Behemoth dove and held his breath, to drown whatever clung to his head. Behemoth drifted like a dead thing at the bottom, among the skeletons of its prey, among the deep live things that survived by existing beneath its notice. Drifting. Trying not to dream. The surface a silvery-gray hole in the world above.
Behemoth became wraith, became phantom, became a notion and a smudge of night. Came up for air at night. Hunted nocturnal and let the silence and wet black wash over, speak to the thing on Behemoth’s head. Starve, Nocturnalia said. Never see the light, Nocturnalia said. Be forever staring up into nothing and nowhere. Like Behemoth.
Sleep overtook Behemoth at strange moments, found gaps in time where he recognized Time. What occurred and what did not occur. As if Nocturnalia had turned on Behemoth and did not work to dislodge the creature. With this knowledge came the dreams in green again, like something from the bottom of the holding ponds. Overlooked. Discarded. Resurrected. Floating.
Even deep, Nocturnalia spoke to him. Spoke in many voices. Something within rising up to meet it, greet something familiar within Nocturnalia. A fox staring out from a burning shed. A flame that became a red tail that became the form of a salamander, wriggling in the mud. A voice that wasn’t a voice. A body that wasn’t a body.
The green, the residue that, long dormant, now coated him once more, sheathed scars and sheathed the creature, too. That the green might replace the thing on his head. For at least Behemoth understood the source of the green, had parlayed with it once upon a time. Grow and grow as once Behemoth had grown mighty.
The green reached into Behemoth like hands slowly plunged into shallow water and tearing at pond weeds at the bottom. Penetrated the citadel atop Behemoth’s head. Seeped in and snuck in, and as the green burrowed there Behemoth could tell the creature atop his head now had, unseeing and unhearing, the features he recognized but could not name. Will never name.
Now the creature inside spoke to Behemoth. Beneath a surface of dead leaves. Hidden in a pile of old clothes in the corner of a shed. You shall give up something to gain something. You shall be something else to remain your self. Like everyone. But Behemoth could not tell if this was real or a mechanism, a latch or a lever or a trick.
Off and on, on and off, flood and retreat. Carved glorious from holding ponds that flickered on and off with life and the dream intensified and Behemoth, drugged, felt himself out of water and inside the Company building. Where he had never been before.
Be calm. Becalmed. Slowed Behemoth’s breathing, sent stillness awash across it, sent a fluid language scrolling across the folds of his brain. Muddened. Obscured. Looking out through the eyes of another water creature. One suspended between life and death, between large and small. That signed language in the water, through its skin.
The inside was coming outside. The outside was going inside. Pond was desert. Desert, pond. As the Company poked and prodded Botch. Behemoth. Leviathan. The tiny fish he had been. All while the green light shone out undetected from the face upon Behemoth’s head, shining out upon all. Seeing all.
The tiny fish that sang at dawn sang out the Company’s demands as commands as scripture as control. Sang out indistinguishable. Nocturnalia a boiling red eye for the moon with the fox hidden beneath it. Revolved there. Became a parade of ghouls. Of dead things brought back to life.
What Behemoth feared now was a monster greater than himself: the Company building, that hid the sun and hid the water and how the clack of steps approaching meant nothing good and the clack of steps departing felt like pain or fury.
The passage of time was like a slab of water and cold and heat and ice and boiling oil. A slab that never resolved into a depth but could only be splayed out upon. But soon enough, Behemoth could sense the people changing under the green light.
Now the green light shone out from the people staring at the flanks of Behemoth and Behemoth, emanating that hidden light himself, could see that gaze wherever it fell upon its body. How the faces behind the gaze murmured, consulted, but in all ways slackened, receded, and expressed the failure of their experiment. Which was not the failure of their experiment but a failure of recognition.
There came a day when the green had so infected the people in the Company building that they fought over Behemoth—what should be done about Behemoth, who should do it, where Behemoth should be taken, what steps, whether steps, wither steps, no steps. But they were all the same person now. But they did not know it yet.
When the floors. When walls. When corridors were streaked with blood and figures lay hunched or huddled there. When the rest had retreated behind a barricade. When came the roar of a bear-man now leashed, collared, chained. When the door lay open for a time. When the leviathan could, be-set and be-sored, became determined and moved long-dormant fins. When much diminished: self-rescue.
Light was warm upon his back, his jaws. Light agile and indiscriminate. Light pouring into the broken places. Light knew the way to the holding ponds, gave permission. For the deep plunge. For the relief of safety. From everything. Except the green light.
Behemoth could no longer. Was not. Had no. Become Leviathan. Ravenous a sacrifice to Nocturnalia. Hunger an empty stomach that felt full. Tried to remember and forget: Nocturnalia. The house on the hill. Nocturnalia: The tidal pools that must be holding ponds. Cool nothing of mud against the hot itch of scales enflamed by rheum and cracks, comfort against battle scars under the stars, the night surcease, too, a different kind. In kind.
The Company ran in ever-widening circles, ever-smaller circles. Sent out expeditions, did not send out expeditions. Fell into disrepair, still repaired. Creatures escaped that the Company had not meant to escape and Leviathan altered let some scuttle and rustle and run out across the desert to a kind of safety in the City. The small ones. The ones that professed to innocence. The ones that had no voice to plead.
The ones that grunted and the ones that gurgled and those that sang to their deaths. The ones that pranced or sprang. The ones that had wide eyes and the ones that had narrow. The ones covered in blood that wept and screamed at the sight of Leviathan. The ones that screamed with their blank-eyed silence. Salvaged. Saved. Given safe passage. Passage. Passing through. Unnatural. But not to me.
Cast out: Many of the Company’s guardians, no longer trusted. Mighty among them, the bear-man, who had grown dangerous. A hesitation. A lingering doubt. The memory of a slaughter inside the Company building, between factions, that had not happened yet, given over to Leviathan as gift and burden. Visions that hurt to understand, and Leviathan let the monster pass.
A dark shadow upon the ground, looming from the sky. The presence on the far side of the Company building that shuddered and shattered the world with its roars, its pain. A flicker of a premonition. Watching a wasp crawl across the crawled mud flats. How it leapt into the air as the surface shook. How it had been crawling across the imprint of a vast paw. How it honored the line of that border.
The paw print the wasp had crawled across filled with water from some hidden source. Leviathan wallowed in the mud of it, slid a vast bulk across the width of it. As if to eclipse it. Yet not large enough to hide it. Only tadpole next to that.
One day, the shadow upon the ground grew until it was so immense there was no place in the holding ponds to hide. The monster behind it, the bear-man grown enormous, set one huge paw down upon the Company building. Crushed it. Feasted upon what came furious out from it. Roared out pain and rage and triumph.
Old jaws lunged out of older reflex. Caught hold of the great bear’s flank. For a moment. Then slid away, snapping, and the bear had hold of Leviathan. There came a rending and a tearing and the sky was where the holding ponds should be. Could not move limbs. Could not see except out of one eye. Thrown down. Discarded. As the bear moved on.
Constellations of scar, lit up by pain. The deep and the narrow. The ones that had cost nothing. The ones that had cost almost everything. And as they flared and burned and cindered, Nocturnalia released into the horizon
and each creature that had made them stitched their outline into the pattern of the stars. A bridge. A tunnel. A burning shed.
Nothing in the dying was brief. But neither was it overlong. Spread out too far across the holding ponds. Alive but not. Dead but not. The dust of the sky drifted onto Behemoth and the gasping call or cry from the broken jaws slackened.
Just the sear of the blue sky and the distant sounds of conflict and a burning that became a numbness. And that was better than nothing.
And in time, Behemoth, you will not suffer. Nor will you cause suffering. In time, you will be as you were hatched from the egg. New, curious. And I will be the old one. And you will be the start of something new … again, through me.
v.6.1
6. THE BODY
– 7 –
There’s always a burning in your brain. Walls burning. Never turning to ash. And you don’t know if you’re inside the walls or outside. Doubled up, coughing, staring down at the moss strewn with plastic bags and straws and cups that line the polluted river some might call a stream. Rendered spectral by moonlight. Framed by a dark thicket of low, gnarled trees.
Something there, entangled. You don’t know what you’ve found at first. It’s just you, being sick onto the muddy ground and, off to the left, this image of a creature staring up at you. Improbable. Crude drawing. Scrap of something left behind.
But then it resolves into the black cover of some book. Wedged violent into the riverbank. The creature staring up at you, drawn in a luminous blue ink. A fox? Probably a fox. Scraps of cloth curl around the base of ferns and weeds nearby, a purple you think might be dried blood.
You convulse, lose the little ballast you had. A cup of tuna. A ladle of soup from the homeless shelter in town. A few crackers you’d stolen from a fast-food restaurant. Something you ate? Or a shift during the night in the pollution hazing the skyline or welling up from ruptured barrels.
Or you have cancer. But there’s a rash, too, so you think it’s just something new in the air. Not something rising out of you. Deep dive: a deep cleansing dive into the river. As you remember it as a child, not the corrupted thing it has become—maybe farther out of town, where it doesn’t smell. Where half-built beaver dams filter and crayfish still survive under rocks.
The fox gleams, winks at you as you recover. Almost cheery in the moonlight that drifts strange, like snow, down through the trees. Bright white streaks.
The creature puts you in mind of a comforting children’s fable. There are always clever talking foxes. Helpful foxes. Smiling with their teeth. Bedtime stories your mother told you. Of fantastical animals transformed by your mother’s gin-tinged breath. How the pages seemed to curl up like something dying at her touch, and the stories curled up, too, the fox becoming something else. The moral never the normal one.
All right, fox, all right. Each thing in its turn. Wiping your mouth with the edge of a ragged sleeve. Letting out one final gasp.
Cloth still clings to the journal like gauze. Someone had come along, unwrapped it. A moment of panic, spinning around. But there’s no one here now. The book’s discarded. Took a look, flung it into the mud. Maybe even someone who lives huddled under the bridge, like you. Even if you’d never do that. You prefer discarded things, the way they bring something or someone with them. Almost as if they bring friends. Company.
You pry the book out, wipe away the mud. The strange plastic, the hard shell, is lacerated, cuts into the edge of your hand. Windswept, and like it had passed through a flame that left it whole. The book—journal, you think, instinctively—smells like blood, with some antiseptic scent peering out beneath that.
Fumble for your cheap key-chain flashlight. To reveal a faint circle on the cover and inside the circle that crude drawing of a fox head, rendered in blue. The circle’s like an upturned goldfish bowl and thus the fox an old-fashioned deep-sea diver in a ponderous suit.
Sharp, harsh lines for the fox, as if it or the person drawing it were cruel. Or in pain. Or angry. Or maybe you don’t know anything from the drawing. The emptiness in your stomach, and you don’t know where the feeling comes from, that you’ve been here before. Passed by the journal. Never saw it, distracted by hunger or sickness or how the plastic-strewn shore has become white noise, part of the backdrop to the world.
Overwhelmed, now on one knee, mush against your jeans. Rough. The journal rough in your hand. Sensing a vastness, as if something has entered the forest that doesn’t belong. Something dangerous.
Where could it come from? Beyond the river and the forest lies the old factory. The smokestacks are just faint lines in the night, but their sacrifice billows bright and narrow and tall as if it were daytime.
A swirl of movement in the water brings you back from floating across the forest, toward the factory. A glint, a gleam, a glimmer. You shine your flashlight out across something smooth and long and (you think) light green.
It feels the light upon it, flinches, turns long enough to reveal large, luminous eyes. A blunt snout. Vaguely reptilian, yet not. About the size of a river otter. Moving fast through the bobbing garbage and reeds.
A gasp. You, gasping, startled.
The creature dives. The splash has depth, reach, certainty. The circles spreading from the absence tell you little. Die out before they reach the shore and yet it feels as if, invisible, they pass right through you.
You’re north, not south. There should be nothing like that in the river. The air’s already crisp, the trees pretending to flake leaves. Winters are hotter than before, but, still, how could such a thing survive here?
With the flashlight off, the water’s somehow clearer, more visible. A latticework of light shadows, the trees beyond like figures standing in judgment. You didn’t mean to blind the creature. Whatever it was. You don’t like to cause discomfort to living things. Not if you can help it. Too many things cause discomfort to you.
The sound of gunfire somewhere back in town galvanizes you. Hide the journal under your shawl. Retreat the fifty yards or so to your shelter inside the tunnel beneath the bridge leading out of town. Join the hunched sleeping shapes there, the humid pulse of body heat. Just the one sentry on duty, ramshackle as you all are. A man who has insomnia. Gaunt. Biblical. Nods at you. Stares back out into the night. Still not quite enough to light a fire in the rusted barrel beside him.
Anything could happen, the closer to town you get. The closer to the factory. It’s better living under the bridge. You would even if you had a choice, but that’s probably a lie. The world beyond feels wrong. Infiltrated. The world beyond isn’t really the world, would eat you alive given the chance. Not enough ways to know what’s still out there, beyond the bridge.
The train’s rare harsh call is half myth now. As rare as hearing an owl. Most of the owls have left, and the mice apparently loved the owls so much, they left too. Whatever “left” means. Nothing good.
It turns cold, like autumn nights used to be, the chill finally reaching you. The landscape having a dream of the past.
You cocoon into your little self-made corner, pile another dirty layer over yourself. Half hidden from the others by an overturned chest of drawers, a mound of plastic sheets, and molding clothes. Journal buried deep in the morass for now, until it’s safe. Wary, you keep peeking out, half expecting the creature to have followed you back to the tunnel.
You can’t shake the image of the eyes in the water. That gaze.
* * *
<
The demons favored any sort of shadow, slipped into view undercover. More and more took the form of strange men. People who looked like people, but were not. People who should belong, but didn’t. Sometimes the new demons brought peculiar animals, on leashes. Animals
that looked like dogs but didn’t move like dogs, more like people crawling on all fours. Or with fur with odd reflective qualities, so that as they hunched past certain surfaces, they seemed to disappear.
If she talked about the demons, people thought she was crazy, because they already thought she was crazy because she was homeless. Or they’d pretend she hadn’t said anything because they didn’t want to think about it. But she knew better than anyone: She grew up here, if more as ghost than citizen. Too many disappearances, and with each, more gaps in the world. In memory.
Sometimes the demons appeared and other people ceased. That made her wonder if she had become delusional. Or had been that way all along. Other times, anger: That others couldn’t see what she saw. Or, worse, she wondered if they did see the demons but kept it to themselves.>>
- 6 -
Across the river, on the opposite bank, at dawn, out of mist … appears a pale, ethereal man. Angular. Skin so clear veins stand out like tributaries.
Dead Astronauts Page 10
