by Matt Cardin
Tyson took a step backward toward the door. Derek looked down and saw that his own hand had picked up a sharp silver letter opener. He twirled it with his fingers, and it seemed just like a feather, a strange, silvery feather with a razor-edged quill. He looked back up at Tyson with the feather growing heavier in his hand. “What do you think it does to a person,” he said, “when you squeeze what’s inside him into the wrong shape?”
He moved as if to come around the desk. Tyson fled. A moment later Derek heard the sound of the front door bursting open and the electronic chime singing its meaningless song.
The phone blipped. “—Warner?” Candace’s voice trembled so near and yet so very far away, all the way on the other side of the black electronic box that still linked him to the world he had inhabited only moments ago. “What—what happened?”
Before he could answer, the Dwarf told him that dangerous men would surely show up before long to vent the Texan’s rage upon anybody they could find. So he said, “Listen, I’m taking the rest of the day off. Why don’t you take off, too? Just make a sign and stick it in the window. Tell everybody we’ll be back on Monday. Go shopping or something.”
There was no reply for a moment. Then: Blip. “Is—is everything all right?” My God, he thought, she actually used the phone correctly. A surge of warmth flooded through him.
Then she said, “Derek?” It was the first time she had ever addressed him by his first name. Visions of huge-nippled breasts bursting through bodice and buttons spilled through his brain like candy. But his new inner sense told him unequivocally that he simply couldn’t pursue them, he couldn’t answer the invitation contained in her use of his name, because there was something else he had to do, a task whose fulfillment would exert a positively talismanic effect upon the shape of the remainder of his life.
He did not answer her query, instead leaving their final contact deliciously unresolved. He slipped out the back entrance, past the Dumpster and around the building to his car. As he drove away he watched the office building reflected in the rearview mirror. It appeared crusty and dilapidated, like an ancient, abandoned prison, and it stood in stark relief against a lurid sky full of weirdly churning clouds, all red and black and ashy like a charcoal drawing.
The commute home was a voyage through a transformed world. He sailed through the highway construction without a hitch, as if pulled along by an invisible current. Road crews paused in their labors to look up with startled expressions as he passed. Fellow motorists veered away and stared wide-eyed through their windows. The radio spoke from the same station he had left it on earlier, the same cultured male voice talking in the same quiet, smooth tones: “. . . a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. The classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or trans-marginal region. That region contains every kind of matter: ‘seraph and snake’ abide there side by side.”
By the time he reached his suburban subdivision, the chaotic sky was darkening toward early night. The clock on the dashboard read barely eleven in the morning, but it was as if a vast bowl of ash had been dumped on the heavens, and the world was gray and glaring with the strange intensity of a solar eclipse. All down the street, the trees lining the lawns of the neighboring houses were tossing their branches in the growing darkness like rows of monstrous lions shaking their manes.
The radio said, “Each of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows—an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporal manifestation. The Self manifests itself through the organism; but there is always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.”
He pulled into his driveway behind a familiar vehicle, an expensive sports car that belonged to someone he had once known, someone he had formerly called his friend. (Steve, the Dwarf whispered into the back of his brain.) When he stepped out of his own car, the stirrings of a mysterious hot breeze grazed his face and ruffled his hair. A muted roar began to creep across the sky from west to east, rolling and crackling like the aftershock of a thunderclap.
The current carried him across the lawn, around to the back of the house, where he approached the bedroom window and peered through it into the gloom. Two pale bodies were pressed together and pulsating with pleasure on the bed. (Linda and Steve, the Dwarf hissed.) He followed the current back around to the front of the house and entered through the door, making no effort to be quiet.
The television was turned on in the living room. The picture showed a white field of shivery static. A cultured male voice lectured through the speakers: “So long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term.”
“Linda!” he called. He plinked his keys loudly into the dish beside the door. “Linda! Come here!” He listened for a response. There was a stillness louder than a shout, and then from down the hallway: a whisper of bedsheets being pulled back, followed by the familiar creak of the floorboard beside his bed.
He crept down the hallway soundlessly, flowing like liquid night. At the doorway he paused for an instant, giving everyone time to prepare. Then he stepped inside and noticed simultaneously that the bathroom door was shut and the bedroom window open. The bedcovers were an obvious hasty job of pulling up and smoothing down. The blue drapes flapped and fluttered in the hot breeze.
The breeze was a whisper of sea spray. The room was a barren windswept plain located on the far side of an odd angular intersection; it was a misshapen cluster of towers tottering under a cold blood moon. He felt the letter opener in his hand twirling faster and faster. Had he indeed brought it with him and only now noticed it? The sound of the shower starting abruptly on the far side of the bathroom door mingled with the ocean-spray breeze and melded with the watery waves of blue light radiating from the drapes and cascading down the white walls in liquid ripples to give life to this cracked desert.
A delicate, tinny sound, like the scraping of an insect, began to tickle his ears, and he realized it was the bedside radio, switched on and dialed to a by-now familiar station. “The apprehension,” it said in tiny insect tones, “of a coming dissolution, the grim conviction that this state was the last state of the conscious Self, the sense that I had followed the last thread of being to the verge of an abyss . . .”
Another sound intruded upon the voice, layering itself gently over the tiers of speech and oceanic flowing, wafting through the open window on the back of the swelling wind: the starting roar of an expensive automobile engine. But there was nowhere the driver could go. For Derek had parked behind him, and Derek was a bloodhungry Dwarf crouched low in the dark, and he carried in his huge hand the pulsing feather of vengeance, plucked from a bloodangel’s wing.
The current lulled him to sleep even as it swept him down the hallway and out the front door onto the lawn, where a wide-eyed man in a foreign car was backing over the grass to get around the car blocking his exit. Derek saw, as if in a blissful vision, this man’s mouth open to jabber and scream as the Dwarf reached out with that blackplucked feather and jabbed it through the Jaguar’s open window again and again, plunging it repeatedly into a pulpy softness that felt like paradise as the black sky roared and the lions shook their manes in regal rows, lifting their heads to bellow and join voices with the storm.
Despite the sudden thunderstorm raging outside, Linda stayed in the shower until the water ran cold. She jumped with each flash of lightning and peal of thunder, rem
embering the urban myths about people being electrocuted in such situations. Finally, when she could stand it no longer, she stepped out and toweled off, shivering violently and struggling to catch her breath.
She considered jeans and a tee shirt but then changed her mind and wrapped her torso with the white towel. She also tousled her wet hair to give it the sexy leonine look that had always turned Derek on. Or at least it had done so for the first six years of their marriage, up until a few months ago when he had begun acting like a stranger and looking at her as if she were some ugly creature that had washed up on the shore of his life.
Surely he couldn’t know about her and Steve. Of that she was confident. And it was easy enough to explain Steve’s car in the driveway, since he was friends with their neighbors and could claim he had just walked over there to say hello (which was exactly what he had fled to do only moments ago). But today’s brush with disaster was the closest yet. Before leaving the bathroom she adjusted the towel again, making sure it rode low enough to expose generous portions of both breasts, which were still stiffened with gooseflesh from the icy water. Especially in the present circumstance, she thought a little misdirection couldn’t hurt at all.
She saw no one when she peered into the bedroom. The hallway was likewise deserted, so she walked confidently down to the living room, holding the towel up with one hand, and then stopped short beside the living room recliner, arrested in mid-step by the sight of her husband crouched low in the open front doorway with his back to her. The storm still raged outside, buffeting the house with heavy winds, blowing the sharp-sweet smell of ozone and ravaged maple trees in through the door. He appeared to be surveying the spectacle, heedless of the rain slapping him in the face. His head rotated back and forth in regular, slow sweeps, and the odd motion, combined with his incomprehensible squatting pose and hunched shoulders, made him look almost comical. She barely suppressed a burst of nervous laughter, raising a hand to her mouth and nearly dropping the towel in the process. When she spoke, her voice still trembled with the inner pressure of giddy humor.
“Oh, hi, honey. I was in the shower. I didn’t hear you come in. Why are you home so early? Shouldn’t you shut the door?”
She was about to ask, “What’s wrong?” when he turned to face her. He remained low in the doorway, crouched like a caveman. Her words stuck in her throat, trapped there by the sudden paralysis in her chest. Derek looked like some primitive tribal chief drenched in red war paint. His eyes were wide and flashing. The corners of his mouth were drawn down in an unearthly grimace. In one hand he gripped a sharp blade that glistened with the same red paint.
Before she could speak or move, he exploded from his crouch and came at her like lightning. She saw a bright burst and felt a concussive blow like a thundercrack. Then she was falling in slow motion, floating down, down to the floor and landing hard with a broken jaw. The storm hit her wrist next, and then two ribs, and then her nose. Strong, sticky hands were tangled in her wet hair, dragging her across rough shag carpet that burned her legs and back as the towel pulled away. Then it was cold ceramic tile sliding beneath her naked body, and the cabinets and refrigerator loomed overhead.
Soured milk was produced and poured over her face. The splash of the cold liquid brought her partly back, and she screeched through a mangled mouth as she awoke for the first time to the horror of what was happening.
But when she tried to scream for help, the only words that came out were, “What’s wrong?” She screamed again and still the same words erupted: “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” Over and over she repeated it, unable to stop, asking desperately for the answer to a question whose implications, as she was only just beginning to understand, extended far beyond anything she had ever imagined.
For bending over her was not her bland, lost husband but the Dwarf with blacksmear eyes. Reaching out to her were not his soft office-worker’s hands but the horny hands of the rottenblood host. And clutched in those hands was not a thin, blood-drenched blade but the piercing vengeance of the greedy-eyed God which would carve the secret shape that swims in the deep. The words and phrases arose like a whirling chant in her head, and she could not tell if they entered through her ears or spoke from a deeper source.
The Dwarf stood above her and raised a misshapen hand, and gripped in that hand was the light of a four-pointed star, which gathered and swelled until it was a blazing beacon of truth in the dimness, scorching her eyes and burning her face, casting shimmering dark shadows across the suddenly real angles and planes of a barren landscape that had enveloped them.
The Dwarf seized her throat and pricked the tender flesh with the star of destiny, which was the black feather of vengeance, drawing out a mesmerizing bead of crimson-on-white, and the fiery pain of it, and the smell of sizzling flesh, refused to let her slip into shock and believe it was a nightmare.
The Dwarf spoke, opening its misshapen mouth for the first time, and its voice was the roar of hot winds and the hissing of blood rains. It said:
“The seraph is a snake. The Self is an abyss. Who knows the stench of God? The blood shall rot away!”
Then it reached down into the naked mystery quivering before it and patiently, joyfully began to make everything right.
Nightmares, Imported and Domestic
With Mark McLaughlin
His name was Lafcadio, and he was an artist, a creator of lavish and colorful landscapes. Or at least, this accounted for part of his life: the part lived by the conscious, waking, sensing self that opened eyes on the external world and breathed in the scents and sights of sun-filled skies and rain-wet streets. Lafcadio the artist spent endless hours reading Zen literature and attempting to incorporate esoteric ideas into his paintings. Lafcadio the artist thrived on the sensuous impressions of the outer world and the intricate thoughts to which they inspired his overheated imagination.
But he was a man divided, and the other part of his life was not nearly so vibrant. For approximately eight hours out of every twenty-four, he assumed the identity of Brian, an accountant, a creator of neatly filled-out forms, who spent his days locked within the taupe walls of an aging suburban office. Lafcadio’s life as Brian was uncommonly realistic for a nocturnal vision. As Brian, he felt pain, hunger, all the usual sensations, and knew them in all their day-to-day, five-sensory vividity. But he did not see his Brian-self through the twin windows of his own eyes. Rather, he watched himself from a distance, as one might watch a character in a television show. Appropriately, this dream-life, Brian’s life, took place in a world of black-and-white, like an old episode of The Andy Griffith Show or I Love Lucy. And the tenor of this dream-existence was entirely in keeping with its grayscaled hues.
The tension between the two selves—the glorious sensuality of the artist and the drab conventionality of the accountant—expressed itself in all the habits and mores of Lafcadio’s life. One of his most oft-indulged amusements was to sample exotic coffees with his eyes closed and try to guess the precise blend and origin of the beans. By contrast, one of Brian’s favorite drinks was instant coffee, mixed with one package of artificial sweetener and one teaspoon of nondairy creamer. He preferred Folgers, but he usually couldn’t detect it when somebody substituted Maxwell House or Sanka.
The only person who had ever slept more than once in Lafcadio’s bed was Lafcadio himself. The right half of Brian’s bed had never held anyone but Susan, his wife for as many years as he could remember.
Lafcadio was high-strung and temperamental. Brian was even-tempered and meek.
The line of contrasts ran right down to physical appearance. Lafcadio was tall and thin, with a vaguely catlike appearance to his bony, bald head. Brian was of average height and weight, with a blandly amiable, slightly rounded face, and a ten-dollar haircut.
Some mornings Lafcadio awoke to a momentary disorientation, brought about by trying to decide whose bed he was lying in. The feeling lasted until after his shower, when the first sip of coffee hit his tongue and he discovered with
relief that it was not Folgers but Jamaica Blue Mountain. The bitter hot tang of the black liquid always confirmed that he was indeed the effervescent artist and not the dreary accountant. But as time went by—months running into years, years into more than a decade, and all the while the nocturnal life of Brian playing like a classic TV show on the screen of his eyelids at night—he found that he slowly came to look forward to his nightly ramblings in a world of white-bread banality.
True, the morning disorientation sometimes left him with a lingering fear that one day he might wake up to find himself in a two-tone world with Susan beside him in bed and his life as Lafcadio the Magnificent receding like foam from the shore of a dream ocean. But in the end he discovered that it was really quite easy to convince himself that a life as Brian the Maudlin wouldn’t be all that bad. Not if Brian were able to spend at least eight hours of every twenty-four dreaming that he was Lafcadio the Magnificent.
“So this Brian,” said Cornelia, Lafcadio’s best friend, over steaming mugs one day at their favorite coffee house, Mondo Mocha. “Your dream buddy. What’s he up to these days? You haven’t mentioned him in a while.”
Lafcadio reflected for a moment before answering. “He’s not really my buddy,” he said at last. “He’s me. And Susan has been talking about flowers.”
“Flowers?” Cornelia looked at him blankly over a Café Corretto.
“She thinks the house looks too plain on the outside. All the other houses on the block have tons of flowers. We have to keep up with the Joneses, you know.” He smiled privately to himself and turned his attention to the steam rising from his Espresso Macchiato. The swirling vapor hinted at a snow-covered landscape, mottled by bizarre seismic convulsions. He allowed the image to take its course in his imagination, hoping it might lead him to his next artistic project.
Cornelia gave him a hard little smile. But then, practically everything about her was hard, though admirably so. She was into boxing and weightlifting, and it showed on her arms and shoulders. Her abs were like a rippled brick wall (as he had discovered once, long ago, on the sole occasion when they had become physically intimate and he had been able to indulge his long-held desire of placing the flat of his palm upon her stomach). Years ago she had served on the police force, before she decided to open a beauty and exercise spa for women only. “This Susan sounds like a perfectly hideous frau,” she was saying, as his snow-swept reverie became transmogrified by her chiseled physique into a Dali-esque scene of powder-and-ice piled into abdominal ripples on an arctic tundra. “Brian has to play gardener now? Tell me everything!”
