tune of this crap? She can’t believe it. They’re Will’s, probably. Or Rayfield’s. Janine said he had some serious kinks. Yet maybe a taste for bondage runs in the family and Jackson’s been repressing. A third drawer yields a stack of magazines devoted to horny housewives, girls next door, hitchhiking coeds, suburban moms. The fates of these innocents are not much different from those of their slutty counterparts. She leafs through one, pauses at a page to which a Post-it is affixed. She flips to another marked page, another, and another yet. She leafs through the entire magazine, a couple of magazines, and is led to the conclusion that all the women singled out for a Post-it in Moms I’d Love To Fuck, No. 7 and Cocksucker U bear a strong resemblance to hers truly, Sanie Bullard. She’s amused, she’s sad, and then she’s angry. As angry as the drug permits her to be. If these magazines belong to Jackson, as now she suspects they do…Her idea of hot fun does not involve being hogtied.

  She slips the magazines back into the drawer. They’re more information than she needs. There is a vortex. Whatever it’s doing can’t be good. That’s the important stuff. Jackson’s sexual predilections are no longer her concern. She grips the armrests and looks up, preparing to stand. Rayfield’s bending over the desk, frowning, his liver-spotted face and glitter-pointed eyes inches away. Her heart jolts, she screams and shoves back the chair until it hits the bookcase. She swings her fist, trying to punch him and gives a yell, hoping to frighten him away. He winks out of existence. Alert to every flicker, every photic flaw in her vision, she steals toward the study door. The corridor is still empty. She stands listening to the house creaking like an old ship in a choppy sea, and then she pounds up the stairs, keeping her eyes low, not wanting to see what’s waiting, ignoring the ghosts, the creatures of the vortex gathered to greet her with their frail subzero breath, and slams the bedroom door behind her, collapses on the bed. The dimness closes in, muffling her like a quilt, and she switches on a bedside lamp. Crummy yellow light, it hurts her eyes, but she leaves the lamp on, preferring it to the gloom.