Stranger Realms

by Jarred Martin

  He found a notepad on the table. Every inch of every page was filled with a tiny, dense handwriting he didn't recognize, in a language that was not his own. He flipped through the blood-spattered pages. The initial few were somewhat comprehensible, but as he continued, he found the writing devolved into meaninglessness. And he discovered, upon returning to the original pages, that they were now senseless to him as well.

  He was suddenly angry and pitched the notepad at a far corner. Something was missing. He had been shown something the previous night, something incredible, but it was gone now. He felt like a blind man tracing a single fingertip over an inch of brick wall, never knowing if he was touching a great cathedral or a derelict shithouse. He'd caught a glimpse of something no man had ever seen last night before it was snatched away. He was determined to know. To understand. To see beyond the limit of his human form.

  He looked out the crude, uneven window of his house, out at the shed. A breeze kicked up and swung its door to, and he watched it drift back open a few inches. It was in there, the thing from the sky. It was waiting for him. It had much to say, but he must be careful. Its voice was very powerful.

  He searched the house for some old tent stakes, a hammer, and a spool of twine. He approached the shed and the thing inside with caution. Each step brought a perversely wonderful swelling inside his skull. That pressure headache, that bottom of the lake sensation. A trickle of blood wormed its way out of his nostril and he wiped at it absently. He stopped suddenly and dropped down to hammer the first stake into the ground and wrap the twine around it. He tied off the twine around three more stakes so that there was a crude semicircle several yards from the front of the shed. When he had finished he came forward until the pressure between his eyes changed ever so slightly and now he was beginning to see figures and pictographs, and runes far more ancient than man. And he stopped here again and hammered stakes and tied twine around them. When he was done with the second semicircle of string, he came forward once more. And once more he knelt down to hammer in the stakes, the blood flowing freely from his nose, splattering in the dirt, while visions of nebulous temples and other unknowable structures and architecture from strange new worlds shimmered on the periphery of his consciousness.

  He was done, and let the hammer fall from his shaking hand ashe started to crawl back over the twine. He crawled over the second line, and over the first, the feeling of a gloriously overfilled hot water bottle swelling inside his head. He faded from consciousness once more and collapsed with warm blood leaking out over the copper earth beneath him.

  It was night when he woke next, stars and darkness overhead. He pulled himself into a seated position facing the shed. The first of the lines of string were in front of him, and he reached to touch it. The pressure, the swelling, was back in his head, and he listened to the thing in his shed as it spoke to him. It had never stopped speaking, he supposed, only he was unconscious and could not pick up the unbroken stream of its voice. But he heard it now, and he let it flow into him like a radio tuned to a private frequency. He could feel his brain expanding against the sides of his skull, growing full with what the visitor from the sky had to tell him. He could go no closer than where he sat, but he accepted the distance. Behind the first of the demarcations was close enough for now, it was too dangerous, too intense for him to edge any closer. What lay in the shed would reveal itself when he could accept it, but for now he must keep his distance.

  Like the ancient Hebrews, fearful of a god whose voice would reduce them to cinders if they heard it, he was afraid. Afraid, but longing to hear it. He sat and listened. More blood trickled out of his nostrils, over his lips and he licked at it, relishing the taste of copper and the warmth. He closed his eyes and saw such wonders. Worlds suspended in fields of stars, structures of inconceivable dimensions, beings that defied explanation. But it was not only the random and unclassified images, because with them came sights and sound and feelings, and understanding the way that the thing in the shed understood. He now knew these things as well, but he also knew that they would vanish and he could not retain them if he was too long away from the thing's voice. And here he stayed, where he could receive the broadcast, where he could be filled with the knowledge of things that gods knew and, to know things that diminished his own world, his own galaxy, his pathetic dimension.

  He opened his eyes slowly. From the agave there came a line of several hares, all tawny like the earth and gray, and they came to where Jacinto sat, and settle down on their haunches behind the twine that he had staked down. They sat and listened to the thing in the shed, and the air was filled with the warbling eruption, the voice of God dictating the universe to them. Jacinto looked at the hares, lined up next to him in dozens, all facing the shed, and had thoughts of breaking them in his hands, feeling the snap of their severed spines vibrate all through his arms. Blood trickled down his face. He resented the presence of the hares, but he did not accost them. Blood spattered from his nose onto the crimson dust. His body was weak. He did not have the energy to move. But his mind was growing stronger. He felt as if he could flex the swollen insides of his skull like a muscle. He waited there in the darkness beside the hares and listened.

  There he saw the gaping mouth of the world set in crystalline figures whose name his mouth could never form. He may not speak it, but his mind knew its name. Around the void there were gathered beings of fabulous evolution, slithering, shifting things that moved on gelatinous limbs, circles of refracted light, vapors of communication, whole worlds and galaxies existing, coexisting simultaneously. It called to him, him and him alone, and he was there, leaning into the infinite void as it disclose its secrets to him

  green and purple skies with hanging moons and celestial bodies glowing. Worlds of gossamer strands of spider web and oil, beings composed of gas. Continents dividing and shifting across globes, destruction of civilizations and the rebirth and doom of a thousand worlds. Planets colliding, stars dying, in and out the other side of quasars.

  He had graduated to the second barrier of twine now. The hares came and went, but he never moved. He would observe them occasionally, the rough things the color of the dust. They were changing. Their heads were expanding, changing the shape of their skulls which bulged now in asymmetrical nodules half the size of their coiled little bodies. Their skulls so broad and newly massive it pinned their ears over at strange new angles. One day, but it might have been hours ago, he watched them at the edge of the agave. They pulled a fox out, seven or eight of them dragging its battered and bloody carcass across the dirt. They devoured the fox in a blood-soaked frenzy. They chewed tunnels as if they were digging a warren through it. And when they were done, they sat staring at Jacinto, their fur wet with hot fresh blood, their skulls bulging, their nose twitching, black eyes locking on to him. They watched him. Perhaps, in a way, he was broadcasting to them.

  Jacinto did not care. The hares could do as they pleased. He could look through every molecule that composed them if he chose, see the hares as the thing in the shed had taught him to see. He learned much, was still learning. His body withered, the pressure in his head forced the black blood from his nose again. He was so thin and weak his scrawny neck could barely support the new weight of his bulging head, the new shape of it, teetering on his shoulders, swollen, asymmetrical humps protruding from his hairless pate.

  He listened to the voice, knowing one day as he listened and listened that he could surpass even the last line of string before him and approach the shed and open the door, and see the thing that produced such wonderful throbbing within his skull. But until then, he was happy to wallow in the knowledge that the thing offered him, the alien symbols, growing more and more familiar to him by the second, the worlds and worlds beyond those that the traveler told him, letting him adsorb it all, letting his mind grow pregnant with information.

  He saw mountains rise on a bruise colored world, he watched it recede and rise again like a breathing chest. One singular being, one entity comprised
that world, a single creature hung in space as dense and huge as every object in his solar system, massive beyond comprehension, only able to describe it in numbers but to experience it, and to experience the vast emptiness that eclipsed it for light years, places the light of stars had yet to reach was transcendent.

  And then the knowledge came that it was dying. He knew that it was impossible for the thing in the shed to survive much longer on his home, a world as alien to the ting in the shed as the place strewn with vein like structures throughout the sky and shimmering lakes of mercury was strange to him. It was weakening. Its beautiful voice was growing soft. The pressure within his now massive head was not as significant, and only felt to him like a summer sinus infection, though the blood continued to flow freely from his nose and mouth and paint the front of his dwindling, starved, chest with a haze of windblown dust and tacky claret.

  The hares had long since ceased their inquiries. Each one lay on its side, baking in the sun, dead in the grit with its head burst open in gruesome abscesses with a litter of exploded bone strewn about and as if something not of this world had escaped them.

  He saw a world of bright, where the sky was filled with zipping suns, dozens and dozens of burning suns, and things as big as houses flew through the air with no wings trailing the scorched earth below with dangling tendrils, touching down and fire traveling up and burning the things off to be swept away by incendiary breeze as the ashes flew away.

  It was dying. Jacinto was dying, but he was well past the point of caring about things as frivolous his body. That heavenly, slithering voice, teaching him, filling him with wonders, was more precious to him than anything. He had lingered at the third barrier of twine for some time, acclimated himself to the things sonorous humming, the swelling and pressure on the other side of his face, long since forgotten. He must see it, he thought. He must glimpse at least once before it went away. He rose, and his withered legs, each as thin as the handle of his coe de jima, tottering wasted body beneath the rocking, enormous weight of his malformed head. Enormous as the Easter island stones, and so much more hideous. Bulging with nodules and blistered skin, wobbling under the awkwardness of its weight, he staggered to the shed. He reached out and slowly opened the door, his shadow lay on the ground behind, monstrously distorted. Slowly the door opened.

  He was not surprised at what he saw inside, the was no emotion left in him anymore, he knew what he would see. The thing was dead. It lay on the crude wooden floor of the like a fallen souffle, with some dark, viscid liquid oozing from its dried, leathery hide. The space above it was suffuse with great beads of glowing light, glittering around like motes of dust, but each one, in time, dying, fading, and falling to nothingness before the light streaming through the open doorway absorbed it.

  He backed away and closed the door. The thing was dead, the pressure, although replaced by something far more dense, had left his head. There was simply nothing more to know. He glanced at the hares lying in various decomposing heaps in the dust, the shattered hollows of their skulls, the burst pieces fragments of themselves littering the ground. He felt strangely empty, which was ironic, because he was not.

  He would die now too, he thought, and lay and rot like the wonderful thing in his shed, and like the ravaged fox, and the exploded hares, and surrender to oblivion.

  It was time.

  Jacinto Sosa dropped to his knees in the mid day sun, and turned his head upward to the sky. His shadow beside him, a distorted and emaciated thing, haggard and wasted with an enormous head tilted back, blackness etched into ephemerality. He closed his eyes in anticipation. He felt a great pain and his jaw dropped open. With a horrible creaking and snapping and rending of tendon over bone and snapping muscles and tissue, his mouth expanded wider. His jaw dangled down until it touched his chest. A sudden gush of blood from his gaping maw exploded outward in a hot torrent of red, and splashed over the sandy ground.

  Blood drained and continue to burst for from his nose, and he could feel deep within his head his skull, his sinus cavities were widening, flesh rending and bursting until there was only one blood-lubricated canal; a single gaping passageway from his swollen skull through his widened and ruined sinuses, and out the enormous gap of his broken jaw, so wide if there were a person to stare down at him they could see far down his red and swollen throat.

  He felt a great shifting inside his head as something broke loose. Suddenly another gush of blood burst forth in a spray and with it some other fluids and a soggy, fleshy sac, fatty and yellow, flowed from the canal and through the back of his throat, choking him, and he had to grab at the sac dangling from his mouth and pull at it like a magician pulling a long line of knotted scarves from his mouth. He struggled to breathe and his red, bulging eyes grew wider in their sockets, and seemed to pulse outward like some giant sort of lizard, before settling.

  A wet, gurgling sound simmered deep in Jacinto's throat as he tried to scream, and beyond that the only sound was the hideous creaking of his shifting bones. He choked and retched on wet blood, and then something solid began to emerge from his gaping mouth. It slithered, slowly through his sinuses and a truly new thing encountered its first taste of a new atmosphere. Jacinto gagged and more of the new thing was exposed- dangling tendrils with knuckles bulging and soft fingernails at the end. Jacinto's skull at last collapsed inward in itself as he gave a final heave and the thing was born.

  Jacinto looked and saw with his dying eyes, a thing which had no earthly name. But he, in his knowledge and gestation had given it one, but sadly, that name would stay forever in his now empty skull, and no one would ever hear it.

  Human Cockroaches

  Sidney Rune lit a cigarette and exhaled a cloud of gray, bitter smoke that dissipated in the dark hollow of the underground parking garage. The stink of exhaust and burned gasoline stained the atmosphere the same way spilled oil stained the concrete. He breathed in through his nose. Someone had pissed in here recently. A roach scurried in front of him and he brought the sole of his shoe down on it. There was a dull clap followed by scraping as he twisted his seven-hundred dollar loafers into the cement. He lifted his foot to examine the oozing yellow paste he'd made of the bug. He heard approaching footsteps and his face split into a predatory smile revealing a mouth full of straight white teeth, small and numerous, as if he had a few too many. He swallowed, salivating with anticipation.

  There were three of them. A potbellied man rapidly approaching the point where he could no longer be described as middle-aged was being roughly escorted by two much larger men wearing flashy designer suits, both with over-oiled, slicked-back hair. The big men brought the older man to Sidney and they stood on either side of him, not restraining him, but each resting a hand on his shoulder so he couldn’t forgot they were there.

  “Mr. Mayor, thank you for making the time to meet with me. I know how busy you are,” said Sidney. He took the last drag of his cigarette and crushed it under his shoe as he’d done the roach earlier. “I see you’ve already met my associates, Ernie Coconuts and Morris the Barber. I hope you didn’t find their company too disagreeable. They can be a little rough I know, but you’ll have to forgive them. After all, we can’t all have the benefit of an affluent upbringing, can we?” He flashed that unsettling, too-many-toothed smile again. “And as for me, well, I don’t have to bother with the introduction, do I?”

  Mayor Randolph attempted to calm the tremors of fear and outrage shaking his hands. He narrowed his eyes. “No. I’ve seen you before. Dried to the inside of a toilet bowl, wasn’t it? Or have I misplaced you?”

  “That’s very fine, Mr. Mayor. But it seems the only thing you’ve misplaced is your sense of decorum.” Sidney Rune snapped his fingers and Ernie Coconuts drove his fist into Mayor Rudolph’s liver, forcing him to double over in agony with his eyes bulging. “You’ll do best not to forget it again, Mr Mayor. As I’ve said before, I know how precious your time is, so let me get to the point. I’m here on behalf of a certain party. A certain party with
a vested interest in real estate. He’d prefer his name not be spoken, but I take it you know to whom I’m referring?”

  The Mayor slumped forward in pain, held up by the two thugs at his sides. “Yes,” he said, solemnly. “I know who you mean.”

  “That’s very good,” Sidney peeled his lips back once more. “Very good indeed. Now my employer has tasked me with presenting you an offer concerning a real estate development. Listen up, Mr Mayor, because if you do, you’ll find this to be a very lucrative offer. It could make you very comfortable.”

  Mayor Randolph righted himself. “You’re offering me a bribe? I don’t take bribes, dammit! Not from people like you, anyway.”

  “I think you’ll take this one. You see, the city happens to be responsible for maintaining certain properties ample with low-income housing. Tenement buildings, dilapidated and abandoned storefronts, uninhabited dwellings, inner city blight. Slum in other words. My employer has taken it upon himself to make offers on all the properties available, and he’s made great progress. There are some holdouts, however, quite a few in fact, not to mention government housing.”

  “You’re talking about, Sable Town.”

  “I am, Mr Mayor. You know your city well. My employer has bought a significant portion of Sable Town with the intent of razing it and installing new, high quality condominiums and high rises, upscale restaurants and shopping centers. But there’s a bit of a roadblock, I’m afraid. My employer is requesting that you use your considerable powers as Mayor to help speed things up. In the next few days you’ll see some paperwork come across your desk. Nothing too conspicuous. Just a few adjustments to some city ordinances, some legislation that makes it a little easier to put the squeeze, so to speak, on the last of the holdouts, not to mention accepting a very generous offer to buy up the public housing properties of course. That’s simple enough, isn’t it? Just sign your name to the bottom of a few papers. And after that, we’ll start serving eviction notices.”