Stranger Realms

by Jarred Martin

  “Quinoa.”

  “Keen-what?”

  “I'm not surprised you haven't heard of it. It's one of those foods that won't give you colon cancer after eating it all your life.”

  “Bullshit, man, everything gives you cancer. Even if you ate like, nothing but cancer medicine, it would still give you cancer.”

  “Science is still out on that. They market this stuff as a superfood.”

  “Superfood, huh? That's pretty good. I'd probably be eating bird seed too if I thought it was superfood,” said Errol.

  “Look, all I know is, waste moves through my bowels like a greased pig through a sewer pipe. Most people in this country can't bend down to tie their shoes without getting dizzy, meanwhile I can fit into the same size 24 jeans I had when I was in high school, so who's really coming out ahead here?”

  “That's right. There's nothing worse to you than looking down and seeing a pair of great big hairy tits growing out of your chest. Your nightmare. You want to know what I think? I think mama Palin caught little Allen going for the Oreo's a few times too many and put some seriously fucked-up shit in his little head about the adverse affect complex carbohydrates have on his ability to be loved.”

  This was perilously close to being true, and it disturbed and angered Allen that he was so transparent. “So what do you want?” he snapped at the phone, trying not to sound like he was snapping at the phone. He thought he heard a grin in Errol's voice when he spoke next, which suddenly made him able to feel his own heartbeat deep within his forehead.

  “I just wanted to make sure you're prepared for the passenger I'm bringing your way.”

  “You think bringing me some floater you dragged out of a river is going to put me off my game? I like the soggy ones. They're soft. It puts less wear on the instruments.”

  “Wow, that's real fucked up, my man, but this is something extra special.”

  “What, are we talking about slippage?” Errol didn't answer immediately. “Slippage is when-”

  “The skin,” Errol interjected. “I know what slippage is. Its exactly what it sounds like. But this ain't that.”

  “So what is it then?”

  “Well,” and Allen could hear the smile creep back into his voice, “since you asked: you got something big rolling in to you.”

  “Big?”

  “Huge. Big like the rear axle of my van is scraping the asphalt. No kidding. I'm throwing off sparks every time I hit a bump.”

  “So what? This is America. A third of the people who come through here are livestock.”

  “Not like this, my friend. This guy is Moby Deceased. The great white fatso. They had to cut a piece of wall out of his house to lift him out. Guess he ain't getting his security deposit back. They weren't even sure he would fit in my van. They wanted to wait on a flatbed truck or something, but I'm like fuck that. If I don't drive, I don't get paid, you know? It took six dudes and me to cram him in there. I'm not even sure the back door is shut all the way.”

  Allen pushed the plastic container of quinoa away from him uneaten. “How heavy, if you had to guess.”

  Errol cackled into the phone. “Shit. I don't know. It's been a while since my carnival days, buddy. Maybe seven-fifty eight-hundred pounds, conservatively.”

  “Jesus.”

  Another peal of laughter. “You got that right, man. You cut this fat fuck open, you got to be careful not to fall in. You might not be able to climb back out.”

  “That's the sort of irreverence that's going to keep you driving dead bodies from point A to point B for the rest of your working life. But I have to wonder; why bring him to me in the first place? Isn't weighing a metric ton enough to justify death at any time? What's so unusual about this guy?”

  “As you pointed out, I just drive the van. But from what I've seen, there's more than enough to rouse some interest. Spooky shit.”

  “Go on.”

  “What I heard, the guy lives alone. Nobody goes in, nobody goes out. At least nobody ever sees anyone. The guy pays his rent on time and he's quiet. Well, suddenly, the rent stops coming. The landlord shows up, uses his spare key. He sees the whole place has been turned into a spook house. I'm talking windows covered, black candles, shit's written all over the walls in like languages nobodies ever said in a thousand years. Alters. Animal sacrifices. Blood. Old books and scrolls. The works.”

  “And that's enough to merit an inquest?”

  “I'm not even at the best part, dude. The landlord finds the tenant, and he's been dead, I don't even know how long, but I mean, I'm smelling him right now, and he's ripe. But what's nuts is the guy is covered, and I mean head to toe, in . . . well, you'd know better than me, but it looks like scars.”

  “Scars?”

  “Self-inflicted. Ritual scarification. It looks like crop circles, patterns, designs, more of that ancient writing. But, he couldn't have done it himself, you know? This dude couldn't have wiped his own ass, much less carved esoteric symbols into the the middle of his back. Pretty weird, right?”

  “When you spend your time examining brain tissue for abnormalities under a microscope, it gets hard to tell what's weird anymore.”

  “Well then, Ill tell you: it's weird.”

  Allen hung up and frowned at the uneaten quinoa.

  Later, after collecting two separate gurneys and lashing them together, he was waiting by the raised door of the delivery entrance while Errol backed the van up. He hadn't been exaggerating about the weight on the back end, the bumper was indeed only an inch or two away from dragging the ground. Errol threw the van into park and went around to the entrance.

  “This is kind of exciting, right?” he said. “It's like waiting for someone to pull the curtains back on a freak show.”

  “Well, whatever it is, it's under attended.”

  “How do you mean, Skinny?” asked Errol.

  “I mean, it's eleven-twenty on a Sunday.”

  “Yeah, a matinee, then.”

  “No. What I mean mean is; there's no one else here. You said it took seven men to lift this guy into your van earlier.”

  “Never you mind about that. When these back doors open up, you just be ready with the gurneys, okay?” He didn't wait on an answer. Instead, he casually walked to the rear of the van, turned to face Allen and winked. Next, with a single casual motion, like the Fonz from Happy Days, he smacked the van a single time with his fist. The doors immediately sprang apart. Allen was so surprised, he almost forgot to come forward with the gurneys. In the next instant, the body came slowly spilling out of the back of the van. He's been stuffed in there at such an awkward, and frankly disgraceful position, that he was ready to pop out like a champagne cork out of a bottle. The chassis groaned and creaked as it was relieved of its burden. The fat man came slithering out like the van was giving birth to him, and in a matter of seconds his huge frame was splayed face-down across the two lashed-together gurneys.

  Allen looked down at the deceased man's massive back. His arms and legs had gone a deep purple from the pooling blood. The man was as wide as a queen sized mattress. He could not be entirely contained by even two gurneys, and massive folds of flesh spilled over the sides. As Errol had described, every inch had been inscribed with painfully intricate looking scarification. His great swaths of flesh were a tapestry of unrecognizable shapes and symbols, hieroglyphs and letters in ancient words, all rendered in meticulous detail.

  “Why is he nude?” Allen asked.

  Errol shrugged. “Maybe it was laundry day.”

  The corpse lying face-down on the gurney was bald. In fact, as far as Allen could see, the man didn't have a single hair on his body. He assumed this might have something to do with keeping the intricate text scrawled all on him legible, but such notion raised the question: who'd been shaving the fat man? And more curious, the man didn't sport stubble anywhere, nor the tiny nicks and abrasions that would come from being so meticulously shaven.

  Errol marveled at the enormous man. The body was distorted to
monstrous proportions, bulging and rippling with dunes of ballooning flesh. “His arms and legs are all swollen. It looks like biscuit dough when you break open the can, you know, when its all stuck together at first.”

  “It's edema,” said Allen. “Fluid retention.”

  “Looks like he's retaining the Great Salt Lake.”

  “Yes,” said Allen absently. “And look here, on his feet. He's got calluses easily an inch-and-a half thick. It's chronic. He also had a bad case of gout.”

  “Well, that's all really fascinating, but I've got other shit to do, so, Ill just leave you to drool over fat boy's feet, while I scoot on out of here. I have a thing for you to sign.”

  “Wait,” said Allen. “How am I supposed to get him on the examination table?”

  “The slab, you mean?”

  “Nobody calls it that.”

  “Whatever you call it. You know, you got no imagination, man. Your brain's only good for cutting shit up and writing down what you see in a journal. No kind of like critical thinking or problem solving.”

  “I can see you've already given it some thought?”

  Errol muttered the word 'dude' and went to the back of his van. He leaned in through the still open doors for a second, and dragged out a floor jack with a long lever handle. “Two-and-a-half tons,” he grinned.

  “It might work,” Allen admitted.

  They rolled the two gurneys back to the examination room, which was not an easy task, and after a lot of arguing and awkward positioning, they were able to get the jack under one side of a gurney and lift it up enough to roll the dead man onto the examination table.

  When the corpse was splayed out and aligned more or less to Allen's liking, Errol passed a clipboard to Allen. “Just sign this release and I'll leave the two of you alone to get better acquired.” He raise his eyebrows suggestively.

  “That's cute.” Allen looked down to sign the form and passed the clipboard back. “I've never heard that one before. Very clever.”

  “There's clever and there's quick, and right now there's somewhere I'd rather be, so I only have time for the corpse-fucking quips at the now. I'll think of something better when I have time.”

  “I sense something mischievous in your haste,” said Allen.

  “Well,” Errol leaned in conspiratorially. “If you want to know, I'm going back to balloon boy's house. Some of that spook shit, the witchcraft stuff, was intriguing, to say the least.”

  “Oh, you're just off for a little Sunday afternoon breaking and entering?”

  “It ain't breaking and entering if a whole wall of your house is gone, is it?”

  “I'm sure there's a judge somewhere that will be willing to make that distinction for you.”

  “I'll be alright. There's just something there that I have to go and look into. Something stuck out to me.”

  “What's that.”

  “The whole place is covered in that same crazy writing that's all over our friend, here, right? It's from one wall to the other. But I saw something that stood out, I want to figure it out. I can't say why. In all that gibberish and dead letters, there was something written in plain English that kept recurring.”

  “What was that.”

  “Just one phrase, but written over and over. It said : THROUGH ME, SHE WILL RISE.”

  ***

  Allen stood alone before the flaccid and scarred mound of pallid flesh laid out on the examination table, the cadaver's stomach bulging so massive he couldn't see the face from where he stood, sacks of flab like running dough spilled over the sides. He tried to imagine how it had all began. He could see the man's path spread out like a storyboard. Double desserts one day, finishing a bag of potato chips in front of the TV the next. Snacking between meals, eating when you're not hungry. Pretty soon you need all new pants, but so what? You needed a new wardrobe anyway. You have a bucket of chicken, a whole pizza alone by yourself. Another pant size, another party sized platter of nachos, then comes the comfort fit slacks with the elastic waistband, then the sweatpants, all the while you're growing vertically, flesh expanding like a marshmallow in a vacuum, swelling around your poor skeleton, crushing your lungs, until one day, you're dead on the floor, nude, covered in scribbles and they have to cut a wall out of your house to get you out.

  Allen was suddenly glad he hadn't finished his lunch earlier. He felt fat just looking at the man.

  He took blood and urine samples and began his examination, making notes as he measured and weighed him. He fingerprinted the body, noted the lack of rigor mortis in the limbs, checked for burst capillaries in the eyes which would indicate suffocation. There were none, and in fact, besides the scars, which he painstakingly documented with photographs, there were no marks of any kind on the dead man. No bruises, no cuts, or scrapes. The man was remarkably pristine.

  The scars were a mystery. They were tiny and meticulous, obviously done by a practiced hand. Allen had never seen anything like it. Literally head to toe covered, even between his fingers and toes, and on his eyelids. Allen looked from the man, back to the display on the camera to make sure the photos had turned out okay. The man had wanted this, but why? Why such dedication to something so incomprehensible?

  He though about how Errol had described his house, the black candles and alters. Perhaps there was something ritualistic to it.

  As if in response, the dead man released a current of pent-up gasses from an unidentified orifice.

  Allen was suddenly struck with a remembrance about something he'd heard in medical school about the famous grave robber and murderer William Burke and how, after his execution and public dissection, his skin was used to for bookbinding. Allen though the dead man was something like that, only the opposite. Here the man was the book. Only nobody could read the damned thing.

  Isn't that the truth of us all, thought Allen, as he pulled a tray of surgical instruments to him.

  He reached for a scalpel, and just as he did, his phone went off.

  “Hello?”

  “Allen,” it was Errol again, “I was just wondering about our fat friend.”

  “I have some bad news. I'm afraid he's dead. How's the burglary going?”

  “Actually, I found something in the house I'd like to show you. I'm on my way right now.”

  “I was just about to open him up. Did you find out something about the symbols all over him?”

  “As a matter of fact I did. The fat man had a lot of literature at his disposal, and I didn't have to search too long to figure out the language.”

  “So you can read him, then?”

  “No. I mean, not straight away. The translations are all over the place, scattered. They'd have to be arranged in some sort of order, and even then I don't think they'd make much sense. But I can tell you the language is an ancient dialect of Akkadian. That's like Mesopotamian. It's specific to a place called Ryuli Schehear.”

  “I've never heard of it,” Allen admitted.

  “Most people haven't. It translates to: The Lost City. It's a fable. Like Atlantis, only it didn't sink into the ocean, it just vanished. One day there's a massive city, the next there's a flat stretch of desert where a city used to be. Nobody knows what happened. Part of the legend is about this demon, Mennon Quam, though the whole city was so beautiful, she took it to Hell to rule for her own. Legend has it one day the city will return, and Mennon Quam and all her legion demons will enact a Hell on Earth type of thing.”

  “Hmm,” Allen tried to absorb all of this. “It's a good story, but I don't see what it has to do with our man here.”

  “I think he was some sort of cultist. I think all the writing and the witchcraft shit, he was trying to raise the lost city. He was trying to bring about the return of Ryuli Schehear, and Mennon Quam to rule it.”

  “Well, everyone needs a hobby, I guess. What was it you wanted to show me?”

  “You'll just have to see it. I'll be there soon.”

  Allen hung up.

  He returned his attention to the dead
man and the massive spread of symbols covering him.

  “It seems the tenants of paganism don't include self-restraint or moderation, do they? Otherwise someone as devout as yourself wouldn't have ended up looking like the float at a Quetzal-Quimbo-or-whatever-day parade.”

  The corpse released another flux of gas and shifted.

  “Right. Let's open you up and take a peek at those organs, shall we? See the damage Little Debbie and Sarah Lee have inflicted on you.” He picked his scalpel up from the tray and set about slicing a 'Y' shaped incision starting at the shoulders. It proved rather rough going. The man's skin was thick as rhinoceros hide, and Allen had to press down with all his weight to cut to any appreciable depth. He was afraid the blade might snap, and he worried over ruining the intricate writing throughout his flesh, should it need to be preserved for some reason.

  He struggled, but eventually managed to cut cleanly through the dermis. And suddenly, when he was nearly done, the flesh caved in around the incision. It happened all at once like an expanse of ground collapsing around a sinkhole. It was so abrupt, and Allen Pallin was so startled, that he dropped his scalpel down into the ensuing cavity.

  The instant the scalpel left his hand, Allen Palin's face took on an expression of supreme horror. He watched the scalpel fall, and it did not land in the rotting entrails of the obese cadaver before him, but instead tumbled down a great depth of what could have been miles.

  He stared down into the dead man's opening, unable to reconcile what he was seeing with the laws of physics that had bound every facet of his known universe. What lay before him was utterly impossible.

  The recesses of the dead man descended to an incredible depth. Far greater than his width would possibly allow. And inside this impossible void, there was light as bright as day. And what was more, Allen saw, shuddering in horror and fascination, was that this light shone down upon an area of vast expanse, surely a circumference of several miles. A sweltering heat came billowing out of the man to the extent that the dry air below wavered as if the very atmosphere were becoming warped from the temperature. All below was the beige color of sand, and at the bottom, there were numerous tiny squares, too many to count, set about in close proximity. Upon further examination he saw that the squares were the flat roofs of dwellings and that he was looking down on a fully realized city contained entirely within the innards of a fat man. Beyond the surrounding expanse of squares set in that sandy realm, he saw fine white lines running across, connecting with two other similar lines, and he concluded that he was looking down on a wall or barrier of some kind. And what this barrier contained was a structure of astonishing dimensions that dwarfed all other structures. It was a massive place of gleaming white, and green, composed of concentric squares, massive at the base, and tapering off as it went up, so that, if he were looking at it from an angle of equal elevation, he would recognize it as a pyramid of gargantuan proportion. What was not brilliant white and gleaming in the sun,was lush and green, and Allen could just make out elaborate layers of topiary, so vibrant that it must be a great man-made oasis clinging to the rows of the pyramid temple.