“C’mre, Spot. Attaboy.”
I felt myself uncapped, poured ... swallowed. Soon I saw them towering above me from the dim eyes of their wobbly dachshund.
“He’s looking at me real weird, Jeff. Ick!”
I’ll show you weird, you twit! I tried to twist the canine throat to pronounce an intelligible spell, but old flesh parted like wet paper under the strain.
“He’s trying to bark. Isn’t that the most disgusting—”
“Yeah, I thought that stuff would save me a trip to the pound, but I guess I’m stuck with it.” Bending over me, he crooned with smarmy enthusiasm, “Hey, Spot, want to go for a ride in the car?”
INTERRUPTED PILGRIMAGE
Malebolgia had never seen such heroes as Heinrich von der Hiedlerheim and his mighty men, so the villagers scrambled to hide in their cellars. There they shaved their daughters’ heads, blackened their faces and pulled their front teeth.
The graf had them dragged forth and flogged. Of those still breathing, he demanded, “Why do you fear us? We are pious pilgrims on our way to Rome.”
“If you are such heroes as you seem,” said Mario the baker, “we can anticipate a fresh outbreak of illusions.”
“Of what sort?”
“Of that sort!” Mario cried before diving into his cellar.
Like many a luckless hell-beast before it, the dragon had crept upon them unawares. A disappointing specimen, it killed only Otto.
After Mario’s recent memory of an iron gauntlet across the face had been refreshed, Heinrich asked, “If that was an illusion, why is my left arm hanging by a thread?”
“Because you believe. Your wound is unreal.”
This seemed reasonable to the graf. When he examined his arm, it was whole.
“Did you hear that, Otto? On your feet!”
“I am dead. Please give me a Christian burial.”
“If you were dead, you couldn’t talk. Not without a decent interval.”
“He’s not breathing,” said Siegfried, kneeling beside his fallen comrade. “And a fly is crawling on his eyeball.”
“His stomach for faith was ever gluttonous. Who casts these spells, baker?”
“The Magus Serpieri,” Mario muttered, indicating a cave in the overhanging cliff with a gesture so guarded that a distant observer would have thought he was characteristically picking his nose. “When he dreams, his dreams oppress us.”
“Don’t bury Otto while we’re gone,” Heinrich commanded.
The climb to Serpieri’s cave was far longer and more arduous than it looked. Three hours ahead of time, the sun set. Three months ahead of time, snow fell. The warriors were sore beset by werewolves and ogres who forced them to transcend all limits of skepticism.
A friar who accompanied them from the village, Brother Degenerato, gave cold comfort with his ceaseless chant: “Defend these sinners, O Lord, we pray, from the desserts of their foul deeds, and harken not to the piteous cries of the virgins they have defiled, the poor they have trampled, the saints they have martyred, the kinsmen they have murdered—”
After a dismal age of this, Heinrich split the monk from pate to beads.
“You killed a holy man!” Reinhardt protested.
“He was an illusion,” Heinrich said. When everyone’s best efforts to disbelieve in the butchered corpse failed, he added, “Of unique potency. The body will vanish if we look away from it and reappear only if we look back.”
This worked, and the graf’s cynicism inspired his men. Gunther rejected all evidence that he had slipped off a real cliff and broken his neck. To the chagrin of Satan, he refuses to this day to admit he is burning in hell.
The penultimate challenge was a den of voluptuous lamias. Having mastered applied ontology, the heroes could dally with the charmers until the climactic moment, then ignore the manifestation of scales and fangs. Illusory or not, the lamias fell into a snit. Hissing echoed in Heinrich’s ears as he at last stumbled into the presence of the Magus.
Serpieri cried, “This must be my wildest dream, for never have I beheld such unspeakably vile brigands! But now,” he added portentously, “I must wake.”
Heinrich gasped to see his sword grow transparent. His mighty men began to fade. With a supreme effort of will, he struck, but the very air fought against his stroke. A look of stupefaction crossed the wizard’s face as the blade regained opacity and fell faster.
“You’re not real!” Serpieri screamed. “You can’t—”
“Dream on, Magus!”
After an uneasy silence, Siegfried mused, “If I am but a dream, and the dreamer is no more, then I am....”
“Immortal, obviously,” Heinrich said.
The sun was setting for the second time as they descended to the village. Reinhardt sighed, “Those girls with the gapped teeth and bald heads remind me of the wenches back home.”
“Female peasants everywhere look like that,” Heinrich said. “If I ever found a pretty one, I might be at a loss to ravish her.”
Otto still believed he was dead, and he had begun to smell even worse than usual. His faithful comrades vowed to carry him to Rome and see what the pope could do for him, but somewhere along the way he managed to sneak off and bury himself.
THE HOLE
I take my time surveying the castle, its black stones glistening in the mist. The gray day and the rotting forest oppress me, but the raucous clacking of crows is a good omen: they salute the black wings on my helmet.
When the dragon slithers forth I see each jewel-like scale glitter on skin that bunches and stretches like a caterpillar’s. I gag on the stink of very old, very dead fish.
It flames me. I smell my flesh burning when my armor melts into my arm. I’m so caught up that I swing my real arm when I chop its head off, and my hand bangs painfully into a real wall, but the pain fits the daydream. This is going to be good.
But I worry that somebody has heard the noise, namely somebody like Ron, my boss, and I’m in too much of a hurry to visualize the wizard. He’s just a sketch of Mr. Witter the last time I saw him, wearing baggy swim trunks. And because of that damn dumb crack I overheard Pop make, one that’s stuck in my mind ever since, he’s wearing boots and spurs and carrying a little whip. This sucks!
Screw Ron, screw the world, I tell myself, this is important, take your time. I concentrate on giving Mr. Witter proper wizard-vestments of black and crimson. He waves his arms to cast a terrible spell, but I duck down and flash him with the mirror-shield. Green snakes of lightning bounce back on him, and he fries, crackling like bacon.
I kick in the door. A dust-storm swirls in the sunbeam that pierces the roof. She’s spotlighted by the sunbeam, naked, chained. She looks at me with hope and gratitude and a little fear, too, because I am one very bad dude in this black armor with spikes.
I study every inch, from her pearly little toes to the top of her blond braid. She looks like her skin is on too tight, the way her breasts tilt up, the way her eyes are tipped.
She begs me to unchain her. I tell her no. She pleads with me to cover her. I laugh. This is going too fast, I don’t hear the armor clang when I throw it aside. I feel her skin, I feel me going in, but it doesn’t feel the least bit soft and wet, it feels like my own stupid hand. And it’s over, like in three goddamn seconds!
I’m back in her bathhouse, where there’s slime on a cushion. Will she smell what I did? Maybe even sit on it, bare-assed, and go, “Ewww?” That’s almost too scary to be exciting. But I don’t wipe it off.
I must be nuts. I can daydream about her and me and the castle at home, but here where I know she’s actually taken off every last stitch and shown her naked body to the four blind walls....
I fix on what I came for, enlarging the hole in the wall with my Scout knife. It’s in a corner on a level with where her ass would be, concealed by the darkness of a pine knot. I touch up the raw new edges with felt marker. It’s taken two weeks to cut. If it’s too big, somebody will notice. But if it’s too small, I won�
�t see anything. After today’s work, it looks to me as big as the double door at St. Boniface, but I tell myself that nobody else would notice it. I slip out the door.
“Billy!” No, not Ron! “Where have you been, sneaking a smoke?”
He pretends to smell my breath, gives me a whiff of his Tic Tacs. Just an excuse to get close, the bastard.
“Or ... you weren’t fooling around in Mrs. Witter’s cabana, were you?” He moves to that door, jingling the keys at his belt. “Why are you always prowling around—”
He’ll see the hole! How can I stop him? Trip him? I blurt out, “My father said her husband died in the saddle.”
That was a stroke of pure genius. Ron loves gossip, he loves to talk about sex. He turns from the bathhouse door.
“Young man, I ought to wash out your mouth with soap.” He forgets about checking the bathhouse and comes close to whisper, “Actually he didn’t die in the saddle, not exactly, but he was stark naked when he took a dive through his bedroom window. Not even that killed him, though, at least not right away. He was rolling around the lawn when the neighbors ran out to help him. He must’ve got glass in his eyes, because they couldn’t stop him from clawing at them.” He edges even closer, but I don’t step back. I make like I’m fascinated. I guess I am.
He says, “My theory is that he was performing his spousal duty on a typical Saturday night when the horrible realization suddenly struck him, after all those years and years of plugging away like a real American he-man, that he really didn’t like girls. That happens, you know. You should let it be a lesson to you.”
He never misses a chance to slip in a remark like that. I guess I let my feelings show, because he’s suddenly The Boss again as he says, “Run along and get your mop. That Delgado brat threw up on the terrace.”
I’m so relieved when he bustles away without checking the bathhouse that I forget my vow to deck him the next time he pats my ass.
Why do I bother? There she is, Mrs. Witter, with her string bikini showing it all. No, not quite all. She must shave herself down there, because there’s never one wisp of hair showing at the edge of the silk triangle between her legs. Believe me, I’ve looked for it. She caught me looking once. I froze. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move. She stared at me for about ten seconds like I was a bug. Worse, like I was a kid. Then she turned her attention back to the book she was reading, not even bothering to put her legs together.
I try to imagine what it looks like from the pictures in the magazines Pop hides in his workshop, but it won’t be like those because it will be hers, Mrs. Witter’s, and it will be perfect, like everything else about her. And I want to see everything. Up close.
She sees me, but only because it’s hard not to see a guy mopping up vomit. Head down, I make like I am the Michael Jordan of vomit-swabbers, two points down with ten seconds on the clock, but I watch her. Them. Her new boyfriend is even older than the husband she screwed to death. His shiny black wig looks too big for his shriveled little head. He’s got breasts. His veiny hand rests high up on her thigh. Disgusting. I figure she’s only after old guys for their money. I guess that’s reasonable, but it makes me sick. Money isn’t everything. I can make love to her ten or twelve times a night when she isn’t even with me.
She kisses the old fart and stands up while he checks to see that she hasn’t sucked his false teeth loose. She’s going! Moving like a lioness. I know what an antelope’s heart must feel like.
I run with the bucket and mop. Ron sees me, beams: There goes one motivated flunkey!
I slip into the vacant bathhouse next to hers. She’s muttering to herself. She mutters a lot. Some foreign language. Weird, but sexy because it’s her doing it.
I put my eye to the hole. When she takes one step to the side, I’ll be able to see ... an old leather coat? No, it has yellow bones embedded in the leather, and it moves like it’s alive, stretching and bunching like a caterpillar, and it smells like very old, very dead fish. I can’t hold in a gagging noise.
I turn away, pressing my cheek to the hole, trying not to breathe. What did I see? Getting all worked up, running, out of breath, my eyes not adjusting right away to the dim light—I didn’t see anything, I was flashing back on my daydream. Hallucinating. I just saw spots in front of my eyes, that’s all. What I smelled must have been the mop I’d brought with me. It hadn’t smelled so bad outdoors.
“Billy,” she says very softly but very clearly. Jesus, I’m caught! I’m dead! I didn’t even know she knew my name. Now she croons it: “Bill-eee.”
Maybe I should get up and run. Maybe I should go, “I’m just cleaning up in here, Mrs. Witter, sorry if I bothered you.”
But she doesn’t sound bothered. She sounds ... inviting. I put my eye back to the hole.
It’s different, very different from what I thought I saw, but I still don’t know what it is. It’s round, pink, sort of like a peach, sort of like a vertical mouth with puffy lips. It’s exactly what I’ve been dying to see all summer, and I don’t even recognize it right away. Dumb, huh? It moves back a little and I see red fingernails indenting her skin at the bikini-line in her tan. Fuck, she’s fucking flashing me!
“Billy,” she says again, still soft and friendly. “Take a real good look.”
I do. I think, this is where she pokes her finger through the hole, or maybe her ballpoint pen, but she sounds too sincere to do that, too nice, and it doesn’t stop me from pressing my eye hard against the wood.
Her red nails dimple her flesh a little deeper. The lips part, showing pink that shades to red. It opens wider, and the red shades to dark red, to black. It keeps opening, and now I wonder again what I’m looking at. It’s like another hole beyond the hole in the wood, only this is a hole in the face of the real world, a deep hole, a pit, and something I can’t make out in the blackness, in the distance, is squirming inside it. That horrible smell returns, and I know damn well this time it’s not the mop.
I tear my eye away and run.
I don’t care that Ron’s yelling, that I knock Mrs. Delgado into the pool. I’m pedaling before I hit my bike.
I must’ve looked directly at the sun when I ran outside. I keep blinking, but this black spot stays in my vision. I shake my head.
I never see the truck that hits me. I know I’m hurt, but I don’t care, because the black spot is the hole that Mrs. Witter showed me, the hole in the world. It sticks with me.
“No, I don’t wanna look!” I scream, and the ambulance guys have to strap me down. I damn near twist my head off to get away from the hole. If I look, I’ll see everything. Up close.
I fight like a maniac at the hospital, still trying to get away from that gap in the real world, so they strap me to a bed and shoot me full of dope. At least the hole isn’t in my vision anymore. It’s in the wall, where I have to strain painfully against the straps to see it.
Each time I check, it’s bigger.
CHANGES
One morning Arthur Moran came to suspect that the world had disintegrated while he slept. Almost everything, however, had been replaced with near-duplicates.
“You’re crazy,” said Trish, his wife, when he confided his suspicion at breakfast.
“That was my first thought, too, but would a crazy person even consider that possibility?”
“A crazy person who was a devious, pseudo-intellectual quibbler would,” she said, “especially if he was a lawyer.” He had grown weary of her lawyer-jokes even before she began compiling a book of them. At that very moment she was jotting in her ubiquitous notebook. This would normally have annoyed him, but now he felt a chill.
“Your notebook is green,” he said.
“Very good, Arthur!”
Ignoring her sarcasm, he said, “Your notebooks are always blue.”
“On the contrary, dear, I bought a dozen green notebooks when I began my project. Green is my favorite color.”
“Perhaps I’m not quite awake yet,” he said mildly.
“Crazy,” she mutter
ed, scribbling.
He studied her guardedly while skimming his newspaper. He could point to no one line or freckle on her fashionably lean face and cry, Aha!, but she was surely not the same woman she had been yesterday. His newspaper was wrong, too. The typeface and the proportions of the page were slightly different, but he could summon no precise image of the paper’s correct appearance.
He asked, “To lie is the intransitive verb, isn’t it?”
“As in, ‘I lied after I laid Ms. Cromer at the Christmas party,’ dear?”
He flushed. With not a single martini glass in sight, she was almost never so vindictive so early in the day.
“Lie meaning to recline,” he said. “I lie, I lay, I have lain.”
“Of course.”
“I’ve come across no less than two instances in today’s paper where lie and lay are confused.”
“And you believe, because The Times employs a copyeditor who didn’t go to Harvard, that you’ve been hurled into a parallel universe?”
“It’s unusual,” he said, unwilling to make a stand on such shaky ground.
Most of the discrepancies in this new world were similarly minor or elusive. They could have been ordinary mistakes; his memories of details could have been false.
His greatest shock today had been his first, when he punched the button on his bedside stereo for his favorite classical music station. He was sickened by a blast of noise, by an inane beat, by screeches fulfilling with a vengeance Isaiah’s prophecy that the tongue of the dumb shall sing. He hurried to adjust the manual tuner, but the frequency was correct. The familiar station was no longer to be found on the dial.
Even that drastic change could be explained. Radio stations were bought and sold, new owners brought new policies, and sometimes they omitted to tell the public that an apparently fixed beacon in the universal flux had been washed away forever. He began to wonder if this shock hadn’t caused a mild stroke. It was hardly a comforting thought, but lost brain-cells might be responsible his persistent sense of reverse deja-vu.
Nasty Stories Page 3
