by S. T. Joshi
Their two kids had been climbing the walls. Not literally, of course, but that’s the way Angie had expressed it. The only place they had to play was the motel parking lot. As far as he was concerned they should let them loose out there—the children could learn a few lessons about taking care of themselves. If they saw a car coming, let them learn to get out of the way. But Angie wouldn’t allow it. He was their father, of course—they had his wise blood in their bodies. He could have insisted. But sometimes you let the mother have the final say where the care of the children is concerned.
Walker’s own mother let him wander loose from the time he was six years old—that had been her way. It didn’t mean she had no caring in her for him. Actually, he had no idea how she felt. She could have felt anything, or nothing. That was simply the way she was.
He’d never met his father, but he felt as if he knew him—certainly he could feel him. She’d lain with a hundred men or more, so it could have been anyone, or anything he supposed. But Walker felt he’d know his father if he saw him, however he manifested himself. It never bothered him. And if he did see this creature, his father, he wasn’t even sure he’d say hello. But he might have questions. He might want a sample of his blood. He might want to see what happened if he poured his father’s blood onto the grounds of the Crossroads.
The boy—they’d named him Jack—threw something at the girl. Gillian, or Ginger, depending on the day. Walker had never quite found a name he’d really liked for her, or even remembered from one day to the next. Walker didn’t know what the boy tried to hit her with—he never saw anything. He didn’t watch them very closely. And there was no sense in asking them—they were both little liars. That was okay with him—in his experience most human beings didn’t respond well to the truth in the best of cases. These children were probably better off lying.
But Angie wouldn’t stop. “They’re going to grow up to be monsters! Both of them! Jack slaps her. Gillian kicks him. This crap goes on all day! Do you even care how they might turn out?”
“Of course I care,” he’d lied. Because it would have been inconvenient if Angie had fully understood his basic attitude toward their children. He couldn’t have her attempting to take the children and leave before things had completed. “I’ll talk to them.” The relief in her face almost made him smile.
The children looked up at him sullenly, defiantly. This was good, he thought. Most children were naturally afraid of him. “Jack, what did you throw at her?” he asked.
“It was a rock,” Gillian or Ginger said. Walker slapped her hard across the face, her little head rocking like a string puppet’s.
“I asked Jack,” he explained.
She didn’t cry, just stared at him, a bubble of blood hanging from one nostril.
“It was a rock,” Jack said quietly. Walker examined his son’s face. Something dark and distant appeared to be swimming in his light green eyes. Angie’s eyes were also that color, but Walker had never seen anything swimming there.
“Would it have made you feel badly if you had really hurt her?”
Jack stared up at him dully. Then the boy turned to his sister and they looked at each other. Then they both looked back up at Walker.
“I don’t know,” Jack replied.
“If you continue to behave this way where other people can see you, eventually you may be detained and imprisoned. It’s your decision, but that is something to think about. Right now, you are upsetting your mother. You do not want to do that. You upset her and she becomes troublesome for me. You do not want that, do you understand?” Both children nodded. “Very well, go play quietly for awhile. Stay out of my field of vision.”
After they left Walker saw that a couple of drops of his daughter’s blood were resting on top of the sand. He kicked at them and they scurried away.
When they’d first checked in the Crossroads had been practically empty, just a single elderly couple with a camper who’d checked out the very next day. But since then a series of single guests and families had wandered in, almost unnoticeable at first since they mostly came in during the night, but the last couple of days there had been a steady stream, so by week’s end the motel was full. Still, more people came into the parking lot, or stopped in the empty land around the building, some on foot with backpacks who set up small tents or lean-tos, others in cars they could sleep in. Despite their numbers, these new visitors were relatively quiet, remaining in their rooms or whatever shelter they’d managed, or gathering casually to talk quietly amongst themselves. Many had no particular focus to their activities, but some could not keep their eyes off that horizon far beyond the motel, with its vague suggestion of dunes and mesas shimmering liquidly in the heat.
“Why are they all here?” Angie eventually came around to asking.
“They’re part of some traveling church group. They’ll be on their way after they rest, I’m told.”
For the first time she looked doubtful about one of his improvised explanations, but she said nothing.
As more people gathered his son and daughter became steadily more subdued, until eventually they were little more than phantom versions of their former selves, walking slowly through the crowd, looking carefully at every one of them, but not speaking to them, even when some of the newcomers asked them questions.
This continued for a day or two, and although Walker could see a great deal of nervousness, a great many anxious gestures and aimless whispering, and although his sense of the bottled-up energy contained in this one location unexpectedly made his own nerves ragged, there was no explosion, and no outward signs of violence. Some of the people in the crowd actually appeared to be paralyzed. One young, dark-bearded fellow had stood by the outside elbow of the motel for two days, Walker was sure, without moving at all. Parts of the man’s cheeks had turned scarlet and begun to blister.
He noticed that the longer the people stayed here, interacting, soaking up one another’s presence, the more they appeared to resemble one another, and him, and his children, as if they had gathered here for some large family reunion. Walker wondered if he were to cut one of them if their blood would also walk, and he was almost sure it would.
He took his morning barefoot walk—why his own feet hadn’t burned he had no idea, he didn’t really even care to know—by the invisible pool. An old woman crouched there like some sort of ape. At first he thought she was humming, but as he passed her he realized she was speaking low and rapidly, and completely incomprehensibly. She sounded vaguely Germanic, but he suspected her speech wasn’t anything but her own spontaneous creation.
He gradually became aware of a rancid stink carried on the dry desert wind. Looking around he saw that those who had sought shelter outside the poor accommodations of the Crossroads were up and about, although moving slowly. When he went toward them, it quickly became obvious that they were the source of the smell.
A tall woman with long dark hair approached him. “You seem familiar,” she said weakly, and raised her hand as if to touch his face. He stepped back quickly, and it wasn’t because he now saw that a portion of the left cheek of her otherwise beautiful face appeared melted, but because he’d never liked the idea of strangers touching him. He knew this made little sense because he’d always been a lone figure among strangers. Angie, certainly, was a stranger as far as he was concerned, and his children Jack and (what was the girl’s name?) little better.
Then an elderly man appeared beside her, and a young boy, all with bubbling, disease-ridden skin. Walker darted past them, and into a crowd of grasping, distorted hands, blisters bursting open on raw, burnt-looking skin. He squirmed his way out, but not without soiling himself with their secretions.
He felt embarrassed to be so squeamish. Was he any different than they? He’d seen the dark familiar shapes swimming in their eyes like the reflections of still-evolving life forms. Clearly, he was no longer alone in the world, because what he had seen in them was both familiar and vaguely familial. But it was an uncomfortable, even
an appalling knowledge.
He was some kind of mongrel, a blending of two disparate species, and yet so were they. He doubted any of them had known their fathers. His own children were their blood kin, but at least they knew their father.
The two most familiar children came out of the crowd and gazed at him, their faces running with changes. He felt a kind of unknowable loss, for a kind of kinship that had never been completely his, for the simpler Sunday afternoon picnic world of humanity that would now be forever out of his reach.
Angie came outside for her children then, bellowing the dumb unmelodic scream of a despairing cow, and he struck her down with indifferent blows from both suddenly-so-leaden hands. She had been his last possible door into humanity, and he had slammed her irrevocably closed. Her children looked on as unconcerned as an incursion of sand over an abandoned threshold.
And now they’ve come out of those distant mesas and deserts, on their astounding black wings, on their thousand-legged spines, their mouths open and humming like the excited blood of ten thousand boiling insects, like the secret longings of the bestial herd, like his blood preparing to leave the confines of vein, like his blood crawling out of the midnight of collective pain, the liquid horizon unfolding.
And out of that shimmering line the fathers come to reclaim their children, the keepers of their dark blood. And Walker must collapse in surrender as these old fathers out of the despairing nights of human frailty, in endless rebellion from the laws of the physical universe, these fathers, these cruel fathers, consume.
* * *
The Wilcox Remainder
BRIAN EVENSON
Brian Evenson is the author of ten books of fiction. His novel Last Days (Underland Press, 2006) won the ALA/RUSA award for best horror novel of the year. Other books include The Wavering Knife (FC2, 2004), The Open Curtain (Coffee House Press, 2006), and Fugue State (Coffee House Press, 2009). His work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Slovenian. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he directs Brown University’s Literary Arts Program.
* * *
1.
NOT LONG AGO, WHILE VISITING MY AUNT ON THE other side of Providence in what she refers to as a resort but which, as the sign outside testifies, is a “mental hospital” (and which until just a few decades ago was called, more bluntly and more honestly, Butler Hospital for the Insane), I was buttonholed by a man who at first I took to be an orderly. In a confidential whisper, he claimed he had something to tell me. Thinking it must be about my aunt and her rapidly declining condition, I acquiesced. Gradually, as his speech quickened and then became more and more frantic, as his gestures grew increasingly erratic, I realized my mistake. However, afraid of alarming him into doing something drastic, I feigned attention and made no sudden moves until the moment when three actual orderlies approached, immobilized the fellow after a struggle, and dragged him screaming away.
It was only near the end of the episode, when I saw the man extract from a pocket a sharp tongue of glass with one end imperfectly wrapped in cloth and use it to hold the orderlies temporarily at bay, that I began to realize what danger I had been in. As he was immobilized and one of the orderlies tried to bandage the man’s very badly cut hand, I became unsteady on my feet and had to lean against the wall. I must have been pale, for one of the men leading the inmate away parted from his companions and returned to make certain of my condition. When he had assured himself that I had partially recovered, he led me not to the exit but to the director’s office. Giving me a plastic cup of water and forcing me to sit, he extracted from me the promise to wait there until I recovered.
* * *
AT FIRST MY CONDITION WAS SUCH THAT I DID NOT PAY the office itself much heed, and was indeed little aware of my own actions. My tie had been loosened and collar undone without my having any clear memory of my hands having done so. The plastic cup had been drained dry, and yet my mouth itself was still chalky and raw. My hands, I saw, were still shaking and making strange roiling movements as if they were being directed by a mind other than my own. It was only with a great deal of effort that I mastered myself and, to distract myself, rose to my feet and began to pace the room.
There was nothing extraordinary about the office itself. Dominating the room was a ponderous oak desk, big enough that it seemed impossible that it might have once shouldered its way through the door. Its surface was covered with a scuffed green leather blotter, a single sheet of creamy hospital stationery arranged carefully in its exact center. Four pens were arranged in a meticulous line beside the stationery. The chair I had been sitting in was a well-worn leather-backed and leather-seated chair of sturdy workmanship, perhaps an antique though in good condition. A similar chair sat on the other side of the desk and behind it, tight against the back wall, was a glass-fronted bookcase. This was full of old nineteenth-century medical books as well as, on a lower shelf, a sequence of gilt and leather-bound literary volumes. The smell of the place was of cracked leather and dust, the air fumid with motes of dust turning slowly in the shaft of sunlight coming through a solitary window.
I paced back and forth. I was, I told myself, recovered: I was now in a condition to leave. And yet I did not leave. What was the patient trying to say to me? I wondered. Despite giving the impression of listening in trying to appease him, I had let his words drift past me, had taken little in, and it was only with difficulty that I could recapture their gist. And his way of speaking had been such that very quickly words had been replaced by garbled moans and shrieks. But these had had a particular, peculiar cadence to them—as if his noises were not at all random but intentional. As if he were speaking an unknown but hideous language.
But what language? I thought, my feet swinging me past the bookcase again until I stopped there at one end, thinking. It was no language with which I, despite my university training, had any familiarity. No, I tried to tell myself. I well knew from my experience with my aunt that the unbalanced mind can convince itself that it is free of aberration, that the structure of a language does not a language make.
And yet, I could not forget the man, his imploring look, the way he grabbed my sleeve, the things he had said in plain English before his descent into the cluttered and hard sounds that seemed like the issue of no human throat. They must not be allowed, he had told me, tightening his grip on my jacket. No, he had said, the statue, it wants to proliferate. I think that is what he said—but what could it mean for a statue to proliferate? Take it, he hissed. Warn them, unless it was learn them. Before they come, he said.
And then his eyes went glassy and he spat a sound that sounded more like the snarl of a dog, no human word I knew, and it was all I could do not to draw away.
* * *
FOR SOME TIME, I REALIZED, I HAD BEEN STANDING before the bookcase, unmoving, staring at something without seeing it. At first I focused on the glass itself, on my faded reflection in it, but no, that wasn’t it. Instead, there, behind the glass, was a strange clay image, a figurine that at first glance looked unfinished, half-formed. I moved my head to block the light and see the thing better, and then, still not satisfied, reached up and opened the glass.
From there it was a small thing to pick the figure up. It was, I now could see, finished after all, humanoid in form but hideous in appearance, unnaturally squat. In place of a head it had a sloping protuberance, shapeless on the top and strangely bristling near where it joined the figure’s shoulders. I found it at once alluring and disturbing. It exerted a certain fascination, though thinking now objectively of why that should be the case, I am at a loss to explain why. Perhaps it was because it was not quite like anything I had ever seen before. It wasn’t ancient but rather of recent manufacture, perhaps the work of one of the patients. What a strange statue, I thought, and, thinking that, I thought again of my encounter and half wondered if this was the statue that wanted to proliferate itself, whatever that meant. Before I knew it, almost without meaning to, I had slipped the thing into my pocke
t and closed the glass door.
* * *
I MIGHT HAVE LEFT THEN HAD THE HOSPITAL’S DIRECTOR not suddenly appeared. He was a stout older gentleman, face red but eye steady, and though he must have been surprised to find someone in his office, he did not betray any hesitation or surprise. Instead, he extended his hand and took mine in his firm grip. He introduced himself as Wilcox and admitted, when I questioned him, that he was a member of Providence’s illustrious Wilcox family—was, so he claimed, one of the younger sons of long-deceased Anthony Wilcox.
Haltingly, I told him which of his inmates I was connected to. He asked me if something was wrong, if there was something about my aunt’s situation that needed attention. I quickly assured him that no, everything was fine as far as she was concerned. Since he still waited attentively, I explained to him the situation that had led me to his office.
“Ah,” he said, and released my hand. “You’ve had the dubious pleasure of meeting Henry.”
I explained that the man hadn’t shared with me his name.
“And what did he share with you?” he asked, and I could almost see his gaze sharpening, tightening on me. “What did he tell you?”
I don’t know what stopped me from telling him the story in detail. Perhaps it was his own manner, his sudden almost rapacious attentiveness. Perhaps it was simply that one cannot but be loth to say anything within the walls of a madhouse that might cause your own sanity to be called into question. In any event, I claimed that Henry had been so disordered that I hadn’t understood a thing. Once I had convinced him of this, and convinced him as well that even had I heard something I would have paid it no heed, he was quick to usher me out of his office and lead me down the stairs to the exit.
2.
IT IS AT THIS POINT THAT MY TALE BEGINS TO TURN dubious. Sometimes I do not believe it myself. If I was reluctant to tell a hospital director the details of my encounter with the inmate named Henry, imagine how much more reluctant I would be to tell him of the matters that follow.
