“What?”
Damon turned to Danny and said, “Kiss.” Then he puckered his lips and made a kissing, smacking sound, as if calling a cat. Danny just looked at him. Damon turned back to the traffic. He pushed his lips through the fence, still making that wet, chirping sound.
Danny stepped back, his concern for Damon turning to horror and incomprehension as Damon’s lips stretched like warm putty beyond the fence, toward the road. They narrowed and elongated until they resembled a five-foot-long pink ribbon and began to graze the speeding cars, still making that kissing sound - along with a soft wet thud at each brief impact.
That’s when Danny finally ran away.
-3-
When he got home he was soaked and shivering. His parents were in the living room watching TV. He changed into pajamas and crawled into bed and shivered until he fell asleep. He dreamed about drowning in a vast white ocean.
Damon was absent from school the next day and a sickening guilt began to grip Danny. He pictured Damon dead by the freeway – cars passing without notice over his flat, waffled lips. He imagined crows diving into gaps in the traffic to pick at the puttied flesh.
When he got home, Danny located the name BRODY in the phone book and memorized the address.
Damon’s family lived over by the old stone quarry. Danny knew Damon rode bus 11. If he was absent tomorrow, Danny would take bus 11 to Damon’s house and find out if he was okay. He had to know what happened to his best friend after he’d abandoned him.
His plan terrified him.
Damon was missing again the next morning.
Tension gathered all day. Danny moved through his classes like a sleepwalker hiking a nightmare. By the time three o’clock arrived, Danny sat at his desk, uncertain whether to board bus 11 or his usual number 8. The empty seat behind him felt like a malediction. When the intercom blurted out his bus, Danny flinched, but remained seated. He heard 9. He heard 10. He heard 11 and rose and walked out of the room, through the front doors, and boarded the unfamiliar bus.
He chose the front seat, behind the unknown driver.
The bus rolled forward, taking him down strange streets and untried byways. The faces of the kids who passed him as they disembarked were familiar but he avoided their curious looks as if they were strangers.
Eventually, he was the only one left on the bus and he worried he’d missed Damon’s stop. For the first time, he wondered how he was going to get home.
The bus pulled over, the door flapped open. Danny got off. He watched the bus disappear behind a haze of blue fumes, and then started walking in what he hoped was the correct direction.
The road was narrow, rutted, and shaded by deep pine woods on both sides.
When he found the house he knew it immediately.
There were no numbers or names displayed; nothing to indicate that his friend lived there. He recognized it with an almost magical clarity, as if he’d visited it in recent dreams.
The house was small and brown.
He approached the door with rising apprehension, knocked.
The woman who answered was gaunt and pale and dressed in black. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in days.
Worry-lines defined her.
“Yes?” she said.
“Hi. I’m Damon’s friend, Danny. From school. Is he home?”
She shut her eyes in a slow-motion blink and pushed open the screen door. “Come in,” she said. He noticed she was clutching a tattered, worn-out Bible to her chest.
He entered the house. It was dark and Spartan but the first thing Danny noticed was the smell. Sulfur and ammonia. The stink of the THING.
He followed the woman down a short corridor and into a darkened bedroom. A man with a bristling beard was kneeling beside a bed, reading a Bible. He looked over at Danny.
“This is Damon’s friend from school,” the woman told him. “His name is Danny.”
The man stood up and nodded. He was tall and dressed in black, like the woman. “Hello, Danny,” he said.
“I’ll leave you two alone. But don’t talk for too long. Damon is weak.” He handed Danny the Bible. “Keep this close at hand,” he said. He and the woman left the room.
Danny approached the bed and a strangled whine escaped his constricted throat when he saw his friend.
Damon wasn’t Damon anymore. Damon was dying.
Damon had always been pale, but now his complexion nearly glowed with a vaporous pallor. His hair was gone, his soft skull webbed with blue blood vessels. His gray, liquescent eyes bulged from pulpous sockets like some primordial amphibian. His lips were melting to jelly down his sunken cheeks, and they rippled like silk when he said,
“... Hello Danny...” in a liquid whisper. His breath transmitted the caustic stink inside him.
Danny said, “Hi.”
Silence fell between them. Danny was trying not to cry. He asked him the only question that came to mind:
“Why aren’t you in the hospital?”
Damon shifted his head. He seemed to be melting into the folds of his pillow. “My parents don’t believe in hospitalsss or doctorssss. They think they can fix me with prayersss and that book.”
Danny looked down at the Bible in his hands.
“But the wordsss in that book, the prayersss my parentsss keep saying, even what I’m saying now, it’sss just scribblesss...”
“This is because of what happened. That alien thing we found,” Danny said, suddenly feeling stupid for stating the obvious.
“It wasn’t from outer-space, Danny... It was music and light. I’m music and light.. . So are you...” Danny shook his head and a tear traveled down his cheek. “I don’t understand.”
“I have a hand in my brain. It’ssss God’ssss hand...”
“You’re dying,” Danny said, stating a flat fact.
“Nooo. I’m falling up into an ocean... It’ssss a warm white ocean and everybody’ssss there.. .”
“Who’s there? Who’s everybody?”
“... Everybody... Even you...” Damon wriggled his arms out from under the covers as if to embrace Danny. His arms were too long and soft and they flopped to the floor and burst into puddles of clear jelly and the sharp stench shocked the room, burning Danny’s eyes and sinuses.
He gasped, dropped the Bible and ran from the room, light refracting to thin slivers in his watery eyes.
He heard Damon whisper, “... Music and light...” He bolted from the house and didn’t stop running until the road abruptly terminated at the edge of the forest.
Danny’s breathing was ragged, his lungs boiling with cool fluid.
He looked at the tree in front of him, suddenly seized with an overriding impulse to touch the rough bark. He reached out and his fingertips stretched like upspearing tendrils until they circled the tree. He felt the whorls and arches of his fingerprints merge with the grains of the wood and experienced a spiraling wave of pure pleasure so intense, he was rendered blind with bliss.
Music and light. He was becoming music and light.
When the police found him the next day he’d been reduced to a smiling pile of jelly.
SIGN OF A POISONOUS INSECT
Jacques Bertrand Houpinière
On the estate car-park they are burning bankers beneath the silver-grey sign of the Great Fish. Young girls dance naked, stretching their legs wide and mocking the dying executives.
On the railway embankment just beyond the shellfish gates a small army has gathered beneath banners and flags made from rubbish found in supermarket bins. Sunwheels, swastikas and lightning-bolts adorn the makeshift flags; likewise the armor of the troops, no two of which are dressed in any way alike. Many are naked, long clean limbs shining beneath their great bird heads.
The sky shimmers like oil. On a hillock overlooking his army stands Hitler, crustacean-armored, heraldic profile as if cast in granite. He gazes unblinking towards the horizon where, beyond the burning ruin of a Tesco’s store, black and silver storm clouds gather.
Ridler wandered the docklands – he always ended up there – every night in his dreams. The area expanded oneirically to the size of a modest metropolis, the derelict buildings spreading out fantastically and upwards, covering the absurdly foreshortened hills. In his dreams, these areas merged seamlessly with other even seedier locales – his old school, his first place of employment, the slum neighborhood he’d played in as a neglected child. But he was awake now, wasn’t he?
He pinched his hand to make sure. He felt nothing.
An expression – which would have appeared comical had there been any onlookers – crossed his deadpan face. He looked down at his hand and pinched it again. The flesh, instead of swelling up red where he’d squeezed it, stayed chalk-white and retained the impression of his fingers – like moldy old dough.
Alarmed now, he decided to test this further and, looking around at the littered street, picked up a six inch sliver of rusted metal, razor-sharp and jagged at one end.
Without even taking a breath he plunged it into the back of his hand. The expression of alarm deepened. Savagely he dragged the metal shard through the flesh of his hand laying it open to the bone. Panic began to set in. He should feel either pain or wake up. Brutally, he carried on making incisions.
He thrust the hand away from him, only then realizing it was not in fact his hand at all – but someone else’s, severed halfway up the forearm. He was now holding this out in front of him with some distaste. He threw it to the floor and stared at it. From the jaggedly severed end maggots crawled. He kicked the thing away and staggered in the opposite direction.
He didn’t know where he was. Most of the windows were boarded over – the ones that weren’t had no glass, most of which crunched under his feet like sugar lumps. He raised his hand (his real hand!!) to his nose and sniffed – formaldehyde! He wanted to go home but couldn’t remember where that was, nor of what ‘home’ consisted.
At the intersection of two seemingly endless streets he found a shop – a ludicrous corner-shop – bread, cigarettes, alcohol, video-rental and newspapers. He only wanted directions. He went in. The bell over the door made a dismal noise like a car being dismantled. From somewhere deep in the interior of the building he heard a muffled scream, followed by a man’s shouting, banging and more screams which were cut off abruptly.
He glanced around. There was nobody in the dusty untidy shop. He shuddered at the thought that the noises he’d just heard had come from the proprietor. He had the sudden impulse to leave, tempered only by the need to find out where he was. Before he could make a decision it was taken out of his hands by the arrival of the proprietor.
At first Ridler didn’t notice the man, until he coughed dragging Ridler’s gaze downwards. The man’s head barely cleared the counter – a dwarf!! What was visible was unpleasant, as though somehow unfinished. The man coughed again.
“Hello. I wonder if you could help me?”
“Depends on what you want? Don’t it?”
The dwarf’s voice was grating and high pitched, like a bluebottle trapped inside a window – it dripped with petulance.
“Well, I just need some directions…” apologized Ridler, “I seem to be lost.”
“Seem to be lost?” the man smiled and it made him uglier. One of his eyes was blue and milky, the pupil shaped like a goat’s.
“You’re definitely fucking lost! Otherwise you wouldn’t have come in here. Nobody ever comes in here!” He spread his ugly hands out palms upwards.
“How do you manage to stay open then?” blurted out Ridler, then regretted it.
“This is a family business.” grinned the dwarf. “I’m the last of the line. When I go, the shop goes. Then it’ll be like the rest of the street.”
Ridler felt suddenly guilty and looked around for something to buy. All of the food looked as if it had been there a long time, so he wandered over to the magazines.
Most of them were in strange languages or had faded so badly in the sunlight that they may as well have been.
Only the top shelf seemed to contain anything intelligible.
He took one down, his face coloring immediately as he realized it was some kind of pornography.
Rather than compound his embarrassment by putting it straight back (his immediate impulse) he decided to flick nonchalantly through the pages first.
The images that met his eyes were shocking in the extreme – the term ‘insect porn’ springing into his mind.
A man (decapitated by the borders of the picture) had forced a woman to her knees – one hand holding his erect penis, the other holding a stick covered in a sticky substance and literally crawling with insects. He was putting the stick onto her open mouth as she gazed up at him adoringly. Ridler turned over quickly.
Several close-ups of vaginas held open while large insects crawled in and out. He dropped the magazine, his hands shaking, nausea clogging his throat.
“Pretty good stuff, eh?” sneered the dwarf. Ridler forced himself to turn round.
“I got better’n that under the counter here – really strong, if you know what I mean. Can’t buy it in this country but I got good contacts….. abroad.” He managed to make the word ‘abroad’ sound obscene.
“Some of the others actually show ….. things hatching out…” he raised his eyebrows horribly and his grin almost split his head in half. There were far too many teeth in the man’s mouth – and they looked too sharp.
Ridler tried to ignore what the man was saying, deciding to try small talk instead.
“I thought you were out back when I came in. I heard some noises…”
The smile vanished from the dwarf’s face as though it had fallen off.
“What d’you mean – noises? What sort of noises?” His eyes narrowed.
“Oh just noises…” Ridler stammered. “You know, voices and stuff.”
The dwarf’s head started to rise vertically in the air.
For a second, Ridler thought the dwarf was on some sort of mechanical lifting device. Then he realised that the man wasn’t in fact a dwarf at all. He’d been kneeling on the floor throughout their whole conversation. Now that the man was standing, Ridler could see that he was, if anything, a giant.
He felt suddenly threatened.
“I just realised I don’t have any cash on me. Sorry….” He began to edge towards the door.
“That’s ok – take what you want. You can pay me next time.”
Although the man’s words seemed casual, he was edging out from behind the counter and sidling closer.
“But I need some cash anyway. I’ll find a cash machine and come back.”
He got the door open just as the man lunged for him.
The hideous doorbell clanged again, precipitating another series of screams from within. This provided just enough distraction for him to clear the doorway and reach the street.
The dwarf realised his mistake and came after him, but Ridler was running now, not looking back. Behind him the man screamed.
“Bastard! Fucking bastard! Nobody ever buys anything in here!”
THE INTERVIEW
Alexandria D. Douros
This night was dark. Clouds were hanging over me like a suffocating blanket. There was nothing before me but a chain link fence leading to an old bizarre place I’d never before seen. I needed this job.
They lead me into the asylum.
Things were changing as I had been directed into what more appeared to be a slaughterhouse/morgue. Babies were screaming and crying in a distant room. Startled and confused, I asked a nurse, “What is that?” The woman gave no response but a blatant stare. She was tall and sickly thin with yellow, fading skin and displayed a nauseating lifeless expression that never seemed to leave her face. I noticed she was wearing worn, discoloured clothes, stained with dark b
lood. Her nametag read ‘Norma.’
“Can I have a tour before my scheduled interview?” I asked.
Norma nodded, guiding me down the hall without making a sound. The hallways were cold and dark. I watched the cracking, tiled floors from under me, glowing lighter and then darker as I passed under each dimming, florescent light. I could smell formaldehyde seeping from the walls.
We came to a door.
Everything seemed to change. It looked as if I were inside my very own home. There was a cosy little fire place in a well furnished room- the place was crawling with toddlers and babies. Each of the children’s eyes revealed a blissful expression when handed a colourful toy.
Norma shut the door and began walking down another hallway, “Did that answer your question?” I remember her giving me a smirk and her eyes looked as if there was something deeply wrong.
Everything kept getting darker and filthier.
There stood a second door.
“This, my dear, is the room where we keep the bodies.”
I smiled and thought to myself, “I’d really enjoy this job.”
Shortly there after I could hear more cries and screams, but these screams were made from agony and suffering. I peeked inside a small window on the door.
People were perfectly lined up, waiting patiently for their heads to be removed by a short and stalky little man, wearing woman’s clothing. He was smiling as he cut off each of their heads with a rusty machete. People there showed no emotion, they looked as if they were robots; lifeless, frozen and cold.
In the distance I could hear a man laughing. He kept laughing and laughing as each of the patients would get into line.
Norma continued showing me as if there was nothing out of the ordinary happening. Off to the side was a freezer full of parts. Norma led me inside. A massive steel door slammed quickly behind me. As I turned around in the dark freezer, she flipped a on a light where I could see frozen babies hanging by their umbilical cords, with pale green faces that had frozen over with a layer of frost. Parts were strung out all over the cold floor and metal racks. All of them were staring and smiling at me. Smiling with evil expressions on their faces. The dead babies were laughing at me! Frozen there, all I could hear was the generator, but inside my head they were screaming and laughing hysterically. It seemed I was there for hours. On my way to the door, Norma picked up a butcher knife. “Give me your hand.” Things went silent. She held my hand near the door and said, “This is the light.” It was dark again. Norma then vanished.
The Starry Wisdom Page 24
