Stranger Realms

by Jarred Martin

  The man in front laughed and said “Si te casas conmigo, tu hijo no será un bastardo!” and laughed again. She understood the last word well enough, and left the cab after that. He pulled away saying something else unpleasant and left her alone before the looming stucco edifice. She was suddenly aware of the abundance of stray dogs wandering around the streets, all skinny and short haired, exploring every crevice for discarded food.

  She went a couple of steps up to a pastel green door and saw that it had a sliding peephole window, the kind through which secret words were uttered. She unfolded the paper in her hands, not knowing any secret words. It would have to do. She knocked. A minute later she saw the deep-set brown eyes of a woman through the peephole. Evelyn held the paper up to her eyeline and said “ Senora Besesino? Am I saying this right? She repeated the word once more and the dark eyes stared at her for another moment through the door before replying “si.” The trap slid closed, and Evelyn took a step back hearing the locks turn and echo like a prison cell.

  Senora Besesino opened the door. “Come in.” She was a slight woman in a green dress, her hair was jet black and held up with pins. She looked once at the street behind Evelyn, at the roaming dogs, once before pulling the door shut. She looked at her for a long while before asking in heavily accented English. “You are sick?” She patted her own stomach for emphasis. “You have the little boy inside you?”

  “Yes,” said Evelyn.

  “Okay, said Besesino. She held her hand out. “The money.”

  Evelyn paid her, waited while she counted it, nodded when she was done and stuck it down the front of her dress.

  “Okay. Come.”

  She followed the Mexican woman through the hall and they came to a staircase. Senora Besesino went up and Evelyn followed

  Senora Besesino stopped at a point and turned around. “You are afraid?”

  “Yes,” she admitted

  “There is no fear for you.” Senora Besesino waved her hand and the two of them started back up the stairs, their heels clicking against he polished wood. “Fear is the little boy,” she continued. “its is no good for you to see him. Later. You will see him later, but right now is the bad time. You are in the movies? They say the camera steal your . . .” She paused in her speech, a puzzled look on her face. “ What is the word?”

  “I don't understand,” said Evelyn.

  The older woman turned and glared at her before hurrying up the rest of the stairs. She said no more as she turned down another corridor. They passed several closed doors. Evelyn heard a lewd panting behind one, like a human imitating a dog. She heard screaming behind another, the sound of something heavy and hard smacking something soft. Senora Besesino apparent did not hear these things or was simply not bothered by them. They eventually came to a room, to which Senora Besesino produced a key, and proceed to unlock. She did not go in.

  “Here,” she commanded. “You wait for the doctor. He will come for you. I will go now. He will come if you wait for him.”

  Evelyn went inside and Senora Besesino slammed the door behind her. She could hear the lock turn, and when she tried the handle, testing it slowly and quietly in case the older woman could still hear her, she found she was unable to open it.

  There was not much besides herself in the room: a table, a counter top with something covered by a sheet sitting on it. She looked down at the floor and saw that there were bloodstains set deep in the the wood grain, as if someone had tried to clean the room but not very hard. She saw that the table was like this too, and she shuddered, thinking about what had happened to it in earlier days; a sudden vision of scared girls lying on it, a disinterested medicine man skewering the mysteries of her sex with an unraveled wire coat hanger, deep within her, ovaries pierced like marshmallows over a campfire. She paced from one end of the room to the other, wringing her hands. She paused when she came to the mysterious object on the counter with the sheet over it. She reached out to lift it, but, just as she did, she heard the door unlock.

  A man walked in, whom she assumed to be the doctor. He was handsome, and had a thin mustache, and dark, cold eyes. He looked like he could have been a movie star. Like Cary Grant but more trim.

  The doctor spoke only in Spanish and used hand gestures to communicate to Evelyn. that she needed to take off her garters and stockings and remove her underwear. She did this and laid down on the table while the doctor pressed on her stomach and seemed to be asking her questions that she need not answer. He never looked her in the eyes again.

  She was looking up at the ceiling when the doctor came and stood by her head. He reached down to put a damp rag over her mouth.

  She struggled, but the doctor pressed it harder into her face saying “aspirar,” in a voice that might have been soothing under different circumstances.

  The room started to spin and she felt sick. Her eyes grew heavy. She tried to keep them open, but everything in her view became a bright smear, and just as she succumbed to the darkness, she watched the doctor pull the sheet off the object on the shelf, and she balked in horror as she eyed the horrendous apparatus underneath. And then sleep overtook her.

  All was devoured by the dark, and it was a place of unconsciousness, an unknowable glut of black where light was not yet a memory. All was the darkness and the darkness was all, and there were no sounds here, nor mouths to make them, the screaming came from without.

  Next came consciousness, or a dream of consciousness. She was coughing. Choking on a pale acid deluge that had trickled up her esophagus. She struggled against the ether haze to sit upright. She was confused, panicked, not knowing where she was or what was happening. The scream dawned through her muddle, the high-pitched mechanical whirring and then the awful sound of suction, like a hose pump emptying the dregs of a septic tank.

  She was immobilized by deep, penetrating pain, some awful prick pinning her down, and she saw, between the splay of her legs, that the doctor had unveiled the covered contraption, and that it was some massive glass tank, like one used for a water cooler. The clear glass bulb was attached to machinery and a length of hose, which the doctor held by the end, and the other end disappeared between her legs. The pain was incredible, and as the clamor of suction crescendo, so did the pain within her, and she felt as if her spine were being wrenched forward. She struggle to scream but a numb groan was all that she could produce. And ahead of her, the doctor looked on sternly and told her once more to aspirar while shoving the hose in and withdrawing lengths of it, and shoving it back inside the hollow of her again. The suction increased, and Evelyn could see the beginnings of red froth sucked back into the glass tank, spattering the sides like a tomato pureed in a blender. The sloughing pink froth with deep chunks of bleeding red whirled all around and began to fill the bottle.

  “Nooo,” she moaned, “you're taking too much. It's too much. You've all taken too much from me! Don't you see I don't have any left?”

  The doctor ignored her pleas. He did not speak her language. He could only preform his services. There was nothing she could do. The machine would have to run its course. She watched the red life drain out of her, frothing liquid at first, the thick, nearly black dabs of jelly. Her organs began to pull away, sucked out by the tube, and crammed wet and greasy in the glass tank for her perusal. Organs and lengths of her severed intestines circled around the tank, she could see long tender strings of sinew and sometimes loose teeth splashed against the side of the glass, but still, the hose did not stop. The pain did not stop. The doctor continued to drag the hose in and out, vacuuming every bit of her, cleaning her out completely until she was only the pallid shell of herself, just the fragile eggshell exterior over nothing but hollow darkness. And she looked again at the dank, and through the surging pink, bubbling and raw, she saw a tiny baby with transparent peach flesh, bald, and pinprick gelatinous eyes, trying to reach out at her through the glass with its miniature, almost translucent hand.

  And then the darkness came back, and as she drifted down, all there was
was only the sound of the continuously running motor, the never-ending sucking sound, no longer muffled by the weight of her body, for it now lay hollow and drained on the table.

  She awoke some time later on the table. She found every movement agony, and her insides felt like her entrails had been invaded and twisted around a scalding blade. Senora Besesino was there, and helped her up. The senora outfitted her with an embarrassingly thick, almost diaper-like bandage between her legs. “For the blood.” the senora said.

  Senora Besesino informed her it was time to leave, and Evelyn cradled her throbbing guts with her hands across her belly, and told her she wasn't sure if she could walk. The woman gave her a confused look and asked her “why not?” And so they went down the stairs and out the building. Outside the stray dogs surrounded her, enticed by the blood. The senora yelled at them and clapped her hands, but the commotion only made them hesitant, and they lingered only a few feet. She was put back into a cab. She didn't remember the ride back. She recalled briefly reflecting on a souvenir of her trip. Instead of bringing something back, she had left something behind. Something raw and bleeding, probably sitting at the bottom of a wastebasket by now, waiting for a stray dog to find it.

  Back on the bus, she did not sleep.

  She felt every bump and pothole in the harsh road between Los Angeles and Tijuana rattle her punctured insides.

  Back home, she peeled the bloody bandage from between her legs,and stared long at the sanguine mess before discarding it and fitting a new one.

  She turned the lights out in her little apartment and gently lowered herself onto a sofa. There was no way to position her body that did not hurt. Her stomach was in torment, she felt like she were trying to digest a tangle of razor wire. Pain radiated from her in scarlet waves, and she thought about the hollow inside. She cried.

  And suddenly, something interrupted her pain and her pity, and she raised her head, listening in the dark.

  A sound, weak and muffled. Coming from somewhere far away.

  She listened.

  There it was again.

  She got up and moved toward the source, straining to hear.

  Ever so faintly, she heard it again.

  She knelt down on the floor and put her ear to the vent.

  When she was satisfied that there was nothing to hear she rose and waited.

  Again she heard that defenseless, far off sound.

  She went to the door, and put her ear against it.

  She heard it again, a little louder now, but still muffled.

  She opened her door and stepped out into the hall. And now she could hear clearly and unmistakably, the sound of a crying baby.

  She pause in the carpeted hall, listing for the source of the cry. She walked down, letting the feeble , desperate cry lead her. At times the wail was interrupted by short, pitiful bursts of coughing. It's sick, she thought, following the noise outside, into the dark night and harsh wind. The baby is sick. It'll die if I don't find it. Someones left it all alone out here.

  Pages of filthy newspaper blew past. She turned down a corner, the wet ground rough under her bare feet.

  She found herself before a narrow alcove, an alley of faded and filthy red brick, its dark recesses echoing with the high mewling of the babe.

  She ventured in past dented metal cans overflowing with garbage, the drippings of unknown moisture dribbling off fire escapes and pooling on the filthy ground below. Bags of trash ripped apart and their contents strewn from one side of the narrow walls containing them to the other, rotting vegetables, cardboard egg cartons, broken milk bottles, half-eaten meals tossed away and teaming with white maggots.

  And at the very end of the alley was a woman of indeterminate age, of indeterminate size, a stratum of rotten rags, and a face encased in eons of forgotten grease. Layers and layers of rags, the hollow space between the flesh and grimy material augmented with reams of crumpled newspaper, poking out of collars and cuffs, and beyond that emerged hands filthy and black with grime. White wild hair, tangled and frayed out of her head like twisted wire, eyes wide, but unseeing milky pale bluish white and below that the mouth quivered toothless. Somewhere in the layers of festering cloth she wore, a baby was harbored. In the dark its sex was indeterminate and it was only apparent that it was nude, and feeble and helpless and crying to be taken away from this awful, wasted woman who held it. This baby did not belong to her. She had stolen it, obviously. Perhaps she found it, took it from outside a fire station maybe, but any way this haggard thing had come to find this baby was illegitimate.

  She burst forth from the mouth of the alley cradling the newborn to her breast, trying to stifle its wounded cries. “Shhh, baby. It's all right. You're with mama now. They tried to take you away, but mam found you again. Mama found you, baby, and now that she has you, she'll never let you go”

  In a stairwell, somewhere between the first floor and Evelyn's apartment, Morris Tidlebaum decided to take another rest. Every step up had made him feel his age and the last flight seemed to have tacked on a decade or two. He leaned over sucking air with the even stronger need to suck down cigar smoke. What the hell, he thought, and pulled a stogie from his vest pocket. Christ, he felt a sold as he looked. These girls he fucked with, they were going to put him in his grave, he knew it. He was sweating like he hadn't in years, his withered, leathery heart was working like a water pump in a drought. Why was he here? Because nobody could get ahold of one of the ditzy twats who worked for him, Evelyn something- the one who liked it up the ass. She hadn't been on set for two days, and the studio was ready to lynch someone over it. It was probably too late, she'd violated her contract, but maybe he could salvage something. These girls he thought, taking a long pull off the cigar, it's a good thing thing they all wanna act, cause no of em got the skill to make it as waitresses. He blew out a gray-blue plume of smoke, still feeling his heart pound like a sledgehammer. He looked up at the remaining flights, sighed, and started up.

  When he finally reached her door, his mouth was dry as sand, and he needed to sit down. He was still sweating, his scalp tingled, and so did the tips of his fingers. He had planned to really lay into this negligent cooze, but now all he wanted was a glass of water and ten minutes to himself on a relatively comfortable sofa.

  He knocked on the door, and there was no answer. He slowly leaned down and stuck his ear to the door. Just barely over his own breathing, he could hear what sounded like singing coming from inside. A soft little voice, like you'd sing to a baby to try and get it to sleep.

  Without bothering to knock again, he threw the door open and walked in.

  He was so unprepared for what he found in the apartment that he found himself reeling back, with both hands to his seizing chest. He hit the wall with his back and slowly slid down, unable to take his eyes away from the horror before him. The girl, his last few thoughts before his heart gave up entirely and left him for dead. She hardly notices I'm here.

  And it was true, she hardly noticed much at all. Her attention was focused on the little babe she was nursing at her breast, while she cooed and rocked, and half-sang lullabies under her breath with a far-away look in her eyes, and the old man knew then that she had lost her mind completely..

  It was ghastly, whatever it was, Morris could not bring himself to think of it as a human infant. The thing was covered in a thick hide of hardened flesh, with odd skinless trenches hewn throughout, peeling, cracked like a dry riverbed. If the thing had a nose it was covered by the dense callouses that enveloped it, and it eyes and mouth were horrible elliptical smears of red, like oblong puddles of melted wax poured over its face. It had taken to her breast, and Morris saw a milky foam bubbling around the grotesque suckling mouth, gone pink as it mixed with blood from her chaffed and cracked nipple.

  Dying there, on the floor, clutching at his chest, his mouth opened to let a worried moan escape, and his cigar fell out and rolled across the floor. Whatever the child had was spreading. He could see that her breast covered in the same e
xcess hardened flesh and cracked, bleeding pattern as the babe. It was spreading to her chest and neck now. And still she cradled it as it suckled at her, and she rocked it so gently and cooed to it, knowing soon she would be covered completely..

  In his last moments before his heart quit entirely, the Morris heard her say, as she look directly at him and affirm in a voice low and deranged, and distant, “He's back, Morris. You all tried to take him but he's back. My handsome boy. Isn't he Handsome? When he grows up, why, he'll be a star!”

  A Hard Man is Good to Find

  They tell me the world is ending. We've got three days to be exact. I am told this in a helicopter as it takes me from one hole in the earth to another. They sent a woman to break the news to me. They figure I might play ball if I hear it from someone who can fill out Air Force dress blues. I watch her cross her legs as she sits opposite me. Shit. Maybe they were right. Or maybe she's just the first woman I've laid eyes on in a decade.

  Miranda Ortega, an armed service pin cushion by the look of her blazer. I can call her Captain Ortega, she says, before adding, “If you don't stop staring at my legs, it's going to be a problem.”

  “What's the problem?” I ask.

  “Breathing through those black hoods that we make Gitmo detainees wear. I hear they're very uncomfortable.”

  “Where should I stare, then?”

  “How about out the window?” she says. “Look at the Earth. Pretend you're free.”

  “Am I?”

  She knows better than to answer the question. They'd never let me mix back with the general public. And they're right not to. “We've got a lot of ground to cover, so to speak, before we touch down. We should get started.”

  “By all means,” I smile, “debrief me.”

  She takes some papers from a folder and shuffles them around and starts to speak without looking at them. “Ten days ago, a little past six AM, an object touched down in South-Eastern South Dakota, forming a crater half-a-mile in diameter. We soon learned that the object was an advanced craft capable of traveling vast distances. We also learned that it was piloted by an extraterrestrial being.”